The Strength of the Wolf (50 page)

Taking on the CIA was hard enough, but Speer was fighting the French too. “SDECE split our people,” Pera says. “Cusack wanted to join the CIA [which may be the reason he returned to the US], so he went with the Paris police squad, which the CIA had co-opted. Tartaglino went with the Central Narcotics Office. So Speer calls Cusack back from Rome and sends me over as acting supervisor. Before I go, Gaffney says, ‘Relax while you're there. Enjoy yourself. Keep a low profile. Do anything for Speer and you're dead.'

“Those four months in Rome
were
deadly,” Pera sighs. “I was reporting back to Washington where Fred Dick, Siragusa, and Cusack were all second-guessing me, because I was ‘Speer's man.' Same thing happened to Tony Pohl, a French-speaking agent Speer sent to Marseilles to find the labs that Andy couldn't find.”

There were problems in Rome, too. Pera had a skeleton crew that consisted of two agents; Hank Manfredi – helpful, but a part-time employee due to his CIA obligations; and Agent Joe Vullo. Knight, like Manfredi, spent as much time working for the CIA as he did the FBN, and was in and out of Paris. Vizzini would be recalled to the US in late 1961, and Pohl was struggling. There were the usual CIA intrigues too. According to Pera, the Police Judiciare had put a wiretap on an OAS general [perhaps General Salan, although Pohl adamantly denies it] who had served in Indochina. “He was an opium smoker,” Pera says, “and we were trying to find his supplier. But SDECE turned us away.

“When I got back,” he continues, “the International Group was gone. Gaffney said I'd get an enforcement group, but by then I'd had it. I hung around in New York for a while, then went to the McClellan Committee in Washington with John Enright and Gene Marshall. Then I quit in October 1963 to join the Office of Naval Investigations.”

The International Group was splintered by then. Its intelligence function, upon which the FBN relied so heavily, went to Group Three, and its technical responsibilities went to Norey Durham at a small unit dubbed the Radio Shack. A separate fugitive squad was created, and by 1961 strange people started popping up – like Johnson, the wiretap man in the French Connection case. Tony Mangiaracina recalls the arrival in New York of an agent who studied the files, then wound up running Pan Am security in Bremerhaven, Germany. “Another time they sent a kid to us from Chicago. He spoke perfect French and was going to Rome, but all he did was sit around reading the files. Then they sent him to Washington to learn Arabic. Very spooky people.”

Lenny Schrier got involved with the spies when he busted a Brazilian lawyer, Luis Almeada, with five ounces of coke. “His brother was a Brazilian congressman, and Luis got the coke from a German priest who managed a lab in Bolivia,” Schrier says with a wry smile. “Then Marty Pera brought Antranik Paroutian back from Beirut, and we put Paroutian in the same cell with Luis. They became friends, and Paroutian offered to introduce Luis to his brother, a police official in Lebanon with a morphine base operation in Syria. We got Luis out of jail, to make it look like he was free to travel around, and then Paroutian wrote to his brother, telling him that Luis was coming over with money to buy heroin. We sent undercover Agent Bob Gaudette instead. Gaudette was a French Canadian who looked like Luis. But,” Lenny shrugs, “the CIA grabbed Gaudette in Beirut, and nothing happened.”

Jim Attie in Chicago had pulled off yet another investigation that led to Sami Khoury and some Lebanese politicians. Attie's cousin was in a Syrian
paramilitary organization and was willing to cover him in the interior of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Attie had his suitcase packed, but Chicago District Supervisor George Belk cancelled the operation. No explanation was proffered, nor was one needed – the CIA and Mossad wanted their prize informer, Sami Khoury, left intact for the time being. Plus Attie, like Pera, was a Speer man, and Henry Giordano wasn't about to let him put a feather in Speer's cap.

Even high-strung George Gaffney was getting jumpier than usual. “Charlie Siragusa let us make the Victor Stadter case at the CIA pad on 13th Street, and that's when it occurred to me that we were asking for trouble. ‘Suppose the defense wants to know where Stadter [a Texas bush pilot and drug smuggler] was interviewed?' I asked Charlie. ‘What are we going to say then?' ”

While more and more US-based case-making agents were experiencing CIA complications, it was business as usual for agents overseas. But
unlike
everyone else working abroad, Sal Vizzini knew how to use nitroglycerine. He was also an expert lock-pick and had once cracked the New York office safe in less than five minutes, on a bet. Along with his undercover abilities, these arcane skills made Vizzini attractive to the CIA and, while he was opening the FBN's first office in Istanbul, he was recruited by Harold Fiedler, a CIA advisor to the Turkish secret police.

“Sal,” according to Fiedler, “was a wild man whom the Turks loved, because he was as tough and brave as they were. But he was doing more than he should have, taking risks beyond belief. There were gunfights. It was complex, but what he did improved my position.”

As Vizzini tells it, “I was there in 1960 during the revolution [when CIA-backed General Cemel Gursel deposed Premier Adnan Menderes] and Hal wanted me to find out how people near the Russian border were feeling, which I was able to do, because I brought along cigarettes and booze. Hal's people were following the Russians, and after I shot two of them, the Turks wanted to hang me. So Cusack calls up Hal and says, ‘We'll make it a junk deal gone bad.' Which they did.

“Then in late 1961, I was called back to Washington, so I cleaned out a '57 Chevy Siragusa had given me in Rome. I was looking under the seat to make sure there wasn't anything there that shouldn't be there, and I found a fully automatic, silenced .22. It's a CIA hit gun.” Vizzini grins. “I didn't tell Charlie, but when I got back I traded it to Gaffney for a pair of binoculars he said came off the bridge of the USS Missouri. Well, the binoculars didn't come off the ship, and taking the gun from Siragusa and trading it to Gaffney turned out to be a big mistake.

“Nothing happens right away. Anslinger was grateful for what I'd done in Turkey and Italy, and he lets me go to Miami. Then he asks me to go to Thailand on a ninety-day TDY, to open an office in Bangkok. As Charlie puts me on the plane he says, ‘We need to convince Customs that they need our help, so glom onto their cases. Be there for the arrest, and send back the photos. But take it away from Customs.

“ ‘Keep your Sicilian up,' Charlie said. ‘We need you.'

“Turns out the Thailand job had another purpose. Customs was in Vietnam, but only under the aegis of helping the soldiers. Apart from that, no one's making cases in Vietnam because the CIA is escorting dope to its warlords. Then through the CIA I hear about a processing plant in Burma. It's their idea. I swim across the Mekong and, using CIA explosives, I blow it up. The State Department's pissed, but the CIA's happy, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.

“When I come back, the pharmacist [Henry Giordano] is the Commissioner, Siragusa's the deputy, and Gaffney's the enforcement assistant. Anslinger puts me in Miami again, and the CIA puts me with Philippe de Vosjoli. Philippe was SDECE's liaison to Angleton, and Angleton gave him wiretap equipment that we passed to his agents inside Cuba. We took photographs and did some other things that were instrumental in defusing the Missile Crisis of October 1962.
²⁴

“Next they want me to go back to Thailand, only this time with Bowman Taylor, an agent from Dallas. Taylor was going over to run the Bangkok office that I'd opened. So I introduce him to my informer, an Army intelligence captain with the Thai narcotic police, and Taylor digs up the fact that I'd bought the guy a Lambretta with official funds. By then Siragusa had bugged the DC office, and he'd overheard Gaffney talking about the .22. Charlie had gotten in trouble with the CIA for losing the gun, and when he found out that I'd taken it, he turned against me. He was pissed off because Cusack had gone behind his back to cover me in Turkey too, so he used Taylor's report to destroy me.”
²⁵

The CIA gave and the CIA took cases away; that was the golden rule every case-making agent and FBN executive understood by mid-1962, when James Angleton assigned James Ludlum, a member of his counter-intelligence staff, as the Agency's first official liaison to the FBN. And with that move, Angleton asserted his control. Already compromised by institutionalized corruption and Anslinger's apathy, the case-makers started to walk a high-tension wire the CIA had strung between fantasy and reality, and with the help of the FBI, the effect began to take its toll.

With Harry Anslinger's retirement in May 1962, the Kennedy administration had a chance to modernize the Bureau of Narcotics, but too many lawmakers had invested too much political capital in promoting the hard line to accept any drastic changes. So the administration formed an Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse in January 1963. Named for chairman E. Barrett Prettyman, a retired federal judge, the Prettyman Commission was to review current drug law enforcement policies and propose alternative policies to those previously pursued.

Prior to this, the search for Anslinger's replacement had turned inward, and in view of Bobby Kennedy's ethnically charged war on the Mafia, a political decision was made that an Italian American would get the job. The choice was between Charlie Siragusa and Henry Giordano, and the key decision maker was Bobby Kennedy's
consigliere
, Carmine Bellino. This should have been to Siragusa's advantage, because he knew Bellino well; Bellino was the Kennedy family's link to his close friend Hank Manfredi, and Manfredi was serving as Jackie Kennedy's personal bodyguard during her occasional visits to Europe. But these personal relationships were not meaningful enough to win Siragusa the Commissioner's job – nor was the support he received from his “rabbi” on Capitol Hill, Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell.

“Charlie wasn't a battler,” explains Fred Dick, his colleague at headquarters. “He knew that Giordano and Gaffney were going to screw it up. But he also knew they were going to win.”

Siragusa facetiously told a friend, “The trick is to get off the stage before the audience starts throwing tomatoes at you.”

After decades of being the alpha wolf, Anslinger, however, wasn't ready to leave the pack, even after his retirement, so despite his promise to Siragusa, he threw his weight behind Giordano. He knew that Giordano was incapable of making decisions without his advice, and that by backing Giordano, and accepting a sinecure position at the United Nations, he would be able to keep his hand in the game.

To assuage Senator Pell and ensure Siragusa a heftier retirement plan, Treasury's assistant secretary for law enforcement, James Reed, on Bellino's advice, persuaded Giordano to accept Siragusa as his deputy for a year, on the condition that Siragusa would then step aside and allow George Gaffney – who had ingratiated himself with Bobby Kennedy – to take his place.

The object was to guarantee political stability at a critical point in Bobby's war on crime. A rebellion by young Mafiosi had erupted after Apalachin, and had never subsided. After Joe Profaci died in June 1962, his ineffectual successor, Giuseppe Magliocco, watched helplessly while Joseph Colombo battled “Crazy Joe” Gallo for control of the family. Having moved to Arizona, Joe Bonanno was fighting an insurgent faction in his family in New York. Stefano Magaddino was under investigation in the Rinaldo–Palmieri case. Carlo Gambino, Tom Lucchese, and Carlos Marcello were in danger of being deported. Sam Giancana was dodging subpoenas. Tony Bender – leader of the mutiny against Genovese family boss Tom Eboli – went for a ride in April 1962 and never returned. And Jimmy Hoffa had been indicted in Tennessee and was set to go to trial in October.

Aware of all this turmoil, Bobby was looking for a knockout punch, the potential for which would emerge in the person of Joe Valachi, the disgruntled Mafia buttonman Frank Selvaggi had squeezed into ratting out Sal Maneri, Sal Rinaldo, and several other hoods. As Kennedy knew, the Rinaldo–Palmieri case had led to the arrest of dozens of major drug traffickers in Italy and America, and had generated two major conspiracy cases. The Attorney General was grateful and in return would reward George Gaffney with a promotion in August 1962 to enforcement assistant, the number three position at FBN headquarters.

Meanwhile, Valachi was convicted in the Rinaldo–Palmieri case in December 1961, and in February 1962, he was sentenced to twenty years
in the Atlanta Penitentiary. To his immense disappointment, that time was to be served in addition to the fifteen years he'd received in the Freeman case. But the FBN wasn't through with him, and Gaffney, while still serving as district supervisor in New York, had him returned to the Federal Detention Center on West Street, for questioning in several new and ongoing investigations. Gaffney's plan was to turn up the pressure on the aging hood by making it appear to his criminal associates as if he was already cooperating. To that end, Gaffney, Pat Ward, and Frank Selvaggi began periodically, and visibly, visiting him at West Street.

As Gaffney recalls, “We'd just gotten Mauro, Caruso, and Maneri in Spain, and we had the US Marshals take them to lock-up at West Street where, by cruel coincidence, Vinnie Mauro sees Valachi. Mauro asks him, ‘What you doing upstairs with the feds for three hours?' ”

Despite the veiled threat from his murderous associate, Valachi felt that Selvaggi had framed him in the Rinaldo case. Angry and obstinate, he refused to cooperate. So US Attorney Robert Morgenthau had him returned to the Atlanta Penitentiary and put in the same cell as Vito Genovese, as a way of softening him up. It was well known that Genovese believed that Valachi was an informer, and in their cell, in full view of everyone, the boss of bosses gave Valachi the “kiss of death,” the traditional Mafia gesture of friendship before a fatal betrayal.