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According to the then Attorney General, Ragen’s revelations led to ‘very high places,’ including Henry Crown, the Chicago financier, and the Annenberg family, which had originally owned the racingwire service. Edgar, however, claimed ‘the people Ragen pointed to had now reformed.’

Pete Pitchess, the longtime Sheriff of Los Angeles County, was an FBI agent in the forties. ‘Organized crime,’ he recalled, ‘was just not a concern of the Bureau. We knew it existed, but there were hardly any prosecutions, and we knew this was FBI policy. I myself had to deal with Bugsy Siegel [a key associate of Meyer Lansky who opened up the West Coast to syndicate operations]. When Siegel took it upon himself that he would like to talk to me, I was afraid even to tell the Bureau.

‘I didn’t tell the Agent in Charge I was going to see him. We’d stand at a street corner on Sunset Boulevard, in front of the old La Rue restaurant. Siegel gave me information on his enemies, but we just put it in some intelligence file – we didn’t dare call it “Mafia.” That, we’d been told, didn’t exist. So we simply dumped it in a file, or quietly passed it on to the police.’2

Neil Welch, a distinguished former SAC who eventually made organized crime his specialty, became an agent in the early fifties. ‘When I was in Boston,’ he recalled, ‘I used to investigate theft of interstate shipments – whole truckloads of freight – that was totally dominated by Mafia union racketeering and the Teamsters Union. It was frustrating; we were trying to solve the theft of a single shipment of shoes, or chickens, when it was obvious to us all that the answer wasn’t in that approach. The whole thing was controlled by organized crime, yet it was never made the subject of investigation. It was just inexcusable blindness. I don’t know how you can have the responsibility that Hoover did, and the FBI did, and just ignore it, for all practical purposes.’

In 1951, millions of Americans watched on television as a procession of gangsters appeared before the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, remembered today as the Kefauver Committee. After hearing 800 witnesses, it concluded that there was indeed ‘a nationwide crime syndicate known as the Mafia,’ and that there were ‘indications of a centralized direction and control’ by Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky and others.

Edgar had appeared before the committee to congratulate its members on having revealed ‘the unholy alliance between the criminal element and officialdom,’ and to mouth courtesies to the senators. Behind the scenes, it was a different story.

Senator Kefauver revealed to Jack Anderson, then a young reporter, that Edgar had tried to prevent the committee from being established in the first place. ‘He told me the FBI tried to block it,’ Anderson recalled. ‘They worked with the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Lucas. Hoover knew that if the public got alarmed about organized crime, the job would go to the FBI. And he didn’t want the job.’

Kefauver’s Assistant Counsel, Joseph Nellis, was still angry in 1990, when he recalled the way Edgar treated the committee. ‘We had a long series of meetings with him off the record, at which he told us, “We don’t know anything about the Mafia or the families in New York. We haven’t followed this.” He told us what we were learning about the Mafia wasn’t true, but we didn’t believe him. It was dreadful. We tried to enlist the FBI’s help in every major city, but got none. Hoover was polite to the senators – he had to be, because they controlled his purse strings. But he gave us nothing.’

Heavily censored documents in Kefauver’s FBI file strongly suggest Edgar gathered smear material on the Senator. He forbade agents to join other law enforcement officials at a meeting with Kefauver and refused requests for FBI protection of committee witnesses – even after two had been murdered.

Edgar told the committee organized crime should be dealt with not by the FBI but by local police forces. Given the chance to call for new laws giving the FBI wider jurisdiction,