Download or read book Masters of Deceit written by John Edgar Hoover and published by . This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masters of Deceit is the product of J. Edgar Hoover's almost obsessive fear of Communism.Although Communism may seem to be almost an anachronism from a time gone by, it was a powerful force in the 1930s and the 1940s. By the mid-1950s, when this book was written, membership of Communist Party USA had slipped from its 1944 peak of around 80,000. However, Hoover continued to devote substantial FBI governmental resources to investigating the Communist Party USA, while ignoring the more serious problems of the Mafia and Organized Crime.