Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Of course, Morgenthau didn’t know that her escape and recapture was far more complicated than the story reported by Gorman. After leaving the hotel, Wendt hailed a cab and went to the Los Angeles airport. There, she boarded a United Airlines flight to New York. Gorman reported that a man who agents assumed was Japanese had purchased her ticket. B. W. Thomas, the taxi driver, confirmed that Wendt had hailed his cab and asked him to drive her to the airport. They made no stops until arriving at the airport. However, since they were early, Thomas drove her around the neighborhood surrounding the airport until ten minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart, at 11:00 a.m.104 Moreover, a stewardess on the flight argued that Ms. Wendt seemed agitated during the flight, but she flew alone and did not speak with any other passengers.105 No one ever demonstrated how Wendt came to have enough cash to purchase her plane ticket or how she had otherwise obtained the ticket. The reports of a Japanese man helping her were never proven. Upon her arrival to New York, how a fugitive without a passport could board a ship bound for Europe further complicated the tale.

  Indeed, how did Wendt, a fugitive, pass through Customs and Immigration and board a ship when an all-points bulletin had been issued for her arrest? During her trial, Wendt testified that upon her arrival in New York she met a Chinese American man named Wong and married him. Once married, she applied for a passport and was issued one under the name of Mayline Wong. She argued that she had met Mr. Wong in a restaurant in New York and that he was the one who had proposed marriage. She accepted, took his name, and acquired a passport under her married name.106

  Whether Wendt married Wong for a passport or whether Wong was part of her network of contacts or even one of her handlers remains a mystery. Yet, it permitted her to gain access to a passport and to board the SS Deutschland bound for Europe. She boarded the ship, and it set sail. Before long, the agents realized their mistake and feared the loss of their jobs.107 They worked with the Coast Guard to intercept the ship and force it back to New York. Customs agents detained Wendt and sent her back to Los Angeles for further questioning. In the U.S. press, Wendt was cast as a mere pawn for a Japanese trafficking ring, while the documentary evidence suggests that she played a key role in the enterprises of Loeffelholz-Brandstatter and Wurthmueller.108

  By the time Wendt returned to Los Angeles, Treasury agent Alvin Scharff had begun to interrogate Sam Schwartz, an accomplice, seen with Wendt on the ship from Shanghai. With both Wendt and Schwartz in custody, customs agents began to piece together an outline of this transnational trafficking organization, but it was Schwartz who told agents that the organization was not based in Shanghai, as it first appeared, but rather in Mexico City. Always unorthodox in his demeanor and policing techniques, Scharff decided to return immediately to Mexico, and he invited Schwartz to travel with him as far as El Paso. During this train trip, Schwartz provided the testimony that Scharff gave Mexican authorities and that led to multiple arrests in Mexico City and New York in 1936 and 1937. Despite Anslinger’s earlier efforts, it was Al Scharff, his competitor and foil, who broke the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter ring, one of the largest drug trafficking organizations to that point, and who rose to prominence in the Department of the Treasury.

  Scharff’s life story is as infamous as those of the traffickers whom he tracked. Like Anslinger, he remained a prominent figure in the early war on drugs from the 1930s into the 1960s.109 In his preface to Scharff’s biography, Philip Nichols Jr., the commissioner of customs, wrote: “It is apparent that another Al Scharff could not possibly be admitted to the Customs Service today. By his own account, Al had smuggled, rustled cattle, peddled counterfeit money, filibustered, and committed fornication on numerous occasions.”110 Scharff’s biography reads like a picaresque account of border life. However sensationalized, his life attested that he knew and understood Mexico, the border, and transnational crime better than most crime fighters.

  Like many young men, Scharff went west to seek his fortune. He came of age on the border, where he worked in mining, counterfeiting, and even smuggling. Scharff ended up in a Mexican prison after he traveled across that country passing counterfeit pesos. A U.S. consul secured his release, recognizing Scharff’s shrewdness and his knowledge of Mexico. During World War I, German U-boats challenged the United States in the Pacific.111 The FBI suspected that there was a wireless station in Mexico being utilized by the Germans, and they recruited Scharff as a special employee to target and destroy it.112 In what reads almost as a fictional account, Scharff set out on the mission accompanied by his guide, Red Slippers, and four Yaquis. In the Sonora Mountains they found and destroyed the wireless station and also killed two German agents.113

  While in Mexico during World War I, Scharff developed sophisticated networks of personal relations in Mexico City and along the border. After the war, he returned to his life of legal and illegal activities. Like many borderlanders, Scharff had a different interpretation of licit living. He was a cattle rustler working both sides of the border to support his fledgling attempts to establish a gold mine. Eventually, his transborder crimes drew the attention of U.S. customs officials, who offered him a chance to put his skills to work for the government or go to jail. As a customs agent, Scharff immediately distinguished himself in the 1920s by breaking up an infamous rum-running organization operating through Galveston, Texas.114 In Galveston, he used informants tied to organized crime to penetrate criminal rings. In the 1930s, the department stationed Scharff in Mexico City to ascertain the duty values to be placed on Mexican handicrafts exported to the United States. Despite tariff laws stipulating that Mexican products must be assessed the same taxes, customhouses in the United States assigned different values. Thus, Scharff returned to Mexico to study and assess different Mexican handicrafts and commodities.

  As Garland Roark established, Scharff made great use of his time in Mexico City. He befriended the U.S. ambassador, Josephus Daniels, who had grown increasingly concerned about narcotics and Mexico’s seeming lack of control along its border with the United States. Scharff also befriended a number of prominent Mexicans in the government, including Dr. José Siroub, the director of the Department of Health, Luis Franco, the head of alcohol and narcotics, and Attorney General Ignacio Téllez. He also made numerous contacts among the Mexican elite, the business classes, and the growing Jewish community. These networks of friends in positions of power assisted him in his investigations, but he reciprocated their value to him by sharing information.

  Unlike his Mexican colleagues and friends who enjoyed Scharff’s antics, straitlaced U.S. bureaucrats like Anslinger grew annoyed and frustrated with him. With his southern twang, cowboy boots, and colorful past, Scharff had broken the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter ring almost single-handedly. He used his extensive contacts within the embassy as well as in Mexican society. Moreover, he continually argued that narcotics and drug smuggling must remain within the domain of Customs, not the FBN, thus threatening Anslinger’s position. Although Anslinger had informed the Mexican government about Loeffelholz-Brandstatter in 1933, the case was broken in Mexico. Journalist Douglas Valentine argues that Scharff generated the leads and informants and did not share them with anyone in the FBN.115

  Figure 9. Alvin Scharff in Sonora, Mexico. Garland Roark Papers, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches, TX.

  Figure 10. Alvin Scharff in a Texas marijuana field. Garland Roark Papers, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches, TX.

  Documents in Mexico suggest that this was indeed true. Scharff provided information to Secretary of Health Siroub and to the Mexican government; in 1936, Scharff controlled the case because he had developed the leads and was working directly with the Mexican authorities, bypassing Anslinger.116 What Scharff uncovered in Mexico led to the arrests of Judas Fustenberg, Icek Katz, Majick Salve, and Mochen Eghise. Scharff stated that the people operating in Mexico coordinated with those who worked in China, including Wurthmueller, Matt Kattwinkel, Mirecea Lep
escu, Curt Smith, Albert Rosenbaum, and José Buchawald; all of these worked with Loeffelholz-Brandstatter as well as Will Seigel, based in New York City.

  All those arrested in Mexico City provided the government with depositions. These, along with Scharff’s deposition, outlined a global organization that moved drugs and money that Scharff had been tracking from the United States and Mexico since the early 1930s.117 Scharff noted that the capture of Wendt, who was to travel to Mexico after arriving in Los Angeles, triggered the collapse of the organization.118 Scharff explained in his deposition that, once Wendt was arrested, her colleagues used various forms of communication to determine what had happened, leading to her escape from the Los Angeles hotel. Once they realized that she had been captured again in New York, they began to liquidate assets and hide their business dealings.

  After her capture in New York, Wendt was returned to Los Angeles by authorities on August 14, 1936. Because of her previous escape, two agents traveled with her from New York, and eight agents met her plane in Los Angeles. She was arraigned and held on a $25,000 bond to stand trial. Since she could not make bail, she awaited trial in the county jail. While incarcerated, she explained to agents that her escape from the Los Angeles hotel had been facilitated by an American woman who had visited her in the hotel and given her travelers checks and a plane ticket.119 While in prison, she became very ill with advanced tuberculosis and underwent surgery. Because of her illness, she repeatedly requested to be deported to China, because she assumed that she would be sentenced to jail time. Despite these appeals, Wendt stood trial and was found guilty of violation of the Harrison Act. She received a sentence of ten years at the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. Newspaper coverage of her trial portrayed her as a petite woman in stylish clothes. Journalists identified her ethnicity as Eurasian or Chinese German.

  Wendt’s ethnic background and that of her collaborators fueled speculation on both sides of the border about who held responsibility for increased heroin trafficking in the 1930s. Customs agent Bailey reported that Mexican officials blamed expatriate Germans and Chinese in Mexico as responsible for the new heroin-processing laboratories that had sprung up in the 1930s. In the United States, customs and FBN agents repeatedly discussed the influence of the Japanese in drug trafficking in North America, due to their already documented involvement in Asian drug trafficking.120 Additionally, the ship that Wendt sailed on to the United States was a Japanese vessel. Wendt and the men associated with her bolstered all these perceptions. Her contacts in Mexico included Germans, Poles, and Jews. Plus, she was of Chinese and German descent. U.S. officials continued to argue that a Japanese agent had also purchased her ticket for the SS Deutschland. Wendt thus embodied the national rhetoric of degeneracy on both sides of the border. She was of partially Asian decent and was involved in drug trafficking with a cross-ethnic organization. She also complicates the narrative.

  As a woman, Wendt maintained that she was simply a mule—“a tool”— who had been “abandoned by those who used me.”121 She argued that she had been arrested on her trial run, and that she had never previously engaged in smuggling. Because she was a woman, she could reiterate certain stereotypes of a “victim,” hoping to sway perceptions in her favor. She was a pawn in a scheme concocted by two men: Loeffelholz-Brandstatter and Wurthmueller. However, the fact of her well-placed contacts in China and elsewhere cast doubt on her story. From the time of her arrest, journalists reported that she hailed from a well-connected Chinese family and that she was a cosmopolitan, multilingual, world traveler. One journalist noted that an agreement had been reached with the court not to disclose her family’s name.

  Figure 11. Maria Wendt: “Girl Smuggler Suspect Escapes from Guards.” Los Angeles Times.

  In 1936, Wendt’s identity came to light when she was listed as the daughter of the governor general of Tibet.122 But it was not until 1938, in a New York Times article about the new government and national anthem in Japanese-occupied Nanking, China, that a journalist reported the name of Wendt’s family. Maria Wendt was the daughter of Wen Tsung-Yao, the minister of justice in the new Nanking government.123 Prior to the 1911 Chinese revolution, he also served in the government in Tibet. Thus, since her childhood, Maria Wendt had moved in sophisticated circles. Moreover, her name remains a mystery. Did she carry her mother’s name or create a Europeanized surname based on her father’s name? Wendt exhibits early on the use of the pseudonym, which remains a common practice among men and women involved in the drug trade. With her multicultural background and powerful father, she was highly educated, urbane, Westernized, and well traveled. She easily moved from one country to another.

  Wendt used certain stereotypical characterizations of women to undermine and resist the authorities in the United States. In California, this worked. Her strategic essentialist argument that she was a pawn was further complicated by the suicide of Naftali Loeffelholz-Brandstatter. U.S. Customs agents had tracked his movements through the 1930s from Shanghai to Mexico, to Cuba, and then to Europe. Wendt’s detention led to the eventual arrest of Loeffelholz-Brandstatter, allegedly her business partner, in Cuba.124 Deported from Cuba to New York in late August, he committed suicide en route while in the custody of U.S. Treasury officials.125 His belongings revealed clues that other women had assisted the organization in addition to Wendt. A photograph of a blond woman was found; on the back of it was a code of some sort. Following Wendt’s arrest and Loeffelholz-Brandstatter’s suicide, police in Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico City conducted numerous raids and arrests resulting from information gathered from Wendt and those arrested in Mexico.

  The evidence shows that Loeffelholz-Brandstatter and Wurthmueller definitely transshipped Asian heroin through Mexico to the United States, demonstrating practices of contemporary transnational criminal organizations. The group took full advantage of modern technologies to communicate with one another via telegram, the postal service, and telephone. They used various forms of transportation to move legitimate products, but also to move heroin. They employed ships, planes, and mail services, as well as human couriers. However, the heroin deliveries that law enforcement agencies were able to document are likely only a fraction of the total deliveries made by the group from the early 1930s to its collapse in 1936. If Wendt brought in fifty-four pounds, given the networks of contacts, bank employees, and operators on three continents, how much heroin altogether was moved by the organization is difficult to document.

  The Loeffelholz-Brandstatter case substantiates much of the contemporary analysis of illicit transnational flows and globalization. As Moisés Naím and Michael Kenney have argued, technological advancements have facilitated illicit trade, and the organization took advantage of a country that was in transition.126 Mexico of the 1930s, under the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas, became more welcoming to foreign immigrants from all over the world as they fled fascism. His period of office coincided with both heightened nationalism and expanded integration and relations with the outside world. Mexican cultural life drew artists from Europe and the Americas, including many seeking refuge from the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism.

  The people involved with Loeffelholz-Brandstatter could easily blend into a changing Mexico, particularly in Mexico City as it was becoming more cosmopolitan. All came from educated and fairly prosperous backgrounds: they were all professionals. Those from Shanghai had worked in engineering and medicine. In Mexico, merchants and bankers joined the narcotics organization as well. All spoke multiple languages and lived transnational lives, due in part to the mass displacements that occurred during the interwar years. Meetings between people of diverse backgrounds routinely took place in Mexico City, among artists, intellectuals, and politicians. Thus, in such a cosmopolitan and evolving city, gatherings among expatriate European professionals such as engineers, bankers, and medical professionals who also happened to be involved in drug trafficking never drew suspicion.

  Despite their level of educati
on and professional experience, or perhaps because of that, they were attracted to profits in opium and heroin trafficking. From the evidence, the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter group had extensive contacts in the banking industry. They also recruited skilled agents who assisted them wherever they were. As scholars Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel have argued, “individuals and social groups that systematically contest or bypass state controls do not simply flout the letter of the law; with repeated transgressions over time, they bring into question the legitimacy of the state itself by questioning the state’s ability to control its own territory.”127 Thus, the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter organization challenged policing agents, national borders, and government regulation by working across a number of regulated spaces such as banking and communications.128 Their ability to respond rapidly to a problem almost ensured that local investigations were inconclusive and the organization remained intact. How else to explain the ease with which the organization was able to purchase a plane ticket for Wendt? Group members mobilized to communicate across multiple borders, and in turn moved money to facilitate Wendt’s escape from Los Angeles in a matter of hours.

  The arrest of Wendt triggered numerous arrests of members of her organization and led to additional transnational cooperation among policing agencies, but the case also had a profound impact on popular culture. Wendt, Loeffelholz-Brandstatter, the “blond” woman, and the others served as the basis for the 1948 film To the Ends of the Earth. Some of those involved became more famous, such as Harry Anslinger, who plays himself in the opening scenes of the film. The screenplay depicts Anslinger and the FBN as central to breaking the case. Customs agent Alvin Scharff is not present, but the protagonist, Michael Barrows, played by Dick Powell, works with narcotics agents in different countries, much like Scharff did.