From Zwillman’s Loan to Roselli’s Phone: How Mob Money Helped Harry Cohn Build Columbia

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From Zwillman’s Loan to Roselli’s Phone: How Mob Money Helped Harry Cohn Build Columbia

Columbia Pictures / Harry Cohn / Abner Zwillman / John Roselli / 1920s–1950s

Harry Cohn did not rise to the presidency of Columbia Pictures by purely legitimate banking alone. Early in Columbia’s history, Joe Brandt sold his one-third share, and Harry consolidated control — a maneuver that historians trace in part to a loan from New Jersey mob boss Abner Zwillman. Over the following decades Cohn developed a long-standing friendship with Chicago racketeer John Roselli, ties that would surface again in the 1950s when Roselli features in accounts of the studio’s intervention in the Sammy Davis Jr.–Kim Novak affair. The practical upshot was that Columbia’s expansion from Poverty Row upstart to an independent studio with national distribution rested, in part, on capital and connections that blurred the line between Hollywood executives and organized crime. The fallout was reputational: stories of gangster loans and favors became part of Columbia’s folklore, helped inspire fictional studio villains such as Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and fed later scrutiny of how the studio system leveraged every available resource — legal and illegal — to protect profits and control talent.