PART 1: THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SE ASIA

Going to restart another book that was disappeared at my last blog. Seeing we are staying at least 3 more years in Afghanistan,maybe at least one person will read this and understand why we are in Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with so called terrorists,and everything to do with the poppy plant.

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia 

By Alfred W. McCoy with 

Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II 

Introduction: 

The Consequences of Complicity

AMERICA is in the grip of a devastating heroin epidemic which leaves no city or suburb untouched, and which also runs rampant through every American military installation both here and abroad. And the plague is spreading-into factories and offices (among the middle-aged, middle-class workers as well as the young), into high schools and now grammar schools. In 1965 federal narcotics officials were convinced that they had the problem under control; there were only 57,000 known addicts in the entire country, and most of these were comfortably out of sight, out of mind in black urban ghettos.(1)* Only three or four years later heroin addiction began spreading into white communities, and by late 1969 the estimated number of addicts jumped to 315,000. By late 1971 the estimated total had almost doubled-reaching an all time high of 560,000.(2) One medical researcher discovered that 6.5 percent of all the blue-collar factory workers he tested were heroin addicts,(3) and army medical doctors were convinced that 10 to 15 percent of the G.I's in Vietnam were heroin users.(4) In sharp contrast to earlier generations of heroin users, many of these newer addicts were young and relatively affluent. 

The sudden rise in the addict population has spawned a crime wave that has turned America's inner cities into concrete jungles. Addicts are forced to steal in order to maintain their habits, and they now account for more than 75 percent of America's urban crime.(5) After opinion polls began to show massive public concern over the heroin problem, President Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in a June 1971 statement to Congress. He urged passage of a $370 million emergency appropriation to fight the heroin menace. However, despite politically motivated claims of success in succeeding months by administration spokesmen, heroin continues to flood into the country in unprecedented quantities, and there is every indication that the number of hard-core addicts is increasing daily. 

Heroin: The History of a "Miracle Drug" 

Heroin, a relatively recent arrival on the drug scene, was regarded, like morphine before it, and opium before morphine, as a "miracle drug" that had the ability to "kill all pain and anger and bring relief to every sorrow." A single dose sends the average user into a deep, euphoric reverie. Repeated use, however, creates an intense physical craving in the human body chemistry and changes the average person into a slavish addict whose entire existence revolves around his daily dosage. Sudden withdrawal can produce vomiting, violent convulsions, or fatal respiratory failure. An overdose cripples the body's central nervous system, plunges the victim into a, deep coma, and usually produces death within a matter of minutes. Heroin addiction destroys man's normal social instincts, including sexual desire, and turns the addict into a lone predator who willingly resorts to any crime burglary, armed robbery, armed assault, prostitution, or shoplifting-for money to maintain his habit. The average addict spends $8,000 a year on heroin, and experts believe that New York State's addicts alone steal at least half a billion dollars annually to maintain their habits. (6) 

Heroin is a chemically bonded synthesis of acetic anhydride, a common industrial acid, and morphine, a natural organic pain killer extracted from the opium poppy. Morphine is the key ingredient. Its unique pharmaceutical properties are what make heroin so potent a pain killer and such a dangerously addicting narcotic. The acidic bond simply fortifies the morphine, making it at least ten times more powerful than ordinary medical morphine and strengthening its addictive characteristics. Although almost every hospital in the world uses some form of morphine as a post-operative pain killer, modern medicine knows little more about its mysterious soothing properties than did the ancients who discovered opium. 

Scholars believe that man first discovered the opium poppy growing wild in mountains bordering the eastern Mediterranean sometime in the Neolithic Age. Ancient medical chronicles show that raw opium was highly regarded by early physicians hundreds of years before the coming of Christ. It was known to Hippocrates in Greece and in Roman times to the great physician Galen. From its original home in the eastern Mediterranean region, opium spread westward through Europe in the Neolithic Age and eastward toward India and China in the early centuries of the first millennium after Christ. Down through the ages, opium continued to merit the admiration of physicians and gained in popularity; in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, for example, opium-based medicines were among the most popular drugstore remedies for such ordinary ailments as headaches and the common cold. 

Although physicians had used various forms of opium for three or four thousand years, it was not until 1805 that medical science finally extracted pure morphine from raw opium. Orally taken, morphine soon became an important medical anesthetic, but it was not until 1858 that two American doctors first experimented with the use of the hypodermic needle to inject morphine directly into the bloodstream. (7) These discoveries were important medical breakthroughs, and they greatly improved the quality of medical treatment in the nineteenth century. 

However, widespread use of morphine and opium-based medicines such as codeine soon produced a serious drug addiction problem. In 1821 the English writer Thomas De Quincey first drew attention to the problem of post-treatment addiction when he published an essay entitled, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. De Quincey had become addicted during his student days at Oxford University, and remained an addict for the rest of his life. Finally recognizing the seriousness of the addiction problem, medical science devoted considerable pharmacological research to finding a non addicting pain killer,a search that eventually led to the discovery and popularization of heroin. In 1874 an English researcher, C. R. Wright, synthesized heroin, or diacetylmorphine, for the first time when he boiled morphine and acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours. After biological testing on dogs showed that diacetylmorphine induced "great prostration, fear, sleepiness speedily following the administration and a slight tendency to vomiting," the English researcher wisely decided to discontinue his experiments. (8) Less than twenty years later, however, German scientists who tested diacetylmorphine concluded that it was an excellent treatment for such respiratory ailments as bronchitis, chronic coughing, asthma, and tuberculosis. Most importantly, these scientists claimed that diacetylmorphine was the ideal non addicting substitute for morphine and codeine. Encouraged by these results, the Bayer chemical cartel of Elberfeld, Germany, decided to manufacture diacetylmorphine and dreamed up the brand name "heroin" for its mass marketing campaign. Bayer wanted all the world to know about its new pain reliever, and in 1898 it launched an aggressive international advertising campaign in a dozen different languages.(9) 

(10)

Hailed as a "miracle drug" by medical experts around the globe, heroin was widely prescribed as a non addicting cure-all for whatever ails you, and soon became one of the most popular patent medicines on the market. The drug's popularity encouraged imitators, and a Saint Louis pharmaceutical company offered a "Sample Box Free to Physicians" of its "Dissolve on the Tongue Antikamnia & Heroin Tablets." (11) And in 1906 the American Medical Association (A.M.A) approved heroin for general use and advised that it be used "in place of morphine in various painful infections." (12) 

Unrestricted distribution by physicians and pharmacies created an enormous drug abuse problem; in 1924 federal narcotics officials estimated that there were 200,000 addicts in the United States, (13) and the deputy police commissioner of New York reported that 94 percent of all drug addicts arrested for various crimes were heroin users.(14) The growing dimensions of heroin addiction finally convinced authorities that heroin's liabilities outweighed its medical merits, and in 1924 both houses of Congress unanimously passed legislation outlawing the import or manufacture of heroin.(15) 

After a quarter century of monumental heroin abuse, the international medical community finally recognized the dangers of unrestricted heroin use, and the League of Nations began to regulate and reduce the legal manufacture of heroin. The Geneva Convention of 1925 imposed a set of strict regulations on the manufacture and export of heroin, and the Limitation Convention of 1931 stipulated that manufacturers could only produce enough heroin to meet legitimate "medical and scientific needs." As a result of these treaties, the world's total legal heroin production plummeted from its peak of nine thousand kilograms (I kilo = 2.2 pounds) in 1926 to little more than one thousand kilos in 1931. (16) 

However, the sharp decline in legal pharmaceutical output by no means put an end to widespread heroin addiction. Aggressive criminal syndicates shifted the center of world heroin production from legitimate pharmaceutical factories in Europe to clandestine laboratories in Shanghai and Tientsin, China. (17) Owned and operated by a powerful Chinese secret society, these laboratories started to supply vast quantities of illicit heroin to corrupt Chinese warlords, European criminal syndicates, and American mafiosi like Lucky Luciano. In Marseille, France, fledgling Corsican criminal syndicates opened up smaller laboratories and began producing for European markets and export to the United States.(18) 

While law enforcement efforts failed to stem the flow of illicit heroin into the United States during the 1930's, the outbreak of World War II seriously disrupted international drug traffic. Wartime border security measures and a shortage of ordinary commercial shipping made it nearly impossible for traffickers to smuggle heroin into the United States. Distributors augmented dwindling supplies by "cutting" (adulterating) heroin with increasingly greater proportions of sugar or quinine; while most packets of heroin sold in the United States were 28 percent pure in 1938, only three years later they were less than 3 percent pure. As a result of all this, many American addicts were forced to undergo involuntary withdrawal from their habits, and by the end of World War 11 the American addict population had dropped to less than twenty thousand." (18) In fact, as the war drew to a close, there was every reason to believe that the scourge of heroin had finally been purged from the United States. Heroin supplies were nonexistent, international criminal syndicates were in disarray, and the addict population was reduced to manageable proportions for the first time in half a century. 

But the disappearance of heroin addiction from the American scene was not to be. Within several years, in large part thanks to the nature of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, the drug syndicates were back in business, the poppy fields in Southeast Asia started to expand and heroin refineries multiplied both in Marseilles and Hong Kong.(19) How did we come to inflict this heroin plague on ourselves? 

The answer lies in the history of America's cold war crusade. World War II shattered the world order much of the globe had known for almost a century. Advancing and retreating armies surged across the face of three continents, leaving in their wake a legacy of crumbling empires, devastated national economies, and shattered social orders. In Europe the defeat of Fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, France, and eastern Europe released workers from years of police state repression. A wave of grass roots militancy swept through European labor movements, and trade unions launched a series of spectacular strikes to achieve their economic and political goals. Bled white by six years of costly warfare, both the victor and vanquished nations of Europe lacked the means and the will to hold on to their Asian colonial empires. Within a few years after the end of World War II, vigorous national liberation movements swept through Asia from India to Indonesia as indigenous groups rose up against their colonial masters. 

America's nascent cold war crusaders viewed these events with undisguised horror Conservative Republican and Democratic leaders alike felt that the United States should be rewarded for its wartime sacrifices. These men wanted to inherit the world as it had been and had little interest in seeing it changed. Henry Luce, founder of the Time-Life empire, argued that America was the rightful heir to Great Britain's international primacy and heralded the postwar era as "The American Century." To justify their "entanglement in foreign adventures," America's cold warriors embraced a militantly anti-Communist ideology. In their minds the entire world was locked in a Manichaean struggle between "godless communism" and "the free world." The Soviet Union was determined to conquer the world, and its leader, Joseph Stalin, was the new Hitler. European labor movements and Asian nationalist struggles were pawns of "international communism," and as such had to be subverted or destroyed. There could be no compromise with this monolithic evil: negotiations were "appeasement" and neutralism was "im moral." In this desperate struggle to save "Western civilization," any ally was welcome and any means was justified. The military dictatorship on Taiwan became "free China"; the police state in South Vietnam was "free Vietnam"; a collection of military dictatorships stretching from Pakistan to Argentina was "the free world." The CIA became the vanguard of America's anti-Communist crusade, and it dispatched small numbers of well-financed agents to every corner of the globe to mold local political situations in a fashion compatible with American interests. Practicing a ruthless form of clandestine realpolitik, its agents made alliances with any local group willing and able to stem the flow of "Communist aggression." Although these alliances represent only a small fraction of CIA postwar operations, they have nevertheless had a profound impact on the international heroin trade. 

The cold war was waged in many parts of the world, but Europe was the most important battleground in the 1940's and 1950's. Determined to restrict Soviet influence in western Europe, American clandestine operatives intervened in the internal politics of Germany, Italy, and France. In Sicily, the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S), formed an alliance with the Sicilian Mafia to limit the political gains of the Italian Communist party on this impoverished island. In France the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles became a major battleground between the CIA and the French Communist party during the late 1940's. To tip the balance of power in its favor, the CIA recruited Corsican gangsters to battle Communist strikers and backed leading figures in the city's Corsican underworld who were at odds with the local Communists. Ironically, both the Sicilian Mafia and the Corsican underworld played a key role in the growth of Europe's postwar heroin traffic and were to provide most of the heroin smuggled into the United States for the next two decades. 

However, the mid-1960's marked the peak of the European heroin industry, and shortly thereafter it went into a sudden decline. In the early 1960's the Italian government launched a crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, and in 1967 the Turkish government announced that it would begin phasing out cultivation of opium poppies on the Anatolian plateau in order to deprive Marseilles's illicit heroin laboratories of their most important source of raw material. Unwilling to abandon their profitable narcotics racket, the American Mafia and Corsican syndicates shifted their sources of supply to Southeast Asia, where surplus opium production and systematic government corruption created an ideal climate for large-scale heroin production. 

And once again American foreign policy played a role in creating these favorable conditions. During the early 1950's the CIA had backed the formation of a Nationalist Chinese guerrilla army in Burma, which still controls almost a third of the world's illicit opium supply, and in Laos the CIA created a Meo mercenary army whose commander manufactured heroin for sale to Americans G.I's in South Vietnam. The State Department provided unconditional support for corrupt governments openly engaged in the drug traffic. In late 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, America's total number of addicts skyrocketed. 

Unlike some national intelligence agencies, the CIA did not dabble in the drug traffic to finance its clandestine operations. Nor was its culpability the work of a few corrupt agents, eager to share in the enormous profits. The CIA's role in the heroin traffic was simply an inadvertent but inevitable consequence of its cold war tactics.[I do not buy that for a second,it might have started like that,but the agencies continued involvement in drug trafficking in heroin as well as cocaine, and the stories of the corrupt banks laundering big time $$$,indicates that by 2017 it has become about the money DC]   

The Logistics of Heroin 

America's heroin addicts are victims of the most profitable criminal enterprise known to man,an enterprise that involves millions of peasant farmers in the mountains of Asia, thousands of corrupt government officials, disciplined criminal syndicates, and agencies of the United States government. America's heroin addicts are the final link in a chain of secret criminal transactions that begin in the opium fields of Asia, pass through clandestine heroin laboratories in Europe and Asia, and enter the United States through a maze of international smuggling routes. 

Almost all of the world's illicit opium is grown in a narrow band of mountains that stretches along the southern rim of the great Asian land mass, from Turkey's and Anatolian plateau, through the northern reaches of the Indian subcontinent, all the way to the rugged mountains of northern Laos. Within this 4,500-mile stretch of mountain landscape, peasants and tribesmen of eight different nations harvest some fourteen hundred tons a year of raw opium, which eventually reaches the world's heroin and opium addicts." A small percentage of this fourteen hundred tons is diverted from legitimate pharmaceutical production in Turkey, Iran, and India, but most of it is grown expressly for the international narcotics traffic in South and Southeast Asia. Although Turkey was the major source of American narcotics through the 1960's, the hundred tons of raw opium its licensed peasant farmers diverted from legitimate production never accounted for more than 7 percent of the world's illicit supply. (20) About 24 percent is harvested by poppy farmers in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India). However, most of this is consumed by local opium addicts, and only insignificant quantities find their way to Europe or the United States. (21) It is Southeast Asia that has become the world's most important source of illicit opium. Every year the hill tribe farmers of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle region-northeastern Burma, northern Thailand, and northern Laos-harvest approximately one thousand tons of raw opium, or about 70 percent of the world's illicit supply. (22) 

Despite countless minor variations, all of Asia's poppy farmers use the same basic techniques when they cultivate the opium poppy. The annual crop cycle begins in late summer or early fall as the farmers scatter handfuls of tiny poppy seeds across the surface of their hoed fields. At maturity the greenish-colored poppy plant has one main tubular stem, which stands about three or four feet high, and perhaps half a dozen to a dozen smaller stems. About three months after planting, each stem produces a brightly colored flower; gradually the petals drop to the ground, exposing a green seed pod about the size and shape of a bird's egg. For reasons still unexplained by botanists, the seed pod synthesizes a milky white sap soon after the petals have fallen away. This sap is opium, and the farmers harvest it by cutting a series of shallow parallel incisions across the bulb's surface with a special curved knife. As the white sap seeps out of the incisions and congeals on the bulb's surface, it changes to a brownish-black color. The farmer collects the opium by scraping off the bulb with a flat, dull knife.

Even in this age of jumbo jets and supersonic transports, raw opium still moves from the poppy fields to the morphine refineries on horseback. There are few roads in these underdeveloped mountain regions, and even where there are, smugglers generally prefer to stick to the mountain trails where there are fewer police. Most traffickers prefer to do their morphine refining close to the poppy fields, since compact morphine bricks are much easier to smuggle than bundles of pungent, jellylike opium. Although they are separated by over four thousand miles, criminal "chemists" of the Middle East and Southeast Asia use roughly the same technique to extract pure morphine from opium. The chemist begins the process by heating water in an oil drum over a wood fire until his experienced index finger tells him that the temperature is just right. Next, raw opium is dumped into the drum and stirred with a heavy stick until it dissolves. At the propitious moment the chemist adds ordinary lime fertilizer to the steaming solution, precipitating out organic waste and leaving the morphine suspended in the chalky white water near the surface. While filtering the water through an ordinary piece of flannel cloth to remove any residual waste matter, the chemist pours the solution into another oil drum. As the solution is heated and stirred a second time, concentrated ammonia is added, causing the morphine to solidify and drop to the bottom. Once more the solution is filtered through flannel, leaving chunky white kernels of morphine on the cloth. Once dried and packaged for shipment, the morphine usually weighs about 10 percent of what the raw opium from which it was extracted weighed. (23)

The heroin manufacturing process is a good deal more complicated, and requires the supervision of an expert chemist. Since the end of World War II, Marseilles and Hong Kong have established themselves as the major centers for heroin laboratories. However, their dominance is now being challenged by a new cluster of heroin laboratories located in the wilds of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. Most laboratories are staffed by a three man team consisting of an experienced "master chemist" and two apprentices. In most cases the master chemist is really a "master chef" who has simply memorized the complicated five-part recipe after several years as an assistant. The goal of the five-stage process is to chemically bind morphine molecules with acetic acid and then process the compound to produce a fluffy white powder that can be injected from a syringe, 

STAGE ONE. To produce ten kilos of pure heroin (the normal daily output of many labs), the chemist heats ten kilos of morphine and ten kilos of acetic anhydride in an enamel bin or glass flask. After being heated six hours at exactly 185' F., the morphine and acid become chemically bonded, creating an impure form of diacetylmorphine (heroin). 

STAGE TWO . To remove impurities from the compound, the solution is treated with water and chloroform until the impurities precipitate out, leaving a somewhat higher grade of diacetylmorphine. 

STAGE THREE. The solution is drained off into another container, and sodium carbonate is added until the crude heroin particles begin to solidify and drop to the bottom. 

STAGE FOUR. After the heroin particles are filtered out of the sodium carbonate solution under pressure by a small suction pump, they are purified in a solution of alcohol and activated charcoal. The new mixture is heated until the alcohol begins to evaporate, leaving relatively pure granules of heroin at the bottom of the flask. 

STAGE FIVE. This final stage produces the fine white powder prized by American addicts, and requires considerable skill on the part of an underworld chemist. The heroin is placed in a large flask and dissolved in alcohol. As ether and hydrochloric acid are added to the solution, tiny white flakes begin to form. After the flakes are filtered out under pressure and dried through a special process, the end result is a white powder, 80 to 99 percent pure, known as "no. 4 heroin." In the hands of a careless chemist the volatile ether gas may ignite and produce a violent explosion that could level the clandestine laboratory.(24) 

Once it is packaged in plastic envelopes, heroin is ready for its trip to the United States. An infinite variety of couriers and schemes are used to smuggle stewardesses, Filipino diplomats, businessmen, Marseilles pimps, and even Playboy playmates. But regardless of the means used to smuggle, almost all of these shipments are financed and organized by one of the American Mafia's twenty-four regional groups, or "families." Although the top bosses of organized crime never even see, much less touch, the heroin, their vast financial resources and their connections with Chinese syndicates in Hong Kong and Corsican gangs in Marseilles and Indochina play a key role in the importation of America's heroin supply. The top bosses usually deal in bulk shipments of twenty to a hundred kilos of no. 4 heroin, for which they have to advance up to $27,000 per kilo in cash. After a shipment arrives, the bosses divide it into wholesale lots of one to ten kilos for sale to their underlings in the organized crime families. A lower-ranking mafioso, known as a "kilo connection" in the trade, dilutes the heroin by 50 percent and breaks it into smaller lots, which he turns over to two or three distributors. From there the process of dilution and profit making continues downward through another three levels in the distribution network until it finally reaches the street.25 By this time the heroin's value has increased tenfold to $225,000 a kilo, and it is so heavily diluted that the average street packet sold to an addict is less than 5 percent pure. 

To an average American who witnesses the daily horror of the narcotics traffic at the street level, it must seem inconceivable that his government could be in any way implicated in the international narcotics traffic. The media have tended to reinforce this outlook by depicting the international heroin traffic as a medieval morality play: the traffickers are portrayed as the basest criminals, continually on the run from the minions of law and order; and American diplomats and law enforcement personnel are depicted as modern-day knight servant staunchly committed to the total, immediate eradication of heroin trafficking. Unfortunately, the characters in this drama cannot be so easily stereotyped. American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics traffic at three levels: (1) coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; (2) abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; (3) and active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America's heroin plague is of its own making.

1. 

Sicily: Home of the Mafia 

AT THE END of World War II, there was an excellent chance that heroin addiction could be eliminated in the United States. The wartime security measures designed to prevent infiltration of foreign spies and sabotage to naval installations made smuggling into the United States virtually impossible. Most American addicts were forced to break their habits during the war, and consumer demand just about disappeared. Moreover, the international narcotics syndicates were weakened by the war and could have been decimated with a minimum of police effort. (1) 

During the 1930's most of America's heroin had come from China's refineries centered in Shanghai and Tientsin. This was supplemented by the smaller amounts produced in Marseilles by the Corsican syndicates and in the Middle East by the notorious Eliopoulos brothers. Mediterranean shipping routes were disrupted by submarine warfare during the war, and the Japanese invasion of China interrupted the flow of shipments to the United States from the Shanghai and Tientsin heroin laboratories. The last major wartime seizure took place in 1940, when forty-two kilograms of Shanghai heroin were discovered in San Francisco. During the war only tiny quantities of heroin were confiscated, and laboratory analysis by federal officials showed that its quality was constantly declining; by the end of the war most heroin was a crude Mexican product, less than 3 percent pure. And a surprisingly high percentage of the samples were fake.' As has already been mentioned, most addicts were forced to undergo an involuntary withdrawal from heroin, and at the end of the war the Federal Bureau of Narcotics reported that there were only 20,000 addicts in all of America. (2) 

After the war, Chinese traffickers had barely reestablished their heroin labs when Mao Tse-tung's peasant armies captured Shanghai and drove them out of China. (3) The Eliopoulos brothers had retired from the trade with the advent of the war, and a postwar narcotics indictment in New York served to discourage any thoughts they may have had of returning to it. (4) The hold of the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles was weakened, since their most powerful leaders had made the tactical error of collaborating with the Nazi Gestapo, and so were either dead or in exile. Most significantly, Sicily's Mafia had been smashed almost beyond repair by two decades of Mussolini's police repression. It was barely holding onto its control of local protection money from farmers and shepherds. (5) 

With American consumer demand reduced to its lowest point in fifty years and the international syndicates in disarray, the U.S. government had a unique opportunity to eliminate heroin addiction as a major American social problem. However, instead of delivering the death blow to these criminal syndicates, the U.S. government-through the Central Intelligence Agency and its wartime predecessor, the O.S.S-created a situation that made it possible for the Sicilian/American Mafia and the Corsican underworld to revive the international narcotics traffic.(6) 

In Sicily the O.S.S initially allied with the Mafia to assist the Allied forces in their 1943 invasion. Later, the alliance was maintained in order to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist party on the island. In Marseilles the CIA joined forces with the Corsican underworld to break the hold of the Communist Party over city government and to end two dock strikes--one in 1947 and the other in 1950-that threatened efficient operation of the Marshall Plan and the First Indochina War. (7) Once the United States released the Mafia's corporate genius, Lucky Luciano, as a reward for his wartime services, the international drug trafficking syndicates were back in business within an alarmingly short period of time. And their biggest customer? The United States, the richest nation in the world, the only one of the great powers that had come through the horrors of World War II relatively untouched, and the country that had the biggest potential for narcotics distribution. For, in spite of their forced withdrawal during the war years, America's addicts could easily be won back to their heroin persuasion. For America itself had long had a drug problem, one that dated back to the nineteenth century.

Addiction in America: 

The Root of the Problem Long before opium and heroin addiction became a law enforcement problem, it was a major cause for social concern in the United States. By the late 1800's Americans were taking opium-based drugs with the same alarming frequency as they now consume tranquilizers, pain killers, and diet pills. Even popular children's medicines were frequently opium based. When heroin was introduced into the United States by the German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, in 1898, it was, as has already been mentioned, declared nonaddictive, and was widely prescribed in hospitals and by private practitioners as a safe substitute for morphine. After opium smoking was outlawed in the United States ten years later, many opium addicts turned to heroin as a legal substitute, and America's heroin problem was born, 

By the beginning of World War I the most conservative estimate of America's addict population was 200,000, and growing alarm over the uncontrolled use of narcotics resulted in the first attempts at control. In 1914 Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act. It turned out to be a rather ambiguous statute, requiring only the registration of all those handling opium and coca products and establishing a stamp tax of one cent an ounce on these drugs. A medical doctor was allowed to prescribe opium, morphine, or heroin to a patient, "in the course of his professional practice only." The law, combined with public awareness of the plight of returning World War I veterans who had become addicted to medical morphine, resulted in the opening of hundreds of public drug maintenance clinics. Most clinics tried to cure the addict by gradually reducing his intake of heroin and morphine. However, in 1923 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in United States vs. Behrman, that the Harrison Act made it illegal for a medical doctor to prescribe morphine or heroin to an addict under any circumstances. The clinics shut their doors and a new figure appeared on the American scene-the pusher. 

The Mafia in America 

At first the American Mafia ignored this new business opportunity.[yeah until the Jews got involved DC] Steeped in the traditions of the Sicilian "honored society," which absolutely forbade involvement in either narcotics or prostitution, the Mafia left the heroin business to the powerful Jewish gangsters-such as "Legs" Diamond, "Dutch" Schultz, and Meyer Lansky-who dominated organized crime in the 1920's. The Mafia contented itself with the substantial profits to be gained from controlling the bootleg liquor industry.(8)However, in 1930-1931, only seven years after heroin was legally banned, a war erupted in the Mafia ranks. Out of the violence that left more than sixty gangsters dead came a new generation of leaders with little respect for the traditional code of honor." 

 Salvatore Lucania, alias Lucky Luciano.

The leader of this mafioso youth movement was the legendary Salvatore C. Luciana, known to the world as Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Charming and strikingly handsome, Luciano must rank as one of the most brilliant criminal executives of the modern age. For, at a series of meetings shortly following the last of the bloodbaths that completely eliminated the old guard, Luciano outlined his plans for a modern, nationwide crime cartel. His modernization scheme quickly won total support from the leaders of America's twenty-four Mafia "families," and within a few months the National Commission was functioning smoothly. This was an event of historic proportions: almost singlehanded, Luciano built the Mafia into the most powerful criminal syndicate in the United States and pioneered organizational techniques that are still the basis of organized crime today. Luciano also forged an alliance between the Mafia and Meyer Lansky's Jewish gangs that has survived for almost 40 years and even today is the dominant characteristic of organized crime in the United States. 

With the end of Prohibition in sight, Luciano made the decision to take the Mafia into the lucrative prostitution and heroin rackets. This decision was determined more by financial considerations than anything else. The predominance of the Mafia over its Jewish and Irish rivals had been built on its success in illegal distilling and rum running. Its continued preeminence, which Luciano hoped to maintain through superior organization, could only be sustained by developing new sources of income. 

Heroin was an attractive substitute because its relatively recent prohibition had left a large market that could be exploited and expanded easily. Although heroin addicts in no way compared with drinkers in numbers, heroin profits could be just as substantial: heroin's light weight made it less expensive to smuggle than liquor, and its relatively limited number of sources made it more easy to monopolize. 

Heroin, moreover, complemented Luciano's other new business venture-the organization of prostitution on an unprecedented scale. Luciano forced many small-time pimps out of business as he found that addicting his prostitute labor force to heroin kept them quiescent, steady workers, with a habit to support and only one way to gain enough money to support it. This combination of organized prostitution and drug addiction, which later became so commonplace, was Luciano's trademark in the 1930's. By 1935 he controlled 200 New York City brothels with twelve hundred prostitutes, providing him with an estimated income of more than $10 million a year. (9) Supplemented by growing profits from gambling and the labor movement (gangsters seemed to find a good deal of work as strikebreakers during the depression years of the 1930's) as well, organized crime was once again on a secure financial footing. 

But in the late 1930's the American Mafia fell on hard times. Federal and state investigators launched a major crackdown on organized crime that produced one spectacular narcotics conviction and forced a number of powerful mafiosi to flee the country. In 1936 Thomas Dewey's organized crime investigators indicted Luciano himself on sixty-two counts of forced prostitution. Although the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had gathered enough evidence on Luciano's involvement in the drug traffic to indict him on a narcotics charge, both the bureau and Dewey's investigators felt that the forced prostitution charge would be more likely to offend public sensibilities and secure a conviction. They were right. While Luciano's modernization of the profession had resulted in greater profits, he had lost control over his employees, and three of his prostitutes testified against him. The New York courts awarded him a thirty to fifty-year jail term. (10) 

Luciano's arrest and conviction was a major setback for organized crime: it removed the underworld's most influential mediator from active leadership and probably represented a severe psychological shock for lower-ranking gangsters. 

Cesare Mori(L)

However, the Mafia suffered even more severe shocks on the mother island of Sicily. Although Dewey's reputation as a "racket-busting" district attorney was rewarded by a governorship and later by a presidential nomination, his efforts seem feeble indeed compared to Mussolini's personal vendetta against the Sicilian Mafia. During a state visit to a small town in western Sicily in 1924, the Italian dictator offended a local Mafia boss by treating him with the same condescension he usually reserved for minor municipal officials. The mafioso made the foolish mistake of retaliating by emptying the piazza of everyone but twenty beggars during Mussolini's speech to the "assembled populace."(11) Upon his return to Rome, the outraged Mussolini appeared before the Fascist parliament and declared total war on the Mafia. Cesare Mori was appointed prefect of Palermo and for two years conducted a reign of terror in western Sicily that surpassed even the Holy Inquisition. Combining traditional torture with the most modern innovations, Mori secured confessions and long prison sentences for thousands of mafiosi and succeeded in reducing the venerable society to its weakest state in a hundred years."(12) Although the campaign ended officially in 1927 as Mori accepted the accolades of the Fascist parliament, local Fascist officials continued to harass the Mafia. By the beginning of World War II, the Mafia had been driven out of the cities and was surviving only in the mountain areas of western Sicily.(13) 

The Mafia Restored: Fighters 

for Democracy in World War II 

World War II gave the Mafia a new lease on life. In the United States, the Office of Naval Intelligence (O.N.I) became increasingly concerned over a series of sabotage incidents on the New York waterfront, which culminated with the burning of the French liner Normandie on the eve of its christening as an Allied troop ship. 

Joseph Lanza

Powerless to infiltrate the waterfront itself, the O.N.I very practically decided to fight fire with fire, and contacted Joseph Lanza, Mafia boss of the East Side docks, who agreed to organize effective anti sabotage surveillance throughout his waterfront territory. When O.N.I decided to expand "Operation Underworld" to the West Side docks in 1943 they discovered they would have to deal with the man who controlled them: Lucky Luciano, unhappily languishing in the harsh Dannemora prison. After he promised full cooperation to naval intelligence officers, Luciano was rewarded by being transferred to a less austere state penitentiary near Albany, where he was regularly visited by military officers and underworld leaders such as Meyer Lansky (who had emerged as Luciano's chief assistant). (14) 

While O.N.I enabled Luciano to resume active leadership of American organized crime, the Allied invasion of Italy returned the Sicilian Mafia to power. 

On the night of July 9, 1943, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the extreme southwestern shore of Sicily.(15) After securing a beachhead, Gen. George Patton's U.S. Seventh Army launched an offensive into the island's western hills, Italy's Mafia land, and headed for the city of Palermo. (16) Although there were over sixty thousand Italian troops and a hundred miles of booby trapped roads between Patton and Palermo, his troops covered the distance in a remarkable four days.(17) 

The Defense Department has never offered any explanation for the remarkable lack of resistance in Patton's race through western Sicily and pointedly refused to provide any information to Sen. Estes Kefauver's Organized Crime Subcommittee in 1951.(18) However, Italian experts on the Sicilian Mafia have never been so reticent. 

Five days after the Allies landed in Sicily an American fighter plane flew over the village of Villalba, about forty-five miles north of General Patton's beachhead on the road to Palermo, and jettisoned a canvas sack addressed to "Zu Calo." "Zu Calo," better known as Don Calogero Vizzini, was the unchallenged leader of the Sicilian Mafia and lord of the mountain region through which the American army would be passing. The sack contained a yellow silk scarf emblazoned with a large black L. The L, of course, stood for Lucky Luciano, and silk scarves were a common form of identification used by mafiosi traveling from Sicily to America. (19) 

Don Calogero

It was hardly surprising that Lucky Luciano should be communicating with Don Calogero under such circumstances; Luciano had been born less than fifteen miles from Villalba in Lercara Fridi, where his mafiosi relatives still worked for Don Calogero. (20) Two days later, three American tanks rolled into Villalba after driving thirty miles through enemy territory. Don Calogero climbed aboard and spent the next six days traveling through western Sicily organizing support for the advancing American troops. (21) As General Patton's Third Division moved onward into Don Calogero's mountain domain, the signs of its dependence on Mafia support were obvious to the local population. The Mafia protected the roads from snipers, arranged enthusiastic welcomes for the advancing troops, and provided guides through the confusing mountain terrain. (22) 

While the role of the Mafia is little more than a historical footnote to the Allied conquest of Sicily, its cooperation with the American military occupation (AMGOT) was extremely important. Although there is room for speculation about Luciano's precise role in the invasion, there can be little doubt about the relationship between the Mafia and the American military occupation. 

This alliance developed when, in the summer of 1943, the Allied occupation's primary concern was to release as many of their troops as possible from garrison duties on the island so they could be used in the offensive through southern Italy. Practicality was the order of the day, and in October the Pentagon advised occupation officers "that the carabinieri and Italian Army will be found satisfactory for local security purposes. (23) But the Fascist army had long since deserted, and Don Calogero's Mafia seemed far more reliable at guaranteeing public order than Mussolini's powerless carabinieri. So, in July the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. army appointed Don Calogero mayor of Villalba. In addition, ANIGOT appointed loyal mafiosi as mayors in many of the towns and villages in western Sicily. (24) 

As Allied forces crawled north through the Italian mainland, American intelligence officers became increasingly upset about the leftward drift of Italian politics. Between late 1943 and mid 1944, the Italian Communist party's membership had doubled, and in the German-occupied northern half of the country an extremely radical resistance movement was gathering strength; in the winter of 1944, over 500,000 Turin workers shut the factories for eight days despite brutal Gestapo repression, and the Italian underground grew to almost 150,000 armed men. Rather than being heartened by the underground's growing strength, the U.S. army became increasingly concerned about its radical politics and began to cut back its arms drops to the resistance in mid 1944. (25) "More than twenty years ago," Allied military commanders reported in 1944, "a similar situation provoked the March on Rome and gave birth to Fascism. We must make up our minds-and that quickly-whether we want this second march developing into another 'ism.' (26) 

In Sicily the decision had already been made. To combat expected Communist gains, occupation authorities used Mafia officials in the AMGOT administration. Since any changes in the island's feudal social structure would cost the Mafia money and power, the "honored society" was a natural anti-Communist ally. So confident was Don Calogero of his importance to AMGOT that he killed Villalba's overly inquisitive police chief to free himself of all restraints. (27) In Naples, one of Luciano's lieutenants, Vito Genovese, was appointed to a position of interpreterliaison officer in American army headquarters and quickly became one of AMGOT's most trusted employees. It was a remarkable turnabout; less than a year before, Genovese had arranged the murder of Carlo Tresca, editor of an anti-Fascist Italian-language newspaper in New York, to please the Mussolini government. (28)

Carlo Tresca (1879-1943), was born in Italy in 1879. After being active in the Italian Railroad Workers' Federation, Tresca moved to the United States in 1904. Elected secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation of North America and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he took part in strikes of Pennsylvania coal miners before becoming involved in the important industrial disputes in Lawrence and Paterson. Tresca, who lived with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, was editor of the antifascist newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer) for over 20 years. Carlo Tresco was leader of the AntiFascist Alliance and was assassinated in New York City in 1943. Many of Tresca's comrades believed that his murder had been ordered by Generoso Pope, the ex-fascist publisher of Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, as Tresca had attacked him relentlessly throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. One plausible theory said that Tresca was killed at the order of an Italian underworld figure named Frank Garofalo, identified as a member of the Mafia. Another theory said that Carmine Galante was the man who undoubtedly killed him. Galante was to become one of the most significant figures in a criminal group that has operated in New York, and beyond, for seventy years. On that dark, miserable January night when he gunned down his target, the probable killer Galante was already associated with or indeed possibly a member of a Mafia organization that is known today as the Bonanno Crime Family. (More Information) 

Image: Vito Genovese (rigth) with Salvatore Giuliano (left). Genovese was Colonel Poletti's driver, interpreter and consiglieri (adviser).  

Genovese and Don Calogero were old friends, and they used their official positions to establish one of the largest black market operations in all of southern Italy. Don Calogero sent enormous truck caravans loaded with all the basic food commodities necessary for the Italian diet rolling northward to hungry Naples, where their cargoes were distributed by Genovese's organization (29) All of the trucks were issued passes and export papers by the AMGOT administration in Naples and Sicily, and some corrupt American army officers even made contributions of gasoline and trucks to the operation. 

In exchange for these favors, Don Calogero became one of the major supporters of the Sicilian Independence Movement, which was enjoying the covert support of the O.S.S. As Italy veered to the left in 1943-1944, the American military became alarmed about their future position in Italy and felt that the island's naval bases and strategic location in the Mediterranean might provide a possible future counterbalance to a Communist mainland. (30) Don Calogero supported this separatist movement by recruiting most of western Sicily's mountain bandits for its volunteer army, but quietly abandoned it shortly after the O.S.S dropped it in 1945. 

Don Calogero rendered other services to the anti-Communist effort by breaking up leftist political rallies. On September 16, 1944, for example, the Communist leader Girolama Li Causi held a rally in Villalba that ended abruptly in a hail of gunfire as Don Calogero's men fired into the crowd and wounded nineteen spectators. (31) Michele Pantaleone, who observed the Mafia's revival in his native village of Villalba, described the consequences of AMGOT's occupation policies: 

By the beginning of the Second World War, the Mafia was restricted to a few isolated and scattered groups and could have been completely wiped out if the social problems of the island had been dealt with . . . the Allied occupation and the subsequent slow restoration of democracy reinstated the Mafia with its full powers, put it once more on the way to becoming a political force, and returned to the Onorata Societa the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it. (32)

Luciano Organizes the 

Postwar Heroin Trade 

In 1946 American military intelligence made one final gift to the Mafia -they released Luciano from prison and deported him to Italy, thereby freeing the greatest criminal talent of his generation to rebuild the heroin trade. Appealing to the New York State Parole Board in 1945 for his immediate release, Luciano's lawyers based their case on his wartime services to the navy and army. Although naval intelligence officers called to give evidence at the hearings were extremely vague about what they had promised Luciano in exchange for his services, one naval officer wrote a number of confidential letters on Luciano's behalf that were instrumental in securing his release. (33) Within two years after Luciano returned to Italy, the U.S. government deported over one hundred more mafiosi as well. And with the cooperation of his old friend, Don Calogero, and the help of many of his old followers from New York, Luciano was able to build an awesome international narcotics syndicate soon after his arrival in Italy. (34) 

The narcotics syndicate Luciano organized after World War It remains one of the most remarkable in the history of the traffic. For more than a decade it moved morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, transformed it into heroin, and then exported it in substantial quantities to the United States-all without ever suffering a major arrest or seizure. The organization's comprehensive distribution network within the United States increased the number of active addicts from an estimated 20,000 at the close of the war to 60,000 in 1952 and to 150,000 by 1965. 

After resurrecting the narcotics traffic, Luciano's first problem was securing a reliable supply of heroin. Initially he relied on diverting legally produced heroin from one of Italy's most respected pharmaceutical companies, Schiaparelli. However, investigations by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1950-which disclosed that a minimum of 700 kilos of heroin had been diverted to Luciano over a four-year period-led to a tightening of Italian pharmaceutical regulations. (35) But by this time Luciano had built up a network of clandestine laboratories in Sicily and Marseilles and no longer needed to divert the Schiaparelli product. 

Morphine base was now the necessary commodity. Thanks to his contacts in the Middle East, Luciano established a long-term business relationship with a Lebanese who was quickly becoming known as the Middle East's major exporter of morphine base,Sami El Khoury. Through judicious use of bribes and his high social standing in Beirut society, (36) El Khoury established an organization of unparalleled political strength. The directors of Beirut Airport, Lebanese customs, the Lebanese narcotics police, and perhaps most importantly, the chief of the anti subversive section of the Lebanese police, (37) protected the import of raw opium from Turkey's Anatolian plateau into Lebanon, its processing into morphine base, and its final export to the laboratories in Sicily and Marseilles. (38) 

After the morphine left Lebanon, its first stop was the bays and inlets of Sicily's western coast. There Palermo's fishing trawlers would meet ocean-going freighters from the Middle East in international waters, pick up the drug cargo, and then smuggle it into fishing villages scattered along the rugged coastline. (39) 

Once the morphine base was safely ashore, it was transformed into heroin in one of Luciano's clandestine laboratories. Typical of these was the candy factory opened in Palermo in 1949: it was leased to one of Luciano's cousins and managed by Don Calogero himself.(40) The laboratory operated without incident until April 11, 1954, when the Roman daily Avanti! published a photograph of the factory under the headline "Textiles and Sweets on the Drug Route." That evening the factory was closed, and the laboratory's chemists were reportedly smuggled out of the country. (41) 

Once heroin had been manufactured and packaged for export, Luciano used his Mafia connections to send it through a maze of international routes to the United States. Not all of the mafiosi deported from the United States stayed in Sicily. To reduce the chance of seizure, Luciano had placed many of them in such European cities as Milan, Hamburg, Paris, and Marseilles so they could forward the heroin to the United States after it arrived from Sicily concealed in fruits, vegetables, or candy. From Europe heroin was shipped directly to New York or smuggled through Canada and Cuba. (42) 

While Luciano's prestige and organizational genius were an invaluable asset, a large part of his success was due to his ability to pick reliable subordinates. After he was deported from the United States in 1946, he charged his long-time associate, Meyer Lansky, with the responsibility for managing his financial empire. Lansky also played a key role in organizing Luciano's heroin syndicate: he supervised smuggling operations, negotiated with Corsican heroin manufacturers, and managed the collection and concealment of the enormous profits. Lansky's control over the Caribbean and his relationship with the Florida-based Trafficante family were of particular importance, since many of the heroin shipments passed through Cuba or Florida on their way to America's urban markets. For almost twenty years the Luciano-Lansky-Trafficante troika remained a major feature of the international heroin traffic. (43) 

Organized crime was welcome in pre-revolutionary Cuba, and Havana was probably the most important transit point for Luciano's European heroin shipments. The leaders of Luciano's heroin syndicate were at home in the Cuban capital, and regarded it as a "safe" city: Lansky owned most of the city's casinos, and the Trafficante family served as Lansky's resident managers in Havana. (44) 

Luciano's 1947 visit to Cuba laid the groundwork for Havana's subsequent role in international narcotics-smuggling traffic. Arriving in January, Luciano summoned the leaders of American organized crime, including Meyer Lansky, to Havana for a meeting, and began paying extravagant bribes to prominent Cuban officials as well. The director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at the time felt that Luciano's presence in Cuba was an ominous sign. 

I had received a preliminary report through a Spanish-speaking agent I had sent to Havana, and I read this to the Cuban Ambassador. The report stated that Luciano had already become friendly with a number of high Cuban officials through the lavish use of expensive gifts. Luciano had developed a full-fledged plan which envisioned the Caribbean as his center of operations . . . Cuba was to be made the center of all inter national narcotic operations. (45) 

Pressure from the United States finally resulted in the revocation of Luciano's residence visa and his return to Italy, but not before he bad received commitments from organized crime leaders in the United States to distribute the regular heroin -shipments he promised them from Europe. (46) 

The Caribbean, on the whole, was a happy place for American racketeers-most governments were friendly and did not interfere with the "business ventures" that brought some badly needed capital into their generally poor countries. Organized crime had been well established in Havana long before Luciano's landmark voyage. During the 1930's Meyer Lansky "discovered" the Caribbean for northeastern syndicate bosses and invested their illegal profits in an assortment of lucrative gambling ventures. In 1933 Lansky moved into the Miami Beach area and took over most of the illegal off-track betting and a variety of hotels and casinos.(47) He was also reportedly responsible for organized crime's decision to declare Miami a "free city" (i.e., not subject to the usual rules of territorial monopoly). (48) Following his success in Miami Lansky moved to Havana for three years, and by the beginning of World War 11 he owned the Hotel Nacional's casino and was leasing the municipal racetrack from a reputable New York bank. 

Burdened by the enormous scope and diversity of his holdings, Lansky had to delegate much of the responsibility for daily management to local gangsters. (49) One of Lansky's earliest associates in Florida was Santo Trafficante, Sr., a Sicilian-born Tampa gangster. Trafficante had earned his reputation as an effective organizer in the Tampa gambling rackets, and was already a figure of some stature when Lansky first arrived in Florida. By the time Lansky returned to New York in 1940, Trafficante had assumed responsibility for Lansky's interests in Havana and Miami. 

By the early 1950's Traflicante had himself become such an important figure that he in turn delegated his Havana concessions to Santo Trafficante, Jr., the most talented of his six sons. Santo, Jr.'s, official position in Havana was that of manager of the Sans Souci Casino, but he was far more important than his title indicates. As his father's financial representative, and ultimately Meyer Lansky's, Santo, Jr., controlled much of Havana's tourist industry and became quite close to the pre-Castro dictator, Fulgencio Batista. (50) Moreover, it was reportedly his responsibility to receive the bulk shipments of heroin from Europe and forward them through Florida to New York and other major urban centers, where their distribution was assisted by local Mafia bosses.(51) 

The Marseilles Connection 

The basic Turkey-Italy-America heroin route continued to dominate the international heroin traffic for almost twenty years with only one important alteration-during the 1950's the Sicilian Mafia began to divest itself of the heroin manufacturing business and started relying on Marseilles's Corsican syndicates for their drug supplies. There were two reasons for this change. As the diverted supplies of legally produced Schiaparelli heroin began to dry up in 1950 and 1951, Luciano was faced with the alternative of expanding his own clandestine laboratories or seeking another source of supply. While the Sicilian mafiosi were capable international smugglers, they seemed to lack the ability to manage the clandestine laboratories. Almost from the beginning, illicit heroin production in Italy had been plagued by a series of arrests-due more to mafiosi incompetence than anything else-of couriers moving supplies in and out of laboratories. The implications were serious; if the seizures continued Luciano himself might eventually be arrested. (52) 

Preferring to minimize the risks of direct involvement, Luciano apparently decided to shift his major source of supply to Marseilles. There, Corsican syndicates had gained political power and control of the waterfront as a result of their involvement in CIA strikebreaking activities. Thus, Italy gradually declined in importance as a center for illicit drug manufacturing, and Marseilles became the heroin capital of Europe. (53) 

Although it is difficult to probe the inner workings of such a clandestine business under the best of circumstances, there is reason to believe that Meyer Lansky's 1949-1950 European tour was instrumental in promoting Marseilles's heroin industry. 

After crossing the Atlantic in a luxury liner, Lansky visited Luciano in Rome, where they discussed the narcotics trade. He then traveled to Zurich and contacted prominent Swiss bankers through John Pullman, an old friend from the rum running days. These negotiations established the financial labyrinth that organized crime still uses today to smuggle its enormous gambling and heroin profits out of the country into numbered Swiss bank accounts without attracting the notice of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. 

Pullman was responsible for the European end of Lansky's financial operation: depositing, transferring, and investing the money once it arrived in Switzerland. He used regular Swiss banks for a number of years until the Lansky group purchased the Exchange and Investment Bank of Geneva, Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic, Lansky and other gangsters used two methods to transfer their money to Switzerland: 

"friendly banks" (those willing to protect their customers' identity) were used to make ordinary international bank transfers to Switzerland; and in cases when the money was too "hot" for even a friendly bank, it was stockpiled until a Swiss bank officer came to the United States on business and could "transfer" it simply by carrying it back to Switzerland in his luggage. (54) 

After leaving Switzerland, Lansky traveled through France, where he met with high ranking Corsican syndicate leaders on the Riviera and in Paris. After lengthy discussions, Lansky and the Corsican's are reported to have arrived at some sort of agreement concerning the international heroin traffic. (55) Soon after Lansky returned to the United States, heroin laboratories began appearing in Marseilles. On May 23, 1951, Marseilles police broke into a clandestine heroin laboratory-the first to be uncovered in France since the end of the war. After discovering another on March 18, 1952, French authorities reported that "it seems that the installation of clandestine laboratories in France dated from 1951 and is a consequence of the cessation of diversions in Italy during the previous years. (56) During the next five months French police uncovered two more clandestine laboratories. In future years U.S. narcotics experts were to estimate that the majority of America's heroin supply was being manufactured in Marseilles. 

 

2. 

Marseilles: America's Heroin Laboratory

FOR MOST Americans, Marseille means only heroin, but for the French this bustling Mediterranean port represents the best and the worst of their national traditions. Marseille has been the crossroads of France's empire, a stronghold of its labor movement, and the capital of its underworld. Through its port have swarmed citizens on their way to colonial outposts, notably in North Africa and Indochina, and "natives" permanently or temporarily immigrating to the mother country. Marseilles has long had a tradition of working class militancy-it was a group of citizens from Marseilles who marched to Paris during the French Revolution singing the song that later became France's national anthem, La Marseillaise. The city later became a stronghold of the French Communist party, and was the hard core of the violent general strikes that racked France in the late 1940's. And since the turn of the century Marseilles has been depicted in French novels, pulp magazines, and newspapers as a city crowded with gunmen and desperadoes of every description-a veritable "Chicago" of France. 

Traditionally, these gunmen and desperadoes are not properly French by language or culture-they are Corsican. Unlike the gangsters in most other French cities, who are highly individualistic and operate in small, ad hoc bands, Marseilles's criminals belong to tightly structured clans, all of which recognize a common hierarchy of power and prestige. This cohesiveness on the part of the Corsican syndicates has made them an ideal counterweight to the city's powerful Communist labor unions. 

Almost inevitably, all the foreign powers and corrupt politicians who have ruled Marseilles for the last forty years have allied themselves with the Corsican syndicates: French Fascists used them to battle Communist demonstrators in the 1930's; the Nazi Gestapo used them to spy on the Communist underground during World War II; and the CIA paid them to break Communist strikes in 1947 and 1950. The last of these alliances proved the most significant, since it put the Corsican's in a powerful enough position to establish Marseilles as the postwar heroin capital of the Western world and to cement a long-term partnership with Mafia drug distributors. 

The Corsicans had always cooperated well with the Sicilians, for there are striking similarities of culture and tradition between the two groups. Separated by only three hundred miles of blue Mediterranean water, both Sicily and Corsica are arid, mountainous islands lying off the west coast of the Italian peninsula. Although Corsica has been a French province since the late 1700s, its people have been strongly influenced by Italian Catholic culture. Corsicans and Sicilians share a fierce pride in family and village that has given both islands a long history of armed resistance to foreign invaders and a heritage of bloody family vendettas. And their common poverty has resulted in the emigration of their most ambitious sons. Just as Sicily has sent her young men to America and the industrial metropolises of northern Italy, so Corsica sent hers to French Indochina and the port city of Marseilles. After generations of migration, Corsican's account for over 10 percent of Marseilles's population. 

Despite all of the strong similarities between Corsican and Sicilian society, Marseilles's Corsican gangsters do not belong to any monolithic "Corsican Mafia." In their pursuit of crime and profit, the Mafia and the Corsican syndicates have adopted different styles, different techniques. The Mafia, both in Sicily and the United States, is organized and operated like a plundering army. While "the Grand Council" or "the Commission" maps strategy on the national level, each regional "family" has a strict hierarchy with a "boss", "under boss," "lieutenants," and "soldiers." Rivals are eliminated through brute force, "territory" is assigned to each boss, and legions of mafiosi use every conceivable racket prostitution, gambling, narcotics, protection-to milk the population dry. Over the last century the Mafia had devoted most of its energies to occupying and exploiting western Sicily and urban America. 

In contrast, Corsican racketeers have formed smaller, more sophisticated criminal syndicates. The Corsican underworld lacks the Ma a's formal organization, although it does have a strong sense of corporate identity and almost invariably imposes a death sentence on those who divulge information to outsiders. A man who is accepted as an ordinary gangster by the Corsicans "is in the milieu," while a respected syndicate boss is known as un vrai Monsieur. The biggest of them all are known as paceri, or "peacemakers," since they can impose discipline on the members of all syndicates and mediate vendettas. While mafiosi usually lack refined criminal skills, the Corsican's are specialists in heroin manufacturing, sophisticated international smuggling, art thefts, and counterfeiting. Rather than restricting themselves to Marseilles or Corsica, Corsican gangsters have migrated to Indochina, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Canada, and the South Pacific. In spite of the enormous distances that separate them, Corsican racketeers keep in touch, cooperating smoothly and efficiently in complex intercontinental smuggling operations, which have stymied the efforts of law enforcement authorities for a quarter century.(1) 

Cooperation between Corsican smugglers and Mafia drug distributors inside the United States has been the major reason why the Mafia has been able to circumvent every effort U.S. officials have made at reducing the flow of heroin into the United States since the end of World War It. When Italy responded to U.S. pressure by reducing its legal pharmaceutical heroin production in 1950-1951, the Corsican's opened clandestine laboratories in Marseilles. When U.S. customs tightened up baggage checks along the eastern seaboard, the Corsican's originated new routes through Latin America. When Turkey began to phase out opium production in 1968, Corsican syndicates in Indochina developed new supplies of morphine and heroin. 

Marseilles is the hub of the Corsican's international network. During the First Indochina War (1946-1954), Corsican syndicates made a fortune in illegal currency manipulations by smuggling gold bullion and paper currency between Saigon and Marseilles. In the 1950's Corsican gangsters supplied a booming black market in "tax-free" cigarettes by smuggling American brands into Marseilles from North Africa. Corsican heroin laboratories are located in Marseilles's downtown tenements or in luxurious villas scattered through the surrounding countryside. Most of the laboratories' morphine base supplies are smuggled into the port of Marseilles from Turkey or Indochina. Marseilles is the key to the Corsican underworld's success, and the growth of its international smuggling operations has been linked to its political fortunes in Marseilles. For, from the time of their emergence in the 1920's right down to the present day, Marseilles's Corsican syndicates have been molded by the dynamics of French politics.

Genesis 

The first link between the Corsican's and the political world came about with the emergence in the 1920s of Marseilles's first "modern" gangsters, Francois Spirito and Paul Bonnaventure Carbone (the jolly heroes of 1970's popular French film, Borsalino). Until their rise to prominence, the milieu was populated by a number of colorful pimps and gunmen whose ideal was a steady income that ensured them a life of leisure. The most stable form of investment was usually two or three prostitutes, and none of the gangsters of this pre-modern age ever demonstrated any higher aspirations Carbone and Spirito changed all that. They were the closest of friends, and their twenty year partnership permanently transformed the character of the Marseilles milieu. (2) 

This enterprising team's first major venture was the establishment of a French-staffed brothel in Cairo in the late 1920's. They repeated and expanded their success upon their return to Marseilles, where they proceeded to organize prostitution on a scale previously unknown. But more significantly, they recognized the importance of political power in protecting large-scale criminal ventures and its potential for providing a source of income through municipal graft. 

In 1931 Carbone and Spirito reached an "understanding" with Simon Sabiani, Marseilles's Fascist deputy mayor, who proceeded to appoint Carbone's brother director of the municipal stadium and open municipal employment to associates of the two underworld leaders. (3) In return for these favors, Carbone and Spirito organized an elite corps of gangsters that spearheaded violent Fascist street demonstrations during the depression years of the 1930's. All across Europe fascism was gaining strength: Mussolini ruled Italy, Hitler was coming to power in Germany, and emerging French Fascist groups were trying to topple the republic through mass violence. Communist and Socialist demonstrators repeatedly rushed to the defense of the republic, producing a series of bloody confrontations throughout France.(4) In Marseilles Carbone and Spirito were the vanguard of the right wing. In February 1934, for example, several days after an inflammatory speech by a Fascist army general, massive street demonstrations erupted on the Canebiere, Marseilles's main boulevard. The thousands of leftist dock workers and union members who took to the streets dominated this political confrontation until Carbone and Spirito's political shock force fired on the crowd with pistols. The national police intervened, the workers were driven from the streets, and the wounded were carted off to the hospital. (5) 

After four years of battling Sabiani's underworld allies in the streets, the left settled its political differences long enough to mount a unified electoral effort that defeated Sabiani and placed a Socialist mayor in office. (6) Although the leftist electoral victory temporarily eclipsed the Fascist-Corsican alliance, the rise of fascism had politicized the Marseilles underworld and marked its emergence as a major force in city politics. 

To those schooled in the Anglo-American political tradition, it might seem strange that the underworld should play such a critical role in Marseilles politics. However, in France the street demonstration has always been as important as the ballot box in influencing the course of politics. From the downfall of King Louis Philippe in 1848, to the Dreyfus scandal of the 1890's right down to the May revolution of 1968, the ability to mass muscle in the boulevards has been a necessary political asset. 

Although they had lost control of the municipal government, Carbone and Spirito's economic strength hardly declined. The emergence of organized narcotics trafficking in the United States provided Carbone with the opportunity to open a heroin laboratory in the early 1930's, while the outbreak of the Spanish civil war enabled him to engage in the arms traffic.(7) Carbone and Spirito found their political influence restored, however, in 1940, when German troops occupied Marseilles after France's precipitous military collapse. Faced with one of the more active resistance movements in France, the Nazi Gestapo unit assigned to Marseilles became desperate for informants and turned to the most prestigious figures in the underworld, who were only too willing to collaborate. 

On July 14, 1942, the Resistance showed its strength for the first time by machine gunning the headquarters of a pro-German political organization in downtown Marseilles (the P.P.F, whose regional director was the Fascist ex-Mayor Simon Sabiani). The following afternoon Carbone and Spirito handed the Gestapo a complete list of all those involved. For these and other invaluable services, they were lavishly rewarded. This prosperity was short lived, however, for in 1943 Carbone was killed en route to Marseilles when his train was blown up by the Resistance, (8) and following the Normandy landing in 1944 Spirito fled to Spain with Sabiani. 

In 1947 Spirito came to the United States where he enjoyed an active role in the New York-Marseilles heroin traffic. However, he was arrested in New York three years later on a heroin smuggling charge and sentenced to two years in Atlanta Federal Prison. (9) Upon his release he returned to France, where he was arrested and tried for wartime collaboration with the Nazis; however, after only eight months in prison be retired to manage a restaurant on the French Riviera. While he remained active in the heroin business, Spirito no longer wielded much power in Marseilles. Occasionally, warring gangs in Marseilles would ask him to use his prestige to mediate their bloody vendettas. But mostly he played bocce on the sand and enjoyed his position as a respectable citizen of Toulon until his death in 1967.(10) 

From Underworld to Underground 

But a significant enough element of the Corsican underworld sided secretly with the Resistance to ensure the consolidation of some sort of power base for the milieu at the end of World War II. Their patriotic activities set the scene for the emergence of a new generation of criminal leaders-the Guerini brothers. 

For while Carbone and Spirito were happy enough to help themselves by helping the Germans, most Corsicans, both in Marseille and on the island itself, were bitterly opposed to the German occupation. It was increasingly apparent that the island would be annexed by the Third Reich's ally, Italy-something totally abhorrent to most Corsicans, who felt that their unique language would become just another Italian dialect and their sense of cultural identity would be in jeopardy as well. In 1940 a group of Corsican Resistance fighters issued a statement concerning the possibility of Italian annexation. Corsica will never accept being handed over to Italy. Since 1789, she has embraced France. She has given France Napoleon. In the course of the Great War, 40,000 Corsicans died on the field of battle in north eastern France .... An Italian Corsica? What a monstrosity! If this crime were ever committed, history would have to reserve some bloody pages for the fight to the death a small people of 300,000 would wage against a powerful nation of 45 million inhabitants. (11) In Corsica itself, this strong anti-Italian chauvinism mobilized the most effective resistance movement in all of France, and the island's mass uprising in 1943 is unparalleled in the annals of the Resistance. (12) 

The Resistance in France itself was hopelessly divided between the Communists and non-Communists. Although wartime American propaganda films and postwar French cinema have projected an image of France as a nation in chains with every other citizen a nighttime warrior, most Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans willingly enough, and were indifferent, if not outright hostile, toward the Resistance. 

In contrast, the Communist party, with its strong anti-Fascist ideology and disciplined cell structure, began resistance activities almost immediately, and remained the only effective armed organization in France until the 1944 Allied landings in Normandy. But despite their alliance with the Soviet Union, America and Britain refused to work directly with French Communist guerrillas, and throughout most of the war never knowingly parachuted them arms or supplies. (13) As a result of this policy, the French Resistance remained deeply factionalized for most of the war and never amounted to anything more than a minor nuisance for the German occupation army. 

The situation in Marseilles was typical. Generally, the movement was divided between the Communist party's FTP (Franc-Tireurs et Partisans), with 1,700 to 2,000 men, and a non-Communist coalition group, the M.U.R (Mouvements Unis de Resistance), with fewer than 800 men. Among the M.U.R's most important components was Marseilles's Socialist party (whose leader was Gaston Defferre, also head of an Allied intelligence network). (14) Both the M.U.R and F.T.P recognized the need for unity. But the persistence of rather un-heroic squabbling, mainly over M.U.R's adherence to the Allied Command's policy of denying arms to the Communist FTP, prevented any meaningful cooperation.(15) The Communists and non-Communists finally managed to form a unified resistance army (Forces Francaises de l'Interieur) in February 1944, but for most of the war they had remained at odds. (16) As a result of their anti-Communist activities in Marseille's politics before the war, few of the resistance-minded Corsicans were accepted into the Communist underground. However, several of Marseille's Corsican syndicates became the backbone of the nonCommunist underground, which was gravely lacking in the necessary experience to carry out effective resistance work. For instance, within a month after its formation in March 1943, MUR was virtually decimated when one of its officers was captured by the Gestapo and informed on many of its members. (17) But with their law of silence and their experience in secret criminal operations, the Corsicans easily adapted to the world of espionage and urban guerrilla warfare. The most famous of these gangster Resistance heroes were the Guerini brothers. Antoine Guerini, a former triggerman for Carbone and Spirito, worked as an agent for AngloAmerican intelligence. When English intelligence officers were parachuted into the Marseille area to make contact with MUR, they were hidden in the cellars of nightclubs belonging to Antoine. Antoine was also responsible for smuggling arms into the city for the MUR after they had been parachuted from British aircraft. During the twelve-day battle for the liberation of Marseille in August 1944, Antoine's younger brother, Barthelemy, rendered invaluable services to Gaston Defferre's Socialist militia (by supplying intelligence, arms, and men) and was later awarded the Legion of Honor for his wartime exploits. (18) 

Political Bedfellows: 'The Socialist Party, the Guerinis, and the CIA 

Although the Corsican underworld's wartime alliances were to have important consequences for the postwar heroin traffic and laid the foundation for Marseilles's future criminal dynasty, the end of the German occupation generally meant hard times for the Marseilles milieu. For over twenty years Carbone and Spirito had dominated the underworld, pioneering new forms of criminal activity, providing leadership and discipline, and most importantly, political alliances. Now they were gone, and none of the surviving syndicate bosses had as yet acquired the power or privilege to take on their mantle. 

To add to its problems, the milieu's traditional enemies, the Communist and Socialist parties, remained firmly allied until mid 1946, thus denying a conservative-underworld alliance any chance of acquiring political power. In the first municipal elections of April 1945, a left wing coalition swept Socialist party leader Gaston Defferre into the mayor's office. Splitting with the Socialists in 1946, the Communist party mounted a successful independent effort- and elected its candidate mayor in November. (19) 

Moreover, a new police unit, the C.R.S (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite) had become the bane of the Marseilles underworld. Formed during the liberation struggles of August 1944, when most of the municipal police force (who had been notorious collaborators) disappeared, (20) the C.R.S was assigned the task of restoring public order, tracking down collaborators, restricting smuggling, and curbing black market activities. A high percentage of its officers was recruited from the Communist Resistance movement, and they performed their duties much too effectively for the comfort of the milieu. (21) 

But the beginning of the milieu's rise to power was not long in coming. In the fall of 1947 a month of bloody street fighting, electoral reverses, and the clandestine intervention of the CIA toppled the Communist party from power and brought about a permanent realignment of political power in Marseilles. When the strikes and rioting finally came to an end, the Socialists had severed their contacts with the Communists, a Socialist underworld alliance was in control of Marseilles politics, and the Guerini brothers had emerged as the unchallenged "peacemakers" of the Marseilles milieu. For the next twenty years their word would be law in the Marseilles underworld. 

The confrontation began innocently enough with the municipal elections of October 19 and 26, 1947. On the national level, Gen. Charles de Gaulle's new anti-Communist party (Rassemblement du Peuple Francais, R.P.F) scored substantial electoral successes throughout France. In Marseilles, the revitalized Conservatives won enough seats on the municipal council to unseat the Communist mayor and elect a Conservative, Michel Carlini. One of Mayor Carlini's first official acts was to raise the municipal tram fares: a seemingly uncontroversial move entirely justified by growing fiscal deficits. However, this edict had unforeseen consequences. 

More than two years after the end of the war, Marseilles was still digging itself out from the rubble left by the Allied bombing. Unemployment was high, wages were low; the black market was king, and a severe shortage of the most basic commodities lent an air of desperation to morning shoppers. (22) The tramways were the city's lifeline, and the increased fare pinched pocketbooks and provoked bitter outrage. The Communist/Socialist labor coalition (Confederation Generale du Travail, C.G.T) responded with a militant boycott of the tramways. Any motorman daring to take a tram into the streets was met with barricades and a shower of rocks from the angry populace. (23) 

Marseilles's working class was not alone in its misery, Across the length and breadth of France, blue-collar workers were suffering through the hard times of a painful postwar economic recovery, Workers were putting in long hours, boosting production and being paid little for their efforts. Prodded by their American advisers, successive French cabinets held down wages in order to speed economic recovery. By 1947 industrial production was practically restored to its prewar level, but the average Parisian skilled worker was earning only 65 percent of what he had made during the depths of the depression. (24) He was literally hungry as well: food prices had skyrocketed, and the average worker was eating 18 percent less than he had in 1938, And even though their wages could barely cover their food expenditures, workers were forced to shoulder the bulk of the national tax burden. The tax system was so inequitable that the prestigious Parisian daily Le Monde labeled it "more iniquitous than that which provoked the French Revolution." (25) 

In Marseilles, throughout early November, ugly incidents heated political tensions in the wake of the tramways boycott, culminating in the escalating violence of November 12. That fateful day began with a demonstration of angry workers in the morning, saw a beating of Communist councilors at the city council meeting in the afternoon, and ended with a murder in the early evening. (26) Early that morning, several thousand workers had gathered in front of the courthouse to demand the release of four young sheet metal workers who had been arrested for attacking a tram. As the police led two of them toward the hall for their trial, the crowd rushed the officers and the men escaped. Emboldened by their initial success, the crowd continued to try to break through police cordons for several hours, demanding that the charges against the workmen be dropped. Responding to the determined mood of the crowd, the court was hastily convened, and at about four in the afternoon the charges were reduced to the equivalent of a misdemeanor. The demonstrators were just preparing to disband when an unknown worker arrived to announce, "Everybody to City Hall. They are beating our comrades." (27) 

The assault had occurred in the course of a regular meeting of the municipal council, when Communist councilors raised the issue of the tramway fares. The discussions became overly heated, and some of the mayor's well-muscled supporters (members of the Guerini gang) rushed forward and administered a severe beating to the Communist councilors.(28) Word of the beatings spread quickly through Marseilles, and within an hour forty thousand demonstrators had gathered in front of City Hall. (29) The handful of police present were only able to bring the situation under control when Communist ex-Mayor Jean Cristofol calmed the crowd. Within thirty minutes it had dispersed, and by 6:30 P.m. all was quiet. 

While most of the demonstrators went home, a contingent of young workers rushed back across the waterfront and charged into the narrow streets around the opera house. 

Crowded with nightclubs and brothels, the area was commonly identified as the headquarters of the underworld. It was generally believed that the black market was controlled from these clubs, and they were deemed a just target for working class anger. As the crowd roamed through the streets breaking windows, Antoine and Barthelemy Guarani fired guns into the crowd, wounding several of the demonstrators. Later that evening a young sheet metal worker died of his wounds. (30) 

The next morning banner headlines in the Communist newspaper, La' Marseillaise, read, CARLINI AND DE VERNEJOUL REINSTATE SABIANI'S METHODS IN THE MAYOR'S OFFICE OF MARSEILLES. The paper reported that an investigation had disclosed it was Guerini men who had attacked the municipal councilors.(31) This charge was not seriously rebutted in the Socialist paper, Le Provencal, or the Gaullist Meridional In a court hearing on November 16, two police officers testified seeing the Guerinis shooting into the crowd. At the same hearing one of the younger Guerini brothers admitted that Antoine and Barthelemy had been in the area at the time of the shooting. But four days later the police mysteriously retracted their testimony, and on December 10 all charges against the Guerinis were dropped. (32) The morning after the shooting, November 13, the local labor confederation called a general strike, and the city came to a standstill. 

The strike was universal throughout France. Marseilles workers had reached the breaking point at about the same time as their comrades in the rest of France. Spontaneous wildcat strikes erupted in factories, mines, and railway yards throughout the country. (33) As militant workers took to the streets, demonstrating for fair wages and lower prices, the Communist party leadership was reluctantly forced to take action. On November 14, the day after Marseilles's unions went on strike, the leftist labor confederation, C.G.T, called for a nationwide general strike. 

Contrary to what one might-expect, French Communist leaders of this era were hardly wild-eyed revolutionaries. For the most part they were conservative middle-aged men who had served their nation well during the wartime resistance and now wanted, above all else, to take part in the governance of their country. Their skillful leadership of the wartime resistance had earned them the respect of the working class, and thanks to their efforts French unionists had accepted low postwar wages and abstained from strikes in 1945 and 1946. However, their repeated support for Draconian government austerity measures began to cost them votes in union elections, and in mid 1946 one U.S. State Department analyst reported that Communist leaders "could no longer hold back the discontent of the rank and file." (34) When wildcat strikes and demonstrations erupted in mid-November 1947, the Communist party was forced to support them or forfeit its leadership of the working class. At best its support was halfhearted. But by late November, 3 million workers were out on strike and the French economy was almost paralyzed. 

Ignoring their own analysts, U.S. foreign policy planners interpreted the 1947 strike as a political ploy on the part of the Communist party and "feared" that it was a prelude to a "takeover of the government." (35) The reason for this blindness was simple: by mid 1947 the cold war had frozen over and all political events were seen in terms of "the world wide ideological clash between Eastern Communism and Western Democracy." 

Apprehensive over Soviet gains in the eastern Mediterranean, and the growth of Communist parties in western Europe, the Truman administration drew up the multi billion-dollar European Recovery Plan in May (known popularly as the Marshall Plan) and established the CIA in September. (36) Determined to save France from an imminent Communist coup, the CIA moved in to help break up the strike, choosing the Socialist party as its nightstick. 

On the surface it may have seemed a bit out of character for the CIA to be backing anything so far left as a Socialist party. However, there were only three major political parties in France-Socialist, Communist, and Gaullist-and by a simple process of elimination the CIA wound up bedding down with the Socialists. While General de Gaulle was far too independent for American tastes, Socialist leaders were rapidly losing political ground to the Communists and were only too willing to collaborate with the CIA. 

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1967, the former director of the CIA's international organizations division, Thomas W. Braden, explained the Agency's strategy of using leftists to fight leftists: 

It was personified by Jay Lovestone, assistant to David Dubinsky in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. 

Once Chief of the Communist Party in the United States, Lovestone had an enormous grasp of foreign-intelligence operations. In 1947 the Communist Confederation Generale du Travail led a strike in Paris which came very close to paralyzing the French economy. A takeover of the government was feared. 

Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown. With funds from Dubinsky's union, they organized Force Ouvriere, a non-Communist union. When they ran Out of money they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that Subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently. (37) 

Shortly after the general strike began, the Socialist faction split off from the C.G.T (Confederation Generale du Travail) and formed a separate union, Force Ouvriere, with CIA funds. CIA payments on the order of $1 million a year guaranteed the Socialist party a strong electoral base in the labor movement, (38) and gave its leaders the political strength to lead the attack on striking workers. While Marseilles Socialist leader Gaston Defferre called for an anti-Communist crusade from the floor of the National Assembly and in the columns of Le Provencal, (39) Socialist Minister of the Interior Jules Moch directed brutal police actions against striking workers. (40) With the advice and cooperation of the U.S. military attache in Paris, Moch requested the call-up of 80,000 reservists and mobilized 200,000 troops to battle the strikers. Faced with this overwhelming force, the C.G.T called off the strike on December 9, after less than a month on the picket lines. (41)

The bloodiest battleground of the general strike had not been in Paris, as Braden indicates, but in Marseilles. Victory in Marseilles was essential for U.S. foreign policy for a number of reasons. As one of the most important international ports in France, Marseilles was a vital beachhead for Marshall Plan exports to Europe. Continued Communist control of its docks would threaten the efficiency of the Marshall Plan and any future aid programs. As the second largest city in France, continued Communist domination of the Marseilles electorate would increase the chance that the Communist party might win enough votes to form a national government. (The Communist party already controlled 28 percent of the vote and was the largest party in France.) 

The growing split between Marseilles Communist and Socialist parties and Defferre's willingness to serve American interests had already been revealed in National Assembly debates over the bloody incidents on November 12 in Marseilles. Instead of criticizing the Guerinis for beating the municipal councilors and murdering the sheet metal worker, Socialist leader Gaston Defferre chose to attack the Communists. 

The American and English flags which were hanging from city hall were slashed by Communist hordes.... We have proof of what the Communists are capable: I trust that the government will take note of the consequences. 

The Socialist Party deplores these incidents, but it will not tolerate that those who try to pass here as representatives will be able to defy the law. (42) 

Several days later Communist deputy Jean Cristofol rebutted Defferre's accusations, charging that the Guerinis' gangsters were in the employ of both Gaullist and Socialist parties in Marseilles. When Defferre rose to deny even knowing M. Guerini, another Communist deputy reminded him that a Guerini cousin was the editor of Defferre's newspaper, Le Provencal Then Cristofol took over to reveal some disturbing signs of the Marseilles milieu's revival: underworld collaborators were being paroled from prison and government officials were allowing milieu nightclubs to reopen, among them the Guerinis' Parakeet Club. (The clubs had been closed in June 1947 by order of Cristofol himself, then town mayor.) (43) 

The Socialists' first step in breaking Marseilles's strike was purging suspected Communist supporters from the C.R.S police units. Once this was accomplished these units could easily be ordered to use violent tactics against the striking workers. Thus, although official reports had nothing but praise for the cool professionalism of these officers (44) Socialist Mayor Gaston Defferre unjustly accused them of having sided with the demonstrators during the rioting of November 12. (45) After Socialist cadres drew up a list of suspected C.R.S Communists, Mayor Defferre passed it along to Socialist Minister Jules Moch, who ordered the blacklisted officers fired. (46) (This action by the Socialists was certainly appreciated by the hard-pressed Corsican syndicates as well. In sharp contrast to the regular police, C.R.S units had been cracking down on the milieu's smuggling and black market activities.) (47) Once these Communist officers had been purged, C.R.S units started attacking picket lines with unrestrained violence. (48)36

But it would take more than ordinary police repression to break the determination of Marseilles's eighty thousand striking workers. If the U.S. was to have its victory in Marseilles it would have to fight for it. And the CIA proceeded to do just that. 

Through their contacts with the Socialist party, the CIA had sent agents and a psychological warfare team to Marseilles, where they dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers. The CIA's operatives supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs for assaults on Communist picket lines and harassment of the important union officials. During the month-long strike the CIA's gangsters and the purged C.R.S police units murdered a number of striking workers and mauled the picket lines. Finally, the CIA psychological warfare team prepared pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and posters aimed at discouraging workers from continuing the strike. (49) Some of the psy-war team's maneuvers were inspired: at one point the American government threatened to ship sixty-five thousand sacks of flour meant for the hungry city back to the United States unless the dockers unloaded them immediately. (50) The pressure of violence and hunger was too great, and on December 9 Marseilles's workers abandoned the strike, along with their fellow workers in the rest of France. There were some ironic finishing touches. On Christmas Eve of 1947, eighty-seven boxcars arrived at the Marseilles train station carrying flour, milk, sugar, and fruit as "gifts from the American people" amidst the cheers of hundreds of schoolchildren waving tiny American flags. (51) 

The Guerinis gained enough power and status from their role in smashing the 1947 strike to emerge as the new leaders of the Corsican underworld. But while the CIA was instrumental in restoring the Corsican underworld's political power, it was not until the 1950 dock strike that the Guerinis gained enough power to take control of the Marseilles waterfront. This combination of political influence and control of the docks created the perfect environmental conditions for the growth of Marseilles's heroin laboratories fortuitously at exactly the same time that Mafia boss Lucky Luciano was seeking an alternate source of heroin supply. 

The same austere economic conditions that had sparked the 1947 strike also produced the 1950 shutdown. Conditions for the workers had not improved in the intervening three years and, if anything, had grown worse. Marseilles, with its tradition of working class militancy, had even more reason for striking. Marseilles was France's "Gateway to the Orient," through which material (particularly American munitions and supplies) was transported to the French Expeditionary Corps fighting in Indochina. The Indochina War was about as unpopular with the French people then as the Vietnam War is with so many of the American people today. And Ho Chi Minh had helped to found the French Communist party and was a popular hero in France among the leftist working class members, especially in Marseilles with its many resident Indochinese. (52) In January, Marseilles dock workers began a selective boycott of those freighters carrying supplies to the war zone. And on February 3 the C.G.T convened a meeting of Marseilles dock workers at which a declaration was issued demanding "the return of the Expeditionary Corps from Indochina to put an end to the war in Vietnam," and urging "all unions to launch the most effective actions possible against the war in Vietnam." The movement of arms shipments to Indochina was "paralyzed." (53) Although the Atlantic ports joined in the embargo in early February, they were not as effective or as important as the Marseilles strike. (54) By mid February, the shutdown had spread to the metal industries, (55) the mines, and the railways. But most of the strikes were halfhearted. On February 18 the Paris newspaper Combat reported that 

Marseilles was once again the hard core; 70 percent of Marseilles's workers supported the strike compared to only 2 percent in Bordeaux, 20 percent in Toulouse, and 20 percent in Nice. (56) Once more Marseilles's working class militancy called for special methods, and the CIA's Thomas Braden later recalled how he dealt with the problem. 

"On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil: 

"Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000 (signed) Norris A. Grambo." 

I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers disclosed the "scandal" of the Central Intelligence Agency's connections with American students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search, and when it ended, I found myself feeling sad. 

For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation.... 

It was my idea to give $15,000 to Irving Brown. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in the Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers." (57) 

With the CIA's financial backing, Brown used his contacts with the underworld and a "rugged, fiery Corsican" named Pierre Ferri-Pisani to recruit an elite criminal terror squad to work the docks. Surrounded by his gangster hirelings, Ferri-Pisani stormed into local Communist headquarters and threatened to make the party's leadership "pay personally" for the continuing boycott. And, as Time magazine noted with great satisfaction, "The first Communist who tried to fire Ferri-Pisani's men was chucked into the harbor." (58) 

In addition, the Guerinis' gangsters were assigned the job of pummeling Communist picket lines to allow troops and scabs onto the docks, where they could begin loading munitions and supplies. By March 13 government officials were able to announce that, despite a continuing boycott by Communist workers, 900 dockers and supplementary troops had restored normal operations on the Marseilles waterfront. (59) Although sporadic boycotts continued until mid April, Marseilles was now subdued and the strike was essentially over. (60) 

But there were unforeseen consequences of these cold war "victories." In supplying the Corsican syndicates with money and support, the CIA broke the last barrier to unrestricted Corsican smuggling operations in Marseilles. When control over the docks was compounded with the political influence the milieu gained with CIA assistance in 1947, conditions were ideal for Marseilles's growth as America's heroin laboratory. The French police later reported that Marseilles's first heroin laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the milieu took over the waterfront. 

Gaston Defferre and the Socialist party also emerged victorious after the 1947 and 1950 strikes weakened the local Communist party. From 1953 until the present, Defferre and the Socialists have enjoyed an unbroken political reign over the Marseilles municipal government. The Guerinis seem to have maintained a relationship with Marseilles's Socialists. Members of the Guerini organization acted as bodyguards and campaign workers for local Socialist candidates until the family's downfall in 1967. 

The control of the Guerini brothers over Marseilles's heroin industry was so complete that for nearly twenty years they were able to impose an absolute ban on drug peddling inside France at the same time they were exporting vast quantities of heroin to the United States. With their decline in power, due mostly to their unsuccessful vendetta with Marcel Francisci in the mid sixties, their embargo on domestic drug trafficking became unenforceable, and.. France developed a drug problem of her own. (61) 

The Guerini-Francisci Vendetta 

From its very beginning, postwar heroin production in Marseilles had been so dominated by the Guerinis, and their operations were so extensive, that some of their subordinates, such as Dominique and Jean Venturi, earned independent reputations as major traffickers. 

Their only serious rival was Marcel Francisci, the owner of a lucrative international gambling syndicate. Described by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as a long-time "understudy" to Spirito and "an important figure Francisci is also a veteran of the wartime in the French underworld resistance(62) and was awarded four medals for his wartime heroics." (63) Although they coexisted happily enough throughout the 1950's, when the Guerinis clearly had the upper hand, Francisci's growing influence in the 1960's produced serious tensions. Competition over control of some casino interests provided the spark. A silent war began in 1965 that continued for three years with little more than extended obituary notices in the French press. In the end the Guerinis were decisively defeated with Antoine himself one of the murdered victims.(64) On June 23, 1967, two assassins pumped eleven bullets into Antoine Guerini in a Marseilles gas station. (65) Antoine's murder marked the beginning of the end for the Guerini dynasty, and Barthelemy's downfall was not long in coming. 

During Antoine's funeral at Calenzana, Corsica, on July 4, two Marseilles burglars took advantage of the absence of the family retainers to break into Antoine's villa and steal family jewelry worth thousands of dollars. (66) Unless Barthelemy acted quickly to avenge his brother's death and catch the burglars, the blow to his prestige would utterly destroy his authority over the milieu. Barthelemy's rage did not go unnoticed, and on July 10 one of the burglars, Jean Paul Mandroyan, returned the jewels, while the other thief fled to Spain. On July 22 the police found Mandroyan shot dead-and a witness reported that he had seen Barthelemy forcing Mandroyan into his Mercedes just before the young burglar's murder. On August 4 police entered the Guerinis' Club Mediterranean and arrested Barthelemy and his five bodyguards. All six were armed. (67) 

Barthelemy's trial began on schedule January 5, 1970, but from the beginning the prosecution suffered reverses. In his distinguished black suit, carefully trimmed hair, and a red lapel pin indicating his wartime decoration, Barthelemy hardly looked the part of a desperate gangster. On the second day of the trial, the key prosecution witness retracted his testimony. (68) A road test proved that it was impossible for Barthelemy's Mercedes to have been the murderer's car. With each day of testimony the prosecution's case grew weaker, as the defense attorney demonstrated that most of the state's evidence was circumstantial. In his summation, the prosecutor could not help admitting his failure and demanded that the Guerini gang must be sentenced, not so much because of their possible guilt, but because they were criminal types who were a menace to Marseilles. (69) 

On January 15 the jury returned a verdict of guilty: Barthelemy received twenty years; his younger brother Pascal and two others, fifteen years apiece. Spectators screamed "scandal." Cries of "This is justice?" were heard. And the defendants themselves shouted "Innocent, innocent, innocent." (70) 

Why were the Guerinis convicted? There had been serious accusations against them in the past that could have become solid cases had the Ministry of Justice been interested. But the Guerinis were guaranteed immunity to local investigations by their relationship with Marseilles's Socialists. However, by 1967 Socialist party influence had declined substantially after a decade of Gaullist rule. Francisci, according to informed French observers, had earned considerable political influence through his services to the Gaullist government. During the early 1960's, he had helped organize a group of Corsican gangsters known popularly as the barbouzes to combat a right-wing terrorist campaign following General de Gaulle's announcement of Algerian independence. As the owner of Paris's most exclusive casino, Cercle Haussmann, Francisci was in daily contact with high ranking government officials. (71) He is a close personal friend of a former Gaullist cabinet minister and is himself a Gaullist provincial counselor in Corsica. 

After the Fall 

In the aftermath of Barthelemy Guerini's conviction, the balance of power in the Marseille heroin trade has shifted somewhat. The Guerini family's declining fortunes are represented by Pierre, a younger brother, and Barthelemy's wife, a former nightclub dancer. The Guerini decline has been matched by the growing influence of the Venturi brothers, longtime Guerini associates, as well as by Francisci himself. The U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has labeled Jean Venturi the "major distributor of French heroin into the United States," and described his younger brother Dominique as "his major source of supply." (72) The Venturis also seem to have inherited the Guerinis' influence with Marseilles's Socialist party; during the last election it was their men who served as Mayor Defferre's bodyguards. Interestingly, in February 1972 The New York Times reported that Dominique Venturi's contracting firm "is currently redoing the Marseilles town hall for the city's Socialist Mayor Gaston Defferre. (73) Although Marcel Francisci has publicly denied any involvement in the drug traffic, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has long identified him as the man who "organizes the smuggling into France of morphine base produced in the Middle East "(74) 

Francisci is not the only gangster who is associated with the ruling Gaullist party. The U.S. Bureau of Narcotics believes that the Gaullists have replaced corrupt Marseilles politicians as the milieu's most important protectors, and some U.S. narcotics agents have become quite concerned over the complicity of high level French intelligence officials in the narcotics traffic. 

During the May revolution of 1968, when thousands of students and workers surged through the streets of Paris, barricades were thrown up, and government buildings were occupied, General de Gaulle's government came close to crumbling. To aid the restoration of public order, Jacques Foccart,[above] the general's top intelligence adviser, organized five thousand men, many of them Corsican and French gangsters, into the Service d'Action Civique (S.A.C). While there were known gangsters in S.A.C's rank and file, police officers and top intelligence officials took on positions of responsibility within the organization. S.A.C was assigned such tasks as silencing hecklers at pro Gaullist rallies, breaking up opposition demonstrations, and providing bodyguards for cabinet ministers and high government officials. (75) When President Georges Pompidou inspected the Concorde supersonic aircraft at Toulouse in August 1971, five hundred S.A.C men turned out to protect him. The same month another five hundred were mobilized to maintain harmony at the Gaullist party's national convention. (76) In addition, both the national police and S.D.E.C.E (Service de Documentation Exterieure et du Contre-Espionage, a French equivalent of the CIA) use S.A.C to execute "dirty" missions that would compromise their regular agents. (77) 

In exchange for their services, S.A.C men are protected from police investigation and given safe-conduct passes-necessary for their more delicate assignments-which grant them immunity to stop-and-search by police. (78) But in spite of S.A.C's protection, there are occasional slip ups, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, at least ten SAC gangsters were arrested in France carrying major shipments of heroin during 1970-1971. In the fall of 1970, when the police arrested Serge Constant, a member of S.A.C in Nice, and charged him with having smuggled two heroin shipments into the United States, he threatened them, saying, "We have protection, so watch your step." A Grenoble bar proprietor named Mrs. Bonnet was arrested with 105 pounds of heroin destined for the United States in her car. She is the widow of S.A.C leader Matthieu Bonnet, who chauffeured President Pompidou during the 1967 election. In September 1971 a notorious heroin courier, Ange Simonpieri, was finally arrested after a Swiss lawyer accused the Gaullists of protecting him on a prime time radio show. Predictably, Simonpieri is a retired barbouze and a close friend of the Gaullist deputy who organized the "parallel police" group in 1961. (79) 

Moreover, informed observers arc convinced that some of S.D.E.C.E's top intelligence officers have been organizing narcotics shipments to the United States to finance S.A.C operations, using S.D.E.C.E's counterintelligence net to protect their shipments. Although U.S. narcotics agents working undercover against French heroin traffickers have little fear of being unmasked by the milieu, they have become increasingly concerned about being discovered by S.D.E.C.E. In early 1971, for example, a U.S. undercover narcotics agent met with representatives of Marseilles's biggest heroin syndicate in a New York City hotel room. Posing as an American mafioso, the undercover agent offered to purchase a hundred kilos of heroin and agreed to pay a top price. Convinced that they were dealing with a real American gangster, the Corsican smugglers flew back to Marseilles, elated at their success, and began to put together the shipment. However, just as they were about to depart for New York and walk into a carefully-laid trap, another Corsican gangster phoned to warn them that the American mafioso was really a U.S. narcotics agent. Incredulous, the smugglers asked the informant over the phone, "How do you know?" And the caller responded, "Colonel- passed this information on to me." According to informed observers, that colonel is a high-ranking S.D.E.C.E intelligence officer. And, these observers ruefully admit, some corrupt elements of S.D.E.C.E seem to have done a good job of penetrating their undercover network. 

The extent of S.D.E.C.E's involvement in the heroin trade was finally given public exposure in November 1971, when a New Jersey prosecutor indicted Colonel Paul Fournier, one of S.D.E.C.E's top supervisory agents, for conspiring to smuggle forty-five kilos of heroin into the United States. On April 5 a U.S. customs inspector assigned to the Elizabeth, New Jersey, waterfront had discovered the heroin concealed in a Volkswagen camper and arrested its owner, a retired S.D.E.C.E agent named Roger de Louette. After confessing his role in the affair, de Louette claimed that he was only working as a courier for Colonel Fournier. (80) Although Fournier's guilt has not yet been established, his indictment rated banner headlines in the French press and prompted former high-ranking S.D.E.C.E officials to come forward with some startling allegations about S.D.E.C.E's involvement in the heroin traffic. (81) 

Even with S.D.E.C.E's clandestine support, however, Marseilles days as the heroin capital of Europe may be numbered. The Guerinis' collapse has thrown open the field to younger gangsters with little respect for their ban on drug peddling inside France. As one of France's top police officials put it, "These new guys are guys who don't follow the rules. With tougher U.S. suppression effort, the cost of smuggling got too much for some of them, so they took the easy way out and began to sell here." 

Within two years after Antoine Guerini's death and Barthelemy's incarceration, France itself was in the grip of an escalating heroin plague. By early 1972 fifteen out of every thousand French army draftees were being rejected because of drug addiction, and Marseilles itself has an addict population estimated at anywhere from five thousand to twenty thousand. As France developed a drug crisis of her own, the French government dropped its rather blase attitude and declared narcotics "France's number-one police problem." Marseilles's police narcotics unit was expanded from eight officers in 1969 to seventy-seven only two years later. In early 1972 the stepped-up police effort scored several spectacular heroin seizures and prompted speculation in the French press that Marseilles's heroin manufacturers might eventually be forced out of business. (83) 

It seems unlikely, however, that French reforms will have any beneficial impact on America's heroin plague. For Marseilles's problems were simply the final blow to a Mediterranean heroin complex already weakened by a decade of serious setbacks. 

The Decline of the European Heroin Trade, and a Journey to the East 

During the 1960's local arrests, internal warfare, and international law enforcement activity progressively weakened the Turkey-Italy-Marseilles narcotics axis. By the end of the decade, the situation had become so serious that the international narcotics leaders were forced to conduct a major reorganization of the traffic. 

In Sicily a costly eight-year battle (1956-1963) between Mafia factions-the "old" Mafia and the "new" Mafia-had reduced the "honored society" to its weakest state since the end of World War II. The "old" Mafia was made up of traditional rural gangsters, the illiterate tyrants who ruled by fear and exploited the impoverished peasants. In contrast, the "new" Mafia was attracted by the modern business methods and the international heroin smuggling that Lucky Luciano and his American deportee cohorts had introduced in the late 1940's. In the first three years of this war eighteen major mafiosi and countless minor gunmen were eliminated. 

Weakened by the enormous cost in leadership, the feud subsided, but it broke out again in 1963 when part of a heroin shipment was stolen by a courier en-route to the United States. It was a singularly inopportune moment for headline murders, as the Mafia itself was well aware, for a parliamentary investigating commission was finally looking into the Mafia. Even though the honored society's Grand Council ordered a moratorium for the duration of the inquiry, passions could not be restrained, and the murders began again. The fast Alfa Romeo sedans favored by mafiosi were being blown up in Palermo with such frequency that the mere sight of one parked was enough for the police to clear the street. 

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Activities of the Mafia began in the midst of the explosions, and its reports contained the first serious legislative suggestions for combating the venerable society. (84) In 1964, 800 mafiosi were arrested in a major sweep and locked up in Palermo Prison. The good work continued: in 1968, 113 more were arrested (though many were subsequently released) and, in May 1971, 33 of the top leadership were exiled to Filicudi and Linosa islands. (85) Although the impact should not be overestimated, these arrests, together with several major heroin indictments, have made Sicily a much less desirable place for American mafiosi to do business. And since Sicily and southern Italy were still important transshipment points for Middle Eastern morphine and Marseilles heroin in the sixties, this weakened the overall strength of the Turkey-ltaly-Marseilles axis.

Equally important in reducing the importance of Sicily and Italy in the international drug trade was the sudden death of Lucky Luciano. It was a timely death, since the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had just arrested, in Spain, three of his heroin couriers, who were fleeing a narcotics indictment in New York. American narcotics agents submitted evidence that Luciano had provided liberal travel expenses for their hopscotch flight across the Caribbean, and the courts began to consider an indictment against him. The leftist Italian press screamed for his arrest, and parliamentary deputies denounced the government's laxity. 

While drinking a cup of coffee at Naples airport on the evening of January 22, 1962, Luciano suffered a fatal coronary attack. (86) The death of the man who had organized the postwar heroin trade, kept it running against considerable adversity, and was thought to be personally responsible for shipping more than $150 million worth of heroin into the United States over a sixteen-year period (87) was an irreplaceable loss. Without Luciano's organizational genius, it became increasingly difficult for Mediterranean smugglers to survive against the growing pressure of international law enforcement efforts. 

The most important blow to the Mediterranean heroin complex, however, came in 1967, when the Turkish government announced plans to reduce, and eventually abolish, opium production. The U.S. government contributed $3 million to build up a special 750-man police narcotics unit, finance research for substitute crops, and improve the managerial efficiency of the government regulatory agency, the Turkish Marketing Organization. (88) Since Turkey's poppy fields were the major source of raw materials for Marseilles's heroin laboratories, the impact of the Turkish government's declaration was obvious. According to analysts at the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, the Corsican syndicates "saw the handwriting on the wall" and quickly realized that they would have to find an alternate source of opium if their lucrative drug racket were to survive. (89) (By early 1972 Turkey had reduced its opium-growing provinces from twenty one to four. And in those areas where poppy production has been prohibited, "U.S. agents have reported little evidence of illicit production, . . . and such crops, when found, have been immediately destroyed." (90) Finally, in mid 1971 the Turkish government announced that it would eradicate all opium production by the end of 1972. (91) (See Map I on page 10.) 

Thus, the international heroin trade was at a crossroads in the mid 1960's. If it were to continue, a major effort would be required to reorganize the traffic. This could hardly be done by letter or telephone, but would necessitate the personal intervention of a high ranking underworld figure. As in any other business enterprise, the leaders of organized crime have almost nothing to do with daily operations, but are the only ones who can initiate major corporate changes or new enterprises. But while ordinary businessmen transact much of their basic negotiations by telephone, correspondence, and intermediaries, police surveillance and telephone taps make this impractical for the tycoons of organized crime. Moreover, mafiosi do not sign binding contracts with other gangsters and can hardly take a partner to court if he welshes on a deal. Therefore, it is one of the basic characteristics of organized crime that all important deals require a meeting of the bosses involved so that they can exchange their personal "word of honor."

This need for face-to-face discussions also explains why Mafia leaders have repeatedly exposed themselves to conspiracy indictments and banner headlines by arranging large underworld conferences, such as the. ill-fated 1957 Apalachin meeting. 

After Luciano's death in 1962, the logical successors to his leadership in the narcotics trade were his two subordinates, Meyer Lansky and Vito Genovese. However, in 1958 Genovese had been indicted for heroin trafficking by a New York court and was later sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Although he continued to direct many of his enterprises from Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was treated with great respect by prisoners and guards alike, he was in no position to conduct the reorganization of the narcotics trade. (92) Lansky at sixty-six was now too old and too carefully watched to repeat his 1949 business trip. And by November 1970, when he retired to Israel, he had already turned over much of the major decision making to his subordinates. (93) Thus, by death and default, the responsibility logically fell to Santo Trafficante, Jr. 

At age fifty-seven, Trafficante is one of the most effective organized crime leaders still operating in the United States. Avoiding the ostentatious life style of Cadillac's and diamonds that is so attractive to many mafiosi, Trafficante cultivates the austerity of the old Sicilian Dons. But unlike the old Sicilians he manages the organization with reason rather than force, and is one of the few major Mafia leaders whose "family" has not been torn apart by internal power struggles or vendettas with other families.(94) Despite his high prestige within the organization, Trafficante's good sense has prevented him from campaigning for a leading position on the Mafia's National Commission. This self effacing attitude no doubt accounts for his personal safety and considerable influence. Through his studious avoidance of publicity, he is one of the least-known and most underestimated leaders of organized crime. 

Trafficante himself is reportedly involved in the narcotics traffic only at the level of financing and crisis management; he never sees, much less handles, any heroin. His organization is so airtight, and he is so discreet, that federal narcotics agents consider him virtually untouchable. (95) 

Trafficante's territory has been Florida and the Caribbean, where he served as one of Meyer Lansky's chief retainers. During the late 1940's and 1950's Trafficante was heavily involved in Luciano's and Lansky's heroin smuggling operations, and after his father's death in 1954, he succeeded him as Mafia boss of Florida and fell heir to his relationship with Lansky. Trafficante has always done his best to look after Lansky's interests. When Anastasia, the head of Murder, Inc., tried to open a competing casino in Meyer Lansky's Havana in 1957, Trafficante arranged a friendly meeting with him in New York. An hour after Trafficante checked out of the Park-Sheraton Hotel, three gunmen murdered Anastasia in the hotel barbershop. (96) 

The Cuban revolution in 1959 forced Trafficante to write off his valuable Havana casino operations as a total loss, but this was partially compensated for by the subsequent flood of Cuban refugees to Miami. 

His association with leading Cuban gangsters and corrupt politicians when he was living in Havana enabled him to expand his control over the Florida bolita lottery, a Cuban numbers game, which became enormously lucrative when the refugees started pouring into Florida in 1960. (97) By recruiting Cubans into Trafficante's organization to expand the bolita lottery, organized crime may have acquired a new group of narcotics couriers and distributors who were unknown to American police or Interpol. With Latin couriers, new routes could be opened up, bringing European heroin into Miami through Latin America. 

The Mafia's transfer of narcotics importation and distribution to its new Cuban associates has caused some confusion in the press; many analysts have misinterpreted the appearance of Cuban and South American couriers and distributors to mean that organized crime has given up the heroin trade. The Justice Department's "Operation Eagle" revealed something of this new organization when, in June 1970, 350 federal narcotics agents made 139 arrests "in the largest federal law enforcement operation ever conducted against a single narcotics distribution ring." Although the arrests were carried out in ten cities, the Bureau of Narcotics stated that all five of the ringleaders were Spanish-speaking and three were Cubans residing in Miami. (98) In addition, federal authorities report that bulk heroin seizures in the Miami area have increased 100 percent during 1971, indicating that the beachfront city has remained a major distribution hub. (99) 

While the recruitment of Cuban gangsters may have solved the problems with couriers and distributors, the Mafia still had to find an alternative source of morphine base and, if possible, a reserve source of heroin to protect itself in case of problems in Marseilles and Europe. There were a number of alternatives, among which Southeast Asia was the most promising. While Mexico had been refining small amounts of low-grade, brownish colored heroin for a number of years, she had never been able to produce the fine white powder demanded by American addicts. Though India and Afghanistan had some lively local opium smuggling, they had no connections with the international criminal syndicates. But Southeast Asia was busily growing more than 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, and the Chinese laboratories in Hong Kong were producing some of the finest heroin in the world. Moreover, entrenched Corsican syndicates based in Vietnam and Laos had been regularly supplying the international markets, including Marseilles and Hong Kong, with opium and morphine base for almost a decade. Obviously this was an area ripe for expansion. 

In 1947, when Lucky Luciano wanted to use Havana as a narcotics transfer point, he went there personally. And just before Marseilles embarked on large-scale heroin production for the American market in 1951-1952, Meyer Lansky went to Europe and met with Corsican leaders in Paris and on the Riviera. 

So, in 1968, in the time-honored tradition of the Mafia, Santo Trafficante, Jr., went to Saigon, Hong Kong, and Singapore. (100) 

next
The Colonial Legacy: Opium for the Natives

notes
Introduction: The Consequences of Complicity 
1. U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs for the Year Ending December 31, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), p. 45. 
2. Statement of John E. Ingersoll, Director, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, before the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, New York City, February 24, 1972, p. 5. 
3. The New York Times, July 23, 1971, p. 1. 
4. The New York Times, May 16, 1971, p. 1. 
5. Newsweek, July 5, 1971, p. 28. 
6. Max Singer, Project Leader, Policy Concerning Drug Abuse in New York State (Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Hudson Institute, May 31, 1970) 1:61. 
7. J. M. Scott, The White Poppy (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1969), pp. 8485, 112. 8. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, Bulletin on Narcotics 5, no. 2 (April-June 1953), 3-4, 6. 
9. It appears that modern-day heroin chemists in Southeast Asia may still be imitating the original Bayer product. Much of the heroin shipped to Asia in the early decades of the twentieth century bore the Lion and Globe trademark of the Bayer company. The Double U-0 Globe brand label so popular today in Laos bears a striking resemblance to the original Bayer label. 
10. This Bayer advertisement originally appeared in a 1900 edition of Medical Mirror, an American medical journal. 
11. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, Bulletin on Narcotics, pp. 3-4, 6. 
12. Ibid., p. 19. 
13. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., 1964, pt. 4, p. 771. 
14. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, Bulletin on Narcotics, p. 7. 
15. Ibid., p. 26. 
16. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 
17. Ibid., p. 10. 
18. Ibid., p. 8; U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, "History of Narcotic Addiction in the United States," in Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Nar. cotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., 1964, pt. 3, p. 771. 
19. U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, "The World Opium Situation," October 1970, p. 10. 
20. Ibid. 
21. In 1969 Iran resumed legal pharmaceutical production of opium after thirteen years of prohibition. It is not yet known how much of Iran's legitimate production is being diverted to illicit channels. However, her strict narcotics laws (execution by firing squad for convicted traffickers) have discouraged the illicit opium traffic and prevented any of Iran's production from entering the international market. (John Hughes, The Junk Merchants [Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Company, 19711 pp. 17-20; U.S. Congress, House Committee on Foreign Relations, International Aspects of the Narcotics Problem, 92nd Cong., I st sess., 197 1, p. 74.) 
22. Report of the United Nations Survey Team on the Economic and Social Needs of the Opium Producing Areas in Thailand (Bangkok: Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 59, 64, 68; The New York Times, September 17, 1968, p. 45; ibid., June 6, 1971, p. 2. Estimates for illicit opium production made by the U.N. and the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics vary widely and fluctuate from year to year as conditions in the opium producing nations change and statistical data improve. In general, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics estimates have tended to underestimate the scope of illicit production in Southeast Asia, while the U.N. has tended to minimize production in South Asia, The statistics used above are compiled from both U.N. and U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures in an attempt to correct both imbalances. However, even if we accept the Bureau's maximum figures for 1968 and 1971, the differences are not that substantial: India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (South Asia) have a combined illicit production of 525 tons, or 29 percent of the world's total illicit supply; Burma (1,000 tons), Thailand (150 tons), and Laos (35 tons) have a combined production of 1,185 tons, or roughly 66 percent of the world's illicit supply; and Turkey accounts for 100 illicit tons, or about 5 percent of the world supply. (U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, "The World Opium Situation," p. 10; U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Foreign Assistance and Related Programs Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1972, 92nd Cong., Ist sess., 1971, pp. 578-584. 23. Alvin Moscow, Merchants of Heroin (New York: The Dial Press, 1968), pp. 6163. 
24. "The Illicit Manufacture of Diacetylmorphine Hydrochloride (No. 4 Grade)," Paper of a Hong Kong government chemist, n.d., pp. 1-5.
25. Singer, Policy Concerning Drug Abuse in New York State, pp. 46-49. 

1 Sicily: Home of the Mafia 
1. J. M. Scott, The White Poppy (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1969), pp. 167-169. 
2. United Nations, Economic and Social Council, World Trends of the Illicit Traffic During the War 1939-1945 (E/CS 7/9, November 23, 1946),pp.10,14. 
3. William P. Morgan, Triad Societies in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Government Press, 1960), pp. 76-77. 
4. Charles Siragusa, The Trail of the Poppy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 180-181. 
5. David Arman, "The Mafia," in Norman MacKenzie, Secret Societies (New York: Collier Books, 1967), p. 213. 
6. The CIA had its origins in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was formed to make sure that intelligence errors like Pearl Harbor did not happen again. The OSS was disbanded on September 20, 1945, and remained buried in the State Department, the army, and the navy until January 22, 1946, when President Truman formed the Central Intelligence Group. With the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 the group became an agency, and on September 18, 1947, the CIA was born (David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government [New York: Random House, 1964], pp. 91-94). 
7. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., lst and 2ndsess., 1964, pt. 4, p. 913. 1 
8. Nicholas Gage, "Mafioso's Memoirs Support Valachi's Testimony About Crime Syndicate," in The New York Times, April 11, 197 1. 
9. Harry J. Anslinger, The Protectors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964), p. 74. 
10. Ibid. 
11. Norman Lewis, The Honored Society (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), pp. 72-73. 
12. Ibid., p. 77. 
13. Michele Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), p. 52. 
14. Gay Talese, Honor Thy Father (New York: World Publishing, 1971), pp. 212213. 
15. R. Ernest Dupuy, Col. U.S.A. Ret., World War II: A Compact History (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), pp. 147-148. 
16. Lt. Col. Albert N. Garland and Howard McGraw Smith, United States Army in World War II. The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Sicily and the Surrender of Italy (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1965), p. 244. 
17. Ibid., p. 238. 
18. Estes Kefauver, Crime in America, quoted in Lewis, The Honored Society, pp. 1819. 19. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, pp. 54-55. Michele Pantaleone is probably Italy's leading authority on the Sicilian Mafia. He himself is a native and long time resident of Villalba, and so is in a unique position to know what happened in the village between July 15 and July 21, 1943. Also, many of Villalba's residents testified in the Sicilian press that they witnessed the fighter plane incident and the arrival of the American tanks several days later (Lewis, The Honored Society, P. 19). 
20. Talese, Honor Thy Father, p. 201. 
21. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 56. 
22. Ibid., pp. 56-57. 
23. Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House 1968), p. 57. 
24. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 58. 
25. Kolko, The Politics of War, p. 48. 
26. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (pt. 3, p. 1114), quoted in Kolko, The Politics of War, p. 55. 
27. Lewis, The Honored Society, p. 107. 
28. Talese, Honor Thy Father, p. 214. 
29. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 63. 
30. Lewis, The Honored Society, pp. 146, 173. 
31. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 88. 
32. Ibid., p. 52. 
33. Lewis, The Honored Society, p. 18, 
34. Siragusa, The Trail of the Poppy, p. 83. 
35. Ibid., pp. 83, 89. 
36. U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Improvements in the Federal Criminal Code, Committee of the Judiciary, Illicit Narcotics Traffic, 84th Cong., Ist sess., 1955, p. 99. 
37. Official correspondence of Michael G. Picini, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to agent Dennis Doyle, August 1963. Picini and Doyle were discussing whether or not to use Sami El Khoury as an informant now that he had been released from prison. The authors were permitted to read the correspondence at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. 
38. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 26, 1971. 
39. Danilo Dolci, Report from Palermo (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), pp. 118-120. 
40. Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 188. 
41. Ibid., p. 192. 
42. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. 
43. Ibid. 
44. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1971. 
45. Harry J. Anslinger, The Murderers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1961), p. 106. (Emphasis added.) 
46. Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), p. 137. 
47. Ibid., pp. 87-88. 
48. Ibid., p. 89. 
49. Ibid. 
50. Ed Reid, The Grim Reapers (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1969), pp. 9092. 
51. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. 
52. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., pt. 4, p. 891. 
53. Ibid., p. 885. 
54. The New York Times, December 1, 1969, p. 42. 
55. Messick, Lansky, pp. 169-170. 
56. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, Bulletin on Narcotics 5, no. 2, (April-June 1953), 48. (Emphasis added.) 

2 Marseille: America's Heroin Laboratory 
1. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., 1964, pt. 4, pp. 873-885. 
2. Eugene Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille (Paris: Julliard, 1968), pp. 53-54. 
3. Ibid., p. 75. 
4. Raymond J. Sontag, A Broken World, 1919-1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 273-275. 
5. Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, p. 76. 
6. Gabrielle Castellari, La belle Histoire de Marseille (Marseille: L'Ecole Technique Don Bosco, 1968), p. 120. 
7. Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, p. 78. 
8. Ibid., pp. 93-94. 
9. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., pt. 4, pp. 887-888, 960. 
10. Ibid., pp. 887-888; Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, p. 91. 
11. Maurice Choury, La Resistance en Corse (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1958), pp. 1617. 12. Charles Tillon, Les F.T.P. (Paris: Union Generale D'Editions, 1967), pp.167-173. 
13. Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 8081. 
14. Madeleine Baudoin, Histoire des groups francs (M.U.R.) des Bouches-Du-Rhone (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 12-13, 163-164, 170-171. 
15. Beginning in September 1941 arms drops to the Marseille Resistance was supervised by Col. Maurice J. Buckmaster of the British Special Operations Executive. The arms were dropped to a special liaison group in Marseille attached to the nonCommunist Resistance. Ibid., pp. 21-23. 
16. Ibid., pp. 51, 136-137, 158. 
17. Ibid., pp. 31-32. 
18. Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, p. 18. 
19. Maurice Agulhon and Fernand Barrat, C.R.S. ~ Marseille (Paris: Armand Colin, 197 1), p. 144. 20. Tillon, Les F.T.P., pp. 292-293. 21. Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille, pp. 46-47, 75-77. 
22. Castellari, La belle Histoire de Marseille, pp. 218-219. 
23. Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille, p. 145. 
24. Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 157. 
25. Ibid., p. 440. 
26. Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille , pp. 145-146. 
27. Ibid., p. 147. 
28. Ibid., p. 148. 
29. Ibid., p. 17 1. 
30. Ibid., pp. 149-150. 
31. La Marseillaise (Marseille), November 13, 1947. 
32. La Marseillaise, November 17 and 21, December 10, 1947. 
33. Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, p. 396. 
34. Ibid., p. 157. 
35. Walter Lafeber, America, Russia and the Cold War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967), p. 47. 
36. Ibid., pp. 48, 56. 
37. Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the C.I.A. Is 'Immoral,'" in The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, p. 14. 
38. Ibid. 
39. Le Provencal (Marseille), November 8-9, 14, 1947. 
40. "It was on this occasion that the leaders of the Force Ouvriere faction separated themselves definitively from the C.G.T., and founded, with the aid of American labor unions, the coalition which still bears its name" (Jacques Julliard, Le IVe Republique [Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1968], p. 124). (Emphasis added.) 
41. Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, p. 370. This alliance betw en the CIA and the Socialists was apparently preceeded by elaborate negotiations. While on a visit to Washington in May 1946, Socialist party leader Leon Blum told a French wire service correspondent that, "Numerous American diplomats with whom I have talked are certain that Socialism can become the best rampart against Communism in Europe." It was later reported in the American press that President Truman's Secretary of the Treasury had urged Blum to unite the nonCommunist parties and drive the Communists out of the government. Only a few months before he "provoked" the split between the Communist and Socialist factions of the CGT, Socialist labor leader Leon Jouhaux came to Washington to meet with members of the Truman administration (Le Monde [Paris], May 12, 1967). 
42. Le Provencal, November 14, 1947. 
43. La Marseillaise, November 19, 1947. 
44. Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille, pp. 156-173. 
45. Le Provencal, November 14, 1947. 
46. Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille, pp. 204, 215. 
47. Ibid., pp. 76, 128. 
48. Ibid., p. 196. 
49. Interview with Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, McLean, Virginia, June 18, 1971. (Lucien Conein worked as an OSS liaison officer with the French Resistance during World War II, and later served as a CIA operative.) 
50. Castellari, La belle Histoire de Marseille, p. 221. 
51. Ibid., p. 222. 
52. The close relationship between Marseille's Vietnamese community and the French left also played a role in the history of the Second Indochina War. Immediately after the liberation, Marseille's left-leaning commissioner, Raymond Aubrac, discovered the wretched conditions at the Indochinese work camps in the city's suburbs and did everything he could to clean them up. His efforts won him the respect of Vietnamese nationalist organizations, and through them he was introduced to Ho Chi Minh, who visited France to negotiate in 1946. When the Pugwash Committee devised the deescalation proposal to end the Vietnam War in 1967, Aubrac was selected to transmit it to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi (Agulhon and Barrat, C.R.S. a Marseille, p. 43). 
53. Combat (Paris), February 4, 1950. 
54. The New York Times, February 18, 1950, p. 5. 
55. The New York Times, February 24, 1950, p. 12. 
56. Combat, February 18-19, 1950. 
57. Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral,'" p. 10. (Emphasis added.) 
58. Time, March 17, 1952, p. 23. 
59. The New York Times, March 14, 1950, p. 5. 
60. The New York Times, April 16, 1950, sec. 4, p. 4. 
61. The New York Times Magazine, February 6, 1972, pp. 53-54. 
62. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., pt. 4, p. 888. 
63. France-Soir (Paris), September 7, 1971. 
64. In September 1971 the French weekly L'Express reported a somewhat different but still complimentary analysis of the Guerin i-Francisci vendetta. In late 1967 two gangsters tried to blow up Francisci's Corsican villa with 220 pounds of TNT, and six months later two snipers tried to assassinate him in a public square. After the two suspected snipers were found murdered in Paris four months later, a police investigation uncovered their connections with a Parisian casino owner named JeanBaptiste Andreani. According to L'Express, Andreani was an associate of Antoine Guerini (L'Express [Paris], September 6-12, 1971 [No. 10521, p. 18). Following the attempts on Francisci's life, three more of the Guerinis' underlings were killed (Le Provencal, January 3, 1970). 
65. Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, pp. 13-14. 
66. Le Provencal, January 3, 1970. 
67. Saccomano, Bandits a Marseille, p. 25. 
68. Le Provencal, January 7, 1970. 
69. Le Provencal, January 6-16, 1970; La Marseillaise, January 6-16, 1970. 
70. Le Provencal, January 16, 1970. 
71. France-Soir, September 7, 1971. 
72. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., pt. 4, p. 961. 
73. The New York Times Magazine, February 6, 1972, pp. 14-15. 
74. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., pt. 4, p. 956; see also Morgan F. Murphy and Robert H. Steele, The World Heroin Problem, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), p. 8. 
75. Phillip M. Williams and Martin Harrison, Politics and Society in De Gaulle's Republic (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1971), pp. 383384. 
76. The Sunday Times (London), September 26, 1971. 
77. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1971. 
78. The Sunday Times, September 26, 1971. 
79. Ibid. 
80. The New York Times, November 16, 1971, p. 1. 81. Le Monde, November 21-22, 23, and 27, 1971. 
82. The New York Times Magazine, February 6, 1972, pp. 53-54. 
83. Michele Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), pp. 167-179. 
84. Norman Lewis, The Honored Society (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), pp. 297-307; Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., pt. 4, pp. 893-894. 
85. Life, June 18, 1971, pp. 35-36. 
86. Jacques Kermoal, L'Onorata Societa (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1971), pp.229-232. 
87. The New York Times, January 27, 1962, p. 1. 
88. Murphy and Steele, The World Heroin Problem, pp. 12, 16. 
89. Interview with John Warner, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. 
90. Murphy and Steele, The World Heroin Problem, pp. 12, 16. 
91. The New York Times, July 1, 1971, p. 1. 
92. Ed Reid, The Grim Reapers (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1969), p. 16. 
93. Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), p. 175. 
94. Reid, The Grim Reapers, p. 97. 
95. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., Ist and 2nd sess., pt. 4, p. 928. 
96. Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 524-525; interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1971. 
97. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, 88th Cong., lst and 2nd sess., pt. 2, pp. 527, 539. (In 1954 Santo Trafficante, Jr., was arrested by the Saint Peters burg police when he tried to bribe a police officer into destroying evidence of his involvement in the bolita lottery.) 
98. Press Release, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington D.C., June 27, 1970. 
99. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. 
100. U.S. Congress, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Fraud and Corruption in Management of Military Club Systems, 91st Cong., lst sess., 1969, p. 279; Reid, The Grim Reapers, p. 296.