43. The FBI system

Paul Maccabee's entertaining and enlightening John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks' Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936, goes a lot deeper than its subtitle might suggest.  The "St. Paul System" in effect between the World Wars meant that gangsters were immune from police investigation in St. Paul so long as they committed no crimes there.   St. Paul was base in an interstate game of tag, and the cops were it.  Not surprisingly, this meant that even small towns elsewhere in Minnesota became scenes of bloody bank robberies, but what did the cops in St. Paul care about that? 

The St. Paul system was one of the factors that helped overcome Congress's resistance to a national police force, helping to pave the way for the creation of that ferocious publicity machine, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.  In Miranda, Chief Justice Warren went on at some length about the FBI's "exemplary record of effective law enforcement" compiled while demonstrating "respect for the  rights of the individual ... consistent with the procedure which we delineate today."  "The practice of the FBI," Warren continued, "can readily be emulated by state and local enforcement agencies."  Here's Maccabee's description of an FBI investigation from 1936:

When [Alvin Karpis] asked to speak with the defense attorney Archibald Cary, the FBI brought the lawyer to the jail and attempted to eavesdrop on the conversation.  Before Cary arrived, "confidential arrangements were made to place a microphone near the place where the conference ... was to take place.  Special agent J.E. Brennan concealed himself in the adjoining cell tier."  But Cary, the lawyer for Minneapolis gangster Isadore Blumenfeld, was no fool: he "began thumping on the table," reported the FBI, "and it was difficult for Agent Brennan to over hear the exact nature of the conversation."

Note that the agent didn't hesitate to put this in his report.  It probably wasn't what the Chief Justice had in mind.