The Strength of the Wolf (9 page)

Anslinger bitterly complained about this incident in his book
The Protectors
, telling how Carolla “gunned down Agent Moore,” and throughout his career Anslinger would place much of the blame for America's drug problem on
the Mafia's corrupting influence on local officials.
¹⁷
But Anslinger, again, was being less than honest; he knew that Carolla had been released in the TACA case and that the espionage Establishment protected Carolla's source of supply.

To put it kindly, Anslinger liked to eat his cake and have it too. In public he was a staunch law enforcement crusader; behind the scenes he was complicit. But he felt justified in maintaining this double standard, because drug smugglers provided a vital counterintelligence resource for the government's security services. In 1940, for example, a special group of Treasury agents under assistant secretary Harold Graves discovered that Japan's top narcotic agent, Shinji Taniguchi, was using a West Coast drug ring to spy on the American military. In that instance, as in others, the security services could not have succeeded without the help of confidential informants they inserted within a foreign intelligence service's drug-smuggling operation.
¹⁸

So Anslinger proceeded on two tracks: if it were in the national interest, Mafiosi were allowed to receive and distribute drugs; but if not, Anslinger's agents were free to energetically pursue them, and with the arrest of Nick Gentile in 1937, the FBN made its first breakthrough into the Mafia's national drug-trafficking syndicate. A close associate of Lucky Luciano, Gentile was general manager of distribution and, when arrested, had in his possession two address books naming his contacts across the country.

The next breakthrough came in April 1941, when FBN agents arrested Carl Caramussa in Kansas City. Through Caramussa – the first Mafia drug trafficker to turn informer – and Gentile's address books, the FBN was able to chart the flow of drugs from Europe and the Far East, through Mexico and Cuba to Florida, and thence to Kansas City for distribution nationwide. But concerns about the security of American ports and shipping negated these important achievements, and with America's entry into the Second World War the FBN found itself at the center of one of America's darkest scandals – the so-called Luciano Project, or Operation Underworld.

The government's secret policy of seconding drug law enforcement to national security geared up in February 1942 when a French ocean liner was sunk in its berth in New York Harbor. In response, the Navy, which was responsible for securing all US ports, assigned officers to work with federal, state, and local law enforcement officials across America. FBN agents in Seattle and San Francisco helped intern Japanese suspects, while in Texas Al Scharff asked Galveston's Mafia boss, Sam Maceo, to have his underlings watch for German submarines along the Gulf Coast. Maceo, as Scharff and Anslinger knew, reported to Sam Carolla, and had been arrested in 1937 with Nick Gentile and eighty-seven other defendants in the FBN's
Special Endeavor case 131. But Maceo, like Carolla, was powerful enough to escape justice.

The government's Faustian pact with the Mafia was largely developed in New York, where District Attorney Frank S. Hogan gave Navy officers access to his Racket Bureau files so they could hire low-level Mafiosi to spy on potential saboteurs along the waterfront. But the hoods refused to cooperate without the consent of their bosses, at which point Assistant DA Murray J. Gurfein introduced the Naval officers to Meyer Lansky's attorney, Moses Polakoff. A former Assistant US Attorney, Polakoff assured Lansky that the Navy was not interested in mob affairs, but that for security reasons the deal had to be made on a handshake. That being the case, Lansky said he needed a sign of good faith – and the approval of Lucky Luciano in Dannemora Prison.

In a move that satisfied the first condition, Luciano was transferred to Great Meadows Prison near Albany in May 1942. Now accessible, the boss of bosses was soon being visited by a steady stream of Navy officers and mobsters including Lansky, Frank Costello, and Bugsy Siegel. In exchange for a promise to reconsider his lengthy prison sentence, Luciano gave his assent, thus satisfying Lansky's second condition, and Mafia bosses began providing Navy officers with union books and undercover jobs on fishing boats from Maine to Florida. In at least one instance they helped nab Nazi spies; but more importantly there were no crippling labor strikes by longshoremen during the war.

The officer in charge of the Luciano Project, Navy Commander Charles R. Haffenden, worked closely with Mafiosi with great success. But the deal had its downside too, for it allowed the criminals to insinuate themselves within mainstream America. In return for services rendered, ruthless hoods were protected from prosecution for dozens of murders that went unsolved during the war, including the 11 January 1943 assassination of
Il Martello
publisher Carlo Tresca in New York. A staunch anti-fascist and socialist, Tresca in the early 1930s had prevented Luciano's top lieutenant, Vito Genovese, from starting a social club for Italian seamen, knowing that it was going to serve as a front for drug smuggling, and he had threatened to expose the Mafia's connection to pro-fascist publisher Generoso Pope. By ordering Tresca's murder, and getting away with it, Genovese used the Mafia's
modus vivendi
with the government to exact his revenge.

Tresca's murder, however, put a dent in the Mafia's armor. Tresca was a respected publisher and his murder could not be ignored, so District Attorney Frank Hogan launched an investigation and, through a wiretap on Frank Costello, unintentionally learned that Costello had gotten
Magistrate Thomas A. Aurelio a seat on the New York State Supreme Court. Someone – most likely George White, as we shall see later in this chapter – leaked portions of Costello's conversations with Aurelio and, as reported in the 29 August 1943
New York Times
, Aurelio was overheard pledging his “undying loyalty” to Costello.

The phrase “undying loyalty” graphically expressed the Mafia's power inside Tammany Hall, but it was unrelated to the Tresca murder case, and could not legally be used against Costello. And due to the government's secret pact with the Mafia, which Costello had helped to broker, action against him would have to wait until after the war. But when the time finally came to exact revenge, the man the Establishment turned to, as we shall see, was Harry Anslinger.

After Lucky Luciano was imprisoned in 1936, he entrusted his family to Vito Genovese. But Genovese was indicted for murder and fled to Italy in 1939, and the position passed to Frank Costello, who served admirably in the job; unlike most hoods, he was never seen at nightclubs with his girlfriends or in public with underworld contacts. But serving directly under Costello were some of the most vicious gangsters in the country, including
caporegimes
Thomas Eboli and Gerardo Catena,
consigliere
Michel Miranda, and crew chiefs Vincent Alo, Michael Coppola, and Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo. Nationwide, Costello managed gambling operations and casinos with Meyer Lansky and bookmaker Frank Erickson. He managed a casino in Louisiana with Tunisian-born Carlos Marcello (real name Calogero Minacora) and Lansky's brother, Jake. He had joint gambling ventures in California with Bugsy Siegel and in New Jersey with Joe Adonis. As the Mafia's prime minister his political contacts included congressmen and Tammany bosses, and individuals within Mayor William O'Dwyer's administration. He was even said to have been a bootlegging partner of Joseph Kennedy's, the wealthy Boston patriarch, US ambassador to Great Britain, and father of JFK.

When the Aurelio “undying loyalty” scandal hit the papers, Anslinger was fully aware of Costello's immunity through the Luciano Project, but looking to the future, he directed the FBN's New York office to link Costello to drug smuggling through East Harlem's 107th Street Gang. Under District Supervisor Robert W. Artiss, the New York office had been
monitoring the Gang since 1939. It knew that the Gang's narcotics manager, Joe Gagliano, organized opium smuggling from Mexico through Texas to New York, where it was processed into heroin in clandestine labs, and in 1942 the investigation resulted in the conviction of several of the Gang's top members – excluding, however, their family boss, Thomas Lucchese.

In 1942, Lucchese appointed John Ormento as his new narcotics manager, and the Gang continued to operate until Agent J. Ray Olivera uncovered its new connections in the Caribbean. Designated Special Endeavor case 204, Olivera's investigation culminated in 1943 with the arrest of 106 smugglers in Mexico, including several Germans, and the conviction of seventeen Mafia smugglers in the US. Though implicated and certainly the financial backers of the conspiracy, Thomas Lucchese, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello were not indicted.

The reason was simple enough: the triumvirate of organized crime – Luciano, Costello, and Lansky – was providing the military with an invaluable service. They were doing someone else's dirty work, and for that reason they would enjoy political protection, for a while.

In January 1943 the Allies decided to invade Sicily, and soon thereafter Navy officers from the Luciano Project joined the Seventh Army in Algeria. On 10 July 1943, Project member Paul A. Alfieri entered Sicily with the invasion fleet and was led to his Sicilian Mafiosi contacts by members of Brooklyn's Vincent Mangano's family.
¹⁹
Amazingly, as revealed by Rodney Campbell in
The Luciano Project
, Naval Intelligence acquired hundreds of informants from Mangano and his
caporegime
Joe Adonis in Italy.
²⁰
With the help of these Mafia contacts, Alfieri slipped through enemy lines and was guided to a villa housing the Italian Naval Command. There he cracked open the safe and found invaluable codebooks and documents on the disposition of Italian and German Naval forces in the Mediterranean.

The Mafia was proving very helpful – according to historian Richard Smith, “A very few OSS men had indeed been recruited directly from the ranks of Murder, Inc., and the Detroit ‘Purple Gang' ” – and after Sicily fell to the Allies, control over Mafia affairs passed from the Navy to several OSS officers.
²¹
One of them, Vincent J. Scamporino, in a report dated 13 August 1943, described the depth of the OSS's dependence on the Mafia in Sicily: “Only the MAFIA is able to bring about the suppression of the black market practices and influence the ‘contadini' who constitute the
majority of the population,” he said. “We have had conferences with their leaders,” Scamporino added, “and a bargain has been struck that they will be doing as we direct.” Through them, “We will have an intelligence network established throughout the island.”
²²

Working with the Army's Civil Affairs Branch, the OSS proceeded to install Mafiosi in top political positions in Sicily. Don Calogero Vizzini, Mafia boss of bosses in Sicily, was appointed mayor of Villaba, and his successor in 1954, Genco Russo, was named mayor of Mussumeli. As the FBN would soon learn, Vizzini and Russo masterminded Sicilian Mafia narcotics operations before, during, and after the war. Next, highly placed Mafiosi were used to extend US influence into mainland Italy, with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Poletti, chief of the American Military Government of the Occupied Territories (AMGOT) in Rome, and Vatican cleric Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), whose intelligence network of Apostolic Delegates proved helpful in nations around the world.
²³

Here it is crucial to note that the secret pact between America's spymasters and the Mafia was made before the war, when, according to historian Richard Smith, Earl Brennan, a young Foreign Service officer in Canada, “made the acquaintance of the chiefs of the Italian mafia, sent into exile by Mussolini.”
²⁴
Based on these contacts, OSS officer David K. Bruce (Anslinger's friend and in-law through Andrew Mellon, whose daughter Bruce had married) recruited Brennan as chief of OSS Special Intelligence. One can safely assume that Anslinger was deeply involved as a security specialist in this matter, and indeed Smith claims that Brennan “remained aloof, partly at the insistence of Major George White, director of Donovan's counterespionage training and a veteran of the federal Narcotics Bureau who refused to trust the syndicate.”
²⁵

Brennan may well have remained aloof, but as we know from Scamporino, the OSS had intimate relations with the Mafia, and as we shall see, White was less than reluctant to work with them.

George White and Garland Williams were two of a select group of FBN agents to serve with the OSS and get involved in the most arcane aspects of drug-related espionage intrigues.

Garland Williams was well versed in intelligence matters. In June 1941 he took command of the Army's Corps of Intelligence Police, which he
reorganized into its first Counterintelligence Corps. Williams next served as an instructor at the Chemical Warfare School, then in June 1942 joined the OSS and was sent, with M. Preston Goodfellow, a former Hearst executive and publisher of the
Brooklyn Eagle
, to London to confer with the chief of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), William Keswick – the same William Keswick who had sat on Shanghai's Municipal Board with Du Yue-sheng. Meanwhile, William's brother John, with Chiang Kai-shek's spy chief, General Tai Li, was directing SOE operations in Chungking, where Du had relocated in 1941.

After meeting British spymaster Keswick, Williams returned to Washington with the SOE's training manuals and helped establish OSS training schools in Maryland and Virginia. He was the OSS's chief of sabotage training; a member of the Army's Strategic Logistics Committee; helped form OSS Detachment 101 in Burma under Customs Agent Carl Eiffler, whom he knew from his stint with the southwest Border Patrol; and in 1944 served in some undisclosed capacity with the OSS's secret Y Force in Kunming, base of the famous contrabandista airline, the Flying Tigers.