The Strength of the Wolf (48 page)

On 10 January, agents Mortimer L. Benjamin and Norris Durham were assigned to watch Jean Jehan. “We saw him meet Scaglia,” Benjamin recalls, “and then followed them to the pier for US Lines, where they stood around freezing – it was about ten degrees – while they watched the cars coming off a ship. Then suddenly they took off.”

With the appearance of yet another conspirator (perhaps a courier) and a car, Carey and Gaffney formed a task force, consisting of scores of FBN
agents and NYPD detectives, to follow the five suspects in the investigation. Angelvin, as yet unidentified, had checked into the Waldorf Hotel and began to tour New York's fashionable nightclubs with a demure secretary named Lilli DeBecque, provided gratis by Scaglia. Patsy was tailed to the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, where he met Jehan and a sixth suspect registered at the Abbey Hotel under the name J. Mouren. Patsy, Jehan, and Mouren drove away in Patsy's car, on what was undoubtedly a drug-trafficking mission. Jehan exited the car on 47th Street, and then Patsy and Mouren drove to an underground parking garage managed by suspected drug trafficker Sol Feinberg at 45 East End Avenue.

On 13 January, Frankie Waters tailed slippery Jean Jehan to the subway. The insouciant Frenchman jumped on and off the train, then hopped on and waved goodbye to his pursuer, who was left behind on the platform, confounded and amazed, just like Gene Hackman (portraying Egan) would be in the movie. Never one to be nonplused, Waters happily waved back. But the tight surveillance had unnerved Jehan. Playing it cool, he called his accomplices, and over the next few days they quietly checked out of their separate hotel rooms by phone, using money orders to pay their bills. The main suspects in what was certainly a major narcotics case had suddenly vanished, and a moment of panic gripped the task force.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. According to Moore in
The French Connection
, Scaglia called Angelvin and told him to bring the Buick to Sol Feinberg's underground parking garage at 45 East End Avenue. Patsy's brother Tony met them there, then drove the Buick to another garage in the Bronx where he, Patsy, and mystery man Mouren allegedly removed a quantity of heroin from hidden compartments in the car's undercarriage. Patsy gave Mouren $225,000 for eighty-eight one-pound bags of heroin, which Patsy put on the backseat of his car. Mouren kept twenty-three bags and some smaller ounce-sized packets in a blue valise for safekeeping, until Patsy could pay him the balance due. Tony drove the Buick to his house in the Bronx, unloaded the eighty-eight packages, and then took the car to Feola's Auto Body Shop for reconstructive surgery.

As noted, none of what happened above was witnessed by anyone in law enforcement. And what happened next, on 18 January 1962, is also debatable. Depending on who tells the story, either Eddie Egan, while driving aimlessly around Manhattan, stumbled on Patsy and tailed him to
Feinberg's garage; or Frankie Waters drove to Feinberg's on a hunch and arrived just in time to see Patsy going in. Either way, FBN agents and NYPD narcotic detectives surrounded the garage and eventually saw Mouren emerge with the blue valise and climb into Patsy's Oldsmobile. Jehan joined them further down the street. A few minutes later, Angelvin exited the garage in the Buick, which had been returned intact from Feola's chop shop. The French TV host picked up François Scaglia a few blocks down the street. There were now two cars to follow, and that made the hastily assembled surveillance that much more difficult. Mouren got out of the Olds on 79th St, without the blue valise, and a few blocks later Jehan left the car with it – just as the radio system between the NYPD patrol cars and the FBN cars mysteriously malfunctioned. For some unknown reason, Egan elected to follow Patsy rather than Jehan – the man with the blue valise, which undoubtedly contained valuable evidence – and, as anyone who has seen the movie knows, Jehan casually walked away with the cash.

“We had the fish on the hook,” Waters recalls, “but we toyed with it too long.”

While Egan followed Patsy – and Mouren and Jehan slipped away – Frankie Waters and Sonny Grosso stopped Scaglia and Angelvin for running a red light. They did not resist arrest. After dropping their catch at a nearby police station, Waters and Grosso joined in the frantic pursuit of Patsy Fuca, who had picked up his wife, Barbara, at their house in Brooklyn, and was intending to drive as far away as fast as possible.

“I was sitting on the base station radio,” Morty Benjamin recalls, “monitoring calls from the field agents with Artie Fluhr. We knew the warrants had been issued and that Waters was about to make the arrest. We're listening. We know that Fuca and Barbara got in the car, and then we hear that Waters lost them. Well, this is Frankie's case. There's fifty feds on the case, and fifty cops; but everybody knows it's Frankie's case, and everyone wants him to make the bust. I'd only been an agent for ten months and I wasn't about to interfere. But Artie'd been around as long as anyone, and when he heard they'd lost Fuca, he said, ‘Let's give them a hand.'

“So off we go. We drive across the Brooklyn Bridge and, just like magic, Fuca zips by. Now Artie's a great driver – he's running lights, driving on the sidewalk, doesn't get a scratch. I'm on the radio to Frankie; I tell him what's happening, and he says, ‘Follow them, but don't bust them!'
Then he starts worrying and changes his mind. ‘Bust them at the next light!' he says.”

Benjamin's expression turns serious. “Patsy had a reputation for fighting cops, and he'd killed someone, which is why guys like Frankie Waters carried a blackjack. That's why you want a guy like Waters to bust a guy like Patsy Fuca. Plus which it was Frankie's case, and he had every right to bust him. But I'm the one who actually did it. And by the time we stopped them at the light, I wanted to do it.

“Fuca's driving. His pretty young wife's in a negligee. They're running, but they're stopped at a light in downtown Brooklyn, and Artie drives right in front of them. There's no place they can go. I'm on the passenger side, my adrenalin pumping. I'd made a promise to myself that if Fuca went for his gun, I wouldn't stop to think about it, I'd just shoot him. So I jumped out of the car, stuck my gun in his ear and said, ‘Keep your hands on the wheel or I'll blow your fucking brains out.' ” Benjamin's voice is trembling.

“Fuca could tell I wasn't kidding. He kept saying, ‘Don't worry, kid. Don't worry.' But I was glad when Artie got around to the other side where Patsy's wife was sitting. We got them out of the car just as Waters arrived.

“You know,” Benjamin says, “that was the first time I'd ever cocked my gun. But those other guys, Waters and Fluhr, they liked doing that stuff. They'd do anything to make a case.

“So we take Fuca to the precinct. We're at the booking desk when the reporters show up and the flashbulbs start popping. Egan's there with a warrant, and we go to Papa Joe Fuca's house to find the junk. We start in the basement, and that's when Artie sees stains on the floor. We look up and see a hole in the ceiling. Artie pulls a chair over, sticks his hand in the hole, and pulls out a half-kilogram bag of heroin. I'm about ten feet away and I do the same thing. Then Egan comes down, and everyone starts pulling out dope. But Artie and I found it, and Moore didn't get that right either!

“Then Gaffney shows up. He's pissed off, as usual. He thinks we're screwing with the junk because the account we're giving keeps changing as we find more and more packages, all of which goes south anyway. Six months before the French Connection dope was supposed to be destroyed, the NYPD Property Clerk saw beetles coming out of the bags. The heroin had been replaced with flour somewhere along the line. So as it turns out, I was lucky not to get credit for the bust, because I never got blamed for the missing dope, either.

“There're lots of things you don't hear about that French Connection case,” Benjamin adds. “You don't hear about the short sentences, or that
Jehan got away with the money, or that Mouren was never identified, or that the heroin we found at Papa Joe's and Tony's house may not have come off the ship. All we found in the Buick was traces. Maybe.”

Here it's important to reiterate that some FBN agents believe the Buick that Angelvin was driving was a decoy, and that the heroin at Joe's basement came from a previous shipment.
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Adding to the intrigue, Moore claims in
Mafia Wife
that somebody “got to” Angie and told him that if he paid $50,000, “he would know in advance when the arrest was to be made” and could protect himself.
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This somebody, of course, could only have been a detective or a government agent.

There is another allegation of official complicity in the famous French Connection case. According to Frankie Waters, when he and Grosso searched Apartment 15C at 45 East End Avenue, they found a photo – taken six days before at La Cloche d'Or restaurant on Third Avenue – of the apartment's occupant with Jean Jehan. But the photo was lost and the occupant, having relocated to Mexico, was never pursued.

“That case taught me a lot,” Benjamin says solemnly. “It taught me that as a young agent you don't claim credit. You don't testify either, and you avoid writing reports. Artie Fluhr spent seven days on the stand trying to explain to the judge why Egan wasn't lying. And Waters had a hard time explaining why running a red light gave him probable cause to search the Buick.”

Acclaimed as a smashing success, the French Connection case, with its missing money and vanishing Frenchmen, in fact reflected the FBN's increasing incapacity to deal with the espionage aspects of international drug trafficking. The trend started on 22 March 1961, when New York Customs agents arrested thirty-five-year-old Air France stewardess Simone Christmann for concealing four and a half pounds of heroin in her ample brassiere. Christmann said she thought the powder was perfume base, and that a “Mr. Mueller” in Paris had given it to her. In June 1961, she was sentenced to four years in prison, but was soon released on bond.
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According to an FBN agent on the case, Christmann was released because she was a spy for the Organization de l'Armée Secrète (OAS), a cabal of French Army officers violently opposed to French president Charles de Gaulle's decision to grant Algeria independence. Because the Soviets were courting the Algerians, the US and Israeli intelligence services
secretly supported the OAS. It's a fact that CIA officers Richard Bissell and Richard Helms met in December 1960 with OAS political chief Jacques Soustelle to assure him of their support for a putsch.
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And it's alleged that CIA officer John Philipsborn met with OAS leader General Raoul Salan in Paris just before the OAS mutiny (a month after Christmann's arrest) in Algeria in April 1961.
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The FBN agent cited above claims that Christmann, being a good soldier, took “a small fall to protect her bosses,” in the CIA-supported faction within the OAS, so the mutiny could go forward. By not doing anything, the FBN was complicit. Paul Knight, the FBN agent in charge in Paris, then secretly working for the CIA, did not investigate Mueller because, he said, “It was a Customs case.” And technically it was. But the Customs agent in Paris at the time, Jacques L. Changeux (a former FBN agent), was also secretly working for the CIA, and he didn't investigate the case either.

Shortly thereafter, Knight quit the FBN and returned to America in February 1962, for training and official enrollment in the CIA, and was replaced in Paris by Agent Victor G. Maria. According to Maria, his job was limited to investigating American citizens involved in drug trafficking, and he was specifically told not to investigate French citizens. So he didn't pursue Mueller either.

And yet, despite the best efforts of the CIA, Mueller's identity was revealed in April 1962, when Etienne Tarditi named Irving Brown in connection with L'affaire Rosal. Through a routine background check, FBN agents learned that Brown, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' representative to the UN, often traveled from New York to Paris, where he frequented a restaurant owned by Georges Bayon. A SDECE agent who recruited diplomats as drug couriers, Bayon used the alias Mueller. Further investigation showed that labor leader Irving Brown was a CIA agent, that he had port privileges in New York (meaning his baggage was never checked by Customs), and that his wife Lilly (perhaps Lilli DeBecque from the French Connection case) was a secretary for Carmel Offie, a former CIA agent then managing an import-export business in Manhattan.
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Excited by this information, Andy Tartaglino launched a Court House Squad investigation of Brown in June 1962 – but was quickly told to drop it. “Joe Amato told me that someone else was handling it,” Tartaglino explains, with a glint in his eye.

That unnamed party was the CIA, of course, which begs the question: Who were Irving Brown and Carmel Offie, and how were they involved with CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton in the French Connection?

Irving Brown was a protégé of Jay Lovestone, leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s. But after he quarreled with Joseph Stalin, Lovestone was expelled from the Party and by 1936 had joined the United Auto Workers Union. He soon abandoned Marxism altogether and, with Brown, began rooting communists out of the American labor movement. In 1945, with the support of the AFL, Lovestone became executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee and sent Brown to Europe to help the CIA subvert communist trade unions.

James Angleton became Lovestone's CIA case officer in 1947 and, according to his biographer, Tom Mangold, after Angleton became chief of counterintelligence in 1955, he contacted Lovestone through Stephen Millet, “the counterintelligence officer who headed the Israeli Desk at Langley. Lovestone's payments and logistics were handled in New York by Mario Brod, Angleton's lawyer friend.”
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