The Strength of the Wolf (16 page)

For his part, Fassoulis denies ever having met Williams, or that Hunt provided money, or that Pawley was involved. He denies everything. However, he had been an American pilot in China during the war, where he may have met Garland Williams, and in 1950 he was vice president of Commerce International China (CIC), a subsidiary of Donovan's WCC. CIC was exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act and supplied the Pawley–Cooke mission with everything from gas masks to airplanes. It was also accused of smuggling contraband to America.
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CIC was accused, but not investigated. On the contrary, FBI and Army counterintelligence agents began investigating critics who might expose the secret government's drug-related operations. In October 1951, none other than Admiral Charles “Savvy” Cooke testified that John Service, the State Department officer who'd reported on the Kuomintang's narcotics dealings, was a communist sympathizer. In a similar instance, State Department officer Oliver E. Clubb objected in one of his reports to Chiang's use of the opium traffic to further his designs for a “Nazi”-style dictatorship.
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Soon thereafter,
Time
editor and former communist Wittaker Chambers told the Internal Security Subcommittee that Clubb had gotten Professor Owen Lattimore (coiner of the pejorative phrase “the China Lobby”) a phony passport. Clubb was suspended from the State Department in July 1951.

More and more reports, some generated by the FBN, appeared linking liberals with drug-dealing communists. Following Agent J. Ray Olivera's investigation of Lucky Luciano in Cuba, for example, someone at FBN headquarters told muckrakers Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer that the Peruvian
communists had built seventeen cocaine factories in Lima, but that the “New Deal State refused to intervene;” the reporters called this “criminal negligence.”
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Meanwhile, Anslinger was nursing a Congressman through a morphine addiction. “Anslinger would have preferred to treat the Congressman as any other addict,” one journalist reported, but he continued to fill the man's prescriptions because, “the national interest was involved.”
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By June 1950 and the start of the Korean War, everything was overshadowed by the national interest. In terms of drug law enforcement, this meant promoting the myths that America was being poisoned by dope that originated “behind the Iron Curtain,” and that Russia used drug profits to pay its secret agents in America; that “the titular head of the Cuban Communist Party offered [Luciano] ‘sanctuary,' and that ‘a pink lawyer' represented the Mafia's drug syndicate in the East Harlem district of ‘left wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio.' ” During Marcantonio's ascendancy, Lait and Mortimer said, “Labor Party district leaders were able to supply police protection [to drug dealers] through alliances with both Tammany Hall and anti-Tammany Hall Mayor LaGuardia.”
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They said that Anslinger had been “handcuffed” for eighteen years by liberal judges who were sure to keep junk peddlers “out of jail because of a fix or muddle headedness.”
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Lait and Mortimer weren't scholars, but their books were popular, and the public perceptions they created, amid the mass hysteria of the McCarthy era, help to explain why Anslinger's campaign to link Lucky Luciano and the Mafia to a mythical communist drug-smuggling conspiracy was conceived and believed.

Few public officials dared dispute Anslinger's assertion that the PRC was using opium profits to finance wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Malaysia, even if that assertion was contradicted by the facts. But considering the poisonous atmosphere of the McCarthy era, evidence was not all that important. It didn't matter, for example, that Huang Chao-chin, who “narrowly escaped conviction while he was Consul General in San Francisco in 1937 on charges of smuggling narcotics in the United States,” sat on the Kuomintang's Central Committee, or that the KMT had massacred thousands of opponents in Taiwan, or that the goal of its CIA-advised secret police was the creation of a police state under Chiang's son and dynastic successor, Chiang Ching-kuo.
⁴⁶

It didn't matter that the CIA was protecting America's drug-dealing allies or that Anslinger, whose broad shoulders had attained Herculean proportions, was running interference. In the Cold War climate, that was how the Great Game was played.

The FBN's Mafia hunt began on the ground with addict informers, the grimy grist for their mill; but junkies didn't volunteer their services, so case-makers had to create a crime.

According to former drug addict and best-selling author William S. Burroughs,

Burroughs goes on to say that while the junky is pondering his decision, the agent puts a few caps of heroin on the table. “This is like pouring a glass of water in front of a man dying of thirst,” Burroughs observes, “and the junky starts spewing names.”
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The agent's goal was to move up the food chain: to force junkies to set up pushers, pushers to set up retailers, and retailers to set up wholesalers with sizable amounts of heroin. Anyone arrested for selling a kilogram of junk could receive a ten-year prison term, and mounting the head of a
Mafia wholesaler on his mantle was every case-maker's dream. But it was impossible for an undercover agent to buy heroin from a Mafia don, and informers in the upper echelons of the Mafia were rare, and their fate certain, as Carl Caramussa learned the hard way. The FBN never had more than five informers inside the Mafia, which in New York numbered around 2000 “made” (meaning officially inducted) members, all of whom were willing “to do the time” in prison to protect their revered and ruthless bosses.

Complicating matters was the fact that most informers were acquired through the plodding process of “two buys and a bust”; two buys being required by law to transcend entrapment and prove intent. So FBN agents scoured the city's seedy hotels, rooftops, and back alleys, searching for the rare addict or street pusher who could entrap a disgruntled Mafioso, who in turn would lead them into the dark heart of the international drug conspiracy.

Though arduous, the two-buys-and-a-bust routine paid dividends by enabling the FBN to record and compile biographical data on almost every major drug trafficker in a two-volume leather-bound blacklist. Domestic violators were listed alphabetically in the dark brown
National List
, while the foreign varieties were listed in the burgundy International List. Both books were published by the Treasury Department and made available to FBN agents. A separate Mafia Book, specific to that genre, was also compiled in an eight and a half by eleven-inch book that was about two and a half inches thick.

The books featured approximately 800 traffickers, plus their aliases, associates, and
modi operandi
. In the days before computers, this composite rogues' gallery was more than just an encyclopedia of dope dealers; it was the first organizational chart of the underworld. It showed relationships that revealed corporate veils, and offshore businesses and bank accounts. And by enabling federal agents to check the passenger lists of ocean liners and merchant vessels for known smugglers, it sometimes allowed them to anticipate deliveries and make significant seizures. But best of all, the books impressed politicians.

Using its blacklists, stable of informers, guerrilla warfare tactics, and contacts in local, state, and foreign law enforcement groups, the FBN by 1950 was putting more bodies in prison than any other federal agency and often provided the evidence the other agencies needed to make gambling, tax, weapons, or counterfeiting cases. As respected investigative reporter Fred Cook gushed, the FBN always seemed to know what was happening “as soon as it happened.”
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In the early 1950s, New York was the major port of entry for most of America's illicit narcotics. Demand was rising, and huge profits awaited the highest concentration of Mafiosi in the nation, represented by the fabled Five Families of scrap-metal czar Vito Genovese, olive oil importer Joe Profaci, cheese importer Joe Bonanno, tomato importer Vincent Mangano, and clothing manufacturer Thomas Lucchese.

In those days the FBN's primary target was the resilient 107th Street Gang, which distributed heroin to Jewish, Italian, Black, and Puerto Rican gangs in and around the city. Observing the Gang's operation was easy: FBN agents would sit outside its depots, watch its customers make purchases, then follow them to their packaging plants, where New York City narcotic squad detectives could, in their jargon, “kick in doors” on suspicion and make busts.

But putting the Gang out of business was impossible, according to Lait and Mortimer (based on tips they received from FBN executives), because Labor Party district leaders loyal to Congressman Marcantonio assured police protection through their allies in Tammany Hall. This accommodation allegedly allowed Marcantonio's political operatives to import Puerto Rican immigrants into the neighborhood for the purpose of selling Mafia narcotics, and to encourage their countrymen to vote for Mafia-approved candidates. The effect of these allegations was to stigmatize Democratic Party officials by linking them to a drug-smuggling conspiracy with Blacks, Puerto Ricans, the left-wing labor movement, the Mafia, and communists.
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The FBN considered Thomas Lucchese as the mastermind of this conspiracy for two reasons: because John Ormento, a ranking member of his family, managed the Gang's narcotics operations; and because Vito Marcantonio was Lucchese's political patron. Marcantonio had even gotten Lucchese's son into West Point. But Lucchese's circle of influential friends transcended partisan politics and included Republicans and the local US Attorney, Myles J. Lane, one of whose top aides paid for rooms used by Lucchese at the Hotel Astor in March 1948. Thus, by 1950, Lucchese ranked with Joe Adonis as the FBN's most wanted drug kingpin, although Frank Costello was still, politically speaking, its most wanted man.
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Tom Lucchese represented everything the Establishment despised about immigrants, the working class, and organized labor. He was born in Palermo
in 1899 and his criminal record dated to 1921. Ten years later, Lucky Luciano awarded him one of the Five Families, and by 1939, having formed relations with Tammany Hall, the pint-sized godfather replaced Louis Buchalter as the underworld boss in New York's garment district. Through extortion, drug trafficking (he was No. 139 on the International List) and labor racketeering, he came to own legitimate garment and trucking businesses that extended throughout New England and New Jersey. However, as a family boss, he sat above the drug syndicate managers on his family's organizational chart. He never actually handled narcotics, and only through a well-orchestrated conspiracy case could the FBN possibly convict him. But that was impossible, because such a complex conspiracy case would necessarily implicate the Establishment judges, prosecutors, and politicians who protected him.

The only alternative was to expose the system itself – the alliance between gangsters, policemen, and politicians that the Establishment secretly maintained. Anslinger and his inner circle understood this, and their relentless PR campaigns acted as bait for the national press corps: reporter Ed Montgomery won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on organized crime in the
San Francisco Examiner
; Don Petit gained fame for exposing the mob in Florida; and Ed Reid won acclaim for revealing that New York's top bookmaker paid members of the NYPD $1 million a year for protection, and that Mayor O'Dwyer's clerk had done favors for “waterfront characters who were close to Albert Anastasia and his mob of killers.”
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In March 1950, the avalanche of press reports had the desired effect, and New York State Representative Kingsland Macy – a Taft Republican veteran of the Rothstein scandal and true believer in the theory that all crime emanated from Tammany Hall – demanded a congressional investigation. Taking up the gauntlet was Estes Kefauver, a Democratic Senator from Tennessee whose goal was to run for president in 1952, and whose strategy was to achieve favorable national attention by exposing the role of organized crime in political corruption, illegal gambling, and labor racketeering. In order to embark on such a perilous mission, the ambitious Senator needed only – and this was no easy task – the approval of President Truman and Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat McCarran.
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A conservative ideologue with a grudge against Big City Democrats, McCarran recognized the merit in Kefauver's idea; however, having legalized gambling in 1931, Nevada was dominated by organized crime figures, to the extent that McCarran was facetiously referred to as “the Gambler's Senator.” This fact put McCarran in a compromising position, so he initially decided to run the investigation himself. But after Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy gained instant notoriety in February 1950, by claiming that he had a list of 205 people in the State Department who were “known members” of the American Communist Party, McCarran turned his attention to the more politically promising anti-communist witch-hunt, and established the Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee. Unable to manage both projects simultaneously, he came to terms with Kefauver.