Claude Kirk

Claude R. Kirk Jr. was the governor of Florida from January 1967 to January 1971, the first Republican to hold the office since Reconstruction.¹

The War on Crime

In his inaugural address of January 3, 1967, Kirk announced a "war on crime" and named George R. Wackenhut its director at a dollar a year. The detectives and offices were supplied by the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables under a contract reported at 500,000 dollars, to be paid not by the state but by the donations of citizens. Against what Time called "anguished cries of 'Nazism!' and 'Dictatorship!'" the experiment, the magazine wrote, "succeeded to the extent of pointing up the need for a regular state police force and led to formation of the first statewide law-enforcement bureau." It produced more than eighty indictments, some of them of local officials. Time put the unpaid bill owed to the company at more than 300,000 dollars.¹

On January 13, 1967, headquarters of the FBI instructed its Florida offices to give Kirk's men nothing: "The Bureau does not recognize the Wackenhut Corporation as a properly constituted law enforcement agency." The order was repeated on April 3, after Kirk had called on the attorney general. That month the CIA, which had used Wackenhut's company since 1961 to give cover to its officers in Miami, withdrew his covert security approval "due to the notoriety that Mr. Wackenhut had received in connection with his activities in Florida." The crime reporter Hank Messick, hired from the Miami Herald, resigned from the company after six weeks, calling the campaign "a cruel hoax" and objecting that Wackenhut kept as a client a former Bahamian minister with gambling interests. The company told the legislature that the "overlord of the whole state's criminal syndicates" was Santo Trafficante.²³