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"The devil's curse works best in politics and baseball." -- Keyser Soze, Immortal Philosopher
If you want to round up some usual suspects to prove that point, start with fans of the Boston Red Sox. They'll tell you mournfully about the curse of the Bambino. You see long before Babe Ruth became the great Yankee slugger, he was the best left-handed pitcher in baseball wearing a Red Sox uniform.
In 1917, Babe was 24-13 and pitched an incredible 35 complete games. Babe could hit as well and, while not pitching in 1919, he played 111 games in the outfield and whacked 29 home runs, then the most ever in Major League history.
But then the Red Sox did the unthinkable. They sold the Babe to the Yankees for $125,000 and a $300,000 loan because Boston's owner Harry Frazee needed the money to invest in a Broadway play.
The Yankees went on to become a dynasty and the Red Sox have never recovered. In the eight years Ruth was with Boston they won four World Series, but haven't won since. My beloved Yankees still reign as world champs. Thus, the curse of the Bambino continues to haunt Beantown.
In politics, the longest reigning curse is J. Edgar Hoover's over the FBI. He was director of the bureau for 48 years, dying with his boots on (or perhaps high heels) in 1972.
Hoover began his government service as a run-of-the-mill lawyer and Southern racist whose slippery politics and unquenchable lust for power allowed him to build an unrivaled empire of brute control and influence.
I don't care that J. Edgar enjoyed dressing up like a little girl and had some strange sexual appetites. What should bother every American, however, is that Hoover trampled on the Constitution, abused his authority and was nothing but a vile crook.
The curse of J. Edgar Hoover hovers over the FBI like the stench over a pig-rendering plant. Hoover's most egregious flaw was that the rights of due process, equal protection, and privacy didn't quite fit with his view of how law enforcement should work. Hoover was a slimy snake who would do anything to nail a real or perceived "enemy," especially when it came to communists or liberals.
But Hoover was also a venal crook who should have been indicted posthumously for extortion and good old-fashioned stealing.
Old J. Edgar and his longtime companion, Clyde Tolson, never spent a dime of their own money for lavish meals and expensive vacations. In Washington, D.C., they ate and drank plenty, nearly every night, at Harvey's Restaurant. The owner always picked up their tab.
To beat the winter, J. Edgar (Bonnie?) and Clyde would head to the warmth of Florida or California, pretending they were on government business. Again, influence-seeking friends (including mobster Meyer Lansky) would cover their expenses.
The serial felon Hoover also regularly spent ten of thousands of taxpayer dollars on improvements to his Washington home. The FBI's carpenters routinely built furniture for J. Edgar's comfort. Hoover stole from the people as though it were his God-given right, which the sicko probably thought it was.
The image of the incorruptible "G-man," which Hoover and his pals in the media created, was a myth, and the man the image was supposed to reflect was thoroughly corrupt.
Hoover's curse strikes again with the stunning revelation that the FBI withheld more than 3,000 pages of documents from Timothy McVeigh's lawyers. Looking at it in the best light, assuming the papers were simply mishandled, the FBI is embarrassingly incompetent.
But since FBI Director Louis Freeh insists the agent in charge of the bombing investigation "had requested on numerous occasions" that field offices turn over all material relating to the case, you have to wonder if the failure to do so was deliberate.
The FBI was forced kicking and screaming to turn over documents in the Wen Ho Lee spy case. Then a judge caught the Federales, again inflating the truth and the spy case fizzled.
The bureau deliberately withheld thousands of documents and tapes that could have easily resulted in an earlier prosecution of Ku Klux Klan members for the fatal bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963.
Hoover's curse lives on and on. But let's try to end it now. The Washington headquarters of the FBI is called the J. Edgar Hoover Building, although even people who work there rarely call it that. They feel the embarrassment.
Let's begin eradicating the curse by changing the name of the FBI building. I would suggest we call it the Elliott Richardson Building. He was Nixon's attorney general and nobly resigned rather than carry out the president's order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Richardson was a decent, principled man whose name would bring honor to the building and help lift the curse.
Naming a building dedicated to law enforcement for J. Edgar Hoover is like naming a hospice for Dr. Jack Kervorkian.