The Strength of the Wolf (36 page)

The Hong Kong No Hunting ban also gave Anslinger a convenient excuse: if FBN agents weren't there, they couldn't prove that the CIA, Kuomintang, and French Corsicans were involved in a drug smuggling conspiracy. Thus, when twenty-one Chinese-Americans were arrested in San Francisco in 1959 with heroin obtained in Hong Kong, Anslinger and George White could say without blushing that it had come from mainland China, because the conspirators referred to themselves “in customary Communist terms.”
¹¹
They made this claim despite the fact that a former president of the Hip Sing T'ong was the mastermind of the conspiracy, and that the president of the Bing King T'ong in Portland was the middleman in the transactions. And that wasn't the worst of it; according to Peter Dale Scott, “The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Anti-Communist League (a KMT front) had been ordered by the US Consulate in Hong Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way … the KMT disappeared from view.”
¹²

Such was the paradoxical beauty of the special relationship with Great Britain. More than any other nation in history, Britain had profited from opium. By distributing narcotics to addicts in the United Kingdom, British public health officials repudiated Anslinger's punitive approach to drug addiction. British businessmen dealt with the PRC on the Hong Kong Exchange through British banks and shipping companies like Jardine
Matheson. And, as Williams implied in his 25 July 1959 report, the British actually protected Kuomintang drug traffickers. The British, he said, seized “eight or ten heroin factories each year,” and “many more” were in operation. But they punished the Kuomintang traffickers merely by “deporting them to Macao.” US Customs agents working with the Brits tried to stop this awful practice; but, due to CIA intervention, they did not have “effective support from the State Department in this endeavor.”
¹³

The Brits, however, weren't doing seditious things like France. The British intelligence service wasn't supplying heroin conversion labs outside London, like SDECE was by facilitating the supply of morphine base to labs outside Paris. Nor were they courting the Soviets and contending with the CIA at every coordinate on the drug smuggling map, from Laos and Beirut, to Algeria and Marseilles. The Brits and Americans were cousins, and the French were ridiculous, after all.

Until May 1954, America and France had a
modus vivendi
: French colonies were allowed to absorb opium revenues in return for waging the First Indochina War. But the accommodation collapsed at Dien Bien Phu, and soon the two nations were struggling for hegemony in the region. Five years later, on 19 November 1959, the role of the illicit drug trade in this
salle guerre
was publicly revealed when a Corsican with SDECE credentials, Renaud Desclerts, was arrested in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam, with 293 kilograms of Laotian opium.
¹⁴

As Marty Pera told the McClellan Committee that year, “When French Indochina existed … quantities of opium were shipped to the labs around Marseilles … then transshipped to the US.” Since then, Pera added, the US had become “preoccupied” with France itself.
¹⁵

Preoccupied, indeed. By 1960, France had replaced Italy as the focus of federal drug law enforcement, but with a national security twist. According to Agent Tom Tripodi, “An investigation undertaken in 1960 by American General E. G. Lansdale … concluded that elements of the French government were engaged in the heroin traffic.”
¹⁶

As we shall see, it wasn't long before the FBN got dragged into the dirty underground war – the
sale guerre
– that the CIA and SDECE were waging within the arcane world of international drug trafficking.

Laos was the source of the opium that the French converted into heroin, and so the CIA, which was anxious to deprive SDECE of this untraceable
source of income, staged a coup that brought its man, General Phoumi Nosavan, to power in November 1960. French advisors to the Laotian military departed in protest, and CIA paramilitary officers took control of the opium-growing hill tribes the French had formed into its anti-communist Armée Clandestine.
¹⁷
In 1963 Laos would withdraw from the UN's 1961 Single Convention and, under the guidance of the CIA, start mass-producing narcotics to support the CIA's own secret army of Laotian hill tribesmen.
¹⁸

But Laos was remote and primitive, and the axis of the CIA's
salle guerre
with SDECE was between Marseilles and urbane Beirut, where, with the failure of the United Arab Kingdom, the Christian Maronites had emerged as the CIA's only viable allies in the struggle against Arab nationalism and communism in the Middle East. Suffering the Francophiles in order to make cases posed enormous challenges for FBN agents in the region. Paul Knight's primary informer was a Maronite, and thus loyal to the French, and the Lebanese police were of little help, when they weren't actually protecting drug smugglers like Sami Khoury – who by 1959 had, ironically, become Knight's best informant.

Small attempts at cooperation were made. In November 1956, the French arrested Khoury in Paris and connected him with Paul Mondoloni. And in January 1959, Khoury, with the approval of the French, enabled Knight to make a case in Paris against Khoury's partners – Antoine Araman, Antoine Harrouk, and Agop Kevorkian – none of who were French citizens. But the French, as Knight notes, could be
“très difficile,”
and cooperation was not forthcoming in December 1959, when Khoury presented Knight with a plan to entrap several of his French customers. The idea, Knight told Cusack in Rome, was to create an international conspiracy case, the likes of which had never been seen before. But the French objected and the plan never got past the drawing board – because Knight wanted to include Frenchman Robert Blemant in the trap. Described by Knight as an “ex-French cop and major if unpublicized trafficker,” Blemant was the founder of Les Trois Canards gang and an employee of SDECE.
¹⁹

Without French aid, there could be no proof of “the Conspiracy.” There was, according to Knight, only a loose confederation of gangsters, some of whom, like Joe Orsini (who'd settled in Spain and returned to drug smuggling upon his release from the Atlanta Penitentiary in 1958) and François Spirito, had been Nazi collaborators, while the Francisci and Guérini gangs had fought with the Resistance. All had political protectors, and all suspended their vendettas in order to make money through drug smuggling. As Knight explains, “They weren't emotional over long-term issues. After all was said and done, they were still Corsicans.”

Complicating the situation was the fact that SDECE was divided into contending factions that, Knight explains, “spent most of their time mounting operations against each other. Each of these factions kept Corsicans in its stable [of non-official agents], and one faction employed drug traffickers who had been of service to de Gaulle during the war. Afterwards they couldn't go into legitimate businesses, so they became his SAC (Service d'Action Civique) people.”

Formed in 1958 by Jacques Foccart, President de Gaulle's deputy for secret foreign affairs, SAC was a parallel service to SDECE, designed specifically to ensure political stability in France's colonies. SAC employed Corsican gangsters to fight the Algerian Liberation Movement, and when a band of French Army officers (aligned with US and British interests in North Africa) formed the Organization de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) to maintain French rule in Algeria against de Gaulle's wishes, Foccart again called upon the Corsicans. Seeking
laissez-passer
to smuggle all sorts of commodities in return for their mercenary services, Free French and Nazicollaborator Corsicans joined forces and defeated the OAS in Algeria, adding yet another deep political subtext to international drug trafficking.

Having returned to the FBN after a stint with Tapline, Joe Salm recalls how difficult it was to make cases in Marseilles. While working undercover in 1960, he arranged to meet with a Corsican chemist at a cafe in the Vieux-Port. Police officers under the direction of French narcotic detective Robert Pasquier were there to cover and film the meet. “We met, shook hands, and arranged to meet again,” Salm says, “but our liaison
forgot
to put film in the camera.

“The problem,” Salm explains, “was that [Inspector Robert] Pasquier was in the pay of these people.”

Political intrigues and police corruption would confound FBN agents in France for the next decade, and in many instances their unintentional insults to French sensibilities only made things worse. According to Salm, “Many agents projected their prejudices onto the situation, misunderstood what was being said, and were summarily dismissed. It was an anti-intellectual pattern established by Siragusa and made worse by Cusack. Whatever success we had against the Corsicans was made possible by the absence of Siragusa and Cusack, and by the arrival in Paris of Andy Tartaglino.”

At enforcement assistant Lee Speer's direction, Andy Tartaglino opened the FBN's first office in Paris in March 1959. Having worked all over Europe since 1956, Tartaglino knew the top French policemen, and was smart enough to avoid the Francophobes at the American Embassy. His big problem was that FBN credentials were being provided to CIA agents, and that Cusack was sending undercover agents into France on unilateral operations. The French were aware of these shenanigans and had come to mistrust anyone working for the Bureau. Knowing that he was under constant scrutiny, Tartaglino compensated for Cusack's misadventures by keeping a low profile. He left his family in Rome and formed good relations with Customs Attaché Andrew Agathangelou and the US Army CID. It was a delicate situation that also required extreme demonstrations of good faith.

As Tony Mangiaracina recalls, “Cusack sent me to Le Havre to see a dealer alone, and while I was on my way, Tartaglino heard about it and told the French police. They chased me down and said, ‘France is not a colony! You can't operate here alone!' ”

The same willingness to appease the French by exposing unilateral FBN operations also brought Tartaglino into conflict with Paul Knight. As Tartaglino recalls, Knight sent an informant from Beirut to Paris without any warning, as part of a CIA operation designed to uncover KGB agents in France. Tartaglino learned about the informer only after he was caught by the French security services – at which point the informant falsely claimed, on Knight's instructions, that he was working for Tartaglino on a drug case. Outraged that Knight had deceived him and had taken his cooperation for granted, Tartaglino refused to go along with the charade. He told the French everything and had the agent blacklisted.

Tartaglino's personal and professional relationship with Knight disintegrated as a result, but he gained the trust of Charles Guillard, chief of the Sûreté's Central Narcotics Office. Having done that, Tartaglino started conducting his own unilateral operations against the French officials who, as General Lansdale noted in his 1960 report, “were involved in the heroin trade.”

One case in point began in 1955, when the Bureau developed information that Charles Valle, chief of the Central Pharmacy Service in the French Ministry of Public Health, was diverting heroin onto the black market.
²⁰
The French refused to investigate Valle, so in December 1959, Lee Speer sent Agent Bill Davis from Detroit to Paris. Working undercover, Davis pretended to be following leads on American soldiers; but, as he recalls, the real object “was to make a case on [Valle]. French merchant
seamen would throw waterproof bags full of heroin into Long Island Sound, and motorboats would pick them up. We had to lie to the Sûreté to make the case, but in April [1960] we got enough evidence to present to Guillard. The French apologized and in return, nothing was said publicly.”

Privately, Tartaglino and Guillard came to terms, and despite Tartaglino's undercover operation against Valle, they formed a joint task force to target Paul Damien Mondoloni, the most influential and most wanted narcotics trafficker of his era. Often described as a captain in the Francisci crime family, Mondoloni spoke excellent French, Spanish, Italian, and English, and had more narcotics connections worldwide than anyone else. Handsome, soft-spoken, and well-mannered, he was married to Juana Carlotta Maria Flores Escobar, a Nicaraguan living in Cuba, and kept a mistress, Marcelle Senesi, in Mexico. Mondoloni was cunning, and dangerous when backed into a corner. A former policeman in Saigon, and a SAC veteran of the OAS war in Algeria, he had solid intelligence connections; indeed, until his murder in Marseilles on 29 July 1985, Mondoloni operated with almost total impunity.

The main weapon in tracking down Mondoloni was Gabriel Graziani, an international drug smuggler arrested in Switzerland in April 1958 for selling stolen securities to Third World nations as short-term loans. According to Tartaglino, Charles Guillard gave him Graziani as an informant as a reward for having exposed Knight's unilateral CIA operation – in which Graziani was the agent provocateur.

Tartaglino describes Graziani as “a Corsican gentleman who said we were wasting our time on small cases. He was very helpful regarding cases in New York, where there were more people involved than we ever dreamed.”

Having served as Mondoloni's operations manager, Graziani was able to explain how the Corsicans worked with Mafiosi in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Miami, and New York, and he identified the Mafia's two main couriers, Ernesto Barese and Giuseppe DiGiorgio. He had considerable information about his Corsican associates in Lebanon, and he revealed that Sami Khoury had hired a new Syrian chemist, Mahmoud Badawi. He also identified the French restaurants and hotels in New York that served as depots for drug smugglers. In effect, Gabriel Graziani opened the door to the next phase of the ongoing French connection.