Generoso Pope, Jr.

Generoso Paul "Gene" Pope, Jr. (January 13, 1927 – October 2, 1988) was an American media mogul, best known for creating The National Enquirer as it is known today.

Pope learned the newspaper business from his father, Generoso Pope, a New York political powerbroker and quarry magnate whose Italian-American newspaper interests included the Corriere d'America and the daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano. Generoso Pope Sr. is said to have had ties to New York crime boss Frank Costello, and at the birth of his son asked Costello to be the godfather. Pope Jr. took over the daily operations of the Il Progresso Italo-Americano at the age of 21 after completing his education at the Horace Mann School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in general engineering in 1946. After his father died in April 1950 at age 59, Pope worked for the CIA's psychological warfare unit.

Pope acquired the New York Enquirer in 1952 for $75,000. The Enquirer purchase was supposedly made, in part, with a loan from Costello. In 1954, Pope revamped the format from a broadsheet to a tabloid, and renamed it The National Enquirer. Pope worked tirelessly throughout the 1950s and 1960s to increase the circulation of the Enquirer. In the late 50s and through to 1967, it was known for its gory and unsettling headlines and stories such as: "I Cut Out Her Heart and Stomped On It" (Sept. 8, 1963) [The true story of the April 1963 mutilation murder of former Olympic Skier Sonja McCaskie & "Mom Boiled Her Baby And Ate Her" (1962). At this time the paper was sold on newsstands and drugstores only - as the gory headlines would not have been allowed in family Supermarkets, etc. Pope stated he got the idea for the format and these gory stories from seeing people congregate around auto accidents. After 1967, Pope tempered the use of gory headlines so the tabloid could be sold in a more family-friendly environment such as at supermarket check-out lines, which Henry Dormann paved the way for by visiting with supermarket executives. This new sales strategy proved to be a huge boon for sales; single-copy sales of some issues (e.g. Elvis in his coffin) peaked above six million in the 1970s.

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