Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [143]
‘He was lying across a bed, in this evening gown. I think the wig was light-colored, or blond. But the face was completely recognizable. Hoover made an ugly-looking woman. Nothing sexual was going on, at least not in the pictures we saw. No one else was in that first picture. It was like he’d just laid down there. I think you could also see a bedside table in the shot. At first we thought it might be Hoover’s head stuck onto another body, a sort of trick picture, phonied up. But the other four or five photos made it clear to us they were authentic – they were taken from different angles, with other people visible, and Hoover was in all the shots. It was a party scene.
‘The way we were shown the pictures was all rather matter-of-fact. The people in that group knew, or behaved as if they knew, that he was gay. We also met two other guys, through Sergeant Bobak, who said they had been to gay parties Hoover attended. Bobak said he had been to Hoover’s house. The boy with him had glommed on to the pictures somehow, swiped them or got hold of prints.
‘At that tender age, it didn’t occur to us that anyone in the gay crowd intended to use the pictures for blackmail. It was more as if they were a curiosity, to be giggled about in the group. It sounds strange now, but at that age – we were only about twenty then – I don’t think it fully occurred to us what it would mean to attach that kind of stigma to a major public figure. It seemed funny to us, kind of laughable. We just looked at the pictures and handed them back and talked about them once or twice afterwards. And that was all. We soon moved away from that circle of people.’
There is no question of collusion between these two witnesses and Susan Rosenstiel. The men who saw the photographs, moreover, knew nothing of Edgar’s connection with Rosenstiel. It seems likely they did see the pictures, and did think they recognized the grotesque man in female garb as Edgar.
Sexual adventuring was folly for Edgar, and especially in the company of a man like Rosenstiel. Several sources told the New York Crime Committee that Rosenstiel had his Manhattan home wired from roof to basement with hidden microphones, so that he could spy on visitors and staff. The man who installed the system, security consultant Fred Otash, said it was rigged to tape conversations for hours on end. Conversations in the library, where Edgar met with Rosenstiel and his cronies, were recorded as a matter of routine. The millionaire was quite capable of having the sex sessions at the Plaza bugged or arranging for Edgar to be photographed in his female costumes.
Meyer Lansky, who claimed Edgar was no threat, that he had been ‘fixed,’ was Rosenstiel’s close associate. Mrs Rosenstiel quoted her husband as saying that ‘because of Lansky and those people, we can always get Hoover to help us.’ The mobster’s insurance policy, according to associates, was photographic evidence of Edgar’s homosexual activity. The evidence suggests that in the late fifties, at a difficult time for the mob, the episodes at the Plaza may have renewed that insurance.
In July 1958, soon after the first Plaza episode – and in order to be seen to be responding to the uproar about the mobsters’ conference at Apalachin – Edgar asked his Domestic Intelligence Division to produce a study on organized crime. Though the full two-volume report remains classified, its summary conclusion stated:
Central Research has prepared a monograph on the Mafia for the Director’s approval. This monograph includes the following points on the Mafia: The Mafia does exist in the U.S. It exists as a special criminal clique or caste engaged in organized crime activity. The Mafia is composed primarily of individuals of Sicilian/Italian origin and descent …
This, of course,