The Strength of the Wolf (67 page)

Replacing Al Garofalo in Marseilles in 1965 was Bob DeFauw. Hired into the FBN in 1960, DeFauw was a talented agent and, in 1962, he attended Fort Holabird's wiretap and surreptitious entry school. “Thereafter I did all the Mission Impossible jobs in Chicago,” he says with a smile.

“Pat Ward was the boss,” DeFauw says, “and one day I got a call to see him, which usually meant you were in trouble. But this time he told me
to call John Enright, the enforcement assistant in Washington. Enright said, ‘You have a French name. Do you speak French?' I said I'd had some French in college, and he said that was good enough, that I'd be going to Marseilles to replace Al Garofalo. He said that I should probably sign up for a refresher course at Berlitz, which I did. The FBN paid half. Afterwards I went out to dinner with Tony Pohl, and we spoke French, and I passed the test. I'd just bought a new T-Bird; Cusack said sell it. When I asked about my personal belongings, he said, ‘You're single. Get rid of them.' They expected me there in sixty days. And those were the circumstances of my assignment to Marseilles.

“I got there in July 1965 and quickly got oriented and went to work. My job was to identify and work around local corruption, gather intelligence needed to set up deliveries and allow them to arrive in areas under FBN control, then seize the drugs and arrest the traffickers. Or to allow the narcotics to go through for the purpose of gathering additional information and setting up the bust of a bigger trafficker down the road. I was also there to penetrate the Corsican underworld, which was the hardest thing to do. Remember, in those days de Gaulle was funding his political action teams through the drug trade. Many of the traffickers were heroes of the Resistance who worked closely with SDECE in countries where their drug trafficking took them, and as mercenaries in places where it was unwise for SDECE officials to move. SDECE acted as a conduit for drug trafficking Corsicans abroad, and de Gaulle protected them all. As a result, the lines between undercover narcotics work and intelligence work were blurred.

“The last thing de Gaulle would permit was CIA agents spying on his domestic political operations, so whenever I came across SDECE, including any of the traffickers in its employ, I had to back off or risk being accused of being a spy. It was touch and go. SDECE had an assassination squad that de Gaulle used to silence his enemies, and every morning I had to check under my car for bombs. But I had to maintain relations too, because the French telephone service was owned by the government, and when I needed a wiretap, SDECE did it. They could tap every room in a 200-room hotel if they wanted.

“In Marseilles I was aligned with two of the Police Judiciare who were assigned as narcotic detectives: Claude Chaminadas and Antoine Barbazza. They were trusted like Americans [one of them mistakenly], but it was difficult because their boss, Commissaire Hugues, had forbidden his men from working with us. So we had to meet out of town in unheard of places where they wouldn't be recognized. Then we'd work up our cases; they'd
give me information, and in return I'd give them items I'd gotten through American channels, like toilet paper from the PX, or ammunition off aircraft carriers at the Naval base, and even .38 caliber revolvers.
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“The other problem was indifference. France didn't have drug addicts, so it wasn't their concern. Their problem was lack of the bare necessities. They lived in tiny apartments like tenements in New York, and were ashamed to invite us over. Everyone was in the black market trying to make ends meet, and in early 1967 we actually mounted an operation against a French Customs official, Thomas Magozzi. We took pictures of him loading a little truck with eighty-six pounds of morphine base that came off a Turkish ship, the Karadeniz. He was arrested, but he was a friend of Marseilles Mayor Gaston Defferre, so his punishment was a transfer two piers down, where he continued to move morphine. Arrested with him was Edouard Toudayan, the key to the Turkish end of the business.

“It was hard to get informants in France too, so we relied heavily on Dick Salmi in Istanbul, and Dennis Dayle in Beirut, to develop the intelligence we needed. We focused a lot on three Turkish ships – the Askindrini, Karadeniz, and Akdeniz – that moved hundreds of kilos of morphine base. And we paid cash to informants in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon, in exchange for license plate numbers. We made big cases working like that, including the Watermelon case, in which Hasan Saheen traveled from Istanbul through Bulgaria into Italy at Trieste.

“The Watermelon case began in April 1966, when we learned from Salmi that Hasan was leaving Istanbul. But we didn't know what his schedule was, and there was no way of tracking him while he was in the East Block countries. So we put the border on alert, and Hank Manfredi in Trieste alerted us when Hasan's truck crossed into Italy in September, at which point Chaminadas and I went to Italy. We followed Hasan through Switzerland and intercepted him at St. Julien as he crossed into France.

“Hasan's truck was loaded with watermelons, and it's an awful long haul from Turkey to France just for that,” DeFauw observes. “We felt sure there was morphine in the truck, so we took it apart. It took two days, but we finally found a false wall in the back. Inside the compartment were 525 kilograms of opium and fifty-four kilos of morphine base packed in five-gallon Shell Oil cans. The seizure led us to a major French lab owner, George Calmet, who was arrested in 1969. It was a huge success, except that Commissaire Hugues was furious that Salmi had gotten the plate number. He felt if anyone got credit, it had to be him.

“If we hadn't seized the truck, and the delivery had been made, the truck would have returned to Turkey with Belgique weapons which the Turks
would have sold to the Kurds in Iran. This link to the black market arms trade is an important feature of the international drug trade. All our best informants were arms merchants, often quite wealthy and very influential, and dealing in gold and diamonds as well. Some were bankers too. They had tremendous political clout, and this is why narcotic agents were so valuable to the CIA: our sources were often their principal means of evaluating and corroborating information. Like the CIA, narcotic agents mount covert operations. We pose as members of the narcotics trade. The big difference is, we're in these foreign countries legally! And not only were we operational, we were accepted by police agencies throughout the world, particularly in source countries. Through our police and intelligence sources, we could check out just about anyone or anything [or plant fabricated incriminating evidence as in the Ben Barka case]. So the CIA jumped in our stirrups.

“When I got to Marseilles, Picini was the boss in Rome. At one time the route went through Rome, but by 1966 it went right to Marseilles. Hank Manfredi was Picini's deputy but because he was CIA, Hank would always be the number two. We all worked closely with the CIA, but Hank and Paul Knight were actually with them. Hank in particular was a fabulous man,” DeFauw says with respect. “He was my mentor when I first arrived. He called two or three times a week to see if I was okay, and when he returned to the States in 1967, he asked me to go along as his assistant at the foreign branch. Knowing I'd be working with him made it a tempting offer, but I'm a field man and I decided to stay.”

Despite the shift in drug smuggling routes, the Italian–Corsican link was still the axis, and not long after DeFauw arrived in Marseilles, Bill Durkin in Mexico sent him Joe Catalanotto, a venerable trafficker turned informant. Born in Sicily, Catalanotto had matured with the major Mafia drug dealers in Detroit. Convicted on drug charges in 1952, he was deported to Italy in 1957, but fled from there to Cuba. He spent a few years in Cuba but, at Charlie Siragusa's request, was deported to Italy again in 1959. Next he fled to Mexico, where he approached Durkin seeking work as an informer. “Durkin told the old man that he couldn't use him in Mexico, but that if he made cases in Marseilles, the Bureau would try to get him back into the States,” DeFauw recalls. Catalanotto agreed, and began providing valuable information about the Sicilian and American Mafia, their Corsican connections, and even Meyer Lansky's involvement in hiding and investing narcotics money.

“Old Joe was special and I treated him that way. I remember Thanksgiving 1966; we cooked a turkey in my apartment and shared it alone. He
talked about his family and how lonesome he was for his daughter, who was stricken with polio and living with his family in Michigan.” DeFauw pauses. “I remember how he cried when I returned one day from Madrid with medals of the Black Madonna, which we sent to his daughter and family.”

With Old Joe's assistance, DeFauw would spend three years in Marseilles making a string of big cases, despite interference from veteran Marseilles narcotic detective Robert Pasquier, who, according to DeFauw, “sold us out.” Another problem was that “no one in headquarters was watching.” As DeFauw explains, “Ours is a cut-throat business in which the guys who make the most cases get promoted. You work alone, and it can ruin you. It's a Hobbes' War that creates the Schriers and Waters: the guys who short-circuit because they're getting cut out and not getting promoted.”

These same guys were also about to become the focus of Andy Tartaglino's cataclysmic integrity investigation.

In the post-Anslinger era, America's drug habits were changing as rapidly as its demographics. Heroin addiction was on the rise, yes, but it was confined mostly to the ghettos, while a wide range of unregulated manufactured drugs – like Black Beauties, a potent amphetamine made in Mexico – were available cheap and were becoming the most abused drugs in America. So, from the mainstream point of view, the pressing concern was the proliferation of amphetamines, barbiturates, pot, and LSD – any of which might incite an impressionable suburban youth to irrational acts of rebellion in the Civil Rights, Free Speech, or Anti-War movements.

The old guard at the FBN viewed the counterculture with a cold eye: uppers and downers were a regulatory problem; pot was a “kiddie” drug; LSD an aberration. What else could they say? As veteran FBN Agent Matt Seifer recalls, “Congress offered Anslinger jurisdiction over speed and barbiturates, but he turned them down flat. He said, ‘If you include them, you'll never have enough jails, even if you bring in the Army and the Navy.' ”

Keeping faith with Anslinger's orthodoxy, the FBN was unwilling to adapt to the sweeping social changes that were rendering it obsolete; a dismantling process that began in January 1963, when the Kennedy administration formed the Prettyman Commission to study the growing problem of dangerous drugs. Unlike studies that had been done under
Anslinger's watch, the Prettyman Commission accepted input from a variety of sources, including foreign governments and Anslinger's critics. Thus, in a report issued on 5 April 1963, the Commission suggested seven ways of reforming federal drug law enforcement, including one recommendation that the Department of Health Education and Welfare assume responsibility for tighter control of non-narcotic drugs. It also proposed better training for FBN agents, closer cooperation between the Bureau and the Justice Department, and reduced prison terms for marijuana users.
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In January 1964, eighteen additional recommendations were added to the original seven, including a controversial proposal (acted upon four years later) that the FBN be moved from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department – a suggestion that prompted George Gaffney to dub the Prettyman Commission “a group of misfits.”
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Although the FBN's conservative hierarchy ridiculed the liberal mood swing in middle-class America, its bureaucratic rivals smelled blood, and on 26 November 1964, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner George P. Larrick announced at a press conference that organized crime was taking over pep pill distribution “in a very substantial way.”
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Larrick's charge was a direct challenge to the FBN to accept responsibility for the burgeoning problem of manufactured drugs. But Commissioner Henry Giordano kept the fundamentalist faith and refused to dilute the FBN's mission. At which point LBJ asked Congress to find a solution.

From the FBN's perspective, the timing of the president's request could not have been worse, for it came while the Interstate Commerce Committee was monitoring a major pep pill case the FDA was making in Virginia. Lawrence “Jerry” Strickler, the FDA undercover agent on the case, had purchased 250,000 uppers from a dozen dealers in three East Coast organizations. The dealers were stationed at truck stops and were purchasing the pills from a crooked doctor who bought his huge mail-order supply from a range of wholesale houses.

Strickler's case underscored the immensity of the new pharmaceutical drug problem, and contributed to the passage of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments, which gave the FDA the authority to regulate the manufacturers and wholesalers of pills that affected the central nervous system. Unregulated distribution of these drugs was deemed illegal, and in February 1966, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC) was created as the FDA's
buffed-up enforcement arm. BDAC agents were empowered to carry guns and make arrests. Their job was to locate clandestine labs and interstate traffickers, monitor the records and facilities of drug manufacturers and distributors, and investigate drug stores and doctors suspected of diverting drugs onto the black market.

John Finlator, the chief administrator of the General Services Administration, was hired as BDAC's director, on the recommendation of Mike Acree, chief of IRS Inspections. (Acree, if the reader will recall, was Andy Tartaglino's partner in the Treasury Department's ongoing integrity investigation of the FBN.) Finlator had no drug law enforcement experience, and his approach was to emphasize modern management techniques, training, research, and public education, as well as standard criminal investigations. In keeping with this methodology, Finlator filled BDAC's senior staff positions with professional managers from such unlikely places as the Department of Transportation, the Department of Labor, and the National Institute of Mental Health. He hired several senior FBI agents to help in managing criminal investigations, and in a move that satisfied the CIA, he hired FDA chemist Dr. Frederick Garfield as his deputy for science and technology. Garfield's CIA connections assured that the spy agency would continue to have control over experimental drug policy.
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