Word: hooverness
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...expansion was electrically powered. As the decade began, about half of all factories were electric, the rest mostly using steam. But by decade's end, more than 80% were on electricity. Household earnings rose; unemployment averaged 4.7%. Car ownership grew from 8 million to 24 million. In 1928 Herbert Hoover declared, "We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land." Oops...
Last Friday afternoon that jury found Hoover and six cohorts guilty of narcotics conspiracy. Though sentencing may not take place for several weeks, the verdict could consign Hoover--already serving a 150-to-200-year sentence for murder--to a maximum-security federal penitentiary for the rest of his life, without possibility of parole and, equally important, cut off from almost all communications. His conviction was the capstone of an eight-year effort by federal prosecutors to break up the Gangster Disciples, the Chicago-based street gang that for more than two decades has controlled some of the most lucrative...
...emerged vividly from tapes recorded through wafer-thin listening devices in prison visitors' badges and from the testimony of fellow gang members who took the witness stand in exchange for reduced prison sentences. The first portrait was of a narcotics empire that virtually controlled the Illinois state prison system. Hoover held jailhouse meetings, dictated memos and issued orders into his cell phone. He wore $400 alligator boots, dined on specially prepared food and splashed himself with expensive cologne. Payoffs to corrections officers permitted his bodyguards to arm themselves with shanks and bedposts. At one prison near Joliet, they even bragged...
...young criminals filtered through prison, they were given application forms to fill out and, if their references proved solid, were indoctrinated into the gang. Everyone who joined had to memorize a 16-rule code dictated by Hoover. The flow of G.D.s back onto the streets enabled Hoover to set up two "boards of directors"--one inside and the other outside the prison--through which he controlled his network of "governors," "coordinators" and "regents." These men in turn managed the gang's day-to-day drug operation: teenage pushers, lookouts and "mules" who worked the inner-city schoolyards, housing projects...
What's wrong at the FBI is not new. Back when J. Edgar Hoover was the director (1924-72), we did not hear of mistakes because he flooded the media with propaganda. Today's director, Louis Freeh, is not a master cover-up artist like Hoover. For decades, FBI scientists have not been qualified as experts in their field. In 1989 Frederic Whitehurst blew the whistle on the FBI lab, and now he is viewed as the culprit. But in 1979 William C. Sullivan, former assistant director in charge of the domestic intelligence division, published a book that stated...