William James Flynn

William James Flynn (November 18, 1867 – October 14, 1928) was the third director of the Bureau of Investigation from July 1, 1919, to August 21, 1921.

Early life and education Flynn was born in New York City and began his government career in 1897, after receiving a public school education.

Early career Flynn began his career as a Manhattan plumber. His first law enforcement job was as an agent in the United States Secret Service. He spent many years combating counterfeiting, which led to his investigation and arrests of Black Hand extortionists and members of the American mafia, many of them associated with the Morello crime family.

Flynn collaborated with New York Police Department Detective Giuseppe "Joe" Petrosino, who was murdered in 1909 in Palermo, Sicily, where he was tracing the backgrounds of the gangsters plaguing New York City. Petrosino's murder was never officially solved, but the author and historian Mike Dash implicates the likely gunman and his accomplice and says there is little doubt that Giuseppe Morello was behind it.

BOI career

In 1919, Flynn was named director of the Bureau of Investigation. Attorney General Palmer praised his new appointee as "the leading, organizing detective of America...Flynn is an anarchist chaser...the greatest anarchist expert in the United States." In one of Flynn's high-profile incidents, one of his operatives who was trailing the German diplomat Dr. Heinrich Albert on a streetcar, snatched Albert's briefcase, which contained sensitive documents. The papers documented Albert's having spent $27 million to build up a spy network in the United States, using German money to fund dock strikes, attacks on shipping, and bombs planted in munitions plants.

After resigning, Flynn "accepted a sinecure as head of the Federal Railway Administration Police". Flynn also became a scenario writer for the motion picture industry through his acquaintance with the actor King Baggot who, Dash notes, was considered the greatest film star in the country at that time in 1912. The producers Theodore and Leopold Wharton commissioned him to write story lines for their films, including The Perils of Pauline, and eventually adapted Flynn's experiences into a 20-part spy thriller titled The Eagle's Eye (1918), starring Baggot. Some of these episodes were published in a book with the same name in 1919.

He also edited a magazine which bore his name, Flynn's Weekly Detective Fiction, and became the longest-running, most successful journal of its genre.

Death Flynn died at age 60 of heart disease in October 1928,