Generoso Paul Pope Jr

A midnight move to Florida is one of the oddities associated with the phenomenon that is the story of the National Enquirer. Purchased from the Hearst Corporation by a man named Generoso Pope Jr., the tabloid is now being recognized for transforming not only American newspapers and magazines but also celebrity culture, TV and even politics. Pope moved his family and his newspaper staff to Florida because he was in fear for his life. And not without reason. The money came from two men: a $10,000 loan from Pope’s godfather, Frank Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime family and head of a national gambling empire, and an equal amount from the lawyer Roy Cohn, a friend of Pope’s who had helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and was soon to gain notoriety as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy. Pope was 25 years old when, in 1952, he bought what was then called the New York Enquirer, but he’d already had some newspaper experience as publisher of the family-owned Il Progresso Italo-Americano. His father, Generoso Pope Sr., shoveled gravel and hauled water to make ends meet after immigrating to America from Italy. His ambition and determination took him from laborer to owner of one of the largest sand and gravel companies in the world in little more than a decade. He bought Il Progresso in 1928, followed by other media acquisitions, and also became active in New York City politics. His third child, Gene, attended the Horace Mann School and earned an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before his father installed him as Il Progresso‘s publisher. But after Pope Sr. died in 1950, his son was ousted because of a fight with his siblings. His next move, sources say, was to join the CIA and undergo training in psychological warfare at the height of the Korean War. When Pope made his move to return to publishing, the New York Enquirer barely sold 17,000 copies a week and published horse-racing statistics for the city’s gamblers. The renamed National Enquirer would one day be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1988, at the age of 61, Pope suffered a heart attack and died on the way to the hospital. He specified in his will that the National Enquirer be sold after his death—and it was, to McFadden Publishing Inc. (It is now owned by American Media Inc. and is moving back to New York.) The paper Pope bought for, at most, $75,000 was sold for $412 million. Mr. Pope was married three times. His first wife, Patricia McManus, died, and his second marriage, to Edith Moore, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, the former Lois Berrodin; his mother; two brothers, Fortunato, a Connecticut resident, and Anthony, of New York City; two sons, Paul, of Lantana, and Generoso 3d, of Mahwah, N.J., and four daughters, Michele Ritter, of Boston, Maria Kessel and Lorraine Pope, both of Manalapan, Fla., and Gina Pope of Knoxville, Tenn.