“We saw a Lincoln Continental with DC plates pull up,” Taylor says excitedly. “The driver’s a tough-looking Black man. Frankie gets out of the Lincoln and goes inside the terminal. Frankie’s a badass, and when we tell Charlie Mac that he’s coming, we could feel the tension over the wire. Frankie sat down at the bar, and the first thing Charlie said to him was, ‘I’m going back on the next flight, so we only have a few minutes.’
“Waters could tell by McDonnell’s demeanor that something was wrong. ‘Wait a minute,’ Frankie says, ‘I gotta talk to you.’ At which point Charlie mumbles, ‘They got one of your prints.’
“ ‘We better lay low,’ Frankie whispers back. Then Charlie says out loud, ‘I need a quarter-key.’ At which point Frankie invites him for a ride. Then the reception breaks apart. Frankie fades into the night, and Charlie Mac goes back to DC.”
When told of Taylor’s account, Frankie Waters gets visibly upset. “It’s totally untrue that I went to meet Charlie in someone else’s car. I went from my house in Hempstead in my Buick and returned the same way. I didn’t want to talk to Charlie, and I never would have said, ‘Hey, I gotta talk to you.’ And he never said to me anything about my prints. Pure fiction.”
When asked why he met with McDonnell, Waters says, “When Charlie was the BDAC boss in Baltimore, he made a lot of calls to me about cases. Even after I quit we talked a lot. But when we met at La Guardia, he was acting weird. So I excused myself and went to the men’s room, and when I got there, Bob Williams [a National List narcotic violator and the man who was driving the Lincoln] was standing at the urinal. We go to have a drink, and he tells me funny stories.”8
Some of the funny stories probably concerned the allegations made by McDonnell and Miles. And it must be stressed that, based on those allegations, Waters was tried and acquitted of selling heroin to McDonnell. In addition, McDonnell served a mere eleven months in prison for selling several pounds of heroin to Miles. “Don’t you think it’s significant that Charlie Mac was let out of jail after eleven months?” Waters asks rhetorically. “It’s because he testified against me!”
Similarly, drug trafficker Joe Miles served no time, in exchange for his work in Tartaglino’s investigation of agent corruption. As Jack Compton recalled in his affidavit, “My informants were telling me that Miles was selling narcotics, so I called Tartaglino and Company and told them. But they said, ‘Leave him alone.’ They came down on one occasion and busted his pad, with him in it.” Compton added that Miles somehow got away, apparently with a kilogram of heroin that “never surfaced anywhere. He did it twice” – Compton told the prosecutors – “and my informants were starting to get the message. They started thinking that I was taking payoffs from Miles, because they could make him, and they wanted to make him. But [the inspectors] wouldn’t touch him.”
Compton concluded this portion of his affidavit by noting that shortly after Frankie Waters was charged, “Miles got seriously dead in New Orleans, and I don’t think anybody has ever bothered to look very damned far in that case.”
The Charlie McDonnell integrity case had repercussions that lasted for the next six years, during which time Andy Tartaglino would earn a reputation as a zealot whose purge destroyed the good, along with the bad and the ugly. And the tactics he used set a dangerous precedent. Years before, he had told David Acheson that in order to make a case on a bad agent, an inspector must use the same tactics an agent used to set up drug dealers. By 1968, those tactics included the same sin for which suspected agents were being investigated – enabling an informer to sell drugs with impunity.
THE SYSTEMS APPROACH
Providing informants with free passage had long been standard practice for the CIA, whose drug trafficking assets ranged far and wide around the world. Indeed, the CIA’s involvement in international drug trafficking was so pervasive that eventually the spy agency decided to use Tartaglino’s integrity investigation as a pretext to infiltrate the BNDD’s inspections, intelligence, and special operations staffs, and seize control of most of its foreign operations. The CIA’s infiltration of the BNDD was a development that fit neatly with the Agency’s ever-expanding counter-terror operations worldwide, the political war it was waging in Washington on behalf of the Establishment, and with John Ingersoll’s defective innovation, the “systems approach” to waging war on drugs.
Ingersoll’s grand idea was to dispense with the old “two buys and a bust” approach. Agents would no longer pursue individuals; instead, the entire organization would be directed against several major drug trafficking systems. To effect this new strategy, the extant bits and pieces of information that existed in BDAC and FBN files were gathered, analyzed, and assembled by a think tank that featured George Belk on enforcement matters and Hank Manfredi on intelligence. Information about ongoing investigations was factored into the emerging systems and, after a year of preparation, the experts established nine general drug trafficking systems to investigate – nine being a number large enough to engage the entire organization, but small enough to be managed by desk officers at headquarters.
What emerged was an extrapolation of the biggest cases already being investigated, the most important being the French connection, which was held responsible for the majority of heroin entering America. Also targeted were systems encompassing anti-Castro Cubans, the world’s biggest purveyors of cocaine; the Mexican marijuana cartels; criminals trafficking in non-narcotic drugs like LSD; and five others, including one for the Mafia. A desk officer monitored the system he was assigned to, provided money to the regional directors investigating the system, and worked with individual field agents to select targets of opportunity within the system. The incubation period lasted until December 1969, by which time the BNDD totaled 900 agents. Meanwhile, Ingersoll hired consultants from IBM to computerize the BNDD’s administrative and operations offices.
Theoretically, the systems approach would allow for better allocation of resources, and enable managers to better coordinate domestic investigations with the BNDD’s rapidly expanding foreign operations. Like the imperialists in Congress who had given Harry Anslinger his overseas mandate in 1930, Ingersoll in 1970 determined that “going to the source” was the only way to solve America’s drug problem. That is where he concentrated the organization’s resources, and that is what the FBN’s overseas agents, at first only minimally affected by the massive reorganization at home, were already doing with substantial results.
In 1968, for example, federal narcotic agents seized over 5,000 kilograms of opium and 800 kilograms of morphine base in Turkey. Based on this statistic, and arguments presented by Jack Cusack (Ingersoll’s advisor on Turkish affairs), the Nixon administration decided that Turkey was the source of 80 percent of the morphine base that was fueling the French connection in Marseilles. And by 1970, the State Department had adopted an extraordinary plan, developed by Cusack, to purchase Turkey’s surplus opium crop.
The French connection was Ingersoll’s major preoccupation, and in this regard he would break with traditions set by Anslinger and Giordano. With Tony Pohl as his interpreter and guide, Ingersoll would directly approach French officials and, in January 1970, would forge the landmark Franco-American Accord, in which the French agreed to talk to the Turks, and focus their enforcement efforts on Marseilles.
Ingersoll vastly expanded BNDD operations into Latin America, where Auguste Ricord’s Group France was trafficking in tons of narcotics. Many permanent posts were established throughout the region, and scores of BNDD agents were sent on intelligence-gathering missions. In many areas their passage was made easier by CIA officer Byron Engle, chief of AID’s Public Safety Program. AID, for example, provided the funds and aircraft for George Gaffney’s marijuana eradication program in Mexico. There was, of course, a quid pro quo. Wherever Castro’s agents were inciting revolution, the CIA was mounting counter-operations through its covert army of drug-smuggling anti-Castro Cubans. In exchange for providing the BNDD with covert financial and operational as
sistance, the BNDD granted drug-smuggling anti-Castro Cubans free passage; which, as one narcotic agent notes, “caused us problems, particularly in Bolivia and Mexico.”
With the systems approach, BNDD agents began forming closer ties with the CIA in Turkey too. For example, the Bulgarian Secret Service was thought to be facilitating the smuggling activities of the Turkish Mafia, so in June 1968, Dick Salmi began working with CIA officer Duane Clarridge to chart the Bulgarian arms and drug connection to France, as well as arms and drug-smuggling routes through Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.
But as BNDD agents soon found out, the CIA was doing the same thing as its enemies. As part of its covert war against terrorism, the CIA hired arms traffickers to smuggle guns to counterinsurgents in dozens of foreign nations, and in exchange the gun smugglers were allowed to move drugs out. One CIA officer insists that the drug traffic was unintentional, the result of unscrupulous assets who exploited their free passage. “Just because they’re dealing,” he says, “it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dealing for their respective secret services. Right?”
In response, another CIA officer notes that, “It is nice to have plausible deniability.”
The problems of free passage and its stepsister, the controlled delivery, were the fatal flaws of the systems approach, as it was cast worldwide under the guidance and with the expertise of the CIA. To map out an entire system, BNDD agents had to stand back and watch the dope flow from one end to the other. They might have to repeat the process several times, and they might even have to provide security to keep the system intact. In other words, Ingersoll’s foolproof systems approach was merely an extrapolation of Lenny Schrier’s modest dictum that in order to make cases, an agent’s informer has to deal narcotics. The systems approach was that practice, on a grand scale, and for that reason it undermined the BNDD’s integrity and fueled America’s drug epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s.
As Bowman Taylor caustically observes, “I used to think we were fighting the drug business. But after they formed the BNDD, I realized we were feeding it.”
CODA
By November 1968, the Nixon administration was rattling the White House doors, and in an attempt to preempt the Republican invaders, Attorney General Ramsey Clark held a farewell news conference to proclaim the Johnson administration’s success in killing off the Wolf Pack. “32 Narcotics Agents Resign in Corruption Investigation Here,” read the headline in the 14 December 1968 New York Times. Clark noted that five of them – Russ Dower, Jack Gohde, Frank Dolce, Charlie McDonnell, and Cleophus Robinson – had been indicted, and that additional prosecutions and resignations would soon be forthcoming.
“After Clark made his announcement,” Andy Tartaglino says dejectedly, “our informers were no good anymore. The integrity investigation was called off, but the job was only half-done.”
However, with the help of the CIA, Tartaglino’s corruption probe would soon be revived, only this time it would target some of the BNDD’s highest executives, and in 1974 it would nearly kill the BNDD’s successor organization, the Drug Enforcement Administration, in its cradle. But that calamity was yet to come. With the corruption purge swept under the carpet for the time being, the fledgling BNDD turned its attention to Richard Nixon’s escalating and, as ever, deeply political war on drugs.
APPENDIX
PAGES FROM THE FBN INTERNATIONAL LIST BOOK
NOTES
1 THE BIRTH OF A BUREAU
1 Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: Harper, 1959).
2 New York Times, 27 November 1928, 1. The Society of St. Tammany was organized in 1778 in New York City by enlisted men of the Revolutionary War to offset the Society of the Cincinnati formed by Alexander Hamilton and the Army’s officers. The Democrats stem from the former, the Republicans from the latter.
3 New York Times, 11 December 1928, 26:2.
4 William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 233. The League of Nations created the Opium Advisory Committee in 1921. It was dominated by colonial nations with opium monopolies in the Far East.
5 New York Times, 27 November 1928, 1.
6 Terry Parssinen, unpublished manuscript, chapter 10: “America and the World Narcotics Market, 1920–1954,” 36.
7 Ibid., chapter 10, 2.
8 Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, July–September 1976, 29.
9 Parssinen, chapter 10, 30.
10 The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy (Washington, DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), 431.
11 New York Times, 8 August 1921, 1:4.
12 Ibid., 5 May 1927, 6:2.
13 Ibid., 8 May 1927, 20:1.
14 Marshall, “Gangsterism,” 32.
15 Ibid., 33.
16 Melvin L. Hanks, NARC: The Adventures of a Federal Agent (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 162–6.
17 New York Times, 9 July 1929, 18:2; 12 July, 2:14; 13 July, 32:2; 14 July, 16:5; 23 July, 17:3; 24 July, 23:3; and 7 September, 17:2.
18 Ibid., 29 December 1929, 1; 30 December 10:5; 31 December, 2:5.
19 Ibid., 15 January 1930, 1.
20 Ibid., 21 February 1930, 1.
21 Douglas Kinder, “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic,” Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, Pacific Historical Review, 1981, 172–3.
22 On 15 January 1930, the same night Roland Nutt declared his innocence, Treasury Secretary Mellon threw a dinner party in honor of President Hoover. Among the honored guests were Mrs. and Mr. David K. E. Bruce, daughter and son-in-law of the host; the Chinese minister, Mr. Wu and his wife; and Mr. and Mrs. William Jardine. In The Traffic in Narcotics, with William F. Tompkins (New York: Funk & Wagnall Co., 1953) 97, Anslinger referred to Mr. Jardine’s namesake forebear as “the greatest and most influential of the opium smugglers.”
2 THE COMMISSIONER AND HIS CLIQUE
1 The American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969).
2 Harry J. Anslinger, The Protectors: The Heroic Story of The Narcotics Agents, Citizens, and Officials in Their Unending, Unsung Battles Against Organized Crime in America and Abroad (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1964), 39–50.
3 Charles B. Dyar, Official Personnel Folders, US Office of Personnel Management, St. Louis, Missouri. Anslinger, The Protectors, 6–24.
4 Garland Roarke, The Coin of Contraband: The True Story of United States Customs Investigator Al Scharff (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964), 330–8.
5 Ibid., 336–7.
6 Ibid., 338, 347.
7 Parssinen, chapter 10, 34.
8 Harry J. Anslinger, with Will Oursler, The Murderers: The Story of the Narcotic Gangs (New York: Strauss and Cudahy, 1961), 70.
9 Dyar, Official Personnel Folders, 27 July 1940, letter from Scharff to Mr. H. S. Creighton.
10 Ralph H. Oyler, Official Personnel Folders, US Office of Personnel Management, St. Louis, Missouri, provided by John C. McWilliams.
11 Ralph H. Oyler, “America’s Lone War Against Dope,” draft article submitted to Colonel L. G. Nutt, Internal Revenue Bureau, US Treasury Department, New York, 30 March 1926, provided by Paul D. Newey.
12 New York Times, 10 September 1921, 1.
13 Benedict Pocoroba report, “The Mafia,” 21 April 1947, provided by Paul D. Newey.
14 Al Ostrow, “Violent Action for Dope Sleuth,” Saint Louis Post Dispatch, 25 December 1949, provided by Paul D. Newey.
15 Garland Williams, Official Personnel Folders, US Office of Personnel Management, St. Louis, Missouri, provided by John C. McWilliams. Anslinger, The Protectors, 15.
16 Jill Jonnes, Hep Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams (New York: Scribner, 1996), 105.
17 Fred J. Cook, Th
e Secret Rulers; The Criminal Syndicates and How They Control the US Underworld (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1966), 122–5.
18 Cook, The Secret Rulers, 122.
19 Ibid., 148.
20 George Wolf, with Joseph DiMona, Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974), 123.
21 Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life (New York: Little Brown & Company, 1991), 59.
22 Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten, The Luciano Story (New York: David McKay Company, 1954), 58, 70–1. Leonard Katz, Uncle Frank: The Biography of Frank Costello (New York: Drake Publishers, Inc., 1973), 89.
23 Anslinger, The Murderers, 88.
3 ANSLINGER’S ANGST
1 Maurice Helbrant, Narcotic Agent (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1941), 273–81.
2 Ibid., 275.
3 William O. Walker III, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 143.
4 Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Policy, 1930–1962,” The Journal of American History, vol. 72, no. 4, March 1986, 919 n. 33.
5 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 103.
6 Walker, Drug Control, 147–50.
7 Marshall, “Gangsterism,” 28.
8 Kinder and Walker, “Stable Force,” 916.
9 Parssinen, chapter 10, 4.
10 Marshall, “Gangsterism,” 29.
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