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February 23, 1981

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 5

80 Years of Abscam

How the FBI Became an American Gestapo


by M. Murray and Charles Tate

FBI czar J. Edgar Hoover and his aides study the "G-man" national gestapo network built up through the Mann Act.

The model for the Abscam-Brilab witchhunts of today is the FBI's first major national assignment: its investigation, toward the beginning of the century, of the "white slave trade" under the Mann Act. This first major undertaking of the FBI's predecessor organization, the Bureau of Investigations, already employed every ugly ruse in the FBI's frameups and entrapments today. The FBI has never been a law enforcement agency. Then as now, the FBI's only relationship to law enforcement is as a pretext for gathering information to be used in its jihad against its assigned targets and its perceived foes.

In each case, the FBI has justified its gross abuses by pointing to a "menace" a threat to citizens' safety or national security so grave as to exonerate even the FBI. "White slavery" was the FBI's first great "menace," and it was through the white slavery "investigation" that the FBI obtained the powers and prerogatives to become an American gestapo. The First Menace When President Theodore Roosevelt created the BOI by executive order in July 1908, Congress denounced the new agency as a threat to the authority of the states, a superfluous institution lacking any justification or authority, and a potential seed-bed for the development of an American secret police on the Czarist Okhrana model. In its earliest years, the FBI scrounged and strained for federal enforcement authorization. According to FBI critic Max Lowenthal, the Bureau of Investigations' first cases "were somewhat makeshift in character. . . . The Justice detectives investigated crimes committed on Indian or other government reservations; they prepared some District of Columbia cases involving false purchases and sales of securities; they handled a few peonage and bankruptcy fraud cases." But under Bureau of Investigations chief Stanley W. Finch, who had been appointed by Roosevelt's Attorney General and BOI co-founder Frank Bonaparte, the Bureau seized the mandate for enforcement of the Mann Act Statutes of 1910. According to FBI historian Fred J. Cook, "Finch quickly saw the Mann Act as a golden opportunity to apply to Congress for even more funds and for ever more agents." Congressional Opposition As in the case of the founding of the BOI itself, fierce opposition from Congress greeted the new white slave trading legislation. Congressman William C. Adamson of Georgia expressed his dislike for the "practice of piling up recitals of filth and iniquity . . . and then running to Congress for more legislation. . . . States ought to take care of morals, and not overburden Congress. . . . If I understand the gentlemen . . . this is not an attempt to prevent prostitution, but to purify [interstate] commerce." And just as congressmen who opposed the creation of the Bureau were smeared as protectors of criminals, now, opponents of the Mann Act, also offering constitutional arguments based on states' rights or fear of government despotism, were maligned as promoters and proponents of vice!

'No Girl is Safe' When the Mann Act became law, no specific guidelines for which enforcement agency would have jurisdiction were set. Finch's Bureau stepped forward to assume responsibility for the new statute. After a few desultory months of investigations. Finch proceeded to stir up a nationwide "girl-nabber" scare to pry loose from the still suspicious Congress the means to create the new national secret police. In a tactic that has become familiar as the modus operandi of the FBI in dealing with Congress and other agencies, Finch painted the following chilling picture before Congress in 1910: "Unless a girl was actually confined in a room and guarded, there was no girl, regardless of her station in life, who was altogether safe. . . . There was need that every person be on his guard, because no one could tell when his daughter or his wife or his mother would be selected as a victim." Despite the knights-to-the-rescue eloquence of Finch's warnings of danger to women everywhere, the Bureau did not use the Mann Act to break up the white slave traffic or organized crime prostitution. It used the Mann Act as a pretext to embark on a crusade against personal immoralityusing as informants and witnesses the very madams and pimps it was purportedly investigating. As an up-and-coming assistant to Finch, J. Edgar Hoover was later to acknowledge, "The average case concerns usually one man and one woman or two men and two women,"not the gangbusting crimehunt of legend. Finch and his detectives used their new funding and congressional mandate to travel from city to city, working with local police in mapping local houses of prostitution. When a new face appeared, especially if it were one that had crossed a state line, the agents would pounce. In congressional testimony, Finch intimated how some of his "leads" were developed: "Some madams are very jealous of other madams . . . and they spy on other madams" for Finch's vice squad. Finch also hired local attorneys to spy on local brothels and keep a census on patrons and prostitutes. Finch used these local relationships to place agents across the nation and turn citizens into the "eyes and ears" of the BOI.

Bureau critic Lowenthal gives some insight into how the collection of BOI informants were roped in and controlled: "Excluded, in the main, from direct action themselves, the agents ordered all persons enumerated in the vice census to obey local laws, and on occasion threatened to furnish the local police with evidence of local crime they had collected [emphasis added]." A National Vice Squad At most, the Bureau's Mann Act mobilization scored a few raids on homes of ill repute that had run afoul of its informant networks. More frequently, the Bureau used Mann Act authorization to launch inquests into the personal morality of individuals not connected to criminal activity in any way. One victim of this aspect of Mann Act enforcement was Jack Johnson, then the world heavyweight champion. Johnson had fallen in love with a lady of ill-repute, and persuaded her to leave her profession and marry him. Johnson and his fiancee were subsequently arrested by the BOI when they crossed state lines. Although there was never any question of criminal activityJohnson intended to violate neither the law nor the woman in questionhe was arrested and sentenced to prison. Johnson's real "crime" may have been that he was black and his fiancee white. In another infamous episode, BOI agents arrested the son of an aide to President Woodrow Wilson for crossing a state line in furtherance "of a private impropriety." Again, there was no suggestion that the young man's peccadillo was related to any criminal activity properly construed. Rather, as J. Edgar Hoover was to explain this and similar cases of federal indictments of private individuals, in instances of personal morality, the agency was attacking the "problem of vice in modern civilization." It is on this model that the Abscam and Brilab cases are construed by the FBI todaycases where weak, foolish, or even entirely innocent individuals are trapped into circumstances in which their intentions have nothing to do with criminal behavior. The result of the Mann Act period was not merely the destruction of the lives and reputation of noncriminals. Through the Mann Act period, the Bureau secured the means to become a national gestapo.

Through its informant "eyes and ears," the Bureau began to accumulate its massive bank of raw dossier material on thousands of citizens. As Lowenthal described an aspect of this process, "Distressed citizens from all over the country write in to give the detectives all kinds of information about the travels of strangers, acquaintances, relatives, or even themselves. Hundreds of thousands of such communications have found their way into the swelling permanent records of the bureau, registering and perpetuating the names, the failings (alleged or real) and the private affairs of the many victims and victimizers." Citizens are protected from monitoring by government until such time as they themselves become suspects in a criminal case, or become victims or step forward as witnesses. But the Bureau does not and has never abided by such routine law enforcement procedures. Instead, acting as an informationgathering agency, not a law enforcement agency, files are opened on individual citizens whenever possible. Through the Mann Act period also, the Bureau began the practice of electronic eavesdropping, and launched its first "dragnet"a mass arrest of individuals not involved in a federal crime. In 1937, J. "Edgar Hoover personally supervised a mass roundup under the Mann Act of ten establishments in Baltimore. Of the 47 arrests made, few were found to have been under federal jurisdiction. However, inaugurating the FBI's by-now routine technique of "trial-by-press." The names of those apprehended were quickly routed to news media for public humiliation. (To Hoover's embarrassment, however, three, whose names were carefully concealed from the press, were close friends of the FBI director himself!) With prosecutions rendered impossible by lack of jurisdiction, Hoover was pressed to explain why the Bureau had acted so hastily. His answer was that the FBI had actedfor the first timeon wiretap information. In fact, the information had been garnered through a wiretap on the phone of a Maryland state legislator! Interpreting the wiretapped conversation incorrectly, the Bureau later explained, they thought they had overheard plans to transport some of the Baltimore female offenders over state lines, but it turned out that the scheme was only entertainment for the locals.

A former FBI agent later recalled that during the 1930s, "When we were doing investigations under the White Slave Traffic Act, there was one dependable way to find out information about call girls, by wiretapping. And we didn't hesitate a bit." It is likely that very little of this information gathered by electronic surveillance ever found its way as evidence into a court of law. Rather, it continued to feed the "raw" data dossiers that are the Bureau's famous black files. How perceptive were those congressmen who warned the nation that the lunching of the FBI would be used only "to dig up the private scandals of men." Ultimately, the Bureau jettisoned the Mann Act rationale for its intelligencegathering activities after a 1940s vice raid in Miami. Cries of private outrage and sober second thoughts by the Justice Department attorneys charged with prosecuting these flimsy cases led the Bureau to back off. However, the FBI had secured its objective. It had become a major bureaucracy, had established a multimillion dollar budget, and a network of offices throughout the country. Most of all, it had its files, with information on thousands of Americans, information that without being criminal materialcould be used to intimidate and coerce.

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