The Strength of the Wolf (61 page)

“Hermo was in Group Four, and by the time I got there in 1964, Art Mendelsohn was in charge, and some of the agents in the group were pretending to be city cops when they kicked in doors. They'd hit an apartment, flash a detective's shield, then make a deal with the occupant [not to arrest the person if he agreed to pay a bribe]. That's what Hermo and a new guy named Danny McLinden did. The next day Hermo sends McLinden back to collect the money. But the occupant had complained to the police, and when McLinden arrived, inspectors from the NYPD's Office of Internal Affairs were there waiting to bust what they thought were ‘bent' city cops. Instead what they got was a federal agent. So they
locked McLinden up, and he folded right away. Then they went after Hermo. They both lost their jobs, and the case opened up other investigations.”

While the Hermo case put the New York agents back under the microscope, sweeping social changes were heightening the racial tensions in the office. The 1964 Civil Rights Act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and allowed minorities to qualify for management positions. Then the Johnson administration, which was already growing to dislike the FBN, enacted privacy laws that prevented cops from kicking in doors on suspicion. This measure was taken, in part, after six FBN agents forcefully entered a man's apartment in November 1965 and arrested him for alleged narcotics violations. The agents cuffed Mr. Bivens in front of his wife and children, and threatened to arrest his entire family if he resisted arrest. Although no drugs were found, they took him to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, where he was interrogated, booked, and subjected to a strip search. Bivens was so enraged he sued the agents – none of whom the author was able to identify – and won his case in court.
¹

Wiretaps on crooks that accidentally uncovered political corruption were also becoming an issue, so the Johnson administration imposed greater restrictions on electronic surveillance. And in 1966, the Miranda Law would prohibit compulsory self-incrimination and guarantee legal counsel to persons under arrest. The result of all these new “liberal” laws was fewer cases, and that meant fewer promotions for White agents, prompting some to complain that minority agents were being held to a lower standard at the expense of their Caucasian colleagues. “John Coursey got his grade eleven after only four years on the job,” one agent gripes.

On the flip side, as addiction spread in America's increasingly angry and volatile ghettos, Black and Hispanic agents were asked to do more and more of the dangerous undercover work. They resented the fact that Norey Durham, as head of the Radio Shack, was still the only agent of color in New York at a grade twelve, and in a supervisory position, and eventually a group of Black agents filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

When asked about racism in the FBN, Black undercover agent John T. Coursey bridles. “If everyone had been making cases, there wouldn't have been a problem. But management was unable to guide people to that end. They were hung up on the formality of conducting investigations, of following ‘proper procedures,' and making the process technological so they wouldn't have to deal with people. Eventually it got to the point
where there was no place left to put the people. But the policy-makers weren't on the street. They never got a gun stuck in their ear. So it became a different problem to everyone, and from my perspective, the only significant White agent was Lenny Schrier. Lenny understood. The others were all on the fringe. Among the Black agents, Jack Peterson was the most significant. He and I caused the last panic in 1962–1963.”

Hired in 1959 and known as “the Egyptian,” sensible John Coursey knew how to make cases while not making waves. But some Black agents were politically outspoken, and they paid a price. John Kreppein, for example, had a reputation as one of the bravest agents in the office. “Kreppein would walk into the middle of a riot in Harlem and arrest someone,” a fellow agent says with awe. “But he was an admirer of [the US Representative from Harlem] Adam Clayton Powell, so a lot of White agents didn't like him.”

One reason for Congressman Powell's unpopularity among FBN agents was that, on 18 February 1965, he charged on the floor of Congress that cops were protecting drug dealers in Harlem at the going rate of $3,000 a month. On 4 March 1965, he named seven protected drug dealers in his district, including Leon Aikens and Frank Johnson. His accusations, along with his denunciation of the
New York Times
for its biased reporting, caused a furor and focused public attention on the fact that without police protection, there would not be so many addicts. Other Black leaders like Malcolm X went further and claimed that law enforcement allowed the Mafia to sell dope in ghettos as a form of political repression. Muslims thought to be working for the CIA or FBI assassinated Malcolm X on 21 February 1965. Powell also paid for his righteous attacks against the Establishment with an IRS investigation and, eventually, compulsory self-exile.
²

By the mid-1960s, the racist, reactionary foundations of America's drug problem, and the related issues of official corruption and the subversion of drug law enforcement by the espionage Establishment, could no longer be ignored. Columnist Carl Rowan noted that Major Stanley Hobbs, though convicted of smuggling fifty-seven pounds of opium into Vietnam (as noted in
chapter 21
), received only a fine and a stipulation that he wouldn't be promoted for five years. “A kid in the slums who steals a loaf of bread will draw stiffer punishment than that,” Rowan quoted a “disgusted” official – Missouri Senator Stuart Symington – as saying.
³

But outrage and disgust were minor irritants to an Establishment bent on expanding its empire and privileges, and America's drug and race problems would only worsen as official corruption flourished under the protection of the national security state.

In early 1964, after he had finished filing his reports on the Gambling Squad, Lenny Schrier was finally, after five years of waiting, made a group leader. First he was put in charge of Group One, replacing Art Fluhr, who became George Belk's executive assistant. Six months later Schrier took over Group Two, again for about six months, and while he was there, his group made a big case on Ramon Marquez, a Puerto Rican club-owner and drug dealer connected to members of the Genovese family. At the time of his arrest in December 1964, Marquez was credited with moving $25 million in cocaine from Corsican suppliers in Chile and Argentina, through anti-Castro Cubans operating in Honduras and Mexico, to other anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, as well as to the Angelet brothers in New York. The case was connected to the one Sal Vizzini was working on in Puerto Rico, and was representative of the new face of international drug trafficking. It was also an early sign that the Mafia was losing its monopoly over drug distribution in America.
⁴

Finally, in early 1965, in recognition of his status as New York's premier case-making agent, Lenny Schrier was made the leader of the reactivated International Group. FBN headquarters revived the International Group, after a four and a half year hiatus, to coordinate the organization's expanding overseas operations with those in the United States. The revival of the International Group was also a tacit admission that headquarters officials, group leaders, and case-making agents were damaging the organization by running secret operations that undermined other agents' cases. Alas, this attempt at reform came too late.

“I finally became a group leader in 1964,” Schrier jokes, “even though my case-making days were just about over, because I didn't have many informants anymore.” He pauses, and then adds solemnly, “Because most of them were dead.”

Dead is one way of putting it; murdered is another. This was no small matter, and the issue of murdered FBN informants (over two dozen by 1968) was a major reason why the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for law enforcement, David Acheson, would approve a secret integrity investigation of the FBN's New York office in 1965. The rivalry between Schrier and the Ward–Dolce–Biase clique was at the center of this issue, and according to Schrier, the problem dated back to 1959, when Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano decided to make his protégé, Mike Picini, the district supervisor in Boston. “But Mike needed management training first,” Schrier explains, “so Giordano formed a fifth group in New York.
He did this by taking a few guys from each of the other four groups and giving them to Mike.” Schrier rolls his eyes. “And I got to go over to Mike's new group from Group One.”

Picini's group made two cases, and Schrier was behind both. The first was on a cocaine dealer on the Upper West Side, and the second was made through Ernie Lamantia, the highest-ranking Mafia informer Schrier ever had. How he acquired Lamantia is worth noting. Fred Dick, then an agent in Group One under Ben Fitzgerald, had made a buy from an unknown Italian, who covered himself by driving a car with fake plates that led to a fake address. Frustrated because he couldn't identify the man, Dick asked Frankie Waters for help. Waters started hanging around the neighborhood and one day he saw the Italian's car, with a parking ticket stuck under a windshield wiper. Through an employee he knew at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Waters found over forty parking violations for this car on a specific street in New York's Little Italy. He told Fred Dick, and Dick loitered on the street until the car showed up, and then he grabbed the Italian: Ernie Lamantia.

“Lamantia was a rarity,” Schrier stresses, “an Italian informant. The Italians had the code of silence, but now we can make cases on Italians.

“I was in Picini's group when Lee Speer asked me to do a submarine job on old Ed Murphy [the FBN agent] in Connecticut. I turned it down, but Fred Dick accepted it – which is how Fred got into Internal Affairs. And while Fred's slithering around Connecticut, he turned Lamantia over to his group leader, Ben Fitzgerald. When Picini left for Boston, I went back to Group One, and that's when Fitz gave Lamantia to me.

“Meanwhile Hunt and Mendelsohn located Frank Russo. Out of the twenty-seven defendants indicted in the Orlandino case, Russo was the only one to flip. He had a screwdriver in his pocket when we arrested him, and when we searched his apartment I saw that some screws had been loosened on the door panel to his refrigerator. We opened it up with his screwdriver and found fifteen ounces of junk inside. So now I had Russo in my stable of informants, which included Ernie Lamantia.

“That's around 1962, and that's when the troubles started. There was a guy from East Harlem, Georgie Farraco, selling to Blacks. Artie Fluhr was on night duty, and he gets an anonymous call about a load going to Farraco's apartment. It sounded good so we decided to hit him. I remember that night very well. Artie called me up and said, ‘Bring your Kaopectate and your gun.' So we arrested Georgie, and when we arrested him, he said, ‘You'll hear from somebody.' And sure enough the next day Patty Biase's waiting in the hall. He points to Farraco and says, ‘He's with me.' Well, a
few weeks later they find Georgie's car double-parked. It'd been there twenty-four hours. Seems somebody told on him.

“The next incident occurred about a year later, and involved Frank Russo. Russo's a good informant, but to be a good informant, he has to sell narcotics. The only way you can make cases is if your informant sells dope. But you have to protect him. You can't let him sell dope to another agent's informant, and you can't introduce him to an undercover agent. So I met him alone, and only my group leader, Ben Fitzgerald, and the enforcement assistant, Pat Ward, knew that Russo was mine.

“John Dolce ran Group Three, then became the enforcement assistant. Dolce was a good agent,” Schrier says with respect. “He was my only competition. But he was ‘in' with Ward and Gaffney, and he had adopted Patty Biase. So Ward tells Dolce, and Dolce tells Biase, and that's how Biase found out that Russo was my snitch. This was in 1963 during the Gambling Squad, but I'm still making cases with Russo. And Biase didn't warn Russo off when he had the chance, so Frank got killed. He was stomped to death in an alley outside a pool hall on 108th Street. When they found his body, rigor mortis had already set in. His face was contorted and he was lying on his back with his arms and legs up in the air.”

Schrier takes a sip of Dewars. “Russo was my first informant to get killed, and Ernie Lamantia knew who did it. Ernie told me the names of the four guys who killed Frank Russo. I told a narcotics cop, Al Villafono, and he told Homicide. But there was a pay-off and nothing was done. I asked Sonny Grosso how that could be, and he said it was like anything else: the cop on the beat takes a sandwich; narcs make money off dope; homicide detectives make money off what's available to them: murder cases.

“Ernie Lamantia was living with three different women,” Schrier continues. “He had kids by all of them and lots of expenses. He wasn't a big dope dealer, but he was connected, and he was giving good information. He was talking about the Five Families long before Valachi. He was friends with Fat Artie Repola, who'd gotten a big name because he was busted with Waxy Gordon [in 1951] and did eight years. Fat Artie supplied Ernie, and Ernie let me take a free look. I saw it happen a few times and I could have made Artie easy, but Ernie didn't want me to. The deal was just to follow Artie and see who he sold to. Ernie and Artie would meet in the Bronx, get into Artie's car, and I'd follow them.

“Then one Sunday night I get a call. Ernie's in a bar in the Bronx. He tells me that he's going to buy a kilo from Artie, and that Artie wants to borrow his car. ‘A kilo's too much,' I said. ‘Don't do it.' Then I hear Ernie say, ‘Here comes Artie now. I gotta go.' Half an hour later they find Ernie
with a bullet in his head and his car motor running. The next morning Biase makes a comment. He knew about that too.”