Crime Is His Specialty
“No. But if it’s a biography of Lyndon Johnson–didn’t he get into his election rigging early on, and didn’t he get into Bobby Baker? Truman and his scandal–his friend Tom Clark arranged for about five Chicago hoodlums to be released all at the same time. Willie Bioff testified they were shaking down the Hollywood movie industry through the projection-booth union. [Bioff, the union president, later was assassinated.] Then they were all convicted and they were sent to Atlanta and they were all released at the same time, which was unheard of. The minutes from the parole board were never made public. This supposedly was arranged through the Truman administration, through Tom Clark, the attorney general, and I believe Tom Clark was named a Supreme Court justice. And that’s how the presidency comes in.
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The October-November issue listed 80 books, including Never Let Them See You Cry by Miami police reporter Edna Buchanan, in the “Anthologies” category; Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, in the “Abortion” category; The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story by David Brock, in the “Current Affairs” category; and Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto, in the “Marilyn Monroe” category.
But Agnew’s expertise runs even deeper than his resume. In 1947, when he was one year old, his family bought the oldest single-room-occupancy hotel in Uptown and moved into it. Now Agnew runs the SRO and lives there still.
“And next door to me was the McCready Funeral Home, where they brought Dillinger’s body. That’s where Nash got into that John Dillinger theory, because the undertaker, Mr. McCready, had the wrong date entered in the ‘incoming’ ledger. It was a week earlier.
The money–the stake–has mounted to somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000. Last March Agnew printed 5,000 copies of issue one and mailed them all to the “creme de la creme.” Some went to librarians, others to Supreme Court justices, judges, prosecuting and defense attorneys, parole officers, and FBI officials named on a list he bought from the Criminal Justice Institute for $300. “I thought they’d look at a category like rape or something and say, ‘We’ve got to get this. We’ve got to keep in front.’”
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