Shrewd Little Sleuth (Paperback or Softback)

“Leckie is one of our most outstanding agents. It is men like he that have made the organization what it is today”.

--J. Edgar Hoover (1939)

“ ... mince no words with Leckie. Let him have it.”

--J. Edgar Hoover (1940)

Something went terribly wrong. In just one year, Hoover’s praise turned to condemnation. What triggered the FBI director’s sudden shift, from close ally to alleged adversary? Despite his controversial ousting in 1939, A.B. Leckie remained in contact with Hoover for over two decades. Why? And why was Leckie found dead with Marilyn Monroe’s unlisted number in his pocket—reported to have died in four different ways, five if you count murder?

He died just two days before Marilyn, in the same upscale LA neighborhood, after weeks of spying for—or on—her. He worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation alongside Robert Mitchum and Norma Jean before she became Marilyn. Did their connection endure? What secrets did he carry from his FBI years, his wartime stint in Pearl Harbor, and his role in securing the founding meeting of the UN in 1945? How did he track down Howard Hughes in hiding, not once, but twice? What about the Hollywood careers ruined by his anti-communist surveillance for McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities?

Leckie knew too much. Did he die because of it?

As his grandson, and a progressive human rights lawyer, I’m left grappling with the legacy of a man who may have helped dismantle the very freedoms I fight to protect. Was he secretly gay, crushed by the era’s homophobia? Or did other demons drive him to the bottle? What do you do when your family history is entangled in the machinery of repression? How do you reconcile a legacy built on silence and control when it’s etched into your own family line?

You do the only thing that makes sense: you write it all down, and hope the truth finds its way through.

Scott Leckie (www.scottleckie.com.au) is a world citizen who has lived in more than a dozen countries across the world. His early life was spent on the West Coast of the United States, where he was attended the University of Oregon. He departed the US permanently in the mid-1980s and then lived in various countries throughout Europe, Asia and the Pacific and Australia.Scott has worked on human rights issues in more than 80 countries. His interventions helped to protect hundreds of thousands of people against planned forced evictions in popular communities in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Zambia and around the world and led to additional hundreds of thousands of refugees and IDPs being able to repossess their homes. For the past 20 years, he has worked with many communities threatened with displacement due to climate change. He founded three major international non-governmental organizations. He currently directs Displacement Solutions (www.displacementsolutions.org), a global not-for-profit NGO dedicated to resolving displacement generated by global warming and climate change. He also founded and directs Oneness World Foundation (www.onenessworld.org), a research think tank exploring new forms of global governance and world citizenship. He manages the One House, One Family (OHOF) initiative, a project in Bangladesh that funds and builds permanent and free homes for climate displaced families. To date, OHOF has built 18 homes to some of Bangladesh's most vulnerable families.He has taught and designed several human rights courses in top-100 universities and law schools around the world, developed the world's first law school course on climate change and displacement which he now teaches at Monash Law School. He has written 28 books and over 300 academic articles and reports on issues including world citizenship, land solutions for climate displacement, housing rights, economic, social and cultural rights, forced evictions, the right to housing and property restitution for refugees and internally displaced persons and other human rights themes. He has written two novels in a seven-novel series, the Pacifica Series, as well as two biographies on his paternal grandfather and maternal uncle, both of whom led extraordinary lives.