The Strength of the Wolf (79 page)

“That's when the case breaks wide open,” Tom Taylor says excitedly. “We had wired Jack Gohde's informant, and he'd met with Dolce and Gohde at various places. Then we make a heroin buy from them right in the Nassau County Sheriff's office! The arrests weren't pleasant, but they didn't resist. Then the Nassau DA put out a press release saying he had done all the work.” Taylor laughs. “He hadn't. He just had the balls to say he had.”

Around this time, the Paris office (which had set up the bust of Nagelberg's couriers at Orly Airport and in Montreal), gave Tartaglino the ammunition he needed to oust a corrupt group leader, whose name Tartaglino would not reveal for ethical reasons. “The group leaders in New York were talking on a regular basis with Vic Maria in Paris,” Tartaglino explains, “exchanging information so as not to get into hassles with the French over unilateral operations and wiretaps. Then an informant in Paris calls us up and says he can buy anything out of the New York office. He says a group leader would call Customs to let him through, and Customs would do it. The informant didn't say he was carrying drugs on these trips, but if he is, it's a big problem.

“I didn't tell Belk,” Tartaglino continues, “but we planted a false set of facts in the office through Interpol, and the day before the informant was going to buy the information, I asked Belk to call a group leaders' meeting for the next day. All of them showed up except one, who was on the phone with the informant.” Tartaglino adds with a level look, “The Assistant US Attorney said that one buy was not enough to indict, and the person quit two days later.”

“New York was like an agency unto itself,” Art Fluhr says, “and Andy was after anyone who'd been there during ‘the corrupt days.' But most of all he wanted Frankie Waters.

“Waters was the reason I was demoted the first time,” Fluhr adds laconically, “by which I mean the shooting incident in Paramus, New Jersey, on October 21, 1967 – what I call, ‘The Day of Infamy.' At the time, Waters was teaching a course in investigative techniques to some local cops in Ramsey, New Jersey. The course had ended, and we were having a graduation party at a local gin mill. Belk's there with most of the group leaders, and he makes a wisecrack about some guy's wife. The guy makes a move on Belk, and Waters flattens him with a barstool. A fight breaks out between the cops and the agents, so we hustle Belk the hell out of
there, and take him to another saloon up the line, where the police chief of Paramus is having a party. It's two in the morning. The place is closed. We're inside and we hear shots. We go outside and see Frankie Black on the hood of my Buick Riviera. He'd put a bullet through the windshield!

“Next morning I get a call. All the wives are talking. So I go back to Paramus, knock out the windshield and drive the car across the George Washington Bridge to a repair shop. Later that day Pat O'Carroll calls. Pat was the training chief down in Washington, and he'd been up for the festivities. Pat tells me the police chief is upset: some innocent bystander has a broken arm and the chief's going to have a line-up of FBN agents to try to identify who did it.”

Fluhr takes a sip of his bourbon. “Belk was supposed to go to the graduation ceremony that day. Now he can't. Then a sergeant comes by with a reporter and Nick Panella's Hunter College ring, which is the only evidence they have. I smooth things out, get the ring back, and nothing's said for two months, until Waters gets drunk one night and tells Chan Wysor, who tells Gaffney, who calls me down to Washington. Gaffney's looking to nail Belk, so I covered his ass. I said it was all my fault, and that's how I got demoted the first time.”

“Oh, no!” Frankie Waters bellows. “It didn't happen like that! Fluhr was Belk's assistant, and he decided who got to use the seized cars. I'm a group leader, and he promises me a nice new Oldsmobile that's sitting in the garage. I wait three months for the thing, then he goes and takes it for himself!”

Frankie Waters smiles his demonic smile. “At the time I was teaching a class at the police academy in Bergen County. I'm teaching rookie cops how to be a lawman within the Bill of Rights. Miranda-type stuff. I'm teaching this course because I can articulate the rules,” he laughs, “not because I followed them.

“Anyway, after the course is over the students throw a party for the instructors. Everyone gets drunk and Belk says something totally out of character to a woman. That's the way it is with episodic drunks. Anyway, her date gets up to smack Belk, so I hit him with a barstool. He was a big guy, and I was glad he stayed down. Then we fled the scene. We drive up to this place where Fluhr has that nice new Olds parked outside. Seeing it there was too much for me to bear, so I put a round through the window.”

Rather than take a transfer to Dallas, Frankie Waters resigned “for service reasons” on 1 December 1967. And thus, by the end of 1967, Frank Selvaggi, Lenny Schrier, and Frankie Waters had resigned, bringing the era of freewheeling case-making agents to a close.
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“By late 1967,” Tartaglino says, “about 140 people are being investigated, but it's hard to make cases because resources are scarce. It was time to do something more substantial, so I suggested to James Hendricks that we create a Task Force, which would use the same techniques to investigate agents that agents used to investigate dope dealers. Hendricks sent me to Giordano for approval, and Henry said, ‘Do you know what you're doing to me?' “I asked him, ‘What do you want me to do?'

“Hendricks was generous,” Andy continues, “and okayed four people for the Task Force. I wanted a cross-section, from conservative to liberal, but all with solid integrity, and each a district supervisor with status. Frank Pappas from Baltimore was strictly by the book. John Evans from Atlanta and Bowman Taylor from Boston were in the middle, and John Windham from Kansas City was our conscience. They were all very conscientious. We'd have meetings and manage by consensus, thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm also a strong believer in documentation – that whenever someone tells you something you write it down, and afterwards decide whether it's worth saving. Down the pike, this is very important.”

John Evans is a medium-built man, forthright, tough as nails, and hard to impress. He compares the New York agents who protected drug dealers to the FBN executives who protected the CIA drug dealers. “Conscience starts where digestion stops,” he says.

Evans is a sentimentalist too. He dedicated his life to the FBN and has the scars from three open-heart operations to show for it. Raised in a tough section of Detroit, he pulled himself out of a street gang, graduated from Michigan State, and, after a stint in the military, joined the FBN in his hometown as a member of District Supervisor Ross Ellis's infamous ‘Purple Gang' (which, of course, is a play on the name of a gang of criminals that dominated Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s).

“The legend of the Purple Gang,” Evans explains, “is that George Belk and Phil Smith, who came out of Detroit, had control of the Bureau. But the legend grew because Ellis promoted his agents faster than the other district supervisors. In some regions you sat at grade seven for three years, but Ross promoted guys to grade nine after one. That fostered a spirit of cooperation, and we stuck together. We also worked with the Detroit cops and the Michigan State Police. Friendships formed, and that's how it got to be known as the Purple Gang.”

After making a big case on a Lebanese trafficker, Evans in 1962 replaced Walt Panich as Ross Ellis's enforcement assistant. He advanced again in
1965, becoming the domestic enforcement chief in Washington under Ray Enright, and in 1966 he was made district supervisor in Atlanta.

“I was in Atlanta,” he recalls, “when Andy called from New York and said, ‘Come up right away. It's secret.' I arrived the day after New Year's and started working with Bo Taylor and Ike Wurms. John Windham worked with Pappas, while Andy went on his own track regarding the suicide of Crofton Hayes, and some other areas that were of personal interest to him.

“New York,” Evans emphasizes, “was not a place I liked. The agents were bitter and salty and, according to them, no one but them ever got anything he deserved. Ross Ellis had been an agent in New York after the war, and he told me stories of agents shooting up in the men's room on the sixth floor at 90 Church Street. Another time we sent four agents from Detroit to New York. Three went bad, and the fourth came back and said, ‘The moment you step on the street, you're into felony shit.' So I had some idea of what to expect. But God knows I came away wizened: agents were committing murder one, selling kilos of dope, and running all sorts of scams.

“There was one guy,” Evans says, “who produced a lot of cases working with the SIU. But they were shaking guys down. He'd give the cops a hundred dollars for each case they came up with in state court, then they'd work together on paper to meet his case initiation quota. He'd make out his daily reports once a week. Then he'd go to Belk and say, ‘This informant can make Vito, so let's not run him through the process.' Then he'd go to the US Attorney and say, ‘I'm using the guy, keep him cool.' Belk and the US Attorney would agree, so now his informant reports are covered, too.

“Then comes the payoff. The cops arrest Vito and tell him, ‘It costs two grand a week to stay out of jail.' Vito asks, ‘What have I got to do to fix it once and for all.' They tell him, ‘Forty grand.' The case is going to federal court, where they need the informant to identify Vito – and that's when the informant gets iced.”

Belk, according to Evans, was an honest cop who inherited the corruption and the CIA shenanigans, and got caught in the middle of Gaffney's power struggle with Giordano. “Belk was close to Giordano,” he explains, “but not Gaffney, and when Giordano sent Belk into New York, Gaffney was worried about what he'd find. So Belk and Giordano shut Gaffney out. Then Andy went over Giordano's head to Hendricks, which is why Art Fluhr couldn't cover Belk's ass. And which is why, when push came to shove, Giordano backed off and let Belk fade the heat.

“The mandate from Hendricks was to get people off the job,” Evans says, “and our main targets were the higher-ups – group leaders and above.
We also tried to solve the murder of an informant, which no doubt happened, although no one was ever caught. But the partners who were involved were removed on other charges. That's how it worked. When we couldn't nail them for criminal violations, we'd get them on administrative. So there was lots of broom-sweeping.”

Among the Task Force's main targets were Gaffney, John Dolce, Pat Ward, and former members of Group Three and the Gambling Squad. As Evans recalls, “Dolce owned a beautiful house and wore expensive clothes, all of which he explained by saying that his wife was an heiress. But he was a friend of Pat Intreri [who resigned in 1972, formed a private investigation firm, and became a bodyguard for drug trafficker Vincent Papa] at the SIU, and with Deputy Chief Inspector Ira Bluth, who ran the NYPD's Narcotic Bureau until we came along. Dolce was also close to Pat Ward, who Andy believed was ‘the Grand Architect' of corruption in New York. But Dolce resigned in 1965, and Ward got out of New York just in time and went to Chicago.”
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Tom Tripodi offers a hypothetical reason for why Pat Ward was considered “the Grand Architect” of corruption in New York. “An agent makes a buy off an Italian,” Tripodi explains, “and the enforcement assistant knows. He says, ‘Go back and make a second buy.' But the day after we make the first buy, someone goes to the Italian and says, ‘For two big ones you won't go to jail.' On the day before the second buy, the Italian flees. The enforcement assistant knows the guy's in Miami, then Canada, then he says, ‘Well, he's gone. Close that case out.' ”

Tartaglino had another, personal reason for targeting Ward. They had worked together in New York in the early 1950s, and he never forgot how Ward would cup one hand behind his back and joke in Italian about “the cripple.” The image was of a man taking a bribe, and Tartaglino hated the ethnic slur, as well as the implication that taking bribes was humorous.

Discussing Tartaglino's pursuit of Ward is not an easy thing for George Gaffney to do. “Pat was appointed district supervisor in Chicago and served there until 1968, when they gave him orders to go to Detroit. He'd just bought a house, so he applied for the job of chief investigator for Ed Hanratty, the Cook County DA. He was about to take the job when [FBN General Counsel] Don Miller calls up Hanratty and says, ‘We will not work with you if you hire him.' When Hanratty asked why, Miller simply repeated the ultimatum.”

Gaffney pauses to compose himself, then says, “Pat Ward was never charged with anything, but he was hounded until he was forced to quit.”

Gaffney tells how it felt to be isolated and targeted himself: “At one point I received orders in writing from the assistant secretary of Treasury,
saying I could no longer exercise any control in New York. Not even to visit the office! I was so far out of the loop, Lenny Schrier was off the job three months before I knew about it.” With an icy glare, Gaffney says, “Eventually I was called to Main Treasury and asked to resign. I told them: ‘It'll be a cold day in hell before I do that. And don't try to force me out either, unless you're ready to have an explosion.'

“In the old days,” Gaffney says philosophically, “agents exercised initiative and ingenuity. We didn't call headquarters for permission, which is why we were successful. We weren't micro-managed. We had 300 agents with a $3 million budget, which was less than 4 percent of the budget for federal law enforcement, and yet we accounted for 15 to 20 percent of all the inmates in federal prisons. We put away more Mafia than everyone else combined. Then they accuse us of corruption.” Gaffney shakes his head in disgust.