“You couldn’t throw a tomato into a crowd of Lebanese and not hit a hashish trafficker.”
Agent Paul Knight
Paul Emerson Knight is a refined, handsome man with interests in poetry, philosophy, and espionage. A graduate of Exeter Academy, he enlisted in the Army at seventeen and was hardened by months of fierce combat following the Normandy invasion. After the war, he remained in France, attending Grenoble University for a year. In 1950 he graduated from Harvard and returned to New Hampshire with “a burning desire to get back abroad,” so he could use the languages he had acquired and learn more. Through acquaintances he applied for work with the FBN and CIA.
The FBN called first and, after meeting with Anslinger and Deputy Commissioner George Cunningham, Knight was hired in the fall of 1950 and assigned to the New York office. He was trained in elementary investigative techniques at the Army CID and Treasury Law Enforcement schools, and then returned to New York where he learned the realities of street work on the Lower East Side under the tutelage of veteran Agent Benjamin “Benny” Groff, and with the help of a Black informant named Hubbard in Harlem.
But Knight wanted only to work on the international scene, so he attached himself to Price Spivey’s Special Endeavor Group, which was focusing on the French connection, and to Joe Amato’s Italian Squad, which was charting the Mafia’s organizational hierarchy. By studying the files of these groups, Knight became familiar with the shadowy individuals and loose-knit groups involved in international drug trafficking.
According to Knight, the FBN already knew which nations produced opium and processed morphine base into heroin, but it was primarily through Spivey and Amato’s investigations that the FBN learned which French and Italian traffickers were purchasing opium and morphine base from sources in Lebanon. At the same time, however, there was an institutional reluctance to focus on any international conspiracy.
“Spivey and Amato were right,” Knight says, “but the idea of a conspiracy was something they had to sell, because it was very difficult to get anyone to cooperate as an informant. The activity that upper echelon people engage in is illegal, but you can never find them doing anything wrong – you would never hear a Mafia don say, ‘Please buy three kilos of heroin.’ So in the early 1950s the policy of making conspiracy cases was hard to implement. Policy from headquarters in Washington was only applicable to work on the street, and old-timers like Benny Groff did mostly low-level work by default.”
Aware that Charlie Siragusa had opened an office in Rome, and anxious to pursue the international conspiracy aspects of drug law enforcement, Knight requested an overseas transfer. His timing was perfect. Posing as a Mafia buyer, Siragusa had done some undercover work in Marseilles in May 1951, with limited success. Marseilles was teeming with French and Indo-Chinese drug smugglers, and the prospects of making cases there were excellent, but the Marseilles narcotic squad consisted of only two men. The one active member, Inspector Robert Pasquier, lived in a two-room flat reminiscent of a New York tenement and was limited in his efforts by a paltry budget and weak laws. Defendants in possession of fifteen kilos of heroin, arrested the previous year by Pasquier and George White, had received one-month sentences!1
Pasquier, however, was well informed, and he notified Siragusa that French Customs had seized 300 kilograms of opium aboard a French ship that had arrived from Beirut and that the shipment was destined for Antoine Cordoliani, an important trafficker in Marseilles. Cordoliani had a conversion lab outside Paris and sold pure heroin to Italians in Rome and Milan, as well as to French-Americans under investigation by the Italian Squad. Pasquier also provided Siragusa with contacts in Egypt and Beirut, the soft spot in a smuggling route that originated in Turkey.
In desperate need of a French-speaking agent to help develop these cases, Siragusa asked Knight to join him in Rome in August 1952. Upon arriving there, Knight found himself living in hotels, out of a suitcase, on a per diem basis. But the freewheeling lifestyle suited him, and he formed an immediate rapport with urbane Hank Manfredi. With Manfredi’s help he began to learn Italian, and he began working undercover cases all over Europe with chunky, prematurely balding Jack Cusack. The first agent to join Siragusa in Europe on a permanent basis, Cusack tried in 1951 to make an undercover buy from chemist Marius Ansaldi in Paris. He failed, but French undercover agents, under the direction of Commissaire A. Edmund Bailleul, made the case soon thereafter. Having participated in the case, Cusack was able to claim a share of the credit, and he remained in Rome on permanent assignment, as New York District Supervisor Jim Ryan’s eyes and ears – for at the time, Rome was a sub-office of District 2, and Ryan and Siragusa were competing to make big cases.
Unable to master French, Cusack was relegated to writing reports and backing up Knight and a series of temporary duty agents – including George Lendrihas, Mike Picini, Gregory Poulos, and Anthony Zirilli – who were spreading out from Rome on undercover assignments. Knight worked mostly in France and Germany; Lendrihas and Poulos in Greece and the Middle East; and Zirilli and Picini in Italy and Sicily. For all of them, imagination and innovation were crucial to their successes.
Knight, for example, knew that the foreign traffickers were aware that American agents, alone among the world’s police forces, were pursuing them. So he devised a plausible cover that would enable him to make undercover buys and set up deliveries. Through a friend who operated a travel agency in New York, he printed business cards with a picture of a man astride the globe and presented himself as Robert Martel, a Canadian employed by the travel agency. Other times he posed as a US Air Force pilot, a Danish seaman, or as a Pan Am pilot or crew member.
Knight’s undercover abilities were tested in Paris in the spring of 1953. Since 1951, the FBN had been receiving reports that Mahmoud Pahlevi, younger brother of the Shah of Iran, was trafficking in narcotics between Tehran, Paris, New York, and Detroit.2 In February 1949, Garland Williams had reported that Iran’s great families had been made rich by opium, and deliberately kept the anti-drug laws weak. Evidently, he was referring to members of Iran’s ruling Pahlevi family, whose holdings included vast opium fields.
The first documented report of Pahlevi’s involvement was in February 1951. Siragusa and Joe Amato were in Hamburg when Siragusa’s special employee, Prince Vittorio San Martino, saw the young Persian prince getting into a purple Cadillac with two beautiful women. Martino told the agents that Pahlevi was “a notorious playboy and bon vivant,” and was smuggling narcotics.3
When Jim Ryan received Siragusa’s report, he said he couldn’t believe that the Shah’s younger brother, because of his position and wealth, would be smuggling. Siragusa calmly replied that, only a few months earlier, he had arrested Prince Alessandro Ruspoli in possession of ten pounds of opium and that Ruspoli was royalty and a millionaire too. Prince Ruspoli was also an addict, Siragusa added, hinting that Pahlevi may have had a drug habit too, and that he was supplying his jet-set friends so they could all enjoy the same exclusive kick.
More information came that winter when French trafficker Louis Carlicchi, “an intimate associate of the notorious Joe Renucci, a Corsican gangster living in Tangiers,” introduced one of Siragusa’s informers to Mahmoud Pahlevi in Paris.4 The prince’s family owned huge opium farms, and the Corsican asked him to supply raw opium and build a heroin conversion factory in Tehran. The prince had agreed to be the supplier and build the factory, and the informer had agreed to be the chemist, but Carlicchi was arrested in another case before the Pahlevi operation could begin.
Despite this failed venture, Pahlevi continued to traffic in narcotics, and in March 1953 Knight discovered that the prince, using the alias Marmoud Kawa, was smuggling heroin between Iran, Paris, New York, and Detroit. Based on the information Knight had gathered, Agent George Lendrihas tried to make an undercover buy from the prince at the Imperial Court Hotel in New York. Lendrihas was unsuccessful, but information he gained in the course of his investigation led Knight, through the Riviera glittera
ti, to Ingebord Griffell, a beautiful young German nightclub singer selling morphine and heroin to a small group of wealthy Americans in Europe.
Knight informed Commissaire Michel Hugues, head of the Sûreté’s narcotic squad in Paris, and together they set a trap. Ingebord Griffell was part of a gang of traffickers, and in June, after winning her affections, Knight was able to meet with her boss, Armen Nercessian. At the meeting, Knight bought a sample of heroin from Nercessian and arranged to buy two kilograms more. A time and place were set, but during their meeting in the designated cafe, Nercessian told Knight that he had changed the plan, and that they would have to drive to the place where the heroin was located. Knight agreed and, to the surprise of the French agents covering him, calmly walked outside and got into Nercessian’s car. The French policemen waited a moment, then ran to their Citroen. They did their best to catch up without being seen, but as Nercessian drove through Paris, he saw them in his rearview mirror and began to panic. Showing great presence of mind, Knight said he had a hideout nearby, and directed Nercessian into the Sûreté’s garage, where he pulled his gun and arrested him.
The arrest caused quite a stir in celebrity-conscious Paris: Knight, the hero, was blond and handsome; Ingebord, the femme fatale, was dark and beautiful; one member of the gang had been Iran’s counsel in Brussels and Cairo; and Nercessian’s wife was the daughter of South Africa’s minister to France. But the CIA was plotting to overthrow the government in Iran, and reinstall the Shah, so FBN headquarters never revealed that Pahlevi’s address was found on Nercessian. In a 22 February 1954 letter to Anslinger, Siragusa merely said there was enough surplus opium in Iran to make what had happened “a trend.”5 In August, after the CIA’s successful coup, the oil fields that Iran had nationalized were returned to their former British and American corporate owners.
CHARLIE’S ANGELS
Impressed with Knight’s finesse and composure, Siragusa brought him into collateral operations with the CIA and military intelligence. “In the early days,” Knight explains, “we did a lot of odd jobs for the government. Most were investigations regarding the Export Control Act of 1949 – making sure that strategic materials weren’t going to the wrong end-users behind the Iron Curtain. We did quite a bit of that in Milano using sources in the East European refugee community. The Treasury Department was asking the military, ‘Is this a real company?’ We’d be asked to find out who was who.
“It wasn’t case-making,” Knight stresses, “it was helping people. It was Charlie passing information to an American colonel in Rome.”
Their involvement in the shadowy realm of spies was a valuable experience for Knight and his fellow overseas agents, and helped the FBN establish good relations with the CIA and military intelligence. But this commitment absorbed half of their time, and as a result, FBN operations in Europe in the early 1950s were slow getting off the ground. Under Siragusa’s direction, these early operations were catch as catch can. Siragusa’s top priority was accessibility, Knight explains – a matter of “Do you have a chance of getting him?”
“We were trying to make cases to demonstrate we could stop heroin from going to America, so they were small cases at first, only three or four kilograms. But in the process we learned about Corsicans like Dom Albertini, who managed heroin labs in Marseilles, and about Mafiosi out of Sicily doing business in Milan and Rome. We learned about Black servicemen moving heroin into Harlem, and about Air France crew members. But the most attractive leads were those that had to do with the supply of raw materials from Iran and Turkey to Lebanon.”
Crucial to FBN operations in Europe were special employees Orlando Portale, a deported Mafioso, and Carlo Dondola, a Lebanese-Greek smuggler and member of the Lebanese Christian Phalange. Dondola moved all manner of contraband between Italy, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, and Africa, and like Portale, often made the necessary arrangements for FBN agents. Portale and Dondola would elicit and authenticate potential leads, and then FBN undercover agents would approach the traffickers. In this way the agents came into contact with the Corsican and Italian smugglers they were seeking.
Complicating matters was the fact that in most European countries, FBN agents were prohibited by law from conducting unilateral operations, or making arrests, or even initiating contact with informers without permission from the local constabulary. In almost every case, success depended on forming good liaison relationships with the local police forces. Entrapment was a crime in France, so agents also had to learn how to make cases without provoking a suspect into buying or selling narcotics. Confidence-building buys, in which there were no witnesses, were allowed on occasion, according to Knight, but only with the tacit approval of a judicial official beforehand. Some foreign policemen were helpful, others were not, but over time, Siragusa, Knight, Cusack (who returned to New York in 1953), and Manfredi were at least recognized in police stations across Europe. By 1954 their presence was firmly established, and under the direction of Charlie Siragusa, the FBN was ready to expand its operations into the Middle East.
OPENING THE BEIRUT OFFICE
In 1954, Charlie Siragusa decided to open an office in Beirut. There were several reasons for this decision. To begin with, the Italian government’s crackdown on diversions had forced the Mafia to seek new sources, and after the exposure in 1954 of a heroin lab owned by Don Calogero Vizzini in Palermo, it was determined that most of the illicit traffic in heroin had been rerouted to Beirut, where Corsicans were working with Meyer Lansky’s associate Samil Khoury, a notorious Syrian smuggler and counterfeiter. Married to a French singer, Khoury had “influence and solid support among top ranking policemen and politicians.”6
Khoury’s drug-smuggling operation was facilitated by Mounir Alaouie, an official in the criminal investigations branch of Lebanon’s Sûreté. Their modus operandi was simple: Alaouie and Khoury would drive to Damascus, Syria, to purchase morphine base, then bring it back across the border, with the help of accomplices in Lebanese Customs, to Beirut’s Casino de Liban, where they made arrangements, through Corsican associates of Marcel Francisci, to transport it to secret labs in and around Marseilles.
Siragusa had known about Khoury’s operation since 1950, but at that time there were too many political complications to allow the FBN to establish a presence in the region. The Arab nations were angry at the creation of Israel, and in 1951 Egypt complained to the UN that Israeli and Lebanese drug lords were deliberately subverting its economy. According to news reports, Lebanese hashish was being smuggled through Israel to Egypt’s huge addict population. The profits represented a major source of unaccounted foreign exchange for both Israel and Lebanon, but the black-market traffic caused a serious financial drain on Egypt.7
In an attempt to assuage the Egyptians and slow Soviet expansion in the region, the State Department offered financial aid to Lebanon, and in exchange the Lebanese premier pledged to clamp down on trafficking. But, as the New York Times reported on 2 July 1951, when Lebanese Premier Abdullah Yafi sent army troops to destroy hashish crops in the northeast, “men who had occupied high office went livid with rage.”8
Most of these livid officials were members of the Maronite Christian minority and its paramilitary action arm, the Phalange. For decades the Maronites served as middlemen between the Turks and French along the Syrian border, and though dedicated fascists during the Second World War, the Maronites secretly supported Israel in exchange for US political and financial support against rival Muslim factions in Lebanon.
Siragusa’s hands were tied by the CIA, while the Maronites and Israelis established their domains in the early 1950s. By 1954, however, both were firmly entrenched, and Siragusa was authorized to open an office in Beirut, which by then was the acknowledged gateway of illicit drugs from Greece, Turkey, and Syria to Western Europe. Opening the office was a job that required an exceptional individual with fluency in foreign languages and that ability, rare among Americans, to make foreign officials feel comfortable. Paul Knight got the job.
Opening an office in Beirut also required the permission of the Lebanese government, so a trial investigation was mounted to prove that drug arrests would not be embarrassing to Maronite officials. The investigation was aimed at a Lebanese–Israeli drug ring managed by Cafe Palestine proprietor Mahmoud Abou Suleiman. The ring smuggled hash to Egypt, had a heroin conversion lab in Tel Aviv, and moved narcotics to Italy.9 Siragusa mounted the operation from Rome, and in July 1954, based on intelligence supplied by Knight and Orlando Portale, the Lebanese Sûreté arrested Suleiman along with a corrupt Lebanese Customs Agent who had helped smuggle three kilos of morphine base aboard a ship that sailed to Naples, where Lucky Luciano was located.10
Having opened the door, Knight moved on to bigger and better things, and his next case relied on international confidence man Carlo Dondola. Described by Siragusa as an agent “for the Greek intelligence service as well as the Arabs and Israelis,” Dondola, at one point in his illustrious career, had “sold some horses to the Israelis, arranged to have them stolen, then resold them to the Arabs … and never got caught.”11
“When I first met Carlo in 1953,” Knight recalls, “he was working for Charlie in Bulgaria, posing as a trafficker. Carlo had made a fortune smuggling gold out of Africa through Lebanon into Egypt.”
Knight’s case with Carlo began when Beirut moneychanger Abou Sayia cheated Dondola in a financial transaction, and Dondola, seeking revenge, volunteered to show the FBN just how easy it was to make narcotics cases in the Middle East. He began by initiating a drug deal with Sayia, and then brought in Knight, undercover of course, as the buyer. Next he convinced Sayia’s source in Syria, Mr. Tifankji, to reveal his source of opium in Turkey, Mr. Mehmet Ozsayar. As the case expanded, Dondola introduced Siragusa (posing as Cal Salerno, a corrupt US Air Force pilot) to Ozsayar. Siragusa assigned Agent George Abraham to work on Tifankji, and then arranged to buy a quantity of opium himself from Ozsayar in Adana, Turkey.
The Strength of the Wolf Page 17