Thirty years later George Gaffney seethes when told of the incident. “How come Tripodi didn’t report it then?” he demands. “If everybody keeps quiet, how can I do anything?”
BREAKING THE CODE OF SILENCE
Enter Edward Coyne, the agent who did bring the integrity issue to Gaffney’s attention. Described as “straight” by his colleagues, Coyne joined the FBN in 1951 as a clerk and became an agent in 1953. For six years he worked on cases without making waves, but he began to have misgivings after the O’Keefe incident. Like Tripodi, he began to see signs of institutionalized corruption.
“One of the clerks told me that a group of agents were ripping off apartments and selling confiscated drugs and guns,” he recalls, “so I went to Gaffney. I explained that I knew nothing first hand, but that I felt he should be aware.”
Coyne told Gaffney that the corrupt agents would raid an apartment where they knew there were drugs and cash. The agents would keep the money and sell, plant, or give the drugs to their informants, who could then entrap other drug dealers. After the targeted drug dealer was arrested, the agents would cut the recycled junk with sugar and return half to the informant, so he could set up more arrests. The agents turned in some of the money and what was left of the diluted heroin, which was tested for purity only after it was submitted.
“Gaffney called the group leaders while I was in his office,” Coyne recalls angrily, “and told them to stand by. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Eddie, you’re a good friend, and no one will ever hurt you while I’m here.’ ”
A few days later an agent approached Coyne and said he was fed up with the corruption too. “I told him to tell it to the people up front, but he never did. No one backed me up. Not even the honest guys.” Coyne’s body tenses. “I went in with sincere belief it was the right thing to do.”
Meanwhile the group leaders had alerted the accused agents, and Coyne found himself being threatened. “One agent made a remark on the elevator,” he recalls, “so I asked him if he thought the office should be corrupt. By his response, I knew that was a serious mistake.”
A week later Gaffney summoned Coyne to his office and asked him if he’d been parked in a car behind the Court House with a female secretary. Coyne denied the allegation, and Gaffney said he didn’t believe it either – but that once an allegation was made (he imparted with a wink) he had to check it out.
“Maybe he was sending a message?” Coyne muses. He conjures the image of O’Keefe passed-out in his car with a bag of heroin in the glove compartment. Then he tells how, on the morning of 31 August 1960, Agent Charles Thompson’s wife found her husband in the living room, sitting in his favorite easy chair, dead from a heroin overdose.
“The rumor was that he’d been given a hot shot,” Coyne explains, “and there was a big meeting with Treasury people from Washington. But they swept it under the carpet. And that’s when I started thinking, ‘I’d better get out of here. They’re going to set me up for sure. Maybe not a hot shot, but someone’s going to put something in my car, at least.’ ”
In late 1960, Eddie Coyne asked for and received a transfer to the customs service office in New York. “By 1961,” he says, “the guys who are under suspicion are making big cases, and the guys who didn’t back me up all get promoted. There were never any confrontations, but you have to ask the question: Can you have widespread corruption without management being part of it?”
George Gaffney has a different recollection of events. “Eddie was conscientious,” he admits. “He came in and he told me. But he didn’t come to me right away. He called Washington first. I know because Charlie McDonnell came to me, and said that Eddie had tried to recruit five agents to go to Washington with him. But no one else would go. Then he came to me, and at that point I called Anslinger and told him what was going on.
“Anslinger sent up District Supervisor Sam Levine from Philadelphia. Sam was in my office when Eddie made his allegations, and Sam asked him to come up with one single fact. But it was all rumors, and a week or two later Eddie came in and expressed regret. He said a Bureau guy had called him at home and told him to meet him in a motel room in New Jersey. The Bureau guy swore Eddie to secrecy, and got him to make a commitment that if he came across any wrongdoing, Eddie would contact him in DC. Not Anslinger. Not me. Just him.”
Gaffney composes himself. “A few months later, this same Bureau official came up to the New York office with Fred Dick to conduct an inquiry.”
The Bureau official was Wayland L. “Lee” Speer, a stocky man with thinning blond hair and a burning, all-consuming desire to put an end to corruption within the FBN.
THE SHOOFLY IN THE OINTMENT
According to Howard Chappell, “Lee Speer was probably the finest investigator in the history of the Bureau. For much of his career he was a traveling supervisor, checking the offices for misuse of funds and equipment, and for efficiency. He was death on any signs of lack of integrity, but he was compassionate and helpful in correcting honest mistakes, and in training agents to improve their operations. He was highly moral himself, and perhaps for that reason he scared the hell out of most of the people in the Bureau, including the other executives. But the truth of the matter was that Lee Speer was an asset to any office he visited – if you wanted help, and if you weren’t doing anything wrong from a legal standpoint.”
Speer’s detractors insist that he put his ambitions above the organization’s well-being at a time when Anslinger’s wife was dying, and he was preoccupied with weighty matters before the UN and Congress. Speer wanted to be Commissioner, they say, and his probe was a pretext to smear Anslinger, while upstaging Siragusa and Giordano.
Andy Tartaglino, a Speer supporter, claims that Anslinger had sent Speer to New York specifically to investigate a group of Black agents backing Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, but that Speer, on his own, expanded the investigation to include agents loyal to Gaffney and former District Supervisor Jim Ryan. Speer had heard rumors for years, and not just about gambling in the office. Among other things, it was said that the district supervisor would dress up in a judge’s robes and hold mock court sessions, in which unwitting addicts were coerced into becoming informants.
So after Coyne’s complaints of theft, and worse crimes committed by certain agents, Speer began a systematic check of vouchers and informant contact reports, and in June 1961, after a year of preparation, he traveled to New York to investigate the agents he believed were corrupt. But Speer did not have the authority to conduct the investigation on his own, and Deputy Commissioner Giordano sent his loyal ally, Fred T. Dick, then serving as the FBN’s field supervisor, to accompany Speer.
One of the FBN’s most infamous agents, Dick joined the FBN in 1951 following a stint with the New York State Police. Meticulous, tough, and street-smart – although characterized as sarcastic and arrogant by one of the agents he rubbed the wrong way – he worked in New York for three years before transferring, “for health reasons,” to Kansas City, where he formed close relations with District Supervisor Henry Giordano. After Giordano became the FBN’s field supervisor in 1956, Dick returned to New York, where he remained until 1959, when Giordano, having become Deputy Commissioner, brought him to headquarters as his dependable field supervisor. This was a very good decision on Giordano’s part, because Fred Dick, it is safe to say, knew where all the bodies were buried.
“Giordano said that Speer had identified receipted payments to informants which had not been made,” Dick says, “so Speer and I went up to New York, and he called the agents over to his hotel room at all hours of the night. He grilled them without informing them of their rights, while I’m there cringing in the corner. It took six weeks, during which time the case turned to pumpkin pie.”
Several agents complained to their Congressman that they were being harassed. One said that Speer had indecently exposed himself (it was late at night, he was changing his clothes, and was wearing only his boxer underpants during part of the interview), and anoth
er said that he made racist remarks. But worst of all, Speer waited until Gaffney was on leave, then rifled through the district supervisor’s desk.
“Anslinger called me down to Washington,” Gaffney recalls, “and when I stepped into his office he pulled some glassine bags out of his desk. ‘I understand the agents use these to steal heroin from seizures,’ he said.”
Gaffney speaks very calmly and carefully. “I told him that all the agents had glassine bags, because Speer had complained that our chemists were reporting different weights, other than what was recorded as having been submitted. What Anslinger didn’t know was that the chemists were shaking the heroin out of the bags onto their scales, while we were weighing it in the bags. The difference was in the weight of the bags, so we kept the bags to compensate. In other cases the heroin was transferred to containers so we could raise fingerprints from the bags it had come in. So there were good reasons for this, and Anslinger was satisfied with my explanation.”
As Fred Dick explains: “Speer and I returned to headquarters, where the stink of this mess was hanging in the air, and Henry called me into his office and asked what had happened. I told him, and he sent me to explain the situation to Gilmore Flues, the assistant secretary over law enforcement at Treasury. And Flues came down hard on Speer.”
“Speer chose to walk away from the number three job after this,” Gaffney says. “He became the district supervisor in Denver, and Siragusa became the enforcement assistant.”
In his final report, Fred Dick said that nine agents had improperly given money to informants, and he recommended they be demoted or suspended. They were not. He said that Group Three, then under John Dolce, led the office “in the exaggerated reporting of seizures,” and he criticized Gaffney for not insisting that regulations be followed.5 Anslinger then assigned Chicago’s enforcement assistant, William J. Durkin (one of Anslinger’s favorite agents, and John Dolce’s former partner in New York) to conduct an independent analysis of the Speer inquiry. Durkin wrote a “bland” report in December 1961, exonerating the case-makers for their “zeal” and recommending that the investigation be concluded in order to remove the “aura of suspicion” that was hanging over their heads. And that was the end of that corruption scandal.6
FALLOUT FROM SPEER’S FAILED INVESTIGATION
After Gaffney promoted some of the agents that Lee Speer had investigated, several New York agents resigned in despair. One was Robert J. Furey. A former state trooper, Furey had investigated Black Muslims, Cuban gunrunners, and political subversives, and he was no ingénu when he entered the FBN in 1959. “I went into the Third Group under John Dolce,” he recalls, “and in less than a year it was clear that what was going on in New York was beyond the comprehension of the bosses in Washington.” Seeking sanctuary, Furey requested a transfer to the Court House Squad. Like many of his colleagues, he viewed the Court House Squad and the International Group as the only honest ways of conducting federal drug law enforcement. “Marty Pera and Andy Tartaglino had more smarts and integrity than all other bosses in the FBN put together,” he asserts. “They were looking at various elements of the French connection that didn’t fit together, and they were making progress; but at the same time, things were getting worse.”
For Furey, the last straw was the murder of informant Shorty Holmes on 8 August 1961. Holmes was a key witness in an important case on several major Mafiosi. He was found mutilated and stuffed in a garbage can. “The world was collapsing around my head,” Furey recalls, “so I and a few other agents transferred out. People went to the State Department, or to ATF, or to Customs. Everyone was afraid of seeing or hearing the wrong thing.”
Tony Mangiaracina sums the situation up: “Everything in the FBN was rush rush rush. But you can’t buy a dealer a beer then ask him for a kilogram of heroin.” He blames Anslinger for a nickel-and-dime management system that forced agents to bend the rules. “Once I wanted to get close to a woman in Beirut. She expects me to buy her champagne. I got eleven dollars per diem! Another time I buy cocaine in Milan, but the FBN didn’t have a lab to test it in, so I had to take it to a drugstore!”
“Why were there only two inspectors while Anslinger was Commissioner?” another agent asks rhetorically. “Because he didn’t want to find anything wrong. He wanted Congress to believe we could handle the problem with 300 agents. But that only made it harder for agents to cooperate with one another. There was nowhere to go, and we ended up eating our own!”
Marty Pera blamed the corruption problem on the intrinsically profane nature of undercover work. “If you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy,” he said. But it was more than that, it was Anslinger’s reactionary policies. In a March 1962 article for Harper’s Magazine, Benjamin DeMott said that Anslinger’s “cop mentality” was responsible for the FBN’s “carelessness about the Constitutional rights of its opposition.” DeMott astutely observed that, “The handmaid of the cop mentality in the Narcotics Bureau is a whole complex of attitudes associated with Bible-Beltism.”7
In 1961, Bill Davis went directly to Anslinger to protest against the cop mentality, and argue for a more humane approach toward addicts. “Mr. Commissioner,” Davis said, “I’d like to talk to you about the high rate of recidivism.”
“Mr. Davis,” Anslinger replied, “we’re law enforcers, not social workers.”
Thoroughly disenchanted, Davis resigned and took a job with the US Information Service.
Agent Tony Johnson also resigned in 1961, for reasons associated with that complex of attitudes known euphemistically as Bible-Beltism. “I’d made thirty cases in six weeks in Gary, Indiana,” Johnson says, “and I requested a transfer to Indianapolis. Instead I was sent to Houston, where Jack Kelly was the agent in charge. Kelly was cooperating with Mexican officials, and I was going to be sent into Mexico with an informant. As part of the deal I was told to go to Dallas to get a truck. I left Houston and along the way I stopped at a place to get a cup of coffee. The people behind the counter tell me to, ‘Get your head out of that door, nigger.’
“Well, I didn’t, and the next thing I know, here come the cops. They didn’t believe my credentials and they held me in jail for two hours. When I finally got to Dallas, the agents there weren’t expecting me. They hadn’t been told I was coming. But the stool, a White guy, had been told a week ahead of time! That was the last straw, so I decided to quit. I went to the New Jersey Crime Commission.”
THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
Harry Anslinger spent much of 1961 pouring the little energy he had left into modifying a plan that was designed to combine all prior UN narcotics agreements under one charter. Known as the Single Convention, one of its provisions allowed several African nations to raise revenue by growing opium for export. Anslinger opposed this aspect of the treaty, but he signed it anyway, at the request of newly elected president John F. Kennedy. In recognition of that gesture, President Kennedy reappointed Anslinger Commissioner of Narcotics. It was a politically smart move by a president whose ambitious brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was planning an assault on organized crime that depended largely on the FBN.
When his wife died in September 1961, Anslinger was physically strong for a seventy-year-old man, and still politically sharp. Nearing mandatory retirement in May 1962, and grieving for his wife, he described himself in March to Benjamin DeMott as “burned out” and spending no more than “an hour a month at his desk.”8 Hopelessly stuck in a bygone era, he coasted through his last months with the FBN. But he had an ulterior motive. If he had wanted to, he could have brought order to FBN headquarters, which was still reeling from Speer’s fated integrity investigation. Instead, so as not to sully his reputation, he kept his distance and cynically allowed his subordinates to fight amongst themselves. And he ended his career in Geneva in characteristic fashion, by blasting Red China one last time at the UN’s seventeenth Narcotics Convention. Having fired his last volley, Anslinger reluctantly
passed his mantle to Henry Giordano and then retired to Hollidaysburg.
Unfortunately for the FBN, Henry Giordano was less intent on bringing a new, ethical sense of purpose to the FBN than he was in making appointments that reinforced his position. One beneficiary was Walter Panich, a savvy agent who had joined the FBN in Detroit as a clerk in 1942. George White, while serving as Detroit’s district supervisor in 1947, had introduced Panich to Giordano (then a member of White’s inner circle), and they had been friends ever since. On the recommendation of Baltimore District Supervisor Irwin Greenfeld, who had done a review of headquarters procedures, Deputy Commissioner Giordano brought Panich to Washington in late 1961 as his assistant on administrative matters.
“Headquarters had a lot of administrative problems,” Panich explains. “There was a general accounting office staffed by one accountant, and the personnel office consisted of four female clerks. It was a complete disaster, so Henry asked me to straighten things out. He was more progressive than Anslinger. He got more money from Congress, hired a personnel manager, and got promotions for the staff, which slowly started to grow.”
But Giordano did not tackle the issue of corruption by expanding the inspections staff as well as the accounting and personnel staffs. He also made the mistake of adopting Anslinger’s cop mentality, despite the overwhelming evidence that methadone was beneficial in treating drug addicts. Worst of all, from an organizational point of view, he advanced Anslinger’s essentially suicidal policy of accommodating the CIA.
15
THE MAGIC BUTTON
“And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved.”
The Strength of the Wolf Page 30