J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Through a tap on Luciano’s phone, Anslinger learned that the main purpose of the mob summit was to establish new routes to speed up the importation of drugs from Europe into the United States. When he failed to convince the Cuban authorities that they should deport Luciano (both Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and its police chief, Benito Herrera, a proud graduate of the FBI Academy, were on Luciano’s payroll), Anslinger decided to go public. The columnist Robert Ruark, not Walter Winchell, got the scoop; and Harry Anslinger, not J. Edgar Hoover, got the credit. Under pressure from the U.S. government, Luciano was arrested on February 23 and deported two months later.

  On February 26, 1947, Hoover opened his first file on Francis Albert Sinatra, a.k.a. Frank Sinatra. Although in time the FBI’s files on Sinatra ran to hundreds of pages—most of them accumulated during the Kennedy administration—the initial entry consisted of a four-page summary of the information in bureau files (BUFILES) on Sinatra’s background and a synopsis of the recent newspaper stories regarding the singer’s “association with hoodlums.”

  Still, Hoover found it of sufficient interest to have it placed in his Official/Confidential file.29

  Even after the Anslinger disclosures, J. Edgar Hoover continued to insist that there was no such thing as organized crime. Had Hoover really wanted to see how high organized crime reached, he would only have needed to open his office door and look across the hall.

  One of the more lucrative new territories invaded by the syndicate following repeal was labor racketeering. The Chicago mob was especially active in this field, its influence extending all the way to Hollywood. In 1934, following a rigged election, the Capone organization put its own man, George Browne, in as president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators. Browne’s real boss, and partner in various criminal endeavors, was Willie Bioff, a former pimp and labor organizer. After knocking down independent theater owners, the pair got bolder and took on the chains. Then, encouraged by their success, they decided to make a really big score. In 1936 Bioff informed a representative of the major studios that they could have labor peace for a price, $2 million. Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Loew’s, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Brothers briefly considered the offer, then agreed to pay. However, Joseph M. Schenck, president of the board of Twentieth Century-Fox, made the mistake of making one of the payoffs with a personal check, which came to the attention of the IRS. Indicted for income tax evasion, Schenck exposed the extortion scheme. In return for a dropping of the tax charges against him, Schenck testified against Bioff and Browne, who, following their convictions, implicated the Chicago mobsters Frank Nitti, Louis Campagna, Phil D’Andrea, Charles Gioe, John Roselli, Frank Maritote, and Paul Ricca.

  These were no low-level hoods. Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti had seized control of the Chicago outfit after Al Capone’s 1931 conviction for income tax evasion, and Paul “The Waiter” Ricca—who had been questioned in scores of murders, including the slaughter of fourteen members of one family—would succeed Nitti, eventually becoming the godfather of the Chicago Mafia.

  With the exception of Frank Nitti, who committed suicide the day after he was indicted, all were brought to trial in New York, convicted, and, on December 31, 1943, sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth penitentiary. Immediately after their convictions, the remaining leadership of the Chicago mob began efforts to secure their release.

  Francis Biddle was found to be unapproachable. Tom Clark was not. On August 13, 1947—after having served the bare one-third minimum of their sentences—the Federal Parole Board paroled Ricca, D’Andrea, Campagna, and Gioe, allegedly after the personal intervention of Attorney General Clark.

  The release of Chicago’s top mob bosses caused such a scandal that Congress appointed a committee to investigate. But the attorney general, citing the separation of powers, refused to testify, nor would he let the committee examine the parole board records. After weeks of inconclusive testimony, the committee, in a carefully worded report, held that although the paroles had been “improvidently granted,” it had been unable to find any evidence that anyone had been bribed. Committee members later stated, however, that they were convinced that Attorney General Clark knew more about the matter than he was willing to divulge.

  J. Edgar Hoover kept his own private file on the case. Although it contained considerable information that did not surface in the congressional probe—he had access, for example, to the parole board records—he, like the committee, was unable to prove that his boss had accepted a bribe.

  Not until 1964, seventeen years later, did the FBI director receive proof. By this time, of course, Tom Clark was no longer attorney general and the statute of limitations had long since expired. Even had it still been in force, Hoover could not have used the evidence in court, since it had been obtained through an illegal microphone surveillance. But even though legally inadmissible, it was still political dynamite, for while Hoover was listening to the incriminating tapes of a bugged conversation in a Chicago tailor shop, Tom Clark was celebrating his fifteenth year as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  With the war over and the draft no longer a threat, those special agents who had chosen the FBI as a form of alternative service were finally able to escape the director’s nearly absolute control. The Bureau grapevine had it that on the day after V-J Day two dozen SAs submitted their resignations. If so, they were only the first in a long line.

  Hoover tried everything to keep them—not even the threat of having their resignations declared dismissals with prejudice, which would deny them any other government employment, deterred many—and not until 1947 was Hoover able to stem the flow. That year, over the opposition of the Bureau of the Budget, the Treasury Department, the civil service, and the president, Congress unanimously passed a special FBI retirement bill. It was, at the time, one of the most liberal pension programs in the federal government. After twenty years an agent could retire and receive 40 percent of the average annual salary he’d been paid during his three highest salary years; at forty years, the percentage rose to 80 percent.*

  This stopped the exodus—and gave the director even greater control. The fear of being drafted was now replaced by the fear of losing one’s pension.

  One of those who left at war’s end was Assistant Director Harold Nathan, who retired in 1945, after twenty-eight years in the Bureau and forty-two years of government service. Ed Tamm once described Nathan as “like the roll fins on a vessel. He kept us from rolling too far from one side to the other. His was always the word of caution: ‘Don’t go overboard.’ ” Among those remaining, only a few dared so advise the director.*31

  One departure shook the Bureau from top to bottom. In 1948 the FBI lost its “rudder”: Edward A. Tamm resigned to accept an appointment as a federal district judge in Washington, D.C. Hoover considered Tamm’s departure as nothing less than a defection and spread the rumor that Tamm had received the appointment in return for whitewashing Truman’s part in a Kansas City vote-fraud case involving the Pendergast machine. Anyone who knew Tamm, or was familiar with the details of the investigation, knew this to be nonsense, but for a number of years Ed Tamm was on the no-contact list. Although the director later forgave him—by the time he was appointed an appellate judge, Crime Records referred to him as a “distinguished FBI alumnus”—Tamm disqualified himself in any cases involving the FBI.

  Following Nathan’s retirement, Clyde Tolson, who had for many years been Hoover’s actual “second in command,” was named associate director, a title he retained until Hoover’s death in 1972. Although many filled the number three position—assistant to the director on the investigative side—none, with the possible later exception of Al Belmont, ever really took Ed Tamm’s place. After Tamm’s departure, the spot became known as the “hot seat.” Few occupied it for long. The briefest tenure of all was that of Leland “Lee” Boardman.

  One morning, after occupying the position for only a few
weeks, Boardman called Tolson and asked, “Say, you folks got any luncheon commitment today?”

  Tolson responded, “I’m having lunch with the director.”

  To which Boardman replied, “Well, I thought I’d join you. Make it a threesome.”

  About a month later, Lee Boardman was transferred to the Washington field office. That Boardman should have made such an error after his many years in the Bureau dumbfounded everyone. “I suppose because he was the number three man he thought he was in the inner family,” William Sullivan remarked, “but nobody ever got in that inner family—there were just two people living in that family.”32

  One of the long-range effects of the retirement program was that those who reached the executive level did everything in their power to stay there until they could claim their pensions. Many promising young agents, looking up the FBI pyramid and seeing no space at the top, decided to pursue other careers.

  In Hoover’s FBI, only two positions were really permanent. Anyone else could fall, and many did, sometimes spectacularly. This was true whether one was an assistant director, a lowly brick agent, or even one of the specially favored legal attachés, or legats.

  Although five years younger than Hoover, Tolson seemed plagued by ill health. One winter he came down with bronchitis, and Hoover suggested he spend a week in Cuba, soaking up the sun.

  Alerted by headquarters that the associate director was coming, and told to roll out the red carpet, the Havana legat decided to make Tolson’s stay particularly memorable. Recently he’d become acquainted with a well-known Scandinavian sex star who, because of immigration problems, was in need of friends in high places. One night, after being wined and dined, Tolson returned to his hotel suite to find his bed already occupied.

  Tolson apparently was neither aroused nor amused. Havana soon had a new legat.

  * * *

  *The case is recounted, in some detail, in The Washington Pay-off, by the former lobbyist Robert N. Winter-Berger.

  *Clark was not even sure there were secret files, later recalling, “Many times in reports he might have a paragraph or two—He didn’t like Mr. Morgenthau, for example, and he might take a dig at him, or he might indicate there were queers in the State Department, but as far as having a dossier that was devoted to one person, I never saw one of those in my life, on any person.”8

  †Clark, too, was apparently unaware of the omission or its effect. In an interview shortly after Hoover’s death, the former attorney general and Supreme Court justice recalled, “When I came in Mr. Hoover asked me to write a letter which he had drafted to the White House asking them to continue the [wiretap] arrangement, which I did.”10

  *Vaughan added, in a 1972 interview with Ovid Demaris, that Hoover “had great ideas about his international importance. He was an egotistic little guy, there’s no doubt about that. He thought nobody could be as right as Hoover on any particular subject, which was a difficult thing to combat.”18

  *Hoover deeply resented Anslinger’s calling his organization the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and, according to William Sullivan, he turned apoplectic whenever he saw its initials, FBN.

  *In a probably apocryphal tale, the show business columnist Earl Wilson claimed to have been present when Hoover asked Costello to join him for a cup of coffee in the Waldorf coffee shop. According to Wilson, Costello declined, saying, “I got to be careful of my associates. They’ll accuse me of consortin’ with questionable characters.”23

  *Costello was not the only one who had this attitude. In a 1976 obituary of Carlo Gambino, who for two decades was organized crime’s most powerful boss, the New York Times observed that Gambino “discouraged Mafia involvement in hijacking and narcotics because those activities interest Federal, rather than local, investigators.”

  *Four witnesses identified the gunmen as Lenny Patrick, Dave Yaras, and William Block. Before they could be brought to trial, however, one of the witnesses was murdered, two recanted, and the fourth vanished and the indictment was dismissed. In addition to working for Guzik, the three men had something else in common: they were friends of a small-time Chicago hood named Jack Rubinstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby, who seventeen years later became famous as the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  *Both Moses Annenberg and his son Walter had been indicted for income tax evasion in 1940. However, after negotiations with the Justice and Treasury departments, a bargain was struck. In return for dropping the charges against his son, Moses pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison and assessed a record $8 million in taxes and penalties, plus interest.

  After Moses Annenberg went to prison, Walter took over his father’s publishing empire and greatly expanded it, adding various newspapers, a chain of radio and television stations, and the magazines Seventeen and TV Guide. One of the leading contributors to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, Annenberg was later appointed ambassador to Great Britain.

  *On the evening of June 20, 1947, Siegel was sitting in the living room of Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills home, reading a newspaper, when “person or persons” unknown fired nine shots through the window, four of which hit Siegel, killing him instantly. Twenty minutes later—long before Siegel’s death made the news—Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway, and Morris Rosen walked into the Flamingo and informed the staff that the hotel was under new management.

  The former Chicago police captain William Drury suspected that the three men identified as the gunmen in the Ragen shooting—Lenny Patrick, Dave Yaras, and William Block—were also implicated in Siegel’s death. However, Drury was himself murdered in 1950, shortly before his scheduled appearance before Senator Estes Kefauver’s special committee to investigate organized crime in interstate commerce.

  *To illustrate what this could mean in monetary terms, Victor Navasky cites the case of one assistant director who left the Bureau in 1964 after twenty-four years’ service. His pension had an actuarial value of over a quarter million dollars. Had he stayed another sixteen years, however, it would have been worth nearly a half million.30

  *One of the few Jews in the FBI, the witty, erudite Nathan was often called upon to give speeches to the B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations. Alex Rosen, who was named an assistant director after Nathan’s departure, took over this function.

  The paucity of Jews in the FBI was not due to anti-Semitism, FBI officials often explained: Jewish people, they claimed, were not attracted to jobs in law enforcement.

  23

  Chief Justice Hoover

  By the end of 1945 the FBI had unearthed—largely through leads supplied by other intelligence services and repentant ex-Communist informants—what appeared to be no fewer than five major Soviet espionage rings. Ordinarily the FBI director would have bragged of such successes, parlaying them into more money and more agents when appropriations time came round. But not these cases. One by one, starting with the first, they blew up in his face. Only one resulted in a conviction, and even that was obtained by subterfuge.

  On taking over the Amerasia investigation from the OSS, the FBI had immediately mimicked the other agency’s tactics, reburglarizing the magazine’s offices. But Hoover didn’t leave it at that. The seventy-five men he assigned to the case committed at least half a dozen other bag jobs, planted bugs, tapped phones, and placed the magazine’s editors, staff, and suspected sources under close surveillance.

  The biggest difference between the OSS and the FBI operations, however, was that the FBI got caught.

  With the evidence thus obtained—there were even identifiable fingerprints on some of the government documents—Hoover was convinced the FBI had a prosecutable case for espionage. However, James McInerney, then chief of the internal security section of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, felt otherwise. Most of the evidence was inadmissible, he argued, having been obtained through either microphones or illegal searches. In addition, the documents were, he felt, “of innocuous, very innocuous character…a little above the level of teacup gossip.”1
As for the charge of espionage, there was no evidence that any of the materials had been passed on to a foreign power.

  But McInerney was not about to take on J. Edgar Hoover. He agreed to prosecute, hoping that at the time of the arrests the FBI would obtain enough admissible evidence to make the charges stick.

  He took his time about it, however, and during the delay someone spread the rumor that it was the president himself who was postponing action, so as not to interfere with the current Hopkins-Stalin talks in Moscow. On hearing this, Truman was so incensed that—forgetting entirely the chain of command he’d once insisted upon—he called not his attorney general, Tom Clark, or even the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, but Myron Gurnea, the FBI supervisor in charge of the case, telling him, according to someone who was in the Oval Office at the time, “This is the president speaking. I don’t care who has told you to stop this. You are not to do it. Go straight ahead with this and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt. This has to be run down. If anybody suggests that you postpone, or anything else, you are not to do it without first getting personal approval from me.”2

  Hoover must have had decidedly mixed feelings: on the one hand, the president’s breach of bureaucratic protocol—he’d not only bypassed him but given orders to one of his agents—was a personal affront of monumental proportions; on the other, Truman had suddenly become an ally, taking his side.