The Strength of the Wolf (47 page)

One can only imagine which Mafia hit men Charles Ford recruited, and the crimes they, Lansdale, and the CIA committed in Cuba, with the blessings of Bobby Kennedy – all to the detriment of the FBN and the American public.

While Bobby Kennedy was using Mafia drug smugglers in murder plots against Castro, and thus neutralizing the FBN, the CIA was relocating its Havana station and anti-Castro terror activities to Miami. Known as JM/WAVE, the station was managed by Theodore Shackley, a protégé of Bill Harvey from Germany. It included Lansdale's Mongoose unit, and some 400 CIA case officers. Already the preferred habitat of America's mobsters, Miami was soon packed with dozens of CIA front companies, thousands of CIA informers and assets, and several drug smuggling terror teams financed by wacky privateers like William Pawley, mentioned in
chapter 5
as having engineered the Pawley–Cooke Advisory Mission to Taiwan in 1950.

To cover a fraction of the cost of this massive enterprise, former OSS spymaster Paul L. E. Helliwell established and directed a string of drug money-laundering banks for the CIA. At the time, Helliwell was general counsel for the Thai Consulate in Miami, an active leader in Florida's Republican Party, and a friend of Nixon's cohort Bebe Rebozo. Among his drug smuggling credentials, Helliwell had worked with Chiang Kai-shek's intelligence chief, General Tai Li, and had set up the CIA's drug smuggling air force, CAT (later Air America), as well as the Bangkok trading company Sea Supply, which provided cover for CIA officers advising the drug-smuggling Thai border police.
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Functioning in a similar capacity in Panama was the ubiquitous World Commerce Corporation, the “commercially oriented espionage net” formed by ardent Republican William Donovan and British spymaster William Stephenson. In Honduras, Richard Greenlee, a member of Donovan's law firm and a former OSS officer in Bangkok, set up Vanguard Services in 1962 as a front for yet another batch of CIA-financed, drug-related anti-Castro operations.
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There were dozens of CIA proprietary companies operating worldwide in similar fashion, and Anslinger in 1964 alluded to the power of this
interlocking cabal of gangsters and spies, when he referred to “higher authorities” (meaning the CIA, or Hoover, or both) subverting a grand jury that had been convened in Miami to probe the financial affairs of dozens of top mobsters. The excuse was that “delicate investigations conducted by another government agency were under way,” but, Anslinger added angrily, this was “a dodge to call us off, and it succeeded.”
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All of which brings us back to Meyer Lansky, the ultimate sleeping partner whose drug money-laundering enterprises stretched from Beirut, to Las Vegas, to the Bahamas, where, following the loss of his concessions in Cuba, he re-established his gambling business with, among others, Louis A. Chesler and Wallace Groves. A Canadian millionaire and former rumrunner, Chesler made a fortune in Florida land deals, then moved to Freeport and formed the Grand Bahama Development Company in 1961 with Groves.
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With the help of Helliwell, Donovan, and other CIA assets, mountains of Thai, Nationalist Chinese, and Vietnamese drug money were allegedly invested in Castle Bank and Florida real estate deals through Chesler's General Development Company.
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Groves had fronted for Lansky since 1951, when he sold valuable Key Biscayne property to Elena Santiero Aleman, mother of Santo Trafficante's Cuban business partner, Jose Aleman.
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Eventually the CIA hired Groves, Tex McCrary (Lansky's public relations consultant, whom George White had visited in Mexico in 1954), and Michael McLaney, manager of Lansky's Miami Beach dinner club, to suborn the top governing officials in the Bahamas, the tropical paradise that quickly became a major, and luxurious, transit point for Latin American drug smugglers.
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Meanwhile, Lansky's financial aide, John Pullman, incorporated the Bank of World Commerce in the Bahamas to handle the skim from several Las Vegas casinos. Pullman then merged his Atlas Bank “in some shadowy way” with Intrabank in Beirut.
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Formed by Palestinian Youseff Beidas, and financed by several Arab nations under the direction of a Saudi Arabian arms trader, Intrabank owned the Casino du Liban in Beirut. This world-famous casino was managed by Lansky's drug smuggling Corsican contact, Marcel Francisci. Like the banks cited above, Intrabank's Bahamian branch laundered Mafia gambling and drug money, with the full knowledge of the CIA.
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Despite the FBN's spotlight on Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky was the lynchpin in the intelligence aspect of international drug smuggling that fascinated Hank Manfredi. Charlie Siragusa watched him closely, and he knew that Lansky sent Joseph F. Nesline and Charles Tourine around the world in 1962 to set up nightclubs and arrange drug deals. FBN agents
followed Nesline (a hit man from Ohio who ran a sexual blackmail ring in Washington) to a meeting in Germany with Daviad Dargahi, “an Iranian … with a background in drug smuggling.”
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FBN agents also followed Tourine, a mob killer in the Genovese family, to Bermuda. And yet, despite the surveillance, neither Lansky, Tourine, nor Nesline would ever be convicted on drug charges.

“Lansky was a chameleon who compartmented his operations, bought political protection, and established fronts,” George Gaffney explains. “Not even the McClellan Committee and Department of Justice under Bobby Kennedy could get to him.”

Tom Tripodi is blunter. “Siragusa was neutralized,” he says with regard to the CIA and FBI's million-dollar men – among them, Meyer Lansky – and their seething hatred of the Kennedy administration.

Here's one example of how this animosity was inspired. JFK wanted to expel Air America, the CIA's drug smuggling proprietary airline, from Laos. And in 1962, in another attempt to curb the CIA's drug smuggling activities in East Asia, Bobby indicted Sea Supply manager Willis Bird (the original OSS liaison officer to General Tai Li) for having bribed a US official in Laos.
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The president also fired ultra General Edwin Walker for attempting to indoctrinate US troops on behalf of the Christian Crusade.
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These were dangerous moves, but not as perilous as Kennedy's plans to desegregate the South and eliminate the oil depletion allowances that enriched Texas oilmen – like Hoover's patron, Clint Murchison, the emerging Bush dynasty, and right-wing zealot, H. L. Hunt – and allowed them to seize control of oil reserves in the Middle and Far East. So Kennedy's enemies ensured that the Bird prosecution was blocked, and that Air America kept its contract in Laos, and continued to fly drugs.
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Meanwhile, General Walker, the far-right American Security Council (including General Lansdale and Air America Chairman Admiral Felix Stump), and the Texas ultras started plotting their
coup d'état
in Dallas.

Such was the new frontier the FBN's wolf pack entered as the Kennedy brothers burst upon the scene; it was a wild country populated by an angry FBI director, CIA assassins and drug smugglers, and – starting in March 1962 with the creation in the Pentagon of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency and Special Activities – members of the US Army Special Forces, assigned by the CIA to monitor the drug trade in areas under communist control. In view of these developments, the new frontier was an inhospitable place for the FBN, which continued its descent into knavish spookery and internecine warfare.

As they mature, Americans have a tendency to revise their history, and in this tradition author Robin Moore offers two different explanations for how the famous French Connection case began. In his first book,
The French Connection
(published in 1969), Moore claims the case began on 7 October 1961, when NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso came to suspect that Pasquale “Patsy” Fuca was dealing narcotics from his luncheonette. Their suspicions were confirmed two days later when an agent in the FBI's fugitive squad told Grosso that Patsy was Angelo Tuminaro's nephew. A member of the Lucchese family and a major narcotics trafficker since 1937, five-foot-two “Little Angie” Tuminaro was married to Bella Stein, the daughter of a powerful Jewish racketeer, and was sought after by the FBN as a fugitive in the Cotroni case.
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Eight years later in
Mafia Wife
(a biography of Patsy Fuca's wife, Barbara), Moore claimed that Egan and Grosso learned about Patsy's relationship with Angie several weeks – rather than days – later, after an FBI agent saw Patsy at Angie's father's funeral. But of all the discrepancies in Moore's books, the biggest concerns Egan and Grosso's integrity. Presented as heroes in
The French Connection
, they are characterized as “sloppy and stupid” if not downright disreputable in
Mafia Wife.
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Moore's change of heart is easy to explain: after the heroin that was seized in the French Connection case was found to have gone missing from
the NYPD property clerk's storeroom in 1972, he decided to distance himself from any possible suspects in the dope's disappearance.
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He is consistent in one respect. In both books Egan and Grosso eventually realize that Patsy is handling heroin from Angie's French connection; and at this point – when the case assumes international proportions – they notify Edward Carey, head of the NYPD's narcotic squad. Carey in turn notifies George Gaffney, and Gaffney assigns Agent Francis E. Waters to work with Egan and Grosso. Tough as nails and a relentless investigator, Waters did far more to make the French Connection case than either Egan or Grosso, and he is eager to explain what really happened.

“Somebody pulled Angie's coat,” Waters says, “by which I mean there were twenty-six defendants in the Cotroni case, but only five or six were actually caught with heroin. Angie was only loosely tied in to the case, and if he could hide until the trial was over, he'd be home free, because the government could never assemble the same lawyers and get the same witnesses together to make the same conspiracy case.

“Angie was on the lam in the Cotroni case, but he was still running the show. His brother Frank was his delivery man, but after Frank was arrested for a burglary, Angie had Patsy fill in. FBI Agent Bill Terry, meanwhile, had an informer who identified Patsy as part of a hijacking ring. Terry was on the FBI's fugitive squad and one day he showed a photograph of Angie to this informer. The informer said he'd seen him at Patsy's luncheonette, so Terry gave the photo to NYPD Sergeant Bill McLaughlin, and McLaughlin gave it to Grosso, and Grosso forgot about it. He wasn't about to do Terry's job for him, and he didn't place any significance on Patsy being Angie's nephew. He didn't have any idea that Angie had a French connection. But I did. I was trying to find Angie, and about two weeks later, while I was at Grosso's office, I happened to see Angie's photo on his desk. Right away I got excited. I had a hunch that Patsy might lead us to Angie, who was a far bigger fish.

“Now Grosso's interested too, and that night Egan and I set ourselves up with binoculars on the roof of a building across the street from Patsy's luncheonette. We see a black car pull up and double park outside. An Italian with a black Borsalino hat gets out, goes inside the luncheonette, comes out, drives away. This happens a few times that night, and we realize what's going down. We even followed Patsy back to his mother's house [Angie's sister Nellie, a major member of the drug ring, was married to Joe Fuca] where the plant was.”

Waters put the pieces together, but Moore was able to credit Egan with initiating the case because, from the moment the NYPD put a wiretap in Fuca's luncheonette, the case was destined for a New York State Court. As
Waters puts it, “We had the intelligence on Angie, but Egan had the steady source of information from the wire.”

Despite the wiretap, from the moment in November 1961 when Frankie Waters saw Patsy meet an unknown man driving a car with Canadian plates, the French Connection case relied almost entirely on his strength and determination. “I followed Patsy for fifty-four days straight without a break,” Waters says with pride. “I slept in the back of my station wagon.”

As the case developed, more FBN agents and NYPD detectives were assigned to follow Patsy, his longshoreman brother Tony, and their French accomplices: Jean Jehan, aged sixty-four, the debonair and distinguished-looking mastermind of the ring, with direct links to François Spirito and Joe Orsini; François Scaglia, a Corsican member of Les Trois Canards, and the ring's liaison to the American Mafia; J. Mouren, a mystery man who has never been identified; and courier Jacques Angelvin, the handsome host of a popular French television show. A recent widower, Angelvin had fallen in love with Scaglia's sister, from whom he acquired a cocaine habit. In his addled state of bereavement, infatuation, and intoxication, Angelvin, as a favor for Scaglia, agreed to drive a custom-made Buick on and off an ocean liner bound for New York. He would later claim that he had no idea what was hidden inside it.

The case gathered steam on 5 January 1962, when Angelvin embarked for New York. Two days later Scaglia flew to Montreal to meet Jehan, and the next day Grosso and Waters followed Patsy to a meeting with Jehan at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Jehan, at the time, was completely unknown to Waters and Grosso. Afterwards, Waters followed Patsy back to Brooklyn, and Grosso tailed Jehan to the Victoria Hotel where the elderly Frenchman met Scaglia, age 35, and using the alias François Barbier. Patsy's meeting with Jehan, and Jehan's contact with Scaglia, allowed the investigators to identify two of the three principal members of Angie Tuminaro's legendary French connection for the first time. At this critical point, a French-speaking agent named Johnson (who'd only been with the FBN a few days and left immediately after the case) bugged their hotel rooms, and members of the International Group began listening to the suspects' conversations.
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