The Strength of the Wolf (64 page)

Francis E. Waters joined the FBN in September 1956 following a three-year stint in the Coast Guard and a summer as a lifeguard at Jones Beach on Long Island. Thomas M. Dugan (Tommy Ogg to the lads in the Irish clique, Young Tom to everyone else) broke him in on the Anthony Carminati conspiracy case, which included Joe Valachi's associates, Robert “Fat Sonny” Guippone and Michael Galgano. As Waters likes to boast, “Robert De Niro later made a movie about these guys called
A Bronx Tale
.”

Agents James Hunt and Arthur Mendelsohn were his next partners. Waters refers to them by their nickname, Death and Destruction, and describes them as “wounded war veterans who hated the criminal element. ‘Where were you, you guinea bastard, when I was slugging through Normandy?' they'd say. That's how they got psyched up to go out and do the things we did.”

After about a year on the job, Waters was sent to Treasury's Law Enforcement School. “The thing I remember most about that,” he says cheerfully, “was the Secret Service agent who taught the class. He said you could always tell where the FBN agent lived in town, because all the junkies would be sitting on his back porch in the morning, waiting for their fix. ‘That's how narcs keep their informants,' he said. Which didn't shock me.
I'd seen what was going on.” Waters cites as an example an NYPD detective who gave his favorite informant a bag of dope every day to wash his car. “That's how it worked. But you didn't tell anyone, especially not the bosses or the US Attorneys, who had to know how a case developed from the first five minutes. If you started to say the wrong thing to one of them, you'd get your leg kicked under the table by one of the older agents.

“There were over sixty agents in the New York office back then, and out of them maybe ten were making cases. The only time the other fifty agents saw heroin was when it was being weighed. These other agents came from places outside of the city, and were expected to go into Chinatown, or Little Italy, or Harlem, and bring back heroin and a defendant. They had a gun and a badge and the street – and the only thing that made it possible was that somebody else was actually doing it. Somebody else was leading the way.

“The other thing that made it possible was the competition between the case-making agents in Group One, which was mostly Irish, and the case-making agents in Group Three, which was mostly Italians. But the competition bred a subversive tone among the agents who couldn't make cases. They'd point at us behind our backs and say, ‘The only reason they make cases is because they bend the rules.' And sometimes what we did was outside the law,” Waters admits. “But if a guy's a criminal and he's got a gun, we figured he was planning on using it against us. So he got his lights kicked out and the gun stuck up his ass.

“I'm not putting these other agents down,” Waters adds. “They weren't wrong. They came to work in car pools, worked regular hours, and led normal family lives. But you can't work regular hours and have a normal family life and still make buys. Some of these agents were so afraid they wouldn't even get out of the car. So there were these two factions: the afraid faction, which had its sense of integrity; and the case-makers, who had theirs, which is summed up in the poem,
The Law Of The Jungle
: ‘The strength of the Pack is in the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is in the Pack.' ”

“In making cases,” Waters says, “good informants are the most desirable thing. But I never had informants. I had
instincts
, and I could read between the lines. But I wasn't like Lenny Schrier. Lenny was like a chess player with informants. He'd say, ‘There's a guy coming around that corner in ten
minutes. He'll be wearing a blue windbreaker and a Yankee baseball cap, and he'll have 100 ounces of heroin.' Which the guy had just bought from Lenny's informant.

“Basically I was a bull in a china closet. But I had my talents, and no one ever questioned my balls.” Waters laughs. “They might question my methods, but never my balls. For twelve years I did things thinking I was invincible, and only the grace of God got me through.

“I'm what's called a self-expansive personality,” he explains. “As a child I had to learn how to defend myself from anxiety. My father was an abusive alcoholic, and I developed a fear that I wouldn't be accepted, so I did things the guys would talk about in bars. In psychology they call it grandiosity. Most of my life I worked on creating the legend of Frankie Black. Sometimes I'd drink too much to relieve the stress. And I had a death wish. So I became a window man. I'd crawl into an airshaft that went into someone's apartment, or I'd climb off the top of tenement roofs onto fire escapes so we could get inside. I wouldn't let anyone else come along because they'd only slow me down. Half an hour later my hands would be shaking.

“Another one of my talents was testifying in court. It was a situation that terrified me at first, but then I did it a few times and realized I liked it, because it fueled all the grandiose ideas I had about myself. And I was good at it. I could testify about a case made in Chicago!” Waters smiles exuberantly. “They called us pinch hitters. Eddie Egan was so comfortable he'd walk into the courtroom and yell, ‘Everybody rise!' And they would. Then he'd walk to his seat and do a little Irish jig before he sat down, while everybody just stood there in awe.”

It didn't matter that some agents couldn't testify well, he adds, especially in big cases where as many as twenty of them might be involved. “Say Agent Joe Blow seizes the most crucial piece of evidence – a note that's essential for the jury to understand the case. Joe's a great agent, but he freezes if he has to speak in front of a crowd. A block away is his articulate partner. I'm the case agent, to whom they both submit their memos. So when I write up the final report, guess who seized the note?

“There's a bigger picture you've got to see,” Waters stresses. “There's a war between good and evil, and we were losing it, and it seemed to many of us that when justice triumphed, it was by accident. So let me tell you about integrity. On the one hand you had the critics, who couldn't make cases for moral reasons, or because they were inept. On the other hand were the case-makers, who knew we had to be the superior force, because the only thing that kept the criminals from overrunning us was
the knowledge that our goon squad would wipe out their neighborhood if they tried. Like the time an agent got ripped off at gunpoint and roughed up by some young wiseguy Italians from Brooklyn. Lenny was the agent's group leader and he said, ‘We've got to teach these guys what their fathers knew – don't ever hurt an agent.'

“We knew who to talk to. We got Selvaggi, Hunt, and Mendelsohn, and we went to the social club where these guys hung out. Lenny waited outside.” Waters is smiling. “One of them tried to get out through the window, so I grabbed him by the ankle and started pulling him in. I had his ankle in one hand, and I was whacking him in the ass with a pool cue I had in my other hand. Meanwhile Lenny's outside and he's got the guy by the collar. Lenny's trying to pull him out with one hand, while he's slugging him with the other. We had this tug of war going on, but neither of us knew it. We'd just hear the guy hollering whenever one of us hit him.”

Owing to what George Gaffney called his “unorthodox methods,” Waters was nicknamed Frankie Black. And because of his grandiosity, he got involved in some of the FBN's most famous cases, including the 1962 French Connection case, in which Angie Tuminaro received heroin from Les Trois Canards member François Scaglia, Jean Jehan in Canada, and a mystery man using the alias J. Mouren. After Angie surrendered in May 1962, his younger brother Frank took over the family narcotics business, and Waters, being responsible for the case, pursued Frank Tuminaro for the next three years. Thanks largely to Waters's efforts, Tuminaro was arrested on 3 February 1965 with thirteen accomplices, including Toots Schoenfeld and William Paradise.

Approximately six months later, Waters – a member of the Schrier clique that ousted the Ward–Dolce–Biase clique – was promoted and made leader of Group Four, over the strenuous objections of Deputy Commissioner George Gaffney.

Six weeks after the arrest of Frank Tuminaro, the French connection took another bizarre turn. On 16 March 1965, Frankie Waters reported that French drug smuggler Maurice Castellani had been bringing “substantial amounts of money” to his fellow Canard François Scaglia at Attica Prison in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, since May 1964.
¹
If the reader will recall, Scaglia's conviction in the 1962 French Connection case was based on flakes of heroin found in the car Jacques Angelvin drove off
an ocean liner into New York – flakes that matched the heroin found in Tony Fuca's basement in the Bronx, and may have originated there.

New York District Supervisor George Belk assigned the Castellani investigation to Lenny Schrier's International Group, and when prison officials alerted the FBN that Castellani had visited Scaglia again on 25 September, Schrier assigned the case to his close friend and former partner, Morty Benjamin. Schrier asked Benjamin to respond to a request made by Hank Manfredi in Rome for reports written in 1962 by Jack Cusack, George Gaffney, and Andy Tartaglino, describing Castellani's relationship with labor leader Irving Brown. As recounted earlier, the CIA had subverted the FBN's 1962 investigation of Brown; and, as Benjamin would soon discover, the freewheeling labor leader still enjoyed protection.

On 11 October 1965, Benjamin reported that Brown and Castellani had arrived together in New York on Air France Flight 025. But Brown had not filled out the I-94 form required by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and three I-94 forms were mysteriously missing for the flight. Benjamin also reported that Brown had “port privileges” at JFK Airport in New York and was routinely ushered through Customs without having to open his bags.
²
Benjamin gave photos of Brown and Castellani to Customs Agent Julius Zamosky, and asked if Customs would please alert the FBN the next time the drug smuggling suspects arrived in New York.

FBN agents in France were also keeping tabs on Castellani and Brown, and on 23 November 1965, they reported to Jack Cusack, now the agent in charge of international operations at FBN headquarters in Washington, that Castellani and Brown had departed for New York. Cusack notified Schrier of their imminent arrival, and he in turn instructed Benjamin and wiretap expert Norey Durham to follow Castellani to Attica Prison and to record his conversation with Scaglia. No attempt was made to follow Brown.
³

Castellani was scheduled to visit Scaglia on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and on Thursday night, with the permission of prison warden Vincent Mancuso, Durham wired the visiting room at Attica Prison. But there were so many visitors making so much noise on Friday that he was unable to record the conversation between the drug traffickers. Benjamin, however, did overhear what was said. “Scaglia was giving Castellani directions about how to handle the business in Marseilles,” he recalls. In a report dated 30 November 1965, Benjamin also stated that Castellani had traveled to and from Attica in a taxicab with Canadian and American plates (the taxicab company was owned by a local associate of the regional Mafia boss, Stefano Magaddino) and, amazingly, that American Airlines had no record of Castellani ever having boarded his flights to and from Buffalo.

Back in New York, on 27 November 1965, Castellani threw a belated birthday party for Brown at the Beaux Arts Hotel. Afterwards he met with several unknown persons, then vanished and was presumed to have returned to France. The FBN dropped its investigation, and “Le Petit” Maurice Castellani continued to traffic in narcotics for the next seven years, without ever getting caught; a fact for which there is only one reasonable explanation: the CIA wanted him to stay in business. Only they had the clout to arrange for his I-94 form and airline records to go missing, and only they could prevent the FBN from conducting a follow-up investigation in France. His immunity was certainly related to his association with Brown, for whom the CIA – most likely James Angleton – arranged port privileges and provided an open invitation to smuggle. But Castellani had protection on other fronts as well. “When I got back to headquarters,” Benjamin says, “I read a report indicating that Castellani was a confidant to the Pope.” According to Tom Tripodi, Castellani had connections with SDECE front groups as well.

The significance of Castellani's escape from New York in November 1965, and his return to drug smuggling with the support of the CIA and SDECE (and perhaps the Vatican), cannot be overstated. INS records indicate that he visited America in 1968 and 1970, and DEA records show that during that period he was associated with Jean Claude Kella, the French supplier of one of New York's biggest drug traffickers, Louis Cirillo. DEA records prove that Castellani was involved in a major heroin smuggling ring with SDECE Agent Andre Labay (a former advisor to Moshe Tshombe in the Congo), and Interpol in 1970 reported that he was “in relation with” Paul Pasqualini, co-owner of a bar in Madrid where emissaries of Ricord's South American Group France met their European contacts.
⁴

Pasqualini's source (and thus Castellani's) in 1966 was SDECE Agent Ange Simonpierri, one of two Corsicans then known to be obtaining narcotics in Indochina.
⁵
From his castle in France, Simonpierri had been sending heroin couriers to the US since 1955, when he was the source of supply for Harry Stromberg.
⁶
His protector and neighbor, Pierre Lemarchand, had commanded the anti-OAS forces with which Simonpierri had fought in Algeria, and had managed a special anti-OAS terror squad in Paris for General de Gaulle.
⁷
Last but not least, the French CNO would report in 1972 that Castellani was involved with French trafficker Joseph Signoli and was still running Les Trois Canards.
⁸