The Strength of the Wolf (56 page)

It isn't impossible that the police were able to keep the Dallas agents in the dark. The Kefauver Committee concluded that big-city vice squads could limit the ability of federal agents to make cases. Civello was a police informant on narcotics cases: perhaps the racist Dallas judicial system was content to protect his narcotics operation in exchange for information on his Black customers, and perhaps the Dallas FBN agents chose to look the other way. That would be in accordance with a formula that is still uniformly applied across America. Or perhaps Civello and Ruby had more powerful patrons. Civello was convicted in 1931 on a federal narcotics charge, but obtained early parole on the recommendation of Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker, a former bootlegger into whose custody Oswald was being transferred when he was shot by Ruby.
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Civello was also linked through his protected gambling racket with Hoover's patron, Clint Murchison. That relationship may explain why, in 1962, the FBI found no evidence of illegal activity by Civello, despite the fact that he'd been convicted in 1960 and sentenced to five years for obstructing justice.
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This may also account for why the Warren Commission, whose conclusions were based largely on the FBI's investigation, was not able to turn up any evidence to establish “a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”
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Consider also that Ruby met with the FBI eight times in 1959, the same year he visited his friend Lewis McWillie in Cuba.
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Then managing Lansky's Tropicana club in Havana, McWillie took Ruby to visit Trafficante at Trescornia prison, shortly before Trafficante was released and hired by the CIA, along with Johnny Roselli, to assassinate Castro using MKULTRA technology in part developed by FBN agents. Add to that the fact that Roselli and Ruby had known each other since the 1930s, and the fact that they both knew George White. As Ike Feldman noted in
chapter 15
, White often sent him to the airport to pick up Roselli and bring him to the office.

The fact that White had long-standing relations with Ruby and Roselli, and the allegation that Ruby and Roselli (then working for Harvey in the ZR/RIFLE assassination project) met twice in Miami in October 1963, is not enough to indict White in a conspiracy to kill JFK.
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His diaries offer no clues. There are no entries from mid-1962 through 1963, while he was seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver, and then they resume in 1964 –
which is very strange. Remember, White was linked through MKULTRA to the sex and drugs blackmail schemes Hoover and the CIA used to keep Jack and Bobby under wraps. And there was a lot of mud waiting to be slung: the Kennedy–Campbell–Giancana intrigue; Jack's affairs with Mariella Novotny (of the Christine Keeler sex-ring scandal, which forced Great Britain's defense minister to resign), and with Ellen Rometsch, known to have bedded Soviet agents; and the affairs Jack and Bobby had with Marilyn Monroe, who died from a drug overdose in August 1962.
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Besides having a blind spot for Mafia drug dealers in Dallas and New Orleans – and Jack Ruby's relationship with them – the FBN incriminated itself further by becoming involved in James Angleton's effort to blame Castro for the Kennedy assassination. According to George Gaffney, Mexican officials intercepted a call to Havana from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The Cubans were claiming credit for the assassination; but instead of telling the FBI or the CIA, the Mexicans told the FBN agent in charge in Mexico City, William Durkin, and on Sunday Durkin called Gaffney in Washington. Gaffney rushed the message to Secret Service chief James Rowley, at which point Angleton's theory that Castro arranged the assassination emerged as an alternative to the Lone Nut theory promulgated by Hoover, and later embraced by the Warren Commission.

There are two other FBN-related factors to consider in the official cover-up. On 20 November 1963, Rose Cheramie was found on a Louisiana road, dazed and bruised. She was taken to a private hospital where she told a doctor that JFK was going to be killed during his forthcoming visit to Dallas. Later that day, Cheramie was released into the custody of Louisiana State policeman Francis Fruge, and while Fruge was taking her to a state hospital Cheramie said she'd been traveling from Florida to Dallas with two men who “were Italians or resembled Italians.”
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She didn't know their names, but they'd stopped at a lounge for drinks. An argument ensued, Cheramie was evicted and, as she stood outside the lounge, she was struck a glancing blow by a car. She also repeated to Fruge her claim that President Kennedy was going to be killed. But because she was a prostitute and drug addict, neither Fruge nor the doctor believed her – at least, not until the afternoon of 22 November.

On 27 November, Fruge interviewed Cheramie again, and she expounded on her story. She said the Italians were taking her to Dallas to obtain
$8,000, so they could buy eight kilograms of heroin from a seaman. The seaman was to meet them in Houston after disembarking in Galveston. Cheramie gave Fruge the names of the seaman and the ship. As they were on the way to Houston to check out her story, Cheramie told Fruge that she was a stripper at Jack Ruby's nightclub in Dallas, and that she had seen Ruby and Oswald together. She said she was part of a Mafia operation in which call girls were rotated between cities, and that Ruby had sent her to Miami on 18 November.

When contacted by Fruge, the Customs agent in charge of Galveston verified that the seaman was being investigated for drug smuggling. The Coast Guard likewise confirmed that it was interested in the ship named by Cheramie regarding its role in drug smuggling operations. But the state narcotics bureaus in Texas and Oklahoma found Cheramie's information “erroneous in all respects,” and when the HSCA asked Customs to produce the agents she had named, and their reports, Customs officials said that neither the agents nor reports could be found.
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The HSCA let this promising lead drop without attempting to talk to Customs agents like William Hughes, who vividly recalls “Nutty Nate” Durham as the feckless agent in charge of Galveston in 1963. Nate may have been alive in 1978, but the CIA did not allow Customs to identify him or provide his reports to Congress. The reason for this subterfuge comes as no surprise: some of Nutty Nate's colleagues on the Galveston case were CIA officers operating under Customs cover, as part of a special unit organized in Houston by Dave Ellis. Members of this unit facilitated the activities of anti-Castro drug smuggling terrorist groups in the US, which is why the FBI also “decided to pursue the case no further.”
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Neither Customs, nor the Coast Guard, nor the FBI, nor any state narcotics bureau revealed the existence of the Galveston drug ring to the FBN. But Fruge did tell congressional investigators that the Cuban Revolutionary Council's delegate in New Orleans, Sergio Arcacha Smith, may have been one of the men who had accompanied and abused Rose Cheramie. Smith's CRC office was located in the same building as Oswald's notional Fair Play for Cuba office at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, and Guy Banister, a former FBI agent in Chicago, had gotten Smith his office space. Smith and one of Banister's employees, David Ferrie, “were also believed to have ties with organized crime figure Carlos Marcello.”
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Here the plot thickens, for Banister was the FBI agent in charge in Chicago while George White was there as the FBN district supervisor in 1945 and 1946. Banister moved on to become deputy chief of police in New Orleans, and then opened a private detective firm that served as a
CIA front. A certified right-wing fanatic, Banister was a member of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean (funded in part by Anastasio Somoza), as well as Louisiana coordinator of the racist Minutemen.
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Working for Banister was David Ferrie, a pilot who knew Oswald and worked for Carlos Marcello. Ferrie claimed that he drove to Houston to ice skate on the day Kennedy was killed, and to Galveston to go duck hunting two days later when Ruby killed Oswald. This put him on the same path Rose Cheramie intended to follow – a bizarre coincidence that suggests that he was involved in transporting and paying conspirators, including Arcacha Smith, in the Kennedy assassination. Adding to this possibility is the fact that Ferrie's boss, Guy Banister, assisted Arcacha Smith in his counter-revolutionary activities, as did Carlos Marcello.
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Banister brings us to the other FBN-related piece in the JFK puzzle: the French connection.

CIA asset Clay Shaw reportedly joined the Permanent Industrial Exhibition in 1957. Known as Permindex, it was a construction company that built trade centers, hotels, and office centers like the Trade Mart he managed in New Orleans. Ten years later, Shaw would attain notoriety as the person New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged with conspiring to kill JFK. He was acquitted, and as far as this author is aware, was not involved in drug trafficking. However, his company, Permindex, after moving to Rome in 1961 and reforming itself as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was reportedly involved as “a cover for the transfer of CIA … funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.”
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More to the point, CMC was accused of channeling funds to the drug-smuggling OAS.

Banister's money allegedly went to Jean René Marie Souetre – or someone impersonating him. A French Army deserter and the OAS representative in southern Algeria, Souetre reportedly met in the spring of 1963 with
E. Howard Hunt in Madrid, ultra General Walker in Dallas, and Guy Banister at 544 Camp Street. In June, he offered the CIA a list of KGB penetrations in the French government. Souetre was also reportedly “on the Paris end of drug traffic,” and had been followed for years by an undercover narcotics agent in Marseilles.
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In 1977, the CIA released a document, dated 1 April 1964, titled “Jean Souetre's expulsion from the US.” In this document, the FBI explains that French security officials wanted to know why Souetre was expelled from “Fort Worth or Dallas 18 hours after the assassination.” Souetre had been in Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination, and had been expelled to “Mexico or Canada.” The French had some reason to believe that Souetre was plotting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle during his upcoming visit to Mexico, and so naturally they wanted to know about Souetre's movements. But the FBI said it had no information on him and, in yet another case of criminal negligence, it never notified the Warren Commission about Souetre.
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There's more to this story. The CIA knew that dentist Lawrence M. Alderson in Houston had contacted Souetre in December 1963. Alderson met Souetre in 1953 while serving as an Army officer in France. They worked together on security issues at a French air base. As he did every year, Alderson sent a Christmas card to Souetre, and somehow that came to the attention of the CIA – and the only way that's possible is if the CIA was monitoring Souetre. People were tailing Alderson within days of the assassination, and FBI agents interviewed him around 1 January 1964, four months
before
the French officials contacted the FBI. The FBI wanted to know if he would act as a go-between if Souetre contacted him again. That never happened, but Alderson told this writer that persons claiming to be agents of the Army CID told him that Souetre had been flown from Dallas to New Orleans on 22 November 1963 on a military transport plane.

No one from the US government ever asked Souetre if he was in Dallas on 22 November. But if wasn't there – and we know a Frenchman was – it may have been SDECE agent Michel Mertz impersonating him.

Mertz, when compared to Souetre, is an equally if not exceedingly enigmatic character. Born in 1920 in Moselle, France, he was drafted into the German Army, but ostensibly defected to the Resistance in 1943. After the war, he joined, or infiltrated (as the case may be) SDECE undercover as a French Army captain. He served a tour in Algeria with Souetre (1958–59) and in April 1961 returned to Algeria as a double, or perhaps triple agent. He presented himself as an OAS sympathizer and either learned of, or provoked, an OAS plot to assassinate de Gaulle in July. In
either case the plot was foiled, France rallied around de Gaulle, and Mertz won the eternal gratitude of Interior Minister Roger Frey and his chief aide, Alexandre Sanguinetti – Marcel Francisci's protector in the French government.
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In 1947, Mertz married the adopted daughter of Charles Martel, a Paris procurer and drug smuggler with connections to François Spirito. It is unthinkable that such a liaison would escape the notice of Charlie Dyar, the veteran FBN agent who worked in France throughout the 1930s. But Mertz was unknown to the FBN, and in 1960, with the blessings of his SDECE bosses, he established a lucrative heroin network between France, Montreal, and New York under the auspices of Spirito's partner, Joe Orsini. Santo Trafficante and Orsini's former cellmate, Benny Indiviglio, the Mafia's distributor in Dallas, managed the American end of the operation. A significant delivery was made in October 1961, just prior to the French Connection case, when Mertz's courier, diplomat Jean Mounet, accompanied a Citroen packed with 100 pounds of heroin to New York. Mounet may have been posing as J. Mouren, and if so, Mertz may have been the guiding hand behind Jean Jehan, Françoise Scaglia, and Jean Angelvin. Apart from any attention he may have attracted if involved in the famous French Connection case, deliveries from Mertz to Indiviglio, averaging ninety kilograms a month, would continue undetected for the next nine years.
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