By Michael Miner
Aaron is an Orthodox Jew himself. He’s also every inch a journalist. His only apprehension about the Bright story was that he’d be beaten to it. “We wanted to get it in as soon as possible out of the feeling that we were going to get scooped. So we put everything aside and had everybody on the staff working on it. It was very intense. I’m telling you, every day I would open the Sun-Times and Tribune with dread, thinking they would have that story. A week never seemed so long before we went to press.”
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It’s a pretty fascinating story. The Jewish News described Bright’s origins in England, his arrival here in 1994, his work as a mashgiach–overseer of Jewish dietary laws–at a Michigan Avenue hotel, his business ventures in Chicago and Skokie, his donation of prayer books to Bnei Ruven Congregation. But the paper’s focus was on the investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration; on Bright’s arrest at La Guardia Airport on April 8, when he was about to fly here with a briefcase that allegedly contained $200,000 in cash; on his release and return to Chicago; on speculation that he “sang like a bird” and in return was taken into the government’s witness-protection program. But this wasn’t the only speculation the Jewish News passed along. On May 9, the day Bright disappeared from Chicago, his brother Alan, a rabbi, vanished in Medellin, Colombia, and there were rumors that one or both Brights had been murdered.
“It is almost always better for a newspaper to report what it knows. Keeping information away from the public may seem to serve some immediate goal for those who wish to deny reality, but concealing acts almost always leads to something worse.”
And Avrom Fox, owner of Rosenblum’s World of Judaica on Devon and another admirer of Aaron’s paper, said, “If it had been about a wealthy Jew living in Lake Forest I’m not sure there would have been any newsworthiness. The fact it was a practicing Orthodox Jew living in Rogers Park caused the excitement. A lot of people wondered why he went to town with the subject.”
Why? I asked.
The staff–the surviving staff–of Advertising Age read with some incredulity a recent column by their leader, Rance Crain. Crain, who’s president of Crain Communications Inc. and editor in chief of Ad Age, had taken his weekly space to reflect on family values in big business.
