The Strength of the Wolf (82 page)

“We're talking to Miles,” Compton said in his affidavit, “and he starts making allegations about narcotic agents – that they'd been hijacking loads in New York. Out and out armed robberies. That they were taking ten-pound seizures of narcotics and giving them to Miles, who'd break off half and cut it back, to make what he was supposed to have. They'd turn in the weaker seizure, and Miles would sell the rest. They were actually peddling narcotics,” Compton said incredulously, “but it wasn't coming fast enough, so the New York agents bought their own Italian connection. They were buying dope, just like any other dope peddler.
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“Miles said he was actually handling narcotics for these agents,” Compton continued, “and he agreed to set up buys. So I recorded his conversations, with his permission, and we started making buys. But there was an ulterior motive,” Compton added, “and that was to embarrass BDAC. We were making the buys on FBN agents who'd gone over to BDAC. And the first guy we bought off was the deputy director of BDAC in Baltimore, Charlie McDonnell. In the meantime the inspectors come
down and took control of Miles. So my active participation with Miles ended, except I'd run into him every now and then on the street, and he'd tell me what they were doing – how they were buying off all these agents.”

To help corral McDonnell in Baltimore, Andy recruited Tom Tripodi, Hank Manfredi, and Joseph “Nickel Bag Joe” Arpaio, head of the Washington field office. Tripodi knew the history, having investigated McDonnell once before in 1962, at Charlie Siragusa's request, regarding a suspicious deposit McDonnell had made in a Washington bank. Manfredi, meanwhile, was interviewing Joe Valachi at La Tuna Prison in Texas, about suspected New York agents.

By early 1968, the groundwork had been laid, and in April, Tartaglino and Arpaio watched while Miles bought two kilograms of heroin from McDonnell on a golf course in Maryland. The second buy was made in the Baltimore apartment that Miles and Charlie Mac shared. McDonnell (who had resigned from BDAC in May) was indicted in June and was arrested on a hot afternoon in July. David R. Wiser, having transferred from the CIA to the BNDD only a month before, was on the scene. “Charlie was at the dry cleaners where he was working,” Wiser recalls. “I was outside with another new agent, Gary Warden, and some old-timers. When it came time to make the arrest, Arpaio sent Charlie Vopat into the store. Charlie was in the back, running the pants press machine. Vopat saw him there, came out, and gave us the signal that it was time to take him off.”

When he was arrested, McDonnell was no longer an agent, but he quickly cut a deal with US Attorney Steve Saxe. The thing that helped McDonnell the most was that he said he had bought his heroin from Frankie Waters. He also had critical information in some 200 pending drug cases. In addition, Saxe knew that if the arrest were made public, he would not be able to make cases on McDonnell's accomplices. So he agreed to keep it quiet. But even then McDonnell was not fully forthcoming. In order to get anything at all, Saxe and Tartaglino had to resort to “a little code system.” If McDonnell said a guy was “an agent's agent,” it meant he was wrong.

The evidence was flimsy, but it was enough to start files on more than two-dozen agents, including Russ Dower and Frankie Waters. Intending to build his strongest case on Waters, Tartaglino hired Joe Miles as an agent provocateur, and obtained an arrest warrant for Dower, who was then serving as a BNDD agent in Connecticut. But Tartaglino wanted to use the warrant as leverage to get Dower to testify against Waters, and, mistakenly, he didn't execute it right away. “I asked if I could put it in my back pocket,” Tartaglino says regretfully, “and Saxe gave his permission.”

Next, Tartaglino had Miles call Dower to arrange a meeting, but Dower
refused to talk on the phone. Although Miles's arrest record had been sealed, McDonnell had managed to sound the alert, and Dower was aware that he was being set up. So Tartaglino instructed Dower's boss in Boston, Dick Callahan, to order Dower to meet Miles in Washington, and to wear a wire. It was an order Dower could not refuse without projecting consciousness of guilt, so he went. But he went very cautiously, and when Miles started talking about McDonnell's allegations about Waters, Dower turned the wire off. Not easily outflanked, Tartaglino had wired Miles on another frequency and caught the subsequent conversation anyway.

“We arrested Dower in DC,” Tartaglino says. “We showed him the warrant and the tape, and he talked for about three hours. He admitted some things, and laid other things out. But then he went and hired attorney Ed Rosnor, who told him to retract everything. Which he did. And when the case went to court, the judge said the tapes were inadmissible, because we had not advised him of his rights.”

With Dower's flawed arrest, making a case on Frankie Waters became harder than ever. But Tartaglino forged ahead. Wasting no time, he ordered McDonnell to call Waters and arrange a meeting at the Eastern Airline lounge at La Guardia Airport. Tripodi wired Charlie Mac, and two agents secretly accompanied him on the plane. Other agents set up surveillance in the airport lounge, while Ike Wurms and Tom Taylor sat in a van in the parking lot, hoping to tape the conversation between Waters and McDonnell over the airport static.

“We saw a Lincoln Continental with DC plates pull up,” Taylor says excitedly. “The driver's a tough-looking Black man. Frankie gets out of the Lincoln and goes inside the terminal. Frankie's a badass, and when we tell Charlie Mac that he's coming, we could feel the tension over the wire. Frankie sat down at the bar, and the first thing Charlie said to him was, ‘I'm going back on the next flight, so we only have a few minutes.'

“Waters could tell by McDonnell's demeanor that something was wrong. ‘Wait a minute,' Frankie says, ‘I gotta talk to you.' At which point Charlie mumbles, ‘They got one of your prints.'

“ ‘We better lay low,' Frankie whispers back. Then Charlie says out loud, ‘I need a quarter-key.' At which point Frankie invites him for a ride. Then the reception breaks apart. Frankie fades into the night, and Charlie Mac goes back to DC.”

When told of Taylor's account, Frankie Waters gets visibly upset. “It's totally untrue that I went to meet Charlie in someone else's car. I went from my house in Hempstead in my Buick and returned the same way. I didn't want to talk to Charlie, and I never would have said, ‘Hey, I gotta talk
to you.' And he never said to me anything about my prints. Pure fiction.”

When asked why he met with McDonnell, Waters says, “When Charlie was the BDAC boss in Baltimore, he made a lot of calls to me about cases. Even after I quit we talked a lot. But when we met at La Guardia, he was acting weird. So I excused myself and went to the men's room, and when I got there, Bob Williams [a National List narcotic violator and the man who was driving the Lincoln] was standing at the urinal. We go to have a drink, and he tells me funny stories.”
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Some of the funny stories probably concerned the allegations made by McDonnell and Miles. And it must be stressed that, based on those allegations, Waters was tried and acquitted of selling heroin to McDonnell. In addition, McDonnell served a mere eleven months in prison for selling several pounds of heroin to Miles. “Don't you think it's significant that Charlie Mac was let out of jail after eleven months?” Waters asks rhetorically. “It's because he testified against me!”

Similarly, drug trafficker Joe Miles served no time, in exchange for his work in Tartaglino's investigation of agent corruption. As Jack Compton recalled in his affidavit, “My informants were telling me that Miles was selling narcotics, so I called Tartaglino and Company and told them. But they said, ‘Leave him alone.' They came down on one occasion and busted his pad, with him in it.” Compton added that Miles somehow got away, apparently with a kilogram of heroin that “never surfaced anywhere. He did it twice” – Compton told the prosecutors – “and my informants were starting to get the message. They started thinking that I was taking payoffs from Miles, because they could make him, and they wanted to make him. But [the inspectors] wouldn't touch him.”

Compton concluded this portion of his affidavit by noting that shortly after Frankie Waters was charged, “Miles got seriously dead in New Orleans, and I don't think anybody has ever bothered to look very damned far in that case.”

The Charlie McDonnell integrity case had repercussions that lasted for the next six years, during which time Andy Tartaglino would earn a reputation as a zealot whose purge destroyed the good, along with the bad and the ugly. And the tactics he used set a dangerous precedent. Years before, he had told David Acheson that in order to make a case on a bad agent, an inspector must use the same tactics an agent used to set up drug dealers. By 1968, those tactics included the same sin for which suspected agents were being investigated – enabling an informer to sell drugs with impunity.

Providing informants with free passage had long been standard practice for the CIA, whose drug trafficking assets ranged far and wide around the world. Indeed, the CIA's involvement in international drug trafficking was so pervasive that eventually the spy agency decided to use Tartaglino's integrity investigation as a pretext to infiltrate the BNDD's inspections, intelligence, and special operations staffs, and seize control of most of its foreign operations. The CIA's infiltration of the BNDD was a development that fit neatly with the Agency's ever-expanding counter-terror operations worldwide, the political war it was waging in Washington on behalf of the Establishment, and with John Ingersoll's defective innovation, the “systems approach” to waging war on drugs.

Ingersoll's grand idea was to dispense with the old “two buys and a bust” approach. Agents would no longer pursue individuals; instead, the entire organization would be directed against several major drug trafficking systems. To effect this new strategy, the extant bits and pieces of information that existed in BDAC and FBN files were gathered, analyzed, and assembled by a think tank that featured George Belk on enforcement matters and Hank Manfredi on intelligence. Information about ongoing investigations was factored into the emerging systems and, after a year of preparation, the experts established nine general drug trafficking systems to investigate – nine being a number large enough to engage the entire organization, but small enough to be managed by desk officers at headquarters.

What emerged was an extrapolation of the biggest cases already being investigated, the most important being the French connection, which was held responsible for the majority of heroin entering America. Also targeted were systems encompassing anti-Castro Cubans, the world's biggest purveyors of cocaine; the Mexican marijuana cartels; criminals trafficking in non-narcotic drugs like LSD; and five others, including one for the Mafia. A desk officer monitored the system he was assigned to, provided money to the regional directors investigating the system, and worked with individual field agents to select targets of opportunity within the system. The incubation period lasted until December 1969, by which time the BNDD totaled 900 agents. Meanwhile, Ingersoll hired consultants from IBM to computerize the BNDD's administrative and operations offices.

Theoretically, the systems approach would allow for better allocation of resources, and enable managers to better coordinate domestic investigations with the BNDD's rapidly expanding foreign operations. Like the
imperialists in Congress who had given Harry Anslinger his overseas mandate in 1930, Ingersoll in 1970 determined that “going to the source” was the only way to solve America's drug problem. That is where he concentrated the organization's resources, and that is what the FBN's overseas agents, at first only minimally affected by the massive reorganization at home, were already doing with substantial results.

In 1968, for example, federal narcotic agents seized over 5,000 kilograms of opium and 800 kilograms of morphine base in Turkey. Based on this statistic, and arguments presented by Jack Cusack (Ingersoll's advisor on Turkish affairs), the Nixon administration decided that Turkey was the source of 80 percent of the morphine base that was fueling the French connection in Marseilles. And by 1970, the State Department had adopted an extraordinary plan, developed by Cusack, to purchase Turkey's surplus opium crop.

The French connection was Ingersoll's major preoccupation, and in this regard he would break with traditions set by Anslinger and Giordano. With Tony Pohl as his interpreter and guide, Ingersoll would directly approach French officials and, in January 1970, would forge the landmark Franco-American Accord, in which the French agreed to talk to the Turks, and focus their enforcement efforts on Marseilles.

Ingersoll vastly expanded BNDD operations into Latin America, where Auguste Ricord's Group France was trafficking in tons of narcotics. Many permanent posts were established throughout the region, and scores of BNDD agents were sent on intelligence-gathering missions. In many areas their passage was made easier by CIA officer Byron Engle, chief of AID's Public Safety Program. AID, for example, provided the funds and aircraft for George Gaffney's marijuana eradication program in Mexico. There was, of course, a quid pro quo. Wherever Castro's agents were inciting revolution, the CIA was mounting counter-operations through its covert army of drug-smuggling anti-Castro Cubans. In exchange for providing the BNDD with covert financial and operational assistance, the BNDD granted drug-smuggling anti-Castro Cubans free passage; which, as one narcotic agent notes, “caused us problems, particularly in Bolivia and Mexico.”

With the systems approach, BNDD agents began forming closer ties with the CIA in Turkey too. For example, the Bulgarian Secret Service was thought to be facilitating the smuggling activities of the Turkish Mafia, so in June 1968, Dick Salmi began working with CIA officer Duane Clarridge to chart the Bulgarian arms and drug connection to France, as well as arms and drug-smuggling routes through Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.