by Curt Gentry
What about his associates? Hill ventured; perhaps they’d be of more interest to the FBI.
Caifano, although far from a dummy, rattled off the names of some of the bosses, explained what their territories and activities were, and noted why they, too, were of no interest to the Bureau. The two parted amicably, Hill informing Caifano that he guessed he’d been misinformed.
Pooling the results of their surveillances, the agents realized that their subjects regularly frequented two establishments, the Armory Lounge, in the suburb of Forest Park, where Sam Giancana seemed to conduct most of his business, and a second-floor tailor shop on North Michigan Avenue, where many of the bosses—Murray Humphreys, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Gus Alex, Giancana, and Caifano—congregated in the mornings. If they could plant a listening device in either…
Older and more cynical agents might have planted a “suicide” bug or tap, without authorization, but William F. Roemer, Jr., who headed the squad, went strictly by the book. First they had to prepare a feasibility survey, to determine whether the device could be installed, monitored, and removed “with security,” that is, without risk of embarrassing the Bureau. Then there was the paperwork, coded telexes to FBIHQ requesting authorization, symbol assignments, equipment requisitions, and so on. As their first target, they picked the tailor shop, since the Armory was protected by the Forest Park police.
SAC Johnson was not optimistic, but, to the surprise of everyone concerned, authorization came right through. The director was under fire from Congress, the White House, and the press—he was also stonewalling the McClellan committee, as well as a special group on organized crime that AG Rogers had set up—and he was anxious to obtain any information he could get. However, installing the bug was another matter. Finally, early on a Sunday morning, the agents managed to get in and despite a few problems—one SA slipped in the crawl space between two floors and almost went through the ceiling of the downstairs restaurant—managed to plant the bug.*
When Bill Roemer later declared, “One microphone was worth a thousand agents,” he was talking about the bug in the tailor shop. This single-microphone surveillance, which remained in place undetected for five years, would teach the FBI more about organized crime than all the generations of bugs it sired.
Names, dates, amounts. Judges, senators, congressmen, mayors, policemen. Murders, robberies, scams, voting frauds. According to William Brashler, the Chicago agents “heard from the hoods’ own lips who had the power and how it was distributed, who put the fix in and where it was put, what decisions were made and who was affected, who had the solutions. They heard stories, anecdotes, family problems, even a history of mob decisions as told with relish by Murray Humphreys.”47
Humphreys, who was known as “the Camel” or “the Hump,” was the legal tactician of the Chicago syndicate and one of the mob’s greatest political fixers. And it was from Humphreys’s own words that J. Edgar Hoover found the solution to an old mystery: how the former attorney general, and current Supreme Court justice, Tom Clark had been bribed to grant parole to the four Chicago Mafia leaders in 1947.
Never one to let modesty get in the way of a good story, Humphreys admitted having masterminded the fix, observing that the attorney general had been “100 percent for doing favors,” but that after the parole scandal broke, “you couldn’t get through for nothing.”48
The fix was twofold, Humphrey explained. There were other indictments pending against a couple of the men: to get the paroles through, these first had to be dismissed. This had been handled by Maury Hughes, a Dallas lawyer who was a close friend and former law partner of Tom Clark. Hughes was “the guy who went to him [Attorney General Clark],” Humphreys said. Paul Dillon, a St. Louis lawyer who had been associated with the Truman campaign in Missouri, had arranged the paroles. The money—Humphreys didn’t mention the amount, only that there had been “a lot of it”49—had changed hands in Chicago’s Stevens Hotel.
Not content with the logs of the conversation, Hoover ordered the tape flown directly to him in Washington.*
Once the FBI director began receiving the logs of the tailor shop bug, the young Chicago agents could do no wrong. Their requests for more bugs—for the Armory Lounge, the homes of Giancana and the leading Mafiosi, the politically important First Ward Democratic headquarters across the street from city hall—were granted almost as soon as they were submitted. As word spread via the grapevine, other SACs put in requests. By the fall of 1959 the information thus recovered had become so rich and varied that the FBI director was begging his special agents in charge to put in more bugs.
From the MISURs, the FBI learned how organized crime operated on the local level, sometimes in gory detail. Favorite murders were discussed, the agents learning where the bodies were buried, literally. “Sealed,” they discovered, meant the homicide victim had been boarded up in an unused building; “double boxing” was used to refer to a funeral home in Niagara Falls, New York, whose owner was too cheap to buy a crematorium and instead used one coffin for two bodies. Much of the information recovered was local—speaking of the Chicago Police Advisory Board, one mobster remarked, “There’s five of them and we got three,” and then named them—but often there would be startling glimpses of the overview, the bigger picture. For example, one FBI report stated, “CH-T-1 advised in September 1959 of the existence of a small group of persons representing groups in various sections of the United States and referred to as ‘The Commission.’ ”51 CH-T-1 was the Chicago tailor shop bug; the person overheard was Sam Giancana, a member of the commission; and September 1959 was two years and nine months before Robert F. Kennedy learned this same information from the informer Joseph Valachi.
Hoover had not only leaped ahead of Kennedy, as far as inside information on organized crime was concerned; much of the intelligence he obtained wasn’t even known to Harry Anslinger of the FBN.
Because of the bugs, old crimes were solved and new ones sometimes prevented. But these weren’t Hoover’s principal concerns. A clue as to what material most interested him can be found in a 1959 SAC letter. He especially wanted information on political tie-ups with crime; police efficiency; and political control and domination of police agencies. Of the three, the first was deemed the most important.
Within twenty-four hours after FBI wiretaps and bugs were installed in Hot Springs, Arkansas, one of the state’s leading politicians—and one of J. Edgar Hoover’s most powerful supporters—was heard taking payoffs from an organized crime figure. From the bug on Giancana’s home, Sam was heard calling “his congressman” off the floor of the House. With the information obtained from this massive, secret intelligence campaign, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would neutralize one U.S. senator (Edward Long of Louisiana), destroy another (Cornelius Gallagher of New Jersey), hear talk of assassinating a president and an attorney general of the United States (John F. and Robert F. Kennedy), and obtain enough blackmail material to persuade another chief executive (Richard M. Nixon) to extend his tenure as FBI director. All this long before the Kennedys would claim that they had “forced” J. Edgar Hoover to recognize the existence of organized crime.
Hoover’s intelligence-gathering operation was of such immensity—at its peak there were probably in excess of a thousand bugs in operation at any one time, and that figure may be low—that special measures had to be taken to keep the purchase of the equipment secret.* This meant the funding had to be disguised in some way so as not to alert Congress to what was going on.
John Mohr, who handled the Bureau’s budget, came up with the solution. Most of the purchases were made under the Confidential Fund, which was supposedly used for payments to informants, or other nonaccountable funds the FBI maintained. To further ensure secrecy, as early as 1956 Mohr entered into a confidential arrangement with a Washington-based electronics firm, the U.S. Recording Company (USRC), which was owned and operated by a close friend of Mohr’s named Joseph Tait. It was an exclusive arrangement: the FBI bought all such equipment from USRC.
For example, on March 14, 1963, Mohr informed Ivan Conrad, assistant director in charge of the FBI Laboratory, “No recorders are to be purchased by the Bureau outside of USRC. The reason for this is because Mr. Tait of the USRC will protect the Bureau in the event questions are asked by a Congressional committee concerning the purchase of recorders by the FBI. Other companies will not do this for the Bureau.”52
One reason why it is impossible to determine exactly how many bugs were in use at any one time is that, following Hoover’s death, Mohr and Assistant Director Nicholas P. Callahan destroyed many of the records of the Confidential Fund, the Library Fund and the FBI Recreational Association. Enough purchasing orders remained, however, for the Justice Department to conduct a secret investigation, which revealed that the FBI often purchased the equipment from USRC at markup of from 40 to 70 percent.
Getting into the Armory presented a problem. The locks could be picked, but it would take time, and the Forest Park police, some of whom had an “arrangement” with Giancana, were apt to drive by at any time.
In their surveillance, the SAs had noticed that one of the busboys often doubled as a “swamper,” cleaning out the place after the bar had closed. Late one night as he was driving home, he was pulled over and arrested by three “narcotics officers.” By the time he was released just before dawn—grateful they’d neither pressed charges nor called “Mr. Sam”—the special agents Ralph Hill, Marshall Rutland, and Bill Roemer had a duplicate set of keys.
In contrast to Giancana’s home, which they’d bugged earlier, the back room of the Armory was devoid even of photographs of “Your buddy Frank” or widower Sam’s longtime lady love, the singer Phyllis McGuire. A musty storeroom, furnished only with a table and chairs, it seemed hardly the offices of a multimillion-dollar corporation, the Chicago syndicate.
Working in total silence, they made the installations, then conducted a thorough search. In the months ahead, whenever they returned to adjust the equipment, they repeated the procedure. Only once did they find anything of interest, and it was startling enough to warrant a VERY URGENT teletype to the director.
Instead of liquor or bar supplies, one of the cardboard boxes was filled with the most sophisticated ELSUR equipment the agents had ever seen. No one needed to even whisper the initials; they flashed simultaneously through all their minds. With an envious last look, for the mikes were only a fraction of the size of the FBI’s, which were almost as big as Coke bottles, they replaced everything exactly as they’d found it, then rushed downtown to query FBIHQ: What would Sam “Mo Mo” Giancana be doing with equipment that obviously belonged to the CIA?
In 1959 Hoover lost one of his oldest adversaries.
Bored with Thailand, William J. Donovan had resigned his ambassadorship after only two years and, in 1955, returned to the United States to resume the practice of law. Corey Ford has caught the sadness of his last years: “Once he had direct access to the president; now his audience might be a Junior Chamber of Commerce or a Women’s Club luncheon.”53
On February 13, 1957, Donovan suffered a stroke—probably only one in a series that may have begun four years earlier. Taken to the Mayo Clinic, he was diagnosed as suffering from arteriosclerotic atrophy of the brain. There was no cure. First his mind went, then his body. Among the former OSS colleagues who visited Wild Bill at his apartment at 4 Sutton Place was the CIA’s general counsel Lawrence R. Houston. “Lying in bed, he could look over the Queensborough Bridge,” Houston would recall. “His clouded mind imagined that Russian tanks were advancing over the bridge to take Manhattan.”54
Donovan’s death, on February 8, 1959, at age seventy-six, caused a minor crisis in Crime Records. The director sent back at least half a dozen drafts of the sympathy letter he’d requested. The final version read:
Dear Mrs. Donovan:
I was distressed to learn of the death of your husband, and I want you to know that my thoughts are with you in deepest sympathy in these trying hours.
There is so little than can be said or done to comfort you in a time like this, but certainly his life’s work, devoted as it was to the service of others, should be a source of gratification to all who were honored to know him. If I can be of any assistance, I hope you will let me know.
Sincerely yours,
J. Edgar Hoover55
Ruth Donovan had the good taste not to respond.
Even though his arch-enemy was dead, Hoover’s hatred lived on. Privately he spread the totally baseless rumor that the former OSS chief had died of syphilis contracted during orgies with prostitutes during World War II.
The previous year Hoover himself had caught a glimpse of his own mortality, and it had frightened him.
Today the medical profession would refer to it as an “incident.” In 1958 it would have been described as a minor heart attack. In either case, it was a warning, and Hoover heeded it.
Only his closest aides knew. But what soon became known—to every agent in the Bureau—was that the director’s doctors had told him that he was overweight, and that as a result he had embarked on a strict diet and exercise program, shedding thirty-three pounds in just ninety days.
Having accomplished this himself, he saw no reason why his overweight agents couldn’t do likewise. Fat edicts rained down on the field, accompanied by a life insurance company chart which set “minimum,” “desirable,” and “maximum” weight standards. Since the chart was based on height, and Hoover had a lifelong habit of falsifying that statistic, he had no trouble fitting into the “desirable” category. Regardless of their build or physical condition, all of his agents were required to emulate the director.
A few ingenious SAs found their way around the new regulations. Summoned to Hoover’s office on another matter, one wore clothing several sizes too large, then, before the director could get a word in, effusively thanked him for his weight reduction program: it had, the agent gratefully exclaimed, saved his life.
This agent survived, by avoiding the director thereafter, but numerous others, including some of the Bureau’s best, fared less well; flunking the now mandatory weigh-ins, they were given letters of censure, transfers, and, finally, dismissals. SA Nelson Gibbons was given a letter of commendation for single-handedly breaking up a Soviet spy ring, then fired because of his weight. A New York agent, on a crash diet, collapsed and died at his desk; his widow later sued the FBI, claiming the weight program had contributed to his demise.
At about this same time, both Hoover and Tolson drew up new wills. According to John Mohr, in a deposition taken when Tolson’s will was contested, the associate director revised his not for medical reasons but because this was “during the time when we were anticipating the Russians were going to atom bomb us.”56
Hoover had always suffered somewhat from hypochondria. That condition now worsened. In addition to consulting his own physician, Dr. Joseph Kennedy, and occasionally Tolson’s doctor, Robert Choisser, the FBI director secretly visited dozens of other doctors, both in the capital and in New York—as agents, interviewing physicians and pharmacists in the course of running background checks for “Q” clearances, discovered to their amazement. No matter whom they called on, the director seemed to have seen him first. Those brash enough to ask about the director’s complaints were told that they were largely psychological: having read or heard about an ailment, Hoover suddenly developed its symptoms. Nor were the doctors without their own complaints. Their famous patient would telephone them at all hours, asking for prescriptions or advice. And he’d never pay his bills.
Then there were the phobias, at first known only to those at SOG but by now common gossip in the field: the director’s compulsive washing of his hands (Sam Noisette once estimated that half of his twenty-five years in the Bureau had been spent handing Mr. Hoover towels); his fear of germs (his home was equipped with an air-filtration system which allegedly “electrocuted” poisonous particles, and he would become almost demented on seeing an unswatted fly); and his insistence that agents not step
on his shadow.
A favorite tale among the agents was that the director, realizing that he and his constant companion were getting along in years, had sent his associate director out to price two adjoining burial plots. The prices were all too high, Edgar had complained upon Clyde’s return. “After all,” he added, “I’ll only need mine for three days.”
It was only a tale, a fiction. J. Edgar Hoover had no intention of dying. It was at about this same time that Hoover entrusted William Sullivan with an especially sensitive assignment. No matter how farfetched the claim, Research and Analysis was given the task of investigating any formula or treatment which allegedly prolonged life. Any articles on these subjects were to be deposited on the director’s desk as soon after publication as possible.
This odd bit of information never left headquarters. But even agents in the field were beginning to hear stories about the director’s growing paranoia.
In October 1959 the New York Post ran a fifteen-part series entitled “J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.” The Bureau had learned about the series nearly a year earlier, when it was first proposed, and had tried to discourage its publication, with not so veiled threats and calls on advertisers. When this failed, derogatory information was leaked about the paper’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, as well as its editor, James Wechsler;* reporters for the paper were tailed; and a bag job was done on the hotel room of one, Edward Kosner, the agents being instructed not only to photograph his notes and try to determine his sources but also to look for “signs that he might have a female in the room or was drinking heavily.” No such signs were found.57 The agents considered planting narcotics in the room and then notifying the WDC police drug squad, but SOG deemed the plan too risky, so it was aborted.