The Strength of the Wolf (45 page)

That particular conspiracy theory will never be proven, but two things are perfectly clear: despite the myth that Lucky Luciano controlled international drug trafficking, the illegal movement of narcotics did not abate with his death; and once Anslinger had handed over the organizational reigns to hapless Henry Giordano, the FBN could no longer defend itself from its arch bureaucratic rival, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director moved in for the kill, and Lucky had the last laugh in hell.

For thirty-two years, Harry Anslinger suffered J. Edgar Hoover's insults and interference and did nothing in response. Anslinger submissively accepted the fact that Hoover was a more powerful bureaucrat, with ten times as many agents, a vastly bigger budget, a broader mandate, and secret files he'd been compiling since his salad days as a special assistant on subversive matters to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is said that Hoover brought along these files when he became the FBI's assistant director in 1921, that he continually expanded them after he became FBI director in 1924, and that he used them to compile dossiers full of dirty little secrets on America's top politicians during a reign of intimidation that lasted forty-six years, and spanned the incumbency of eight presidents.

Knowing he was outgunned, Anslinger refrained from directly challenging Hoover; but a rivalry simmered between them, and for years, Hoover kept Anslinger on the defensive by making snide comments about the corrupting influences of undercover narcotics work. Plus which the publicity-conscious FBI director grabbed all of the glory by having his agents chase celebrity public enemies like John Dillinger, at the expense of mounting arduous investigations of organized crime. Anslinger, however, had Andrew Mellon and several other Establishment heavyweights in his corner, and he could not be dismissed. He wasn't intimidated by Hoover's
bluster and prominence, and he continued about his business. In public he behaved properly, as if he respected the despicable little man.

Behind the scenes, the personal animosity between the two bureaucratic warlords began in 1932, during the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping case. Anslinger's mentor and friend, Elmer Irey, chief of the IRS Intelligence Unit, played a decisive role in the investigation by having marked bills passed to Richard Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper. That measure, which was standard operating procedure for FBN agents, led to Hauptmann's capture and conviction. Lindbergh was grateful, but Hoover was incensed. Fearing that Irey would solve the case, Hoover initially tried to have him removed from it; but Lindbergh objected and prevailed. So Hoover put Irey under FBI surveillance in a brazen attempt to steal his investigative leads. Despite Hoover's juvenile attempts to preempt him, Irey single-handedly solved the case, and Lindbergh publicly credited him for doing so. But the indignity of having been upstaged prompted Hoover to open one of his secret files on Irey and, for years afterwards, Irey routinely checked his telephone for FBI taps. This episode taught Anslinger a valuable lesson about the petty FBI director's unforgiving and abusive nature, and the advantages of staying out of his line of fire.
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Hoover's fad for chasing down “Most Wanted” criminals subsided with the Depression, and Anslinger's prestige grew during the Second World War. But Hoover's power grew even greater. While many of Anslinger's agents joined the Armed Services, and his workforce diminished, President Roosevelt increased the number of FBI agents fivefold, and gave Hoover carte blanche to bug and wiretap anyone in the name of national security. The FBI was also made responsible for intelligence operations in the western hemisphere, and Hoover spread 150 Special Intelligence Service agents throughout Latin America and Canada. The FBI director also entered into an exclusive liaison relationship with William Stephenson, chief of Great Britain's intelligence operations in the western hemisphere.

Hoover savored his exclusive relationship with Stephenson while it lasted, but then in 1942, President Roosevelt put William Donovan in charge of the OSS. The British welcomed Donovan and his OSS forces, which started fighting behind enemy lines in Europe, and “Wild Bill” cheerfully crashed what J. Edgar thought was going to be a private party with Bill Stephenson. That hurt, socially and professionally. But when Donovan's OSS agents started mounting counterintelligence operations in the US – in one instance breaking into the Spanish Embassy – Hoover retaliated in every way possible.
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Having formed a fast personal friendship
with Donovan, and having sent several of his best men into the OSS, Anslinger again found himself allied with one of Hoover's most hated rivals.

Still steaming after the war, Hoover opposed Donovan's efforts to form the Central Intelligence Agency. He repeated a claim he had made about the OSS, and said that the CIA was hiring communists. But the Agency was created over Hoover's protests, and when President Truman decided that the new spy agency should absorb the FBI's operations in the western hemisphere, Hoover vindictively ordered his agents not to share their files or sources with the CIA, with whom Anslinger had also aligned.
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The new wave of anti-communist witch-hunts instigated in 1950 by Senator Joe McCarthy restored Hoover's confidence and sense of purpose, and during the ensuing Cold War his powers peaked: FBI agents were exempted from Civil Service rules and, under the aegis of national security, were allowed to conduct burglaries and all types of illegal surveillance. With eyes and ears in bedrooms all over Washington, Hoover packed his files full of sexy secrets that he traded to beholden politicians for power. Then in 1956, he unveiled his most awesome weapon ever, the notorious Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which allowed FBI agents to commit any crime imaginable in order to suppress civil rights and leftist groups that threatened national security. COINTELPRO enabled him to shape the political climate in America, and his bulging secret files prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to declare that Hoover had “more power than the president.”
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That may have been true, but Anslinger wasn't afraid, and he eventually forced a showdown with Hoover over the Mafia. As we know, Hoover denied its existence, and his disingenuous position on this issue had a cumulative, negative effect on federal drug law enforcement. So, in his last year as Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger unleashed his frustration and fury. In a 1962 interview, he said that he had refused to give a copy of the Mafia Book to Hoover because he “just wouldn't risk it.”
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Anslinger insinuated that Hoover had been corrupted by organized crime, and it was true; Hoover's friend, columnist Walter Winchell, socialized with Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, and served as an intermediary between the famous, influential gangsters and the star-struck FBI director. Hoover and Costello actually met on occasion, and investigative journalist Anthony Summers, citing several sources, reports that Lansky acquired, from Donovan and the OSS, photographs of Hoover engaged in a homosexual act, and that those pictures put him in the mob's pocket forever.
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Not only was Hoover a closet queen, he was a degenerate gambler too. He liked to bet on the ponies and, in exchange for free passes and hot tips,
he repaid his underworld patrons by insisting that racetrack gambling was not a federal crime. He pretended not to know that Lansky and Costello controlled the off-track bookie business, or that it was one of organized crime's biggest sources of revenue.

Anslinger's standing with Hoover did not improve during the Kefauver Hearings, which, with the FBN's expert assistance, forced Costello into early retirement and Lansky into exile. But Hoover quickly found a new patron in Texas oil tycoon Clint Murchison, and starting in 1953, Hoover and his housemate, FBI executive Clyde Tolson, became Murchison's annual guests at the Del Mar Racetrack in California. The oilman's ties to organized crime were not as close as Costello's, but they were there. According to Summers,

Hoover's defenders say he had bigger fish to fry, and that he let Anslinger and the IRS chase the gangsters, while his G-men pursued communists, civil rights leaders, and other menaces to national security. But the man had a secret agenda, and, as the Establishment's private police force, the FBI served its patrons by allowing organized crime to subvert the labor and civil rights movements from within. If the hoods moved drugs in their spare time, who cared (like the Mafia bosses said), as long as the poison ended up in ghettos, and not in good neighborhoods?

Anslinger and Hoover obviously agreed on the racial issue, but the FBI director's protection of organized crime undermined Anslinger's mission and his legacy. So he waited and in a veiled attack on Hoover, he said in 1964, “Sometimes our strongest foes can be found in the chambers of justice, the state houses and even higher.”
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Anslinger waited until he was on the verge of retirement to attack his old foe, but he never would have had the opportunity if not for the November 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president, and his appointment of his
brother Bobby as Attorney General. Ambitious, ruthless, and cunning, Bobby wasn't content to behave in the traditional role as the president's
consigliere
, and he used his authority as Attorney General to sidestep Hoover. Declaring war against organized crime, he increased the number of attorneys in the Justice Department's Criminal Division from fifteen to sixty and directed them against the nation's leading racketeers. Bobby had a mean streak, too; in order to make his presence felt, he openly inquired how a behemoth like organized crime could escape the attention of the FBI's director. He further bruised Hoover's gigantic ego by praising the FBN for putting more Mafia bosses behind bars than the FBI, and, according to George Gaffney, by dubbing it “the Marine Corps of federal law enforcement.”

Figuratively speaking, this insolent behavior was a death sentence for both Bobby Kennedy and the FBN. Hoover was so angry that he sent a letter to Anslinger calling the Genovese case a “frame-up” and a “travesty of justice.”
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Heedless of having made an enemy of J. Edna (as he privately referred to the lavender-scented FBI director), Bobby formed a special group in the Justice Department to pursue Jimmy Hoffa and Hoffa's closest Mafia associates – Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and Carlos Marcello – all of whom shared Hoover's hatred of the overly aggressive AG. But Bobby was looking for a fight, and his first reckless act as Attorney General was to deport Marcello to Guatemala in April 1961. As a pretext, Bobby claimed that Marcello was an undesirable alien, based on the fact that the FBN had busted him in 1938 for selling twenty-three pounds of marijuana. With this fateful action, Kennedy pushed his criminal and government enemies into an alliance and, six weeks after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Marcello slipped back into America and, with equally furious anti-Kennedy factions in the FBI, CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exile community, began plotting revenge.

While serving as chief counsel on Senator John McClellan's Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, Bobby Kennedy learned how drug smuggling factored into the Mafia's relationship with the Teamsters. He was present in July 1959 when FBN Agent Ike Wurms explained to the Committee how Teamsters official Abe Gordon laundered drug profits through a union welfare fund. Bobby learned that Carlo Gambino was involved with the Teamsters through his laborconsulting firm in Manhattan, and that Jimmy Hoffa had protected
Detroit's major drug traffickers, John Priziola and Raffaele Quasarano, by assigning them to Teamsters Local 985. He knew that Trafficante and Marcello were associated with Hoffa; that Marcello influenced the Teamsters and Longshoreman's unions in Louisiana; and that Trafficante had an office at a Teamsters Local in Miami, which had been established by Mafia drug traffickers James Plumeri and Frank Dioguardia.

Kennedy knew that Marcello's representative in Dallas, Joe Civello, had attended the Apalachin conference on Marcello's behalf, and he suspected that Marcello, through Trafficante in Florida, and Sam Carolla and Frank Coppola in Sicily, played a dominant role in international drug trafficking. As Bobby was certainly aware, the FBN office in New Orleans believed that Marcello received narcotics from Trafficante in Florida on Teamsters trucks, and that his Pelican Tomato Company, which supplied Naval bases in Louisiana, smuggled drugs from Mexico “without interference from customs.”
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Kennedy wanted to nail Trafficante and Marcello, but the FBN had only four agents in its Miami and New Orleans offices, and the FBI – though it had the manpower – chose not to place wiretaps on them. These two were the only Mafiosi to receive such privileged treatment from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI agent in charge in New Orleans, Regis Kennedy, even made the outrageous claim that Marcello was not involved in crime – so Bobby took matters in hand. INS officials arrested Marcello on a street in New Orleans, placed him in handcuffs, drove him to an airport, put him on a plane, and whisked him off to Guatemala – which he had identified on a falsified birth certificate as the land of his birth – without so much as a toothbrush.
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