Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  In the early fifties, according to a Senate committee, 20 percent of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was owned by the Vito Genovese crime family. Handridge Oil, a Murchisonowned outfit, was the subject of a deal with Las Vegas gamblers involving massive security violations. There were also to be deals with Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked boss of the Teamsters Union, and Clint, Jr., established financial ties with Mafia boss Marcello.

  It was Edgar who suggested the Murchisons hire one of his own former administrative assistants, Thomas Webb. A seventeen-year FBI veteran, Webb was to have an interest in the Murchison meat deal that was part of the Bobby Baker scandal during the Johnson presidency. According to Baker, he and Webb once traveled together to make a political contribution – cash in a white envelope, no questions asked. Webb, Baker said, was ‘the fixer for the Murchisons in Washington, the bagman.’ Also, according to Baker and others, he ‘worshiped’ Edgar.

  It was a Murchison aide who introduced Edgar to Washington lobbyist Irving Davidson. Davidson has been linked to the Teamsters and organized crime. He was involved in the Murchison meat deal and, more recently, was the go-between for Clint Murchison, Jr., and Carlos Marcello during the sting operation that sent the Mafia boss to prison in 1983.

  ‘I’m a great admirer of Mr Hoover, and I did have access,’ said Davidson. ‘We used to have parties before the Redskin games, at Tom Webb’s house or my house, and Hoover always came to them. He was a darned good friend. I lived around the corner from him, three quarters of a block. I’d go over and say hello to him and Clyde Tolson. If Mr Tolson was sick I’d bring him a Cowboy jersey or some Polish kielbasa.’5

  In the late fifties, while monitoring a bug on Murray ‘The Camel’ Humphries in Chicago, surprised agents heard their boss’ name mentioned. Humphries was the head of the ‘Connection Guys,’ the criminal group with special responsibility for corruption of public officials. He was talking, with evident knowledge and interest, about Edgar’s friendship with Clint Murchison.

  ‘Murchison owned a piece of Hoover,’ Bobby Baker mused in an interview for this book. ‘Rich people always try to put their money with the sheriff, because they’re looking for protection. Hoover was the personification of law and order and officially against gangsters and everything, so it was a plus for a rich man to be identified with him. That’s why men like Murchison made it their business to let everyone know Hoover was their friend. You can do a lot of illegal things if the head lawman is your buddy.’

  Everywhere they went, Edgar and Clyde indulged a passion for horseracing. At Hialeah in Florida and Del Mar in California, at Bowie and Pimlico in Maryland, Charles Town in West Virginia and Belmont in New York, Edgar’s face was familiar for forty years. Edgar and Clyde had special tables, and usually complimentary boxes, at every track. There was a horse called Director J. E. in Maryland, a J. Edgar in Texas and a J. Edgar Ruler in California. At Laurel, in Maryland, they still run a J. Edgar Hoover Handicap.

  Racing, and the gambling that went with it, became an addiction for Edgar. An in-house joke had it that the FBI agent whose hair grayed fastest was the man who had to get the Director to the track through rush-hour traffic. Headquarters staff were dispatched to the Library of Congress to dig out racing information. Edgar issued standing orders that he was not to be bothered on Saturdays and, according to DeLoach, once defied an order by President Johnson to return for a meeting with Cabinet members. Racing got Edgar overexcited. After a run of luck one afternoon, former Speaker Tip O’Neill recalled, he took another man’s car by mistake and drove it all the way back to Washington.

  Edgar encouraged his oil millionaire friends in 1954 when, not content with owning a hotel near Del Mar, they bought the track itself. The group they bought it from was headed by Al Hart, a liquor distributor with links to the Chicago mob – another dubious character with whom Edgar had socialized.

  ‘At first,’ said Del Charro manager Witwer, ‘Murchison and Richardson were not only turned down by Hart and his directors, they were practically thrown out of the office. And Murchison said, “If those fellas won’t deal with me, we’ll sick old J. Edgar on them.” And Hoover sent two FBI agents out to call on Hart. I heard this from the agents themselves afterwards. And then Hart sold.’

  All the profits from the track, Murchison claimed, were to go to Boys Inc., a fund established by the Texans ‘for the benefit of underprivileged boys.’ To present a respectable front, he picked a revered war hero, General Holland Smith, to serve as president. ‘I think $200 a month for General Smith,’ he wrote, ‘is good propaganda …’

  Murchison guessed wrong. The general resigned after a few months, noting that in spite of clearing $640,000 at one meeting, ‘not one cent has been turned over to Boys Inc. I do not know where the money went. It is my considered opinion that no money will be transferred to Boys Inc. for at least five years, if then. I hope I have given you a fair idea of what I think of Mr Murchison and Mr Richardson …’

  Skeptics, including the California tax authorities, said the Del Mar scheme was just another moneymaker for the millionaires. Because the profits were supposed to go to charity, they could not be taxed – and the state wanted the tax. Murchison counterattacked with every asset at his disposal, including the obliging Edgar.

  ‘I know Clint Murchison,’ Edgar told the racing press, ‘and I think he would be the last person in the country to use such a plan as a clever tax or business subterfuge … This work helps directly in making the nation sturdy, for Communist penetration is currently directed mainly at labor and youth organizations.’

  Some Del Mar profit did go to charity over the years, but eminent critics did not share Edgar’s confidence. ‘This dodge,’ said former President Herbert Hoover, Chairman of Boys’ Clubs of America and normally one of Edgar’s allies, ‘is as old as the hills. They do not give all profits to charity.’ George Allen, racing enthusiast and intimate of Murchison and Edgar, admitted years later, ‘It was a racket, if you want to know … a tax racket.’

  Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime. Police intelligence in California learned that he regularly used bookmakers linked to the mob.

  In Florida, Edgar asked Phil ‘The Stick’ Kovolick, a heavy for Meyer Lansky, for the winning numbers. At one stage, crime reporter Hank Messick learned, ‘gangsters began taking advantage of Hoover’s ignorance by getting themselves invited to his box at the track and posing with him for pictures. It became something of a game …’

  Edgar was not so ignorant. He once boasted about shady gambling to Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon administration. ‘He told me,’ Mardian recalled, ‘that he was once in an illegal race parlor down in Florida where you could have dinner and place bets and so on. And the Miami police raided the place. He laughed and said, “Well, what a shock they got when they found me there! They cleared out faster than you can imagine.”’6

  FBI propagandists, who apparently understood the risks better than their boss, regularly let it be known that Edgar placed only small bets. ‘Temperance and moderation in everything,’ he was quoted as saying, and he was duly photographed standing at the $2 window. The truth was otherwise.

  ‘We all used to laugh about that,’ said Del Charro manager Allan Witwer. ‘At Del Mar, when he’d been authoritatively tipped, Hoover would place two-hundred-dollar bets’ ($1,000 at today’s rates). To avoid being observed making large bets, insiders recalled, he would send companions – often FBI agents – to place the bets for him.

  Edgar made light of suggestions that racing was penetrated by the mob. ‘The FBI,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘has much more important functions than arresting gamblers all over the place.’ And, all the while, he carried on an amicable relationship with one of the most notorious gambling bosses in the country, the mob boss known as ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld.’

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; ‘Intelligent gangsters from Al Capone to Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky have always been fierce, voluble defenders of the capitalist faith, and to that extent they were and are J. Edgar Hoover’s ideological kinsmen.’

  Albert Fried, historian

  Edgar had a relationship with mob chieftain Frank Costello that lasted for years, and it has never been satisfactorily explained. It started, apparently, with a seemingly innocuous meeting on a New York street.

  Edgar recalled the occasion himself, in a private conversation with the veteran journalist Norma Abrams – a confidence she kept until shortly before her death in 1989.

  ‘Hoover was an inveterate window-shopper,’ said Abrams. ‘Early one morning in the thirties, he told me, he was out walking on Fifth Avenue and somebody came up behind him and said, “Good morning, Mr Hoover.” He turned to see who it was, and it was Frank Costello. Costello said, “I don’t want to embarrass you,” and Hoover said, “You won’t embarrass me. We’re not looking for you or anything.” They talked all the way to Fifty-seventh Street together, but God protected them, and there was no photographer around, or anyone …’

  The contact was renewed, as Edgar explained to Eduardo Disano, a Florida restaurateur who also knew Costello. ‘Hoover told me he and Costello both used apartments at the Waldorf,’ Disano recalled. ‘He said Costello asked him to come up and meet in his apartment. Hoover said he told him by all means he would meet him, but not in his room, downstairs … I don’t know what they talked about. Hoover was a very quiet man about business.’

  If Costello was trying to cultivate Edgar, it worked. Once they even took the risk of sitting together in the Stork Club. Costello was soon referring to Edgar as ‘John’ – a habit he presumably picked up from Winchell. The mobster was to recall with a chuckle the day Edgar in turn took the lead and invited him for coffee. ‘I got to be careful about my associates,’ Costello told Edgar. ‘They’ll accuse me of consorting with questionable characters …’

  In 1939, when Edgar was credited with the capture of racketeer Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, it was Costello who pulled strings to make it happen. This was the time the mob would remember as the Big Heat, when Thomas Dewey, then District Attorney, brought unprecedented pressure on organized crime. The heat was on, especially, for the capture of Lepke, the man they called the head of Murder, Inc.

  Shortly before midnight on August 24, Edgar called in newsmen to hear a sensational announcement. He, personally, had just accepted Lepke’s surrender on a New York street. It made a fine tale – Edgar, in dark glasses, waiting in a parked limousine for his encounter with one of the most dangerous criminals in America. Edgar said the FBI had ‘managed the surrender through its own sources,’ and it emerged that his friend Winchell had played a role as go-between. Edgar was covered in glory, to the rage of Dewey and the New York authorities, who said he had operated behind their backs.

  He had indeed, thanks to a neat piece of manipulation by the mob. Lucky Luciano, issuing orders to Costello and Lansky from prison, had decided that to relieve law enforcement pressure on mob operations Lepke must be made to surrender. Word went to the gangster that he would be treated leniently if he surrendered to Edgar – a false promise, as it turned out, for he was to end up in the electric chair. Costello, meanwhile, met secretly with Edgar to hammer out the arrangements.

  The beauty of it all, Luciano would recall, was that they achieved two things at once. They won relief from law enforcement pressure and simultaneously ensured that Edgar and Dewey – even the ego-obsessed Walter Winchell – each got their ‘piece of the cake.’ For supreme practitioners of the Fix, the sacrifice of Lepke was a job well done.

  William Hundley, the Justice Department attorney, had a glimpse of the way Costello handled Edgar. It happened by chance in 1961, when Hundley was staying at the apartment of his friend – and the mobster’s attorney – Edward Bennett Williams. ‘At eight o’clock in the morning,’ Hundley recalled, ‘there was a knock at the door. There was a guy there with a big hat on, and this really hoarse voice. It was Frank Costello, and he came in, and we sat around eating breakfast … Somehow the subject of Hoover came up, and Hoover liking to bet on horseracing. Costello mentioned that he knew Hoover, that they met for lunch. Then he started looking very leery of going on, but Ed told him he could trust me. Costello just said, “Hoover will never know how many races I had to fix for those lousy ten-dollar bets.” He still looked leery, and I guess he didn’t want to say much more.’

  In Costello, Edgar had one of the most powerful tipsters in gambling history. One of his primary mob functions was to control betting and fix races. Those who failed to cooperate got hurt, or worse. Edgar’s relationship with him was corroborated by sources both inside and outside the mob. ‘Costello did give tips to Hoover,’ said Walter Winchell’s colleague Herman Klurfeld. ‘He got them from [betting-parlor operator] Frank Erickson and passed them on through Winchell … Sometimes Costello and Hoover met directly. Now and then, when Hoover was in the barbershop at the Waldorf, so was Frank Costello.’

  Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana reportedly had an inside track on the relationship. His half brother Chuck claimed that Costello ‘worked the whole thing out. He knew Hoover was just like every other politician and copper, only meaner and smarter than most. Hoover didn’t want an envelope each month … so we never gave him cash outright; we gave him something better: tips on fixed horse races. He could bet ten thousand dollars on a horse that showed twenty-to-one odds, if he wanted … and he has.’1

  In 1990, aged eighty, New York mob boss Carmine Lombardozzi said Costello and Edgar ‘had contact on many occasions and over a long period. Hoover was very friendly towards the families. They took good care of him, especially at the races … The families made sure he was looked after when he visited the tracks in California and on the East Coast. They had an understanding. He would lay off the families, turn a blind eye. It helped that he denied that we even existed. If there was anything they could do for him, information that did not hurt family business, they would provide it.’2

  George Allen, Edgar’s racecourse companion for forty years and a prominent public figure who had no connection to the mob, recalled a conversation between Edgar and Costello. ‘I heard Hoover in the Stork one night,’ he said, ‘tell Costello that as long as he stayed out of Hoover’s bailiwick, he’d stay out of his.’

  Since Costello’s principal business was gambling, and since gambling was not a federal offense, it could be said that Edgar’s remark merely reflected the legal situation of the day. Other clues, however, suggest that his laissez-faire attitude went deeper. In the early fifties, when there were efforts to have Costello deported to Italy, there was no pressure from the FBI. According to Walter Winchell’s friend Curly Harris, who knew both Edgar and the mobster, Edgar once went out of his way to protect Costello from his own agents.

  ‘The doorman at Frank’s apartment building,’ Harris remembered, ‘told him that there were a couple of FBI guys hanging around. So Frank got hold of Hoover on the phone and told him, “What’s the idea of these fellows being there? If you want to see me you can get to me with one phone call.” And Hoover looked into it, and he found out who the fellows were and why they were doing that. He said they weren’t under any orders to do it, they’d taken it on themselves. He was very sore about it. And he had the agents transferred to Alaska or someplace the next day … He and Costello had mutual friends.’3

  To Costello, and to his associate Meyer Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky’s expertise in such corruption that made him the nearest there ever was to a true national godfather of organized crime.

  Another Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. ‘Ways could be found,’ he said in his memoirs, ‘so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn’t interfere with him.’ T
he way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.

  The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar’s compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year’s Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell’s guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde.4 At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello’s associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello’s, and Costello was said to be the club’s real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.

  Seymour Pollack, a close friend of Meyer Lansky, told this author that Edgar’s homosexuality was ‘common knowledge’ and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. ‘I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on!… They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it.’

  Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have ‘turned’ and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. ‘I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front,’ Fratianno recalled, ‘and said, “Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it’s J. Edgar Hoover.” And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, “Ah, that J. Edgar’s a punk, he’s a fuckin’ degenerate queer.”’