Retired Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins interviews Nathan Masters about his new book Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal. We learn about a corrupt U.S. Attorney General named Harry Daugherty, the puppet master behind President Warren G. Harding’s unlikely rise to power. Daugherty was well-known to maintain cozy relations with bootleggers and gamblers like Arnold Rothstein and other scofflaws. When his constant companion and trusted fixer, Jess Smith, is found dead of a gunshot wound in the apartment the two men share, a corruption-busting senator from Wyoming and the incorruptible J. Edgar Hoover go to work.

This book is packed with political intrigue, salacious scandal, and many similarities to our modern era of political discord. Nathan Masters’ thrilling historical narrative shows how this intricate web of inconceivable crookedness set the stage for the next century of American political scandals.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

GARY JENKINS, Nathan Masters

00:00

Yeah, so one of the scenes that really got me going when I started writing this book was something that happened on Memorial Day 1923 at the Wardman Park in fashionable Hotel in Washington where the Attorney General lived, there was a gunshot somebody and there was a man dead from a gunshot wound inside the suite that the Attorney General lived in. And the first law enforcement officer in the scene was none other than the head of what became the FBI, a man named William J. Burns, which if you think about it, it’s a pretty unusual circumstance to have the head of the FBI investigating a local homicide. I’ll read it from my book here a little bit inside the bedroom suite 600 E. Burns found the body of a man named Jeff Smith 50 crumpled at the foot of two beds, in his right hand was a 32 caliber revolver, single bullet had plowed through his head. This was clearly a matter for the local authorities burns knew better than to summon the police immediately, the situation called for discretion for a few in Washington had known as much as the man who now lay before him in a bloody heap, then the book just sort of unfolds from there.

00:56

Thanks a lot. That’s great. Yeah, guys, welcome. I’ll you work average out there. You just heard a little bit out of a new book out crooked. And it’s going to tell us all more than we ever want to know about a variety of things. If you remember back when you were a kid, you heard about the Teapot Dome scandal. There was this corrupt administration under Warren G. Harding, where the President and the founding of the FBI came out of this and just a lot of other interesting stories. The Attorney General the FBI was investigating their own attorney general and he was crooked as heck, as you can tell, but that was his sweet. So welcome. Nathan masters. Thanks a lot, Nathan, for coming on the show.

01:37

Well, thanks for having me, Gary.

01:39

So we’re a little bit about your background. You were in public TV, get background Public TV. Tell us a little bit about that.

01:47

Yeah, I’ve hosted a public television show called last la that explores Los Angeles history through the archives. I’ve been doing that since 2016. So I have a lot of experience digging through archival materials for compelling stories to share th...