“Early that day I got a call from Lenny,” Morty Benjamin recalls, “saying there was a load coming into Dorval, so I hopped on a plane and flew up to Montreal to work with Fred Cornetta, the Customs inspector up there. We’re looking around the airport while Canadian Customs was making the bust, and I see Viv standing off to one side! I’d met her back in 1961 when Lenny first busted Gerry. So Fred and I grab her and take her to a room, where she tells me she’s working for Jack Gohde. She thinks Gohde’s still with the FBN! So I immediately called Lenny to verify what she had said. Lenny says, ‘I’ll get right back to you,’ and he calls Gohde. Gohde denies everything, so I return to New York and write a memo that includes all the allegations Viv made about drug dealers who had their hooks into agents, and vice versa.”2
Benjamin wrote his initial report on 9 June 1967, reciting Vivienne’s allegation that she had introduced Gohde to “the Fraulein” (a prostitute named Ursula working for Ike Feldman, perhaps in a MKULTRA blackmail scheme that targeted Russians and East Germans at the UN), and that Gohde had shot drug trafficker John Cangiano. She named FBN agents Frank Bishopp, Cleophus Robinson and Lenny Schrier, and Assistant US Attorney Bill Tendy, as her friends. She said that “even your district supervisor, Mr. Belk, owes me a favor too.”
“Belk wouldn’t front the money to make the call to Marseilles to confirm Jack Gohde’s tie to Nagelberg,” Benjamin frowns. “Maybe he thought I was wrong. Maybe not.”
Or maybe Belk was covering himself. In 1965, he wrote a letter to federal prosecutors that got Gerson Nagelberg off his 1961 bust. Belk wrote the letter because Schrier said the Nagelbergs were his best informants. But were they? “He had to attribute the cases he was making to someone,” an agent comments, “so maybe he wrote them off as being made by Nagelberg?”
TARTAGLINO’S TACTICS
By the summer of 1967, Tartaglino had indexed every New York agent’s tax returns, and had started questioning them about their finances. “You’re trying to get leads,” he explains, “but you’re also trying to sew up a case against the agent; and to get perjury, you have to know the answers to some of the questions you ask. That’s how you get them to lie under oath. It was lots of work, and it was frustrating too, because we’d have a good case going, then suddenly the agent would quit and jump to BDAC.”
As Art Fluhr recalls, “Treasury sent in the IRS inspectors, and the first thing they did was investigate Belk and me. They did an in-depth audit of our net worth, and we were cleared, and I was made the liaison between Giordano and the IRS. Then Andy starts coming in with cases. In one case he says, ‘You’ve got a guy here who never filed an income tax statement in his life.’
“I said, ‘Andy, you’re telling me something, but what’s it got to do with the FBN? If the agent’s got a job on the side, and he’s not reporting it, how the hell is Belk supposed to know?’ But Andy insisted, so I asked him why he hadn’t filed. He says, ‘I’m single, so they take it out anyway.’ I tell him, ‘You gotta file.’ So he files and gets a refund! But like a lot of guys, he’s so mad he quits. He starts a security firm for Motown Records, and soon he’s making ten times more money than he ever did with the Bureau.
“When Andy came in,” Fluhr snarls, “it was all corruption, and fifty good agents went down the drain for nothing.”
Having backed the agents into a corner, Tartaglino began to examine their informant files. “If an agent has an informant who’s going to get twenty years,” Tartaglino explains, “the agent will tell him, ‘Make cases for me and I’ll get the sentence reduced.’ And that’s okay. But some of the agents weren’t doing anything to get the sentences reduced. They were keeping the informants on a string. And then, in some cases, the informant would die.”
Tartaglino’s eyes are twinkling. “Say I’ve got three buys on Gotti through my informant, Pascoli, who has to testify at the trial. So I arrest Gotti, and in the car I mention where Pascoli lives. Gotti leaves a bundle of cash on the seat, and the next thing you know, Pascoli gets killed. And that’s how it worked.”
Knowing it was the only way to make cases on bad agents, Tartaglino decided to take over the FBN’s entire stable of informants. Chuck Leya was in the office when Belk assembled all the agents and delivered the news. “As you can imagine,” Leya says, “the impact was explosive: FBN operations in New York came to a screeching halt, the good agents got demoralized, and the bad agents ran to the US Attorney’s office to cover their asses – and they started calling their informants too.”
Tartaglino then started hiring informants, including Richard Lawrence, to set up the bad agents. The scheme worked like this: Andy would have the informant call up his case agent and say, falsely, that some other agent was selling dope. If the case agent did not report the allegation, no matter how outlandish, he could be fired. But many of the informers double-crossed Tartaglino. After promising to cooperate, they’d call up their case agent and sell updates on his progress. When he found out that this was happening, Tartaglino tried to checkmate the bad informants by asking US Attorney Robert Morgenthau not to “write off” any more cases.
“If you have an informant who’ll cooperate,” Chuck Leya explains, “you’ve got to play along with him in order to make cases. But headquarters didn’t see it that way, so it was tough to begin with. Then Andy had everyone turn over his informers, and that’s when it mushroomed. That’s when Andy started turning the informants against the agents. Now if I’m an informer and I’m compromised, Andy’s going to be my savior. It happened to me with one of my informants. He tells Andy that I used the office car for personal reasons and that my reports weren’t accurate. Soon I’m heading for an administrative hearing. So I quit.”
MYSTERIOUS RESIGNATIONS
Morty Benjamin vividly remembers the day, 3 November 1967, that his friend and mentor, Lenny Schrier, was called up front. “The inspectors were there,” he says, “and a few hours later, Lenny comes out, white as a sheet.” Morty whispers softly, “He passed right by me without saying a word, cleaned out his desk, and I never saw him again.”
A few minutes later, Benjamin was called into the front office, and Artie Fluhr told him that Schrier had been asked to explain a large deposit in his bank account. Schrier said his father had been a cab driver all his life, and had saved a large sum of money in a box, which he gave to Lenny to deposit in his account. According to another source, Schrier said the money was a cash inheritance his wife had received from a former employer. But apart from the money, there was also the issue of his relationship with the Nagelbergs, and six days after Schrier resigned, two more of Nagelberg’s couriers were caught at Orly Airport with five kilograms of heroin, while boarding a flight to Bermuda. As Vic Maria recalls, “When we made the bust, the [couriers] implicated Lenny Schrier. So we just naturally assumed that Morty Benjamin, who’d worked for Lenny all those years, was involved too.”
As the Nagelberg investigation expanded to include Benjamin, former FBN agents Frank Dolce and Jack Gohde – then investigators for the Nassau County Sheriff’s office – were arrested on 12 December 1967, based on information provided by cooperating informant Eddie Mitchell. Also arrested that day were FBN Agent Cleophus A. Robinson, and NYPD Special Investigations Unit detectives Raymond Imp, Marvin Moskowitz, and Charles Kelly. Robinson was charged with selling marijuana; Kelly, Imp and Moskowitz were charged with selling cocaine; and Dolce and Gohde were charged with selling heroin.
“That’s when the case breaks wide open,” Tom Taylor says excitedly. “We had wired Jack Gohde’s informant, and he’d met with Dolce and Gohde at various places. Then we make a heroin buy from them right in the Nassau County Sheriff’s office! The arrests weren’t pleasant, but they didn’t resist. Then the Nassau DA put out a press release saying he had done all the work.” Taylor laughs. “He hadn’t. He just had the balls to say he had.”
Around this time, the Paris office (which had set up the bust of Nagelberg’s couriers at Orly Airport and in Montreal), gave Tartaglino t
he ammunition he needed to oust a corrupt group leader, whose name Tartaglino would not reveal for ethical reasons. “The group leaders in New York were talking on a regular basis with Vic Maria in Paris,” Tartaglino explains, “exchanging information so as not to get into hassles with the French over unilateral operations and wiretaps. Then an informant in Paris calls us up and says he can buy anything out of the New York office. He says a group leader would call Customs to let him through, and Customs would do it. The informant didn’t say he was carrying drugs on these trips, but if he is, it’s a big problem.
“I didn’t tell Belk,” Tartaglino continues, “but we planted a false set of facts in the office through Interpol, and the day before the informant was going to buy the information, I asked Belk to call a group leaders’ meeting for the next day. All of them showed up except one, who was on the phone with the informant.” Tartaglino adds with a level look, “The Assistant US Attorney said that one buy was not enough to indict, and the person quit two days later.”
THE DAY OF INFAMY
“New York was like an agency unto itself,” Art Fluhr says, “and Andy was after anyone who’d been there during ‘the corrupt days.’ But most of all he wanted Frankie Waters.
“Waters was the reason I was demoted the first time,” Fluhr adds laconically, “by which I mean the shooting incident in Paramus, New Jersey, on October 21, 1967 – what I call, ‘The Day of Infamy.’ At the time, Waters was teaching a course in investigative techniques to some local cops in Ramsey, New Jersey. The course had ended, and we were having a graduation party at a local gin mill. Belk’s there with most of the group leaders, and he makes a wisecrack about some guy’s wife. The guy makes a move on Belk, and Waters flattens him with a barstool. A fight breaks out between the cops and the agents, so we hustle Belk the hell out of there, and take him to another saloon up the line, where the police chief of Paramus is having a party. It’s two in the morning. The place is closed. We’re inside and we hear shots. We go outside and see Frankie Black on the hood of my Buick Riviera. He’d put a bullet through the windshield!
“Next morning I get a call. All the wives are talking. So I go back to Paramus, knock out the windshield and drive the car across the George Washington Bridge to a repair shop. Later that day Pat O’Carroll calls. Pat was the training chief down in Washington, and he’d been up for the festivities. Pat tells me the police chief is upset: some innocent bystander has a broken arm and the chief’s going to have a line-up of FBN agents to try to identify who did it.”
Fluhr takes a sip of his bourbon. “Belk was supposed to go to the graduation ceremony that day. Now he can’t. Then a sergeant comes by with a reporter and Nick Panella’s Hunter College ring, which is the only evidence they have. I smooth things out, get the ring back, and nothing’s said for two months, until Waters gets drunk one night and tells Chan Wysor, who tells Gaffney, who calls me down to Washington. Gaffney’s looking to nail Belk, so I covered his ass. I said it was all my fault, and that’s how I got demoted the first time.”
“Oh, no!” Frankie Waters bellows. “It didn’t happen like that! Fluhr was Belk’s assistant, and he decided who got to use the seized cars. I’m a group leader, and he promises me a nice new Oldsmobile that’s sitting in the garage. I wait three months for the thing, then he goes and takes it for himself!”
Frankie Waters smiles his demonic smile. “At the time I was teaching a class at the police academy in Bergen County. I’m teaching rookie cops how to be a lawman within the Bill of Rights. Miranda-type stuff. I’m teaching this course because I can articulate the rules,” he laughs, “not because I followed them.
“Anyway, after the course is over the students throw a party for the instructors. Everyone gets drunk and Belk says something totally out of character to a woman. That’s the way it is with episodic drunks. Anyway, her date gets up to smack Belk, so I hit him with a barstool. He was a big guy, and I was glad he stayed down. Then we fled the scene. We drive up to this place where Fluhr has that nice new Olds parked outside. Seeing it there was too much for me to bear, so I put a round through the window.”
Rather than take a transfer to Dallas, Frankie Waters resigned “for service reasons” on 1 December 1967. And thus, by the end of 1967, Frank Selvaggi, Lenny Schrier, and Frankie Waters had resigned, bringing the era of freewheeling case-making agents to a close.3
THE TASK FORCE
“By late 1967,” Tartaglino says, “about 140 people are being investigated, but it’s hard to make cases because resources are scarce. It was time to do something more substantial, so I suggested to James Hendricks that we create a Task Force, which would use the same techniques to investigate agents that agents used to investigate dope dealers. Hendricks sent me to Giordano for approval, and Henry said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing to me?’ “I asked him, ‘What do you want me to do?’
“Hendricks was generous,” Andy continues, “and okayed four people for the Task Force. I wanted a cross-section, from conservative to liberal, but all with solid integrity, and each a district supervisor with status. Frank Pappas from Baltimore was strictly by the book. John Evans from Atlanta and Bowman Taylor from Boston were in the middle, and John Windham from Kansas City was our conscience. They were all very conscientious. We’d have meetings and manage by consensus, thumbs up or thumbs down. I’m also a strong believer in documentation – that whenever someone tells you something you write it down, and afterwards decide whether it’s worth saving. Down the pike, this is very important.”
John Evans is a medium-built man, forthright, tough as nails, and hard to impress. He compares the New York agents who protected drug dealers to the FBN executives who protected the CIA drug dealers. “Conscience starts where digestion stops,” he says.
Evans is a sentimentalist too. He dedicated his life to the FBN and has the scars from three open-heart operations to show for it. Raised in a tough section of Detroit, he pulled himself out of a street gang, graduated from Michigan State, and, after a stint in the military, joined the FBN in his hometown as a member of District Supervisor Ross Ellis’s infamous ‘Purple Gang’ (which, of course, is a play on the name of a gang of criminals that dominated Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s).
“The legend of the Purple Gang,” Evans explains, “is that George Belk and Phil Smith, who came out of Detroit, had control of the Bureau. But the legend grew because Ellis promoted his agents faster than the other district supervisors. In some regions you sat at grade seven for three years, but Ross promoted guys to grade nine after one. That fostered a spirit of cooperation, and we stuck together. We also worked with the Detroit cops and the Michigan State Police. Friendships formed, and that’s how it got to be known as the Purple Gang.”
After making a big case on a Lebanese trafficker, Evans in 1962 replaced Walt Panich as Ross Ellis’s enforcement assistant. He advanced again in 1965, becoming the domestic enforcement chief in Washington under Ray Enright, and in 1966 he was made district supervisor in Atlanta.
“I was in Atlanta,” he recalls, “when Andy called from New York and said, ‘Come up right away. It’s secret.’ I arrived the day after New Year’s and started working with Bo Taylor and Ike Wurms. John Windham worked with Pappas, while Andy went on his own track regarding the suicide of Crofton Hayes, and some other areas that were of personal interest to him.
“New York,” Evans emphasizes, “was not a place I liked. The agents were bitter and salty and, according to them, no one but them ever got anything he deserved. Ross Ellis had been an agent in New York after the war, and he told me stories of agents shooting up in the men’s room on the sixth floor at 90 Church Street. Another time we sent four agents from Detroit to New York. Three went bad, and the fourth came back and said, ‘The moment you step on the street, you’re into felony shit.’ So I had some idea of what to expect. But God knows I came away wizened: agents were committing murder one, selling kilos of dope, and running all sorts of scams.
“There was one guy,” Evans says,
“who produced a lot of cases working with the SIU. But they were shaking guys down. He’d give the cops a hundred dollars for each case they came up with in state court, then they’d work together on paper to meet his case initiation quota. He’d make out his daily reports once a week. Then he’d go to Belk and say, ‘This informant can make Vito, so let’s not run him through the process.’ Then he’d go to the US Attorney and say, ‘I’m using the guy, keep him cool.’ Belk and the US Attorney would agree, so now his informant reports are covered, too.
“Then comes the payoff. The cops arrest Vito and tell him, ‘It costs two grand a week to stay out of jail.’ Vito asks, ‘What have I got to do to fix it once and for all.’ They tell him, ‘Forty grand.’ The case is going to federal court, where they need the informant to identify Vito – and that’s when the informant gets iced.”
Belk, according to Evans, was an honest cop who inherited the corruption and the CIA shenanigans, and got caught in the middle of Gaffney’s power struggle with Giordano. “Belk was close to Giordano,” he explains, “but not Gaffney, and when Giordano sent Belk into New York, Gaffney was worried about what he’d find. So Belk and Giordano shut Gaffney out. Then Andy went over Giordano’s head to Hendricks, which is why Art Fluhr couldn’t cover Belk’s ass. And which is why, when push came to shove, Giordano backed off and let Belk fade the heat.
“The mandate from Hendricks was to get people off the job,” Evans says, “and our main targets were the higher-ups – group leaders and above. We also tried to solve the murder of an informant, which no doubt happened, although no one was ever caught. But the partners who were involved were removed on other charges. That’s how it worked. When we couldn’t nail them for criminal violations, we’d get them on administrative. So there was lots of broom-sweeping.”
The Strength of the Wolf Page 60