The Strength of the Wolf (53 page)

Jim is sitting very still. “Two days later, when I went back to the office, Belk called me in. He made me sit outside his office for hours while he talked with Greenfeld. Finally he called me in and said I'd have to go to the hospital. Then he asked me to sign something.

“I said to them, ‘You people drugged me.'

“Greenfeld was rigid with fear. ‘I want your gun,' he said. But I refused, at which point they called in Hunt, Mendelsohn, Krueger, and Durham.
And while they were taking me outside, I heard Greenfeld talking on the phone with Giordano. ‘We'll get him admitted,' he said. ‘Don't worry.' So I looked at Belk, put my thumbnail under my tooth, and flicked.” Attie shakes his head. “And that was my exit from the FBN. I went to the Public Health Service Hospital where they did a spinal tap, but didn't find any drugs in my system.”

Jim smiles bravely. “I brought a lot on myself,” he laughs, “by telling off Anslinger and Giordano. I should have listened to Tony Zirilli. Tony was the greatest undercover agent ever. He used to gamble with tens of thousands of Bureau dollars. Tony made me look like an amateur. One time he said to me, ‘Why use your own money? They can't pay me enough to do this job.' And he was right.”

The next shock felt by the faltering FBN came shortly after Joe Valachi described Vito Genovese as the boss of bosses on national TV. The problem started on 27 January 1961, when John Ormento took Nelson Cantellops to a church in the Bronx and – in the presence of a priest, notary public, and three lawyers – Cantellops confessed to having lied about his meeting with Genovese. On that basis, Criminal Defense Attorney Edward B. Williams filed an appeal on Genovese's behalf. But Cantellops re-recanted, and the appeal was denied, and in April 1962, at the age of 62, Genovese began serving a fifteen-year sentence at the Atlanta Penitentiary.
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In October 1963, Williams filed another appeal on Genovese's behalf, claiming he should have been given copies of the prosecutor's interview notes with Cantellops. “Then, to everyone's surprise,” Gaffney recalls, “Williams introduces Bill Rowan as a witness for the defense.

“A few years earlier,” Gaffney continues, “Rowan had worked for the Bureau, but I fired him, and he went to work for Prudential Bache. Then Williams brings him up to New York, and I'm called to testify. Williams asks me to explain why I fired Rowan. I told him that he had cracked up a government car, but didn't report it. So Williams walks over with a letter of recommendation I'd written for Rowan, addressed to officials at Bache. The letter listed his good qualities and Williams made me read it out loud. Then he said, ‘Reconcile your firing of Rowan with this letter.'

“ ‘There's nothing sinister about it, counselor,' I said. ‘The man's got a wife and a couple of kids. Just because he can't take the pressure of the FBN doesn't mean he should be deprived of a livelihood. It doesn't mean
he's not suited for a less stressful job.' At which point the judge leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Don't say another word. You've got him by the balls.' ”

Gaffney laughs bitterly. “Williams accused the Bureau of destroying crucial documents that should have gone to the US Attorney. But the Genovese appeal was denied, and after that, Williams vowed he'd never handle another narcotic case again.”

Rowan's testimony didn't help Genovese, but the fact that a former agent would testify on behalf of the Mafia's boss of bosses contributed to the FBN's downward spiral. So did Paul Knight's transfer to the CIA, and Howard Chappell's resignation in 1961. Chappell quit to become Commissioner of Public Works in Los Angeles after Giordano tried to transfer him to New York. Marty Pera's resignation and transfer in October 1963 to the Office of Naval Intelligence was another blow, as was Charlie Siragusa's retirement in December 1963.

Social forces were conspiring against the FBN too. In 1961, the American Medical and Bar Associations issued a 173-page report titled
Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease?
The report blamed surges in drug smuggling and poverty on Anslinger's policy of regarding addicts as criminals rather than people in need of medical assistance. The report argued that the FBN was driving addicts into the black market by ignoring Supreme Court rulings that allowed doctors to prescribe narcotics to addicts for legitimate medical purposes. It was in response to this report that the Kennedy administration had created the Prettyman Commission and had appointed Dean Markham as its drug policy advisor. And in a 30 May 1963 letter to the
New York Times
, Markham backed a Prettyman Commission recommendation that doctors be allowed to prescribe narcotics to addicts on a “maintenance basis.” As a result, experimental “halfway houses” like Synanon and Daytop began to emerge as viable alternatives to imprisonment.

Last but not least, the FBN was hurt by a shift in focus by the Giordano administration from the Sicilian Mafia to the French connection and its sources in Turkey. This change served the Mafia well at a time when it should have been reeling from the Valachi revelations, the Rinaldo–Palmieri case, and the wars within the Profaci and Bonanno families. But America's intelligence and security agencies continued to protect the million-dollar men they had conscripted in the Establishment's secret and ongoing war against labor, liberalism, and desegregation.

The loss of case-making agents to the Gambling Squad, several key retirements and resignations, the dismantling of the International Group, and the FBN's emphasis on the French connection, combined to give the
Mafia the breathing room it needed to reorganize its sputtering drug industry. The process began in Sicily on 30 June 1963 when a booby-trapped Fiat, into which Palermo boss Sal Greco was about to enter, exploded and killed several policemen and bystanders. The Ciaculli Massacre put the Carabinieri on a massive manhunt that scattered Sicilian Mafiosi to the four winds. The most important fugitive was Tomasso Buscetta. A participant at the Palermo summit in 1957, Buscetta would become the indispensable middleman between the Badalamenti family in Sicily and the Gambino family in America. While a fugitive, he would form relations with Corsicans in South America, Mexico, and Montreal. Meanwhile, lacking the necessary funds and personnel, the Italian authorities called off their manhunt, and Buscetta's godfather, Gaetano Badalamenti, began waging a vendetta against the Grecos and La Barberas.
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The Badalamenti connection dated back to 1946, when Gaetano immigrated to Detroit and formed relations with Frank Coppola, Sam Carolla, and Carlos Marcello. After his deportation in 1950, Gaetano and his brothers teamed up with Coppola, who, having been deported, settled in their neighborhood, and together they became Sicily's major heroin traffickers. The Sicilian Badalamentis were known to the FBN, as was their cousin Salvatore in the Profaci family. Gaetano, like Buscetta, had attended the 1957 Palermo summit, where the old alliance between Luciano and Joe Valachi's godfather, Joe Bonanno, gave way to the new one between Carlo Gambino and the Badalamentis.
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Further impacting the situation was a major change at the Vatican, where Giovanni Montini was named Pope Paul VI in June 1963. Son of the founder of Italy's Christian Democrat Party, with whom the Mafia was allied, Montini named Hank Manfredi's close friend Paul Marcinkus as his personal secretary. Marcinkus started working with Michele Sindona to secure their mutual interests, just as Bill Harvey – having been fired from Operation Mongoose by Bobby Kennedy for sending terror teams into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis without permission – arrived in Rome as the CIA's new station chief. Harvey's main job was to help ultra General Giovanni De Lorenzo, head of Italy's military intelligence and security services, subvert the government of leftist Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Naturally, the CIA's efforts on behalf of De Lorenzo further advanced the interests of the Mafia.

Back in the States, a corresponding shift in the Establishment's power base was reflected in the gradual migration of Americans to the south and west. The alliance between Bonanno in Arizona, Marcello in New Orleans, and Trafficante in Florida reflected the trend, as did the consolidation of
mob power in Las Vegas, through Morris “Moe” Dalitz, one of Meyer Lansky's closest associates, and the emergence of Miami as America's new crime capital.

Wherever the Mafia went, the CIA was ready and waiting: in New Orleans, home of Carlos Marcello, where Tony Varona – Trafficante's partner in the CIA's murder plots against Castro, and head of the Miami chapter of the terrorist Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) – visited in June 1963, after conferring with Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and acquiring funds for an anti-Castro paramilitary training camp in Louisiana.
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In Dallas, CIA officer Dave Phillips was establishing the state-sponsored, anti-Castro terrorist organization Alpha 66.
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Everywhere they went, CIA agents rubbed shoulders with the lunatic fringe: racist Minutemen in cahoots with Carlos Marcello, mercenary and mob hit men, and crazed anti-Castro Cubans, all pledged to kill a Kennedy, any Kennedy, for Christ.

Richard J. “Rick” Dunagan joined the FBN in 1962 after a hitch in the Air Force and five years with the Border Patrol. A big rough-and-tumble agent, fluent in Spanish and familiar with all types of firearms, Dunagan was assigned to the four-man Miami office where, as he recalls, “Gene Marshall was the boss, Sal Vizzini was the assistant, and Jack Greene, a former Miami cop, was there too. Just the four of us, and deputy sheriff Anthony DeLeon, who later became a fugitive.

“When I started working for the FBN, I was so green the cows could eat me,” Dunagan laughs. “Marshall gave me an informer, the brother of a guy he'd put away a few years before. The office had a nice '58 Chevy, which we take for a drive. When we get where we're going, the informer gives me a deck of cocaine and says, ‘I'll be right back.' I toss it under the seat. Meanwhile I'm a White guy hanging around a Black neighborhood looking suspicious, and a cop arrests me. I'm undercover, I've got no ID. He says, ‘Get out of the car.' He searches the car, finds the coke, and tosses me in jail.

“After that I stayed in the office, playing water boy to Marshall and Vizzini, until the day Sinbad arrived. Sinbad was a Moorish Muslim who saved my career. He came into the office wearing cut-offs, a beanie, and rubber thongs. He'd been put away before by Vizzini, done seven years, and was out and looking to become a professional informant. First he went
to Marshall, then Vizzini, then Greene, and they all threw him out. Finally he sticks his head in my office and says, ‘Does you be a narcotic agent?' I said, ‘Yeah.' He asks, ‘Can you make me a helper?' So I pretended to be a government agent and said, ‘Depends on what you have to offer.'

“Sinbad rolls off names of people he can make cases on, all big-time traffickers. I hadn't been to the Academy yet, and in the process of making cases on these people he taught me 95 percent of everything I know. He worked for me for years in Miami, through an awful lot. He wasn't a junky, but he'd shoot up to make a case, and one time the bad guys tried to kill him with poison. The only thing that saved his life was that his Muslim brothers in his clan got him a medic.

“Finally they sent me to the Technical Investigations Aide School, which was run by Agent Johnny Thompson, where they taught us how to pick locks, put on wiretaps, and take surreptitious photographs. When I got back to Miami, I was really in business. I had Sinbad, and I'd been trained, but I was still new. One day a big guy walks in the office wearing a planter's hat, a Harry Truman floral shirt, Bermuda shorts, and thongs. He's smoking a big Cuban cigar. ‘Is Gene Marshall in?' he asks. ‘Depends,' I say. ‘Who wants him?'

“Real slow he says, ‘Harry J. Anslinger.'

“Well, I burst out laughing. I stick my head into Marshall's office and say, ‘Hey Gene, there's a guy out here say's he's Harry J. Anslinger.'

“ ‘What's he look like?' Marshall asks. I tell him.

“ ‘Yep,' he says. ‘That's Mr. Anslinger.'

“I soon found out that Anslinger loved Gene Marshall. He and Gene liked to go out fishing on Sal Vizzini's boat, and I'd listen to the stories he'd tell about how he lost his hair from the stress of so many people shooting for his job before the war. Man, the things I heard.”

When not entertaining Anslinger, the Miami agents conducted narcotics investigations, and one target was Tampa resident Santo Trafficante. As part of the on-again, off-again surveillance, Dunagan in 1963 monitored Trafficante's daughter's wedding. But that was as close as any FBN agent ever got to the million-dollar man. There were other CIA intrigues too. As Dunagan explains, “The CIA made weekly visits to our office, but they never helped us make cases. It was a one-way street. We helped them. For example, one time one of our Cuban informants said, ‘This weekend, some former Bay of Pigs people are going to steal some vessels and armaments and launch an invasion.' So we told the CIA guy, and they stopped it. Another time a Cuban Army major, who had worked for Castro, and had been my informant since I was in the Border Patrol in Daytona, says to
me, ‘Rick, you like weapons, right? Big weapons, like fifty-caliber and thirty-caliber machine guns?”

“ ‘Yeah,' I said. So he says, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee?'

“We're having some of that jazzy Cuban coffee, and he says, ‘How'd you like to make $5,000 for one night's work?'

“ ‘Is this a bribe?' I ask. ‘No,' he says, ‘it's business. We're making a run and we need someone on the bow of the boat to man the machine gun.'

“It didn't seem right, so I went back and asked Marshall, and he said, ‘You're crazy! You're a goddamned federal agent. How would it look if you got caught invading Cuba?'