Permindex and Double-Chek Agents and Activities

After a question was posed by a reader of this blog, I noticed a draft which I failed to post earlier. It relates to research done a few years ago pertaining to what prompted the publication of the Torbitt Document in 1969.

What did "Torbitt" Know?

David Copeland's Manuscript

David Copeland (writing under the pseudonym of William Torbitt) wrote in Chapter VI of the Torbitt Document, entitled "Permindex and Double-Chek Agents and their Activities") that Double-Chek Corporation, 

a Florida corporation organized and operated by the CIA and the American counterpart of Permindex and Centro Mondiale Comerciale, was taken over by Division Five of the FBI and was used as one of the principal funding agencies for President Kennedy's death planners.

In other words, Copeland, through information he gleaned from various underground sources while his first wife was employed at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft in Fort Worth, compared Double Chek's organization to that of Permindex and CMC--all CIA proprietaries which he thought were "taken over" by J. Edgar Hoover in order to pay the assassins of President Kennedy.

The Italian Centro Mondiale Commerciale (translated "world trade center") was a creature of the national security authority Americans set up to comply with requirements of various international pacts at the conclusion of World War II to fight further Soviet expansion. These mutual security agreements set the stage for "stay behind" military forces which continued to police Europe in order to prevent Stalin's military from taking advantage of the devastation. At the same time, other funds were funneled into companies designed to strengthen the ability of the locals to defend themselves. Presumably the CMC was a front company into which American money was funneled for either or both of such purposes.

Not until 1973 was the existence of Double-Check as a CIA proprietary company confirmed by the Church Committee Report.

From Church Committee Reports, page 263

In describing the Defense Industrial Security Command, Copeland seemed to rely on the gun-running activities in which David Ferrie and Jack Ruby had often been engaged, but he also used information supplied by criminal defendants he had represented. After mentioning the allegations made by Donald P. Norton connecting Ferrie to Oswald, as well as statements made by Jules Rocco Kimble about Ferrie's contacts in Montreal, he stated that Walter Sheridan "was the liaison man with Bobby Kennedy for Joe Carroll of the Defense Intelligence Agency."

One of the agents employed by Hoover's Espionage Section [also referred to as Division 5 or the Domestic Intelligence section] was W. Marvin Gheesling, who took Lee Oswald off the FLASH warning only one day before alarms would have been set off while he was in contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. [See page 178 of James Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable.]


Mexican Assassins in Texas in 1952
 
David Copeland aka William Torbitt wrote the following, concerning the assassination cabal housed somewhere in Mexico:

The Free Cuba Committee, anti-Communist Russian Solidarists, A.C.C.C. and Division Five of the FBI obtained the team of world's best Mexican riflemen through the offices of Double-Chek Corporation, an American based subsidiary of Permindex, the FBI and CIA funded Swiss corporation, and Centro Mondiale Comerciale, also known as World Trade Center Corporation, another FBI and CIA funded corporation which moved from Rome to Johannesburg, South Africa in 1962. Both of these corporations had been used by J. Edgar Hoover to fund the 1961 and 1962 assassination attempts on General DeGaulle.

The existence of the espionage section of the FBI's nest of professional assassins in Mexico began under the supervision of Albert Osborne in 1943. It was Hoover's brain child and he has kept a close management on the unit of twenty-five to thirty expert riflemen and continues to do so in 1969. He has allowed the Defense Intelligence Agency to use these men but they remain as his charges. In 1952 two of the professionals, Mario (El Turko) Sapet and Alfredo Cervantes, took a private contract to assassinate Jake Floyd, a District Judge in Alice, Texas, and a bitter enemy of George Parr of Duval County. These men were allowed to take such private employment but [the FBI's] Division Five never knew anything concerning such unauthorized killings.

At about dusk on September 8, 1952, Sapet and Cervantes positioned themselves in a field adjacent to the rear of Floyd's house and when Buddy Floyd, Jake's 19 year old son, who resembled his father, started out of the house to the garage, Cervantes mistakenly shot Buddy through the head, killing him. Cervantes, Sapet and Nago Alaniz, George Parr's personal lawyer, were indicted for the assassination and for conspiracy to murder. Sapet was caught before he could cross the Mexican border and was given a 99 year sentence. Cervantes crossed back into Mexico where he found his Division Five assassination group, and, although Mexican authorities arrested him, political pressure was brought to bear and Alfredo has remained a free man in Mexico despite sixteen years of constant effort to extradite him by Sam Burris, the Alice District Attorney. Burris and Bill Allcorn, Special Assistant Attorney General of Texas, were unable to convict Nago Alaniz, but one of the conspirators gave Bill Allcorn pertinent information. The accomplice told Allcorn that there were twenty-five to thirty professional assassins kept in Mexico by the espionage section of the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation; that these men were used to commit political assassinations all over North, South and Central America, the East European countries and in Russia; that these men were the absolute world's most accurate riflemen; they they sometimes took private contracts to kill in the United States; that the contact man for employment of the riflemen was a man named Bowen posing as an American Council of Christian Churches' missionary in Mexico; that you could reach Bowen through the owner of the St. Anthony's Hotel in Laredo, Texas.

Albert Alexander Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen, alias J.H. Owen, a charter member and employee of the A.C.C.C. [American Council of Christian Churches], met Lee Harvey Oswald and accompanied him to Mexico City in late September of 1963. Osborne or Bowen in 1942 organized and operated a Nazi black shirt group called the "Campfire Council" in the country near Knoxville, Tennessee. The "Campfire Council" was sponsored by the espionage cover group, the "American Council of Christian Churches." Osborne so vehemently opposed the United States war with Nazi Germany that during 1942, he tore down an American flag and stomped it into the ground. The neighbors complained of the pro-Nazi activities of Bowen and his young Fascists even though the rural area in Tennessee where they were located was very sparsely populated. More than six witnesses on the bus trip from Laredo to Mexico City placed Osborne with Lee Oswald in his company as a definite traveling companion. The two stayed together during the entire trip and sat together on the bus.

On February 8, l964, Osborne was interviewed by the FBI and lied to them about his name among other things. He gave them the name John Howard Bowen and gave them the following statement: Bowen advised that he has been in the Russellville, Alabama area, speaking at various rural Baptist Churches, and has been residing at the residence of Wylie Uptain, Rural Route, Russellville, Alabama. He stated that he intended leaving the Russellville, Alabama area, February 11, 1964, enroute back to Laredo, Texas by way of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Bowen stated to the best of his knowledge he was born at Chester, Pennsylvania on January 12, 1885, and his father's name was James A. Bowen, and his mother was Emily Bowen. He did not know his parents, but he was reared in an orphanage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His grandmother, Sarah Hall, participated to a limited extent in giving him guidance and shelter during the early years of his life. His grandmother and relatives are all deceased, and he has no known relatives of any kind. . . . Bowen stated he considers himself an itinerant gardener and preacher. He was formerly a member of the First Baptist Church at Knoxville, Tennessee, and more recently was a member of the First Baptist Church at Laredo, Texas. He has visited and worshiped at the latter church intermittently for the past twenty years. . . . He considers his home to be the St. Anthony Hotel, Laredo, Texas, and he is well known there by the manager, Oscar Ferrina. He has been residing at the hotel intermittently for the past twenty years, and has made trips to Mexico for the past twenty years as an itinerant preacher. . . .

On February 20, 1964, Osborne was interviewed by FBI agents in Laredo, Texas and repeated the falsehoods told in the earlier statement. Then on March 5, 1964, he told FBI agents at Nashville, Tennessee the amazing story which follows. Please remember that this is the man who was such a dedicated Nazi that during World War II, he tore down the American flag and stomped it into the ground in protest against the United States war with Hitler's Nazi Germany. A part of the amazing statement follows:

Albert Osborne, whose permanent address is 920 Salinas, Box 308, Laredo, Texas, was interviewed at his temporary place of residence at the Central YMCA, Nashville, Tennessee, where is registered under the name of John H. Bowen. (Box 308 is the address of the St. Anthony Hotel in Laredo).

At the outset of the interview, Osborne denied his true identity and claimed that his name was John H. Bowen; however he later admitted that his correct name is Albert Osborne and he furnished the following background information concerning himself. Osborne indicated that he was born November 12, 1888 at Grimsby, England, to James Osborne and Emile Cole Osborne, both of whom are deceased. He identified his brothers as Walter Osborne, Grimsby, England; Arthur Osborne, Grimsby, England; William Osborne, deceased, and Frank Osborne, deceased. . . . .

Osborne admitted that he had been untruthful in three previous interviews concerning his own identity and had furnished false information concerning John H. Bowen, whom he had previously indicated was an acquaintance for whom he, Osborne, had been frequently mistaken. . . . . Osborne was advised that his photograph had been positively identified by other English speaking people on the Red Arrow Bus from Laredo, Texas to Mexico City on September 26, 27, 1963. Osborne again denied that he was on a bus with any other English speaking people and that he himself spoke no English to anyone on the bus.

Rev. W. L. Hluchan; click to enlarge.

Osborne's associates said he had lived in Central Mexico since about 1942. One close associate said Osborne had a mission in Texmelucan, State of Puebla, Mexico, and "his mission consisted have no home or ties." Rev. Walter Laddie Hluchan of Eagle Pass, Texas, [see newspaper excerpt, right] said, "Osborne has for many years given religious instruction to Mexican boys who resided at his residence." Oscar Ferrino, owner of the St. Anthony Hotel, Laredo, Texas, said Osborne "is operating a school for approximately 25 to 30 boys" in Pueblo, Mexico. Ferrino has known and taken mail and messages for Osborne since 1942. When not in Mexico supervising his "missionaries," Osborne traveled regularly to Austin, Dallas and Tyler, Texas. In Dallas he visited one Cortez and H.L. Hunt. Cortez was reported to be one of the assassins in the 26 volumes published by the Warren Commission. The same volumes connect a Saunders from Tyler Texas in the plot with Cortez.

Albert Osborne was in Clay Shaw's office at 124 Camp Street, New Orleans on October 10, 1963. [Note: This is the same day the alarm would have gone off about Lee Oswald's contacts with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, had not the FLASH being discontinued by the FBI agent, W. Marvin Gheesling.]

Later the same day he was in the office of Maurice Brooks Gatlin, the FBI transporter and Guy Bannister, the FBI Section Five Southern Manager, at their office at 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. From there, Osborne went directly into Mexico City where on the 17th or 18th of September, 1963, he was [had previously been?] seen by a Mexican detective with the man posing as Oswald. A Cuban Negro delivered a large sum of money to the man posing as Oswald as a partial payment for his part in the assassination. Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen, was discovered to have another person working with him who also used the alias John Howard Bowen. The second person also travelling as Bowen was Fred Lee Chrismon [sic; Crisman], another agent for the munitions makers police agency, the Defense Industrial Security Command.

Chrismon [sic] also posed as a missionary and also used other aliases. Among the cognomens for Chrismon [sic] were Fred Lee, Jon Gould and Jon Gold. Osborne and Chrismon [sic] also bore a marked resemblance and appeared to be about the same age. Chrismon [sic] was a Syrian immigrant and had been closely associated with Osborne since the 1920's. Chrismon [sic], Osborne and their riflemen charges in Mexico were based at Clint Murchison's huge ranch when not posing as missionaries in other areas of Mexico.

In addition to the misspelling of Crisman's name, the so-called Torbitt Document above also was incorrect in stating that he was a Syrian immigrant. Frederick Lee Crisman was born in Tacoma, Washington, and both his father (a WWI veteran) and mother (the former Eva Pitcher) were born in Iowa. His paternal grandfather, Frederick M. Crisman was born in Pennsylvania in 1849. 

While residing in Laredo, John Howard Bowen, was reported in 1944 to be organizing the "Campfire Baseball League" comprised of players ages 16 and under. Bowen urged "captains, coaches and managers" to attend a meeting "between the Red Cross building and the Colonial Hotel on Hidalgo Street." 

More than a year later, the following item appeared in that same paper:

Missionary Returns

John Howard Bowen has returned after a several weeks visit to cities in the north and east. While away he enjoyed his favorite sport of skiing. He was a former missionary in India and Arabia, and while away visited in New York, Washington, D. C., Nashville, and the estwhile [sic] "Secret City" Oak Ridge Tenn. He spoke in the chapel at Oak Ridge where 75,000 families are housed, as well in other cities he visited. [Laredo Times, Jan. 31, 1946]

A few weeks after his return, on Feb. 17, 1946, the following letter appeared on the editorial page of the Laredo Times:

The Editor
Laredo Times

I have travelled around the world twice. I have crossed the seas on North German Lloyds, Orient Lines, P and O Steamers, Cunard Lines and the French Lines. I have rode in all manners of vehicles, house-boats, sampans, junks, and canoes. I have travelled in all kinds of wheels vehicles tongas, ekkas, drokas, bashes, wheelbarrows and jinrikhas. The jinrikisha, is a large baby carriage which is pulled by a man. Its name means "manpulled-car" hence, it is the original pullman car. I have travelled, on elephants, buffaloes, camels, Mexican burros, mules, horses and afoot. I have swam the rivers Jordon, in Palestine, Ganges, in India, Nile, in Egypt, and the Congo, in Africa, as well as the rivers of America. I have walked with pilgrims on the road to the holy city of Benares, in India, with the Sikhs to the Golden Temple, with Mohammedans on the trackless wastes r of the Arabian desert to Mecca, and the Blue Mosque, in Cairo, in Egypt, and accompanied David Solemon Cohen, the Clerk of the City of Jerusalem, to the Temple there. I have taught school in India, Arabia, and Africa, and in all my observations and travels, I have never seen a better spirit of cooperation and brotherhood, than was manifested at the Brotherhood banquet at the Plaza Hotel on Friday night.

Here ten Protestant congregations, and two Jewish congregations gathered in the finest spirit of brotherhood, and it is indeed a credit to the City of Laredo, to have religious leaders who believe like the great Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles, that "From one forefather He (God) has created every nation of mankind, and made them live on the face of the earth". There can be no longer any desert solitudes. The races have become people.


"The blood of the people! Changeless tide
Through century, creed and race
Stilll one, as the sweet salt sea is one
Though tempered by sun and place
"One love, one hope, one duty theirs!
No matter the time or kin.
There is no separate heart-beat
In all the races of men."

John Howard Bowen                                         

Box 635 Laredo, Texas                                      

Poem from World Service of the Methodist Episcopal Church

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE DAILY GLEANER, Kingston, Jamaica - December 14, 1949

Mr. William G. (Bill) Gaudet, head of Latin American Reports, Inc. in New Orleans, arrived in the island on Friday afternoon last on the first leg of a complete Latin American tour. He left on Saturday afternoon for Port au Prince, Haiti.

Bill Gaudet of The Latin American Report

January 24, 1967

Credit U.S. Diplomats With
Ending Nicaraguan Uprising

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)—U S. diplomats were credited today with ending a 20-hour uprising against the Nicaraguan government, an uprising that killed 21 and wounded more than 100 Nicaraguans. Through U.S. Embassy mediation, the rebellion ended Monday night when the rebels freed 117 foreign hostages, including 89 North Americans held in the Grand Hotel, which had been turned into a fortress. The rebels surrendered their arms and were allowed to go free.

Waved Bedsheet

The American role was dramatized when Bill Gaudet, publisher of a New Orleans monthly, the Latin American Report, followed by two American nuns ran out of the hotel waving a bedsheet as a white flag. The nuns were Jeanne Dienan of St. Paul, Minn., and Mary Martha Meyer of Los Angeles of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who were attending a nurses' convention. Gaudet said he told rebel leaders in the hotel he was going out to try to get the shooting stopped, then grabbed the sheet and yelled: "Who will go with me?" The nuns volunteered, and the three made a dash to a corner where there were National Guard officers.

Taken to Embassy

After Gaudet asked the guards to hold their fire he and the nuns were taken to the U.S. Embassy. The rebels against the Somoza family, which has ruled Nicaragua for more than 30 years, had holed up in the hotel. National Guardsmen with tanks surrounded the hotel while insurgent leaders negotiated with representatives of President Lorenzo Guerrero in the presence of U.S. diplomats. A cheer went up from a crowd outside as the first U.S. hostages emerged from the hotel. They included uniformed but unarmed members of the U.S. military mission. An American flag appeared over the second-floor balcony.
The hostages included a number of North American tourists and businessmen staying at the hotel. They were given shelter in the homes of U.S. diplomats and U.S. residents in Managua. Inside the hotel, soldiers sorted out a small arsenal of rebel weapons, including 10 rifles and 25 pistols of ancient make, a quantity of ammunition, knives and saws.

 The short-lived revolt erupted Sunday after a political rally conducted by Fernando Aguero, Conservative party candidate for president against Gen Anastasio Somoza Jr., standardbearer of the Liberal party and an heir to Latin America's oldest political dynasty.

The "Latin American Report" was allegedly published by Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba Inc., of Washington, D.C., and Miami, Fla. Bill Gaudet, from New Orleans and a graduate of Tulane,  had been a journalist for several years prior to WWII for the International News Service when his name began to appear in connection with the monthly paper. Paul Bethel, an attache in Havana for three years before Castro's takeover, ran the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba and had some involvement in the Latin American Report in the 1960s.

The Great Heroin Coup - Chapter 15

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:

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:

Foreword and Chapter 1

Chapters 2-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12  

Chapter 13 

Chapter 14

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

In February 1961 Maheu, Trafficante and Roselli met at Miami's Fontainebleu Hotel. There Maheu gave the hoods untraceable poison capsules for delivery to a Cuban exile connected with the Trafficante mob.[14] 0ther Cubans were to smuggle them to the island and poison Castro; but the attempt failed. Trafficante engineered more attempts, including one in September 1962,[15] and his organization also provided Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[16]

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

The invasion's moral and financial supporters included many leading China Lobbyists. Most important was the multi‑millionaire behind Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers, William Pawley.[20] Pawley had been involved in the CIA's 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected Arbenz regime. Like Lansky and Trafficante, Pawley had had a big stake in Cuba. Prior to Castro's takeover he had owned the Havana bus system and sugar refineries. He met with President Eisenhower several times in 1959 to persuade the president to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro. Pawley then helped the CIA recruit anti‑Castro Cubans.[21]

[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

In late 1970, in the wake of Operation Eagle, Bay of Pigs veteran GuillermoHernandez‑Cartaya set up the World Finance Corporation (WFC), a large company alleged to be a conduit for Trafficante investments and for the income from his narcotics activities.[42] Duney Perez-Alamo, a CIA‑trained explosives expert involved with several Cuban exile terrorist groups, was a building manager for the WFC. Juan Romanach, a close Trafficante associate, was a WFC bank director.[43] As Hank Messick put it:

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

From Hong Kong, Trafficante journeyed to Saigon, registering at the Continental Palace hotel owned by the Corsican Franchini family. His last stop was in Singapore, where he contacted a branch of the splintered Chinese Mafia.

     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

So Santo Trafficante began his war against the Corsicans.[48] His major foe, Auguste Ricord in Paraguay, wasn't about to roll over and die. Ricord got hold of his own Hong Kong connection, Ng Sik‑ho,[49] also known as "Limpy Ho," a major Nationalist Chinese heroin smuggler well‑connected to the Taiwan regime.[50] After Ricord's emissaries had travelled twice in 1970 to Japan, where they met with Mr. Ho,[51] heroin shipments began going to Paraguay via, among other transit points, Chile. 62 When in 1972 Ricord was extradited to the U.S., Limpy Ho tried establishing his own smuggling route to the U.S. via Vancouver. But that failed when two of his lieutenants, Sammy Cho and Chang Yu Ching, were arrested in the U.S. with fifty pounds of pure heroin.

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.