The Strength of the Wolf (5 page)

Then a truly amazing thing happened. On 14 January 1930 the son of Narcotics Division chief Colonel Levi Nutt appeared before the Grand Jury. Employed as a tax attorney in the nation's capital, Roland Nutt was accused of filing false income tax statements for none other than Arnold Rothstein! There was even a suggestion that Roland was involved in drug trafficking. Stung by the allegations, Roland declared his innocence. Yes, he had examined Rothstein's tax returns in 1926 – but only as a favor for his brother-in-law!
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The scandal simmered and in late February, amid charges that the Narcotics Division office in New York was guilty of “misconduct, incompetence and dereliction of duty,” the grand jury released its final report. It revealed that the Narcotic Division's Deputy Commissioner, William C. Blanchard, had instructed George W. Cunningham (Oyler's replacement as agent in charge of the Narcotics Division's New York office) to “pad” reports. Blanchard in turn pointed the finger at Colonel Nutt, who, he said, had become obsessed with “showing success.”
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The affair ended with Colonel Nutt's demotion and exile to an Internal Revenue office in upstate New York. Congressman Hamilton C. Fish (D-NY) then presented Congress with a plan to reorganize the Narcotics Division. No further investigations into official corruption were conducted, and any relationships that might have existed between federal narcotic agents and congressmen receded into the shadows of history.

On 30 June 1930 the Bureau of Narcotics was formed from the remnants of the Narcotics Division and the Treasury Department's Foreign Control Board. As part of the reorganization, President Herbert C. Hoover, on the recommendation of Representative Porter and William Randolph Hearst, appointed Harry Jacob Anslinger as acting Commissioner.

Anslinger was not the only contender for the job, but he was uniquely qualified. As a former captain in the Pennsylvania Railroad's police force,
he understood the security needs of private industry, and was able to manage rough-and-tumble detectives. Having served as a Foreign Service officer from 1918 to 1926 in Germany, Venezuela, and the Bahamas, he also had the diplomatic experience that was necessary to represent America abroad. This latter qualification was especially important in view of a mandate, imposed by Congress upon the Commissioner of narcotics, to go to the foreign source of America's narcotics problem, without upsetting the State Department's apple cart.
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Furthermore, Anslinger was familiar with the modus operandi of international smugglers. In 1926 he was transferred from the State Department to the Treasury Department, where he served until 1929 as chief of the Prohibition Unit's Division of Foreign Control. In this position he honed his bureaucratic skills working with the senior administrators of several government agencies to halt the flow of illegal liquor and narcotics into US ports. In 1929 he was appointed assistant Commissioner of prohibition, and for over a year directed the Old PU's elite Flying Squad, composed of the Treasury Department's top agents, against interstate and international drug and alcohol smuggling rings. But it was his marriage to Andrew Mellon's niece, Martha Denniston Leet, that secured for Anslinger the highly sought-after job as Commissioner of narcotics. This Establishment family connection, and the financial security it entailed, meant that Anslinger, unlike his ill-fated predecessor Colonel Nutt, could not be bought and would not use his position to enrich himself. In addition, it helped him garner the support of the industries, business associations, and social organizations that were investing in drug law enforcement. Among Anslinger's supporters (later referred to as “Anslinger's Army”) were the blue chip drug manufacturing and pharmaceutical lobbies, several conservative newspaper publishers, the law enforcement community, the Southern-based evangelical movement, and the powerful China Lobby. Anslinger's in-law connection with the Mellon family also reinforced his ideological association with other Roosevelt Republican scions of America's Establishment.
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Anslinger took charge of the Bureau of Narcotics in September 1930, at the age of thirty-eight. He was given a broad international mandate to pursue, at their sources, the drug smuggling rings that had proliferated in the 1920s. He was also told to work with state and local narcotic bureaus to disrupt interstate trafficking and eliminate corruption. As the record shows, Anslinger performed his job with flair. For thirty-two years, until his retirement in 1962, his personality, policies, and appointments defined both the Narcotics Bureau and the nation's war on drugs.

In the course of its obscure existence, the Bureau of Narcotics embarked on the most successful federal law enforcement endeavor in American history. On a per capita basis, it put more hardened criminals behind bars and penetrated more deeply into the underworld than its rival, the FBI. The magnitude of this accomplishment is even more astounding when one considers that the Bureau of Narcotics rarely employed more than 300 agents at any time, and that those 300 in turn relied upon a small percentage of “case-makers” to perform the dangerous undercover work and handle the duplicitous informants required to get the job done.

The story of these case-making agents is at the heart of the tragedy of the Bureau of Narcotics – and America's fatally flawed war on drugs. For in the course of bringing down one predatory drug trafficker after another, these superlative agents were perpetually on the verge of uncovering the underworld's clandestine relationship with America's Establishment, that “exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.”
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As demonstrated by the Rothstein, Husar, and Kao cases, the Establishment preferred to dismantle the Narcotics Division rather than endure the consequences of thorough investigations that would have revealed the corruption within the system and the fact that the government was protecting the Nationalist Chinese drug-smuggling syndicate. As a result, the
case-makers walked a very thin line. And the one thing that kept them from crossing that line – and bringing down the Bureau of Narcotics – was Harry J. Anslinger, the organization's inimitable Commissioner from 1930 until 1962.

Harry Anslinger was an imposing figure, husky and nearly six feet tall, with an intimidating stare, an imperious air, and a flair for self-promotion. But first and foremost he was a patriot with a deep and abiding commitment to the security of America's ruling elite. As an apparatchik of corporate America, he faithfully subordinated federal drug law enforcement to the Establishment's national security interests and, when necessary, concealed the government's involvement with foreign nations that profited from trafficking in illegal narcotics.

On the domestic political front, Anslinger kept Congress satisfied through an unwavering law-and-order approach to drug addiction policy, and he kept state and local officials happy by making politically astute appointments at the Bureau's fourteen district offices, which he staffed with supervisors he chose as much for their contacts as their management skills. Supervisors were expected to adhere to Anslinger's orthodoxy and to solve problems of agent misbehavior on the spot and without fanfare. Younger agents, other than “Special Hire” appointments (agents hired for a unique qualification, such as the ability to speak a Sicilian dialect) were college graduates with degrees most often in pharmacy or law, while senior agents were usually veterans of the First World War, former private detectives, or former Prohibition agents.

Whatever their backgrounds, federal narcotic agents were unique in the field of law enforcement. Upon joining the Bureau they were given a gun and a badge and taught how to make arrests, gather evidence for presentation in court, test and handle seized narcotics, tail a suspect without being seen, and rule their informants with an iron fist. They learned how to use disguises, marked bills, and opium-sniffing dogs, and were taught how to raid opium dens and “shooting galleries” where addicts gathered to smoke or inject drugs. They were also pioneers in the use of wiretaps and hidden microphones: and when court orders for electronic surveillance were not forthcoming, “gypsy wire” men emerged from the ranks and the practice continued
sub rosa
as a means of developing leads.

In their role as provocateurs, case-making agents “created a crime” by posing as buyers and setting up drug deals. At great personal risk they lived within the criminal milieu and, by necessity, developed extra-legal tactics. They knew how to hold “sidewalk court” and administer “street justice.” They knew how to use a blackjack or brass knuckles instead of their fists,
how to pick a lock and search a room without leaving a trace, and how to check their scruples at the door; for their work began on skid row, searching the lining of a pocket, or in a sock, or a body cavity of some sniveling, sniffing, lice-infested junky.

Creating a crime required agents to fool addicts and smugglers into making mistakes, and conservative judges and prosecutors often admired such proactive tactics. As a result Narcotics Bureau agents acquired a reputation as the most daring and productive, albeit unscrupulous, of all federal lawmen. In stretching the limits of the law, case-making agents also developed an abiding and self-destructive antipathy for liberal lawyers and lenient judges. Frustrated by what they perceived as a rigged judicial system, they viewed the Bill of Rights as an obstacle and, instead of acting in strict compliance with a suspect's rights under the law, they formed an unwritten code of silence to protect themselves.

The sacred rite of passage for case-makers was undercover work. When delving into the deadly recesses of the underworld, they assumed a criminal persona and worked alone and incommunicado. Though beaten and tossed in jail by policemen who were unaware (or resentful) of their true identity, or when tested to the limits of their endurance (or conscience) by the felons they deceived, undercover agents did what was necessary to preserve their cover and honor their creed.

The result was unrivaled success, and as America's silent law enforcement agency, the Bureau of Narcotics charted the hierarchy of crime in America, as it was organized by the Mafia's boss of bosses, Charles Luciano, and his Polish-born Jewish partner, Meyer (real name Suchowljansky) Lansky. Their strength and determination won Anslinger the trust of America's law enforcement community. But it was Anslinger, not his agents, who single-handedly earned the trust of America's drug-manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries by forcefully backing a proposal at the League of Nations for an open, competitive drug market. Restricted by Prohibition-era laws, the American drug industry was disadvantaged on the unregulated world market, and Anslinger's prominent role in the passage of the 1931 Limitation Agreement did much to level the playing field. After it was ratified in 1933, and America officially joined the League's Opium Advisory Committee, Anslinger arguably became the most influential member in the global drug community.

He was certainly its most aggressive member, and on the diplomatic front his chief rivals were the elegant gentlemen of the Opium Bloc – the venerable colonial powers that had the largest financial stake in the licit opium trade. Using his considerable intelligence and security-related talents,
Anslinger co-opted this powerful clique in 1931 by forming the Committee of One Hundred, a secret group consisting of the chief narcotics officers from Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland, and some two dozen other nations that would be required by the Limitation Agreement to establish narcotics bureaus like the one Anslinger managed.

In addition to setting up this global law enforcement and intelligence network (which helped crack the Eliopoulos case), Anslinger worked closely with the Foreign Policy Association and drug industry lobbyists to square foreign and domestic drug policy to the advantage of the industrial elite. The support of the private sector and its adjunct, the espionage Establishment, as well as the Committee of One Hundred, provided Anslinger with a unique unofficial apparatus that facilitated the Bureau's clandestine operations.

Apart from being an international operator, Anslinger was a bureaucrat and was required to show success in a cost-effective manner, and he achieved this feat during the Great Depression by having his agents seize a quantity of narcotics that exceeded, in dollar amount, his annual budget of about $3 million. A tight-fisted manager, he kept his agents' expenses to a bare minimum too.

Anslinger also exploited the controversy over national drug policy to bolster his standing with Washington's conservative Establishment. His primary weapon in this endeavor was a talent for generating the type of sensational publicity that elevated his status in the tabloid press and enabled him to upstage social scientists and other liberals who advocated legalization and a reduction in the price of prescription medicines as the most cost-effective ways of putting drug traffickers out of business. Defusing such progressive notions was the major public relations issue Anslinger faced, and he cleverly stalemated his critics by emphasizing the evils of the Mafia and its phantom communist allies, rather than focusing attention on misguided pharmacists and family physicians dispensing narcotic drugs to middle-class, mostly female, addicts. In this way the Commissioner moved the debate over national drug policy away from the ambiguous issue of demand, which he could not control, to the issue of supply – the grist of his guerrilla warfare organization's mill.

To convince congressional appropriations committees that his outfit was performing effectively and efficiently, and to obtain scarce resources during the Depression, Anslinger presented politically correct but dubious statistics about the number and nature of drug addicts, thus enabling Congressmen to wage the popular “tough on crime” campaigns that consistently ensured their re-election. As each new crop of Congressmen demanded stronger
medicine to cure the nation's drug plague, Anslinger promoted mandatory sentencing and longer prison terms. Convinced that Anslinger's agents were all that stood between America's impressionable youth and the irresistible temptations of narcotic drugs, Congress in turn expanded the Bureau's search and seizure powers, enhancing its ability to make cases and improving agent morale.