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Miami Herald crime reporter fed leads by the FBI, who joined Wackenhut's Florida crime war in December 1966 and quit after six weeks calling it a cruel hoax upon the people of Florida. | Miami, Florida | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
Hank Messick was a crime reporter under contract to the Miami Herald whose articles on gambling and corruption in Dade County, Florida and Broward County, Florida counties led grand juries to indict the sheriffs of both in 1966. An internal memorandum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation records that the bureau had "made available lead information to Hank Messick, veteran crime reporter of the Miami Herald."1
He resigned from the newspaper on December 13, 1966, and joined the Wackenhut Corporation, which Governor Claude Kirk engaged the following month to conduct a war on organized crime in Florida. On January 13, 1967, FBI headquarters ordered its Florida offices to give the company's men nothing: "The Bureau does not recognize the Wackenhut Corporation as a properly constituted law enforcement agency."1
Messick left in February. "I quit the Wackenhut Corp. because I have reluctantly concluded a cruel hoax is being perpetrated upon the people of Florida," he told reporters. He said later: "As far as the war on crime is concerned, they've done absolutely nothing; they haven't even scraped the surface." His objection was that the company kept as a private client Sir Stafford Sands, a former minister of the Bahamas with gambling interests, while it was supposed to be pursuing Meyer Lansky. George R. Wackenhut answered: "I do not find it necessary to dignify Mr. Messick's remarks with a reply."2
Footnotes
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Federal Bureau of Investigation, headquarters and Tampa files on the Wackenhut Corporation. https://archive.org/details/WackenhutCorporation Airtel to SAC Jacksonville, January 13, 1967, and undated headquarters memorandum. ↩︎
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"Wackenhut Aide Quits; 'Cruel Hoax,'" The Tampa Tribune, February 17, 1967, and St. Petersburg Times clipping, in the FBI's Tampa file on the company. ↩︎