Justice is incidental to law and order. -J. Edgar Hoover
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
The FBI has collected hundreds of thousands of illegal surveillance files. There are reports on subversive singers-Zimmerman, Robert Allen (alias Bob Dylan). In protest song, Subterranean Homesick Blues, subject confesses to "thinkin' 'bout the Government." No details provided. On dissident poets-Ginsberg, Irwin Allen: In beatnik poem Howl, subject claims to have observed "best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." No names provided. Even on radical religious leaders-King, Jr., Martin Luther: In radical Mountain Top sermon, subject claims to have seen Promised Land. No location provided.
"It was an open secret that the FBI was carrying on illegal surveillance against 'subversives, dissidents and radicals,'" writes Miss Deal in Power to the Poker People, "and yet we poker players were so unbelievably naïve that we never imagined that we too were under investigation."
J. Edgar Hoover wanted to be a great poker player. It was the job of "Hoover's Helpers" to make believe that he was. They set up poker games full of carefully selected sycophants who would let the director win and then flatter him effusively for his brilliant play. Hoover soon developed delusions of poker grandeur, coming to believe he was an unbeatable card player, a poker stud. This led Hoover to venture into actual competitive games and, losing in them badly, he came to believe he was being cheated. Those who cheated him were put under investigation.
In the late 1950's the FBI's "Card Squad" was created to collect files on the people Hoover played poker against. Special agents, trained in poker opposition research, infiltrated Washington, D.C.'s highest-profile poker games, and filed long and detailed poker surveillance reports. At first these files contained only poker tells-"Richard Nixon, out of position, will fold if re-raised," or "Joe Kennedy will fumble with his chips when strong." Soon, though, non-poker information began to creep into these files-"Joe McCarthy, a chronic alcoholic, will play aggressively with low pairs," or "Roy Cohn, a known homosexual, will overbet with suited connectors."
The circle of poker players under illegal surveillance by the Card Squad soon widened to include everyone who was anyone in poker-Lester (alias "Benny") Binion, "Poker entrepreneur charged twice with murder;" Stuart Errol (alias "The Kid") Ungar, high-stakes tournament player with known cocaine addiction."
To justify collecting all this information on the private lives of poker players, J. Edgar Hoover told the House Committee on Un-American Activities, "It is within the relaxed and collegial atmosphere of recreational poker that card-carrying Communists and their pinko sympathizers can be duped into a false sense of security by FBI Agents specially trained to play their game."
Long after Hoover's death the Card Squad routinely continued to play this game, illegally surveilling not only high-profile professional poker players, but card room and Internet players as well. "No one," writes Miss Deal, "will ever know how many poker surveillance reports were filed over the last fifty years by Special Agents posing as poker players."
It is at the FBI Academy's "Quantico Card Room," a fully functioning replica of a poker room, that Agents are trained in the techniques of "card counter-espionage." The Card Squad's special agent in charge is Miller Harlow Thatcher III. "Thatch," as he is known, supervises the continued collection of the poker files. He could be looking at your file right now.
(To be continued in the next issue)
