Jack Lait

[1] He readily adapted to the newspaper world of gangland-era Chicago, quickly learning the ins and outs of the police beat.

Developing a knack for sensational reportage, he moved rapidly through the Hearst newspaper ranks from reporter to columnist and from editor to executive.

[3][full citation needed] In 1934 he became managing editor of the New York American and immediately fired his son George to avoid accusations of nepotism.

In 1963, nine years after Lait's death, it ceased publication following a strike and was absorbed into the then top-selling paper the New York Daily News.

Lait's story, dispatched to the International News Service in New York, reached that city before even the Chicago papers were aware of what had happened.

[1] In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lait, with co-author Lee Mortimer, wrote a series of four controversial books detailing the seamy underside of America and three of its main cities.

The books garnered much criticism in the press and elsewhere for their sensational, salacious tone and "nonfactual accounts of alleged crime-politics links, vice and scandal.

In April 1953, Lait and Mortimer counter-sued seeking $1,500,000 for "conspiracy and agreement to restrain commerce, and suppress the printing, publication and distribution" of the book.

[2] Sixty-three years after its publication Washington Confidential was described in an account as an "infamous guide to the D.C. demimonde" written by "a pair of right-wing hacks determined to peel back the city's white-frosted veneer to expose a fetid underbelly of Communist sympathizers, Chinese bookies, call girls, Mafiosi, and homosexuals."

[1] He became an impresario working with William Morris organizing vaudeville shows at the American Music Hall in Chicago, including Harry Lauder's tours of the US and Annette Kellermann's first US appearance.

Lait was bedridden for 18 months from October 1952 and went into a coma before he died April 1, 1954, of a circulatory ailment at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 71.