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was completely painted and major maintenance performed inside and out every year while he vacationed in California. The Exhibits Section designed, constructed and built a portico on the front of his house, and a lighted fish pond complete with pump. Shelves, telephone stands, and other furniture was built and furnished. A handcrafted oriental fruit bowl was made … Home appliances, air conditioners, stereo equipment, tape recorders, television sets and electric wiring were serviced and repaired by Radio Engineering Section employees … Employees were on call night and day for complete repair and maintenance of the entire home and grounds.

FBI men serviced Edgar’s lawn mower and snowblower, maintained his yard, replaced sod twice a year, installed artificial turf, planted shrubbery, constructed a deck at the rear of the house, erected a redwood fence and laid a flagstone court and sidewalks. When Edgar complained of the smell of bacon at breakfast, the FBI installed a powerful fan. When he fussed that his television took too long to warm up, FBI technicians labored to solve the problem. If even a light bulb failed, the FBI replaced it.

Tolson, who fancied himself an inventor, was credited with dreaming up two items of gadgetry: a bottle-cap opener and a system to open and close windows automatically. The bottle opener is remembered as a ‘Rube Goldberg flop.’ When it failed to work, an official recalled, ‘Tolson or Hoover came up with the idea to goldplate the things and give them away to “friends of the Bureau.”– Edgar’s millionaire friends, such as Clint Murchison, were among the recipients.

The window system was later installed, with accompanying propaganda fanfare, in President Johnson’s bedroom at the White House. The Justice Department inquiry, however, established that the gadgets were developed not by Tolson but by the FBI laboratory, at public expense.

Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler, who supervised the probe, concluded that Edgar ‘lived like an Oriental potentate.’ Edgar declared he would eat ice cream only out of a round package – so it was flown in and kept in a freezer in the basement of the Justice Department. He wanted sides of beef from Colorado – they were flown in, too, all for free.

‘There were the craziest things,’ recalled John Dowd, the prosecuting attorney who led the investigation. ‘Hoover had a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI laboratory. When he decided it was either a quarter of an inch too high or too low, it had to be redone. Then there was the raccoon turd. One day Hoover opened the door of his patio, and there was a turd. He had the laboratory come and remove it, to get it analyzed. It was priority number one that morning. No matter what official business they had in the goddamn lab, it was “You identify that turd and report.” Tolson was going apeshit, threatening to fire people and asking again and again, “What is it? What is it?” Some guy in the lab said, “Hey, it’s gotta be a wild animal. I’ve got a friend at the Smithsonian.”

‘So they took the turd to the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian identified the turd. There were berry shells in it that raccoons eat. So they told Hoover it was raccoon shit. Hoover ordered a trap built to destroy that raccoon. They built a trap and installed it on the patio. And the following morning the neighbor’s cat was spread all over the wall of the house.

‘When you saw the whole picture,’ said Dowd, ‘it wasn’t funny at all. This was the Director of the FBI helping himself, using his power to obtain whatever he wanted. He didn’t have any out-of-pocket expenses like the rest of us.’

The investigators also stumbled on the ‘safe’ oil investments arranged by Edgar’s millionaire friends, the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free accommodation at La Jolla and the vacation transport paid for with Bureau funds. The labor for work done by FBI employees at Edgar’s home, thousands of man-hours of it, had been provided free. It was clear, too, that much of the cost had been paid out of shadowy