The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Among the Task Force’s main targets were Gaffney, John Dolce, Pat Ward, and former members of Group Three and the Gambling Squad. As Evans recalls, “Dolce owned a beautiful house and wore expensive clothes, all of which he explained by saying that his wife was an heiress. But he was a friend of Pat Intreri [who resigned in 1972, formed a private investigation firm, and became a bodyguard for drug trafficker Vincent Papa] at the SIU, and with Deputy Chief Inspector Ira Bluth, who ran the NYPD’s Narcotic Bureau until we came along. Dolce was also close to Pat Ward, who Andy believed was ‘the Grand Architect’ of corruption in New York. But Dolce resigned in 1965, and Ward got out of New York just in time and went to Chicago.”4

  Tom Tripodi offers a hypothetical reason for why Pat Ward was considered “the Grand Architect” of corruption in New York. “An agent makes a buy off an Italian,” Tripodi explains, “and the enforcement assistant knows. He says, ‘Go back and make a second buy.’ But the day after we make the first buy, someone goes to the Italian and says, ‘For two big ones you won’t go to jail.’ On the day before the second buy, the Italian flees. The enforcement assistant knows the guy’s in Miami, then Canada, then he says, ‘Well, he’s gone. Close that case out.’ ”

  Tartaglino had another, personal reason for targeting Ward. They had worked together in New York in the early 1950s, and he never forgot how Ward would cup one hand behind his back and joke in Italian about “the cripple.” The image was of a man taking a bribe, and Tartaglino hated the ethnic slur, as well as the implication that taking bribes was humorous.

  Discussing Tartaglino’s pursuit of Ward is not an easy thing for George Gaffney to do. “Pat was appointed district supervisor in Chicago and served there until 1968, when they gave him orders to go to Detroit. He’d just bought a house, so he applied for the job of chief investigator for Ed Hanratty, the Cook County DA. He was about to take the job when [FBN General Counsel] Don Miller calls up Hanratty and says, ‘We will not work with you if you hire him.’ When Hanratty asked why, Miller simply repeated the ultimatum.”

  Gaffney pauses to compose himself, then says, “Pat Ward was never charged with anything, but he was hounded until he was forced to quit.”

  Gaffney tells how it felt to be isolated and targeted himself: “At one point I received orders in writing from the assistant secretary of Treasury, saying I could no longer exercise any control in New York. Not even to visit the office! I was so far out of the loop, Lenny Schrier was off the job three months before I knew about it.” With an icy glare, Gaffney says, “Eventually I was called to Main Treasury and asked to resign. I told them: ‘It’ll be a cold day in hell before I do that. And don’t try to force me out either, unless you’re ready to have an explosion.’

  “In the old days,” Gaffney says philosophically, “agents exercised initiative and ingenuity. We didn’t call headquarters for permission, which is why we were successful. We weren’t micro-managed. We had 300 agents with a $3 million budget, which was less than 4 percent of the budget for federal law enforcement, and yet we accounted for 15 to 20 percent of all the inmates in federal prisons. We put away more Mafia than everyone else combined. Then they accuse us of corruption.” Gaffney shakes his head in disgust.

  Art Fluhr agrees that there was no proof that Pat Ward was the Grand Architect of corruption in New York. “Andy made a lot of accusations and caused a lot of turmoil, but the agents who went to jail went because of local offenses, not through anything Andy found. Andy’s Gang was all petty bullshit. He’d come into my office and say, ‘You got a guy here who took the tires off a surplus car and put them on a government car.’ And I’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, Andy, we get $250 dollars a month to repair seven cars!’

  “The focus of Speer’s investigation was Group Three,” Fluhr says bitterly, “but Andy’s investigation hit everyone, whether they were right or wrong!”

  John Evans agrees. “Andy got affected. He was too close, too long.”

  HOW THE TASK FORCE WORKED A CASE

  Tartaglino’s investigation soon spread from New York to St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans, where agent Luis Gonzalez found his head on the chopping block in the spring of 1968. A Puerto Rican-American from the wiseguy section of South Brooklyn, Luis loved being an FBN agent. Working for public sanitation, or becoming a cop, were the two avenues of escape from his neighborhood, and he felt like he had become “a corporate executive” when he was hired by John Dolce in 1960. He served for the honor of serving.

  Among his colleagues, Luis earned a reputation as one of the best undercover agents ever. From Lenny Schrier he learned how to develop informers, and from John Coursey he learned how to stay in control of the situation. “They taught undercover work at the Law Enforcement School,” Luis says matter-of-factly, “and you can pick up stuff there – but it’s not like the action.”

  In the course of his career, Gonzalez worked on the French Connection case, and testified against Ambassador Pardo Bolland. He was the first Puerto Rican to get inside the Mafia, and he made the case against a famous Mafioso, Gianotti Salzano. “The conviction was based on my word against his,” he says with pride. But more often than not, Gonzalez worked on major Hispanic violators, and he made cases on Patsy Vellez, Carlos Ortiz, Willie Angelet (who was half Italian, half Puerto Rican), “One-Eyed” Benny Rodriguez, and Enrique Carbonelle. A drug trafficker who had been in Batista’s Army in Cuba, Carbonelle became an informer and took Gonzalez and John Coursey to “El Cubiche.” Better known as Felix Martinez, El Cubiche was a major drug trafficker with a French connection through Argentina.

  Gonzalez’s problems with Andy’s Gang began shortly after his transfer in 1967 to Miami, where the resident, non-Hispanic agents had been unable to develop any major cases, and where he found himself entangled in CIA intrigues. “Tripodi was there with the CIA,” Gonzalez says, “and through him I was introduced to a few of the CIA Cubans who were messing around with guns and drugs. One of them, cab driver Rudy Garcia, introduced me to a Mexican who wanted to sell dope. I told the Mexican I wanted to buy, but I wanted to meet his man first.

  “The Mexican was prepared to take me to his source,” Gonzalez says, “but the agent in charge in Miami, Bob Nickoloff said there wasn’t enough money in the budget.

  “To make a long story short, Nickoloff and I didn’t get along after that, so they send me to New Orleans in early 1968. I’m there a few weeks,” Gonzalez says with a shudder of emotion, “and I get a phone call at the office. There’s no one else in the office, and the guy asks for me, specifically. He says he’s been making trips to South America. He’s a co-pilot, and he’s going again soon with the pilot to pick up several kilograms of cocaine.

  “ ‘Why are you telling this to me?’ I ask him.

  “ ‘I don’t want to get in trouble,’ he says. ‘If you don’t believe me, I’ll give you a sample.’ He tells me where the hotel is, and then he says, ‘But you’d better come over right now, because we’re leaving soon.’

  “So I go to the hotel, which is near the airport. The rule is to always take someone along, but no one else is there, so I go alone.” Gonzalez struggles to maintain his composure. “The guy’s in a pilot’s uniform. He takes half an ounce of coke out his flight bag. When he shows it to me, I see a small vial inside the bag. I tell him, ‘Take that out, too.’

  “ ‘It’s for the pilot’s personal use,’ he says. ‘If I give it to you, he’ll know.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ I say. It’s five in the afternoon. I wait around outside. I see a guy in a pilot’s uniform enter the room, and I see them leave. They get in a car and I follow them. But I lose them, so I head back to the office and turn the half-ounce over to the agent in charge, Jim Bland, and we open the case. But when I report to work the next day, Bland comes in and says, ‘Frank Pappas and John Windham are here and they want to see you. Bring your dailies.’

  “I ask him, ‘What’s this about?’

  “ ‘You’ll see,’ he says.”

  Gon
zalez is stone-faced. “Pappas was the pilot, Windham was the co-pilot. They cite me for leaving the office without an escort, and for letting dope leave the country. Then they come at me from leftfield; they mention Gohde and Dolce. They try to flip me, and that’s when I blew up.”

  A case-making agent who kept the faith, Luis Gonzalez smiles bravely. “So I agreed to leave for falsification of documents and frequency of transfer, which was bad for the health of my kids. But I was never told I could have legal advice, and they got me to resign in the heat of the moment. It was a total set-up.”

  REQUIEM

  “Andy’s Rangers were supposedly after the group leaders and the supervisors,” Frank Selvaggi says solemnly, “but who gets hurt? Luis Gonzalez, an undercover agent.”

  Selvaggi grimaces. “There was never any reason for it. They say that Nixon got $5 million from the mob. Milliken steals billions. There’s heroin disappearing from the NYPD Property Clerk. Siragusa says the Pope has a mistress and the mob is shaking him down. I meet Guido Penosi in Miami: I lose my wife, my kids, my pension, my career.”

  “I think it’s significant,” Frankie Waters says about the December 1965 Nebbia case, “that out of the multitude of cops and agents – not just from the FBN, but from Customs and the CID too – that descended on Columbus from all over Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina, that it was two New York City street agents who did the crucial surveillance, uncovered the cache, and made the pivotal arrest. That’s me and Frank Selvaggi, and we did it alone.

  “We – whose methods were so awful, and who were later vilified – brought down the beast. And while the others gathered to feast on it, and survive on its entrails for years to come, the street agents moved out to seek and bring down another beast.”

  No statement better captures the fate of the wolf pack. Its methods were often unlawful, so the Establishment it had faithfully served turned on it and hunted it down. Having gone the way of the Latin Mass, the greatest federal law enforcement agency ever faded from America’s collective consciousness without fanfare, amidst the turmoil of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and a rapidly unraveling, drug-addled society.

  EPILOGUE

  “Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses.”

  William Burroughs, Junky

  By 1967, studies and statistics showed that drug related arrests (most involving kids under twenty-one) were rising faster than those in any other category of crime, and that drug abuse was a factor in the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations that were dividing the nation. Seizing upon this issue, the opportunistic Republicans blamed the problem on the liberalizing effects of LBJ’s Great Society, and they made “Law and Order” in general, and drug law enforcement in particular, a central theme in the forthcoming presidential campaign.

  Enter Joseph Califano, the point man in the Johnson administration’s war on drugs. A Brooklyn-born Harvard graduate, Califano had been inspired by JFK’s call to public service, and had left a lucrative job with a powerful law firm to join Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s staff as a specialist on Latin American affairs. Recognized as one of the “best and brightest,” he was hired by the White House in 1965 to prepare legislation and public relations campaigns to help quell the domestic political unrest that was causing the Johnson administration so much grief. After meeting with a number of criminologists in 1967, Califano concluded that one of the things that would help was a state-of-the-art drug law enforcement organization, situated for maximum effectiveness in the Justice Department.

  Having determined that the FBN was obsolete, Califano in late 1967 sent emissaries to BDAC director John Finlator and Assistant Treasury Secretary James Hendricks with a proposal to combine BDAC and the FBN. Both bureaucrats recoiled in horror. But irresistible forces were at work. Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler was pressing for spending cuts and Representative Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, wanted to trim social programs. So on 7 February 1968, the Johnson administration introduced Reorganization Plan No. 1, in which it proposed to combine the FBN and BDAC into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) in the Justice Department. The stated reasons were: to end fragmentation by consolidating authority; to pave the way for closer relations with state and local governments; to improve worldwide operations by working more closely with other nations; and to conduct a nationwide public education program on drug abuse “and its tragic effects.”1 The unstated reasons were LBJ’s wrath over the FBN’s involvement in the Bobby Baker snooping incident, and the CIA’s need to manage drug law enforcement without interference, especially in Southeast Asia.

  After the initial shock – enforcement assistant John Enright likened it to “a drunken sailor marrying an old maid” – FBN executives scrambled to get with the program. Training chief Pat O’Carroll, for example, stepped out of character and, employing the techno-jargon of the era, said the merger presented an opportunity for “a rebirth, like a phoenix arising from the ashes … using the instrumentalities of imagination, intellect, research and experience to establish an ecological, holistic point of view.” It’s hard to imagine an FBN agent buying that sales pitch, but there was more. According to O’Carroll, the rebirth was to be based on “a systems approach, rigorous comprehensiveness, and manipulation of models to achieve a dynamic creative equilibrium.”2

  While dazed FBN agents wondered what the hell a “creative equilibrium” was, a Task Force was formed in the office of the Deputy Attorney General to effect the reorganization. The principal representatives were BDAC’s executive officer, Nelson Coon, and Ernie Gentry from the FBN. Subcommittees were formed to manage the transition and, according to O’Carroll in his thesis, the Task Force was the epitome of effective management, relying on Herbert Simon’s theory of “systematic scanning of the environment, and sensitivity to problems and challenges.”

  Sensitivity, smensitivity. According to Walter Panich, a member of the FBN’s Plans and Policy staff, the mood at headquarters was alternately frantic and bitter. “Giordano came back from a meeting with the Treasury secretary,” he recalls, “and we had one meeting to prepare for this merger with BDAC. Gentry and I did most of the negotiations with Hugh Nugent, the Task Force chief at Main Justice, and with Assistant Secretary of Administration, Art Weatherby, at Main Treasury. And that was all the support we had.”

  In March, the Government Operations Committee held hearings on Reorganization Plan No. 1, and accepted the idea with the proviso that the National Institute of Mental Health be included, at which point the CIA quietly seized control of BNDD’s Office of Science and Education. Having control of this aspect of drug law enforcement was crucial to the CIA, which fully intended to continue testing and employing “behavioral agents,” even after October 1968, when it became a felony to manufacture, sell, and distribute LSD and other dangerous drugs.

  A resolution to stop Reorganization Plan No. 1 was submitted by legislators concerned that BNDD’s placement in the Justice Department would put too much emphasis on law enforcement, and not enough on research and prevention. They raised the specter of a Gestapo-style national police force. Worried that stiffer controls would reduce profits, the pharmaceutical industry also raised objections, but was persuaded that consolidation would lower costs. There were even mild protests from within the FBN itself. But, as George Gaffney recalls, “When Reorganization Plan No. 1 was being considered by the Senate, orders came to us from Treasury that we were not to lobby against it. It passed by five votes.”

  The resolution was rejected and in April 1968, Reorganization Plan No. 1 was signed into law by Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher. The BNDD was officially in business. A few days later, Henry Giordano and John Finlator were appointed acting associate directors, with the understanding that a director would be chosen by June. Composed of 483 people from the FBN, 466 from BDAC, 12 from Main Treasury, and 60 from the Department of Health Education and Welfare, the new organization was to be phased in at 91 field offic
es under the direction of a joint Review Board. A timetable for implementation was set up, targeting October for complete “integration.”3 Letterhead paper was ordered and, in May, a corresponding Narcotics and Dangerous Drug Section was formed in the Justice Department under US Attorney William Ryan. Through this office, BNDD would obtain indictments and wiretap authorizations under Title III, and participate in Justice Department Strike Forces nationwide.

  ENTER JOHN INGERSOLL

  Joseph Califano, meanwhile, was meeting separately with Finlator and Giordano, telling each one not to worry. And on the day of reckoning, the eager executives arrived in the Attorney General’s office wearing their best blue suits, each one fully expecting to be chosen as BNDD’s director. Instead they were introduced to John E. Ingersoll.

  “I was there afterwards,” Andy Tartaglino recalls, “when Giordano went to Hendricks to complain. Hendricks asked him, ‘What exactly did Califano say?’ ‘He said he’d take care of me,’ Henry replied. ‘But did he promise you the job?’ To which Henry hung his head and said, ‘No.’ ”

  On 12 July 1968, Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced John Ingersoll’s appointment as BNDD’s director, knocking many a proud FBN agent to his knees. Not only had they been forced into a shotgun wedding with the chicken pluckers, but their new leader had never made an undercover buy or bust. To make matters worse, Ingersoll projected nothing but disdain for the FBN’s legacy, along with a fierce desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and the growling wolf pack he had inherited. It was not an auspicious beginning.