The Strength of the Wolf (60 page)

Habib laughs satirically. “I'm sitting in Sullivan's office surrounded by a gang of menacing CIA officers. Sullivan introduces himself and asks if I would please explain what I'm doing in Laos. I say I'm there to work undercover with the police, to locate morphine labs. To which he replies, ‘Are you serious?' At which point a CIA officer says to me, ‘You! Don't do nothing!' Meanwhile Sullivan goes to his office and composes a yard-long telegram to Secretary Rusk saying, in effect, ‘Don't they know that Laos [which had withdrawn from the Single Convention in 1963] is off-limits?' Then they tell me how Taylor set up an undercover buy from a guy. He got a flash roll together and went to the meet covered by the Vientiane police. When the guy steps out of the car and opens the trunk, the police see it's the king of the Meos. The police run away, and Taylor busts General Vang Pao, alone.”

“It's true,” Taylor laughs. “I made a case on Vang Pao [the general just happened to be the commander of the CIA's private army of indigenous, opium-growing tribesmen in Laos] and was thrown out of the country as a result. But what you weren't told was that the prime minister gave Vang Pao back his Mercedes Benz and morphine base, and that the CIA sent him to Miami for six months to cool his heels. I wrote a report to Giordano, but when he confronted the CIA, they said the incident never happened.

“The station chiefs ran things in Southeast Asia,” Taylor stresses, adding that the first secretary at the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok had a private airline for smuggling drugs to Saigon. “I tried to catch him, but there was no assistance. In fact, the CIA actively supported the border police, who were involved in trafficking.” He shrugs. “The CIA would do anything to achieve its goals.”

Habib returns to his story. “A few days after Sullivan sends his telegram, Rusk writes back and says, ‘Let him at them.' So Sullivan calls me into his office and says, ‘Okay. You can work. But don't forget, they're fighting a war for us.' ”

In effect, Sullivan limited Habib's investigation of the regional heroin traffic to the involvement of non-CIA Americans. Sullivan referred Habib to Public Safety Advisor Paul Skuse in this regard, and Skuse said that no Americans were involved, that Air Force General Ouane Rattikone was
the drug lord, but that the Laotian prime minister protected him. The local US Information Service officers likewise said no Americans were involved, as did Robert Rosselot, president of the CIA-connected Continental Air Service. One lead Habib obtained came from Air America's security officer, Luther F. Gilbert. Gilbert implicated an American mercenary named Elias L. Papp, and Habib launched an undercover operation against Papp, but without success.
²⁴

Next Habib met with CIA station chief Douglas Blaufarb and his deputy, James Lilley (a close friend of former president George H. W. Bush), regarding heroin factories in Luang Prabang and Houei Sai. According to Habib, the CIA officers were “very well acquainted with the opium traffic in Laos”
²⁵
and actually had photos of the heroin factories. They allowed Habib to study the plants for five days, and as a result of his investigation, Habib identified General Rattikone, Rattikone's brother-in-law, Luang Prabang's police chief, and a Colonel Huang Hsiang-chun as the protected ringleaders of the regional drug traffic.

“Well, the Laotian officials are off-limits,” Habib says, “so I spent most of the time in Houei Sai, where Corsicans were flying opium into Vietnam. I got two French informants and focused on them. The first, Gerard Lebinsky, had a plane but no money, and he made a case on François Mittard: eighty kilos of morphine base seized in Bangkok. Mittard owned the Concorde restaurant in Vientiane, where I went undercover and tried to make a case on [Bonaventure “Rock”] Francisci, who owned an air force [Air Laos Commerciale]. But there was no money to pay the informants, and a case is only as good as the informant.”
²⁶

“My other good informant,” Habib continues, “was introduced to me by an Army major in the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok. He knew the Vietcong were buying opium and taking it to Saigon, and through him I was introduced to a VC agent in a park in Bangkok. The VC were using small boats to transport small amounts to the Chinese in Saigon, and using the profits to buy guns. They wanted someone with a plane, so I agreed to play the part of the pilot.

“The ambassador gave his approval, and I went to Saigon, where I met with the deputy ambassador and an air force major. Well, the major gets excited and says, ‘We gotta bring in the CIA.' Next thing I know, three CIA officers are in the room. One of them tells the major that we, the FBN, can't run the operation. We have to introduce our informant to Vietnamese Customs. I told them to screw off. Later it turns out that Vietnamese Customs had a warehouse full of confiscated opium which they were selling out the back door.”

Evidently, it wasn't profitable enough to simply protect its warlords and so, as Sal Vizzini noted in
chapter 18
, the CIA was actually flying opium to them. This was proven to be true on 30 August 1964, when Major Stanley C. Hobbs, allegedly a member of MACV Advisory Team 95, was caught smuggling fifty-seven pounds of opium from Bangkok to a clique of South Vietnamese officers. He had flown into Saigon on Air America. His general court martial in November 1964 at Ryukyu Island was conducted in secret for “security” reasons, and the defense witnesses were all US Army and South Vietnamese counterintelligence officers. The records of the trial have been lost, and though convicted, Hobbs was merely fined $3,000 and suspended from promotion for five years. As a protected drug courier, he served no time.
²⁷

FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano was well aware of the case and wrote a letter to Frank A. Bartimo, assistant general counsel (Manpower), at the office of the assistant secretary of defense, complaining about the sentence Hobbs received. After Andy Tartaglino asked for a record of the trial, which was not provided, Giordano sent a letter to Senator Thomas J. Dodd asking for help obtaining information. But Dodd was stonewalled too. Which only goes to show that in the mid-1960s, the espionage Establishment was, as it still is today, powerful enough to subvert federal drug law enforcement at the legislative level.

By 1964, the FBN had more agents stationed overseas than ever before. Bill Durkin and Ray Maduro were in Mexico, and Jim Daniels (real name Snockhaus) was in Peru. Mike Picini was the supervisor in Rome, Hank Manfredi was his deputy, and Joseph Dino his administrative assistant. Vic Maria was in Paris, and Al Garofalo in Marseilles. Joseph Arpaio was the agent in charge in Turkey, and Dennis Dayle was raising hell in Beirut. Bowman Taylor and Charles Casey were in Bangkok, and gregarious, reckless Peter B. Niblo was in Hong Kong working closely with customs service Agent Stu Adams. Niblo had served in the CIA's Audio Surveillance Division from 1951 until 1955, when he first joined the FBN, and had worked for Public Safety in Vietnam from 1960 until 1962, when he rejoined the FBN. He was well acquainted with the Far East and was the first American to work with Hong Kong's police narcotics unit and its British advisor, John Browett. When he reported to Hong Kong in December 1963, the specific instruction Niblo received from Browett was
“No undercover work, period!” Hong Kong had delicate relations with China at that point, which it did not want Niblo to disrupt, so as in every other place the FBN worked overseas, unilateral operations were strictly forbidden – though they were periodically conducted by TDY agents on special assignments.

Like his fellow agents abroad – who never numbered more than seventeen while the FBN was in existence – Niblo was a member of one of America's most unique and extraordinary fraternities. It was a wolf pack not unlike the Gambling Squad, but scattered far and wide. As Dennis Dayle says, “We'd meet periodically in Rome, where Joe Dino had arrived as Picini's administrative assistant to take the burden off Hank Manfredi. Joe was my old street partner from Chicago. Joe Arpaio in Turkey had been in Chicago too, so we were all old friends, and we stuck together.”

Alas, by 1965 even the FBN's overseas wolf pack was already being targeted for extermination by the CIA.

Sal Vizzini remembers when it all started coming apart. “There was a clique of case-making agents the Bureau relied upon, but got rid of starting around 1964,” he says, “after which their cases went sour because ‘the good guys' screwed them up.

“My own problems began in August 1964,” he continues. “Giordano calls me up to Washington. Gaffney's there too. They say they're going to demote me from a grade twelve to an eleven because I gave a Lambretta to a Thai police captain in Bangkok – and for a few other things. I've got thirty days to appeal.

“ ‘Don't make waves,' Gaffney tells me. ‘Don't resign. In a year you'll be back.' So against my better judgment I take the demotion and go undercover into Puerto Rico for Gaffney and Justice Department Attorney Robert Peloquin, who said that drugs were passing through Puerto Rican casinos on their way to New York. They gave me a refresher course in dealing cards, then I went in with my informers, Joey Rosa and Chester Gray. And through the narcotics chief down there, José Barber, I got a job as a croupier and made nineteen buys at the Ali Baba club. Nineteen cases! I think I'm going to work my way back in, but then three guys jump me in an alley. My back gets screwed up and I go on disability leave. That's May 1965. By then Gene Marshall had been bagged, and within a week the whole shooting match goes to hell.”

Rick Dunagan, the rough-and-tumble agent introduced in
chapter 19
, was a witness to the emotionally charged events that led to the arrest and conviction on bribery charges of Gene Marshall, the high profile FBN agent in charge in Miami.

“It was early 1965,” Dunagan says, “and Nick Navarro was the new deputy sheriff assigned to the office [after his predecessor, Anthony DeLeon, became a fugitive]. Ray Cantu was there too. Ray was an older man who'd made cases along the lower Rio Grande and then gone with Public Safety in Panama. After that, he came back to the Bureau in Miami. Vizzini was claiming disability and wasn't around much, and I was working undercover cases with Gene Marshall. Gene would play ‘Johnny Manila,' and I'd pretend to be a diamond thief, and that's how we made cases.

“Marty Saez had come down from Detroit. Marty was straight, and together we began making a case on the biggest Black trafficker in Miami at the time, Holton Newbolt. My informant, Sinbad, knew a junky named Old Willie who bought dope from Newbolt's number two man, Slimy Smith. Sinbad put us with Old Willie and through Old Willie we made three buys off Slimy Smith.”

When Dunagan and Saez arrested Slimy, he had $3,000 in cash and a .25 automatic. But when Gene Marshall wrote up the report, he said that Slimy only had $300 and no gun. Dunagan complained, and the gun was returned to the office safe the next day. The money, however, went missing, and at his pre-trial hearing, Slimy made allegations against the FBN agents. Before he disappeared, Slimy also wrote a fifteen-page document about corruption in the Miami FBN office. Keeping in mind that drug defendants often give perjured testimony, his most serious charge, according to Dunagan, was that he had sold five ounces of heroin to an agent in an elevator in the federal building, in the presence of an Assistant US Attorney. Meanwhile, Holton Newbolt flipped and presented evidence to IRS Inspections about his financial relationship with Gene Marshall. Working with FBN headquarters, IRS Inspections tapped Marshall's office phone and wired one of his informants, and on 20 April 1965 he was arrested at the home of the informant while taking a bribe.

“Gene Marshall was my idol,” Dunagan says emotionally, “and I got to know him well. His real name was Jacob Rosenthal. He was born in Germany and came to America before the war. I thought he was so cool. It wasn't until afterwards that I started to see his flaws.”

Agent Gene Marshall, a handsome ladies' man and one of Anslinger's favorite agents, was thirty-eight when he was arrested and charged, with two Miami detectives, for taking bribes averaging $2,000 a month. The
new enforcement assistant at FBN headquarters in Washington, John Enright, and the district supervisor in Atlanta, Daniel P. Casey (formerly George White's enforcement assistant in San Francisco), participated in the arrest. “They were at the stool's house,” Dunagan recalls, “when this new kid comes up and arrests Gene Marshall. Gene Marshall, who was ‘Mr. Narcotics' in Miami, arrested by a rookie agent! It was just too much for the man, and during the trial he went goofy and pled insanity.

“It was Ray Cantu who finally had the guts to tell Casey about Marshall's wheeling and dealing,” Dunagan says with grudging respect. “I remember wanting to punch Ray out at the time. I just couldn't believe that Marshall was wrong. I was so mad I wanted to resign. But the secretary in Atlanta, Alice Lee Ginn, talked me out of it. ‘Rick,' she said, ‘you've got seven kids already.' ”

In New York, the case-making agents were feeling the heat too. Charles J. Leya, Jr., a Pace College graduate and former Marine Corps lieutenant, joined the FBN in 1960 after a stint with the Nassau County Police Department. “My first job with the Bureau was keeping track of addicts as part of a survey for Congress,” Leya says. “Then I went into Group Two, and for the next three years I worked closely with three detectives from the NYPD's Special Investigative Unit in the Bronx. This was at a time when most of the city detectives were deeply suspicious of the federal agents.

“There were about ninety agents in the New York office by then,” Leya continues, “and most of the integrity cases were isolated events, and were handled by the enforcement assistant or the district supervisor. But with the Joe Hermo incident, headquarters started getting involved again, like it had under Lee Speer.