The Strength of the Wolf (78 page)

If you talk to his supporters, Andy Tartaglino comes across as the FBN's high priest and exorcist. But if you talk to the agents he targeted in his integrity investigation, you hear about a “scorpion” or a “tarantula” (a play on his name, even though in Italian it means “little turtle”), a merciless grand inquisitor who used his bureaucratic powers to destroy his personal enemies.

According to one of his victims, Chuck Leya, “When Andy came back from Italy, he was unassigned and started hanging out at the Court House Squad. By all appearances he was a good guy. Then he gets into Internal Affairs and gets a taste of blood. Soon it becomes an obsession. The man becomes rabid, and before you know it, a lot of innocent people get dragged in.” Leya's words are laced with venom. “He sold himself as the strong-willed enforcer of principles, but he had his own problems, and among ourselves, we questioned his motives.”

“Andy was a good agent before he went to Washington,” George Gaffney agrees. “Then he changed. He developed an unbridled ambition.”

He'd also become very powerful. He was serving as executive assistant to David Acheson, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for law enforcement, and since 1965, he had been the engine of an anti-corruption unit that included Acheson's personal assistant for FBN affairs, Tony Lapham (the CIA officer who told Tartaglino to shut down the MKULTRA pad
on 13th Street in New York); Henry Petersen at Main Justice; and Vernon “Iron Mike” Acree, the chief of IRS Inspections. By late 1966, Acree's team had assembled enough data on the targeted agents to allow Tartaglino to begin his inquiries.
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But there was no way to conceal the investigation, and FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano was able to insist that New York District Supervisor George Belk be kept fully informed. Belk in turn assigned Art Fluhr, his trusted executive assistant, as his liaison to the IRS, and thereafter Fluhr kept Giordano abreast of any important developments.

Tartaglino and Inspector Irwin Greenfeld moved into an office on lower Broadway and began squaring agent net-worth and tax statements. “In one case an agent deposited $60,000 in his bank account,” Tartaglino recalls with a mixture of amazement and contempt. “One deposit! I checked to see what cases had happened at the time, and found that two days before the deposit, the agent had arrested a guy with $300,000.” He shakes his head and asks, “How stupid can you get? They think that because they're cops, they're above the law, and that no one will challenge them.”

Inevitably, Tartaglino's integrity investigation uncovered corruption within the NYPD, as well as the FBN, and he began working with the NYPD's Office of Internal Affairs. Also joining him at this time was IRS inspector Thomas P. Taylor, a hard-bitten former New York detective. Since March 1967, Taylor had been investigating the NYPD for everything, in his words, “from attempted bribery and shakedowns, to sticking up crap games, to allegations about corruption in the Special Investigations Unit and the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations.

“I'd gone to the
Journal American
reporters who'd done the Kadlub investigation,” Taylor explains, “and they turned their notes over to me, including the anonymous letter naming twenty-seven FBN agents as being involved in corruption. Some of the allegations were specific, so I sent the letter to Washington where it landed on the desk of Acheson's replacement, James Hendricks. Then came the June 1967 arrest of Secret Service Agent Gene Ballard and FBN Agent Jesse Spratley. They'd raided an apartment in New York, seized half a million dollars in counterfeit bills, and kept twenty grand for themselves. So this was a cumulative thing, with more and more people getting involved as the investigation expanded.

“We had information on informants,” Taylor adds, “plus allegations about agents, and agents resigning – all of which culminates with the arrest [on 12 December 1967] of Frank Dolce and Jack Gohde. Dolce and Gohde had quit the FBN in 1966 and gone to work for the Nassau County narcotics squad, and they were actually selling dope out of their office. Gerson Nagelberg and his wife, Vivienne, were their source of supply, but
we couldn't show it, because the informants were deathly afraid of Gohde, who'd allegedly killed someone for the love of Viv.”

Gerson “Gerry” Nagelberg played a central role in Tartaglino's integrity investigation. Born in 1912 in Germany, he came to America as a young man, became a citizen and served in the Second World War. Afterwards he made enough money in bookmaking to buy several nightclubs, which he used as fronts for his drug dealing operations. As an insurance policy, he paid former NYPD narcotic detectives to manage his bars, and his bar on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem was a favorite hangout for several FBN agents. Morty Benjamin says, “They'd go in for a drink, have dinner on the house, and then Gerson's wife Vivienne would ask a small favor: ‘Will you run a plate for me?' If they did, Viv would say, ‘Let me thank you.' She had a stable of gorgeous girls who provided the favors, and that was her hook. A few weeks later she'd call the agent again, wanting to know the price of an ounce of heroin on the street. She got them to violate small rules first, then once she got her hooks into them, she got them to break the big rules.”

Nagelberg came to the FBN's attention in the late 1950s, and Lenny Schrier arrested him in 1961. Charlie McDonnell and John Coursey did the undercover work on the case, at the Place Pigale on Amsterdam Avenue. Nagelberg became Schrier's informant, although it's unclear how many cases, if any, he enabled Schrier to make over the next few years. What's known is that in 1965 Nagelberg traveled to Marseilles and acquired a French connection through Dimitrio Porcino, an associate of the Guérini crime family in Nice. Couriers were hired and the machinery set in motion, and all went well for Nagelberg and Porcino until 1967, when Bob DeFauw uncovered their operation.

“Schrier and Frankie Waters were always calling me,” DeFauw says irritably, “asking about the Guérinis. Schrier even talked to Antoine through an interpreter. So I had Joe Catalanotto set up a delivery into Montreal.” DeFauw notified Customs Inspector Frank Cornetta (a former FBN agent) about the delivery, and on 27 May 1967, two of the Nagelbergs' couriers were caught bringing six kilograms of heroin into Dorval International Airport.

“Early that day I got a call from Lenny,” Morty Benjamin recalls, “saying there was a load coming into Dorval, so I hopped on a plane and flew up
to Montreal to work with Fred Cornetta, the Customs inspector up there. We're looking around the airport while Canadian Customs was making the bust, and I see Viv standing off to one side! I'd met her back in 1961 when Lenny first busted Gerry. So Fred and I grab her and take her to a room, where she tells me she's working for Jack Gohde. She thinks Gohde's still with the FBN! So I immediately called Lenny to verify what she had said. Lenny says, ‘I'll get right back to you,' and he calls Gohde. Gohde denies everything, so I return to New York and write a memo that includes all the allegations Viv made about drug dealers who had their hooks into agents, and vice versa.”
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Benjamin wrote his initial report on 9 June 1967, reciting Vivienne's allegation that she had introduced Gohde to “the Fraulein” (a prostitute named Ursula working for Ike Feldman, perhaps in a MKULTRA blackmail scheme that targeted Russians and East Germans at the UN), and that Gohde had shot drug trafficker John Cangiano. She named FBN agents Frank Bishopp, Cleophus Robinson and Lenny Schrier, and Assistant US Attorney Bill Tendy, as her friends. She said that “even your district supervisor, Mr. Belk, owes me a favor too.”

“Belk wouldn't front the money to make the call to Marseilles to confirm Jack Gohde's tie to Nagelberg,” Benjamin frowns. “Maybe he thought I was wrong. Maybe not.”

Or maybe Belk was covering himself. In 1965, he wrote a letter to federal prosecutors that got Gerson Nagelberg off his 1961 bust. Belk wrote the letter because Schrier said the Nagelbergs were his best informants. But were they? “He had to attribute the cases he was making to someone,” an agent comments, “so maybe he wrote them off as being made by Nagelberg?”

By the summer of 1967, Tartaglino had indexed every New York agent's tax returns, and had started questioning them about their finances. “You're trying to get leads,” he explains, “but you're also trying to sew up a case against the agent; and to get perjury, you have to know the answers to some of the questions you ask. That's how you get them to lie under oath. It was lots of work, and it was frustrating too, because we'd have a good case going, then suddenly the agent would quit and jump to BDAC.”

As Art Fluhr recalls, “Treasury sent in the IRS inspectors, and the first thing they did was investigate Belk and me. They did an in-depth audit of our net worth, and we were cleared, and I was made the liaison between
Giordano and the IRS. Then Andy starts coming in with cases. In one case he says, ‘You've got a guy here who never filed an income tax statement in his life.'

“I said, ‘Andy, you're telling me something, but what's it got to do with the FBN? If the agent's got a job on the side, and he's not reporting it, how the hell is Belk supposed to know?' But Andy insisted, so I asked him why he hadn't filed. He says, ‘I'm single, so they take it out anyway.' I tell him, ‘You gotta file.' So he files and gets a refund! But like a lot of guys, he's so mad he quits. He starts a security firm for Motown Records, and soon he's making ten times more money than he ever did with the Bureau.

“When Andy came in,” Fluhr snarls, “it was all corruption, and fifty good agents went down the drain for nothing.”

Having backed the agents into a corner, Tartaglino began to examine their informant files. “If an agent has an informant who's going to get twenty years,” Tartaglino explains, “the agent will tell him, ‘Make cases for me and I'll get the sentence reduced.' And that's okay. But some of the agents weren't doing anything to get the sentences reduced. They were keeping the informants on a string. And then, in some cases, the informant would die.”

Tartaglino's eyes are twinkling. “Say I've got three buys on Gotti through my informant, Pascoli, who has to testify at the trial. So I arrest Gotti, and in the car I mention where Pascoli lives. Gotti leaves a bundle of cash on the seat, and the next thing you know, Pascoli gets killed. And that's how it worked.”

Knowing it was the only way to make cases on bad agents, Tartaglino decided to take over the FBN's entire stable of informants. Chuck Leya was in the office when Belk assembled all the agents and delivered the news. “As you can imagine,” Leya says, “the impact was explosive: FBN operations in New York came to a screeching halt, the good agents got demoralized, and the bad agents ran to the US Attorney's office to cover their asses – and they started calling their informants too.”

Tartaglino then started hiring informants, including Richard Lawrence, to set up the bad agents. The scheme worked like this: Andy would have the informant call up his case agent and say, falsely, that some other agent was selling dope. If the case agent did not report the allegation, no matter how outlandish, he could be fired. But many of the informers double-crossed Tartaglino. After promising to cooperate, they'd call up their case agent and sell updates on his progress. When he found out that this was happening, Tartaglino tried to checkmate the bad informants by asking US Attorney Robert Morgenthau not to “write off” any more cases.

“If you have an informant who'll cooperate,” Chuck Leya explains, “you've got to play along with him in order to make cases. But headquarters didn't see it that way, so it was tough to begin with. Then Andy had everyone turn over his informers, and that's when it mushroomed. That's when Andy started turning the informants against the agents. Now if I'm an informer and I'm compromised, Andy's going to be my savior. It happened to me with one of my informants. He tells Andy that I used the office car for personal reasons and that my reports weren't accurate. Soon I'm heading for an administrative hearing. So I quit.”

Morty Benjamin vividly remembers the day, 3 November 1967, that his friend and mentor, Lenny Schrier, was called up front. “The inspectors were there,” he says, “and a few hours later, Lenny comes out, white as a sheet.” Morty whispers softly, “He passed right by me without saying a word, cleaned out his desk, and I never saw him again.”

A few minutes later, Benjamin was called into the front office, and Artie Fluhr told him that Schrier had been asked to explain a large deposit in his bank account. Schrier said his father had been a cab driver all his life, and had saved a large sum of money in a box, which he gave to Lenny to deposit in his account. According to another source, Schrier said the money was a cash inheritance his wife had received from a former employer. But apart from the money, there was also the issue of his relationship with the Nagelbergs, and six days after Schrier resigned, two more of Nagelberg's couriers were caught at Orly Airport with five kilograms of heroin, while boarding a flight to Bermuda. As Vic Maria recalls, “When we made the bust, the [couriers] implicated Lenny Schrier. So we just naturally assumed that Morty Benjamin, who'd worked for Lenny all those years, was involved too.”

As the Nagelberg investigation expanded to include Benjamin, former FBN agents Frank Dolce and Jack Gohde – then investigators for the Nassau County Sheriff's office – were arrested on 12 December 1967, based on information provided by cooperating informant Eddie Mitchell. Also arrested that day were FBN Agent Cleophus A. Robinson, and NYPD Special Investigations Unit detectives Raymond Imp, Marvin Moskowitz, and Charles Kelly. Robinson was charged with selling marijuana; Kelly, Imp and Moskowitz were charged with selling cocaine; and Dolce and Gohde were charged with selling heroin.