The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Vizzini’s exceptional undercover skills were highly prized by Anslinger, Cusack, and Gaffney, but his arrival in Rome was not universally welcomed. Tall, dark, and handsome – and a swashbuckling ladies’ man – Vizzini stood in stark contrast to diminutive Andy Tartaglino, his temperamental nemesis. Tartaglino had formed an abiding animosity for Vizzini in 1955, when Vizzini stole the important Vellucci–Berhman case from him. Tartaglino had done all of the thankless preliminary work, but Vizzini had made the arrest and gotten credit for the bust. For freewheeling Sal it was part of the game, but for high-strung Andy it was an unforgivable sin. It didn’t help that Vizzini was part of a clique that was contending with his mentor, Charlie Siragusa, or that Cusack had brought Vizzini to Rome specifically to replace Tartaglino’s close friend Ralph Frias. Frias had performed the lion’s share of District 17’s undercover work for the past two years, but had lost his enthusiasm for the job when his son died at birth in Rome; and rather than accept a transfer to unfamiliar and, by reputation, unhealthy New York, Frias resigned from the FBN in December 1958 and, brokenhearted, returned to California.

  Eager to set the world on fire, Vizzini began to do what no agent had done before: penetrate a faction of Lucky Luciano’s inner circle which was managing a clandestine heroin conversion laboratory in Sicily. The FBN wanted to smash the operation, so an introduction was arranged and, posing as a corrupt Air Force pilot, Vizzini used his considerable charms to seduce the FBN’s bête noire. He tells how he did this in his autobiography, but omits three important details that he wasn’t permitted to tell at the time: 1) that he was introduced to Luciano by one of Hank Manfredi’s CIA assets; 2) that he reported to Manfredi, not District Supervisor Jack Cusack, on the case; and 3) that copies of his reports about Luciano went to Bobby Kennedy.

  Despite Vizzini’s threadbare cover, Luciano accepted him on the word of Manfredi’s asset. As improbable as it may seem, Luciano’s skeptical associates also came to accept Vizzini, and they eventually got him a job as an assistant to Mafia chemist Joe Mancuso in a heroin conversion lab in Sicily. Over the course of a few harrowing weeks, Vizzini worked closely with a backup squad of Italian police to engineer Mancuso’s arrest. The case led to the arrest of Luciano lieutenant Joe Pici, and several Corsicans in Marseilles. Although he wasn’t able to implicate Luciano in the conspiracy, Vizzini’s success in smashing the Sicilian heroin ring so enhanced his reputation that, in late 1959, Anslinger gave him the honor of opening the FBN’s first office in Istanbul.2

  Meanwhile, having finished testifying in the Orlandino case in New York, Tony Mangiaracina was rewarded with the transfer he desired, and arrived in Rome. Affable and easy-going, but resolute, his primary mission was to work on Italians wherever they were – Germany, Sicily, France, Beirut – but he did special jobs as well. His big problem was adjusting to Jack Cusack’s hypercritical, micro-management style, which often reduced the four office secretaries to tears.3 Consequently, Mangiaracina had little success making cases overseas. He describes Cusack as “an okay conspiracy maker,” but is careful to note that Cusack couldn’t speak Italian, and Hank Manfredi was much better equipped to head the Rome office. “The Italian police,” Mangiaracina says, “always used to ask me: ‘Why isn’t Mr. Manfredi the boss? He’s been here ten years!’ ”

  The reason, of course, was that Hank Manfredi was mired in the murky depths of espionage. As the lynchpin in CIA officer Bob Driscoll’s initiative, Manfredi had formed a cadre of Italian policemen from Trieste into a secret operations unit designed to neutralize the Communist Party in Rome and infiltrate its Soviet link. But Driscoll hadn’t consulted with James Angleton, the CIA’s tyrannical counterintelligence chief, and when Angleton (who was running a parallel operation through the Italian military) found out what Driscoll was doing, he notified General Giovanni De Lorenzo, the Sicilian-born chief of Italy’s secret service. Word of Driscoll’s secret unit hit the papers, scandal ensued, the initiative fizzled, and Driscoll was sent to Tangiers to await his next assignment. The call would come in June 1960, when the Belgian Congo declared its independence, and by posing as a doctor and recruiting Joseph Mobuto, the chief of staff of the Congolese Army, Driscoll would resurrect his CIA career.4

  But redemption would elude Manfredi. He wasn’t exposed in the scandal, thanks to his FBN cover and friends in the Italian police forces – and he did manage to maintain good relations with Angleton – but his faith in the ideal that all Americans were working together, for God and country, was shattered by Angleton’s betrayal. He’d also blown his chance to achieve stardom in the CIA. But worst of all, he had to go back to work for Jack Cusack, for whom he had no love or respect. Insecure by nature, and a hypochondriac, father figure Hank Manfredi fell into a black depression that disturbed everyone in District 17.

  Back at FBN headquarters, the CIA was casting its wicked spell on Charlie Siragusa too. Wrapped in red tape by Giordano and Speer, he longed for an investigation he could sink his teeth into. Instead, Anslinger made him the FBN’s liaison to the CIA, and Siragusa became inextricably entwined in the MKULTRA Program and the CIA’s disastrous plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Like Hank Manfredi before him, Siragusa’s career was compromised as a result.

  Siragusa’s walk down the primrose path began in January 1959, when Anslinger, expecting more cooperation from Castro than he’d gotten from Batista, sent Charlie to Cuba with a list of fifty drug traffickers he wanted arrested and expelled. Topping the list was Santo Trafficante, who had been subpoenaed in the Anastasia murder case. But the fledgling Cuban government couldn’t find the Batista regime’s dossiers on the gangsters Anslinger wanted expelled. Then the case against Trafficante was mysteriously dismissed in the US, probably at the behest of the CIA, and the patron saint of drug traffickers was released from a Cuban detention facility and returned to Tampa a free man.5

  Meyer Lansky, meanwhile, had ransomed his brother Jake from the same detention facility and was relocating his offshore banking and gambling operation to the Bahamas, where he teamed up with a motley crew of dissolute British barristers and bankers. Lansky financed the operation with laundered drug and gambling money, his business friends provided the respectable façade, and together they created a formidable criminal empire. Making the whole thing possible was the CIA, which had hired a slew of gangsters, including Trafficante, in its mad attempt to murder Castro. In return for their services, the hoods were protected from criminal prosecution, and in this way and others, the CIA would subvert the FBN’s efforts against the American Mafia. It was also the beginning of what Andy Tartaglino referred to as “The Age of Anglophiles and Francophobes.”6

  THE ANGLOPHILES

  In 1953, Siragusa had reported that Corsicans smuggled morphine and heroin from Indochina.7 What he didn’t know at the time was that the Corsicans relied on CIA assets in the Kuomintang as their source of supply. Garland Williams, however, clarified the situation once and for all in a 25 July 1959 report titled “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East.” As Williams noted, 10,000 Kuomintang soldiers living illegally in Burma had “almost exclusive responsibility for moving opium shipments out of the area.” This Kuomintang operation, Williams said, supplied, “the persistent major violators of French nationality who operate in New York City.”8

  Williams wasn’t whistling in the wind, and in May 1959 – a month after he recommended that the Kuomintang–French operation be destroyed – the Burmese attacked a KMT camp where they discovered 6,000 CIA-supplied KMT soldiers and “three morphine base refineries operating near a usable airstrip.”9

  According to Williams, American mercenaries working for the CIA flew refined heroin out of the Golden Triangle to contacts in Hong Kong and Saigon. All of this was known to Anslinger and his chief executives, and in one instance, according to Andy Tartaglino, FBN agents arrested two CIA agents carrying twelve kilograms of morphine base from Thailand to Hong Kong. But the CIA said they were low-level rogues, and the incident was swept under the
carpet.

  Taking his cue from the CIA, Anslinger did nothing to embarrass the Kuomintang or the French, and he continued to claim that all heroin reaching Hong Kong came from the People’s Republic of China. “The Los Angeles area alone probably received forty percent of the smuggled contraband from China’s heroin and morphine plants,” he said in 1961.10

  However, behind the veil of political propaganda, Anslinger was being pressured to post an agent in Hong Kong, as Williams had recommended. But the British colonialists in control of Hong Kong were not sending out engraved invitations. On the contrary, they’d seen America snatch South Vietnam away from the French and, fearing that America had similar designs on Hong Kong, they put up as many barriers as possible. For example, when the British learned that George White had slipped an agent into the Crown Colony in 1959, Hong Kong’s customs service, in retaliation, searched a Pan Am passenger plane and miraculously discovered four pounds of morphine base in an unnamed person’s luggage. The airline was fined a mere $2,700, but the message was clear: the center of the Far Eastern drug trade was off-limits to the FBN. To get around this No Hunting ban, Anslinger sent Bill Tollenger to Hong Kong as Pan Am’s security chief. Operating under CIA control, Tollenger’s job was to snoop around the Far East without upsetting the status quo, while keeping Sam Pryor’s airline out of trouble.

  The Hong Kong No Hunting ban also gave Anslinger a convenient excuse: if FBN agents weren’t there, they couldn’t prove that the CIA, Kuomintang, and French Corsicans were involved in a drug smuggling conspiracy. Thus, when twenty-one Chinese-Americans were arrested in San Francisco in 1959 with heroin obtained in Hong Kong, Anslinger and George White could say without blushing that it had come from mainland China, because the conspirators referred to themselves “in customary Communist terms.”11 They made this claim despite the fact that a former president of the Hip Sing T’ong was the mastermind of the conspiracy, and that the president of the Bing King T’ong in Portland was the middleman in the transactions. And that wasn’t the worst of it; according to Peter Dale Scott, “The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Anti-Communist League (a KMT front) had been ordered by the US Consulate in Hong Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way … the KMT disappeared from view.”12

  Such was the paradoxical beauty of the special relationship with Great Britain. More than any other nation in history, Britain had profited from opium. By distributing narcotics to addicts in the United Kingdom, British public health officials repudiated Anslinger’s punitive approach to drug addiction. British businessmen dealt with the PRC on the Hong Kong Exchange through British banks and shipping companies like Jardine Matheson. And, as Williams implied in his 25 July 1959 report, the British actually protected Kuomintang drug traffickers. The British, he said, seized “eight or ten heroin factories each year,” and “many more” were in operation. But they punished the Kuomintang traffickers merely by “deporting them to Macao.” US Customs agents working with the Brits tried to stop this awful practice; but, due to CIA intervention, they did not have “effective support from the State Department in this endeavor.”13

  The Brits, however, weren’t doing seditious things like France. The British intelligence service wasn’t supplying heroin conversion labs outside London, like SDECE was by facilitating the supply of morphine base to labs outside Paris. Nor were they courting the Soviets and contending with the CIA at every coordinate on the drug smuggling map, from Laos and Beirut, to Algeria and Marseilles. The Brits and Americans were cousins, and the French were ridiculous, after all.

  THE FRANCOPHOBES

  Until May 1954, America and France had a modus vivendi: French colonies were allowed to absorb opium revenues in return for waging the First Indochina War. But the accommodation collapsed at Dien Bien Phu, and soon the two nations were struggling for hegemony in the region. Five years later, on 19 November 1959, the role of the illicit drug trade in this salle guerre was publicly revealed when a Corsican with SDECE credentials, Renaud Desclerts, was arrested in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam, with 293 kilograms of Laotian opium.14

  As Marty Pera told the McClellan Committee that year, “When French Indochina existed … quantities of opium were shipped to the labs around Marseilles … then transshipped to the US.” Since then, Pera added, the US had become “preoccupied” with France itself.15

  Preoccupied, indeed. By 1960, France had replaced Italy as the focus of federal drug law enforcement, but with a national security twist. According to Agent Tom Tripodi, “An investigation undertaken in 1960 by American General E. G. Lansdale … concluded that elements of the French government were engaged in the heroin traffic.”16

  As we shall see, it wasn’t long before the FBN got dragged into the dirty underground war – the sale guerre – that the CIA and SDECE were waging within the arcane world of international drug trafficking.

  Laos was the source of the opium that the French converted into heroin, and so the CIA, which was anxious to deprive SDECE of this untraceable source of income, staged a coup that brought its man, General Phoumi Nosavan, to power in November 1960. French advisors to the Laotian military departed in protest, and CIA paramilitary officers took control of the opium-growing hill tribes the French had formed into its anti-communist Armée Clandestine.17 In 1963 Laos would withdraw from the UN’s 1961 Single Convention and, under the guidance of the CIA, start mass-producing narcotics to support the CIA’s own secret army of Laotian hill tribesmen.18

  But Laos was remote and primitive, and the axis of the CIA’s salle guerre with SDECE was between Marseilles and urbane Beirut, where, with the failure of the United Arab Kingdom, the Christian Maronites had emerged as the CIA’s only viable allies in the struggle against Arab nationalism and communism in the Middle East. Suffering the Francophiles in order to make cases posed enormous challenges for FBN agents in the region. Paul Knight’s primary informer was a Maronite, and thus loyal to the French, and the Lebanese police were of little help, when they weren’t actually protecting drug smugglers like Sami Khoury – who by 1959 had, ironically, become Knight’s best informant.

  Small attempts at cooperation were made. In November 1956, the French arrested Khoury in Paris and connected him with Paul Mondoloni. And in January 1959, Khoury, with the approval of the French, enabled Knight to make a case in Paris against Khoury’s partners – Antoine Araman, Antoine Harrouk, and Agop Kevorkian – none of who were French citizens. But the French, as Knight notes, could be “très difficile,” and cooperation was not forthcoming in December 1959, when Khoury presented Knight with a plan to entrap several of his French customers. The idea, Knight told Cusack in Rome, was to create an international conspiracy case, the likes of which had never been seen before. But the French objected and the plan never got past the drawing board – because Knight wanted to include Frenchman Robert Blemant in the trap. Described by Knight as an “ex-French cop and major if unpublicized trafficker,” Blemant was the founder of Les Trois Canards gang and an employee of SDECE.19

  Without French aid, there could be no proof of “the Conspiracy.” There was, according to Knight, only a loose confederation of gangsters, some of whom, like Joe Orsini (who’d settled in Spain and returned to drug smuggling upon his release from the Atlanta Penitentiary in 1958) and François Spirito, had been Nazi collaborators, while the Francisci and Guérini gangs had fought with the Resistance. All had political protectors, and all suspended their vendettas in order to make money through drug smuggling. As Knight explains, “They weren’t emotional over long-term issues. After all was said and done, they were still Corsicans.”

  Complicating the situation was the fact that SDECE was divided into contending factions that, Knight explains, “spent most of their time mounting operations against each other. Each of these factions kept Corsicans in its stable [of non-official agents], and one faction employed drug traffickers who had been of service to de Gaulle during the war. Afterwards they
couldn’t go into legitimate businesses, so they became his SAC (Service d’Action Civique) people.”

  Formed in 1958 by Jacques Foccart, President de Gaulle’s deputy for secret foreign affairs, SAC was a parallel service to SDECE, designed specifically to ensure political stability in France’s colonies. SAC employed Corsican gangsters to fight the Algerian Liberation Movement, and when a band of French Army officers (aligned with US and British interests in North Africa) formed the Organization de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) to maintain French rule in Algeria against de Gaulle’s wishes, Foccart again called upon the Corsicans. Seeking laissez-passer to smuggle all sorts of commodities in return for their mercenary services, Free French and Nazicollaborator Corsicans joined forces and defeated the OAS in Algeria, adding yet another deep political subtext to international drug trafficking.

  THE FBN’S FIRST OFFICE IN FRANCE

  Having returned to the FBN after a stint with Tapline, Joe Salm recalls how difficult it was to make cases in Marseilles. While working undercover in 1960, he arranged to meet with a Corsican chemist at a cafe in the Vieux-Port. Police officers under the direction of French narcotic detective Robert Pasquier were there to cover and film the meet. “We met, shook hands, and arranged to meet again,” Salm says, “but our liaison forgot to put film in the camera.

  “The problem,” Salm explains, “was that [Inspector Robert] Pasquier was in the pay of these people.”

  Political intrigues and police corruption would confound FBN agents in France for the next decade, and in many instances their unintentional insults to French sensibilities only made things worse. According to Salm, “Many agents projected their prejudices onto the situation, misunderstood what was being said, and were summarily dismissed. It was an anti-intellectual pattern established by Siragusa and made worse by Cusack. Whatever success we had against the Corsicans was made possible by the absence of Siragusa and Cusack, and by the arrival in Paris of Andy Tartaglino.”