Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [130]
Racing, and the gambling that went with it, became an addiction for Edgar. An in-house joke had it that the FBI agent whose hair grayed fastest was the man who had to get the Director to the track through rush-hour traffic. Headquarters staff were dispatched to the Library of Congress to dig out racing information. Edgar issued standing orders that he was not to be bothered on Saturdays and, according to DeLoach, once defied an order by President Johnson to return for a meeting with Cabinet members. Racing got Edgar overexcited. After a run of luck one afternoon, former Speaker Tip O’Neill recalled, he took another man’s car by mistake and drove it all the way back to Washington.
Edgar encouraged his oil millionaire friends in 1954 when, not content with owning a hotel near Del Mar, they bought the track itself. The group they bought it from was headed by Al Hart, a liquor distributor with links to the Chicago mob – another dubious character with whom Edgar had socialized.
‘At first,’ said Del Charro manager Witwer, ‘Murchison and Richardson were not only turned down by Hart and his directors, they were practically thrown out of the office. And Murchison said, “If those fellas won’t deal with me, we’ll sick old J. Edgar on them.” And Hoover sent two FBI agents out to call on Hart. I heard this from the agents themselves afterwards. And then Hart sold.’
All the profits from the track, Murchison claimed, were to go to Boys Inc., a fund established by the Texans ‘for the benefit of underprivileged boys.’ To present a respectable front, he picked a revered war hero, General Holland Smith, to serve as president. ‘I think $200 a month for General Smith,’ he wrote, ‘is good propaganda …’
Murchison guessed wrong. The general resigned after a few months, noting that in spite of clearing $640,000 at one meeting, ‘not one cent has been turned over to Boys Inc. I do not know where the money went. It is my considered opinion that no money will be transferred to Boys Inc. for at least five years, if then. I hope I have given you a fair idea of what I think of Mr Murchison and Mr Richardson …’
Skeptics, including the California tax authorities, said the Del Mar scheme was just another moneymaker for the millionaires. Because the profits were supposed to go to charity, they could not be taxed – and the state wanted the tax. Murchison counterattacked with every asset at his disposal, including the obliging Edgar.
‘I know Clint Murchison,’ Edgar told the racing press, ‘and I think he would be the last person in the country to use such a plan as a clever tax or business subterfuge … This work helps directly in making the nation sturdy, for Communist penetration is currently directed mainly at labor and youth organizations.’
Some Del Mar profit did go to charity over the years, but eminent critics did not share Edgar’s confidence. ‘This dodge,’ said former President Herbert Hoover, Chairman of Boys’ Clubs of America and normally one of Edgar’s allies, ‘is as old as the hills. They do not give all profits to charity.’ George Allen, racing enthusiast and intimate of Murchison and Edgar, admitted years later, ‘It was a racket, if you want to know … a tax racket.’
Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime. Police intelligence in California learned that he regularly used bookmakers linked to the mob.
In Florida, Edgar asked Phil ‘The Stick’ Kovolick, a heavy for Meyer Lansky, for the winning numbers. At one stage, crime reporter Hank Messick learned, ‘gangsters began taking advantage of Hoover’s ignorance by getting themselves invited to his box at the track and posing with him for pictures. It became something of