Rumors of homosexuality and cross-dressing followed Hoover from his earliest days in government. He never married and he lived with his best friend, confidant, and assistant at the FBI, Clyde Tulson, for decades, sparking rumors of a gay relationship. Hoover spent virtually all of his waking hours with Tulson, working with him at the FBI, eating lunch with him, and even vacationing with him. As reported in the book, Official and Confidential, multiple witnesses came forward in the years after Hoover's death, claiming to have witnessed him holding hands or cuddling with Tulson. But these reports were 30 plus years old at the time they were published, making corroboration all but impossible. Hoover frequented the Del Mar racetrack for relaxation and was described as a regular attendee, often placing high bets through companions, including FBI agents, to avoid being seen making large wagers for himself. He even brought Clyde Tulson with him. Hoover was very successful in his bets.
Seymour Pollock - In Official and Confidential, powerful Jewish mobster, Meyer Lansky's associate, Seymour Pollock, was quoted as saying: "Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter, and verse. One night when we were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornado, we were talking about Hoover and Meyer laughed and said, 'I fixed that son of a bitch didn't I?'... The homosexual thing was Hoover's Achilles heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people."
As for Summers' source for these details, Seymour Pollock, there's precious little information in the public record about him, except for, ironically, an FBI memo identifying Pollock as an FBI informant on the mafia. But the fact that the bureau apparently considered Pollock a legitimate source of information on Meyer Lansky's horse racing interests well before he became a source for Summers' book suggests at the very least that Pollock could plausibly have been in a position to know the details of Lansky's blackmail on Hoover.
Ash Resnik - According to the same book, in 1971, pro basketball player and Patriarca crime family associate, Irving ''Ash'' Resnik and an associate talked with writer Pete Hamill in the Galleria bar at Caesar's Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as the man who nailed Jay Edgar Hoover: ''When I asked what they meant, they told Meyer Lansky had some pictures. Pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tulson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures and he had made his deal with Hoover to lay off. That was the reason that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI.''
John Weitz - In Official and Confidential, Summers quotes a former OSS officer named John Weitz, who claimed he'd attended a dinner party in the 1950s at which CIA head of Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton had shown him a photo of Hoover engaging in a sex act with Tulson: ''After a conversation about Hoover, our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. Angleton said the men were Hoover and Tulson.''
The source for this anecdote was John Weitz, a wealthy Jewish refugee from Nazi era Germany who worked for the OSS during WWII and went on to become a successful textile manufacturer, author, and race car driver in the US. Given his OSS connections, it's entirely plausible that Whites and Angleton at least knew each other, making this one of the more credible anecdotes of its kind.
Gordon Novel - In a separate interview for the same book, a CIA contractor and electronics expert named Gordon Novel claimed that he too had been shown compromising photos of Hoover: ''What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tuson a blowjob, more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover's head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tulson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me. I was pursuing a lawsuit against New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop, but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I've been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tulson, sitting in the RIB room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs and that Angleton had sent me, Tulson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, 'Get the hell out of here.' And I did. Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946. At the time, they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got.''
Bill Bonano - According to mobster Bill Bonano's autobiography, Bound by Honor: ''Whom can we count on as a friend? 'Roy Cohn mentioned Jagger Hoover, but I said that Hoover no longer seemed reliable to me or to anyone else. He waved a hand. 'You know how many FBI agents are assigned to organized crime? About half a dozen,' he said. I was as aware as anyone that for years Hoover had followed a hands-off policy towards us. But times had changed, I told Cohn. Anyone could see that. Ever since Velachi, Hoover, like everyone else, had had to go along with the tide. He hates Bobby, Con said matter-of-factly. You know, he still won't use the term mafia. He has an active professional stake in believing there's no such thing. Want to show you guys something? he said, getting up from his huge desk and strutting into another room from which he returned in a moment carrying a manila folder. Ever see these? He said, untying the stay and removing a batch of photos. There were seven or eight of them. Most were 5x7 shots. A couple were 8x10 photos. They were all pictures of Hoover in women's clothing. His face was dobbed with lipstick and makeup, and he wore a wig of ringlets. In several of the photos, he posed alone, smiling, even mugging for the camera. In a few other photos, he was sitting on the lap of an unidentified male, stroking his cheek in one, hugging him in another, holding a morsel of food before his mouth in yet another. Louie [meaning Lewis Rosensteel], took most of these, Con said at a party on a houseboat in the Keys, 1948, 1949. I think there are one or two others taken earlier, maybe in the 30s. Who knows? Hoover knows about these. Believe me, he's always been aware of what would happen if they ever got out.''
Roy Cohn - (((Roy Cohn))) was a homosexual mob lawyer, later disbarred, and political fixer, who rose to prominence as one of the mid-20th century's preeminent red baiters, prosecuting the nuclear spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets and working under Senator Joe McCarthy to expose suspected communists in what came to be known as the second red scare; he was also Trump's Mentor.
After McCarthy's fall from grace, Cohn remained a fixture in conservative politics, maintaining relationships with figures like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and, of course, Trump, among others, while working as a lawyer and ruthless political operative. In the 1960s, Cohn was repeatedly charged with serious felonies, including extortion, blackmail, bribery, securities fraud, conspiracy, and witness tampering, winning acquittals in every case.
Cohn was simultaneously deeply enmeshed in the New York City underworld, acting as a lawyer and consultant for various mobsters at the same time that he was advising multiple powerful Republican politicians, former CIA director William Casey and then New York mayor, Abraham Beam, among others, until 1986 when Cohn was finally disbarred for stealing from clients and falsifying records, dying later that same year from AIDS.
Lewis Rosensteel, on the other hand, was an extremely wealthy mafia affiliated businessman who'd made his fortune in the liquor business in the wake of prohibition. In his forward-facing biographical claims, Rosensteel said that he'd had a hunch in the early 30s that prohibition was coming to an end, so, he'd opportunistically invested in the infrastructure to mass-produce and distribute different types of alcoholic drinks before the ban was lifted, putting himself in a position to corner the market once prohibition ended. Then, when the 18th amendment was repealed, Rosensteel's bet paid off, making him one of the biggest players in the nascent American alcohol industry, and he would later consolidate his various business holdings under the name, Shenley Industries.
It's been widely speculated that given Rosensteel's mafia connections, the story about buying abandoned distilleries and alcohol production equipment was probably self-mythologizing, and rather than sitting around waiting for prohibition to end, Rosensteel had really started out bootlegging liquor for the mafia in the northeast and simply continued these operations when they became legal. Regardless of the true source of Rosensteel's wealth, it is beyond dispute that he was at the very least on friendly terms with both the mafia and J. Edgar Hoover, attending parties with the FBI director, hiring his underlings for jobs at his company, and even donating a million dollars to establish the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation while simultaneously maintaining deep connections with organized crime. Roy Cohn was perhaps even closer to Hoover, consulting him for advice when he was a lawyer at the Justice Department and attending private celebrations in his honor. Hoover was the one who had recommended Cohn when Senator McCarthy was looking for a chief counsel for his hearings on communist subversion; the two remained both political allies and private friends.
John Klotz - John Klotz, the New York lawyer, allegedly became privy to information about the blackmail ring when he was retained by a former client and lover of Roy Cohn's in the early 1980s to defend him against harassment charges initiated by Cohn. As part of his defense strategy, Klotz hired private investigators to look into Cohn's personal life. And according to Klotz, as quoted in the book, Bobby and J. Edgar by Burton Hersh, his investigators discovered gay orgies hosted by Cohn where powerful men could mingle with young prostitutes at a hotel in New York: ''Roy Cohen was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from, blackmail.'' This quotation appears in both the Hersh and Whitney Webb books, but unfortunately neither of them tell us what exactly Klotz saw that led him to this conclusion. To be fair, in the actual quotes we have from Klotz, he did not explicitly claim to have seen any blackmail material himself.
Susan Rosensteel - Susan Rosensteel's testimony, was first published in 1993 in Anthony Summers's book about Hoover, Official and Confidential. Susan was Lewis Rosensteel's fourth wife, who married him at the height of his wealth in power, and personally witnessed his interactions with mobsters, including Meyer Lansky. According to Susan, her ex-husband's relationship with Hoover was more extensive than had been previously reported. Hoover frequently flew on Rosensteel's private plane and placed bets on horse races through Rosensteel, where if Hoover won, Rosensteel would pay out, but if he lost, the debt was forgiven immediately. In return, Rosensteel would lean on Hoover to put in a good word with judges when he was involved in litigation or needed an associate freed from jail. Hoover also helped Rosensteel with lobbying efforts. By Susan's telling, Rosensteel hired Hoover's influence man on Capitol Hill, Lewis Nichols, to help secure a change in alcohol tax laws that would save his company some $45M. Susan claimed she was present at a meeting in New York between Hoover, Rosensteel, Roy Cohn and their associates, at which Hoover helped coordinate the bribes that would be paid to sitting congressmen, including the notoriously corrupt Senator Lyndon Johnson and Representative Emanuel Celler for successfully shepherding the bill through both houses of Congress.
But her most scandalous revelations were about attending Roy Cohn's orgies in the Blue Suite at the Plaza Hotel with her husband and J. Edgar Hoover. Susan Rosensteel's previous marriage had collapsed because her first husband was predominantly homosexual; now she concluded she had made a similar mistake. Lewis Rosensteel seemed little interested in having sex with her, but went to great expense to have her dress up in clothes that made her look like a little girl. She discovered, meanwhile, that he enjoyed sex with men. One day, Susan recalled: "I came into my husband's bedroom and found him in bed with Roy Cohn. It was about 9:00 in the morning. I was shocked. Just shocked. He made some sort of joke about it being so he could be alone with his attorney. And I said, "I've never seen Governor Dewey in bed with you because Dewey was one of his attorneys, too." And I walked out. Sometime in 1958, probably in the spring, Rosensteel asked his wife whether while living in Paris with her previous husband, she had ever witnessed an orgy. A few weeks later, when Cohen was there, he commented that I was a regular and knew what life was, that my first husband had been gay and I must have understood because I'd stayed with him for 9 years. and they said, "How would I like to go to a party at the hotel plaza? But if it ever got out, it would be the most terrible thing in the world." I told them, "If you want to go, I'll go." Cohn said, "You're in for a big surprise." A few days later, Rosensteel took his wife to the plaza, the venerable hotel overlooking New York's Central Park. They entered through a side entrance and took an elevator to a suite on the second or third floor. She had the impression her husband had been there before. He knocked, Susan recalled, and Roy Cohn opened the door. It was a beautiful suite, one of their biggest, all done in light blue. Hoover was there already, and I couldn't believe what I saw. According to Mrs. Rosensteel, Edgar was dressed up as a woman in full drag. He was wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces and lace stockings and high heels and a black curly wig. He had makeup on and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his legs crossed. Roy introduced him to me as Mary, and he replied, "Good evening, Rusk." Like the first time I'd met him. It was obvious he wasn't a woman. You could see where he'd shaved. It was Hoover. You've never seen anything like it. I couldn't believe it. That I should see the head of the FBI dressed as a woman. I think it was about then that Roy muttered to me that Hoover didn't know that I knew who he was, that I'd think he was someone else. I certainly didn't address him the way I had at other times. As Mr. Hoover, I was afraid of my life by then. The next thing, a couple of boys come in, young blonde boys. I'd say about 18 or 19. And then Roy makes the signal we should go into the bedroom... Hoover takes off his lace dress and pants and under the dress he was wearing a little short guarder belt. He lies on the double bed and the two boys work on him with their hands. One of them wore rubber gloves. Then Rosensteel got into the act with the boys. I thought you disgusting old man. Hoover and Cohn were watching enjoying it. Then Cohn runs to get himself satisfied. Full sex with the two boys. Those poor boys. He couldn't get enough, but Hoover only had them, you know, playing with him. Rosensteel would not discuss Edgar's part in the evening's events, but Cohen later laughed about it. He said, "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?" A year later, according to Susan, Rosensteel asked her to accompany him to the plaza again. She agreed in return for an expensive pair of earrings from Harry Winston's, and the procedure was the same as on the previous occasion. Cohn ushered them into a suite to find Edgar, again, attired in female finery. His clothing this time was even more outlandish. He had a red dress on, Susan recalled, and a black feather boa around his neck. He was dressed like an old flapper like you see on old tin types. After about half an hour, some boys came like before. This time they're dressed in leather, and Hoover had a Bible. He wanted one of the boys to read from the Bible, and he read I forget which passage, and the other boy played with him, wearing the rubber gloves, and then Hoover grabbed the Bible, threw it down, and told the second boy to join in the sex.''
Susan Rosensteel has insisted she could not possibly have been mistaken that Edgar was definitely the man in the dress at the plaza. Her account remained consistent and she signed a sworn affidavit that it was true. She was permitted to witness Edgar and the others in such a situation; she surmised because they wanted a woman present: ''I guess it gave them some sort of extra thrill. And if I'd said anything, they'd have said I was crazy, that Hoover hadn't been there. It would have been my word against theirs and no one would have believed it.'' People who know Rosensteel say he was bisexual; Roy Cohn was indeed homosexual and regularly hired young male prostitutes. The facts of Edgar's life, meanwhile, fit the Plaza scenario well enough. He regularly traveled to New York City and without Clyde.
Former agent, John Dixon who served in New York during that period, often had the task of meeting Edgar when he arrived at Penn Station. After traveling alone from Washington, he would be taken by car to the Waldorf, his usual hotel, and then left to his own devices. Sexual adventuring was folly for Edgar and especially in the company of a man like Rosensteel. Several sources told the New York Crime Committee that Rosensteel had his Manhattan home wired from roof to basement with hidden microphones so that he could spy on visitors and staff. The man who installed the system, security consultant, Fred Otash, said it was rigged to tape conversations for hours on end. Conversations in the library where Edgar met with Rosensteel and his cronies were recorded as a matter of routine. The millionaire was quite capable of having the sex sessions at the plaza bugged or arranging for Edgar to be photographed in his female costumes. Meyer Lansky, who claimed Edgar was no threat, that he had been fixed, was Rosensteel's close associate. Mrs. Rosensteel quoted her husband as saying that: ''Because of Lansky and those people, we can always get Hoover to help us.'' The mobster's insurance policy, according to Associates, was photographic evidence of Edgar's homosexual activity. The evidence suggests that in the late 50s, at a difficult time for the mob, the episodes at the Plaza may have renewed that insurance. In the second edition of official and confidential, the author, Anthony Summers, added some additional sourcing that he discovered after the first edition had already been published: ''Susan Rosensteel mentioned to me that she had once possessed a photograph of Hoover in the company of her husband's mobster friends. That she did have such evidence was confirmed following publication of this book by Mary Nichols of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who met Mrs. Rosensteel years ago. She did have suitcases of photographs that she had hauled away from her marriage to Louis Rosensteel. "The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and Rosensteel at all sorts of social events with mobsters."
Elliot Roosevelt - Elliot Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asserted that his father knew about Hoover's homosexuality in the 1930s, but did not feel it was grounds for removing him from his directorship of the FBI so long as his abilities were not impaired.
The section about Susan is immediately followed by quotes from two anonymous witnesses totally unrelated to Rosensteel, who claimed that a fellow gay man in Washington DC had shown them close-up photos of Hoover on a bed while dressed as a woman in 1948, some 10 years before the photos from the alleged orgies in the Plaza Hotel were taken. The man who showed them the photos didn't say anything about blackmail. They were presented in more of a 'look at this crazy thing I have' kind of context.
Presumably, this anecdote was included to make Susan's story sound more convincing. But if true, that would bring us to a total of at least three or four different sets of blackmail photos of Hoover: a single indistinct photo taken from far away that James Angleton showed to John Whites in the 1950s; a set of photos, including a clear close-up shot of Hoover's head taken with a special lens in 1946, which Angleton showed to Gordon Novel in 1966, possibly from the same photo set; the photos of Hoover in drag posing on a bed seen by two anonymous gay men in 1948; and the 1958 photos of Hoover at the Blue Suite orgies.
But logically, it seems like every true case of blackmail against Hoover would make the other allegations less likely to be true, not more. Hoover was by all accounts paranoid, reputation obsessed, and especially sensitive to allegations of homosexuality. If he was getting blackmailed with compromising photos of himself in 1948 and then 10 years later in 1958, he's hanging out at a gay orgy and someone whips out a camera, is it really plausible that he'd just sit there smiling like an idiot while they took pictures?
________________________________________________________________________________
By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
No comments:
Post a Comment