Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [136]
It may be significant, too, that compromising pictures are reported as having been in the hands of both the OSS and Meyer Lansky. The OSS and Naval Intelligence had extensive contacts with the Mafia during World War II, enlisting the help of criminals in projects including the hiring of burglars and assassins, experimentation with drugs, the protection of American ports from Nazi agents and the invasion of Sicily.8 Lansky helped personally with the latter two operations, meeting with Murray Gurfein, a New York Assistant District Attorney who later became one of Donovan’s most trusted OSS officers.9
At least once, Lansky worked alongside U.S. intelligence officers on exactly the sort of operation likely to turn up smear material on prominent public men. In 1942, he arranged for the surveillance of a homosexual brothel in Brooklyn suspected of being the target of German agents. ‘Clients came from all over New York and Washington,’ Lansky recalled, ‘and there were some important government people among them … If you got hold of the names of the patrons you could blackmail them to death … take some pictures through a hole in the wall or a trick mirror and then squeeze the victim for money or information.’10
There is no knowing, today, whether the OSS obtained sex photographs of Edgar from Lansky, or vice versa, or whether the mobster obtained them on his own initiative. A scenario in which Lansky obtained pictures thanks to the OSS connection would suggest an irony: that Edgar had tried and failed to find smear material on General Donovan, that Donovan in turn found smear material on him and that the material found its way to a top mobster, to be used against Edgar for the rest of his life.
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‘For like Caesar’s wife, the FBI Director must not only be above suspicion but be seen to be so.’
Smith Hempstone, journalist, 1971
In November 1957, the zeal of a rural policeman established what competent law enforcers had long accepted, that there was indeed a Mafia, a vast national organization directed by known godfathers of crime.
On a routine inquiry about a bad check, Police Sergeant Edgar Croswell of Apalachin, New York, stumbled on an extraordinary gathering. Sixty-three top mobsters, from fifteen states, were assembled at the palatial home of a Sicilian killer, Joe Barbara, for what could only be described as a Mafia convention.
For all Edgar’s denials, events of recent months had made anyone who read the newspapers aware of organized crime. Gang warfare in New York had been making headlines for months: Frank Costello shot and wounded in the lobby of his Central Park apartment building; Frank Scalise, a henchman of Albert Anastasia, killed in the Bronx, his brother Joseph missing, reported shot, the body apparently dismembered and dumped; then one of the great Mafia sensations of the century, Anastasia, Costello’s key protector, the man reputed to have been chief executioner of Murder Inc., riddled with bullets in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel.
The Eisenhower government realized something had to be done. According to former Attorney General William Rogers, however, Edgar had to be dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ into action. He obstructed, especially, the task force known as the Special Group on Organized Crime, set up by Rogers in response to Apalachin.
The Group’s Chicago office was headed by Richard Ogilvie, a future Republican Governor of Illinois, a man revered by those in the FBI who did try to work against organized crime. Edgar, Ogilvie recalled, ‘ordered that the FBI files, containing the very information we needed on organized crime, were to be closed to us. Furthermore, he forbade any agents even to