While no one dared discuss it while he was alive, Hoover was a bad example of a lawman. A closet homosexual (although claims he was a transvestite are probably untrue), he authorized illegal wiretapping and surveillance bugs on innocent people, as well as suspects, and maintained continuing dossiers on everybody who was anybody—all of which made him the 20th century’s poster boy for rampant abuse of power. His underhanded tactics of officially documenting what he knew to be lies about prominent people—followed by threats of publication if they didn’t back away from the current issue at hand—became well known throughout the political circles of Washington.
It was precisely these tactics used by Hoover to destroy and later jail New Jersey Rep. Cornelius Gallagher—who persisted after being warned—in his investigation into the FBI’s ability to spy on Americans. Rep. Gallagher began hearings on the topic in the 1960s.
After creating a scenario of affiliation with the local New Jersey mob, the FBI broke into the congressman’s home, stole his personal stationery and forged documents connecting Rep. Gallagher to local Mafia chieftain Joe Zicarelli. They also forged telephone tapes of Rep. Gallagher talking with Zicarelli and succeeded in getting Life magazine to publish a false story about it. Agents warned Rep. Gallagher’s lawyer that unless the congressman resigned, Life would print a story that a New Jersey gambler had died of a heart attack at Gallagher’s home while in bed with his wife.
Today’s legalized payoffs to lying witnesses would have made Hoover deliriously happy.
Hoover was so compromised by New York mobsters that for decades he denied the Mafia even existed. This control apparently went back to the late 1920s when the director had been arrested on homosexuality charges in New Orleans. He was able to keep the news suppressed, but could not keep the information out of the hands of the laughing mob, and each agreed to leave the other alone, with mutual benefits.
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