statistics to the Senate Appropriations Committee that XXX numbers of cars worth XXX numbers of dollars were recovered, thus justifying further expansion of the FBI budget.
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One-time number three man in the FBI, William C. Sullivan, stated in his book,
The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI
(published just after his accidental death): "... the Mafia is powerful, so powerful that entire police forces or even a mayor's office can be under Mafia control. That's why Hoover was afraid to let us tackle it. He was afraid that we'd show up poorly. Why take the risk, he reasoned, until we were forced to by public exposure of our shortcomings." Sullivan, more or less regarded as Nixon's man in the agency, was most likely to succeed Hoover if Nixon had carried out his wish to fire Hoover, a step that Nixon drew back from. ("Christ almighty," Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian once reported to Sullivan of an aborted attempt, "Nixon lost his guts.")
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In place of fighting organized crime, Hoover lay special emphasis on relatively easy targets, with a highly publicized war on so-called public enemiesDillinger, Ma Barker (who never was charged with any crime), Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly (who never fired his gun at anyone in anger) and other targets more easily hit than the Mafia. "The whole of the FBI's main thrust," said Sullivan, "was not investigation but public relations and propaganda to glorify its director."
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Historian Albert Fried has written that "Hoover paid so little attention to organized crime, indeed, so little that one could accuse him of dereliction of duty." In
The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America
, Fried contends that Hoover thought organized crime "constituted no immediate danger to established order. Or, as some have argued, he assumed that the gang/syndicate members ... were in fact pillars of the status quo. They at least had a vested interest in the health of the free enterprise system, in America's triumph over communism and for that matter over Socialism and liberalism tooover anything that might remotely threaten their specific opportunities." Thus, Fried concluded, the more intelligent mobsters, à la Al Capone, Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky, were valuable defenders of capitalism and thus to a certain extent "J. Edgar Hoover's ideological kinsmen."
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A Hoover biographer, investigative reporter Hank Messick, carries the idea even further, declaring, "John Edgar Hoover has received support, as well as more tangible rewards, from right-wing businessmen who, in turn, have dealt directly and indirectly with organized crime figures who have not been disturbed by John Edgar Hoover."
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However, the Fried-Messick theses may be granting a depth to Hoover's motivations that was not really there. The more standard view is that Hoover simply was too afraid to go after the Mafia and organized crime and rationalized this fear by claiming: 1) the problem didn't exist and 2) (falsely) that his agency lacked the authorization to do anything anyway. This so the argument goes, suffices to explain his reluctance to war on the syndicate.
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Additionally, Hoover regarded some members of organized crime as "ideological kinsmen" for reasons other than what Fried states. He once told Frank Costello in the Stork Club, "Just stay out of my bailiwick" and that he in turn would stay out of his. Costello's bailiwick was gambling. Hoover, an inveterate horseplayer, was very tolerant of that activity and said, "The FBI has much more important functions to accomplish than arresting gamblers all over the country." Only to Hoover was it not apparent that with the end of Prohibition, gambling became the chief source of revenue to organized crime, the grease that kept the mob's other rackets functioningeverything from buying protection from the law to financing enormous narcotics enterprisesand murder.
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Hoover's morning-noon-and-night devotion to duty has always been a bit exaggerated; within the FBI his disappearances in the afternoon were legendary. He and his lifelong sidekick Clyde Tolson would head for a bulletproof car in the courtyard of the Department of Justice after announcing they were off to work on a case. Actually, they would be on their way to make the first race at Bowie, Pimlico, Charleston, Laurel, Havre de Gracewherever the bangtails were running. Hoover's preoccupation with the races became so pronounced that he was frequently photographed at the $2 window and had a form letter that was sent out to irate citizens objecting to his wagering. (He said he was really only interested in the improvement of the breed and only bet $2 now and then so as not to embarrass his hosts.)
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In truth, Hoover played the role of decoy at the $2 window. As Sullivan stated, and others have confirmed, "He had agents assigned to accompany him to the track place his real bets at the hundred-dollar window, and when he won he was a pleasure to work with for days."
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But nobody seemed more determined to keep Hoover happy than the boys in the mob. A happy Hoover was not likely to destroy gamblers and syndicate criminals, and so the mob developed a technique to stroke the FBI kingpin. The key in this operation was Costello and a mutual friend, gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hoover got horse tips from Winchell who got them from Costello who, in turn, got them from Frank Erickson, the nation's leading bookmaker. The tips were on "sure things," a term that does not connote in mob vernacular the best horse in a race as much as the one who was going to win. Erickson and Costello spelled sure thing: "F-I-X."
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