The Strength of the Wolf (73 page)

FBN agents were also, finally, learning to be wary of the CIA. “So much of their information was classified, you could never tell if a guy [like Rosenbaum or Safra] was material,” Vic Maria explains. “As a result, lots of [potentially explosive] information wasn't acted on. Other times you ended up following a guy [like Ben Barka] who wasn't in narcotics.”

Fewer ethical restraints, however, and the return of Marcel Francisci to Marseilles, meant that fomenting dissent among traffickers was easier than ever overseas. “We shot Joe Catalanotto [the veteran Mafioso drug smuggler from Detroit turned FBN informant in Mexico] into Joe Orsini,” DeFauw recalls with delight. “We had him tell Orsini that Antoine Guérini was setting up his shipments and telling the police where his labs were. Antoine was killed in June 1967, and his son barely escaped with his life. When Antoine's brother Meme Guérini found out who did it, he took the guy to a cliff, broke every bone in his body, then threw him over.”

Meme Guérini went to jail for that murder, and Antoine was dead, which meant that the Guérini gang had been effectively eliminated as a major
link in the international drug trade. “But there was a downside to that operation.” DeFauw sighs. “Old Joe did such a good job that we promised to ask the INS to allow him to return to America to visit his family. But the process was too slow for Joe, and against my wishes he went to Italy to visit his family there, using fake ID we had furnished. And that's when [Marseilles Police Inspector Robert] Pasquier gave him up. Old Joe was arrested, and for fear of creating an international incident we dropped him, and he was banished for life to Bari.”

After taking the Fifth before a grand jury convened by US Attorney Robert Morgenthau in October 1964, and then vanishing, Joe Bonanno's whereabouts had become a
cause célèbre
by 9 February 1966, when the
New York Times
reported that he was in Tunis handling international narcotics transactions for the Sicilian Mafia, and that five federal agents from an unnamed agency had gone to Palermo to search for him. The
Times
did not name Bonanno's Sicilian contacts, but it did imply that he was a government snitch. Evidently some disgruntled Bonanno family members had reached the same conclusion, and, on 28 January 1966, renegade Frank Mari took a few shots at Bonanno's emotionally unstable son Billy and his aides, John Notaro and Frank Labruzzo. Mari and Michael Consolo had deserted the Bonanno family for a splinter faction formed, with the Mafia Commission's consent, by Gaspare Di Gregorio in 1965.
¹⁸

Then on 17 May 1966, Bonanno magically appeared at the federal court in New York, and afterwards settled back into his routine, without legal problems and without explaining where he had been. He tried to stabilize his family, but by then the Banana Wars were spinning out of control. The New York tabloids gleefully kept score as Bonanno family loyalists and rebels murdered one another individually and in groups around the city. Competition for narcotics connections further inflamed the situation when Bonanno family rebels Frank Mari and Michael Consolo forged an alliance with Carlo Gambino's brother, Paul, on behalf of Di Gregorio. Bonanno loyalists, led by the imprisoned Carmine Galante, were infuriated at the Gambino family over this development, and Consolo was murdered as a result in March 1968. Frank Mari vanished forever that September.
¹⁹

Meanwhile, Carlo and Paul Gambino had been joined by their Sicilian cousins Giuseppe, Rosario and John (an associate of Mafia banker Michele Sindona), in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and were embarking on one of the
most enduring drug trafficking enterprises ever, the famous Pizza Connection case.
²⁰
At the center of the ring was Tom Buscetta, the indispensable link between the Sicilian, Canadian, and American Mafias, and the liaison to Ricord's Group France and its Italian partners in Latin America and Mexico. Gaetano Badalamenti in Sicily supplied the Gambinos through middlemen in Mexico and the Cotronis in Montreal. Critical to the new organization was an old scheme, devised before the war and perfected by Vito Genovese, in which young Sicilians were brought to America to handle distribution. Working on this project with Buscetta was Salvatore “Saca” Catalano, a top Sicilian Mafioso and fugitive from the 1963 Ciaculli massacre, then living in Brooklyn. Saca's cousin Toto arrived in 1966 and, with Mafia financing, opened one of the first pizza parlor fronts in a new national distribution network.
²¹

The central player in this New World Narcotics Order, Buscetta, after fleeing Sicily in 1963 at the age of thirty-eight, traveled with his girlfriend, Vera Girotti, a beautiful Italian television star, from Milan to Mexico City, where he underwent plastic surgery. From Mexico he traveled to Toronto, where the Cotroni syndicate put him in touch with Domingo Orsini, a Corsican resident of Argentina since 1949, and an associate of Auguste Ricord, Paul Chastagnier and Albert Larrain-Maestre. In 1965, Buscetta slipped through Canada into Brooklyn and, with $10,000 provided by Carlo Gambino, opened his own pizza parlor. Having established his front, he contacted his Sicilian associate Pino Catania in Mexico City. Catania, “through a Mexican industrialist in textiles” had formed relations with a veteran drug trafficker mentioned several times before in this book, Jorge Asaf y Bala. Catania also introduced Buscetta to New York distributor Carlo Zippo, owner of the Brazitalia Company, an electronics shop near Times Square.

Many of Buscetta's movements and activities were known to the FBN. The Italian police had been searching for him since the Ciaculli massacre, and since 1964 the FBN had suspected him of importing heroin from Ontario into the US through Detroit. In February 1966, the FBN opened a confidential correspondence with Italian authorities regarding his new organization, but the investigation was dropped in June 1966 after Buscetta was detained in New York by INS agents for using the passport of a deceased Mexican labor leader. Deportation hearings were initiated, but – like Maurice Castellani before him – Buscetta mysteriously slipped away. By one account he was recruited by the CIA to spy on the Latin American politicians and Corsican spies complicit in his drug-smuggling operations.

There is circumstantial evidence to support the theory that he had been recruited by the CIA, for immediately after his interview with the INS, Buscetta began financing August Ricord's Group France and its major operators, Françoise Chiappe, Lucien Sarti, Françoise Rossi, Christian David, Michel Nicoli, and Claude Pastou, all of whom were “auxiliary agents” of French Intelligence. If the CIA wanted to monitor the activities of the Mafia and the Group France, what better way than through elegant, ubiquitous Tomasso Buscetta?

Robert Kennedy's vaunted war on crime was a faded memory on 22 September 1966, when thirteen major Mafiosi were arrested for “consorting with criminals” at La Stella Restaurant in Forest Hills, New York. Among those present were Carlo Gambino, the boss of bosses; Genovese family boss Tom Eboli and his
consigliere
Mike Miranda; Profaci family boss Joe Colombo and his erstwhile rival Joe Gallo; Santo Trafficante, the Mafia's narcotics manager, based in Tampa, and his close associate Carlos Marcello from Louisiana. After their release, the audacious hoods thumbed their collective nose at the Law, and imperiously invited the press to attend a meeting they held the following day.

Several reasons have been given for the mini-Apalachin, including the need to address the disruptive Banana Wars. Another reason concerned Joey Gallo, whose crew had helped New York Mayor John Lindsay quell race riots in Harlem that summer. “Crazy Joe” had acquired a measure of political protection as a result, and the Mafia mini-summit was convened to welcome him into the fold and seal a truce between him and Colombo. But the primary reason for the meeting was the need to organize the New World Narcotics Order through sleepers (non-Mafia members) like Carlo Zippo, by then the biggest distributor in New York.

Though not represented at La Stella, the Lucchese family was also busy reorganizing its narcotics activities. On 23 January 1967, emissaries from
Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, the family's narcotics manager, met with Marcel Francisci in Paris. At Fouquet's restaurant, Francisci and Corallo's emissaries discussed the formation of a new narcotics syndicate, using Francisci's contacts (most likely Jean Croce and, a mere two weeks after his arrest, Paul Mondoloni) to move heroin from France, through the Dominican Republic, to the US.
¹

Unraveling this New World Narcotics Order would test the skills of FBN agents beset by IRS investigations, subversion by the FBI and CIA, and an alliance between BDAC and Customs that was starting to trespass on Bureau operations overseas. This latter problem began in June 1967, when BDAC boss John Finlator declared that the Mafia was importing and distributing LSD and other pharmaceutical drugs, and then sent Agent Ed Anderson to London and Rome to conduct a joint investigation with US Customs, Scotland Yard, and Italy's Ministry of Health. This international case focused on Mafia banker Michele Sindona and others “involved in the illicit movement of depressant, stimulant and hallucinogenic drugs between Italy, the United States and possibly other European countries.”
²

When Commissioner Henry Giordano heard that BDAC had ventured to Europe and was working with Customs, he went straight to Main Treasury and petitioned for redress. But LBJ had already signed the FBN's death warrant, and Giordano's protestations fell on deaf ears.

Making matters worse, Customs had formed a four-man narcotics unit in New York that was gathering significant French connection-related intelligence and making major seizures. The Customs narcotics unit was connecting the dots in a way the FBN wasn't, and it wasn't sharing the picture it was forming with the Bureau. But it was revealing its information to the CIA's counterintelligence staff, which had helped put the unit together. The result was a considerable increase in the number of Customs informants (who worked by default for the CIA as well) inside August Ricord's South American facet of the French connection.
³

Adding to the FBN's woes was the deluge of drug traffickers setting up shop in the Far East and exploiting America's escalating military involvement in Vietnam. Meyer Lansky's emissary, John Pullman, landed in Hong Kong in April 1965, and began buying into casinos and arranging for Filipino and Malaysian couriers to transport heroin to America through Canada, the Caribbean, Chile, and Paraguay. Other mob couriers
moved morphine base from Hong Kong and Bangkok to Europe and America.
⁴

Santo Trafficante was also establishing a foothold in the Far East through his emissary, Frank Furci. The son of a lieutenant in Trafficante's Florida-based family, Furci landed in South Vietnam in 1965 with the first wave of American troops. His patriotic purpose was to equip military social clubs with hamburgers, soft drinks, jukeboxes, and vending machines, while on the side he provided prostitutes and drugs to the troops. Although he was forced out of Saigon in 1967 for illegal currency transactions, Furci resurrected his enterprise in Hong Kong with a group of retired Army sergeants.
⁵
But this too was a typical Mafia scam that cheated the clubs and their customers out of millions of dollars, and eventually became the focus of a congressional investigation – which was subverted by the same system of graft, bribes, and kickbacks that enabled Lansky and Trafficante to grab a controlling chunk of the Far East rackets, with the blessings of military and CIA officials willing to do anything to win the war.

This enduring accommodation with the Mafia was an extension of the Luciano Project, and in 1967, Albert Anastasia's son-in-law, Anthony Scotto, then vice president of the International Longshoreman's Association, would be called upon to send one of his henchmen to protect the Port of Saigon from saboteurs and thieves who were stealing shiploads of cargo, and selling it on the black market to the Viet Cong.
⁶

That was not the full extent of the CIA's Faustian pact with the Mafia in Vietnam. The CIA believed that French president, Charles de Gaulle, was obstructing America's war effort through a network of resentful French landowners and businessmen. Supposedly, de Gaulle's motive was to improve France's standing with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, both of whom were aiding the Vietnamese insurgents. James Angleton wanted to penetrate this SDECE apparatus, and in 1965 he sought to establish an independent CIA counterintelligence unit in Saigon. But the military rejected his initiative, so the CIA turned to its old Mafia allies to help fight an underground war against the French and their Corsican gangster accomplices.

The CIA's major asset in this effort was Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, a willing strongman it had recruited in the wake of the assassination of President Diem in November 1963. This bloody
coup d'état
was supposed to win popular support for the Americans by replacing the repressive, Catholic Ngo regime with a Buddhist general. But the military men and politicians comprising the new Government of Vietnam (GVN) were more interested in making money than making war, and within a year the
insurgents had seized control of the countryside. Taking matters into its own hands, the CIA in early 1965 arranged for Ky, then commander of the First Transport Group, to be appointed as the GVN's national security chief. Trained as a pilot in France and married to a French woman, Ky then placed his right-hand man, Air Force General Nguyen Ngoc Loan (also trained in France) in control of the law enforcement, intelligence, and security branches of the GVN.