The Strength of the Wolf (52 page)

Regarded by many as the most knowledgeable agent in the office, Ward was a dapper dresser who talked out of the side of his mouth and, according to one agent, resembled a character from a Damon Runyon story. He'd led Group Three before becoming Jim Ryan's enforcement assistant, and he'd mentored many of New York's finest agents, including George Gaffney and John Dolce. And with Dolce's help, Ward drafted the ten best case-making agents into the Gambling Squad, most from Group Three. This quintessential wolf pack included Lenny Schrier as Ward's second in command, Patty Biase, Jack Brady, Jack Griffen (a former NYPD narcotics detective known as “the red-headed lieutenant”), Frank Dolce (John's brother), Jack L. Gohde, Edward “Russ” Dower, Walter J. Smith (a former NYPD narcotics detective and schoolmate of John Dolce's), John Gallagher (a former NYPD narcotics detective who went to the Chicago Crime Commission with Charlie Siragusa), Frank Selvaggi, and Frankie Waters.

Waters half-jokingly describes the group as “the renegades – the semilegal, ultra-effective ones who no one wanted to work with, and no one wanted to boss.”

“Busting crap games tended to be dangerous work,” another New York agent explains, “and the IRS wasn't getting the job done. So Tendy put the Gambling Squad under Ward, who ran it over at the Court House with IRS Intelligence, while Gaffney went to Washington and John Enright stepped in as acting district supervisor.”

Expanding on the subject, Lenny Schrier says, “Ward was going to be transferred as part of the house cleaning in New York, but he was tight with Tendy. So to keep Pat around, Tendy made him head of the Gambling Squad, and Pat picked ten guys, including me. I was in line for a group and I didn't want to go, but Enright said I had to. And John Dolce, the new enforcement assistant, promised me that I'd get a group once we were through.

“I was Mr. Clean,” Schrier laughs, “so they made me number two to Ward. I remember him coming in that first day, with his hat tilted back on his head, rubbing his hands together. ‘What're we gonna do?' he says. I told him I had something. One of my informants, Frank Russo, had a cousin
who picked up numbers. ‘Mikey' was what they call a controller. So we followed him out of Harlem to a Bronx apartment. The next day I get a call from Russo. ‘Lenny!' he says. ‘What the fuck! They fired my cousin Mikey. Now he's hot and I gotta get him a job as a [drug] courier.'

“What that meant,” Schrier says in mock amazement, “is that someone sold us out after one day! But we made the case anyway, and through Frank Dolce and John Gohde we eventually got information about the Lou Ehrlich numbers outfit: night shift, day shift, a pad with the cops. There were 200 guys in the ring and they had 200 one-dollar bills, consecutively numbered. Each guy had a number. If he got pinched, he gave the bill to the cop, and the bill went up the line.

“We arrested these guys in Times Square with a shopping bag full of numbers and a fortune in cash. One guy gave us a marked bill and said, ‘Who you from? You a Borough?' I told him, ‘We're Feds, and please don't say any more.' We took him to the IRS, turned in the numbers, and drove over to the US Attorney's office. When we get there, the parking lot's packed with twenty-five cop cars and fifty cops shitting bricks. But there was nothing to worry about, because IRS Intelligence was selling out the cases.”

Schrier takes a sip on his Scotch. “We were closing in on Ehrlich, then JFK gets shot. I remember that day: Morgenthau and Tendy had gone to Washington to talk to Bobby Kennedy about setting up a permanent Gambling Squad – a new agency apart from the FBI. That's why Tendy asked Part Ward to take charge of it, so he could get in on the ground floor. But after the assassination they shut it down, and I got the job of filing all our reports, which took about two months.” He pauses for effect. “The names in there were as big as Lansky. Dignitaries. But it was all for nothing.”

The other great change brought about by Gaffney's promotion was the arrival of George Belk as the new district supervisor in New York. According to Howard Chappell, “Anslinger went to George Belk and asked him to help Giordano, who needed all the help he could get, and wasn't about to get it from Siragusa or Gaffney. So Belk left his job as district supervisor in Chicago to take over New York, and Pat Ward left the Gambling Squad and replaced Belk as the district supervisor in Chicago.”

An agent since 1948, Belk was a proven manager. He'd purified Chicago in the wake of Chappell's corruption investigation in 1956, and was well
aware of the dangers of his New York assignment, which included replacing group leaders and agents suspected of being corrupt. Aware that Giordano was incapable of helping him, and that Gaffney would resist, Belk took the job on the condition that he could bring along a cadre of trusted agents from Chicago, including George R. Halpin to head Group Five, Theodore “Ted” Heisig to head Group Two, and Clarence Cook as his liaison to the Black agents.

Right away there was trouble. “We're all having drinks one night,” Frank Selvaggi says, “and Halpin wants to show everyone how tough he is. So he calls me ‘Selagusa.' People used to call me that, because they all thought Charlie was doing for me. But Charlie never did anything for me, even though he could have. Anyway, I say something back to Halpin, and as I'm leaving the bar he comes charging out and jumps on my back. I spin around, carry him over to the curb, and dump him in a trashcan. Some tough guy. He pulls the same sort of stunt with Frankie Black [Frankie Waters's nickname] later on. Frankie was getting a little out of control around then, and he put a round between his legs.” A smile spreads across Selvaggi's face. “I watched the bullet skip off down the street, while Halpin just stood there with his mouth hanging open.”

George Belk arrived in New York in April 1963, knowing that he was stepping into a hornets' nest. But he didn't expect to find that, at George Gaffney's insistence, John Dolce was his enforcement assistant. The rationalization was that Dolce would provide continuity while Belk settled in. But in reality, Gaffney put Dolce in place so he could influence the direction of major investigations. Complicating the situation was the fact that Dolce, as a former leader of Group Three, was at the top of Belk's hit list of agents he wanted to fire.

“Belk knew that the troops needed somebody other than John Dolce to go to,” an agent recalls, “and after conferring with Artie Fluhr, he created an executive assistant job specifically for Art. New York was the first office to have that position. As Belk's executive assistant, Artie started hiring replacement agents. He also helped Belk make case assignments, and he got a salary upgrade for everyone.”

One cynical New York agent says, “Belk makes Fluhr his executive assistant, and La Fluhr does for Belk what Mendelsohn did for Gaffney: he carries stories. He tells Belk what the agents are doing: anything that can be used against them, like who their girlfriends are. And from then on it's Belk and Fluhr drinking on the arm at [drug trafficker-cum-informer] Gerry Nagelberg's place on 56th Street, while Harry Masi [the office clerk] did all of Fluhr's work.”

Although, as the previous paragraph illustrates, some agents resented his promotion and friendship with Belk, Arthur J. Fluhr was a dedicated and effective agent. He'd quit his accounting job with General Motors in 1954, while married with kids, to take an entry-level position with the FBN. A veteran of the Marine Corps and a graduate of Iona College, he was never part of the Gaffney–Ward–Dolce clique, but he could swim with sharks and could hold his Jack Daniels – in other words, Fluhr was precisely the type of executive assistant Belk needed to circumvent Gaffney and Dolce, in an attempt to reform an office that was spinning out of control, in part as a result of the Gambling Squad.

The Gambling Squad scandals of 1963 occupy a prominent place in the annals of FBN folklore. Even a CIA debriefer, when questioning Charlie Siragusa in 1977 about the MKULTRA Program, inquired if “the scandals of 1963” had anything to do with the CIA pad on 13th Street, or Feldman's pad on 18th Street. Siragusa responded with an equivocal “they might have.”
⁸

The scandals of 1963 grew out of rumors about Gambling Squad members holding up crap games at gunpoint, or stealing bags of money as they were being delivered to bookies. But they also included stories like the one about the time Frankie Waters was found unconscious in a bar in Brooklyn. He'd left his car parked in front of a fire hydrant and a patrol car stopped to check it out. The cops found wiretap equipment on the front seat, a gun underneath it, and a bundle of cash. When taken to the precinct to explain, Waters said the cash was a loan from his father for a down payment on a house.

In a similar incident in the Bowery, cops found an agent passed out in his car, with the headlights on and the motor running, and wiretap equipment, guns, and a briefcase full of cash in the trunk. The agent had just escorted a Frenchman to the airport.

There were only two inspectors investigating these incidents and allegations in 1963. Having been demoted from enforcement assistant, Lee Speer as district supervisor in Denver handled corruption inquiries west of the Mississippi, while Irwin Greenfeld handled those on the east. But Greeny on his own couldn't manage the problem in New York, and as a result, morale was at an all-time low among the agents, good and bad. Violent factions were forming, a whisper campaign raged, and ill feelings simmered, waiting to explode. Eventually it all got to be too much for veteran undercover Agent Jim Attie, who had been transferred to New York in 1961.

“I was Jim's partner during the Gambling Squad era,” Tony Mangiaracina recalls. “I was in Group Four at the time. Art Mendelsohn
had inherited the group from Joe Amato, who'd transferred to Boston, then retired after developing neurological problems from stress. We called the office ‘The Fish Bowl' back then, because everybody was watching everybody else. It was a convoluted situation, and Jim was definitely paranoid – but we were all paranoid, so I didn't notice right away. Then he does a U-turn on a one-way street near Times Square: he thought a Mossad agent was tailing us. Plus he was bitter, and getting angrier all the time.

“Then one day he shows up in the reception area outside Belk's office. He's sitting there muttering about how Siragusa fucked him and how he's gonna kill him. Well, Belk didn't see him right away, so he just sat there getting madder and madder.

“Some guys say he shot up the office, but that's not true. But some guys from Group Four did talk him into giving up his gun and going with them to the Public Health facility, where the doctor said that Jim had to voluntarily commit himself to get an examination – and that's when he took out a drop gun and gave it up. The agents were a little shook up over that. They didn't like the idea that he was sitting between them in the car with a drop gun.

“Well, Jim stayed at the hospital and never came back.”

Thirty-five years later, Jim Attie summarized his experience as an FBN agent as follows: “I'm not proud of what I did. It was a dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic agent.”

Through his daring exploits, Attie had generated as much good press for the FBN as any agent, and he felt that Anslinger should have reciprocated with raises and promotions. But those rewards were not forthcoming. “The Hearst newspapers were doing articles on our undercover work in the Middle East,” he explains, “and the reporters couldn't believe what they were being told. So the Bureau had me come to Washington to talk about the cases I'd made. And during the interview Anslinger says, ‘We've had some better, some worse.' He also said I was always covered, which wasn't true. I was
always
alone. After he said those things, I thought about how he kept the Bureau small enough to fuel the competition, and how that caused all the trouble. So in front of the reporters I said to him, ‘What could you possibly know about it?' I called him a manipulator and a cheapskate, and I said I wasn't impressed. He didn't say a word.”

But Anslinger didn't forget, either. In 1961, Attie was transferred to New York and put in Group Four, where he was not received with open arms. Based on his reputation as a Speer man, and a potentially homicidal lone wolf, the nervous New York agents considered him both dangerous and a sleeper for the shooflies – and his problems began to mount.

As Attie recalls, “I came to work with two dollars in my pocket and my lunch in a brown paper bag. Meanwhile, the other guys in the group are eating lunch at an expensive Japanese restaurant. Around me, they were all secretive and apprehensive, and I was never asked to do anything. In New York I made nothing but small cases,” he sighs. “Meanwhile, Charlie Mac is in town talking with Lenny Schrier and playing cards with Ike Feldman. When we worked together in Chicago, Charlie Mac set me up with a hit man named Garibaldi. Next thing I know, Garibaldi's in New York, looking for me.”

Attie's situation didn't improve when his former boss, George Belk, replaced George Gaffney as district supervisor. “When I was in Chicago, Belk was always bragging about how I made so many big cases, using so little money,” Attie explains. “In 1960, he even recommended me for the Treasury Employee of the Year Award. In Chicago he was hard, but fair. But in New York, he was told by Giordano to unload me. He puts me in Durham's unit (the Radio Shack) and says: ‘You're a grade twelve, like him; but remember, you're not in charge.'

“I'm there in the electronics unit,” Attie continues, “but it's all gypsy wires. One day Durham says, ‘We've got to tap a phone tonight, and you've got to do it yourself.' I told him I wouldn't do it without written authorization.” Jim tenses. “A few days later, Durham invited me for coffee at the Choc Full O'Nuts, and when I got back to the office, my head was spinning. I remember grabbing the desk and thinking I'd ingested something. I put on my coat and hat and when I got on the elevator, my mouth was dry and my body was trying to vomit. Colors were intense and had sound. I walked to the 33rd Street Station and took a train home. And when I got home, my wife took me to two doctors, and they said it sounded like I'd unwittingly ingested LSD.”