nicer living conditions and early releases. One day during the
investigation, White came across guards pummeling a pair of
prisoners. White threatened to fire the guards if they ever abused
an inmate again. Afterward, one of the prisoners asked to see
White privately. As if to express his gratitude, the prisoner showed
White a Bible, then began to lightly rub a mixture of iodine and
water over its blank fly page. Words magically began to appear.
Written in invisible ink, they revealed the address where a bank
robber—who had escaped before White became warden—was
hiding out. The secret message helped lead to the bank robber’s
capture. Other prisoners, meanwhile, began to share information,
allowing White to uncover what was described as a system of
“gilded favoritism and millionaire immunity.” White gathered
enough evidence to convict the former warden, who became
prisoner No. 24207 in the same penitentiary. A bureau official who
visited the prison wrote in a report, “I was very much struck with
the feeling among the inmates relative to the action and conduct
of Tom White. There seems to be a general feeling of satisfaction
and confidence, a feeling that they are now going to get a square
deal.” After the investigation, Hoover sent a letter of
commendation to White that said, “You brought credit and
distinction not only to yourself but to the service we all have at
heart.”
White now arrived at headquarters, which was then situated on
two leased floors in a building on the corner of K Street and
Vermont Avenue. Hoover had been purging many of the frontier
lawmen from the bureau, and as White headed to Hoover’s office,
he could see the new breed of agents—the college boys who typed
faster than they shot. Old-timers mocked them as “Boy Scouts”
who had “college-trained flat feet,” and this was not untrue; as one
agent later admitted, “We were a bunch of greenhorns who had no
idea what we were doing.”