Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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I enjoyed reading the Jan. 18 letter “Retire Hoover’s name from FBI,” which I wholeheartedly agree with.
J. Edgar Hoover’s official position was that “there was no such entity as the Mafia.” But the Apalachin meeting of 1957 made Hoover look like a fool. For a quarter of a century, the top law man in the United States (Hoover) claimed his finger was on the pulse of criminal activity. Yeah, right!
His credibility was shattered when The New York Times printed the front-page headline “65 Hoodlums Seized in a Raid and Run Out of Upstate New York Village.”
Hoover was so livid he could barely contain his rage. He decided he must cling to his position: The Mafia doesn’t exist. Speaking through the FBI’s official mouthpiece, Louis B. Nickols, Hoover continued to express “strong doubts about the Mafia’s existence.”
After 65 years, I still laugh.
