Martin Scorsese's upcoming 'Killers of the Flower Moon' examines the origins of an agency that forged a relationship with the entertainment industry in the 1930s, cementing the tropes audiences see today.
Created in 1908 within the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Investigation and formally branded with the trademark initials in 1935, the FBI grew up during the first wave of electronic age media and took full advantage of the coincidence. Hollywood cinema , radio crime shows, comic strips and television series cheerfully operated as unpaid publicity for the FBI and the man who presided over it for almost fifty years.
Though an unlikely media star, J. Edgar Hoover was a master of manipulation. Born in 1895, an unsocial and unsmiling boy whose best friend was indeed his mother, he began his desk-bound career as a factotum at the Library of Congress, where he honed his penchant for cataloging information and indexing reality.
Given the brazen corruption and incompetence that had been seen in local law enforcement, Hoover’s vision of a centralized headquarters to gather crime statistics, evaluate evidence and train a cadre of forensic-minded experts made sense. Grann’s book — a riveting true crime account of the serial killing of oil-rich members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s — supports Hoover’s case.
In the early 1930s, the FBI seized an even better opportunity to make its bones. Prohibition had given birth to a new criminal type, the urban gangster, a tommy-gun toting outlaw ready-made for Hollywood’s early sound era. Like their real-life inspirations, the prototypes for an aborning genre —
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