The Deeds of My Fathers

The son of dirt-poor Italian immigrants, Generoso Pope Snr. would become president of the company that made the bricks for the Rockefeller Center and myriad other New York landmarks, but also create a media empire whose legacy was a family feud which resulted in his youngest son, left sidelined and broke, creating an icon of journalistic audacity - The National Enquirer. With a loan from 'Uncle Frank', mobster Frank Costello, his real-life godfather, and forcing the Enquirer's distribution onto grocery checkout counters across America, Gene Pope Jnr. created a new species of modern media - the supermarket tabloid. Seven million copies were sold of the Enquirer's 1977 expose on the death of Elvis Presley. Drawn from over 500 interviews, and voluminous documentary and archival sources, Paul David Pope chronicles a saga of a splendidly dysfunctional family in a candid and unvarnished fashion.