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Suspicion focused on the FBI Recreation Fund, ostensibly created to promote athletic activities for ordinary agents, and its subsidiary, the Library Fund. No one could explain why the fund bore this name; it had little to do with books. Edgar’s aides had destroyed its records soon after his death. Fund money had paid for Edgar’s personal public relations, and Exhibits chief John Dunphy admitted having pilfered petty cash to pay for ‘nonofficial projects or “gifts” to the Director.’

Few of the miscreants were punished. Former Assistant Directors John Mohr and Nicholas Callahan, both deemed to have violated the law, escaped prosecution thanks to the statute of limitations. Callahan, still in office when the inquiry began, was forced to resign. John Dunphy pleaded guilty to converting FBI property to his own use, and he too resigned.

Had they been alive, Edgar and Clyde would have faced prosecution and dismissal. Statements by prosecutor Dowd and Michael Shaheen, of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, indicated the pair were guilty of several federal offenses, including private use of government property and accepting gifts from lesser-paid employees. The scale of Edgar’s abuse would have made him liable to up to ten years in prison and automatic dismissal.

Dowd, the former head of the Department Strike Force formed to fight organized crime, remembered above all the atmosphere of fear he encountered at the FBI. ‘There I was,’ he said, ‘interviewing employees who were just as scared as the loan sharks, bookies and all the other people I’d had to deal with in pursuing Mafia chieftains. There were people in my office absolutely trembling, relating twenty or thirty years of this sordid conduct. They were still afraid, even though Hoover himself was dead. I’ve investigated corruption for many years, but I’ve seen no greater betrayal of the public trust.’

It seems, however, that Edgar was guilty of an even greater dereliction of duty. For his own secret reasons, he refused to confront the Mafia.

22

‘The art of the police consists in not seeing what there is no use seeing.’

Napoleon Bonaparte

One of the last Mafia bosses of the old tradition, Carmine ‘The Doctor’ Lombardozzi, was asked in 1990 about the mob’s attitude toward J. Edgar Hoover. Lombardozzi, known as ‘the Italian Meyer Lansky,’ continued to direct financial operations for the Gambino family until his death. ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ he replied, ‘was in our pocket. He was no one we needed to fear.’1

The growth of the American Mafia coincided precisely with Edgar’s career. Its seeds had been sown when Edgar was a little boy, when Italian and Sicilian immigrants poured into the United States bearing the bacillus of Cosa Nostra, ‘Our thing.’ They formed ghetto gangs that battled the authorities and one another, and began to practice their specialty, extortion enforced by violence.

While Edgar was growing up, the gangs remained disparate and unstable. But by the time he became FBI Director, in the spring of 1924, Prohibition had opened 200,000 speakeasies. The bootlegger was in business by popular demand, and few cared that bootlegger was synonymous with crook. This was when the mob empire was founded, on a basis of booze, prostitution, loan-sharking and labor racketeering.

The names that made the fortunes – Luciano, Costello, Capone, Siegel, Torrio, Dutch Schultz, Longy Zwillman – were in league with the captains of Prohibition commerce, liquor dealers like Lewis Rosenstiel, forging alliances that were to make them multimillionaires when liquor became legal again. In time, at least two of these characters would forge relationships with Edgar. Around 1930, following their first high-level conferences, the nation’s top criminals divided the United States into agreed spheres of influence operating under a formal alliance.

Edgar’s life and rise to power ran parallel to that of the mob, in significant phases. Professionally, his early performance was fairly good. The Bureau responded well in the early twenties, when