Gaston Bullock Means

• Born: July 11, 1879
• Birthplace: Blackwelder's Spring, North Carolina
• Died: December 12, 1938
• Place of death: Springfield, Missouri

American civil servant and private investigator

Major offenses: Mail fraud and larceny

Active: 1924 and 1932

Locale: Washington, D.C.

Sentence: Two years’ imprisonment for stealing liquor; two years’ imprisonment for mail fraud; and fifteen years’ imprisonment for larceny

Early Life

Born in North Carolina in 1879 to an unaccomplished family, Gaston Bullock Means (meens) apparently had three core beliefs. One was in the superiority of the Republican Party; the second was in white supremacy; and the third was that laws were made to be broken. He became a fringe figure in Republican politics and evolved into a highly unscrupulous private investigator who craved a civil service position. In 1920, Republican Warren Harding won a landslide victory in the U.S. presidential race, and Means, who knew several key players in the new Harding administration, saw an opportunity for advancement.

Political Career

Means befriended the ambitious and similarly amoral William J. Burns, who would be the director of the new Bureau of Investigation from 1921 to 1924. Accordingly, Burns hired Means to extort referrals and recommendations from wealthy and influential individuals. Tall, charming, and dimpled, Means succeeded at this because he made a point of knowing the guilty secrets of powerful people and threatening them with exposure. He also ingratiated himself with Harry Daugherty, Harding’s corrupt new attorney general, and Daugherty’s cohort Jess Smith. Smith’s job was to collect extortion money from corporations and individuals whom Daugherty threatened with antitrust indictments.

Means, who at various times worked in the Justice and Treasury Departments while maintaining his own investigation business, spent most of his working hours protecting the career and reputation of President Harding. When two of Harding’s mistresses threatened to publish presidential love letters unless the administration paid hush money, Means promptly broke into their homes and stole the letters.

Gradually, the weak-willed Smith fell under Means’s influence. Together, they conspired to steal printing plates from the Treasury Department for counterfeiting purposes, but Means came to see Smith as a security risk. Smith was becoming increasingly erratic and unreliable, and when his sudden death in 1923 was reported as suicide, many felt Means was somehow responsible. President Harding died suddenly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, under circumstances that many deemed strange.

Legal Action and Outcome

In October, 1923, Means was indicted for the illegal removal of liquor from government warehouses. He was charged with larceny and conspiracy, but before his trial started he gave incriminating testimony to the Wheeling Committee in the Senate, which was investigating the alleged wrongdoing of Daugherty. Means was found guilty of the alcohol-related offense, as well as mail fraud in 1924, and sentenced to two years in prison for each crime and fined ten thousand dollars.

His time in prison did not reform him. Upon his release, he began work on a book (greatly aided by a ghostwriter) titled The Strange Death of President Harding (1930), a sleazy work that detailed Harding’s adultery and stated assertively that Harding had been poisoned by his wife, Florence, a sensational and unsubstantiated charge. In 1932, Means convinced heiress and socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean that he had some inside knowledge about the 1934 kidnapping of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and persuaded her to give him $100,000 for “expenses” so he could arrange the child’s release. McLean paid the money, but Means had merely perpetuated another fraud, and the baby was later found dead.

For this last wrongful act, Means was convicted of larceny and this time sentenced to fifteen years at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. He died in 1938, following gall bladder surgery at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.

Impact

In the years after his death, Gaston Bullock Means’s name and myriad crimes were largely forgotten, perhaps due to the catastrophic world events that followed with the dawn of World War II. Perhaps his greatest legacy is the debasement and lowering of White House ethics and the many scandals that have plagued presidential administrations since.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. Florence Harding. New York: William Morrow, 1998. This biography of Mrs. Harding stresses Means’s efforts to cover up the president’s infidelities and repudiates Means’s assertion that Harding had her husband poisoned.

Dean, John W. Warren G. Harding. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. This work discusses Means’s book about the Hardings and dismisses it as untruthful and poorly written.

Means, Gaston Bullock. The Strange Death of President Harding: From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, as Told to May Dixon Thacker. New York: Guild, 1930. Asserts that Harding was an adulterer and that he was poisoned to death by his wife, Florence.

Sobel, Robert. Coolidge: An American Enigma. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1998. Means’s testimony before the Wheeler Committee, which was investigating the Harding administration, is discussed, along with Means’s 1924 conviction.