Personal animosities that would haunt the FBN were also bred by the Hearings. In March 1951, Charlie Siragusa returned to New York, after having established the FBN’s first overseas office in Rome, to testify before the Committee. Touted as “the” expert on the Mafia, Siragusa claimed that Luciano was the Mafia’s exiled king and referred to rumors that his commutation may have been the result of a bribe. Shocked, Kingsland Macy called for an investigation of Governor Dewey, reigniting Dewey’s simmering feud with Anslinger. In desperation, Dewey “summoned FBI director J. Edgar Hoover … and strongly urged that Anslinger be replaced as narcotics Commissioner.” But Anslinger’s “ardent Republican backers (especially in the pharmaceutical industry that the FBN monitored) and their plaudits” came to his defense and prevailed.25 When that effort failed, Dewey in 1954 would direct William B. Herlands, the New York State Commissioner of Investigations, to conduct an inquiry that would finally clear his name.
NEW YORK: THE CENTER OF FBN OPERATIONS AND INTRIGUES
In addition to having made powerful bureaucratic and political enemies during the Kefauver Hearings, the FBN was damaged by internecine warfare within the all-important New York office. The problem climaxed when Garland Williams was recalled to active duty in June 1950. Certain he would be chosen to replace Williams as district supervisor, George White, as Agent George H. Gaffney recalls, “hung all his prize photos up on the wall, including the one of the Jap he’d killed with his bare hands in New Delhi. The photos were there for about two weeks, then for some reason George was sent to Boston.”
One reason was Truman’s unhappiness with White’s attempts to link him to Kansas City’s Pendergast machine. Another was Hoover’s anxiety over White’s increasingly cozy relationship with the CIA. But the ultimate veto came from Dewey, who blamed White for the ongoing Luciano commutation scandal. But White was too important to be slighted, so Anslinger avoided a confrontation with his rivals, and assuaged White, by appointing him as the district supervisor in Boston. According to agents on the scene, White was rarely there. Instead he kept his apartment in New York and went to work for Newbold Morris, a Labor Party functionary who served as a special assistant to the Attorney General on organized crime from February to April 1951, when Hoover summarily derailed his investigation. A great opportunity arose at this point, and White signed a contract with the CIA and began a secret LSD-testing project, which will be discussed at length later. The CIA arrangement allowed White to run operations in New York, to the dismay of James Clement Ryan, the FBN agent who was appointed to the New York district supervisor’s job.
A former Marine Corps officer, Ryan was a veteran agent with a wide range of experience, including investigations in Latin America. But he’d spent most of his career in New York, where he was plugged into the Irish Establishment through his rabbi, Cardinal Spellman, and his many friends in the senior ranks of the NYPD. One of his colleagues, George H. Gaffney, describes him as a “superb agent, honest and fair, and blessed with a pleasing personality,” and says that Ryan was genuinely admired by his colleagues. Another agent compares him to John Wayne in style and appearance, and says that he was the last popular supervisor in the highly visible New York office.
When Ryan took command, there were approximately sixty agents working in the New York office, accounting for one-third of the FBN’s entire field force. Within the office there were four enforcement groups, a compliance squad, and three Special Endeavor groups, one each under agents LeRoy Morrison, Price Spivey, and J. Ray Olivera. Another select group under Joe Amato focused exclusively on the Mafia and its international connections. One agent was assigned to satellite offices in Buffalo, Newark, and Patterson, New Jersey, the latter having been established by Anslinger as a personal favor for Representative Gordon C. Canfield (R-NJ), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The most significant members of Ryan’s Celtic clique were Charles G. “Pat” Ward (leader of Enforcement Group Three), Patrick P. O’Carroll, Benjamin Fitzgerald, George H. Gaffney, John T. “Jack” Cusack, Thomas “Old Tom” Dugan, and LeRoy “Roy” Morrison, the only non-Chinese agent to work the t’ongs independently of George White in New York. Fitzgerald was said to be Ryan’s closest confidant. Known for his hornrimmed glasses and florid face, “Fitz” was often seen huddled with Ryan at a local saloon, where they spent their time talking in whispers and playing dollar poker. A tough Welshman from Hell’s Kitchen, Pat Ward was Ryan’s chief lieutenant; he knew all of the city’s narcotic detectives and drug dealers by sight and name, and managed the office’s most important investigations. Maxie Roder, a German-American agent who had been in New York continually since his days in Colonel Nutt’s Narcotic Division, was Ryan’s liaison to the NYPD precinct captains and, based on his seniority, ran the office’s Irish sweepstakes.
Crucial to Ryan’s success was his relationship with the NYPD’s narcotic squad, which had the power to conduct warrantless searches and shared with Ryan its numerous informers, as well as its contacts at the telephone company and the District Attorney’s office. In return, Ryan provided the City’s narcotic squad with the latest wiretap and bugging technology, as well as intelligence on the national and international activities and associates of New York-based drug traffickers.
The problem was that Ryan’s Celtic clique was insensitive to the feelings of other ethnic groups, and there was resentment over assignments and perceived insults. As Howard Chappell notes, “It was the Irish Catholic agents against everybody else. They especially resented Garland Williams for always assigning Irwin Greenfeld as acting district supervisor in his absence.”
Chappell – who arrived in New York in 1949 and served in Sam Levine’s enforcement group through 1951 – cites as an example the case his group made on Ellsworth R. “Bumpy” Johnson, Harlem’s biggest heroin distributor. With Meyer Lansky as his advisor, Johnson had taken over the numbers racket in the 1930s, but in order to prevent his rivals from amassing enough power to challenge him, he became a drug distributor for the Mafia. Genovese’s caporegime, Joey Rao, was his heroin supplier. In 1950, Black Agent Bill Jackson made two undercover buys from Bumpy, with Chappell covering his back, under the direction of Sam Levine. But Ryan allowed Pat Ward and George Gaffney to make the arrest and take credit for the bust.
Complaints of favoritism were annoying, but Ryan’s biggest headache was George White. White had an extensive network of informers in New York, and his private investigations undercut and often upstaged Ryan. Worse, White sent poison-pen letters to Anslinger, relaying rumors about Ryan and members of his inner circle being involved in corruption. White’s source of gossip was his own clique of agents, including several who lurked in Chinatown and Little Italy as part of Joe Amato’s wide-ranging Mafia Squad.
A major member of White’s clique was Price Spivey. A heavy-set Southerner, Spivey had worked closely with White in New York before the war and during the war had served in the US Army CID tracking black marketeers in France, before returning to the FBN. Spivey’s Special Endeavor case (SE 226) focused on Harold Meltzer’s drug-smuggling operation out of Mexico. In October 1950, while putting the finishing touches on the case, Spivey suffered a broken leg and seven broken ribs when a mob hit team ran him off a road outside Atlantic City. Despite three months on the critical list, he returned to action and in March 1951 wrapped up the case. Meltzer received a stiff sentence in California, although his New York connection, John Ormento, was sentenced to only two years. Unindicted co-conspirators included Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen in California.
One of the items of business for the New York office was tracking down fugitives from the Meltzer case. High on the list was Frank Tornello, a major drug dealer whose arrest would break open an important aspect of the post-war French connection and set Agent George Gaffney on the fast track to success.
A Naval Academy graduate, Gaffney had served as a navigator on the USS Missouri during the war. But his real interest was in intelligence work, so he resigned his commiss
ion in 1949 and, based on a brief association with Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s first director, sought work with the CIA. Hillenkoetter, however, had disappointed Truman and was on the way out when Gaffney applied, and after the CIA rejected his application, he turned to the FBN and was hired in 1949 by Garland Williams. Charlie Siragusa was his first group leader, and Pat Ward was his first partner in Group Three. In 1950 he attended the CID’s School of Investigations at Camp Gordon, and upon his return he joined Group One under Irwin Greenfeld and began tracking Frank Tornello.
Gaffney’s partner on the Tornello case, Mike Picini, was slightly senior and had already made his mark as the undercover agent who made buys in Los Angeles from Waxey Gordon (real name Irving Wexler), a notorious drug trafficker since 1917!
Picini’s induction into the FBN is worth describing, for it illustrates how freewheeling the organization was in the 1940s. Following a tour in the Army CID, Picini enrolled in Rutgers University’s Law School, then went to work as a clerk for a judge in Camden, New Jersey. One day, while filling a prescription for the judge in a local drug store, Picini was spied by Joe Bransky, the FBN’s district supervisor in Philadelphia. Branksy was conducting a compliance inspection, and Picini so closely resembled a typical Mafia hood that Bransky offered him a job on the spot.
Picini accepted the offer and, after a brief period of familiarization, was assigned to the Washington field office where, under the direction of Mal Harney, he was sent to Los Angeles to work on the Waxey Gordon case with San Francisco District Supervisor Ernie Gentry. Pretending to be an East Coast gangster on the lam, Picini and special employee John Pitta, a former Mafia drug dealer, worked eighteen months on the case. Picini says with pride, “There only were about twelve of us doing undercover work then; three Italians – me, Tony Zirilli, and Benny Pocoroba – and the rest were Blacks.”
After the Gordon bust, Picini tracked Frank Tornello to New York. District Supervisor Ryan, however, was not inclined to let his turf be worked independently by Picini out of Washington, so he relieved Gaffney of his other duties and ordered him to help Picini locate and arrest Tornello. As Gaffney recalls, “Tornello was a used-car salesman who was last seen driving a 1946 Cadillac Sedan. I knew the plate number and I followed leads in seven states and Canada until finally, alone, I found him in the cocktail lounge at a bar in Eastchester, New York, in January 1952.”
“What?” says Picini in mock disbelief when told of Gaffney’s apocryphal account of the Tornello case. “The truth,” he says, “is that some guy who went to this club in Eastchester saw Tornello’s face in True Detective magazine. There was a reward for any information leading to his arrest, so the guy went to the editor, Rene Buse, to collect. Well, George was a friend of Buse’s, and on a Friday she tells him that Tornello goes to this club. Gaffney tells me, and we agree to wait till Monday before we pick him up. So what happens?” By now Picini is convulsing with laughter, “That little shit arrests him while I’m home in New Jersey visiting my wife over the weekend.”
Picini, like Gaffney, would enjoy a successful career in the FBN, and having already made a name for himself in the Gordon case, he didn’t care that Gaffney claimed credit for making the Tornello case – although the episode does underscore the virtue of corroborating what any FBN agent says about his prowess and achievements. In any event, the Tornello case was more than a stepping-stone in Gaffney’s career. After his capture, Tornello would provide significant new leads to an important avenue of the French connection.
Meanwhile, Agent Henry Giordano was working on a related French connection case in Canada and had made undercover buys from George Mallock, a big-league trafficker working with Mafia and French traffickers in Canada. Although George and his brother John Mallock fled before the Mounties closed in, Anslinger was impressed by Giordano’s style, and took a personal interest in his career (some say because Giordano’s mother was a bigwig in the Republican Party), appointing him agent in charge in Minneapolis in 1952, then district supervisor in Kansas City in 1954.
Two years later came the twist of fate that opened the door to a headquarters position. In 1956, Irwin Greenfeld was serving as district supervisor in Baltimore, and was in line to become Anslinger’s field supervisor. But a beloved younger brother had a sudden, fatal heart attack. Greeny was so devastated that he was placed on sick leave, and in his absence, Giordano got the job. He would remain at headquarters for the rest of his career, and would stay in Anslinger’s good graces by adopting his Spartan management style and militant crusade against marijuana. Giordano’s pharmacological background further endeared him to Anslinger, for it enabled him to provide Congressmen with credible explanations as to why methadone should not be considered a treatment for addiction.
After he became Commissioner in 1962, Giordano would try to perpetuate Anslinger’s policies. But the policies were obsolete by then, and he lacked charisma, let alone Anslinger’s exquisite mystique; and in less than six years, the FBN under Giordano would descend into oblivion.
But those developments were far off in the future, and in 1951 the FBN’s greatest days lay ahead, thanks largely to Giordano’s chief rival, the inimitable Charlie Siragusa.
7
CONTINENTAL CAPERS
“It’s a small underworld after all.”
Maurice Helbrant, Narcotic Agent
While the FBN focused its feeble post-war international powers on the Mafia’s smuggling operations out of Mexico, Frank Coppola and his associate Sam Carolla were setting up operations in Sicily and branching out through Europe, just as Lucky Luciano and his entourage of deported Mafiosi were doing in Rome. Meyer Lansky, meanwhile, was discreetly forming prostitution, gambling, and narcotics enterprises in the Middle East with two Corsican crime lords – Marcel Francisci in Marseilles and Joe Renucci in Tangiers – whose lieutenants controlled Mediterranean smuggling routes and had connections in East Asia as well. As a result of these developments, by 1950 pure white French connection heroin was appearing in volume on America’s streets, available through Mafia distributors to an ever-increasing number of consumers.
The timing of this resurgence in international drug trafficking corresponded neatly with Anslinger’s desire to increase the FBN’s influence at home and abroad. Political developments were favorable everywhere, but most importantly in Italy. Threatened by communist movements in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, the Vatican prayed for help, and America’s Roman Catholic bishops responded by forming the Save Europe Committee, and the State Department delivered a multimillion-dollar emergency loan to the Christian Democrats in Rome. When the communists began to organize the Italian peasantry in preparation for the 1948 general elections, Secretary of Defense John Forrestal authorized the CIA to route US weapons to the Italian Army and the Royal Counterespionage Service, the Carabinieri. There were allegations by the Italian left that former OSS chief William Donovan was also moving guns and propaganda materials to goon squads composed of Fascists and Mafiosi, including Salvatore Giuliano and Frank Coppola, operating under the protection of local police forces.
To roll back Soviet expansion and protect American investments in Europe, Congress approved the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars to avowed anti-communist nations. To protect this huge capital investment, the National Security Council (NSC), at its first meeting on 19 December 1947, directed the CIA to launch an all-out, covert campaign of economic, political, and psychological warfare against the Soviets. In June 1948 the Soviets replied with the Berlin blockade, and the Cold War escalated in deadly earnest. The Asiatic strain of the Cold War virus erupted in October 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and turned sizzling hot with the Korean War in June 1950.
As America’s commitments grew overseas, so did the FBN’s opportunity to establish a permanent base abroad. Anslinger had only to suggest that communist agents and drug smugglers were conspiring to subvert America’s security by subsidizing addiction. In his bid to expand the Bure
au’s influence worldwide, he followed one path in Europe and another in Asia.
THE EUROPEAN PLAN
As Anslinger told Ray Richards of the Detroit Times on 25 February 1947, the Mafia had “obtained a vast dope hoard through looters in the last chaotic weeks of the European and Asiatic wars.”1 And it was true. The black market was booming in post-war Europe, and narcotics were one of the more precious commodities being traded. Germany was at the center of the trade, in part because the German Medical Corps had abandoned a huge stash of cocaine in Garmisch, a city south of Munich in an area occupied by the US Army. A group of enterprising former Polish prisoners of war found the stash and sold it in Italy and France in 1946. Other smugglers naturally gravitated toward the Polish operation, and for the next two years Garmisch was home for three major drug rings. A German and a Chinese man called Leo ran one, and moved heroin into Bolzano, Italy. Lucky Luciano was involved in a second ring based at the White Horse Inn, Garmisch’s underworld and espionage hangout, through his representative, Rino San Galli. And the Polish smugglers, still percolating, moved cocaine through Bari, Italy, to Cairo.2
The CID investigated the drug trade in Garmisch, after receiving evidence that the business was financed with $3 million that US Army officers had stolen from the Reichsbank. But senior Army officers impeded the CID’s investigation and destroyed the evidence in order to preserve the Army’s good-guy image. To this day the CID claims to have “no papers” regarding its narcotics investigations between 1945 and 1948.3
The Army’s image problem, notably, reached critical mass in December 1947 when Guenther Reinhardt, a special employee of the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), revealed that CIC officers were participating in drug smuggling operations that involved Hubert von Blucher, a wealthy, influential Bavarian. A former German intelligence officer, von Blucher, with the help of two US Army colonels, had buried $15 million in Reichsbank gold near his home in Garmisch in April 1945. It was a profitable venture and von Blucher, after relocating to Argentina in 1948, would move to California in 1951, become a chief shareholder in Pan American Airways and a successful Hollywood screenwriter.
The Strength of the Wolf Page 14