The Strength of the Wolf (38 page)

“Next I went to Mexico City where I met Ben White, Colonel Manuel Dominguez Suarez (Director of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, 1959–61) and Colonel Hector Tello.
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White put up the money for the Federales to fly over to Guadalajara. At Chapala we rented a VW bus from a couple of hippies, then drove to Urapan, where I met the connections and got a sample of the opium. After making sure it was not synthetic, I gave the signal and the deliverymen and I were arrested. In Mexico there is no charge for sale, only possession, so the Federales took the evidence away from me and gave it back to the peddlers. Then by forceful interrogation they located the balance of opium and marijuana, and several more defendants, all of whom went to jail.

“Incidentally, I had no advance funds for purchases or flash on that trip,” Chappell adds. “Giordano thought it was too risky and suggested I use a bogus letter of credit.” Rolling his eyes, Chappell asks, “Can you imagine Mexican wholesalers accepting a letter of credit?

“Otherwise it was the same procedure in all cases,” Chappell concludes, “and as long as everything turned out okay, Anslinger left me alone, used the information when it could be used to his advantage, and acted like it hadn't happened otherwise.”

Upon his transfer there in 1957, Jim Attie learned that Chicago was still the unsavory place described by Maurice Helbrant and Marty Pera. “I'd been diagnosed at the VA hospital as having encephalitis,” Attie says.
“They'd done a spinal tap and found a high degree of infection, and they said my days of undercover activity were over. But I wanted to keep working, so they sent me to Chicago, where I continued to have physical problems and where [District Supervisor Al] Aman wouldn't let me drive a company car. When I complained to Giordano, the only thing he said was: ‘If you don't like it, quit.'

“That just made me more determined. I had this parochial belief that diligent work would lead to success. So I used my own car.”

Attie established a false identity and, while covering himself from the Mafia – as well as from FBN agents on its payroll – infiltrated the inner circle of Chicago's notorious Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Giancana hired Attie as his chauffeur, a position that enabled him to purchase half a kilogram of heroin from a vicious killer, Carlo Fiorito, and to identify Giancana's sources of supply in Canada, Mexico, and Latin America.

Meanwhile, Al Aman had retired and been replaced by George M. Belk, one of the FBN's most respected agents and managers. At Belk's direction, in coordination with Belk's enforcement assistant William J. Durkin, Attie prepared for his first ventures into Mexico – forays he describes as “deadly” because “there was always shooting.”

“Howard Chappell came to me one day while I was working a case out of California into Mexico, and said, ‘I hear you think you made some big cases in the Mideast.'

“ ‘No,' I said. ‘I don't think that.'

“ ‘Well,' he said, ‘Don't. Not until you work the Yacqui Indians down in Mexico.'

“Chappell was feared in Mexico,” Attie says with awe. “He shot and killed Puerto Vallarta's biggest dealer, who was also the sheriff, in a gunfight at high noon in a hotel lobby.”
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Attie's fake ID and travel documents were prepared in the San Antonio office with the help of the agent in charge, John Frost. Colonel Hector Tello, a drug trafficking policeman who readily informed on his competitors, provided many of Attie's leads in Mexico. Tello's help, however, did not make it any easier to operate. Attie rarely worked with an informant or backup agent, and eventually ended up with a reward on his head for illegal provocation. His main targets were Sicilians working with Chicago and New York hoods, but he also made cases on Asaf y Bala, Jose Garcia Aiza, Chinese restaurateur Simon Hom, and Alfred Trevino, a Mexican out of Monterey. He also developed leads into Bolivia and Peru. “When I got to La Paz,” he recalls, “the US ambassador summoned me to his office and said: ‘We know about you from the Middle East. Mess things up here, and I'll get you fired.' ”
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Attie didn't mess up, and the case led to the arrest of Blanca y Ibanez de Sanchez and Ebar Franco, who dealt in New York through Cuba. But, as heroic Jim Attie confesses, “By then the job was making
me
feel like a criminal.”

J. Edgar Hoover liked to remind Harry Anslinger that agent corruption was an inherent part of drug law enforcement. And it was true, every few years a scandal rocked federal drug law enforcement, one of the biggest having occurred in 1929, when the son of Anslinger's predecessor, Colonel Nutt, was accused of filing false income tax statements for drug trafficker Arnold Rothstein, and the Narcotics Division office in New York was charged with “misconduct, incompetence and dereliction of duty.”
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While Anslinger was Commisioner, the corruption that crippled the FBN was fostered by his unrealistic policies and sloppy management style. He had only one field supervisor on his staff (although sometimes there were two – one for offices east of the Mississippi, one covering those west) and discipline was left to supervisors whose priority was making cases, and who gave agents the leeway they needed to show success. Standard procedure was to warn new agents about “the three Bs” – booze, broads, and bread – then hand them over to the veterans and say a prayer.

Anslinger didn't set the best example either.

“He tried to do what Hoover did,” Matt Seifer observes. “There was a New York case involving a drug lab, and we had information in our Boston file about it. A letter came to us with Anslinger's stamp, requesting the file. We sent it down, but it never came back, and the main file in DC
was never seen again.” Seifer shakes his head. “There was a letter in the Boston file from a politician, asking for consideration.”

And while Anslinger coddled the drug-addicted offspring of the Establishment elite, his agents were pretending to be New York City detectives and kicking down doors in Harlem without search warrants.
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This double standard was not lost on the Black agents, and while the CIA prevented the FBN from properly fulfilling its mission overseas, this pervasive racism undermined its integrity at home.

“We went through hell,” Bill Davis says. “We wanted to be accepted as full-fledged agents, not just Blacks doing the bidding of Whites. But even though in many cases we could write better and testify better, we weren't allowed to supervise Whites. They'd come by and say, ‘I want to
use
him today.' They'd have us make buys and try to cover us, and then they'd take the evidence so they could mark it up and get credit. If we complained, we got harassed.

“We had to survive the heaviest stress,” Davis asserts. “We had to watch our backs, not just from the crooks, but from the White agents who didn't want us moving ‘out of our place.' And we were held to a higher standard.” Davis notes that Black agents were not allowed to physically intimidate White informers, although White agents routinely roughed up Blacks.

“We had an interrogation room with a two-way mirror in New York. One day I was standing outside, looking in. An agent I'll call Mr. Tex had a man stripped naked and was verbally abusing him, calling him ‘nigger.' I went in and asked Mr. Tex to come out, and then I asked him why he was abusing the man. He said, ‘If they won't come up to my level, I have to go down to theirs.' I told him not to use the word nigger again, and that if he used it around me, I wouldn't let it drop. So he wouldn't speak to me again. Same with Pat Ward, who always called the Italian agents ‘dagos' and ‘guineas.' When I called him on it, he said I was too ‘thin-skinned.'

“We also knew about the shenanigans – that White agents were stealing drugs.” Davis refers to the wall of silence around Crofton Hayes's heroin overdose. “But we couldn't say anything, or they'd nitpick us to death.”

Granted, Anslinger didn't create racism, but the organization he fashioned in his image, like the criminal justice system it served, fully accepted White superiority as gospel; and belief in that fiction made it easier to propagate other myths, like the Communist Chinese drug conspiracy, or that pot was as dangerous as heroin. These fallacies supported the double standards that elevated Anslinger above the law, and gave George White the license to poison people with LSD.

The subordination of its ethical standards to issues of national security caused tremendous damage to the FBN. If agents were expected to fabricate evidence about the People's Republic of China, as in the George Yee case, or suppress evidence about CIA drug smuggling, as happened with increasing frequency after 1959, how could they be expected to inform on corrupt colleagues? Either they had a code of silence, or they obeyed the law. It couldn't work both ways. But the biggest lie of all was that agents weren't involved in the crimes they investigated.

“You can't make a case without informants,” an agent explains, “and you can't get information unless you pay for it. So you give them three dollars, and they use it to buy dope. There's no way around it: paying addict informants perpetuates the business. The rationale is that we're not ‘creating a crime' because it would have happened anyway. But you
are
creating a crime, and that's why you need two busts – to transcend entrapment. Giving addicts dope is probably a better idea, because it doesn't put money into the system and doesn't send them running to the man. But if you do that, then you can't ever make a case, and you've put yourself out of business.”

Anslinger's way of reconciling this contradiction was through a standardized reporting system that required agents to explain exactly how they interacted with informants, gathered evidence, and made arrests. In practice, however, agents revised their reports to disguise the tactics they actually used. For example, it was customary for a case-making agent to give his informant money, and for the informant to show the agent where his source was by going there and buying heroin. That trick of the trade was called taking a “free look.” But no agent ever wrote in a report that he took a free look to find out where the dealer and his dope were located. No one ever said that he learned where and when a delivery was being made through a “gypsy wire” (FBN jargon for an illegal wiretap). And no agent ever said that he “spooned out,” which meant siphoning off a small amount of heroin from a bust.

“Even Charlie Siragusa spooned out,” one agent claims. “He told me not to do it – but he said they all did it back in the old days before the war, when the New York agents were called the Forty Thieves. Because, when you bust a guy, no one sees. So a lot of agents decide to protect themselves. If someone sells them turkey, or if they get ripped off at gunpoint, they're out the official funds. So they keep a few ounces tucked away in a bag in their pocket. Agents carried a drop gun for the same reason.”

“We didn't get paid very much,” another agent explains. “The office furniture was crud. The typewriters didn't work. We worked with city detectives going late at night to tenements in Harlem and kicking in doors
until we dropped. It was exhausting work, because the dope dealers put iron bars across their windows and doors. But that's how cases began. We kicked in doors until we found a stash of dope, or some stolen TVs, or a weapon; whatever we could use to turn someone into an informant.”

By rewarding those who initiated the most cases, Anslinger's tightfisted management style and flawed reporting format compelled agents to make as many small cases as possible, at the expense of pursuing drug kingpins through complex, time-consuming conspiracy cases. But of all the FBN's problems, none was as dangerous as an agent's relationship with his informants. So rules were put in place. Agents were required to frisk an informant before and after a buy, to make sure the snitch didn't buy five ounces for the agent, and one for himself. Payments to informants were authorized only when fingerprints and a mug shot were obtained. But those safeguards were impractical in some situations, such as when an agent met a heroin-addicted prostitute in an alley in Harlem, in the middle of the night in February. “How the hell are you going to fingerprint her there?” an agent exclaims in frustration.

All the case-makers worked alone, and became friends with their best informants. But it was a double-edged sword, as one agent explains: “She calls you at two a.m. to get her out of jail. Your wife answers the phone, now you got to explain. But it's impossible not to become friends. You meet, you socialize, you drink together in bars. The really good agents knew that you had to get people to like you. Any of the bosses who'd been street agents understood.”

So case-making agents kept their best informants secret, to prevent other agents from arresting them, or even killing them. The result was a cut-throat system in which informants began to manipulate their case agents, and the organization slowly came apart at the seams.

Sadly, at the end of his career, the cumulative effects of Anslinger's secret practices and double standards eclipsed the brilliance of his mystique. The process began in February 1959 in New York, when an agent named O'Keefe was found unconscious in his car. An FBN inspector's report written in 1968 claims that O'Keefe was shaking down drug dealers who were protected by corrupt agents in Group Three. The bad agents allegedly turned him in, but after O'Keefe complained to his Congressman, Anslinger let him off the hook. Next, according to the report, the corrupt agents
gave O'Keefe a beer laced with pure heroin; but he survived the hot shot because he was a user and had built up a tolerance to the powerful drug.
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