Forty years ago, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover recruited a band of professional killers for his private execution squad. He found them in organized crime families, the armed forces, and in other intelligence services. He called them the unknowns, and they did jobs so dirty even the CIA was afraid of them.
Now, for the first time anywhere, Mike Milan, a member of the Squad, tells the true story of Hoover’s private war. Milan, who “made his bones” for the Lucchese Family on New Yorks Lower East Side, served in the OSS during World War II, executed ex-Nazis and Soviet KGB agents after the war, and conducted Hoover’s deep-cover counter-intelligence program inside the Ku Klux Klan.
He wiped out a KGB spy ring in New Orleans, supplied gold for the US government’s secret war in Southeast Asia, and was part of a hit team that mopped up “embarrassing” witnesses to the JFK assassination in Dallas.
For over forty years Mike Milan led a double life, walking the tightrope between the Department of Justice and organized crime families. The Squad is his true story.
Fascinating and frightening, The Squad reveals:
The Squad is a must-read for fans of conspiracy thrillers and for people who want the truth about the US government’s most secret intelligence operations.
Full of contentious, blockbuster revelations, this is the autobiography of a man who purportedly was part of a hit team—”J. Edgar Hoover’s private Squad”—that between 1947 and 1971 dealt with people with whom the law either couldn’t or wouldn’t. The pseudonymous Milan was born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and early on became a Mafia collector and enforcer.
He writes that he was recruited by Hoover, as were others from the mob, the OSS and the military, and worked on cases involving a former Japanese officer who played a major role in the Bataan death march, an ex-Nazi who escaped to the U.S. after the war and a taxi driver who was implicated in JFK’s assassination. Typical of the prose is Milan’s description of his execution of the Dallas cabbie: “The sonovabitch didn’t even twitch like most people do when you shoot’em (sic) in the head.” Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This book is not an expose of governmental collusion with organized crime. The pretense is that the pseudonymous author was recruited by J. Edgar Hoover into a private “execution squad.” Actually, this reads like an unpleasant, third-rate I-was-a-hit-man-for-da-Mafia novel. Milan relishes describing bouts of violence and murder with vulgar, sadistic flourishes.
He makes no attempt to lend any credence to his preposterous claims—he murdered CIA agents for Hoover, Hoover assigned him to kill the Berrigan brothers, the Secret Service plotted to assassinate President Ford, and so on. This is an embarrassingly bad book and does not deserve an audience. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
