Official and Confidential (12 page)

The deciding vote probably came from Attorney General Cummings, who wanted Edgar to stay on. Roosevelt agreed and on July 29, 1933, the appointment was announced. A great liberal President had taken the first in a series of steps that would ensure Edgar not only survived in office, but survived to become the nation's most powerful force for right-wing oppression, detested by liberals everywhere.

Cummings, for one, was to regret the advice he had given the President. It was, he recalled ruefully, ‘one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.' He would discover that Edgar was ‘difficult to handle, could not be controlled, and had the faculty of attracting too much attention to himself.'

At the outset, getting attention was exactly what was required. The Roosevelt administration was under pressure to do something about crime, and to be seen to be doing it. In the hard-hit Midwest, where farms lay untended and businesses closed, banks were being robbed at gunpoint and
wealthy men kidnapped for huge ransoms. Now was the time of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.

This was a regional problem. The statistics do not support the notion that there was a national crime wave, but the government saw the chance of good headlines in hard times. ‘We are now engaged,' the Attorney General declared, ‘in a war that threatens our country.' He called for a national crusade against crime.

As one kidnapping followed another, Cummings summoned several leading journalists to dinner. He told them, recalled the columnist Drew Pearson, that ‘he believed the best cure for kidnapping was to build up the FBI, not only in actual strength but in the strength of public opinion behind it … He asked our opinion about the appointment of a top-notch public relations man and those of us present, including Cummings, all agreed on Henry Suydam.'

Suydam was a former war correspondent, then working as Washington correspondent for the
Brooklyn Eagle
. He was also a former head of the State Department Information Service, a personal friend of the President's, and would go on to become aide to Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and adviser to the Shah of Iran.

Edgar, meanwhile, acquired his own personal scribe, an exotic figure named Courtney Ryley Cooper. Cooper had begun his career as a circus clown, and moved on to become press agent for Colonel William Cody, better remembered today as Buffalo Bill. He was also a writer of pulp westerns, a scribbler who turned out some 750 short stories. Cooper's nonfiction, one reviewer noted, was ‘not always written with entire regard for actualities.'

Cooper, nevertheless, now became the Bureau's Boswell. With Suydam, he pumped out the propaganda that made Edgar a household name. In 1940 he would be found hanged in a hotel room, driven to suicide, according to his widow, by some wrong Edgar had done him.

Many gangsters, and a number of brave lawmen, were to die bloodily in the mid-thirties. Cummings would eventually become just another forgotten Attorney General. Edgar, as ever, would survive, the one public official to emerge from the Depression as a national hero.

7

‘If this tremendous body of evil-doers could be welded into a unit of conquest, America would fall before it, not in a month, not in a day, but in a few hours.'

J. Edgar Hoover, on the crime wave, 1936

I
n the campaign against the bandits, Edgar's chief lieutenant was twenty-nine-year-old Melvin Purvis, his Agent in Charge in Chicago. Theirs is a tale of friendship and betrayal, the only episode in Edgar's personal life that is heavily documented. While virtually no other personal correspondence has survived, the Purvis family preserved some 500 letters the pair exchanged between 1927 and 1936. Many are intimate, and they make it clear that Edgar treated the younger man like no other field agent in Bureau history.

Purvis' youth had mirrored Edgar's own. The son of a South Carolina planter, he had captained his school cadet company and obtained a law degree, and he was a member of the Kappa Alpha fraternity and the Masons. He was incredibly hardworking, and so fastidious that he changed his shirts three times a day. Edgar took a shine to him the moment he hired him, two years below the regulation recruiting age.

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 department intended.
¹

Edgar decided the brains behind the Urschel kidnapping was Kelly's wife Kathryn, who allegedly wrote the ransom letters. Only in 1970 did it emerge that the Bureau had
suppressed its own handwriting expert's report, which flatly exonerated Mrs Kelly. Denied that evidence, she served twenty-six years in prison.

‘When a woman does turn professional criminal,' Edgar claimed, ‘she is a hundred times more vicious and dangerous than a man … acts with a cold brutality seldom found in a man.' Edgar also told the New York Round Table, in all seriousness, that a female criminal ‘always has red hair … She either adopts a red wig or has her hair dyed red.' Kathryn Kelly had worn such a wig, and Edgar stuck to the bizarre theory for years.
²

Edgar began his fortieth year, 1934, still keeping up a constant correspondence with his protégé Melvin Purvis. The letters were increasingly intimate, with Edgar worrying whenever the younger man caught a cold. In one note, written around the time Clark Gable was shooting to stardom in
It Happened One Night
, Edgar teased Purvis about the way a newspaper had described him. ‘I don't see how the movies could miss a “slender, blond-haired, brown-eyed” gentleman,' he wrote. ‘All power to the Clark Gable of the service.'

It is hard to interpret the correspondence as anything other than a homosexual courtship, even though Purvis is not known to have had any such tendencies. Edgar's oddest letter to him, a handwritten one dated April 3, 1934, was a bizarre mix of schoolboy humor and sexual innuendo:

Dear Melvin,

I received the True-Vue and films, bombs, magic trick and your sassy note. What did the True-Vue and films cost? I asked you to get them for me and I intend to pay for them. The films were both educational and uplifting but I thought they would include a series on ‘A Night in a Moorish Harem' or was it a ‘Turkish Harem'? Nevertheless it was some night and I am still looking forward to you producing a set. Of course my interest is
solely as a censor or as Chairman of the Moral Uplift Squad. The bombs are the best yet. I have already caused Miss Gandy to jump two feet and that is something considering the fact that she is now in the heavyweight class. The damned Magic Trick has me almost ‘nuts' trying to figure out how it is done ... Well, son, keep a stiff upper lip and get Dillinger for me, and the world is yours.

Sincerely and affectionately,

Jayee

Exactly a month before Edgar wrote that letter, John Dillinger had become a Bureau target. He had recently emerged from jail, aged thirty, after serving a long sentence for an attempted holdup. Then, in the space of four months, he had organized a mass escape by former cellmates and, armed with machine guns and bulletproof vests stolen from a police station, begun ranging across the Midwest holding up bank after bank. Three policemen were killed in the process – though apparently not by Dillinger himself.

The bandit was in jail again in Indiana when he pulled his most brazen trick – one that made headlines around the world and put Dillinger on Edgar's hit list. He talked his way out of jail waving a fake wooden gun, stole the sheriff's car and hightailed it into neighboring Illinois. For the first time, by driving a stolen car across a state line, Dillinger had committed a federal offense – and became a prime target for Melvin Purvis.

Things went badly wrong in late April, when Purvis received a tip-off that the bandit was holed up at Little Bohemia, a lakeside resort in Wisconsin. Purvis called Edgar, agreed on a plan and rushed to Little Bohemia with a large posse of agents.

‘Nervous Purvis,' as other agents called him behind his back, made a thorough mess of the operation. ‘The fever for action,' he admitted later, ‘dissipated all other emotions …'
Purvis and his team blundered into the resort grounds and blazed away excitedly – at innocent customers leaving the restaurant. One man was killed and two wounded. Nearby, a member of Dillinger's gang, Baby Face Nelson, killed one agent and wounded another. All the bandits escaped.

It was the second time in three weeks that Dillinger had made the Bureau look like the Keystone Cops. At Bohemia, according to one source, some of Edgar's fabled agents had ‘mutinied and taken their superiors into custody.' The press began calling for Purvis' resignation – even for Edgar's.

Edgar, rarely silent, said little in public about the incident. Behind the scenes he sent a trusted Washington inspector, Sam Cowley, with thirty handpicked men to form a special Dillinger squad in Chicago. Yet, although Purvis had committed a glaring breach of the rule all veteran agents still recall: ‘Don't Embarrass the Bureau,' he remained Agent in Charge. Jayee was looking after Melvin.

Dillinger, whom Edgar called ‘a beer-drinking plug-ugly,' was rated Public Enemy Number One and featured on Wanted posters all over the United States. Attorney General Cummings said that agents should ‘shoot to kill – then count ten.' Although Dillinger himself was not known to have killed anyone, eliminating him had become a public relations imperative.

For Edgar it was a matter of saving face and, as with Machine Gun Kelly, settling a personal challenge. Dillinger was taunting the Director with a series of defiant postcards. With no word from Chicago of a breakthrough, his correspondence with Purvis took on a tone of stern formality. Suddenly it was no longer ‘Dear Mel' but ‘Dear Mr Purvis':

June 4: I was very disturbed today when I learned from you that the order which I had issued this morning had not been complied with … You have absolutely no right to ignore instructions …

June 16: I had occasion this afternoon to try to reach you by telephone … I then learned you had gone to one
of the Country Clubs for golf … There is no reason why the Agent in Charge should not leave word where he can be reached at any time …