Don Adams, whose career as an FBI agent spanned 22 years, never really bought the official line of his own employer: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Adams, who died on June 14 at age 83 in Akron, Ohio, eventually wrote From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle (Trine Day, 2012), in which he
Throughout its checkered history, the nation’s capital has held special allure for the most sophisticated species of the American criminal class: the con artist. Nowhere else, save perhaps for Wall Street, has the confidence game been more comfortably practiced and its practitioners more handsomely rewarded. Disciples of Phineas Barnum, knights of the golden fleece, con artists have swindled their way through society soirées on Embassy Row and wheedled their way into
J. EDGAR HOOVER ALWAYS GOT HIS MAN, or so they said, but apparently he never got his hat. Sometime during World War II the fearsome director of the FBI went into Harvey’s, which was then next to the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue, and laid his fedora on the counter of the restaurant’s checkroom. Hoover didn’t bother to get
A dense curtain of fog gripped the Long Island coastline in the early hours of June 13, 1942, parted here and there only by misty beams of moonlight. Amagansett Beach, a sheltered stretch of rolling dunes and tall grasses, was deserted, serene.