In one alternative historical story, I found this
passage. I ask to help me understand this. How reliable is this information -
- "By the way, how did you end up in Cuba?" - Nick asked with interest.
- "Moved" - Mark smiled. - "Ever since the former bosses kicked me off, Edgar Hoover."
- "Did you work for the FBI?" - Nick raised an eyebrow in surprise. - And I thought you were also a political emigrant, like all the rest. So you are not a communist?
- "How to say," Mark scratched his nose and sipped from his glass (judging by the smell, his cocktail was the most authentic one by the recipe), "I started out as an anti-communist. True, I served more in the fight against crime, fortunately, I did not have to arrest the poor fellow who had a volume of Marx or Mao at home, like many of my colleagues. Actually, it was the fight with the bandits that brought me here.
- "An interesting twist." - grumbled Nick, more out of politeness, seeing that Stein wanted to speak out.
- Not really. Here we need to know the background of our ... more precisely, no longer our office. As you know, Hoover headed the Bureau in the 24th when it was part of the Department of Justice. The office got him in that still kind. I knew someone who worked there before the arrival of Edgar - none of them went on an American car: entirely on expensive British.
- "Dry law" brought to many officials good cars, - Nick nodded understandingly, - And spacious apartments.
- "Well, this is an inevitable evil." - There it was a matter of deeds worse. Many agents organized the gangs themselves and created networks for the trade in alcohol, with a full cycle, from production to marketing. At us now it is considered, that then the "outfit" has risen, first of all. So it is, but the gangs were, alas, only hired employees of federal officials ... No, I'm not saying that it's only the Bureau. There all were covered, from prosecutors, to senators. But, one way or another, when Hoover came to the office, he, for starters, dispersed the whole bastard, to the very last man. Seriously no one was hurt, everyone saved their capital. Now - very respected people. But the work was lost and had to do something else. And in their place, Hoover began to recruit completely new people. Not only not related to the former Bureau, but in general, to law enforcement agencies.
"It seems to me very reasonable, is not it?"
"It's fine with us, yes, it's reasonable." Edgar was young then, and he reasoned accordingly: they say, there can be no corrupt officials and policemen in nature. However, the trouble was in another: in the one whom he hired instead of corrupt. And the criteria he had, heh, let's say so, peculiar.
- What do you have in mind?
- Yes, nothing about what now is not known to all concerned, in fact. Hoover had a personal weakness: he loved beautiful young intellectual boys. Especially tall, slender brunettes. He wanted the guys to stay like gentlemen, wear flawless suits, so that they had perfect nails, and that they did not use all the words of white shawls and blacks, like "as long as" or "how much". These are the criteria for professional selection. One of these smart and beautiful was me, alas ...
- "What's wrong with that?" - Nick shrugged. He happened to hear and not about such an asshole of employers. One of his neighbors, Bill Jenkins from New Mexico, was telling, somehow, on a family barbecue, about his latest job in the States. It was a ranch of one very rich man who picked up cowboys not only of the same height, but also the same color of hair and, even, the eyes, so that they looked like his own sons.
"It was bad that we did not know anything," Mark snorted. "We had perfect suits, ties and cuff links, excellent handwriting and Harvard scribbling, but we had no idea how to investigate, how to collect evidence, interrogate witnesses and document all this. And, of course, none of us in life had a revolver in hand, or even more, a "tom", and we could not even imagine what would happen if we met nose to nose with a man like Floyd's Handsome or Nelson's "Muzzle" . Hoover, by the way, hated guns. One guy who was taken on probation at the same time as me, he found one morning in front of the planer, after cleaning the revolver. The guy flew off the job the same day.
- A peculiar style of leadership. But, excuse me, to whom and why the hell do you need a policeman without weapons? After all, it is the cannon that gives rise to political power, as it seems to me.
"He believed that we should use the power of our intellect." One problem - intellectuals among us, too, in fact, almost was not ... For some time, Hoover simply enjoyed his "harem", we had long intellectual conversations on planners and in every way represented a stormy activity. Even then we became, yet not particularly impudent, to fabricate business. The easiest way was to make a case for an anarchist, a communist or a Negro activist: they often acquired weapons to defend themselves from the Rights, little understood the real conspiracy and, among "respectable citizens," there was always plenty of willing to testify against the "red" or "obnoxious niggas ". In fact, it is this kind of success that we, for the most part, could have been shown.
"And are not you ashamed?"
- And how. True, I was lucky: I just made out some of the anonymous documents. I have never led such "investigations" myself. Well, because of his youth, of course, and also because he was not in big favor with Hoover. In his opinion, I was handsome, but, nevertheless, by our standards, neotesan ... So. Since we were not able to present anarchists and other similar public to the Justice Department alone, we still had to fight crime. But here we were completely helpless. Remember, probably, this period, "The heyday of bank robbers"?
- Especially I do not remember, I was too small. About all these "Johnny" a lot of chatting, of course. But I was not interested in details. Father and grandfather, in general, considered bankers to be worse robbers than all these gangsters put together.
- So it was. Great honor to these guys brought, just, Hoover. He ensured that the robbery of the bank was recognized as a federal crime, and, accordingly, immediately declared a "war" to the robbers. For him, they were a real salvation - by the time his personal incompetence, and indeed our whole company, it was already impossible to hide.
"And how did you fight the gangsters if you did not know how to shoot and conduct investigations?" As far as I remember, then many agents were killed.
- How? Bad. Very bad. We tried to sew business to them, as with political activists. But it worked poorly. Unlike anarchists or socialists, gangsters did not care how many charges they were charged. They were in any case people finished. Therefore, it was most important for them to track them down and, sorry, arrest them. I apologize because we could not just arrest someone. The weapons were given to us, though, but we did not become effective police. In fact, the FBI was then just another gang, big, but not the largest, and one of the most incompetent, by the way.
- The newspapers wrote a lot about you. And they also sold comic books about the adventures of Hoover and Melvin Pervis. It's even I remember.
- Comics ordered himself Hoover. On your money. They say that he even painted them himself, but this is a lie, most likely. I saw his drawings, handwriting on the margin of documents. Nothing in common in style. And the newspapers wrote everything from the words of Hoover and Pervis.
- But in practice?
"But in fact everyone who was really caught was caught by local cops." Here among the local cops there were enough men who could keep the gun from the right end. But then they had not yet learned how to send important boys with university reprimands far away, and very often our journalists managed to report to the local newspapers beforehand. Do you remember the story, like Purvis, supposedly personally shot Beauty Floyd from a hunting rifle?
- It's vague. I remember that everything there was arranged in a wildly heroic way.
- Not surprising. I was there myself. Floyd was discovered by local, pedigree, small, by the way, professional people. Just this fool did not even hide. We joined the raid, and, in Persis, there was no other weapon, except for a hunting rifle in the trunk. And it even turned in our favor - Floyd jumped right at us. He ran out of ammunition, he just knocked out the disc, and I figured out what to do. I even managed to aim from the "tomi" into it, but my submachine gun jammed. Purvis fired, but missed. A devil Handsome, of course, threw his machine into Persis, and asked strekoche. Do not be near a local policeman who slapped him in the side, from the same Winchester, like the ones you had recently remade for us, very likely would have fled. Only when Floyd was already lying on the grass, he informed him that he was arrested. But he already gave his soul to God. Then it turned out that the "terrible gangster" does not have a revolver, not even a pocket knife. And I, as a junior agent, first looked for his gun, and then threw him to the corpse along with my own disc, because from the point of view of the then newspaper photographer, an uncharged machine is no worse than a baton.
- H-yes. But, it seems to me, you are too strict towards yourself. Whatever one may say, you really risked your life there. After all, it could have come out like this-and it could have been quite different. "Tommy" is such a machine - if the gangster had at least half the disk, he could cut you, and Pervis, and that cop in one burst.
- And I do not deny that we acted risky. It was just "the risk of the idiot". We had no idea what the risk was. Well, and when I and Persis conspired to take their fame not only from catching Floyd (we were even there), but also from tracking down - this was just meanness, in relation to these cops. Who risked their heads no less than ours. Later it became our "visiting card". We could not track anyone, every time we accidentally encountered damned gangsters, they killed several of our guys and ran. But we immediately informed the newsmen that it was we who were investigating that each arrest was our job, that it was Purvis and others, at the forefront, with automatic rifles, doing all the work. It was a blatant lie, but it was replicated by everyone who was not lazy. Purvis was handsome, had a heroic look, and Hoover, for the time being, had no soul in him. Here I'm not hinting at anything - I just do not know what was between them, but the fact that Hoover forgave him everything. Falsification of reports, loss of documents, forgotten lines where transcripts of testimony, failed operations. Therefore, all this cheating went off our hands. However, for the cause we were still useless. Eventually, Hoover realized that this could end badly, and formed a group of real shooters, grated sheriffs from the Midwest, border guards and rangers. So they covered the Dillenger gang for the second time, got Nelson, and a few more bastards. Pervis, incidentally, later appropriated this idea, declaring his own, than he fatally offended the boss. In addition, Hoover then had a new handsome ... We, all the same, suffered heavy losses. But, none of these old cowboys were even wounded. It's just that we, young people, could not be instructed at all. Taking the testimony, we managed to listen to the most important, getting in an ambush, we looked at those for whom we watched, when they passed two steps from us. Everything, literally everything - was done by completely different people. In short, we got the glory, but this one was a stolen glory. And very soon the awl began to get out of the bag. Hoover did everything to present these guys, bank robbers, insane killers and murderers. Some of them were like that. For example, Nelson. But most of them were just village guys who came to the city from despair, and tried to somehow break the jackpot. Compared with how much money the mafia twisted during the Dry Law, in comparison with bribes of officials, with theft on state contracts - it was not even crimes, but so. Pampering. We saw this better than anyone else. And this is us who did not even think about social justice and other such matters! For us, justice was in the old good set of values - private property, democracy and the inviolability of the individual. At the same time, without the trial and warrant, we placed under arrest the relatives of these same gangsters, so that their elderly mothers from the farm could testify against them or indicate where they are hiding, we knocked out testimony with beatings and telephone cables, we simply wrote transcripts of interrogations, almost through a carbon paper. Then, personally, I moved more personal grievance than justice: and what the heck is this Johnny, who even has his own gang, in fact, does not lead us for such a long time ?! Later I began to realize how stupid it was.
- When Dillengera already took?
"When Purvis killed him," Mark said sadly. "Actually, the situation there was also idiotic. Local cops Johnny D. surrendered his mistress and her friend, the banders come from Poland, or something like that (in fact, from Romania, despite cooperation with the FBI, she was deported to Romania later, in 1934). Of course, everything was arranged by Purvis, as if it was the result of his "investigation." Local cops, they must be given their due, were people grated. They figured in advance a plan to arrest the gangster without shooting, and indeed, without much fuss. Purvis, on purpose, arranged everything so that the scoundrel was shot. And then he said that no one had thought of arresting such an eerie and cold-blooded murderer ...
- And why did he need it?
- What for? He did not confess to me, but, it seems to me, least of all Melvin wanted to see the "Enemy of Society Number One", giving testimony in court. Then everyone would most likely see that this is nothing more than a guy from the South, not the worst, not the smartest, reckless and brave, but only. It's not the king of the underworld, but only the little whiskey, desperate, not without it, but not at all bloodthirsty. He killed only one person, and then, more automatically - the cop shot him, and hit him twice, Dillenger rescued a bulletproof vest. Do not think that I'm sorry bastard. For me, so burn it in hell. The point is different: people have robbed banks before Hoover, many times, ever since fucking banks appeared in our country. They continued to rob them and after Johnny D. They are still being robbed. "The American legend" of them was made by Hoover and we. Simply because we needed to point at someone, present, so to speak, the root of all social ills. And these were, meanwhile, marginal loners, or very small groups of simple, like moo, stupid bastards. Hell, most of them did not even have any criminal connections. They bought weapons and ammunition in ordinary stores, wandered around motels, friends and girlfriends, money was spent on races, spent on costumes and drinks. To the same Nelson, for example, would it have occurred to let the loot into growth, put together some kind of business that allowed not to run more along the streets with an automatic rifle? No, they lived one day. And at this time guys like Meir Lansky were doing things for their partners - people with real money, who in life did not take a cannon in their hands, and there was nothing for them.
- And when you ... uh ... disagreed with the leadership in the views finally?
- After the war. There it became clear that, sooner or later, Hoover would again have problems. Crime felt like it could not be better. Italians in the East, gambling in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and in Atlantic City, the Chicago kids settled in Las Vegas, Nevada. Drug trafficking has become a significant factor in the national economy - I'm not joking or exaggerating. When personalities like Alfonso Capone and Luciano were stifled, for the job it played a rather positive role: from now on, the outfit simply worked exclusively in conjunction with large legal capital and politicians, and nothing else. And Hoover, for all that, simply denied the existence of organized crime. Absolutely. He continues, to this day, and continues to insist that crime in America - these are the same "Johnny" with guns, and today it is over. Naturally, a new "root of all the evils of society" was needed, well, they turned out to be you, the Communists. Very conveniently all has coincided. Of course, I understand that I was a bad agent in the fight against crime. And that all these high-profile campaigns of the '30s were a pure circus, dust in the eyes of the public. At least, most of these guys were scoundrels. Plant them, even shoot them - it's more natural. But, Nick, what Hoover started in the late 40's, I was already not at all at the core.
"Have you begun to fabricate the case again?"
- Yes, that's what they did! Hoover directly demanded not to pull the tires, and first to seek arrest, then beat out at least some evidence - stupidly knock out, truncheons, wrapped cloth. Then the case was filed for these statements. So fake that the bees flew to him, but no one had anything to do with this before. In a word, about that time I could not resist, and sent him away.
- So what?
- And nothing. I worked for another five years at a dust-free position. Hoover is afraid of us, those who see him through and through, and he knows about his motivation, about his predilections, and about his previous affairs. He does not touch us with a finger. They just did not give me any investigation, and I stumbled through the papers. And then he collected some of these pieces of paper, and fled.
"To Cuba?"
- No, when else - in Canada. He lived in Toronto, under a strange name. Tried to publish something, thought to write a book. But last year they found me. I managed to escape: first, I, after all, over the years have learned something from gangsters, and secondly, Hoover's people are still useless. But there was already no choice, where exactly to run, and I accidentally remembered about one Trotskyite, who in his time helped to avoid too much attention McCarthy. A decent man, he did not steal banks, he did not sell drugs, he just wanted to send all that scum to Alaska and clean the snow. Is this a crime, I thought then? But when he pressed himself, he helped me already. And Castro very graciously offered me a job. So - I'm trying.