The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  An agent since 1948, Belk was a proven manager. He’d purified Chicago in the wake of Chappell’s corruption investigation in 1956, and was well aware of the dangers of his New York assignment, which included replacing group leaders and agents suspected of being corrupt. Aware that Giordano was incapable of helping him, and that Gaffney would resist, Belk took the job on the condition that he could bring along a cadre of trusted agents from Chicago, including George R. Halpin to head Group Five, Theodore “Ted” Heisig to head Group Two, and Clarence Cook as his liaison to the Black agents.

  Right away there was trouble. “We’re all having drinks one night,” Frank Selvaggi says, “and Halpin wants to show everyone how tough he is. So he calls me ‘Selagusa.’ People used to call me that, because they all thought Charlie was doing for me. But Charlie never did anything for me, even though he could have. Anyway, I say something back to Halpin, and as I’m leaving the bar he comes charging out and jumps on my back. I spin around, carry him over to the curb, and dump him in a trashcan. Some tough guy. He pulls the same sort of stunt with Frankie Black [Frankie Waters’s nickname] later on. Frankie was getting a little out of control around then, and he put a round between his legs.” A smile spreads across Selvaggi’s face. “I watched the bullet skip off down the street, while Halpin just stood there with his mouth hanging open.”

  George Belk arrived in New York in April 1963, knowing that he was stepping into a hornets’ nest. But he didn’t expect to find that, at George Gaffney’s insistence, John Dolce was his enforcement assistant. The rationalization was that Dolce would provide continuity while Belk settled in. But in reality, Gaffney put Dolce in place so he could influence the direction of major investigations. Complicating the situation was the fact that Dolce, as a former leader of Group Three, was at the top of Belk’s hit list of agents he wanted to fire.

  “Belk knew that the troops needed somebody other than John Dolce to go to,” an agent recalls, “and after conferring with Artie Fluhr, he created an executive assistant job specifically for Art. New York was the first office to have that position. As Belk’s executive assistant, Artie started hiring replacement agents. He also helped Belk make case assignments, and he got a salary upgrade for everyone.”

  One cynical New York agent says, “Belk makes Fluhr his executive assistant, and La Fluhr does for Belk what Mendelsohn did for Gaffney: he carries stories. He tells Belk what the agents are doing: anything that can be used against them, like who their girlfriends are. And from then on it’s Belk and Fluhr drinking on the arm at [drug trafficker-cum-informer] Gerry Nagelberg’s place on 56th Street, while Harry Masi [the office clerk] did all of Fluhr’s work.”

  Although, as the previous paragraph illustrates, some agents resented his promotion and friendship with Belk, Arthur J. Fluhr was a dedicated and effective agent. He’d quit his accounting job with General Motors in 1954, while married with kids, to take an entry-level position with the FBN. A veteran of the Marine Corps and a graduate of Iona College, he was never part of the Gaffney–Ward–Dolce clique, but he could swim with sharks and could hold his Jack Daniels – in other words, Fluhr was precisely the type of executive assistant Belk needed to circumvent Gaffney and Dolce, in an attempt to reform an office that was spinning out of control, in part as a result of the Gambling Squad.

  The Gambling Squad scandals of 1963 occupy a prominent place in the annals of FBN folklore. Even a CIA debriefer, when questioning Charlie Siragusa in 1977 about the MKULTRA Program, inquired if “the scandals of 1963” had anything to do with the CIA pad on 13th Street, or Feldman’s pad on 18th Street. Siragusa responded with an equivocal “they might have.”8

  The scandals of 1963 grew out of rumors about Gambling Squad members holding up crap games at gunpoint, or stealing bags of money as they were being delivered to bookies. But they also included stories like the one about the time Frankie Waters was found unconscious in a bar in Brooklyn. He’d left his car parked in front of a fire hydrant and a patrol car stopped to check it out. The cops found wiretap equipment on the front seat, a gun underneath it, and a bundle of cash. When taken to the precinct to explain, Waters said the cash was a loan from his father for a down payment on a house.

  In a similar incident in the Bowery, cops found an agent passed out in his car, with the headlights on and the motor running, and wiretap equipment, guns, and a briefcase full of cash in the trunk. The agent had just escorted a Frenchman to the airport.

  There were only two inspectors investigating these incidents and allegations in 1963. Having been demoted from enforcement assistant, Lee Speer as district supervisor in Denver handled corruption inquiries west of the Mississippi, while Irwin Greenfeld handled those on the east. But Greeny on his own couldn’t manage the problem in New York, and as a result, morale was at an all-time low among the agents, good and bad. Violent factions were forming, a whisper campaign raged, and ill feelings simmered, waiting to explode. Eventually it all got to be too much for veteran undercover Agent Jim Attie, who had been transferred to New York in 1961.

  “I was Jim’s partner during the Gambling Squad era,” Tony Mangiaracina recalls. “I was in Group Four at the time. Art Mendelsohn had inherited the group from Joe Amato, who’d transferred to Boston, then retired after developing neurological problems from stress. We called the office ‘The Fish Bowl’ back then, because everybody was watching everybody else. It was a convoluted situation, and Jim was definitely paranoid – but we were all paranoid, so I didn’t notice right away. Then he does a U-turn on a one-way street near Times Square: he thought a Mossad agent was tailing us. Plus he was bitter, and getting angrier all the time.

  “Then one day he shows up in the reception area outside Belk’s office. He’s sitting there muttering about how Siragusa fucked him and how he’s gonna kill him. Well, Belk didn’t see him right away, so he just sat there getting madder and madder.

  “Some guys say he shot up the office, but that’s not true. But some guys from Group Four did talk him into giving up his gun and going with them to the Public Health facility, where the doctor said that Jim had to voluntarily commit himself to get an examination – and that’s when he took out a drop gun and gave it up. The agents were a little shook up over that. They didn’t like the idea that he was sitting between them in the car with a drop gun.

  “Well, Jim stayed at the hospital and never came back.”

  JIM ATTIE’S EXCRUCIATING EXIT

  Thirty-five years later, Jim Attie summarized his experience as an FBN agent as follows: “I’m not proud of what I did. It was a dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic agent.”

  Through his daring exploits, Attie had generated as much good press for the FBN as any agent, and he felt that Anslinger should have reciprocated with raises and promotions. But those rewards were not forthcoming. “The Hearst newspapers were doing articles on our undercover work in the Middle East,” he explains, “and the reporters couldn’t believe what they were being told. So the Bureau had me come to Washington to talk about the cases I’d made. And during the interview Anslinger says, ‘We’ve had some better, some worse.’ He also said I was always covered, which wasn’t true. I was always alone. After he said those things, I thought about how he kept the Bureau small enough to fuel the competition, and how that caused all the trouble. So in front of the reporters I said to him, ‘What could you possibly know about it?’ I called him a manipulator and a cheapskate, and I said I wasn’t impressed. He didn’t say a word.”

  But Anslinger didn’t forget, either. In 1961, Attie was transferred to New York and put in Group Four, where he was not received with open arms. Based on his reputation as a Speer man, and a potentially homicidal lone wolf, the nervous New York agents considered him both dangerous and a sleeper for the shooflies – and his problems began to mount.

  As Attie recalls, “I came to work with two dollars in my pocket and my lunch in a brown p
aper bag. Meanwhile, the other guys in the group are eating lunch at an expensive Japanese restaurant. Around me, they were all secretive and apprehensive, and I was never asked to do anything. In New York I made nothing but small cases,” he sighs. “Meanwhile, Charlie Mac is in town talking with Lenny Schrier and playing cards with Ike Feldman. When we worked together in Chicago, Charlie Mac set me up with a hit man named Garibaldi. Next thing I know, Garibaldi’s in New York, looking for me.”

  Attie’s situation didn’t improve when his former boss, George Belk, replaced George Gaffney as district supervisor. “When I was in Chicago, Belk was always bragging about how I made so many big cases, using so little money,” Attie explains. “In 1960, he even recommended me for the Treasury Employee of the Year Award. In Chicago he was hard, but fair. But in New York, he was told by Giordano to unload me. He puts me in Durham’s unit (the Radio Shack) and says: ‘You’re a grade twelve, like him; but remember, you’re not in charge.’

  “I’m there in the electronics unit,” Attie continues, “but it’s all gypsy wires. One day Durham says, ‘We’ve got to tap a phone tonight, and you’ve got to do it yourself.’ I told him I wouldn’t do it without written authorization.” Jim tenses. “A few days later, Durham invited me for coffee at the Choc Full O’Nuts, and when I got back to the office, my head was spinning. I remember grabbing the desk and thinking I’d ingested something. I put on my coat and hat and when I got on the elevator, my mouth was dry and my body was trying to vomit. Colors were intense and had sound. I walked to the 33rd Street Station and took a train home. And when I got home, my wife took me to two doctors, and they said it sounded like I’d unwittingly ingested LSD.”

  Jim is sitting very still. “Two days later, when I went back to the office, Belk called me in. He made me sit outside his office for hours while he talked with Greenfeld. Finally he called me in and said I’d have to go to the hospital. Then he asked me to sign something.

  “I said to them, ‘You people drugged me.’

  “Greenfeld was rigid with fear. ‘I want your gun,’ he said. But I refused, at which point they called in Hunt, Mendelsohn, Krueger, and Durham. And while they were taking me outside, I heard Greenfeld talking on the phone with Giordano. ‘We’ll get him admitted,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’ So I looked at Belk, put my thumbnail under my tooth, and flicked.” Attie shakes his head. “And that was my exit from the FBN. I went to the Public Health Service Hospital where they did a spinal tap, but didn’t find any drugs in my system.”

  Jim smiles bravely. “I brought a lot on myself,” he laughs, “by telling off Anslinger and Giordano. I should have listened to Tony Zirilli. Tony was the greatest undercover agent ever. He used to gamble with tens of thousands of Bureau dollars. Tony made me look like an amateur. One time he said to me, ‘Why use your own money? They can’t pay me enough to do this job.’ And he was right.”

  MORE BAD NEWS

  The next shock felt by the faltering FBN came shortly after Joe Valachi described Vito Genovese as the boss of bosses on national TV. The problem started on 27 January 1961, when John Ormento took Nelson Cantellops to a church in the Bronx and – in the presence of a priest, notary public, and three lawyers – Cantellops confessed to having lied about his meeting with Genovese. On that basis, Criminal Defense Attorney Edward B. Williams filed an appeal on Genovese’s behalf. But Cantellops re-recanted, and the appeal was denied, and in April 1962, at the age of 62, Genovese began serving a fifteen-year sentence at the Atlanta Penitentiary.9

  In October 1963, Williams filed another appeal on Genovese’s behalf, claiming he should have been given copies of the prosecutor’s interview notes with Cantellops. “Then, to everyone’s surprise,” Gaffney recalls, “Williams introduces Bill Rowan as a witness for the defense.

  “A few years earlier,” Gaffney continues, “Rowan had worked for the Bureau, but I fired him, and he went to work for Prudential Bache. Then Williams brings him up to New York, and I’m called to testify. Williams asks me to explain why I fired Rowan. I told him that he had cracked up a government car, but didn’t report it. So Williams walks over with a letter of recommendation I’d written for Rowan, addressed to officials at Bache. The letter listed his good qualities and Williams made me read it out loud. Then he said, ‘Reconcile your firing of Rowan with this letter.’

  “ ‘There’s nothing sinister about it, counselor,’ I said. ‘The man’s got a wife and a couple of kids. Just because he can’t take the pressure of the FBN doesn’t mean he should be deprived of a livelihood. It doesn’t mean he’s not suited for a less stressful job.’ At which point the judge leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Don’t say another word. You’ve got him by the balls.’ ”

  Gaffney laughs bitterly. “Williams accused the Bureau of destroying crucial documents that should have gone to the US Attorney. But the Genovese appeal was denied, and after that, Williams vowed he’d never handle another narcotic case again.”

  Rowan’s testimony didn’t help Genovese, but the fact that a former agent would testify on behalf of the Mafia’s boss of bosses contributed to the FBN’s downward spiral. So did Paul Knight’s transfer to the CIA, and Howard Chappell’s resignation in 1961. Chappell quit to become Commissioner of Public Works in Los Angeles after Giordano tried to transfer him to New York. Marty Pera’s resignation and transfer in October 1963 to the Office of Naval Intelligence was another blow, as was Charlie Siragusa’s retirement in December 1963.

  Social forces were conspiring against the FBN too. In 1961, the American Medical and Bar Associations issued a 173-page report titled Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease? The report blamed surges in drug smuggling and poverty on Anslinger’s policy of regarding addicts as criminals rather than people in need of medical assistance. The report argued that the FBN was driving addicts into the black market by ignoring Supreme Court rulings that allowed doctors to prescribe narcotics to addicts for legitimate medical purposes. It was in response to this report that the Kennedy administration had created the Prettyman Commission and had appointed Dean Markham as its drug policy advisor. And in a 30 May 1963 letter to the New York Times, Markham backed a Prettyman Commission recommendation that doctors be allowed to prescribe narcotics to addicts on a “maintenance basis.” As a result, experimental “halfway houses” like Synanon and Daytop began to emerge as viable alternatives to imprisonment.

  Last but not least, the FBN was hurt by a shift in focus by the Giordano administration from the Sicilian Mafia to the French connection and its sources in Turkey. This change served the Mafia well at a time when it should have been reeling from the Valachi revelations, the Rinaldo–Palmieri case, and the wars within the Profaci and Bonanno families. But America’s intelligence and security agencies continued to protect the million-dollar men they had conscripted in the Establishment’s secret and ongoing war against labor, liberalism, and desegregation.

  The loss of case-making agents to the Gambling Squad, several key retirements and resignations, the dismantling of the International Group, and the FBN’s emphasis on the French connection, combined to give the Mafia the breathing room it needed to reorganize its sputtering drug industry. The process began in Sicily on 30 June 1963 when a booby-trapped Fiat, into which Palermo boss Sal Greco was about to enter, exploded and killed several policemen and bystanders. The Ciaculli Massacre put the Carabinieri on a massive manhunt that scattered Sicilian Mafiosi to the four winds. The most important fugitive was Tomasso Buscetta. A participant at the Palermo summit in 1957, Buscetta would become the indispensable middleman between the Badalamenti family in Sicily and the Gambino family in America. While a fugitive, he would form relations with Corsicans in South America, Mexico, and Montreal. Meanwhile, lacking the necessary funds and personnel, the Italian authorities called off their manhunt, and Buscetta’s godfather, Gaetano Badalamenti, began waging a vendetta against the Grecos and La Barberas.10

  The Badalamenti connection dated back to 1946, when Gaetano immigrated to Detroit and formed relations
with Frank Coppola, Sam Carolla, and Carlos Marcello. After his deportation in 1950, Gaetano and his brothers teamed up with Coppola, who, having been deported, settled in their neighborhood, and together they became Sicily’s major heroin traffickers. The Sicilian Badalamentis were known to the FBN, as was their cousin Salvatore in the Profaci family. Gaetano, like Buscetta, had attended the 1957 Palermo summit, where the old alliance between Luciano and Joe Valachi’s godfather, Joe Bonanno, gave way to the new one between Carlo Gambino and the Badalamentis.11

  Further impacting the situation was a major change at the Vatican, where Giovanni Montini was named Pope Paul VI in June 1963. Son of the founder of Italy’s Christian Democrat Party, with whom the Mafia was allied, Montini named Hank Manfredi’s close friend Paul Marcinkus as his personal secretary. Marcinkus started working with Michele Sindona to secure their mutual interests, just as Bill Harvey – having been fired from Operation Mongoose by Bobby Kennedy for sending terror teams into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis without permission – arrived in Rome as the CIA’s new station chief. Harvey’s main job was to help ultra General Giovanni De Lorenzo, head of Italy’s military intelligence and security services, subvert the government of leftist Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Naturally, the CIA’s efforts on behalf of De Lorenzo further advanced the interests of the Mafia.

  Back in the States, a corresponding shift in the Establishment’s power base was reflected in the gradual migration of Americans to the south and west. The alliance between Bonanno in Arizona, Marcello in New Orleans, and Trafficante in Florida reflected the trend, as did the consolidation of mob power in Las Vegas, through Morris “Moe” Dalitz, one of Meyer Lansky’s closest associates, and the emergence of Miami as America’s new crime capital.