“The big problem was corruption,” Salmi reiterates. “The average Istanbul cop made about fifty dollars a month, and his rent was sixty, which meant that a lot of cases were sold out.”
The illegal activities of the Turkish police force were well known at FBN headquarters. In 1962, Jack Cusack had reported that the chief of the Central Narcotics Bureau in Ankara “extorted kickbacks from informants.” Istanbul’s police chief considered the traffic of morphine base “a source of revenue,” and the head of Istanbul’s narcotics unit believed the problem was the importation of drugs by non-Turkish citizens. The only reliable cop was Turkey’s Interpol representative, Halvit Elver. But Elver was on the CIA’s payroll and was shunned by his colleagues, who called him disparagingly “the American tail.”7
As in France, official complacency was related to the fact that Turkey had very few heroin addicts of its own. In addition, smoking hash was part of its culture. As a result, one of Salmi’s hardest chores was persuading the Turk narcotics squad to even consider conducting drug investigations. He had little technical support, either. There were no radios, and he used the same 1957 Chevrolet that Sal Vizzini had used six years before. But he loved his work and despite the brutality of the Turkish police (as vividly depicted in the movie Midnight Express), Salmi made an unprecedented string of cases, as the focus in drug law enforcement shifted from war-torn Lebanon to Turkey.
THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
In 1965, Turkish smugglers were already bypassing their traditional Syrian and Lebanese middlemen and dealing directly with Italians and Corsicans. The quantity of narcotics moving to Western Europe had reached record highs, and Dennis Dayle, though stationed in Beirut, was spending more time in Turkey than in Lebanon, often on behalf of the CIA, from whom he obtained front money in return for services rendered. In one instance the station chief gave Dayle nine million Turkish liras for an undercover job. “And I didn’t even have to sign a receipt,” he recalls with muted awe.
But trouble lay ahead. “Paul Knight introduced me to Carlo Dondola,” he explains, “and through Carlo I contracted to buy a ton of opium in Mersin, a city on the Turkish coast, not far from Syria. One of the smugglers was the brother of the regional police chief, so I went there with the police from Andana, and we seized the dopers and locked the opium up in the local jail; a ton of opium, which I field tested as positive. Then I mailed samples back to DC for verification. But when I got back to Beirut, I was notified that the Turks had determined that it was river mud.”
Very coolly, Dayle says, “The sample was high grade, the seizure was mud. Which leaves only two conclusions. And fraud was the conclusion reached by Washington.”
According to John Evans, then acting chief of foreign operations at FBN headquarters, “Dennis was blasted out of Beirut, and the CIA moved in.”
Having been set up by the CIA, Dennis Dayle returned to Chicago for a year, and in April 1966 jumped to BDAC. In the meantime he was replaced in Beirut by Agent Arthur Doll. Described by Dick Salmi as “a midwestern hayseed,” Doll, although liked by the Lebanese, had a hard time adjusting to Middle Eastern culture, and he deeply resented the fact that suave CIA Agent Paul Knight had been given official diplomatic credentials as the region’s Treasury Attaché. This cover put Knight above Doll in the Embassy’s hierarchy, and enabled the Knights, not the Dolls, to attend Embassy parties and make all the important contacts. Doll’s persistent objections to this arrangement alienated Knight, and without his support, Doll was rendered ineffective at the same time the Arab–Israeli “Six Day War” altered forever the political climate of the region – and with it the nature of international drug trafficking.
One early casualty was the reigning Lebanese drug lord, Sami Khoury. According to Joe Salm, Khoury and his partner, ex-Lebanese Sûreté officer Mounir Alaouie, crossed the River Jordan and were never seen again after “they failed to honor an obligation” with a trafficker who happened to be the king of Jordan’s uncle and the boss of the Bedouin. Knight heard that Alaouie had been “naughty in money matters.” In either case, the result was the same.8
Another sign of the shifting scene was the collapse of Intrabank and the mysterious death in November 1966 of Youseff Beidas, its wealthy Palestinian founder. Among Intrabank’s holdings were shipyards in Beirut and Marseilles, an airline, and the infamous Casino du Liban, where Alaouie and Khoury had consorted with Corsican crime lord Marcel Francisci. According to author Jim Hougan in his book Spooks,
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was said to extract a percentage of the [Casino Liban’s] skim to finance terrorist operations against Israel, and law enforcement authorities contended that the gaming tables and the Intra Bank itself were used to launder the proceeds from heroin transactions conducted by the casino’s manager, Marcel Paul Francisci.”9
In a provocative passage in his book, Hougan claims that French industrialist Paul Louis Weiller, after putting Intrabank Beirut out of business in 1967, joined forces with three people: Eduardo Baroudi, a notorious arms trafficker; Conrad Bouchard, a Canadian heroin smuggler associated with Pepe Cotroni; and Marcel Boucon, a Mediterranean smuggler – and thereafter emerged, under Richard Nixon’s protection, as the major force in a new facet of the French connection.10
Be that as it may, with the forced retirement of Khoury and Alaouie, the increased security measures in Beirut that accompanied the Six Day War, and the murder of Beidas and the failure of Intrabank, Corsican crime lord Marcel Francisci had no choice but to retreat to Marseilles, where he was forced to engage the rival Guérini gang in a bloody turf war.
Increasingly isolated and ever more dependant on America, Israel was forming closer relations with the FBN too. As Bob DeFauw recalls, “Yitzak showed up at my door about two weeks after I arrived, and thereafter visited me about three or four times a year. He was a general in the Mossad and had responsibility for the same geographical areas as I. His people had the book on everything that went on in their backyard, and whatever I needed to know about the Bekka Valley in Lebanon, he got for me. In return, Yitzak liked hearing about what we had on the Lebanese heroin families, the Makkoots and the Maaloufs. He was also interested in gunrunning: ‘Where are the guns coming from?’11
“The Israelis helped us move people around too. They’d fly a guy to Franco’s people in Spain where, if there were drug charges pending, we could deal with them. We’re talking serious interrogations. So these people became useful informants by virtue of the Israelis moving them to places where they’d face problems.”
In June 1967 came the Six Day War and the subsequent alliance of the PLO with Syria’s Ba’ath Party. Having anticipated this development, an army of CIA officers descended on Beirut, including Air America’s former operations manager in Vietnam, Moe Kuthbert. With the arrival of “Air Opium” on the scene, knave spookery and drug smuggling merged in the Middle East more closely than ever before, putting greater pressure on FBN agents. “We had a Palestinian informer in France,” Vic Maria explains, “who worked for the Israelis, the PLO, and the Lebanese. We see him go into the Israeli embassies in Rome and Copenhagen. Do we give this to the Lebanese police?”
The answer was an emphatic no, because the Israeli connection was one of James Angleton’s most closely guarded secrets, and was protected in every instance in order to preserve the Mossad’s ability to monitor political, military, and economic developments in the region. As Maria observes, “French Jews in Algeria and Morocco had the connections, which is why the traffic, which follows linguistic channels, went through South America, Florida, and Texas, to the French in America.”
The FBN had known about the CIA–Israeli connection at least since 1957, when Paul Knight reported that Edmond Safra and his brother were smuggling morphine base from Beirut to Milan, and laundering the profits through Safra’s bank. That investigation was quietly closed for political reasons, but in June 1966, after Safra opened the Republic National Bank in New York, the FBN launched another investigation into his
affairs. Again, in September 1966, the case on Safra was closed, this time after Interpol reported that it was not in possession of any information that would confirm any implications that influential Edmund Safra was involved in drug trafficking.12
Before he passed away, Paul Knight acknowledged that Safra had indeed helped to launder drug money, and that his brother had smuggled morphine base. But Paul feared being sued, or labeled anti-Semitic, so he never talked publicly about what he privately knew to be true.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION ENCORE
The Six Day War brought about a change in drug routes, but the French connection was still the focus and, in 1967, with the FBN compromised at every twist and turn, it was far from being dismantled. One enduring problem was that the major traffickers were protected by top French officials. Specifically, Paul Mondoloni and Jean Jehan, mastermind of the famous 1962 French Connection case, were named in the December 1965 Nebbia case; but Jehan was never extradited to the US, and Mondoloni was released the day after he was arrested at Orly airport.13 Although charged with moving ten tons of heroin worth $10 billion over two decades, Mondoloni would meet with the Cotronis and other “key gangsters from Canada and the US in Acapulco, Mexico in 1970.”14 He was still at large in the mid-1970s, overseeing the Mexican connection, and operated with impunity until his assassination in Marseilles on 29 July 1985.
In the mid-1960s, thanks primarily to official corruption at every point on the drug trafficking map, the narcotics business was booming as never before, and big cases were there for the making, as was demonstrated in May 1966, when Vic Maria got a tip that generated the FBN’s next great success, the Oscilloscope case. Maria’s informant (whom he had acquired from SDECE Agent Antoine Lopez) revealed that Paul Chastagnier in Guayaquil, Ecuador, was about to send six kilograms of heroin to an unknown New York buyer. A veteran trafficker, Chastagnier had smuggled narcotics with Paul Mondoloni, whom he referred to as his “big boss,” since 1954.15 In 1966, he co-owned an import-export firm in New York City with the wife of Georges Boucheseiche, the Attia Gang member to whom Paris stupes Louis Souchon and Roger Voitot, and SDECE Agent Lopez, had delivered Mehdi Ben Barka for torture and assassination on 29 October 1965.
Based on Maria’s information, members of Lenny Schrier’s International Group placed Chastagnier under surveillance upon his arrival in New York in December 1966, but they saw no evidence of illicit activity on his part. French officials, however, discovered through SDECE wiretaps that Chastagnier had developed a method of smuggling heroin in oscilloscopes, and that another shipment was being prepared for delivery on 20 March 1967. The French informed Maria that Louis Bonsigneur was to receive the heroin at Chastagnier’s office on 90 West Street in New York, and then deliver it to Albert Larrain-Maestre, a Puerto Rican national soon to become the FBN’s most wanted man.
On 20 March 1967, without alerting Chastagnier or any of his accomplices, Maria and Inspector Marcel Carrere seized two cartons packed with oscilloscopes at Orly airport. Each carton contained six oscilloscopes and each oscilloscope held one kilogram of heroin. Keeping one carton so the French could claim credit in the case, Carrere departed from the strict letter of French law, which does not allow narcotics to leave the country, and, in an effort to establish good relations with New York District Supervisor George Belk, allowed the others to be put on the plane. Accompanied by French detectives, the cartons were flown to New York and delivered to Chastagnier’s company, where FBN agents arrested Chastagnier’s sales manager as he accepted them. But Chastagnier’s arrest in Paris had, by then, already been reported by the French press, and his partners in America, Louis Bonsigneur and Albert Larrain-Maestre, were able to flee.
As Morty Benjamin recalls, “We knew that Maestre’s girlfriend was a passenger service manager for Trans-Caribbean Airlines. We’d seen her with one of Maestre’s customers, so we rushed right over to her apartment after the arrests. When we got there, Maestre’s bags were downstairs with the doorman. We ran upstairs to his room, but all we found was a drawer full of money. Maestre wasn’t there. So we ran back down and when we got outside, his bags were gone! We were five minutes behind him all the way.”
The manhunt for Maestre would forever undo the myth that Castro’s Cuba was the major transit point of narcotics from Europe and South America. Instead it would prove that heroin from Joe Orsini in Madrid was transported to Puerto Rico through the Dominican Republic on Spanish and French ships, which picked up cocaine in Venezuela and Mexico along the way, before delivering the narcotics to receivers in New York. Another significant revelation was that Maestre, while on the run and searching for new customers and a source to replace Chastagnier, met with Norman Rothman in Miami in June 1967. A member of the drug traffickers’ hall of fame, million dollar man Rothman was a close friend of Meyer Lansky and several senior CIA and FBI agents.16
Upon his arrest in Madrid, Spain, on 5 December 1967, Maestre would betray his accomplice in Spain, Domingo Orsini, and his customers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His testimony would lead to the indictment of Auguste Ricord in Argentina, and open a major investigation into Group France in South America. Chastagnier’s sales manager would also provide numerous leads into this same far-reaching network, centered in Marseilles.
Most significantly, Maestre’s association with Norman Rothman underscored the fact that Meyer Lansky was still pulling the financial strings behind the scenes. Lansky’s organization, with the consent of his Mafia associates, engaged in insurance fraud and tax evasion through offshore bank accounts and ghost companies. It used stolen securities as collateral for loans and, with the help of Panama’s ambassador to Great Britain, Eusebio Morales, it laundered the Vegas skim through the Panama branch of a Swiss bank. Lansky, notably, had been introduced to Morales by Tibor Rosenbaum, the likely Mossad agent and owner of the drug money-laundering bank, BCI. And for that reason, Lansky, the dark star of organized crime, remained above the law.
THE LAW
Faced with the harsh reality of its limitations, the FBN’s small overseas contingent was learning, as Marseilles Agent Bob DeFauw observes, “that there was one set of rules domestically and another internationally. To begin with, our informers weren’t working off cases. They were mercenaries, but they were your partners too. Often they had police credentials, and they always carried a gun. So you learned how to work with everyone. There was a priest who ran a school in Rome and delivered morphine base to Paris. There were old Nazis too. When a hit was ordered [on some unfortunate leftist], these old Nazis were imported through the collaborator network in Europe, North Africa, and South America. Many were granted asylum in Spain where they served as anti-communist informers for the Franco regime.”17
FBN agents were also, finally, learning to be wary of the CIA. “So much of their information was classified, you could never tell if a guy [like Rosenbaum or Safra] was material,” Vic Maria explains. “As a result, lots of [potentially explosive] information wasn’t acted on. Other times you ended up following a guy [like Ben Barka] who wasn’t in narcotics.”
Fewer ethical restraints, however, and the return of Marcel Francisci to Marseilles, meant that fomenting dissent among traffickers was easier than ever overseas. “We shot Joe Catalanotto [the veteran Mafioso drug smuggler from Detroit turned FBN informant in Mexico] into Joe Orsini,” DeFauw recalls with delight. “We had him tell Orsini that Antoine Guérini was setting up his shipments and telling the police where his labs were. Antoine was killed in June 1967, and his son barely escaped with his life. When Antoine’s brother Meme Guérini found out who did it, he took the guy to a cliff, broke every bone in his body, then threw him over.”
Meme Guérini went to jail for that murder, and Antoine was dead, which meant that the Guérini gang had been effectively eliminated as a major link in the international drug trade. “But there was a downside to that operation.” DeFauw sighs. “Old Joe did such a good job that we promised to ask the INS to allow him to return to America to visit his famil
y. But the process was too slow for Joe, and against my wishes he went to Italy to visit his family there, using fake ID we had furnished. And that’s when [Marseilles Police Inspector Robert] Pasquier gave him up. Old Joe was arrested, and for fear of creating an international incident we dropped him, and he was banished for life to Bari.”
NEW MAFIA NAMES AND FACES
After taking the Fifth before a grand jury convened by US Attorney Robert Morgenthau in October 1964, and then vanishing, Joe Bonanno’s whereabouts had become a cause célèbre by 9 February 1966, when the New York Times reported that he was in Tunis handling international narcotics transactions for the Sicilian Mafia, and that five federal agents from an unnamed agency had gone to Palermo to search for him. The Times did not name Bonanno’s Sicilian contacts, but it did imply that he was a government snitch. Evidently some disgruntled Bonanno family members had reached the same conclusion, and, on 28 January 1966, renegade Frank Mari took a few shots at Bonanno’s emotionally unstable son Billy and his aides, John Notaro and Frank Labruzzo. Mari and Michael Consolo had deserted the Bonanno family for a splinter faction formed, with the Mafia Commission’s consent, by Gaspare Di Gregorio in 1965.18
The Strength of the Wolf Page 55