The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Based on this anonymous letter, and reports written by Hank Manfredi and other CIA agents, Bobby may have believed that the plan to assassinate JFK was effected in Mexico through Mondoloni’s protected drug route. A little-known fact is that Bobby went to Mexico in the fall of 1964 on business concerning the assassination.13 It isn’t clear if he was conducting an investigation, or shutting one down; like Lee Oswald’s activities in Mexico, Bobby’s have not been satisfactorily recorded. What is known is that Lucien Rivard was indicted in the US on 17 January 1964, based on the testimony of the defendants in the Abramson and Caron cases – but Paul Mondoloni was not.

  Patty Biase’s resignation from the FBN was another quiet occurrence that followed these strange events. There is nothing to report about his reasons for resigning. That last year in the FBN he divided his time between the frolics of the Gambling Squad and his closely held Coudert investigation in France. Not even the Paris agent in charge, Vic Maria, was told that Biase was operating undercover there. Biase had initiated the case on 25 May 1962, when, at his direction, his informant George Farraco called Canadian trafficker Roger Laviolette to arrange a transaction. Farraco was murdered a week later, allowing Biase to adopt the identity of Farraco’s fictitious brother, Jack. The case fizzled out, but thanks to Biase’s “spectacular testimony” in Paris on 29 November 1963, Laviolette was sent to trial.14 Laviolette was sentenced to only one year in prison, but he did drop the bombshell that his source, “Old Roger” Coudert, got “his stuff from behind the Iron Curtain.”15

  In 1964, Biase reportedly purchased a Bonanza Steak House franchise. After becoming nauseous at the FBN’s 1966-67 New Year’s Eve party, he was taken to a nearby hospital by one of his friends in the NYPD, and was pronounced dead a few hours later, to the amazement and sorrow of his friends. He was thirty-seven years old.

  THE SECOND AMBASSADOR CASE

  While the Rivard case was unfolding in Canada, a related case was developing there as well. In 1961, FBN officials began to think that a Mexican diplomat in Ottawa, Salvador Pardo Bolland, was the diplomat even “bigger” than Rosal. Although Pardo suspended his activities in the wake of the 1962 French Connection case, the Court House Squad continued to gather information on him and his associates and when he finally got back into the game, the FBN was ready and waiting. In February 1964, while under FBN surveillance, Pardo traveled from the Netherlands to France using a fake passport he had issued to himself. In Cannes he met with Gilbert Coscia, operations manager of the Marignani drug ring, and Juan Carlos Arizti, an official with the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry. From Cannes he was followed to Paris, where the investigation went into high gear.16

  “Mike Picini and I followed him on foot,” Vic Maria recalls, “and Mike even talked to him at the Air France terminal in Orleans. Pardo was flagged, and when Arizti left the suitcases at the terminal, we sat on them. In case we were watching, which he didn’t know for sure, Pardo flew into New York as a decoy, and the next day Arizti left with the heroin for Montreal. The French gave us permission to let it leave the country, but they insisted that two French policemen accompany it on the plane.”

  While Pardo flew to New York, Arizti flew to Montreal and checked the four suitcases at the local railway station. While Arizti booked himself into a local hotel, the Mounties emptied 136 pounds of heroin from his luggage and refilled the packages (except for one) with flour. None the wiser, Arizti retrieved his bags and traveled to New York, where on 21 February 1964, at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, he was arrested with Pardo and merchant seaman Rene Bruchon, the ring’s link to the Mafia since 1947!

  As Morty Benjamin recalls, “When Artie Fluhr arrested Pardo Bolland, it was the first time an FBN agent had his face on the front page of the Daily News and hadn’t done something wrong.”

  After his conviction, Pardo told an astonishing tale about a smuggling ring formed by five diplomats assigned to the Middle East in 1951: himself; his Argentine colleague Enrique F. Lupiz in Turkey; his Mexican colleague Marco Aurelio Almazan Diaz in Lebanon; Uruguayan Chargé d’Affaires Jose Manzor in Beirut; and Juan Arizti in Tel Aviv until 1954, then Athens until 1961. Initially, Almazan (who admitted to making nineteen drug smuggling trips into the US) and Lupiz were hired by Sami Khoury’s partner Antoine Araman to move morphine base from Syria to Beirut. Pardo went to work for Araman in 1956 and, after he was assigned to Canada in 1958, delivered heroin to Jean Jehan, mastermind of the French Connection case. In 1959, Pardo joined forces with three people Etienne Tarditi named in 1960 after his arrest in the First Ambassador case: Gilbert Coscia, Jean-Baptiste Giacobetti, and Charles Marignani. Upon completing a tour in New Delhi in June 1961, Pardo was assigned to the United Nations and began supplying one of Roger Coudert’s contacts in New York, Szaja Gerecht.17

  In early 1962, Pardo was reassigned to Bolivia, where Colonel Luis Gomez Aguilera managed the cocaine trade, apparently with CIA and SDECE protection. As Andy Tartaglino recalled, “We asked the CIA for help [locating Pardo], and it turned out he was … playing bridge on a regular basis with the ranking CIA man there.”18

  That says something memorable about that particular CIA officer’s ability to sniff out crooks. (One wonders if Laughlin Campbell, the station chief in Paris, was playing tennis with Paul Mandoloni.) And in yet another bizarre and totally unexplored twist to the case, Gil Coscia said the ring’s financier was an American, a Mr. Amato, living in Tangiers.19

  Loose ends aside, the Second Ambassador case generated fabulous publicity for the FBN, and in a March 1964 article in Parade Magazine, Jack Anderson heaped praise upon Henry Giordano and his intrepid agents. The FBN had smashed a cabal of crooked diplomats that was responsible for a large percentage of the illegal narcotics that entered the US every year. But the bust itself could not have been more poorly timed, for during Pardo’s trial in March, President Johnson was meeting in Palm Springs with Mexican president Adolfo Lopez Mateos to discuss the tidal wave of heroin washing over the border.

  As Gaffney recalls, “Secretary of State Dean Rusk called and asked if we were trying to embarrass Johnson, and if there was any way to release Pardo. I said no to both questions, and explained that I had informed Robert Kennedy, and that we were in constant communication with the Mexican Desk at the State Department on every development.”

  Even great successes were turning into political defeats: as Charlie Siragusa had predicted, Giordano and Gaffney were messing it up, to the extent that they had alienated the president of the United States. But the FBN and its allies in Canada and Mexico soldiered on. Chauvet and ten of his accomplices were arrested in Mexico in March 1964, and Rivard was arrested in Montreal that June. Mondoloni, however, escaped to France and in August 1964, with Jean Francisci (Marcel’s brother), met with smugglers Louis Douheret and Achille Cecchini. Since 1959, Douheret (aka Jacques the American) had been the Orsini group’s liaison to American Mafiosi Benny Indiviglio and Arnold Romano (who had a virtual monopoly over wholesale distribution on the Lower East Side). As a crime lord, Orsini was not involved in the production of heroin in clandestine labs in France, but he did finance smuggling ventures, and thus had an abiding interest in the sale of the merchandise. Orsini, according to Douheret, entrusted his narcotics ventures to Jean Nebbia, who bought significant amounts of heroin produced in France through his supplier, Achille Cecchini. Nebbia then arranged for Michel Victor Mertz and his assistant, Jean Bousquet, a wealthy Parisian contractor, to move the heroin to Douheret, his man in America.20

  In August 1964, Mondoloni and Francisci presented Cecchini and Douheret with a proposition. According to Douheret, he occasionally had trouble obtaining narcotics and other times was overstocked, so Mondoloni and Francisci graciously offered to manage those aspects of their operation. Douheret felt they were trying to squeeze him out of the Orsini operation, and he turned them down flat, saying such an arrangement would mean “total subjugation to a competition group.”21

  He would also have lost a lot of money. Si
nce 1959, Nebbia and Douheret, under the auspices of Orsini, had been moving ninety kilograms of heroin a month to Indiviglio and Romano, who operated under the auspices of Santo Trafficante. But Mondoloni’s return to France would bring about a major change and, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, the FBN would uncover the Nebbia–Douheret facet of the Orsini operation in December 1965. Perhaps coincidentally, this would clear the way for Mondoloni, who would survive for a few years longer, as would SAC member Cecchini. SDECE Agent Mertz, as noted in the previous chapter, would continue to move narcotics to America until 1969!

  Obviously, international drug smuggling would not abate with the demise of Rivard and the Ambassador ring. Other smugglers were eagerly waiting to pick up the slack, and within a year, fugitive Tom Buscetta would visit Mexico and Montreal as an emissary of Carlo Gambino and the Badalamenti clan in Sicily and begin setting up replacement drug routes to the Mafia in New York. Buscetta would also begin to finance Ricord’s Group France in South America in what amounted to the total reorganization of international drug smuggling that followed on the heels of the Rivard and Second Ambassador cases.22

  THE CIA’S SOUTHEAST ASIAN CONNECTION

  Paul Mondoloni, Michel Mertz, Tom Buscetta, and Maurice Castellani would evade their pursuers for years. But other traffickers were not so fortunate, and on 8 October 1964, FBN Agent Albert Garofalo and a contingent of French policemen under Commissaire Michel Hugues raided Jo Cesari’s lab at Clos St. Antoine and seized sixty-four kilograms of morphine base. Not only was it the first heroin conversion lab found in Marseilles in over ten years – as well as a testament to Picini’s policy of working with, rather than against, the French authorities – but by exposing Cesari’s Armenian cousin, Edouard Toudayan, the raid also highlighted the importance of Turkey as a major source of supply in the French connection. Shutting down Turkey’s underground opium economy would be one of the highest priorities of federal drug law enforcement from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s.23

  Another important incident occurred a month later, when a hundred pounds of heroin was stolen from one of Mertz’s America-bound Citroens. Orsini blamed Jean Bousquet, although the culprit may have been Mondoloni. Having lost huge investments in the Abramson and Caron seizures, Mondoloni was anxious to grab a larger share of the French market and, in August 1964, he had vainly offered to facilitate Douheret’s operations. Faced with a recalcitrant rival, Mondoloni may have hijacked Bousquet’s heroin as a way of recouping his losses and establishing himself as the dominant force in France. Or, the drug smuggling world being what it is, Bousquet may have stolen the load for Mondoloni, and gone into business with him and Mertz. In any event, Orsini abandoned Bousquet and began working through Jean Nebbia with a retired US Army major, paving the way for the FBN’s next great case. Made in America by Frank Selvaggi and Frank Waters, the Nebbia case would track back to Paul Mondoloni and the Southeast Asian connection – the inevitable missing link in the CIA’s elusive international narcotics conspiracy.

  The FBN’s intrusion upon this most important CIA drug smuggling operation began in February 1963, when agent Bowman Taylor was assigned to Bangkok on a permanent basis. Hired in 1951 in Dallas, Taylor had served continually in Texas. But his career had stalled and, though an overseas assignment did not suit his parochial personality, he accepted the post in search of advancement. “There was no preparation,” Taylor notes. “I just packed my bags and went.”

  Finding friends in Thailand was not easy, for no one at the Embassy wanted to jeopardize his career by being sullied by the mess a federal narcotic agent would surely make in the Kingdom of Opium. Shunned by his colleagues, Taylor forged relations with the Thai narcotics bureau and with a colonel in the Thai Army’s CID. Three months after his arrival, Taylor received additional help when Agent Charles Casey arrived. A mid-westerner with as little understanding of the Far East as Taylor, Casey teamed up with a Chinese-American FBN agent from San Francisco to make a case on Kuomintang drug smugglers in the Shan States of Burma. For CIA-related reasons, with which the reader is well acquainted by now, the case collapsed after several months.

  At Taylor’s direction, Casey next made a case on two Thai lieutenants serving with the CIA-advised border police. But they were the CIA’s “best” lieutenants, according to Taylor, and after their arrest the Agency simply sent them to manage a drug network in Laos. In another instance, a CIA pilot left a suitcase full of opium at the Air America ticket counter in Bangkok. Taylor and a Thai police officer tailed the pilot to an American air base outside Tokyo; but the pilot was whisked away to the Philippines and put under protective custody by CIA security officers.

  Joining Taylor and Casey in 1965 was Agent Al Habib. Fluent in Arabic and French, Habib, as we know from chapter 15, had a very interesting background. After leaving Tunisia and arriving in San Diego in 1955, he had met Ike Feldman at a synagogue. Feldman recognized that Habib had all the natural attributes for undercover work, and introduced him to George White, who hired Habib five years later, immediately upon his acquisition of US citizenship.

  Assigned to San Francisco, Habib assisted White in the MKULTRA project and became a member of the office’s Asian intelligence group. Central to the group were Chinese-American agents Milton Woo, William Wang, and Alton Bok Wong, upon whom the other FBN agents relied for the interrogation of Asian suspects and the recruitment of Asian informants. White’s enforcement assistant, Daniel Casey, and Peter Niblo, a former CIA agent who knew the Chinese telegraphic code, were also in the group. According to Habib, Feldman was scheduled to go to Bangkok, but elected to remain in New York rather than serve under Bowman Taylor. Eager to get back abroad, Habib took his place. “I went on a ninety-day TDY,” he recalls, “and after the initial shock, I wound up staying two years.”

  The initial shock, of course, was the CIA. “Taylor had gotten in trouble in Laos,” Habib recalls, “and eventually he sent me there to patch things up. I reported to the Embassy in Vientiane, where I was met by a CIA officer. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him I was there to make narcotic cases. Well, that made him nervous, so he called the marine guard. Then he told me to ‘Stay here until we come to get you.’ And I sat there under guard until they took me to see Ambassador William Sullivan.”

  Habib laughs satirically. “I’m sitting in Sullivan’s office surrounded by a gang of menacing CIA officers. Sullivan introduces himself and asks if I would please explain what I’m doing in Laos. I say I’m there to work undercover with the police, to locate morphine labs. To which he replies, ‘Are you serious?’ At which point a CIA officer says to me, ‘You! Don’t do nothing!’ Meanwhile Sullivan goes to his office and composes a yard-long telegram to Secretary Rusk saying, in effect, ‘Don’t they know that Laos [which had withdrawn from the Single Convention in 1963] is off-limits?’ Then they tell me how Taylor set up an undercover buy from a guy. He got a flash roll together and went to the meet covered by the Vientiane police. When the guy steps out of the car and opens the trunk, the police see it’s the king of the Meos. The police run away, and Taylor busts General Vang Pao, alone.”

  “It’s true,” Taylor laughs. “I made a case on Vang Pao [the general just happened to be the commander of the CIA’s private army of indigenous, opium-growing tribesmen in Laos] and was thrown out of the country as a result. But what you weren’t told was that the prime minister gave Vang Pao back his Mercedes Benz and morphine base, and that the CIA sent him to Miami for six months to cool his heels. I wrote a report to Giordano, but when he confronted the CIA, they said the incident never happened.

  “The station chiefs ran things in Southeast Asia,” Taylor stresses, adding that the first secretary at the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok had a private airline for smuggling drugs to Saigon. “I tried to catch him, but there was no assistance. In fact, the CIA actively supported the border police, who were involved in trafficking.” He shrugs. “The CIA would do anything to achieve its goals.”

  Habib returns to his story
. “A few days after Sullivan sends his telegram, Rusk writes back and says, ‘Let him at them.’ So Sullivan calls me into his office and says, ‘Okay. You can work. But don’t forget, they’re fighting a war for us.’ ”

  In effect, Sullivan limited Habib’s investigation of the regional heroin traffic to the involvement of non-CIA Americans. Sullivan referred Habib to Public Safety Advisor Paul Skuse in this regard, and Skuse said that no Americans were involved, that Air Force General Ouane Rattikone was the drug lord, but that the Laotian prime minister protected him. The local US Information Service officers likewise said no Americans were involved, as did Robert Rosselot, president of the CIA-connected Continental Air Service. One lead Habib obtained came from Air America’s security officer, Luther F. Gilbert. Gilbert implicated an American mercenary named Elias L. Papp, and Habib launched an undercover operation against Papp, but without success.24

  Next Habib met with CIA station chief Douglas Blaufarb and his deputy, James Lilley (a close friend of former president George H. W. Bush), regarding heroin factories in Luang Prabang and Houei Sai. According to Habib, the CIA officers were “very well acquainted with the opium traffic in Laos”25 and actually had photos of the heroin factories. They allowed Habib to study the plants for five days, and as a result of his investigation, Habib identified General Rattikone, Rattikone’s brother-in-law, Luang Prabang’s police chief, and a Colonel Huang Hsiang-chun as the protected ringleaders of the regional drug traffic.