gatherer. “In those days we had no power of arrest,” White later
recalled. Agents were also not authorized to carry guns. White had
seen plenty of lawmen killed on the frontier, and though he didn’t
talk much about these deaths, they had nearly caused him to
abandon his calling. He didn’t want to leave this world for some
posthumous glory. Dead was dead. And so when he was on a
dangerous bureau assignment, he sometimes tucked a six-shooter
in his belt. To heck with the Thou Shall Nots.
His younger brother J. C. “Doc” White was also a former Texas
Ranger who had joined the bureau. A gruff, hard-drinking man
who often carried a bone-handled six-shooter and, for good
measure, a knife slipped into his leather boot, he was brasher than
Tom—“rough and ready,” as a relative described him. The White
brothers were part of a small contingent of frontier lawmen who
were known inside the bureau as the Cowboys.
Tom White had no formal training as a law-enforcement officer,
and he struggled to master new scientific methods, such as
decoding the mystifying whorls and loops of fingerprints. Yet he
had been upholding the law since he was a young man, and he had
honed his skills as an investigator—the ability to discern
underlying patterns and turn a scattering of facts into a taut
narrative. Despite his sensitivity to danger, he had experienced
wild gunfights, but unlike his brother Doc—who, as one agent said,
had a “bullet-spattered career”—Tom had an almost perverse habit
of not wanting to shoot, and he was proud of the fact that he’d
never put anyone into the ground. It was as if he were afraid of his
own dark instincts. There was a thin line, he felt, between a good
man and a bad one.
Tom White had witnessed many of his colleagues at the bureau
cross that line. During the Harding administration, in the early
1920s, the Justice Department had been packed with political