Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [105]
In 1961, while sorting out his late father’s affairs, the Massachusetts businessman Peter Sprague came across correspondence showing that Edgar and Clyde were major investors in Santiago Oil and Gas, a Texas oil drilling company. The former president of Santiago, Leland Redline, confirms it, and documents show Edgar continued to invest in Texas oil. ‘I know we made them a profit,’ said Redline, ‘but the amounts varied from year to year. Their profits were no business of mine.’
As Sprague recalls it, documents showed Edgar and Clyde put huge sums into Santiago Oil – more than a million dollars in today’s figures. ‘The question struck me,’ he said, ‘where did they get all that money? Certainly not from saving their FBI salaries …’ Sprague passed the records to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
‘Basically,’ Morgenthau said in 1988, ‘these were wires sent to Hoover telling him of his drilling ventures. What caught my eye was these were federal leases – and Hoover was an official of the federal government. Had he helped his principal to get those leases? Was the investment income in effect a finder’s fee? This could have been what they call in the trade a “carried” interest, a reward for bringing the lease or oil prospect to the principal’s attention. That would have been improper for someone in a federal agency, like Hoover.’
Some information on the links between Edgar’s oil ventures and Clint Murchison, evidence that could have destroyed him, reached federal officials over the years. Telltale business records were sent to the desk of William Hundley, head of the Organized Crime Section at the Justice Department during the Kennedy administration. ‘There wasn’t enough to make a criminal case,’ Hundley recalled. ‘But it was wrong. He shouldn’t have done it.’
John Dowd, who headed a Justice Department probe into FBI corruption after Edgar’s death, was appalled by what he learned of the oil investments. ‘Hoover did have oil ventures with Clint Murchison,’ Dowd confirmed in 1988. ‘If the drilling company hit a dry hole he’d get his money back. Everything was a sure thing. It had to be a sure thing. If not, he’d get his money back, be it stocks, bonds or oil ventures. It was extraordinary.’
According to William Sullivan, Edgar ‘had a deal with Murchison where he invested in oil wells and if they hit oil, he got his share of the profits, but if they didn’t hit oil, he didn’t share in the costs … One time, he got into serious trouble on his income tax manipulations, and we had to send an accountant from New York to Houston, Texas, where apparently the operations existed. He told me afterwards, “Good God Almighty. If the truth were known, Hoover would be in serious trouble …’’’ Apparently he did straighten it out. But he did say that Hoover had done something that was a serious violation of the law.’
The Bureau’s Chief Clerk, Albert Gunsser, looked after tax matters for Edgar and Clyde in later years – and a grateful Clyde was to leave Gunsser $27,000 in his will.
In the late summer of 1953, as Edgar was enjoying Murchison’s hospitality at the Del Charro for the first time, Joe McCarthy turned up unexpectedly at the hotel. Edgar told reporters it was just a coincidence, but the evidence suggests it was a crisis meeting between protégé and patron.
The start of the Eisenhower presidency, the previous year, had given the Senator the chairmanship of the Sub-committee on Investigations, his opportunity to hold the repellent hearings for which he would become infamous. And his Chief Counsel during that season of political terror was one of Edgar’s most favored acolytes, Roy Cohn.
The gifted son of a New York Supreme Court judge, Cohn had a good deal in common with Edgar. He was already identified with the far Right when he arrived in Washington, at the age of twenty-five,