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-In February 1929, Joe Kennedy made an offer to buy the
Pantages theater chain, the second biggest in California,
from its owner Alexander Pantages, a Greek immigrant who had
built the chain from scratch into a multi-million dollar
business.
-Joe's innate arrogance was now rampant, and when Pantages
rebuffed his offers, Kennedy threatened him by boasting of
his influence in the banking and movie businesses. Soon,
Pantages found his theaters were being denied first-run
blockbuster features from major studios, but that was only
the beginning.
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-On August 9,1929 in Pantages's flagship theater, the
Beaux Arts in downtown Los Angeles, an hysterical lady in
red emerged from the janitor's broom closet on the mezzanine
screaming: "There he is, the Beast! Don't let him get at
me!" She pointed to the silver-haired Alexander Pantages in
the office next to the broom closet.
- The girl, Eunice Pringle of Garden Grove, California,
told police that she had come to Pantages looking for work
as a dancer. Instead of offering her a job, he had pushed
her into the broom closet, wrenched her underwear loose and
raped her. Pantages insisted that he was being framed, and
that the young woman had torn and ripped her own
clothing.
- Poor Pantages was convicted and sentenced to fifty
years, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, on the
basis that it was prejudicial to Pantages to exclude
testimony about the morals of the plaintiff. The court found
her testimony "so improbable as to challenge credulity."
-At the new trial, Pantages' lawyers reenacted the alleged
rape and showed that it could not have occurred in the small
broom closet the way Pringle had described it. The jury was
also shown how athletic Pringle was, casting doubt on her
claim that she could not fight off advances by the slightly
built Pantages.
- The second jury acquitted Pantages, but because of the
notoriety, his business had plummeted. A few months after
Kennedy's final offer of $8 million, Pantages was forced to
sell out to Joe's RKO for $3.5 million.
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Eunice Pringle
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- Two years after the acquittal, Pringle told
her lawyer she wanted to come clean. Stories began
circulating that she was about to blow the lid off
the rape case and name names. Suddenly, she died of
unknown causes. The night she died, she was
violently ill and red in color, a sign of cyanide
poisoning.
- On her deathbed, Pringle confessed to her
mother and a friend that Joe Kennedy had set up
Pantages. In exchange for their perjured testimony,
Kennedy had paid $10,000 to Pringle and her agent
and lover Nicolas Dunaev. Joe had also promised he
would make her a star. Pringle, however, never
became a star, and Dunaev never gave her her share
of the money.
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