The Strength of the Wolf (34 page)

New York District Supervisor George Gaffney was aware of Pepe's operation, but making a case against him in Canada depended on the cooperation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the ability of courageous undercover Agent Patrick Biase to make a buy directly from him. That challenge was hard enough, but Gaffney was ambitious and wanted to expand the case into a conspiracy that enveloped Pepe's Mafia customers in New York as well. How that was done was complicated, and requires the introduction of a number of individuals in a very short space. It also requires a profile of Lenny Schrier, one of the most significant agents in FBN history. And it needs an examination of the Orlandino case, which Schrier made in New York in 1959.

Two aspects of the Orlandino case have special significance. To begin with, it did not rely upon the testimony of a dubious informer like Nelson Cantellops, but upon seized heroin that was placed on a courtroom table for a jury to see. Secondly, Gaffney's management of the case contributed to the internecine strife that brought the FBN to its knees. At the center of this tragic tale is Lenny Schrier. Tall, intelligent, and engaging, Schrier was born in Brooklyn, trained as an accountant, and seeking excitement, joined the FBN in 1951. Considered the best case-maker ever by many of his colleagues, he began to shine in the summer of 1956. Schrier remembers it well, because The Platters had just released their fabulous song,
The Great Pretender
. That summer, Schrier and undercover Agent Marshall Latta
arrested Tony and Rocky Flamio for delivering heroin to Schrier's best informant, Cleveland Lockwood.

“We took them down to 90 Church,” Schrier explains, “and split them up. Rocky was a furniture stripper with a couple of kids and a nice wife. This was a one-time favor for his brother Tony, and he was feeling suicidal. So he flipped. And to work off the bust, Rocky started making introductions to Tony's customers, and that's when things really start to pop. We got Rocky a second-hand car and brought in Tony Grapes [Anthony Mangiaracina] to do the undercover work. And we made cases for two years! We were making so many cases we needed help, so they gave us Steve Giorgio, a very smooth guy who made two buys from Sammy ‘the Jew' Manis. That's Sam Monastersky, who took us to Marcantonio Orlandino – one of Pepe Cotroni's customers.

“This,” Schrier says, “is the big time. Unfortunately, Grapes had been making cases for two years straight and he wanted a transfer to Rome. But as the undercover agent who'd made the buys, he had to testify in court before he could go. So Gaffney ordered me to wrap things up. He said to me, ‘Schrier, I want these cases wrapped up, or your ass is mud.' Then he walked away.”

Schrier repeats the word mud, then continues. “I sat at my desk until I calmed down, then I went to the front office and asked Gaffney for a little more time to make this last part of the case on Sammy the Jew. I told him that Rocky was essential to the case, and that I needed time to make arrangements for him. He wouldn't have to testify because he'd only made the introductions, but we were going to have to pay him something so he could move his family out of New York. I had to argue for everything, but finally Gaffney said I could have the money for Rocky's expenses, and the time I needed to make Sammy Manis and Richie McGovern – which is the key to Orlandino.

“So Rocky takes Giorgio to Sammy Manis. Sammy didn't have his hands on the junk, but he did the negotiating at a bar where he and Richie McGovern hung out. And when it was time for the delivery, Manis took Giorgio to an apartment in Midtown where they met Richie, who, by the way, was a real maverick. His body was covered with tattoos. Richie told Giorgio that the junk wasn't there, but that it was being delivered. Meanwhile, Grapes was waiting downstairs with the buy money, and me and Jimmy Doyle were watching from a car outside. Another car pulls up and we see William Struzzeri get out and take the junk up to the apartment. The guy driving the car is looking around, so I pull alongside. Doyle rolls down the window and asks, ‘You pulling out?' That way we get a good
look at the driver. It's Marcantonio Orlandino. He's out on parole, and he doesn't know McGovern, and he doesn't trust Struzzeri, so he went along to protect his money.

“That first buy was two half-kilogram packages from Manis and McGovern. We saw the people bring it in, we followed them to Orlandino's house in Levittown, and then we set up another buy for three more kilograms. After the second buy, we followed Struzzeri back to the plant at Phil Orlandino's place in Flushing. Phil was Marcantonio's brother. Of course we wanted to know where Orlandino got his junk, so we put a tap on Phil's phone.

“Gaffney, meanwhile, is huddling with Marty Pera. It's all very
hush hush
,” Schrier says facetiously. “The junk is coming out of Canada from the Cotronis, and the guys behind Orlandino are Angelo Tuminaro and Anthony DiPasqua. But somehow Bayonne Joe Zicarelli in New Jersey is involved too. Johnny Dolce and Patty Biase are working the Cotroni case, and Pera's got three or four guys on Bayonne Joe – they got radar in the sky following his car. I'm not supposed to know that, or that Dolce and Biase have an informant, Eddie Smith, into Cotroni, or that they're going to use
my junk
to tie everyone else into him. They're going to use Eddie Smith for information, but without
my narcotics
they haven't got a conspiracy in New York.

“Now it's time for the roundup,” Schrier says, “and the whole office is involved. We had buys on thirty Italians in East Harlem, plus Ralph Wagner and Herbie Sperling – both of whom delivered junk for Joe Valachi. It was a Saturday night [14 February 1959]. We had a combat photographer with us from one of the newspapers. All the dignitaries from City Hall were at the St. George Hotel, waiting with Gaffney. So we round up all these kids, then finish up at Phil Orlandino's house. There's ten kilograms of pure heroin at the plant in Flushing, and we find a gym bag with $50,000, which nobody claimed.”
¹¹

Schrier smiles, then gets serious. “Orlandino blamed Richie McGovern, who fled to Mexico with Ralph Wagner. McGovern wasn't an informant, but in April they found his body in a ditch outside Acapulco. His face was so badly mutilated, the only way they knew it was him was by the tattoos.”

To Lenny Schrier's credit, the Orlandino case enabled federal prosecutors to make a conspiracy case in New York on Canadian Pepe Cotroni and twenty-eight American co-defendants. As noted, Cotroni supplied five major wholesalers in New York, including Angelo Tuminaro and Anthony DiPasqua. But the Cotroni case was so spectacular that it eclipsed Schrier's accomplishment. Adding insult to injury, the Cotroni case was made by
Gaffney's mentor and enforcement assistant Pat Ward, and Ward's protégés in Group Three, agents John M. Dolce and Patrick J. Biase. Smart and sophisticated, Dolce lived in Bethpage, as did Ward and Biase. Biase, a former CID agent who had investigated drug cases in Korea, was a ladies' man and racetrack gambler who broke all the rules and exasperated his bosses.

After the Cotroni and Orlandino cases, the New York office would fracture along a fault line, with the supporters of Schrier on one side, and those of Ward, Dolce, and Biase on the other.

The case on Pepe Cotroni began in April 1958, when one of Pat Ward's informers revealed that the aforementioned Eddie Smith was Cotroni's courier. After several months of observing Smith's activities, Ward and the agents he assigned to the case – Johnny Dolce and Patty Biase – planted a homing device in Smith's car (a black Lincoln with a white top and a blue and pink interior) with the intention of catching him red-handed with a load of heroin at the tollbooths on the Tappan Zee Bridge. But when they stopped and searched the car, the person they found inside was diamond merchant Ben Sachs. As the FBN agents soon learned, handsome Eddie Smith was engaged to Sachs's daughter. Sachs, of course, was aghast to discover his future son-in-law's occupation, and he prevailed upon him to become an FBN informant. And under Ward's guidance, Eddie Smith ‘cut' (in FBN jargon) daring undercover Agent Patty Biase, posing as Jack Farraco (the fictitious brother of Mafioso George Farraco), into Pepe Cotroni.
¹²

Covered by his close friends Pat Ward and John Dolce, as well as a contingent from the RCMP's narcotic squad, Biase in June 1959 twice purchased two kilograms of heroin from Pepe in Montreal. Those buys led to Pepe's arrest on 8 July on the charge of conspiracy to sell $8 million worth of narcotics. Pepe was tried and convicted in Montreal that October. Subsequently, federal prosecutors charged twenty-eight co-defendants in the Southern District of New York, including Angelo Tuminaro, Anthony DiPasqua, Carmine Galante, Sal Giglio, John Ormento, and the Mafia's courier to Texas, Benny Indiviglio. Alas, the trial turned into a three-ring circus: the defense attorneys objected to every witness statement; there were charges of jury tampering; the jury foreman was hurt in a freak accident; and Pepe's mistress recanted her testimony. And even though everyone was convicted, Giglio, Tuminaro, DiPasqua, and Indiviglio were released on bond and became fugitives. All of which, in conjunction with
the collapse of the Apalachin case, underscored how much more federal prosecutors had to learn about making major drug conspiracy cases.
¹³

Nor did the drug trafficking out of Montreal abate with Pepe's demise; his former contact Lucien Rivard returned from Cuba and, with Paul Mondoloni, revived the Canadian facet of the French connection. Rivard was well placed in this regard: he and Mondoloni were co-owners of the El Morocco club in Cuba with Norman Rothman, a close associate of Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante.
¹⁴

As Paul Knight in Beirut and other FBN agents were aware, Mondoloni's Corsican partners, Jean Croce and Dominique Nicoli, were in Cuba in early 1958, waiting while their chemist, Dom Albertini, negotiated a morphine base deal with Sami Khoury. Knight wanted to let the Corsicans move freely in Cuba to see which American mobsters they contacted, but Batista's Secret Police – perhaps at the request of a foreign intelligence service – arrested Croce and Nicoli on 13 March 1958 and deported them to France, nipping the FBN investigation in the bud.
¹⁵

Not much had changed eight months later. In a 24 November 1958 memo to Anslinger, Atlanta District Supervisor Jack Cusack, the agent with jurisdiction over Cuba, reported that every three to six months, Mondoloni sold between 50 to 150 kilograms of heroin to Rothman and “almost all important Italian-American suspects visiting Havana.” Cusack said that Mondoloni's operation in Cuba, which had begun in 1955 with Norman Rothman and Trafficante, “poses a most serious threat to the suppression of the illicit heroin traffic at the present time.”
¹⁶

While Mondoloni's operation proceeded apace, Rothman and former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras were indicted for arms trafficking to Castro.
¹⁷
And Rothman and Salvatore Mannarino, a Pittsburgh Mafia boss (and co-owner with Trafficante of the Sans Souci club in Cuba), were indicted with Pepe Cotroni for receiving stolen bonds from a 1958 bank robbery in Canada.
¹⁸
But the bonds were being used to pay for Castro's guns, so the CIA had the gangsters set free. According to historian Peter Dale Scott, “In 1978, Rothman told a CBS television interviewer that he had avoided conviction because of the CIA's interest in his gunrunning activities.”
¹⁹

By early 1959, with Castro in power and Cuba no longer a friendly base for American drug lords, French and Corsican suppliers began to make
deliveries directly to New York. This development would bring the FBN's New York office into the next and most famous French connection phase of its four-year winning streak under George Gaffney.

This development occurred simultaneously with a decision, resulting from the Genovese and Apalachin cases, by the Mafia Commission to protect itself by prohibiting its made members from directly trafficking in narcotics; at which point a new legion of unfamiliar faces from Sicily appeared on the scene, adding new complications to the arcane narcotics trafficking situation.

For Gaffney, the FBN's winning streak was a mixed blessing. It would secure forever his reputation as the FBN's greatest district supervisor; but his successes engendered a sense of infallibility which hampered his judgment.

In utter exasperation Lenny Schrier says, “For two years, Lee Bennett and I made 50 percent of the cases, and 50 percent of the seizures in New York, by ourselves. So when Angelo Zurlo was transferred to Washington in June 1959, everyone knew I should get Group Three. But Dolce got it instead.” Schrier scowls. “Dolce didn't deserve the promotion, and the only reason he got it was because he was
in
with Ward and Gaffney.”

As the New York office descended into bitter internecine warfare, Henry Giordano further subverted agent morale by initiating an integrity case against revered undercover Agent Tony Zirilli.

“They'd sent him to Baltimore to work a gypsy wire, and he came back tired and disgusted,” Tony Mangiaracina recalls. “Then they sent him down to New Orleans. An agent down there supposedly had an informant who was willing to tie him into a dealer. So Tony goes down and meets the agent, Jack Frost, the informant, and Tom Dean, another agent from Texas. Frost and Dean introduce Tony to a third agent from New Orleans, Fred Young, who was posing as a bartender. The three of them kept track of Tony's drinks, and when he wrote up his report, they nailed him. Tony's unforgivable sin was having spent ten bucks on booze one night, then reporting that he'd spent five dollars two nights in a row, so as not to appear to be a boozer.”

Mangiaracina sighs. “The Bureau was so small. There were only five groups in New York, so you had to knock the other guy out of the box to get a promotion. But what goes around comes around. Frost left under a cloud a few years later, Dean was forced to take a job with Customs, and Young, the agent in charge in New Orleans, was arrested by the police on a morals charge, then fired.