The Strength of the Wolf (11 page)

No doubt these “new patrons” were America's master spies.

At the end of the Second World War, momentous changes were taking place in US foreign and domestic policies that would radically affect the FBN's organizational consciousness and direction. Within the FBN the issues were corruption and competition among agents, race relations, closer collaboration with government security and intelligence agencies, the fallout from the Luciano Project, and bureaucratic conflicts with the FBI and customs service. In this transitional period dynamics were set in motion that would determine the course of drug law enforcement during the second half of the twentieth century and set the stage for the FBN's demise in 1968.

The FBN's primary image-maker and consciousness-shaper was Harry Anslinger. Unlike many of his bureaucratic peers, Anslinger had seen the war coming and had taken steps to ensure that a five-year supply of opium would be available to America's military and civilian populations. In 1939 he had “arranged with drug manufacturers to stockpile a sufficient quantity of opium to carry the US and her allies through a conflict.”
¹
He did this without congressional appropriations, by having private funds made available directly to opium manufacturers in Turkey, Iran, and India. To ensure security he convinced the League of Nations to move its narcotics files and experts to the US, and in early 1942 he instructed the Defense Supplies Corporation to “acquire all available stocks of opium in
preparation for a long war.”
²
He personally determined the amount of opium that was brought from Turkey and Iran to the manufacturing companies and he stationed inspectors at their facilities.

“He would send surrendered drugs down to Fort Knox by American Express,” recalls Agent Matt Seifer. “Ten trucks loaded with opium, guarded by FBN agents armed with Tommy guns. From Fort Knox it went to the pharmaceutical companies where the morphine was extracted; places like Ligits, New York Quinine, and Mallinchrodt and Merck. Anslinger had a control committee and every manufacturer had a quota.”

As a result of Anslinger's foresight, the Allies by 1943 were relying on America for most of their opium derivatives, and Anslinger was serving as the guardian of the free world's drug supply. When he learned that Peru had built a cocaine factory, he and the Board of Economic Warfare confiscated its product before it could be sold to Germany or Japan. In another instance Anslinger and George A. Morlock (who had replaced Stuart Fuller as his counterpart at the State Department) prevented a Hoffman La Roche subsidiary in Argentina from selling drugs to Germany. At the same time, Anslinger met his security and counterespionage responsibilities by permitting “an American company to ship drugs to Southeast Asia despite receiving intelligence reports that French authorities were permitting opiate smuggling into China and collaborating with Japanese drug traffickers.”
³

Reconciling the FBN's incompatible espionage and drug law enforcement functions would become one of Anslinger's primary public relations goals throughout the remainder of his tenure as Commissioner of Narcotics.

As a result of his wartime services, Anslinger's prestige and power increased dramatically within the national security Establishment. But there had been no sensational narcotics cases, and drug law enforcement was of little concern to the war-weary public. Many of his agents had been conscripted into the military, and his agent force had dwindled to a bare minimum, to as few as 150 agents. So Anslinger launched a major publicity campaign to create an urgent need for his organization.

The campaign kicked off in 1945 in Washington, DC, when he accused Judge Bolitha Laws of being soft on drug offenders. When, in response to the provocation, Judge Laws suggested that Anslinger's agents might be inept, the Commissioner was ready and waiting: noting to his friends in
the press that the Washington field office had only three agents, he summoned fifty more from around the nation and divided them into two teams.
⁴
With the aid of local policemen and Deputy US Marshals, the teams led spectacular raids on several narcotics rings. One team under Agent LeRoy W. Morrison arrested 200 Blacks in the capital's ghetto and seized a quantity of heroin that was traced to Harlem. The other team, under the direction of Agent Gon Sam Mue, arrested 123 Chinese suspects in fourteen downtown opium dens. The raids brought home the immediacy of the drug problem, proved the FBN was not inept, and scored Anslinger points with the Washington press corps, which appreciated the well-staged publicity stunt.
⁵

Sustaining the public's perception of an urgent need, however, required a steady diet of sensational publicity, so Anslinger aimed his agents at celebrities like Robert Mitchum (busted for marijuana possession) and Errol Flynn (vilified for his cocaine habit). FBN agents paid particular attention to Black jazz musicians like Billie Holiday, arrested by Agent Joe Bransky in 1947 in Philadelphia, and saxophonist Charlie Parker, arrested by Agent John T. Cusack in June 1948 in New York City.

Putting a famous face on the drug problem highlighted the increasing availability of heroin and, as a bonus, by linking marijuana to surges in juvenile delinquency, homosexuality, interracial sex, and other signs of social decay brought about by liberalism, Anslinger bolstered the need for a punitive approach to drug abuse, thus satisfying his conservative core of supporters in Congress while, at the same time, reinforcing the urgent need for his organization.

Another aspect of Anslinger's publicity campaign began in January 1946, when Governor Thomas Dewey approved the commutation of Lucky Luciano's lengthy prison term in return for his wartime services. Luciano was deported to Italy and freedom on 9 February 1946, bringing joy to his Mafia associates. Anslinger, however, was livid with rage, and within a year, allegations that the Mafia had purchased Luciano's freedom were traced to FBN agents, prompting Dewey to engage Anslinger in a bitter feud that would last for years and ultimately damage the FBN's credibility. But Anslinger served the espionage Establishment, which had a vested interest in denying that the Luciano Project ever took place; and in the long run Luciano's deportation benefited Anslinger by providing the FBN with a durable scapegoat and the basis for a sustainable PR campaign. Luciano contributed to the FBN's cause by immediately conferring, upon arriving in Italy, with the Sicilian boss of bosses, Don Calogero Vizzini, and by surrounding himself with fellow deportees.

Anslinger would also suggest that Luciano was part of a communist plot to subvert America with narcotic drugs. This unproven allegation would also damage the FBN's credibility; but the fiction was accepted at the time and helped Anslinger to persuade Congress that stopping drugs overseas, before they reached America's shores, was a matter of national security – a prescient notion that fitted neatly with the Cold War imperative for foreign intervention and helped to establish the need for a larger, more powerful federal Narcotics Bureau.

While Anslinger was exploiting America's prejudices and fears to advance the interests of the FBN, the underworld was reorganizing its drug smuggling and distribution industry. Central to this reorganization was Vito Genovese's release from jail on 24 June 1946. Having worked for the US Army in Italy, Genovese enjoyed a degree of political protection in Manhattan, where he took over the multimillion-dollar Italian lottery. Once the money started rolling in, he began scheming to seize control of the Luciano family from Frank Costello and claim the title of
capo di tutti capi
of the American Mafia.

During this violent transitional stage, gangster veterans of the Luciano Project began to play a more important role in the deep politics of American society. A quick examination of the background characters in the 1943 murder of
Il Martello
publisher Carlo Tresca provides a graphic example of organized crime's deep political association with members of the Establishment.

Tresca was an avowed socialist, and his political adversary was Generoso Pope, publisher of the pro-fascist
Il Progresso Italo-Americano
. It has always been easy for fascists to acquire political patrons in America, but once it became clear that America was going to war with Italy, Pope enlisted the help of New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein, co-founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In 1941 Dickstein defended Pope before Congress, a fact that contributed immensely to Pope's successful attempt to achieve respectability.
⁶

With Dickstein in his corner, Pope emerged as a wedge between the Establishment and the Mafia and, with the support of influential friends like columnist Drew Pearson (a former employee of
Il Progresso
), and Assistant US Attorney Roy Cohn, he was able to provide political cover for his gangster cronies. Frank Costello, for example, was godfather to his
children. But Pope's closest underworld ally was Joseph Bonanno, whose narcotics manager, Carmine Galante, though never convicted, was universally recognized as Tresca's assassin.
⁷

All the Mafia families were investing in labor racketeering, and Pope had aligned with International Ladies Garment Workers Union leader Luigi Antonini through a sweetheart deal arranged by Joe Bonanno's
consigliere
, Frank Garofalo. A vicious killer, Garofalo had been Pope's “factotum” since 1934, when, as Professor Alan Block asserts, Pope had used him to intimidate “other Italian-language newspapers which were anti-fascist and anti-Pope.”
⁸
Tresca threatened to expose Garofalo's connection with Pope, and as a result of that (and because he had blocked Genovese's attempt to establish a social club as a front for drug trafficking), Genovese ordered his execution. Tresca was shot and killed on 11 January 1943. Galante was arrested and held for eight months, but was never indicted, and the FBI failed to connect any Mafiosi with the crime – despite the fact that contributions to Galante's defense fund were funneled through Lucchese family member Joseph DiPalermo and the Teamsters' Union.

Aware that the Mafia was serving new patrons in the wake of the Luciano Project, Pope threw his weight behind the CIA-supported Christian Democrats and became a key player in shaping US foreign policy in Italy. His relations with the espionage Establishment were reportedly cemented when his son, having served briefly in the CIA, purchased the
New York Enquirer
and turned it into the public opinion-shaping, Mafia-friendly tabloid the
National Enquirer.
⁹

In these ways the Mafia began the post-war era on a firm political, economic, and national security footing. The same, however, could not be said for the understaffed, fragmented FBN.

In 1945 the FBN was composed of approximately 150 agents and inspectors. The agents had passed the Treasury exam and spent two weeks at the Law Enforcement School, or as Special Hires they were exempt from the standard Civil Service rules, based on some unique qualification such as the ability to speak a Sicilian dialect. FBN inspectors were licensed pharmacists who worked compliance cases, which involved checking the records of pharmacies and physicians. Some inspectors were agents as well.

Within this small group, a smaller group of case-making agents began to emerge as the organization's leaders. Chief among them was George
White, whose wartime activities and involvement with the Luciano Project placed him squarely in the middle of the FBN's alliance with America's security and intelligence apparatus.

In July 1945 White returned to the US and, after conferring with William Donovan, visited Garland Williams (back from the war and serving again as FBN district supervisor in New York) to study the office files and meet with Mafia expert Arthur Giuliani. In early August, White and Anslinger's trusted enforcement assistant, Malachi Harney, traveled to Kansas City to interview Mafia boss Charles Binaggio, and review the watershed Impostato–DeLuca case of 1942.
¹⁰

As mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, Kansas City since the mid-1930s had served as the way station in the Mafia's national distribution system, under the auspices of Mafia boss Joseph DeLuca. Based in Kansas City, Nick Gentile managed distribution until his arrest in 1937 in FBN Special Endeavor case 131, at which point Nick Impostato took over, traveling the country to make sure that drugs flowed freely from Florida, through Kansas City, to Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, and other western cities. But the success of the nationwide operation relied on political security in Kansas City, and in that respect Joe DeLuca was the key until his downfall in 1942. As Ed Reid notes in
Mafia
, the FBN's 1942 case “shook Kansas City's Mafiosi to the bone.”
¹¹
But by 1945 James Balestrere, manager of the Chicago-based racing wire service in Kansas City, and Charlie Binaggio, the Mafia's liaison to Kansas City's Pendergast machine, were back in control.

Apart from its central role in the Mafia's drug syndicate, two things made Kansas City of special importance to the FBN in August 1945. The first issue was personal: Carl Caramussa – a member of the syndicate and the main witness against Impostato and DeLuca in the 1942 case – had been killed by a shotgun blast to the head two months earlier in Chicago, where he was living under an assumed identity. That was bad enough, but the Mafia assassins had hung a wreath in the local FBN agent's garage as an unsubtle warning, and Anslinger, Harney, and White were enraged and determined to put the arrogant hoods back in their pre-Luciano Project place.

The second matter was political, and concerned President Truman's relationship with Kansas City's infamous Pendergast machine. A compulsive gambler, successful businessman, and astute political kingmaker, Thomas Pendergast had handpicked Harry Truman for the Senate in 1934 and had supported Truman throughout his political career. But Pendergast had earned the wrath of the FBN when, in an effort to help Kansas City survive
the Depression, he opened up the city to gambling, Black jazz musicians, and by extension, the Mafia's drug syndicate.