The Federal Bureau of Investigation “investigates.”
The Postal Inspectors “inspect.”
The Treasury Agents “enforce.”
The Secret Service “protects”—the President and the currency.)
The Narcotics Bureau is covered elsewhere in some detail; but this is as good a place as any to assure you that Federal cops are human beings, not machines assembled to turn out convictions. A principal function of the Narcotics Bureau is to combat the dope evil, not to imprison its victims. This was demonstrated when a famed Hollywood movie star went on the junk. The Bureau, in checking prescriptions, found she was in the hands of a quack who was ruining her life. Commissioner Anslinger made a trip to Hollywood to plead with the head of her studio to give her a year off, so she could go to a sanitarium for a cure. She had two pictures in the works and the studio factotum demurred. He mentioned her contract, said the company had millions invested in the films. He “couldn’t possibly see my way clear.”
Anslinger warned him she would collapse and the company would lose an asset worth even more. The young woman was being kept alive during the day on benzedrine. Afternoons the doctor tapered her off on secanol. After work she was dosed with morphine. The inevitable eventuated. She blew up completely, tried suicide, was hospitalized and suspended. Then the government stepped in and gave her the cure. Now she is dehabituated and rehabilitated.
The Intelligence Unit uncovered the huge tax fraud that sent Henry Lustig, former owner of New York’s Longchamps Restaurant chain, to the pen. Many stories are told on how the prosecution began, including the apocryphal one that Henry Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, was forced to stand in line and wait for a table in a Miami cafe when Lustig was ushered in ahead of him; Morgenthau asked who the man was, exploded and ordered the Feds to get him.
But the real story is this: The New York hideaway office of the unit is at 253 Broadway. There’s a Longchamps Restaurant in the basement. Federal agents don’t earn enough to afford its fancy prices. They usually lunch in a counter-joint around the corner. But one day it rained. Some agents were tied up on a big case, didn’t have time to wait, so they ducked down in the elevator.
Many Wall Street financiers lunch there regularly, have tables reserved and waiting. The only empty one had a “reserved” sign, but the Intelligence boys grabbed it over the protest of the hostess. When the millionaires arrived they had to wait. They fumed. Lustig was there. He shouted, “Why did you let those bums take that table?”