The Strength of the Wolf (39 page)

One Group Three agent agrees that O'Keefe was using drugs in order to win the trust of dope dealers, but denies that he was given a hot shot. The agent also questions why the inspector's report misconstrued the incident. It is absurd, he suggests, to think that corrupt agents would inform on another corrupt agent, or that Anslinger would forgive a blatant wrongdoer.

George Gaffney gives his version of what happened. “I interviewed and hired O'Keefe when I was the supervisor in Atlanta. He'd been a lieutenant in the Army and I thought he had the right stuff. Then he came up to New York and decided to become a loner, and that's when he got into trouble. He went into a bar in Little Italy, thinking he could blend in. Well, the hoods fingered him in a second and the next thing you know, they take his gun and badge.

“By then I was the supervisor in New York, and I referred the problem to headquarters. Meanwhile O'Keefe contacted his Congressman, which he had every right to do. Siragusa was the field supervisor, so Charlie, the Congressman and Anslinger met with O'Keefe. Anslinger asked him, ‘How could you possibly lose your gun?' Quick as a flash, O'Keefe reaches over and snatches Charlie's gun. Charlie's standing there flabbergasted, and that's that.

“O'Keefe was sent back to work, and not long after that he was found passed-out in a car. The police reported it, and when we went to investigate, we found a matchbox folded in a V shape under the seat. It was the kind of thing addicts use to sniff dope, and there was heroin residue in it. So I asked for his resignation.”

“You start learning about these things,” an agent says, “when you get a corrupt partner. He ‘accidentally' busts another guy's informant, and then things get serious.

“It was tough to begin with,” the agent continues. “You had to feed your informants two or three dollars every time you'd see them, but you had to wait until the case went down before you got reimbursed. That's when you filled out a voucher. But if your informant didn't produce, or if you bought turkey or got ripped off, then you had to put the money back from your own pocket. You'd say to your boss, ‘I want to get reimbursed.' He'd say, ‘You know how to make it up.'

“He doesn't explain. You just know.

“Remember, you can't make a bust based on one buy: that's entrapment. You have to make two. So the first time you make a buy, you sign a receipt saying you handed over $300. But you only hand over two-fifty. Second buy, same thing. Third buy you bust him. That's how it worked. The guy you busted doesn't know what you told your boss, and the extra hundred covers your out-of-pocket expenses, like buying people drinks so they think you've got a lot of money.

“An agent meets his connection in a bar. He buys a round of drinks and adds that to the price of the buy. And that simple act is how you get sucked in. The bigger the case, the bigger the pad. Then after awhile it becomes a way to make an extra grand, so you can buy your wife something nice. Other agents would angel off [another way of saying that they “spooned out”] a little dope from every bust, and keep it in their pocket just in case they bought turkey.”

Agent Tom Tripodi – a towering, muscular man of conscience – claims that corruption was “institutionalized” in the New York office.
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In his autobiography he tells how, in January 1960, as a rookie agent in Group Four, he followed five senior agents into a tenement. The older agents told him to wait outside an apartment and, a few minutes later, they signaled for him to come in. Tripodi grew suspicious when they sent him into a room alone and told him to search it; and when he found a package inside a dresser, he wisely decided to leave it there. Later that day the older agents angrily explained that the package contained heroin they had saved from a previous seizure. They'd been unable to make a case on the drug dealer living in the apartment, so they snuck in when he wasn't there and planted the heroin where Tripodi could find it. Not having been part of the frame, he could, theoretically, testify against the dealer without perjuring himself.

Thirty years later George Gaffney seethes when told of the incident. “How come Tripodi didn't report it then?” he demands. “If everybody keeps quiet, how can I do anything?”

Enter Edward Coyne, the agent who did bring the integrity issue to Gaffney's attention. Described as “straight” by his colleagues, Coyne joined the FBN in 1951 as a clerk and became an agent in 1953. For six years he worked on cases without making waves, but he began to have misgivings
after the O'Keefe incident. Like Tripodi, he began to see signs of institutionalized corruption.

“One of the clerks told me that a group of agents were ripping off apartments and selling confiscated drugs and guns,” he recalls, “so I went to Gaffney. I explained that I knew nothing first hand, but that I felt he should be aware.”

Coyne told Gaffney that the corrupt agents would raid an apartment where they knew there were drugs and cash. The agents would keep the money and sell, plant, or give the drugs to their informants, who could then entrap other drug dealers. After the targeted drug dealer was arrested, the agents would cut the recycled junk with sugar and return half to the informant, so he could set up more arrests. The agents turned in some of the money and what was left of the diluted heroin, which was tested for purity only after it was submitted.

“Gaffney called the group leaders while I was in his office,” Coyne recalls angrily, “and told them to stand by. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Eddie, you're a good friend, and no one will ever hurt you while I'm here.' ”

A few days later an agent approached Coyne and said he was fed up with the corruption too. “I told him to tell it to the people up front, but he never did. No one backed me up. Not even the
honest
guys.” Coyne's body tenses. “I went in with sincere belief it was the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile the group leaders had alerted the accused agents, and Coyne found himself being threatened. “One agent made a remark on the elevator,” he recalls, “so I asked him if he thought the office should be corrupt. By his response, I knew that was a serious mistake.”

A week later Gaffney summoned Coyne to his office and asked him if he'd been parked in a car behind the Court House with a female secretary. Coyne denied the allegation, and Gaffney said he didn't believe it either – but that once an allegation was made (he imparted with a wink) he had to check it out.

“Maybe he was sending a message?” Coyne muses. He conjures the image of O'Keefe passed-out in his car with a bag of heroin in the glove compartment. Then he tells how, on the morning of 31 August 1960, Agent Charles Thompson's wife found her husband in the living room, sitting in his favorite easy chair, dead from a heroin overdose.

“The rumor was that he'd been given a hot shot,” Coyne explains, “and there was a big meeting with Treasury people from Washington. But they swept it under the carpet. And that's when I started thinking, ‘I'd better get out of here. They're going to set me up for sure. Maybe not a hot shot, but someone's going to put something in my car, at least.' ”

In late 1960, Eddie Coyne asked for and received a transfer to the customs service office in New York. “By 1961,” he says, “the guys who are under suspicion are making big cases, and the guys who didn't back me up all get promoted. There were never any confrontations, but you have to ask the question: Can you have widespread corruption without management being part of it?”

George Gaffney has a different recollection of events. “Eddie was conscientious,” he admits. “He came in and he told me. But he didn't come to
me
right away. He called Washington first. I know because Charlie McDonnell came to me, and said that Eddie had tried to recruit five agents to go to Washington with him. But no one else would go.
Then
he came to me, and at that point I called Anslinger and told him what was going on.

“Anslinger sent up District Supervisor Sam Levine from Philadelphia. Sam was in my office when Eddie made his allegations, and Sam asked him to come up with one single fact. But it was all rumors, and a week or two later Eddie came in and expressed regret. He said a Bureau guy had called him at home and told him to meet him in a motel room in New Jersey. The Bureau guy swore Eddie to secrecy, and got him to make a commitment that if he came across any wrongdoing, Eddie would contact him in DC. Not Anslinger. Not me. Just him.”

Gaffney composes himself. “A few months later, this same Bureau official came up to the New York office with Fred Dick to conduct an inquiry.”

The Bureau official was Wayland L. “Lee” Speer, a stocky man with thinning blond hair and a burning, all-consuming desire to put an end to corruption within the FBN.

According to Howard Chappell, “Lee Speer was probably the finest investigator in the history of the Bureau. For much of his career he was a traveling supervisor, checking the offices for misuse of funds and equipment, and for efficiency. He was death on any signs of lack of integrity, but he was compassionate and helpful in correcting honest mistakes, and in training agents to improve their operations. He was highly moral himself, and perhaps for that reason he scared the hell out of most of the people in the Bureau, including the other executives. But the truth of the matter was that Lee Speer was an asset to any office he visited – if you wanted help, and if you weren't doing anything wrong from a legal standpoint.”

Speer's detractors insist that he put his ambitions above the organization's well-being at a time when Anslinger's wife was dying, and he was preoccupied with weighty matters before the UN and Congress. Speer wanted to be Commissioner, they say, and his probe was a pretext to smear Anslinger, while upstaging Siragusa and Giordano.

Andy Tartaglino, a Speer supporter, claims that Anslinger had sent Speer to New York specifically to investigate a group of Black agents backing Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, but that Speer, on his own, expanded the investigation to include agents loyal to Gaffney and former District Supervisor Jim Ryan. Speer had heard rumors for years, and not just about gambling in the office. Among other things, it was said that the district supervisor would dress up in a judge's robes and hold mock court sessions, in which unwitting addicts were coerced into becoming informants.

So after Coyne's complaints of theft, and worse crimes committed by certain agents, Speer began a systematic check of vouchers and informant contact reports, and in June 1961, after a year of preparation, he traveled to New York to investigate the agents he believed were corrupt. But Speer did not have the authority to conduct the investigation on his own, and Deputy Commissioner Giordano sent his loyal ally, Fred T. Dick, then serving as the FBN's field supervisor, to accompany Speer.

One of the FBN's most infamous agents, Dick joined the FBN in 1951 following a stint with the New York State Police. Meticulous, tough, and street-smart – although characterized as sarcastic and arrogant by one of the agents he rubbed the wrong way – he worked in New York for three years before transferring, “for health reasons,” to Kansas City, where he formed close relations with District Supervisor Henry Giordano. After Giordano became the FBN's field supervisor in 1956, Dick returned to New York, where he remained until 1959, when Giordano, having become Deputy Commissioner, brought him to headquarters as his dependable field supervisor. This was a very good decision on Giordano's part, because Fred Dick, it is safe to say, knew where all the bodies were buried.

“Giordano said that Speer had identified receipted payments to informants which had not been made,” Dick says, “so Speer and I went up to New York, and he called the agents over to his hotel room at all hours of the night. He grilled them without informing them of their rights, while I'm there cringing in the corner. It took six weeks, during which time the case turned to pumpkin pie.”

Several agents complained to their Congressman that they were being harassed. One said that Speer had indecently exposed himself (it was late
at night, he was changing his clothes, and was wearing only his boxer underpants during part of the interview), and another said that he made racist remarks. But worst of all, Speer waited until Gaffney was on leave, then rifled through the district supervisor's desk.

“Anslinger called me down to Washington,” Gaffney recalls, “and when I stepped into his office he pulled some glassine bags out of his desk. ‘I understand the agents use these to steal heroin from seizures,' he said.”

Gaffney speaks very calmly and carefully. “I told him that all the agents had glassine bags, because Speer had complained that our chemists were reporting different weights, other than what was recorded as having been submitted. What Anslinger didn't know was that the chemists were shaking the heroin out of the bags onto their scales, while we were weighing it
in
the bags. The difference was in the weight of the bags, so we kept the bags to compensate. In other cases the heroin was transferred to containers so we could raise fingerprints from the bags it had come in. So there were good reasons for this, and Anslinger was satisfied with my explanation.”

As Fred Dick explains: “Speer and I returned to headquarters, where the stink of this mess was hanging in the air, and Henry called me into his office and asked what had happened. I told him, and he sent me to explain the situation to Gilmore Flues, the assistant secretary over law enforcement at Treasury. And Flues came down hard on Speer.”

“Speer chose to walk away from the number three job after this,” Gaffney says. “He became the district supervisor in Denver, and Siragusa became the enforcement assistant.”

In his final report, Fred Dick said that nine agents had improperly given money to informants, and he recommended they be demoted or suspended. They were not. He said that Group Three, then under John Dolce, led the office “in the exaggerated reporting of seizures,” and he criticized Gaffney for not insisting that regulations be followed.
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Anslinger then assigned Chicago's enforcement assistant, William J. Durkin (one of Anslinger's favorite agents, and John Dolce's former partner in New York) to conduct an independent analysis of the Speer inquiry. Durkin wrote a “bland” report in December 1961, exonerating the case-makers for their “zeal” and recommending that the investigation be concluded in order to remove the “aura of suspicion” that was hanging over their heads. And that was the end of that corruption scandal.
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