The Strength of the Wolf (30 page)

Andy Tartaglino, one of the most significant and controversial characters among the FBN's dramatis personae, replaced Jim Attie in Rome in the autumn of 1956. Said to have the mind of a mathematician and the soul of a Dominican monk, Tartaglino graduated from Georgetown University in 1949. A year later, while serving in the Naval Reserve aboard a ship in the Mediterranean Sea, he met a navigator who had been in the Treasury Department's old Alcohol Tobacco Tax unit. Standing on the bridge at night, charting a course by the stars, the navigator regaled Tartaglino with tall tales of true crime. Eager to live the exciting life of an undercover narcotic agent, Tartaglino approached Charlie Siragusa while on shore leave in Naples and applied for a job with the FBN.

“The Bureau had six Special Hires coming to it each year,” Tartaglino recalls, “and my special quality was that I spoke an Italian dialect. I was told to go to Washington and was hired in 1951 while still in the Naval Reserve.”

Fresh from the spic and span Navy, Tartaglino was taken aback upon arriving at the New York office in 1952. “The Bureau was badly undermanned,” he explains, “and there were forces at work that prohibited the necessary countermeasures. Some of those forces were bureaucratic, but some were the result of the agents' own weaknesses. In New York,” he says ruefully, “some of the agents were junkies.
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“Anslinger never asked for sufficient resources to investigate corruption within the Bureau,” Tartaglino continues, “and even though addiction was skyrocketing, he harassed the doctors who were researching methadone, which was hard to regulate and was finding its way onto the streets. This
negative attitude out of headquarters obstructed any non-enforcement solution to the problem.”

Despite the obstacles, Tartaglino was intrigued with international drug smuggling, and under the tutelage of Angelo Zurlo, he began working as an undercover agent. He bought narcotics from Joseph Armone, an underboss in the Anastasia family, and he laid the groundwork for the Anthony Vellucci–Nathan Behrman case, the largest Italian–Jewish–French connection operation at the time. Recognized by his bosses as honest and possessing leadership abilities, Tartaglino was assigned to the International Group, where he learned about overseas operations from Joe Amato, and formed a fast friendship with Marty Pera. One of the new breed of younger agents seeking to overcome the inertia and corruption of the past, Tartaglino heeded Pera's advice concerning the realities of working overseas.

As Marty Pera recalls: “In 1951, I was chosen to go to Europe with Charlie Siragusa and Joe Amato on a ninety-day temporary duty assignment. Siragusa went to Italy, Amato to Germany, and I went to Turkey, where a pro-American government had been established and was allowing the US to open military bases. It was the start of a large US presence there.

“As you know, George White had been to Turkey in 1948 and Hollywood made a movie about his adventures called
To The Ends Of The Earth
[starring Dick Powell] in which the Turkish police were portrayed as bumbling fools, which they are not. So when I met Kamal Aygun, the head of the Turkish Sûreté in Istanbul, the first thing he told me was that, contrary to press reports and the movie, White had bungled the operation. He'd never made a raid or an arrest, and in fact, the Turkish police had someone deliver five kilograms of heroin to White, in order to placate Anslinger, who was giving the Turks grief at the UN about diversions. They'd done Anslinger this tremendous favor, so he could save face, but as a result of all the negative publicity White had generated, Turkey became a pariah.

“After we talked for a while, Aygun asked me, ‘What are you going to do here?' I said I was there to make undercover cases, to which he replied: ‘We cooperated fully last time, and it was turned against us. So no help this time.' Then he wished me good luck.”

Pera sighs. “From Istanbul I ventured into the countryside, where I found that opium reporting by farmers was a total sham. They sold what was required to the government and the rest to the highest bidder. I learned that we had to solve the problem here,” he stresses, “before we went overseas. And I learned that without Hank Manfredi, Charlie Siragusa would have been nothing.”

Starting in 1956, in his position as chief of the International Group, Pera's primary task was tracking heroin from its overseas sources to the American Mafia. “Some leads came from Frank Sojat,” he says, “after Sojat was sent to Turkey to straighten out their reporting. Other leads came from Paul Knight in Beirut. But most came from Manfredi in Rome; and that's when I realized how incredibly strong Hank's ties were with the Italian police. In the early days after the war he brought them food and clothing, and when they rose through the ranks, they remembered. Hank was honest and hardworking, and the Italians loved him.”

Tartaglino's dream of an overseas assignment came true when Jack Cusack, his supervisor at the Court House Squad, wrote a letter to Siragusa recommending him. Within weeks, Tartaglino was on his way to Rome to replace Jim Attie. It was a tough act to follow, but the most important relationship in FBN history was about to be formed. Speaking with devotion about his mentor, Tartaglino says, “If Charlie Siragusa were alive today, we wouldn't have the drug problem we have in America. Charlie was a workaholic who traveled by train with a typewriter on his lap, and he expected the same from his agents. If he sent you to Beirut, you sent him a telegram saying when, exactly, you arrived – then you unpacked your bags and went to work. And you wrote reports on Sunday, on your own time. But Charlie was gold, a nuts-and-bolts person who showed you the basics; how to set up an office, what questions to ask your counterparts, and how to act in their presence. I remember when the mob was shaking down the famous opera singer Mario Lanza in Italy. We were going to meet him, and I was nervous. Charlie looked at me with disapproval and said: ‘He's awed by us.'

“Charlie was on top with everybody,” Tartaglino beams. And under Siragusa's tutelage, Tartaglino found, as one colleague puts it, “the
consigliere
within.”

According to Tartaglino, the FBN's focus in 1956 was to find “the Conspiracy” between communists and international drug smugglers. “In the process of doing that,” he says, “we made buys in Italy from American seamen and followed leads to Turkey and France. Charlie had developed a good rapport abroad, and that allowed us to do some unilateral operations too. Anslinger's only rule was, ‘stay away from State,' meaning ambassadors Clare Luce and her replacement, James Zellerbach.

“When Charlie wasn't there,” Tartaglino continues, “I stepped in as acting supervisor and representative to the other agencies at the Embassy. Francis Coleman, the CIA station chief, was very helpful. We borrowed flash money from him. Lots of it. ‘If you hear anything about East–West trade, let us know,' he'd say, and that's all he wanted. The other helpful person was Treasury Attaché Francis DiLucia, although Francis was more concerned with the price of merchandise for tax purposes. Our thing was drugs, and that's what we did.”
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In doing that thing, Tartaglino worked closely with Hank Manfredi and Paul Knight, as well as CIA officers Joe Salm and Fred Cornetta, who had been assigned to the FBN after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Also arriving at the FBN's Rome office in late 1956 was Agent Ralph Frias.

A native of Prescott, Arizona, and a veteran of the Second World War, Frias spoke fluent Spanish and for that reason was hired by the FBN in Los Angeles in 1951. Blessed with a knack for undercover work, Frias learned the tricks of the trade from the agent in charge of Los Angeles, George Davis. A craggy old-timer, Davis relied on Frias to produce almost all of the office's cases against Hispanic violators. But by the time Howard Chappell replaced Davis in 1956, case-maker Frias was ready for a change of scene, and greater challenges.

Able to speak French and Italian as well as Spanish, Frias was accepted by Siragusa in Rome, and began sharing office space with Manfredi, Tartaglino, and Cornetta. At the time, Knight and Joe Salm were in Beirut, where, according to Frias, “they had lots of dubious information in big files,” but were accomplishing little in the absence of undercover ace Jim Attie.

Frias, like Attie, disliked Siragusa, whom he considered a publicity hound. But he did form a friendship with Tartaglino. “Andy was serving as Siragusa's administrative aide,” Frias recalls, “and eventually Andy became so well-informed and so influential that he actually began to guide Siragusa. But Andy did very little undercover work.”

Tartaglino's exit from undercover work, notably, was the result of a harrowing experience in Monte Carlo in October 1956. His informer had set up a deal with two Corsican traffickers. But instead of delivering six kilograms of heroin, as agreed, the traffickers arrived with sugar and put a gun to Tartaglino's head. Some agents say the Corsicans knew that they'd
encountered an FBN agent, and that they made Andy beg for his life. Meanwhile, Siragusa and the French police were next door, but their hidden microphone malfunctioned, and the Corsicans got away with $16,000 in buy money.

“They were quickly captured,” Tartaglino explains, “but Charlie took a beating in the press, because the French police had taken the $16,000 dollars from their Treasury without authorization.” The
Saturday Evening Post
described the incident as “the first big defeat for Siragusa.”
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Siragusa's first big failure also marked the end of Tartaglino's undercover days. But fortunately for District 17, Ralph Frias was there to pick up the slack. Fashioning a persona as Johnny Rizzo, the son of a made man from San Bernardino who was willing to smuggle anything, Frias quickly acquired a number of informants and began to make a string of significant cases. The first climaxed on 18 June 1957, when he made a buy in Beirut from Sami Khoury's associate Youseff el-Etir. Covering Frias were Lebanese Customs chief Edmond Azizi and Joe Salm. To everyone's surprise, el-Etir arrived at the meeting with Omar Makkouk, the most wanted chemist in Lebanon. The ensuing bust resulted in the seizure of three kilograms of heroin and twenty-five kilograms of morphine base. Makkouk's lab in Syria was located, and leads were developed into German, Swiss, and Iranian smuggling rings. The case contributed to the indictment of sixty-two traffickers in New York as well. This worldwide ring, managed since 1950 by Meyer Lansky's associate in Philadelphia, Harry Stromberg, moved fifty kilograms of heroin a month from Macao and Turkey, through Lebanon and France, to major Mafiosi in America.
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Next Frias was introduced through a special employee to Giuseppe Badalamenti, a top Mafia source of heroin in Sicily. Linked closely to deported American Mafiosi Frank Coppola and Sam Carolla, Giuseppe took Frias into his confidence, and after Giuseppe died of the Asiatic flu in December 1957, Frias made a buy from his brother Vito in January 1958. Despite the fact that a vicious war was underway between the Badalamenti and the Greco clans in Sicily, Frias, backed up by Hank Manfredi, made a second buy from Vito in March. Vito Badalamenti and his two closest associates were arrested in June, and the Grecos temporarily took over the Sicilian heroin business.

Until Frias came along, no FBN agent had generated so much intelligence on the Sicilians or their Corsican partners in Mexico, Cuba, and Canada. For example, it was through a case made by Frias that the FBN learned that after the Mexican federal police had arrested Antoine D'Agostino in March 1955, Paul Mondoloni and Jean Croce had escaped
to Cuba, where they re-established their drug-smuggling business under Batista's protection. And it was through Frias that the FBN learned, in August 1958, that a French diplomat was carrying heroin to Vincent Todaro, a member of the Trafficante organization in New York. Frias's successes also helped the FBN to smash the Stromberg and Badalamenti rings – although, within a month, Corsican Antoine Cordoliani had set up a new operation with the Grecos, on behalf of Dom Albertini, the Guérini brothers, and Robert Blemant in Marseilles. This major reorganization had begun, notably, a year earlier, in June 1957, when Lucky Luciano arrived in Palermo to attend an historical and soon-to-be discussed summit meeting between senior representatives of the American and Sicilian Mafias.

More on the ramifications of the Palermo summit remains to be said, but for now we must turn our attention to Henry L. Manfredi, the extraordinary agent who made the fateful decision that kept Charlie Siragusa from replacing Harry Anslinger as Commissioner of Narcotics.

Manfredi's first job was as a textile cutter in Brooklyn. But he longed to be a policeman and shortly before the war he obtained part-time work fingerprinting Civil Service personnel for the NYPD. Through that job he met FBN Agent Irwin Greenfeld, and in 1942, Greenfeld got Manfredi a job with Lieutenant Rudy Caputo, chief of security for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Caputo's office was collocated with the FBN at 90 Church Street, and under Caputo's direction, Manfredi set up an Identification Bureau at the Naval Yard. He also began tracking subversives as part of the Luciano Project. In 1943, Manfredi joined the Army CID and served in North Africa, Italy, and Austria. After the war he returned to Italy as a security specialist and, in 1948, he caught Anslinger's eye when he found a huge stash of narcotics in Austria. After helping Siragusa identify the Italian companies that were diverting heroin onto the American market, he joined the FBN and began to investigate the money-laundering activities of the Mafia.
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The CIA also employed Manfredi. “One time he asked me to cover him while he met an East German at a cafe on the Via Parioli,” Ralph Frias recalls. “He wanted to know if anyone was watching. He described the guy and told me to be there an hour early to see if he came alone. Which he did. Hank arrived later, sat down, got something to drink, lit one of his short, black cigars, and started talking with this guy. I walked
around behind to see if anyone else was covering the meet. There wasn't, and afterwards I followed the guy Hank had met and I watched him get in a taxicab. I never told Charlie,” Frias confesses, then adds that Manfredi returned the favor. “No one else was willing to cover me when I went to meet Vito Badalamenti in Sicily,” he says. “But Hank wasn't afraid. He said, ‘Okay, kid. I'll go with you.' And he did.