The Strength of the Wolf (33 page)

The third timely development in Gaffney's ascent happened on 14 November 1957, when State Trooper Edgar Croswell spied an armada of black limousines – all packed with mean-looking men wearing wide-brimmed black hats – berthing at Joseph Barbara's estate in rural Apalachin, New York. By most accounts, Croswell recognized Carmine Galante in one of the cars and instantly realized that he had stumbled upon a Mafia convention. In fact, he'd been alerted by the FBN agents who had Palermo summit attendee Philip Buccola under surveillance. Fully aware of what was afoot, Croswell and his fellow Troopers set up roadblocks around Barbara's estate and began stopping and searching cars. Taken by surprise, some fifty immaculately dressed Mafiosi panicked and, stepping out of character, tried to escape by scampering through the surrounding forests. Almost all were quickly captured. A trooper on the scene, Robert Furey, vividly recalls the bosses of the five New York families – Thomas Lucchese, Joseph Profaci, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Bonanno, and Vito Genovese, as well as Santo Trafficante and dozens of other delegates arrested that day – sitting on the floor of the Vestal substation in mud-caked overcoats covered
with brambles, with their manicured hands on their neatly trimmed heads, and scowls on their sullen faces.

The indignity of the Apalachin debacle was so deep that many young hoods lost all respect for their Mafia bosses. Equally important, the Apalachin debacle provided Robert Kennedy with the pretext he needed to wage a national war on crime. And it provided the FBN with its biggest coup since the Kefauver Hearings. In the months following Apalachin, several agents would address the Senate about the relationship between drug smugglers and organized crime. International Group Leader Marty Pera told how opium was moved from Turkey to Syria, where it was processed into morphine base, then shipped to France and converted into heroin, and then smuggled through Mexico, Cuba and Canada to America. Veteran Agent Joe Amato explained how Vincent Squillante and Joe Mancuso were the kingpins of a secret society “specifically” organized for smuggling narcotics.
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And Jack Cusack, then serving as Gaffney's replacement as district supervisor in Atlanta, described the link, through John Ormento, between the Civello family in Dallas and the Magaddino family in Buffalo. Cusack linked the Civellos with Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, Santo Trafficante in Tampa, and, remarkably, with Jimmy Hoffa and gunrunning to Cuba.
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There was evidence backing the charges, and in January 1958 the FBN conducted raids on Mafia drug rings in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The Virginia raid alone netted ten kilograms of heroin and led to the arrest of Frank Coppola in Italy.

Could the Mafia's patrons in the espionage Establishment have played a role in setting the stage for these events? Perhaps. Only the CIA had the power to remove Scalici's records from every government file, and providing the Commission with a reason to eliminate Anastasia served to strengthen the position of the drug smugglers the CIA relied upon most – Lansky and Trafficante in Cuba. The FBN raids in January 1958 were a temporary setback, and Lansky and Trafficante knew that better days lay ahead in Cuba. That scenario, of course, is speculation, although the CIA, through Hank Manfredi, certainly knew about the Apalachin summit before it happened; and sabotaging the summit would have served the CIA, perhaps most importantly, by providing it with a means of severing its contract with Vito Genovese, its major Luciano Project liability.

Bolstered by Apalachin and Bobby Kennedy's ascent, George Gaffney arrived in New York in January 1958 with a simple strategy. “We didn't
have specific targets,” he explains. “There was no purpose following Joe Profaci around town. What we did was develop the informants we had in place. We picked targets based on the best information, and that's where we began.”

Gaffney's first target of opportunity was Vito Genovese, former special employee of Army Intelligence, now Mafia boss of bosses. The case against Genovese began serendipitously when Agent Anthony Consoli arrested an ordinary drug addict, and the addict revealed that his supplier was Nelson Cantellops, a Puerto Rican and, curiously, an erstwhile Communist. Agent Steve Giorgio made two buys off Cantellops, who, with very little arm-twisting, flipped and turned out to be anything but ordinary. By his own account, Cantellops since 1954 had been running heroin and cocaine from Cuba to Las Vegas, Miami, and El Paso for Joey DiPalermo of the Lucchese family. He was so successful in this venture that in 1956, in an extraordinary breach of Mafia protocol, DiPalermo introduced him to John Ormento and Carmine Galante, co-managers of the Mafia's national drug syndicate, and they asked him to start an operation out of Puerto Rico. According to Cantellops, Vito Genovese personally blessed the deal. Knowing he was on to something big, Gaffney assigned the case to John R. Enright, a veteran agent who had replaced Jack Cusack as head of the Court House Squad. Married to a girl friend of George Gaffney's sister, Enright worked under the direction of William “Tendy” Tendesky, the Assistant US Attorney in charge of the narcotics “Junk Squad” in the Southern District of New York.

“We were determined to prepare an airtight case,” Enright says, “and I remember the excitement I felt when Tendy came out of his interview with Cantellops and said, ‘We're going to indict Vito Genovese!' Right away I called headquarters, and they said, ‘Challenge Cantellops!' Which we did. But we couldn't shake him. So Genovese was indicted on July 8, 1959. John Ormento and Carmine Galante too.”

According to Agent Tom Tripodi, it wasn't quite that simple. Tendy wanted corroboration, so Cantellops agreed to meet with Genovese under FBN surveillance. In another extraordinary breach of Mafia protocol, the syphilitic Puerto Rican was brought before the Mafia boss of bosses in a German restaurant, where Genovese allegedly acknowledged that Cantellops was “all right.”
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Tripodi also claims that FBN agents Francis E. Waters and James Hunt overheard his words while seated at the bar, and that the Genovese indictment was based on their corroborating testimony.

When approached by the author, Hunt was unavailable for comment, and Waters claimed not to recall the incident. Not exactly, that is. Waters
did say, “I was a rookie agent at the time, and I probably would have said it, if asked to.”

Genovese was arrested on 7 July 1958, and – along with Carmine Galante, John Ormento, and thirty-four major Mafia drug traffickers – was charged with trafficking in more than 160 kilograms of heroin since 1954. One day later US Attorney Paul Williams announced his candidacy for governor of New York. The arrest was that big.
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Vito Genovese's problems were compounded by two related developments that occurred outside the FBN. The first was the appointment of Myles J. Ambrose as the Treasury Department's law enforcement coordinator. The son of a prominent Republican Wall Street broker, Ambrose had served as Devenco's personnel director from 1948 to 1953. If the reader will recall, Devenco was the CIA firm that helped Marty Pera build several electronic devices that enhanced the FBN's case-making ability, and possibly outfitted George White's MKULTRA pad in Greenwich Village.

After receiving his law degree, Ambrose served as an Assistant US Attorney in New York's Southern District, often prosecuting drug cases made by FBN agents. This hands-on experience, plus his charismatic personality and his CIA-related work at Devenco, had prepared him, though he was only thirty-one years old, for one of the most important jobs in federal law enforcement.

Ambrose replaced John Lathem as chief coordinator in July 1957. His boss was assistant secretary of Treasury David Kendall. “While I was preparing for the job,” Ambrose recalls, “I met with Mal Harney, who gave the history of the job, with an emphasis on the importance of IRS Intelligence. Lathem was helpful too. John had come from IRS Intelligence, and during his tenure as acting chief coordinator he had expanded the Law Enforcement Officer Training School under director Pat O'Carroll, an FBN agent I'd known in New York. Fred Douglas, incidentally, continued to serve admirably as my assistant and liaison to Interpol.

“My job,” Ambrose continues, “was to coordinate the investigative activities, oversee the budgets, and referee disputes between the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Tax, the Coast Guard, the customs service, the Secret Service, the IRS Intelligence and Inspections Units, and the Bureau of Narcotics. I also tried to establish a local coordinator in each of the six
districts around the country, and explain to these guys that their enemy was the FBI, not each other.”

Ambrose cites, as an example of his intimate involvement with FBN affairs, a dispute in Texas in which District Supervisor Ernie Gentry accused Customs Agent Dave Ellis of obstructing FBN cases through the use of convoys. Ambrose went to Texas, reviewed the case, and advised that Gentry be reassigned. But Anslinger, ever protective of his agents, interceded on Gentry's behalf, and Ellis was transferred to New York instead.

“Anslinger was like the Pope,” Ambrose says with awe. “When he spoke, it was
ex cathedra
. Everyone knew he was a tough in-fighter who had outfoxed Hoover for years, and I wasn't about to tangle with him. The biggest hassle I had was with Fred Scribner, the under secretary over the IRS. IRS Intelligence had about 1,400 agents, and Scribner only wanted to use them to pursue tax evasion cases, not for organized crime law enforcement.

“Well,” Ambrose states matter-of-factly, “Apalachin changed that. The ATT and FBN were already involved, but I wanted IRS Intelligence in it too. So I went to Scribner and he agreed to open a file on every Apalachin attendee. After that, IRS agents started furnishing monthly reports to me and the evidence started piling up. Then William Rogers became Attorney General and in April 1958 he assigned anti-trust lawyer Milton Wessel to start a Special Group with several sub-groups around the country. And I became Treasury's liaison to Wessel at the Justice Department.”

The formation of the Special Group to prosecute the Apalachin alumni was the second development that put pressure on Vito Genovese. But there was a hitch: the Apalachin scandal had forced the FBI to join the investigation, and that spelled trouble for the FBN. As Gaffney recalls, “No less than a dozen FBI agents rummaged through our files at 90 Church Street trying to find out who the arrestees were, and two were still there when I took over the New York office on the first working day in 1958.”

Gaffney assigned Thomas J. Dugan as his representative to Wessel's Group. A veteran agent, “Old Tom” brought a vast knowledge of the Mafia to the investigation. Also assigned were agents William Rowan, Jack Gohde, Armando Muglia, Norman Matuozzi, and Norris “Norey” Durham; John Enright at the Court House Squad; overseas Mafia experts Hank Manfredi and Charlie Siragusa; and FBN informants Orlando Portale and Roger Coudert.
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The Special Group's purpose was to build a conspiracy case against 387 Mafiosi nationwide, but for budgetary reasons the investigation focused on the seventy-two Apalachin alumni, of whom only twenty-seven were indicted. On a single day in May 1959, FBN agents in Dallas, Cleveland,
Tucson, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, and New York arrested twenty-one of the suspects. Two later surrendered, four remained at large, and in October 1959, twenty-three Mafia bosses, including Vito Genovese, were brought to trial in New York. All were found guilty of conspiracy in November.

Although an Appellate Court overturned the verdict, the Apalachin conspiracy case kept Genovese scrambling while Gaffney's case-makers groomed Nelson Cantellops for his courtroom appearance; and based on his testimony, Genovese and fourteen accomplices were convicted in April 1959 of conspiring to smuggle heroin from Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Charged and convicted, but not present for the trial, were fugitives Carmine Galante and John Ormento.

Not since Lucky Luciano's downfall in 1936 had a gangster of Vito Genovese's status been convicted of such a serious crime – but there was more to come. In March 1959, Marty Pera and Jim Hunt captured John Ormento at gunpoint in his apartment; and in June 1959, Pera and Agent Bill Rowan, with the help of the New Jersey State Police, captured Carmine Galante after he was betrayed by Sal Giglio, his trusted representative to the Corsicans in Cuba.

Exactly why Giglio betrayed Galante is a story worth telling, as it reveals how intimately involved FBN agents often were with drug smuggling Mafiosi. Through NYPD detective Tommy O'Brien, Marty Pera placed a wiretap on Galante's
consigliere
, Joe Notaro, and through the wire Pera located Giglio. Meanwhile, agents Anthony Mangiaracina and Bill Rowan found, in a Canadian newspaper, a photograph of Giglio getting married to Florence Anderson, a waitress at the El Morocco Casino in Cuba, on 22 March 1957. A few weeks later, Pera appeared at Giglio's house in Queens, and while the gangster's original wife, Mary, was in the kitchen cooking pasta, Pera sat in the living room and presented Giglio with the incriminating photo. In exchange for a pledge that Mary would not be told about Florence, Giglio revealed Galante's location, before returning to Cuba to resume his drug-smuggling enterprises.

Within two years of taking on what Anslinger called “the toughest job in the Bureau,” Gaffney had done the incredible; he'd made cases on Genovese, Ormento, Galante, and other ranking members of the five families. This was an achievement upon which a typical district supervisor would have
coasted for the rest of his career. But not Gangbuster Gaffney. He forged ahead like a man possessed and, in 1959, under the guidance of his mentor Pat Ward, he artfully orchestrated the sensational Giuseppe “Pepe” Cotroni Conspiracy case in Montreal.

The younger brother of Vincent and Frank, Pepe managed the family's narcotics business in league with Carmine Galante, his American Mafia contact in New York, and Lucian Rivard, his French connection in Montreal. In 1956, at Galante's insistence, Rivard relocated to Havana, where he joined Paul Mondoloni and Jean Croce in the operation of several nightclubs, through which they moved narcotics at a cost of approximately $20,000 a week to Batista. The Corsicans in Cuba had a steady source of supply and, at a meeting with Croce in Paris in 1957, Pepe agreed to buy heroin from Mondoloni's associates in France, Jean and Dominick Venturi. By the year's end, Pepe and Galante, whose trucking company did business in Montreal, were supplying the five biggest Italian wholesalers in New York (including Angelo Tuminaro and Anthony DiPasqua, about whom much more remains to be said) with fifty kilograms of heroin a month.
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