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While he was thinking, a Karafin story appeared in the Inquirer under an eight-column headline, warning Philadelphians that house-repair frauds were spreading. "High pressure salesmen" were preying on "unwary home owners." A spokesman for the Better Business Bureau was quoted as saying that "the only way to stop this racket is to expose it." Scolnick and Karafin again dropped around to see Py, found him convinced. Py wrote two checks, one for $3,000 and another for $2,000. Thereafter, Karafin stopped by Py's office every Monday morning for a regular retainer check. Over the next four years, Py paid Karafin close to $12,000. Many other companies and associations connected with the home-repair and credit-paper business also hired Karafin, paid him tens of thousands of dollars.
Trail of Checks. In 1962, Philadelphia's city controller stopped payments to the Broadway Maintenance Co., which serviced the city's lights and parking meters, charging negligence, destruction of records, padding of bills and payoffs to city officials. Reporter Karafin raked no muck this time. Instead, he came to Broadway's defense, accusing the controller of making wild charges, praising the company for its "good maintenance program." Eventually a judge ordered the controller to stop blocking payments to Broadway, and the firm received a new $800,000-a-year contract from the city. All the time Harry was covering the story for the Inquirer he was on Broadway's payroll, getting $10,000 a year. He still was as of the beginning of March.
Reporter Karafin watched out for the interests of the small guy as well as the big. Once, when a lonely, 51-year-old bachelor crippled with arthritis sued a dance studio for inveigling him into paying for 1,000 hours of lessons, Karafin wrote an incisive story about the case. Then Karafin called on the head of the company that owned the studio. Thereafter, Karafin wrote no more dance studio stories. A lawyer friend of Karafin's worked out a settlement by which the company repaid the bachelor a fraction of the money he had been charged. Karafin was paid more than $2,000 "for services rendered."
Philadelphia's reporters followed a trail of information and canceled checks to other public relations clients. The Pennsylvania Refuse Removal Association, for example, paid Karafin $1,000 after some of its members were charged by a federal grand jury with conspiring to fix prices (the members were found guilty anyway). And when the president of a Philadelphia loan firm was subpoenaed by a state senate investigating committee in 1962, he quickly signed on Karafin, paid him $12,000 over the next few years.
When Karafin got wind that Philadelphia was planning a story on his activities, he filed for an injunction, charging that Fonzi and Walter had illegally obtained his tax returns. Philadelphia fought the suit, and published. Afterwards, a bank dealing in credit paper that had paid Karafin $6,000 a year fired Karafin as its public relations representative. Other businessmen who paid for Karafin's services now say they did so reluctantly. "I don't like to deal with Harry," said one client, "but he can do things for you. It's like castor oil. You don't like to take it, but sometimes you have to."