Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [127]
In 1953, more than a year after Kefauver’s report had been issued, FBI Assistant Director Alan Belmont wrote a memo to Assistant to the Director D. M. Ladd. ‘Maffia [sic],’ he wrote, ‘is an alleged organization … The organization’s existence in the U.S. is doubtful.’ This was the truth according to Edgar, a truth maintained at the top of the FBI, in defiance of all the facts. The street agents who actually encountered organized crime had to behave as if black was white.
‘During the early 1950s,’ recalled veteran agent Anthony Villano, ‘two agents caught a made guy [formally enrolled mafioso] in midcrime … He relaxed and started to tell them war stories – Mafia war stories. They were astonished at his recitation of the table of organization in criminal circles. They wrote it all down and filed reports in New York. None of the brass believed a word of it; after all, the Director had announced that organized crime didn’t exist. It was filed and forgotten.’
‘At headquarters,’ recalled former agent William Turner, ‘there wasn’t even a section working on organized crime. In the field, what we did get on top mobsters was just dropped into the General Investigative Intelligence file – to be forgotten.’
During the writing of this book, three former Attorneys General, a District Attorney, the former police chief of a major city, a congressional consultant on organized crime, several former Justice Department officials, a professor of law and nineteen former FBI employees, including several Assistant Directors, were asked why Edgar failed to tackle organized crime. None had a satisfactory explanation. Some thought that, because cases would be difficult to make, Edgar was afraid his annual statistics would suffer – that the FBI would appear to be slipping. Some thought he feared contact with gamblers and hoodlums would corrupt his agents. Others mentioned Edgar’s supposed animosity toward Harry Anslinger, the head of the Narcotics Bureau. Because Anslinger saw the hand of the mob everywhere in the narcotics rackets – so went this theory – Edgar automatically rejected the notion.3
Some pointed to the excuse Edgar himself offered in the sixties, after change had been forced on him. ‘The truth of the matter,’ he claimed, ‘is that the FBI had very little jurisdiction in the field of organized crime prior to September 1961.’ This was not true. The FBI had had some local jurisdiction in crimes of violence since 1934, and many federal statutes covered mob activity. In any case, when Edgar did want a change in the law, Congress generally obliged. On the question of organized crime, he never asked.
Edgar’s claim about having no jurisdiction, said the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘was a transparent fraud.’ ‘If they want to do it,’ said Director of Prisons James Bennett, ‘it’s within the jurisdiction of the FBI. If they don’t want to do it, they tell you it’s outside the jurisdiction of the FBI.’
Former FBI official Neil Welch could conclude only that Edgar’s attitude was a mystery. ‘None of the usual excuses,’ he said, ‘are convincing. Hoover and his top people knew of the existence of the Mafia. They knew from the agents’ reports that routinely referred to it, certainly all through the fifties … Hoover’s attitude was so contrary to reality as to be a reason for great speculation. It’s a mystery …’
The clues that explain Edgar’s behavior lead back to the midthirties. It was then, as the American Mafia was establishing itself, that he had begun enjoying national celebrity. Egged on by the columnist Walter Winchell, he started making regular weekend trips to New York, there to enter a social world that put him perilously close to organized crime.
The danger started with Winchell himself. Any decent crime reporter makes it his business to know criminals on a personal basis, but Winchell did not know where to draw the line. The journalist was on close terms with Owney ‘The Killer’