The Strength of the Wolf (63 page)

The irony, obviously, is that Gaffney had exiled Tartaglino to Main Treasury, thinking that would get him out of his hair. But the plan backfired, and through the formation of an independent anti-corruption unit, Tartaglino would exact revenge on the people he felt had hounded Charlie Siragusa out of the Bureau, and who, out of pure spite, were continuing to chip away at his legacy. Orlando Portale is a case in point.

“Orlando was a deported mobster who told Charlie how the mob was organized in several US cities,” Tartaglino says. “For years Orlando was not believed, but he was vindicated by Apalachin, and when the people arrested at Apalachin were charged with consorting to conspire, Charlie offered Orlando's services to [prosecuting attorney] Milton Wessel. But there were threats on his life, so when it came time to testify, Charlie brought Orlando into the country clandestinely. The paperwork was fudged, and Orlando testified under the alias Roger Kent. After the case ended, he stayed in America. But his protection ran out when Charlie retired, at which point Gaffney tried to have him deported back to Italy.”

Tartaglino braces himself: “Orlando called me while I was at Main Treasury, working on the special projects. I went to INS, and they put the deportation on indefinite hold, and Orlando was allowed to remain in the country.”

Gaffney, as ever, begs to differ. “Siragusa had convinced the prosecutors that this man could make a major contribution to their probe. But I cannot recall anything of any value ever attributed to Roger Kent.” He takes a deep breath. “As for Andy, he was a good agent before he came to Washington. When he was in Europe he came up with good information, but he never could find the labs. Speer asked me to get rid of him because of that, but I refused. I asked Speer, ‘How many labs did you find?' So I'm the one who prevented Andy from being fired, and I'm the one who suggested that he come to Washington. But then he developed an unbridled ambition, and I was personally very disappointed.”

As the FBN expanded its overseas operations, displacing Customs in the Far East and Mexico, the CIA grew ever more interested in its affairs, especially in drug-infested Miami, where former FBN Agent Tom Tripodi arrived in 1965 as the CIA's security chief. According to Tripodi, “The break in the Marshall investigation came through my predecessor, Bill Finch, the CIA's liaison to the FBN in Miami. Bill would take Marshall out for sumptuous lunches, and Marshall would keep the receipts and then claim he'd paid for them. Marshall was also claiming payments to an informant [a CIA double agent masquerading as an FBN informant], but never reported that he was reimbursed for those payments by Finch.”

Finch told Ray Cantu about Marshall's indiscretions, and Cantu told District Supervisor Dan Casey in Atlanta. (Finch went to Cantu because the CIA had employed Cantu while he was teaching foreign policemen how to conduct drug investigations at the International Police Academy in Panama.) Once Casey had been informed, he had no choice but to tell headquarters, and that's when the corruption investigation of Gene Marshall began. The CIA, through Tony Lapham, would use this same process – gathering evidence of an FBN agent's wayward activities, and then using it to have him arrested or forced to resign – with great success, throughout the entire organization, in the months to come. The FBI, as demonstrated in the Kadlub affair, was already employing this same modus operandi, and would continue to do so, too.

Marshall's removal, notably, paved the way for the CIA's reorganization of drug law enforcement in Miami, in line with its pseudo-national security need to protect its irregular army of cocaine-crazed, anti-Castro terrorists. The problem with the uncontrollable Cubans had climaxed in September 1964, when Manuel Artime and his goon squad – composed of Ralph Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, and Ricardo Chavez – sank a Spanish ship off the coast of Cuba. Working out of a ranch in Costa Rica owned by Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Artime's team regularly mounted torpedo boat attacks on Cuban vessels. But in a fatal case of poor spelling, they hit the Sierra Aranzazo instead of the Sierra Maestre. The ship's captain was killed, and the US government had to pay $1 million in damages and admit its error publicly.
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Not long after the Sierra Maestre flap, Artime's camp on Somoza's ranch in Costa Rica was identified as a transit point for Colombian cocaine. Subsequently, Artime went to work as Somoza's business agent in Miami, and his lieutenants – Quintero, Rodriguez, and Chavez – were sent to the Congo to fight rebels receiving assistance from the legendary Argentine revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and some one hundred Cuban advisors. And here, with Guevara, the CIA's counterinsurgency, counter-intelligence, and narcotics operations merged with surprising results.
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According to Tom Tripodi, Che left Africa in March 1965 and, on behalf of the Communist Chinese, built a series of cocaine labs in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. If this is true, Guevara's narcotics were probably reaching his sworn enemies in Miami's exile community. Incredible as it may seem, Tripodi says that Castro would turn off his radar at certain times to allow the double agent smugglers in his employ to slip into Cuba with badly needed embargoed items. Through electronic monitoring posts its infiltration teams had concealed in Cuba, the CIA knew when the radar was down, and would insert its agents at those times. Tripodi would like us to believe that only Castro's double agents were coming back with cocaine, not the good guys in the CIA's employ. The truth is that they were all smuggling dope, and the CIA didn't give a damn. As Tripodi explains, “The CIA was happy, because the smuggling gave a sense of purpose and a means of funding to a group it had trained for a counterrevolution that every day seemed less likely to occur.”
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As the CIA's security chief in Miami, Tripodi's job was to identify double agents within the CIA's mercenary army and political infrastructure. His concern was that an infiltration team, managed by CIA contract agent Greyson Lynch, had been penetrated by Castro's drug-smuggling agents. Helping him to identify these double agents were Miami policemen Joe
Fernandez – later to join the CIA and be disgraced in the Iran Contra scandal – and FBN Agent Nick Navarro, later to become sheriff of Broward County. Through his security function, Tripodi discovered that the CIA's anti-Castro Cuban drug smugglers were unloading cocaine at secret bases in the Florida Keys, and selling it on the streets of Miami. Within Miami's exile community, the smugglers were using cocaine profits to fund a shadow war between rival political factions. But they were also serving a valuable counterintelligence function, and as they expanded their drug trafficking operations into Europe, Latin America, and the Far East, the Cubans were able to keep tabs, Tripodi said, on “thirty to forty French traffickers with intelligence connections.”

In yet another strange twist to the CIA's convoluted Cuban connection, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt inherited Tripodi's assets. Hunt would use some of these same Cubans to burglarize Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and bug Democratic Party headquarters in Washington in 1971, thus provoking the Watergate scandal. By then, the CIA's private army of Cuban drug smugglers would rival such well-established narcotics organizations as those of the Mafia, the Kuomintang, and the Corsicans.

Tom Tripodi arrived in Miami with a new contingent of CIA officers led by JM/WAVE's new station chief, John Demer. The previous station chief, Ted Shackley, was reassigned as station chief in Laos, the Agency's primary source of narcotics. Having met General Vang Pao during his “cooling off” period in Miami (after he'd been caught selling fifty kilograms of morphine base to FBN Agent Bowman Taylor), Shackley was well prepared for the job that awaited him; as was the loyal clique of CIA officers he brought with him. Meanwhile, Robert Nickoloff arrived from San Francisco to replace Gene Marshall as the FBN agent in charge in Miami. Nickoloff had served as George White's administrative assistant since 1963. But when White retired in July 1965, Henry Giordano appointed Fred Dick as San Francisco's new district supervisor, and Dick replaced Nickoloff with his own ally from Los Angeles, John Windham. As part of the shuffle, veteran San Francisco Agent Dan Casey became the FBN's district supervisor in Atlanta, and gladly accepted his old friend Bob Nickoloff (in accordance with CIA and FBI wishes) as the ineffectual agent in charge in Miami.

As Rick Dunagan explains, “After White retired, Nickoloff needed a place to go. Well, ‘Smiling Dan' Casey was Nickoloff's rabbi, so Nickoloff
gets Miami – and drug law enforcement comes to a standstill. The first thing Nickoloff did was undo everything Dolce had done. He took us off the sheriff's frequency, and then he hired Nick Navarro and sent him undercover to New York, where Nick got in a load of trouble.

“There were still only five agents in Miami when Nickoloff arrived: me, Marty Saez, Vizzini on disability, Jack Greene, and Ray Cantu, the acting agent in charge. But because we had all worked for Marshall, Casey and Nickoloff decided to scatter us to the four winds. I don't know where Cantu and Greene ended up, but Marty went to Texas, and I,” Dunagan sighs, “was sent to Fred Dick in California.

“Miami was not what it is today,” Dunagan says. “There were no big conspiracies. That wouldn't happen for another year, when the Cubans took over. Trafficante, in Tampa, was being watched, but the intelligence came out of New York's International Group. Then BDAC [the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control] comes around and clouds the picture. The entire drug world was changing. We were seeing less heroin and more pharmaceuticals, and more minor dealers were popping up. It was becoming a free for all, but it stayed the same for the agents, whose ability to make cases still depended on their ability to turn drug dealers into informers, and to choose cases that could go somewhere. There were still the same old money problems too; you ran out of money in April and had to dip into your own pocket until July. And there were still the same old punishments if you kicked down the wrong door. Mistakes were always the critical factor.”

In the wake of the Kennedy assassination and the transfer of political power from the northeast to the Johnson administration in the southwest, the underworld underwent important changes. In December 1963, Profaci family boss Joe Magliocco died MK-BORGIA style, from a poison pill allegedly administered by assassins working for his friend, Joe Bonanno. According to one source, Joe “was noted for it.”
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Bonanno had been plotting with Magliocco against the Gambino and Lucchese families, and reportedly murdered Magliocco to assure his silence in the matter. Bonanno also skipped to Canada and applied for citizenship, prompting the Mafia Commission to make two important decisions. At the urging of Stefano Magaddino, it named Joe Colombo as head of the venerable Profaci family. A good money-maker, Colombo was an expert at using stolen stocks and bonds as collateral for loans to foreign investors
in Europe and Africa – and his loan sharks were famous for stealing back the paper and reselling it to other suckers. Magaddino also interpreted Bonanno's foray into Canada as an attempt to intrude on his holdings, and so, at his request, the Commission named Gasper Di Gregorio as Joe Bonanno's successor. This decision prompted the famous Banana Split, with Bonanno, his son Billy, and their loyal followers fighting Di Gregorio and those Bonanno family members who had defected to his side.
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Picking up where Bobby Kennedy had left off, US Attorney Robert Morgenthau continued to wage war on crime by convening three grand juries: one on the Five Families; one on Joe Bonanno; and one on Tom Lucchese. As a result, Bonanno was expelled from Canada in early 1964, and in August was summoned before Morgenthau's grand jury. He took the Fifth and in October was either kidnapped by Magaddino and sent to Haiti to avoid the grand jury, or was hired by the CIA and sent to Sicily then Tunisia to oversee the Mediterranean facet of international drug trafficking. In either case he vanished and was not seen again until May 1966. His reticence at this particular time is understandable, considering his reputation as an FBN and FBI informant, and his work for the CIA in various assassination attempts against foreign leaders in countries where he and the CIA had pecuniary interests.
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In the summer of 1965, Morgenthau granted immunity to aging Tom Lucchese; Lucien Rivard was extradited to Texas to stand trial in the Caron case; Jorge Moreno Chauvet was convicted and imprisoned, briefly, in Mexico; and Sam Giancana was slammed in a Chicago jail for contempt of court. Million-dollar man Joe Bonanno continued to elude the law, and the new boss of bosses, Carlo Gambino, summoned Tom Buscetta to New York, set him up in the pizza business as a cover, and had him launch a new international narcotics trafficking syndicate with Gaspar Di Gregorio and their mutual contacts in Italy, including Michele Sindona, the Vatican banker with a hell of a lot of penance to pay.

By 1964, Sindona had formed a new Mafia money-laundering mechanism, Moneyrex. Composed of over 800 client banks, Moneyrex invested for Italy's ultra Masonic order P2, the Vatican, and the Mafia through Christian Democrat Senator Graziano Verzotto. Employed as manager of Sicily's State Mining Corporation, Verzotto wrote kickback checks to Buscetta's Mafia allies. Buscetta's protectors, the Badalamenti clan, used at least some of the money to combat their new rivals, the LaBarberas.
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In September 1964, Hank Manfredi received the Treasury Department's coveted Exceptional Service Award and began searching for Joe Bonanno
in Sicily. On 4 October 1965, Pope Paul VI made history by becoming the first pontiff to visit the US. After meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, the pope – who had worked with the OSS while managing the Vatican's intelligence operations, and later paved the way for Sindona to manage the Vatican's investments – made an impassioned appeal for world peace at the United Nations. Notably, his bodyguard and interpreter throughout his visit was Hank Manfredi's close friend, Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus would soon become a bishop and, as manager of the Vatican Bank, start working with Sindona. As one Bureau agent notes, the FBN had “an old secret file [undoubtedly compiled by Siragusa and Manfredi] down at Playhouse 90 [a reference to FBN headquarters on 90 Church Street in New York], detailing the pontiff's “unsavory pals who had connections to the mobs.” There was even a rumor that the mob was blackmailing the man. But that consecrated aspect of international drug trafficking's intelligence angle was too unholy for anyone to handle.