Official and Confidential (39 page)

The contact was renewed, as Edgar explained to Eduardo Disano, a Florida restaurateur who also knew Costello. ‘Hoover told me he and Costello both used apartments at the Waldorf,' Disano recalled. ‘He said Costello asked him to come up and meet in his apartment. Hoover said he told him by all means he would meet him, but not in his room, downstairs …
I don't know what they talked about. Hoover was a very quiet man about business.'

If Costello was trying to cultivate Edgar, it worked. Once they even took the risk of sitting together in the Stork Club. Costello was soon referring to Edgar as ‘John' – a habit he presumably picked up from Winchell. The mobster was to recall with a chuckle the day Edgar in turn took the lead and invited him for coffee. ‘I got to be careful about my associates,' Costello told Edgar. ‘They'll accuse me of consorting with questionable characters …'

In 1939, when Edgar was credited with the capture of racketeer Louis ‘Lepke' Buchalter, it was Costello who pulled strings to make it happen. This was the time the mob would remember as the Big Heat, when Thomas Dewey, then District Attorney, brought unprecedented pressure on organized crime. The heat was on, especially, for the capture of Lepke, the man they called the head of Murder, Inc.

Shortly before midnight on August 24, Edgar called in newsmen to hear a sensational announcement. He, personally, had just accepted Lepke's surrender on a New York street. It made a fine tale – Edgar, in dark glasses, waiting in a parked limousine for his encounter with one of the most dangerous criminals in America. Edgar said the FBI had ‘managed the surrender through its own sources,' and it emerged that his friend Winchell had played a role as go-between. Edgar was covered in glory, to the rage of Dewey and the New York authorities, who said he had operated behind their backs.

He had indeed, thanks to a neat piece of manipulation by the mob. Lucky Luciano, issuing orders to Costello and Lansky from prison, had decided that to relieve law enforcement pressure on mob operations Lepke must be made to surrender. Word went to the gangster that he would be treated leniently if he surrendered to Edgar – a false promise, as it turned out, for he was to end up in the electric chair. Costello, meanwhile, met secretly with Edgar to hammer out the arrangements.

The beauty of it all, Luciano would recall, was that they achieved two things at once. They won relief from law enforcement pressure and simultaneously ensured that Edgar and Dewey – even the ego-obsessed Walter Winchell – each got their ‘piece of the cake.' For supreme practitioners of the Fix, the sacrifice of Lepke was a job well done.

William Hundley, the Justice Department attorney, had a glimpse of the way Costello handled Edgar. It happened by chance in 1961, when Hundley was staying at the apartment of his friend – and the mobster's attorney – Edward Bennett Williams. ‘At eight o'clock in the morning,' Hundley recalled, ‘there was a knock at the door. There was a guy there with a big hat on, and this really hoarse voice. It was Frank Costello, and he came in, and we sat around eating breakfast … Somehow the subject of Hoover came up, and Hoover liking to bet on horseracing. Costello mentioned that he knew Hoover, that they met for lunch. Then he started looking very leery of going on, but Ed told him he could trust me. Costello just said, “Hoover will never know how many races I had to fix for those lousy ten-dollar bets.” He still looked leery, and I guess he didn't want to say much more.'

In Costello, Edgar had one of the most powerful tipsters in gambling history. One of his primary mob functions was to control betting and fix races. Those who failed to cooperate got hurt, or worse. Edgar's relationship with him was corroborated by sources both inside and outside the mob. ‘Costello did give tips to Hoover,' said Walter Winchell's colleague Herman Klurfeld. ‘He got them from [betting-parlor operator] Frank Erickson and passed them on through Winchell … Sometimes Costello and Hoover met directly. Now and then, when Hoover was in the barbershop at the Waldorf, so was Frank Costello.'

Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana reportedly had an inside track on the relationship. His half brother Chuck claimed that Costello ‘worked the whole thing out. He knew Hoover was just like every other politician and copper, only
meaner and smarter than most. Hoover didn't want an envelope each month … so we never gave him cash outright; we gave him something better: tips on fixed horse races. He could bet ten thousand dollars on a horse that showed twenty-to-one odds, if he wanted … and he has.'
¹

In 1990, aged eighty, New York mob boss Carmine Lombardozzi said Costello and Edgar ‘had contact on many occasions and over a long period. Hoover was very friendly towards the families. They took good care of him, especially at the races … The families made sure he was looked after when he visited the tracks in California and on the East Coast. They had an understanding. He would lay off the families, turn a blind eye. It helped that he denied that we even existed. If there was anything they could do for him, information that did not hurt family business, they would provide it.'
²

George Allen, Edgar's racecourse companion for forty years and a prominent public figure who had no connection to the mob, recalled a conversation between Edgar and Costello. ‘I heard Hoover in the Stork one night,' he said, ‘tell Costello that as long as he stayed out of Hoover's bailiwick, he'd stay out of his.'

Since Costello's principal business was gambling, and since gambling was not a federal offense, it could be said that Edgar's remark merely reflected the legal situation of the day. Other clues, however, suggest that his laissez-faire attitude went deeper. In the early fifties, when there were efforts to have Costello deported to Italy, there was no pressure from the FBI. According to Walter Winchell's friend Curly Harris, who knew both Edgar and the mobster, Edgar once went out of his way to protect Costello from his own agents.

‘The doorman at Frank's apartment building,' Harris remembered, ‘told him that there were a couple of FBI guys hanging around. So Frank got hold of Hoover on the phone and told him, “What's the idea of these fellows being there? If you want to see me you can get to me with one phone call.”
And Hoover looked into it, and he found out who the fellows were and why they were doing that. He said they weren't under any orders to do it, they'd taken it on themselves. He was very sore about it. And he had the agents transferred to Alaska or someplace the next day … He and Costello had mutual friends.'
³

To Costello, and to his associate Meyer Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky's expertise in such corruption that made him the nearest there ever was to a true national godfather of organized crime.

Another Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. ‘Ways could be found,' he said in his memoirs, ‘so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn't interfere with him.' The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.

The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde.
⁴
At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.

Seymour Pollack, a close friend of Meyer Lansky, told this author that Edgar's homosexuality was ‘common knowledge' and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. ‘I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on!… They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it.'

Jimmy ‘The Weasel' Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have ‘turned' and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. ‘I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front,' Fratianno recalled, ‘and said, “Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it's J. Edgar Hoover.” And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, “Ah, that J. Edgar's a punk, he's a fuckin' degenerate queer.”'

Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men's room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. ‘Frank,' he told the mobster, ‘that's not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me.' It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.

Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of ‘proof' that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans.
⁵
Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city officials were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it.

Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar's homosexuality and used it to neutralize the
FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving ‘Ash' Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarca family from New England, and an original ownerbuilder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to one used by Edgar and Clyde. ‘I'd sit with him on the beach every day,' Resnick remembered. ‘We were friendly.'

In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who ‘put everything together' – and as the man who ‘nailed J. Edgar Hoover.' ‘When I asked what they meant,' Hamill recalled, ‘they told me Lansky had some pictures – pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover – to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI.'
⁶

Seymour Pollack, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky's daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas. ‘Meyer,' said Pollack, ‘was closemouthed. I don't think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when we were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, “I fixed that son of a bitch, didn't I?”' Lansky's fix, according to Pollack, also involved bribery – not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.

Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti's restaurant in Miami Beach recall that
the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. ‘But they just looked at one another,' recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti's. ‘They never talked, not here.'

If Edgar's eyes met Lansky's, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. ‘The homosexual thing,' said Pollack, ‘was Hoover's Achilles' heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people … Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done.' (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky's orders, in 1947.)

According to Pollack, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. ‘Meyer brought Clark down to Havana,' Pollack said. ‘I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don't know what … There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer's people, not for a long time.'

Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable – a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. ‘In 1966,' noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky's biographers, ‘a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky.'