Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [128]
Winchell was on first-name terms with Lansky himself, and often dined with him in New York and Florida. As the mobster’s widow has revealed, the columnist even asked Lansky’s permission before writing sensitive stories about the mob. He knew Frank Costello – Winchell called him ‘Francisco’ – even better. They both had apartments at 115 Central Park West and met there frequently. In the fifties, when Costello was targeted by the Kefauver Committee, Winchell rushed out an article saying what a good, misunderstood fellow he was.
The Stork Club, where Edgar and Clyde joined Winchell as regulars, was infested by the mob. The nominal proprietor, Sherman Billingsley, was a former bootlegger with several convictions. Yet Edgar gave him a character reference for his gun permit and spoke of him as ‘a very good friend.’ Costello, who may have been the club’s real owner, leaned on the unions for Billingsley when necessary.
It was the same in Florida, where Edgar vacationed regularly. His favorite Miami haunt, from the late thirties, was Joe’s Stone Crabs restaurant – also frequented by Capone, Costello and Lansky. Lansky, who stamped on industrial trouble at Joe’s as Costello did at the Stork, liked to come in for a pink gin. The restaurant’s owner, Jesse Weiss, agreed in 1988 that he was on close personal terms with gangsters while simultaneously ‘very, very, very close friends’ with Edgar.
‘Jesse had friends the Bureau was looking for,’ Mrs Weiss recalled. ‘Edgar would be sitting there, and there might be some of these fellows sitting at the other side of the dining room.’ Sometimes Weiss puzzled over the way Edgar ignored a man’s known crimes. ‘I’d ask him, “You had so-and-so on him for twenty years, for Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you do anything?”’
Edgar was protective, at the highest level, of millionaire developer and casino owner Del Webb, best known to the public as the owner of the New York Yankees baseball team. ‘The Las Vegas casinos,’ Edgar would one day assure President Johnson, ‘represent the worst element of the Cosa Nostra – except, of course, for Del Webb’s.’
‘Hoover gave Webb a pass. He was his buddy,’ said Justice Department attorney William Hundley, who was present at the White House that day. ‘No bugs went in on Webb’s places.’ FBI sources and mob security personnel confirm that establishments owned by Webb went uninvestigated.
Webb was deeply involved with organized crime for thirty years, an involvement he concealed with a series of fronts and middlemen. Through proxies, he was in business with Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and a string of other criminals. Webb and Edgar, observed the former FBI Agent in Charge in Las Vegas, were ‘very close friends.’ When Edgar visited the city, he reportedly stayed at Webb’s hotels, free of charge. Like Edgar, Webb was a frequent guest at the Del Charro, Clint Murchison’s hotel in California.
The Del Charro was small, and in its comparative privacy Edgar rubbed shoulders with a bevy of white-collar crooks. Those welcomed at the hotel in the fifties included Ed Levinson, John Drew and Ray Ryan, all notorious names to rackets investigators. Drew once departed leaving a valuable antique, a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey, as a present for Edgar.
Far from avoiding such men, Edgar socialized with them. The hotel manager, Allan Witwer, saw him huddled with Art Samish, California’s political fixer supreme and mob front man, soon after Samish emerged from a long stint in jail. The pair lounged around talking, said Witwer, ‘without apparent embarrassment to either of them.’
By 1959, the year he saw Edgar with Samish, such encounters no longer astonished Witwer. It had been different five years earlier, when Dub McClanahan, oil-man and gambler, came to stay – and sat by the pool talking with Edgar each morning. The manager thought of McClanahan as just another friend of Clint Murchison’s –