Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [140]
Within months, according to Susan Rosenstiel, Edgar was involved in an episode remembered as an outrageous example of congressional corruption. This was the passage in 1958 of the Forand Bill – a piece of legislation incomprehensible to the general public but crucial to Rosenstiel’s fortunes. Schenley Liquor was facing serious trouble because of a miscalculation made eight years earlier. At the start of the Korean War, the millionaire had guessed that hostilities would continue for a long time – causing shortages of several of the ingredients needed to make whiskey. On that assumption, Schenley had produced and stored millions of gallons of liquor, far more than usual. When shortages came, Rosenstiel gambled, prices would skyrocket – and he would make a fabulous profit.
It never happened. The war ended in 1953, and there was no shortage. Rosenstiel had no market for his whiskey hoard. In 1958, the liquor would become subject to a crippling government tax – $10.50 on each gallon. The only solution was to get the tax law changed, which meant bringing pressure on Congress.
It was at that time that Nichols, Edgar’s influence man on Capitol Hill, came to work for Rosenstiel. He at once began bombarding politicians with phone calls and requests for meetings, and his lobbying succeeded. Congress passed the Forand Bill, named after the Congressman of that name, freeing liquor companies from punitive tax on stored whiskey for a dozen extra years – ample time to dispose of their stocks. For Rosenstiel, it meant bonanza as well as salvation. The bill saved the company between $40 and $50 million, and the value of Schenley stock soared by $33 million in a single day.
A few months before the passage of the bill, according to Susan Rosenstiel, she was present at a meeting in New York attended by her husband, Edgar, Nichols, Cohn and Sokolsky. ‘Hoover,’ she said, ‘told them the bill would pass. He said it would cost a great deal of money, but it would be worth it. His involvement was talking to certain congressmen and senators.’ Nichols, said the millionaire’s wife, was ‘the bagman.’ ‘He carried the money to the politicians. The Schenley plane was like a shuttle, taking cash down to Washington.’
According to Mrs Rosenstiel, several politicians accepted money from Rosenstiel. Lyndon Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, allegedly received half a million dollars. She said she was present, at her husband’s Connecticut estate, when Rosenstiel personally handed a large sum of money to Emanuel Celler, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. And, Mrs Rosenstiel claims, the whole corrupt operation was conducted with Edgar’s knowledge and approval.
FBI records released in 1991 establish that Rosenstiel twice visited Edgar in his office in 1958, at the time the Forand Bill was going through its most crucial stages.
Susan Rosenstiel’s final and most sensational allegations suggest her husband and Roy Cohn involved Edgar in sex orgies – thus laying him more open than ever to pressure from organized crime.
Susan Rosenstiel’s previous marriage had collapsed because her first husband was predominantly homosexual. Now, she concluded, she had made a similar mistake. Her husband seemed little interested in having sex with her, but went to great expense to have her dress up in clothes that made her look like a little girl. She discovered, meanwhile, that he enjoyed sex with men.
‘One day,’ Susan recalled, ‘I came into my husband’s bedroom and found him in bed with Roy Cohn. It was about nine o’clock in the morning. I was shocked, just shocked.