Today's Reading
PROLOGUE
"Almost Boys"
MARCH 1, 1932, HOPEWELL, NEW JERSEY, ABOUT NINE P.M.
On a cold, rainy, blustery night, a shadowy figure tilted a ladder against the wall of a sprawling French country-style house, reached a second-floor window, and slipped inside. After grabbing a baby from its nursery crib, he carried the child to the open window, left an envelope on the windowsill, and began his descent in the darkness.
Partway down the rickety ladder, a rung gave way, and the baby fell from his arms to the ground. In all likelihood, the blow to the child's head was fatal. Nonetheless, the abductor carried his captive into the woods to await a response to the $50,000 ransom demand he had placed in the envelope.
Around midnight in Washington, DC, an obscure government bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover received a telephone call at his home on Capitol Hill informing him of what the New Jersey State Police knew already, and what millions of Americans would find out in their newspapers over breakfast the next morning: that the twenty-month-old son of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, the most revered man in the nation, had been kidnapped. It was the crime of the century.
And yet, in the hunt for the perpetrator, Hoover's FBI was relegated to the sidelines. At the time, kidnapping was not a federal crime, so the agency lacked jurisdiction over the case. And the FBI's stature was so little that Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the baby's parents, even declined Hoover's offer to meet with them.
The FBI did coordinate the federal effort to assist the local authorities to the extent possible. It also provided support from its fingerprinting and other technical experts who worked in the new crime laboratory that Hoover was proudly developing. But as much as Hoover would have liked to control the investigation to increase his agency's prestige, the case belonged to the state of New Jersey, where the baby had been abducted.
To states' righters, including another Hoover—President Herbert Hoover—legislation making kidnapping a federal crime was unnecessary. It was already a crime under state law, the argument went, so why involve the feds? The last thing that opponents of centralized federal power wanted was a national police force.
The FBI was also powerless to pursue bank robberies, which had mushroomed since the arrival of the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash. Particularly in the Midwest and the Southwest, where numerous bank foreclosures enraged the local citizenry, banks became popular targets for robbers in cars, or so-called motorized bandits. High-powered weapons such as the Thompson submachine gun—the famed "tommy" gun seen in every 1930s gangster film—allowed bank robbers to overwhelm locals wielding only six-shooters.
Compounding the problem for law enforcement, the rules were stacked in the outlaws' favor. When they robbed a bank in, say, Indiana, and drove their fast getaway cars to cross the border into Ohio or Illinois, no one could touch them. Not the FBI, because there was no federal jurisdiction. Not the peace officers in the state to which the bandits fled, because they had committed no crime there. The only law officers with authority to chase and arrest the bandits were those in the state of the original robbery, and their jurisdiction stopped at the state line.
Murder—even of a federal officer—was not a federal crime, either.
In retrospect, it is amazing how little authority the FBI had to combat violent crime at the time. But then, it wasn't originally envisioned as a crime-fighting unit. President Theodore Roosevelt and his attorney general created the FBI in 1908 as a small corps of detectives within the US Department of Justice to investigate corporate wrongdoing and fraudulent government land deals.
In the aftermath of World War I, the FBI was preoccupied with Red-baiting activities that Hoover, as the young head of the General Intelligence Division, had eagerly carried out: spying on Communists, Socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, and other " subversives," then rounding up and deporting them. Luckily for Hoover, although the lawless program was exposed and discredited in the early 1920s, it ended without any damage to his own reputation inside the federal government as an honest and efficient administrator.
Enforcing Prohibition, before its repeal in 1933, was a US Treasury Department responsibility, so the FBI didn't deal with bootleggers such as Al Capone and their gun-toting henchmen. And the Internal Revenue Service under Treasury was in charge of prosecuting tax evasion. It was T-men, not G-men, who brought down Capone in 1931.
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