Saturday, May 12, 2007

Narcotics diary of FBI agent on EBay

If you were smoking dope in New York between 1931 and 1959, your comings and goings may be detailed in a surveillance diary of a former FBI agent, which is being sold on EBay. It is apparently complete and unredacted. No name have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty. More: Boing Boing: EBay find: Narcotics diary of FBI agent, NYC, 1931-1959

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm trying to get the word out about this.

I thought it was odd that the guy said it was an FBI agent's diary because I thought the Treasury Department had jurisdiction over all narcotics investigations back then - there was a division called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that handled that enforcement. Also, J. Edgar Hoover wanted nothing to do with drug law enforcement because he didn't want his agents to run the risk of being corrupted. And another thing - I went to the FBI's homepage and if you look through the history of the FBI's major cases from back in those days - you don't find many (if any) drug related busts. They focused on gangsters, corruption, bank robbers, kidnappers, etc. I'm not even sure if they had jurisdiction over drug crimes.

Here's an article from our Congressional Research Service (highly respected, and boy, do they hate it when these get released) that speaks of Hoovers reluctance (or refusal?) to get involved with drug crime investigations. In fact, he seemed to avoid it at all costs.


http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32095.pdf