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Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable – a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. ‘In 1966,’ noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky’s biographers, ‘a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky.’

Also in the sixties a wiretap picked up a conversation between two mobsters in which, curiously, Lansky was referred to as ‘a stool pigeon for the FBI.’ The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, taping a conversation between a criminal in Canada and Lansky in the United States, were amazed to hear the mob chieftain reading from an FBI report that had been written the previous day.7

There was no serious federal effort to indict Lansky until 1970, just two years before Edgar died. Then, it was the IRS rather than the FBI that spearheaded the investigation. Even the tax evasion charges collapsed, and Lansky lived on at liberty until his own death in 1983.

New information indicates that Lansky was not the only person in possession of compromising photographs of Edgar. John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. ‘After a conversation about Hoover,’ he said, ‘our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson …’

Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton, a fellow OSS veteran and – in the fifties – top CIA officer. A source who has been linked to the CIA, electronics expert Gordon Novel, he said Angleton also showed him compromising pictures of Edgar.

‘What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob,’ said Novel. ‘There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover’s head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me …’

Novel said Angleton showed him the pictures in 1967, when Angleton was CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief and when Novel was involved in the furor swirling around the probe into the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. ‘I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I’d been told I would incur Hoover’s wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I’d seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, “Get the hell out of here!” And I did …’

With Angleton dead, there is no way to follow up this bizarre allegation. While Novel has been a highly controversial figure, his account of seeing compromising pictures must be considered in light of other such references – not least that of former OSS officer John Weitz. For Novel added one other significant detail, that ‘Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946, at the time they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got.’

During his feud with OSS chief William