by Curt Gentry
*A GID report, which Hoover had specially prepared for Palmer’s appearance before the Rules Committee, was equally unfeeling. Claiming that Salsedo had been held for two months by “his own choice” and for his own protection, and that “he was never mistreated at any time and never struck, intimidated or threatened,” it bluntly concluded, “Salsedo put an end to his part of the agreement by jumping from the fourteenth floor of the Park Row building upon the street, committing suicide.”36
*In 1973 the Mafia informant Vincent Theresa claimed in his book My Life in the Mafia that the South Braintree crimes had actually been committed by the Morelli gang and that one of its members, Butsey Morelli, had admitted this to him.
BOOK THREE
The Director
“If I can leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated any of the rights of the citizens of this country…then I shall feel satisfied.”
—J. Edgar Hoover, acting director
of the BI, to Roger Baldwin,
founder of the ACLU, 1924
9
The Department of Easy Virtue
With the departure of A. Mitchell Palmer and the advent of the new Republican administration, John Edgar Hoover was in danger of losing his job. Other young attorneys in the Justice Department, facing the same threat, either accepted demotions or sought employment elsewhere. Not Hoover. Already a seasoned bureaucrat, he saw in the change an opportunity to move upward, to an even more powerful position.
To accomplish this, he used a variety of tactics, some new, some by now familiar. Again he quickly made himself indispensable to the new attorney general, in this case Harry M. Daugherty, Harding’s former campaign manager. Daugherty soon discovered that the GID chief’s files contained information not only on radicals but also on Harding’s political opponents, and that young Hoover was not averse to sharing it.
Within hours after being sworn in as attorney general, Daugherty began a wholesale “reorganization” of the Department of Justice. This consisted mostly of replacing Democrats with Republican political appointees. Despite his having been closely allied with Palmer, a one-time Democratic hopeful, Hoover readily survived the purge. Since District of Columbia residents could not vote, Hoover did not have to go on record as belonging to any political party. Thus he had no trouble pledging allegiance to the new administration. Even his support of the former attorney general was a plus. Hoover’s proven loyalty to his superiors—particularly his defense of Palmer before the Senate, long after it was either popular or personally advantageous for him to make such a defense—did not go unnoticed.
Nor did Hoover wait shyly to be asked: he lobbied for the job he wanted. One of the most important lessons he’d learned from the Red raids, and especially their aftermath, was the value of establishing a congressional base. As Palmer’s assistant, he’d become acquainted with many key people on the Hill. Albert Johnson, chairman of the powerful House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, was easily persuaded that Hoover should be given more responsibility. Another influential friend who felt young Hoover merited promotion was Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover’s confidential secretary, Lawrence Richey, who belonged to the same Masonic lodge as John Edgar. There is also some evidence indicating that Hoover received covert support and encouragement from his mysterious friends in military intelligence, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill and the ubiquitous Major General Ralph H. Van Deman.
It is not known when Hoover and “the father of American intelligence” first met. It may be that Van Deman spotted Hoover as a “comer” while the latter was still working for John Lord O’Brian, and then did what he could to advance his career, as happened with many another promising young protégé. What is known is that in 1922 Van Deman arranged for Hoover to receive a reserve officer’s commission in the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (by 1942, when he resigned his commission, Hoover had risen to lieutenant colonel); that Hoover worked closely with Marlborough Churchill, Van Deman’s successor as head of MID, during the Palmer raids and thereafter; and that Hoover and Van Deman maintained a mutually beneficial relationship that continued until Van Deman’s death in 1952.*
But probably as important as the recommendations was the fact that Hoover was a specialist whose particular knowledge and talents were much appreciated by the new administration. With the departures of Garvin, Burke, and, finally, Flynn, Hoover probably knew more about American radicalism than any other man in government. And he certainly knew more about the files, since he’d created them.
Hoover also boosted his candidacy with what was, in effect, a little Red scare of his own. When Daugherty first become attorney general, in March 1921, he’d shown no interest in “the menace”; by August he had all the fanaticism of the newly converted. In the interim, Hoover had inundated the AG with memos, as well as a weekly intelligence digest, on radical activities both in the United States and abroad.†
The attorney general was a busy man. Personally involved in much of the corruption that would characterize the Harding administration, he needed five months to get around to “reorganizing” the Bureau of Investigation.
First, he fired Flynn, with a rude telegram, replacing him with his boyhood friend William J. Burns.
Then, four days later—on August 22, 1921, another date every future FBI agent had to memorize—he named twenty-six-year-old John Edgar Hoover to the post he had been lobbying for: assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
At the same time, Daugherty also transferred the General Intelligence Division from the Department of Justice to the Bureau of Investigation, where it remained under Hoover’s direct command. Thus Hoover, in addition to helping run the Bureau, retained control of both the GID and his ever-growing files.
Albeit unknowingly, Daugherty had made an almost permanent appointment. Hoover would remain in the Bureau until the day he died, his image and that of the organization becoming so indistinguishable that few would recall that the Bureau of Investigation had been in existence more than a dozen years before Hoover joined it or that it had already had a checkered past.
It had, for starters, been born illegitimately, on July 1, 1908. It was, as one congressman had correctly labeled it at the time, a “bureaucratic bastard,” the issue of a union unsanctioned by the Congress of the United States. However, its father was known. He was Charles Joseph Bonaparte, American-born grandnephew of Napoleon I, and attorney general of the United States from 1906 to 1908.
Bonaparte had first approached Congress in 1907, requesting authorization for “a small permanent detective force” in the Department of Justice. Although charged with the “detection and prosecution of crime against the United States,” his department had no investigators of its own; agents had to be borrowed from the Secret Service, which was under the Treasury Department. This, as Bonaparte pointed out, presented numerous problems. Since Treasury had to be informed of the reason for the loan, there was little chance of keeping an investigation confidential. Also, agents often were less than the best, those made available being those most easily spared. And they were temporary, lent out on a case-by-case basis. As is not uncommon with temporary help, an individual might want to make his employment permanent. As Bonaparte explained it, “If you pay him by the job and make his continued employment dependent on finding more jobs, you run the danger…of making him what they call abroad an ‘agent provocateur,’ a person who creates the crime in order that he may get credit for detecting and punishing the criminal.”2
Unconvinced, House Appropriations Committee Chairman James A. Tawney turned down the attorney general’s request.
Bonaparte tried again in April 1908, but his timing couldn’t have been worse. Congress was in a hurry to adjourn and return home to campaign; and it was widely rumored, though never proven, that the president, Theodore Roosevelt, was already using the Secret Service “to obtain interesting data when the gentlemen of Congress tread, heavily and rashly, on the Primrose Path.”3
Again Bonaparte emphasized the gravity of the situation. In the antitrust field alone, for example, there were seven or eight very large cases pending, including that of Standard Oil.
The example was not one with which to win the heart of Congress. Many of its members owed election to the very trusts “Teddy” was so determined to bust.
But Congress had still other reasons for opposing a permanent federal police force, which came out during this and subsequent hearings.
Wasn’t there a risk these detectives would become a secret police, carrying out the dictates of whoever was in office?
Bonaparte admitted that “there are certain inherent dangers in any system of police and especially in any system of detective police,” but he assured the congressmen his force would never be used for political purposes.4
What was to keep them from snooping into the private lives of Americans?
Bonaparte replied, “I do not approve…of the use of a detective force either by the Government or by anybody else for the ascertainment of mere matters of scandal and gossip that could affect only a man’s purely private life.”5
What about the kind of men he’d employ? one congressman asked, recalling the old adage “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”
“The class of men who do that work as a profession is one you have to employ with a good deal of caution,” Bonaparte granted, yet if he could pick his own men, and train them, he was sure he could create an elite, highly disciplined unit.6
Every new agency starts small; what was to keep this one from growing into just another appropriations-eating monster?
He wanted to keep its size down, Bonaparte explained, because he was convinced a small force would be not only more effective, having its own esprit de corps, but easier to supervise.
What controls, if any, would there be over these federal detectives?
“The Attorney General knows, or ought to know, at all times what they are doing,” Bonaparte observed. Then, too, Congress could investigate any alleged abuses.7
One congressman noted that he could see the day when the bureau might hide things from Congress. Bonaparte deemed this unlikely.
Congressman J. Swagar Sherley, Democrat of Kentucky, found still another reason for opposing a federal police force. “In my reading of history I recall no instance where a government perished because of the absence of a secretservice force, but many there are that perished as a result of the spy system. If Anglo-Saxon civilization stands for anything, it is for a government where the humblest citizen is safeguarded against the secret activities of the executive of the government.”8
Had the representatives been more charitably disposed, they might have simply voted down the attorney general’s request. Instead they added a rider to the Sundry Appropriations Act—which became effective at the beginning of the new fiscal year, July 1, 1908—prohibiting the Justice Department from even borrowing agents from the Secret Service.
In their arguments, however personal or partisan their reasoning, the congressmen had foreseen almost every problem the Bureau would have in the years ahead, with a single exception: although they feared the use a president or attorney general might make of such a police force, they failed to consider the possibility that its own chief might someday become so powerful that he would dictate to presidents, attorneys general, and Congress.
Unlike his granduncle, Bonaparte refused to accept his defeat. Using his limited discretionary funds, he quietly went shopping—in the Treasury Department. Unfortunately for his purposes, the most experienced Secret Service agents were also the best paid, so he had to compromise between quality and quantity, finally choosing nine men.
On June 30, just hours before the deadline, the nine resigned from the Treasury Department and were immediately put on the Justice Department’s payroll.
With the nine, plus a number of examiners and accountants whom Bonaparte transferred from other parts of Justice the next day, the attorney general now had his elite detective force—very elite, consisting of just twenty-three men—although another year passed before Bonaparte’s successor, George Wickersham, christened it the Bureau of Investigation (BI), and not until 1935 did it become known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
On July 26, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt issued a presidential order authorizing Attorney General Bonaparte’s permanent subdivision, thus giving it a sort of postdated legitimacy.
Predictably, Congress complained, but not too loudly. No one wanted to be accused of aiding and abetting criminals, especially during an election year. There were additional hearings, but since they were now dealing with a fait accompli, little came of them. The need for controls was much discussed, but no one ever got around to voting any. Also, ever pragmatic in such matters, Congress quickly realized that a new bureau meant new patronage appointments.
So the “bureaucratic bastard” was born and belatedly legitimized. As its first chief, Bonaparte appointed Stanley W. Finch, his head examiner, who served until 1912.
By then the Bureau had grown in size to just under a hundred men and, more important, expanded in directions attorney general Bonaparte had never anticipated.
Perhaps the best capsule description of the new bureau was that of Francis Russell, who called it “an odd-job detective agency with fuzzy lines of authority and responsibility.”9
The Secret Service guarded the president and chased counterfeiters and spies. The Post Office had its own investigators to ferret out mail fraud. So it was with most of the rest of the agencies of the federal government. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation picked up what was left. In its early years this included investigating: antitrust, banking, bankruptcy, and neutrality violations; crimes committed on Indian reservations; the interstate shipment of stolen goods, contraceptives, obscene books, and prizefight films; and, after 1910, madams, prostitutes, and pimps.
It had taken less than two years for the Bureau to depart from Bonaparte’s promise not to investigate personal morality. Ironically, it did so under a mandate from Congress.
The White Slave Traffic Act of 1910—best known by the name of the congressman who introduced it, James Robert Mann of Illinois—was aimed at the traffic in foreign-born prostitutes. But prostitution also had its American roots, as the special agents soon discovered.
As a first step in enforcing the new law, an attempt was made to survey every known house of prostitution in the United States. The madams and each of their “girls” were questioned to determine their true names, places of birth, business histories, and procurers’ identities. Unscheduled spot checks followed, although these often netted less usable evidence than did informers. Many of the madams became regular “Bureau sources,” not only turning in their competitors but providing information on wanted fugitives, fencing operations, and other crimes. Such information would, in a few years, lead to the killing of John Dillinger and the capture of Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, last member of the infamous Ma Barker gang.
Incidental to the evidence of Mann Act violations, the BI agents also accumulated a massive amount of related information, such as which police, city officials, and political bosses were receiving payoffs; who profited from the ownership of the various brothels, hotels, and rooming houses where prostitution took place (Rockefeller, Mellon, and Vanderbilt were only a few of the better-known landlords); and, often, the names of such locally prominent customers as bankers, legislators, and judges.
Such information was duly reported to Bureau headquarters in Washington, where it became a part of the master files.
Despite its honorable intent, the Mann Act was a badly worded law.* Though aimed at commercial vice, the law was soon applied to noncommercial immorality. Any man who took a woman to whom he was not married across a state line and had sexual relations with her could be arrested, and a great many were, including the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, whose real crime was being black and having a white mistress, while others—such as the newspaper magnate William Randolph He
arst—would become victims of “Mann Act blackmail.”
In 1912, Finch was replaced with A. Bruce Bielaski, who served as head of the Bureau through the war years, to 1919. It was Bielaski who—with the permission of his superiors—turned loose on the nation, with Justice Department credentials, some 250,000 amateur sleuths, to hunt down suspected draft dodgers, aliens, dissenters, labor-union militants, and, less successfully, German spies.
Bielaski was replaced, briefly, by William E. Allen, who, following the bombing of Attorney General Palmer’s home, was in turn replaced by William J. Flynn, who conducted the 1919-20 Red raids.
Flynn was succeeded by William J. Burns and his new assistant John Edgar Hoover.
Like his predecessor, Burns was a former Secret Service chief. On retiring in 1909, he had founded his own private-detective agency, billing himself as “The Internationally Famous Sleuth.” Among the many well-known cases he’d solved was the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times. He’d also spied for the Germans prior to America’s entry into the war and had been convicted of breaking into a law office to copy documents for a client.
Although Burns accepted Daugherty’s appointment, he was reluctant to give up his lucrative business of spying on labor, particularly at a time when the National Association of Manufacturers was launching another of its open-shop campaigns. So he didn’t. Instead he assigned government-paid BI agents to work on his company-contracted assignments.