WWW- Can’t get enough celebrity news? Hooked on cop shows and reality TV?
The FBI has a Web site for you!
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Freedom of Information- Privacy Act web site is a gold mine of gossip through declassified documents on a long list of “famous persons.”
It’s old news, and the only people you can spy on are dead, but it’s fascinating reading that ranges from the tragic to the absurd. The files are written in authentic cop lexicon, using period technology. Typewritten mistakes are X’d out, with corrections typed above.
Inside the FBI’s files: MIKE ROYKO. A subversive group in Pennsylvania mailed him stolen FBI documents.
WALTER PAYTON: He received a death threat in 1982 from someone called “Scorpio.”
RICHARD WRIGHT: Contains correspondence concerning his “Twelve Million Black Voices.”
MARIAN ANDERSON: State Department had considered her for “a top-level position.”
Mike Royko has a file because some nut calling himself “Michael Corleone” made a mail threat in 1976, and because a subversive group in Pennsylvania once mailed him stolen FBI documents.
Frank Lloyd Wright has a file because “in 1943, many Germans went to the Wright household and held musicals.”
Writer, social activist and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. DuBois, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard University, has a 927-page file in five parts. In 1942, the FBI claimed his writing “indicates him to be a socialist” and that “he has been called a Communist.” DuBois emigrated to Ghana, where he died in 1963.
Mass murderer John Wayne Gacy’s fingerprints and rap sheet are contained in a 17-page file that is mostly blacked out, but creepy just the same.
Walter Payton, the revered Chicago Bears running back, has a file because of a 1982 death threat from someone called “Scorpio.” The file contains the 8-page FBI laboratory analysis that determined the letter was written on an IBM magnetic card “Executive” typewriter first produced in 1972. Another letter is in Payton’s FBI file, a note of congratulations from FBI director William S. Sessions when the Anti-Defamation League award Payton its “World of Difference Award” in 1988.
Author Richard Wright’s file contains 1942 correspondence between J. Edgar Hoover and an assistant in the Military Intelligence Service who believed Wright’s “Twelve Million Black Voices” was subversive.
“Material of this character in the hands of designing persons can lead to many forms of sabotage and result in a general breakdown of morale,” the MIS warned, suggesting that Wright was guilty of “treasonable utterance in time of war.”
Hoover personally responded, “If your inquiry develops information of an affirmative nature, you should of course order an investigation to be undertaken as to subject’s background, inclinations and current activities.”
Singer Marian Anderson was investigated in 1958 when the State Department considered her for “a top level position.” Documents reveal concern by the White House about her association with Paul Robeson, and a falling out with an accompanist years before. Someone at Temple University said Anderson should not be placed in a high-level government position because she was a “typical temperamental musician.”
Many other musicians have files, including the Beach Boys, and a group listed in the FBI’s alphabetized list as “Halen, Van.” Van Halen apparently attracted the FBI’s notice when someone at Warner Brothers Records (name blacked out) sent the bureau’s Technical Services Division its new releases in March, 1978, and April, 1979, with a note: “Enclosed please find two 8-track tapes of each of our latest top recordings…”
The Doors merited a collective file because letters to Hoover complained that “lyrics to songs performed by this group were filthy, vulgar and offensive.” And frontman James Douglas Morrison earned his own file for interfering with a flight crew during a 1969 Continental flight from Los Angeles to Phoenix.
According to FBI files, the Doors were so unruly that the pilot left the cockpit twice to scold the musicians for ignoring the “fasten seatbelt” and “no smoking” signs.
Agents took this statement from a flight attendant: “She stated that in Los Angeles a group of hippies which someone told her later were a musical group using the name of the Dors (sic) boarded the flight. She got up and made the oxygen instruction speech and during this time, these individuals were talking and yelling…All during the flight, these individuals were using foul language and making off-color hand jestures (sic) to her and the rest of the stewardesses.
“The individuals remained quiet for about 15 minutes after the Captain talked to them, and then started up again…. Just before the flight landed, one of the individuals took his drink which was partially full and threw it against the bulkhead and yelled. The drink and ice went all over (a flight attendant) and one of the individual’s friends.”
“But he put soap in my drink,” one of the “longhaired hippie types” complained to the captain. They were arrested upon arrival in Phoenix. … “At 2:30 PM, JAMES D. MORRISON was taken into custody from the Phoenix Police Department and transported by Government automobile to the custody of the United States Marshal.”