The Strength of the Wolf (26 page)

But integrity issues continued to plague the FBN, and a few months later the NYPD revealed to Anslinger that, through a wiretap, it had
overheard an FBN agent discussing cases with a drug trafficker nicknamed Tony Iodine (real name Daidone). The police couldn't prove that the agent had taken a bribe from Iodine; but the agent had been involved in a case against major drug trafficker Sol Gelb (who allegedly had a source in the PRC), and the case against Gelb evaporated as a result – as did $10,000 Jim Ryan had given the agent to buy half a kilogram of heroin from Gelb. In 1954, $10,000 was the New York office's budget for an entire month.
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Minimizing the impact and implications of the above incident, Anslinger in 1961 referred to it as “the type of shock that comes occasionally in our kind of job.” Then, as if to put this shock in perspective, he told of an agent who had been “a spy for the underworld” and had killed several drug traffickers for his Mafia employers. Anslinger claims this agent-cum-assassin committed suicide outside his office, after Anslinger confronted him with his crimes.
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An FBN assassin for hire; an agent caught selling out cases; agents addicted to heroin, and one dead from an overdose; allegations of agents handing out seized narcotics from the drug disposal vault at headquarters: all of this was business as usual for Anslinger, and he simply applied to the FBN's integrity problems the same policy of “defensive avoidance” that he adopted when dealing with drug smuggling allies like Batista and the Nationalist Chinese. Anslinger looked the other way, for acknowledging the extent of corruption within the FBN would have brought the organization to its knees, and perhaps would have revealed that George White was dosing unwitting people with LSD on behalf of the CIA. Anslinger looked the other way, and as a result the problems just got worse.

Such was the web of deceit Anslinger had woven around the FBN when, in January 1954, Governor Dewey asked the chief of the New York State Commission of Investigations, William B. Herlands, to investigate the oft-repeated rumor that Dewey had commuted Lucky Luciano's prison sentence in exchange for a bribe. Because it was out of his hands, and because several FBN agents had played a role in spreading the rumor, this investigation was one of the greatest threats Anslinger had ever faced.

Lucky Luciano and other Mafiosi did help the government's intelligence services during the Second World War; this fact was uncovered during the Herlands investigation. And yet, while the details were not released to the public for twenty years, Anslinger, Garland Williams, George White, and Charlie Siragusa knew the truth at the time. Their problem began in 1947, when Walter Winchell suggested that Luciano might be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his wartime services. Aware that they could not sustain their crowd-pleasing, anti-Luciano propaganda campaign
if the
bête noire
was portrayed as a hero, they scrambled to preserve the government's dirty little secret. Garland Williams obtained denials from William Donovan and Charles Haffenden, and repeated their denials in a 22 February 1947 article in the
New York Times.
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As a way of further concealing the truth, Anslinger fueled rumors that Dewey had taken a bribe in exchange for commuting Luciano's sentence. His loudest mouthpiece in this regard was Michael Stern. In several articles he wrote for
True: The Man's Magazine
, Stern asserted that Luciano's commutation “had cost him $75,000 in favor of the Republican electoral campaign,” and that “experts in this field estimated that he had to spend $200,000.”
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Stern even suggested that Dewey, having freed Luciano, was personally to blame for America's drug problem. Based on Stern's allegations, Senator Kefauver raised the issue in 1951, and a Democratic State Senator charged that Luciano had bribed Dewey with $300,000.
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Dewey endured the smears until 1954, when he directed Herlands to bury the rumors once and for all. The records of the Commission remained secret for twenty years, but it is now known that Luciano and the Mafia served the government, and that George White and Charlie Siragusa gave perjured testimony about it during the Kefauver Hearings. When called before the Herlands Commission, Siragusa “grudgingly admitted editing parts” of Stern's article. He denied, however, editing the parts that had to do with the bribe. This was a lie, too. Siragusa, in a 1952 letter to Anslinger, indicated that Stern had based his false allegations on a memo written by Mafia Squad leader Joe Amato. Sent by Amato to Jim Ryan on 16 August 1951, the memo said that $500,000 had been paid to the “right” people for Luciano's parole, in exchange for Mafia help in the 1948 presidential election. The memo referred to Stern's article in
True Magazine.
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Siragusa's testimony, along with that of Navy intelligence officers, led Herlands and other powerful Establishment insiders to speculate that the CIA and military intelligence, through the FBN, were still employing drug lords like Luciano. Were the hoods, or even FBN agents, serving as CIA assassins? A Pandora's Box was about to be opened, and that's when Anslinger asked his masters to intervene: on 7 July 1954, the CIA sent Herlands a telex indicating that his investigation jeopardized national security. He was forced to back off, and George White continued his extralegal MKULTRA activities apace.
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As a postscript to this shameful episode in FBN history, it should be noted during the Herlands Commission investigation, Senator Joe McCarthy crowned his disreputable career by claiming there were subversives within the US Army and the CIA. McCarthy directed his assault
at CIA officer Cord Meyer. As chief of the CIA's International Operations Division, Meyer was responsible for infiltrating domestic and foreign labor unions and preventing them from being controlled by communists. His search for the so-called “compatible Left” was steeped in underworld intrigues, and dovetailed with operations conducted by CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton and his assets in the FBN, Charlie Siragusa and George White. In other words, McCarthy, through his investigation of Meyer, was getting close to the CIA's international drug-smuggling conspiracy.

The Senate launched an investigation of McCarthy shortly after he began to attack the espionage Establishment, and for reasons that were never made public, he was censored and stripped of power by his colleagues in December 1954. The reason may have been connected to narcotics. In 1962, Anslinger confessed in his book
The Murderers
that he had nursed an important Congressman through a drug addiction. Perhaps that Congressman was McCarthy? If so, did Anslinger's CIA masters encourage him to engage in this illicit activity? What better way to compromise a political hack? Anslinger kept McCarthy high, while the CIA fed him an enemies list; and when he became a liability, they pulled the plug. If true, it was the perfect MKULTRA operation.

MKULTRA operations were coordinated with political operations that impacted the CIA's protected drug routes. As noted, one such operation was reportedly conducted by George White on behalf of Rudolph Halley. In 1953, as the Fusion Party's candidate for Mayor, Halley was working with two of the CIA's primary International Operations Division assets; Fusion Party Co-Chairman David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the AFL's Irving Brown.
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Seafarers' Union president Paul Hall was certainly involved too, in working to discredit left-leaning waterfront and maritime unions, and union officials, by tying them to drug traffickers. George White dropping LSD in the drinking water of one of Halley's opponents was another surefire way of discrediting someone.

FBN agents also helped to provide security for the CIA's drug smuggling operation by keeping certain longshoremen under surveillance, because they were “working with … smugglers.”
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Those longshoremen were invariably with the left-leaning National Maritime Union, or the Mafiatainted International Longshoreman's Association. Topping the list of
drug-dealing longshoremen was Rosario “Saro” Mogavero, former vice president of ILA Local 856, a post he left in 1953 after being charged with extortion. Mogavero's son was married to Rocco Pellegrino's daughter, and Pellegrino controlled all the rackets in Westchester County, New York. Pellegrino supplied heroin to Joe Civello in Dallas through Mogavero, his contact man with John Ormento, manager of the Mafia's drug distribution syndicate.
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The ILA, notably, was in competition with the CIA-connected International Brotherhood of Longshoremen. The situation was fraught with political intrigues, and White addressed the problem with his old friend Price Spivey – who had quit the FBN and gone to work for the Seafarers' Union as a security specialist after gangsters planted heroin in the car of the Seafarers' president, Paul Hall.
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On 2 October 1954, White met with another old friend from the FBN, John Hanly, then with the Secret Service, to discuss what he called in his diary the “CIA Avenue.” This was a reference to the CIA's protected drug route from the Far East, through Cuba, to the Mafia in New York. Two days after White and Hanly met, Saro Mogavero went to trial for harboring drug lord John Ormento, a fugitive in the Happy Meltzer case, which Price Spivey had managed in 1952. A made member of the Genovese family, Mogavero pled guilty and received a short prison sentence. This enabled Ormento to walk away – or, more precisely, to be driven home to Manhattan by George White. According to White they went out for drinks, Ormento promised to be a good boy from then on, and White, defying logic, believed him.

There are several disturbing aspects to this sequence of events. In September 1954, an informant for Agent Ben Fitzgerald arranged to buy kilogram amounts of heroin from Chicago mobster Jacob Klein, and Klein agreed to introduce the informant to Mogavero. But someone tipped Klein off and, at the very last minute, he refused to meet with undercover Agent Angelo Zurlo. The case, as a result, fell apart in October, and Klein continued to deal narcotics in Chicago with apparent immunity. To wit, in January 1958, Agent Jack Love spotted Klein with Saro Mogavero at the Sheridan Bar in Chicago; but Love was transferred to Los Angeles and the Klein case was passed to another agent. In 1960 the Klein investigation collapsed, once and for all, when the new agent's informant was murdered.
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What is especially disturbing is that the failure to make the New York case on Klein enabled Mogavero to take the fall for Ormento, and for Ormento to open the heroin gateway from Cuba, evidently with George White's tacit approval – unless White actually believed Ormento's pledge
to give up drug smuggling, which he did not do. Instead, Ormento formed an alliance with Joe Bonanno's drug manager, Carmine Galante, and they began moving massive amounts of narcotics from Cuba and Montreal to New York, Chicago, and Dallas. It's an unbelievable coincidence that White met with Ormento at the exact moment the New York agents had a chance to kill the biggest Mafia drug-smuggling operation (the CIA Avenue) in its cradle. It's as if White on behalf of the CIA, and Ormento on behalf of the Mafia, were conspiring together.

There is one more unsettling aspect to this story. In early 1955, through a police wiretap, agents Greg Poulos and Louis Pagani learned where and when a drug delivery was to be made. They waited patiently, and when John Ormento and his bagman Sal LoProto pulled up to make the drop, the agents descended and searched the car. In a trap under the front right seat they found not drugs, but $5,000 in cash and a silenced .22 automatic, the type of gun typically used in CIA assassinations.
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Having arrested John Ormento, and having stopped a murder in progress, Poulos and Pagani vaulted into the big leagues. Then things got weird. Within weeks, both agents were transferred (like the aforementioned Jack Love in Chicago) and the Ormento case was given to more deserving agents in New York. LoProto, like Mogavero before him, took a fall for John Ormento, and Agent Gregory Poulos, who had come to hate “the beastly nature” of the business, quit the FBN in disgust.

What was most bestial about this line of work was articulated in a bizarre letter White wrote to his MKULTRA partner Sid Gottlieb. In it White said: “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
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Where else indeed?

Granted, George White was an aberration; and it's important to remember that only a few FBN agents worked with him in illegal CIA operations. But White was the CIA's secret policeman and was always protected, and in the wake of the Herlands “quiz” (as Dr. Gottlieb sarcastically referred to it), arrangements were made to close the Bedford Street pad. On 6 December 1954, Gottlieb visited White and Pierre Lafitte one last time in New York. He arrived with a fountain pen air-gun and an instruction manual on the use of drugs and prostitutes in sexual seduction blackmail schemes, as part of the new MKULTRA Leather Project to be conducted by White in San Francisco, where he had been safely ensconced as the FBN's new district supervisor.

George Gaffney arrested fugitive Frank Tornello in January 1952, and a few weeks later tracked Tornello's co-defendant in the Orsini case, Ray DeMartino, to the Hotel New Yorker. It wasn't possible to snap a photograph of DeMartino without alerting him to the fact that he was being watched, so Gaffney drew a sketch of the fugitive drug trafficker from memory and then distributed it to other FBN agents on the scene. Thanks to Gaffney's quick thinking and artistic aptitude, DeMartino was easily arrested later that day in the hotel lobby.