The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Aware that the Mafia was serving new patrons in the wake of the Luciano Project, Pope threw his weight behind the CIA-supported Christian Democrats and became a key player in shaping US foreign policy in Italy. His relations with the espionage Establishment were reportedly cemented when his son, having served briefly in the CIA, purchased the New York Enquirer and turned it into the public opinion-shaping, Mafia-friendly tabloid the National Enquirer.9

  In these ways the Mafia began the post-war era on a firm political, economic, and national security footing. The same, however, could not be said for the understaffed, fragmented FBN.

  A PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT

  In 1945 the FBN was composed of approximately 150 agents and inspectors. The agents had passed the Treasury exam and spent two weeks at the Law Enforcement School, or as Special Hires they were exempt from the standard Civil Service rules, based on some unique qualification such as the ability to speak a Sicilian dialect. FBN inspectors were licensed pharmacists who worked compliance cases, which involved checking the records of pharmacies and physicians. Some inspectors were agents as well.

  Within this small group, a smaller group of case-making agents began to emerge as the organization’s leaders. Chief among them was George White, whose wartime activities and involvement with the Luciano Project placed him squarely in the middle of the FBN’s alliance with America’s security and intelligence apparatus.

  In July 1945 White returned to the US and, after conferring with William Donovan, visited Garland Williams (back from the war and serving again as FBN district supervisor in New York) to study the office files and meet with Mafia expert Arthur Giuliani. In early August, White and Anslinger’s trusted enforcement assistant, Malachi Harney, traveled to Kansas City to interview Mafia boss Charles Binaggio, and review the watershed Impostato–DeLuca case of 1942.10

  As mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, Kansas City since the mid-1930s had served as the way station in the Mafia’s national distribution system, under the auspices of Mafia boss Joseph DeLuca. Based in Kansas City, Nick Gentile managed distribution until his arrest in 1937 in FBN Special Endeavor case 131, at which point Nick Impostato took over, traveling the country to make sure that drugs flowed freely from Florida, through Kansas City, to Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, and other western cities. But the success of the nationwide operation relied on political security in Kansas City, and in that respect Joe DeLuca was the key until his downfall in 1942. As Ed Reid notes in Mafia, the FBN’s 1942 case “shook Kansas City’s Mafiosi to the bone.”11 But by 1945 James Balestrere, manager of the Chicago-based racing wire service in Kansas City, and Charlie Binaggio, the Mafia’s liaison to Kansas City’s Pendergast machine, were back in control.

  Apart from its central role in the Mafia’s drug syndicate, two things made Kansas City of special importance to the FBN in August 1945. The first issue was personal: Carl Caramussa – a member of the syndicate and the main witness against Impostato and DeLuca in the 1942 case – had been killed by a shotgun blast to the head two months earlier in Chicago, where he was living under an assumed identity. That was bad enough, but the Mafia assassins had hung a wreath in the local FBN agent’s garage as an unsubtle warning, and Anslinger, Harney, and White were enraged and determined to put the arrogant hoods back in their pre-Luciano Project place.

  The second matter was political, and concerned President Truman’s relationship with Kansas City’s infamous Pendergast machine. A compulsive gambler, successful businessman, and astute political kingmaker, Thomas Pendergast had handpicked Harry Truman for the Senate in 1934 and had supported Truman throughout his political career. But Pendergast had earned the wrath of the FBN when, in an effort to help Kansas City survive the Depression, he opened up the city to gambling, Black jazz musicians, and by extension, the Mafia’s drug syndicate.

  As the FBN’s Mafia experts knew, the Kansas City Mafia had recovered from the 1942 catastrophe and was functioning as usual under new bosses James Balestrere and Charlie Binaggio. Anslinger’s enforcement assistant Mal Harney, a staunch Republican, knew that the Pendergast machine relied on Binaggio and Balestrere to bring out North Side voters on election day. And while it may not have mattered to Harney that the votes invariably went to Democrats, his personal involvement in the Kansas City investigation earned him Truman’s eternal enmity and prevented his promotion until the Eisenhower administration.

  Though a self-professed Democrat, White was Harney’s protégé, and after raiding Binaggio’s gambling joint he dutifully and delightedly punched Binaggio in the nose when the hood “tried to get tough.”12 At Harney’s direction, White next met with John Larocca, the Mafia boss in western Pennsylvania. In quick succession White visited major Mafiosi in Chicago, Nevada, New Orleans (where he met Sam Carolla), and New York and on 3 September he met with Santo Trafficante in Tampa. White did not disclose in his diary the purpose of their meeting, but he knew the Kansas City syndicate was supplied “by Mafia agents in Tampa, Florida, who received the smuggled drugs from Marseilles, via Havana.”13

  White undoubtedly let Trafficante know that the FBN was aware of his activities, but he may have done something more significant than that. Trafficante, Larocca, and several of the other Teamster-connected Mafiosi whom White visited in the summer of 1945 would eventually become involved in CIA intrigues in Cuba – and if anyone was in a position to help the Mafia reorganize its narcotics activities after the war, on behalf of its new patrons in the espionage Establishment, it was White. While it is only circumstantial evidence, immediately after White’s meeting with Santo Trafficante, the patron “saint” of drug “trafficking” fought and won a war with his Mafia competitors in Florida and went on with Luciano Project veteran Meyer Lansky to acquire total control of the Cuba-to-Tampa drug connection.

  On 12 September, having touched base with many of America’s most powerful Mafiosi, White traveled to Chicago to replace James Biggins as supervisor of District 9, covering Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. White would remain there until June 1947 when he would replace Ralph Oyler as district supervisor in Detroit.

  Meanwhile, Garland Williams in 1945 had resumed his post as New York district supervisor, and under his direction the office was focusing its attention on the 107th Street Gang and its Mexican connection; on polished Frank Costello, the FBN’s most wanted man in New York since the Aurelio scandal of 1943; and on Joe Adonis, the Mafia’s handsome field marshal, now headquartered in New Jersey.

  The FBN’s propaganda campaign against Costello began with a front page article in the 19 December 1946 New York Times detailing the arrest of six men from the “East Harlem Narcotics Syndicate.” Among the six were Vito Genovese’s caporegime Mike Coppola and Tom Lucchese’s narcotics manager Joseph Gagliano. Williams branded them “the young Mafia of Harlem” and claimed that Costello was their “mastermind and absolute ruler.”14 In a 21 December 1946 article in the Times Costello vehemently denied the charge.

  There was a ring of truth to Williams’s allegation, but the FBN was in fact concentrating on Brooklyn Mafioso Joe Adonis, who was far more deeply involved in drug trafficking than Costello. Prior to his transfer to the OSS, White had spearheaded the FBN’s investigation into Adonis’s drug-smuggling activities. In March 1941, White and Agent William J. Craig had tracked Adonis to Duke’s Clam Bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Adonis regularly met with Willie Moretti, Tom Lucchese, and other Mafia leaders to discuss business.15

  Under the direction of Garland Williams, Agent Ross B. Ellis picked up the trail in 1945 and through a wiretap placed in the phone booth at Duke’s he discovered exciting new information about Adonis’s drug and gambling connections in Saratoga Springs, New York, Miami, and Detroit. All involved Meyer Lansky’s Jewish associates in the Purple Gang, with whom Adonis co-owned gambling houses in Florida, in partnership with Frank Coppola and other major Mafiosi from Detroit. Ellis also learned that Adonis was in contact with Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese’s caporegime Tony Bender, and Vincent Mangano
’s caporegime Albert Anastasia. By December 1945 Garland Williams had joined forces with DA Frank Hogan and, through Ellis, had inserted an informant (Dr. H. L. Hsieh, a wealthy Chinese merchant and gambler) inside Duke’s – and the hammer was about to fall on the Adonis operation.16

  FBN FACTIONS AND HEADQUARTERS AFTER THE WAR

  Having completed his wartime tour with the OSS in Italy, Charlie Siragusa returned to New York and was assigned by Garland Williams as a group leader, and emerged as the titular leader of New York’s Italian agents. In New York in 1946, Charlie Siragusa, Joe Amato, Arthur Giuliani, and Angelo Zurlo formed the original Italian Squad, which focused exclusively on penetrating the Mafia and formed the basis of what would later become the International Group, the critical point of contact with the Bureau’s expanding overseas operations.

  Also arriving in New York was tall, handsome Howard Chappell, who had met and formed a friendship with Garland Williams while serving as a parachute instructor at the Army Airborne Ranger Training School in Fort Benning. OSS chief Donovan had, at the time, appointed Williams commanding officer of the Airborne Training School, and it was there that Williams recognized Chappell’s exceptional courage, composure, and combative spirit, and recruited him into the OSS.

  As an OSS officer, Chappell led Italian partisans in daring sabotage missions behind enemy lines, and after the war his exploits were chronicled in a Reader’s Digest article commissioned by “Wild Bill” Donovan, who needed good press to maintain the OSS over the objections of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the joint chiefs of staff. But Donovan’s effort failed, the OSS was disbanded, and after the fanfare died down Chappell found himself looking for work.

  “In 1947 I decided to stop at the FBN office at 90 Church Street and see Garland Williams,” Chappell recalls, “and he suggested I come into the Bureau, which I did. I was hired in Cleveland, my hometown, and in 1947 I began working cases under Joe Bell in Detroit.”

  Chappell goes on to describe the core group that was managing the FBN when he joined it: “Anslinger was the Commissioner, and Mal Harney and George Cunningham were his assistants. Harney was straight-laced and aloof, but a tireless worker, while Cunningham was laid-back and liked by all the agents. Cunningham was a friend of Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley, and after Barkley became Truman’s vice president, Cunningham became Anslinger’s deputy in 1949. Cunningham had the lobbying power on the Hill on the Democratic side, while Anslinger and Harney had the influence on the Republican side, along with several powerful supporters outside of government.

  “Baxter ‘B. T.’ Mitchell from Tupelo, Mississippi was chief counsel and an assistant to Cunningham. His rabbi was Senator Theodore G. Bilbo [D-MS]. Mitchell died at a fairly young age and was replaced by Carl DiBaggio. Betsy Mack handled all financial operations, including final approval of expense vouchers. Betsy was about fifty years old: a big, attractive, good-natured woman as long as you leveled with her, but hell on wheels if anyone tried to flimflam her. Betsy had an assistant, and Anslinger had a driver named Tommie Andrews. Andrews doubled as agent in charge of the Washington field office, which was separate from Bureau headquarters. Headquarters itself occupied two floors in the Coast Guard building on 290 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “Garland ran the New York office with the help of Group Leader Irwin Greenfeld. Greeny was known for his imagination and intelligence, and Garland held him in such high esteem that he always named him as acting supervisor in his absence, much to the dismay of the Irish and Italian agents in the office.

  “Incidentally,” Chappell adds, “if you think there was a small number of people running the Bureau in the late 1940s, remember, we only had 160 agents and a $2 million budget. We had one-man offices in important places like Cincinnati, Buffalo, Miami, and New Orleans.”

  CORRUPTION AND COMPETITION WITHIN THE FBN

  While FBN headquarters was staffed by an elite group of veteran insiders, its fourteen district supervisory positions were up for grabs, and the competition was fierce; factions were forming and Anslinger’s assistant, Mal Harney, was looking for reasons to put the old bulls out to pasture. Corruption, which most commonly meant taking bribes from drug dealers or providing drugs to addict informants, had emerged as the FBN’s biggest internal problem, with Chicago as the focus.

  Chicago had earned its dubious reputation in 1925 when Elmer Irey arrested Narcotic Division Supervisor William Beech and three agents for selling seized drugs to gangsters. Upon arriving in Chicago in 1927, Maurice Helbrant was told by the new district supervisor, “There is no dope in Chicago.” There was “no moral regeneration, either,” Helbrant quipped, noting that the price of dope was very affordable and that business was flourishing.17

  The situation hadn’t improved by 1948, when Agent Martin F. Pera was assigned to the Windy City. One of a new breed of earnest young agents (including Frank Sojat, Paul Gross, and George Emrich) to join the FBN in Chicago after the war, Pera was born in France and was fluent in German, French, and Assyrian. As a soldier in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, he had developed a passion for electronics and after graduating from Northwestern University he joined the FBN.

  Pera describes Chicago as a “hell hole” with two types of agents: “Old-timers who were a legacy of Prohibition and told great stories about how they’d raid a speakeasy then commandeer it like pirates raiding a ship. And young kids fresh out of college with a totally different perspective. They knew that local corruption was a fact of life, but they saw a higher role for federal law enforcement, one that focused on interstate distribution, and could not be handled by 150 agents.”

  Pera and the new breed in Chicago were fortunate to come under the tutelage of Vince Newman, “the only older agent with his head above water.” As Pera explains, “Newman had worked on the Hip Sing T’ong case with George White, and he showed us the importance of Special Endeavor cases. He made us read the files to see how they worked, and in doing that I learned three things: that nothing changes; that I had to get out of Chicago; and that in order to get to the top in the Bureau you had to have the respect of your peers, and a rabbi, someone like Wilbur Mills at Appropriations. Most of the old-timers knew that and had grown jaundiced. They were just plodding along, serving out their time as administrators. The only active old-timer was Benny Pocoroba, who did special projects for Anslinger. Benny had enormous patience: he’d feed pigeons on a stakeout, then trap, cook, and eat them.

  “There were twenty-five agents in Chicago when I got there,” Pera continues, “and it was fascinating to learn how the system worked. My first group leader gave me fifty dollars and said, ‘Go buy pot. You have a week.’ So I ventured into Chicago alone and started buying pot and less often heroin. I’d make two or three buys, then we’d hit the pad. I was getting pretty good at it and eventually made what I thought was the perfect case: three buys, marked bills, no defense. Well, the judge throws it out. ‘It’s too pat,’ he says.”

  Pera rolls his eyes. “Chicago was an incredibly corrupt place, so I wasn’t too surprised when one of my cases led to a sergeant on the vice squad. I followed him on his route, and everywhere he went he collected money and/or junk. So I went to our district supervisor, R. W. Artiss, but he told me to shut up. So I learned there are limits set by big-city vice squads – which are usually run by some paunchy disreputable guy working with whores, degenerate gamblers, and drug dealers – and that kickbacks are funneled to the top through them. In big cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, in the days before the Kennedys, certain neighborhoods were controlled by political machines working with the vice squad and the Mafia. There wasn’t a drug deal on the South Side of Chicago that didn’t pass through the police to the politicians.”

  Pera was determined to find a better way, and his solution was the Special Endeavor conspiracy case, in which agents followed cases across district lines and used all the investigative tools available to them, including undercover agents, wiretaps, and informers. Serving as a model was Georg
e White’s case on the Hip Sing T’ong.

  But Pera became disillusioned with undercover work. “Only four or five agents in the whole organization were any good at it. Most were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You’re talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses, and undercover work became the credo – and a source of boundless, profitable hype. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways.”

  The profane nature of undercover work spilled over into competition for the fourteen district supervisory jobs, and only four districts were large enough to have group leader positions. Competition for these jobs was fierce. At the same time, budgetary restraints made promotions hard to come by, especially for the aging, tainted agents from the Old PU. In addition to that a battle royal was being waged by the drugstore inspectors and the street agents. At the time the inspectors had the advantage, because most of the dope that hit the streets during the war had been diverted by crooked doctors and pharmacists. As a result, registrant and compliance work had become more important than undercover work, and pharmacist/agents like Joseph Bransky and Henry Giordano had emerged from the rank and file to get supervisory positions.

  Bransky in particular was one of Anslinger’s favorite agents. Not only had he arrested Lucky Luciano in 1923; more importantly, Bransky had made the 1941 case on the Direct Sales Company, which was selling morphine tablets through the mail to doctors in South Carolina. More than 1,350 wholesalers were providing doctors with narcotics, and the Direct Sales case put a stop to the practice. As Anslinger proudly proclaimed in The Protectors, Bransky was “the instrument through which the Supreme Court hammered home the responsibility of the drug trade and medical profession alike for alert narcotics supervision and control.”18