The Strength of the Wolf (40 page)

After Gaffney promoted some of the agents that Lee Speer had investigated, several New York agents resigned in despair. One was Robert J. Furey. A former state trooper, Furey had investigated Black Muslims, Cuban gunrunners, and political subversives, and he was no
ingénu
when he entered the FBN in 1959. “I went into the Third Group under John Dolce,” he recalls, “and in less than a year it was clear that what was going on in New York was beyond the comprehension of the bosses in Washington.” Seeking sanctuary, Furey requested a transfer to the Court House Squad. Like many of his colleagues, he viewed the Court House Squad and the International Group as the only honest ways of conducting federal drug law enforcement. “Marty Pera and Andy Tartaglino had more smarts and integrity than all other bosses in the FBN put together,” he asserts. “They were looking at various elements of the French connection that didn't fit together, and they were making progress; but at the same time, things were getting worse.”

For Furey, the last straw was the murder of informant Shorty Holmes on 8 August 1961. Holmes was a key witness in an important case on several major Mafiosi. He was found mutilated and stuffed in a garbage can. “The world was collapsing around my head,” Furey recalls, “so I and a few other agents transferred out. People went to the State Department, or to ATF, or to Customs. Everyone was afraid of seeing or hearing the wrong thing.”

Tony Mangiaracina sums the situation up: “Everything in the FBN was rush rush rush. But you can't buy a dealer a beer then ask him for a kilogram of heroin.” He blames Anslinger for a nickel-and-dime management system that forced agents to bend the rules. “Once I wanted to get close to a woman in Beirut. She expects me to buy her champagne. I got eleven dollars per diem! Another time I buy cocaine in Milan, but the FBN didn't have a lab to test it in, so I had to take it to a drugstore!”

“Why were there only two inspectors while Anslinger was Commissioner?” another agent asks rhetorically. “Because he didn't want to find anything wrong. He wanted Congress to believe we could handle the problem with 300 agents. But that only made it harder for agents to cooperate with one another. There was nowhere to go, and we ended up eating our own!”

Marty Pera blamed the corruption problem on the intrinsically profane nature of undercover work. “If you're successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy,” he said.
But it was more than that, it was Anslinger's reactionary policies. In a March 1962 article for
Harper's Magazine
, Benjamin DeMott said that Anslinger's “cop mentality” was responsible for the FBN's “carelessness about the Constitutional rights of its opposition.” DeMott astutely observed that, “The handmaid of the cop mentality in the Narcotics Bureau is a whole complex of attitudes associated with Bible-Beltism.”
⁷

In 1961, Bill Davis went directly to Anslinger to protest against the cop mentality, and argue for a more humane approach toward addicts. “Mr. Commissioner,” Davis said, “I'd like to talk to you about the high rate of recidivism.”

“Mr. Davis,” Anslinger replied, “we're law enforcers, not social workers.”

Thoroughly disenchanted, Davis resigned and took a job with the US Information Service.

Agent Tony Johnson also resigned in 1961, for reasons associated with that complex of attitudes known euphemistically as Bible-Beltism. “I'd made thirty cases in six weeks in Gary, Indiana,” Johnson says, “and I requested a transfer to Indianapolis. Instead I was sent to Houston, where Jack Kelly was the agent in charge. Kelly was cooperating with Mexican officials, and I was going to be sent into Mexico with an informant. As part of the deal I was told to go to Dallas to get a truck. I left Houston and along the way I stopped at a place to get a cup of coffee. The people behind the counter tell me to, ‘Get your head out of that door, nigger.'

“Well, I didn't, and the next thing I know, here come the cops. They didn't believe my credentials and they held me in jail for two hours. When I finally got to Dallas, the agents there weren't expecting me. They hadn't been told I was coming. But the stool, a White guy, had been told a week ahead of time! That was the last straw, so I decided to quit. I went to the New Jersey Crime Commission.”

Harry Anslinger spent much of 1961 pouring the little energy he had left into modifying a plan that was designed to combine all prior UN narcotics agreements under one charter. Known as the Single Convention, one of its provisions allowed several African nations to raise revenue by growing opium for export. Anslinger opposed this aspect of the treaty, but he signed it anyway, at the request of newly elected president John F. Kennedy. In recognition of that gesture, President Kennedy reappointed Anslinger Commissioner of Narcotics. It was a politically smart move by a president
whose ambitious brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was planning an assault on organized crime that depended largely on the FBN.

When his wife died in September 1961, Anslinger was physically strong for a seventy-year-old man, and still politically sharp. Nearing mandatory retirement in May 1962, and grieving for his wife, he described himself in March to Benjamin DeMott as “burned out” and spending no more than “an hour a month at his desk.”
⁸
Hopelessly stuck in a bygone era, he coasted through his last months with the FBN. But he had an ulterior motive. If he had wanted to, he could have brought order to FBN headquarters, which was still reeling from Speer's fated integrity investigation. Instead, so as not to sully his reputation, he kept his distance and cynically allowed his subordinates to fight amongst themselves. And he ended his career in Geneva in characteristic fashion, by blasting Red China one last time at the UN's seventeenth Narcotics Convention. Having fired his last volley, Anslinger reluctantly passed his mantle to Henry Giordano and then retired to Hollidaysburg.

Unfortunately for the FBN, Henry Giordano was less intent on bringing a new, ethical sense of purpose to the FBN than he was in making appointments that reinforced his position. One beneficiary was Walter Panich, a savvy agent who had joined the FBN in Detroit as a clerk in 1942. George White, while serving as Detroit's district supervisor in 1947, had introduced Panich to Giordano (then a member of White's inner circle), and they had been friends ever since. On the recommendation of Baltimore District Supervisor Irwin Greenfeld, who had done a review of headquarters procedures, Deputy Commissioner Giordano brought Panich to Washington in late 1961 as his assistant on administrative matters.

“Headquarters had a lot of administrative problems,” Panich explains. “There was a general accounting office staffed by one accountant, and the personnel office consisted of four female clerks. It was a complete disaster, so Henry asked me to straighten things out. He was more progressive than Anslinger. He got more money from Congress, hired a personnel manager, and got promotions for the staff, which slowly started to grow.”

But Giordano did not tackle the issue of corruption by expanding the inspections staff as well as the accounting and personnel staffs. He also made the mistake of adopting Anslinger's cop mentality, despite the overwhelming evidence that methadone was beneficial in treating drug addicts. Worst of all, from an organizational point of view, he advanced Anslinger's essentially suicidal policy of accommodating the CIA.

While the case-making agents were dodging enforcement assistant Lee Speer's corruption investigation in the conflicted New York office, the CIA was adding to the organization's mounting ethical woes by employing FBN agents and informants, as well as major drug traffickers, in an official assassination program codenamed ZR/RIFLE. Charlie Siragusa was the main player, through the CIA's MKULTRA Program.

George White, of course, had set up the first MKULTRA pad in New York in 1953, and in 1955 had moved his operation to Chestnut Street in San Francisco, where Ike Feldman joined him. Siragusa got involved in 1959 in his capacity as the FBN's field supervisor, when he inspected White's second MKULTRA facility (the Chestnut Street pad having been closed in 1958) at 261 Green Street in Mill Valley, across the Bay from San Francisco in Marin County. There White (increasingly debilitated by alcoholism), Feldman, and sundry CIA scientists tested stink bombs, itching powders, diarrhea inducers, and other “harassment substances.” Also tested was “a fine hypodermic needle to inject drugs through the cork in a wine bottle.”
¹
The needle was so fine it could pierce a person's skin without being felt, and had potentially lethal applications.

The Mill Valley safehouse proved unsuitable, for a number of reasons, and in February 1960 the CIA opened a new one in San Francisco. Used
until 1965, the so-called Plantation Inn was a favorite watering hole for San Francisco's inner circle of FBN agents. Siragusa described it as “one large room and a small kitchen and bath.” He said that “White had the place wired up, and there was a two-way mirror. When White wanted to use the mirror, he would rent the adjoining apartment.” Ike Feldman had the key to the safehouse and any agent who wanted to use it had to clear it with him. “Feldman was a wise little guy, a fast talker, and overly aggressive,” Siragusa said.
²

Feldman operated the Bay Area safehouses with Dr. Ray Treichler, a reclusive and timid, yet effective spook. Treichler had been assigned as the CIA's liaison to the major American pharmaceutical companies, and had acquired the MKULTRA account in 1957, when Sid Gottlieb embarked on an overseas assignment. White, Feldman, Treichler, and various CIA scientists conducted an array of experiments at the MKULTRA pads and at nightclubs in the Bay Area. One exotic weapon they tested was a gas cartridge, calibrated to fit certain types of guns, and designed to spray an incapacitating chemical more disabling than tear gas.

Despite being aware of these MKULTRA operations and facilities, Siragusa was prohibited from reading White and Feldman's reports, or listening to their tape recordings. All that changed, however, in January 1961, when Treichler asked Siragusa to open a safehouse in New York City, at 105 West 13th Street, at which point he too, perhaps unwittingly, became a part of the MKULTRA Program. By Siragusa's account, Treichler did not tell him why the CIA was opening the 13th Street pad; but in 1977, he told a Senate Subcommittee that he assumed it was because the CIA wanted “to uncover defectors in their own organization.”
³
The New York pad had hidden tape recorders, bugs in the telephone, spike mikes (microphones that looked like nails) in the molding along the floor, and a two-way mirror behind a sofa bed, in the wall between the adjoining apartments.

Treichler gave Siragusa cash, which he deposited in an account under the alias Cal Salerno, for furniture and rent. Andy Tartaglino, having just returned from Europe and joined the Court House Squad, helped his mentor furnish the pad. The FBN's firearms instructor, veteran Agent John Tagley, was assigned as its caretaker.

Siragusa then introduced George Gaffney to Treichler at a restaurant in New York. Gaffney recalls that Treichler spoke with a British accent, wore a derby hat, carried an umbrella, and gave him two very specific instructions. He said the CIA had priority over the safehouse, that Siragusa would call him when the CIA wanted to use it, and that he should keep the FBN agents away when that happened. Gaffney was also told to make the apartment
look “lived in.” In compliance with this second instruction, the 13th Street pad became a convenient place for FBN agents to make cases, quiz informants, and have parties. It was also a place where out-of-town agents, family members, old friends, and dignitaries could stay while in New York.

Few agents knew that the mysterious apartment was funded by the CIA, and its existence fueled rumors that headquarters was involved in corruption – that the bosses, perhaps, were receiving “things,” if not money, from Establishment benefactors like Pan Am executive Sam Pryor. In this way the 13th Street pad further undermined the integrity of the stressed-out New York office. But bigger CIA-related problems were looming.

Through MKULTRA, the FBN factored in the CIA's plots to murder Fidel Castro. One of these plots was launched in March 1960 at the direction of President Eisenhower, and relied on what the CIA euphemistically called “the gambling syndicate” for help in recruiting assassins inside Cuba. To implement the plan, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards recruited Robert Maheu, a private investigator whose firm had been subsidized by the Agency since 1955, when it helped Stavros Niarchos wrestle a lucrative Saudi Arabian oil-shipping contract from Aristotle Onassis. Maheu in turn enlisted Johnny Roselli, a Mafioso he'd met through criminal defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams. Then managing a vending machine concession on the Vegas Strip, Roselli (born Francesco Sacco) had been arrested for peddling heroin in 1921, and had served three years in prison (1941–44) for his role in a Hollywood union extortion scam. A very well known and influential gangster, he traveled to New York in September 1960 to meet his CIA case officer, James O'Connell. One month later in Miami, Edwards, O'Connell, and Maheu (all former FBI agents) brought Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, the patron saint of drug traffickers, into the murder plot.
⁴

Santo Trafficante was the indispensable man in the Castro assassination plot, even though he was listed as No. 234 in the FBN's International List book, and even though there were serious doubts about his loyalty. The CIA knew, for example, that during the four months he'd been detained in Cuba, Trafficante had lived in relative luxury while he negotiated the return of seized Mafia assets with Fidel Castro's brother Raoul. The CIA also knew that after his release, Trafficante traveled freely to and from Havana. But the doubts were set aside because he was intimately connected
to leaders in the anti-Castro Cuban exile community and could contact their secret agents in Cuba. One of the purported secret agents, Juan Orta Cordova, was the director of Fidel Castro's ministerial office in Havana. On the assumption that Orta was willing and able to kill Castro, CIA security chief Edwards had Trafficante arrange the delivery of MKULTRA poison pills to him. The plan was that Orta would drop the pills in Castro's coffee. But Cuban security officials discovered that Orta was a counter-revolutionary, and a Mafia flunky, and he was fired on 26 January 1961. By the time the pills arrived in February, he was unavailable to do the job.