Bert Rovere’s Paris Inn & the lighter side of FBI undercover work – 1936
This was in the first draft of The Girl in the Iron Box. As much as I love the story, it had to go. Enjoy! If an undercover special agent wanted to show his “date” a good time, impress her with his life style, spill a few drinks, and trick her into spilling what she knew about the kidnapping of June Robles, he could do worse than take her to Bert Rovere’s Paris Inn. A favorite with the Hollywood crowd, the restaurant stood out in a city dotted with flashy and garish night spots. The exterior Paris Inn resembled a Norman castle, complete with turret, while the interior looked like a street café. The satisfied clientele was treated to French and Italian fare, singing waiters, and an orchestra playing opera and jazz, accompanied at times by the burly baritone-voiced...
Read MoreWriting grassroots history
I think it was C.L. Sonnichsen who coined the title “grassroots historian.” Certainly, he wrote about and defined such non-academic (and often non-academically trained) historians in an article of the same name appearing in a 1970 issue of Southwestern Historical Quarterly (Vol. 73, No. 3, January, 1970, pp. 381-392). You can find the article at http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30238074?uid=3739960&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100835322691 . I can’t speak for other fields of history, but in the niche of Old West lawmen/outlaws/gunfighters/armed & dangerous sodbusters, the grassroots historian probably has been responsible for much, if not most of the discoveries of the past 35 or more years concerning the details of the lives, acts of violence, and deaths of such men (and occasional women), and of the many men and women who were witness to or wrapped up in their stories. The Journal of the Wild West History Association...
Read MoreLooking for family papers of former FBI Special Agents
While I have personnel files for most the of FBI Special Agents who are the leading characters in my book-in-progress on the FBI’s investigation into the 1934 kidnapping of 6-year-old June Robles, I would like to flesh out this material with family photos, letters, and other papers dealing with the following agents (referred to only by initials in many documents): Harold Edward Andersen / H.E. Andersen Orville C. Dewey / O.C. Dewey Joseph Edward Patrick Dunn / J.E.P. Dunn Carlton J. Endres / C.J. Endres Chapmon Fletcher James Malcolm O’Leary / J.M. O’Leary Enos Sandberg Manuel Sorola Lewis Charles Taylor / L.C. Taylor Clarence D. White / C.D. White The personnel files of Andersen and Dewey were severely gutted by the Bureau for unknown reasons, and so family papers would be especially helpful in their...
Read MoreHiring Special Agents – Lewis Taylor Part 2
Bureaus are breeding grounds for bureaucracy, and Hoover’s was no different. Hoover might be interested in virtually everything his agency did, down to the smallest detail, but he could not do it all himself. He might read virtually every piece of paper passing through the Bureau of Investigation, he might direct its movement, but he could not control it. Paperwork in Hoover’s domain, as in anyone else’s, had a life of its own. In Lewis Taylor’s case, all necessary documentation by the Denver field office was completed by May 13. The application folder was mailed to Washington for further action but instead was simply filed away. A confused Taylor, who had already registered his intent to accept the job of Special Agent, wired Hoover on May 29, “Does failure to hear from you mean that application has not been...
Read MoreHiring Special Agents – Lewis C Taylor Part 1
As FBI Assistant Director Harold “Pop” Nathan explained in 1934, the Division of Investigation (later renamed the FBI), “First and foremost… selects its personnel with the greatest care from the best available material.” The applicant’s record and associations should be “rigidly scrutinized” all the way back to his school days. Higher education, agency testing, and hiring interviews ensured that the prospective law enforcement officer possessed the required “resourcefulness, aggressiveness, tact, energy, and the like.” The hiring of Special Agent Lewis Charles Taylor, the lead agent in Tucson during the first months of the June Robles kidnapping investigation, provides an example of how these requirements of Director J. Edgar Hoover were put into practice not long after he assumed leadership. Taylor was a 24-year-old law student at the University of Colorado at Boulder when he applied for the position of...
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