by Lucy Inglis
The Corsican Mafia
The French Connection was another scheme using Turkish heroin, but this time it was the Corsican Mafia, under Paul Bonnaventure Carbone, Francois Spirito and Antoine Guérini. They came to dominate Marseilles over a twenty-year period beginning in the 1920s, transforming the city’s organized-crime scene. Spirito was born the rather less romantic Charles Henry Faccia in Marseilles in 1900 and never became fully literate. His first job was as a transatlantic drug smuggler and he was convicted twice in Boston, the second time for smuggling fifty-five pounds of opium out of the SS Exeter.35
Spirito and Carbone established a French brothel in Cairo in the late 1920s and then returned to Marseilles with the same model, eventually reorganizing the Marseilles prostitution scene. In 1931, they made an agreement with Simon Sabiani, Marseilles’ deputy mayor, who made Carbone’s brother director of the city stadium and appointed various associates of Carbone to civic posts. In return, Carbone organized violent street protests in the name of fascism to support Sabiani’s political stance, and eventually his men opened fire on a genuine fascist riot of dock workers and the time had come to seek new opportunities.
The Harrison and Volstead Acts had given new impetus to organized crime in America, and a Jewish racketeer named Arnold Rothstein had taken an iron grip on the narcotics business on the East Coast from his base in New York, but he had been shot in 1928 and the market was suddenly opening up. Seeing a gap in the market, Carbone and Spirito opened a heroin laboratory in the early 1930s, and later began dealing arms during the Spanish Civil War.
When the Germans arrived in Marseilles in 1942 they needed informants against the Resistance. Carbone and Spirito were more than happy to help, and handed over a list of names and details. A year afterwards the Resistance blew up a train Carbone was on and Spirito fled to America. He later returned and ran a restaurant in Toulon, but continued to deal in heroin. The business passed to the next generation.
If Carbone and Spirito were not exactly loyal Resistance members, their hitmen the Guérini brothers were. Antoine Guérini was an agent for Anglo-American intelligence, who hid English agents in the basements of his nightclubs, and his younger brother Bartélemy won the Legion of Honour for his work for the Resistance. After the war, Marseilles was a shambles and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intervened to topple the Communist Party from power, leaving the Guérinis and their socialist connections in power for the next two decades.
In 1947, France had not only not recovered from the war, people were poorer than ever, and the Communist Party of France was organizing labour strikes throughout the country. The newly formed CIA began to pay the Socialist Party $1 million a year to promote itself to voters and lead the attack on Communism. For the USA, it was essential that the Communists did not take control of Marseilles, the second largest city and the largest port. The CIA sent a ‘psychological warfare unit’ to the city to work with the Corsican Mafia and the Guérini brothers to break the general strike on Marseilles docks. It lasted for a month, with the CIA delivering food, then threatening to take it away if the dock workers would not unload it. The strike was broken, and the Guérinis were firmly connected to the CIA. From that moment, they became one of Canada’s and America’s main suppliers of high-grade heroin refined from Turkish opium in Marseilles, as the CIA and French intelligence used them as and when.
For the Guérinis, from then until 1965, it was a rising market in line with demand from the USA, and the Corsicans ended up with more than twenty laboratories around the city. The brothers banned the rest of the Corsicans from dealing inside France, on principle.
It came to an end in 1967 when the Francisci syndicate shot Antoine at a petrol station in Marseilles over a feud, and Bartélemy went to prison for twenty years for avenging him.
The Five Families of New York’s Cosa Nostra
Of all of the Italian crime organizations involved in heroin, the Cosa Nostra (translating literally as ‘our thing’ but meaning ‘our family’) is probably the most famous, along with the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria and the Neapolitan Camorra. The New York Cosa Nostra’s heroin trade, at one stage responsible for 90 per cent of the heroin in America, has consisted, since 1931, of the five families: Bonnano, Columbo, Gambini, Genovese and Lucchese.
All of these families originated in Sicily, and were brought together by one boss, who declared himself capo di tutti capi – the boss of all bosses – Salvatore Maranzano. Beneath him was the boss of each individual family (capofamiglia), the boss’s assistant (sotto capo), the counsellor (consigliere), the line manager (caporegime), the foot soldier (soldato), and finally the associate who is the gopher for everyone else. At the time, this structure was unique to the Sicilian Mafia, and its military organization played a strong part in the steady rise of the five families of New York. Their style of business also came from Sicily, beginning in the nineteenth century, when the first true Mafia gangs emerged there.
The end of feudalism on the island, beginning in 1812, and the acquisition of smaller parcels of land by the people, meant the start of modern property rights there. Without the protection of a large estate, and living on poor land where resources were precious, the Sicilians were prone to raids and attacks by violent gangs of bandits. And with a police force of only around 350 for the whole island, the gangs were free to act with impunity. Landlords and citizens were therefore better off paying a small set of thugs whom they trusted, both to protect their belongings and property, and in addition their businesses, by seeing off incoming competition, known as cartel protection. These were the two mainstays of the earliest Sicilian mafiosi. Many had been armed guards on the large feudal estates, and so were not only accustomed to firearms, but were also professionals with aristocratic connections, giving them status when it came to hiring themselves out to the new, anxious landowners. Yet even towards the end of the century, the Sicilian Mafia had little formal structure.
Aware of the need to understand their growing problem with organized criminals, the Sicilian Parliament ordered two inquiries: the Bonfadini Report of 1876, and the Damiani Report of 1881–6. Bonfadini found that ‘The Mafia is not an association that has established set forms or special structures; neither is it a temporary grouping of criminals with a transitory or precise aim . . . it does not have leaders.’36 It also recorded that mafiosi worked in gangs called coshe, who were strongly territorial.
The Damiani Report is the more intriguing of the two, and marks the Mafia’s move into business: primarily, the Sicilian citrus market. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the discovery that citrus fruit cured scurvy, initially noted by Scottish physician James Lind in 1753, meant a sudden high demand for the fruit from the maritime industry. Sicily was the dominant force in the citrus market, and so, when feudalism ended, those who were suddenly in a position to supply a lot of oranges and lemons were making a considerable amount of money.
This did not escape the notice of the emerging mafiosi, who began to gather in the towns and villages producing the most and best lemons, offering their services to prevent lemon-rustling. Because the landowners had little or no faith in public protection, another of the key Mafia elements emerged, that of personal trust.
By the time the Damiani Report was published, it showed the Mafia were firmly entrenched in the best citrus-producing towns and villages. The link to New York emerges soon after that, when Sicily began exporting millions of dollars’ worth of citrus to the US, most of it through New York. In 1898 and 1904, 100 per cent of US lemon imports came from Sicily, and in 1903, 100 per cent of its limes.37 And the US was not only importing lemons and limes into New York, but the Sicilian Mafia too, who were soon dominant in the market in the city. The armed guards and protection racketeers had moved into business. In Sicily, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the Mafia had become so powerful that Fascist leader Benito Mussolini initiated a crackdown in 1924, driving many of the island’s Mafia to New York and wider America, where by now they had es
tablished family ties. The mafiosi of New York, many of whom arrived only a few years after Harrison had created such demand for heroin, soon realized how profitable the trade was, although many of the older ones would not take part in either the drugs trade or prostitution owing to Sicily’s ‘honoured society’ code. The East Coast heroin and bootleg liquor trade was largely controlled at the time by Jewish gangs, headed up by Meyer Lansky, nicknamed The Mob’s Accountant, and also a young Sicilian immigrant who had arrived in America at the age of nine, Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who had close ties with the Genovese family, and was not so influenced by the ‘honoured society’ ideal. When a war broke out within the American Mafia in 1930–1, resulting in more than sixty deaths, Luciano was in a prime position to come to power at the head of the Genovese family. He had already forged close ties with the Jewish gangs, and with Meyer Lansky in particular, and at a conference in Atlantic City in May 1929, just before the Mafia war broke out, Luciano, Lansky and other notorious American gangsters such as Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel met to form the National Crime Syndicate, and carved up America between them. After the massacres of the following year, the Italian-American Mafia formed what was known as The Commission, to strengthen ties between the families and enforce the hierarchical structure. It was controlled by the five families and also had connections with Al Capone in Chicago and the Buffalo crime families.
Luciano began to build up a prostitution racket, bullying small-time pimps out of the action and taking over the girls forcibly. He discovered that they were more pliant when addicted to heroin, and began to run it as a side business, which grew rapidly. Five years later, he oversaw 200 of New York’s brothels and more than 1,200 prostitutes, bringing in an estimated $10 million a year.38
He was also beginning to dominate the heroin trade. The Jewish gangs had largely brought in skilfully cooked high-grade heroin from China, made in Shanghai or Tientsin, which could be snorted. However, the Sicilians began to forge links with the Corsicans of Marseilles and the Eliopoulos brothers, and by the late 1930s, Luciano was largely in control of the city’s street distribution. Heroin purity dropped significantly, leading to a boom in the use of the hypodermic needle. As one dealer complained, ‘the Jews were businessmen, they gave it to you the way you wanted it . . . Then the wops started to get in it . . . These sons of bitches were so hungry for money that they cut it half a dozen times.’39
By now, the Federal agencies were mobilizing against the mobsters and, in 1936, the strongly anti-Mafia District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey had enough on Luciano to imprison him either for drugs trafficking or forced prostitution. Luciano chose the latter, and on 7 June 1936 was convicted on sixty-two counts of forced prostitution, with three of his prostitutes testifying against him. He was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in state prison.
In Sicily, the Mafia had also taken a serious blow when, in the 1920s, Mussolini, offended by a local Mafia boss during a visit to western Sicily, once again went to war with the Mafia. Arrests and torture became common, and by the time of Luciano’s arrest, the decimated Sicilian Mafia were surviving only in the mountain villages.
The saviour of the Sicilian Mafia, like that of the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles, came with the Second World War. Ships on the New York waterfront were being sabotaged, and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) decided to step in. They were unable to penetrate the tightly knit labour unions and gang networks there, and when their initial attempts to recruit the Mafia failed, they turned to Luciano, who was interned in an upstate New York prison.
The ONI was also hearing rumblings about the Allied invasion of Sicily, named Operation Husky, planned for 1943. The invasion was intended to establish a US base in Europe for the Italian Campaign, but prior to that they hoped to win over the natives and gain information. It was suggested that Luciano was the man to do both. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, was becoming increasingly alarmed about the rise of the Communist Party in Italy, and the US army, which had been conducting weapons drops to the Italian resistance fighters, scaled back their efforts to help. Luciano’s connections enabled the OSS to penetrate both Sicily and Naples through Vito Genovese. A Mafia member who had fled to Naples in 1937 to avoid the law in New York, Genovese worked for the Allies as what was coyly termed an ‘interpreter’, while running the black market in military-issue weaponry across the south of Italy. By the end of the war, the Mafia had not only made a return to power, they were well connected and often on friendly terms with American secret services. And, in Sicily, the Allied bombing, which had left 14,000 homeless, allowed them to become firmly entrenched in the construction trades, which were soon exported to New York, just as the lemons had been.
In 1946, Luciano was deported to Italy as a parting gift, never to return. His exile from the United States resulted in the establishment of one of the largest heroin-trafficking empires in history. In America, the near collapse of the large Mafia drugs businesses, and tightened border surveillance, had seen heroin consumption and addiction drop dramatically, perhaps to as low as 20,000 addicts. Twenty years later, the boom in heroin trafficking, owing largely to Carbone’s French Connection and Luciano’s operation, saw it rise to 150,000.40
Left alone by the authorities for a decade, Luciano brought heroin in from Turkey through Beirut using the influential narcotics dealer and Beirut socialite Sami El Khoury. At first Luciano refined it in laboratories he had constructed on the coast of Sicily, but later he relied more on the better quality result from the Marseilles chemists. Teaming up with Meyer Lansky, who ran the finances and directed part of the traffic into the US through Cuba (where Luciano and Lansky had secretly gone to organize the route in 1946, and to watch Frank Sinatra sing, Lansky alleged) and the Caribbean, their operation was dominant in the American heroin trade until Luciano’s death in Naples airport in 1962. Naples remains scourged by heroin, the city’s heroin trade now controlled by the powerful Camorra mafia. The Mafia’s return to power after the Second World War was remarkable, aided as it was by US complicity in its determination to fight radical leftist politics, but it came at such great cost for so many American addicts.
These are only a few examples of the many stories of organized crime based on the illegal demand generated worldwide by the Harrison Act, which meant that after 1914 opiates were inextricably linked with the trafficking of weapons and people, and, increasingly, government collusion in criminal activity. An Act that was supposed to make the world black and white had increasingly fragmented it into shades of grey, populated by figures who operated all the way through the spectrum, from corrupt politicians to mob bosses and street pimps. And at no time were there more shades of grey than when the very states which signed the Hague Convention had to go cap in hand to the countries which didn’t, so that they could send soldiers to war.
Chapter Eight
FROM THE SOMME TO SAIGON
The First World War
‘A war benefits medicine more than it benefits anybody else. It’s terrible, of course, but it does.’1
Mary Merritt Crawford, surgeon at the American Hospital, First World War
It’s safe to say that Britain and her Allies were unprepared for the medical needs that the First World War would present to them. When war broke out on 28 July 1914, the Harrison Act was in motion, although it would not be passed until December. Instantly, the price of pharmaceuticals rocketed as supplies dwindled. For the previous two decades, Europe had relied upon Germany, primarily Bayer and Merck, to supply them with the highest-grade medical products. Now that this was not an option, Britain found herself woefully unprepared. It wasn’t only supply issues, either. Hydrogen peroxide, which was used to propel German rocket motors and is also a disinfectant for minor wounds, was usually shipped in from the USA, and the price rose 75 per cent four to five weeks after the declaration of war.2 This was not so much a case of profiting from war, as outright profiteering by pharmaceutical companies.
At the first battle of the war
, the Battle of the Marne on 6–8 September, 2 million men in total fought and the dead on all sides amounted to around one in four. It was hailed as a victory for the Allies, but four years of trench warfare ensued. Initially the wounded were dragged from the battlefield by horses or mules with carts, placed in boxcars and taken off down the railway tracks to the nearest town. At the Marne, this primitive system was overwhelmed; ‘things were badly organized and the conditions were shocking’, recorded Harvey Cushing, an American volunteer doctor. ‘One of these trains had dumped about five hundred badly wounded men and left them lying between the tracks in the rain, with no cover whatsoever.’3
The US ambassador, Myron T. Herrick, assembled a group of friends with cars and began to take the wounded to the American Hospital in Paris. They retrieved thirty-four on the first run before returning to save as many as they could. By 1915, the American Field Service, a small corps of volunteers, were driving motor ambulances for the French army, one of the revolutionary innovations of the First World War.
In the field hospitals, however, things were still little better. Harvey Cushing watched with dismay as a colleague attempted to dress war wounds. ‘Dr Dehelly did a number of dressings – very badly I thought – unnecessary pain and bleeding from the extraction of adherent gauze. It was awful, wicked indeed, to see the poor devils, one of whom chewed a hole in his coverlet rather than utter a groan.’4 This was in April 1915, when Britain and the Allies were coming to realize that the Harrison Act had put them in a very difficult position. They did not have the almost bottomless supplies of morphine and diamorphine that were going to be needed for the number of casualties involved in fighting a land war on such a scale. No one had anticipated that the trench warfare would last so long, and stocks were in short supply. Even such basics as aspirin, which might have offered a little relief, had shot up to ‘more than 20 times the prewar price’ by the following year.5