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By Root 1805 0

and he was against interning Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II.48 But whenever it was a question of “communism,” “leftism,” or “subversion,” Hoover was like a man obsessed. He came to see a communist under every bush. His right-wing paranoia poisoned much of the work of the FBI: its vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr., is a good example.49 In the fifties and sixties, the FBI, more and more, turned into a kind of “political police,” an “independent security state within the state.”50 The FBI was, in many ways, a law unto itself. It was widely believed, too, that Hoover’s secret dossiers, filled with “dirt” on politicians and other leaders, gave him vast power and made him impregnable in office.

The FBI did come to stand for the latest in forensic science, blood tests, fingerprinting—in short, professionalism. It preached this gospel of crime detection to local law-enforcement officials.51 It also got involved in some mundane but useful tasks. One of these was the gathering of crime statistics. The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, run by the bureau, goes back to the 1920s. A committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police prepared a plan for gathering uniform crime statistics in 1929. Seven crimes (the “index” crimes) were listed: murder and manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, larceny, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. Arson was added in 1979. The FBI set out standardized definitions for these crimes; and from 1930 on, the UCR has produced the most widely used index of American criminality. 52

Whether these figures are good enough, however, has come to be questioned. Not all crimes are reported to the police, after all. “Victimization” studies turn up figures quite different (and higher) than those of the UCR. These studies start from the other end—that is, by asking people if they have been victims of crime. Nonetheless, the federal role in putting together some useful numbers is not to be sneezed at.

The Syndicate

One factor that fed the movement toward federal involvement was fear of organized crime, “the syndicate,” or the “Mafia.” The Mafia was supposed to be a giant criminal conspiracy made up of Italian gangsters (Sicilians, to be specific). The Mafia was blamed for the murder of the police chief of New Orleans, in 1890.53 Prohibition was an era of crime syndicates, an age of celebrity gangsters, men like Al Capone—many of them Italian. When Prohibition died, there were plenty of other lines of illegal work to replace it—gambling, vice, extortion. People found it easy to believe that some sinister web united crime factions in the various cities.

The Mafia flared up again as an issue in the 1950s. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee headed a special committee of Congress to investigate racketeering and organized crime.54 The Kefauver Committee claimed it uncovered a lot of dirty linen, and it made superb use of publicity in the process. The committee’s message was that the Mafia had its tentacles in every major city; it was growing rich and powerful on the spoils of vice and crime. The eye of the television cameras covered the work of Kefauver’s committee; the hearings were one of the earlier demonstrations of the sinister power of this medium, whose tentacles were in the process of spreading everywhere, too. One especially dramatic moment came during the testimony of the gangster Frank Costello: the camera avoided Costello’s face, focusing instead on his hands “as he crumpled a handkerchief, interlocked and picked at his fingers, grasped for a glass of water, stroked his eyeglasses” and “rolled a little ball of paper between his thumb and index finger.” The TV images suggested a faceless, hidden man, a man of “immense conspiratorial power.”55 Viewed in the cold light of hindsight, Kefauver seems to have produced little in the way of hard evidence. But he produced a lot in terms of images and headlines, which to Kefauver and others on his committee were far more important.

The FBI, somewhat reluctantly, formed a special unit to fight “racketeers” and interstate