The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  The FBN’s district supervisor in Houston, Piney Williams, didn’t care that Customs agents were mounting convoys. The objection came from Anslinger. By 1954, Customs agents in the southwest were making so many narcotics seizures and arrests, that they were upstaging the FBN. Through their informant network in Mexico, they were also interfering in FBN undercover operations. So Anslinger went to court and challenged the legality of convoys and the right of Customs agents to hire informants in Mexico. He was especially angry at his old nemesis Al Scharff. The reader will recall that Scharff, as a Justice Department special employee, had assassinated two German spies in Mexico during the First World War and, after joining the customs service, had briefly managed Treasury Department narcotics operations in Europe before the Second World War, causing Anslinger and Charlie Dyar an immense amount of grief. But Scharff’s unforgivable sin was preaching that all drugs smuggled into America should come under Customs jurisdiction.

  The conflict between Anslinger and Scharff climaxed in the spring of 1954, when several detectives on the Houston narcotic squad were accused of mishandling seized narcotics. Initially it seemed like any other big city corruption case, and in March the Treasury Department’s law enforcement coordinator, James Maloney, sent Agent Fred Douglas to Houston to investigate the charges. A few weeks later, Douglas discovered that Scharff was involved in the case through one of his informants – and that’s when Anslinger sent George White to Texas. His mission: to rid Anslinger of aggravating Al Scharff, once and for all.

  Described by Scharff as “domineering and ruthless,” White began by questioning the main suspects about Scharff’s alleged role in the movement of seized drugs to a local trafficker.2 One of the people White interrogated was an unfortunate Houston detective named Billnitzer – and that’s when the trouble began. An hour after his final session with White, Billnitzer was found dead in the Houston police department’s narcotic squad room. Exactly what happened is unclear: FBN Agent Jack Kelly said that Billnitzer “had either blown out his brains or someone had done it for him.”3 By another account, Billnitzer shot himself twice in the heart. Twenty-five years after the incident, when questioned by a CIA officer investigating the MKULTRA Program, George Gaffney suggested that Billnitzer’s suicide might have been provoked by a dose of LSD administered by George White.4

  In any event, Scharff blamed White for having pushed Billnitzer over the edge. Bent on revenge, he holstered his pistol and headed to the William Penn Hotel for a reckoning. When he arrived, Fred Douglas and Henry Giordano were seated at a table in the coffee shop. They invited Scharff to join them.

  “Billnitzer just shot himself,” Scharff said, as rotund George White, dressed entirely in black, stepped up to the table. Looking at Scharff in a manner laden with “premeditated scorn and action,” White asked Scharff, “What in hell are you so nervous about?”5

  The “urge of violence” fell upon Scharff. “Look here,” he said to White, “If you don’t like what I just said, you’ve got a six-shooter on your hip. Reach for it.”

  According to Scharff’s biographer, only “the timely interference of Douglas and Giordano brought the heated situation under control.”

  Angrier than ever at Scharff, White resumed his investigation with renewed vigor, with the result that the head of the Houston vice squad was indicted, and that ten charges were brought against Scharff. But the trial of the vice squad captain resulted in a hung jury, and though his reputation was sullied, Scharff escaped punishment. The FBN paid a higher price than anyone. Reeling from the negative national publicity White had visited upon them, Houston’s town fathers forced Anslinger to remove the FBN’s district office from Houston. Eventually it was relocated to Dallas. Supervisor Piney Williams (a veteran of the old Narcotics Division) was reassigned as the deputy district supervisor in Atlanta, and Howard Chappell was named acting agent in charge in Houston.

  Having satisfied Anslinger by publicizing Scharff’s dubious tactics, White was rewarded with an appointment as district supervisor in San Francisco, displacing veteran FBN Agent Ernest M. Gentry. Gentry in turn was reassigned as district supervisor in Dallas, where he became embroiled in the FBN’s holy war against Scharff and the customs service, and nurtured his abiding resentment for George White.

  White settled in the San Francisco Bay area in March 1955, where his MKULTRA experiments would continue for the next ten years. In June, he conscripted Agent Ira “Ike” Feldman into the program. Fluent in several Chinese dialects, Feldman had served as an Army intelligence officer in the Korean War, and may have known Garland Williams, who might have brought him into the FBN. One of the most colorful agents in FBN history, Feldman stood five feet two inches tall, wore a full-length Chesterfield overcoat with velvet collars, a black fedora, and smoked humungous Winston Churchill cigars. Gruff and tough, he posed as a pimp when working undercover cases, and allowed the prostitutes in his employ to indulge their heroin habits; in return the ladies of the night lured their unwitting victims to White’s MKULTRA pad at 225 Chestnut Street for an evening of sex, drugs, and observation. To ensure that the illegal CIA program would not be exposed, White used a coded chit system to alert the San Francisco police whenever one of Feldman’s girls was arrested on narcotics or prostitution charges.6

  For the next five years, White and Feldman, with the assistance of the CIA officers Sid Gottlieb and Dr. Raymond Treichler, would open two more MKULTRA safehouses in the San Francisco Bay area, birthplace in the early 1960s of America’s psychedelic subculture.

  THE EMERGENCE OF MARTY PERA

  While the turf war between Customs and the FBN broiled in the southwest, and White moved his little shop of MKULTRA horrors to San Francisco, Jack Cusack returned from Europe and replaced George Gaffney at the Court House Squad in New York. Gaffney replaced Pat Ward as the leader of Group Three, and Ward became Jim Ryan’s enforcement assistant. Because it was so large and so critical to FBN operations, New York was the first office to have an enforcement assistant position. Then in 1956, true detective George Gaffney was named district supervisor in Atlanta and, in his absence, Martin F. Pera emerged as the New York office’s new shining star.

  How Pera achieved prominence within the FBN is interesting and important. Following a four-month assignment in Europe in 1951, he had joined George White and Pierre Lafitte in an investigation of corrupt policemen and drug smugglers in the southwest. “We were successful,” Pera recalls, “but the bender ended in controversy, because we were going into districts without the knowledge of the supervisors. Gentry in San Francisco was especially livid. After that, I went back to Chicago where the synthetic narcotic amadone was appearing on streets and causing a lot of overdoses. No one had a handle on it, so I took a look, and because of my background in chemistry I found out how the dealers were making it. Two manufacturers in the New York area were the source of the precursors, so I was sent there in 1953 to follow up. I was assigned to Joe Amato’s International Group [formerly the Mafia Squad], along with Andy Tartaglino, Don Miller, and Arthur Giuliani, who soon left to join the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations in Italy.”

  When Amato was made leader of Group Four in 1956, Pera took over the International Group. As he explains, the job was to respond to queries from Charlie Siragusa in Rome; gather information and originate leads in the US regarding the traffic overseas; recover fugitives; and conduct special projects. Under its uniquely qualified leader, the International Group would expand from four to twelve members, and become one of the most powerful weapons in the FBN’s arsenal.

  Central to the International Group’s success was Pera’s friendship with George White. A high tech enthusiast himself, White knew that Pera was developing useful gadgets in an electronics shop he’d set up in his office. To help Pera in his research work, White introduced him to Al Stern at the engineering firm Devenco, a CIA-connected company that developed and supplied the intelligence community with spy gadgetry. With Devenco’s help, Pera built several devices that
enhanced the FBN’s case-making ability, including a tiny transmitter for tapping telephones, a microphone that could be slipped into a room without opening the door, and a radio wave direction finder that could be hidden in a car. For his technical innovations, Pera earned the (rarely employed) nickname Captain Video and the unwarranted suspicions of some of his colleagues, who were undergoing a spate of integrity investigations initiated in Washington by controversial Lee Speer.

  CHICAGO AND THE RESURRECTION OF HOWARD CHAPPELL

  In Houston, in the wake of what the local newspapers dubbed “The George White Scandals,” straightforward Howard Chappell restored relations with the prosecutors and police. But Chappell was unhappy serving under Ernie Gentry in Dallas. A raw-boned Alabaman, Gentry was rabid at having been pushed out of San Francisco by Chappell’s friend George White. Gentry directed his anger at Chappell, and after Chappell refused to curb an investigation into John Ormento’s narcotics connections in Texas, Gentry reprimanded him for insubordination. Bill Tollenger – having spent two years as an inspector checking on agent misdeeds, and two years as agent in charge in St. Louis – was assigned to replace Chappell in Houston. Reluctantly, Deputy Commissioner George Cunningham sent Chappell into internal exile at the one-man office in Toledo, Ohio.

  There were few cases to be made in Toledo, and immediately upon arriving there, Chappell was ordered by Anslinger to conduct an integrity investigation in the Chicago area with Tony Zirilli. Then about thirty years old, Zirilli was courageous and smart, a natural undercover agent with all the mannerisms and the dialects of an old-country Italian. He knew how the top hoods thought and behaved, and he knew that in order to gain their confidence, he could not act, in FBN jargon, like “a boot-and-shoe bum.” So Zirilli affected the persona of a high-stakes gambler.

  “Tony was so goddamned authentic,” Chappell sighs. “But he was impetuous. We were working in the Chicago area without the knowledge of Al Aman, the district supervisor. Aman was suspected of having relations with local gangsters, but he was tight with one of Anslinger’s most ardent supporters, Senator Paul Douglas, so we had to be careful. Tony and I were posing as gamblers – I was his money-man and bodyguard – and that way we gathered intelligence and made a lot of buys. Chicago Agent George Belk was picking up the evidence and taking it to Detroit for analysis. Belk was the only person, other than three or four in Washington, and Ross Ellis in Detroit, who knew we were there. It had to be kept quiet because we were getting information on a Chicago police lieutenant who was a source of information for the syndicate. There was politics involved, too.

  “Tony was a gambler,” Chappell stresses. “It wasn’t just a role he played. When he was in New York, he was one of the agents who stayed late on payday to shoot craps with Angie Zurlo. Some agents would lose two weeks’ pay on Friday night, then go home empty-handed to their wives. So it got to be a problem. Tony was like that, and while we were working this case around Chicago, he lost $10,000 in cash he’d been fronted by headquarters. Then he got into a game going head to head with a local hood called Johnny C. Tony wound up winning back the ten grand, but Johnny didn’t have the cash. First he offered us the title to his Cadillac, and when we refused that, he came back with a tray of diamonds. ‘That’s the best I can do,’ he said.

  “I called Washington,” Chappell continues, “and I asked Anslinger to stall B. T. Mitchell, who wanted to round everyone up the next day. Anslinger didn’t want to know any of the details, but he did give me twenty-four hours to unload the stones. So I had an idea. Tony and I got in my car and drove to see Johnny C’s boss in Calumet City. He agreed to see us, and I told him the score. I said ‘Johnny C’s your man, so our problem’s your problem.’ He agreed, and asked what I wanted him to do. I gave him the stones and told him to wire a $10,000 money order to Anthony Zirilli at 90 Church Street in New York. Which he did.”

  The quiet Chicago integrity investigation uncovered the ties between the local policemen and Mafiosi, and resulted in Al Aman’s retirement and replacement by George Belk. Chappell’s quick thinking also enabled Tony Zirilli to return $10,000 in front money to FBN headquarters, saving his career. As a reward, Chappell was restored to the good graces of his bosses and in April 1956 he replaced George Davis (an ally of Ernie Gentry) as the agent in charge of the increasingly important Los Angeles office. His boss was his friend George White in San Francisco. Chappell quickly improved relations with the sheriff’s office and built the office up from twelve to thirty-three agents. He equipped his agents with the best weapons and the latest technology, formed a friendly and reciprocal working relationship with Customs Agent Ben White in Mexico City, and focused his personal attention on making cases in northwest Mexico.

  ANGLETON, LABOR, AND THE INTERNATIONAL NARCOTICS CONSPIRACY

  From his post in San Francisco, China expert George White concentrated on slowing the surge of East Asian heroin that was flooding the West Coast. The political context of the problem had changed after the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, and the US had assumed responsibility for the defense of Southeast Asia from communism. By default the US had also assumed responsibility for drug control in South Vietnam, where President Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother, Nhu, was deeply involved in the regional opium trade through his secret service. For that reason, drug control in Southeast Asia became a task for diplomats, spies, and generals.

  It was a fact that only a handful of the American soldiers in the Far East were becoming addicted, and on that basis the officials in charge of the counterinsurgency refused to allow an FBN agent to be assigned on a permanent basis in South Vietnam. For propaganda purposes, however, Anslinger was permitted to send Lee Speer to Saigon in January 1954, and in May, based on Speer’s reports, he told a Foreign Relations Subcommittee that the People’s Republic of China was the “major source of illicit traffic for the entire world.”7 Anslinger knew the allegation was untenable and that the Southeast Asian narcotics trade was in the hands of Vietnamese politicians, generals, and gangsters working with Corsicans in the Golden Triangle, as well as CIA-protected Kuomintang brokers in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Saigon. Nevertheless, he repeated his charges in 1955 before the Senate Internal Security Committee, claiming that 95 percent of the heroin that reached San Francisco came from the PRC.

  Helping to spread Anslinger’s disinformation was the Committee of One Million, a lobby composed of establishment scions and prominent senators, including Anslinger’s admirer, the aforementioned Paul Douglas in Illinois. Formed in 1953, the Committee’s raison d’être was to keep the PRC out of the UN, and to that end it consistently charged the PRC with operating a worldwide drug network to finance communist subversion in Asia.

  Also backing Anslinger was Richard L. G. Deverall, the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee representative in India and Japan. In a 1954 book titled Red China’s Dirty Dope War, Deverall thanked Anslinger and repeated his claim that 4,000 communist agents were pushing drugs on American soldiers in Japan. Deverall was a close friend of several prominent trade union officials working with the CIA’s International Operations Division, especially the AFL’s Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and in this respect, his support for Anslinger against the PRC was understandable. However, organized labor lobbied for national health insurance in America, which Anslinger opposed. Deverall’s book, though an obscure footnote in history, is significant because it shows how America’s top labor leaders betrayed their own union members by spreading CIA disinformation, and otherwise serving its anti-labor activities. The relevance, in regard to drug law enforcement, of this pact between labor leaders and the CIA became evident in 1955 when the AFL and CIO merged, and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton became Jay Lovestone’s case officer. A former communist, Lovestone had founded the Free Trade Union Committee, which, with CIA black-bag money, financed compatible left labor unions outside of the US. Organized crime was involved in this certified CIA covert action. According to author Tom Mangold, “Lovestone’s payments
and logistics were handled in New York by Mario Brod,” a labor lawyer from Connecticut and New York who, as an Army counterintelligence officer, had worked with OSS officers James Angleton, Vincent Scamporino, and Charlie Siragusa in Italy during the Second World War. He was also a wedge. Mangold quotes Sam Papich, the FBI’s liaison to the CIA, as saying: “Mario had contacts with the mafia.”8

  Mario Brod was Angleton’s contact to the Mafia, and through Siragusa and Hank Manfredi, he knew exactly where the Mafia was receiving its narcotics. Through assets in the labor movement, like Lovestone, Brown, and Deverall, he could also learn about and contact drug traffickers all over the world. And there was more. As the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, he was in liaison with all US law enforcement agencies and many foreign police agencies, and he alone possessed the coveted Israeli account. Angleton and his inner circle alone were in liaison with the Mossad – which according to FBN Agent Jim Attie was backing Sami Khoury’s narcotics operation in the Middle East. If anything put Angleton at the center of the CIA’s international narcotics conspiracy – which is where he was – it was the fact that it was his job to penetrate the intelligence services of the French, as well as the Communist and Kuomintang Chinese.

  THE DANIEL ACT

  In 1955, few people dreamed that the CIA was involved in international drug smuggling. But the gap between the government’s stated and secret policies was widening, in direct proportion with the public’s growing demand for drugs. More and more people were starting to question Anslinger’s policies towards drug addicts. Rufus King said that year: “All the billions our society has spent enforcing criminal measures against the addict has had the sole result of protecting the peddler’s market, artificially inflating his prices and keeping his prices fantastically high. No other nation hounds its addicts as we do, and no other nation faces anything remotely resembling our problem.”9