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Edgar’s fingerprint bureau grew from one small file room to a huge L-shaped clearing house high in the Department of Justice, and eventually to a six-story building occupying an entire city block. By the sixties it was said that the fingerprint cards, stacked one on top of another, would reach 113 times higher than the Empire State Building. By the time Edgar died, a vast computerized Identification Division offered instant access to the whorls, loops and arches of the fingers of 159 million people.

Edgar developed a massive Crime Laboratory, room after room in which rows of experts pored over ballistics evidence and analyzed poisons, hairs and fibers. Other staff members spent their entire working lives immersed in the Rubber Stamp and Printing Standards File, the Checkwriter Standards File, the Safety Paper Standards File, the Typewriter Standards File, the Confidence Man File or the Anonymous Letter File.

The FBI Crime Laboratory quickly became the most advanced in the world – and the key to the expansion of Edgar’s empire. The first step was to persuade America’s police chiefs, always jealous of their power, that in an increasingly mobile nation a centralized fingerprint system was essential. Once local forces started shipping copies of their prints to Washington, thousands of them every day, the payoff in arrests and convictions proved Edgar right.

The fingerprint and laboratory operations alone changed the Bureau from a small agency with limited jurisdiction to a vital facility upon which all other law enforcement depended. Soon it would offer the Uniform Crime Reports system, a bureaucratic miracle that coordinated millions of crime statistics pumped in from across the nation. Next came the Law Enforcement Bulletin, which started as the first centralized Wanted list and became a slick magazine bringing the Bureau’s views – or rather Edgar’s – to every policeman in the land. Soon the Bureau had a virtual monopoly on the supply of crime information, not only to the police but to the country at large. Accurate or not, its version became gospel.

The final link with the police would be forged in 1935, when Edgar created the police training school that became the FBI National Academy. In an era when there was no such thing as a professional qualification for policemen, the officers who took the Academy course went home to become the elite. Eventually, of the Academy graduates who remained in law enforcement, one in five would end up running a police department. Graduation exercises became grand occasions attended by presidents and attorneys general, and the Academy was recognized as the West Point and Harvard of law enforcement.

Edgar had been shrewd. He knew there was a deep-seated fear of a national police force, so he repeatedly went out of his way to say such a force could never work. The police fraternity he created, though, came close to being the very thing he publicly deplored. It depended entirely on the Bureau – and the Bureau, everyone knew, was Edgar.

Edgar always limited the Bureau to what he knew it could do successfully. He avoided accepting a mandate to police drug trafficking, for example, because he feared exposing his agents to corruption, and because there was little chance of easy success. So it was that other agencies dealt with narcotics, violations of Prohibition, smuggling, forgery and immigration offenses. Indeed, while Edgar was Director, the Bureau had jurisdiction over only a minute percentage of the serious crimes committed in the United States.

Edgar readily took on more straightforward targets, those that offered easy prestige. He responded willingly in the thirties, when a series of spectacular crimes convinced the nation it was being overwhelmed by a crime wave. For Edgar, launched on a rocket of publicity designed originally to benefit the government, it would prove the breakthrough that assured his fame.

Edgar succeeded at self-advertisement like no comparable public figure, in the long term because,