The Strength of the Wolf (23 page)

“We were trying to make cases to demonstrate we could stop heroin from going to America, so they were small cases at first, only three or four kilograms. But in the process we learned about Corsicans like Dom Albertini, who managed heroin labs in Marseilles, and about Mafiosi out of Sicily doing business in Milan and Rome. We learned about Black servicemen moving heroin into Harlem, and about Air France crew
members. But the most attractive leads were those that had to do with the supply of raw materials from Iran and Turkey to Lebanon.”

Crucial to FBN operations in Europe were special employees Orlando Portale, a deported Mafioso, and Carlo Dondola, a Lebanese-Greek smuggler and member of the Lebanese Christian Phalange. Dondola moved all manner of contraband between Italy, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, and Africa, and like Portale, often made the necessary arrangements for FBN agents. Portale and Dondola would elicit and authenticate potential leads, and then FBN undercover agents would approach the traffickers. In this way the agents came into contact with the Corsican and Italian smugglers they were seeking.

Complicating matters was the fact that in most European countries, FBN agents were prohibited by law from conducting unilateral operations, or making arrests, or even initiating contact with informers without permission from the local constabulary. In almost every case, success depended on forming good liaison relationships with the local police forces. Entrapment was a crime in France, so agents also had to learn how to make cases without provoking a suspect into buying or selling narcotics. Confidence-building buys, in which there were no witnesses, were allowed on occasion, according to Knight, but only with the tacit approval of a judicial official beforehand. Some foreign policemen were helpful, others were not, but over time, Siragusa, Knight, Cusack (who returned to New York in 1953), and Manfredi were at least recognized in police stations across Europe. By 1954 their presence was firmly established, and under the direction of Charlie Siragusa, the FBN was ready to expand its operations into the Middle East.

In 1954, Charlie Siragusa decided to open an office in Beirut. There were several reasons for this decision. To begin with, the Italian government's crackdown on diversions had forced the Mafia to seek new sources, and after the exposure in 1954 of a heroin lab owned by Don Calogero Vizzini in Palermo, it was determined that most of the illicit traffic in heroin had been rerouted to Beirut, where Corsicans were working with Meyer Lansky's associate Samil Khoury, a notorious Syrian smuggler and counterfeiter. Married to a French singer, Khoury had “influence and solid support among top ranking policemen and politicians.”
⁶

Khoury's drug-smuggling operation was facilitated by Mounir Alaouie, an official in the criminal investigations branch of Lebanon's Sûreté. Their
modus operandi
was simple: Alaouie and Khoury would drive to Damascus, Syria, to purchase morphine base, then bring it back across the border, with the help of accomplices in Lebanese Customs, to Beirut's Casino de Liban, where they made arrangements, through Corsican associates of Marcel Francisci, to transport it to secret labs in and around Marseilles.

Siragusa had known about Khoury's operation since 1950, but at that time there were too many political complications to allow the FBN to establish a presence in the region. The Arab nations were angry at the creation of Israel, and in 1951 Egypt complained to the UN that Israeli and Lebanese drug lords were deliberately subverting its economy. According to news reports, Lebanese hashish was being smuggled through Israel to Egypt's huge addict population. The profits represented a major source of unaccounted foreign exchange for both Israel and Lebanon, but the black-market traffic caused a serious financial drain on Egypt.
⁷

In an attempt to assuage the Egyptians and slow Soviet expansion in the region, the State Department offered financial aid to Lebanon, and in exchange the Lebanese premier pledged to clamp down on trafficking. But, as the
New York Times
reported on 2 July 1951, when Lebanese Premier Abdullah Yafi sent army troops to destroy hashish crops in the northeast, “men who had occupied high office went livid with rage.”
⁸

Most of these livid officials were members of the Maronite Christian minority and its paramilitary action arm, the Phalange. For decades the Maronites served as middlemen between the Turks and French along the Syrian border, and though dedicated fascists during the Second World War, the Maronites secretly supported Israel in exchange for US political and financial support against rival Muslim factions in Lebanon.

Siragusa's hands were tied by the CIA, while the Maronites and Israelis established their domains in the early 1950s. By 1954, however, both were firmly entrenched, and Siragusa was authorized to open an office in Beirut, which by then was the acknowledged gateway of illicit drugs from Greece, Turkey, and Syria to Western Europe. Opening the office was a job that required an exceptional individual with fluency in foreign languages and that ability, rare among Americans, to make foreign officials feel comfortable. Paul Knight got the job.

Opening an office in Beirut also required the permission of the Lebanese government, so a trial investigation was mounted to prove that drug arrests would not be embarrassing to Maronite officials. The investigation was aimed at a Lebanese–Israeli drug ring managed by Cafe Palestine proprietor Mahmoud Abou Suleiman. The ring smuggled hash to Egypt, had a heroin conversion lab in Tel Aviv, and moved narcotics to Italy.
⁹
Siragusa mounted
the operation from Rome, and in July 1954, based on intelligence supplied by Knight and Orlando Portale, the Lebanese Sûreté arrested Suleiman along with a corrupt Lebanese Customs Agent who had helped smuggle three kilos of morphine base aboard a ship that sailed to Naples, where Lucky Luciano was located.
¹⁰

Having opened the door, Knight moved on to bigger and better things, and his next case relied on international confidence man Carlo Dondola. Described by Siragusa as an agent “for the Greek intelligence service as well as the Arabs and Israelis,” Dondola, at one point in his illustrious career, had “sold some horses to the Israelis, arranged to have them stolen, then resold them to the Arabs … and never got caught.”
¹¹

“When I first met Carlo in 1953,” Knight recalls, “he was working for Charlie in Bulgaria, posing as a trafficker. Carlo had made a fortune smuggling gold out of Africa through Lebanon into Egypt.”

Knight's case with Carlo began when Beirut moneychanger Abou Sayia cheated Dondola in a financial transaction, and Dondola, seeking revenge, volunteered to show the FBN just how easy it was to make narcotics cases in the Middle East. He began by initiating a drug deal with Sayia, and then brought in Knight, undercover of course, as the buyer. Next he convinced Sayia's source in Syria, Mr. Tifankji, to reveal his source of opium in Turkey, Mr. Mehmet Ozsayar. As the case expanded, Dondola introduced Siragusa (posing as Cal Salerno, a corrupt US Air Force pilot) to Ozsayar. Siragusa assigned Agent George Abraham to work on Tifankji, and then arranged to buy a quantity of opium himself from Ozsayar in Adana, Turkey.

With Dondola having already lined up the ducks, Siragusa was able to persuade the chiefs of the Lebanese, Greek, Turkish, and Syrian police forces to support his investigation. Accompanied by Greek and Turkish officials, Siragusa arrested Ozsayar in early April 1955. The Syrian police, assisted by George Abraham, arrested Tifankji in Aleppo two days later, while the chief of Lebanon's Sûreté, Emir Faoud Chehab, raided a clandestine lab in Beirut with Lebanese Customs chief Edmond Azizi and Paul Knight. In total, twenty-seven traffickers were arrested, ringleader Omar Makkouk was identified (though he remained at large), and 800 pounds of opium and forty-four pounds of morphine base were seized.
¹²

As Siragusa said with pride: “We got the Greeks to work with the Turks and, as you know, they're dedicated enemies. We also got the Syrians to work with the Turks at a time when there was no love lost between them either.”
¹³

Soon thereafter, Paul Knight cautiously opened the FBN's second overseas office in Beirut. At the time, Lebanon was a bubbling cauldron of
political intrigues. Having been carved out of their country by the French, the Syrians considered Lebanon to be stolen property, and Syrian agents enthusiastically smuggled weapons to the Lebanese Muslim factions that were fighting the Maronites. Lebanon was also flooded with Palestinian refugees; the Egyptians were unleashing the Fedayeen on Israel; and Israel was raiding Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. As the British withdrew from their commitments in the region, America stepped gingerly into the breach. To keep the Soviets at bay and protect the Arab–American Oil Company (ARAMCO) pipeline that stretched from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon's coast, the CIA began secretly arming its Christian and Israeli allies, buying politicians, and backing Stravos Niarchos in his competition with Aristole Onassis for the lucrative Saudi oil-shipping contract.

When Knight arrived in Beirut, he was given a room in the American Embassy, in the Agency for International Development's Office of Public Safety, which provided material aid to the Lebanese police forces. But Lebanese security officials were aware that CIA officers were operating undercover of the Public Safety program, so Knight had to keep his distance from the Embassy. He also had trouble forming relations with Lebanese police officials. He had a personal, not a diplomatic, passport, and he lived at the St. George Hotel, posing as a travel agent, in order to make undercover cases. As a result of his multiple identities, some Lebanese officials were suspicious. “They weren't quite sure why I was there,” Knight recalls. “Was I an Israeli spy?”

Knight's initial contact was Lebanon's national security chief Emir Faoud Chehab, but the influential Chehab family had been involved in corruption under the French mandate, which ended in 1945. As a result, Knight says, “for political, economic and cultural reasons” there wasn't much Chehab could do to help him make narcotics cases. It was not until Captain Azizi of the customs service introduced him to Hannah Yazbek, a Maronite strongman, that Knight was able to begin recruiting informers and gathering intelligence on local drug traffickers.

As Knight explains, “They had a system in Beirut not unlike that in Chicago, in which the city was divided into ethnic and religious neighborhoods. Each neighborhood had a strongman, the
abada
, from whom criminals and businessmen alike bought protection. Hannah Yazbek, otherwise known as Abu George [meaning father of George], was the Maronite
abada
. He was a hashish smuggler connected to the Gemayel family, which controlled the Fascist Phalange and had collaborated with the Vichy French, so he was not beloved of the British or Israelis. But he was essential to getting the job done.”

At first Knight would meet Abu George at his house, where the
abada
would introduce him to the right people. Soon informants were visiting Knight's office. But some were “dragging their coats,” intending to deceive him, so Knight would tell Abu George who they were and what they said. Like Orlando Portale in Rome, Abu George would authenticate the informants' stories – if doing so did not conflict with his own prosperous hashish business. “He would confirm,” Knight explains, “if it helped make a case against Sami Khoury or the Druze.”

The Maronites were deeply involved in financial crime and hashish smuggling. It was a part of Lebanese culture Knight did not like, but he came to regard Abu George as indispensable. After it became known that they were friends, however, they were no longer able to meet, so Abu George introduced Knight to his nephew, Elie, a concierge at the Capitol Hotel, and thereafter Elie served as Knight's indispensable link to Beirut's teeming underworld.

Through Abu George, Elie, and his own unilateral contacts, Knight began to collect intelligence on drug smuggling operations in Beirut and the nearby Bekka Valley, the ancient Biblical land between Syria and Lebanon where hashish was grown and narcotics were smuggled. In concert with Customs officer Azizi, Knight provided the intelligence to undercover Agent Jim Attie, the initiator of a string of significant cases.

Jim Attie was uniquely qualified for undercover work in the Middle East. His father had led a band of Assyrian rebels that protected Christian settlements from the Ottoman Turks. Slated for a hangman's noose in Istanbul, Attie senior fled to Detroit, where Jim was raised in abject poverty. During the war he served with the US Navy and fought his way to the welterweight championship of the Pacific Fleet. After the war he earned a college degree and took a job as a therapist with the Veteran's Administration. Proud, restless, and adventurous, Attie joined the FBN in Detroit in 1950. In 1954, under the direction of District Supervisor Ross Ellis, he made a major case on a hapless Lebanese baker. The case brought him to Anslinger's attention and launched his career as an undercover agent in the Middle East, where he came into serious conflict with Paul Knight and Charlie Siragusa.

“It all started with the case I made in Detroit,” Attie says ruefully. “I still pity the poor guy [Hussine Hider] to this day. He was merely
thinking
about getting into the business, and I talked him into it. Eventually he gave me a number, and they sent me to Beirut to meet a politician and rug merchant named Amir Ghoriab. I persuaded Ghoriab to deliver two kilograms of morphine base to me in Beirut, where Lebanese Customs agents arrested him in May 1955.

“After he was arrested, Ghoriab told me, ‘You'll never leave here alive.' And he was almost right. I was staying at a hotel we suspected of being a depot for dope dealers and, a few days after the Ghoriab bust, I walked into the lobby and was arrested. I was taken to Sûreté headquarters and brought before Haj Touma, director of the Sûreté's security branch. Touma was a big dope dealer himself, and at his direction the interrogator asked me who I was. I said I was a tourist and I demanded to know why I'd been arrested. At which point they handcuffed me. Then Touma reached over and punched me in the face.