On The Death of TV News Part Four: Sales Tips for the Street

Crime Scene, originally uploaded by freefotouk.

Covering mobsters and the FBI required most of the skills or least training if not skills that went all the way back to my days here. I had to get to know the mob personally. I take a lot of collect calls from prison.—this just in: they’re all innocent. And outside the can, I make a lot of visits. I’ve tracked them, ambushed them, and even dined with some of them afterwards.

You need a sense of history; family history, scholarship, detective work and skepticism. And the pursuit brings you deep into the field of epistemology. There’s a lot in common between reporters and salespeople, though you might not think so. The product we’re selling is ourselves. Trust me. I’ll give you a fair shake. Trust me. I’m all ears. Trust me. If you don’t want your name involved I’ll keep you out of this. Trust me. I’m just looking for the truth.

For modern historians, sales people and reporters, access is the key. Just like salespeople, we need to get our foot in the front door. You know what they tell you when you are training for sales? “Don’t worry. What do you think? They’re going to kill you?”

Well, when you’re covering mobsters, the first thing you have to worry about is that they are going to kill you!

So you’re approach is everything. Consider the cold call. When you’re dealing with my crowd, cold calls are the only way to go.

The opening line I discovered was the key to any successful approach. There’s the obvious sort of thing, like referring to Vinnie the Animal Ferrara as “Mr. Animal.”

But then there’s the hook.

A few years ago, in a move that I’d like to think would have made Gene Golob, my history professor here, proud, I went looking for an old thug living on government money and off the radar. I needed to know more about a murder he’d committed for an FBI-sanctioned informant and mob boss back in the Sixties.

First I had to find him. He was supposed to be anonymous and untraceable. But I got a line on him. He was renting a place in Southeast Massachusetts. When I showed up at his address, I encountered the scared owners Hugh and his girlfriend had stiffed and threatened a few months earlier. They gave me his new address and made me swear I wouldn’t tell Hugh where I got it. I headed off to find him.

Lost among a bunch of badly numbered houses, I gave the number to a friendly woman on a porch and asked for help. I still couldn’t find the place and when I came back to ask her for more help, there was a big ugly man on the porch in her place.

“Who you looking for?” he asked.

“Hugh Shields,” I said. I twigged that I was looking at him.

And “Who are you?” he snarled.

“I’m David Boeri.”

“Like I said, who are you?” He obviously wasn’t a viewer of News Center Five.

This was the ultimate selling moment..

“I’m a student of history, Mr. Shields. And that’s why I’m here.”

“C’mon in,” he said.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d already made the sale.

I walked through the living room where his girlfriend was watching the “Price is Right,” sat down at the kitchen table, and within about four minutes Hugh Shields was bragging about the night he killed Billy Bennett thirty four years earlier.

“Yeah, I put a bullet in his chest. Then the stupid son of a bitch went for the car door instead of going for his gun; he might still be alive if he had; with the second bullet I shot him in the heart.”

It was squalid all right, but behind the squalor was the FBI, a story of scandal, corruption and cover up. Hugh Shields, a seedy sideline player with a lot of stories about the big time, which he never made, told me that in its war against the Mafia, the FBI tried to talk him into carrying a machine gun down to the North End to wipe out the Mafia don, Gerry Angiulo, back in the day.