New Elliot Mintz Book ‘We All Shine On’ - Review

As expected, Elliot Mintz gives very little away about himself and the events of 8th December 1980 in his newly released book

For the last 44 years, Elliot Mintz has stuck to a brief account of his experiences around the assassination of John Lennon. The story goes that Elliot heard about the assassination in Los Angeles on the evening in question. Mintz then dramatically rushed to the airport and booked the last red eye out of LA to New York. A crying air hostess exiting the cockpit, confirmed to Elliot the tragic news. Once he arrived at the Dakota, Mintz described seeing blood on the pavement and some broken glass at the scene. Mintz then helped out at the Dakota with phone calls and the like. All very stoic. All very vague.

in his newly released book, ‘We All Shine On’, Mintz doesn’t go much into the first 25 years of his life. When he does, it is sparse and highly selective. You never get a sense of knowing who the real Elliot Mintz really is and what his motives and drivers are. Mintz was born in the Bronx in New York in 1945 to a working class Jewish family. He apparently had a stutter when he was a teenager, which might account for his infamous slow speech delivery. In 1963, Mintz moved to LA from New York to attend Los Angeles City College and study broadcasting. His first big break was linked to a conspiracy. One of his college classmates, Roland Brynum, had apparently known Lee Harvey Oswald when they were in the marines together. Mintz sensed an opportunity and interviewed Brynum shortly after JFK’s assassination. The audio interview was picked up by national and international radio stations. Mintz was on his way. Mintz then became a DJ in the Los Angeles area for a few minor community radio stations. By 1971, Mintz had spent five years as a local DJ who now and again managed to interview various Hollywood celebrities. He was destined to stay on the margins of life, until in the Autumn of 1971, he rang Yoko Ono’s publicists and told them that he was playing her album ‘Fly’ on his radio station and could he possibly interview her. It was a clever play. Ono agreed to a phone call interview and Mintz deliberately focused the whole interview on Ono and never mentioned John. Ono rang Mintz back to thank him for the interview. Mintz wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass. He phoned Ono back and he quickly became her phone confidant. For many years forthwith, Mintz became Yoko and John’s friend and advisor. He didn’t ask for pay because he didn’t have to. Once people knew he was connected to John and Yoko, multiple interviews and then subsequent publicist gigs with lots of Hollywood players easily came his way. Connecting himself to Ono led Mintz to being connected to a Beatle. Being connected to a Beatle meant Mintz didn’t have to worry about paying his bills ever again. In his new book, Mintz lays out his connection to Lennon and Ono as some kind of fateful happenstance that was written in the stars. I don’t buy that. I think Mintz cultivated Ono to get to John and he used his connection to both of them to get known and then subsequently employed by the rich and famous in Hollywood. You have to admire the man’s hustle.

One of the famous Hollywood people who Mintz got to know and became ‘good friends’ with, was actor Sal Mineo. Mineo came to prominence through starring in the seminal 1955 film ‘A Rebel Without a Cause’, with James Dean and Natalie Wood. Twenty years later when Mintz became his friend, Mineo’s career was very much on the slide. In the mid 1970’s, Mineo was slated to appear in an Orson Welles film about the RFK assassination, playing Sirhan Sirhan. When Mineo was murdered in early 1976, in a Los Angeles street via a stab wound to the heart, Mintz took it very badly. Though three separate witnesses saw a white man running from the Mineo murder scene, a black man called Lionel Williams was eventually convicted of Mineo’s murder. This was because nearly a year after the murder, Lionel’s wife Theresa went to the LA police and told them that her husband confessed to her about the murder on the night in question. Lionel denied it but he was convicted and got 51 years to life. Disturbingly, Theresa apparently committed suicide shortly after giving her statement to the police. Conspiracy theories have constantly swirled around the Mineo murder. Many people believe that Mineo may have got to know too much about the RFK assassination and he was murdered to silence him.  Mintz claims he heard about the Mineo murder while dining out with a friend. Apparently, a waiter brought a phone over to Mintz’s table and someone told him the news over the phone. Mintz then said he went to the murder scene and saw Mineo’s body under a tarp. Mintz admitted he was later questioned by detectives over Mineo’s death and was considered a ‘person of interest’. The LAPD even went as far as to make Mintz take a polygraph test to according to Mintz – ‘clear my name’. No account of Mineo’s murder has ever mentioned Mintz being at the scene after the fact or being considered a suspect. Most contemporary accounts of the Mineo murder describe the police theorizing that robbery was not a motive for the murder. It was widely reported that Mineo had $21 in his coat and the jewellery that he was wearing and his car keys were lying next to his body. But Mintz in his new book declares that Mineo’s assailant ‘grabbed his wallet and made away with a grand total of $11’. The New York Times reporting the very next day after the Mineo murder confirmed – ‘Mr. Mineo's wallet was found intact on his body”. Where did Elliot get his $11 and a stolen wallet story from?  No one has ever mentioned a missing $11 before. Surely you would think Elliot would have thoroughly investigated his best friends murder with a bit more attention to detail? It’s all very strange.

Police at the Sal Mineo murder scene

There is no proof of any conspiracy in the Sal Mineo murder, but speaking about conspiracies in a recent Spin magazine interview, Mintz decaled that he thought the events of 22^nd November 1963 when JFK was assassinated, was a coup d’etat in America. Mintz featured the JFK assassination on his radio show back in the day and apparently, John Lennon became fascinated by the case, once declaring to Mintz - ‘Don’t give up on new information’. After Mineo’s strange murder, Lennon declared to Mintz – ‘If they want to get you, they’re going to get you. Look what happened to Kennedy with all those people around him’.

May Pang controversially said in her memoir that she thought Yoko Ono hired a hypnotist to apparently cure John of smoking, after he went back to see Ono at the Dakota, when John and May were still together. John never returned to May from the Dakota. The day after John’s hypnotic session at the Dakota, May ran into John at a dentist’s office. May said John seemed befuddled and in a daze. The inference being that Ono somehow used this hypnotist to hypnotise John into staying with her and leaving May. Elliot doesn’t deny the existence of the hypnotist (who Mintz interestingly refers to as a ‘mesmerist’), but Mintz now reveals that he was the person who arranged for the hypnotist and ‘Yoko had nothing to do with it’. Apparently, John had remembered that Mintz had interviewed a hypnotist on his radio show and he asked Mintz to arrange for the hypnotist to fly to New York to help John quit smoking. According to Mintz, the unnamed hypnotist was a bit of a diva who didn’t like his hotel room and he also didn’t manage to cure John of his smoking habit. Mintz also revealed that John told him that the hypnotist did not even succeed in ‘putting him under’. Lastly, and perhaps most tellingly, Mintz does admits that the ‘very next day’ after the hypnosis session, John broke it off with May and returned to the Dakota and resumed his marriage with Ono. According to everyone who knew John at that time, his period in LA and New York with May Pang was mostly a happy experience – outside of some drinking mishaps in LA nightclubs. Mintz though, ever the faithful Ono servant, describes the period rather callously as a ‘long and lonely winter’. I’m looking forward to reading May Pang’s reply to all of this.

Back to the Mintz book and matters surrounding the 8^th December 1980.

I was always troubled about Elliot’s previous accounts regarding how he heard about John’s murder. In his new book, he reveals that his mother called him at his West Coast home from the East Coast on the evening of 8^th December 1980. His mother told him that she had heard on the radio that there was a shooting at the Dakota on 72^nd street. Unless Elliot’s mother was a CB radio enthusiast and was listening to police airwaves, it is highly unlikely she would have heard this. News journalist Alan Weiss broke the news to his News employers that John Lennon was being treated for gunshot wounds at the same hospital he was being treated for a motorcycle accident. From that time of roughly 11.30pm, local, and very quickly national radio stations started reporting that John Lennon had been shot. 30 minutes later around midnight, Dr. Stephan Lynn told the media outside the Roosevelt hospital that John Lennon was dead. If by some strange happenstance, Elliot’s mother heard about a shooting on 72^nd street, within the next hour, the whole world would have known John Lennon was shot. But in his new book, Mintz wants us to think he never knew this fact until he was on an aeroplane.

Mintz reveals that after talking to his mother, he rang the Lennon’s apartment and home studio and no one answered. A little strange perhaps but Mintz must have known that John and Yoko were working on new music at the time, often deep into the small hours. Mintz then says he called the front desk at the Dakota multiple times. After numerous attempts, someone picked up. Mintz recognised the voice of the ‘Dakota Operator’. This must have been concierge Jay Hastings. Mintz has also said in a recent podcast that he called ‘the doorman’. I’m confident Doorman Jose Perdomo would not have operated the phones at the Dakota due to his poor English. According to Mintz, when Hastings answered the phone he simply said ‘Yes”. Mintz explained who he was, revealing that the ‘Dakota Operator” knew who he was. Instead of Hastings saying the obvious simple line - ‘John has been shot’ - something that would have taken barely two seconds, Hastings apparently put the phone down on Mintz. Perhaps Hastings was busy doing something else? Mintz started to panic. He turned on the television, but this was before rolling 24-hour news became a thing, so the TV told him nothing. Mintz said something told him that he had to get to New York. He threw some clothes in a bag and got in his old Jaguar car and drove to LAX airport. Mintz then tried listening to his car radio on the way to the airport but it apparently didn’t work. I simply do not believe that a radio DJ would drive around in a Jaguar car and accept that the radio wouldn’t work. Listening to the radio surely would have been one of DJ Elliot’s main priorities in life. I’ve driven in cars at that time and the analogue AM radios in those early eighties cars were pretty much indestructible. They almost always never failed. They often worked even without an aerial. But poor Elliot’s faulty Jaguar radio kept him in a ‘news blackout’. Arriving at the airport, Elliot parked and went to buy a ticket. Considering all we know and Mintz claiming he got a 10pm flight out of LA, we can safely estimate that the news of John Lennon being shot and killed was at least 3 hours old by the time Elliot Mintz entered LAX airport. Elliot had been working in TV and radio for over a decade at this point in his life, it is impossible to believe that he did not know a credible news producer or company that he could not call from a pay phone in LAX, and ask if they had heard anything big from New York. Why didn’t he call back his mother and ask if she had an update?

Like a scene from a clichéd melodrama, Mintz apparently made the last red-eye plane to New York just as it closed its doors. Once seated, he then apparently started to think - like any sane person would at this point - that he may have acted irrationally. It’s all very improbable and strange. To put a final dramatic twist on this convoluted and frankly very hard to believe story, Mintz then said he saw an air hostess exit the cockpit of the plane, with tears streaming down her face. When Mintz enquired if she was OK, the woman answered: “They Killed Him. They murdered John Lennon”. Note the dramatic use of the word ‘They’.  Stoically, Elliot said he tried to bury his grief on the flight so he could be strong for Yoko and Sean when he got to New York. When Elliot arrived at the Dakota at 7.30am the next morning, he recalled, as he had done in previous interviews, that he saw:

‘blood on the pavement – John’s blood’ and ‘shards of broken glass from a window shattered by one of the bullets’.

All the cops who attended the Dakota after John was shot said they did not see blood in the driveway. But, most of them did say that when John was being carried out by two officers, he was bleeding profusely from his mouth. Blood easily could have dripped on the driveway floor at this point. As for the glass, Jay Hastings and Joe Many both told me that the Dakota driveway was open again to residents the very next morning. The pools of blood in the back office(s) were mopped up in the early hours of the morning by Joe Grezik. Knowing all this, is it credible to believe that Dakota staff would have left broken glass lying around the vestibule floor and driveway entrance? It’s possible but again unlikely with what we know.

Mintz thought this scene reminded him of seeing Sal Mineo’s body under a yellow tarp outside his home in West Hollywood. Mintz then said he eventually saw Yoko and helped where he could. One recollection of note (if true), is when Yoko apparently saw the face of Chapman on the television for the first time in her bedroom. She seemed according to Mintz, ‘mesmerized and repulsed and deeply confused’.  I have also heard from a confidential source that Yoko Ono later tasked Mintz to look into the murder. Mintz fails to mention this in his book or outline what he may have found out that did not fit with the official narrative. Mintz briefly mentions John’s fast-track cremation, but it is discussed in a way that the reader may mistakenly believe that the cremation happened ‘days and weeks’ after John’s murder and not within 36 hours.

Mintz also revealed that Ono told him after the publication of Albert Goldman’s book, that she was warned by one of her ‘mystical’ advisors, (this probably meant tarot card reader Charlie Swan aka John Green), that ‘John was in danger in New York’. Apparently, Ono told Mintz that this was the reason that she sent John to Bermuda to keep him safe. If this ‘John in danger’ story is true, this shines a very suspicious light on John Green. Because if Green did have some foreknowledge of a threat to John in New York, I don’t believe this knowledge would have come from a pack of magic cards.

Before we get to the most interesting and revelatory bit of information in Mintz’s book, lets quickly sum up what he said about the post murder months at the Dakota. A lot of this is old ground covered by David Sheff’s infamous article and Fred Seaman and Albert Goldman’s books. Mintz talks about the numerous death threats Ono received and the off-duty police officers who now arranged the Ono security. He also mentions Sam Havadtoy moving in and ‘sharing a bed’ with Ono, but Mintz wonders whether the gay Havadtoy and Ono were ever ‘lovers”. Mintz also talks about Project Walrus. He identifies Lennon assistant Fred Seaman and his accomplice Robert Rosen as the ‘chief instigators’ in the plan to ‘pilfer material’ such as John’s journals, to include in a ‘tell-all’ book. Mintz wrongly though ascribed the infamous ‘dead Lennon’s equal big $’ quote to Fred Seaman. This disgusting line was actually written by the loathsome Robert Rosen and deserves to be his ultimate epitaph.

There is one very interesting account in this book and if it is true, it shines a very interesting light on the NYPD and DA’s office integrity and their desire to give Mark Chapman a fair trial and John Lennon a thorough investigation into his assassination. Mintz sets out his usual dramatic scene:

‘It was a snowy night in February 1981. It’s the dead of winter’

‘At this moment, in February 1981, the function I am performing is archivist and scrivener’

‘On this particular blizzard night in February I can practically hear the snow falling outside the window’

As you can gather, Mintz is very keen to let us all know that this bit of information comes from a snowy February 1981. Unfortunately studying the historical weather maps for the area in 1981, it clearly shows that it did not snow in New York in February 1981. It did snow in January 1981, so this is probably the month Mintz is talking about. For a man who likes to come across as fastidious and detail-driven, Mintz often gets details wrong. Regardless, what is crucially important is what Elliot said he was doing in this snowy setting:

‘I spot an object in the room, tucked away in a corner, that snaps me out of my musings. It’s something I usually go out of my way to ignore, something I have been avoiding dealing with for weeks, since the day representatives from Roosevelt Hospital delivered it to the Dakota, handing it over as gingerly as fine crystal. It’s a twin-ply paper bag, folded at the top and heavily stapled. Inside are the clothes John was wearing the day he was killed—a pair of pants, a black leather jacket, a blood-soaked shirt, and, hauntingly, a pair of blood-spattered eyeglasses—along with a few items he was carrying in his pockets.

I do not catalogue these items. I cannot bring myself to open the bag, let alone videotape what’s inside’.

We know that John’s clothes went in a brown bag with John’s body, from the Roosevelt hospital to the morgue, in the small hours of 9^th December 1980. We know CMO Elliot Gross catalogued the clothes in his autopsy report on the morning of 9^th December. We know police officer Tony Palmer picked the clothes up from the Chief Medical Officers office at lunchtime on 9^th December 1980. Palmer then took the bag of clothes immediately back to the 20^th precinct police station and put them into the evidence lock-up at the station. That’s all we can say for sure. What should have happened next in the following weeks, is the Manhattan’s DA’s office requesting all the physical evidence of the murder case to be sent to their office to be logged and available for the upcoming trial. If Mintz is telling the truth, and that is a big if when you consider all the problems in his book outlined in this article, then the DA’s office or the 20^th precinct station of the NYPD, broke all protocols by giving away vital evidence for an upcoming trial. Remember, Chapman did not plead guilty until Monday 8^th June 1981. Until he did this, an upcoming trial (of the century?) was set for the Summer of 1981. Mintz and Ono appeared to have been given John’s clothes way before the trial date and before Chapman’s guilty plea. Further clarification is needed, but this seems to me like further proof – if anymore proof where needed – that the New York authorities of the time had no intention of giving Mark Chapman a fair trial or investigating John Lennon’s assassination in the thorough manner it deserved.

Much of the content in this book has been heard and said before. There is little new for the reader to ponder or enjoy. There is also, as I have outlined in this article, a lot of misinformation and hard to believe stories contained within. Penguin recently declared this book ‘the definitive’ John Lennon and Yoko Ono story’. It’s nothing of the sort. The narrative is predictably skewed in favour of Ono, with John getting a particular hard time around the May Pang affair. As for who Elliot Mintz really is, this book does not reveal that. The real Elliot Mintz, like the truth surrounding the horrendous events of 8^th December 1980, is as elusive as ever.