THE QUESTION IS HOW FAR J. EDGAR STUMBO, OR HIS SUCCESSOR, WILL GO

The Attorney General of Kentucky, J. Edgar Stumbo, has gathered his
investigators into one unit, which he is calling the Kentucky Bureau
of Investigation.

Stumbo has given FBI coloration to the entire investigative function
of the state attorney general's office, by creating this thing and
calling it the KBI.

Commissioner David James will oversee 35 KBI investigators, divided
among four units: public corruption and special investigations;
Medicaid fraud and abuse control; welfare fraud; and drug
investigations.

Of those 35, only four will be formally assigned to drug
investigations, yet the ultimate goal of this reorganization is
supposed to be more effective drug enforcement.

I wonder why it was necessary to create a KBI, with all the potential
for roguery that it involves, just to put four agents to work finding
suppliers of meth-making ingredients? What else is happening here?

Stumbo's predecessor, Ben Chandler, set up a public corruption unit
and named a former FBI supervisor, Jim Huggins, to head it.

Now that unit, through which a lot of mischief could be made, has been
merged, expanded (from two to six agents) and elevated to "branch"
status.

What this looks like, at best, is more knee-jerk, superficial
politicking by the admittedly talented and often progressive Stumbo.

He insists, "I have no plans to run for governor at this time." But it
doesn't take a detective to figure out what "at this time" means.

At worst, however, the KBI looks like an instrument with which some
corrupt and ambitious attorney general could run amok, blackjacking
his enemies and protecting his friends.

No wonder Lt. Gov. Steve Pence, who is committed to a major Fletcher
administration anti-drug effort, is skeptical. He'll do the hard work
of organizing the administration's campaign against Kentucky's drug
problems, across a broad front, while J. Edgar Stumbo receives the
press in the KBI grandstand.

Having given his reorganized investigative arm a name that calls up
the history and culture of the FBI, how far will Stumbo go in
emulating the original?

For instance, the real J. Edgar (Hoover) tended roses, slept in the
nude, dressed out of a band box, lived with his mother until her
death, rode around in a shiny black bulletproof Cadillac and
maintained a decades-long "spousal" relationship (nothing physical, or
so they say) with an assistant named Clyde. He also ran his agency as
an absolute despot.

(All this, and more, can be found in the Hoover biographical
compendium on Courtroom Television Network's Web site,
www.crimelibrary.com.)

This is not to suggest that Stumbo has chosen a thoroughly bad role
model. Columnist Jack Anderson, who fought bitterly with the FBI
director, admitted when Hoover died that he had "transformed the FBI
from a collection of hacks, misfits and courthouse hangers-on into one
of the world's most effective and formidable law enforcement
organizations. Under his reign, not a single FBI man ever tried to fix
a case, defraud the taxpayers or sell out his country."

But it's also true that government-sanctioned sleuthing creates the
opportunity for abuse of power, which already has a long history in
Kentucky.

When J. Edgar Hoover died, aides rushed to get rid of the potentially
embarrassing stash of papers that was kept in his secretary's office,
many of them filed under names that were meant to cover and confuse -
some 17,750 pages of raw material, collected over 50 years.

Curt Gentry reports in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets that "their
contents included blackmail material on the patriarch of an American
political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of
two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane
Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of
America's best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and
female, white and black; the child molestation documentation the director
used to control and manipulate one of the Red-baiting proteges; a list of
the Bureau's spies in the White House during the eight administrations when
Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps
and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general (and
later Supreme Court justice) had received payoffs from the Chicago
syndicate; as well as celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover
could amass on some of the biggest names in show business."

Maybe Stumbo's plans for the KBI are benign, but let's see whether he
sends out RFPs for more file cabinets.