The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  “So off we go. We drive across the Brooklyn Bridge and, just like magic, Fuca zips by. Now Artie’s a great driver – he’s running lights, driving on the sidewalk, doesn’t get a scratch. I’m on the radio to Frankie; I tell him what’s happening, and he says, ‘Follow them, but don’t bust them!’ Then he starts worrying and changes his mind. ‘Bust them at the next light!’ he says.”

  Benjamin’s expression turns serious. “Patsy had a reputation for fighting cops, and he’d killed someone, which is why guys like Frankie Waters carried a blackjack. That’s why you want a guy like Waters to bust a guy like Patsy Fuca. Plus which it was Frankie’s case, and he had every right to bust him. But I’m the one who actually did it. And by the time we stopped them at the light, I wanted to do it.

  “Fuca’s driving. His pretty young wife’s in a negligee. They’re running, but they’re stopped at a light in downtown Brooklyn, and Artie drives right in front of them. There’s no place they can go. I’m on the passenger side, my adrenalin pumping. I’d made a promise to myself that if Fuca went for his gun, I wouldn’t stop to think about it, I’d just shoot him. So I jumped out of the car, stuck my gun in his ear and said, ‘Keep your hands on the wheel or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.’ ” Benjamin’s voice is trembling.

  “Fuca could tell I wasn’t kidding. He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, kid. Don’t worry.’ But I was glad when Artie got around to the other side where Patsy’s wife was sitting. We got them out of the car just as Waters arrived.

  “You know,” Benjamin says, “that was the first time I’d ever cocked my gun. But those other guys, Waters and Fluhr, they liked doing that stuff. They’d do anything to make a case.

  “So we take Fuca to the precinct. We’re at the booking desk when the reporters show up and the flashbulbs start popping. Egan’s there with a warrant, and we go to Papa Joe Fuca’s house to find the junk. We start in the basement, and that’s when Artie sees stains on the floor. We look up and see a hole in the ceiling. Artie pulls a chair over, sticks his hand in the hole, and pulls out a half-kilogram bag of heroin. I’m about ten feet away and I do the same thing. Then Egan comes down, and everyone starts pulling out dope. But Artie and I found it, and Moore didn’t get that right either!

  “Then Gaffney shows up. He’s pissed off, as usual. He thinks we’re screwing with the junk because the account we’re giving keeps changing as we find more and more packages, all of which goes south anyway. Six months before the French Connection dope was supposed to be destroyed, the NYPD Property Clerk saw beetles coming out of the bags. The heroin had been replaced with flour somewhere along the line. So as it turns out, I was lucky not to get credit for the bust, because I never got blamed for the missing dope, either.

  “There’re lots of things you don’t hear about that French Connection case,” Benjamin adds. “You don’t hear about the short sentences, or that Jehan got away with the money, or that Mouren was never identified, or that the heroin we found at Papa Joe’s and Tony’s house may not have come off the ship. All we found in the Buick was traces. Maybe.”

  Here it’s important to reiterate that some FBN agents believe the Buick that Angelvin was driving was a decoy, and that the heroin at Joe’s basement came from a previous shipment.5

  Adding to the intrigue, Moore claims in Mafia Wife that somebody “got to” Angie and told him that if he paid $50,000, “he would know in advance when the arrest was to be made” and could protect himself.6 This somebody, of course, could only have been a detective or a government agent.

  There is another allegation of official complicity in the famous French Connection case. According to Frankie Waters, when he and Grosso searched Apartment 15C at 45 East End Avenue, they found a photo – taken six days before at La Cloche d’Or restaurant on Third Avenue – of the apartment’s occupant with Jean Jehan. But the photo was lost and the occupant, having relocated to Mexico, was never pursued.

  “That case taught me a lot,” Benjamin says solemnly. “It taught me that as a young agent you don’t claim credit. You don’t testify either, and you avoid writing reports. Artie Fluhr spent seven days on the stand trying to explain to the judge why Egan wasn’t lying. And Waters had a hard time explaining why running a red light gave him probable cause to search the Buick.”

  THE CIA’S FRENCH CONNECTION

  Acclaimed as a smashing success, the French Connection case, with its missing money and vanishing Frenchmen, in fact reflected the FBN’s increasing incapacity to deal with the espionage aspects of international drug trafficking. The trend started on 22 March 1961, when New York Customs agents arrested thirty-five-year-old Air France stewardess Simone Christmann for concealing four and a half pounds of heroin in her ample brassiere. Christmann said she thought the powder was perfume base, and that a “Mr. Mueller” in Paris had given it to her. In June 1961, she was sentenced to four years in prison, but was soon released on bond.7

  According to an FBN agent on the case, Christmann was released because she was a spy for the Organization de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a cabal of French Army officers violently opposed to French president Charles de Gaulle’s decision to grant Algeria independence. Because the Soviets were courting the Algerians, the US and Israeli intelligence services secretly supported the OAS. It’s a fact that CIA officers Richard Bissell and Richard Helms met in December 1960 with OAS political chief Jacques Soustelle to assure him of their support for a putsch.8 And it’s alleged that CIA officer John Philipsborn met with OAS leader General Raoul Salan in Paris just before the OAS mutiny (a month after Christmann’s arrest) in Algeria in April 1961.9

  The FBN agent cited above claims that Christmann, being a good soldier, took “a small fall to protect her bosses,” in the CIA-supported faction within the OAS, so the mutiny could go forward. By not doing anything, the FBN was complicit. Paul Knight, the FBN agent in charge in Paris, then secretly working for the CIA, did not investigate Mueller because, he said, “It was a Customs case.” And technically it was. But the Customs agent in Paris at the time, Jacques L. Changeux (a former FBN agent), was also secretly working for the CIA, and he didn’t investigate the case either.

  Shortly thereafter, Knight quit the FBN and returned to America in February 1962, for training and official enrollment in the CIA, and was replaced in Paris by Agent Victor G. Maria. According to Maria, his job was limited to investigating American citizens involved in drug trafficking, and he was specifically told not to investigate French citizens. So he didn’t pursue Mueller either.

  And yet, despite the best efforts of the CIA, Mueller’s identity was revealed in April 1962, when Etienne Tarditi named Irving Brown in connection with L’affaire Rosal. Through a routine background check, FBN agents learned that Brown, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ representative to the UN, often traveled from New York to Paris, where he frequented a restaurant owned by Georges Bayon. A SDECE agent who recruited diplomats as drug couriers, Bayon used the alias Mueller. Further investigation showed that labor leader Irving Brown was a CIA agent, that he had port privileges in New York (meaning his baggage was never checked by Customs), and that his wife Lilly (perhaps Lilli DeBecque from the French Connection case) was a secretary for Carmel Offie, a former CIA agent then managing an import-export business in Manhattan.10

  Excited by this information, Andy Tartaglino launched a Court House Squad investigation of Brown in June 1962 – but was quickly told to drop it. “Joe Amato told me that someone else was handling it,” Tartaglino explains, with a glint in his eye.

  That unnamed party was the CIA, of course, which begs the question: Who were Irving Brown and Carmel Offie, and how were they involved with CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton in the French Connection?

  LABOR’S LOVE LOST

  Irving Brown was a protégé of Jay Lovestone, leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s. But after he quarreled with Joseph Stalin, Lovestone was expelled from the Party and by 1936 had joined the United Auto Workers Un
ion. He soon abandoned Marxism altogether and, with Brown, began rooting communists out of the American labor movement. In 1945, with the support of the AFL, Lovestone became executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee and sent Brown to Europe to help the CIA subvert communist trade unions.

  James Angleton became Lovestone’s CIA case officer in 1947 and, according to his biographer, Tom Mangold, after Angleton became chief of counterintelligence in 1955, he contacted Lovestone through Stephen Millet, “the counterintelligence officer who headed the Israeli Desk at Langley. Lovestone’s payments and logistics were handled in New York by Mario Brod, Angleton’s lawyer friend.”11

  What Mangold is saying is profoundly important, and requires further explanation. First, Angleton contacted Irving Brown’s boss, Jay Lovestone, through his liaison to Israeli Intelligence. This is a fact that lends credence to Jim Attie’s allegation that the Mossad was involved in international drug smuggling – most likely in support of Angleton and Brown. Next, Angleton paid Lovestone, and thus Brown, through labor lawyer Mario Brod, his liaison to the Mafia. This arrangement put Brod in position to broker drug deals, on Angleton’s behalf, between the Mafia, the Mossad, and Brown’s soon-to-be-revealed French connection. This explains why Joe Amato told Andy Tartaglino that someone else was handling the Brown investigation of 1962. But could that someone else have been Charlie Siragusa? If the reader will recall, Siragusa knew Angleton and had worked with Brod in Italy during the war; and according to Colonel Tulius Acampora, Angleton was so dependent on Siragusa for his Mafia contacts that he “kissed Siragusa’s ass in Macy’s window at noon.” All of this, even without Siragusa’s personal involvement, puts Angleton, Israeli intelligence, Brown, his Corsican contacts, the FBN, and the Mafia at the heart of the CIA’s emerging drug-trafficking conspiracy.

  Irving Brown has an interesting background. In return for his double agent work in the 1930s, he was named the AFL’s representative to the War Production Board, where he befriended Tracy Barnes. (Barnes in 1962 was chief of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division. In that capacity, he managed Cuban exile and Mafia operations, as well as proprietary companies in America, and the dissemination of disinformation through American academia, publishing houses, and mainstream press outlets.)12 After the war, Brown worked for the AFL in Europe and in 1949, with CIA money, he established a compatible left, anti-communist union in Marseilles. When the communists called for strikes in Marseilles, Brown enlisted Corsican gangster Pierre Ferri-Pisani, and Pisani in turn recruited Corsican and Sicilian thugs to toss the strikers into the Mediterranean Sea.13

  In 1952, either Pisani or, more likely, French-spy-turned-gangster Robert Blemant, introduced Brown to drug lords Antoine Guérini and Jo Cesari in Bordeaux, after which Brown met with unidentified Mafiosi in Italy, the scene of his next CIA machinations.14 According to his secretary, Naomi Spatz, Brown also met Maurice Castellani in Marseilles at this time. Strikingly handsome, and known either as “Le Petit Maurice” or “Tête Cassée” (meaning “Broken Head” – a reference to his talent as an extortionist), Castellani was one of the most enigmatic and successful drug traffickers of his time. As a very young boy, he had served bravely with the Resistance in Marseilles, and was well respected within the Corsican underworld. More importantly, Castellani was one of Robert Blemant’s lieutenants in Les Trois Canards gang in Paris, along with François Scaglia of French Connection case fame. Notably, the three ducks often met for fish soup and snails at Georges Bayon’s restaurant – Bayon being the aforementioned Mr. Mueller who supplied OAS Agent Simone Christmann with heroin.

  During the mid-1950s, Brown came under the tutelage of the aforementioned Carmel Offie, a former Foreign Service officer who had served in Honduras in the mid-1930s during the TACA affair and, following that, as an aide to Ambassador William Bullitt in Russia. (Bullitt, as we know from chapter 5, was one of several diplomats linked to smuggling in the post-war era, and played an instrumental role in establishing the Pawley-Cooke Mission in Taiwan in 1950.) After the war, Offie became a CIA contract agent. He formed refugee groups in Germany and ran agents posing as black marketeers behind the Iron Curtain. He also smuggled Nazis to South America, with James Angleton, as part of Operation Bloodstone.15

  As a political advisor to the AFL’s Information Service and the CIA’s bagman to the Free Trade Union Committee, Offie guided Brown in Europe until 1954, when, amid rumors of pouch abuse, gunrunning, and White slavery, he returned to the United States and became a consultant to a Washington law firm whose senior partners included Alben Barkley’s son-in-law. (Barkley, of course, was close to George Cunningham, the FBN’s deputy director from 1949 until 1958.) Offie’s New York-based import-export company did business in France, Germany, South Vietnam, and Italy. In 1957, he acquired part-ownership of a mining company in North Africa, at the same time Brown was in Tunis recruiting Algerian student leaders, through the National Student Association, and sending them into France to infiltrate communist-controlled front groups.16

  The French intelligence services uncovered Brown’s espionage activities and in 1960, having been declared persona non grata in Europe and North Africa, he returned to New York and set up shop near the UN. His wife Lilly took a secretarial job at Carmel Offie’s import-export firm. As head of the AFL’s American African Labor Institute, Brown worked with numerous African leaders in various CIA intrigues, including, evidently, the smuggling of narcotics on behalf of the OAS and Israel.

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION’S CIA FACET

  On 1 June 1962, Harry Anslinger was quoted in the New York Times as saying that heroin was being moved from the PRC on horse caravans to Burma, and from there through Cuba to the US. But he knew that wasn’t true. In his July 1959 report, “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East,” Garland Williams had identified the Kuomintang as the region’s primary narcotics producer and Bangkok as “the most important single source of illicit opium in the world today. It is also the locale for the least amount of corrective effort by responsible American agencies,” he said, placing the blame squarely on the CIA. Thai Army personnel moved massive amounts of drugs to the seaport and, Williams said, “many Thai officials, some of great prominence in both civil and military echelons of the government, are involved in the drug traffic, but are forbidden to carry on similar activities in the area of enforcement.” But, Williams reported, the CIA and State Department “never mentioned the subject to the police chief or any other Thai official. Avoidance is policy,” he said, even though the director of the US Mission “knew all about it in detail, names, methods of movement, where it goes.” The US counsel in Chiang Mai (an undercover CIA officer) had “uncalled for sympathy with opium producers in his district.”17

  Not only were Thai, CIA, and Kuomintang officials involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle; according to Williams there was also, in Bangkok, “an old, experienced, well-equipped, and financially strong” French organization that supplied “the group which supplies the persistent major violators of French nationality who operate in New York City.” Alas, Williams did not name the members of this group in his report, but he did say “a trained narcotic investigator could soon develop the facts for use by those who he would find to take action.”

  What Williams knew, and told Anslinger in 1959, was becoming public knowledge by 1962, and that year author Andrew Tully provided further insights into the central role of the CIA and Kuomintang in international drug trafficking. In his book, CIA: The Inside Story, Tully told of a CIA officer arriving in Burma from Taiwan. He saw no soldiers, only a vast plantation. “You see,” said the Kuomintang colonel in charge, “it takes money to run an operation like this and so … we’re growing opium.” As Tully noted, the treacherous Kuomintang “supplemented” their drug-smuggling income “by selling their arms to the Chinese Communists.”18

  “In 1962, we thought the source was Turkey,” Tom Tripodi explains. “But the French were taking drugs out of Southeast Asia. French Intelligence was ru
nning the show. Thirty to forty people were involved, including [Ambassador Mauricio] Rosal. Rosal was being blackmailed by Tarditi, and Tarditi was part of the Brown–Lovestone–Angleton net.”

  Brown’s friend, Maurice “Le Petit” Castellani, was the likely operations manager of this CIA facet of the French connection, the group Williams referred to in 1959 – the year Castellani was connected with the seizure of seven kilos of cocaine in Milan. Castellani would also be linked to SDECE front groups, and may have been the mysterious J. Mouren of the January 1962 French Connection case.19 He was a close friend of fellow Canard, François Scaglia, and, according to Frankie Waters, “Patsy Fuca talked about ‘Le Petit Maurice’ with great deference.”

  Waters also stumbled on the Far East and Israeli connections when he discovered that Patsy was connected to Toots Schoenfeld and that Toots was connected to Angie’s father-in-law, an important Jewish gangster named Stein. Stein was linked to the Frenchman at Apartment 15C, who in turn was bankrolling Jehan’s operation. “We’d found the same address in the possession of a smuggler tied to Marcel Francisci,” Waters says, “so Grosso and I got a search warrant and went to the apartment. It was a beautiful place, but it was owned by an executive of the Michelin Tire Company, so we had to back out.”

  Waters shrugs. “Think about it. Mouren was never identified; Scaglia was trained by the OSS; and Special Forces people were involved in the French Connection case.”20

  Think about this, too: Patsy and J. Mouren allegedly removed about fifty kilograms of heroin from the Buick, though some FBN agents claim the car was a decoy and that someone from the FBN flaked traces of heroin in it. According to Tripodi, the eleven kilograms found at Joe Fuca’s house may not have come from the same shipment as the thirty-three kilograms found at Tony’s. The car supposedly contained fifty kilograms of heroin, so, Tripodi says, “we started to think that as much as seventeen kilograms had never made it to the evidence room.”21