Vice Queens and White Slaves: The FBI's Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City (original) (raw)
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2016
the FBI director who added the "Federal" to the Bureau's name, managed and symbolized American state power for a longer term than any U.S. president. The photograph of this national bulwark on the jacket of J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (1969), one sequel to Hoover's anticommunist classic Masters of Deceit (1958), depicts a ruddy, graying, older man, stocky and tidy. He sits at the edge of a desk and balances an anonymous book on his right thigh, the red of the binding offsetting his neatly coordinated blue suit and tie. His face is dominated by the loose jaw, spatulate nose, and wide, baggy eyes that inspired his frequent caricature as a bulldog (see figure 1.1). Yet for all its resonance, this familiar image of the sturdy, vigilantly literate Hoover, the Cold War icon who personified a watchful "Fourth Branch of Government, " has blocked our view of the comparably significant young Hoover first hired by the Bureau's Radical Division in 1919. Then pictured as a "slender bundle of high-charged electric wire" (Vaile), this twenty-four-year-old Hoover embodied a clean-cut, streamlined, dynamically modernized shift in American police leadership. In shades of Nick Carraway, the true star of The Great Gatsby (1925), one Jazz Age newspaper feature cast him as a dead ringer for "an active young bond salesman" (qtd. in Hoover, Scrapbooks). 1 While the FBI was attracting some of its first headlines by chasing African American boxer Jack Johnson, an even younger John Edgar Hoover was earning the modern nickname "Speed" by delivering groceries in his native Washington, D.C., grinding out the grades that made him valedictorian of the Central High class of 1913, and drilling Company A in his school's corps of cadets. His zealous neatness, watertight memory for written detail, gift for steering
Organizational Secrecy and the FBI's COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist Hate Groups Program, 1967-1971
This article explains how secrecy influenced the communication and decision-making processes of the FBI's covert and illegal program to disrupt left-leaning Black political organizations between 1967-1971. Memos exchanged between the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and field offices reveal the explicit techniques for concealing their identities as the source of their anonymous communication. The Bureau's techniques point to the high degree of coordination among organization members required to maintain organizational secrecy; they also point to the ways in which secrecy enabled the organization to engage in reprehensible behavior.
August Vollmer, Traffic in Women, and the Theory of Organized Crime
Social Sciences
During the 1920s, the League of Nations carried out the first intercontinental investigation into the traffic in women. Although this work is virtually unknown in criminology, the investigators, William Snow and Bascom Johnson, formulated the conceptual language of “trafficking” used today. It was also during the 1920s that Frederick Thrasher and John Landesco published their pioneering works on “organized crime” drawing on research in Chicago. The advantages of the League’s model can be seen in the response to a 1924 report of a white slave traffic ring in Los Angeles by August Vollmer, the celebrated founder of professionalism in American policing. Vollmer’s language of a white slave traffic ring in Los Angeles recalls a nineteenth-century understanding of traffic in women but previews the illegal enterprise model that emerges from the industrial city. Drawing on their understanding of crime in port cities, Snow and Johnson situate the traffic in women within a social networks mod...
Journalist Whitney Webb investigation : "The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime"
2022
At the time of World War ll, US intelligence formalized its cooperation with organized crime to form Operation Underwood. From there, the web of corruption grew to entangle many well-known figures. STORY AT-A-GLANCE Whitney Webb's book, "One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein," provides the framework to understand not just the role and function of Epstein, but also, more broadly, the mess we're now finding ourselves in Around the time of World War II, the intelligence community in the United States formalized its cooperation with organized crime syndicates in what was known as Operation Underworld, and the web of corruption grew from there Sexual blackmail was used by organized crime before U.S. intelligence even existed. As criminal factions and intelligence agencies developed a symbiotic relationship, blackmail became a tool to achieve their individual ends While it may appear as though organized crime is being combated, this is rarely ever the case. Stories of cracking down on organized crime are cover stories to hide what's really happening, which is the consolidation of organized crime territory The incentive behind all this criminal activity is not merely the hoarding of money to live in the lap of luxury. It's about power and control over others. The good news is we can pull the plug on their plans In this interview, investigative journalist Whitney Webb discusses her book, "One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein." The book is so long, it was cut into two volumes. Volume 1 alone is 544 pages, but it's a fascinating read and incredibly well-referenced. When asked what drove or inspired her to become an investigative journalist and to write this tome, Webb reviews some of her personal history that made her question adults and authority in general and, more specifically, the systems that run our world, including health care and politics. "I became acutely aware of a lot of these issues with health care and big pharma, environmental issues and political stuff ...
Steal or Starve Black Women's Criminal Work in New York City, 1893 to 1914
Journal of Women's History, 2020
This article focuses on the criminal work performed by African American women in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City. I examine Black women’s illegal work in the larger context of dominant society’s racist-sexist ideologies and white male police officers’, judges’, and journalists’ responses to crime. I argue that, for most con- victed Black women, crime was a type of work. Black women’s criminal work, most frequently in the form of theft, was a tactical and moral response to poverty generated by racist-sexist discrimination. White men’s legalistic and journalistic interpretations of women’s criminal work were race, class, and gender specific. Popular racial fictions about female criminality, widely represented in the white press, motivated and justified the discriminatory law enforcement that produced Black women’s disproportionate incarceration rate.
Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley
American Studies, 2015
review-policing-sexuality-the-mann-act-and-the-making-ofthe-fbi/ Policing Sexuality links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the US agency the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In pursuit of offenders, working prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted. Nafiseh Sharifi thinks Pliley's intriguing and easy to read book is a brilliant resource for historians and researchers in the field of gender. Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the making of the FBI. Jessica R. Pliley. Harvard University Press. November 2014. Laws intended to police sex trafficking rarely benefits those who have been trafficked; instead these laws mark women as bodies to be policed.-Policing Sexuality Jessica Pliley is an assistant professor of women's history at Texas State University. Her first book, Policing Sexuality, is an insightful document about the history of government surveillance and control of sex and sexuality in the United States. Pliley chooses a period of time in American history in which issues of prostitution, adultery, and venereal diseases became problematic. University of London. For her thesis Nafiseh is working on personal experiences of body and sexuality amongst different generations of Iranian women. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in Iran, sexual politics in Muslim societies, and women's narratives of embodiment.