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Since Costello’s principal business was gambling, and since gambling was not a federal offense, it could be said that Edgar’s remark merely reflected the legal situation of the day. Other clues, however, suggest that his laissez-faire attitude went deeper. In the early fifties, when there were efforts to have Costello deported to Italy, there was no pressure from the FBI. According to Walter Winchell’s friend Curly Harris, who knew both Edgar and the mobster, Edgar once went out of his way to protect Costello from his own agents.

‘The doorman at Frank’s apartment building,’ Harris remembered, ‘told him that there were a couple of FBI guys hanging around. So Frank got hold of Hoover on the phone and told him, “What’s the idea of these fellows being there? If you want to see me you can get to me with one phone call.” And Hoover looked into it, and he found out who the fellows were and why they were doing that. He said they weren’t under any orders to do it, they’d taken it on themselves. He was very sore about it. And he had the agents transferred to Alaska or someplace the next day … He and Costello had mutual friends.’3

To Costello, and to his associate Meyer Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky’s expertise in such corruption that made him the nearest there ever was to a true national godfather of organized crime.

Another Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. ‘Ways could be found,’ he said in his memoirs, ‘so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn’t interfere with him.’ The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.

The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar’s compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year’s Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell’s guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde.4 At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello’s associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello’s, and Costello was said to be the club’s real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.

Seymour Pollack, a close friend of Meyer Lansky, told this author that Edgar’s homosexuality was ‘common knowledge’ and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. ‘I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on!… They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it.’

Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have ‘turned’ and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. ‘I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front,’ Fratianno recalled, ‘and said, “Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it’s J. Edgar Hoover.” And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, “Ah, that J. Edgar’s a punk, he’s a fuckin’ degenerate queer.”’

Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men’s room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. ‘Frank,’ he told the mobster, ‘that’s not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me.’ It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.

Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis