The Strength of the Wolf (37 page)

As a result of Graziani's information, the FBN was able to track Paul Mondoloni from Havana, through Madrid (where he conferred with Joe Orsini), Marseilles,
and Palermo to Acapulco, where in March 1960 he was seen in the company of Lucien Rivard, Rosario Mancino, and Marius Cau.
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Rivard, of course, was Montreal's reigning drug lord in the absence of Pepe Cotroni. Mancino, a Sicilian, was suspected of shipping heroin (manufactured in a clandestine lab he owned in Lebanon) in tomato cans to Vito and Albert Agueci in Toronto. Cau was a Corsican drug smuggler and former associate of Gabriel Graziani operating mostly in Canada. These smugglers were organizing a major new drug ring in league with Mondoloni's contact in Mexico since 1954, Jorge Asaf y Bala, a Mexican of Arabian descent living in Mexico City.

Seeking to disrupt this conspiracy before it could start moving narcotics through Texas, Customs Agent Ben White convinced the Mexican Federal Police to arrest Mondoloni on 8 April 1960. But the clever Corsican was protected and fled to Havana six weeks later. The FBN had more luck with Canadian officials and, when Mancino arrived in Montreal on 14 April, the Mounties persuaded him to return to Italy that same day.
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But the conspiracy that Mondoloni organized in Mexico in the spring of 1960 would unfold nevertheless, and persist for years, for the FBN had been rendered virtually powerless in Mexico as a result of a case Jim Attie and Ray Maduro made on the aforementioned Jorge Asaf y Bala in November 1959. For that reason it is a case worth reviewing.

One of the first Puerto Ricans hired by the FBN, Ray Maduro, in mid-1959, was introduced to a Cuban drug dealer named Escabi in New York. Working undercover, Maduro met with Escabi and placed an order for cocaine, with the delivery to be made in Mexico City. The New York office provided Maduro with documentation and booked him into a hotel in Mexico City where Jim Attie, on a separate case out of Chicago, was also staying. This proved to be very fortunate, for Escabi came to his meeting with Maduro not with cocaine, as agreed, but with heroin he'd obtained from Asaf y Bala. Rookie Agent Maduro was nonplused by this unexpected turn of events, and was exceedingly grateful when veteran agent Attie entered the negotiations “cold” (meaning without any preparation in FBN jargon), posing as Maduro's rich Arab money-man.

After Attie arranged a second meeting to make the buy, Anslinger personally asked Mexico's representative to the United Nations, Dr. Oscar Robasso, for assistance. Robasso called for police backup, and Attie – after a good deal of macho posturing that nearly resulted in a shootout – purchased the heroin. On 11 November 1959, Mexican Federal policemen arrested Asaf y Bala with three kilograms of heroin. But the Mexican Supreme Court overturned the conviction and Asaf was set free to conspire for the next five years with Mondoloni, Rivard, and Mancino.
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In Mexico, as in France, Cuba, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, unilateral FBN operations were not often rewarded with prosecutions or convictions. Issues of national sovereignty and corruption trumped drug law enforcement, and after the Asaf y Bala case was overturned by the Mexican Supreme Court, Mexican Attorney General Fernando Lopez Arias met with US Assistant Treasury Secretary A. Gilmore Flues in Washington in early 1961. Arias told Flues three things: 1) that no more buy cases would be allowed in Mexico; 2) that FBN agents would not be allowed to testify in Mexican courts; and 3) that traffickers had to be arrested in possession of narcotics before the delivery was made.
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Clearly, these legal regulations hindered the FBN's efforts against Mondoloni and the French connection, which as a result had found safe haven in Mexico.

Although the French connection had settled safely in Mexico, its operations in Lebanon suffered a temporary setback when Paul Knight initiated two important cases there in 1960. The first began when Gabriel Graziani revealed the activities and whereabouts of his erstwhile partner, Antranik Paroutian. A financial manager in the Mondoloni organization, Paroutian handled bank accounts in Switzerland for Corsican and Lebanese drug smugglers. Paroutian, however, was under indictment in New York, so Knight (based on information provided by Graziani) arranged for his arrest in Beirut in early March 1960, on trumped up charges related to the seizure of two shipments of morphine base. International Group Leader Marty Pera immediately flew to Beirut, only to find that Paroutian had been acquitted, but that Knight, through his friends in the Lebanese police force, had arranged for the drug trafficker to be held without charges until his arrival. Upon arriving at the airport, Pera forcefully took Paroutian – a martial arts expert who put up a fight – into custody and brought him in shackles back to New York where, with the assistance of Swiss banking officials, he was tried and convicted. The Paroutian case was a major breakthrough for the FBN in regard to investigating the money-laundering activities of international drug smugglers. And, thanks to Marty Pera's painstaking research, it set an important precedent. At first the Swiss refused to release information about Paroutian's account, and did so only after Pera reminded them that their government had signed an agreement with the League of Nations that required them to do so, if the account holder was laundering drug money.

The second case began a few weeks later, in June 1960, when Maronite underworld boss Abu George personally gave Paul Knight a tip about one of the most important drug rings operating between Beirut and Paris. Knight passed the information along to Lee Speer in Washington, and he, acting on what he'd been told, asked Customs to check its files for diplomats named Maurice. Only about one hundred diplomats routinely arrived and departed from Eastern ports, so it didn't take long to identify Mauricio Rosal Bron, Guatemala's ambassador to Belgium and Holland, as the main suspect. A dapper dresser with a fatal fondness for young boys, Rosal had been making bimonthly trips to New York for a year. As Customs discovered, his baggage always weighed less when he departed than when he arrived, and he often traveled with a Corsican named Etienne Tarditi.

Next, at Andy Tartaglino's request, the French placed a wiretap on Tarditi, and overheard Tarditi and Rosal making plans to visit New York in August. Taking charge of the case in New York, George Gaffney arranged surveillance, and FBN agents watched while Tarditi met with Charles Bourbonnais, a TWA purser, and Nick Calamaris, a longshoreman in the Gambino family. Gaffney informed senior State Department officials of what was happening, and they persuaded Guatemala to revoke Rosal's diplomatic immunity, without his knowledge, paving the way for his arrest when he returned to New York in October.

On 2 October 1960, having returned to New York with another load of heroin, Rosal and Tarditi left their hotel to meet Calamaris and Bourbonnais. They climbed into a cab driven by FBN Agent Francis E. Waters, and were tailed by Gaffney and Ray Maduro. As Maduro recalls, “They were in the cab, and Rosal's luggage was in the trunk, and we had probable cause. But it was a hot day, and Gaffney was wearing a heavy wool suit, and he got itchy. So we arrested them before the exchange. Agent Tony Falanga was stopped at a red light in front of Calamaris's station wagon, and Gaffney called him on the radio and said, ‘Box him in! We're right behind you!' ”

FBN agents found fifty kilograms of heroin inside Rosal's luggage, and nearly $70,000 cash on the floor of Calamaris's car. Further investigation led to the discovery of another fifty kilos at a safehouse in Long Island. Altogether it was one of the biggest heroin seizures ever, and a fantastic public relations coup for the FBN. The intelligence take was phenomenal too. Tarditi named Robert LeCoat and Felix Barnier as his sources, and they were arrested in France in February 1961. He fingered Gilbert Coscia as the man handling transactions in Canada, and Coscia surrendered in
April 1961. Tarditi identified the four major trafficking groups in France, the three major labs, and the manager of his organization's Swiss bank accounts. He also revealed that a “bigger” diplomat than Rosal, someone accredited with the British Commonwealth, was smuggling for the Charles Marignani Group.
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And before he clammed up, Tarditi made the provocative statement that he “was involved in intelligence work beneficial to American interests.”
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Was Tarditi a CIA spy, reporting to the CIA about KGB agents within SDECE? Perhaps. The French did have legitimate complaints against the United States, and they were using the drug issue as leverage. Indeed, after “L'affaire Rosal,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk raised the narcotics issue with Paris, “but was told that no extra men could be assigned until the problem in Algeria (where the CIA was meddling) was settled.”
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In any case, the FBN would soon come to regard Tarditi and Rosal not as CIA agents, but as members of a SDECE drug-smuggling operation formed by SAC chief Jacques Foccart. This SDECE operation was different than other drug-smuggling rings in that it blackmailed French diplomats (like the pedophile Rosal) into becoming couriers. Its existence contributed to James Angleton's theory – which was planted in his mind by KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn in 1962 – that the KGB had infiltrated SDECE. However, considering that Golitsyn's attorney, Mario Brod, was Angleton's liaison to the Mafia, the allegations against SDECE and Foccart (separate from the drug-smuggling issue) are just as likely to have been disinformation designed by Angleton to throw the FBN off the trail of certain drug-smuggling Mafiosi in the CIA's employ.

Tarditi's affiliations and Angleton's intentions remain impenetrable mysteries; what is known is that Rosal's accomplice, Charles Bourbonnais, did provide the FBN with information that led to Gambino family members Joseph Biondo, Arnold Romano, and Joseph Cahill. Documents seized at Cahill's home incriminated Profaci family member Frank Dioguardia in Miami, and Pepe Cotroni's lieutenant Frank Dasti in Montreal. All of which was very helpful.
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L'affaire Rosal was one of the FBN's most spectacular successes, and Andy Tartaglino and Paul Knight shared the credit, though their rewards were hardly commensurate with their achievement. In March 1961, Lee Speer brought Tartaglino back to New York and reassigned him to the Court House Squad, as a sort of demotion. As Gaffney explains, “Andy was Siragusa's protégé, and Siragusa and Speer hated each other. And rather than give Andy a commendation, Speer wanted to fire him on the pretext that he was always telling the French everything, and because he hadn't
found any labs. So I offered to put him in the Court House Squad to follow up leads from Tarditi.”

Knight replaced Tartaglino in Paris, and went to work for the CIA on an unofficial basis. Former FBN inspector Fred Wilson replaced Knight in Beirut. Wilson was an ally of Speer, and Speer was capitalizing on his role as enforcement assistant to place his slim supply of supporters in positions of importance, to improve his chances of succeeding Anslinger.

The Rosal and Asaf y Bala cases underscored the fact that the FBN needed to expand its operations in Latin America and Mexico, but Congress would not authorize the funds, primarily because South America was not a major opium producing region, and cocaine had yet to eclipse heroin in popularity. Little would be done during the FBN's existence. George White conducted perfunctory investigations in Peru and Ecuador in 1954, and George Gaffney, as district supervisor in Atlanta in 1957, worked with the Colombian Security Service and CIA officer Robert Service (son of John Service, mentioned in
chapter 5
) to make a case on Tomas and Rafael Herran Olozaga in Medellin, Colombia, on the heels of related cases in Cuba and Ecuador. “The brothers had been in business since 1948,” Gaffney explains, “selling heroin and cocaine in Cuba. They had a lab on their estate, and we identified the chemicals there as the same ones from the Quito bust.”
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In response to the increasing frequency of Customs seizures along the border, FBN forays into Mexico did increase in number throughout the 1950s, although most were conducted close to home by agents out of California and Texas. As Howard Chappell recalls, “I worked Mexico fairly regularly, and from 1956 to 1961, I made around two dozen cases down there. I usually had an agent from the office with me and sometimes someone from Customs. But no one else was aware of the cases during development, other than Mexican officials, which in my cases was usually the district attorney in Vera Cruz, Toca Canges. Customs Agent Ben White in Mexico City would send Toca up to Tijuana to help me knock off labs. The Bureau certainly knew nothing about these manipulations, because it frowned on agents working with Customs. The Bureau also thought that all Mexican officials were crooks, which in the main was true.

“Here's an example of how a Mexican case worked,” Chappell continues. “I got a call from the Buena Park Police in August 1960: a fellow
named Wilson was being held on suspicion of auto theft. He asked for me and when I got there, he said that he and his partner Webster, and another guy named Goldheimer, had a plan to lease Burt Lancaster's yacht and use it to haul a ton of marijuana and some opium up from Mexico. After Lancaster agreed to let us use his yacht, I went to Guadalajara with Wilson to meet Webster, who had the Mexican connection. Goldheimer stayed in the States to bring the boat down to Ylapa when they were ready.

“Wilson went to Ylapa, a popular hippy tent village on the coast, to locate Webster, and they returned together to meet me, the money-man. Webster said the connection was in the Guadalajara Prison, so I went there next – hoping not to meet anybody I'd put inside – and from the prison connection I got the names of the people who were going to make the delivery in the mountain village of Urapan. The connection, while in prison, made all the arrangements as to the place and date of the meet.