J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (52 page)

But, with Ragen’s murder, “the investigation never got off even to a start.”
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Ever since his mother’s death, Hoover spent the Christmas holidays outside Washington. Usually he and Tolson went to Miami the first or second week in December, returning to the capital after his birthday, which was also New Year’s Day. Walter Winchell took his vacation at the same time and place, and they usually had dinner together, most often at Joe’s Stone Crab.

Hoover and Winchell were there on December 10, 1946, when they learned that their friend Damon Runyon had just died of cancer. That night, as they drove through the darkened streets of the city in the director’s bulletproof limousine, they reminisced about their friend and recalled his wish “to be remembered even a little while.”
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It was Hoover who suggested that perhaps they could do something to help other victims of cancer. Thus was born the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund.

Some years earlier the USO had a similar beginning, when the showman Billy Rose approached the FBI director with an idea he had for entertaining the troops. Enthusiastic, Hoover arranged for Rose to meet with President Roosevelt, who heartily endorsed the plan.

Had Winchell and Hoover driven to the Miami airport on that December 1946 night, they would have witnessed a memorable sight, one which just might have changed the FBI director’s mind about the existence of organized crime. From all over the United States, leading mobsters were descending on Miami, en route to Havana to welcome back the
capo di tutti capi,
Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who had secretly slipped back into Cuba less than a year after his deportation to Italy from the United States. The Fischetti brothers (cousins of Al Capone) had even brought along the Hoboken crooner Frank Sinatra to entertain the group on Christmas night.

J. Edgar Hoover might not believe in a national crime syndicate whose tentacles reached every part of the country, but his longtime adversary Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, did. Sixty miles south of Miami, FBN agents watched as the mobsters got off planes at the Havana airport, then took limousines to the Nacional hotel, where they occupied all thirty-six of its lavish suites.

Among those paying honor to the “boss of all bosses” were Frank Costello,
Vito Genovese, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, Mike Miranda, Albert Anastasia, Joseph Profaci, Joseph Bonanno, Thomas Lucchese, and Joe Magliocco (New York City); Tony Accardo, Rocco and Joey Fischetti (Chicago); Moe Dalitz (Cleveland); Carlos Marcello (New Orleans); Santos Trafficante (Tampa); and Meyer Lansky (Havana and Miami). Also present were representatives from Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, and Kansas City.

Conspicuously absent but much discussed was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who was frantically trying to ready the Flamingo hotel for its grand opening the day after Christmas. Following Ragen’s murder, two of Guzik’s lieutenants had taken over the Continental Wire Service, and Siegel had been ordered to close down Trans-America. Defiantly, he’d refused, unless paid $2 million. The mob had already invested more than $6 million in Siegel’s dream of transforming the tiny, windswept desert community of Las Vegas into a gambling capital, and the hotel wasn’t even finished. Because of bad timing (the holidays) and bad weather (the planes that were to ferry guest celebrities from Los Angeles never left the ground) the December 26 Flamingo opening was a disaster. More important, the casino itself lost more than $100,000 in the first two weeks, and kept losing. All this, coupled with the knowledge that Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, had made a number of unexplained visits to banks in Switzerland, led the mob leaders to vote to “hit” Siegel.
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Through a tap on Luciano’s phone, Anslinger learned that the main purpose of the mob summit was to establish new routes to speed up the importation of drugs from Europe into the United States. When he failed to convince the Cuban authorities that they should deport Luciano (both Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and its police chief, Benito Herrera, a proud graduate of the FBI Academy, were on Luciano’s payroll), Anslinger decided to go public. The columnist Robert Ruark, not Walter Winchell, got the scoop; and Harry Anslinger, not J. Edgar Hoover, got the credit. Under pressure from the U.S. government, Luciano was arrested on February 23 and deported two months later.

On February 26, 1947, Hoover opened his first file on Francis Albert Sinatra, a.k.a. Frank Sinatra. Although in time the FBI’s files on Sinatra ran to hundreds of pages—most of them accumulated during the Kennedy administration—the initial entry consisted of a four-page summary of the information in bureau files (BUFILES) on Sinatra’s background and a synopsis of the recent
newspaper stories regarding the singer’s “association with hoodlums.”

Still, Hoover found it of sufficient interest to have it placed in his Official/Confidential file.
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Even after the Anslinger disclosures, J. Edgar Hoover continued to insist that there was no such thing as organized crime. Had Hoover really wanted to see how high organized crime reached, he would only have needed to open his office door and look across the hall.

One of the more lucrative new territories invaded by the syndicate following repeal was labor racketeering. The Chicago mob was especially active in this field, its influence extending all the way to Hollywood. In 1934, following a rigged election, the Capone organization put its own man, George Browne, in as president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators. Browne’s real boss, and partner in various criminal endeavors, was Willie Bioff, a former pimp and labor organizer. After knocking down independent theater owners, the pair got bolder and took on the chains. Then, encouraged by their success, they decided to make a really big score. In 1936 Bioff informed a representative of the major studios that they could have labor peace for a price, $2 million. Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Loew’s, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Brothers briefly considered the offer, then agreed to pay. However, Joseph M. Schenck, president of the board of Twentieth Century-Fox, made the mistake of making one of the payoffs with a personal check, which came to the attention of the IRS. Indicted for income tax evasion, Schenck exposed the extortion scheme. In return for a dropping of the tax charges against him, Schenck testified against Bioff and Browne, who, following their convictions, implicated the Chicago mobsters Frank Nitti, Louis Campagna, Phil D’Andrea, Charles Gioe, John Roselli, Frank Maritote, and Paul Ricca.

These were no low-level hoods. Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti had seized control of the Chicago outfit after Al Capone’s 1931 conviction for income tax evasion, and Paul “The Waiter” Ricca—who had been questioned in scores of murders, including the slaughter of fourteen members of one family—would succeed Nitti, eventually becoming the godfather of the Chicago Mafia.

With the exception of Frank Nitti, who committed suicide the day after he was indicted, all were brought to trial in New York, convicted, and, on December 31, 1943, sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth penitentiary. Immediately after their convictions, the remaining leadership of the Chicago mob began efforts to secure their release.

Francis Biddle was found to be unapproachable. Tom Clark was not. On August 13, 1947—after having served the bare one-third minimum of their sentences—the Federal Parole Board paroled Ricca, D’Andrea, Campagna, and Gioe, allegedly after the personal intervention of Attorney General Clark.

The release of Chicago’s top mob bosses caused such a scandal that Congress appointed a committee to investigate. But the attorney general, citing the separation of powers, refused to testify, nor would he let the committee examine the
parole board records. After weeks of inconclusive testimony, the committee, in a carefully worded report, held that although the paroles had been “improvidently granted,” it had been unable to find any evidence that anyone had been bribed. Committee members later stated, however, that they were convinced that Attorney General Clark knew more about the matter than he was willing to divulge.

J. Edgar Hoover kept his own private file on the case. Although it contained considerable information that did not surface in the congressional probe—he had access, for example, to the parole board records—he, like the committee, was unable to prove that his boss had accepted a bribe.

Not until 1964, seventeen years later, did the FBI director receive proof. By this time, of course, Tom Clark was no longer attorney general and the statute of limitations had long since expired. Even had it still been in force, Hoover could not have used the evidence in court, since it had been obtained through an illegal microphone surveillance. But even though legally inadmissible, it was still political dynamite, for while Hoover was listening to the incriminating tapes of a bugged conversation in a Chicago tailor shop, Tom Clark was celebrating his fifteenth year as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

With the war over and the draft no longer a threat, those special agents who had chosen the FBI as a form of alternative service were finally able to escape the director’s nearly absolute control. The Bureau grapevine had it that on the day after V-J Day two dozen SAs submitted their resignations. If so, they were only the first in a long line.

Hoover tried everything to keep them—not even the threat of having their resignations declared dismissals with prejudice, which would deny them any other government employment, deterred many—and not until 1947 was Hoover able to stem the flow. That year, over the opposition of the Bureau of the Budget, the Treasury Department, the civil service,
and
the president, Congress unanimously passed a special FBI retirement bill. It was, at the time, one of the most liberal pension programs in the federal government. After twenty years an agent could retire and receive 40 percent of the average annual salary he’d been paid during his three highest salary years; at forty years, the percentage rose to 80 percent.
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This stopped the exodus—and gave the director even greater control. The fear of being drafted was now replaced by the fear of losing one’s pension.

One of those who left at war’s end was Assistant Director Harold Nathan, who retired in 1945, after twenty-eight years in the Bureau and forty-two years of government service. Ed Tamm once described Nathan as “like the roll fins on a vessel. He kept us from rolling too far from one side to the other. His was
always the word of caution: ‘Don’t go overboard.’ ” Among those remaining, only a few dared so advise the director.
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One departure shook the Bureau from top to bottom. In 1948 the FBI lost its “rudder”: Edward A. Tamm resigned to accept an appointment as a federal district judge in Washington, D.C. Hoover considered Tamm’s departure as nothing less than a defection and spread the rumor that Tamm had received the appointment in return for whitewashing Truman’s part in a Kansas City vote-fraud case involving the Pendergast machine. Anyone who knew Tamm, or was familiar with the details of the investigation, knew this to be nonsense, but for a number of years Ed Tamm was on the no-contact list. Although the director later forgave him—by the time he was appointed an appellate judge, Crime Records referred to him as a “distinguished FBI alumnus”—Tamm disqualified himself in any cases involving the FBI.

Following Nathan’s retirement, Clyde Tolson, who had for many years been Hoover’s actual “second in command,” was named associate director, a title he retained until Hoover’s death in 1972. Although many filled the number three position—assistant to the director on the investigative side—none, with the possible later exception of Al Belmont, ever really took Ed Tamm’s place. After Tamm’s departure, the spot became known as the “hot seat.” Few occupied it for long. The briefest tenure of all was that of Leland “Lee” Boardman.

One morning, after occupying the position for only a few weeks, Boardman called Tolson and asked, “Say, you folks got any luncheon commitment today?”

Tolson responded, “I’m having lunch with the director.”

To which Boardman replied, “Well, I thought I’d join you. Make it a threesome.”

About a month later, Lee Boardman was transferred to the Washington field office. That Boardman should have made such an error after his many years in the Bureau dumbfounded everyone. “I suppose because he was the number three man he thought he was in the inner family,” William Sullivan remarked, “but nobody ever got in that inner family—there were just two people living in that family.”
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One of the long-range effects of the retirement program was that those who reached the executive level did everything in their power to stay there until they could claim their pensions. Many promising young agents, looking up the FBI pyramid and seeing no space at the top, decided to pursue other careers.

In Hoover’s FBI, only two positions were really permanent. Anyone else could fall, and many did, sometimes spectacularly. This was true whether one
was an assistant director, a lowly brick agent, or even one of the specially favored legal attachés, or legats.

Although five years younger than Hoover, Tolson seemed plagued by ill health. One winter he came down with bronchitis, and Hoover suggested he spend a week in Cuba, soaking up the sun.

Alerted by headquarters that the associate director was coming, and told to roll out the red carpet, the Havana legat decided to make Tolson’s stay particularly memorable. Recently he’d become acquainted with a well-known Scandinavian sex star who, because of immigration problems, was in need of friends in high places. One night, after being wined and dined, Tolson returned to his hotel suite to find his bed already occupied.

Tolson apparently was neither aroused nor amused. Havana soon had a new legat.