The Strength of the Wolf (35 page)

“Giordano set the whole Zirilli thing up,” he adds bitterly. “Then Giordano had the nerve to tell Tony that he'd forget the whole thing if
he'd apologize. Tony had a wife and a couple of kids, but he didn't take crap from anybody, least of all a punk like Giordano. Tony had worked inside the Bonanno family and had made some of the biggest cases overseas. So he quit. He told me he'd lost the wanderlust.”

According to Howard Chappell, Zirilli was set up because he had gotten close to Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, through Marcello's girlfriend. Chappell claims that Gentry, the district supervisor over New Orleans, “set him up on purpose to protect Marcello.”

Whatever the cause of Zirilli's fall from grace, it had a ripple effect, and by 1959 the FBN's premier case-making agents were looking over their shoulders for shooflies, as the power struggle to replace Harry Anslinger turned lethal.

With the death of Deputy Commissioner George Cunningham in October 1958, the political positioning to replace Harry Anslinger took a new twist. Henry Giordano was named Deputy Commissioner as a way of rewarding Congressman Hale Boggs for his years of support, and Lee Speer was appointed enforcement assistant as a way of appeasing both Sam Rayburn, the powerful Speaker of the House, and former Senator Price Daniel. Summoned back from the far reaches of the globe to find the number two and three headquarters positions already filled, Charlie Siragusa got what was left; a quick fling as field supervisor, then the number four post as deputy assistant for administration.

Finding himself low man on the totem pole was a big blow for proud Charlie Siragusa. He had made over one hundred cases in over a dozen nations since 1950, and had accomplished far more than Giordano and Speer combined. But now, as field supervisor, and in other non-enforcement roles, such as updating the Mafia Book, he was taking orders from his inferiors. According to agents on the scene, the tension between Siragusa, Speer, and Giordano was visceral, and negatively affected how the FBN was managed.

The reorganization spelled trouble in District 17 too, where Ralph Frias had come to despise Paul Knight. He blamed Knight for the beating Jim Attie received from Lebanese security chief Haj Touma, and he resented
Knight for giving him the majority of the dangerous undercover assignments, while, in his opinion, Knight sat in his office, writing reports and taking all the credit. “At a meeting in Rome, Paul said he was too well known to do undercover work,” Andy Tartaglino recalls. “To which Ralph sarcastically replied: ‘Well, Paul, you
do
let everybody know.' ”

Another personality clash had developed as well. While inspecting the Beirut office, Tartaglino had opened the safe and found “gossipy” letters from Siragusa. Some belittled him and Frias, others advised Knight to keep them away from the press “if,” Siragusa had written, “we're going to get anywhere.” Each letter closed with the words “Burn this letter.” Angry at the content of the letters, and the fact that Knight hadn't burned them, Tartaglino confronted Siragusa in Rome. When faced with his own duplicity, Siragusa chose to blame Knight rather than himself. He forced Knight to destroy the letters in his presence and, upon his return to Washington in 1958, he named Tartaglino, not Knight, as the acting district supervisor in Rome. Tartaglino held the position until Giordano's nominee, Jack Cusack, arrived in early 1959. Having been unfairly upbraided and passed over for a position he deserved, Knight decided to seek employment with the CIA.
¹

Tensions in Rome were further heightened by the arrival of Sal Vizzini. Audacious and smooth as silk, Vizzini had served as an Air Force investigator prior to joining the FBN in Atlanta in 1953. Two years later he was transferred to New York and inducted into the ruling Ward–Gaffney–Dolce clique. Vizzini made several important undercover cases and in 1956 was sent to Miami to work in Cuba under the direction of Atlanta District Supervisor George Gaffney, and later under Gaffney's replacement, Jack Cusack.

Vizzini's exceptional undercover skills were highly prized by Anslinger, Cusack, and Gaffney, but his arrival in Rome was not universally welcomed. Tall, dark, and handsome – and a swashbuckling ladies' man – Vizzini stood in stark contrast to diminutive Andy Tartaglino, his temperamental nemesis. Tartaglino had formed an abiding animosity for Vizzini in 1955, when Vizzini stole the important Vellucci–Berhman case from him. Tartaglino had done all of the thankless preliminary work, but Vizzini had made the arrest and gotten credit for the bust. For freewheeling Sal it was part of the game, but for high-strung Andy it was an unforgivable sin. It didn't help that Vizzini was part of a clique that was contending with his mentor,
Charlie Siragusa, or that Cusack had brought Vizzini to Rome specifically to replace Tartaglino's close friend Ralph Frias. Frias had performed the lion's share of District 17's undercover work for the past two years, but had lost his enthusiasm for the job when his son died at birth in Rome; and rather than accept a transfer to unfamiliar and, by reputation, unhealthy New York, Frias resigned from the FBN in December 1958 and, brokenhearted, returned to California.

Eager to set the world on fire, Vizzini began to do what no agent had done before: penetrate a faction of Lucky Luciano's inner circle which was managing a clandestine heroin conversion laboratory in Sicily. The FBN wanted to smash the operation, so an introduction was arranged and, posing as a corrupt Air Force pilot, Vizzini used his considerable charms to seduce the FBN's
bête noire
. He tells how he did this in his autobiography, but omits three important details that he wasn't permitted to tell at the time: 1) that he was introduced to Luciano by one of Hank Manfredi's CIA assets; 2) that he reported to Manfredi, not District Supervisor Jack Cusack, on the case; and 3) that copies of his reports about Luciano went to Bobby Kennedy.

Despite Vizzini's threadbare cover, Luciano accepted him on the word of Manfredi's asset. As improbable as it may seem, Luciano's skeptical associates also came to accept Vizzini, and they eventually got him a job as an assistant to Mafia chemist Joe Mancuso in a heroin conversion lab in Sicily. Over the course of a few harrowing weeks, Vizzini worked closely with a backup squad of Italian police to engineer Mancuso's arrest. The case led to the arrest of Luciano lieutenant Joe Pici, and several Corsicans in Marseilles. Although he wasn't able to implicate Luciano in the conspiracy, Vizzini's success in smashing the Sicilian heroin ring so enhanced his reputation that, in late 1959, Anslinger gave him the honor of opening the FBN's first office in Istanbul.
²

Meanwhile, having finished testifying in the Orlandino case in New York, Tony Mangiaracina was rewarded with the transfer he desired, and arrived in Rome. Affable and easy-going, but resolute, his primary mission was to work on Italians wherever they were – Germany, Sicily, France, Beirut – but he did special jobs as well. His big problem was adjusting to Jack Cusack's hypercritical, micro-management style, which often reduced the four office secretaries to tears.
³
Consequently, Mangiaracina had little success making cases overseas. He describes Cusack as “an okay conspiracy maker,” but is careful to note that Cusack couldn't speak Italian, and Hank Manfredi was much better equipped to head the Rome office. “The Italian police,” Mangiaracina says, “always used to ask me: ‘Why isn't Mr. Manfredi the boss? He's been here ten years!' ”

The reason, of course, was that Hank Manfredi was mired in the murky depths of espionage. As the lynchpin in CIA officer Bob Driscoll's initiative, Manfredi had formed a cadre of Italian policemen from Trieste into a secret operations unit designed to neutralize the Communist Party in Rome and infiltrate its Soviet link. But Driscoll hadn't consulted with James Angleton, the CIA's tyrannical counterintelligence chief, and when Angleton (who was running a parallel operation through the Italian military) found out what Driscoll was doing, he notified General Giovanni De Lorenzo, the Sicilian-born chief of Italy's secret service. Word of Driscoll's secret unit hit the papers, scandal ensued, the initiative fizzled, and Driscoll was sent to Tangiers to await his next assignment. The call would come in June 1960, when the Belgian Congo declared its independence, and by posing as a doctor and recruiting Joseph Mobuto, the chief of staff of the Congolese Army, Driscoll would resurrect his CIA career.
⁴

But redemption would elude Manfredi. He wasn't exposed in the scandal, thanks to his FBN cover and friends in the Italian police forces – and he did manage to maintain good relations with Angleton – but his faith in the ideal that all Americans were working together, for God and country, was shattered by Angleton's betrayal. He'd also blown his chance to achieve stardom in the CIA. But worst of all, he had to go back to work for Jack Cusack, for whom he had no love or respect. Insecure by nature, and a hypochondriac, father figure Hank Manfredi fell into a black depression that disturbed everyone in District 17.

Back at FBN headquarters, the CIA was casting its wicked spell on Charlie Siragusa too. Wrapped in red tape by Giordano and Speer, he longed for an investigation he could sink his teeth into. Instead, Anslinger made him the FBN's liaison to the CIA, and Siragusa became inextricably entwined in the MKULTRA Program and the CIA's disastrous plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Like Hank Manfredi before him, Siragusa's career was compromised as a result.

Siragusa's walk down the primrose path began in January 1959, when Anslinger, expecting more cooperation from Castro than he'd gotten from Batista, sent Charlie to Cuba with a list of fifty drug traffickers he wanted arrested and expelled. Topping the list was Santo Trafficante, who had been subpoenaed in the Anastasia murder case. But the fledgling Cuban government couldn't find the Batista regime's dossiers on the gangsters Anslinger wanted expelled. Then the case against Trafficante was mysteriously dismissed in the US, probably at the behest of the CIA, and the patron saint of drug traffickers was released from a Cuban detention facility and returned to Tampa a free man.
⁵

Meyer Lansky, meanwhile, had ransomed his brother Jake from the same detention facility and was relocating his offshore banking and gambling operation to the Bahamas, where he teamed up with a motley crew of dissolute British barristers and bankers. Lansky financed the operation with laundered drug and gambling money, his business friends provided the respectable façade, and together they created a formidable criminal empire. Making the whole thing possible was the CIA, which had hired a slew of gangsters, including Trafficante, in its mad attempt to murder Castro. In return for their services, the hoods were protected from criminal prosecution, and in this way and others, the CIA would subvert the FBN's efforts against the American Mafia. It was also the beginning of what Andy Tartaglino referred to as “The Age of Anglophiles and Francophobes.”
⁶

In 1953, Siragusa had reported that Corsicans smuggled morphine and heroin from Indochina.
⁷
What he didn't know at the time was that the Corsicans relied on CIA assets in the Kuomintang as their source of supply. Garland Williams, however, clarified the situation once and for all in a 25 July 1959 report titled “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East.” As Williams noted, 10,000 Kuomintang soldiers living illegally in Burma had “almost exclusive responsibility for moving opium shipments out of the area.” This Kuomintang operation, Williams said, supplied, “the persistent major violators of French nationality who operate in New York City.”
⁸

Williams wasn't whistling in the wind, and in May 1959 – a month after he recommended that the Kuomintang–French operation be destroyed – the Burmese attacked a KMT camp where they discovered 6,000 CIA-supplied KMT soldiers and “three morphine base refineries operating near a usable airstrip.”
⁹

According to Williams, American mercenaries working for the CIA flew refined heroin out of the Golden Triangle to contacts in Hong Kong and Saigon. All of this was known to Anslinger and his chief executives, and in one instance, according to Andy Tartaglino, FBN agents arrested two CIA agents carrying twelve kilograms of morphine base from Thailand to Hong Kong. But the CIA said they were low-level rogues, and the incident was swept under the carpet.

Taking his cue from the CIA, Anslinger did nothing to embarrass the Kuomintang or the French, and he continued to claim that all heroin
reaching Hong Kong came from the People's Republic of China. “The Los Angeles area alone probably received forty percent of the smuggled contraband from China's heroin and morphine plants,” he said in 1961.
¹⁰

However, behind the veil of political propaganda, Anslinger was being pressured to post an agent in Hong Kong, as Williams had recommended. But the British colonialists in control of Hong Kong were not sending out engraved invitations. On the contrary, they'd seen America snatch South Vietnam away from the French and, fearing that America had similar designs on Hong Kong, they put up as many barriers as possible. For example, when the British learned that George White had slipped an agent into the Crown Colony in 1959, Hong Kong's customs service, in retaliation, searched a Pan Am passenger plane and miraculously discovered four pounds of morphine base in an unnamed person's luggage. The airline was fined a mere $2,700, but the message was clear: the center of the Far Eastern drug trade was off-limits to the FBN. To get around this No Hunting ban, Anslinger sent Bill Tollenger to Hong Kong as Pan Am's security chief. Operating under CIA control, Tollenger's job was to snoop around the Far East without upsetting the status quo, while keeping Sam Pryor's airline out of trouble.