The Strength of the Wolf (49 page)

What Mangold is saying is profoundly important, and requires further explanation. First, Angleton contacted Irving Brown's boss, Jay Lovestone, through his liaison to Israeli Intelligence. This is a fact that lends credence to Jim Attie's allegation that the Mossad was involved in international drug smuggling – most likely in support of Angleton and Brown. Next, Angleton paid Lovestone, and thus Brown, through labor lawyer Mario Brod, his liaison to the Mafia. This arrangement put Brod in position to broker drug deals, on Angleton's behalf, between the Mafia, the Mossad, and Brown's soon-to-be-revealed French connection. This explains why Joe Amato told Andy Tartaglino that someone else was handling the Brown investigation of 1962. But could that someone else have been Charlie Siragusa? If the reader will recall, Siragusa knew Angleton and had worked with Brod in Italy during the war; and according to Colonel Tulius Acampora, Angleton was so dependent on Siragusa for his Mafia contacts that he “kissed Siragusa's ass in Macy's window at noon.” All of this, even without Siragusa's personal involvement, puts Angleton, Israeli intelligence, Brown, his Corsican contacts, the FBN, and the Mafia at the heart of the CIA's emerging drug-trafficking conspiracy.

Irving Brown has an interesting background. In return for his double agent work in the 1930s, he was named the AFL's representative to the War Production Board, where he befriended Tracy Barnes. (Barnes in 1962 was chief of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division. In that capacity, he managed Cuban exile and Mafia operations, as well as proprietary companies in America, and the dissemination of disinformation through
American academia, publishing houses, and mainstream press outlets.)
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After the war, Brown worked for the AFL in Europe and in 1949, with CIA money, he established a compatible left, anti-communist union in Marseilles. When the communists called for strikes in Marseilles, Brown enlisted Corsican gangster Pierre Ferri-Pisani, and Pisani in turn recruited Corsican and Sicilian thugs to toss the strikers into the Mediterranean Sea.
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In 1952, either Pisani or, more likely, French-spy-turned-gangster Robert Blemant, introduced Brown to drug lords Antoine Guérini and Jo Cesari in Bordeaux, after which Brown met with unidentified Mafiosi in Italy, the scene of his next CIA machinations.
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According to his secretary, Naomi Spatz, Brown also met Maurice Castellani in Marseilles at this time. Strikingly handsome, and known either as “Le Petit Maurice” or “Tête Cassée” (meaning “Broken Head” – a reference to his talent as an extortionist), Castellani was one of the most enigmatic and successful drug traffickers of his time. As a very young boy, he had served bravely with the Resistance in Marseilles, and was well respected within the Corsican underworld. More importantly, Castellani was one of Robert Blemant's lieutenants in Les Trois Canards gang in Paris, along with François Scaglia of French Connection case fame. Notably, the three ducks often met for fish soup and snails at Georges Bayon's restaurant – Bayon being the aforementioned Mr. Mueller who supplied OAS Agent Simone Christmann with heroin.

During the mid-1950s, Brown came under the tutelage of the aforementioned Carmel Offie, a former Foreign Service officer who had served in Honduras in the mid-1930s during the TACA affair and, following that, as an aide to Ambassador William Bullitt in Russia. (Bullitt, as we know from
chapter 5
, was one of several diplomats linked to smuggling in the post-war era, and played an instrumental role in establishing the Pawley-Cooke Mission in Taiwan in 1950.) After the war, Offie became a CIA contract agent. He formed refugee groups in Germany and ran agents posing as black marketeers behind the Iron Curtain. He also smuggled Nazis to South America, with James Angleton, as part of Operation Bloodstone.
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As a political advisor to the AFL's Information Service and the CIA's bagman to the Free Trade Union Committee, Offie guided Brown in Europe until 1954, when, amid rumors of pouch abuse, gunrunning, and White slavery, he returned to the United States and became a consultant to a Washington law firm whose senior partners included Alben Barkley's son-in-law. (Barkley, of course, was close to George Cunningham, the FBN's deputy director from 1949 until 1958.) Offie's New York-based import-export company did business in France, Germany, South Vietnam,
and Italy. In 1957, he acquired part-ownership of a mining company in North Africa, at the same time Brown was in Tunis recruiting Algerian student leaders, through the National Student Association, and sending them into France to infiltrate communist-controlled front groups.
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The French intelligence services uncovered Brown's espionage activities and in 1960, having been declared
persona non grata
in Europe and North Africa, he returned to New York and set up shop near the UN. His wife Lilly took a secretarial job at Carmel Offie's import-export firm. As head of the AFL's American African Labor Institute, Brown worked with numerous African leaders in various CIA intrigues, including, evidently, the smuggling of narcotics on behalf of the OAS and Israel.

On 1 June 1962, Harry Anslinger was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying that heroin was being moved from the PRC on horse caravans to Burma, and from there through Cuba to the US. But he knew that wasn't true. In his July 1959 report, “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East,” Garland Williams had identified the Kuomintang as the region's primary narcotics producer and Bangkok as “the most important single source of illicit opium in the world today. It is also the locale for the least amount of corrective effort by responsible American agencies,” he said, placing the blame squarely on the CIA. Thai Army personnel moved massive amounts of drugs to the seaport and, Williams said, “many Thai officials, some of great prominence in both civil and military echelons of the government, are involved in the drug traffic, but are forbidden to carry on similar activities in the area of enforcement.” But, Williams reported, the CIA and State Department “never mentioned the subject to the police chief or any other Thai official. Avoidance is policy,” he said, even though the director of the US Mission “knew all about it in detail, names, methods of movement, where it goes.” The US counsel in Chiang Mai (an undercover CIA officer) had “uncalled for sympathy with opium producers in his district.”
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Not only were Thai, CIA, and Kuomintang officials involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle; according to Williams there was also, in Bangkok, “an old, experienced, well-equipped, and financially strong” French organization that supplied “the group which supplies the persistent major violators of French nationality who operate in New York City.” Alas, Williams did not name the members of this group in his report, but
he did say “a trained narcotic investigator could soon develop the facts for use by those who he would find to take action.”

What Williams knew, and told Anslinger in 1959, was becoming public knowledge by 1962, and that year author Andrew Tully provided further insights into the central role of the CIA and Kuomintang in international drug trafficking. In his book,
CIA: The Inside Story
, Tully told of a CIA officer arriving in Burma from Taiwan. He saw no soldiers, only a vast plantation. “You see,” said the Kuomintang colonel in charge, “it takes money to run an operation like this and so … we're growing opium.” As Tully noted, the treacherous Kuomintang “supplemented” their drug-smuggling income “by selling their arms to the Chinese Communists.”
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“In 1962, we thought the source was Turkey,” Tom Tripodi explains. “But the French were taking drugs out of Southeast Asia. French Intelligence was running the show. Thirty to forty people were involved, including [Ambassador Mauricio] Rosal. Rosal was being blackmailed by Tarditi, and Tarditi was part of the Brown–Lovestone–Angleton net.”

Brown's friend, Maurice “Le Petit” Castellani, was the likely operations manager of this CIA facet of the French connection, the group Williams referred to in 1959 – the year Castellani was connected with the seizure of seven kilos of cocaine in Milan. Castellani would also be linked to SDECE front groups, and may have been the mysterious J. Mouren of the January 1962 French Connection case.
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He was a close friend of fellow Canard, François Scaglia, and, according to Frankie Waters, “Patsy Fuca talked about ‘Le Petit Maurice' with great deference.”

Waters also stumbled on the Far East and Israeli connections when he discovered that Patsy was connected to Toots Schoenfeld and that Toots was connected to Angie's father-in-law, an important Jewish gangster named Stein. Stein was linked to the Frenchman at Apartment 15C, who in turn was bankrolling Jehan's operation. “We'd found the same address in the possession of a smuggler tied to Marcel Francisci,” Waters says, “so Grosso and I got a search warrant and went to the apartment. It was a beautiful place, but it was owned by an executive of the Michelin Tire Company, so we had to back out.”

Waters shrugs. “Think about it. Mouren was never identified; Scaglia was trained by the OSS; and Special Forces people were involved in the French Connection case.”
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Think about this, too: Patsy and J. Mouren allegedly removed about fifty kilograms of heroin from the Buick, though some FBN agents claim the car was a decoy and that someone from the FBN flaked traces of heroin in it. According to Tripodi, the eleven kilograms found at Joe Fuca's house
may not have come from the same shipment as the thirty-three kilograms found at Tony's. The car supposedly contained fifty kilograms of heroin, so, Tripodi says, “we started to think that as much as seventeen kilograms had never made it to the evidence room.”
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How could that happen? Moore in
Mafia Wife
claims that Egan and Grosso knew about the heroin at Tony's house for a month before they seized it, and then waited for two days before they turned it in. For this reason inspectors came to suspect that corrupt cops and/or FBN agents stole the missing heroin: seventeen kilograms of it according to FBN Agent Tom Tripodi; sixteen pounds in Moore's estimation. For now it is enough to know that Frankie Waters was charged and acquitted of selling to Charlie McDonnell a portion of the heroin that went astray.
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More than ever, after the botched French Connection case, the infighting at FBN headquarters negatively affected investigations of international drug law enforcement. The problem had started festering the year before, when Lee Speer sent Agent Tony Pohl to Paris to work with Paul Knight and conduct undercover operations in Marseilles. A tall, intimidating man, Pohl had served as the Army CID liaison to the Secret Service in Europe in the 1950s, and eventually his connections in the higher ranks of the French and German police forces brought him to Charlie Siragusa's attention. In September 1960, Siragusa recruited Pohl into the FBN, specifically to work on the French connection. Pohl proved his abilities during the interrogation of Etienne Tarditi. Everyone in the office was yelling at the Frenchman, trying to get him to open up. Finally Pohl, who had grown up in France and served in the Resistance, walked over to Tarditi, who was proudly wearing his Legion of Honor ribbon outside his coat. Pohl pointed at it and said, in his booming baritone voice, words to the effect of, “Your activities have brought only disgrace to this.” At which point Tarditi cracked.

In March 1961, Pohl arrived in Paris, and was immediately shunned by Knight, and mistrusted by Cusack. As Pohl recalls, “I hadn't been officially transferred, and they couldn't understand why a mere GS-7 had been sent on a special assignment to Paris.” He explained that his job was to quietly open an unofficial office in Marseilles (which he did in June 1961 at the US Consulate), and make some undercover cases; but his primary task was to locate heroin conversion labs using Marty Pera's innovative precursor tracking technique. Unfortunately, after years of wrapping himself in the
FBN's devious undercover ethos, Cusack could not prevent himself from believing that Pohl, a wiretap expert, was there as an emissary of Lee Speer, to spy on him! So Knight and Cusack froze Pohl out.

Marty Pera was a victim of the same paranoia that was devouring the FBN. Right after Pohl opened the office in Marseilles, Cusack was summoned back to FBN headquarters for some inexplicable reason, which probably had to do with Speer's integrity investigation. Perhaps Giordano had called Cusack back to help sabotage the crusading enforcement assistant? In any event, Pera was relieved of his duties as chief of the International Group and sent to Rome as acting district supervisor from July until November 1961. As Pohl noted, Pera had developed a precursor tracking system that enabled the FBN to include the operators of illicit labs in France in international conspiracy cases by matching the heroin they produced in France to heroin seized in the US. Pera's International Group had also been narrowing its focus on three major Mafiosi involved in the French connection – Santo Sorge (Joe Bonanno's financial advisor), Carlos Marcello, and Santo Trafficante. Pera was making progress, but he slipped up on two counts: he'd uncovered the CIA's guiding hand, and he'd sided with doomed enforcement assistant Lee Speer.

“Speer was good to me,” Pera acknowledges, “but he was hated by the New York agents, especially Gaffney, and I got caught in the crossfire. I tried to avoid trouble, but Gaffney was using Group Three for secret operations, and I was just getting in the way.” In addition, Pera says, “Speer was concerned about the CIA. It was obvious that Far East Asian dope was coming to the US, and everyone knew it couldn't happen without SDECE. But it was to the CIA's advantage to have these sources left intact, and Speer was a fool to think otherwise.”
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