The Strength of the Wolf (65 page)

While SDECE Agent Maurice Castellani and CIA Agent Irving Brown were slipping away, two major French connection cases were brewing in late 1965, both of which, like Castellani, would return to haunt the FBN and drug law enforcement in the United States.

The Nebbia case began on 14 December 1965, when French authorities, based on SDECE wiretaps, told FBN Agent Vic Maria in Paris that Louis Jacques Douheret in Sao Paulo, Brazil, had closed a deal with Joe Orsini in Madrid for “a maximum delivery” of narcotics.
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The French knew that Douheret (as mentioned in
chapter 21
) worked for Joe Orsini's narcotics manager, Jean Nebbia, as Nebbia's contact to American drug traffickers, and that Nebbia obtained heroin, produced in clandestine labs in France, from Achille Cecchini. Douheret, Nebbia, and Cecchini were not on the International List, however, and for some reason the French sat on the information for a month before telling Maria – so everything that happened next, came as a sudden surprise for the man in charge of the case, Lenny Schrier, head of New York's International Group.

As the French knew, Douheret had arrived in New York on 8 December, and Nebbia arrived three days later. After being informed of these developments on 14 December, International Group member Tony Mangiaracina checked the INS I-94 files and found out that Nebbia was staying at the plush Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Within hours his phone was tapped, and Nebbia's chats with his mistress, Suzanne Couergou, led FBN agents straight to Douheret and his assistant, Joseph Nonce Luccarotti.

The next day, FBN agents tailed Douheret to a meeting with Frank Dioguardia, the powerful Miami-based Teamster and Mafioso. The Corsican and the American had only known each other for a week, but during that time Dioguardia had purchased the Nebbia facet of the French connection from his close associate, Santo Trafficante, after its previous owner, Arnold Romano, went on the lam after being implicated in the Air France case in Canada. Dioguardia returned to Miami on 17 December, and the next day Morty Benjamin followed Nebbia and Douheret to La Guardia Airport. Sensing something was amiss, he radioed the office and told trouble-shooter Frankie Waters what was happening. Waters raced to the airport and, as the passengers were boarding the plane, he flashed his badge and climbed aboard. He was armed and wearing his favorite sloppy sweatshirt and dungarees.

“As soon as we arrived in Columbus, Georgia,” Waters recalls. “I called Lenny Schrier in New York, then alerted the local police. Lenny sent down Tom Dugan, Norman Matouzzi [Belk's new enforcement assistant], Frank Selvaggi, and a new agent, Jack Kiere. Kiere spoke French and had sat on the bug at the Waldorf. We still didn't know where the heroin was at, and our job was to find it.

“To make a long story short, we end up in a big car chase. Selvaggi and I are riding with the Georgia State police and we follow the Frenchmen [Nebbia and Douheret] to the Black Angus Motel off Veterans Highway. They know they're being followed, so they drive right through and out onto the highway again. Everyone else is watching the Frenchies, but as we drive by the motel, I see a guy standing in the shadows on the second-floor balcony, and I get one of my telegrams from God.” Waters arches his eyebrows. “I tell the trooper to stop the car, grab Selvaggi by the collar, drag him out of the car, and we check into the place. Then we lay low.

“After a while we ask the motel manager about the guy I saw. His name is Sam Desist and he's a retired Army major. The manager lets us check his room when he's not there, then we arrange to get a rental car so we can follow him. The next day we follow the major to Gaylord's department store and watch while he meets a young guy with a crew cut. I'm in my sweatshirt. Selvaggi's in his black overcoat, looking like Count Dracula. We're hiding behind the racks in this redneck department store, as conspicuous as raisins in rice pudding, but Desist and Conder don't notice us.” Waters laughs. “But we see them buy four suitcases, and right away we know they're dirty. We see them put the suitcases in the young guy's van, and we follow them across town to a trailer park near Fort Benning, where the young guy, Warrant Officer Herman Conder, lives with his wife.

“We take turns watching the trailer, and pretty soon we see Conder take the suitcases to a shed out back. There's a freezer in the shed, and it looks like Conder's going to take the dope out of the freezer and put it in the suitcases, so I rush over to a gas station across the street and call Matouzzi in Atlanta. I tell him we're about to nail the bad guy. Then I go up to the trailer with Selvaggi. We make the arrest, and then we make Conder take us over to the shed, where we find 190 half-kilogram bags of heroin in the suitcases. Eventually Matouzzi arrives with everyone else, and we take the junk back to our room, call New York, and tell Lenny, ‘We got it! Arrest everybody!' ”

A few hours later, FBN agents arrested Dioguardia in Miami, and Nebbia, Douheret, and Luccarotti in New York. On 22 December, Vic Maria and Emil Angles, deputy director of the Central Narcotics Office in Paris, arrested Sam Desist at his home in Orleans, France. Desist had a relative in the Mafia, and as Maria recalls, “From Desist we got information about military personnel who were transporting heroin to bases in America, at which point the Pentagon launched its own investigation.”

Because the military took over the investigation, the FBN was prevented from pursuing leads arising out of the Nebbia case, and would not discover
– until Douheret opened up in August 1968 – that Orsini had first sent Douheret to America in 1959 to contact Benny Indiviglio, the Gambino man operating in New York and Texas under the aegis of Santo Trafficante. The FBN never knew that between 1959 and 1964, Douheret delivered ninety kilograms of heroin a month to Indiviglio and Arnold Romano in New York. They knew Romano had a French connection, but they didn't know it was Nebbia until December 1965; and the FBN never learned, not even after the case was made, that Douheret had received deliveries from Jean Bousquet and SDECE Agent Michel Victor Mertz, while Mertz was wearing his French Army uniform! Douheret's arrangement with deliverymen Mertz and Bousquet had lasted from 1960 until September 1964, when Orsini broke with Paul Mondoloni's representative, Bousquet, and turned to Desist. In 1968, Douheret would reveal that Mondoloni was the receiver for the Francisci clan, but more importantly, in 1966, Douheret and Nebbia would name Paul Mondoloni, Michel Mertz, Achille Cecchini and Marcel Francisci “as responsible for the traffic.”
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Despite the military's obstructionism, the Nebbia case produced another significant piece of information as well. A search of Nebbia's belongings led to Albert Dion, president of a Corsican association in New York, and to Blaise Gherardi, a restaurateur and friend of Philippe de Vosjoli, SDECE's liaison officer to James Angleton until 1963.
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De Vosjoli and James Angleton had often dined together at Gherardi's Rive Gauche restaurant in Washington!
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In addition, FBN agents found the number of Nebbia's Swiss bank account and traced it to Sami Khoury's financial manager, Hersh Gross. Tough Joseph Luccarotti remained silent, but the investigation exposed his contacts in Sao Paulo and Jamaica. Assigned to an engineer battalion at Fort Benning when he was busted, Herman Conder became the government's chief witness and received a mere suspended sentence. Sam Desist and Frank Dioguardia were convicted in July 1966. Dioguardia's links to Frank Dasti in Montreal were revealed, as were his receivers in New York – Armand Casoria and Joseph Mangano.
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Further investigation revealed that Casoria supplied Gennardo Zanfardino, as well as Frank and Joseph Malizia (aka the Pontiac brothers). Zanfardino would soon become an object of Frankie Waters's attention, and, according to Tom Tripodi, so would the Malizias.

As noted, the intelligence angle of the Nebbia case would return to haunt the FBN. Achille Cecchini was arrested in the case but released, and resumed his position as heroin supplier to the Mertz SDECE operation, which continued to smuggle an estimated quarter ton of heroin annually to
America through 1968. When Mertz was finally arrested in November 1969, he served only six months in jail and, as reported by the
Newsday
staff in
The Heroin Trail
, then retired to his 1,400-acre estate in Loiret, France, under the protection of his patron, SDECE Colonel Nicholas Fourcaud.
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The CIA had known about Mertz all along, but chose to look away. This fact became evident in October 1972, when
Newsday
reporters asked Paul Knight for information about Mertz. Then a CIA agent, as well as the federal narcotic agent in charge of European operations, Knight, who'd been in the business for twenty years by then, said he never heard of him.

Two months prior to the Nebbia case, another political espionage-charged French Connection case had climaxed in October 1965 with the murder of the exiled Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka. As nothing is what it appears to be in this affair, a little background is helpful in understanding why Barka became a drug trafficking suspect, and how the FBN played a central role in his murder.

Several years before Barka's exile in July 1963, the CIA struck a deal with Morocco's King Hassan II and the top managers of his security forces. It was agreed that Hassan would allow the CIA to use Morocco's Kenitra Air Base to launch covert operations in Africa and the Middle East, and in exchange the CIA would provide technical assistance in identifying and eliminating his domestic opponents, including Ben Barka. But Hassan was considering a pardon for Barka in the summer of 1965 and, having agreed to chair the January 1966 Tri-Continental Congress in Havana, Barka's real enemy was the CIA, which considered his visits to Moscow and his potential return to Moroccan politics as direct threats to US security interests in the region.
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Barka, who was a socialist and not a communist, may also have known about CIA and SDECE involvement in the hash traffic between Morocco and France – very likely out of the aforementioned Kenitra Air Base – and that dirty little secret may have been the real reason both parties wanted him dead.
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Moroccan intelligence officers and French gangsters killed Ben Barka, but the CIA and FBN paved the way. Members of de Gaulle's administration were afraid that Barka would return to Morocco and reform its government and were thus susceptible to manipulation. Knowing this, the CIA, through its chief asset in the Moroccan security service, General Mohammed Oufkir, had Barka's name entered into the Paris vice squad's
narcotics watch list, as a pretext for arresting him while he was in Paris. The French swallowed the CIA plan hook, line and sinker, thus providing the CIA with a patsy, as well as a plausibly deniable means of eliminating Barka, while achieving its goal of weakening Charles de Gaulle and strengthening his chief rival, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. The CIA wanted to see Pompidou succeed de Gaulle, and the former was apparently aware of the CIA's plan to frame Ben Barka on the phony narcotics charge, and then murder him.

During this period, FBN Agent Vic Maria was working closely with Paris narcotic agents Roger Voitot and Louis Souchon. “We copied their reports,” Maria notes, “and Cusack made regular trips to Paris to check their index files.”

Sadly for Barka, his name was entered into a report linking him to narcotics smuggling. Maria copied the report and sent it to Cusack, and from Cusack it went to the CIA. But, Maria stresses, “Barka was not a criminal. He was investigated simply to satisfy those who were controlling the budget. It was to their advantage to make the problem bigger, as their accomplishment would grow in stature as a result.”

Barka, meanwhile, was lured from his residence in Geneva to Paris by the prospect of starring in a propaganda film. He fell into the trap, and on 29 October 1965, Paris stupes Souchon and Voitot, at the direction of SDECE Agent Antoine Lopez, arrested Barka outside the world-famous Brasserie Lipp on suspicion of drug trafficking. Lopez at the time was working for the CIA-infiltrated SDECE faction loyal to Pompidou. According to investigative reporter Henrik Kruger, Pompidou personally arranged for Lopez's assignment as Air France security chief at Orly airport (where he bugged the VIP waiting room), as a cover for his narcotics-related activities as a double agent.

Following the arrest, Lopez and the Paris stupes took Barka to a villa owned by Georges Boucheseiche, a lieutenant in the Jo Attia Gang who operated a string of brothels in Morocco. From Boucheseiche's villa Barka was taken to the Château d'Aunoy and put under guard by the Bande de la Tour, a shadowy organization (the remnants, perhaps, of a unit formed by General Boyer de La Tour to provide security for Morocco's prison system during French Protectorate days), described by Vic Maria's informant, Dick Jepson, as “Southern people from the Compagnies Republicans de Sécurité.” As Jepson explains, “The château had a moat and high walls and was surrounded by barbed wire. It was a secluded place where political people could be held. Algeria's first president, Ben Bella was locked up there too, along with seven or eight others.”

According to Jepson, the Moroccans slowly tortured Barka to death at the Château d'Aunoy. However, a 10 January 1966 article in
L'Express
alleged that General Oufkir had killed Barka at another location. The article, which was delivered to the magazine by Lyon Gang member Joseph Zurita, and which was undoubtedly CIA disinformation, was widely believed and cast blame where it did not belong. That in itself is very interesting, but what is important for the subject of this book is that, immediately after delivering the article, Joseph Zurita applied for a US visa. Zurita listed his address as 10 rue de Dobropol. When arrested, Jean Nebbia had the same address among his papers, which directly ties their drug rings together. Upon arriving in New York, Zurita met daily with Maurice Castellani from 20 to 26 April 1966, thus bringing him as well into direct association with Nebbia, Mertz, Mondoloni and Francisci.
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