PRESIDENT 12%
MCLANE 25%
UNDECIDED 14%
OTHER 4%
In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author of books on the Mob said that Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had made something like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano had simply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.
A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicago released the results of a two-month investigation into connections between the Cozzano family and the Mafia. The centerpiece was a vast family tree - actually, several family trees intertwined into a thicket - so big that it had been drawn, in minute letters and lines, on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood. The extended Cozzano family was shown in blue. Mob families were shown in red. The family trees went all the way back to the twelfth-century Genoa and showed that William A. Cozzano, John Gotti, Al Capone, and Benito Mussolini were all distantly related.
The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that the American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths had not existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a membership of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdraw from the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor who had been discharged under other than honourable circumstances. One of them no longer practiced because he could no longer obtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcy after fifty of his patients filed a class-action suit against him complaining of botched breast implants.
The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own, showing the incumbent President and Tip McLane tripping over their shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these two might want to have neurological exams of their own.
Finally, a video expert was trotted out to state that the videotape of Cozzano nearly dropping the baby in Newark had evidently been doctored; other videotapes made of the same event did not show him doing anything unusual.
Friday, October 25:
COZZANO 40%
PRESIDENT 14%
MCLANE 29%
UNDECIDED 13%
OTHER 4%
Acting on an anonymous tip, a reporter for a Chicago network affiliate tracked down Alberto ("Stitches") Barone, ninety-six years of age, who was living in a dingy convalescent home on Chicago's south side. Stitches agreed to have the nurses unbutton his shirt so that he could display the numerous scars that he had received during an epochal knife duel with John Cozzano, William's father, some sixty years earlier, for the hand of the fair Francesca Domenici. Over time, the scars had contracted and become even more grotesque than they had been to begin with. Stitches Barone, fortified with a few injections, managed to sit up in bed and deliver an unrehearsed, four-hour statement to the TV cameras, telling the entire story of his ten-decade life and times. Of these four hours, one hour was devoted to his childhood in Italy, one hour to his heyday in the Al Capone organization, one hour to his physical ailments, and one hour to recounting the antics of his favorite dog, Bozo, who had died of vehicular trauma in 1953. The reporter took the videotape home and culled the one sentence devoted to the subject of John Cozzano: "he was a vicious man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, and I was afraid of him."
William A. Cozzano appeared at a press conference in New York with a number of leading Italian-Americans, including the daughter of Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza. The Italian-American leaders blasted the media for defaming Cozzano, and Costanza's daughter, in particular, stated that there had never been any connection between her father and Cozzano. A family tree was brought out to show that Cozzano was also related to Leonardo da Vinci and Joe Dimaggio. Saturday, October 26:
COZZANO 36%
PRESIDENT 14%
MCLANE 31%
UNDECIDED 14%
OTHER 5%
Campaigning in the state of Washington, William A. Cozzano visited Seattle's Pike Place Market, where a number of Southeast Asian immigrants had been able to set up thriving businesses selling produce that they raised on truck farms outside the city. Making his way down the center of the market, surrounded by a high cloud of media, Cozzano stopped at one stand and bought an apple from the attractive young Laotian-American woman on the other side of the counter.
Just as he was biting into the apple, he was assaulted, and nearly knocked down, by a tiny, rabid, screaming person who had charged in underneath the radar of the Secret Service men. It was an old woman, not much more than four feet tall, wearing a conical hat, screaming hysterically in Vietnamese, pummeling and clawing at Cozzano with both hands.
By the time the Secret Service dragged her off of the shocked Cozzano, roughly a hundred dollars' worth of assorted produce had been destroyed by the feet of video cameramen and still photographers who leapt up on to the high ground as soon as they heard trouble, running back and forth along the tables looking for a camera angle, churning the opulent displays of fresh strawberries, asparagus, basil, chanterelles, blackberries, and sweet corn into succotash. Most of them just barely had time to zero their cameras in on the contorted face of the old Vietnamese woman before she began to scream, in English: "You killed my baby! You killed my baby! You are an evil man!" Sunday, October 27:
COZZANO 35%
PRESIDENT 15%
MCLANE 34%
UNDECIDED 12%
OTHER 4%
A front-page exclusive in the Sunday editions of The Dallas Morning News told an interesting story of about Cozzano's son, James. James Cozzano had spent most of the spring and summer following the primary campaigns as part of a research project for his doctoral dissertation. During this period he had made contacts with Lawrence Barnes, a wealthy Dallas businessman who was a big supporter of the candidacy of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. After Sweigel's loss to Tip McLane, Lawrence Barnes had approached James Cozzano and offered him a position on the board of directors of an import-export business, based in Houston, in which Barnes held a majority interest. The business dealt mostly in equipment related to oil exploration and drilling.
It was now revealed that this company did most of its business with Iraq and Libya, and that minority interests were owned by shady offshore companies that were known to be controlled by the governments of those countries.
Monday, October 28:
COZZANO 32%
PRESIDENT 16%
MCLANE 34%
UNDECIDED 13%
OTHER 5%
Fifty newspapers across the United States ran the same photograph on the front page, a wire service photo taken on a small lake a few miles south of Tuscola, Illinois. The photo showed a local farmer out on a little rowboat, examining the surface of the lake, which was covered with dead fish. The farmer said that the fish kill was almost certainly caused by a spill of toxic waste originating from the CBAP plant in Tuscola - the economic foundation of the Cozzano fortune.
The Cozzano campaign held a press conference in Seattle, in which leaders of the local Vietnamese-American community stated that no one had ever seen, or heard of, the little Vietnamese lady who had accused Cozzano of war crimes. The woman herself had gone into seclusion after having been released by the police, and was no longer speaking to the press; but her family insisted that Cozzano had rolled a hand grenade into their hut in Vietnam and blown up three small children.