They learn to live with the pointing tourists and the constant irritation of paparazzi snapping photos at them, while the celebrities are out in public, doing mundane and everyday things.

Celebrities don't expect to have the attention of the U.S. government and law enforcement agencies, yet there is a long list of celebrities from myriad fields who have come under the jaundiced glare of officialdom. Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover led the hounding pack.

While the FBI is better known for capturing dangerous bank robbers, kidnappers and solving crimes regarded as unsolvable, they had a hidden face too: keeping an eye on organizations and individuals who were considered a threat to United States domestic security. Hundreds of celebrities, as well as sociopolitical luminaries, came under the baleful gaze of Hoover's G-men.

APBonline.com has compiled a huge Web site of articles, documents and mug-shots that were obtained by filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI and statutory authorities. The stories of the FBI's ridiculous and laughable actions, have, finally publicly surfacedcome, one after another.

Some stories reveal how the law enforcement agencies changed the entertainment economy. The FBI getting CBS to change the actor line-up of Hawaii 5-0, its popular television show, reported by Tami Sheheri (November 1st, 1999). By the third episode of the series, the show's FBI character, who slept on the job while the star worked industrially around him, and put the FBI in a support position during a kidnapping plotline, got the FBI so upset that it demanded the character be cut from the show, costing the actor, Clarence "Cliff" Eblin, his well-paid job. Until contacted for comment by APBonline.com in 1999, Eblin had no idea that the FBI caused him to be fired over thirty years earlier.

Another article, by Janon Fisher (April 10th, 2000) describes how the FBI, in a file made up of just fourteen short pages, managed to gather a number of "scandalous and dubious allegations," of things like "hoarding pornography and befriending mobsters," about the US comedian pair, Abbott and Costello. Chris Costello, Lou Costello's youngest daughter, is quoted saying that story is just "bunk, bunk, bunk," and that there was no library of pornographic movies within Costello's massive film collection. There were also reports that Costello once had a Mafiosi threaten someone making the move on his wife. No criminal charges were ever filed against either of the comedians stemming from the FBI's investigations.

The legendary and innovative Charlie Chaplin was under surveillance by the FBI for decades, reports Sheheri in another article, (March 20th, 2000). The first known FBI memo on him was written in 1922, but there wasn't too much more until the 1940s, when the FBI took interest in assisting gathering information to help try and convict Chaplin of violating a young woman's civil rights under te Mann Act (also known as the White Slavery Act). During the investigation, FBI agents went so far as to inspect the sheets from the couple's beds in a New York hotel. Although acquitted of the charges, Chaplin was eventually forced to pay child support for one of the woman's babies, even though his blood type showed conclusively he was not the child's father. In 1954, Chaplin set sail for Europe and while crossing the Atlantic he "was notified his re-entry permit was rescinded." He was only able to reenter the US once more in his life, to claim his lifetime achievement award from the Academy Awards in 1972. The US Government granted him an entry visa for that one trip. "Oh well, this is great, they're still scared of me," Chaplin said.

The list goes on: Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holliday, John Lennon, Ernest Hemingway, Wilt Chamberlin were all under FBI investigation at one time or another. Even the US Army got into the act, taping Eleanor Roosevelt having an affair with a US Army Sergeant Joseph Lash in 1943, leading President Franklin Roosevelt to successfully order him out of the country and unsuccessfully into combat. Lash survived the war and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book about the First Lady.