“I finally became a group leader in 1964,” Schrier jokes, “even though my case-making days were just about over, because I didn’t have many informants anymore.” He pauses, and then adds solemnly, “Because most of them were dead.”
Dead is one way of putting it; murdered is another. This was no small matter, and the issue of murdered FBN informants (over two dozen by 1968) was a major reason why the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for law enforcement, David Acheson, would approve a secret integrity investigation of the FBN’s New York office in 1965. The rivalry between Schrier and the Ward–Dolce–Biase clique was at the center of this issue, and according to Schrier, the problem dated back to 1959, when Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano decided to make his protégé, Mike Picini, the district supervisor in Boston. “But Mike needed management training first,” Schrier explains, “so Giordano formed a fifth group in New York. He did this by taking a few guys from each of the other four groups and giving them to Mike.” Schrier rolls his eyes. “And I got to go over to Mike’s new group from Group One.”
Picini’s group made two cases, and Schrier was behind both. The first was on a cocaine dealer on the Upper West Side, and the second was made through Ernie Lamantia, the highest-ranking Mafia informer Schrier ever had. How he acquired Lamantia is worth noting. Fred Dick, then an agent in Group One under Ben Fitzgerald, had made a buy from an unknown Italian, who covered himself by driving a car with fake plates that led to a fake address. Frustrated because he couldn’t identify the man, Dick asked Frankie Waters for help. Waters started hanging around the neighborhood and one day he saw the Italian’s car, with a parking ticket stuck under a windshield wiper. Through an employee he knew at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Waters found over forty parking violations for this car on a specific street in New York’s Little Italy. He told Fred Dick, and Dick loitered on the street until the car showed up, and then he grabbed the Italian: Ernie Lamantia.
“Lamantia was a rarity,” Schrier stresses, “an Italian informant. The Italians had the code of silence, but now we can make cases on Italians.
“I was in Picini’s group when Lee Speer asked me to do a submarine job on old Ed Murphy [the FBN agent] in Connecticut. I turned it down, but Fred Dick accepted it – which is how Fred got into Internal Affairs. And while Fred’s slithering around Connecticut, he turned Lamantia over to his group leader, Ben Fitzgerald. When Picini left for Boston, I went back to Group One, and that’s when Fitz gave Lamantia to me.
“Meanwhile Hunt and Mendelsohn located Frank Russo. Out of the twenty-seven defendants indicted in the Orlandino case, Russo was the only one to flip. He had a screwdriver in his pocket when we arrested him, and when we searched his apartment I saw that some screws had been loosened on the door panel to his refrigerator. We opened it up with his screwdriver and found fifteen ounces of junk inside. So now I had Russo in my stable of informants, which included Ernie Lamantia.
“That’s around 1962, and that’s when the troubles started. There was a guy from East Harlem, Georgie Farraco, selling to Blacks. Artie Fluhr was on night duty, and he gets an anonymous call about a load going to Farraco’s apartment. It sounded good so we decided to hit him. I remember that night very well. Artie called me up and said, ‘Bring your Kaopectate and your gun.’ So we arrested Georgie, and when we arrested him, he said, ‘You’ll hear from somebody.’ And sure enough the next day Patty Biase’s waiting in the hall. He points to Farraco and says, ‘He’s with me.’ Well, a few weeks later they find Georgie’s car double-parked. It’d been there twenty-four hours. Seems somebody told on him.
“The next incident occurred about a year later, and involved Frank Russo. Russo’s a good informant, but to be a good informant, he has to sell narcotics. The only way you can make cases is if your informant sells dope. But you have to protect him. You can’t let him sell dope to another agent’s informant, and you can’t introduce him to an undercover agent. So I met him alone, and only my group leader, Ben Fitzgerald, and the enforcement assistant, Pat Ward, knew that Russo was mine.
“John Dolce ran Group Three, then became the enforcement assistant. Dolce was a good agent,” Schrier says with respect. “He was my only competition. But he was ‘in’ with Ward and Gaffney, and he had adopted Patty Biase. So Ward tells Dolce, and Dolce tells Biase, and that’s how Biase found out that Russo was my snitch. This was in 1963 during the Gambling Squad, but I’m still making cases with Russo. And Biase didn’t warn Russo off when he had the chance, so Frank got killed. He was stomped to death in an alley outside a pool hall on 108th Street. When they found his body, rigor mortis had already set in. His face was contorted and he was lying on his back with his arms and legs up in the air.”
Schrier takes a sip of Dewars. “Russo was my first informant to get killed, and Ernie Lamantia knew who did it. Ernie told me the names of the four guys who killed Frank Russo. I told a narcotics cop, Al Villafono, and he told Homicide. But there was a pay-off and nothing was done. I asked Sonny Grosso how that could be, and he said it was like anything else: the cop on the beat takes a sandwich; narcs make money off dope; homicide detectives make money off what’s available to them: murder cases.
“Ernie Lamantia was living with three different women,” Schrier continues. “He had kids by all of them and lots of expenses. He wasn’t a big dope dealer, but he was connected, and he was giving good information. He was talking about the Five Families long before Valachi. He was friends with Fat Artie Repola, who’d gotten a big name because he was busted with Waxy Gordon [in 1951] and did eight years. Fat Artie supplied Ernie, and Ernie let me take a free look. I saw it happen a few times and I could have made Artie easy, but Ernie didn’t want me to. The deal was just to follow Artie and see who he sold to. Ernie and Artie would meet in the Bronx, get into Artie’s car, and I’d follow them.
“Then one Sunday night I get a call. Ernie’s in a bar in the Bronx. He tells me that he’s going to buy a kilo from Artie, and that Artie wants to borrow his car. ‘A kilo’s too much,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it.’ Then I hear Ernie say, ‘Here comes Artie now. I gotta go.’ Half an hour later they find Ernie with a bullet in his head and his car motor running. The next morning Biase makes a comment. He knew about that too.”
Steam is coming out of Schrier’s ears. “Now I’ve got two informants dead,” Schrier continues, “and I’m infuriated. I felt sorry for Ernie’s families, and for a year I had the same dream every night: I’m standing in a hallway with my gun on Artie Repola, who’s on the lam.
“Then a couple of smart cops arrested Artie at his mother’s gravesite on the anniversary of her death. They couldn’t arrest him for Russo’s murder, but they had him on a parole violation, so they turned him over to me, and I tried to flip him.
“Meanwhile Belk goes to the War College and I’m made acting district supervisor, during which time I get a call from Fitz. Fitz is now head of the Court House Squad, and they grabbed an Air France steward with a couple of keys up in Canada. At the same time Fat Artie’s up there to cop from Carmine Paladino. Turns out Artie’s a stool for Fitz, but he never told me!
“Now I’m in a blind rage. I told everyone that Fitz stole my stool and well, I must have told the wrong person, because in no time Artie’s dead. He was shot four times. That’s June 1965. Artie was shot in the liver and it took him nine days to die. But he never said who did it.”
Unknown to Schrier, Fat Artie Repola was an informant for Ben Fitzgerald at the Court House Squad, and was gathering information about people involved in the Air France case. That’s why Fitzgerald, and presumably District Supervisor Belk and George Gaffney, the enforcement assistant at headquarters, didn’t tell Schrier – even though he was running the International Group. The need to protect Repola also explains why they and the RCMP agreed not to arrest Carmine Paladino on 24 March 1965, when Paladino received six kilograms of heroin from his Canadian contact in Montreal. Paladino was the Mafia’s courier to the Air France ring, and the RCMP agreed not to ar
rest him for two reasons. First, because “federal agents took advantage of the courier’s brief absence to seize the merchandise.” And secondly, because the FBN needed to keep Repola “intact” in order to make cases on the people, like Ernie Lamantia, he was supplying in New York.5
Apparently, Fitzgerald, Belk, and Gaffney didn’t care that Repola had murdered Schrier’s best informant; they were content to sacrifice the smaller cases Schrier and Lamantia were making in New York, so they could make a splashier case in Canada. And it was a very important case, leading to seizure of thirty-seven pounds of heroin and the arrest of Georges Henrypierre, an associate of Simone Christmann from the 1961 OAS case. It also exposed Henri La Porterie, “the man in charge of the ring and a close associate of Paul Mondoloni.”6
But in another respect, the obsession with secrecy backfired, for by enraging Schrier, Artie Repola got murdered – and, as a result, his FBN case agents lost the chance to make cases on a group of Mafia narcotics traffickers, including Joseph Bendenelli, Vincent Pacelli, and Gennardo Zanfardino, then operating in New York.
THE RESIGNATION OF JOHN DOLCE
In 1964, FBN headquarters had finally, to its credit, recognized that there was an urgent need to end the factional infighting and secret operations that resulted in busted cases and murdered informants. One faltering step in that direction was the revival of the International Group under Lenny Schrier. Another was John Dolce’s resignation, on 9 July 1965, to become chief of Public Safety in Westchester County, a job he would hold for the next thirty years.
Why Dolce resigned is unclear. He would not speak with the author. But three explanations – ranging from the popular, to the plausible, to the controversial – have been offered. The most popular, although speculative, explanation is that the IRS had concluded that Dolce’s lifestyle was lavish beyond his means, even though his lovely wife Lola was an heiress. Most New York agents agree that John Dolce left the FBN simply to avoid a hassle with the IRS.
Miami agent Rick Dunagan offers a more plausible account. “Right after Marshall was busted,” he says, “Johnny Dolce came down to Miami to straighten out the office. Dolce was sharp, and within a week he had us on the sheriff’s frequency. He’d have been a good boss, but he didn’t last long. One day I walked into his office. Nick Navarro, who’d been a barber in Cuba, was cutting his hair. Dolce was on the phone with Gaffney, and he was very upset. ‘I told you that under no circumstances will I take this job on a permanent basis,’ he said. And sure enough, at the end of thirty days, Dolce told Gaffney, ‘I’m going home. Book me out.’ And he was gone.”
Dunagan’s explanation is hard to refute. But the FBN was steeped in underworld intrigues and office infighting, so naturally there is a more complex and controversial explanation for Dolce’s sudden departure. It makes sense of the unexpected, rapid transfer of New York’s enforcement assistant to Miami. It’s also related to the unresolved French Connection case of January 1962, and the on going investigation of Angie Tuminaro’s younger brother Frank. This part of the story requires a little catching up.
Having made an undisclosed deal with the authorities, Angie Tuminaro, at the age of fifty-two, surrendered in Miami in the early summer of 1962. But his brother Frank continued to deal narcotics in New York with Alexander “Tootie” Schoenfeld, owner of the garage where courier Jacques Angelvin parked the car that may have contained the French Connection case heroin. In May 1963, naive Jacques Angelvin was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he got out in four). Unrepentant François Scaglia received a stiffer sentence and was incarcerated in Attica Prison without revealing anything about his French accomplices. Neither Jean Jehan, who had slipped away to France with the money, nor his mysterious accomplice J. Mouren, could be located, so the French Connection case heroin was kept in the NYPD’s property clerk’s office as evidence, should the French fugitives ever be brought to trial in New York.
Meanwhile, Sonny Grosso, Eddie Egan, and Frankie Waters commenced a leisurely pursuit of Frank Tuminaro. And finally, after three years of observation (during which time Egan earned the nickname “Popeye” from the effects of pep pills and from watching everyone through binoculars for so long), Tuminaro was arrested on 3 February 1965 with thirteen accomplices, including Schoenfeld and William Paradise. Tuminaro immediately jumped bail and stayed on the lam until he was murdered in 1968.
With this background, and that from the French Connection case chapter in mind, Lenny Schrier and Frankie Waters provide the controversial explanation for why John Dolce resigned. Schrier says that Waters, while under his supervision in early 1965 as a member of the International Group, followed Tuminaro’s delivery man to Dolce. “The guy could have been his informant,” Schrier muses, giving his archrival the benefit of the doubt. In addition, Waters and Sonny Grosso allegedly tape-recorded a conversation Tuminaro had with Dolce. This in itself does not imply complicity, for again, like his deliveryman, Tuminaro may have been Dolce’s informant – and as we will learn in the next portion of this chapter, stringing informants along was part of the narcotics game. In any event, this information was allegedly passed to District Supervisor George Belk at a secret meeting held at the CIA’s 13th Street pad; and as a result, Belk and Henry Giordano – despite Gaffney’s best efforts to prevent it from happening – gave Dolce an ultimatum: take the job in Miami or quit. As Schrier dryly observes, “Dolce resigned not long after that.”
Whether his decision was voluntary or forced upon him, Dolce’s resignation marked the end of an era in FBN history. In 1964, Pat Ward left New York to become the district supervisor in Chicago, and Patty Biase moved into private enterprise and an early death, either from a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage; or, by Tom Tripodi’s account, from poison administered by a retired NYPD detective at a 1966–67 New Year’s Eve party. In any event, by the summer of 1965, the ruling Ward–Dolce–Biase clique was gone and in its absence, Lenny Schrier, Frank Waters, and Frank Selvaggi emerged as New York’s dominant case-making triumvirate.
ANDY TARTAGLINO’S MYTHIC TRANSFORMATION
As a result of the Marshall and Hermo affairs, IRS inspectors were already probing the financial affairs of every New York FBN agent when an ex-con and small-time drug dealer named Joseph Kadlub killed a policeman on 31 July 1965. “Kadlub was sitting in a Bay Shore bar waving a gun and busting the waitress’s chops,” an agent recalls, “so an off-duty cop named Maitlan Mercer, who just happened to be there, takes him outside. Kadlub turns around and shoots Mercer dead. Mercer’s partner rushes outside and shoots Kadlub dead. And that’s how that problem began.”
The problem was that Kadlub was FBN Agent Frank Farrell’s informer. An agent for less than two years, Farrell was using Kadlub to make a case on Carmine “Junior” Persico, an up-and-coming soldier in the Colombo family. Kadlub, alas, was playing a double game and, while working for the FBN, he was helping crime reporter Dom Frasca investigate FBN corruption. Using wiretap equipment provided by the FBI, Frasca – perhaps at the FBI’s instigation – recorded a phone call from Kadlub to Farrell, in which Farrell said he was shaking down Persico for two grand a month on a phony narcotics charge. Immediately after Kadlub’s death, Frasca charged the FBN with systematic corruption in a series of articles in the tabloid New York Journal-American. In his articles, he made sure to emphasize that District Supervisor George Belk had monitored Farrell’s incriminating chat with Kadlub. Henry Giordano, however, steadfastly refused to investigate the allegations, and Farrell was exonerated when Belk explained to the press that tricking informants was part of the narcotics game, and that they were merely stringing Kadlub along.7
Belk may have been telling the truth, but fallout from the Kadlub affair further riled the White House, and Lyndon Johnson’s pain was felt at Main Treasury, where, by a portentous twist of fate, Andy Tartaglino had arrived with a preconceived plan on how to purge the FBN of all its sinners. But other matters would come first. “Fred Douglas [the Treasury Department’s aging liaison to Interpo
l and the CIA] had had a heart attack,” Tartaglino explains, “and had fallen behind on his correspondence. So Gaffney, who wanted me out of his hair anyway, sent me to Main Treasury to replace Douglas and to work with Arnold Sagalyn, the new law enforcement coordinator.”
Tartaglino resolved the correspondence problems with Interpol and took over Douglas’s contacts with the CIA. “It took about six months to straighten things out,” he recalls, “and just about then David Acheson arrived as [Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon’s] assistant for law enforcement. Acheson’s first job was to reorganize the Secret Service in the wake of the JFK assassination, and he was very busy doing that. I had just finished the Interpol assignment and he needed help, so he asked me to stay at Main Treasury as his assistant, to help resolve a problem between Henry Giordano and Customs Commissioner Lester Johnson.”
Giordano had complained to Acheson that Customs was subsidizing drug dealers in Mexico and, through its misuse of convoys, losing loads of heroin. Customs denied the charges and, in retaliation, stopped communicating with the FBN. This had serious consequences, and in one instance an FBN informant actually bought heroin from a Customs informant, and neither of their case agents realized it until after the exchange had taken place. Agents from the rival organizations were subverting each other’s investigations, and finally shots were exchanged in a border town. “There was so much anger between Johnson and Giordano,” Tartaglino says, “that a compromise could not be reached.
“Luckily,” he adds, “Johnson had been the Customs Attaché in Rome when I was there in the late 1950s. We’d formed a rapport, and when Johnson saw me at Main Treasury, he asked Acheson if I could replace Giordano as the FBN’s representative to Customs. Giordano and Acheson agreed, and I did a six-month border study. The final report set guidelines for convoys and the use of informants inside Mexico, and paved the way for a compromise that was never followed.”
The Strength of the Wolf Page 47