Leadership Notes #58
Interview: Eric Dezenhall
After founding the firm in 1987, Eric Dezenhall has stepped down from day-to-day activity effective January of 2025. He remains Chairman of the Board. With more than 38 years of executive-level experience as a crisis, communications, and management counselor for corporations, prominent individuals, sports organizations, nonprofits, and educational institutions. Dezenhall became one of the nation’s foremost crisis and damage control experts.
Eric has authored twelve books, including three non-fiction texts on crisis communications and corporate witch hunts, entitled Damage Control: How to Get the Upper Hand When Your Business is Under Attack (Portfolio, 2007), Nail ‘Em! Confronting High Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses (Prometheus Books, 1999), and Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal (Hachette, 2014), which explores how once-powerful people, organizations, and brands are easily brought down by the seemingly powerless through the media and internet that feed almost exclusively on destructive information. These books have been widely cited in business, media, and academic circles. His most recent non-fiction work, Wiseguys and the White House (Harper Collins, 2025), is a “connected” account of how the Mob has worked with America’s Commanders in Chief and has influenced the presidency for nearly a century.
Over the course of his career, Dezenhall appeared on network television and radio outlets including NPR, CNN, FOX, CNBC, and MSNBC; has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today; and is a regular contributor to the Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and CNBC.com. A sought-after lecturer, he has spoken at universities such as the University of Chicago (Booth School of Business), Georgetown University, Dartmouth College, and The George Washington University; and to audiences such as Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Army. Dezenhall was also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Dezenhall is a trustee of the Institute for Responsible Citizenship, an organization devoted to fostering educational and career opportunities for outstanding young African-American men. He was also a founding member of the Board of Directors of the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition.
Dezenhall graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied political science and the news media.
A condensed transcript of Eric Dezenhall’s appearance at PGLF at CIED Georgetown’s Virtual Author Series
Potolicchio: You have now shifted full-time into writing. When writing was only your part-time vocation, you still wrote 12 books, four of them I'd like to talk about today, including the first book, “Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made.”
You write "Some of these insights will come from my 40-year crisis management career where I've been involved with people and institutions accused of doing terrible things. These experiences have given me some sense of how power, light, and dark works and doesn't.”
I can't think about a better and more appropriate time to talk about how light and dark works. I’d like to open up by sampling your prose. But first two of the prefatory quotes to your book. Number one,“The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.” by Pete Hamill, and then Ralph Salerno saying “Organized crime will put a man in the White House someday and he won't even know it until they hand him the bill.” And here's how your book starts: “On a hot summer day in the early 1980s, I followed two women I worked with in the communications office of the White House, out to the South Lawn for a media opportunity with President Ronald Reagan. I was in my early 20s and my role that day was routine and minor, ensuring I got the contact information for the media in attendance for a potential follow up. One of the women, Sue, asked me to remind her where I was from. I answered “Cherry Hill, New Jersey”. “Isn't that Mafia,” she asked. Her question made sense. My hometown had been in the news lately because of a violent mob war. The longstanding Philadelphia, South Jersey, Docile Don, Angelo Bruno, had been killed in front of his house and photographed, very dead, in the passenger seat of his car, his bloody mouth wide open in a mask of shock. This ignited a power struggle involving a Mafia old guard, young Turks, pro-drug and anti-drug gangsters, and two New York City Mafia families with interests in the region. Bruno had been a savvy operator. Someone close to him told me that when the Don wanted to meet with his associates, he would check into the Cherry Hill Hospital complaining of chest pain, then get a room in the maternity ward near crying babies to hold sensitive meetings. All of this as a way to avoid surveillance.”
You say it's not easy to get the truth when writing about people who lie a lot, but you wanted to try nevertheless. The first question is how do we get information from people who do not want to tell us the truth? And how do we also ferret out fact from fiction?
Dezenhall: Both of my careers had one thing in common, which is that I'm getting lied to all day long. In the crisis management business, every corporate scandal I ever worked on began with the same three words and the client would say, “It's all bs.”
When you're writing about gangsters and spies, they're lying to you as well. Lying became a language and among the things I had to learn in both cases, was to resist the temptation to go, “you're not going to fool me, I'm too clever.” Sometimes it's good to let them believe initially that you are being fooled, because the lies people tell end up telling you the truth in some way. If you're dealing with a corporate scandal, there is no way that the Justice Department brings down a 47 count indictment that they completely made up. But the fact that the client believes that, tells you what a difficult case it's going to be. With spies and gangsters, you have a similar phenomenon.
Gangsters love to tell you that they're no different from other business people, which is not true. They are different because it makes a difference whether you cross a line or you are dancing along the line. The thing about legitimate business people, someone like Joe Kennedy, is they did dance along the line, but they didn't go over it.
You hear that Joe Kennedy, President Kennedy's father, was a bootlegger. He was not a bootlegger. For Joe Kennedy to be a bootlegger would be like Warren Buffett in the 1990s deciding to become a cocaine kingpin. There would have been no reason for him. He was in the liquor business but what he was smart at doing was dancing along the line. For example, Joe Kennedy's partner in some of his businesses during prohibition and after prohibition was President Roosevelt's son. Now, President Roosevelt's son was not in the liquor end of the business, he was in the insurance end. Joe Kennedy was able to buy liquor companies during prohibition, but not distribute it, which was the sin.
By letting a gangster lie to you, it tells you what he believes. The other thing I think that the lying helps with is it shows you how low their self-esteem is and how desperate they are to be respected. If they can't get the respect, what they do is they make up things. You could bring up any world event, take the Kennedy assassination to stay on subject, and they'll smirk and go, “you know, our guys did that.” No, they didn't! What the lying tells you is what they believe. They need to be able to show you that they're significant.
There's no surefire way to know that someone's lying, but there are a few things that are told to me. One of them is anyone who seems to know how everything went down, you got to wonder. You learn different ways to figure out whether you're being lied to, and then you can back into the truth from there.
Potolicchio: You're too humble to cite this example but here’s an example of your artistry while you're talking to a former big-time gangster. You write, “I pressed Becker on an earlier allegation he had shared with federal investigators about Marcello, suggesting he wanted President Kennedy dead and had intended to make his move. Becker confirmed that Marcello had told him this. And then I made my mistake. Without thinking through the consequences of my question, I asked Becker earnestly, “Why would Marcello tell you this? Or was he just blowing off steam?” The avuncular man, then in his 80s, exploded. He told me that I had no idea what I was talking about and that I had been a baby when his conversation occurred. This was true, but I had never suggested that I had been privy to assassination plotting when I was an infant. I apologized for the way I had worded the question, but it felt sorrier for having wounded an elderly man who I liked, even though I thought my question had been reasonable. I reframe the question. Marcello was a Mafia boss stating his intent to murder the president. ‘He must have trusted you a lot.’ Becker calmed down and said something about his having been what he wanted Marcelo to think and that he saw Becker as being part of their world enough to trust him.”
Dezenhall: The legend that the Mafia killed President Kennedy came from one source, which was this one man who had become a friend of mine. You have to wonder on its face, a powerful Mafia boss is going to tell you about his role in the murder of a president. It's absolutely ridiculous but it's the thing that human beings need more than anything.
After oxygen, food and water, is the need for people to believe that they are players. We want people to think that our lives have been significant, which is why when I do a book talk, people don't ask questions that they want an answer to, they tell me about their tie to the story. It is deeply human for people to want to be known as significant.
Right now, in the United States, conspiracy thinking is at an all-time high, it's in the news every day. The Mossad killed Charlie Kirk; Jeffrey Epstein had his ties into international governments. The crisis management business, the reason why it has helped me as a writer, is I was in the conspiracy business for 40 years. A crisis is a conspiracy. People get together and they do bad things, conspiracies exist. What doesn't exist is magic.
What I have found is, I have been told about murders by Mafia members, about espionage secrets by spies, psychiatrists about their famous patients. None of these people should have been doing that. Why did they do it? They can't help it, because it was very important to them for you to know.
The chances that the Mafia killed John F. Kennedy are absurd, I grew up around these guys. All they wanted to do was steal as much as they could, without getting killed and going to jail. They didn't kill cops, maybe two or three in the entire history of the organization, but they're going to murder the President of the United States, whose brother is the Attorney General? Are you out of your mind?
Then, we get to the CIA. When I was writing my spy book, a KGB agent said to me, "Eric, do you know the theory that CIA killed Kennedy?" I said, “Sure, I know the theory.” He says, “Do you know where this comes from?” And I said, “No”. He says, “What do you think I do, 60s, 70s? We paid left wing professors and the writers to say this.” And I said, “Well, who do you think killed President Kennedy?” Bonks me on the head and goes, “We know, f-ing idiot Oswald.” What he was telling me is they spent from 1963 gaining no traction until 1975, when the Senate had the church hearings on assassinations. It took them almost a decade and a half to successfully plant the seeds.
I'm not going to delve deep into politics or world events, but what the Soviets had in common with the Islamists is that their view of propaganda is very different from the United States’. They knew they had all the time in the world. The Soviets knew they weren't going to win industrially or militarily. They spent the equivalent of billions on propaganda, which would chip away at the American confidence. The whole idea that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, the FBI and the Mafia, this erodes the concept of confidence. I’m not saying Americans are somehow better, I'm saying that their approach is different. When you deal with the Americans or the Israelis, what you'll get is “If we give you a hundred thousand dollars, how will that impact public opinion? I want the answer in four months and if I don't get it, you're fired.” You get questions like, “What can you do in four months for $100,000?” The answer is “nothing.”
When you spend billions over decades, you can get those different results. Part of the challenge that I dealt with is that you can't just spend billions of dollars on a game.
In my career, it's impossible to compete with the expectations of what it is that people believe that you can do. I've just come to enjoy writing a lot more. That's a bit of a leap from the lying and the Mafia. The Mafia business really gets into some of the stuff that happens today, which is the belief in a mysterious cabal that is pulling the strings. When I say that, people will say, “So you don't believe there's a Mafia or the CIA?” Not what I said! I totally believe there are, I've known people from both worlds. What I don't believe is I see no evidence that they are magicians. Do they kill people? Do they spy? They do all that stuff. But can they keep a secret? A little bit, but the worst gossipers I've ever met in my life are gangsters and spies.
Potolicchio: You told me it cheapens the assassination of Kennedy if it's just one person, if it is not a cabal, if it's not something, as you write, that is weightier than a major operation that occurs. I want to ask two questions that have leadership implications, that you may have learned both in your crisis management, but also in writing this book. You mentioned Kennedy and wrote, "After his money-making genius, perhaps Joe Kennedy's greatest talent was his ability to dwell in the gray, that line between criminality and marginally lawful conduct."
You've talked about how any powerful person is going to have to make a devil's bargain at some point. Any lessons for how to cultivate our sense of ethics and a moral code when we see people who are operating in the gray or making devil's bargains become tremendously successful?
Dezenhall: One of the unfortunate lessons that I've learned in my career is that what goes around doesn't always come around. What I would tell my children is “You should operate with the principle that what goes around comes around” because I don't want them to get hurt. But some people are immune. The week before the 2016 election, I ran into one of Hillary Clinton's senior advisors and he was in very good spirits. He said:
-“What do you think is going to happen next week?”
-“I think you're going to lose.” He laughed. He thought I was joking and he saw I wasn't.
-“What basis could you possibly have to think that Trump will win?”
-“I know two things you don't know.”
-“What is that?”
-“Number one, you're making a very big accounting error. You are putting things about Trump in the liabilities column that are assets. The business of grabbing women, making fun of a disabled person, making fun of war heroes, prisoners of war, these are positives. These things are saying to the American public, ‘my God, this guy is going to burn it all down.’ And that's what we want.” These were assets and he was shocked.
-“You guys are laughing when he says all this stuff thinking he's going to pay a price.” I said this a little tongue in cheek, but I said to him, “The second thing, don't forget, God loves Trump.” He looked at me like I was out of my mind. I told him a story about how I grew up riding around with a rather colorful uncle around 1990 in Atlantic City, and he said:
-"Boy, this Trump guy, this guy is amazing. He's a genius."
-“Didn't he run three of these casinos into the ground?” I asked.
-“Do you know how hard that is? It's a printing press for cash.” Then, he looked at me and he said:
-“He'll be fine. He will always be fine. Don't forget that.”
I didn't quite understand where he was going. I've watched his career and he is being looked after by something that is beyond anything that I can describe, not suggesting CIA or Putin or anything. But one of the things that I see all the time in my business is there are certain people who are taken care of by forces that I don't claim to understand.That has been the basis for my accurate predictions about Trump.
What I always tell people is just because you think somebody else can do something, be very careful about thinking you can do it. One of the biggest things that Trump has brought to the crisis management is something that a lot of us knew for decades, which is you don't have to run around apologizing.
For most of my career, everything in crisis management was all about apologies. I became hated by MBA professors because I would say things like, “Why are you apologizing when you should be fighting your attacker?” I believed it then and I believe it now. That doesn't mean that if you dumped acid in the river, you don't apologize or clean it up. Trump intuitively understood that it worked. However, that worked for him, I don't know if that would work for Procter&Gamble.
In terms of your question about ethics, it's not just a question of doing things that you think are right, it's a question of understanding downstream consequences. One of the things I've seen is that gangsters break the law, but they have an inability to calculate risk. The thing about criminals is they don't go, “Tell me more about that. How do you think we should do that?”
So you have to not only look at morality, but also at what your life experience has told you is plausible to get away with.
Joe Kennedy understood he was not going to become a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt, or an ambassador to England if he was considered a bootlegger. He danced along the line. Where did he make his real money? He made most of his money in what we today call “insider trading”, which was legal during his time, which is why he was made the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, because Roosevelt knew he knew how to do it.
Potolicchio: Last question on “Wiseguys and the White House” for our leadership careers. You write that there's a serious problem with the whole concept of mob ties. Exactly what qualifies someone as being tied to the mob? Is it mere personal acquaintance? It could be we bought a Toyota from them or the cashier at the 7-Eleven sold a soda to a Don? What advice do you have for us for how we construct our own ties, given how we are often judged by our ties? This brings in your other career as well, when it comes to network architecture and our reputation by associations.
Dezenhall: One of the interesting things that's happening now in the American media is they are paying a price for the world that they created, slandering and ruining people. They're taking it hard because nobody really wants free speech. When people argue for free speech, what they're saying is, "I want free speech, I don't want your free speech."
For years, the progressives in America were saying “free speech.” Now that the right has been so badly hurt by it, they want to say “free speech” and you see what's happening on the right with silencing the media.
Reputationally you have to look at how to fight back. We would always hear that somebody has mob ties. Growing up where I did, 100% of us, depending on the definition, did. Does it mean you have a relative or a neighbor or a family friend? I sure did. I had an investigative reporter after me a number of years ago, and the way he wanted to come after me for what I wrote was to say mob ties. Mob ties, what that really meant, was that you had to have a relative or a neighbor or a family friend. The true implication is you do business with these people. I'm a writer. I had no intention of allowing this reporter to do this. I can't tell you everything I did, but one of the things that, in addition to my lawyer's going after that media outlet to prohibit them from saying it, I was able to introduce into the public eye that this reporter, many years ago, had played a role in the wiretapping of civil rights leaders. He didn't like that, even though it was true.
What you see is when people are asked to play by the rules that they created, they don't like it very much. A lot of what you have to do is push back using the rules that you've been given. I've always been offended by how people can get ruined with the phrase, “having mob ties”, which doesn't really mean anything. An investigative reporter who has contacts in Al-Qaeda, do they have Terrorist ties? No, they're not terrorists. The media in America have been allowed to hurt a lot of people.
In order to win a defamation suit in America, it's not just falsehood, most of my clients never understood. They really believed that there was a law prohibiting the media from publishing inaccurate information. Not true. The media here are allowed to use false information. What they're not allowed to do is engage in a conspiracy to knowingly use that false information. What's happening now is you're seeing the Trump world using not so much the law, but the business power of the media: “We will hurt your business if you continue to employ this person to change things.”
This is something that I never really foresaw as a way to fight back. If a client was facing a boycott, I would always ask the same question left or right: “Who's boycotting?” If it was the right wing, don't worry about it, they can't boycott to save their life. If it was the gay rights movement, environmental movement, they've got a problem because they can pull off a boycott. The right couldn't. Whether we're talking about mob ties or any other thing, it's all about whether you have the horsepower, the weaponry to fight with, not whether the allegation is true or not.
Potolicchio: From the Mafia now to spies. Let me read from “Best of Enemies.” There are some rabid rumors that Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale will play the two characters that I'm going to read about here from your book. Here's Dezenhall:“In a notorious Moscow hellhole of a prison, confused and terrified, 63-year-old Gennady went on hunting trips with a cowboy. That's Jack Platt, the CIA officer. Two days earlier, on the first day of hunting season in the woods surrounding Moscow, he had been at his rural dacha with his mother, his girlfriend, Masha, and their young children, his second family. As the country celebrated its annual Moscow Days, he was in the front yard playing with the kids when he caught sight of 10 or so black men” I'll say police, just in terms of the terminology,“encircling his property. ‘I'm about to become the first victim of hunting season’, he thought, as he reached out to shake hands with the sheriff and acquaintance. The commandos pounced, beating the pulp out of him and breaking his knee in front of his hysterical mother, girlfriend and children. If you step one inch in any direction, we'll shoot you in front of them, one guard snarled. Then they hauled him off to hell. Hell for him came in many waves. First, he was taken to the local police station where he was told that illegal explosives had been found in his apartment. All the residences of his immediate family had been ransacked and the troops had found more explosives in his homes and his cars.”
In this book you brilliantly explore recruitment. This is Yuri Shvets talking, “recruitment is almost like a first love.” Can you give us advice as you studied these spies - how can we recruit people to our own cause, to our companies, to our political movements more effectively?
Dezenhall: Probably the biggest misconception I had going into writing this book was that the way you get people to come to your side is through money or blackmailing of some kind. The lesson I learned is that the main reason somebody betrays their country is resentment. You have to encourage people to go in the direction that they're already going.
One of the great myths of persuasion and propaganda is that I can get you to believe things that you don't believe. Whether we're talking to Donald Trump or getting people to hate Israel— you are dealing with preexisting things. If you're talking about recruiting people, you just can't sit there and harangue people: “Why don't you see this? Let me show you the data, once you see the data, you'll understand.” It's not about data, it is about emotion. That is why people do the things that they do, because it consummates a pre-existing emotion and that's what you have to work with.
Can you get somebody to spy through blackmail or threats or something like that? Sure, it happens. But what's interesting about some of the worst traitors in history is they were walk-ins. In other words, they volunteered or they weren't that hard to get because they wanted to betray.
A lot of these people in Iran, who cooperated with Israel, are doing what they're doing because they don't want the caliphate in charge.
Potolicchio: My final question is a heuristic question. There's a great line in here on surveillance, that the CIA knew that there would be operatives from the KGB that would go back to Moscow, as soon as they saw that the Russians were loading up on toilet paper, because the toilet paper in the US was so much finer than what they would have back in Moscow. Is there a shortcut like that in your career, a secret that you can pass on to us?
Dezenhall: What I have noticed is that my corporate clients always had this misconception that they had a team. They never understood that they didn't have a team. They had a collection of individuals with self-interest.
One of the reasons why it got harder with technology to manage these cases was we would be sitting in a room with 17 people on their laptops. The enemy was not outside, the enemy was in the room. Our conversations were being emailed by a 24-year-old who wanted to cultivate the Wall Street Journal. They were sending them everything. It's not a perfect corollary to the toilet paper thing, but I found that if there was another PR firm, we were not a conventional PR firm, but the villain was usually somebody in their 20s from that PR firm because it was in their self-interest to leak everything.
Now, law firms have to be pretty careful. As a 28-year-old lawyer, your career would end if you got caught. Law firms don't like each other either, but it's not just ethical obligations. It is a complete career ender, even a firm ender, if something like that happens. You're sitting in a room with a bunch of consultants and a bunch of people. I found that the enemy was always in the room and after a while, I wouldn't take cases when such people were in there and somebody would say: “What, you don't trust them? You can't play well with others?” It has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the fact that the self-interest of the person who is sitting at the table was not in the company.
One of the reasons why you saw all of this woke stuff happening in corporations is not because it was good for the company, but it was within the value system of the people, who personally worked in the marketing departments of these big companies. They were people in their late 20s, Ivy League educated, and they wanted to go back to their reunions to say, “Look what I did on LGBT or racial issues.” It had nothing to do with business and they blew themselves up. The backfire effect has been enormous because they were not looking out for what was best for the company, they were looking for a narcissistic achievement.
Potolicchio: Eric, I need to thank you for being a philanthropist. I have two mentoring philanthropists on this call here. Both of you have been so supportive of my career. I didn't read yet from your book “False Light”, so I want to end our session today by reading it. This is the opening of this novel: “Whatever the hell I had been doing at work the past few years no longer mattered. I thought for sure my investigative series on the presidential candidate's proven mob ties would have caused a ripple with readers, but he'd been elected anyway. Nobody gave a damn.” And you continue to write:“The scrap of paper was tacked to a cubicle and read, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword and considerably easier to write with.’ What I'm getting at, I guess, is not just that my work didn't matter anymore, but that I didn't matter.” Eric, you matter a lot, not just in terms of your support, but with your pen. I hope we can have you back when you write your 13th book and I hope that happens maybe in the next couple months because it's tough to go two months without Eric Dezenhall.