Final_Judgment

[82] Final Judgment 143
J. Edgar Hoover's own connections to the Lansky Crime Syndicate and
to the pro-Israel lobby have been the subject of rumors and controversy for
many years.
It was the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith that
was largely responsible for the establishment of the J. Edgar Hoover
Foundation in 1947. (Top Lansky associates have long been generous
financial backers of the ADL.) The Hoover Foundation's first president was
Rabbi Paul Richman, Washington director of the ADL.
Hoover's longtime associate, Louis B. Nichols, the FBI's Assistant
Director in charge of the Records and Communications Division of the
Bureau, was the FBI's key contact with the ADL when the ADL helped
orchestrate mass sedition trials against key critics of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's foreign policy.
Nichols went on to serve as president of the J. Edgar Hoover
Foundation, but only after he left the FBI. Upon retirement from the bureau
he signed on as Executive Vice President of Schenley Industries, a major
liquor firm run by ex-bootlegger and Lansky associate Lewis R.
Rosenstie1. 218 Rosenstiel himself was a very close friend of the FBI director
in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, his ties to Lansky.
THE ADL AND ORGANIZED CRIME
The liquor industry, largely controlled by Jewish families such as the
Bronfman family, and others, have been major contributors to the ADL,
financing a large portion of its budget over the years. 219 These same liquor
interests—obviously, as we have seen—had longtime contacts with Lansky
from his earliest years in the bootlegging and rum-running rackets.
The origins of Hoover's sponsor—the ADL—is quite interesting. The
organization's initial impetus came not so much out of a desire to defend
members of the Jewish faith, but, more so, in particular, Jewish mobsters.
In the early part of this century New York City Police Commissioner
Thomas Bingham had begun a dedicated investigation of organized crime in
his city. By 1908 Bingham was under fire and being accused of being "anti-
Semitic" for pointing out the role of certain Jewish gangsters in organized
crime.
Ultimately, Bingham was forced out of office and organized crime took
hold in New York City. One of the immediate beneficiaries of Bingham's
departure was mobster Arnold Rothstein, Lansky's mentor and the
undisputed Jewish underworld leader prior to the younger Lansky's rise to
power.
The source of the attacks on Bingham was a public relations committee
formed by a corporate attorney by the name of Sigmund Livingston. By
1913 Livingston's committee had formally incorporated as the Anti-
Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. 220