#5.J. Edgar Hoover
Who?
J. Edgar Hoover was the first director of the FBI, from 1935 until 1972, and he was crazy for every minute of it. Not coincidentally, Hoover's also the reason FBI directors are limited to 10-year terms of service.
Why He Was A prick of a Boss:
The world may never know exactly how insane J. Edgar Hoover was. That's the thing about holding an unelected position in an organization specializing in undercover work and keeping rooms full of secret files with the demand that they be destroyed upon your death. Stories have been boiling up about the man pretty much from the moment he expired, each more bizarre than the last. Nobody knows which are true, but they all paint a picture of a man about five minutes away from a shooting rampage.
One biography says
he kept FBI employees on call 24 hours a day to just do random crap around his house, like repair his lawnmower. When he found a small animal turd on his patio, he demanded that agents take it to the lab to analyze it, completely sure he was being stalked by a wild animal. He then allegedly had them set a trap on the patio, which promptly killed the neighbor's cat.
He also loved to scrawl almost unreadable notes and instructions in the margins of memos. Then when one memo came his way with barely enough room on the edges for him to write in, he scrawled,
"WATCH THE BORDERS."
Nobody had any clue what that meant, and they were too terrified of the crazy old bastard to ask him. So, they put out word to the Border Patrol to watch both the Canadian and Mexican borders for anything unusual. They arrested American Communist Party leader Gus Hall during the crackdown. A week later, staff finally figured out that "WATCH THE BORDERS" meant "leave more room in the margins of these memos because I like to write stuff in them."
Also, he apparently had a file of nude photos. Not of porn models; of everyone. He had
nude pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt. Why? Just in case.
He is said to have monitored every aspect of agents' lives, telling them
where they could and couldn't live, what clubs they could and couldn't join and what to wear. He allegedly
fired agents because he thought their heads looked too small.
But life under Hoover wasn't all Michael Scott-esque lovable eccentricity. Melvin Purvis (as in, "the guy Christian Bale plays in
Public Enemies") pissed Hoover off by having the nerve to track down three of the most infamous gangsters in American history (Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Johnny Depp's John Dillinger) and not give Hoover the credit. Hoover harassed Purvis until he left the FBI, then supposedly
went around trying to sabotage all future jobs Purvis tried to get in the years after.
Wait, you're still picturing Eleanor Roosevelt naked, aren't you? *barf*