The Strength of the Wolf (19 page)

After the Gordon bust, Picini tracked Frank Tornello to New York. District Supervisor Ryan, however, was not inclined to let his turf be worked independently by Picini out of Washington, so he relieved Gaffney of his other duties and ordered him to help Picini locate and arrest Tornello. As Gaffney recalls, “Tornello was a used-car salesman who was last seen driving a 1946 Cadillac Sedan. I knew the plate number and I followed leads in seven states and Canada until finally, alone, I found him in the cocktail lounge at a bar in Eastchester, New York, in January 1952.”

“What?” says Picini in mock disbelief when told of Gaffney's apocryphal account of the Tornello case. “The truth,” he says, “is that some guy who went to this club in Eastchester saw Tornello's face in
True Detective
magazine. There was a reward for any information leading to his arrest, so the guy went to the editor, Rene Buse, to collect. Well, George was a friend of Buse's, and on a Friday she tells him that Tornello goes to this club. Gaffney tells me, and we agree to wait till Monday before we pick him up. So what happens?” By now Picini is convulsing with laughter, “That little shit arrests him while I'm home in New Jersey visiting my wife over the weekend.”

Picini, like Gaffney, would enjoy a successful career in the FBN, and having already made a name for himself in the Gordon case, he didn't care that Gaffney claimed credit for making the Tornello case – although the episode does underscore the virtue of corroborating what any FBN agent says about his prowess and achievements. In any event, the Tornello case was more than a stepping-stone in Gaffney's career. After his capture, Tornello would provide significant new leads to an important avenue of the French connection.

Meanwhile, Agent Henry Giordano was working on a related French connection case in Canada and had made undercover buys from George Mallock, a big-league trafficker working with Mafia and French traffickers
in Canada. Although George and his brother John Mallock fled before the Mounties closed in, Anslinger was impressed by Giordano's style, and took a personal interest in his career (some say because Giordano's mother was a bigwig in the Republican Party), appointing him agent in charge in Minneapolis in 1952, then district supervisor in Kansas City in 1954.

Two years later came the twist of fate that opened the door to a headquarters position. In 1956, Irwin Greenfeld was serving as district supervisor in Baltimore, and was in line to become Anslinger's field supervisor. But a beloved younger brother had a sudden, fatal heart attack. Greeny was so devastated that he was placed on sick leave, and in his absence, Giordano got the job. He would remain at headquarters for the rest of his career, and would stay in Anslinger's good graces by adopting his Spartan management style and militant crusade against marijuana. Giordano's pharmacological background further endeared him to Anslinger, for it enabled him to provide Congressmen with credible explanations as to why methadone should not be considered a treatment for addiction.

After he became Commissioner in 1962, Giordano would try to perpetuate Anslinger's policies. But the policies were obsolete by then, and he lacked charisma, let alone Anslinger's exquisite mystique; and in less than six years, the FBN under Giordano would descend into oblivion.

But those developments were far off in the future, and in 1951 the FBN's greatest days lay ahead, thanks largely to Giordano's chief rival, the inimitable Charlie Siragusa.

While the FBN focused its feeble post-war international powers on the Mafia's smuggling operations out of Mexico, Frank Coppola and his associate Sam Carolla were setting up operations in Sicily and branching out through Europe, just as Lucky Luciano and his entourage of deported Mafiosi were doing in Rome. Meyer Lansky, meanwhile, was discreetly forming prostitution, gambling, and narcotics enterprises in the Middle East with two Corsican crime lords – Marcel Francisci in Marseilles and Joe Renucci in Tangiers – whose lieutenants controlled Mediterranean smuggling routes and had connections in East Asia as well. As a result of these developments, by 1950 pure white French connection heroin was appearing in volume on America's streets, available through Mafia distributors to an ever-increasing number of consumers.

The timing of this resurgence in international drug trafficking corresponded neatly with Anslinger's desire to increase the FBN's influence at home and abroad. Political developments were favorable everywhere, but most importantly in Italy. Threatened by communist movements in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, the Vatican prayed for help, and America's Roman Catholic bishops responded by forming the Save Europe Committee, and the State Department delivered a multimillion-dollar emergency loan to the Christian Democrats in Rome. When the communists began to organize the Italian peasantry in preparation for the 1948 general
elections, Secretary of Defense John Forrestal authorized the CIA to route US weapons to the Italian Army and the Royal Counterespionage Service, the Carabinieri. There were allegations by the Italian left that former OSS chief William Donovan was also moving guns and propaganda materials to goon squads composed of Fascists and Mafiosi, including Salvatore Giuliano and Frank Coppola, operating under the protection of local police forces.

To roll back Soviet expansion and protect American investments in Europe, Congress approved the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars to avowed anti-communist nations. To protect this huge capital investment, the National Security Council (NSC), at its first meeting on 19 December 1947, directed the CIA to launch an all-out, covert campaign of economic, political, and psychological warfare against the Soviets. In June 1948 the Soviets replied with the Berlin blockade, and the Cold War escalated in deadly earnest. The Asiatic strain of the Cold War virus erupted in October 1949 with the establishment of the People's Republic of China and turned sizzling hot with the Korean War in June 1950.

As America's commitments grew overseas, so did the FBN's opportunity to establish a permanent base abroad. Anslinger had only to suggest that communist agents and drug smugglers were conspiring to subvert America's security by subsidizing addiction. In his bid to expand the Bureau's influence worldwide, he followed one path in Europe and another in Asia.

As Anslinger told Ray Richards of the
Detroit Times
on 25 February 1947, the Mafia had “obtained a vast dope hoard through looters in the last chaotic weeks of the European and Asiatic wars.”
¹
And it was true. The black market was booming in post-war Europe, and narcotics were one of the more precious commodities being traded. Germany was at the center of the trade, in part because the German Medical Corps had abandoned a huge stash of cocaine in Garmisch, a city south of Munich in an area occupied by the US Army. A group of enterprising former Polish prisoners of war found the stash and sold it in Italy and France in 1946. Other smugglers naturally gravitated toward the Polish operation, and for the next two years Garmisch was home for three major drug rings. A German and a Chinese man called Leo ran one, and moved heroin into Bolzano, Italy. Lucky Luciano was involved in a second ring based at the White Horse
Inn, Garmisch's underworld and espionage hangout, through his representative, Rino San Galli. And the Polish smugglers, still percolating, moved cocaine through Bari, Italy, to Cairo.
²

The CID investigated the drug trade in Garmisch, after receiving evidence that the business was financed with $3 million that US Army officers had stolen from the Reichsbank. But senior Army officers impeded the CID's investigation and destroyed the evidence in order to preserve the Army's good-guy image. To this day the CID claims to have “no papers” regarding its narcotics investigations between 1945 and 1948.
³

The Army's image problem, notably, reached critical mass in December 1947 when Guenther Reinhardt, a special employee of the Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), revealed that CIC officers were participating in drug smuggling operations that involved Hubert von Blucher, a wealthy, influential Bavarian. A former German intelligence officer, von Blucher, with the help of two US Army colonels, had buried $15 million in Reichsbank gold near his home in Garmisch in April 1945. It was a profitable venture and von Blucher, after relocating to Argentina in 1948, would move to California in 1951, become a chief shareholder in Pan American Airways and a successful Hollywood screenwriter.

An idealist at the time, Reinhardt took his charges of corruption and drug smuggling directly to the assistant secretary of the Army, Gordon Gray. But Gray, a profound realist, was in no mood for a scandal involving the CIC and von Blucher. One of the most powerful men in the espionage Establishment, Gray undoubtedly feared that an investigation into the drug smuggling indiscretions of US Army and ex-Nazi officers would expose Operation Bloodstone, the US intelligence operation in which Nazi scientists and spies were being relocated to the US, Canada, and South America. So Reinhardt was discredited and sent away. General Lucius D. Clay, commander of the military government in West Germany, summarily closed the Garmisch investigation on 1 March 1948, although, to the dismay of the Americans, the story was picked up in the East European communist press.

Anslinger was aware of these developments and immediately sent Charlie Dyar to Germany to straighten things out. Assigned to General Clay's office as a Narcotic Control officer, Dyar traveled to Garmisch in March 1948 – right after General Clay closed the case – and on 3 April reported to Anslinger that the communist press was expanding on a January 1948 article in the
New York Herald Tribune
, in which reporter Ed Hartrich identified “a wealthy Bavarian” as “director of the narcotics ring.”
⁴
The communists had dug a little deeper and discovered that the drug ring was financed with
stolen Reichsbank money, that it included former Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and that it was selling indigent German girls to brothels in South America.

Dyar reported that von Blucher had, in fact, been the director of the drug ring. Unfortunately, the Nazi had already obtained a phony Swiss passport and would escape to Argentina in October 1948. Dyar also reported that although the Polish and Chinese rings were still operating in Garmisch, Hamburg had become the new center of narcotics activity in Germany. Finally, he tried to make a case on the Polish cocaine ring, but the US Army CID would not provide the front money. His informant blamed this on the CID's fears that Dyar would discover its past indiscretions, and that's where the matter ended.
⁵

Well, almost: seeking redemption, Reinhardt in 1953 wrote a book alleging that ex-Gestapo agent Irmgard Bidder was the Soviet agent in control of a Communist Chinese dope ring launched in Europe after the war. He totally ignored Garmisch, and instead said that Bidder smuggled tons of raw opium from China to an East German pharmaceutical firm for refinement into heroin. He said the Soviet operation supplied Luciano in Italy, and that Frau Bidder had 4,000 agents doing her bidding, including former Nazis working for the Soviets in Argentina. And in this way history was rewritten.
⁶

Anslinger knew that the Garmisch drug operation had been managed for three years by US counterintelligence officers, in league with a group of prominent Nazis, and that some of the profits went to finance Operation Bloodstone, through which von Blucher made his way to Argentina. But it would have been bureaucratic suicide to reveal any of this, so he propagated the myth that Luciano was managing the drug trade with Soviet and Chinese Communists.

The situation in Asia required an even less sophisticated approach.

Anslinger knew the Nationalist Chinese were smuggling opium to Hong Kong, but he didn't want to suffer the same fate as John Service or Guenther Reinhardt, so whenever he was faced with overwhelming evidence of Kuomintang drug smuggling, he adopted, according to historian William O. Walker III, “a strategy of defensive avoidance.”
⁷

Avoidance meant feeding lies to the news media to shift the blame, and after the People's Republic of China (PRC) banned the cultivation of
opium in November 1950 and began to impose severe penalties on violators, Anslinger initiated a campaign of disinformation, much of which he acquired from Taiwan's representative to the UN, Hsia Chin-lin. In 1952 Hsia would tell the UN that Communist military authorities had set up a narcotics-refining factory in China and were producing three hundred pounds of morphine base a day, which was then smuggled across China's southeastern border. Having served as General Tai Li's representative to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, Hsia was well acquainted with narcotics trafficking.

This dubious Kuomintang evidence was supported by reports filed by FBN agents Bill Tollenger and Wayland “Lee” Speer, in accordance with Anslinger's policy objectives. Initially sent to Japan to organize narcotics squads within the Japanese police force, Tollenger and Speer found that their mission had changed in 1949 when the Nationalists lost the war. That year, with the help of the CID, the FBN agents first heard about a communist heroin lab in Tientsin; and in 1950, with the help of the CIA, they linked drug-dealing communists in Japan and China. Allegedly managed by the Soviets, as Reinhardt would claim in 1953, the ring relied on Japanese prisoners of war. During their incarceration in North Korea and China, the Japanese were allegedly brainwashed by the wicked Soviets and, when repatriated to Japan, they formed a prostitution ring that pushed Communist Chinese narcotics on unsuspecting American soldiers, specifically to finance Communist Party activities.

Jack Pruitt, a CID agent on the scene, recalls how the smugglers operated: “We first learned about [the ring] from Japanese soldiers on leave in Shanghai, when we still had reasonable relations with mainland China. Taiwanese ships that were bringing supplies to help rebuild Japan – everything from sugar and grain, to lumber and steel – were stopping in Shanghai, and that's where the drugs were smuggled aboard the ships.”