Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [125]
In the thirties, Edgar concentrated on soft targets, kidnappers and bandits like Dillinger, but he did seem seriously interested in the mob. He set up the Hoodlum Watch, which required all Bureau offices to collate information on local crime bosses, and he announced a national drive against racketeers, or ‘organized business criminals.’
In 1935, not to be upstaged by Thomas Dewey, then Special Prosecutor for New York, Edgar declared Dutch Schultz ‘Public Enemy Number One.’ Soon he was sounding like a crusader against organized crime. ‘Racketeering,’ he said early the following year, ‘is a problem which, if not solved, will destroy eventually the security of American industrial life and the faith of our people in American institutions.’
In 1937, as Baltimore society danced the night away at the Preakness Ball, Edgar personally led dozens of agents on raids against the city’s brothels. Clyde, who was at his side, earned the nickname ‘Slugger’ for knocking out a man who resisted arrest. The premises targeted were operated by Italian gangsters, and – according to notes kept by the agent who organized the operation – Edgar ‘was interested in the big racketeers and the tide of dirty money that flowed from the houses to the racketeers and through them filtered out to local protectors, police, small-time politicians and even ultimately into the coffers of state political machines.’
There could hardly be a more succinct description of the way organized crime works. And Edgar pressed on. In August, after swoops in three states, Edgar made a point of telling newsmen that one of those arrested – for running prostitution rackets – worked for Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano.
Edgar was getting to the heart of things. Luciano, specialists agree, was the father of organized crime in America, founder with Meyer Lansky of the national syndicate, a key man behind the Atlantic City mob convention of 1929 and the victor in the gang wars that followed. He had been in prison since 1936, following his prosecution by Dewey for vice offenses, but still wielded vast power. On the outside Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis continued to run the empire of crime: in targeting the Luciano network, Edgar was threatening the heartland of the Mafia.
Then, abruptly, Edgar’s attitude changed. From the late thirties on, the FBI’s war with organized crime became a nominal affair, a thing of occasional sound but no fury at all. The American criminal, Edgar was insisting by 1938, was ‘not of a foreign country, but of American stock with a highly patriotic American name.’ Comforting words for crime bosses with names like Costello and Luciano, Genovese and Adonis, Lansky and Siegel.
World War II was boomtime for organized crime, a boom boosted by new rackets and black marketeering. The New York mob leadership won official approval by helping to protect the waterfront against Nazi saboteurs, thus easing the way for Luciano’s release and deportation. After the war, Costello, Lansky and the crime empire flourished out of control, while Edgar did nothing.
Sometimes it was as if he was deliberately thwarting progress against the mob – as in the case of James Ragen, owner of a racingwire service covering half the country. Whoever controlled that wire had enormous power over gambling operations, and in 1946 the Mafia tried to muscle in. Ragen resisted and began telling the FBI all he knew about the rackets. Yet Edgar refused to provide protection – and the mob killed Ragen.
‘The Ragen affair,’ said William Roemer, later the FBI’s star expert on the Chicago mob, ‘is a very, very significant moment for any study of J. Edgar Hoover and organized crime. When Ragen started talking, the FBI opened a real operation against organized crime in the city for the first time ever. But as soon as Ragen was killed, Hoover dropped the investigation. For eleven years afterwards, that was