The G-man: Hoover’s “ideal law enforcement officer”
To better ensure that crimes got solved and criminals got caught, J. Edgar Hoover demanded that the Bureau’s agents meet and exhibit the highest professional standards. The expected qualities, and they were legion, were listed in a speech given in September, 1934, by Assistant Director Harold Nathan on his boss’s behalf. The “ideal law enforcement officer,” and that certainly meant the Bureau’s special agents, according to Nathan, “should be well educated, because law enforcement is now a profession.” In the FBI, that meant a law or accounting degree. He (and there was no “she” in the ranks of special agents) should also be “truly intelligent. He should possess a mind capable of thinking quickly and effectively along the shortest possible lines to the solution of the most complicated, baffling problems. His thinking should be supplemented by a broad experience...
Read MoreJ Edgar Hoover & the G-men
While the Lindbergh Law assigned jurisdiction over kidnapping to the United States Bureau of Investigation (BOI) within the Department of Justice, that authority applied only if the kidnap victim was transported across a state or international border. Unfortunately, the law as originally written failed to provide a practical trigger for BOI intervention in a case. In the absence of some clue dropped by the kidnappers, or the violation of some other federal statute by the suspects, such as the Dyer Act (1919) forbidding interstate transportation of stolen vehicles, the BOI lacked the authority to investigate. In the face of public demand for action, the legal barrier proved no bar to the Bureau’s ambitious and aggressive chief, John Edgar Hoover Intelligent, well educated, and an efficient organizer of men and resources, Director Hoover was also an unsurpassed bureaucratic politician, with...
Read More“Unless something drastic is done…”
By the 1930s, kidnappings in the United States were commonplace, and the crime “had become a profession.” The police chief of St. Louis, the national epicenter of the gangster “snatch racket,” advised Congress that he investigated 282 cases extending into 21 states within the space of a year. Police chiefs in 501 cities reported to Congress in 1931 that 279 kidnappings had taken place, a fraction of the estimated total. Only 69 persons had been convicted, out of the 2,000 persons thought to be involved in the “snatch,” transportation, or sequestration of the victims. Ransoms paid ran from $1,500 to $125,000. Kidnapping had truly “assumed the proportions of big business.” Whatever the numbers, said the Denver police chief, kidnapping was “increasing tremendously… throughout the country.” “Unless something drastic is done,” the Jacksonville chief asserted, “it will be unsafe for...
Read MoreMore on the kidnapping of Gil Jamieson by Myles Fukunaga
The kidnapping of Gill Jamieson by Myles Fukunaga is the subject of Chapter V in Edward Dean Sullivan’s The Snatch Racket (Vanguard Press, 1932). Fukunaga’s first ransom note looked like the work of what Sullivan called “a half-mad and flighty individual” [page 75]. He was certainly educated, given to pompous language, a touch of cruel humor, and the melodramatic flourish. The note began, “The fates have decided so we have been given this privilege in writing you on this important matter. We presume you will be alarmed at first. Nevertheless we hope that you will get over this surprise soon and listen to the writers namely. What is it all about? “Your son has been kidnapped for ransom!” The letter included the usual ransom note talking points: Keep this a secret; Collect the ransom in unmarked bills of specified...
Read MoreChild Kidnapping in the Twenties
Racketeers may have been responsible for turning kidnapping into a “snatch racket,” but they were not alone in profiting in the advantages enjoyed by kidnappers. Some revenge-seekers, thrill junkies, and psychopathic killers may have asked for a ransom, but their base motives could put the kidnap victim at greater risk than the prisoners of cautious criminal “businessmen.” In these cases, it seemed, children were especially vulnerable. The infant Blakely Coughlin (abducted in 1920), 5-year-old Giuseppi Verotta (1921), 14-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks (killed by Leopold and Loeb in 1924), Marion Parker (1927), Grace Budd (1928), and Gill Jamieson (1929) were among the kidnapped children who never returned to their parents. By contrast, five-year-old Jackie Thompson, the first child snatched by an organized gang, was released after payment of $17,000 and an $8,000 note. All of these abductions and murders were...
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