The Strength of the Wolf (27 page)

Having played a major role in the capture of Tornello and DeMartino, and having proven his abilities in a number of other ways, Gaffney by 1953 was ready for his next special assignment, as the FBN's original representative to the newly formed Court House Squad. Partially in response to the Kefauver Hearings, Congress had enacted statutes in which anyone committing any act, no matter how small, in the
furtherance
of a crime was guilty of conspiracy. This new law was a potent weapon that required closer coordination between federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, so the Justice Department formed a special unit in New York to implement the new statutes. Located in the Federal Court House under Assistant US Attorney Robert Patterson Jr., the Court House Squad consisted of representatives from the customs service, the IRS Intelligence Unit, the IRS Alcohol Tobacco Tax Division, the FBN, and the Secret Service. But
as Gaffney caustically observes, “The FBI didn't join, because it didn't want to share information.”

Tornello, meanwhile, had become an FBN informant, and under the guidance of Group Three Leader Pat Ward, had introduced undercover Agent Angelo Zurlo to a prominent French narcotics smuggler, Jean “the Silver Fox” David, co-owner of a fashionable restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Zurlo made kilogram purchases of heroin from David, and the suave Frenchman was arrested in April 1953.

Although David refused to cooperate, the case advanced when Zurlo found a letter from Mexico in David's Midtown apartment inquiring about the price of linen in New York. At Pat Ward's direction, a French-speaking agent, pretending to be David, wrote a reply in December. It was a simple response, saying that the price was good. And though the letter was considered a long shot, the ploy worked, and a most unexpected response was soon forthcoming.

At the time, veteran Agent Angelo Zurlo was sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with a promising new agent named Andrew Tartaglino. According to Andy, he came home from work one day to find his elderly Italian landlady waiting for him excitedly at the front door. “There's a man upstairs in your room,” she whispered, “and he wants to talk to Angelo.”

Tartaglino realized that the man upstairs was there in response to the contrived letter, but he was concerned because there were several items in the apartment, including his FBN credentials, that revealed the true nature of his and Zurlo's employment. But the French smuggler, Roger Coudert, didn't notice any of the incriminating signs. Overcome by greed and impatience, he fully accepted Tartaglino's assertion that he was Zurlo's protégé in the drug smuggling business.

Zurlo arrived at the apartment a few hours later and, after haggling with the Frenchman over price and quantity, he agreed to buy five kilograms of heroin, contingent on Coudert delivering a sample so he could ascertain its quality. Exuding confidence, Coudert assured Zurlo that it was 99 percent pure. Heroin of that high a quality was rare, but Zurlo calmly replied that if it was 99 percent pure, he was willing to pay $7,000 per kilogram. Hearing that, Coudert instantly lost his composure and dashed out of the apartment in an effort to retrieve a consignment he'd just sold to Anthony Farina, his usual Mafia connection, for a mere $4,500 per kilogram. But Farina, to Coudert's dismay, refused to return it.

Several days later, Coudert delivered a sample to Zurlo – one ounce of pure heroin from a lab in Marseilles. “But because Farina had refused to part with his heroin,” Gaffney explains, “Coudert told Zurlo that he'd have
to get the five kilograms he promised from Mexico. We monitored the call that Coudert made to his connection in Mexico, then notified Customs Agent Ben White in Mexico City. White traced the number to the home of the commanding general of the federal district. We also learned from White that Zurlo's letter had been delivered to a cafe a block from the American Embassy, and that the cafe was owned by the mistress of the Mexican president.

“Coudert told Zurlo not to worry,” Gaffney continues, “that he would go to Mexico and get the heroin himself, right away. Then he asked Andy if he knew anyone who could repair suitcases. Andy didn't know anyone who could do that, but he said he did, of course, at which point Coudert gave him the key to a footlocker at Penn Station. We went there and retrieved the suitcases and when we examined them we found traces of heroin inside a hidden compartment. So now we had Coudert on possession, as well as the transfer of the sample to Zurlo. I arrested Coudert,” Gaffney says with pride, “and Pat Ward arrested Farina.

“Farina had been a soldier with the Italian Army in Ethiopia,” Gaffney continues. “He was a tough guy and he didn't say a word. But Coudert gave chapter and verse on the Corsican connection, and how it was run in Mexico by Antoine D'Agostino, Paul Mondoloni, and Jean Croce. He said that Mondoloni had been a policeman in Saigon, and that he'd been arrested for the Aga Khan robbery on the French Riviera. None of us knew any of this before, and it was all very exciting.”
¹

While the New York office was unraveling the reorganized French connection, Anslinger in January 1954 assigned George White as the FBN's one and only supervisor at large (a position Anslinger created just for him), and in May 1954, after testifying before the Herlands Commission, White traveled to Texas to challenge the customs service over its use of convoys, and to investigate allegations that Customs Agent Alvin Scharff was sending informants into Mexico to buy narcotics, with the aim of setting up local suspects for arrest in Texas.

A convoy was an investigative technique devised by Customs agents in the early 1950s, and it began when a Customs inspector seized narcotics at a port of entry, often through a routine search. Other times, through informants, the inspector knew when and where a drug shipment was coming across the border. In either case, after he made the seizure, the
inspector would call in Customs agents, who could move around the country following cases. The agents would turn the person delivering the drugs (the mule) into an informant in exchange for a reduced sentence. Next they would replace most of the narcotics with flour, then one of the Customs agents would climb into the trunk of the car and, with the informant driving, would ride with the substitute shipment to its destination – a warehouse in Chicago perhaps – where an arrest would be made. Customs agents felt that convoys, by eliminating the intermediary steps and taking them directly to the receiver, were quicker and more effective than the FBN's protracted two buys and a bust technique.

The FBN's district supervisor in Houston, Piney Williams, didn't care that Customs agents were mounting convoys. The objection came from Anslinger. By 1954, Customs agents in the southwest were making so many narcotics seizures and arrests, that they were upstaging the FBN. Through their informant network in Mexico, they were also interfering in FBN undercover operations. So Anslinger went to court and challenged the legality of convoys and the right of Customs agents to hire informants in Mexico. He was especially angry at his old nemesis Al Scharff. The reader will recall that Scharff, as a Justice Department special employee, had assassinated two German spies in Mexico during the First World War and, after joining the customs service, had briefly managed Treasury Department narcotics operations in Europe before the Second World War, causing Anslinger and Charlie Dyar an immense amount of grief. But Scharff's unforgivable sin was preaching that all drugs smuggled into America should come under Customs jurisdiction.

The conflict between Anslinger and Scharff climaxed in the spring of 1954, when several detectives on the Houston narcotic squad were accused of mishandling seized narcotics. Initially it seemed like any other big city corruption case, and in March the Treasury Department's law enforcement coordinator, James Maloney, sent Agent Fred Douglas to Houston to investigate the charges. A few weeks later, Douglas discovered that Scharff was involved in the case through one of his informants – and that's when Anslinger sent George White to Texas. His mission: to rid Anslinger of aggravating Al Scharff, once and for all.

Described by Scharff as “domineering and ruthless,” White began by questioning the main suspects about Scharff's alleged role in the movement of seized drugs to a local trafficker.
²
One of the people White interrogated was an unfortunate Houston detective named Billnitzer – and that's when the trouble began. An hour after his final session with White, Billnitzer was found dead in the Houston police department's narcotic squad room.
Exactly what happened is unclear: FBN Agent Jack Kelly said that Billnitzer “had either blown out his brains or someone had done it for him.”
³
By another account, Billnitzer shot himself twice in the heart. Twenty-five years after the incident, when questioned by a CIA officer investigating the MKULTRA Program, George Gaffney suggested that Billnitzer's suicide might have been provoked by a dose of LSD administered by George White.
⁴

In any event, Scharff blamed White for having pushed Billnitzer over the edge. Bent on revenge, he holstered his pistol and headed to the William Penn Hotel for a reckoning. When he arrived, Fred Douglas and Henry Giordano were seated at a table in the coffee shop. They invited Scharff to join them.

“Billnitzer just shot himself,” Scharff said, as rotund George White, dressed entirely in black, stepped up to the table. Looking at Scharff in a manner laden with “premeditated scorn and action,” White asked Scharff, “What in hell are you so nervous about?”
⁵

The “urge of violence” fell upon Scharff. “Look here,” he said to White, “If you don't like what I just said, you've got a six-shooter on your hip. Reach for it.”

According to Scharff's biographer, only “the timely interference of Douglas and Giordano brought the heated situation under control.”

Angrier than ever at Scharff, White resumed his investigation with renewed vigor, with the result that the head of the Houston vice squad was indicted, and that ten charges were brought against Scharff. But the trial of the vice squad captain resulted in a hung jury, and though his reputation was sullied, Scharff escaped punishment. The FBN paid a higher price than anyone. Reeling from the negative national publicity White had visited upon them, Houston's town fathers forced Anslinger to remove the FBN's district office from Houston. Eventually it was relocated to Dallas. Supervisor Piney Williams (a veteran of the old Narcotics Division) was reassigned as the deputy district supervisor in Atlanta, and Howard Chappell was named acting agent in charge in Houston.

Having satisfied Anslinger by publicizing Scharff's dubious tactics, White was rewarded with an appointment as district supervisor in San Francisco, displacing veteran FBN Agent Ernest M. Gentry. Gentry in turn was reassigned as district supervisor in Dallas, where he became embroiled in the FBN's holy war against Scharff and the customs service, and nurtured his abiding resentment for George White.

White settled in the San Francisco Bay area in March 1955, where his MKULTRA experiments would continue for the next ten years. In June, he conscripted Agent Ira “Ike” Feldman into the program. Fluent in several
Chinese dialects, Feldman had served as an Army intelligence officer in the Korean War, and may have known Garland Williams, who might have brought him into the FBN. One of the most colorful agents in FBN history, Feldman stood five feet two inches tall, wore a full-length Chesterfield overcoat with velvet collars, a black fedora, and smoked humungous Winston Churchill cigars. Gruff and tough, he posed as a pimp when working undercover cases, and allowed the prostitutes in his employ to indulge their heroin habits; in return the ladies of the night lured their unwitting victims to White's MKULTRA pad at 225 Chestnut Street for an evening of sex, drugs, and observation. To ensure that the illegal CIA program would not be exposed, White used a coded chit system to alert the San Francisco police whenever one of Feldman's girls was arrested on narcotics or prostitution charges.
⁶

For the next five years, White and Feldman, with the assistance of the CIA officers Sid Gottlieb and Dr. Raymond Treichler, would open two more MKULTRA safehouses in the San Francisco Bay area, birthplace in the early 1960s of America's psychedelic subculture.

While the turf war between Customs and the FBN broiled in the southwest, and White moved his little shop of MKULTRA horrors to San Francisco, Jack Cusack returned from Europe and replaced George Gaffney at the Court House Squad in New York. Gaffney replaced Pat Ward as the leader of Group Three, and Ward became Jim Ryan's enforcement assistant. Because it was so large and so critical to FBN operations, New York was the first office to have an enforcement assistant position. Then in 1956, true detective George Gaffney was named district supervisor in Atlanta and, in his absence, Martin F. Pera emerged as the New York office's new shining star.

How Pera achieved prominence within the FBN is interesting and important. Following a four-month assignment in Europe in 1951, he had joined George White and Pierre Lafitte in an investigation of corrupt policemen and drug smugglers in the southwest. “We were successful,” Pera recalls, “but the bender ended in controversy, because we were going into districts without the knowledge of the supervisors. Gentry in San Francisco was especially livid. After that, I went back to Chicago where the synthetic narcotic amadone was appearing on streets and causing a lot of overdoses. No one had a handle on it, so I took a look, and because of
my background in chemistry I found out how the dealers were making it. Two manufacturers in the New York area were the source of the precursors, so I was sent there in 1953 to follow up. I was assigned to Joe Amato's International Group [formerly the Mafia Squad], along with Andy Tartaglino, Don Miller, and Arthur Giuliani, who soon left to join the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations in Italy.”