The Strength of the Wolf (28 page)

When Amato was made leader of Group Four in 1956, Pera took over the International Group. As he explains, the job was to respond to queries from Charlie Siragusa in Rome; gather information and originate leads in the US regarding the traffic overseas; recover fugitives; and conduct special projects. Under its uniquely qualified leader, the International Group would expand from four to twelve members, and become one of the most powerful weapons in the FBN's arsenal.

Central to the International Group's success was Pera's friendship with George White. A high tech enthusiast himself, White knew that Pera was developing useful gadgets in an electronics shop he'd set up in his office. To help Pera in his research work, White introduced him to Al Stern at the engineering firm Devenco, a CIA-connected company that developed and supplied the intelligence community with spy gadgetry. With Devenco's help, Pera built several devices that enhanced the FBN's case-making ability, including a tiny transmitter for tapping telephones, a microphone that could be slipped into a room without opening the door, and a radio wave direction finder that could be hidden in a car. For his technical innovations, Pera earned the (rarely employed) nickname Captain Video and the unwarranted suspicions of some of his colleagues, who were undergoing a spate of integrity investigations initiated in Washington by controversial Lee Speer.

In Houston, in the wake of what the local newspapers dubbed “The George White Scandals,” straightforward Howard Chappell restored relations with the prosecutors and police. But Chappell was unhappy serving under Ernie Gentry in Dallas. A raw-boned Alabaman, Gentry was rabid at having been pushed out of San Francisco by Chappell's friend George White. Gentry directed his anger at Chappell, and after Chappell refused to curb an investigation into John Ormento's narcotics connections in Texas, Gentry reprimanded him for insubordination. Bill Tollenger – having spent two years as an inspector checking on agent misdeeds, and two years as agent
in charge in St. Louis – was assigned to replace Chappell in Houston. Reluctantly, Deputy Commissioner George Cunningham sent Chappell into internal exile at the one-man office in Toledo, Ohio.

There were few cases to be made in Toledo, and immediately upon arriving there, Chappell was ordered by Anslinger to conduct an integrity investigation in the Chicago area with Tony Zirilli. Then about thirty years old, Zirilli was courageous and smart, a natural undercover agent with all the mannerisms and the dialects of an old-country Italian. He knew how the top hoods thought and behaved, and he knew that in order to gain their confidence, he could not act, in FBN jargon, like “a boot-and-shoe bum.” So Zirilli affected the persona of a high-stakes gambler.

“Tony was so goddamned authentic,” Chappell sighs. “But he was impetuous. We were working in the Chicago area without the knowledge of Al Aman, the district supervisor. Aman was suspected of having relations with local gangsters, but he was tight with one of Anslinger's most ardent supporters, Senator Paul Douglas, so we had to be careful. Tony and I were posing as gamblers – I was his money-man and bodyguard – and that way we gathered intelligence and made a lot of buys. Chicago Agent George Belk was picking up the evidence and taking it to Detroit for analysis. Belk was the only person, other than three or four in Washington, and Ross Ellis in Detroit, who knew we were there. It had to be kept quiet because we were getting information on a Chicago police lieutenant who was a source of information for the syndicate. There was politics involved, too.

“Tony
was
a gambler,” Chappell stresses. “It wasn't just a role he played. When he was in New York, he was one of the agents who stayed late on payday to shoot craps with Angie Zurlo. Some agents would lose two weeks' pay on Friday night, then go home empty-handed to their wives. So it got to be a problem. Tony was like that, and while we were working this case around Chicago, he lost $10,000 in cash he'd been fronted by headquarters. Then he got into a game going head to head with a local hood called Johnny C. Tony wound up winning back the ten grand, but Johnny didn't have the cash. First he offered us the title to his Cadillac, and when we refused that, he came back with a tray of diamonds. ‘That's the best I can do,' he said.

“I called Washington,” Chappell continues, “and I asked Anslinger to stall B. T. Mitchell, who wanted to round everyone up the next day. Anslinger didn't want to know any of the details, but he did give me twenty-four hours to unload the stones. So I had an idea. Tony and I got in my car and drove to see Johnny C's boss in Calumet City. He agreed to see us, and I told him the score. I said ‘Johnny C's your man, so our problem's
your problem.' He agreed, and asked what I wanted him to do. I gave him the stones and told him to wire a $10,000 money order to Anthony Zirilli at 90 Church Street in New York. Which he did.”

The quiet Chicago integrity investigation uncovered the ties between the local policemen and Mafiosi, and resulted in Al Aman's retirement and replacement by George Belk. Chappell's quick thinking also enabled Tony Zirilli to return $10,000 in front money to FBN headquarters, saving his career. As a reward, Chappell was restored to the good graces of his bosses and in April 1956 he replaced George Davis (an ally of Ernie Gentry) as the agent in charge of the increasingly important Los Angeles office. His boss was his friend George White in San Francisco. Chappell quickly improved relations with the sheriff's office and built the office up from twelve to thirty-three agents. He equipped his agents with the best weapons and the latest technology, formed a friendly and reciprocal working relationship with Customs Agent Ben White in Mexico City, and focused his personal attention on making cases in northwest Mexico.

From his post in San Francisco, China expert George White concentrated on slowing the surge of East Asian heroin that was flooding the West Coast. The political context of the problem had changed after the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, and the US had assumed responsibility for the defense of Southeast Asia from communism. By default the US had also assumed responsibility for drug control in South Vietnam, where President Ngo Dinh Diem's brother, Nhu, was deeply involved in the regional opium trade through his secret service. For that reason, drug control in Southeast Asia became a task for diplomats, spies, and generals.

It was a fact that only a handful of the American soldiers in the Far East were becoming addicted, and on that basis the officials in charge of the counterinsurgency refused to allow an FBN agent to be assigned on a permanent basis in South Vietnam. For propaganda purposes, however, Anslinger was permitted to send Lee Speer to Saigon in January 1954, and in May, based on Speer's reports, he told a Foreign Relations Subcommittee that the People's Republic of China was the “major source of illicit traffic for the entire world.”
⁷
Anslinger knew the allegation was untenable and that the Southeast Asian narcotics trade was in the hands of Vietnamese politicians, generals, and gangsters working with Corsicans in the Golden
Triangle, as well as CIA-protected Kuomintang brokers in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Saigon. Nevertheless, he repeated his charges in 1955 before the Senate Internal Security Committee, claiming that 95 percent of the heroin that reached San Francisco came from the PRC.

Helping to spread Anslinger's disinformation was the Committee of One Million, a lobby composed of establishment scions and prominent senators, including Anslinger's admirer, the aforementioned Paul Douglas in Illinois. Formed in 1953, the Committee's
raison d'être
was to keep the PRC out of the UN, and to that end it consistently charged the PRC with operating a worldwide drug network to finance communist subversion in Asia.

Also backing Anslinger was Richard L. G. Deverall, the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee representative in India and Japan. In a 1954 book titled
Red China's Dirty Dope War
, Deverall thanked Anslinger and repeated his claim that 4,000 communist agents were pushing drugs on American soldiers in Japan. Deverall was a close friend of several prominent trade union officials working with the CIA's International Operations Division, especially the AFL's Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and in this respect, his support for Anslinger against the PRC was understandable. However, organized labor lobbied for national health insurance in America, which Anslinger opposed. Deverall's book, though an obscure footnote in history, is significant because it shows how America's top labor leaders betrayed their own union members by spreading CIA disinformation, and otherwise serving its anti-labor activities. The relevance, in regard to drug law enforcement, of this pact between labor leaders and the CIA became evident in 1955 when the AFL and CIO merged, and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton became Jay Lovestone's case officer. A former communist, Lovestone had founded the Free Trade Union Committee, which, with CIA black-bag money, financed compatible left labor unions outside of the US. Organized crime was involved in this certified CIA covert action. According to author Tom Mangold, “Lovestone's payments and logistics were handled in New York by Mario Brod,” a labor lawyer from Connecticut and New York who, as an Army counterintelligence officer, had worked with OSS officers James Angleton, Vincent Scamporino, and Charlie Siragusa in Italy during the Second World War. He was also a wedge. Mangold quotes Sam Papich, the FBI's liaison to the CIA, as saying: “Mario had contacts with the mafia.”
⁸

Mario Brod was Angleton's contact to the Mafia, and through Siragusa and Hank Manfredi, he knew exactly where the Mafia was receiving its narcotics. Through assets in the labor movement, like Lovestone, Brown, and Deverall, he could also learn about and contact drug traffickers all over
the world. And there was more. As the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, he was in liaison with all US law enforcement agencies and many foreign police agencies, and he alone possessed the coveted Israeli account. Angleton and his inner circle alone were in liaison with the Mossad – which according to FBN Agent Jim Attie was backing Sami Khoury's narcotics operation in the Middle East. If anything put Angleton at the center of the CIA's international narcotics conspiracy – which is where he was – it was the fact that it was his job to penetrate the intelligence services of the French, as well as the Communist and Kuomintang Chinese.

In 1955, few people dreamed that the CIA was involved in international drug smuggling. But the gap between the government's stated and secret policies was widening, in direct proportion with the public's growing demand for drugs. More and more people were starting to question Anslinger's policies towards drug addicts. Rufus King said that year: “All the billions our society has spent enforcing criminal measures against the addict has had the sole result of protecting the peddler's market, artificially inflating his prices and keeping his prices fantastically high. No other nation hounds its addicts as we do, and no other nation faces anything remotely resembling our problem.”
⁹

Having said that, King challenged Congress to re-evaluate its position. Picking up the gauntlet was Senator Price Daniel (D-TX), a member of the Internal Security Subcommittee and a participant in Senate Hearings held in 1955 on Communist China's involvement in the illicit narcotics traffic. At those hearings, Anslinger convinced Senator Daniel that the PRC was responsible for drug addiction throughout the world, and Daniel deduced that by linking drugs to communism, he could justify a punitive approach toward drug addiction in America – and that by running as a law and order candidate, he could achieve his life's ambition, to be elected governor of Texas.

Daniel jumped in with both feet, and from June through December 1955, his Criminal Code Subcommittee, with Lee Speer as its chief investigator, heard FBN agents Jim Ryan and Ernie Gentry link the PRC to drug smuggling. Gentry went so far as to claim that the PRC was using drugs as a weapon of psychological warfare, “to try to demoralize any of our people who get in touch with it.”
¹⁰
Anslinger, on 1 August 1955, called the PRC “the greatest purveyor of drugs in history.”
¹¹

As a direct result of the Daniel Hearings, the Senate passed legislation sharply increasing the penalties for drug trafficking. The Senate legislation, which was based largely on charges brought against the PRC by Anslinger and his FBN experts, was pushed through the House by one of the FBN's greatest supporters, Congressman Hale Boggs, whose subcommittee on the Control of Narcotics, Barbiturates, and Amphetamines met from October through December 1955. And again, one of Anslinger's top field agents was available; George White testified to the Boggs Committee that the PRC packed every President Line ship full of drugs in exchange for gold, with which it bought strategic materials to arm North Vietnam.

The Daniel Act was the most important piece of legislation in the FBN's history. By providing for mandatory sentencing, it enabled the FBN to more easily acquire informers and thus achieve greater success in the burgeoning war on drugs. However, under the new laws, a teenager caught with a joint was treated as severely as a Mafia don, so many judges resisted the Act, as did many of Anslinger's critics. Alfred Lindesmith stated in 1956 that “the disastrous consequences of turning over to the police what is an essentially medical problem are steadily becoming more apparent as narcotic arrests rise each year.”
¹²

But the disastrous consequences of a mainly Black urban problem were not yet apparent to the general public. The majority was unaffected, and almost everyone believed Anslinger's propaganda, so Congress implemented his hard-line approach, thinking it was the best way to curb drug addiction – and it blamed the PRC for international drug trafficking. The problem was that Anslinger was wrong on both counts.