Low Light: The Plot to Blackmail J. Edgar Hoover

Low Light is about a scheme to neutralize the FBI by blackmailing its young Director, J. Edgar Hoover, in Atlantic City during the summer of 1929. Al Rubin, the narrator protagonist, is an ordinary man who wants a better life and is offered one by the New York gangster Meyer Lansky and by the Boss of Atlantic City, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Low Light is a novel that weaves a plausible explanation for a 20th Century mystery – why did J. Edgar Hoover deny that there was a national crime syndicate operating in America? Until the late 1960s, Hoover claimed that criminals were too dumb to be organized. In 1929, Lansky threw a bachelor party in Atlantic City to which he invited all the men who controlled the alcohol trafficking network of America’s cities east of the Mississippi. During the weeklong party, a loose confederation of gang lords was organized into what would morph into The Mob and into its assassination arm, Murder Incorporated, just a few years hence. In Washington, Hoover had just been given a job as the first permanent director of the investigations bureau of the Justice Department. Young Hoover had made a name for himself when he’d built a first-class filing system and used it to keep incriminating records of the high and mighty as well as of the “low-life Commies and immigrant trash” who were trying to destroy The American Way of Life. Atlantic City was a hotbed of immigrant trash, ground zero for the culture wars of the day – the Las Vegas of the Jazz Age. In Cutler’s tale, Atlantic City’s people – the African Americans who staffed the hotels and restaurants, the Italians who built the hotels, the Jews who owned the stores and the supply businesses, the white folk from the farms who owned the land and the Republican Party – compete for the brass ring. The characters are distinct and believable. Al Rubin tells their story as he tells us what happened to him when he was offered a legitimate, can’t-miss business opportunity in exchange for taking a photograph of the Director in his comp’ed hotel room on Decoration Day, 1929. This is the story about the ways of power in big city neighborhoods, not about angst in the Gatsby suburbs. Lansky and Nucky Johnson, in Stanley J. Cutler’s tale, see Federal power as a threat to their interstate business plan. They know of Hoover because of his leadership role in the Palmer Raids, the arrest and deportation of hundreds of immigrants on charges of subversion. Hoover was a ruthless publicity hound, a darling of the guardians of moral rectitude, the one man in a position to bypass the corrupt cops and judges that Johnson and his ilk kept in their pockets by throwing prosecutions directly into the hard-to-fix Federal Courts. Al Rubin - an ex-garment worker, ex-boxer turned studio photographer - is just the man for the job. He’s the Everyman who wrestles with his conscience. Is it right to eavesdrop on an eavesdropper? What is the moral legitimacy of laws in a country that views selling beer as a crime, that allows the New York Stock Exchange as it closes down casinos, that deports working people without due process? Cutler compels the reader to see parallels between Prohibition and The War on Drugs, The Red Menace and Radical Jihad, European immigration and Central American immigration, and how adoption of the telephone, radio and automobiles foreshadowed efforts to adjust today’s America to the technologies of the 21st Century. As the fast-paced story develops, Al’s carefully planned photo-shoot goes awry. He runs for his life into a dangerous world of bootleggers, IRA gunmen, big time gamblers, anti-Semitic sea captains, African American race jockeys, flappers, gun molls, G Men, and powerful politicians. Readers who like the HBO miniseries “Boardwalk Empire” will find a great deal to enjoy in this entertaining and informative novel.