Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [139]
Contrary to denials by Edgar’s two propaganda chiefs, Lou Nichols and Cartha DeLoach, Rosenstiel was also close to Edgar. ‘They knew each other very well,’ said Sidney Stricker, the son of Rosenstiel’s longtime attorney, who himself worked for Schenley. Jesse Weiss, owner of Joe’s Stone Crabs restaurant in Miami Beach, confirmed the relationship. ‘Rosenstiel and Edgar were social friends. They came to my place together when they were in Miami.’ Edgar sometimes flew with Rosenstiel in his private plane.
Recently released FBI documents show that Hoover was aware of Rosenstiel, and extended Bureau assistance to him, as early as 1933. In 1939, Meyer Lansky reportedly used Rosenstiel as a go-between while plotting the surrender to Edgar of the gangster Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter. In 1946, Edgar and Clyde were guests of honor at a barbecue thrown by leading liquor companies, including Rosenstiel’s. The FBI files show that the millionaire’s friendship with the Director began in earnest with a meeting at FBI headquarters in 1956.
By the fifties, Rosenstiel was surrounded by familiar figures from Edgar’s world. There was George Sokolsky, the Hearst columnist who churned out right-wing propaganda, much of it gleaned from daily calls to the FBI. Sokolsky had long since acted as a mouthpiece for Edgar. Now, in return for regular handouts, he also parroted Rosenstiel’s views.
Closest of all was Roy Cohn, now a high-profile New York attorney. His services were at the disposal of Lewis Rosenstiel – not that he had any genuine affection for the man. He would be disbarred, twenty years later, in part for ‘helping’ Rosenstiel sign a document naming Cohn as his trustee and executor – when the millionaire was senile and in a terminal coma.
Rosenstiel trusted Cohn ‘as a son,’ and Cohn indulged his eccentricities. The pair was once observed on a yacht, cruising past the West Point Military Academy with a recording of General MacArthur’s farewell speech blaring forth from a loudspeaker. The Rosenstiel clique liked to address one another as if they were members of some secret army. Cohn, like Lansky, called Rosenstiel ‘Supreme Commander.’ The millionaire called Cohn ‘Field Commander,’ another crony ‘Sergeant-at-Arms’ and so on.
Rosenstiel cultivated Edgar assiduously. He quietly bought up 25,000 copies of Masters of Deceit for distribution to schools around the country. In the sixties, he would contribute more than a million dollars to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, a fund established to ‘safeguard the heritage and freedom of the United States of America … to perpetuate the ideas and purposes to which the Honorable J. Edgar Hoover has dedicated his life … and to combat Communism.’ The foundation still exists today, under the aegis of Cartha DeLoach. It makes grants to those planning careers in law enforcement, to the Scripps Clinic in California, where Edgar had his medical checkups, to Boys’ Clubs of America, and the Freedoms Foundation, an ultra-right-wing organization that aims ‘to preserve and improve the Distinctive American System of Freedom.’
According to Susan Rosenstiel, there was nothing innocent about her husband’s relations with Edgar. ‘I learned,’ she said, ‘how much Hoover liked the races, that he was a big gambler. My husband was friendly with several Lansky bookmakers – Red Ritter and Max Courtney and Charlie “The Brud” Brudner – and he would call them at the Eden Roc and give them Hoover’s bets. And Hoover didn’t have to pay off. If he won, he won. My husband would send the money through Cohn. If Hoover didn’t win, he didn’t pay.’
Rosenstiel called in such favors, Susan said, by using Edgar to obtain the release of jailed associates, to ‘help with the judges’ when Rosenstiel was involved in litigation – even to ‘put in a word’ with the tax authorities.
Susan Rosenstiel met Edgar in the fall of 1957, when he came to the town house on East Eightieth Street. ‘It was supposed to be a bit cloak and dagger,’ she recalled. ‘Nobody was to know he was coming. He didn’t come with Clyde Tolson; he came alone.
‘I remember thinking