J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Only one man had actually seen and talked to the recipient of the ransom, the publicity-hungry John F. Condon. But, even with a lineup consisting mostly of obvious cops, Condon refused to make a positive identification, much to the disgust of Hoover, Colonel Schwarzkopf, and representatives of the New York Police Department, who had already scheduled a press conference for that afternoon. They held it anyway, announcing, “We now have in custody the man who received the ransom money.”23 And that was about all they had. “At this point our legal case was shakier than a house of cards,” Turrou later observed.24

  Although one of the ransom bills had been found on Hauptmann’s person at the time of his arrest, a “thorough” search of his home by the New Jersey State Police had failed to turn up anything incriminating. Hoover and the entire Lindbergh squad were convinced, however, that the money was in the house or somewhere near it, that “Hauptmann’s dull mentality would not permit another hiding place.”25 Although Colonel Schwarzkopf at first protested, vociferously, he finally agreed to let the BI agents make their own search.

  They found, in a badly concealed compartment in the wall of the garage, $1,830 in $10 gold certificates, all of which were on the ransom list.

  However, since no member of the household was present at the time of the search, the money was not legally admissible as evidence. To remedy this defect, the money was returned to the wall, Mrs. Hauptmann was brought in, and the money was again “discovered.” A second and third cache were later found in the garage, bringing the total amount recovered to $14,600. Confronted with the money, Hauptmann claimed that it had been left with him by one Isidor Fish, who had since died.

  With what must have been a tremendous sense of relief, on October 10, 1934, Hoover called a press conference to announce that the Bureau had withdrawn from the case.

  After what Leon Turrou characterized as “a mockery” of a trial, Richard Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., and on April 3, 1936, he was electrocuted.

  The case left a legacy of doubt, as a series of long-suppressed inter-Bureau memorandums reveals. Two days after failing to identify Hauptmann in the lineup, Dr. Condon told Turrou, “He is not the man. But he looks like his brother.” Hauptmann was “much heavier” than the man he passed the money to in the cemetery, Condon said, “had different eyes, different hair, etc.”26 Four days later Condon changed his mind, and by the time of the trial he was positive in his identification. So was Colonel Lindbergh, who identified Hauptmann by his voice. Although the jury found his testimony convincing, Turrou was more skeptical: “Many, including myself, thought it remarkable that Colonel Lindbergh, sworn to truth, could recognize a voice heard for a few moments in a dark wood after a lapse of two years.”27

  There was good reason for skepticism: in appearing before the grand jury some months earlier, Lindbergh had testified that he couldn’t “say positively” it was the same voice.28 Another key witness, a neighbor of the Lindberghs, identified Hauptmann as a man he’d seen near their house. One BI memo, however, characterized the neighbor as “a confirmed liar and totally unreliable” and noted that when he was first questioned by the Bureau he’d denied seeing anyone near the house.29 Charles Appel was positive that Hauptmann wrote the ransom notes; but, as Hoover himself admitted in a memo of September 24, 1934, Hauptmann’s fingerprints did not match “the latent impressions developed on the ransom notes and the ransom money.”30 The agents were also split on the question of whether Hauptmann had acted alone or had one or more accomplices. In a memo written on the day the Bureau withdrew from the case, Hugh H. Clegg summed up the differing views of the members of the Lindbergh squad by noting, “There are logical reasons which would point to the presence of someone else but there are an equal number of reasons why there is only one person.”31 Even Hoover himself had doubts, remarking in one secret memo, “I am skeptical as to some of the evidence.”32

  There were other legacies. At the time of the trial, Charles Lindbergh told Elmer Irey of the Treasury Department, “If it had not been for you fellows being in the case, Hauptmann would not now be on trial and your organization deserves full credit for his apprehension.” Hoover would never forgive Lindbergh for that remark.33

  Although Lindbergh credited Irey and his men, history, as interpreted by Crime Records, gave full honors to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Anyone who took the famed FBI tour left it with the impression that the Bureau, acting alone, had solved the Lindbergh case, while Irey’s insistence that gold certificates be included in the ransom money went unmentioned in Bureauauthorized accounts.

  “Irey was a good Christian who didn’t cuss,” observed his longtime assistant Malachi Harney, “but the air would be blue when the subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping case came up.”34

  * * *

  *Immediately after being informed of Walsh’s death, Hoover had wired Special Agent Edward E. Conray, who was assigned to North Carolina, to board the train and accompany the widow and the senator’s body back to the capital. He also met the train himself, to express his personal condolences.

  *Bureau participation was obvious in at least one letter—that of Representative J. J. McSwain, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee and, perhaps not coincidentally, a friend of General Ralph Van Deman—which stated that “at least fifteen or sixteen…out of twenty-four field offices” were “headed by Democrats.” Only someone high up in the Bureau could have supplied this information.6

  †Wheeler’s recollections of the incident were contained in his autobiography Yankee from the West, which was not published until 1962. By this time Wheeler, having become an isolationist and a conservative, had changed his mind about Hoover several times, and he’d change it yet again. According to William Sullivan, who knew Wheeler well, “he started off distrusting Hoover and he ended up distrusting him.”8

  ‡Stone wrote Frankfurter; “He removed from the Bureau every man as to whose character there was any ground for suspicion. He refused to yield to any kind of political pressure; he appointed to the Bureau men of intelligence and education, and strove to build up a morale such as should control such an organization. He withdrew it wholly from its extra-legal activities and made it an efficient organization for the investigation of criminal offenses against the United States.”9

  *In effect, this was little more than a name change. The Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Identification (which maintained more than 3.5 million fingerprints and criminal records) had already merged, albeit without official sanction, while the Prohibition Bureau was in its final days.

  *“Hoover didn’t mince his steps—or his words,” a former Hoover aide recalled, on rereading the Collier’s “hatchetjob” many years later. “He was short, squat and he had the smallest feet I’ve ever seen on a man—but he walked like he talked, fast. When he was coming down the hall toward you he looked like a locomotive on a straight track. You knew he wasn’t going to deviate one inch, so you automatically stepped aside.

  “But when you saw him from behind, the effect was entirely different. His bottom—well, it sort of bounced.

  “You tried your best not to look, not to notice, because, well, one, he was the director, and two, God preserve you if you laughed!”17

  *Colonel Lindbergh initially opposed including gold certificates or recording the numbers of the ransom bills. Only after Irey threatened to withdraw from the case did Lindbergh relent.

  *The police later explained that they made their decision to arrest Hauptmann on the spur of the moment, that after seeing him run a red light they presumed he had spotted his tail and was trying to flee. Leon Turrou goes along with this in his book Where My Shadow Falls. The above version of Hauptmann’s arrest and its aftermath is based on the recollections of Charles Appel, who, though not on the scene, talked to all the agents who were.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Gangster Era

  DILLINGER SLAIN IN CHICAGO:

  SHOT DEAD BY FEDERAL MEN


  IN FRONT OF MOVIE THEATER

  —New York Times,

  July 23, 1934

  FRED AND “MA” BARKER

  DIE IN GUNFIGHT WITH

  OFFICERS AT OCKLAWAHA

  —Jacksonville (Fla.) Journal,

  January 16, 1935

  KARPIS CAPTURED

  IN NEW ORLEANS

  BY HOOVER HIMSELF

  —New York Times,

  May 1, 1936

  13

  The Rise and Fall of Public Hero Number One

  The press gave them their names—Handsome Johnny Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Ma Barker, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd—and glamorized their exploits. In the stale weariness of the deepening Depression, their crimes, chases, and—as often as not—escapes were like a continuing serial at the Saturday matinee.

  The “midwestern crime wave”—which, more than any other event, catapulted the Bureau into national prominence—was of relatively short duration. It began in 1933 and was, for the most part, over by the end of the following year. It was also restricted to a limited area. Most of the crimes occurred in seven states: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

  But while the crime wave lasted, it caught the public fancy, in a way that “outraged J. Edgar Hoover’s Presbyterian concept of right and wrong.”1

  Everyone knew that Handsome Johnny was a good boy gone bad, but perhaps not all that bad; that Verne Miller was a war hero and former sheriff; that Ma, for all her killing ways, was still filled with maternal love for her “murderous brood.”

  From a safe distance, they often appeared to be Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich to benefit the poor. Whenever he hit a bank, Pretty Boy took not only the cash but also the bank’s loan and mortgage records. Not surprisingly, in a time when banks were foreclosing on thousands of homes, farms, and businesses, Floyd and others like him became nearly national heroes. The Dillinger gang member Harry Pierpont summed it up after his capture when he told a reporter, “My conscience doesn’t hurt me. I stole from the bankers. They stole from the people. All we did was help raise the insurance rates.”2

  It was almost hard not to cheer them, as when Dillinger escaped Crown Point jail by means of a wooden gun (or so he claimed), then, short of real guns, held up police stations to get them.

  They were, for the most part, rural rather than urban criminals, far removed from the big-city gangs and criminal syndicates that had sprung up in the wake of Prohibition. For all their much publicized cunning, none of them were very bright. It took little ingenuity to rob a bank, and, unlike most other crimes, kidnapping, much favored by the gangs, placed the kidnappers in jeopardy at least three times: when the crime occurred, when the ransom was paid, and when it was spent.

  The public, caught in the vicarious excitement of their exploits, tended to forget that many of them were also vicious killers.

  Until, that is, June 17, 1933.

  It was early morning, and the street in front of Kansas City’s Union Station was crowded with arriving and departing passengers. One group, leaving the station, kept to themselves. In the center, in handcuffs, was Frank “Jelly” Nash, an escaped bank robber who had been captured two days earlier. Surrounding him were four special agents of the Bureau and three policemen. The group had just reached the vehicle which was to take Nash to Leavenworth prison when they were suddenly ambushed by three men carrying pistols and submachine guns. By the time the firing had stopped, four of the lawmen, including Special Agent Raymond Caffery, were dead and two others wounded. Also dead was Nash, the man they’d tried to free.

  The killings outraged the nation. This was no Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, where gangsters killed each other. Blatantly, arrogantly, the gunmen had shot down seven people in broad daylight in a public place. To Hoover this flagrant disregard for all constituted authority was nothing less than “a challenge to law and order and civilization itself.”

  And Hoover was quick to accept that challenge. In a speech delivered to the International Association of Chiefs of Police the following month, the BI director asked all the police forces of the country to unite in a national war on crime. “Those who participated in this cold-blooded murder will be hunted down,” Hoover promised. “Sooner or later the penalty which is their due will be paid.”*3

  In May and June of 1934—in part as a result of public reaction to the Kansas City massacre and the midwestern crime wave, but also, in a very large measure, because of the lobbying efforts of Director Hoover and Attorney General Cummings—Congress passed, almost without opposition, a package of nine major crime bills.

  The new laws were, as Sanford Ungar has noted, “one of the most important, if least recognized, New Deal reforms.” They gave the federal government, for the first time, a comprehensive criminal code. And they gave Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation not only a greatly expanded mandate but also vast new authority with which to enforce it.4

  The Bureau was no longer limited to investigating white-slave cases, interstate auto theft, and federal bankruptcy violations. Under the new laws, the robbery of a national bank or member bank of the Federal Reserve System was made a violation of federal law, as were the transportation of stolen property, the transmission of threats, racketeering in interstate commerce, and the flight of a felon or witness across state lines to avoid prosecution or giving testimony. The Lindbergh Law was amended to add the death penalty and to create a presumption of interstate transportation of the victim after seven days, thus allowing the Bureau to enter the case. And—in keeping with Hoover’s promise following Shanahan’s death—special agents of the Bureau of Investigation were given the right to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry firearms, while the killing or assaulting of a government agent was made a federal offense.

  The days of the small Bureau were over. Gone, too, were the days when special agents were merely investigators.

  Quietly and without publicity, for the Bureau was still maintaining that it employed only law school graduates and accountants, Hoover used part of his increased appropriation to go shopping for “hired guns”—former lawmen with practical police experience. There were already a few in the Bureau, among them John Keith and Charles Winstead. But Hoover greatly increased their number, hiring, among others, Gus T. Jones (an ex-Texas ranger), C.G. “Jerry” Campbell and Clarence Hurt (both from Oklahoma City, the latter formerly chief of detectives), and Bob Jones (who’d held the same post in Dallas).

  Few had attended college, much less studied law, and none fit Hoover’s prescribed image of a special agent. Most wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and carried their own guns—Keith a matched pair of Colt .45s, Winstead a .357 Magnum—and all were inclined to react out of instinct and experience rather than according to the manual. But Hoover was wise enough to realize he needed them, for a time. Although they attained legendary status within the Bureau, and figured prominently in some of its most famous early cases, Hoover made sure their exploits and backgrounds went unpublicized.*

  He was less successful with Melvin “Little Mel” Purvis.

  When Melvin Purvis arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1927—the train trip north was the first time he’d been outside his home state of South Carolina—it was with the intention of becoming a diplomat. He’d tried practicing small-town law, but it had quickly bored him; he craved travel and excitement. But, on being told there were no positions open in the State Department, he walked over to the Department of Justice and applied for a job as a special agent.

  He had three strikes against him. Very slight in build and just a shade under five feet tall, he failed to meet the minimum weight and height requirements, and, although he was what was then the minimum age, twenty-three, he didn’t look it. When Pop Nathan suggested, not unkindly, “You look pretty much like a kid,” Purvis responded with two lies: that he’d had considerable experience and that he’d traveled a lot. To which Nathan smiled and said, “Probably all o
ver the state of South Carolina.”6 But a few days later he received his letter of acceptance, and by 1932, only five years after joining the Bureau, he was special agent in charge of its second-most-important field office, Chicago.

  Contrary to another well-publicized myth, that no candidate was ever accepted into the Bureau or received advancement therein because of political connections, there were, over the years, various presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, and even some large-corporation heads whose good graces the director wished to cultivate or retain. Just having some personal contact with a new president-elect, for example, was often enough to merit a fast express elevator ride up the Bureau pyramid, to a specially created post with a title such as White House liaison. The ride often lasted only as long as the sponsor remained in power, but there were many such “exceptions.”

  Melvin Purvis was one, the son of an aristocratic plantation owner who had close personal and business ties to South Carolina’s powerful Senator Ed “Cotton” Smith. Yet, even without this link, Purvis might well have become a Hoover favorite. At this time the director still personally reviewed each application for the job of special agent. And he must have noticed that Purvis, too slight to make the high school football team, had gone on to become captain of his local cadet corps. Moreover, next to “Little Mel,” even the director looked tall.†

  “John Dillinger escaped from the Crown Point jail a few minutes ago,” SAC Purvis teletyped Hoover on March 3, 1934.7 Details were sketchy, Purvis having received his information from a reporter, and not until the following day was he able to verify that, after breaking out of the “escape proof” Indiana jail, Dillinger had stolen the sheriffs car and driven it across the state line into Illinois.