The Informant

Starred review from March 21, 2005
May, whose previous explorations of American history in works such as Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington
were critically acclaimed for their vivid writing and painstaking research, has turned his formidable talents to restoring a controversial episode in the civil rights struggle. While slain activist Viola Liuzzo is far from a household name today, her murder in 1965 at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Selma, Ala., voting rights march was a national sensation. President Johnson kept close tabs on the investigation. When suspects were taken into custody almost immediately, it seemed that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was doing its job brilliantly; federal informant Gary Thomas Rowe, who fingered the suspects, had infiltrated the Alabama Klan five years earlier. But as May lucidly describes, Rowe's own role in the murder was suspicious, and his experiences with the KKK, which often crossed the line dividing observer from participant, linked him with other notorious race crimes of the era, including the Birmingham church bombing. May succeeds brilliantly at weaving his threads into an engrossing narrative, even while maintaining the three-dimensional humanity of both Liuzzo and Rowe. Contemporary resonance is provided by linking the FBI's handling of Rowe with the challenges today's bureau faces in the war on terror, which must also rely on unscrupulous and violent informants. This is popular history at its best and shines a long overdue light on a dark chapter in the FBI's past.

June 15, 2005
Alabama Klansmen in March 1965 murdered Viola Liuzzo as she drove to Selma to march for the pending federal Voting Rights Act. The murder of the white mother of five appalled the nation. The FBI produced almost instant results in the case, as it had an informant among the Klansmen-Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. May (history, Univ. of Delaware; Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington) focuses on him to critique the FBI's informant system as it worked then and continues to work, but May does so not in the usually pictured gangster setting that George Anastasia (The Last Gangster: From Cop to Wiseguy to FBI Informant; Big Ron Previte and the Fall of the American Mob) or Kurt Eichenwald (The Informant: A True Story) have detailed. In the shadow of 9/11, May probes the tensions inherent in employing terrorists to commit terror so that they can inform on other terrorists. Amid illuminating portraits of Rowe and Liuzzo, May reveals the politics and pratfalls of maintaining an informant system within the letter and spirit of U.S. law. Recommended for academic and public library collections on civil rights, civil liberties, and U.S. law and law enforcement.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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