J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  As will be documented in a subsequent chapter, one of the deepest and darkest of all the FBI’s secrets was that America’s number one law enforcement officer was himself a crook.

  On June 3, 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 1, reversed the conviction of Clinton Jencks, a New Mexico labor leader who had been convicted of perjury after signing a non-Communist affidavit, the court ruling that defendants in criminal cases had the right to see prior statements of witnesses who testified against them.† The sole dissenting vote was that of the former attorney general Tom Clark, who warned that the decision could result in “fishing expeditions” in the FBI’s files and open up “a veritable Pandora’s box of troubles.”38

  Nothing frightened the FBI more than the Jencks decision. It did not mean, as Clark alleged, that anyone could go fishing in the FBI’s files. But it did mean—and this was equally frightening to Hoover—that possibly inconsistent earlier statements of such witnesses and informants as Elizabeth Bentley and David Greenglass would have to be made available if the defense requested them.

  A mass counterattack was mounted, led by Lou Nichols, the head of Crime Records and the Bureau’s congressional liaison. Hoover did not openly denounce the Court, but he dropped broad hints, which Nichols made sure reached the New York Times and others, that in order to protect its confidential sources the FBI might be forced to drop out of some espionage cases, such as the forthcoming trial of Colonel Rudolf Abel. President Eisenhower, by now very disappointed in his Court appointees—Brennan had written the decision and Warren had seconded it—spoke of the “incalculable damage”39 that would follow the opening of the FBI’s files. And the prestigious American Bar Association, in a resolution secretly written by Nichols, severely critized both the Court and its decision.

  But the real fight against the Court took place behind the scenes, in the cloakrooms and hallways of Congress. Calling in his due bills and mobilizing his support group, Hoover lobbied through a bipartisan bill—sponsored in the House by Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, and in the Senate by Joseph O’Mahoney, a liberal Wyoming Democrat—which supposedly protected the sanctity of the FBI’s files, while at the same time, in the small print, gutting the Jencks decision.*

  Although the bill passed by strong majorities in both houses, it took almost two years before the Supreme Court ruled on its constitutionality. When it did, on June 22, 1959, it was clear that J. Edgar Hoover had won a momentous victory. The FBI director had not only taken on the Supreme Court; he’d forced it to reverse one of its own decisions.

  Unfortunately, the man most responsible for that victory wasn’t around to share in the plaudits. Lou Nichols, after almost single-handedly creating the FBI’s vast public relations empire and faithfully serving its director for twenty-three years, had resigned from the Bureau in November 1957 and, is so doing, become the first Judas.

  Drew Pearson planted his time bombs carefully, months apart. “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” January 14, 1957: “Lou Nichols has been busy ingratiating himself with key senators, who have the impression he is grooming himself to be Hoover’s heir-apparent. To this Lou modestly replied: ‘My only desire is to serve Mr. Hoover.’ ” September 5, 1957: “The FBI’s amiable press agent, Lou Nichols, is cozying up to Vice President Nixon. Lou has his eye on J. Edgar Hoover’s job, is keeping close to the powers-that-might be.” There were more such items, but these were quite adequate. After each, Hoover stopped speaking to Nichols.

  Nichols did have aspirations, and he had discussed them with Nixon, but both agreed that it seemed unlikely that Hoover would step down anytime in the foreseeable future. Although a dozen years the director’s junior, Nichols had already had two nervous breakdowns and one heart attack. He enjoyed the perks of his office—he’d later admit to this author that he had shared in the Masters of Deceit royalties—but he was exhausted from his most recent lobbying effort. Then too, as Nichols himself observed, “the closer you were to the director, the more flack you took.”41 And Nichols had been very close, not just physically—his office, 5640 was right across the hall from 5636, the director’s reception room, so Hoover could summon him quickly when he needed him—but also professionally: nearly every major decision Hoover made he first tried out on Nichols, who, like Tolson, sometimes dared to say no. Clyde Tolson was also part of the problem. Once close, they had in recent years become estranged, Tolson resenting Nichols’s end runs to the director, all of which were dutifully reported to him by his loyal aides.

  Nichols’s announcement that he intended to retire did not go over well. Hoover had called him a Judas, among other things. Although the director attended his retirement party and presented him with a gold FBI badge, he not so secretly seethed over his defection.* “I never want another man to have such power in this organization again.”42 Like any other top executive who abandoned ship against the director’s express wishes, Nichols, after leaving the FBI, was tapped, bugged, burgled, and tailed. Since Nichols lived on a farm near Leesburg, Virginia, only “limited physical surveillance” was possible there, but whenever he was working in New York City or on trips to Florida, agents followed him everywhere. Aware of the surveillance—he’d ordered a few such himself—Nichols was careful always to praise and never to criticize the director, sure Hoover would soon lose interest.

  Nichols did not retire to his farm. He went to work for Lewis Rosenstiel, the founder of Schenley Industries, as executive vice-president of the firm, at a huge increase in salary. A former Prohibition era bootlegger, like his friend Joseph Kennedy, Rosenstiel craved respectability and was willing to spent vast amounts of money—some $75 million—to establish the image of a publicspirited philanthropist. Lou Nichols knew a lot about image making.

  Roy Cohn had introduced them.† “Naturally when Mr. Rosenstiel began talking to me about coming with the Schenley Company I started checking on him,” Nichols later testified before a New York State crime commission. “I used every resource available to me and I found no information, much less credible evidence, of Mr. Rosenstiel’s alignment with the underworld. Needless to say I would never have become associated with him if there was the slightest taint on his record.”

  The purchase of the services of the former assistant to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave Rosenstiel a much needed veneer of respectability.‡ It was a part of Nichols’s job to testify before various investigative agencies that Mr. Rosenstiel had “never, directly or indirectly, had any dealings or associations with Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, or any other underworld characters.”43

  But Nichols was more than a front man. In addition to being a public relations genius, he was also a master lobbyist, who had—to Hoover’s intense displeasure—left the Bureau with a copy of the FBI’s Capitol Hill contact list. During Nichols’s first year with Schenley, he lobbied the Foran bill through Congress, saving the company—which was still almost solely owned by Rosenstiel—somewhere between $40 and $50 million in excise taxes.

  That Nichols had gone to work for Rosenstiel was an embarrassment to Hoover. But what most embittered him was the timing of Nichols’s move. He retired from the FBI on November 2, 1957, just twelve days before the greatest public relations crisis in the Bureau’s history.

  Saturday mornings there was usually little activity in Apalachin, New York, a small village located in the mountains just north of the Pennsylvania state line, and even less so in the hills outside of town where the New York state trooper Edgar Croswell was parked, but November 14, 1957, was an exception. As Croswell watched, one long, black limousine after another disappeared through the gates of the large, secluded estate of Joseph Barbara, Sr. In Apalachin one such vehicle was an oddity. But Croswell had counted five in the last couple of hours—all Lincolns or Cadillacs, all with out-of-state plates, and all with the same destination. It was enough to make a man curious.

  Although he had no reason to suspect that Barbara was anything more than what he appeared to be—a Canada Dry soft-drin
k distributor—Croswell had run a check on him shortly after he’d purchased the property, on hearing that he carried a gun, and had found that Barbara had a Pennsylvania rap sheet with more than a dozen arrests, including two for murder, but only minor convictions and none in recent years.

  Now the limousines. And the butcher’s comment that Barbara had placed a special order for an unusually large number of prime steaks. Plus the block of reservations at a local motel, in Barbara’s name, which he’d noticed while checking the register during a bad-check investigation. In his mind he tried to fit the pieces together, only to find the interlocking parts still missing. Ed Croswell couldn’t abide unsolved puzzles.

  Having no evidence that a crime had been committed, he couldn’t raid Barbara’s home. But there was a way he could satisfy his curiosity about the identity of his guests. Under the state motor vehicle laws, Croswell could stop any vehicle on a public roadway and require its occupants to produce valid identification. Since there was only one road to the estate, he need only block it, then wait. Figuring that the limousines would depart as they’d arrived, separately, he wouldn’t even need many men, and so he radioed for only a backup car and three deputies. They were just setting up the roadblock when they heard a deafening roar and looked up to see bearing down on them not five but dozens of limousines.

  A deliveryman from the village had only to mention the word “police” when Barbara’s house seemed to explode, more than fifty men flying out the doors and windows. Many made for the cars and fell into Croswell’s trap. Others took to the fields and sank knee deep in mud. One man (later identified as a Buffalo city councilman) was caught astraddle a barbed wire fence. When finally noticed by a deputy, he seemed more concerned about damage to his camel’s hair coat than to his private parts. The deputy boosted him over, then, as soon as his feet touched ground on the other side, pointed to a nearby NO TRESPASSING sign and placed him under arrest.

  Only those wise enough to stay where they were (some forty in all, including the entire Chicago delegation) avoided being questioned, although several were later identified through motel registration cards or auto rental forms.

  As for the others, a total of sixty-three were rounded up, identified, and released. Of that number, sixty-two were active or retired “businessmen” of Italian extraction (the single exception being one of Barbara’s servants, who’d run when everyone else did). When asked the reason for their presence at Apalachin, most said they’d heard Barbara wasn’t feeling well and had decided to visit him. It was just coincidence that all had arrived on the same day.

  J. Edgar Hoover discovered the existence of the Mafia the next morning when, with his cairn terriers nipping at his heels, he reached down and retrieved the Sunday paper from his front steps.

  Since even the top brass were expected to work at least part of Saturday (most did so of necessity, in a vain attempt to keep up with the work load), Sunday was the only day with their families. Not this Sunday. Breakfast left unfinished, they converged on Justice, to find the situation even worse than expected.

  According to a headquarters official of the time, the FBI not only had no idea the hoodlums were going to meet but didn’t even know who they were.

  Vito Genovese, Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Carmine Galante, Thomas Lucchese (New York City); John Scalisi (Cleveland); Stefano Magaddino (Buffalo); Joseph Zerilli (Detroit); James Lanza (San Francisco); Frank DeSimone (Los Angeles); Joseph Civello (Dallas); Santos Trafficante (Miami/Havana)—to none were these and the other fifty-three names more foreign than to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  For over three decades, the director had assured the country that there was no such thing as a nationwide criminal organization. If the newspaper accounts were correct—and Hoover was far from conceding that—someone was at fault for not informing him of the true facts. And that person was obviously the head of the investigative division—Assistant Director Al Belmont.

  Belmont, who was undoubtedly guilty of repeating the director’s own pronouncements, admitted he alone deserved censure; his men had nothing to do with it.

  But there was blame enough to share. Most of the director’s choicest invectives were hurled at the former head of Crime Records. But Lou Nichols, the first Judas, was twelve days on the safe side of retirement. The truth was, he badly needed Nichols, for this was a public relations crisis of major magnitude. But not only had Nichols deserted him; he was now working for a man many believed to be linked with the underworld.*

  Nor did the pressure lessen. In addition to the jackals of the press, Joseph Kennedy’s arrogant young son Robert, the chief counsel of Senator McClellan’s racket committee, had stormed in, without an appointment, demanding everything the Bureau had on the hoods.

  Nor did it help Hoover’s mood to learn that after leaving the FBI, Kennedy and the reporters had gone straight to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where Harry Anslinger had given them armloads of dossiers and reports.†

  The FBI’s official response that this was a local problem and should be handled by the local police hardly satisfied the press, which pointed out that every part of the country, from the East Coast to the West, had been represented at Apalachin.

  In reality FBIHQ was stalling, while desperately trying to get more information which it could release. Urgent telexes were sent to the major field offices (Albany and Buffalo each claimed that Apalachin was in the other’s jurisdiction), but most reported back that the query must be in error since the subject was a local businessman, either respectable or retired or both. Joseph Civello of Dallas, for example, was described as “a counselor to the Italian community at large.”45

  So desperate was Hoover that he called in his section chiefs and asked if they had any ideas. William Sullivan, who headed Research and Analysis, had one. What if he pulled his best people off their other assignments and had them prepare a study of the Mafia? Hoover gratefully grabbed the suggestion, ordering him to make it top priority.

  The result, which wasn’t completed until the fall of 1958, was a two-volume monograph, one volume devoted to the history of the Mafia in Italy, the other dealing with its arrival and evolution in the United States.

  Immensely proud of the efforts of his staff—who had found and summarized over two hundred books on an organization that J. Edgar Hoover had long maintained did not exist—Sullivan sent the monograph, plus a five-page synopsis, to the director, via Boardman, who then occupied the number three spot. Noting that he would review the monograph when he had time, Boardman passed on the summary to the director, who immediately responded favorably with the blue-ink notation “The point has been missed. It is not now necessary to read the two volume monograph to know that the Mafia does exist in the United States.”46

  Delighted that he had finally convinced Hoover that there was indeed a Mafia, Sullivan ordered distribution of the monograph. Twenty-five copies were sent out just before noon. As usual, Hoover and Tolson lunched at the Mayflower. On their return, the director started reading the monograph and accompanying paperwork and discovered something very disturbing. The study not only proved that the Mafia existed in the United States; it established that it had been operating during all the decades when he had denied its existence. To make the situation even worse, copies had been sent to other agencies in the Justice Department, including Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

  Ordered to “retrieve them at once,” Sullivan sent agents scurrying through the building, pulling copies out of in-baskets and, in at least one instance, yanking one from the hands of an assistant attorney general. Sullivan’s monumental study was suppressed, and no one outside the FBI ever read it.

  But by the time the Sullivan study had been completed, the FBI was already very much involved in the investigation of organized crime, albeit surreptitiously.

  In November of 1957, just days after the Apalachin story broke, Hoover had ordered the Top Hoodlum Program inaugurated, each of the field offices being required to identify the ten ma
jor hoodlums in their jurisdiction. Although this caused some problems—some field offices had a surfeit to pick and choose from, some had none, and some, such as New Orleans and Dallas, continued to maintain, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that there was no Mafia in their area—information now began to arrive at FBIHQ in such quantity that subcategories had to be established to file it.

  But none was more important than that provided by a group of Young Turks in Chicago.

  The single bug they requested, for which no one really expected authorization, would be the progentitor of the most massive electronic intelligence effort in the history of the FBI. Not only would it give J. Edgar Hoover undreamedof power over the political processes of the United States; it would also assure him a lifetime lease on his job.

  The Chicago SAC, Marlin Johnson, who was only a little taller than his never mentioned predecessor Little Mel Purvis, happened to have a group of restless young agents who were bored with paperwork and security checks and wanted something, anything, that would take them out on the streets. So when the Top Hoodlum Program was established, Johnson assigned them to it.

  They were not only young but also naive. And, oddly enough, it helped. For example, Special Agent Fred Hill was assigned to follow Marshall Caifano, one of the most respected, that is, feared, senior members of the Chicago syndicate.* With more arrests on his rap sheet than Hill had birthdays, Caifano quickly spotted his tail and, doubling back, confronted him, discovering, to his relief, that he was only an FBI agent. He was wasting his time following him, Caifano advised Hill. He was mostly into gambling, books, joints, jukeboxes, a little juice, some protection, that kinda stuff, nothing that would interest Mr. Hoover.