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Edgar refused to see the Group’s chief, Milton Wessel, dismissing him as a ‘Pied Piper’ and, in writing, as ‘a real rat.’ FBI agents investigated Wessel and may have tapped his home telephone. When the Group concluded that nationwide organized crime existed ‘without any doubt,’ Edgar derided its members as people who ‘look at “Mr District Attorney” on TV too frequently.’

In order to appear to be taking an interest in organized crime, however, Edgar suddenly discovered an old statute – the Hobbs Act – under which the FBI could investigate racketeers. Two weeks after the Apalachin gathering, startled Agents in Charge received instructions to embark on a new project, the Top Hoodlum Program.

The agents called the project THP, and it called for each field office to produce a list of exactly ten suspect members of the underworld. That was, of course, ridiculous. While one town might have trouble identifying more than a couple of gangsters, another, like Chicago, could point to dozens. For all that, the agents went to work with a will. In Washington, Edgar agreed that William Sullivan – then Chief of Research and Analysis – should report on the nature of organized crime. At last, it seemed, Edgar was interested in reality.

In the two years that followed, the FBI gathered intelligence on organized crime as never before. Then, just as his agents were starting to make real progress, Edgar quietly let things slide. The campaign against the mobsters first slowed, and then ground to a virtual halt for no apparent reason. A possible explanation is that Edgar had become the target of fresh blackmail – through one of Frank Costello’s allies, Lewis Solon Rosenstiel.

Rosenstiel, sixty-six in 1957, was a hulking figure who favored amber-tinted glasses, which he rarely removed, and large cigars to go with his status as one of the wealthiest men alive. As a young man, he had entered the liquor trade thanks to an uncle who owned a distillery. Then, during Prohibition, he had built up massive whiskey stocks for the day America could drink legally again. By the end of World War II his company, Schenley, had become the leading U.S. distiller, with profits of $49 million a year. By the late fifties he owned a luxury house on East Eightieth Street in Manhattan, a 2,000-acre estate in Connecticut, a mansion and yacht in Florida and a large private airplane.

The public Rosenstiel wore the mantle of business tycoon and philanthropist. He gave $100 million over the years to Brandeis University, the University of Notre Dame and hospitals in New York and Florida. Secretly, he was in league with the nation’s top mobsters and had a corrupt relationship with Edgar. According to an allegation made to this author, he also joined Edgar in bizarre sex orgies, at the very time the FBI was under pressure to pursue organized crime at last.

Rosenstiel’s lifelong involvement with the Mafia came to light only in 1970, when the New York State Legislative Committee on Crime established that he and mob characters had formed a consortium to smuggle liquor during Prohibition. When Prohibition ended, committee investigators learned, Rosenstiel had appeared at a business meeting flanked by Frank Costello. ‘Costello was there,’ a witness said, ‘to give them a message that Rosenstiel was one of their people. You know, if there were any problems they would see to it. Here’s where you had the Jew with the brains coming in with the Italian with the muscle.’

Rosenstiel also had longstanding links to Meyer Lansky. He and the gangster ‘owned points together’ in mob-operated businesses, including a Las Vegas casino. During the committee’s investigations, the millionaire was observed playing host to Angelo Bruno, the Philadelphia Mafia boss.

Many of the committee’s leads were supplied by Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan. At fifty-two, she was emerging from a decade in the divorce courts, during which Rosenstiel had spent half a million dollars attempting to concoct phony evidence. Embittered though she was, Crime Committee Chairman John