03/01/10 Where Is The Wanna Be Greenwich Time Gossip Monger Susie "The Dish" Costaregni? Someone Should Report On All The Hearst Family Scandals

John, the once-boyish grandson of the maniacal yellow-press baron William Randolph Hearst-nicknamed "Bunky" by Washington Redskins owner George Marshall, who found him a dead ringer for the baby-hero of a 1920s comic strip-is among the 13 fortunate souls presiding over the Hearst Family Trust.

The Trust conveniently also makes up a stolid majority of the Hearst Corporation's board of directors.

This clannish overlapping directorate was the brainchild of Big Daddy Hearst, who was determined that his blood descendants should lord over the sprawling Hearst empire with the same iron fiat that he enjoyed.

Town residents have long known that Hearst Corp's Greenwich Time could do better job of unearthing local news.

What Greenwich residents didn't know is that the Hearst Corporation, and the family behind it, are dedicated to a cult of secrecy unique in American newspaper dynasties.

Citizen Bunky

Let's take a little peek at the inner dealings of John Randolph "Bunky" Hearst Jr., grandson of William Randolph Hearst and an integral member of the Hearst Corporation, owner of, among many other things, the Greenwich Time, the Greenwich Citizen, The Stamford And Norwalk Advocates , The Connecticut Post , The Danbury News-Times as well as, a bunch of Fairfield County weeklies.

Lets start revealing some of the company's deepest secrets

Recently the corporation, that owns the Greenwich Time, got dragged into the last throes of Bunky's marriage and is now a cautionary tale in corporate governance

As stipulated by William Randolph Hearst's will, five of the 13 seats on the company's board of trustees (the corporation is run by the Hearst Family Trust) are filled by family members, who also sit on the 20-member board of directors.

The Owners Of The Greenwich Time Demand Transparency From Others, But Hide Their Corporate Operations From The Public

How this truly works is kept shrouded, as the family got the state of California to seal Hearst's will and trust after Patricia Campbell "Patty" Hearst (cousin to Bunky) was kidnapped in 1974, allowing it to operate in secrecy.

When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, guardians of the Hearst holdings won the right to quarantine the identities of the lead trustees as well as most of their fiduciary doings, on the theory that publicizing such information would grant a virtual blueprint for other scheming scion-abductors.

Hearst Corporate Cult of Secrecy Detailed in Bunky Hearst Divorce Saga

Bunky's third marriage-to Barbara, a former Hamptons-cruising photo stylist who had formerly been in hock to the IRS for $50,000-went asunder.

Barbara served divorce papers to Bunky in 2004, some 15 years after he suffered a debilitating stroke.

Bunky initially tried to smite down Barbara's robust proposed settlement of shared assets via the tried-and-true adultery tactic with a claim that she had been on the scene and in flagrante when a neighbor dropped dead. The neighbor was found naked in his bedroom under the influence of a dosage of black-market Viagra.

Barbara, meanwhile, chalked up the awkward scene to a fatal heart attack the poor gent suffered during a post-gardening shower. She was merely lunching on site in the Hamptons.

But the adultery strategem proved a wash. Bunky, who had been disabled by a stroke in 1989, had prevailed on a nurse for a blowjob, Barbara's legal team countercharged—while freely conceding that their client had approved a series of "sexual surrogates" for Bunky once the couple's sex life went permanently south.

So Team Bunky mounted a fraud offensive. The scheming Barbara, Bunky's attorneys claimed, had taken advantage of her husband's "vulnerable" condition to quietly leverage control of most of his holdings. She had fired his longtime lawyer and took on one who made some brisk transfers, permitting her to pile up real estate holdings and to close nearly all of Bunky's bank accounts, while opening more than a dozen bank and brokerage accounts in her name.

Bunky shot back and accused Barbara of gold-digging -Hearst v Hearst - and trying to infiltrate his estate, claiming that the scores of documents she drafted that transferred much of his wealth into her name and got him to renounce any rights to her estate upon her death were signed only because of his weakened state.

This Caused Barbara Hearst To Raised The Issue Of Bunky's Post-Stroke Coherence

If Bunky's competence was in question then the decisions he made over the past 15 years as a Hearst trustee and director should be admissible at trial -- every letter he signed and the minutes of every meeting he attended since his stroke.

Barbara Hearst's attorneys subpoenaed Hearst Corp. for every post-stroke document that reflected Bunky's "actions and involvement" as a trustee or as a member of Hearst's board.

War of the Roses-style legal positioning comes to a halt

Hearst corporate lawyers quickly made it a point of unassailable corporate honor that Bunky was merely "vulnerable" to Barbara's wily machinations, and not flat-out "incompetent" to manage his, and the family's, affairs.

In that none-too-flattering distinction, after all, resided the hallowed Hearst prerogative to keep company finances and secret plans firmly grounded in the family hearth.

Now Horror Of All Horrors: Hearst Corp.'s previously secret inner workings would come to a very public light.

The Hearst family and company put up a secrecy Maginot Line when Mrs. Bunky demanded to see documents memorializing 15 years worth of Bunky's decisions as a Hearst trustee and director.

Most of Bunky Hearst's fortune came from the payments he received as a beneficiary of a family trust that controls the privately-held Hearst media empire (Hearst's assets include 200 magazines, 16 newspapers, the A&E cable channel and a 20% stake in ESPN).

Bucky reportedly was a favorite grandson of his famous grandfather. He holds one of the trustee seats and received a reported $9.5 million from the trust in 2006 (with similar payouts yearly). The trust also helped Bucky's cousin, Phoebe Hearst Cooke, grow a fortune worth more than $2 billion.

Even by the standards of privately-held companies Hearst is remarkably secretive. Yet Barbara Hearst's legal maneuvering around her divorce came close to spilling the company's most closely-held business secrets into the open.

In This Hearsts' Split, Mrs. Bunky Got Old W.R.'s Booty

In a September 2008 response to Barbara's motion, the Hearst Corporation offered to stipulate that Bunky was "legally competent" in exchange for not having to turn over legal papers.

Barbara's lawyers declined the offer.

In December 2008, Bunky agreed to withdraw his fraud action in exchange for a divorce, and agreed to allow Barbara to keep most of the assets he had claimed she had embezzled.

Bunky coughed up most of the $10 million in assets to which Barbara had laid claim-though not the $90,000 in monthly alimony she had requested.

A Hearst Corporation attorney has publicly insisted the company had not forced Bunky to settle.

Documents remained private.

Bunky retreated to his estate in the Hamptons

Bunky's consolation prizes included restored full title to his favorite boat, The Millicent (named for his grandmother), and the Hamptons estate that Barbara, in that beguiling way of hers, dubbed "Little Versailles." Mainly, though, he stays in the cottage abutting the spread, which sits on the water near his boat; there, he sneaks cigarettes when out of view of his nurses, and dotes on possessions like a copy of the famed "Rosebud" sled featured in Orson Welles' fictionalized account of his granddad's exploits, Citizen Kane.

We're never told what Bunky's views may be on Gore Vidal's celebrated claim that "rosebud" stands in for a very different kind of mogul's perk for the elder Hearst.

The Former Mrs. Bunky Moves On With Her Life

Barbara, meanwhile, has a new blonde dye job (which you can admire on her sadly invitation-only Facebook page.

What's more, of course, she's hung on to the Hearst family name-and, given all that she's done to surmount New York state's otherwise ungenerous divorce settlement laws, who can deny that she's earned it?

The Hearst Corporation and the Greenwich Time and the Greenwich Citizen remain as shrouded in corporate secrecy as ever

The Hearst trustees have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the family business private.

Skeptics -- among them some renegade Hearst family members -- have suggested that the trustees' fondness for secrecy has more to do with their fear of being sued and preservation of their own positions that require little or no work but provides a hefty salary.

The Hearst trust has been sued by Hearsts and their ex-wives for three generations now yet has remained unscathed -- though it will come to an end, and the company will be divided up, when the last of William Randolph Hearst's grandchildren dies.

Here is the wikipedia page about Hearst Corp. that overviews how expansive it is.

Try out this William Randolph Hearst relationship map

==================================
Please send your comments, Hearst Corporate sexrets, news tips and press releases to GreenwichRoundup@gmail.com