FBI Vault, Abner Zwillman, Part 06: "Bribery" and "Obstruction of Justice" memoranda, 1959
FBI memoranda of 1959 headed "Bribery" and "Obstruction of Justice" about the jury in Zwillman's 1956 tax trial. The first page reports that a press release on "Abner 'Longie' Zwillman, et al." was given to the wire services on February 16, 1959. Most of the OCR is unreadable.
- Date
- 1959
- Kind
- case-file
- Source
- FBI Records: The Vault
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under the Freedom of Information Act. A federal work, public domain in the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 105. Redactions are as released by the FBI. The stored image is the first page of the part as the Vault viewer serves it.
The Vault viewer shows 88 pages. The OCR text layer is unreadable on most of them; only a handful of pages yield text. The stored image is page 1, read from the scan: an office memorandum of February 17, 1959 from C. D. DeLoach to Mr. Tolson, subject “Abner ‘Longie’ Zwillman, et al., Bribery, Press Release.” It says that after approval in the Justice Department, “we made the attached press release available to United Press International (UPI) and Associated Press (AP) at 8:07 p.m., 2-16-59,” that the story moved on the wires that evening, and that the Newark office “advised that the subjects were to be arraigned in Jersey City before a U. S. Commissioner.”
The few other readable pages concern the 1956 trial: the post-verdict motion for a judgment of acquittal, the secrecy of the jury room, concern for two witnesses, and the status of the United States Attorney’s inquiry. The press release itself was not read, and the memorandum does not name the other subjects.
No outcome of the bribery inquiry is recorded in the pages read, and nothing here is a finding against Zwillman or anyone else. Zwillman’s death is not documented in the pages read. A human reading of the scans would recover more than the OCR does.
