The Strength of the Wolf (18 page)

Not everyone, however, attributed the timely deaths of Charles Fischetti and Sam Maceo, and the murders of James Lumia, Charles Binaggio, William Drury, Phil Mangano, and Willie Moretti – all prior to their testimony before the Kefauver Committee – to some mythical Mafia hit team conjured up by George White. Willie Moretti's murder in October 1951 was especially troubling and prompted eccentric New Jersey millionaire Clendenin Ryan, the financier of Desmond Fitzgerald's Committee of Five Million, to call it “a clear-cut case of murder to prevent testimony concerning gambling and corruption.”
²²

Perhaps Ryan doubted that Moretti's murder was a Mafia hit. If not, was it committed by law enforcement officials, the people referred to by
the Kefauver Committee as “the brokers between the law and reality,” those who had so much to lose by Moretti's confessions? Or were organized crime's new patrons in the US intelligence and security agencies weeding out troublesome Mafiosi? The master spies certainly had the capability; they even had their own hit team under Colonel Boris Pash, former counterintelligence chief of the Manhattan Project and George White's colleague in the OSS Truth Drug program. As revealed in Senate hearings in 1976, Colonel Pash had joined the Office of Policy Coordination in March 1949, to manage a five-person unit that conducted assassinations for the State Department and the CIA.
²³

Is it possible that Pash's hit team murdered Moretti, and perhaps other alumni of the Luciano Project, to prevent the Kefauver Committee from uncovering the Mafia's ties to the espionage Establishment – to people like Kefauver's close friend William Donovan, whose law firm provided the Committee with several staff members? Though not widely disseminated, this theory has a lot to recommend it: as Salvatore Vizzini – an FBN agent with solid CIA connections – says so succinctly, “Starting around 1947, a lot of Mafia hits weren't.”

Be that as it may, the Mafia did some serious house cleaning after the Kefauver Hearings. After his brother Phil was murdered, and his biggest money-maker Joe Adonis was imprisoned, Vincent Mangano chose to retire and pass control of his family to Albert Anastasia. With Costello out of the picture, and Lucchese hounded by the FBN, Vito Genovese became more powerful than ever, and his
caporegimes
, Joey Rao and Mike Coppola, seized control of narcotics distribution in Harlem and the Bronx.

The Kefauver Hearings had negative consequences for everyone involved, not just the Mafia. Kefauver's call for a National Crime Commission was squelched by J. Edgar Hoover, and while Kefauver was nominated as his party's vice presidential candidate in 1952, the Democrats had become synonymous with crime and corruption, and the Hearings contributed mightily to their loss of the Senate and the presidency in the 1952 elections. After the Committee was disbanded, its files were transferred to the Commerce Department, where they gathered dust.

The Hearings did some damage to the FBN as well. Increased public attention to drug addiction engendered a perceived need for more governmental oversight, and in November 1951, Truman formed the Interdepartmental Narcotic Committee (INC) to coordinate all federal agencies in the new war on drugs. Though Anslinger chaired the INC, its representative from the Federal Security Agency, Oscar Ewing, publicly defined drug addiction as a health issue related to public access to doctors
and medicine. Ewing admitted Black doctors, for the first time in history, to Washington, DC hospitals, and noting that Black children were not getting medicine, he called for comprehensive prepaid health coverage financed through social security. The AMA opposed him in this effort, as did his segregationist foes, with significant success.
²⁴

Ewing publicly advocated treatment as an alternative to Anslinger's punitive approach, and although opposed by powerful forces, he was supported in this effort by Rufus King, the Chairman of the American Bar Association's Commission on Organized Crime. King and the ABA opposed mandatory sentencing and launched a campaign opposing the Boggs Bill, stressing that the legislation was flawed because it failed to distinguish between addicts, first-time pot smokers, and Mafia distributors.

Personal animosities that would haunt the FBN were also bred by the Hearings. In March 1951, Charlie Siragusa returned to New York, after having established the FBN's first overseas office in Rome, to testify before the Committee. Touted as “the” expert on the Mafia, Siragusa claimed that Luciano was the Mafia's exiled king and referred to rumors that his commutation may have been the result of a bribe. Shocked, Kingsland Macy called for an investigation of Governor Dewey, reigniting Dewey's simmering feud with Anslinger. In desperation, Dewey “summoned FBI director J. Edgar Hoover … and strongly urged that Anslinger be replaced as narcotics Commissioner.” But Anslinger's “ardent Republican backers (especially in the pharmaceutical industry that the FBN monitored) and their plaudits” came to his defense and prevailed.
²⁵
When that effort failed, Dewey in 1954 would direct William B. Herlands, the New York State Commissioner of Investigations, to conduct an inquiry that would finally clear his name.

In addition to having made powerful bureaucratic and political enemies during the Kefauver Hearings, the FBN was damaged by internecine warfare within the all-important New York office. The problem climaxed when Garland Williams was recalled to active duty in June 1950. Certain he would be chosen to replace Williams as district supervisor, George White, as Agent George H. Gaffney recalls, “hung all his prize photos up on the wall, including the one of the Jap he'd killed with his bare hands in New Delhi. The photos were there for about two weeks, then for some reason George was sent to Boston.”

One reason was Truman's unhappiness with White's attempts to link him to Kansas City's Pendergast machine. Another was Hoover's anxiety over White's increasingly cozy relationship with the CIA. But the ultimate veto came from Dewey, who blamed White for the ongoing Luciano commutation scandal. But White was too important to be slighted, so Anslinger avoided a confrontation with his rivals, and assuaged White, by appointing him as the district supervisor in Boston. According to agents on the scene, White was rarely there. Instead he kept his apartment in New York and went to work for Newbold Morris, a Labor Party functionary who served as a special assistant to the Attorney General on organized crime from February to April 1951, when Hoover summarily derailed his investigation. A great opportunity arose at this point, and White signed a contract with the CIA and began a secret LSD-testing project, which will be discussed at length later. The CIA arrangement allowed White to run operations in New York, to the dismay of James Clement Ryan, the FBN agent who was appointed to the New York district supervisor's job.

A former Marine Corps officer, Ryan was a veteran agent with a wide range of experience, including investigations in Latin America. But he'd spent most of his career in New York, where he was plugged into the Irish Establishment through his rabbi, Cardinal Spellman, and his many friends in the senior ranks of the NYPD. One of his colleagues, George H. Gaffney, describes him as a “superb agent, honest and fair, and blessed with a pleasing personality,” and says that Ryan was genuinely admired by his colleagues. Another agent compares him to John Wayne in style and appearance, and says that he was the last popular supervisor in the highly visible New York office.

When Ryan took command, there were approximately sixty agents working in the New York office, accounting for one-third of the FBN's entire field force. Within the office there were four enforcement groups, a compliance squad, and three Special Endeavor groups, one each under agents LeRoy Morrison, Price Spivey, and J. Ray Olivera. Another select group under Joe Amato focused exclusively on the Mafia and its international connections. One agent was assigned to satellite offices in Buffalo, Newark, and Patterson, New Jersey, the latter having been established by Anslinger as a personal favor for Representative Gordon C. Canfield (R-NJ), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

The most significant members of Ryan's Celtic clique were Charles G. “Pat” Ward (leader of Enforcement Group Three), Patrick P. O'Carroll, Benjamin Fitzgerald, George H. Gaffney, John T. “Jack” Cusack, Thomas “Old Tom” Dugan, and LeRoy “Roy” Morrison, the only non-Chinese
agent to work the t'ongs independently of George White in New York. Fitzgerald was said to be Ryan's closest confidant. Known for his hornrimmed glasses and florid face, “Fitz” was often seen huddled with Ryan at a local saloon, where they spent their time talking in whispers and playing dollar poker. A tough Welshman from Hell's Kitchen, Pat Ward was Ryan's chief lieutenant; he knew all of the city's narcotic detectives and drug dealers by sight and name, and managed the office's most important investigations. Maxie Roder, a German-American agent who had been in New York continually since his days in Colonel Nutt's Narcotic Division, was Ryan's liaison to the NYPD precinct captains and, based on his seniority, ran the office's Irish sweepstakes.

Crucial to Ryan's success was his relationship with the NYPD's narcotic squad, which had the power to conduct warrantless searches and shared with Ryan its numerous informers, as well as its contacts at the telephone company and the District Attorney's office. In return, Ryan provided the City's narcotic squad with the latest wiretap and bugging technology, as well as intelligence on the national and international activities and associates of New York-based drug traffickers.

The problem was that Ryan's Celtic clique was insensitive to the feelings of other ethnic groups, and there was resentment over assignments and perceived insults. As Howard Chappell notes, “It was the Irish Catholic agents against everybody else. They especially resented Garland Williams for always assigning Irwin Greenfeld as acting district supervisor in his absence.”

Chappell – who arrived in New York in 1949 and served in Sam Levine's enforcement group through 1951 – cites as an example the case his group made on Ellsworth R. “Bumpy” Johnson, Harlem's biggest heroin distributor. With Meyer Lansky as his advisor, Johnson had taken over the numbers racket in the 1930s, but in order to prevent his rivals from amassing enough power to challenge him, he became a drug distributor for the Mafia. Genovese's
caporegime
, Joey Rao, was his heroin supplier. In 1950, Black Agent Bill Jackson made two undercover buys from Bumpy, with Chappell covering his back, under the direction of Sam Levine. But Ryan allowed Pat Ward and George Gaffney to make the arrest and take credit for the bust.

Complaints of favoritism were annoying, but Ryan's biggest headache was George White. White had an extensive network of informers in New York, and his private investigations undercut and often upstaged Ryan. Worse, White sent poison-pen letters to Anslinger, relaying rumors about Ryan and members of his inner circle being involved in corruption. White's source of
gossip was his own clique of agents, including several who lurked in Chinatown and Little Italy as part of Joe Amato's wide-ranging Mafia Squad.

A major member of White's clique was Price Spivey. A heavy-set Southerner, Spivey had worked closely with White in New York before the war and during the war had served in the US Army CID tracking black marketeers in France, before returning to the FBN. Spivey's Special Endeavor case (SE 226) focused on Harold Meltzer's drug-smuggling operation out of Mexico. In October 1950, while putting the finishing touches on the case, Spivey suffered a broken leg and seven broken ribs when a mob hit team ran him off a road outside Atlantic City. Despite three months on the critical list, he returned to action and in March 1951 wrapped up the case. Meltzer received a stiff sentence in California, although his New York connection, John Ormento, was sentenced to only two years. Unindicted co-conspirators included Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen in California.

One of the items of business for the New York office was tracking down fugitives from the Meltzer case. High on the list was Frank Tornello, a major drug dealer whose arrest would break open an important aspect of the post-war French connection and set Agent George Gaffney on the fast track to success.

A Naval Academy graduate, Gaffney had served as a navigator on the USS Missouri during the war. But his real interest was in intelligence work, so he resigned his commission in 1949 and, based on a brief association with Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA's first director, sought work with the CIA. Hillenkoetter, however, had disappointed Truman and was on the way out when Gaffney applied, and after the CIA rejected his application, he turned to the FBN and was hired in 1949 by Garland Williams. Charlie Siragusa was his first group leader, and Pat Ward was his first partner in Group Three. In 1950 he attended the CID's School of Investigations at Camp Gordon, and upon his return he joined Group One under Irwin Greenfeld and began tracking Frank Tornello.

Gaffney's partner on the Tornello case, Mike Picini, was slightly senior and had already made his mark as the undercover agent who made buys in Los Angeles from Waxey Gordon (real name Irving Wexler), a notorious drug trafficker since 1917!

Picini's induction into the FBN is worth describing, for it illustrates how freewheeling the organization was in the 1940s. Following a tour in the Army CID, Picini enrolled in Rutgers University's Law School, then went to work as a clerk for a judge in Camden, New Jersey. One day, while filling a prescription for the judge in a local drug store, Picini was spied by
Joe Bransky, the FBN's district supervisor in Philadelphia. Branksy was conducting a compliance inspection, and Picini so closely resembled a typical Mafia hood that Bransky offered him a job on the spot.

Picini accepted the offer and, after a brief period of familiarization, was assigned to the Washington field office where, under the direction of Mal Harney, he was sent to Los Angeles to work on the Waxey Gordon case with San Francisco District Supervisor Ernie Gentry. Pretending to be an East Coast gangster on the lam, Picini and special employee John Pitta, a former Mafia drug dealer, worked eighteen months on the case. Picini says with pride, “There only were about twelve of us doing undercover work then; three Italians – me, Tony Zirilli, and Benny Pocoroba – and the rest were Blacks.”