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Edgar was not so ignorant. He once boasted about shady gambling to Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon administration. ‘He told me,’ Mardian recalled, ‘that he was once in an illegal race parlor down in Florida where you could have dinner and place bets and so on. And the Miami police raided the place. He laughed and said, “Well, what a shock they got when they found me there! They cleared out faster than you can imagine.”’6

FBI propagandists, who apparently understood the risks better than their boss, regularly let it be known that Edgar placed only small bets. ‘Temperance and moderation in everything,’ he was quoted as saying, and he was duly photographed standing at the $2 window. The truth was otherwise.

‘We all used to laugh about that,’ said Del Charro manager Allan Witwer. ‘At Del Mar, when he’d been authoritatively tipped, Hoover would place two-hundred-dollar bets’ ($1,000 at today’s rates). To avoid being observed making large bets, insiders recalled, he would send companions – often FBI agents – to place the bets for him.

Edgar made light of suggestions that racing was penetrated by the mob. ‘The FBI,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘has much more important functions than arresting gamblers all over the place.’ And, all the while, he carried on an amicable relationship with one of the most notorious gambling bosses in the country, the mob boss known as ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld.’

23

‘Intelligent gangsters from Al Capone to Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky have always been fierce, voluble defenders of the capitalist faith, and to that extent they were and are J. Edgar Hoover’s ideological kinsmen.’

Albert Fried, historian

Edgar had a relationship with mob chieftain Frank Costello that lasted for years, and it has never been satisfactorily explained. It started, apparently, with a seemingly innocuous meeting on a New York street.

Edgar recalled the occasion himself, in a private conversation with the veteran journalist Norma Abrams – a confidence she kept until shortly before her death in 1989.

‘Hoover was an inveterate window-shopper,’ said Abrams. ‘Early one morning in the thirties, he told me, he was out walking on Fifth Avenue and somebody came up behind him and said, “Good morning, Mr Hoover.” He turned to see who it was, and it was Frank Costello. Costello said, “I don’t want to embarrass you,” and Hoover said, “You won’t embarrass me. We’re not looking for you or anything.” They talked all the way to Fifty-seventh Street together, but God protected them, and there was no photographer around, or anyone …’

The contact was renewed, as Edgar explained to Eduardo Disano, a Florida restaurateur who also knew Costello. ‘Hoover told me he and Costello both used apartments at the Waldorf,’ Disano recalled. ‘He said Costello asked him to come up and meet in his apartment. Hoover said he told him by all means he would meet him, but not in his room, downstairs … I don’t know what they talked about. Hoover was a very quiet man about business.’

If Costello was trying to cultivate Edgar, it worked. Once they even took the risk of sitting together in the Stork Club. Costello was soon referring to Edgar as ‘John’ – a habit he presumably picked up from Winchell. The mobster was to recall with a chuckle the day Edgar in turn took the lead and invited him for coffee. ‘I got to be careful about my associates,’ Costello told Edgar. ‘They’ll accuse me of consorting with questionable characters …’

In 1939, when Edgar was credited with the capture of racketeer Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, it was Costello who pulled strings to make it happen. This was the time the mob would remember as the Big Heat, when Thomas Dewey, then District Attorney, brought unprecedented pressure on organized crime. The heat was on, especially, for the capture of Lepke, the man they called the head of Murder, Inc.

Shortly before midnight on August 24, Edgar called in newsmen to hear a sensational announcement. He, personally, had just accepted Lepke’s surrender on a New York street. It made a fine tale – Edgar,