Official and Confidential (38 page)

The Stork Club, where Edgar and Clyde joined Winchell as regulars, was infested by the mob. The nominal proprietor, Sherman Billingsley, was a former bootlegger with several convictions. Yet Edgar gave him a character reference for his gun permit and spoke of him as ‘a very good friend.' Costello, who may have been the club's real owner, leaned on the unions for Billingsley when necessary.

It was the same in Florida, where Edgar vacationed regularly.
His favorite Miami haunt, from the late thirties, was Joe's Stone Crabs restaurant – also frequented by Capone, Costello and Lansky. Lansky, who stamped on industrial trouble at Joe's as Costello did at the Stork, liked to come in for a pink gin. The restaurant's owner, Jesse Weiss, agreed in 1988 that he was on close personal terms with gangsters while simultaneously ‘very, very, very close friends' with Edgar.

‘Jesse had friends the Bureau was looking for,' Mrs Weiss recalled. ‘Edgar would be sitting there, and there might be some of these fellows sitting at the other side of the dining room.' Sometimes Weiss puzzled over the way Edgar ignored a man's known crimes. ‘I'd ask him, “You had so-and-so on him for twenty years, for Christ's sake. Why didn't you do anything?”'

Edgar was protective, at the highest level, of millionaire developer and casino owner Del Webb, best known to the public as the owner of the New York Yankees baseball team. ‘The Las Vegas casinos,' Edgar would one day assure President Johnson, ‘represent the worst element of the Cosa Nostra – except, of course, for Del Webb's.'

‘Hoover gave Webb a pass. He was his buddy,' said Justice Department attorney William Hundley, who was present at the White House that day. ‘No bugs went in on Webb's places.' FBI sources and mob security personnel confirm that establishments owned by Webb went uninvestigated.

Webb was deeply involved with organized crime for thirty years, an involvement he concealed with a series of fronts and middlemen. Through proxies, he was in business with Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and a string of other criminals. Webb and Edgar, observed the former FBI Agent in Charge in Las Vegas, were ‘very close friends.' When Edgar visited the city, he reportedly stayed at Webb's hotels, free of charge. Like Edgar, Webb was a frequent guest at the Del Charro, Clint Murchison's hotel in California.

The Del Charro was small, and in its comparative privacy Edgar rubbed shoulders with a bevy of white-collar crooks.
Those welcomed at the hotel in the fifties included Ed Levinson, John Drew and Ray Ryan, all notorious names to rackets investigators. Drew once departed leaving a valuable antique, a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey, as a present for Edgar.

Far from avoiding such men, Edgar socialized with them. The hotel manager, Allan Witwer, saw him huddled with Art Samish, California's political fixer supreme and mob front man, soon after Samish emerged from a long stint in jail. The pair lounged around talking, said Witwer, ‘without apparent embarrassment to either of them.'

By 1959, the year he saw Edgar with Samish, such encounters no longer astonished Witwer. It had been different five years earlier, when Dub McClanahan, oil-man and gambler, came to stay – and sat by the pool talking with Edgar each morning. The manager thought of McClanahan as just another friend of Clint Murchison's – until a friendly FBI man enlightened him.

‘My office faced the swimming pool,' said Witwer, ‘and one of the agents was in there with me one evening. He looked out the window – we had torches by the pool at night – and he saw McClanahan, and he said, “Allan, what's he doing here? D'you know who he is?” And I said, “Sure.” And he said, “I bet you don't. He's a partner of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello.” And I said, “Well, tell Hoover that! He has breakfast with him every morning.” I got a kind of shock that Hoover would allow McClanahan to be with him at all.'

McClanahan remained Edgar's regular poolside companion at the Del Charro until 1959, when he went on trial for tax evasion.
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Another, reportedly, was Johnny Roselli, the West Coast henchman of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. ‘I knew Hoover,' Roselli would say breezily years later. ‘I'd buy him drinks, and we'd talk. It was fun to be with the Director of the FBI like that.'

In the mid-fifties, as Murchison's two sons became more involved in the business, the family's money became
inextricably involved with Mafia money. The Murchisons' affairs were probed constantly between 1955 and 1965 – by two congressional committees and no fewer than nine federal agencies.

In the early fifties, according to a Senate committee, 20 percent of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was owned by the Vito Genovese crime family. Handridge Oil, a Murchisonowned outfit, was the subject of a deal with Las Vegas gamblers involving massive security violations. There were also to be deals with Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked boss of the Teamsters Union, and Clint, Jr., established financial ties with Mafia boss Marcello.

It was Edgar who suggested the Murchisons hire one of his own former administrative assistants, Thomas Webb. A seventeen-year FBI veteran, Webb was to have an interest in the Murchison meat deal that was part of the Bobby Baker scandal during the Johnson presidency. According to Baker, he and Webb once traveled together to make a political contribution – cash in a white envelope, no questions asked. Webb, Baker said, was ‘the fixer for the Murchisons in Washington, the bagman.' Also, according to Baker and others, he ‘worshiped' Edgar.

It was a Murchison aide who introduced Edgar to Washington lobbyist Irving Davidson. Davidson has been linked to the Teamsters and organized crime. He was involved in the Murchison meat deal and, more recently, was the go-between for Clint Murchison, Jr., and Carlos Marcello during the sting operation that sent the Mafia boss to prison in 1983.

‘I'm a great admirer of Mr Hoover, and I did have access,' said Davidson. ‘We used to have parties before the Redskin games, at Tom Webb's house or my house, and Hoover always came to them. He was a darned good friend. I lived around the corner from him, three quarters of a block. I'd go over and say hello to him and Clyde Tolson. If Mr Tolson was sick I'd bring him a Cowboy jersey or some Polish kielbasa.'
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In the late fifties, while monitoring a bug on Murray ‘The Camel' Humphries in Chicago, surprised agents heard their boss' name mentioned. Humphries was the head of the ‘Connection Guys,' the criminal group with special responsibility for corruption of public officials. He was talking, with evident knowledge and interest, about Edgar's friendship with Clint Murchison.

‘Murchison owned a piece of Hoover,' Bobby Baker mused in an interview for this book. ‘Rich people always try to put their money with the sheriff, because they're looking for protection. Hoover was the personification of law and order and officially against gangsters and everything, so it was a plus for a rich man to be identified with him. That's why men like Murchison made it their business to let everyone know Hoover was their friend. You can do a lot of illegal things if the head lawman is your buddy.'

Everywhere they went, Edgar and Clyde indulged a passion for horseracing. At Hialeah in Florida and Del Mar in California, at Bowie and Pimlico in Maryland, Charles Town in West Virginia and Belmont in New York, Edgar's face was familiar for forty years. Edgar and Clyde had special tables, and usually complimentary boxes, at every track. There was a horse called Director J. E. in Maryland, a J. Edgar in Texas and a J. Edgar Ruler in California. At Laurel, in Maryland, they still run a J. Edgar Hoover Handicap.

Racing, and the gambling that went with it, became an addiction for Edgar. An in-house joke had it that the FBI agent whose hair grayed fastest was the man who had to get the Director to the track through rush-hour traffic. Headquarters staff were dispatched to the Library of Congress to dig out racing information. Edgar issued standing orders that he was not to be bothered on Saturdays and, according to DeLoach, once defied an order by President Johnson to return for a meeting with Cabinet members. Racing got Edgar overexcited. After a run of luck one afternoon, former Speaker Tip O'Neill
recalled, he took another man's car by mistake and drove it all the way back to Washington.

Edgar encouraged his oil millionaire friends in 1954 when, not content with owning a hotel near Del Mar, they bought the track itself. The group they bought it from was headed by Al Hart, a liquor distributor with links to the Chicago mob – another dubious character with whom Edgar had socialized.

‘At first,' said Del Charro manager Witwer, ‘Murchison and Richardson were not only turned down by Hart and his directors, they were practically thrown out of the office. And Murchison said, “If those fellas won't deal with me, we'll sick old J. Edgar on them.” And Hoover sent two FBI agents out to call on Hart. I heard this from the agents themselves afterwards. And then Hart sold.'

All the profits from the track, Murchison claimed, were to go to Boys Inc., a fund established by the Texans ‘for the benefit of underprivileged boys.' To present a respectable front, he picked a revered war hero, General Holland Smith, to serve as president. ‘I think $200 a month for General Smith,' he wrote, ‘is good propaganda …'

Murchison guessed wrong. The general resigned after a few months, noting that in spite of clearing $640,000 at one meeting, ‘not one cent has been turned over to Boys Inc. I do not know where the money went. It is my considered opinion that no money will be transferred to Boys Inc. for at least five years, if then. I hope I have given you a fair idea of what I think of Mr Murchison and Mr Richardson …'

Skeptics, including the California tax authorities, said the Del Mar scheme was just another moneymaker for the millionaires. Because the profits were supposed to go to charity, they could not be taxed – and the state wanted the tax. Murchison counterattacked with every asset at his disposal, including the obliging Edgar.

‘I know Clint Murchison,' Edgar told the racing press, ‘and I think he would be the last person in the country to use such a plan as a clever tax or business subterfuge … This work
helps directly in making the nation sturdy, for Communist penetration is currently directed mainly at labor and youth organizations.'

Some Del Mar profit did go to charity over the years, but eminent critics did not share Edgar's confidence. ‘This dodge,' said former President Herbert Hoover, Chairman of Boys' Clubs of America and normally one of Edgar's allies, ‘is as old as the hills. They do not give
all
profits to charity.' George Allen, racing enthusiast and intimate of Murchison and Edgar, admitted years later, ‘It was a racket, if you want to know … a tax racket.'

Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime. Police intelligence in California learned that he regularly used bookmakers linked to the mob.

In Florida, Edgar asked Phil ‘The Stick' Kovolick, a heavy for Meyer Lansky, for the winning numbers. At one stage, crime reporter Hank Messick learned, ‘gangsters began taking advantage of Hoover's ignorance by getting themselves invited to his box at the track and posing with him for pictures. It became something of a game …'

Edgar was not so ignorant. He once boasted about shady gambling to Robert Mardian, an Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon administration. ‘He told me,' Mardian recalled, ‘that he was once in an illegal race parlor down in Florida where you could have dinner and place bets and so on. And the Miami police raided the place. He laughed and said, “Well, what a shock they got when they found me there! They cleared out faster than you can imagine.”'
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FBI propagandists, who apparently understood the risks better than their boss, regularly let it be known that Edgar placed only small bets. ‘Temperance and moderation in everything,' he was quoted as saying, and he was duly photographed standing at the $2 window. The truth was otherwise.

‘We all used to laugh about that,' said Del Charro manager Allan Witwer. ‘At Del Mar, when he'd been authoritatively tipped, Hoover would place
two-hundred
-dollar bets' ($1,000 at today's rates). To avoid being observed making large bets, insiders recalled, he would send companions – often FBI agents – to place the bets for him.

Edgar made light of suggestions that racing was penetrated by the mob. ‘The FBI,' he was quoted as saying, ‘has much more important functions than arresting gamblers all over the place.' And, all the while, he carried on an amicable relationship with one of the most notorious gambling bosses in the country, the mob boss known as ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld.'

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‘Intelligent gangsters from Al Capone to Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky have always been fierce, voluble defenders of the capitalist faith, and to that extent they were and are J. Edgar Hoover's ideological kinsmen.'

Albert Fried, historian

E
dgar had a relationship with mob chieftain Frank Costello that lasted for years, and it has never been satisfactorily explained. It started, apparently, with a seemingly innocuous meeting on a New York street.

Edgar recalled the occasion himself, in a private conversation with the veteran journalist Norma Abrams – a confidence she kept until shortly before her death in 1989.

‘Hoover was an inveterate window-shopper,' said Abrams. ‘Early one morning in the thirties, he told me, he was out walking on Fifth Avenue and somebody came up behind him and said, “Good morning, Mr Hoover.” He turned to see who it was, and it was Frank Costello. Costello said, “I don't want to embarrass you,” and Hoover said, “You won't embarrass me. We're not looking for you or anything.” They talked all the way to Fifty-seventh Street together, but God protected them, and there was no photographer around, or anyone …'