There are two other FBN-related factors to consider in the official cover-up. On 20 November 1963, Rose Cheramie was found on a Louisiana road, dazed and bruised. She was taken to a private hospital where she told a doctor that JFK was going to be killed during his forthcoming visit to Dallas. Later that day, Cheramie was released into the custody of Louisiana State policeman Francis Fruge, and while Fruge was taking her to a state hospital Cheramie said she’d been traveling from Florida to Dallas with two men who “were Italians or resembled Italians.”39 She didn’t know their names, but they’d stopped at a lounge for drinks. An argument ensued, Cheramie was evicted and, as she stood outside the lounge, she was struck a glancing blow by a car. She also repeated to Fruge her claim that President Kennedy was going to be killed. But because she was a prostitute and drug addict, neither Fruge nor the doctor believed her – at least, not until the afternoon of 22 November.
On 27 November, Fruge interviewed Cheramie again, and she expounded on her story. She said the Italians were taking her to Dallas to obtain $8,000, so they could buy eight kilograms of heroin from a seaman. The seaman was to meet them in Houston after disembarking in Galveston. Cheramie gave Fruge the names of the seaman and the ship. As they were on the way to Houston to check out her story, Cheramie told Fruge that she was a stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub in Dallas, and that she had seen Ruby and Oswald together. She said she was part of a Mafia operation in which call girls were rotated between cities, and that Ruby had sent her to Miami on 18 November.
When contacted by Fruge, the Customs agent in charge of Galveston verified that the seaman was being investigated for drug smuggling. The Coast Guard likewise confirmed that it was interested in the ship named by Cheramie regarding its role in drug smuggling operations. But the state narcotics bureaus in Texas and Oklahoma found Cheramie’s information “erroneous in all respects,” and when the HSCA asked Customs to produce the agents she had named, and their reports, Customs officials said that neither the agents nor reports could be found.40
The HSCA let this promising lead drop without attempting to talk to Customs agents like William Hughes, who vividly recalls “Nutty Nate” Durham as the feckless agent in charge of Galveston in 1963. Nate may have been alive in 1978, but the CIA did not allow Customs to identify him or provide his reports to Congress. The reason for this subterfuge comes as no surprise: some of Nutty Nate’s colleagues on the Galveston case were CIA officers operating under Customs cover, as part of a special unit organized in Houston by Dave Ellis. Members of this unit facilitated the activities of anti-Castro drug smuggling terrorist groups in the US, which is why the FBI also “decided to pursue the case no further.”41
Neither Customs, nor the Coast Guard, nor the FBI, nor any state narcotics bureau revealed the existence of the Galveston drug ring to the FBN. But Fruge did tell congressional investigators that the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s delegate in New Orleans, Sergio Arcacha Smith, may have been one of the men who had accompanied and abused Rose Cheramie. Smith’s CRC office was located in the same building as Oswald’s notional Fair Play for Cuba office at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, and Guy Banister, a former FBI agent in Chicago, had gotten Smith his office space. Smith and one of Banister’s employees, David Ferrie, “were also believed to have ties with organized crime figure Carlos Marcello.”42
Here the plot thickens, for Banister was the FBI agent in charge in Chicago while George White was there as the FBN district supervisor in 1945 and 1946. Banister moved on to become deputy chief of police in New Orleans, and then opened a private detective firm that served as a CIA front. A certified right-wing fanatic, Banister was a member of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean (funded in part by Anastasio Somoza), as well as Louisiana coordinator of the racist Minutemen.43 Working for Banister was David Ferrie, a pilot who knew Oswald and worked for Carlos Marcello. Ferrie claimed that he drove to Houston to ice skate on the day Kennedy was killed, and to Galveston to go duck hunting two days later when Ruby killed Oswald. This put him on the same path Rose Cheramie intended to follow – a bizarre coincidence that suggests that he was involved in transporting and paying conspirators, including Arcacha Smith, in the Kennedy assassination. Adding to this possibility is the fact that Ferrie’s boss, Guy Banister, assisted Arcacha Smith in his counter-revolutionary activities, as did Carlos Marcello.44
Banister brings us to the other FBN-related piece in the JFK puzzle: the French connection.
JFK’S FRENCH CONNECTION
CIA asset Clay Shaw reportedly joined the Permanent Industrial Exhibition in 1957. Known as Permindex, it was a construction company that built trade centers, hotels, and office centers like the Trade Mart he managed in New Orleans. Ten years later, Shaw would attain notoriety as the person New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged with conspiring to kill JFK. He was acquitted, and as far as this author is aware, was not involved in drug trafficking. However, his company, Permindex, after moving to Rome in 1961 and reforming itself as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was reportedly involved as “a cover for the transfer of CIA … funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.”45
More to the point, CMC was accused of channeling funds to the drug-smuggling OAS.
In tracing the money used to finance the [July 1961] de Gaulle assassination plots, French Intelligence discovered that about $200,000 in secret funds had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Crédit Internationale. In 1962, Banister had dispatched to Paris a lawyer friend … with a suitcase full of money for the OAS, reportedly around $200,000.46
Banister’s money allegedly went to Jean René Marie Souetre – or someone impersonating him. A French Army deserter and the OAS representative in southern Algeria, Souetre reportedly met in the spring of 1963 with E. Howard Hunt in Madrid, ultra General Walker in Dallas, and Guy Banister at 544 Camp Street. In June, he offered the CIA a list of KGB penetrations in the French government. Souetre was also reportedly “on the Paris end of drug traffic,” and had been followed for years by an undercover narcotics agent in Marseilles.47
In 1977, the CIA released a document, dated 1 April 1964, titled “Jean Souetre’s expulsion from the US.” In this document, the FBI explains that French security officials wanted to know why Souetre was expelled from “Fort Worth or Dallas 18 hours after the assassination.” Souetre had been in Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination, and had been expelled to “Mexico or Canada.” The French had some reason to believe that Souetre was plotting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle during his upcoming visit to Mexico, and so naturally they wanted to know about Souetre’s movements. But the FBI said it had no information on him and, in yet another case of criminal negligence, it never notified the Warren Commission about Souetre.48
There’s more to this story. The CIA knew that dentist Lawrence M. Alderson in Houston had contacted Souetre in December 1963. Alderson met Souetre in 1953 while serving as an Army officer in France. They worked together on security issues at a French air base. As he did every year, Alderson sent a Christmas card to Souetre, and somehow that came to the attention of the CIA – and the only way that’s possible is if the CIA was monitoring Souetre. People were tailing Alderson within days of the assassination, and FBI agents interviewed him around 1 January 1964, four months before the French officials contacted the FBI. The FBI wanted to know if he would act as a go-between if Souetre contacted him again. That never happened, but Alderson told this writer that persons claiming to be agents of the Army CID told him that Souetre had been flown from Dallas to New Orleans on 22 November 1963 on a military transport plane.
No one from the US government ever asked Souetre if he was in Dallas on 22 November. But if wasn’t there – and we know a Frenchman was – it may have been SDECE agent Michel Mertz impersonating him.
Mertz, when compared to Souetre, is an equally if not exceedingly enigmatic character. Born in 1920 in Moselle, France, he was drafted into the German Army, but ostensibly defected to the Resistance in
1943. After the war, he joined, or infiltrated (as the case may be) SDECE undercover as a French Army captain. He served a tour in Algeria with Souetre (1958–59) and in April 1961 returned to Algeria as a double, or perhaps triple agent. He presented himself as an OAS sympathizer and either learned of, or provoked, an OAS plot to assassinate de Gaulle in July. In either case the plot was foiled, France rallied around de Gaulle, and Mertz won the eternal gratitude of Interior Minister Roger Frey and his chief aide, Alexandre Sanguinetti – Marcel Francisci’s protector in the French government.49
In 1947, Mertz married the adopted daughter of Charles Martel, a Paris procurer and drug smuggler with connections to François Spirito. It is unthinkable that such a liaison would escape the notice of Charlie Dyar, the veteran FBN agent who worked in France throughout the 1930s. But Mertz was unknown to the FBN, and in 1960, with the blessings of his SDECE bosses, he established a lucrative heroin network between France, Montreal, and New York under the auspices of Spirito’s partner, Joe Orsini. Santo Trafficante and Orsini’s former cellmate, Benny Indiviglio, the Mafia’s distributor in Dallas, managed the American end of the operation. A significant delivery was made in October 1961, just prior to the French Connection case, when Mertz’s courier, diplomat Jean Mounet, accompanied a Citroen packed with 100 pounds of heroin to New York. Mounet may have been posing as J. Mouren, and if so, Mertz may have been the guiding hand behind Jean Jehan, Françoise Scaglia, and Jean Angelvin. Apart from any attention he may have attracted if involved in the famous French Connection case, deliveries from Mertz to Indiviglio, averaging ninety kilograms a month, would continue undetected for the next nine years.50
ADDING IT UP
Extrapolating on the fascinating information presented in this chapter, one can hypothesize that an assassin used Paul Mondoloni’s protected drug route in Mexico to enter Texas through Laredo, and to exit through Houston or New Orleans. Souetre was probably willing to do the hideous deed for money to support the OAS. Mertz was a professional assassin and may have been acting on behalf of the CIA faction within SDECE. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was capable of moving the assassins through his Brown–Castellani network. His staff had a phony 201 file on Oswald and, through MKULTRA, could have set up Oswald as the patsy. Last but not least, William Harvey, who hated Bobby Kennedy, and Desmond Fitzgerald, the far-right Republican, had access to Corsican assassins and the Marcello–Trafficante–Bonanno Mafia clique that could have maneuvered Jack Ruby and the Dallas police. As outlined in chapter 15, Harvey recommended hiring Corsican drug smugglers as assassins, in order to protect certain Mafiosi in the CIA’s employ. He also wanted to turn Corsicans, working for the Soviets, into double agents, which brings us to the final piece in the puzzle.
In an incredible coincidence, Angleton met on 22 November 1963 with SDECE Colonel de Lannurien at Le Rive Gauche restaurant in Georgetown, regarding allegations made by Philippe de Vosjoli (FBN Agent Sal Vizzini’s partner in operations into Cuba during the October 1962 Missile Crisis) that Colonel Leonard Houneau, deputy head of SDECE, was a KGB agent. De Vosjoli, however, proved to be a double agent working for Angleton against his own government and, according to Angleton’s biographer, Tom Mangold, Houneau was exonerated, the CIA acknowledged that de Vosjoli had given “bad information,” and de Gaulle was so upset that he severed relations with the CIA over the incident. “The consequences of this split were serious and benefited only the KGB,” Mangold said. Among other things, the animosity created by Angleton cost the CIA valuable French intercepts and intelligence assets in Vietnam.51
It’s almost as if Angleton was a double agent, and if he was the “mole” he was searching for, it’s possible that SDECE agents working for the KGB may have sent an assassin into Dallas through Angleton’s Brown–Castellani drug network, or through Paul Mondoloni. If Angleton was a KGB mole, perhaps he used QJ/WIN (who could have been Mertz) to assassinate JFK, and programmed Lee Harvey Oswald as the unwitting patsy through the MKULTRA Program.52
Speculation such as this will always surround the unsolved assassination of JFK. Angleton was, like White, debilitated by his alcoholism, and the problems he caused may well have been the result of incompetence rather than malice. So this chapter will close by returning to where it started, to eerie MKULTRA. On 29 November 1963, a week after the president was murdered, Marshall Carter, the deputy director of the CIA, met with Richard Helms, John Earman, James Angleton, Sid Gottlieb, and Lyman Kirkpatrick. What a group. At this meeting the CIA chiefs agreed to continue to test unwitting subjects through MKULTRA using the FBN and its safehouses.53 To this end they launched MKULTRA Subproject 149 in New York in January 1964, specifically to provide a replacement for Charlie Siragusa. An unnamed individual in the import and export business conducted the project at least until April 1965.54
These CIA officers, especially Angleton, had the desire and the ability to mold assassins and patsies. The three main suspects in the assassination – Marcello, Trafficante, and Hoffa – were CIA million-dollar men. And the CIA prevented the FBN from going after these drug traffickers, or investigating CIA agents like Irving Brown – and perhaps even Michel Mertz – in Angleton’s French connection. All of which forms an unmistakable trail leading from the CIA, through the FBN, to the assassination of JFK.
21
NO INNOCENTS ABROAD
“Remember the Wolf is a hunter –
go forth and get food of thine own.”
Rudyard Kipling, “The Law of the Jungle”
Charlie Siragusa’s last year at FBN headquarters was not a happy one. As he said in his CIA debriefing, “I was the number two man. But instead of taking orders from me, Gaffney would go over my head to Giordano.”
“Charlie felt uneasy in the company of Gaffney and Giordano,” says his protégé, Andy Tartaglino. “He’d had a heart attack while shoveling snow, but they pushed him hard and complained when he didn’t keep up. It was vicious. It got to the point,” Tartaglino says bitterly, “where he wouldn’t even have lunch with them.
“Ambassador Rosal was bringing in fifty kilograms at a time,” Tartaglino continues, “so Charlie knew there was a lot more heroin entering America than Anslinger acknowledged; and he knew there was pouch traffic between Lebanon and Paris. The Colombian minister to Russia was involved, as were Corsicans and the Lower East Side mob. We were building a case at the Court House Squad, getting close to ‘the bigger’ diplomat that Tarditi had alluded to, and Charlie knew all the details. I was on the phone with him daily. Meanwhile, Gaffney’s on the phone to Pat Ward every day, trying to find out what we’re up to. Gaffney finally brought me down to Washington as his assistant on the Ambassador case, to report the details to him every day.”1
Gaffney, naturally, has a different recollection. “Giordano and Belk built a high wall around New York to keep me from meddling in Belk’s affairs,” he says. And just as Siragusa complained that Gaffney went “over his head,” Gaffney’s beef was that Belk bypassed him in the chain of command, and communicated directly with Giordano. As to his clash with Siragusa, Gaffney says, “Charlie was trying to become the Commissioner, so I applied for deputy. When he found out, he called me in and asked, ‘What makes you think you’re qualified?’ I told him that I’d made more cases and put more Mafiosi in prison than him. ‘So, if you’re qualified for Commissioner,’ I said, ‘I’m qualified for deputy.’ ”
Such was the venomous, negative atmosphere at FBN headquarters in 1963. Anslinger had retired to Hollidaysburg, taking his coalescing mystique with him, and Giordano and Gaffney, after they had joined forces to nullify Siragusa, “went after each other like gladiators battling it out in an arena of politics and power,” according to FBN historian John McWilliams. Giordano and Gaffney filed civil service charges against one another, and Giordano won; but it was all for nothing, “since he was too weak to survive the massive reorganization that occurred in 1968.”2
Too committed to law enforcement to break away entirely, Siragusa took a job
as chief of the Illinois Crime Commission in 1964. Highly committed to the FBN, he did one other significant thing as well: he introduced Andy Tartaglino to his contacts at the CIA. And by passing that torch, he provided his protégé with the power to avenge him.
“Charlie was good to me,” Tartaglino says reverentially. “He tried to keep me out of the office infighting. But several months before Charlie left, Gaffney took me off the Ambassador case and had me reassigned as an inspector. Fred Dick was my instructor, and we immediately left on an extended tour of the Bureau’s overseas offices.”
As will become evident, Tartaglino’s reassignment as an inspector marked a watershed in the FBN’s evolution, and was a major factor in the organization’s demise. In the meantime, an overview of his tour with Fred Dick will serve as a convenient introduction to the FBN’s overseas situation in the early years of the Giordano administration.
THE FBN IN EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
In March 1963, Henry Giordano assigned his protégé, Mike Picini, as the new district supervisor in Rome. His job, as Picini explains it, “was to focus the local governments on curbing supply. The strategy was political; to show the police how to do it, supply them with intelligence, and get them to increase their commitment.”
Picini departed from FBN tradition and took a forthright, political approach toward drug law enforcement when dealing with his foreign counterparts. But conducting operations was still a challenge. His deputy, Hank Manfredi, was less involved than ever in FBN operations. He had bugged almost every Embassy in Rome and was so busy listening to foreign spies and diplomats, and reporting their conversations to the CIA, that he didn’t have time to keep up with his FBN workload. “One night in Rome,” Fred Dick recalls, “Hank asked me to pose as a White House representative and give $300 to an Italian cop who was bringing police files to the American Embassy almost every night. This was his great source. This was how Charlie Siragusa got all his information on the Sicilian mob.”
The Strength of the Wolf Page 43