While there's overwhelming evidence that Hoover leveraged his extensive database of blackmail material about politicians, journalists, and celebrities to achieve his own objectives, there's also reason to believe that Hoover was likely a victim of sexual blackmail himself. Chronologically, the earliest allegations regarding blackmail in Hoover's career date to the late 1940s during the power struggle to establish the CIA. In the wake of the Second World War, America's wartime Foreign Intelligence Agency, the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, was disbanded, and various proposals were circulating for the establishment of a permanent American foreign intelligence agency. While Bill Donovan, the former head of the OSS, was lobbying for the office to be reconstituted for peaceime operations under his own command, while Hoover vigorously opposed this, arguing that the FBI's mandate should just be expanded to cover international affairs. According to the book Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA by Mark Reeding, Hoover's campaign against Donovan went beyond mere persuasion. There was a lingering suspicion that Hoover had collected dirt on Wild Bill Donovan and used it to keep him from becoming the CIA director. Old Donovan hands like future CIA director Richard Helms would allege that Hoover played a very skillful game with knowledge of the sexual habits of prominent people. Hoover was said to have spread the rumor that Donovan had contracted syphilis in orgies with prostitutes. While Donovan's men may have been the genesis of a mafia homosexual blackmail thesis advanced after Hoover's death. Notwithstanding any blackmail that may have taken place, neither man ultimately won the power struggle. President Truman would incorporate the CIA in 1947 with Rear Admiral Sydney Sewers as its first director. While Hoover remained FBI director with the bureau's jurisdiction limited to the United States. The same dynamic, Hoover blackmailing others while appearing to be blackmailed himself would play out repeatedly throughout Hoover's career. Rumors of homosexuality and crossdressing 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 Tolson, for decades, sparking rumors of a gay relationship. Hoover spent virtually all of his waking hours with Tulsson, 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 Tolson. But these reports were 30 plus years old at the time they were published, making corroboration all but impossible. Hoover actively cultivated an image as a tough anti-communist crime fighter. But in private, he was personally corrupt, using FBI labor and resources to renovate his private residence and developed a gambling habit that some have claimed grew into an addiction. Much of the speculation regarding Hoover's sexuality was grounded in the FBI's inexplicable reluctance to prosecute organized crime during Hoover's tenure. Famously, Hoover publicly denied that organized crime even existed in America during the heights of Prohibition era gangsterism and mafia consolidation, which led to widespread rumors that elements of the mafia must have had some kind of leverage over Hoover. And in the years since his death, numerous gangsters with varying levels of credibility have claimed that the mafia had indeed used blackmail to neutralize Hoover and the FBI. In the book, Official and Confidential, powerful Jewish mobster Meer 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 [ __ ] didn't I?" Lansky's fix, according to Pollock, also involved bribery, not of Edgar himself, but men close to him. "The homosexual thing," said Pollock, was Hoover's Achilles heel. "My 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 Meer Lansky's horse racing interests well before he became a source for Summers' book suggested at the very least Pollock could plausibly have been in a position to know the details of Lansky's blackmail of Hoover. According to the same book, in 1971, pro basketball player and patriarchic crime family associate Irving Ash Resnik and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galleria bar at Caesar's Palace. They spoke of Meer Lansky as a genius, the man who put everything together and as the man who nailed Jay Edgar Hoover. When I asked what they meant, Hamill recalled, they told me Lansky had some pictures. Pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures and he had made his deal with Hoover to lay off. That was the reason they said that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI. The ultimate source for the story, Ash Resnik was a pro basketball player who went on to spend four decades as a significant figure in the management of mobcrolled Las Vegas casinos. Resnik and Pollock were both mafia connected and knew each other well. According to Summers, however, it's worth noting that even though Summers personally interviewed both men for his book, neither interview subject actually told Summers that they had personally seen evidence of blackmail. Pollock only said that Lansky was bribing Hoover's men and that he knew homosexuality was Hoover's Achilles heel. And even though Summers interviewed Resnik himself, the only mention of Resnik having knowledge of sexual blackmail material comes from a third-hand account. Instead of quoting Resnik himself talking about seeing Lansky's blackmail photos of Hoover, Summers quotes the author Pete Hamill, who said he'd heard the story from Resnik at a dinner decades earlier. If Summers conducted his own interview with Resnik for the book, why didn't he just ask him about the Hoover photos himself? Is it really possible he just forgot to bring it up? Or did Pollock deny the story or give some other version which Summers left out in favor of the more sensational third-hand account he got from Pete Hamill? The same quote appears in Whitney Webb's One Nation Under Blackmail, attributed to a former Lansky Associate rather than an author who interviewed a former Lansky associate. An unfortunate omission on Web's part. Anthony Summers never tells us why he opted to print a third party's decades old recollection of an anecdote from a dinner meeting with Resnik rather than a firsthand quote from his interview with Resnik himself. But at the very least, these claims should be evaluated with this context in mind. The alleged photos of Hoover engaged in homosexual activity are a consistent theme in the historical accounts of Hoover's blackmail. In the book Official and Confidential, Summers quotes a former OSS officer named John Whites, who claimed he'd attended a dinner party in the 1950s at which the OSS veteran and top CIA official James Jesus Angleton had shown him a photo of Hoover engaging in a sex act with his assistant Clyde Tolson. 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 Tolson. The source for this anecdote was John Whites, a wealthy Jewish refugee from Nazi era Germany who worked for the OSS during the Second World War and went on to become a successful textile manufacturer, author, and race car driver in the United States. 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. 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 Tlson a 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 Tolson. 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 heal. 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 Tolson sitting in the RIB room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs and that Angleton had sent me, Tlsson 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. Now, the source of the story, Gordon Novel, is an enigmatic figure with a strange and wildly varied background. He was involved in a burglary of a munitions bunker in Louisiana, which procured the guns that would be used in the Bay of Pigs invasion. a burglary which Novel insisted was approved by the CIA, after which he went on to open a marketing agency and a business selling wiretapping equipment while working as a private investigator. It was in this latter capacity that Novel was hired by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as his security during Garrison's investigation of the Kennedy assassination. But Garrison would come to suspect that Noville was a CIA plant sent to sabotage his investigation, an insinuation which Novel himself seemed to encourage at times. There's no evidence in the public record explicitly proving that Novel was a CIA agent. However, he was verifiably connected to numerous known intelligence agents and operations. So, an association with James Jesus Angleton is certainly within the realm of possibility. Whether this makes his claims about Hoover more or less credible is subject to interpretation. It's notable that both Whites and novel claimed to have been shown the photos of Hoover by the same man, James Jesus Angleton, a CIA counter inelligence chief who knew both Richard Helms and Wild Bill Donovan. On the other hand, it's also worth noting the discrepancies between whites and novels descriptions of the photos they claimed to have seen. For whites, it was a single photo, quote, "not a good picture clearly taken from some distance away." And he says Angleton told him it was of Hoover and Tulsen, implying that the photo wasn't clear enough that their identities would be obvious. Whereas novel said there was more than one photo, including a quote startling close shot of Hoover's head taken with a special lens in which Hoover was totally recognizable. From their descriptions, it seems unlikely that Whites and novel saw the same photo. But Whites's story takes place in the 1950s, while novels happens in 1967, meaning that if both stories are true, the CIA may have been spying on Hoover well into the ' 50s or 60s. This discrepancy also has implications for the mafia connection. If the CIA and Meer Lansky's criminal organization both had compromising photos of Hoover, it raises the question, was it the same set of photos? Because if it was, that suggests that the CIA was passing information to organized crime or vice versa. Is it really possible that there was more than one set of blackmail photos of Hoover in circulation? One obtained by Lansky and one from the CIA. And could this explain the differences in whites and novels descriptions of the photos? Whatever Lansky was doing, it appears to have worked. Because despite decades of flagrant lawbreaking and extensive FBI surveillance, Lansky was able to run his criminal enterprise free from serious prosecution for almost the entire duration of Hoover's tenure as FBI director. And these weren't the only compromising photos of Hoover that had allegedly made it into the mafia's hands. According to mobster Bill Beneno's autobiography, Bound by Honor, whom can we count on as a friend? Roy Conn 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 Conn. Anyone could see that. Ever since Velachi, Hoover, like everyone else, had had to go along with the tide. He hates Bobby, Con said matterofactly. 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. Now, to be clear, this is the same Bill Banano autobiography discussed earlier, the one that was derided by critics upon its release for, among other things, suggesting that JFK had actually been assassinated by the mobster Johnny Roselli, who' fired the fatal shot while hiding in a storm drain underneath Dei Plaza. And Bonano himself had multiple felony convictions by the time the book was published, including mail fraud and defrauding senior citizens. So, his claim should be considered within the context of his questionable reliability as a witness. On the other hand, Banano wasn't the only one claiming to have seen evidence of blackmail between Roy Conn, Louisis Rosensteel, and Hoover. And in fact, this relationship was one of the most consistent themes in the testimony of witnesses who said the mafia had blackmailed Hoover. Roy Conn was a deeply closeted homosexual 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. After McCarthy's fall from grace, Cohen remained a fixture in conservative politics, maintaining relationships with figures like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump, among others, while working as a lawyer and ruthless political operative. In the 1960s, Conn was repeatedly charged with serious felonies, including extortion, blackmail, bribery, securities fraud, conspiracy, and witness tampering, winning acquitt. Conn was simultaneously deeply inshed 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 Con 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 1930s 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 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 nent 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. But 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 Jed Garoover, attending parties with the FBI director, hiring his underlings for jobs at his company, and even donating a million dollars to establish the Jed Garoover Foundation while simultaneously maintaining deep connections with organized crime. Roy Conn was perhaps even closer to Hoover, consulting him for advice when he was a lawyer at the Justice Department and attending private celebrations in Hoover's honor. Hoover was the one who had recommended Conn when Senator McCarthy was looking for a chief counsel for his hearings on communist subversion, and the two remained both political allies and private friends. Although the stories about Conn and Rosensteel being involved in blackmail against Hoover have come from multiple witnesses with varying levels of credibility, the substance of the accusations remained largely consistent regardless of who was telling the story. Essentially, Rosensteel and Conn were both gay or at least bisexual with extensive social networks and underworld contacts in New York where they would throw gay male orgies with very young prostitutes. After insinuating themselves into Hoover's social circle, they invited him to these orgies at a location called the Blue Suite in New York's Plaza Hotel and made sure photos were taken depicting Hoover in compromising positions. Rosensteel's own house was extensively bugged so that conversations virtually anywhere in the house could be recorded by the home's audio surveillance system. And it's been widely speculated that Rosensteel may have rigged the Blue Suite with similar recording devices, though this remains unproven. The photographs, which depending on who you ask, showed Hoover dressed in women's clothing or engaged in sex acts with young men, including Clyde Tolson, were then either passed on to the mobster Meeransky or used by Con himself to blackmail Hoover into covering for the mafia or to extract political favors.
But that still leaves one more witness to Cohn's blackmail ring. The one who provided probably the most thorough and convincing testimony of all, whose claims set off a firestorm of controversy when they became public. Lewis Rosensteel's ex-wife, Susan Rosensteel, aka Susan Kaufman. Although it's been cited by every serious work on the topic of the last 30 years, including Web's book, 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 Myer 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 $45 million. Susan claimed she was present at a meeting in New York between Hoover and Rosensteel Roy Conn 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 shephering the bill through both houses of Congress. But her most scandalous revelations were about attending Roy Con's orgies in the Blue Suite at the Plaza Hotel with her husband and Jay 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 Conn. 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 Dwey in bed with you because Dwey 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. It was a tremendous bedroom with a bed like in Caesar's time with a deamas spread blue I think like the suite and they go into the bedroom and 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 female dress at the plaza. Her account remained consistent and she signed a sworn affidavit that it is 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 Otach, 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. Meer 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 Louisis Rosensteel. Nichols recalled, "The ones I saw showed Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and Rosensteel at all sorts of social events with mobsters." It's worth noting that Rosensteel's connections to organized crime were not widely known until they were revealed in New York State government hearings in the early 1970s, right before Hoover's death. So appearing in public with Rosensteel wouldn't have been caused for scandal at the time Hoover did it. And to be clear, Susan didn't even explicitly say that she had personal knowledge of Hoover being blackmailed, even if she quotes her husband implying as much with his reference to Meer Lansky quote fixing Hoover. Specifically, Susan says that she saw Hoover crossdressing while engaging in bizarre homosexual acts and directly participating in flagrant corruption, including the bribery of congressmen, while Susan's journalist friend testified to seeing compromising, though not sexual, photos of Hoover with Roy Cohn and several mobsters. But when it comes to blackmail specifically, Susan makes no claim to having seen anything herself. Since Susan was the most persuasive of Anthony Summers' witnesses with the most inflammatory story, the sections of official and confidential detailing her claims provoked the most voseiferous push back upon release. Typical of the criticism was that found in the journal article Queer Hoover, Sex, Lies, and Political History by the author Clare Bond Potter. For one thing, historians and respectable journalists usually rely on corroborated evidence. Furthermore, despite the fact that rumors of Hoover's homosexuality had circulated in print from the moment he became director in 1926, there is reason to doubt Susan's credibility and Summers' use of her as a source. The facts of her life suggest that Susan, reduced to an impoverished old age, may have invented an outlandish tale in a search for revenge, profit, and fame. In 2002, journalist Ronald Kesler in his book Secrets of the FBI summarized the doubts also raised by others when he noted that Hoover had provided damaging information about Susan during the Rosensteel's divorce in the late 1960s, that Susan had testified for the government against Lewis and his organized crime associates, but had been convicted and served a prison term for perjury in 1971, and that her fall from wealth and status may have made her a willing accomplice to the lowest kind of journalism. when he found her living in a single room occupancy hotel in New York, Guestler wrote, "Susan freely admitted that Summers had paid for interviews and paid her again not to talk until his book was out." She had subsequently been paid by Frontline and the BBC to participate in television documentaries. Like most journalists and news organizations, Kesler commented, "I believe that paying for information calls into question its credibility." "Anthony Summers responded to many of these charges in the second edition of Official and Confidential about Susan Rosensteel's perjury charge." Summers says the following. Hoover defenders maintained that Mrs. Rosensteel was not a credible source because she pleaded guilty to an attempted perjury charge in 1971. I told readers this, but unlike the critics also explained the context. The very week the charge was brought, the New York State Legislative Committee on Crime had planned to produce Mrs. Rosensteel as a witness to her husband's links to the mafia. The committee's chairman and chief counsel were outraged at the perjury development. The perjury charge was brought in connection with a 1969 civil suit, a move lawyers considered unprecedented and bizarre. Committee officials believed it was instigated by Rosensteel himself, using his vast wealth and influence to obstruct the official inquiry by discrediting his former wife. Court records show the tycoon had used similar tactics in the recent past to pervert the course of justice. So, to be clear, in 1971, the week Susan Rosensteel was going to testify to the New York State Legislature about her wealthy husband's mafia connections, she was hit with perjury charges related to a civil suit she'd been involved in two years prior. This move by prosecutors was described as unprecedented and bizarre because typically perjury charges would be pressed immediately after the perjured testimony, not at random two years later, which gave the appearance that the charges were retaliation for her planned testimony to the legislature. The omission of these facts by the supposed debunkers seems irresponsible at best. Later in Queer Hoover, Potter admits, quote, "When contacted 10 years after Official and Confidential came out, by the journalist Ronald Kesler, who promised that she would be famous again if she admitted that she made up the crossdressing story, she insisted that it did happen. While Kesler finds the story to be outlandish, that the post-war rumors were probably generated by one of Hoover's political enemies in the CIA, and that Hoover simply could not have engaged in such activity at the plaza with a number of witnesses present without having it leak out." He also cites the very respectable assertion by Elliot Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D. and Eleanor, 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. Another critic, Alan Theo Harris, points out in his book J. Edgar Hoover sex and crime that Hoover was well aware of the gay rumors about him and on multiple occasions sent FBI employees to interrogate and intimidate random citizens who had been reported to the FBI for merely gossiping about Hoover's sexuality. In one case, the FBI received information that a Cleveland woman had told members of her bridge club that she'd heard a rumor that Hoover was gay. and the FBI sent a senior official to interrogate her, making her promise that at her next bridge club meeting, she would quote, "point out to each of those present that her statement was not founded on fact and that she was deeply sorry." There were similar incidents involving a woman at a beauty parlor in Washington DC and a businessman in New York. The FBI agent who met with the businessman threatened that if he ever called Hoover gay again, the agent would quote, "finish him right there on the spot. In other words, murder him." These events were documented in contemporaneous FBI reports by the agents themselves. So, there's no question that Hoover was jealously guarding his reputation from gay rumors. It's worth pointing out that there's no indication in the text of official and confidential that Anthony Summers ever explicitly asked Susan, "Was your husband Roy Conn or their associates blackmailing Jay Edgar Hoover? And how do you know?" The closest we get is Susan quoting her ex-husband, saying, quote, "Because of Lansky and those people, we can always get Hoover to help us." Which doesn't imply firsthand knowledge of blackmail on Susan's part. And even in that quote, Lewis Rosensteel, a close associate of Roy Cohn, implies that it was not Cohn blackmailing Hoover, but rather quote Meer Lansky and those people. This is significant because Susan Rosensteel's testimony from official and confidential is often cited as one of the central pieces of evidence supporting the existence of Roy Cohn's sexual blackmail operation. But even though Susan claimed to have seen Hoover participate in orgies, and the photos that resulted, at no point in the book does Susan say explicitly that she knew that Roy Cohn specifically was blackmailing anyone. 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 split out 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 Sweet 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 just sit there smiling like an idiot while they take pictures? Whitney Webb thinks so. In One Nation under blackmail, Webb speculates that Hoover was quote no longer concerned about being extorted or manipulated with sexual blackmail in ways that would end his career or destroy his public image. He had fallen in with the very crowd that had reportedly blackmailed him, later developing a symbiotic relationship with that same network. Obviously, Susan Rosensteel's claims cannot be proven true or false to any rigorous standard. But it is remarkable that the basic elements of the story of Hoover's blackmail. The crossdressing, the gay sex acts, compromising photos, Meer Lansky and his mafia associates remained largely the same no matter which witness was telling the story. On the other hand, Susan's narrative of events does suffer from some obvious shortcomings. The lack of any physical or documentary evidence. The fact that no one seems to have gone public with their allegations until some 40 years after the alleged events. The fact that almost every witness is either dead, a convicted criminal, a spy, a mobster, or an ex-lover of one of the people involved. The lack of any contemporaneous evidence or documentation, and so on.
But there was another blackmail ring operating at roughly the same time and in the same general area which even seems to have targeted some of the same people, but which doesn't suffer from these shortcomings, not least because it was actually investigated by the NYPD and the FBI who sent people to jail over it. A case which has come to be known as the chickens and the bulls. In late July 1965, a call came in to the Midtown Manhattan precinct of the NYPD from a Western Union office in Grand Central Station. A man who appeared to be impersonating a police officer had walked into the Western Union in the company of a 14-year-old runaway and had contacted the boy's father in Texas, asking him to wire $150 for Plane Fair to send the boy home. The father had grown suspicious after realizing the man was asking for nearly double the actual price of a plane ticket and decided to call police. The fake cop turned out to be a 34year-old man named John Akin, a felon with a prior conviction for child sexual abuse, who claimed he was just trying to do the boy a favor. Realizing that he was likely facing prison time, Akin told police that he could provide them with information about a much bigger crime involving famous names and large sums of money, he told the detective, James Macdonald, about an extortion ring that had targeted closeted gay men throughout the US, many of whom were married with families, listing off names of victims that included prominent politicians and entertainers. Over the next year, the NYPD and the FBI would discover the true extent of the operation. A blackmail ring of at least 70 men had extorted at least $2 million. That's about 20 million in 2025 money from thousands of victims over less than a decade with a list of victims that allegedly included Admiral William Church, the brother of the Democratic Senator and famous CIA critic Frank Church, as well as the head of the American Medical Association, two generals, the Republican Congressman and House Foreign Affairs Committee member Peter Ferrelling Hoison, Malcolm Forbes from Forbes magazine, a professor from Princeton University, the Catholic cardinal of New York, Francis Spelman, famous rock musicians, a prominent surgeon, a prep school headmaster, multiple US senators, heads of business firms, several well-known politicians, actors, singers, and television personalities, including Liberace, and perhaps most importantly, Jed Garoover and his partner Clyde Tolson. The blackmail ring, which was centered in New York and Chicago, but operated all across the country, used several methods of extortion, but the most common ones involved sending attractive, often underageed young men referred to as chickens into specific hotels frequented by older, wealthier homosexuals, intending to meet such men for purposes of prostitution. and then having members of the ring known as bulls intercede posing as corrupt vice squad detectives demanding bribes from the victim. In some cases, the chicken would lure the victim into a hotel room and then once he was in a compromising position, the bulls would bust into the room, display their fake police badges, and handcuff the victim. After explaining the penalties for violating sodomy laws or corrupting a minor, the bulls would either directly solicit a bribe or tell the victim that he could pay quote bail money upfront to prevent his arrest from going public. In other cases, the chicken would bring his victim into a hotel room and then rob him of his personal effects. The chickens would get to keep any money or valuables they stole, while the bulls kept the IDs and credit cards for themselves. Weeks later, after identifying the victim from his ID card, the bulls would contact him, posing as corrupt police officers and suggest that he'd been identified in relation to a gay prostitution ring. The fake cops would convince the victim he was facing possible arrest or subpoena as a witness, and when they felt he was sufficiently scared, offer to make it all go away for a fee. Prosecuting the extortionists proved difficult, primarily because no one involved wanted to testify. The victims were understandably scared of the effects that being publicly outed would have on their families and careers, and most decided it simply wasn't worth coming forward. The chickens were mostly runaways and transient hustlers who were hard to track down, and the ones police were able to find weren't exactly ideal witnesses. The strategy the prosecutors settled on was to try to flip as many of the blackmail ring's members as possible and have them testify against each other or take plea deals to minimize the number of victims who would have to testify in open court. The investigation would reveal that despite employing at least 70 bowls and dozens if not hundreds of male prostitutes. The ring was ultimately controlled by three men, John Pine, Sherman Kaminsky, and Ed Murphy. Operating out of Chicago was Pine, a former Chicago cop who maintained a nationwide network of police department employees as informants. When he was arrested, police found in his possession dozens of police badges and arrest forms, warrants, and extradition forms from virtually every jurisdiction in the country. Kaminsky, who used the alias Paul Vargo, was based out of New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, and is believed to have served in the Israeli army, although little else is known about his background. The third ring leader was a World War II veteran and convicted felon named Ed Murphy, who, in addition to running the blackmail ring, worked as both a pimp and a bouncer for various gay bars in New York. Just months before his apprehension in the Chickens and the Bulls case, Murphy had been arrested in a separate blackmail ring operating out of the New York Hilton Hotel, which had extorted over $100,000 from wealthy gay men in much the same manner. Authorities announced the arrests as they happened, but press coverage was sporadic, and at the encouragement of the DA's office, the media refrained from identifying any of the victims or airing out any of the sorted sexual details. But there was another strange aspect to the media's treatment of the case. According to the book Stonewall by David Carter, a particularly noteworthy feature about the contemporary news accounts of the story is that the initial newspaper stories listed Edward Murphy as one of the arrested extortionists, but afterward his name disappeared from the newspaper coverage. For example, in nine New York Times articles on the case published between February 18, 1966 and July 12th, 1967. Murphy was never mentioned again after the initial February 18, 1966 story. Yet, the initial news story made it clear that Murphy was one of the three ring leaders. if not the head of the entire operation. In March of 1968, the New York Madishene newsletter published by the gay rights activist group the Madisheen Society asked why Murphy had not been sentenced for his role in the blackmail ring. The newsletter stated that not only had Murphy served several prior prison terms, but he also had recently plead guilty under a federal indictment to extortion charges and was under a number of indictments at the state level. After pleading guilty to the federal extortion charge, Murphy had merely been put on probation for 5 years. The newsletter reported that Mattisheen, New York, had been informed that Murphy's sentence had been so often postponed because he'd made a deal to turn states evidence and the delays are to work out another deal to lighten his sentence. Murphy apparently did give evidence against the two other main figures in the ring. John J. Pine, a Chicago police officer, and Sherman Chadwick Kaminsky, a Bronx native who also went by the name Paul Vargo. however, that Murphy, after having been to prison several times before, could get off with serving only part of a 5-year sentence, merely for giving evidence against his co-conspirators, despite shaking down approximately 1,000 men over almost 10 years, including a number of men of very eminent social rank, as detailed earlier, is astonishing. Moreover, while several names emerged in the newspaper accounts as key players in the scheme, word on the street said that the gang had one ring leader. The New York Machine newsletter of March 1968 named Ed Murphy as that person. The theory of a single person at the head of the enterprise is bolstered by a letter from Richard Inman, a homophile activist battling police extortion of homosexuals in South Florida. Written to Machine Washington co-founder Jack Nichols in 1965. In the letter, Inman stated that he knew via a friend inside the FBI that there was one boss man of the syndicate's homo shakeddown detail for the whole US. That Inman wrote the letter before the police uncovered the national ring adds to its credibility. But Murphy did even better in the waters he trolled. He landed the biggest fish of all, one whose value exceeded even that of money, because this one had the ability to keep law enforcement off his back. Murphy's operation landed none other than the nation's top law enforcement officer, Jay. Edgar Hoover. The same net that hauled in Hoover brought along a bonus prize. Jay Edgar Hoover's longtime companion Clyde Tlson who was moreover an associate director of the FBI. The mafia had photographic evidence implicating Hoover in homosexual activity. But it also came to light that Hoover at times dressed in female attire. Research conducted for this book strongly suggests that Ed Murphy had one or more of these photographs which allowed him to avoid serving time in prison for leading an extensive national blackmail ring. Carter attributes these claims to quote research conducted for his book. But what proof does he offer? Well, he relates some anecdotes from the famous poet Alan Ginsburg where Ginsburgg claims that he had friends who encountered Hoover in various gay spots around Washington DC. Carter mentions a 1968 publication called the Homosexual Handbook in which Hoover is listed as a prominent closeted homosexual which was later withdrawn. He also cites the Anthony Summers book, Official and Confidential, which we've already covered here. But the only actual firsthand witness testimony Carter offers comes from his interviews with a guy named John Paul Reineer. In another excerpt from his book, Stonewall, David Carter writes, "John Paul Raineeri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy's criminal enterprises for gay history." Reeri said that as a youth from Westchester County, he'd been forced by blackmail and mafia supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for 3 years before he escaped the mob's control. He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk. For while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Raineri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Ardell Spelman, Liberace, US senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and Jay Edgar Hoover. Reer said that he met Jay Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel, and that Hoover's name was never mentioned. Hoover was always in drag and Reeri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him. Reeri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover given to him by the photographer. So, if you're keeping track, this brings us to a total of five alleged photo sets featuring Hoover in a compromising sexual position. But how credible are these claims? Well, unfortunately, the evidence overwhelmingly points to John Paul Reeri being an unreliable witness. Reary was actually the subject of my first YouTube video, which I believe is the most complete collection of information about Reer currently in existence. But if you haven't seen it, in short, Reer was a press hound who gave wildly inconsistent accounts of his own background to multiple different journalists over time, including claims that he was a member of the supposed satanic cult in Yoners, New York, that went on to commit the Son of Sam murders and later became a friend and confidant of Jeffrey Dmer during his killing spree in Milwaukee. all the while telling journalists contradictory stories about his early life. In fact, David Carter even acknowledges this in a footnote in his Stonewall book. John Paul Reeri had a lifetime of mental health issues, and I did not always find his accounts of events to be reliable. For these reasons, I only used information from him that was corroborated by other sources. Following the section on Reer, Carter cites a 1993 New York Post article titled, "Jay Edgar's slip was showing." Shortly after Hoover's homosexuality and transvestism became public and Anthony Summers' book, Official and Confidential, was published, a newspaper story about the 1960s National Homosexual Blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject. Without mentioning Murphy's name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover posing amiably with the racket's ring leader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lover, had himself fallen victim to the extortion ring. After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared. This New York Post story referenced by Carter apparently cites anonymous law enforcement sources who worked on the case who said they'd actually found a photo of Hoover in a compromising position with the head blackmailer Ed Murphy and uncovered evidence that Clyde Toulson had been blackmailed. Curiously, all traces of this article seem to have been wiped from the internet. It isn't available on any newspaper archive sites or the New York Post website, and it doesn't appear to have been transcribed anywhere. For a mainstream news article published in 1993, this is pretty anomalous. Unfortunately, Carter gives us no indication whether or not he was able to track down these anonymous law enforcement sources cited by the Post, so it's hard to judge the credibility of these claims with any level of certainty. Personally, I couldn't shake a nagging suspicion that one of these anonymous sources could have been old James Rothststein himself. But that is and seemingly will remain pure speculation on my part. On the other hand, despite the DA's moratorium on naming the victims, the chicken and the bulls case did receive relatively substantial press coverage following the arrests and prosecutions of its ring leaders, even if it was largely treated as a local story compared to the cases covered thus far. The Chickens and the Bulls case was the only one which received contemporaneous press coverage, and more importantly, it actually went to trial and at least some aspects were proven in court. In this sense, Ed Murphy's blackmail ring is among the best substantiated in American political history with the most evidence to back it up. One fact that can't be discounted is the wild discrepancy in the sentences handed down to the different ring leaders. The ex- Chicago cop John Pine got two consecutive 20-year sentences. Sherman Kaminsky agreed to plead guilty, but during plea negotiations, one of his victims committed suicide and fearing the possibility of additional manslaughter charges. Kaminsky fled, becoming a fugitive for 11 years. Kaminsky was apprehended in 1978, long after any press attention or political pressure had subsided, and he struck a deal with prosecutors to testify in a different case. this time against one of the central conspirators and the Orlando Latutellure assassination in exchange for admission into the federal witness protection program. This is perhaps one of the most bizarre intersections with intelligence agencies in this entire video. Latellier was a critic of the Agusto Pinese regime of Chile who was assassinated with a carb bomb in Washington DC ostensibly by agents of the Pinese era Chilean intelligence agency known as Dina. The assassination occurred in 1976 in the midst of the CIA's Operation Condor, a yearslong campaign of terror in which the US government helped its Latin American allies, virtually exclusively right-wing dictatorships, to carry out intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations against their left-wing opponents, both domestically and internationally. It's long been speculated that the CIA had at least tacitly approved, if not directly, participated in Latellier's assassination as part of Operation Condor, either through training, funding, or just looking the other way. Kaminsk's role was as a jailhouse informant testifying in court that one of the plots's alleged ring leaders had divulged incriminating information to him. It seems notable that this ex-con fugitive Kaminsky almost immediately upon his arrest turned federal informant in a highly politically sensitive case providing information the government considered so valuable that it canceled out his years of blackmail. Was this a pre-existing relationship between Kaminsky and the feds? had he been an informant all along and the prosecutors or case agents just planted him in the same jail as the assassins knowing they could rely on him to elicit a confession or just concoct one. This became an issue in the Latellier case when the judge ultimately ruled that Kaminsky had been acting as an agent of the US government when he questioned the alleged assassins in jail. But even Kaminsk's seemingly incredible good luck doesn't match the leniency shown to the actual ring leader, Ed Murphy. Despite having been charged in a separate blackmail operation just months before his arrest in the chickens and the bulls case, being under state level indictments for blackmail in multiple states and already having a long rap sheet, Murphy came out with a sentence of just 5 years probation with no prison time. And even more incredibly, the evidence suggests that Ed Murphy continued or even expanded his blackmail operation after being put on federal probation. According to David Carter's book, Stonewall, information uncovered in researching this history suggests that having the goods on Hoover, Ed Murphy continued to blackmail homosexual men using the Stonewall Inn as a prime local for this new extortion operation. There, he targeted professional gay men, especially those working on Wall Street. According to the same 1968 New York Machine newsletter that asked why Ed Murphy had not been sentenced for his role in the national blackmail ring, Murphy had an interest in several gay bars in New York, including the Stonewall in the only club identified in the article and these clubs membership lists had been used for blackmail. The Machine Society of New York has also been informed that Murphy has an interest in the Stonewall, a club on Christopher Street and several other gay clubs in New York. Our source claims that the membership lists of some of these clubs are used to further extortion and shakeddown schemes. Stronger evidence of Murphy using the Stonewall Inn for blackmail comes from a 1969 publication that quoted the Madison Society of New York. In the 1960s, it was not easy to find gay bars. And so, as a service, the Madison Society of New York began compiling lists of these bars. Eventually, a local guide was published by a small business venture as the Gay Scene Guide. and the publishers on friendly terms with Mattishene New York quoted material from that organization's newsletter. Still, the bar lists remain just that, lists of gay bars, but with one exception. In the 1969 gay scene guide after the entry for the Stonewall in, there was a long quote from the New York Madishine newsletter inserted in the midst of the brief descriptions of gay bars. The following news item was reported in the March 1968 Madison New York newsletter and is presented here in condensed form. The Mattishene Society, Inc. of New York was instrumental in aiding DA Frank Hogan's office with information that led to the arrests of a number of black mailers. Edward FP Murphy, an ex-convict who is alleged to have been the head of the National Ring, which recently was active in extorting money from homosexuals, has served prison terms for lararseny and for carrying deadly weapons and was arrested for impersonating an officer and for extortion under federal indictment on extortion charges, permitted to plead guilty and received a 5-year probation. On a number of indictments in the state courts, Murphy pleaded guilty on May 16, 1966. Sentencing has been postponed six times. He could get up to 15 years in prison as a second offender on the robbery charge alone. MSNY has also been informed that Murphy has an interest in the Stonewall, a club on Christopher Street, and several other gay clubs in New York. We caution our readers never to use your real name when cruising. Never give your address to a questionable bar or club. And remember, that trick or hustler you've just picked up may be working for the management. We urge you, if you've been intimidated or blackmailed in the past, to report it to the DA's office or to the MSNY. That a local guide book took the unusual step of inserting a warning against giving out information to employees of the Stonewall Inn in the middle of a bar listing is more than suggestive. Indeed, several years later, Dick Lish was quite forceful about Murphy's role at the Stonewall Inn, writing that he seemed to be the manager of the place. The homosexual handbook reported that the burly at the door of the Stonewall Inn keeps boxes that hold or are rumored to hold thousands of cards upon which are printed the particulars of the many thousands of customers which echo some of the ideas found in the New York Machine newsletter article and may explain part of how the blackmail routine operated. Did some customers naively believe that they were really being screened for membership in a private club and that the screening would protect them by both excluding police officers and helping to establish the identity of the place they patronized as a legitimate private club? Beyond Murphy's involvement in the Stonewall Inn and in blackmailing gay men, he was deeply involved in male prostitution. Chuck Shaheen, who had a very high regard for Murphy, told Marty Dubberman, "I knew Eddie Murphy for a long time. He was into young boys, most definitely and was very, very involved with procurement of young boys." Danny Garvin recalls how he would always see these hustlers hanging out with Murphy. He had connections and these hustler kids would hang out with him. Bob Kohler, who hated Murphy passionately, cited as evidence of Murphy's lonesomeness that he paid the use he pimped with counterfeit money. Research on this book uncovered a couple of elusive references to a prostitution ring that was run on the second floor above the Stonewall Inn. When one looks at all the available evidence today, there is little doubt that such a ring operated out of the floor above the Stonewall Inn, although few know it existed. But by Murphy's own account upstairs, the mafia retained a room. But beyond the Stonewall being linked to blackmailing Wall Street employees and blackmailer Ed Murphy being connected to the Stonewall in, is there any piece of evidence that directly connects Murphy himself to blackmailing men on Wall Street? There is. In the late 1970s, a friend of Murphy's told Morty Manford that Ed Murphy said that he had been informing on the mob to the FBI. Murphy's friend went on to explain that because the mob had discovered that Murphy was an informer, Murphy had decided to come out, stop working with the mob, and quit informing because he wants to become a good guy, Manford reacted skeptically to Murphy's claim of being an FBI informer by saying, "I've heard that he was involved in a ring that was blackmailing homosexual men down at Wall Street." So, does Carter's evidence here stand up to scrutiny? Much of his information came from gay rights organizations like the Madisheen Society in the context of explicit warnings to other gay men about Murphy's blackmail operations. It seems unlikely that activists like this would intentionally lie or report unsubstantiated rumors about a matter of such significance to their community. And the existence of contemporaneous documentary evidence like the Machine Society newsletters as opposed to just decades old anecdotes like in other cases certainly lends the allegations some credibility. The quote where Murphy allegedly admitted to being an FBI informant came from an interview conducted by the International Gay Information Center with a famous gay rights activist named Morty Manford. But Manford was reporting secondhand information, something he'd allegedly heard from a friend of Murphy's. But even the most skeptical reading still has to explain Murphy's incredible ability to avoid arrest and incarceration despite having been perhaps the most prolific gay blackmailer of his era with a reputation for extortion that was so well established that gay rights organizations were printing warnings about him in their newsletters. Carter offers two possible explanations. Under one interpretation, Murphy was in possession of those alleged compromising photos of Hoover, and law enforcement prevented his incarceration and tolerated his later blackmail and pimping operations out of fear that he might expose the FBI director and his assistant. In the other version, Murphy had become a prolific FBI informant, and instead of blackmailing the agency, he was passing them information ostensibly about the mafia. It's also easy to imagine a scenario in which Murphy was collecting the exact kinds of sexual blackmail material that Hoover coveted and rather than snitching on the mafia, he was actually providing the bureau with a point of leverage over certain powerful figures from Wall Street or the federal government. Carter even speculates that the raid which precipitated the Stonewall riots was actually intended to bust up Murphy's blackmail ring being operated out of the Stonewall Inn rather than just to harass the bar's patrons as conventional wisdom dictates. Murphy would never be prosecuted again after taking his plea agreement in the chickens and the bulls case. And by the late 70s, his reputation had been transformed into that of an elder statesman of the gay rights movement and a fixture at gay pride events in New York City, including those commemorating the Stonewall riots. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that of all the alleged sexual blackmail rings of this era, the most wells substantiated one with the most convincing evidence was not motivated by some lofty ideological concern like Roy Conn and his supposed anti-communist blackmail, but rather by the exact same thing that has motivated most criminals throughout history, greed. Murphy and his chickens weren't seeking political power or social status. Their goal was simply to make money. and Murphy's relationship with the FBI appears to have been purely transactional to keep the John's and their money flowing. It's also worth noting that informants are typically made to testify in court cases against the people they're informing on, but there's no evidence in the public record that Ed Murphy ever testified against anyone. Maybe Murphy's arrangement with the FBI was similar to Whitey Bulgers, where he just fed the bureau information on other mafia figures and in return was allowed to run his criminal operations free from state and federal interference. It does seem oddly coincidental that of the three ring leaders, two proved so valuable to the feds that they avoided prison completely, while the third was stuck with a then rare 40-year sentence. By all accounts, Murphy continued running his blackmail ring for another decade or so after taking the plea deal years after his operation had become common knowledge among the moreworked members of New York's gay scene. Was the FBI leveraging Murphy's ring to target diplomats, foreign spies, Wall Street bankers, UN delegates? At this point, we'll likely never know. That's the end of part one, and we're not even halfway through the 1960s yet. These videos take a lot of work, so if you want to see a part two, then leave a comment, like the video, or subscribe. Thanks for watching.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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