Kruger ends the last paragraph of this chapter with the implication that President Nixon would work directly for Santo Trafficante and his mob, by saying:
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Trafficante and company could agree that if the Corsicans were to be neutralized, it had to be done totally and effectively. That was a job for President Nixon and his WhiteHouse staff, the BNDD/White House Death Squad, and the Central Intelligence Agency.Follow his research and see if he came up with the correct conclusion.
Selected Excerpts from
THE GREAT HEROIN COUP - DRUGS, INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL FASCISM
By Henrik Kruger; Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980: Box 68 Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print; Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien; Bogan 1976
Previous chapters:
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CUBANS OF FLORIDA
Meyer Lansky, the Syndicate's financial wizard and its chairman from around
1947, began building his Cuban empire in the early forties. When free elections
chased his close friend and dictator Fulgencio Batista from office in 1944,
Lansky also left the island, entrusting his empire to the Trafficante family
headed by Santo, Sr. Lansky and Batista settled in Hollywood, Florida, just
north of Miami. Before long, Lansky was running an illegal casino empire on the
coast, and in 1947 he eliminated Bugsy Siegel and moved into Las Vegas.
All the while Lansky expanded the narcotics trade founded by Lucky Luciano.
The older Mafia dons deemed the trade taboo, so Lansky's wing of the Syndicate
cornered the market, with Trafficante's eldest son, Santo, Jr., overseeing the
heroin traffic.[1]
When Florida's illegal casinos were shut down in 1950, Lansky promoted
Batista's return to power in Cuba. The drive bore fruit in 1952. With
Trafficante, Sr.'s death in 1954, Santo, Jr. became Lansky's right‑hand man and
manager of his Cuban interests. Until then, he had managed the Sans Souci
Casino, a base for running Havana's tourist trade and keeping tabs on heroin
shipments from Marseille to New York via Florida and Cuba.[2] [Editor's Note: In 1953, Santo, Sr. had been arrested in Tampa, as news headlines announced the overthrow of Mossadegh, the beginning of a blockade around Berlin, the Russians' acquisition of "the bomb," and the ouster by the French of the Sultan of Morocco, whose supporters went to exile in Corsica--all occurring on that one day--on August 23, 1953!]
 |
| Click to enlarge further. |
Trafficante, Jr. has proven more talented than his father. Extraordinarily
intelligent and energetic, he has handled the most acute crises with detached
calm. Luciano characterized him as ". . a guy who always managed to hug
the background, but he is rough and reliable. In fact, he's one of the few guys
in the whole country that Meyer Lansky would never tangle with."[3]
In no time, Trafficante, Jr. ingratiated himself with dictator Batista,
while remaining loyal to Lansky, who appointed him manager of his own Florida
interests in addition to those in Cuba. Lansky needed to spend increasing
amounts of time in New York, between travels to Las Vegas, Rome, Marseille,
Beirut, and Geneva.
Many envied Lansky's ever‑increasing power and wealth, among them Murder,
Inc. chairman of the board Albert Anastasia. In 1957 the latter tried enlisting
Trafficante's aid in removing Lansky from the Havana scene. It was one of
Anastasia's last moves. Trafficante arranged a "friendly" meeting in
New York's Sheraton Hotel. An hour after Trafficante had checked out, Anastasia
was murdered in the hotel's barber shop, shaving cream still on his face.[4]
According to Peter Dale Scott, "certain U.S. business interests
collaborated with the narcotics‑linked American Mafia in Cuba-‑as they did with
similar networks in China and later in Vietnam -‑for the Mafia supplied the
necessary local intelligence, cash and muscle against the threat of communist
takeover.[5] As Scott wrote those words in 1973, Cuban‑Americans recruited by
the CIA were suspected by federal and city authorities to be "involved in
everything from narcotics to extortion rackets and bombings."[6] The
Church committee and other Senate and law enforcement reports would confirm
these allegations.
Again we observe the Cuba/ Southeast Asia/ CIA triangle, and it's no secret
who managed the Cuban side. There Trafficante, Jr. hired the fast‑learning
natives, while dictator Batista's men made the empire safe for organized crime,
often appearing more loyal to Trafficante than to Batista himself. In return
the Cubans learned the business.
With Fidel Castro's 1 January 1959 ouster of Batista, Lansky and
Trafficante were in trouble. Though they were expelled from their Cuban
kingdom, nearly a year elapsed before the Syndicate departed and the casinos
were closed. Along with Trafficante and Lansky, half a million Cubans left the
island in the years following Castro's takeover. Some 100,000 settled in the
New York City area, especially Manhattan's Washington Heights and New Jersey's
Hudson County. Another 100,000 headed to Spain, others to Latin America, and a
quarter of a million made their new home in Florida, the site of Trafficante's
new headquarters.
Out of the Trafficante‑trained corps of Cuban officers, security staffers
and politicians, a Cuban Mafia emerged under the mobster's control. It
specialized in narcotics, first Latin American cocaine, then Marseille heroin.
With his Cubans Trafficante also grabbed control of La Bolita, the numbers game
that took Florida by storm and became a Syndicate gold mine.[7]
Besides the Cubans, who comprised the main wing of his organization,
Trafficante also worked closely with the non‑Italian Harlan Blackburn mob, a
break with Mafia tradition.[8] But the core of the Trafficante family remained
Italian, and the Italians also dealt in drugs. In 1960 his man Benedetto
"Beni the Cringe" Indiviglio negotiated the opening of a narcotics
route with Jacques l'Americain, the representative of Corsican boss Joseph
Orsini.[9] Benedetto and his brothers Romano, Arnold, Charles and Frederick
eventually ran Trafficante's Montreal‑bound smuggling network, and were later
joined by the notorious New York wholesaler Louis Cirillo.[10]
Trafficante settled in Tampa, but continued to run some of his activities
from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamster Local 320 in Miami. Trafficante and David Yaras of
Sam Giancana's Chicago mob were instrumental in founding Local 320, which,
according to the McClellan hearings, was a front for Syndicate narcotics
activities.[11]
After losing his Havana paradise, far‑sighted Meyer Lansky used straw men
to buy up much of Grand Bahama Island and erected a new gambling center around
the city of Nassau. But though Lansky and Trafficante each survived in style,
neither they nor the Cuban exiles relinquished hope of a return to Cuba.
Moreover, they were not alone in dreaming of overthrowing Castro. The CIA in
particular let its imagination run wild to this end. Its covert operations
expert, General Edward Lansdale, seriously planned to send a submarine to the
shore outside Havana, where it would create an inferno of light. At the same
time, Cuba‑based agents would warn the religious natives of the second coming
of Christ and the Savior's distaste for Fidel Castro. However,
"Elimination by Illumination" was shelved in favor of less fantastic
suggestions for Castro's assassination. The latter brought together the CIA,
Cuban exiles, and the Syndicate in the person of Santo Trafficante.
In 1960 the CIA asked its contract agent Robert Maheu to contact the
mobster John Roselli. Roselli introduced Maheu to Trafficante and Sam Giancana,
the Chicago capo, and the strange bedfellows arranged an attempt on the life of
Castro.[12] The agency had previously stationed an agent on Cuba who was to
flash the green light when assassination opportunities arose. He was Frank Angelo
Fiorini, a one‑time smuggler of weapons to Castro's revolutionary army, to whom
Castro had entrusted the liquidation of the gambling casinos.[13]
Through
the latter assignment Fiorini had made the acquaintance of Trafficante.
 |
| Fontainebleu in 1961 |
Never before had there existed a more remarkable, fanatical group of
conspirators than that assembled to create, finance, and train the Bay of Pigs
invasion force. The top CIA figures were Lansdale protege Napoleon Valeriano,
the mysterious Frank Bender, and E. Howard Hunt, who was himself involved in at
least one of the attempts on Fidel Castro's life. They were supported by a
small army of CIA operatives from four of its Miami cover firms.[17]
Runner‑up to Hunt for the Most Intriguing CIA Conspirator award is [Frank] Bender,
a German refugee whose true identity remains a matter of speculation. Some
contend that he had been an agent of the West German Gehlen espionage network
under the name Drecher; others contend it was Droller.[18] The former security
chief for Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo claims that Bender was in
fact one Fritz Swend, a Gehlen collaborator and leader of ex‑Nazis in Peru.
Prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion Swend was allegedly the CIA's man in the
Dominican Republic as Don Frederico. There he purportedly planned the invasion
along with mobster Frank Costello and ex-Cuban dictator Batista.[19]
 |
| Ambassador Pawley |
[Editor's Note: Pawley was President Truman's non- diplomatic appointee in 1945 to be Ambassador to Peru, but the businessman had actually been "discovered" by FDR. In 1928 Pawley was president of a Cuban company, Nacional Cubana de Aviación Curtiss, which was sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932. He then went to work for Curtiss-Wright's China Airways company in 1929 and then had organized an aircraft manufacturing company in China in 1933 for Curtiss-Wright. When Truman appointed him to be Peru's ambassador, he replaced John Campbell White, a man from a family of diplomats.]
The key Cuban exile conspirators in the Bay of Pigs operation and the
ensuing attacks on Cuba and Castro included Manuel Artime, Orlando Bosch,
Felipe de Diego, and Rolando Martinez -‑the first a close friend of Howard
Hunt's, the last two future Watergate burglars. The name of Bosch was to become
synonymous with terrorism.
Distinguishing the noncriminal element among the Bay of Pigs' anti‑Castro
Cubans is no easy matter, since so many emerged from Trafficante's Cuban Mafia.
According to agents of the BNDD, nearly 10 percent of the 1500‑man force had
been or eventually were arrested for narcotics violations.[22] Its recruiters
included Syndicate gangsters like Richard Cain, the former Chicago policeman
who became a lieutenant for Sam Giancana.
The Dominican Republic, a focal point in the invasion scheme, also became a
transit point for Trafficante's narcotics traffic. Furthermore, the CIA,
according to agents of the BNDD, helped organize the drug route by providing
IDs and speedboats to former Batista officers in the Dominican Republic in
charge of narcotics shipments to Florida.[23]
It is of paramount importance to
note the close CIA cooperation with Trafficante's Cuban Mafia, whose overriding
source of income was the smuggling of drugs.
One of Trafficante's personal CIA contacts for the Bay of Pigs was Frank
Fiorini, Castro's liquidator of Mob casinos, who now preferred the name Frank
Sturgis.[24] In late 1960 Sturgis ran the Miami‑based International Anti‑Communist
Brigade (IACB), said to be financed by the Syndicate.[25] According to Richard
Whattley, a brigade member hired for the invasion, "Trafficante would
order Sturgis to move his men and he'd do it. Our ultimate conclusion was that
Trafficante was our backer. He was our money man."[26]
Another detail from Sturgis's past is especially interesting in light of
Frank Bender's alleged ties to the Gehlen organization. For a period in the
early fifties Sturgis was involved in espionage activities in Berlin, serving
as a courier between various nations' intelligence agencies, and was thereby
inevitably in contact with the Gehlen network.[27]
The Bay of Pigs invasion was, of
course, a fiasco. But that hardly stopped the CIA, the Syndicate, or their
Cuban exile troops. Wheels were soon turning on new assassination attempts
under CIA agent William Harvey, who again collaborated with the underworld. Within
months, the Miami CIA station JM/Wave was again in full swing. It sponsored a
series of hit‑and‑run attacks on strategic Cuban targets that spanned three
years and involved greater manpower and expenditures than the Bay of Pigs
invasion itself.
To head the JM/Wave station, the CIA chose one of its up‑and‑coming agents,
the thirty‑four year old Theodore Shackley, who came direct from Berlin. His
closest Cuban exile associates were Joaquin Sanjenis and Rolando (Watergate
burglary) Martinez.[28] Some 300 agents and 4,6000 Cuban exile operatives took
part in the actions of JM/Wave. As later revealed, one of its last operations
was closed down because one of its aircraft was caught smuggling narcotics into
the United States.[29]
Shackley is another contender for the Most Intriguing CIA Conspirator
award. After years of collaboration with Trafficante organization Cubans, he
and part of his Miami staff were transferred to Laos,[30] where he joined
Lucien Conein.[31] There they helped organize the CIA's secret Meo tribesmen
army, the second such army drummed up by Shackley that was up to its ears in
the drug traffic.
Vientiane, where Shackley was the station chief, became the new center of
the heroin trade. Later he ran the station in Saigon, where the traffic flowed
under the profiteering administration of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. When the agency
prepared its coup against the Chilean President Salvador Allende, Shackley was
its chief of covert operations in the Western Hemisphere. When William Colby
became the director of the CIA in 1973, Shackley took over his job as chief of
covert operations in the Far East. Eventually he was booted out of the agency
as part of the shakeup ordered by its current director Stansfield Turner.[32]
In the JM/Wave period a great expansion in China Lobby‑Traffiicante‑Cuban
exile‑CIA connections occurred. William Pawley financed a mysterious summer
1963 boat raid against Cuba in his own yacht, the Flying Tiger II. Besides
Pawley himself, the crew included mafioso John Martino, who had operated
roulette wheels in one of Trafficante's Havana casinos; CIA agents code‑named
Rip, Mike, and Ken; the ubiquitous Rolando Martinez; and a dozen other Cuban
exiles led by Eddie Bayo and Eduardo Perez, many of whom eventually disappeared
mysteriously.[33] Loren Hall, another former Trafficante casino employee,
claimed that both his boss and Sam Giancana had helped plan the raid.[34]
CIaire Boothe Luce, a queenpin of the China Lobby, testified during Senate
hearings on the CIA that she had financed an exile gunboat raid on Cuba after
JFK had ordered the agency to halt such raids.
I will not wander deeply into the quagmire of circumstances surrounding the
murder of President John F. Kennedy. However, it is worth repeating a few lines
from the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations:
"The Committee's extensive investigation led to the conclusion that the
most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in such a
unilateral assassination plan were Carlos Marcello and Santo
Trafficante."[35]
Of the many connections between Trafficante and Dallas the most important
are his association with Jack Ruby, who visited him in a Havana prison in 1959;
his statement to Cuban exile financier Jose Aleman that Kennedy "is going to
be hit"; and his close association with fellow Mafia capo Carlos Marcello.
The Cuban exiles, drug racketeers, and the CIA had no shortage of anti‑Kennedy
motives, which were all the more intensified as the three forces gradually
welded together.
The anti‑Cuba actions continued well into 1965, at which time a crucial
three‑year turnabout for the Lansky Syndicate began. Its money had been
invested in the unsuccessful attempts at toppling Castro and in its new casino
complex in Nassau, which was threatened by local anti-gambling forces. So when
Southeast Asia began emerging as a new heroin export center, Lansky sent his
financial expert John Pullman to check out the opportunities for investment.
Close on his heels went Frank Furci, the son of a Trafficante lieutenant.[36]
From 1968 on, Trafficante's Cubans were in effective control of the traffic
in heroin and cocaine throughout the United States.[37] The Florida capo's only
gangland partner of significance was the Cotroni family in Montreal.
Trafficante carried out his business in a cool and collected manner. Never
out of line with the national Syndicate, he enjoyed relative anonymity while
other, less prominent gangsters wrote their names in history with blood. His
organization was so airtight that when narcotics investigators finally realized
how big a fish he was, they had to admit he was untouchable. The BNDD tried
nabbing him in its 1969‑70 Operation Eagle,
then the most extensive action ever directed against a single narcotics
network. The Bureau arrested over 120 traffickers, wholesalers, and pushers,
but made no real dent. Within days, well‑trained Cubans moved into the vacated
slots.[38]
To
the BNDD's surprise, a very large number of those arrested in Operation Eagle
were CIA‑trained veterans of the Bay of Pigs and Operation 40. Among them were
Juan Cesar Restoy, a former Cuban senator under Batista, Allen Eric Rudd‑Marrero,
a pilot, and Mario Escandar.[39] Their fates were most unusual. Escandar and
Restoy, alleged leaders of the narcotics network, were arrested in June 1970
but fled from Miami City Jail in August. Escandar turned himself in, but was
released soon afterward when it was established that Attorney General John
Mitchell had neglected to sign the authorization for the wiretap that incriminated
Escandar. He returned to narcotics and was arrested in 1978 for kidnapping, a
crime punishable by life, but for which he got only six months.[40] As this
book went to press the FBI was investigating Escandar's relationship with the
Dade County (Miami) police force.
Juan Restoy, on the other hand, turned to blackmail. He threatened to
expose a close friend of President Nixon's as a narcotics trafficker, if not
given his freedom and $350,000.[41] Restoy was shot and killed by narcotics
agents, as was Rudd‑Marrero.
 |
| Daily Star Oneonta, New York |
Escandar, of course, was a friend of Hernandez‑Cartaya, who was a friend of Dick Fincher, who was a friend of Bebe Rebozo, who was a friend of Richard Nixon, who once told John Dean he could get a million dollars in cash.[44]
In 1968 Trafficante himself went on an extended business trip to the Far
East, beginning in Hong Kong, where he had located his emissary Frank Furci.[45] After a slow 1965‑66 start, Furci had made great headway. Through his own
Maradem, Ltd. he had cornered the market on Saigon's night spots catering to
GIs.[46] He even ran officer and soldier mess halls, and he had set up a chain
of heroin labs in Hong Kong to serve the GI market.
 |
| Saigon |
Several
doors had to be opened to gain access to the opium treasure. The first led to
the CIA‑ controlled Taiwan regime, the second to the Golden Triangle's KMT
Chinese and Laotian Meo tribesmen. The latter door had already been opened by
the CIA. Still another led to the Triads (Chinese gangster organizations) in
Hong Kong. Traffiicante opened that door with the help of Furci, who gave him
access to Southeast Asia's overseas Chinese. There was no way around the
Nationalist Chinese suppliers and middle men. The world had long been told that
the narcotics came from Red China, but the facts belied that propaganda
claim.[47]
Trafficante liked what he saw in his Southeast Asian tour. With enough
trained chemists, his Mob could be supplied with heroin at a fraction of what
it was then paying out to the Corsicans. But first the smuggling networks had
to be worked out and the Corsicans had to be eliminated.
 |
| Limpy Ho |
By early 1970, Southeast Asian‑produced
heroin was ready to be tested on GI guinea pigs. Meyer Lansky, facing charges
of business illegalities, turned over control to Trafficante and fled to
Israel. On July 4 Lansky narcotics associates reportedly made their investment
plans for Southeast Asia at a twelve‑day meeting with representatives of
several Mafia families at the Hotel Sole in Palermo, Sicily.[53]
Weeks later the Corsican Mafia contemplated counter‑moves in a meeting at
Philippe Franchini's suite in Saigon's Continental Palace Hotel. Turkish opium
production was already waning and could no longer be relied upon. Unrest in the
Middle East was destabilizing the production of morphine base. The Corsicans
had to do something to regain control over their longtime Southeast Asian
domain, a task made all but impossible by the U.S. presence. But the Corsicans
still had
large stocks of morphine, their Marseille labs, and a smoothly functioning
smuggling network. Trafficante and company could agree that if the Corsicans
were to be neutralized, it had to be done totally and effectively. That was a
job for President Nixon and his White House staff, the BNDD/White House Death
Squad, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
pps.
141-152
Notes
1. Santo Trafficante,
Jr.'s first important appearance in his role as overseer of the heroin traffic
might have been at a 1947 summit in Havana reportedly attended by Auguste
Ricord, alias Lucien Dargelles, the French Nazi collaborator who became Latin
America's narcotics czar; see V. Alexandrov: La Mafia des SS (Stock, 1978).
2. A.McCoy: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper&
Row, 1972).
3. M. Gosch and R.
Hammer: The Last Testament of Lucky
Luciano (Little, Brown & Co., 1974).
4. Lansky was not then
entirely sure of Trafficante's loyalty. He had the latter swear a
"holy" oath, witnessed by Vincent Alo: "With an ancient Spanish
dagger — none from Sicily was available — Trafficante cut his left wrist,
allowed the blood to flow, and wet his right hand in the crimson stream. Then
he held up the bloody hand: 'So long as the blood flows in my body,' he intoned
solemnly, 'do I, Santo Trafficante, swear allegiance to the will of Meyer
Lansky and the organization he represents. If I violate this oath, may I burn
in Hell forever.'" — H. Messick: Lansky
(Berkeley, 1971).
5. P.D. Scott: "From
Dallas to Watergate," Ramparts, November
1973.
6. New York Times, 3 June 1973.
7. E. Reid: The Grim Reapers (Bantam, 1970).
8. Ibid.
9. P. Galante and L.
Sapin: The Marseille Mafia (W.H.
Allen, 1979).
10. The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Trail (Souvenir Press, 1974).
11. D. Moldea: The Hoffa Wars (Charter Books, 1978).
12. U.S. Congress,
Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence
Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots
Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate
Report No. 94‑463, 1975. (Henceforth referred to as Assassination Report).
13. P. Meskill:
"Mannen som Ville Myrde Fidel Castro," Vi Menn, 1976.
14. Assassination Report, op. cit.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. D. Wise and T.B.
Ross: The Invisible Government (Random
House, 1964);
P.D. Scott: The War Conspiracy (Bobbs‑Merrill,
1972).
18. The name Drecher
appears in T. Szulc: Compulsive Spy (Viking,
1974); Droller is used in P. Wyden: The
Bay of Pigs (Simon & Schuster, 1979).
19. L. Gonzalez‑Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976). According to this
source (the author was the chief of security for the Dominican Republic's
dictator, Rafael Trujillo), Howard Hunt went to the Dominican Republic with the
mobster John Roselli in March 1961.
20. Pawley eventually
built five large airplane factories around the world. It is also likely that he
was involved in the CIA's Double Chek Corp. in Miami, as he had similarly been
in the Flying Tigers. The CIA's air proprietaries are said to stick together.
When in 1958, CIA pilot Allen Pope was shot down and taken prisoner in
Indonesia, he was flying for CAT. When he was released in 1962 he began flying
for Southern Air Transport, another agency proprietary, which operated as late
as 1973 out of offices in Miami and Taiwan. Southern's attorney in 1962 was
Alex E. Carlson, who a year before had represented Double Chek when it
furnished pilots for the Bay of Pigs invasion; see V. Marchetti and J.D. Marks:
CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Jonathan
Cape, 1974). On 23 March 1980, just as Iran's revolutionary government was
about to request that Panama extradite Shah Reza Palevi, the ex‑dictator who
had been installed on his throne in 1953 by a CIA coup, he was flown off to
Cairo on an Evergreen International Airlines charter. As reported by Ben
Bradlee of the Boston Globe, (20
April 1980), in 1975 Evergreen had assumed control over Intermountain Aviation,
Inc., a CIA proprietary. George Deele, Jr., a paid consultant for Evergreen,
controlled the CIA's worldwide network of secret airlines for nearly two
decades.
21. M. Acoca and R.K.
Brown: "The Bayo‑Pawley Affair," Soldier
of Fortune, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1976.
22. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.
23. H. Kohn: "Strange Bedfellows," Rolling Stone, 20 May 1976.
24. The main character in
Howard Hunt's 1949 spy novel, Bimini Run,
was "Hank Sturgis."
25 . H. Tanner: Counter‑Revolutionary
Agent (G.T. Foules, 1972).
26. Kohn, op. cit.
27. Meskill, op. cit.
28. Shackley was also
indirectly responsible for Martinez's participation in the 17 June 1972
Watergate breakin; see T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.
29. New York Times, 4
January 1975.
30. Branch and Crile, op. cit.
31. J. Hougan: Spooks (William
Morrow, 1978).
32. Shackley might also
have been responsible for the CIA's tapping of all telephone converstions to
and from Latin America in the first half of 1973 "in connection with
narcotics operations" (see Newsweek,
23 June 1975). According to Branch and Crile, op. cit., Shackley, as chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division
of Clandestine Services, "had overall responsibility for the agency's
efforts to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile."
In a recent article in which he refers to Shackley as one of
"the CIA's most esteemed officers," journalist Michael Ledeen claims
that Shackley left the agency voluntarily when "forced to choose between
retirement and accepting a post that would have represented a de facto
demotion." (New York, 3 March
1980). Ledeen, incidentally, is a colleague of Ray S. Cline at Georgetown's
rightwing propaganda mill, the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(see chapter 14, footnote 20).
33. Acoca and Brown, op. cit.
34. D. Russell:
"Loren Hall and the Politics of Assassination," Village Voice, 3 October 1977.
35. The New York Times, ed.: The Final Assassinations Report (Bantam,
1979). In early 1980 the Justice Department was investigating allegations that
Marcello had offered Mario T. Noto, the Deputy Commissioner of Immigration, a
guaranteed "plush job" after retirement, in return for Noto's help in
lifting Marcello's travel restrictions. Noto's attorney, ironically, is Myles
Ambrose, who stepped down from his job at the head of the BNDD in the wake of
corruption allegations. (New York Times,
11 February 1980).
36. McCoy, op. cit.
37. H. Messick: The Mobs and the Mafia (Spring Books,
1972). 38. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.
39. H. Messick: Of Grass and Snow (Prentice‑Hall, 1979);
The Newsday Staff, op. cit.
40. Miami Herald, 30 March 1978.
41. Messick: Of Grass and Snow, op. ‑cit.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. McCoy, op. cit.
46. Ibid.
47. In the early
seventies the opium bankrollers in Taiwan sent out, through their international
lobby, the WACL, propaganda charging Red China with "the drugging of the
world." The propaganda was directed at Nixon's rapprochement with mainland
China. A 1972 BNDD report stated, however, that "not one investigation
into heroin traffic in the area in the past two years indicates Chinese Communist
involvement."
48. The existence of such
a drug war is also mentioned in A. Jaubert: Dossier
D ... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau,
1974).
49. S. O'Callaghan: The Triads (W.H. Allen, 1978).
50. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagen
Paul, 1977). 51. O'Callaghan, op. cit.
52. McCoy, op. cit.
53. F. Wulff in the
Danish Rapport, 14 April 1975. A BNDD
agent on the scene was reportedly discovered and liquidated. Apparently he
hadn't known that the code words were "baccio la mano" — I kiss your
hand. Subject number one of the meeting was Southeast Asia, which the conferees
decided would replace Turkey and Marseille as the main source of opium and
heroin. Mexico, to which Sam Giancana was sent, would be a safety valve. On one
thing they were uananimous: the Corsicans had to be eliminated. To begin with,
$300 million was to be invested in the bribery of politicians, as well as of
military and police officers in Thailand, Burma, Laos, South Vietnam, and Hong
Kong. Another nine‑figure sum was set aside to maximize opium production in the
Golden Triangle.
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