“Rinaldo,” Selvaggi stresses, “was a death sentence for everyone. Right away, Eboli puts out a contract on all of these guys. Each one’s got a price on his head, but $1 million dollars for anyone who kills Rinaldo. That’s when things get rough. A witness in the case, Shorty Holmes, is found stuffed in a garbage can in August. Then in September, Judge Dimmock reduces bond on Mauro, Caruso, and Maneri, and they flee; which means that Valachi, who’s in jail and can’t go anywhere, becomes the main target of the State prosecutor. So now, more than ever, he wants assistance. He’s hoping to do the Rinaldo time on top of the Freeman time, but I told him that I already had Rinaldo’s number. ‘Cop a plea,’ I said, ‘or come up with something new.’
“Valachi became incensed,” Selvaggi says. “ ‘You double-banged me!’ he yelled. Then he tells me that Mauro, Caruso, and Maneri fled to South America, thinking that might help. But we knew that too. So tough. Then Albert Agueci gets pissed off at Magaddino. Magaddino got two grand for every kilogram Albert brought in, but he wouldn’t bail him out of jail. Albert had to mortgage his house. Well, Albert’s a badass, so he goes to Magaddino and confronts him. A few days later [23 November 1961], they find Albert’s body near the Canadian border. He’d been burned with a blowtorch and chunks of flesh had been carved out of legs. It was gruesome. At which point his brother Vito wants revenge and starts cooperating. So now we have Rinaldo, Palmieri, and Vito Agueci. And that’s when Matteo Palmieri and I go up to Buffalo to make a case on Magaddino.”4
THE ISOLATION OF FRANK SELVAGGI
As mentioned earlier, Charlie Siragusa had chewed out John Dolce for sending Frank Selvaggi alone into Harlem. For that reason, and because he was Siragusa’s in-law, one of the Group Three agents christened Frank with the nickname, “Selagusa.” That didn’t bother him, as it was part of the ribbing that went back and forth in the New York office. What troubled him was that the Group Three clique was starting to interfere in his cases.
“Sal Rinaldo had two other connections,” Selvaggi explains, “a guy named Shears, whom we hadn’t heard about before, and a super-connection named Mickey Blair. You couldn’t go to Blair [real name Dominick Castiglia] for less than five kilos. He’d been in the Army during the war, and when he was arrested in the Borelli case, he said that General Mark Clark would vouch for him.” Selvaggi arches his eyebrows.
“Anyway, Brady found out that Shears was Sal Maneri, the contact-man between the Italians and the French. So we arrested Maneri one night on the street, and during the arrest I treated his wife with respect – which is why Maneri called me when he got out on bail. Like everyone else in the Rinaldo case, he was on Eboli’s hit list and wanted help. So we started meeting in Times Square on Sunday afternoons. Maneri tells me things. He says he’ll give me ‘a house,’ meaning a plant, if I can help him. ‘They’ll make you a general,’ he says.
“Well, Dolce is my group leader, and he knew I was meeting with Maneri. He also knew that Maneri was running a crap game down on the Lower East Side with a Czechoslovakian guy, Jan Simack. The next thing I know, Dolce decides he’s going to hit Maneri’s crap game. Everyone in the group gets an envelope. The way it works, you open the envelope at a prearranged time, and inside is a piece of paper telling you where to meet everyone. But there’s no envelope for me.” Frank pauses reflectively.5
“Later on I heard what happened. They’re outside Maneri’s crap game and they see him handing something to someone on the street. They think it’s a pass, so they hit them right then and there. But it’s cash, not drugs. Maneri hands ten grand to Simack. Not long after that, Maneri flees the country with Mauro and Caruso.”
Selvaggi lights a cigarette. “After that I requested a transfer to the Court House Squad. An agent could avoid trouble by joining the Court House Squad,” he explains. “Same with the International Group. Those groups could subpoena their suspects under the Thirty-Five Hundred Rule. They didn’t need dope on the table, and they didn’t have to testify in court.” And testifying in court was risky business, because slick criminal defense attorneys invariably claimed that the arresting agent had stolen money from, or planted evidence on, the defendant. But even at the Court House Squad, Selvaggi was on the frontlines, eyeball to eyeball with hoods, even if he wasn’t turning them into informants anymore.
“I talked to everyone,” Selvaggi says with pride. “I talked to Genovese. I talked to John Ormento too. I was in the courtroom when he was sentenced. He was fifty-three years old and he got forty years. I was sitting behind him and he turned to me and said, ‘It’s nothing, kid. I can do it standing up.’ ”
As any FBN agent will attest, no one had the Mafia sources Frank Selvaggi had. But what made him strong also made him vulnerable. “I was doing pretty good,” Selvaggi says. “I’d made Valachi, and Rinaldo, and an eleven-kilogram case on Frank Frederico. But then I made the mistake of telling Assistant US Attorney John Rosner that I didn’t believe that Nelson Cantellops ever met Vito Genovese. I said that Genovese was the smartest of all the bosses, that he’d made more judges than anyone could ever know, and that there was no way a little nine-plus syphilitic Puerto Rican like Nelson Cantellops could ever get near him.
“Well, Rosner tells Bill Tendy at the Junk Squad. Tendy is tight with Ward and Dolce, and Tendy tells Dolce that I called Genovese ‘the frame of the century.’ Tendy tells Dolce, and Dolce tells John Enright, who’s my boss at the Court House Squad. And now Enright and Dolce both want me out!”
LUCIANO’S LUCK RUNS OUT
While tensions were mounting among the case-making agents in the New York office, the Italian police were doing their part to find three of the fugitives in the Rinaldo–Palmieri case. They had seen an American couple, Henry and Theresa Rubino, visiting Lucky Luciano in Naples. Something about the Rubinos aroused their suspicions, so they told Hank Manfredi and, at his request, they tailed the couple to the border of Spain. Spanish officials picked up the trail and followed them to a meeting with Vinnie Mauro and Frank Caruso. On 14 January 1962, FBI agents arrested Mauro and Caruso in Barcelona, and Sal Maneri in Majorca.6
The next day, in an attempt to curry favor with the FBI, Mauro called Luciano, and over Lucky’s futile protestations, he explicitly mentioned drugs. The FBI was listening in, of course, and one week later the Italian police summoned Luciano for questioning about his conversation with Mauro. During the interrogation, Hank Manfredi taunted the once powerful boss of bosses. Complaining of heart palpitations, Luciano was released and proceeded under police escort to the Naples airport to meet Martin Gosch, a writer with whom he was co-authoring an exposé. As Gosch stepped off the plane, Luciano reached to shake his hand, and then collapsed on the tarmac and died of a massive heart attack.
Thirty minutes later, Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano “revealed that [the FBN] had been on the point of arresting the powerful Mafioso for having introduced $150 million worth of heroin to American territory over the previous ten years.”7
It’s unbelievable that the FBN had decided to label Luciano as the mastermind of the Rinaldo–Palmieri ring on the basis of a phone call from Vinnie Mauro. And it’s incredibly uncanny that Luciano died half an hour before his arrest. It is an unlikely sequence of events that suggests that this was not death by natural causes. But the FBN would not have killed him. For over a decade he’d been a source on numerous drug traffickers, and during that time Harry Anslinger had shamelessly exploited him for publicity purposes. But Anslinger was on the verge of retirement, and perhaps Giordano felt that the bête noire had outlived his purpose. Or perhaps, as Sal Vizzini claims, the CIA was afraid of what Luciano might say if he was put on trial. The CIA knew that Luciano was concerned about his heart condition, and that American mobsters routinely sent vitamins to him in Naples. According to Vizzini, the CIA simply intercepted a delivery and substituted identical pills laced with an untraceable poison.
That particular conspiracy theory will never be proven, but two things are perfectly clear: despite the myth that Lu
cky Luciano controlled international drug trafficking, the illegal movement of narcotics did not abate with his death; and once Anslinger had handed over the organizational reigns to hapless Henry Giordano, the FBN could no longer defend itself from its arch bureaucratic rival, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director moved in for the kill, and Lucky had the last laugh in hell.
17
AGGRAVATING EDGAR: BOBBY KENNEDY AND THE FBN
“What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene 3
For thirty-two years, Harry Anslinger suffered J. Edgar Hoover’s insults and interference and did nothing in response. Anslinger submissively accepted the fact that Hoover was a more powerful bureaucrat, with ten times as many agents, a vastly bigger budget, a broader mandate, and secret files he’d been compiling since his salad days as a special assistant on subversive matters to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is said that Hoover brought along these files when he became the FBI’s assistant director in 1921, that he continually expanded them after he became FBI director in 1924, and that he used them to compile dossiers full of dirty little secrets on America’s top politicians during a reign of intimidation that lasted forty-six years, and spanned the incumbency of eight presidents.
Knowing he was outgunned, Anslinger refrained from directly challenging Hoover; but a rivalry simmered between them, and for years, Hoover kept Anslinger on the defensive by making snide comments about the corrupting influences of undercover narcotics work. Plus which the publicity-conscious FBI director grabbed all of the glory by having his agents chase celebrity public enemies like John Dillinger, at the expense of mounting arduous investigations of organized crime. Anslinger, however, had Andrew Mellon and several other Establishment heavyweights in his corner, and he could not be dismissed. He wasn’t intimidated by Hoover’s bluster and prominence, and he continued about his business. In public he behaved properly, as if he respected the despicable little man.
Behind the scenes, the personal animosity between the two bureaucratic warlords began in 1932, during the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping case. Anslinger’s mentor and friend, Elmer Irey, chief of the IRS Intelligence Unit, played a decisive role in the investigation by having marked bills passed to Richard Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper. That measure, which was standard operating procedure for FBN agents, led to Hauptmann’s capture and conviction. Lindbergh was grateful, but Hoover was incensed. Fearing that Irey would solve the case, Hoover initially tried to have him removed from it; but Lindbergh objected and prevailed. So Hoover put Irey under FBI surveillance in a brazen attempt to steal his investigative leads. Despite Hoover’s juvenile attempts to preempt him, Irey single-handedly solved the case, and Lindbergh publicly credited him for doing so. But the indignity of having been upstaged prompted Hoover to open one of his secret files on Irey and, for years afterwards, Irey routinely checked his telephone for FBI taps. This episode taught Anslinger a valuable lesson about the petty FBI director’s unforgiving and abusive nature, and the advantages of staying out of his line of fire.1
Hoover’s fad for chasing down “Most Wanted” criminals subsided with the Depression, and Anslinger’s prestige grew during the Second World War. But Hoover’s power grew even greater. While many of Anslinger’s agents joined the Armed Services, and his workforce diminished, President Roosevelt increased the number of FBI agents fivefold, and gave Hoover carte blanche to bug and wiretap anyone in the name of national security. The FBI was also made responsible for intelligence operations in the western hemisphere, and Hoover spread 150 Special Intelligence Service agents throughout Latin America and Canada. The FBI director also entered into an exclusive liaison relationship with William Stephenson, chief of Great Britain’s intelligence operations in the western hemisphere.
Hoover savored his exclusive relationship with Stephenson while it lasted, but then in 1942, President Roosevelt put William Donovan in charge of the OSS. The British welcomed Donovan and his OSS forces, which started fighting behind enemy lines in Europe, and “Wild Bill” cheerfully crashed what J. Edgar thought was going to be a private party with Bill Stephenson. That hurt, socially and professionally. But when Donovan’s OSS agents started mounting counterintelligence operations in the US – in one instance breaking into the Spanish Embassy – Hoover retaliated in every way possible.2 Having formed a fast personal friendship with Donovan, and having sent several of his best men into the OSS, Anslinger again found himself allied with one of Hoover’s most hated rivals.
Still steaming after the war, Hoover opposed Donovan’s efforts to form the Central Intelligence Agency. He repeated a claim he had made about the OSS, and said that the CIA was hiring communists. But the Agency was created over Hoover’s protests, and when President Truman decided that the new spy agency should absorb the FBI’s operations in the western hemisphere, Hoover vindictively ordered his agents not to share their files or sources with the CIA, with whom Anslinger had also aligned.3
The new wave of anti-communist witch-hunts instigated in 1950 by Senator Joe McCarthy restored Hoover’s confidence and sense of purpose, and during the ensuing Cold War his powers peaked: FBI agents were exempted from Civil Service rules and, under the aegis of national security, were allowed to conduct burglaries and all types of illegal surveillance. With eyes and ears in bedrooms all over Washington, Hoover packed his files full of sexy secrets that he traded to beholden politicians for power. Then in 1956, he unveiled his most awesome weapon ever, the notorious Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which allowed FBI agents to commit any crime imaginable in order to suppress civil rights and leftist groups that threatened national security. COINTELPRO enabled him to shape the political climate in America, and his bulging secret files prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to declare that Hoover had “more power than the president.”4
That may have been true, but Anslinger wasn’t afraid, and he eventually forced a showdown with Hoover over the Mafia. As we know, Hoover denied its existence, and his disingenuous position on this issue had a cumulative, negative effect on federal drug law enforcement. So, in his last year as Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger unleashed his frustration and fury. In a 1962 interview, he said that he had refused to give a copy of the Mafia Book to Hoover because he “just wouldn’t risk it.”5
Anslinger insinuated that Hoover had been corrupted by organized crime, and it was true; Hoover’s friend, columnist Walter Winchell, socialized with Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, and served as an intermediary between the famous, influential gangsters and the star-struck FBI director. Hoover and Costello actually met on occasion, and investigative journalist Anthony Summers, citing several sources, reports that Lansky acquired, from Donovan and the OSS, photographs of Hoover engaged in a homosexual act, and that those pictures put him in the mob’s pocket forever.6
Not only was Hoover a closet queen, he was a degenerate gambler too. He liked to bet on the ponies and, in exchange for free passes and hot tips, he repaid his underworld patrons by insisting that racetrack gambling was not a federal crime. He pretended not to know that Lansky and Costello controlled the off-track bookie business, or that it was one of organized crime’s biggest sources of revenue.
Anslinger’s standing with Hoover did not improve during the Kefauver Hearings, which, with the FBN’s expert assistance, forced Costello into early retirement and Lansky into exile. But Hoover quickly found a new patron in Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison, and starting in 1953, Hoover and his housemate, FBI executive Clyde Tolson, became Murchison’s annual guests at the Del Mar Racetrack in California. The oilman’s ties to organized crime were not as close as Costello’s, but they were there. According to Summers,
“20 percent of the Murchison oil lease company was owned by the Vito Genovese crime family. Handridge Oil, a Murchison owned outfit, was the subject of a deal with Las Vegas gamblers involving massive security violations. There were also to be deals with Jim
my Hoffa, the crooked boss of the Teamsters Union, and Clint, Jr., established financial ties with Mafia boss [Carlos] Marcello.”7
Hoover’s defenders say he had bigger fish to fry, and that he let Anslinger and the IRS chase the gangsters, while his G-men pursued communists, civil rights leaders, and other menaces to national security. But the man had a secret agenda, and, as the Establishment’s private police force, the FBI served its patrons by allowing organized crime to subvert the labor and civil rights movements from within. If the hoods moved drugs in their spare time, who cared (like the Mafia bosses said), as long as the poison ended up in ghettos, and not in good neighborhoods?
Anslinger and Hoover obviously agreed on the racial issue, but the FBI director’s protection of organized crime undermined Anslinger’s mission and his legacy. So he waited and in a veiled attack on Hoover, he said in 1964, “Sometimes our strongest foes can be found in the chambers of justice, the state houses and even higher.”8
ENTER BOBBY KENNEDY
Anslinger waited until he was on the verge of retirement to attack his old foe, but he never would have had the opportunity if not for the November 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president, and his appointment of his brother Bobby as Attorney General. Ambitious, ruthless, and cunning, Bobby wasn’t content to behave in the traditional role as the president’s consigliere, and he used his authority as Attorney General to sidestep Hoover. Declaring war against organized crime, he increased the number of attorneys in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division from fifteen to sixty and directed them against the nation’s leading racketeers. Bobby had a mean streak, too; in order to make his presence felt, he openly inquired how a behemoth like organized crime could escape the attention of the FBI’s director. He further bruised Hoover’s gigantic ego by praising the FBN for putting more Mafia bosses behind bars than the FBI, and, according to George Gaffney, by dubbing it “the Marine Corps of federal law enforcement.”
The Strength of the Wolf Page 34