“Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you just ask Hoover what he knows that we don’t know?’ ” Hoover’s top aide Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach recalls. “But no one wanted to show his ignorance.”
So, he says, FBI agents checked with Customs, which knew nothing of any developments on the borders. A few days later, a supervisor was reviewing the memo when he noticed it had been typed with the narrowest possible margins. Always fastidious, Hoover had picked up his pen and had scrawled on the memo, “Watch the borders!”
Hoover’s quirks included a ban on drinking coffee on the job and on wearing colored shirts. Drinking coffee conflicted with the image of hardworking supermen who never took a break. As a result of Hoover’s dictum, agents would take time off from work to search for a coffee shop instead of drinking coffee at their desks.
More important, Hoover turned a blind eye to the Mafia. Because of Prohibition, the Mafia took control of the liquor business, paying off police to look the other way. By instilling fear through gangland killings, the Mafia took over labor unions such as the Teamsters and major industries, from construction and garbage collecting to garment making and trucking, in most major cities. As organized crime grew in power, it penetrated politics. The Mafia could dictate appointments of judges and police chiefs. Because of those alliances, organized crime was considered untouchable. Yet as the Mafia tightened its grip on the country, Hoover consistently denied what everyone else knew: that organized crime was the single greatest criminal threat to the United States. He insisted that Mafia figures were local hoodlums who were not part of a national syndicate.
But on November 14, 1957, New York State Police found that sixty-three Mafia leaders from a number of states were meeting at the secluded estate of Joseph Barbara Sr. in the hills outside the village of Apalachin, New York. No longer able to claim that organized crime was a local matter, Hoover reluctantly began to attack it. Yet in Hoover’s FBI, statistics, not quality of cases, demonstrated success.
“Back then, the FBI still had this nonsense that all cases are equal,” says Dan Reilly, an agent who worked organized crime in New York. “If you caught two hubcap thieves, it was better than catching Bernie Madoff. Also the FBI had a lot of rough, tough ex-military guys. Their theory was that if anybody robs with a fountain pen, they’re kind of a sissy. They liked armored-car robbers, bank robbers, kidnappers. Even within the New York FBI office, in the late 1960s, going after the Mafia was considered junk work.”
At the time, the New York field office had two organized crime squads, one that went after numbers racketeering and another that focused on bookmaking. In the late 1970s, five squads of fifteen or twenty agents were formed to go after the five New York Mafia families. Agents worked on developing the backgrounds of Mafia members—when they were born, whether they were illegal aliens from Sicily, whether they had criminal records, who their relatives were.
“Slowly, through contacts with cooperating, top-of-the-line New York City Police Department detectives, the FBI found out who the key figures were and started to focus on them,” Reilly says. “And when they interviewed these people, the FBI had a great deal of credibility. The knowledge the FBI had about these figures was in itself frightening to people in a secret criminal society.”
Police corruption was rampant.
“I was told to my face by top figures in the police department, they bragged to me openly that they themselves only took clean graft from gambling operations, and that they would never touch the evil money from drug operations,” Reilly says. “And I, horrified internally, felt like slapping them in the face and telling them that the same guys who run drugs run gambling.”
Every day, the boss of the Colombo crime family parked his white Rolls-Royce at a bus stop in front of a firehouse in Brooklyn.
“That was his parking spot,” Reilly says. “No one else could park a car there. And the local precinct was notified in person by FBI agents that this was going on, and never did I see a parking ticket or a tow on that car.”
Corruption reached high into political circles. One member of the Colombo family told Reilly that during Prohibition, he competed against the bootlegging operation of Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy. The founder of the Kennedy dynasty owned an entire fleet of boats for importing liquor illegally.
In a move that later became standard practice, the FBI decided in 1972 to start its own garbage collection company in the Bronx to catch Mafia figures trying to shake it down. Meanwhile, the FBI developed Mafia informants, including a member of the Colombo crime family named Gregory Scarpa.
“Scarpa was an encyclopedia as an informant,” Reilly says. “You could run any imaginable question involving organized crime by the agent who handled Scarpa on a given day, and within minutes the answer was on your desk or you had a phone call, and the information was always completely correct.”
Another informant told the FBI that the Genovese crime family was considering murdering an FBI agent. Reilly walked up to the boss of the Genovese crime family in front of his home and gave him a message. Using his nickname, Reilly said to him, “Funzi, we keep hearing these crazy rumors that you folks are considering killing an FBI agent. Right now, the FBI only works half a day. The agents from Arkansas and Oregon spend their other half of the day figuring out how to get back to Arkansas or Oregon. You kill an FBI agent, and we’ll start working not only full days, we’ll start working overtime. You people will see so many arrests and so many convictions in the next few months you won’t believe it.”
Not until Hoover died in 1972 did the FBI begin to develop long-term strategies for taking out the entire leadership of Mafia families. By then, the Mafia was so powerful it was difficult to eradicate.
Many theories have been advanced to explain Hoover’s aversion to attacking organized crime. Anthony Summers, in his book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, claimed that Hoover did not pursue organized crime because the Mafia had blackmail material on him. Summers quoted Susan L. Rosenstiel, a former wife of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, chairman of Schenley Industries Inc., as saying that in 1958, she was at a party at the Plaza Hotel where Hoover engaged in cross-dressing in front of her then-husband and Roy Cohn, former counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy.
“He [Hoover] was wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig,” Summers quoted Susan as saying. “He had makeup on and false eyelashes.”
A year later, Susan claimed, she again saw Hoover at the Plaza. This time, the director was wearing a red dress. Around his neck was a black feather boa. He was holding a Bible, and he asked one of the blond boys to read a passage as another boy fondled him.
A former bootlegger, Lewis Rosenstiel was well acquainted with Mafia figures. But Susan, who died in 2009, was not exactly a credible witness. In fact, she served time at Rikers Island for perjuring herself in a 1971 case.
“Susie Rosenstiel had a total ax to grind,” says William G. Hundley, who headed organized crime prosecutions at the Justice Department. “Somebody who worked for me talked to her. It [the cross-dressing story] was made up out of whole cloth. She hated Hoover for some alleged wrong he had done. Plus the story was beyond belief.”
While there was always speculation about Hoover’s relationship with his deputy Clyde Tolson, there were never any rumors within the FBI or outside it about Hoover cross-dressing. Oliver “Buck” Revell, a former associate director of the FBI, observes that if the Mafia had had anything on Hoover, it would have been picked up in wiretaps mounted against organized crime after Apalachin. There was never a hint of such a claim, Revell says.
Hoover was more familiar to Americans than most presidents. The director of the FBI simply could not have engaged in such activity at the Plaza, with a number of witnesses present, without having it leak out.
On the other hand, Hoover and Tolson, both bachelors, were inseparable. They ate lunch together every day and dinner together almost ev
ery night. They vacationed together, staying in adjoining rooms, and they took adoring photos of each other.
Beginning in the 1950s, the FBI regularly assigned agents from the Washington field office to discreetly follow Hoover and Tolson as a security precaution. R. Jean Gray, one of the agents assigned to what was called HOOWATCH, says the surveillance consisted of agents in two bureau cars who would tail Hoover and Tolson as they left the Justice Department at the end of the day. While the two knew that agents watched over them, they usually did not spot them.
“We followed them to Harvey’s or to the Mayflower, where they had dinner,” Gray says. “Then we took them to Tolson’s apartment on Cathedral Avenue, where Tolson got out. Then we went to Hoover’s home. We stayed overnight. The next morning, agents would follow Hoover as he picked up Tolson and went through Rock Creek Park and down Constitution Avenue to the Justice Department,” Gray says.
“We speculated about Edgar and Clyde,” Gray says. “But if anything scandalous had happened with the director, it would have gone coast to coast within the bureau in thirty minutes.”
Still, the fact that Hoover spent his leisure time with a man and that they took adoring photos of each other points to Hoover’s being homosexual. He lived with his mother in the family home until she died when he was forty-three. He left his estate to Tolson. While he could have been in denial about his sexual orientation or was aware of it but suppressed it, he also conceivably could have had sexual relations with Tolson when the two were alone together in each other’s homes, as they often were. Given their emotional attachment, Hoover and Tolson had a spousal relationship, as the term is broadly defined.
4
SECRET FILES
COMPLEX MAN THAT HE WAS, HOOVER LEFT NOTHING TO chance. The director shrewdly recognized that building what became known as the world’s greatest law enforcement agency would not necessarily keep him in office. So after Hoover became director, he began to maintain a special Official and Confidential file in his office. The “secret files,” as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remain director as long as he wished.
Defenders of Hoover—a dwindling number of older former agents who still refer to him as “Mr. Hoover”—have claimed his Official and Confidential files were not used to blackmail members of Congress or presidents. They say Hoover kept the files with sensitive information about political leaders in his suite so that young file clerks would not peruse them and spread gossip. The files were no more secret than any other bureau files, Hoover supporters say.
While the files may well have been kept in Hoover’s office to protect them from curious clerks, it was also true that far more sensitive files containing top-secret information on pending espionage cases were kept in the central files. If Hoover truly was concerned about information getting out, he should have been more worried about the highly classified information in those files.
Moreover, the Official and Confidential files were secret in the sense that Hoover never referred to them publicly, as he did the rest of the bureau’s files. He distinguished them from other bureau files by calling them “confidential,” denoting secrecy. But whether they were secret or not and where they were kept was irrelevant. What was important was how Hoover used the information from those files and from other bureau files.
“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” said William Sullivan, who became the number three official in the bureau under Hoover, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”
Lawrence J. Heim, who was in the Crime Records Division, confirmed to me that the bureau sent agents to tell members of Congress that Hoover had picked up derogatory information on them.
“He [Hoover] would send someone over on a very confidential basis,” Heim said. As an example, if the Metropolitan Police in Washington had picked up evidence of homosexuality, “he [Hoover] would have him say, ‘This activity is known by the Metropolitan Police Department and some of our informants, and it is in your best interests to know this.’ But nobody has ever claimed to have been blackmailed. You can deduce what you want from that.”
Of course, the reason no one publicly claimed to have been blackmailed is that blackmail, by definition, entails collecting embarrassing information that people do not want public. But not everyone was intimidated.
Roy L. Elson, the administrative assistant to Senator Carl T. Hayden, will never forget an encounter he had with DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison with Congress. For twenty years, Hayden headed the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and later the Senate Appropriations Committee, which had jurisdiction over the FBI’s budget. He was one of the most powerful members of Congress. As Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, suffered hearing loss and some dementia in his later years, Elson became known as the “101st senator” because he made many of the senator’s decisions for him.
In the early 1960s, DeLoach wanted an additional appropriation for the new FBI headquarters building, which Congress approved in April 1962.
“The senator supported the building,” Elson said. “He always gave the bureau more money than they needed. This was a request for an additional appropriation. I had reservations about it. DeLoach was persistent.”
DeLoach “hinted” that he had “information that was unflattering and detrimental to my marital situation and that the senator might be disturbed,” said Elson, who was then married to his second wife. “I was certainly vulnerable that way,” Elson said. “There was more than one girl [he was seeing].… The implication was there was information about my sex life. There was no doubt in my mind what he was talking about.”
Elson said to DeLoach: “Let’s talk to him [the senator] about it. I think he’s heard about everything there is to hear about me. Bring the photos if you have them.” At that point, Elson said, “He started backing off.… He said, ‘I’m only joking.’ Bullshit,” Elson said. “I interpreted it as attempted blackmail.”
Commenting on Elson’s allegation, DeLoach says, “It never happened.”
Reading the Official and Confidential files that survived makes it clear they could have been gathered for no other purpose than blackmail. For example, on June 13, 1958, the head of the Washington field office informed Hoover that, prior to marrying a member of Congress, the member’s wife had been “having an affair with a Negro [and] also at one time carried on an affair with a House Post Office employee.” More recently, the report said, the congressman’s wife “endeavored to have an affair with [an] Indonesian, who declined.”
In response to this tidbit, Hoover wrote back on June 25 that it was “certainly thoughtful of you to advise me of matters of current interest, and I am glad to have the benefit of this information.”
“This was a way of putting congressmen on notice that we had something on them and therefore they would be more disposed to meeting the bureau’s needs and keeping Hoover in power,” says John J. McDermott, who headed the Washington field office and eventually became deputy associate FBI director.
Hoover let presidents know that he had dirt on them as well. For example, on March 22, 1962, Hoover had lunch with President Kennedy. Hoover told him that through bugs and wiretaps, the FBI had learned that Jack was having an affair with Judith Campbell Exner, a twenty-five-year-old divorcée. Hoover informed the president that Exner was also having an affair with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Because Hoover knew such tidbits, no president would fire him.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “I would rather have him [Hoover] inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
Many of the confidential files were destroyed after Hoover’s death. One such item that never came out previously was a teletype sent to headquarters from William Simo
n, who headed the Los Angeles field office, just after the August 5, 1962, death of Marilyn Monroe at her Brentwood, California home. According to DeLoach, who saw the teletype, it said that then Attorney General Robert Kennedy had borrowed Simon’s personal car to see Monroe just before her death.
Confirming this, Simon’s son Greg says, “My father said Robert Kennedy would borrow his white Lincoln convertible. That’s why we didn’t have it on many weekends.” Simon’s daughter Stephanie Branon also confirmed that her father lent his car to Kennedy and remembered that the attorney general once left his Ray-Ban sunglasses in the glove compartment.
As attorney general, Kennedy was entitled to be driven by an FBI security detail. The fact that he chose to use Simon’s personal car is consistent with William Simon’s report to headquarters that he lent his car to Kennedy for the purpose of clandestine meetings with Monroe. Whether his last meeting with her, possibly to break up with her, may have contributed to her suicide is legitimate speculation.
While there is ample evidence that Hoover used the information in his files for blackmail, there was usually no need for it. Simply the perception that he had such information was enough to keep politicians in line.
In the end, the answer to why Hoover did not go after organized crime until he was forced into it is the same reason he maintained files on members of Congress. Above all, Hoover wanted to keep his job. Many members of Congress—not to mention powerful local politicians—had ties to organized crime and might try to unseat him if he went after the Mafia. The Mafia was as powerful as the president. Moreover, as a perfectionist, Hoover did not want to risk losing a case against a powerful figure.
For the same reasons, for purposes of prosecution, Hoover would not investigate corrupt politicians. As FBI director, Hoover had an obligation to go after both Mafia figures and corrupt politicians. Yet until he was pressured into investigating organized crime, those two targets were sacrosanct.
The Secrets of the FBI Page 4