Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [39]
Edgar dropped his usual rigid formality when he corresponded with Purvis, calling him ‘Dear Melvin’ or ‘Dear Mel,’ and signing himself ‘J. E. H.’ and even ‘Jayee.’ Understandably nervous, Purvis stuck to ‘Mr Hoover’ until Edgar told him to ‘stop using MISTER,’ then moved on to ‘Dear Chairman’ or ‘Dear Jayee.’
When Edgar’s letters to Purvis concerned official business, he laced them with a puerile brand of humor. As a cure for a U.S. attorney suffering from ‘mental halitosis,’ his standard epithet for those who disagreed with him, he proposed ‘the Mussolini treatment – a quart of castor oil administered in equal doses three in succession.’
In unofficial notes, Edgar kept harping on the way women fell for Purvis, not least his own secretary, Helen Gandy. At one point he taunted the younger man with claims that Gandy, a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, had been seen locked in the embrace of another Bureau official. In the fall of 1932 he assured Purvis that, should he come to Washington for the Halloween Ball, Gandy would come dressed in a ‘cellophane gown.’
The following year, when Edgar was fighting for his job, he found time to send Purvis a Bel Air Smoke Consumer, an air circulation device to help ease the younger man’s sore throat. He fired off a torrent of notes of concern, three in four days at one point.
All that followed, the ballyhooed chase after the thirties’ bandits, took place against the background of this curious relationship. By delivering the bandits, dead or alive, Purvis was to ensure Edgar’s fame.
In June 1933, the month before Edgar’s reappointment, brewing company president William Hamm, Jr., was kidnapped in St Paul, Minnesota, then released after payment of a $100,000 ransom. The next day, in Kansas City, Missouri, a Bureau agent and three policemen were mowed down by bandits with machine guns. Another wealthy man, John Factor, disappeared in Chicago two weeks later. Thanks to a new law enacted after the Lindbergh tragedy, agents now had the power to investigate kidnappings, and were permitted to carry guns. The Bureau went to work.
On the face of it, Purvis performed brilliantly. He seemingly solved both the Hamm and Factor kidnappings within weeks, by arresting Roger ‘The Terrible’ Tuohy, a big-time Illinois bootlegger from Prohibition days. Edgar called Tuohy one of the ‘most vicious and dangerous criminals in the history of American crime.’ Capturing him, he said, was ‘a credit to the entire Bureau.’
In fact, Tuohy had been spotted not by Edgar’s men but by an unarmed policeman out on a fishing trip. Later, when public attention had moved on, he turned out to be innocent of the Hamm kidnapping. Although he was convicted in the Factor case and rotted in jail for a quarter of a century, it was finally established that he had been set up by other criminals. The federal judge who released Tuohy, in 1959, was especially scathing about the FBI’s refusal to let the court see relevant files.
Edgar gained further glory in the summer of 1933, when oil millionaire Charles Urschel was abducted from his home in Oklahoma City. After Urschel’s release, on payment of a ransom, the gang responsible was pursued across six states, an area the size of central Europe. One of its leaders, George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly, responded with a stream of letters, some taunting Edgar and his ‘sissy college boys’ as incapable of finding him. He even managed to make threatening telephone calls to Edgar’s mother – but never actually fired a gun at anyone.
Edgar’s men did find Kelly. It was he, according to Bureau propaganda, who originated the nickname ‘G-Men’ – with the ‘G’ standing for ‘Government’ – as the underworld nickname for Bureau agents. He supposedly shrieked, ‘Don’t shoot, G-Men! Don’t shoot!’ as agents and police burst into his hideout. This is a nice story, but it is not supported by the accounts of policemen present that day. In any case, criminals went on calling Edgar’s agents ‘the Feds,’ as they had done previously. Only the press latched on to G-Men, which was probably what Edgar’s publicity