The Strength of the Wolf (13 page)

Bransky in particular was one of Anslinger's favorite agents. Not only had he arrested Lucky Luciano in 1923; more importantly, Bransky had made the 1941 case on the Direct Sales Company, which was selling morphine tablets through the mail to doctors in South Carolina. More than 1,350 wholesalers were providing doctors with narcotics, and the Direct Sales case put a stop to the practice. As Anslinger proudly proclaimed in
The Protectors
, Bransky was “the instrument through which the Supreme Court hammered home the responsibility of the drug trade and medical profession alike for alert narcotics supervision and control.”
¹⁸

But the most successful of the drugstore men would be Henry L. Giordano. A pharmacist from Seattle, Giordano became a full-fledged agent working on an important undercover case in Canada. More remains to be said about him, but for now it's enough to know that in 1962 Giordano would replace Anslinger as Commissioner of Narcotics.

After the war, with the resurgence of the Mafia and international drug smuggling, the emphasis shifted from compliance work to undercover work and conspiracy cases, and street agents became more important than the inspectors. Likewise the war brought about desegregation, a mass migration of Southern Blacks to Northern cities, and a rise in drug addiction, much of it among former soldiers and much of it in Black communities. Congress, ever vigilant, declared a heroin epidemic and pushed for results, which Anslinger was happy to deliver. But in order to achieve those results, Anslinger had to increasingly rely upon Black undercover agents, a development that put his personal prejudices on a collision course with his organization's vital needs.

Anslinger boasted of having more Black employees than any other federal agency, and in
The Protectors
he claimed that his anti-narcotics crusade against Black musicians had nothing to do with prejudice. He had worked nights as a piano player in a silent movie theater, he liked jazz, and he had compassion for people who ruined their careers with dope. He could even relate to poor folk: “For some,” he acknowledged, “narcotics block out the sights and sounds of poverty.”
¹⁹
But throughout his tenure as Commissioner of the FBN, Anslinger's unstated policy was blatantly segregationist, and he instructed his supervisors to keep Black agents on what they privately and snidely called “the merry-go-round,” which meant sending Black undercover agents from district to district so they could never stay in one place long enough to exert any individual or concerted influence. The result, of course, was that tensions began to build between White and Black agents.

“Undercover agents were used against their own ethnic groups,” Matt Seifer says in defense of Anslinger and the FBN. “Italians went after Italians; Jews went after Jews; Blacks went after Blacks. There was a lot of teasing to ease the tension, so you couldn't be thin-skinned about your heritage. People even teased Benny Pocoroba because he spoke broken English and urinated in a bottle on stakeouts.”

But Irish, Italian, and Jewish agents
were
promoted to management positions, while Blacks, though performing an increasingly larger percentage of the undercover work, were not. (The one Hispanic agent to be put in charge of an office, J. Ray Olivera, was fortunate to have Congressman B. Carroll Reece as his rabbi.) Yet in order to keep faith with the White agents who
sometimes
covered their backs, the Black agents were expected to honor the FBN's sacred code of silence.

The predicament of Black agents is best expressed by William B. Davis. After graduating from Rutgers University, Davis, while visiting New York City, heard singer Kate Smith praising Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show. “She described him as a Black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a federal narcotic agent, and that was my inspiration. I applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or give direction to Whites. The few Black agents we had at any one time,” he says bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities heaped upon us.”
²⁰

Davis tells how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the 1930s, created a patent medicine called Mother McCree's Goose Grease. But McCree made the mistake of writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that federal prosecutors in the South were calling Black agents “niggers.” As a result, Anslinger had his legal staff charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine. McCree was fired and his dismissal had the intended ripple effect: it sent a clear message that complaints from Black agents would not be tolerated.

Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police in the 1970s, explains the situation from local law enforcement's point of view: “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because it was easy. We didn't need a search warrant, it allowed us to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there's no expectation on the jury's part that we even have to make a case. So rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we're interested in. We don't care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That's the job of federal agents.”

Alas, under Anslinger's bigoted guidance, his agent force often seemed more intent on perpetuating addiction in America's ghettos than in eradicating it.

The FBN was a political animal and political patronage was one of its traits. Matt Seifer recalls the time Eleanor Roosevelt was unhappy with Anslinger and wanted to replace him. So he appointed one of the First Lady's
classmates as district supervisor in Denver. “She [Elizabeth Bass] always went about in the company of two male agents,” Seifer says, “and she always carried two semi-automatics in her handbag. She'd get to a hotel and plop that bag down on the counter and you could hear the guns clanking inside. She was quite a character!”

But the fish rots from the head down, and Anslinger's penchant for patronage, and for asking agents to perform petty favors, created a venal environment that fostered corruption. Charges that Anslinger was abusing his power began in 1939, after Professor Alfred Lindesmith questioned his punitive approach toward addicts and charged that Anslinger's policy only added a profit motive to trafficking. In retaliation, Anslinger sent Chicago District Supervisor James Biggins to Indiana University to warn the authorities that Lindesmith's Narcotic Research Foundation, which advocated the treatment of addicts, was sponsored by “a criminal organization,” which it was not.
²¹

To justify his punitive stance, Anslinger also (at the expense of making conspiracy cases) focused his agent force on bringing in all known addicts, fingerprinting them, and counting them for statistical purposes. But behind the scenes, some of his agents were handing out dope to the addicts, feeding their habits in order to make cases and inflate the statistics, thus fostering corruption throughout the organization.

“Anslinger got away with murder,” Matt Seifer says. “He catered to the wealthy and instead of prosecuting their kids, he sent them to Lexington [where the Public Health Service drug addiction treatment center was located]. He played politics, but he was smart. Our jurisdiction in Boston covered all of New England into Canada, and some of the houses that were used as depots were half in and half out, and one time one of our men killed a Canadian. But Anslinger wouldn't let them extradite the agent. He was very protective.”

Despite the discontent of some Black agents, and despite policies that, by fostering corruption, disturbed both Black and White agents, Anslinger maintained his exquisite mystique – and the loyalty of the vast majority of his agent force.

“FBN agents were dedicated,” Seifer says proudly. “None of this nine-to-five crap. We worked a hundred hours a week and kept a change of clothes in the office. Back in the old days the agents used their own money too. Earl Teets used money from his own pockets to feed his dogs, which he had trained to sniff out opium. Greeny used to say, ‘You get bit by the bug.' ”

With Anslinger and his agents it was tit for tat. In order to make cases, agents had to start with addicts on the street and work their way up the
food chain to the Mafia kingpins. To pave the way for his men, Anslinger promoted the myth that potheads and junkies were as guilty as the drug lords who managed the trade. Stigmatizing and criminalizing users did nothing to reduce demand, but it did make it easier for agents to turn minor offenders and addicts into informants. Ironically, in this consciously misconstrued way, myths about pot smokers and heroin addicts advanced the short-term interests of the FBN and laid the groundwork for its epic Mafia hunt.

By mid-1946, Lucky Luciano was settled in Rome with his trusted cadre of deported American Mafiosi and had formed working relations with the Sicilian Mafia. Then in October 1946, in a bold attempt to reorganize the American rackets under his command, the droopy-eyed villain traveled to Havana and, after establishing contacts, summoned his former paisanos in December. Among those paying homage (some grudgingly) to the resurrected boss of bosses were Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Chicago's Charlie Fischetti. At this infamous Cuban crime summit, the Mafia's top priorities were reorganizing its drug syndicate and settling a dispute between two competing racing wire services. At the center of both issues was tempestuous Bugsy Siegel.

In order to appreciate this situation it is necessary to know some of the details of the Mafia's sordid history. In 1937 Lansky and Costello sent Siegel to Los Angeles so that, together with the reigning Mafia boss of California, Jack Dragna, he could seize control of the various West Coast gambling and labor rackets. Pleased at the prospect of ruling his own fiefdom, Siegel energetically pushed his way into independently owned racetracks and gambling houses, and set about replacing James Ragen's Continental Press Service out of Chicago with Trans-America, a racing wire service he and Dragna eventually formed in 1945. The Chicago mob, which had joined
with Lansky and Costello in the West Coast venture, had a stake in reaching a settlement with Ragen, and made him an offer he should not have refused. But the feisty newspaperman sought protection from the FBI instead, and that was a big mistake. On 24 June 1946, Ragen was shot in traditional gangland style as he stood on a street corner. He died a few weeks later in a Chicago hospital, allegedly from a lethal injection of mercury.

With Ragen out of the way, the Mafia's takeover of the West Coast racing wire business seemed a sure bet. But Siegel, suffering from delusions of grandeur, refused to fold Trans-America into Continental. The ensuing “wire service war” raged for a year and was bad business for everyone except Bugsy, who controlled both services and profited doubly by forcing bookmakers to buy from both. Siegel further aggravated his patrons by spending huge amounts of their money building the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and trying to grab control of the Mexican drug trade.

Meanwhile, on 11 February 1947, radio host Walter Winchell announced to the world that Lucky Luciano was consorting with known criminals in Cuba, at which point Garland Williams sent veteran Agent J. Ray Olivera to Havana to investigate. Working with Treasury representative Joseph A. Fortier and Cuban secret police chief Renito Herrera, Olivera uncovered Luciano's involvement with a slew of crooked Cuban generals and politicians, including Senator Eduardo Suarez Rivas and Congressman Indelicio Pertierra, the “axle,” as Olivera called him, between the Cuban and American gangsters.
¹
One of their joint ventures was a small airline that landed at Key West, without passing through US Customs, and undoubtedly served to smuggle narcotics.

Eager to do business with the Mafia, Senator Suarez Rivas had endorsed Luciano's entry visa and was proud to be his political protector, though Lucky was cutting deals with everyone of importance in Cuba including First Lady Paulina Aleina Ida de Grau; her nephew by marriage, Manuel Arias, operator of the National Casino; and Senator Paco Prio Socarras, a drug addict and brother of Premier (and future president) Carlos Prio Socarras.
²

Through an informant and a microphone hidden in Suarez Rivas's office, Olivera discovered that the Senator was in business with Lansky, that Costello owned the Hotel Presidente, and that Luciano was negotiating to buy a piece of the National Casino. He also reported that a Peruvian woman brought cocaine to Suarez Rivas and Paco Prio Socarras and, more importantly, that Luciano was allegedly planning to divert narcotic medicines, exported to Cuba by American pharmaceutical firms, onto the black market.

Outraged that Luciano was conspiring to traffic in black-market narcotics only ninety miles off the Florida coast, Anslinger threatened to
cut off
all
medical supplies to Cuba unless Luciano was immediately expelled. He didn't have the authority to impose an embargo, but Attorney General Thomas C. Clark and the State Department supported him, and as a result, Cuban president Ramon Grau San Martin acceded to Anslinger's ultimatum. Luciano was arrested on 23 February, and in early March was forcibly returned to Italy, in steerage, aboard a Turkish tramp steamer. The mortified mobster arrived in Genoa on 11 April 1947, having failed in his audacious attempt to restructure the Mafia drug syndicate, and Anslinger savored his victory.