The Strength of the Wolf (10 page)

George White also slipped into top-secret operations. In late 1941 he was assigned to the Office of the Coordinator of Information (OCI) and in February and March 1942 received training in the fine arts (as he described them) of “murder and mayhem” at the OSS counterintelligence school in Toronto. In the summer of 1942 he became a member of the X-2 counterespionage training division and, according to reporter Al Ostrow, “established America's first school for spies and counter-spies.” The idea, White avowed, “was that a cop should be able to teach others how to escape being caught by cops.” And, he might have added, how to teach spies to elude FBN agents. Accompanied by an interpreter, White then moved throughout North Africa before the Allied landings, organizing resistance groups among the Arabs.
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White slipped into Cairo in early November 1942, then visited Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where he surveyed opium stockpiles. By early 1943 he was in Jerusalem with Colonel Harold Hoskins, the OSS officer in charge of Mideast operations, and Ulius Amoss, a Greek–American importer, and executive officer of the OSS's Mideast detachment. Notably, White and Amoss had met in February 1942 while working on the Eliopoulos case with White's protégé, Agent Charlie Siragusa, and Charlie Dyar (both of whom, along with J. Ray Olivera and several other FBN agents, would also join the OSS). Through March 1943, White and Amoss investigated “the frequent tie-up”
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between smuggling and spying, until Amoss was fired for importing “an ex-convict from the United States for
the purposes of expert assassination.”
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If anyone knew assassins it was White, not Amoss, but OSS security officer Robert Delaney cleared White of wrongdoing. Apparently Amoss was expendable, but White's underworld connections were not, and in April he met again with Delaney to discuss what in his diary he termed the “Mafia Plan.”
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In 1943 the Mafia Plan was what historian Rodney Campbell dubbed the Luciano Project, otherwise known as Operation Underworld. Whatever it was called, White was at the heart of it, though not as a foil as historian Richard Smith claims, but as security chief and fixer. In the summer and fall of 1943, as described in his diary, White attended several Mafia Plan meetings, including an August excursion into Chinatown with James J. Angleton, who was soon to become chief of OSS X-2 operations in Rome and later chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division. One month later White escorted Angleton into Chinatown again, this time with his boss from the Mideast, Colonel Hoskins. Considering that the OSS was passing X-2 personnel through the FBN's New York office at the time, the purpose of these trips undoubtedly concerned the Mafia Plan – which translated into drug smuggling, espionage, and assassination.

While serving as chief of Mafia Plan security, White shared an apartment with John Hanly, the Secret Service agent with whom he'd visited Lucky Luciano in 1938. Then serving as a Navy officer in the Luciano Project, Hanly kept White up to date on the frequent chats his boss, Charles Haffenden, was having with Frank Costello – chats that DA Frank Hogan was secretly recording! In this way White covered all the bases; through Hanly he was able to keep Anslinger abreast of Haffenden's deep political machinations and, as Mafia Plan security chief, with access to Hogan's tapes, he could apply pressure on Mafioso Frank Costello, for example, by leaking Magistrate Aurelio's aforementioned “undying loyalty” pledge to the
New York Times
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As if that wasn't enough, George White was just getting started.

In early 1942 OSS chief William Donovan decided that extracting the truth from enemy soldiers and spies was essential to winning the war and he directed his staff of research scientists to produce a Truth Drug. The scientists worked under the supervision of a committee that included Anslinger and Mal Harney, and after experimenting with the most powerful drugs the FBN could produce, the scientists settled on tetrahydrocannabinol acetate,
the active chemical compound in marijuana. The scientists, however, were not equipped to handle street work, so Donovan and Anslinger chose George White to test the Truth Drug on unsuspecting hoods, spies, and assassins.
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In May 1943 the OSS Truth Drug team assembled in Anslinger's office with a beaker full of liquid marijuana extract and an eyedropper and began lacing loose-leaf tobacco, which they rolled into a joint that was potent enough to knock White on his ass. High as a Rastafarian, and probably laughing at the irony of Anslinger's Killer Weed campaign, he embarked on his mission.

White's mission was to discover how enemy spies were exploiting drug smuggling routes worldwide. Like its progeny the CIA, the OSS wanted to use secret drug smuggling routes to insert agents behind enemy lines and recruit foreign national drug smugglers in the cause for freedom and democracy. Liberating occupied France was a major goal and the OSS was aware that some drug smugglers were collaborating with the Gestapo, while others were in the Resistance. One of the leading experts in this matter was Lucky Luciano's associate, August Del Grazio, who'd been the Mafia's representative to Elie Eliopoulos and had managed a heroin factory in Istanbul on their behalf – until the US consul in Turkey saw Del Grazio's face on the Committee of One Hundred's blacklist. Anslinger informed the Gestapo and Del Grazio was arrested in Berlin in late 1931 and served a brief stint in prison. To avoid a similar fate, Eliopoulos initiated a meeting with Charlie Dyar in Athens where he ratted out his rival, and partner, Louis Lyon. Ten years later, Nazi sympathizer Eliopoulos and his brother George were arrested in New York by George White, Charlie Dyar, and Charlie Siragusa; but to no avail – the statute of limitations had expired on the 1931 case, and the Eliopoulos brothers were set free. Lyon, meanwhile, would arrange the assassination of his and Eliopoulos's former partner, Gestapo agent Paul Carbone, in December 1943, forcing Carbone's protégé, François Spirito, to flee to Madrid.
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White's Truth Drug experiments were related to these intrigues, which is why he traveled to New York in May 1943 to test his superpot on Del Grazio, whose connections to Corsican and Mafia drug smugglers were well known. According to author John Marks, what Del Grazio revealed about “the ins and outs of the drug trade” was “so sensitive that the CIA deleted it from OSS documents it released thirty-four years later.”
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Obviously, White's session with Del Grazio was a smashing success, and subsequent Truth Drug experiments included the interrogation of German prisoners of war and American soldiers suspected of harboring communist sympathies. On 25 September 1943, White visited Manhattan Project
security officer John Lansdale in San Francisco to administer the Truth Drug to scientists developing America's atomic bomb.

Having completed this assignment, White in April 1944 was assigned as OSS X-2 chief in the India–Burma–China theater. One of his tasks was to investigate rumors that Detachment 101, which had been organized by Garland Williams under former Customs Border Patrol Agent Carl Eiffler, was providing opium to Burmese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. The rumors were true and on Anslinger's behalf, White asked Eiffler to stop. But the OSS officer refused.
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As Eifler's replacement William Peers succinctly stated, “If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.”
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America's spymasters would never sever the drug-smuggling connections they established during the war, nor could the FBN exert any influence over the situation. On the contrary, the FBN assumed a collateral role in narcotics-related espionage activities that was antithetical to its mandate. The Luciano Project and Truth Drug programs are examples, as was the formation of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, OSS chief William Donovan, and Chiang Kai-shek's intelligence chief, General Tai Li. SACO would effectively put an end to any drug control over Nationalist China.

SACO went into action in 1943, when a team of Americans under Treasury Agent Charles Johnston was sent to Chungking to train Chiang Kai-shek's secret police force. Milton Miles, the Navy officer who commanded SACO with General Tai Li, describes Johnston as having spent fifteen years “in the narcotics game.”
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When Johnston and his team, which included FBN agents, arrived in China, Tai Li was working closely with drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng in Chungking. It was an open secret that Tai Li's agents escorted opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon and used Red Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese. His drug-smuggling operation undoubtedly reached American shores, but once he was appointed co-director of SACO, he received the same immunity afforded Detachment 101.

In July 1944, the Army's Criminal Investigations Division (CID) learned that the former lieutenant governor of New York State, Colonel Charles Poletti, then running AMGOT in Italy, had authorized the appointment of Vito Genovese as an interpreter, first in Sicily then Naples, for a succession
of Army Civil Affairs and Judge Advocate General officers. Amazingly, one of the most violent and corrupt Mafia chieftains had become a special employee of the US Army. But spymasters as well as politicians rely on the underworld, and Genovese had developed extensive contacts in Europe in 1933 when, while setting up narcotics connections in Italy, he befriended the secretary of Mussolini's Fascist Party. Six years later Genovese was named as a suspect in the 1934 murder of gangster Ferdinand Boccia, and fled to Italy, where his friendship with Mussolini's top aides proved beneficial, as did a $250,000 donation to the Party. In return for his generosity, Genovese was allowed to purchase a power plant near Naples and manage a chain of banks controlled by the Fascist government. For ordering the murder of anti-fascist publisher Carlo Tresca in New York in 1943 he was awarded Italy's highest civilian title, presented personally by Mussolini.

Genovese's narcotics connections reportedly enabled Mussolini's son-in-law to fly opium out of Turkey to refiners in Milan. The heroin was then flown to Mediterranean ports on Italian Air Force planes and routed by Genovese to Nicolo Impostato, an assassin from Kansas City who had replaced Nick Gentile, then in Italy assisting Genovese and Poletti, as general manager of the American Mafia's national drug syndicate.
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As the war came to a close, Genovese used his privileged position as Poletti's liaison to the Italian Mafia to establish black-market routes between Germany, Yugoslavia, and Sicily. But the happy arrangement ended in June 1944 when CID Agent Orange Dickey arrested two Canadian deserters for having stolen two US Army trucks. The Canadians fingered Genovese as their boss, and Dickey tracked him down and arrested him on 27 August 1944. Forewarned, Genovese had in his possession letters of recommendation from three Army officers, praising him for having exposed several cases of bribery and black marketeering. The letters, and the fact that Genovese had been forewarned, sparked Dickey's curiosity, so he contacted the FBI and was told that Genovese had been indicted and was wanted for Boccia's murder.

After searching Genovese's apartment and finding a powerful radio receiver, Dickey sought entry to his bank vault. But the Italian authorities refused, and by the time he did get in, the vault was empty. Frustrated, Dickey wrote a report in which he named several high-ranking Army officers as being involved in a conspiracy to protect Genovese; at which point the US consul told Dickey that Genovese was an Italian citizen and could not be held in an American jail.

Unaware of just how well-connected Genovese was, Dickey went to Rome to seek Poletti's advice; and there, by coincidence, he encountered
William O'Dwyer, former Brooklyn DA, friend of Joe Adonis and Frank Costello, then serving as the Judge Advocate General in Italy. When Dickey described the Genovese investigation, O'Dwyer said it was of no concern to the Army and he suggested that Dickey contact the current Brooklyn DA, which Dickey did. The DA put the machinery in motion and in November 1944 the State Department issued Genovese a passport, allowing him to be returned to New York to stand trial for the Boccia murder. But a general's name had become involved in the case, and in December the Provost Marshal told Dickey to transfer Genovese to a civilian prison in Bari, where OSS officer Charlie Siragusa, having transferred from the FBN, questioned him. As Siragusa recalled, “being a civilian cop I couldn't resist pushing the hood on his New York City rackets. It was known that he still pulled the strings back there.”
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By Siragusa's account, the interview was a waste of time – possibly because he had been instructed to give Genovese a free pass. In any case, Dickey's efforts to achieve justice met yet another obstacle when, in January 1945, the principal witness against Genovese died of an overdose of barbiturates while sequestered in a Brooklyn jail. Shortly after the murder of the only material witness against him, Genovese's extradition was processed, and Dickey single-handedly brought him to New York in May 1945. But there was one last surprise to come: as Dickey arrived at the DA's office, General O'Dwyer came walking out. For what it was worth – and it certainly wasn't worth all his efforts, including threats on his life and his family's – Dickey dutifully transferred Genovese to the authorities and then faded into obscurity. O'Dwyer was elected mayor of New York, and the case against Genovese was dismissed. As Brigadier General Carter W. Clarke remarked in a memo dated 30 June 1945, the Genovese file was so “hot” that it should “be filed and no action taken.”
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Criminology professor Alan Block asserts that the Genovese case “marks an important point in American political history” in which professional criminals continued to ply their trade, but “for new patrons.”
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