Here's a reprise from 9/7/04. Amazingly, the links in it are still good. Since then, I've read a lot more FBI reports that have leaked out onto the net and they all seem to be like Dean Martin's, full of info that wouldn't even satisfy the accuracy stands of TMZ or Sean Hannity. Makes you wonder how the bureau has ever caught anyone…
I was just browsing over at one of my favorite sites, The Smoking Gun. The folks there manage to dig up a wide array of suppressed or otherwise unavailable documents which they gleefully make available to all. One of the many categories, and perhaps the most amazing, presents a stash of old FBI dossiers. Your government actually spent (and probably still spends) your tax dollars to compile "files" on prominent people…and judging from the ones that are available, these files contain a mix of readily-available info — the kind of thing you can find in the person's professional bio — mixed with gossip, much of it blind-sourced and often inaccurate.
In 1972, a report on Dean Martin was requested by Alexander P. Butterfield, the Deputy Assistant to the President. We will forever be grateful to Mr. Butterfield for it was he who revealed the existence of the taping system installed by his boss, Richard M. Nixon. Butterfield was probably following orders, maybe even Nixon's, when he ordered this paperwork…and you can read what he received here. As you'll see, it consists of some common knowledge plus some unsourced gossip, including some scanty evidence that Mr. Martin was gay. While I obviously can't swear this is not true, I did know Craig — one of several children Dino fathered — and Craig used to tell pretty authentic-sounding stories of his old man bedding a steady stream of famous ladies. None of that info is in the report but I was especially amused at this paragraph…
So here's the question: Should we be more outraged that our government assembled this kind of info on citizens? Or that they relied on such vague and probably inaccurate sources? And how about that sloppy redacting job, blacking out what appears after Dean Martin's name in the above? The censored section is followed by "were," which tips us that there's another name under there. That means that the word after Dean Martin's name is "and" then we presumably have a first name, a space, then a last name. Since this document was typed in a non-proportional spaced font, it's easy to look at the line above and figure out that the name that was blacked-out has ten letters.
Okay, it's 1955 and some source mentions a name with ten letters in the same breath as Dean Martin. Gee, I wonder who that could be.
A ten-letter name — probably the same one — is blacked-out on the first page where it says Dean and someone else made a pornographic record in May of 1956. Hmm…who was Dean Martin working with in May of 1956 who had ten letters in his name? That's too early for Joey Bishop. Can you think of anyone who might have been in a recording studio with Dean in May of 1956? (Hint: Dean and his partner played their last professional engagement at the Copacabana in New York on July 24, 1956.)
And back on the second page of the report, it looks like a ten-letter name has also been redacted in the sentence about names being found in a book of alleged clients for a homosexual prostitution ring. I'm guessing it's the same ten-letter name each time and that they did make the dirty record but that the gay stuff is an outright lie which someone in your Federal Bureau of Investigation took seriously. The guy who compiled this was inept and so was whoever was assigned to cross-out the name of Martin's cohort to conceal his identity. One hopes they do a better job of protecting the identity of mob informants.
It is worth noting that this report is dated August of 1972. The infamous FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover — who gathered smut on people— died in May of that year. Still, the information in the document is from the FBI files so it was almost certainly collected on Hoover's watch…even though, as it notes, there was no formal investigation of Martin. I really, really hope that the many intelligence failures we've experienced lately in this country weren't because the bureau was busy gathering this kind of poop on Harry Connick, Jr.