Word sometimes reached the agents at Casey’s that ‘Cementhead’ Malone, one of Edgar’s closest associates, was on his way to flush them out. ‘Seventeen or eighteen guys would abandon their breakfasts and clear out through the fire escape, rushing pell-mell, brushing pedestrians aside.’
For the agent and his family packed off to the other end of the nation for some trivial transgression, there was nothing to laugh about. ‘The worst thing,’ said a former Agent in Charge who suffered such punishment, ‘is what happens to you in the eyes of your family. “You must have done something wrong or Mr Hoover wouldn’t have demoted you,” they say. You can’t ever explain it, even in your own family. You lose faith in yourself. The things that used to be true aren’t true anymore. I don’t think Mr Hoover really understood this phase of his disciplinary actions, because he never had a family – wife and kids, I mean.’
The massive file on Agent Nelson Gibbons, who served from 1954 to 1962, is a catalogue of calculated cruelty. Gibbons came to the FBI after war service in the Marines and a spell on the police force. He proved an outstanding agent, attracting six commendations and for years no censures at all – a state of grace achieved by few. He was brave in action against armed criminals and won praise from Edgar for unmasking a Soviet spy. Gibbons became a Resident Agent, running a small FBI office on his own, at the age of thirty-three.
His troubles began only in 1958, when – at sixty-three – Edgar began worrying excessively about his health. There was nothing significantly wrong, but, not least judging from the bewildering number of doctors he consulted, he had become something of a hypochondriac. That year Edgar read an insurance company prospectus that listed ideal weights in proportion to height. It told him he was overweight, and, according to the FBI press office, he went on a diet that brought his weight down from 203 pounds to 170.
What the Director did for his health, agents were expected to do, too. Agents in Charge were charged with monitoring the weight of every man in the Bureau. As a health precaution, properly administered, the idea had merit. As an iron rule, rigidly enforced under pain of punishment, it was a disaster.
It was certainly that for Agent Gibbons, a thickset fellow, nearly six feet tall, who usually weighed more than 190 pounds. He weighed in at 195 when Edgar’s checks started, and the examiner recommended he lose seven pounds. Gibbons tried hard to conform, even though his own doctor thought his weight reasonable given his size. The agent duly lost seven pounds, but then his weight began straying up into the low 190s again. That was not good enough for headquarters.
In 1960, after being turned down for promotion because of the weight issue, Gibbons made a declaration of independence. He said he was happy with his weight at 190 and asked to see Edgar – a right theoretically extended to all agents. Edgar refused, ordering Gibbons to be transferred to Detroit and weighed every thirty days.
Gibbons was now on the Bureau ‘bicycle.’ Soon he was moved again, to Mobile, Alabama, then – two months later – to Oklahoma City. There he was twice censured and suspended without pay. Yet senior officials reported he had ‘no surplus fat,’ and he continued to work out at the YMCA. For all the abuse, he said he wanted to go on working for ‘the best organization in the world.’
Unimpressed, Edgar condemned Gibbons for not being a ‘team worker’ and transferred him again – to Butte, Montana. Then again, to Anchorage, Alaska, where petty punishment continued. At last, after a fatuous interrogation as to whether and how often he might have gotten drunk while in the Marines, long before he joined the FBI, Gibbons cracked. He quit his post and cabled Edgar, saying he felt ‘mentally unable’ to continue.
Though Gibbons never suffered mental illness, before or after this ordeal, the FBI found a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as ‘paranoid.’ He was retired on a disability pension, an event Edgar perceived as some kind of victory. ‘Good riddance,’ he scrawled on a final memo, ‘of bad rubbish.’
Nelson Gibbons was lucky. In New York, while on a crash diet to meet Edgar’s weight standards, Agent George Blue collapsed and died at his desk.
The experience of Jack Shaw and his wife May, ten years later, was another Orwellian nightmare. Agent Shaw, a law graduate and former Marine captain, had served with distinction since 1963. He was thirty-seven years old and the father of four children under the age of ten when he enrolled for master’s degree classes at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a prestigious course for law enforcement personnel. Once qualified, Shaw hoped, he would go on to become an instructor at the FBI Academy.
When his sociology professor made some harsh criticism of the FBI, Shaw jumped to defend it. Later, however, he decided to prepare a detailed critique of the organization’s good and bad points. A bad point, he wrote, was that the Bureau had become ossified. ‘We are not simply rooted in tradition,’ he wrote, ‘we’re stuck in it up to our eyeballs. And it all revolves around one key figure, the life and exploits of J. Edgar Hoover.’
Though this was hardly the stuff of revolution, Shaw was apprehensive. ‘I feel certain,’ he wrote his professor, ‘that all of what I have said will be retained by you in complete confidence. In the Bureau’s eyes, of course, however academically intended, my statements would constitute a prima facie case of heresy. I would prefer not to be martyred this calendar year.’
Martyred he was, because of his own openness. Shaw made the mistake of giving the draft of the letter to a trusted FBI secretary to type. She in turn gave it to a colleague, and the private communication was private no more. The agent was soon being interrogated by Assistant Director Malone.
‘It was clear from the start that my head was on the platter,’ Shaw recalled. ‘The inquisition went on and on, from 4:00 P.M. till about 9:00. I tried to tell Malone this hadn’t been some covert, clandestine operation. No harm had been done. I hadn’t even mailed the critique to my professor yet.’
Reason, however, played no further part in relations between Shaw and the FBI. He was suspended ‘for possible insubordination and criticism of the Bureau’ and told to hand in his badge and gun and go home. There he heard his sentence: one month’s suspension without pay, six months’ probation and a transfer to Butte, Montana, for failing to report his professor’s original criticism of the FBI.
An FBI official called the president of John Jay College, Dr Donald Riddle, saying that no FBI students would attend the school while Shaw’s professor remained on the faculty. The professor stayed, so the FBI men departed, as did others – studying at American University, in Washington, D.C.
Jack Shaw, meanwhile, sat at home worrying about his future and about his wife, who was sick. In her condition a move to Montana was out of the question, so Shaw resigned. Edgar accepted the resignation ‘with prejudice,’ a blot on Shaw’s record that would make it virtually impossible for him to get work with another federal agency or a major company. A star FBI agent had been destroyed over a private letter no one had yet read, which had never even been sent.
Within months of Shaw’s resignation, his wife’s illness was diagnosed as terminal cancer. At first, as she lay desperately sick in the hospital, her husband’s FBI colleagues rallied around. Two agents offered to give blood for her transfusions, then shamefacedly retracted. They had been told not to associate with Shaw, because he was ‘in touch with enemies of the Bureau.’
The Bureau even used false pretenses to spy on Shaw as he sat in the hospital with his dying wife. The wife of another agent, a nurse, showed up in uniform in two different hospitals and chatted with Shaw as if out of genuine sympathy. Later, when Shaw saw his FBI file, he found detailed reports of the conversations. The nurse had been commended by her husband’s superiors for ‘penetrating Shaw’s inner circle.’
After his wife’s death, Shaw took his case to the American Civil Liberties Union. Senior senators raised the issue in Congress, and the former agent became a cause célèbre. The FBI settled the matter with a cash payment and removal of the ‘with prejudice’ slur from his re
cord. Shaw went on to become an Assistant Commissioner in charge of investigations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Edgar had written his damning ‘with prejudice’ notation, a virtual sentence to unemployment, in the full knowledge that Shaw’s wife was seriously ill. Shaw and others who complained, he said, were ‘malcontents or crybabies.’ Edgar never accepted that he had been wrong.
The cult of the personality reigned at the FBI in a way unparalleled in American government, outside the presidency. When Edgar and Clyde traveled, men worked feverishly to smooth their way. Gas station toilets were inspected in advance in case the Director should need to use the facilities. A faulty generator in one of Edgar’s limousines triggered a nationwide operation. Agents got help from the management of Cadillac, delayed a commercial flight and rushed about with sirens wailing, to get the part to Cleveland in time. In Edgar’s hotel suite, agents quickly removed bottles of liquor that had been only partially consumed. For fear of being poisoned, Edgar reportedly insisted on drinking from newly opened bottles.
Across the country, agents were taught the wisdom of writing regularly to congratulate their boss on his birthday, the anniversary of his appointment or simply to tell him he was wonderful. ‘He loved to get those letters,’ said William Sullivan. ‘You couldn’t be too lavish in telling him what a great job he was doing for the country. Tolson had a standard phrase that he used all the time: “The Director will go down in history as the greatest man of the century.”’
In 1958, Agent Arthur Murtagh sent Edgar a courteous letter commenting on Bureau personnel policy, and mailed it, according to routine, through Roy Moore, his Agent in Charge. Moore, a mild-mannered man of vast experience, astonished him with his response.
‘Art,’ Moore said, ‘I can’t send that letter … You don’t understand Bureau politics … You must understand that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in, and to show him that’s the way things are …’
These comments would be quoted twenty years later, in sworn testimony to a congressional committee. In the late fifties, although many men thought Edgar had lost his mental balance, few dared to say so out loud.
Four years after Edgar’s death, during a Justice Department inquiry into the misuse of FBI funds, it would emerge that Edgar had been corrupt. It had started with little things. A well-timed gift, his officials learned, could win the master’s favor. It might be a birthday cake, sent from Miami to Washington on an agent’s lap. Or, at headquarters, a regular supply of flowers. ‘He really liked pretty flowers,’ said Cartha DeLoach. ‘That was a good thing to give him. I personally or my group made sure that we gave him azaleas. That was his favorite.’
The higher the official, the more costly the giving. ‘Hoover was always hitting us for gifts,’ said William Sullivan, ‘and we’d have to buy extremely expensive ones. They handled it very cleverly. It would always come out of Tolson’s office to us … For example, I was told he wanted a garbage masher. We Bureau officials paid for it out of our own pockets.’ It was wise to pay up. Edgar reportedly kept a record of those who rendered tribute and those who didn’t. His own gifts to colleagues, on the other hand, were usually purchased at government expense.
Edgar lived virtually free, at taxpayers’ expense. The FBI Exhibits Section, which made displays for official use, had been Edgar’s personal building contractor. His house in Rock Creek Park, the Justice Department report revealed:
was completely painted and major maintenance performed inside and out every year while he vacationed in California. The Exhibits Section designed, constructed and built a portico on the front of his house, and a lighted fish pond complete with pump. Shelves, telephone stands, and other furniture was built and furnished. A handcrafted oriental fruit bowl was made … Home appliances, air conditioners, stereo equipment, tape recorders, television sets and electric wiring were serviced and repaired by Radio Engineering Section employees … Employees were on call night and day for complete repair and maintenance of the entire home and grounds.
FBI men serviced Edgar’s lawn mower and snowblower, maintained his yard, replaced sod twice a year, installed artificial turf, planted shrubbery, constructed a deck at the rear of the house, erected a redwood fence and laid a flagstone court and sidewalks. When Edgar complained of the smell of bacon at breakfast, the FBI installed a powerful fan. When he fussed that his television took too long to warm up, FBI technicians labored to solve the problem. If even a light bulb failed, the FBI replaced it.
Tolson, who fancied himself an inventor, was credited with dreaming up two items of gadgetry: a bottle-cap opener and a system to open and close windows automatically. The bottle opener is remembered as a ‘Rube Goldberg flop.’ When it failed to work, an official recalled, ‘Tolson or Hoover came up with the idea to goldplate the things and give them away to “friends of the Bureau.”– Edgar’s millionaire friends, such as Clint Murchison, were among the recipients.
The window system was later installed, with accompanying propaganda fanfare, in President Johnson’s bedroom at the White House. The Justice Department inquiry, however, established that the gadgets were developed not by Tolson but by the FBI laboratory, at public expense.
Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler, who supervised the probe, concluded that Edgar ‘lived like an Oriental potentate.’ Edgar declared he would eat ice cream only out of a round package – so it was flown in and kept in a freezer in the basement of the Justice Department. He wanted sides of beef from Colorado – they were flown in, too, all for free.
‘There were the craziest things,’ recalled John Dowd, the prosecuting attorney who led the investigation. ‘Hoover had a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone. Then there was the raccoon turd. One day Hoover opened the door of his patio, and there was a turd. He had the laboratory come and remove it, to get it analyzed. It was priority number one that morning. No matter what official business they had in the goddamn lab, it was “You identify that turd and report.” Tolson was going apeshit, threatening to fire people and asking again and again, “What is it? What is it?” Some guy in the lab said, “Hey, it’s gotta be a wild animal. I’ve got a friend at the Smithsonian.”
‘So they took the turd to the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian identified the turd. There were berry shells in it that raccoons eat. So they told Hoover it was raccoon shit. Hoover ordered a trap built to destroy that raccoon. They built a trap and installed it on the patio. And the following morning the neighbor’s cat was spread all over the wall of the house.
‘When you saw the whole picture,’ said Dowd, ‘it wasn’t funny at all. This was the Director of the FBI helping himself, using his power to obtain whatever he wanted. He didn’t have any out-of-pocket expenses like the rest of us.’
The investigators also stumbled on the ‘safe’ oil investments arranged by Edgar’s millionaire friends, the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free accommodation at La Jolla and the vacation transport paid for with Bureau funds. The labor for work done by FBI employees at Edgar’s home, thousands of man-hours of it, had been provided free. It was clear, too, that much of the cost had been paid out of shadowy FBI ‘special funds.’
Suspicion focused on the FBI Recreation Fund, ostensibly created to promote athletic activities for ordinary agents, and its subsidiary, the Library Fund. No one could explain why the fund bore this name; it had little to do with books. Edgar’s aides had destroyed its records soon after his death. Fund money had paid for Edgar’s personal public relations, and Exhibits chief John Dunphy admitted having pilfered petty cash to pay for ‘nonofficial projects or “gifts” to the Director.’
Few of the miscreants were punished. Former Assistant Directors John Mohr and Nicholas Callahan, both deemed to have violated the law, escaped prosecution thanks to the statute of limitations. Callahan, still i
n office when the inquiry began, was forced to resign. John Dunphy pleaded guilty to converting FBI property to his own use, and he too resigned.
Had they been alive, Edgar and Clyde would have faced prosecution and dismissal. Statements by prosecutor Dowd and Michael Shaheen, of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, indicated the pair were guilty of several federal offenses, including private use of government property and accepting gifts from lesser-paid employees. The scale of Edgar’s abuse would have made him liable to up to ten years in prison and automatic dismissal.
Dowd, the former head of the Department Strike Force formed to fight organized crime, remembered above all the atmosphere of fear he encountered at the FBI. ‘There I was,’ he said, ‘interviewing employees who were just as scared as the loan sharks, bookies and all the other people I’d had to deal with in pursuing Mafia chieftains. There were people in my office absolutely trembling, relating twenty or thirty years of this sordid conduct. They were still afraid, even though Hoover himself was dead. I’ve investigated corruption for many years, but I’ve seen no greater betrayal of the public trust.’
It seems, however, that Edgar was guilty of an even greater dereliction of duty. For his own secret reasons, he refused to confront the Mafia.
22
‘The art of the police consists in not seeing what there is no use seeing.’
Napoleon Bonaparte
One of the last Mafia bosses of the old tradition, Carmine ‘The Doctor’ Lombardozzi, was asked in 1990 about the mob’s attitude toward J. Edgar Hoover. Lombardozzi, known as ‘the Italian Meyer Lansky,’ continued to direct financial operations for the Gambino family until his death. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ he replied, ‘was in our pocket. He was no one we needed to fear.’1
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