The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  White’s Truth Drug experiments were related to these intrigues, which is why he traveled to New York in May 1943 to test his superpot on Del Grazio, whose connections to Corsican and Mafia drug smugglers were well known. According to author John Marks, what Del Grazio revealed about “the ins and outs of the drug trade” was “so sensitive that the CIA deleted it from OSS documents it released thirty-four years later.”32

  Obviously, White’s session with Del Grazio was a smashing success, and subsequent Truth Drug experiments included the interrogation of German prisoners of war and American soldiers suspected of harboring communist sympathies. On 25 September 1943, White visited Manhattan Project security officer John Lansdale in San Francisco to administer the Truth Drug to scientists developing America’s atomic bomb.

  Having completed this assignment, White in April 1944 was assigned as OSS X-2 chief in the India–Burma–China theater. One of his tasks was to investigate rumors that Detachment 101, which had been organized by Garland Williams under former Customs Border Patrol Agent Carl Eiffler, was providing opium to Burmese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. The rumors were true and on Anslinger’s behalf, White asked Eiffler to stop. But the OSS officer refused.33

  As Eifler’s replacement William Peers succinctly stated, “If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.”34

  America’s spymasters would never sever the drug-smuggling connections they established during the war, nor could the FBN exert any influence over the situation. On the contrary, the FBN assumed a collateral role in narcotics-related espionage activities that was antithetical to its mandate. The Luciano Project and Truth Drug programs are examples, as was the formation of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, OSS chief William Donovan, and Chiang Kai-shek’s intelligence chief, General Tai Li. SACO would effectively put an end to any drug control over Nationalist China.

  SACO went into action in 1943, when a team of Americans under Treasury Agent Charles Johnston was sent to Chungking to train Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police force. Milton Miles, the Navy officer who commanded SACO with General Tai Li, describes Johnston as having spent fifteen years “in the narcotics game.”35

  When Johnston and his team, which included FBN agents, arrived in China, Tai Li was working closely with drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng in Chungking. It was an open secret that Tai Li’s agents escorted opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon and used Red Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese. His drug-smuggling operation undoubtedly reached American shores, but once he was appointed co-director of SACO, he received the same immunity afforded Detachment 101.

  VITO GENOVESE BRINGS IT ALL BACK HOME

  In July 1944, the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division (CID) learned that the former lieutenant governor of New York State, Colonel Charles Poletti, then running AMGOT in Italy, had authorized the appointment of Vito Genovese as an interpreter, first in Sicily then Naples, for a succession of Army Civil Affairs and Judge Advocate General officers. Amazingly, one of the most violent and corrupt Mafia chieftains had become a special employee of the US Army. But spymasters as well as politicians rely on the underworld, and Genovese had developed extensive contacts in Europe in 1933 when, while setting up narcotics connections in Italy, he befriended the secretary of Mussolini’s Fascist Party. Six years later Genovese was named as a suspect in the 1934 murder of gangster Ferdinand Boccia, and fled to Italy, where his friendship with Mussolini’s top aides proved beneficial, as did a $250,000 donation to the Party. In return for his generosity, Genovese was allowed to purchase a power plant near Naples and manage a chain of banks controlled by the Fascist government. For ordering the murder of anti-fascist publisher Carlo Tresca in New York in 1943 he was awarded Italy’s highest civilian title, presented personally by Mussolini.

  Genovese’s narcotics connections reportedly enabled Mussolini’s son-in-law to fly opium out of Turkey to refiners in Milan. The heroin was then flown to Mediterranean ports on Italian Air Force planes and routed by Genovese to Nicolo Impostato, an assassin from Kansas City who had replaced Nick Gentile, then in Italy assisting Genovese and Poletti, as general manager of the American Mafia’s national drug syndicate.36

  As the war came to a close, Genovese used his privileged position as Poletti’s liaison to the Italian Mafia to establish black-market routes between Germany, Yugoslavia, and Sicily. But the happy arrangement ended in June 1944 when CID Agent Orange Dickey arrested two Canadian deserters for having stolen two US Army trucks. The Canadians fingered Genovese as their boss, and Dickey tracked him down and arrested him on 27 August 1944. Forewarned, Genovese had in his possession letters of recommendation from three Army officers, praising him for having exposed several cases of bribery and black marketeering. The letters, and the fact that Genovese had been forewarned, sparked Dickey’s curiosity, so he contacted the FBI and was told that Genovese had been indicted and was wanted for Boccia’s murder.

  After searching Genovese’s apartment and finding a powerful radio receiver, Dickey sought entry to his bank vault. But the Italian authorities refused, and by the time he did get in, the vault was empty. Frustrated, Dickey wrote a report in which he named several high-ranking Army officers as being involved in a conspiracy to protect Genovese; at which point the US consul told Dickey that Genovese was an Italian citizen and could not be held in an American jail.

  Unaware of just how well-connected Genovese was, Dickey went to Rome to seek Poletti’s advice; and there, by coincidence, he encountered William O’Dwyer, former Brooklyn DA, friend of Joe Adonis and Frank Costello, then serving as the Judge Advocate General in Italy. When Dickey described the Genovese investigation, O’Dwyer said it was of no concern to the Army and he suggested that Dickey contact the current Brooklyn DA, which Dickey did. The DA put the machinery in motion and in November 1944 the State Department issued Genovese a passport, allowing him to be returned to New York to stand trial for the Boccia murder. But a general’s name had become involved in the case, and in December the Provost Marshal told Dickey to transfer Genovese to a civilian prison in Bari, where OSS officer Charlie Siragusa, having transferred from the FBN, questioned him. As Siragusa recalled, “being a civilian cop I couldn’t resist pushing the hood on his New York City rackets. It was known that he still pulled the strings back there.”37

  By Siragusa’s account, the interview was a waste of time – possibly because he had been instructed to give Genovese a free pass. In any case, Dickey’s efforts to achieve justice met yet another obstacle when, in January 1945, the principal witness against Genovese died of an overdose of barbiturates while sequestered in a Brooklyn jail. Shortly after the murder of the only material witness against him, Genovese’s extradition was processed, and Dickey single-handedly brought him to New York in May 1945. But there was one last surprise to come: as Dickey arrived at the DA’s office, General O’Dwyer came walking out. For what it was worth – and it certainly wasn’t worth all his efforts, including threats on his life and his family’s – Dickey dutifully transferred Genovese to the authorities and then faded into obscurity. O’Dwyer was elected mayor of New York, and the case against Genovese was dismissed. As Brigadier General Carter W. Clarke remarked in a memo dated 30 June 1945, the Genovese file was so “hot” that it should “be filed and no action taken.”38

  Criminology professor Alan Block asserts that the Genovese case “marks an important point in American political history” in which professional criminals continued to ply their trade, but “for new patrons.”39

  No doubt these “new patrons” were America’s master spies.

  4

  INSIDE THE FBN

  “What’s past is prologue.”

  Shakespeare, The Tempest, act II, scene 1

  At the end of the Second World War, momentous changes were taking place in US foreign and domestic policies that would radically affect the FBN’s organizational consciousness and direction. Within t
he FBN the issues were corruption and competition among agents, race relations, closer collaboration with government security and intelligence agencies, the fallout from the Luciano Project, and bureaucratic conflicts with the FBI and customs service. In this transitional period dynamics were set in motion that would determine the course of drug law enforcement during the second half of the twentieth century and set the stage for the FBN’s demise in 1968.

  The FBN’s primary image-maker and consciousness-shaper was Harry Anslinger. Unlike many of his bureaucratic peers, Anslinger had seen the war coming and had taken steps to ensure that a five-year supply of opium would be available to America’s military and civilian populations. In 1939 he had “arranged with drug manufacturers to stockpile a sufficient quantity of opium to carry the US and her allies through a conflict.”1 He did this without congressional appropriations, by having private funds made available directly to opium manufacturers in Turkey, Iran, and India. To ensure security he convinced the League of Nations to move its narcotics files and experts to the US, and in early 1942 he instructed the Defense Supplies Corporation to “acquire all available stocks of opium in preparation for a long war.”2 He personally determined the amount of opium that was brought from Turkey and Iran to the manufacturing companies and he stationed inspectors at their facilities.

  “He would send surrendered drugs down to Fort Knox by American Express,” recalls Agent Matt Seifer. “Ten trucks loaded with opium, guarded by FBN agents armed with Tommy guns. From Fort Knox it went to the pharmaceutical companies where the morphine was extracted; places like Ligits, New York Quinine, and Mallinchrodt and Merck. Anslinger had a control committee and every manufacturer had a quota.”

  As a result of Anslinger’s foresight, the Allies by 1943 were relying on America for most of their opium derivatives, and Anslinger was serving as the guardian of the free world’s drug supply. When he learned that Peru had built a cocaine factory, he and the Board of Economic Warfare confiscated its product before it could be sold to Germany or Japan. In another instance Anslinger and George A. Morlock (who had replaced Stuart Fuller as his counterpart at the State Department) prevented a Hoffman La Roche subsidiary in Argentina from selling drugs to Germany. At the same time, Anslinger met his security and counterespionage responsibilities by permitting “an American company to ship drugs to Southeast Asia despite receiving intelligence reports that French authorities were permitting opiate smuggling into China and collaborating with Japanese drug traffickers.”3

  Reconciling the FBN’s incompatible espionage and drug law enforcement functions would become one of Anslinger’s primary public relations goals throughout the remainder of his tenure as Commissioner of Narcotics.

  PROMOTING THE BUREAU

  As a result of his wartime services, Anslinger’s prestige and power increased dramatically within the national security Establishment. But there had been no sensational narcotics cases, and drug law enforcement was of little concern to the war-weary public. Many of his agents had been conscripted into the military, and his agent force had dwindled to a bare minimum, to as few as 150 agents. So Anslinger launched a major publicity campaign to create an urgent need for his organization.

  The campaign kicked off in 1945 in Washington, DC, when he accused Judge Bolitha Laws of being soft on drug offenders. When, in response to the provocation, Judge Laws suggested that Anslinger’s agents might be inept, the Commissioner was ready and waiting: noting to his friends in the press that the Washington field office had only three agents, he summoned fifty more from around the nation and divided them into two teams.4 With the aid of local policemen and Deputy US Marshals, the teams led spectacular raids on several narcotics rings. One team under Agent LeRoy W. Morrison arrested 200 Blacks in the capital’s ghetto and seized a quantity of heroin that was traced to Harlem. The other team, under the direction of Agent Gon Sam Mue, arrested 123 Chinese suspects in fourteen downtown opium dens. The raids brought home the immediacy of the drug problem, proved the FBN was not inept, and scored Anslinger points with the Washington press corps, which appreciated the well-staged publicity stunt.5

  Sustaining the public’s perception of an urgent need, however, required a steady diet of sensational publicity, so Anslinger aimed his agents at celebrities like Robert Mitchum (busted for marijuana possession) and Errol Flynn (vilified for his cocaine habit). FBN agents paid particular attention to Black jazz musicians like Billie Holiday, arrested by Agent Joe Bransky in 1947 in Philadelphia, and saxophonist Charlie Parker, arrested by Agent John T. Cusack in June 1948 in New York City.

  Putting a famous face on the drug problem highlighted the increasing availability of heroin and, as a bonus, by linking marijuana to surges in juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, interracial sex, and other signs of social decay brought about by liberalism, Anslinger bolstered the need for a punitive approach to drug abuse, thus satisfying his conservative core of supporters in Congress while, at the same time, reinforcing the urgent need for his organization.

  Another aspect of Anslinger’s publicity campaign began in January 1946, when Governor Thomas Dewey approved the commutation of Lucky Luciano’s lengthy prison term in return for his wartime services. Luciano was deported to Italy and freedom on 9 February 1946, bringing joy to his Mafia associates. Anslinger, however, was livid with rage, and within a year, allegations that the Mafia had purchased Luciano’s freedom were traced to FBN agents, prompting Dewey to engage Anslinger in a bitter feud that would last for years and ultimately damage the FBN’s credibility. But Anslinger served the espionage Establishment, which had a vested interest in denying that the Luciano Project ever took place; and in the long run Luciano’s deportation benefited Anslinger by providing the FBN with a durable scapegoat and the basis for a sustainable PR campaign. Luciano contributed to the FBN’s cause by immediately conferring, upon arriving in Italy, with the Sicilian boss of bosses, Don Calogero Vizzini, and by surrounding himself with fellow deportees.

  Anslinger would also suggest that Luciano was part of a communist plot to subvert America with narcotic drugs. This unproven allegation would also damage the FBN’s credibility; but the fiction was accepted at the time and helped Anslinger to persuade Congress that stopping drugs overseas, before they reached America’s shores, was a matter of national security – a prescient notion that fitted neatly with the Cold War imperative for foreign intervention and helped to establish the need for a larger, more powerful federal Narcotics Bureau.

  THE ASCENT OF THE MAFIA

  While Anslinger was exploiting America’s prejudices and fears to advance the interests of the FBN, the underworld was reorganizing its drug smuggling and distribution industry. Central to this reorganization was Vito Genovese’s release from jail on 24 June 1946. Having worked for the US Army in Italy, Genovese enjoyed a degree of political protection in Manhattan, where he took over the multimillion-dollar Italian lottery. Once the money started rolling in, he began scheming to seize control of the Luciano family from Frank Costello and claim the title of capo di tutti capi of the American Mafia.

  During this violent transitional stage, gangster veterans of the Luciano Project began to play a more important role in the deep politics of American society. A quick examination of the background characters in the 1943 murder of Il Martello publisher Carlo Tresca provides a graphic example of organized crime’s deep political association with members of the Establishment.

  Tresca was an avowed socialist, and his political adversary was Generoso Pope, publisher of the pro-fascist Il Progresso Italo-Americano. It has always been easy for fascists to acquire political patrons in America, but once it became clear that America was going to war with Italy, Pope enlisted the help of New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein, co-founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In 1941 Dickstein defended Pope before Congress, a fact that contributed immensely to Pope’s successful attempt to achieve respectability.6

  With Dickstein in his corner, Pope emerged as a wedge between the Esta
blishment and the Mafia and, with the support of influential friends like columnist Drew Pearson (a former employee of Il Progresso), and Assistant US Attorney Roy Cohn, he was able to provide political cover for his gangster cronies. Frank Costello, for example, was godfather to his children. But Pope’s closest underworld ally was Joseph Bonanno, whose narcotics manager, Carmine Galante, though never convicted, was universally recognized as Tresca’s assassin.7

  All the Mafia families were investing in labor racketeering, and Pope had aligned with International Ladies Garment Workers Union leader Luigi Antonini through a sweetheart deal arranged by Joe Bonanno’s consigliere, Frank Garofalo. A vicious killer, Garofalo had been Pope’s “factotum” since 1934, when, as Professor Alan Block asserts, Pope had used him to intimidate “other Italian-language newspapers which were anti-fascist and anti-Pope.”8 Tresca threatened to expose Garofalo’s connection with Pope, and as a result of that (and because he had blocked Genovese’s attempt to establish a social club as a front for drug trafficking), Genovese ordered his execution. Tresca was shot and killed on 11 January 1943. Galante was arrested and held for eight months, but was never indicted, and the FBI failed to connect any Mafiosi with the crime – despite the fact that contributions to Galante’s defense fund were funneled through Lucchese family member Joseph DiPalermo and the Teamsters’ Union.