Telling the same old inside, somewhat exaggerated truth
Anthony Howard
GANGLAND: HOW THE FBI BROKE THE MOB by Howard Blum Hutchinson, f16.99, pp. 349 What with its most famous director allegedly waltzing inside New York's Plaza Hotel in a fluffy black dress, his successor being left to twist slowly in the wind by President Nixon and even the most recent casualty being summarily fired by President Clinton last July, the FBI has been through some choppy waters lately. Even that massive building in Washington, DC still, as ill luck would have it, named after J. Edgar Hoover — no longer perhaps strikes terror into the heart of the evil-doer in the way it once did. Indeed, according to a controversial book published by Anthony Summers last year, Hoover himself was in league with the Mafia — a far more dam- aging charge than the one about his putting on false eyelashes, lace stockings and a feather boa in order to indulge his fantasies with young men.
Somewhere in the recesses of that vast Stalinesque structure on Pennsylvania Avenue, which serves as the FBI head- quarters, someone seems to have conclud- ed that the time had come to stop the rot. This book is probably best regarded as the beginning of the fight-back campaign. Written very much as the screenplay for a movie — the blurb proudly announces that a film from Columbia Pictures is already on the way — it seeks to take us back to the grand old days when The FBI Story (starring Jimmy Stewart) packed the
punters into cinemas across the world.
To be fair, the author — a former inves- tigative reporter for the New York Times - comes quite clean. In many ways the most revealing passages in the book are those concealed in the nine pages at the back headed 'A Note on Sources'. Howard Blum is at pains to emphasise that he was not born yesterday — in fact, he goes out of his way to tell us: 'I had gone to college and graduate school at a time when, with some reason, the FBI was often seen as the enemy.' Never mind, it is not long before that map of prejudice is rolled up: 'The agents of the C-16 team turned my precon- ceptions around completely.' That was obviously just as well — for, as the author also has the candour to admit: 'I realised from the start that to tell such a tale effec- tively would depend on the co-operation of the FBI.' All one can say is that he has not only enjoyed it but earned it in full measure.
Briefly, the tale he has to tell is of how over a period of six years, and at a cost of $75 million, a team of 15 dedicated agents (the C-16 section of the FBI in Manhattan) succeeded, largely through the use of invig- ilating bugs, in putting a local New York hoodlum and his accomplices — one of whom eventually and obligingly took up the role of a canary — behind bars. (In what precise way this essentially local achievement equates with the claim on the dust-jacket, 'How the FBI Broke the Mob' is never quite explained.) Still, Howard Blum is the master of a certain sort of breathless, pacey narrative — and for those who like a Boys' Own Paper approach to crime, this will be just their sort of thing. Here again, though, in his confessional section at the back, the author cannot help giving the show away. The writing of his book, he reveals, was still in progress when the news of the coming film broke in the press. His task, he admits, was immediately and immensely eased — a number of agents promptly 'began to search me out, eager to suggest why Tom Cruise, perhaps, would be the perfect choice to play them'.
Maybe there is no harm in all this, provided the reader realises that what we have here is an inside massage job. In that sense, not perhaps so far removed, after all, from the curious private world of J. Edgar Hoover.
Previous page
