The Informant

Gary May's The Informant is a riveting account of a bizarre tale and a solid work of investigative history. The author retells the story of Tommy Rowe, a dairy factory employee recruited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) in 1960 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama. Rowe, a rowdy bruiser and “cop buf,” had all the qualities of a perfect Klansman and a perfect informant. As May explains, the fbi recognized that “the most productive informants” were “criminally inclined”; fbi director J. Edgar Hoover preferred career criminals, or “double crossers,” as he called them (p. 4). Charged with avoiding violence, Rowe reported on Klan activities while participating in those same activities; his involvement in “missionary work,” as the Klan euphemistically called its assaults on “outside agitators” who threatened the “southern way of life,” implicated him in the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, Michigan, killed while shuttling civil rights activists between Selma and Montgomery

Civil rights · Criminology · Management · Political science · Politics · ROWE · Sociology · White (mutation · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Race, History, and American Society

• Breaking Down the State

  Open Access•Afp Photo, Genya Savilov et al.•Breaking down the State•2015

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