The Strength of the Wolf (15 page)

While the FBN focused on corrupt officials in Mexico, the Mafia was moving high-grade heroin through Canada to Detroit, where George
White arrived in June 1947 as district supervisor following Ralph Oyler's death in March. Oyler's fatal heart attack came just a few weeks after Detroit was identified in the 25 February 1947
Detroit Times
as a “key city” in a new dope ring established by Lucky Luciano. Anslinger was quoted as saying that after Luciano's arrival in Havana the FBN had discovered a Mafia scheme to make Tampa and New Orleans “the new main ports of entry for a gargantuan flood of illicit dope.” Anslinger added that the Mafia had “obtained a vast dope hoard through looters in the last chaotic weeks of the European and Asiatic wars.”
²⁴

Anslinger's revelations, and the situation in Detroit, are two more examples of the FBN's inability to neutralize the Mafia in the late 1940s. One reason was the FBN's reduced strength – but there was a more sinister reason as well. According to Paul Newey, an FBN agent in Detroit from 1943 until 1948, “We were restricted from taking cases that concerned the Mafia before the US grand jury unless the US Attorney cleared it with the Attorney General in Washington, DC. This, to me, was a method of putting the ‘fix'
sub rosa
for political purposes.”

From the ports of Marseilles and Hong Kong, to the streets of America's cities, political considerations shaped the drug trade, and during Oyler's twelve-year tenure as district supervisor in Detroit, the agents under his command were focused on making politically correct cases against pot smokers, Black heroin addicts, and Chinese opium dens. The Mafia, which controlled importation and distribution, was not a concern, and George White's arrival as acting district supervisor failed to signal a shift in policy. Characteristically, White's primary function in Detroit was to bring the FBN good press. “The FBI had hired a Public Relations man,” Newey explains, “but Anslinger didn't have enough money to do likewise, so he relied on White to get the Bureau publicity.”

White, as ever, was glad to oblige, and posed, a mere month after his arrival in town, with a Tommy gun in one hand and an opium pipe in the other for the 27 July 1947
Detroit Free Press
. Throughout 1946 and 1947, White also continued to experiment with “a speech inducement drug that could be administered orally in alcohol or by insertion in crystal form into a cigarette.”
²⁵
Thus his pursuit of publicity, and his activities on behalf of the espionage Establishment, occupied more of his time than investigating the Mafia in Detroit at a critical point following the war.

Meanwhile, as Anslinger had revealed, Detroit drug smugglers were receiving narcotics from Santo Trafficante in Tampa, via New Orleans. The connection was established in December 1945 when Costello and Lansky opened the Beverley Club in New Orleans under the supervision of Sam
Carolla and Frank Coppola. Originally a member of the Luciano family, Coppola moved to Detroit in the late 1930s and enjoyed political protection there after he joined forces with Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters to kick the Congress of Industrial Organizations out of town in 1941. Coppola was godfather to Hoffa's foster son, and Hoffa protected Coppola's narcotics receivers in Detroit, John Priziola and Raffaele Quasarano, “by assigning them to Teamsters Local 985.”
²⁶

From Hoffa's headquarters in Detroit, the Teamsters facilitated the Mafia's national drug distribution system. After being received from overseas sources, Frank Coppola's narcotics were transported to Joe Civello in Dallas and Frank Livorsi in New York by John Ormento's trucking company. Family ties were the key to success; Livorsi's in-laws included Ormento and brothers John and Frank Dioguardia, who controlled Teamsters locals in New York and Florida with their uncle, James Plumeri, a ranking member of the Lucchese family.

Another advantage was political control at the local level, through which the Mafia was able to seamlessly maintain its national drug distribution network even though the federal government deported dozens of Mafiosi in the post-war years. Case in point: New Orleans boss Sam Carolla was deported to Sicily in May 1947, and Frank Coppola was deported to Italy in January 1948, at which point the New Orleans operation passed to Tunisian-born Carlos Marcello. But drug operations proceeded apace, for like his predecessors, Marcello was protected at home; although FBN agents had arrested him in 1938 for possession of 23 pounds of pot, while he was known to be running one of the “major narcotics rings in the New Orleans area,” Louisiana Governor O. K. Allen arbitrarily reduced his sentence, and within nine short months Marcello was back on the streets.
²⁷

Deportation didn't cramp Carolla's or Coppola's style, either. For many years Coppola had made frequent trips to Europe to purchase narcotics, and he and Carolla merely re-established their base of operations in Sicily, where they continued working with the ranking Sicilian narcotic traffickers, the Badalamentis and the Grecos. It is even likely that Carolla and Coppola, as a result of their Luciano Project and anti-communist activities, were part of what Professor Scott describes as “a post-war intelligence-mafia collaboration” that exploited “international drug traffickers for covert purposes.”
²⁸

The foundation for this symbiotic relationship was laid by the OSS during the war, when it placed Mafiosi in positions of political importance in Sicily and Italy and helped forge their alliance with the Christian Democrats. Involved in this criminal conspiracy were remnants of Mussolini's secret police force (the OVRA); the Italian Masonic Order,
P-2; the Vatican's intelligence service; and the CIA, through William Donovan's World Commerce Corporation (WCC). Formed in 1947 with the financial backing of the Rockefellers, WCC was a private sector version of the Marshall Plan, investing primarily in munitions and strategic materials. Based in Panama and composed largely of former OSS officers, WCC has been described as a cross between “an import-export combine and a commercially oriented espionage network.”
²⁹

One covert and commercial use to which international drug traffickers were put was as a tool in the suppression of communists and labor organizers. In May 1947, for example, Mafioso Salvatore Giuliano and his gang killed eight people and wounded thirty-three in a Sicilian village that had voted for the Communist Party's candidates in elections held four days before. Frank Coppola, from his base in nearby Partinico, reportedly provided Giuliano with the bombs and guns, and was himself “allegedly financed by former OSS chief William Donovan.”
³⁰

“Coppola was the controller behind the scenes, the maker of Sicilian and Roman deputies,” author Gaia Servadio says in
Mafiosi
, and “the deus ex machina of the Salvatore Giuliano saga.”
³¹

By 1948, the CIA was so influential in Italy that the leader of its Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, charged the US with subverting Italy's national elections. He also charged that reporter Michael Stern (who had glorified Giuliano in a series of articles for
True Magazine
in 1947) was a spy for William Donovan and China Lobby Senator Carl Mundt, one of Anslinger's strongest backers. That implies that Anslinger knew everything about the alleged “post-war intelligence-mafia collaboration” that exploited “international drug traffickers for covert purposes.”
³²

US government support for drug smugglers as a function of national security moved with the Kuomintang to Taiwan in October 1949, when the People's Republic of China (PRC) was established. At American insistence, the Nationalists were recognized by the UN as China's legitimate government. Meanwhile, under the direction of the CIA, drug smuggler General Li Mi and the Nationalists' 93rd Division crossed into Burma and, with the assistance of CIA assets in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, began launching covert paramilitary operations against mainland China. To bolster the CIA's covert actions, China Lobby Senator Pat McCarran in February 1949 requested $1.5 million in aid to the Kuomintang, and in April Senator Knowland
began attacking KMT critics in the State Department. Determined to prevent the UN from admitting the PRC, the China Lobby launched a massive propaganda campaign based largely on Anslinger's allegations that the PRC was the source of
all
the illicit dope that reached Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong – despite the 23 July 1949 seizure reported by the
New York Times
at Hong Kong's Kaituk airfield of 22 pounds of heroin that had emanated from a CIA-supplied Kuomintang outpost in Kunming.

Anslinger pulled his weight in many ways: in 1950, when the PRC announced its desire to sell 500 tons of opium on the open market, he refused to allow New York Quinine and Chemical Works to import samples. His stated reason was to prevent the PRC from acquiring the staggering sum of foreign currency the sale would have generated. Anslinger said that he was afraid the PRC would use the money to buy weapons to support communist insurgencies worldwide. But the refusal served an insidious ulterior purpose as well, for by forcing the PRC to sell its opium on the black market – or by creating the impression that it was doing so – Anslinger was able to sustain a black propaganda campaign against the emerging communist nation.

To protect Taiwan from the PRC, the China Lobby raised nearly $5 million of private money, which the CIA used to purchase General Chennault's fleet of planes and convert them into the CIA's first proprietary air force, Civil Air Transport (CAT). Working with Chennault were William Peers, the CIA station chief in Taipei (a former commander of the OSS's opium-dispensing Detachment 101), and Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA's deputy for Asian affairs. Like Peers, Fitzgerald was no stranger to opium: as a liaison officer to Nationalist troops fighting the Japanese during the war, he had “enjoyed the exotic life of the bush, smoking opium with Burmese chieftains.”
³³

Wall Street lawyer Fitzgerald, a figure of some importance in the FBN's clandestine history, had also dabbled in the dirty partisan politics of New York. In February 1949 he had joined with Clendenin J. Ryan and several Republican reformers to create the ostentatiously named Committee of Five Million, whose mission was to expose Mayor O'Dwyer's ties with Frank Costello and torpedo the Democrats in the upcoming mayoral election. But according to his biographer, Evan Thomas, Fitzgerald “was embarrassed” in March when two of the Committee's private investigators were caught wiretapping the home of a Tammany Hall leader. Fitzgerald had attended the wiretap planning sessions and, while not named in the indictment, the experience “soured his enthusiasm for public politics.”
³⁴
But it did propel him into the highest echelons of the
CIA, where his madcap adventures on behalf of the Republican Party continued apace.

Joining Fitzgerald and Peers in 1950 was General Richard Stilwell. As special military advisor to the US ambassador to Italy from 1947 to 1949, Stilwell had helped the Christian Democrats and the Mafia solidify their positions. As CIA logistics chief in Asia from 1949 to 1952, he arranged for CAT to support General Li Mi's incursions from Burma into Yunnan, and thus enable the renegade general to bring to market “a third of the world's illicit opium supply.”
³⁵

The plan to save Taiwan advanced on 7 November 1949, when privateer William S. Pawley received permission from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to lead a group of retired military officers, headed by Admiral Charles Cooke, to Taiwan to advise the KMT on security affairs. No stranger to political intrigues or the underworld, Pawley owned sugar plantations, an airline and a bus system in Cuba, and was linked to Mafia leaders who had investments there too. He was well connected to the espionage Establishment as well: Bill Donovan met with Chiang Kai-shek's defense minister and secret police chief to grease the skids on Pawley's behalf, and William Bullitt in December began raising funds for the so-called Pawley–Cooke Advisory Mission – the lion's share of which was provided by a group of Texas oilmen led by right-wing fanatic H. L. Hunt, a one time professional gambler who, in his younger days, helped finance his empire by running a private racing wire.
³⁶

Also involved in the Pawley–Cooke escapade was M. Preston Goodfellow, former publisher of the
Brooklyn Eagle
and Donovan's liaison, with Garland Williams, to William Keswick and the British SOE in 1942. Later in the war Goodfellow managed sensitive OSS operations in Burma and China, and formed close ties to General Tai Li and drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng. According to Korean War historian Bruce Cumings, Goodfellow made a fortune by combining business ties with “right wing regimes in Asia, with interests in Central America.”
³⁷

Pawley's collusion with Cooke, Donovan, Goodfellow, Bullitt, and Hunt is a textbook example of how Establishment privateers run the secret government. And naturally the mission dovetailed with federal narcotics activities. In January 1950 Goodfellow traveled to Taipei with Cooke, and in April Bullitt's bagman arrived. Soon thereafter, a “Colonel Williams” introduced the bagman to Satiris Fassoulis, “who gave him $500,000 for a PR campaign on Taiwan.”
³⁸

Was this our Garland Williams? Probably. Williams had experience at both ends of the Iran–China connection. In 1948 and 1949 he had
conducted surveys of Iranian opium production and had reported to Anslinger that Iran's most influential families had amassed fortunes through the opium trade, and that they intended to keep anti-drug laws weak.
³⁹
He knew that Iran shipped tons of opium to Indochina through Greek and Armenian brokers like Fassoulis. But Williams was also a security chief for the secret government, and at the same time that CIA officer Allen Dulles was meeting with KMT officials to seal the Pawley–Cooke deal, he was recalled to active duty and took command of the Army's 525th Military Intelligence Group. Among its functions, the 525th MIG prepared intelligence officers for duty in Korea, and as chief of the Group, Williams was in a position to provide covert support to the Pawley–Cooke Advisory Mission, or to Satiris Fassoulis.