“Hank was a great believer in collateral missions,” explains Colonel Tully Acampora, then in Rome as a CIA advisor to the Carabinieri. “He was passing information to Bill Harvey, who’d landed in Rome as station chief after Bobby Kennedy tossed him out of Washington. We knew the Mexicans were using the pouch in both directions, so Hank and I sat down and wrote reports to the CIA and the FBN. But we couldn’t disrupt the diplomatic network without putting our own foreign policy objectives at risk. So we identified the Embassy people involved, photographed them, confronted them, and then used them as informants to broaden the thing. This channel was being watched, but it had to be handled carefully, because Hank did not have an entrée to military counterintelligence in Italy. Harvey was the key player in that regard, with Angleton and the Mossad. Military counterintelligence was Angleton, and that was strictly off-limits to Hank.”
The situation was just as delicate in France, where President de Gaulle had severed relations with the CIA over Angleton’s false allegations that the deputy chief of SDECE was a KGB agent. French security officials knew that the FBN and CIA were in cahoots, and were angry with the FBN for having accused them of conspiring to dump heroin on America. “Cusack had taken a ‘get tough’ approach,” Tartaglino sighs, “but the French were doing the best they could. What was needed was their cooperation, not their wrath, for only they could provide the informants, intelligence, and manpower we needed to conduct stakeouts and make arrests. France was not a victim country and needed to be persuaded, not pushed.”
Victor G. Maria agrees. An agent since 1958, first in San Francisco, then under his mentor Howard Chappell in Los Angeles, Maria was the sole FBN agent stationed in Paris from February 1962 until 1966. His top priority, reflecting Giordano’s new policy of accommodation, was to find out how drugs were getting to the US without upsetting the French.
“My parents were Lebanese and I spoke Arabic,” Maria says, “and I’d been a croupier in Lake Tahoe and Vegas, so I hung around the Paris casinos where the wealthy Arabs and Corsicans went to gamble. I also went to the American areas, where I met young soldiers and musicians who were sending drugs back home. The only rule was: ‘If it’s an international case, okay.’ But as the French authorities repeatedly made clear, the FBN wasn’t there to make cases on French citizens, and if we did, then the local police wouldn’t help us develop the international cases. It was that simple.
“Charles Guillard, Marcel Carrere, and Emil Angles at the Central Narcotics Office [CNO] were fabulous,” Maria stresses. “They built up dossiers on the people we wanted, and persuaded the riot police and the gendarmes to help us too. We also got help from the vice squad of the Prefecture – that’s Louis Souchon and Roger Voitot – who went after small retailers and worked up the Corsican ladder.
“The CNO also had access to SDECE people for wiretaps and files on the people we were targeting,” Maria says, “like Paul Mondoloni. But the FBN didn’t have access to the files, and we weren’t prepared to watch Mondoloni all day to the exclusion of everyone else. By myself, I covered Spain, France, Belgium, and Germany, and made trips into Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. In Europe,” he stresses, “most of my support came from the Army CID in Heidelberg. They provided flash rolls and people to cover me. But even Tony Pohl, who was French and spoke French with the right accent, was frustrated. Before Picini arrived in Rome, we’d get little blue memos from Cusack saying, ‘Make undercover cases or else.’ But all the good cases were made with the expertise of the French police, within the confines of French law. Not undercover.”
Anthony Pohl agrees. As noted in chapter 18, he’d been recruited into the FBN by Siragusa in 1960, and after interrogating Etienne Tarditi, had been sent to France in 1961 to open an office in Marseilles and locate heroin conversion labs using Marty Pera’s innovative precursor tracking system. But Paul Knight shunned him in Paris, and Cusack initially suspected him of being a spy for Lee Speer. Having come from the military and served as a CID agent in Europe for many years, Pohl was “horrified” by the FBN’s “unprofessional” (call it paranoid) and counterproductive culture. Even after Cusack apologized following his return to Rome as district supervisor in January 1962, and even after Pohl had formed official relations with the French in Marseilles in June 1962, he was still beset by problems.
“There was no tight control of information,” Pohl says, “and even though we knew when the acidic anhydride was ordered and purchased, sometimes it would sit for months at the depot. Then Jo Cesari [the premier Corsican chemist in Marseilles] would disappear for a few weeks. When he returned, his face would be pale and we knew he’d been working, but only once did we actually track the precursor to the lab.”
Part of the problem was that Cesari’s half-brother, Dom Albertini, was an informer for an investigating judge in Marseilles.3 Likewise, Marseilles Mayor Gaston Defferre protected the Guérini gang for political purposes, and SAC chief Jacques Foccart, along with Interior Minister Roger Frey and his deputy, Alexandre Sanguinetti, protected Marcel Francisci and thus, by default, Paul Mondoloni.4
Pohl’s failure to locate heroin conversion labs led to his transfer to Chicago and replacement in Marseilles by Albert Garofalo in March 1963. A skilled and fearless case-making agent, Garofalo had made undercover buys in April 1960 from a Dutch seaman carrying kilogram amounts of heroin from the Aranci brothers (thought to have SDECE protection, and a source in the Far East) in Marseilles to Charles Hedges in New York. Hedges was arrested and provided leads to a ring of Air France stewards and their receivers, including members of the Lower East Side mob that Tartaglino referred to above. The so-called Air France case in Canada overlapped with and developed concurrently with the Second Ambassador case in the US.
Meanwhile, CIA Agent Paul Knight was back in Beirut working undercover as Pan Am’s regional security chief. When not guarding the Shah of Iran, or accosting KGB colonels, Knight assisted Fred Wilson, the FBN’s new agent in charge in Beirut. Wilson, however, quickly became a target of Inspector Fred Dick and his apprentice torpedo, Andy Tartaglino. Fred Dick recalled that Wilson had overcharged the FBN for a trip he made to Turkey. According to another agent, he had gotten involved in the gold trade with Carlo Dondola, the suave swindler and special employee who, from behind the scenes, ran the Beirut office for Knight. Whatever the exact cause, Wilson’s troubles climaxed when inspectors Dick and Tartaglino arrived in Beirut.
“While he was driving us to our hotel,” Dick recalls, “Wilson said he was being worked to death, and that made me suspicious. So when I got to the Embassy the next morning, I asked the marine guard what kind of hours Wilson was working. The marine said that after he’d dropped us off at our hotel, Wilson had returned to the Embassy and removed some documents from the office safe. We knew he kept a diary, so I told him, ‘Give the diary over, or swim back to America.’ ” Matter-of-factly, Dick says, “We accepted his resignation on the spot.”5
Wilson’s replacement, Dennis Dayle, arrived soon thereafter. Trained as a concert violinist, Dayle sought more exciting work, and was employed as a Milwaukee policeman when FBN Agent George Emrich recruited him in 1958. Assigned to Chicago, Dayle – a good-looking, aggressive case-making agent – came to the attention of headquarters in typically spectacular style. Posing as mobster Mike Novak, he purchased two kilograms of heroin from Mafia boss Joe Marassa while Chicago District Supervisor George Belk, Assistant Treasury Secretary For Law Enforcement James Reed, and FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano watched from across the street in a car. “Afterwards Belk took me to the Playboy Club,” Dayle recalls. “ ‘Dennis,’ he said, ‘you made me look good, and I’ll never forget it.’
“Well,” Dayle says with a careless shrug, “Treasury had just given Giordano the money to open offices in Bangkok, Turkey, and Mexico, and a few months later I was given a choice: ‘Go to Beirut or else.’ My initial reaction was, ‘Where’s Beirut?’ Lebanon wasn’t well known to FBN agents, except New York’s International Group. So I agreed to do a three-mon
th TDY, to identify traffickers and make cases. That was the job. But there was no Foreign Service or language training. I took a plane to Rome, where Mike Picini was supposed to be waiting to escort me to Beirut. But Mike was in Paris, so I went to Beirut alone. I arrived on a Sunday and when I finally found the Embassy, the FBN office was padlocked. I couldn’t get in. I didn’t even know about the Wilson fiasco until I got there.
“Well, I soon found out that I was there to repair relations, and in doing that I relied on Paul Knight. Paul had left the FBN, but he provided contacts to informants and law enforcement people in Turkey, Lebanon and Syria – my most important contact being Osman Osman, the chief of criminal investigations in Lebanon. Paul and I became close friends and we often dined with Joe Salm, and relaxed while listening to classical music. Otherwise I was the only person in the region, handling all Treasury functions. My family didn’t know where I was for weeks at a time.”
A typical case began with Dayle posing as an Air France crewman, and Knight introducing him to an informer. The informer then introduced Dayle to morphine base distributor Saleh Ghazer and Ghazer’s supplier in Beirut, Abou Jaoude, an associate of Sami Khoury. Dayle and Ghazer opened a joint account at Intrabank (which had branch offices in Paris and the Bahamas) where Dayle deposited “buy” money for morphine base. Next he met Jaoude’s suppliers in Damascus, where he sampled and sealed the product in two-kilogram packages. “I said I had to go back to the hotel to get the money,” Dayle recalls, “and while I was gone, I called in the Syrian authorities and everyone was arrested. One of the traffickers was a Syrian Army officer using desert patrol vehicles to transport the base from the lab site. He was summarily executed.”
Like Knight before him, Dayle would soon employ Sami Khoury as an informant. Fresh out of prison for cigarette smuggling, and looking for free passage to traffic in narcotics, Khoury identified Corsican traffickers and provided information that led to the seizure of morphine base on Turkish ships. He also provided valuable information about South America, where several nations were emerging as major drug transit points. Unfortunately, as Dayle once noted with dismay, “The major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”6
THE LATIN-AMERICAN CONNECTION
After Jacques Foccart and SAC smashed the OAS, many drug smuggling Corsicans moved to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay where, according to Dennis Dayle, they began receiving heroin, often shipped in Arabic sweets, from Sami Khoury and his chemist, Omar Makkouk. Heading the Corsican network in South America was Auguste Joseph Ricord. A Nazi collaborator, Ricord fled to Buenos Aires in 1947 and first appeared on the FBN radar screen in 1951 as Angel “Petit Ze” Abadelejo, a member of the Orsini ring. In 1957, he was known primarily as a procurer, with houses of prostitution in Brazil and Venezuela. After being expelled from Venezuela for white slavery in 1963, Ricord moved to Argentina where, as Rico Cori, he established a major drug trafficking operation with Paul Mondoloni’s associate, Ansan Bistoni, and several experienced Corsicans. Ricord bought police protection throughout South America and, from their base at Ricord’s El Sol restaurant in Buenos Aires, the “Group France” drug smuggling ring established the infamous Triangle of Death, sending cocaine to Europe in return for heroin that was then smuggled to the US. Ricord often obtained heroin from Paul Mondoloni and Jean-Baptiste Croce, whose sources included the Francisci brothers, and Paul Pajanacci, an associate of Maurice Castellani.7
Corrupt officials in Latin America greatly facilitated the Group France and its Triangle of Death. A case in point involved Bolivia’s Vice President Juan Lechin Oquendo, who resigned in September 1961 after Argentine official Joseph Guzman accused him of managing all the cocaine labs in Bolivia. But in September 1963, after the scandal subsided, Lechin was absolved by the Bolivian Congress, and returned to work.
Despite the quiet migration of Corsicans to South America, there was little demand for cocaine in America in the early 1960s, and heroin smuggling across the Mexican border was the FBN’s bigger concern. But Customs had jurisdiction in Mexico, and it wasn’t until the Kennedy administration launched its Alliance for Progress – and began sending mountains of military aid to nations that were willing to accept, as part of the deal, Special Forces counterinsurgency advisors and CIA officers posing undercover as Public Safety police advisors – that the FBN was invited to open offices in Mexico. And that’s when FBN agents William J. Durkin and Renaldo “Ray” Maduro arrived on the scene.
“I was transferred from New York to Los Angeles in August 1962,” Maduro recalls, “and in November Charlie Siragusa called. Charlie had been my money-man in the big Vic Stadter bust we made in 1961 at the CIA pad in New York. He had confidence in me, and during the interview he said that Treasury was transferring narcotics jurisdiction in Latin America from Customs to the FBN. It was a package deal. Durkin, who’d been Belk’s enforcement assistant in Chicago, was going down too, as the agent in charge. I agreed, and Giordano signed the clearance. I went on an official passport to fill a Customs space vacated by Chili Martinez, who went to Texas.8
“Durkin went down first,” Maduro continues, “in December 1962. Bill was tall, husky, and tight with Gaffney, and he brought along a copy of the International Book. We quickly became friends, and over the next four years we made a lot of cases together. I drove down in February 1963 and reported to the head of the Federales, Colonel Hernandez Tello, whom I’d met on the Asaf y Bala case in 1959 [and whom Jim Attie described as a drug trafficking policeman who informed on his competitors].”
To promote good relations with their counterparts in the narcotics branch of the Mexican Federal Police (the MexFeds), Maduro and Durkin provided advice and materiel aid through the US Military Advisory Group and the Office of Public Safety. Their relationship with Public Safety was especially tight, even though the CIA was recruiting, through the Office of Public Safety’s International Police Academy in Panama, the same policemen and military officers – like Tello – who protected and contended with the region’s drug traffickers. Meanwhile, US Army Special Forces A-Teams, under the direction of the CIA, were setting up Civic Action camps in the cocaine-producing Andes. Under cover of attending to the health and security needs of the indigenous people, the “Sneaky Petes” spied on, and ran covert operations against, rebellious Indians and labor leaders, and their Cuban advisors.
In exchange for intelligence on traffickers in South and Central America, FBN agents did favors for the CIA. In 1962, for example, a former Latin American ambassador to the US was identified as a drug courier. At Siragusa’s request, Tom Tripodi met with the diplomat at the University Club in Washington. When faced with the threat of deportation, the diplomat became an informant and, though he never produced any information that generated any drugs busts, he did provide nude photographs of the wife of the nation’s Marxist vice president in bed with another man. Siragusa passed the photos to the CIA, and a political threat was neutralized.9
Due to the fact that the CIA protected its drug dealing assets in the Mexican intelligence service, the FBN continued to have a hard time making significant cases in Mexico. But the CIA had no hold on some Customs port inspectors, with the result that Customs made two significant seizures in Texas. The first was the 7 November 1962 bust of Milton Abramson in Houston. Abramson had purchased twenty-two pounds of heroin from Paul Mondoloni and was delivering it to Gambino family member Joseph Stassi, a former co-owner of the Sans Souci casino in Havana with Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. The second case occurred in October 1963 when Gambino family member Tony Farina (having been released from prison after his arrest in the 1954 Coudert case, see chapter 10) was spotted in Laredo. A week later, Farina’s Canadian accomplice, Michel Caron, was busted with thirty-four kilograms of heroin.
Under questioning by FBN officials, Caron said he was working for Lucien Rivard in Montreal. Caron said that Paul Mondoloni had put the heroin in his car with the help of Fulgencio Cruz Bonet (an anti-Castro Cuban), and t
hat Frank Coppola in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was the intended recipient. Using Pera’s precursor tracking technique, tests showed that Caron’s heroin was identical to the heroin seized from Abramson in 1962, from the 1958 Pepe Cotroni case, and from a 1955 case involving Marcel Francisci. It was also identical to heroin that two Canadian traffickers were planning to sell to undercover Agent Patty Biase in August 1963.10
Here it’s important to digress for a moment, and to note that these Canadian traffickers were supplied by Roger Coudert. As we know from chapter 10, George Gaffney arrested Coudert in 1955 (Pat Ward arrested Caron’s recipient, Tony Farina, in the same case), at which point Coudert revealed that he was working with Mondoloni in Mexico. According to Gaffney, that was the first time the FBN had heard of Mondoloni. Coudert spent the next three years in prison, but was released after testifying for Siragusa at the Apalachin trial. By 1963, when he was arrested in the Biase case, the incorrigible drug trafficker – who was either “the stupidest drug trafficker ever,” as Gaffney calls him, or an FBN informer – was also involved with the Air France ring, and the Charles Marignani organization, which sheltered the “bigger” diplomat the FBN had been searching for since 1960.
Getting back to the Caron case: further investigation revealed what had been known since 1960, that Mondoloni was supplying the Gambino family through drug traffickers Jorge Moreno Chauvet and José Garcia Aiza, an Arab millionaire in Mexico. Luckily for the traffickers, Garcia was a friend of Ramon Luzo, Attorney General of Mexico’s federal district and the drug ring’s protector. One interesting facet of this investigation is that Robert Kennedy became personally involved, and sent an Assistant US Attorney to Canada on 1 November 1963 to escort Caron back to the US for debriefing.11 Despite the deep personal loss that resulted from the tragic event that occurred three weeks later, Kennedy’s interest in the Mondoloni case never faded, and may have been fueled by an anonymous letter, dated 25 November 1963, that arrived at FBN headquarters, telling how Mondoloni moved heroin in false-bottom suitcases from labs in Nice, through Panama, Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and the Yucatan, to Chauvet in Mexico City.12
The Strength of the Wolf Page 44