Exerpt from J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, by Curt Gentry, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1991)

Saturday mornings there was usually little activity in Apalachin, New York, a small village located in the mountains just north of the Pennsylvania state line, and even less so in the hills outside of town where the New York state trooper Edgar Croswell was parked, but November 14, 1957, was an exception. As Croswell watched, one long, black limousine after another disappeared through the gates of the large, secluded estate of Joseph Barbara, Sr. In Apalachin one such vehicle was an oddity. But Croswell had counted five in the last couple of hours -- all Lincolns or Cadillacs, all with out-of-state plates, and all with the same destination. It was enough to make a man curious.

Although he had no reason to suspect that Barbara was anything more than what he appeared to be -- a Canada Dry soft-drink distributor -- Croswell had run a check on him shortly after he'd purchased the property, on hearing that he carried a gun, and had found that Barbara had a Pennsylvania rap sheet with more than a dozen arrests, including two for murder, but only minor convictions and none in recent years.

Now the limousines. And the butcher's comment that Barbara had placed a special order for an unusually large number of prime steaks. Plus the block of reservations at a local motel, in Barbara's name, which he'd noticed while checking the register during a bad-check investigation. In his mind he tried to fit the pieces together, only to find the interlocking parts still missing. Ed Croswell couldn't abide unsolved puzzles.

Having no evidence that a crime had been committed, he couldn't raid Barbara's ]ionic. But there was a way he could satisfy his curiosity about the identity of his guests. Under the state motor vehicle laws, Croswell could stop any vehicle on a public roadway and require its occupants to produce valid identification. Since there was only one road to the estate, he need only block it, then wait. Figuring that the limousines would depart as they'd arrived, separately, he wouldn't even need many men, and so he radioed for only a backup car and three deputies. They were just setting up the roadblock when they heard a deafening roar and looked up to see bearing down on them not five but dozens of limousines.

A deliveryman from the village had only to mention the word "police" when Barbara's house seemed to explode, more than fifty men flying out the doors and windows. Many made for the cars and fell into Croswell's trap. Others took to the fields and sank knee deep in mud. One man (later identified as a Buffalo city councilman) was caught astraddle a barbed wire fence. When finally noticed by a deputy, he seemed more concerned about damage to his camel's hair coat than to his private parts. The deputy boosted him over, then, as soon as his feet touched ground on the other side, pointed to a nearby NO TRESPASSING sign and placed him under arrest.

Only those wise enough to stay where they were (some forty in all, including the entire Chicago delegation) avoided being questioned, although several were later identified through motel registration cards or auto rental forms.

As for the others, a total of sixty-three were rounded tip, identified, and released. Of that number, sixty-two were active or retired "businessmen" of Italian extraction (the single exception being one of Barbara's servants, who'd run when everyone else did). When asked the reason for their presence at Apalachin, most said they'd heard Barbara wasn't feeling well and bad decided to visit him. It was just coincidence that all had arrived on the same day.

J. Edgar Hoover discovered the existence of the Mafia the next morning when, with his cairn terriers nipping at his heels, he reached down and retrieved the Sunday paper from his front steps.

Since even the top brass were expected to work at least part of Saturday (most did so of necessity, in a vain attempt to keep up with the work load), Sunday was the only day with their families. Not this Sunday.

Breakfast left unfinished, they converged on Justice, to find the situation even worse than expected.According to a headquarters official of the time, the FBI not only had no idea the hoodlums were going to meet but didn't even know who they were.

Vito Genovese, Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Carmine Galante, Thomas Lucchese (New York City); John Scalisi (Cleveland); Stefano Magaddino (Buffalo); Joseph Zerilli (Detroit); James Lanza (San Francisco); Frank DeSimone (Los Angeles); Joseph Civello (Dallas); Santos Trafficante (Miami/ Havana) -- to none were these and the other fifty three names more foreign than to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For over three decades, the director had assured the country that there was no such thing as a nationwide criminal organization. If the newspaper accounts were correct -- and Hoover was far from conceding that -- someone was at fault for not informing him of the true facts. And that person was obviously the head of the investigative division -- Assistant Director Al Belmont.

Belmont, who was undoubtedly guilty of repeating the director's own pronouncements, admitted he alone deserved censure; his men had nothing to do with it.

But there was blame enough to share. Most of the director's choicest invectives were hurled at the former head of Crime Records. But Lou Nichols, the first Judas, was twelve days on the safe side of retirement. The truth was, he badly needed Nichols, for this was a public relations crisis of major magnitude. But not only had Nichols deserted him; he was now working for a man many believed to be linked with the underworld. 1

Nor did the pressure lessen. In addition to the jackals of the press, Joseph Kennedy's arrogant young son Robert, the chief counsel of Senator McClellan's racket committee, had stormed in, without an appointment, demanding everything the Bureau had on the hoods.

Nor did it help Hoover's mood to learn that after leaving the FBI, Kennedy and the reporters had gone straight to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where Harry Anslinger had given them armloads of dossiers and reports. 2

The FBI's official response that this was a local problem and should behandled by the local police hardly satisfied the press, which pointed out that every part of the country, from the East Coast to the West, had been represented at Apalachin.

In reality FBIHQ was stalling, while desperately trying to get more information which it could release. Urgent telexes were sent to the major field offices (Albany and Buffalo each claimed that Apalachin was in the other's jurisdiction), but most reported back that the query must be in error since the subject was a local businessman, either respectable or retired or both. Joseph Civello of Dallas, for example, was described as "a counselor to the Italian community at large."

So desperate was Hoover that he called in his section chiefs and asked if they had any ideas. William Sullivan, who headed Research and Analysis, had one. What if lie pulled his best people off their other assignments and had them prepare a study of the Mafia? Hoover gratefully grabbed the suggestion, ordering him to make it top priority.

The result, which wasn't completed until the fall of 1958, was a two-volume monograph, one volume devoted to the history of the Mafia in Italy, the other dealing with its arrival and evolution in the United States.

Immensely proud of the efforts of his staff -- who had found and summarized over two hundred books on an organization that J. Edgar Hoover had long maintained did not exist -- Sullivan sent the monograph, plus a five-page synopsis, to the director, via Boardman, who then occupied the number three spot. Noting that he would review the monograph when he had time, Boardman passed on the summary to the director, who immediately responded favorably with the blue-ink notation "The point has been missed. It is not now necessary to read the two volume monograph to know that the Mafia does exist in the United States."

Delighted that he had finally convinced Hoover that there was indeed a Mafia, Sullivan ordered distribution of the monograph. Twenty-five copies were sent out just before noon. As usual, Hoover and Tolson lunched at the Mayflower. On their return, the director started reading the monograph and accompanying paperwork and discovered something very disturbing. The study not only proved that the Mafia existed in the United States; it established that it had been operating during all the decades when he had denied its existence. To make the situation even worse, copies had been sent to other agencies in the Justice Department, including Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Ordered to "retrieve them at once," Sullivan sent agents scurrying through the building, pulling copies out of in baskets and, in at least one instance, yanking one from the hands of an assistant attorney general. Sullivan's monumental study was suppressed, and no one outside the FBI ever read it.

But by the time the Sullivan study had been completed, the FBI was already very much involved in the investigation of organized crime, albeit surreptitiously.

In November of 1957, just days after the Apalachin story broke, Hoover had ordered the Top Hoodlum Program inaugurated, each of the field offices being required to identify the ten major hoodlums in their jurisdiction. Although this caused some problems -- some field offices had a surfeit to pick and choose from, some had none, and some, such as New Orleans and Dallas, continued to maintain, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that there was no Mafia in their area -- information now began to arrive at FBIHQ in such quantity that subcategories had to be established to file it.

But none was more important than that provided by a group of Young Turks in Chicago.

The single bug they requested, for which no one really expected authorization, would be the progentitor of the most massive electronic intelligence effort in the history of the FBI. Not only would it give J. Edgar Hoover undreamed-of power over the political processes of the United States; it would also assure him a lifetime lease on his job.

The Chicago SAC, Martin Johnson, who was only a little taller than his never mentioned predecessor Little Mel Purvis, happened to have a group of restless young agents who were bored with paperwork and security checks and wanted something, anything, that would take them out on the streets. So when the Top Hoodlum Program was established, Johnson assigned them to it.

They were not only young but also naive. And, oddly enough, it helped.

For example, Special Agent Fred Hill was assigned to follow Marshall Caifano, one of the most respected, that is, feared, senior members of the Chicago syndicate. 3 With more arrests on his rap sheet than Hill had birthdays, Caifano quickly spotted his tail and, doubling back, confronted him, discovering, to his relief, that lie was only in FBI agent. He was wasting his time following him, Caifano advised Hill. He was mostly into gambling, books, joints, jukeboxes, a little juice, some protection, that kinda stuff, nothing that would interest Mr. Hoover.

What about his associates? Hill ventured; perhaps they'd be of more interest to the FBI.

Caifano, although far from a dummy, rattled off the names of some of the bosses, explained what their territories and activites were, and noted why they, too, were of no interest to the Bureau. The two parted amicably, Hill informing Caifano that he guessed he'd been misinformed.

Pooling the results of their surveillances, the agents realized that their subjects regularly frequented two establishments, the Armory Lounge, in the suburb of Forest Park, where Sam Giancana seemed to conduct most of his business, and a second-floor tailor shop on North Michigan Avenue, where many of the bosses -- Murray Humphreys, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Gus Alex, Giancana, and Caifano -- congregated in the mornings. If they could plant a listening device in either ...

Older and more cynical agents would have planted a "suicide" bug or tap, without authorization, but William F. Roemer, Jr., who headed the squad, went strictly by the book. First they had to prepare a feasibility survey, to determine whether the device could be installed, monitored, and removed "with security," that is, without risk of embarrassing the Bureau. Then there was the paperwork, coded telexes to FBIHQ requesting authorization, symbol assignments, equipment requisitions, and so on. As their first target, they picked the tailor shop, since the Armory was protected by the Forest Park police.

SAC Johnson was not optimistic, but, to the surprise of everyone concerned, authorization came right through. The director was under fire from Congress, tile White House, and the press-he was also stonewalling the McClellan committee, as well as a special group on organized crime that AG Rogers had set up -- and he was anxious to obtain any information he could get. However, installing the bug was another matter. Filially, early on a Sunday morning, the agents managed to get in and despite a few problems -- one SA slipped in the crawl space between two floors and almost went through the ceiling of the downstairs restaurant -- managed to plant the bug. 4

When Bill Roemer later declared, "One microphone was worth a thousand agents," he was talking about the bug in the tailor shop. This single-microphone surveillance, which remained in place undetected for five years, would teach the FBI more about organized crime than all the generations of bugs it sired.

Names, dates, amounts. Judges, senators, congressmen, mayors, policemen. Murders, robberies, scams, voting frauds. According to William Brashler, the Chicago agents "heard from the hoods' own lips who had the power and how it was distributed, who put the fix in and where it was put, what decisions were made and who was affected, who had the solutions. They heard stories, anecdotes, family problems, even a history of mob decisions as told with relish by Murray Humphreys."

Humphreys, who was known as "the Camel" or "the Hump," was the legal tactician of the Chicago syndicate and one of the mob's greatest political fixers. And it was from Humphreys's own words that J. Edgar Hoover found the solution to an old mystery: how the former attorney general, and current Supreme Court justice, Tom Clark had been bribed to grant parole to the four Chicago Mafia leaders in 1947.

Never one to let modesty get in the way of a good story, Humphreys admitted having masterminded the fix, observing that the attorney general had been "100 percent for doing favors," but that after the parole scandal broke, "you couldn't get through for nothing."

The fix was twofold, Humphrey explained. There were other indictments pending against a couple of the men: to get the paroles through, these first had to be dismissed. This had been handled by Maury Hughes, a Dallas lawyer who was a close friend and former law partner of Tom Clark. Hughes was "the guy who went to him [Attorney General Clark]," Humphreys said. Paul Dillon, a St. Louis lawyer who had been associated with the Truman campaign in Missouri, had arranged the paroles. The money -- Humphreys didn't mention the amount, only that there had been "a lot of it" -- had changed hands in Chicago's Stevens Hotel.

Not content with the logs of the conversation, Hoover ordered the tape flown directly to him in Washington. 5

Once the FBI director began receiving the logs of the tailor shop bug, the young Chicago agents could do no wrong. Their requests for more bugs -- for the Armory Lounge, the homes of Giancana and the leading Mafiosi, the politically important First Ward Democratic headquarters across the street from city hall -- were granted almost as soon as they were submitted. As word spread via the grapevine, other SACs put in requests. By the fall of 1959 the information thus recovered had become so rich and varied that the FBI director was begging his special agents in charge to put in more bugs.

From the MISURs, the FBI learned how organized crime operated on the local level, sometimes in gory detail. Favorite murders were discussed, the agents learning where the bodies were buried, literally. "Sealed," they discovered, meant the homicide victim had been boarded up in all unused building, "double boxing" was used to refer to a funeral home in Niagara Falls, New York, whose owner was too cheap to buy a crematorium and instead used one coffin for two bodies. Much of the information recovered was local -- speaking of the Chicago Police Advisory Board, one mobster remarked, "There's five of them and we got three," and then named them -- but often there would be startling glimpses of the overview, the bigger picture. For example, one FBI report stated, "CH-T-1 advised in September 1959 of the existence of a small group of persons representing groups in various sections of the United States and referred to as 'The Commission'" CH-T-1 was the Chicago tailor shop bug; the person overheard was Sam Giancana, a member of the commission; and September 1959 was two years and nine months before Robert F. Kennedy learned this same information from the informer Joseph Valachi.

Hoover had not only leaped ahead of Kennedy, as far as inside information on organized crime was concerned; much of the intelligence he obtained wasn't even known to Harry Anslinger of the FBN.

Because of the bugs, old crimes were solved and new ones sometimes prevented. But these weren't Hoover's principal concerns. A clue as to what material most interested him call be found in a 1959 SAC letter. He especially wanted information on political tie-ups with crime; police efficiency; and political control and domination of police agencies. Of the three, the first was deemed the most important.

Within twenty-four hours after FBI wiretaps and bugs were installed in Hot Springs, Arkansas, one of the state's leading politicians -- and one of J. Edgar Hoover's most powerful supporters -- was heard taking payoffs from an organized crime figure. From the bug on Giancana's home, Sam was heard calling "his congressman" off the floor of the House. With the information obtained from this massive, secret intelligence campaign, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would neutralize one U.S. senator (Edward Long of Louisiana), destroy another (Cornelius Gallagher of New Jersey), hear talk of assassinating a president and an attorney general of the United States (John F. and Robert F. Kennedy), and obtain enough blackmail material to persuade another chief executive (Richard M. Nixon) to extend his tenure as FBI director. All this long before the Kennedys would claim that they had "forced" J, Edgar Hoover to recognize the existence of organized crime.

Notes:

 

1 Nichols did call, to ask if he could help during the "crisis," but Hoover refused to take his calls.

2 Robert Kennedy later recalled, "After the meeting at Apalachin, which 70 people attended, I asked for files on each of [them] and they didn't have any information, I think, on 40." And what information they did have, Kennedy said, consisted mostly of newspaper clippings, in contrast to the FBN, which "had something on every one of them. The FBI didn't know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States."

3 As the young agents soon learned, no one who belonged to the Mafia ever referred to it as such: it was usually Cosa Nostra, or "Our Thing." Regional names also differed. In Chicago the local organization was the outfit, the syndicate, or the arm. In Cleveland it was the combination (because Jews and Greeks were allowed in). In Kansas City, it was the combination or the syndicate. In New England, the office. In Philadelphia, the big boys or the Italian club.

4 Usually while a break-in was in progress, an agent would sit with the police dispatcher to make sure no prowler calls went out over the radio, but in Chicago they couldn't trust the police.

5 From listening to the bugged conversations, the agents developed a fondness for the Hump, who was often heard to say, "Good morning, gentlemen, and anyone listening. This is the nine o'clock meeting of the Chicago underworld." Unlike Giancana, whose every other word was profane, Humphreys never swore. In addition to having "perhaps the most brilliant mob mind in Chicago," as William Brashler has put it, he was also a marvelous raconteur. Although Welsh, not Italian, he played the role of the old-world Sicilian Mustache Pete to perfection. Murray Humphreys died of a heart attack shortly after being arrested by the same agents.