The Strength of the Wolf (62 page)

Steam is coming out of Schrier's ears. “Now I've got two informants dead,” Schrier continues, “and I'm infuriated. I felt sorry for Ernie's families, and for a year I had the same dream every night: I'm standing in a hallway with my gun on Artie Repola, who's on the lam.

“Then a couple of smart cops arrested Artie at his mother's gravesite on the anniversary of her death. They couldn't arrest him for Russo's murder, but they had him on a parole violation, so they turned him over to me, and I tried to flip him.

“Meanwhile Belk goes to the War College and I'm made acting district supervisor, during which time I get a call from Fitz. Fitz is now head of the Court House Squad, and they grabbed an Air France steward with a couple of keys up in Canada. At the same time Fat Artie's up there to cop from Carmine Paladino. Turns out Artie's a stool for Fitz, but he never told me!

“Now I'm in a blind rage. I told everyone that Fitz stole my stool and well, I must have told the wrong person, because in no time Artie's dead. He was shot four times. That's June 1965. Artie was shot in the liver and it took him nine days to die. But he never said who did it.”

Unknown to Schrier, Fat Artie Repola was an informant for Ben Fitzgerald at the Court House Squad, and was gathering information about people involved in the Air France case. That's why Fitzgerald, and presumably District Supervisor Belk and George Gaffney, the enforcement assistant at headquarters, didn't tell Schrier – even though he was running the International Group. The need to protect Repola also explains why they and the RCMP agreed not to arrest Carmine Paladino on 24 March 1965, when Paladino received six kilograms of heroin from his Canadian contact in Montreal. Paladino was the Mafia's courier to the Air France ring, and the RCMP agreed not to arrest him for two reasons. First, because “federal agents took advantage of the courier's brief absence to seize the merchandise.” And secondly, because the FBN needed to keep Repola “intact” in order to make cases on the people, like Ernie Lamantia, he was supplying in New York.
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Apparently, Fitzgerald, Belk, and Gaffney didn't care that Repola had murdered Schrier's best informant; they were content to sacrifice the smaller cases Schrier and Lamantia were making in New York, so they could make a splashier case in Canada. And it was a very important case, leading to seizure of thirty-seven pounds of heroin and the arrest of Georges Henrypierre, an associate of Simone Christmann from the 1961 OAS case.
It also exposed Henri La Porterie, “the man in charge of the ring and a close associate of Paul Mondoloni.”
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But in another respect, the obsession with secrecy backfired, for by enraging Schrier, Artie Repola got murdered – and, as a result, his FBN case agents lost the chance to make cases on a group of Mafia narcotics traffickers, including Joseph Bendenelli, Vincent Pacelli, and Gennardo Zanfardino, then operating in New York.

In 1964, FBN headquarters had finally, to its credit, recognized that there was an urgent need to end the factional infighting and secret operations that resulted in busted cases and murdered informants. One faltering step in that direction was the revival of the International Group under Lenny Schrier. Another was John Dolce's resignation, on 9 July 1965, to become chief of Public Safety in Westchester County, a job he would hold for the next thirty years.

Why Dolce resigned is unclear. He would not speak with the author. But three explanations – ranging from the popular, to the plausible, to the controversial – have been offered. The most popular, although speculative, explanation is that the IRS had concluded that Dolce's lifestyle was lavish beyond his means, even though his lovely wife Lola was an heiress. Most New York agents agree that John Dolce left the FBN simply to avoid a hassle with the IRS.

Miami agent Rick Dunagan offers a more plausible account. “Right after Marshall was busted,” he says, “Johnny Dolce came down to Miami to straighten out the office. Dolce was sharp, and within a week he had us on the sheriff's frequency. He'd have been a good boss, but he didn't last long. One day I walked into his office. Nick Navarro, who'd been a barber in Cuba, was cutting his hair. Dolce was on the phone with Gaffney, and he was very upset. ‘I told you that under no circumstances will I take this job on a permanent basis,' he said. And sure enough, at the end of thirty days, Dolce told Gaffney, ‘I'm going home. Book me out.' And he was gone.”

Dunagan's explanation is hard to refute. But the FBN was steeped in underworld intrigues and office infighting, so naturally there is a more complex and controversial explanation for Dolce's sudden departure. It makes sense of the unexpected, rapid transfer of New York's enforcement assistant to Miami. It's also related to the unresolved French Connection
case of January 1962, and the on going investigation of Angie Tuminaro's younger brother Frank. This part of the story requires a little catching up.

Having made an undisclosed deal with the authorities, Angie Tuminaro, at the age of fifty-two, surrendered in Miami in the early summer of 1962. But his brother Frank continued to deal narcotics in New York with Alexander “Tootie” Schoenfeld, owner of the garage where courier Jacques Angelvin parked the car that may have contained the French Connection case heroin. In May 1963, naive Jacques Angelvin was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he got out in four). Unrepentant François Scaglia received a stiffer sentence and was incarcerated in Attica Prison without revealing anything about his French accomplices. Neither Jean Jehan, who had slipped away to France with the money, nor his mysterious accomplice J. Mouren, could be located, so the French Connection case heroin was kept in the NYPD's property clerk's office as evidence, should the French fugitives ever be brought to trial in New York.

Meanwhile, Sonny Grosso, Eddie Egan, and Frankie Waters commenced a leisurely pursuit of Frank Tuminaro. And finally, after three years of observation (during which time Egan earned the nickname “Popeye” from the effects of pep pills and from watching everyone through binoculars for so long), Tuminaro was arrested on 3 February 1965 with thirteen accomplices, including Schoenfeld and William Paradise. Tuminaro immediately jumped bail and stayed on the lam until he was murdered in 1968.

With this background, and that from the French Connection case chapter in mind, Lenny Schrier and Frankie Waters provide the controversial explanation for why John Dolce resigned. Schrier says that Waters, while under his supervision in early 1965 as a member of the International Group, followed Tuminaro's delivery man to Dolce. “The guy could have been his informant,” Schrier muses, giving his archrival the benefit of the doubt. In addition, Waters and Sonny Grosso allegedly tape-recorded a conversation Tuminaro had with Dolce. This in itself does not imply complicity, for again, like his deliveryman, Tuminaro may have been Dolce's informant – and as we will learn in the next portion of this chapter, stringing informants along was part of the narcotics game. In any event, this information was allegedly passed to District Supervisor George Belk at a secret meeting held at the CIA's 13th Street pad; and as a result, Belk and Henry Giordano – despite Gaffney's best efforts to prevent it from happening – gave Dolce an ultimatum: take the job in Miami or quit. As Schrier dryly observes, “Dolce resigned not long after that.”

Whether his decision was voluntary or forced upon him, Dolce's resignation marked the end of an era in FBN history. In 1964, Pat Ward
left New York to become the district supervisor in Chicago, and Patty Biase moved into private enterprise and an early death, either from a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage; or, by Tom Tripodi's account, from poison administered by a retired NYPD detective at a 1966–67 New Year's Eve party. In any event, by the summer of 1965, the ruling Ward–Dolce–Biase clique was gone and in its absence, Lenny Schrier, Frank Waters, and Frank Selvaggi emerged as New York's dominant case-making triumvirate.

As a result of the Marshall and Hermo affairs, IRS inspectors were already probing the financial affairs of every New York FBN agent when an ex-con and small-time drug dealer named Joseph Kadlub killed a policeman on 31 July 1965. “Kadlub was sitting in a Bay Shore bar waving a gun and busting the waitress's chops,” an agent recalls, “so an off-duty cop named Maitlan Mercer, who just happened to be there, takes him outside. Kadlub turns around and shoots Mercer dead. Mercer's partner rushes outside and shoots Kadlub dead. And that's how that problem began.”

The problem was that Kadlub was FBN Agent Frank Farrell's informer. An agent for less than two years, Farrell was using Kadlub to make a case on Carmine “Junior” Persico, an up-and-coming soldier in the Colombo family. Kadlub, alas, was playing a double game and, while working for the FBN, he was helping crime reporter Dom Frasca investigate FBN corruption. Using wiretap equipment provided by the FBI, Frasca – perhaps at the FBI's instigation – recorded a phone call from Kadlub to Farrell, in which Farrell said he was shaking down Persico for two grand a month on a phony narcotics charge. Immediately after Kadlub's death, Frasca charged the FBN with systematic corruption in a series of articles in the tabloid
New York Journal-American
. In his articles, he made sure to emphasize that District Supervisor George Belk had monitored Farrell's incriminating chat with Kadlub. Henry Giordano, however, steadfastly refused to investigate the allegations, and Farrell was exonerated when Belk explained to the press that tricking informants was part of the narcotics game, and that they were merely stringing Kadlub along.
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Belk may have been telling the truth, but fallout from the Kadlub affair further riled the White House, and Lyndon Johnson's pain was felt at Main Treasury, where, by a portentous twist of fate, Andy Tartaglino had arrived with a preconceived plan on how to purge the FBN of all its sinners. But other matters would come first. “Fred Douglas [the Treasury Department's
aging liaison to Interpol and the CIA] had had a heart attack,” Tartaglino explains, “and had fallen behind on his correspondence. So Gaffney, who wanted me out of his hair anyway, sent me to Main Treasury to replace Douglas and to work with Arnold Sagalyn, the new law enforcement coordinator.”

Tartaglino resolved the correspondence problems with Interpol and took over Douglas's contacts with the CIA. “It took about six months to straighten things out,” he recalls, “and just about then David Acheson arrived as [Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon's] assistant for law enforcement. Acheson's first job was to reorganize the Secret Service in the wake of the JFK assassination, and he was very busy doing that. I had just finished the Interpol assignment and he needed help, so he asked me to stay at Main Treasury as his assistant, to help resolve a problem between Henry Giordano and Customs Commissioner Lester Johnson.”

Giordano had complained to Acheson that Customs was subsidizing drug dealers in Mexico and, through its misuse of convoys, losing loads of heroin. Customs denied the charges and, in retaliation, stopped communicating with the FBN. This had serious consequences, and in one instance an FBN informant actually bought heroin from a Customs informant, and neither of their case agents realized it until after the exchange had taken place. Agents from the rival organizations were subverting each other's investigations, and finally shots were exchanged in a border town. “There was so much anger between Johnson and Giordano,” Tartaglino says, “that a compromise could not be reached.

“Luckily,” he adds, “Johnson had been the Customs Attaché in Rome when I was there in the late 1950s. We'd formed a rapport, and when Johnson saw me at Main Treasury, he asked Acheson if I could replace Giordano as the FBN's representative to Customs. Giordano and Acheson agreed, and I did a six-month border study. The final report set guidelines for convoys and the use of informants inside Mexico, and paved the way for a compromise that was never followed.”

More problems lay ahead. “After the Customs dispute was settled,” Tartaglino says, “Gene Marshall was arrested in Miami and Kadlub was killed in New York – right after he'd gone to the
Journal-American
– and Acheson, to say the least, was concerned. He was supposed to be reorganizing the Secret Service, but he'd complain at staff meetings that he was spending all of his time on Narcotic Bureau problems. He needed help, so he brought on Bob Jordan to handle the Secret Service, and Tony Lapham to handle the FBN. Lapham was a young Washington lawyer from an old San Francisco banking family, well connected in the Democratic Party.
And if not for Tony [whom Tartaglino says was a CIA officer and who, in 1976, became the CIA's General Counsel under DCI George H. W. Bush], I wouldn't have been able to form the anti-corruption group. Lapham saw so much corruption he said, ‘You have to do something.' ”

Choosing his words carefully, Tartaglino says: “I told Lapham, ‘I want to help, but I can't serve two masters.' So Lapham and Acheson went to Giordano, and Henry agreed that I should be autonomous. I was assigned to Main Treasury full-time, as Acheson's executive assistant, and Acheson asked me to devise a plan.”

Tartaglino, as noted, had been contemplating an integrity investigation for years, and already had a course of action in mind. He told Acheson there was wrongdoing in New York, “up to the district supervisor,” and that the investigation had to begin where Lee Speer had left off, by reviewing what Fred Dick and Bill Durkin had done in 1961. He also asked that IRS Inspections be directed to examine the tax returns of every FBN agent who had served in New York from 1950 through 1965. Acheson agreed to both approaches. While Tartaglino and Henry Petersen at the Justice Department began a review of the Speer investigation, Acheson approached Vernon “Iron Mike” Acree, the chief of IRS Inspections. Already in the business of routinely checking the tax returns of some freewheeling FBN agents, Acree assembled a team of top-notch criminal investigators and auditors and began a clandestine investigation of all current and past FBN employees. Acree reported directly to Acheson in this regard, and for the moment, Tartaglino was not involved.