WATCH
THE FBN AND THE MAFIA
by Ed Magnuson
Until 1963 the private and public position of J Edgar Hoover, the Director of the largest and most powerful law enforcement agency in the United States, was that the Mafia did not exist. Hoover's self-induced blind spot had many reasons, including a relationship with Frank Costello, the so-called Prime Minister of the Underworld... a relationship based on Hoover's veritable addiction to horse racing. Costello has been documented as once saying, "The horse races! You'll never know how many races I had to fix for those lousy $10 bets of Hoover's."
In his first two decades in office, 1924-1944, Hoover created a an FBI which couldn't be corrupted. But he must have also known that organized crime in America had grown immensely prosperous during Prohibition, a situation which put it in a position to buy cops, politicians, even judges and police commissioners at will. And Hoover did not want to expose his agents to the temptations of the flesh. Instead, he wanted them free from mob entanglements so they could probe his favorite domestic enemy, the Communists. In 1959 the Bureau's largest and most active office, New York, had a grand total of 4 agents investigating organized crime while at the same time 400 were assigned to investigate such earthshaking matters as whether the head of the American Communist Party drove an automobile or took a subway to party headquarters.
Hoover was also very publicity conscious... and therefore went after criminals not affiliated with organized crime whose spectacular captures were guaranteed to make front page headlines. The bureau's "Public Enemy Number 1" were the likes of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson, William Sullivan. the Bureau's number two man under Hoover, wrote in his memoirs, "The whole of the FBI's main thrust was not investigation hut public relations and propaganda designated to glorify its director."
However, the much smaller Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was under no such delusion about Hoover's non-existent Mafia. In the period 1956 to 1964, 206 Mafiosi were convicted for trafficking in heroin... the most notable being Mafia boss Vito Genovese. In his article "MAFIA, THE PROTOTYPICAL ALIEN CONSPIRACY," Professor Dwight Smith wrote, "For 17 years the Bureau labored to produce a receptive mood toward a criminal threat and convincing set of facts that would re-establish 'Mafia' in the public eye."
And in 1963, the labors of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics did just that in the person of Joe Valachi. In the eyes of the Mafia, Valachi's road to perdition began when he was arrested for selling heroin.
While incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Valachi walked across the exercise yard, grabbed a hunk of pipe, and bludgeoned a fellow inmate to death. When asked to explain the assault, authorities got more than they ever dreamed of. Valachi had mistaken his victim for a man he thought his cellmate, Vito Genovese, had ordered to kill him... Genovese could order any man killed because he was the Capo Di Tutti Capi (boss of all bosses) of the Mafia.
Soon Valachi was spinning his tale for the Attorney General of the United States and before the senate McClellan Committee. Valachi named hundred of organized criminals and ID'd their status in the Mafia, which he said was called La Cosa Nostra, or, "our thing." His testimony gave law enforcement and the public its first clear picture of what the country was up against... a thoroughly organized and vicious criminal cartel.
Valachi's testimony about his 30 years of crime pushed Republicans to a law and order campaign in 1964 and prompted the victorious Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, to announce a war on crime that would include a Presidential Commission or Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which would appoint a special Task Force on organized crime.
In 1967, the Task Force issued its report. Congress was urged to adopt many anti-organized crime weapons and over the next 3 years many were. Special federal Organized Crime Strike Forces were formed in cities run by a Mafia family. Wiretapping and other electronic surveillance methods were legalized under certain conditions. Prosecutors were given the power to impanel grand juries and immunize witnesses. Finally, a sweeping new law, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act was past.
RICO, the greatest weapon the FBI had ever had against the Mafia, was born from the testimony of Joe Valachi, a Mafia drug dealer arrested by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when the FBI's official position was that there was no such thing as the MAFIA!
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Answers By Our Founding Fathers
I have been told that DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine and other select members of his staff are not big promoters of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and, in fact, would like nothing better than to have it abolished.
Why? Because they are of the self-serving opinion that institutions which utilize impartial finders of the fact to resolve difficult personnel problems are only manipulating their sacred system by uncovering such "loopholes" as unfairness, discrimination, and illegality.
In DEA WATCH's crusade for the Holy Grail the Truth this writer went back in history to find it. The 200 year old Federalist Papers, combined essays written to combat the philosophy of anti-federalism, provided answers which can be applied today.
Why do we need institutions like MSPB, EEO, and the courts?
Answer by James Madison: "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm... If men were angels, no government would be necessary... If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
Answer by Alexander Hamilton: "... men are ambitious vindictive, rapacious... Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."
Is it just to have a higher authority review the internal actions of a governmental agency?
Answer by Alexander Hamilton: "There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the terror of the commission under which it is exercised, is void... To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above the master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize but what they forbid."
Should government employees speak out about opinions and actions they disagree with?
Answer by James Madison: "If it be true that all governments rest on opinion, it is no less true that the strength of opinion in each individual, and the practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which ho supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when left atone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is associated."
Are impartial finders of the fact really necessary?
Answer by James Madison: "It is true that in controversies... the tribunal which is ultimately to decide is to he established under the general government. But this does not change the principle of the case. The decision is to be impartially made according to the rules... and all the usual and most effective precautions are taken to secure this impartiality. Some such tribunal is clearly essential to prevent an appeal to the sword and a dissolution of the compact..."
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had a particular vision of what human beings were really like and the necessity for safeguards against any one leader or institution having too much power. However, bureaucrats thrive on power, the more they have, the better they like it. And that is the reason why Administrator Constantine and his select few are not ardent supporters of MSPB, EEO and the courts.