Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [134]
Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar’s homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving ‘Ash’ Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarca family from New England, and an original ownerbuilder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to one used by Edgar and Clyde. ‘I’d sit with him on the beach every day,’ Resnick remembered. ‘We were friendly.’
In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who ‘put everything together’ – and as the man who ‘nailed J. Edgar Hoover.’ ‘When I asked what they meant,’ Hamill recalled, ‘they told me Lansky had some pictures – pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover – to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI.’6
Seymour Pollack, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky’s daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas. ‘Meyer,’ said Pollack, ‘was closemouthed. I don’t think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when we were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, “I fixed that son of a bitch, didn’t I?”’ Lansky’s fix, according to Pollack, also involved bribery – not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.
Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti’s restaurant in Miami Beach recall that the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. ‘But they just looked at one another,’ recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti’s. ‘They never talked, not here.’
If Edgar’s eyes met Lansky’s, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. ‘The homosexual thing,’ said Pollack, ‘was Hoover’s Achilles’ heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer’s people … Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done.’ (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky’s orders, in 1947.)
According to Pollack, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. ‘Meyer brought Clark down to Havana,’ Pollack said. ‘I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don’t know what … There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer’s people, not for a long time.’