Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cowboys: Gus T. Jones, the San Antonio SAC, and Doc White’s older brother, an ex-Ranger named Thomas White, the Oklahoma City SAC.
    Hoover’s reorganization transformed the Bureau. Unproductive field offices were closed. Bureaucracy was streamlined. A chain of command was drawn. Paperwork was standardized. After six months the Bureau was on its way to becoming the very model of a modern, efficient government organization. The “interim” was removed from Hoover’s title. Once the Bureau was retooled, the challenge became finding something for its agents to do. In Hoover’s first six years his men spearheaded a corruption investigation at the federal prison in Atlanta and a probe of murders and oil-rights thievery on Indian lands in Oklahoma. They were minor cases, all run by the Cowboys; Tom White handled the Atlanta and Oklahoma investigations. When White was named warden at Leavenworth in 1927, Hoover summoned Gus Jones to supervise a vain attempt to capture a set of high-profile escapees.
    On all these cases Hoover’s men did the legwork but stepped aside when it was time to make arrests, sometimes to the snickers of police. “I can remember [calling] policemen when a wanted fugitive is at such-and-such place,” Hugh Clegg recalled. “The policeman will tell me, ‘Well, you guard the back and I’ll go in the front. You don’t have a gun, so I’ll go in.’ I’ve stood at the back door of a house, had [only a] brickbat in my hand, hoping that [the fugitive] would not come out that way . . . If he’d come out shooting, I had no defense at all, no weapons, no offensive weapons, and you’re just at his mercy.” 3
    Hoover’s role was strictly administrative. He seldom left Washington, where he worked from an office decorated with fine Chinese antiques. In the spring of 1933, while billing himself as the nation’s leading law-enforcement expert, Hoover himself had never made an arrest, much less fired a gun in anger. The SACs ran the investigations, Hoover peering over their shoulders, firing off memos at anything he disliked. He and Pop Nathan could be scathing in their appraisals. Privately both knew they had few competent men. “I believe that the trouble with many of our offices is that our Agents in Charge are somewhat foggy mentally,” Nathan wrote in a memo to Hoover in June 1932. “Or at any rate they function slowly along mental lines.” 4
    Like any good civil servant, Hoover made certain the public knew how well he was doing. He gave speeches and occasional newspaper interviews, emphasizing the Bureau’s integrity and its devotion to what he called “scientific policing,” based on fingerprints and evidentiary analysis. Not all the press was receptive. A 1933 article in Collier’s characterized the Bureau as Hoover’s “personal and political machine. More inaccessible than presidents, he [keeps] his agents in fear and awe by firing and shifting them at whim; no other government agency had such a turnover of personnel.” It was the Collier’s article that first hinted at Hoover’s Achilles’ heel, the rumors of his sexual orientation. “In appearance Mr. Hoover looks utterly unlike the story-book sleuth,” it noted. “He dresses fastidiously, with Eleanor blue as the favored color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks . . . He is short, fat, businesslike, and walks with mincing step.”
    After eight years of pursuing minor crimes, Hoover’s first opportunity to perform on the national stage came in June 1932, with the passage of the Lindbergh Law, three months after the kidnapping (and subsequent murder) of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son in Hopewell, New Jersey. The new law made kidnapping a federal crime but only where the kidnapper or his victim had crossed a state border. The Lindbergh kidnapping spawned a rash of copycat crimes throughout 1932, but to Hoover’s frustration, none of the kidnappings fell in his domain.
    But as word spread in the underworld of