Did Mob Blackmail Ex-FBI Chief? -- Writer: Gay-Sex Photos Hoover's `Achilles' Heel'

WASHINGTON - The Mafia blackmailed the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover with photos allegedly showing him engaged in homosexual acts, which effectively delayed a crackdown on organized crime by decades, a new book contends.

"The homosexual thing was Hoover's Achilles' heel," Seymour Pollock, an associate of mobster Meyer Lansky, is quoted as saying in the book by Anthony Summers, "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover."

"Meyer found it and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people," Pollock said in 1990, according to excerpts from the book released yesterday by Vanity Fair.

The book, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, and a "Frontline" documentary - airing Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Channel 9 - detail extensive contacts between Hoover and top crime figures.

Some of the relations were friendly, stemming from the FBI director's penchant for betting on horse races - many allegedly fixed by mobsters to ensure that Hoover won - and his love of high living, some of it financed by the mob.

But there was a stick along with these carrots, and that was compromising photos of homosexual activity between Hoover and longtime aide Clyde Tolson that allegedly were obtained by Lansky and mobster Frank Costello.

Hoover, as FBI chief, made a habit of squirreling away information about the sexual lives of Washington's power elite, including John and Robert Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and others, according to a number of biographers.

Hoover, who headed the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, was rumored to be homosexual as long ago as the 1930s. The rumors arose in part from his sharing a bachelor house with Tolson, who died in 1975.

This is the fifth book written by Summers, a former British Broadcasting Corp. journalist, who also wrote "Goddess," about actress Marilyn Monroe.

Summers says the Mafia may have gotten the purported photos of Hoover from the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. OSS chief William Donovan and Hoover were feuding over control of foreign intelligence, and they investigated each other.

Gordon Novel, identified by Summers as an electronics expert with CIA links, said CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton showed him several compromising photos of Hoover engaged in homosexual sex.

Susan Rosenstiel, the fourth wife of mobster and liquor distributor Lewis Solon Rosenstiel, said she saw Hoover dressed in women's clothing and involved in homosexual play with young men at two sex parties at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

"He was wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels and a black curly wig," Mrs. Rosenstiel said of the first party in 1958, attended also by attorney Roy Cohn. "He had makeup on, and false eyelashes."

The widow of psychiatrist Marshall Ruffin said in the book that her husband treated Hoover for years and "everybody then understood he was homosexual." Monteen Ruffin said her husband's notes, which he burned shortly before he died in 1984, "would've proved that."