He insisted on rigorous hiring criteria, including background checks, interviews, and physical tests for all special agent applicants, and in January 1928, he launched the first formal training for incoming agents, a two-month course of instruction and practical exercises in Washington, D.C.
#MODERN DAY MAFIA 4 CODE#
He did so by weeding out the “political hacks” and incompetents, laying down a strict code of conduct for agents, and instituting regular inspections of Headquarters and field operations. Hoover would go on to serve for nearly another half century.Īt the outset, the 29-year-old Hoover was determined to reform the Bureau, quickly and thoroughly, to make it a model of professionalism. Three years later, Stone named him Director. In 1921, he was named Assistant Director of the Bureau. Hoover had joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and had quickly risen through its ranks. Not long after the news of these secret activities broke, President Calvin Coolidge fired Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, naming Harlan Fiske Stone as his successor in 1924.Ī good housecleaning was in order for the Bureau, and it came at the hands of a young lawyer by the name of J. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. In the young Bureau of Investigation, things were not much better. And their jurisdictions stopped abruptly at their borders.
More often than not, local police forces were hobbled by the lack of modern tools and training. Dealing with the bootlegging and speakeasies was challenging enough, but the “Roaring Twenties” also saw bank robbery, kidnapping, auto theft, gambling, and drug trafficking become increasingly common crimes. On the other side was law enforcement, which was outgunned (literally) and ill-prepared at this point in history to take on the surging national crime wave. By 1926, more than 12,000 murders were taking place every year across America. Rival gangs led by the powerful Al “Scarface” Capone and the hot-headed George “Bugs” Moran turned the city streets into a virtual war zone with their gangland clashes.
With wallets bursting from bootlegging profits, gangs outfitted themselves with “Tommy” guns and operated with impunity by paying off politicians and police alike. In one big city alone- Chicago-an estimated 1,300 gangs had spread like a deadly virus by the mid-1920s. There was no easy cure.
#MODERN DAY MAFIA 4 PROFESSIONAL#
On the one side was a rising tide of professional criminals, made richer and bolder by Prohibition, which had turned the nation “dry” in 1920.
It wasn’t much of a fight, really-at least at the start. The “war to end all wars” was over, but a new one was just beginning-on the streets of America.
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