The Strength of the Wolf (7 page)

Not only was Oyler a skilled investigator, he had high-ranking contacts in the military. Most important was an association he formed in 1923 with Assistant US Attorney William J. Donovan. Together they cracked an international drug ring based in Buffalo, New York, and a huge seizure they made in Canada became a hot topic at the 1924 Geneva Opium Conference, and provided Representative Porter with the evidence he needed to trace the source of the narcotics to British and French Opium Bloc colonies. It is very likely that Oyler introduced Donovan to Harry Anslinger. Along with Donovan, future Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Allen W. Dulles, and Andrew Mellon's son-in-law David K. Bruce (later ambassador to France, Germany, and Great Britain), Anslinger would become one of the founding fathers of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Second World War and the CIA in 1947.

The turning point in Oyler's career, however, was the Rothstein investigation, and his reward for smashing the world's biggest narcotics ring and
for uncovering corruption within the Narcotics Division was a summary transfer to Chicago. But Anslinger recognized Oyler's talents and in 1934 resurrected his career by appointing him district supervisor in Detroit. Oyler served in this position until his death in 1947, making numerous newsworthy (but local) cases against mostly Chinese and Afro-American gangs dealing in opium and marijuana.

While Oyler's tenure in Detroit was marked by mostly small and safe investigations, other case-making agents were actively pursuing heroin traffickers and establishing the basis for the FBN's great post-war Mafia hunting expedition. Bespectacled, demure, and small in stature, Benedict “Benny” Pocoroba was one of the few undercover FBN agents ever to slip unnoticed inside the upper echelons of the Mafia. A man of immense courage, Pocoroba worked from 1918 to 1928 for a private detective agency that had launched its own investigation of the Mafia. Through this experience he had acquired insights into the secret organization that had taken over drug trafficking from the original Chinese and Jewish gangs. Pocoroba was recruited by Anslinger in 1930 and assigned the task of infiltrating Mafia chapters in California, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York.
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The exact opposite of flashy Ralph Oyler, Benny Pocoroba was unglamorous and eminently un-newsworthy, but he and a few Italian, Chinese, and Jewish undercover agents are said to have “made the Bureau,” which by the late 1930s was accurately mapping out the Mafia's hierarchy.

By 1937 the FBN's rising star was George Hunter White, the organization's most flamboyant and controversial character. White's claim to fame was the 1937 undercover case he made against the Hip Sing T'ong, the infamous drug-smuggling Chinese–American trade association. Posing as John Wilson, a nephew of his “Uncle Sam” (a hitherto unknown gangster forming a new drug syndicate), White initiated the case in Seattle, then crossed the country contracting with Hip Sing T'ong members for huge purchases of opium. According to legend, White was initiated into the T'ong, swearing to accept “death by fire” should he ever break its sacred oath of secrecy.
¹⁴
The investigation climaxed in November 1937 with a series of spectacular mass arrests, one of which implicated Charles Luciano through the arrest of the wife and brother of one of his top aides. The Hip Sing T'ong case earned White his well-deserved status as one of the FBN's top case-making agents.

At five feet seven inches tall and 200 pounds, White, with his head shaved bald, was the picture of the mythical detective who made bad guys tip their hats and speak politely to cops. A native of California, White was ebullient and exceedingly confident, and as a former crime reporter for the
San Francisco Call Bulletin
, he had a nose for sniffing out trouble – and trouble was what he enjoyed more than anything else. It didn't matter that he collected confiscated opium pipes or drank to excess, because White was the roughest and the toughest, and he fought with the troops on the front lines. More importantly, his newspaper contacts were always available to his publicity-hungry boss – and after he helped to extricate Anslinger's stepson, Joseph, from an undisclosed legal problem, White became Anslinger's favorite and most trusted agent.

Anslinger's top field manager was Garland H. Williams from Prentiss, Mississippi. After earning a degree in civil engineering, Williams served in the Louisiana National Guard until 1929, when he entered the customs service. An intrepid investigator, Williams worked for Anslinger in the Flying Squad on some of the Foreign Control Board's most important and wide-ranging cases. Utterly dependable, Williams in 1936 was chosen to negotiate, with Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, an anti-smuggling agreement that allowed Treasury agents to operate inside Mexico. That same year Williams organized the customs service's southwest Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, to monitor the entire US–Mexican border.
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Williams was transferred to the FBN in November 1936, after Manhattan US Attorney Lamar Hardy complained to Secretary Morgenthau about the FBN's failure to make any significant drug cases in New York in the previous two years. Morgenthau, without notifying Anslinger, sent a team of IRS agents to New York to find out why. What the IRS agents found was an office paralyzed by corruption and a lack of leadership. Morgenthau, having lost confidence in Anslinger (who nearly lost his job, and did lose all of his hair as a result of the stress), assigned Williams the job of cleaning up the mess in New York.
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As New York district supervisor, Williams whipped the office's maverick case-making agents (aka the Forty Thieves) into line, and then tied Yasha Katzenberg's gang of Jewish narcotics smugglers to Japan through their source in Tientsin, China, at the same time that Anslinger, in March 1937, was accusing the Japanese of dispensing opium in Manchuria as a weapon of war.

The Katzenberg case marked a pivotal point in the history of international drug smuggling. To sum it up, Yasha Katzenberg managed an
elaborate drug ring that, with the help of corrupt Customs officials, smuggled huge amounts of narcotics on luxury liners from China to Mafia and Jewish distributors in New York. After Katzenberg was indicted in 1937, Garland Williams tracked him across Europe and caught him in Greece. Brought back to New York to stand trial, Katzenberg “flipped” and became the main witness against his fellow conspirators. But of his many revelations, the most important was that Giuseppe “Joe Adonis” Doto had stolen his last drug shipment, and had effectively taken control of narcotics importation. The significance of Katzenberg's revelations about Adonis cannot be overstated: it confirmed that the Mafia had always obtained narcotics from the Far East, and that it had taken over international drug trafficking from the Jewish gangs; but it also meant that the FBN had identified a top member of the conspiracy – as well as his political protector, Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer.
¹⁷

A member of Mafia boss Vincent Mangano's crime family in Brooklyn, Joe Adonis rose to power in the underworld by providing the Ford Motor Company with the muscle it needed to smash an autoworkers strike outside Detroit in 1932. He was rewarded with a lucrative franchise, and until 1951 his Automotive Conveying Company freely moved sedans and drugs between Detroit and New Jersey, and thence throughout New England and the East Coast. “In the eight years from 1932 to 1940,” investigative journalist Fred Cook wrote, “Ford paid this Adonis-controlled company a cool $8 million.”
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The FBN's headquarters staff knew this about Adonis, but Katzenberg provided an astounding new insight into the relationship between Adonis, his Mafia and Jewish associates, and politicians in New York. According to Katzenberg, Adonis had used his political influence to ensure that Brooklyn policeman William O'Dwyer first became a magistrate, and then Brooklyn's District Attorney. By 1941, O'Dwyer was a powerhouse in his own right and would successfully run as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, presumably with Mafia backing.

Anslinger and Harney knew that O'Dwyer, while serving as DA, had investigated the murder of labor leader Joe Rosen. They knew that O'Dwyer's informant in the case, Abe Reles, a professional hit man for Murder Incorporated (the joint Jewish–Mafia operation that sanctioned underworld murders nationwide) had named Katzenberg's financier, Louis
“Lepke” Buchalter, as having ordered Rosen's murder. O'Dwyer indicted Buchalter for murder, of course, but what troubled Anslinger and Harney was that Reles had also named Joe Adonis, Willie Moretti, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegel, Frank Costello, and Albert Anastasia as Buchalter's co-conspirators – and yet they were not indicted. In fact, when prosecutors in California sought Reles's testimony in order to indict Siegel on murder charges, O'Dwyer declined to send him.
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Then on 12 November 1941, Reles (“the canary who couldn't fly”) took a fatal fall from the sixth floor window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while under the protection of six policemen – all of whom had fallen asleep simultaneously. With no material witness to testify against Adonis and the other members of Murder Inc., the case against them evaporated.
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Bigger problems, however, were looming for the FBN, and two weeks after Reles was silenced, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the wholesale reorganization of American society and ushered in a more complicated phase in the FBN's history. The exigencies of world war would turn Anslinger's enemies into unwanted allies and would pervert the nature of drug law enforcement for a long time to come.

In 1930 the Mafia's boss of bosses, Charles Luciano, and his Polish-born Jewish partner, Meyer Lansky, incorporated crime in America. As the organization's financial manager and executive producer of vice, Lansky located and shielded investors in its various rackets and channeled mob profits into an assortment of legitimate business ventures, including Florida land deals, Mexican racetracks, and casinos in Cuba. A financial wizard and a government informant when it suited his purposes, Lansky was a seeker of the respectable façade. But he could never expunge from his lengthy rap sheet a Public Health Act charge for violating drug laws that he incurred in January 1929 with his partner since childhood, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
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Lansky's other boyhood friend, Charles Luciano, was born in Sicily in 1897 and arrived in New York in 1904. A fifth-grade dropout and compulsive gambler, his first arrest for heroin possession was in 1916. His second occurred in 1923, and this time he cooperated with New York Narcotics Division agent Joe Bransky and set up a rival gang member rather than face charges. Six years later, on a chilly October night, Luciano
earned his famous nickname. As related in
The Luciano Story
, a drug shipment from the Eliopoulos gang was headed for New York on a Greek ocean liner. Unaware that rivals had betrayed him, Luciano went to the pier to receive the load, but was tailed by Narcotics Division agents. He recognized the agents before the exchange was made and backed away, but the agents wanted to know where the drugs were hidden, so they took Luciano to a secluded spot on Staten Island where a brutal interrogation ensued.
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Luciano was cut so badly he acquired a permanent droop to his right eyelid; but he remained true to the Mafia code of omerta (a word derived either from the Sicilian
umirta
, for humility, or the Spanish
hombre
, to be a man) and revealed nothing. By the time the story got around town, he had also acquired the nickname “Lucky” and the abiding respect of the upper underworld. He also acquired a seething Sicilian hatred for federal narcotic agents in general, and for Anslinger in particular, whom he mockingly referred to as “Asslicker.” It was the start of a very bitter rivalry that would help define the course of FBN history.

Shortly after his run-in with the federal narcotic agents, Luciano retired the old Mafia dons, established New York's five crime families, made peace overtures to his rival crime lords in Chicago, and formed a national commission of Mafia bosses, with himself as chief executive officer, Lansky as chief financial officer and liaison to a worldwide network of Jewish gangsters, and respectable Frank Costello as prime minister and liaison to the Establishment. The Commission settled disputes and regulated four industrial-sized rackets: labor racketeering, gambling, prostitution, and a drug importation and distribution syndicate which, according to Anslinger, had its own legal staff and sales force. Under general manager Nicola “Nick” Gentile (a member of the Mangano family), this Mafia drug syndicate would secure a monopoly (originally established by Jewish gangs) over interstate distribution, and by the late 1930s was the focus of the FBN's attention.
²³

Incredibly, Luciano's reign as the
capo di tutti capi
(boss of bosses) did not end in 1936, when New York State's special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey – using wiretaps placed in Luciano's bordellos, the perjured testimony of three addict prostitutes, and the testimony of Mafia turncoat Joe Basile, an informant for FBN agent J. Ray Olivera – convicted Luciano on sixty-two counts of compulsory prostitution. Luciano received a thirty-to-fifty-year prison sentence, but maintained his status as boss of bosses even behind bars. Lansky eluded the long arm of the law altogether, and the Mafia's drug syndicate survived, as did the Luciano family under the leadership of politically astute Frank Costello. With its managers still in
place, the Mafia would ironically in 1942 become one of America's most undesirable allies.

This development was a terrible blow to Harry Anslinger. He hadn't been to the right schools, and he didn't speak with the right accent, but he did understand the meaning of power, privilege, and place. Standing erect with his head held high, he was the image of strength and sobriety. He owned a home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, and he resided at the exclusive Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. His circle of friends included judges, bankers, diplomats, and affluent executives who liked to hunt bear and elk in Canada, or deer and pheasant on their country estates. He was not the type of man to suffer underlings, let alone mobsters.