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The LIFE caption read: “Decoy officer and partner lead handcuffed homosexual away in Hollywood. This photo originally ran with an 1964 issue on homosexuality in Life magazine, around the time the extortion ring was operating. In its review of Basil Dearden’s 1961 British blackmail thriller, Victim, which was instrumental in the repeal of anti-sodomy laws in the U.K., Time magazine scorned the film’s “implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice.” * A 1963 New York Times report, headlined “ Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” cited the general belief “that strict enforcement of the law against seduction of minors is important to protect borderline cases from adult influences that could swing them toward homosexual orientation when heterosexual adjustment was still possible.”
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Scandal sheets like Confidential magazine took exceptional delight in outing the prominent, publishing cruel, mocking exposes littered with snide references to “tearoom arrests,” “lavender stripes,” “double-gaitedness,” and “forbidden satisfactions.” Even more-respectable precincts of the press could be disdainful. Closeted gay men, if exposed, could expect their careers wrecked, marriages ruined and friendships destroyed. Broad societal homophobia set the stage for extortion, offering blackmailers lots of leverage. That a gay extortion ring existed in the mid-1960s was hardly a surprise. The “agents,” he said, had told him the prostitute was underage but that they could process the matter through back channels if the professor gave the agents $11,000 in “bail money.” After waiting for his money to be returned, as the agents stipulated they would in their “arrangement,” the professor now suspected he’d been had, and wanted the FBI to help him get the money back. Around the same time as the Western Union incident in New York, a renowned paleontologist and professor emeritus from Princeton walked into a New Jersey FBI field office and explained that two men claiming to be federal agents had confronted him about a homosexual assignation with a male prostitute in Washington, D.C. That informant was Edward Murphy, the Hilton hotel security director who he had arrested shortly after the Western Union incident.Īlthough the Manhattan DA’s office got into the case first, the FBI was not far behind. McDonnell was only on temporary assignment to the rackets squad, but he insisted on “running” the principal informant he had developed. Jim McDonnell had 15 years as a detective and shared the working-class, Irish Catholic background of most of the of Rackets Squad members, but he still felt like an outsider when he arrived to brief them on the information he’d developed. The squad’s commander, Inspector Paul Vitrano, enjoyed Hogan’s confidence for the work the squad had performed on numerous, highly publicized cases. The Rackets Squad, which investigated unlawful doings in the garment, construction and trucking industries as well as labor union corruption and some organized crime activity, was particularly favored by Hogan, who had once been its senior prosecutor before becoming DA.
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They wore sharp suits, crisp shirts, silk ties and Old Spice after-shave. The NYPD detectives who worked in the office’s various investigative bureaus were considered “the pick of the force,” as The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere put it. By the summer of 1965, Frank Hogan had been Manhattan district attorney for almost 25 years, earning the nickname Mr.