Washington Lawyer - July/August 2024 - 45

WORTH READING
The Bulldog Detective
Jeffrey D. Simon
Prometheus Books, 2024
Review by Diane Kiesel
B
efore the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and its legendary
longtime director, J. Edgar
Hoover, there was the littleknown
precursor agency called the
Bureau of Investigation (BI) led by
William J. Flynn, a six-foot-tall, 300pound
" bulldog " of a man who was
once just as infamous as Hoover.
Flynn's law enforcement career began when he
joined the U.S. Secret Service in 1897, and it
ended in 1921 after fallout from the infamous
Palmer Raids against radicals and anarchists.
The raids led to the arrest, imprisonment, and
deportation of resident aliens, often in violation
of their civil rights. Flynn's rise and hard fall are
the subject of a new biography, The Bulldog Detective,
by Jeffrey D. Simon.
Simon, a former research analyst and also a lecturer
on terrorism, is uniquely qualified to write
about Flynn, who arguably conducted the nation's
first fight against foreigners seeking to
destroy American democracy through violence.
Unfortunately, Simon's chronicle of
Flynn's career takes the reader along detours
that consume pages when paragraphs would
suffice. Lengthy background on the Sicilian
Mafia, the New York City Police Department's
first Italian detective, and the historical underpinnings
of World War I stall readers seeking to
get to the heart of the story of this man now
forgotten to history.
When the focus finally turns to Flynn, the book
is an interesting look at a dedicated crime fighter
with a hunger for publicity. He routinely
yakked to the press about his investigations
and wrote self-aggrandizing newspaper stories
and books about his exploits. A 1919 book, The
Eagle's Eye, is a novelization of facts provided by
Flynn about his work exposing German spies in
America. The book even became a 20-episode
serial film, which flopped.
In 1919 Flynn published The Barrel Mystery, a
book about a counterfeiter he captured who
was responsible for the assassination of a stool
pigeon's relative found stuffed in a barrel on
the Lower East Side. In 1922 Flynn arranged for
the New York Herald to publish a 10-week series,
" Black Hand: Inner Secrets Laid Bare. " He created
a fictional detective, Peabody Smith (modeled
after himself) for a popular weekly magazine.
And in 1924 he and a publisher launched
a new detective magazine named, of course,
Flynn's.
One of six children of an Irish immigrant, Flynn
grew up on the rough streets of New York's
Hell's Kitchen. As a boy he saw a well-dressed
U.S. Secret Service agent collar a counterfeiter
and dreamed of being that dashing agent. That
dream was deferred when his father died, forcing
a teenage Flynn to quit school. He worked
as a rug delivery man, stone carver, plumber,
and semi-pro baseball player. His first law enforcement
job of sorts was as a guard at the
Ludlow Street Jail in Lower Manhattan, where
he paid close attention to the men being held
as counterfeiters and learned their methods.
Because of his limited law enforcement experience,
it took Flynn a decade to get hired by the
Secret Service at a time when its main mission
was to nab counterfeiters. (The Secret Service
would not protect presidents until after the
1901 assassination of William McKinley.) Within
four years, Flynn was running its New York office.
In 1910 he was named a deputy commissioner
of the New York City Police Department
by a reform mayor and tasked with cleaning up
corruption. But within six months, Flynn determined
he didn't have political support and returned
to the Secret Service, where he was
named chief of the entire agency.
During World War I, Flynn's agents hunted
down German spies and saboteurs imbedded
in America. Flynn resigned in 1918, vocally complaining
about infighting among the Secret
Service, BI, and Justice Department over responsibility
for counterintelligence. Then-BI
chief A. Bruce Bielaski called Flynn " a good deal
of a fat head, " albeit one with good intentions.
President Wilson threw Flynn a consolation
prize - chief detective of the U.S. Railroad Administration,
a job that bored him.
In June 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
appointed Flynn director of the BI to replace
Bielaski, who had left government. " He's the
greatest anarchist expert in the United States, "
Palmer told Congress. All hell had just broken
loose. On June 2, 1919, a bomb exploded on
Palmer's front porch in Washington, D.C., and at
eight other locations around the country - an
unprecedented terrorist attack believed to be
instigated by " Reds. " The bombings followed a
series of mail bombs by Italian insurrectionists
earlier that spring.
In response, the so-called Palmer Raids, roundups
of suspected radicals, began. Thousands of
people were arrested in November 1919 and
January 1920. Eventually, America's most famous
radical, Emma Goldman, was arrested
and deported to Russia. Flynn was on the dock
to see her off, along with J. Edgar Hoover, then
the 24-year-old head of the BI's new Radical Division,
through which he maintained copious
records about suspected anarchists.
Flynn's star began falling when he was unable
to find the people responsible for the bombings
and public backlash against the raids grew.
The end came for Flynn's career when he also
failed to apprehend the bomber who set off an
explosion on Wall Street on September 16,
1920, killing more than 30 people.
After Warren Harding became president in
1921, Flynn, whose reputation by then was in
tatters, was replaced by William J. Burns, who
had run a private detective agency. Burns was
forced out three years later because of his role
in the Teapot Dome Scandal. Hoover, then 29,
was waiting in the wings to replace him.
The name of the bureau was changed to the
FBI in 1935, and Hoover remained its director
until his death in 1972. Ironically, it was Hoover's
list-making in the Radical Division, which he
shared with Flynn and the BI, that enabled the
raids leading to Flynn's downfall.
Diane Kiesel is a retired justice of the New York
Supreme Court, adjunct law professor, and author.
JULY/AUGUST 2024 * WASHINGTON LAWYER 45
Washington Lawyer - July/August 2024

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