Robert Unger spoke about his book, The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, at the November 14, 2007, meeting. Unger is a professor at UMKC and worked as a reporter for the KC Star. When he requested information for his book, he ended up with 200,000 pages of material. The first edition was published in 1997. The FBI did not like the book or the documentary that was made about the book but they could not come with anything wrong with either one.
Mr. Unger began working on the story while a reporter at the KC Star. In 1983, at the 50th anniversary of the massacre, he decided to write a story about it and requested information from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act. It took him five years to get all of the files and 13 years to write the book. During the time, he was a national and foreign correspondent for the Star so he did not have time to write. Eventually he left the Star, got his Masters at Harvard and started teaching journalism at UMKC.
The files he received from the FBI were not in order, not numbered, and some were the 8th or 9th copy of carbon paper. He created his own index of 32 single spaced pages. The detail was incredible. At the time the FBI told the truth and wrote everything down. Today they do not write anything down that they don’t want read. Back then they didn’t think anyone would read it.
Mr. Unger discovered 7 problems in the story that was put out to the public:
1) Agent testimony. The FBI never thought there would be a trial, so the case was not very good. In the files an agent claims to have seen nothing, but at the trial, he said he saw what happened.
2) Lottie West was a wannabe police woman who told the FBI what they wanted to here about Pretty Boy Floyd, even though the FBI knew she was wrong.
3) Ballistics—the file said the process destroyed evidence. The judge could have thrown this out.
4) Vi Matthias—The FBI coerced her into telling them that people were at her house before the massacre who were not.
5) Pretty Boy Floyd did not have the shoulder wound that Vi claimed he had.
6) Jimmy Needles La Capra claimed to see the whole thing the way the FBI wanted because he wanted protection from the mob.
7) Fingerprinting—the record print and event print need to match. At the time, no matches were made, but a year later the FBI said there was a match. Hoover, who was known to be malicious in his retaliation, rewarded the man who made the mistake and could have blown the biggest case in the FBI’s history. This did not make sense.
Although a police officer at Union Station was killed by the bad guys, most of the killing was done accidently by an FBI agent trying to get a shot gun to work properly. Before this time, FBI agents could not carry guns. They were warrant servers with no powers and could not cross state lines. It was not even a crime to kill an FBI agent. One year later Congress passed a law giving the FBI powers. This is what Hoover built the FBI on. There was no real organization before the massacre, but after it became a national organization. The FBI could not go back later and say that the events did not happen they way they first thought they did. The cover-up started out as agents trying to protect themselves amid the chaos and snowballed from
there.
Today FBI agents are on staff at consulates and embassies throughout the word to protect the rights of U.S. citizens.
