Chapter VI: Part 6

Attardi switched on a light over the bed. “What do you want to see me about?” he said. “I’m clean.”

“Have you got any narcotics in this room?” O’Carroll asked him.

Attardi shook his head. “No. You can search the room if you like. I’m out of the business.”

O’Carroll pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down. He began to talk about Attardi’s connections with well-known underworld figures, asking him why it was that he had been convicted in Houston while others in the mob had gone free.

As they talked, bitterness began to creep into Attardi’s voice. He had taken the rap in Houston--and then his pals had deserted him. They didn’t even try to communicate with him while he was in prison. His wife had become ill and no one had come forward to help her. She had died. He had even lost the little olive oil and cheese shop on Christie Street.

“Now I have nothing,” he said.

“Maybe we can help you,” O’Carroll said. “I can’t make any promises, but if you help us we may be able to help you when your deportation case comes up.”

Attardi shook his head. “I can’t do it. I’d be dead if I worked for you.”

O’Carroll continued talking of the injustices done to Attardi by his old pals, insisting that he owed them nothing since they had deserted him. But Attardi continued to say no.

At last O’Carroll said, “Well, I’ll leave my name and telephone number. If you ever need help--I’ll be glad to talk to you.” He wrote his name and telephone number on a slip of paper and handed it to Attardi.

For six months O’Carroll heard nothing from Attardi. He made no move to see the man again. He had planted the seed, and whether it took root depended on what went on in the mind of the skinny little ex-convict.

But in early December Attardi called the Narcotics Bureau office and Agent George O’Connor took the call. He explained that he wanted to talk to O’Carroll and he would be waiting for him on Delancey Street near Christie.

That afternoon O’Carroll and O’Connor drove to Delancey and parked near the street number mentioned by Attardi. A few minutes later the hoodlum walked from a doorway and ducked into the car with them.

The agents had assumed that Attardi had made the call because he was frightened over the prospect of being deported to Italy. But it wasn’t deportation that was on Attardi’s mind. He had fallen in love. He had met a twenty-two-year-old waitress in one of the mean little restaurants on the Lower East Side--and this girl had become the most important thing in his life. They wanted to get married, but he had no money.

Attardi said he was willing to put the agents onto some Puerto Ricans living in Brooklyn who were dealing in narcotics. If the price were right, Attardi would help knock off the gang.

The agents listened to Attardi’s story and then O’Carroll shook his head. “It’s no deal,” he said. “We want better cases than that. We want to go to the top.”

Attardi was frightened but he also was in love. And so he began asking how the agents could protect him if he did agree to work with them. He flatly refused to do any buying of narcotics himself.

At last it was agreed that Attardi would introduce an undercover agent to some of his friends who were in the peddling business. Then it would be up to the agent to handle the deals, Attardi’s role being to vouch for the agent as “one of the boys.”

Undercover Agent Joe Tremoglie, a big, curly-haired man, was chosen to work with Attardi. Tremoglie’s parents had come to the United States from Sicily and Joe spoke fluent Italian. He knew the underworld, its mannerisms, superstitions, and nuances. He had about him a conspiratorial air that seemed to appeal to criminals and to disarm them.

Attardi’s first assignment was to introduce Tremoglie to a cafe cook on Newberry Street who was pushing narcotics on the side. The agent made a small purchase and then let himself be seen in the right places with Attardi--who began to introduce him as a distant cousin.

As the weeks passed, Tremoglie met narcotics pushers and wholesalers. He played poker with them. Slowly he moved up the ladder until one day he was introduced to Benny Bellanca, who took an immediate liking to him after Tremoglie had given the right answers to all the questions. He liked him so well, in fact, that they discussed the possibility of Tremoglie going to Europe as a courier to bring back a load of heroin.

He met Pietro Beddia, too, and an intensive surveillance by Narcotics agents disclosed a link between Bellanco and Beddia.

At the end of ten months of work by Tremoglie, the trap was set. Arrangements were made for Tremoglie to make a series of purchases during one afternoon and night on a timetable that was worked out to the minute. For twelve hours, Tremoglie raced from one meeting place to another, making the prearranged purchases of narcotics. And at 3 o’clock in the morning twenty of the leading narcotics dealers in the New York area--including Bellanca and Beddia--had been rounded up.

Alphonse Attardi wasn’t around for the trials. He took his $5,000 reward money plus expenses--plus his bride--and faded from the scene. All he would tell agents was that he planned to buy a little place in the country and settle down to make an honest living.

The underworld finally figured out that it was Attardi who had sprung the trap on them, and defense counsel for the accused men demanded that he be produced by the government for questioning. But Narcotics agents could honestly say they knew nothing of Attardi’s whereabouts. They didn’t want to know.

Informers have given valuable aid to the Customs Service in its drive against smuggling, and there are many Alphonse Attardis--each with his own motive--who work with the agents.

Under the law, the Customs Service is permitted to pay up to $50,000 for information leading to the seizure of smuggled goods. The system provides that the informer may receive 25 per cent of the net recovery in any case in which he provides the original information leading to arrest and conviction for smuggling or fraud. Net recovery means the amount which goes into the Treasury of the United States as a result of a disclosure. For example, suppose Customs agents seize from a smuggler a diamond necklace that is worth $10,000, the appraisal being based on the American selling price. The necklace is forfeited and sold at public auction for $8,000. Assuming expenses of $400 involved in the case, then the net recovery is $7,600, of which the informant is entitled to $1,900.

The theory behind such payments is that the government has made a good bargain when it can pay an informer $1 and then have $3 left over for the Treasury--money which would have been lost without the cooperation of the informant.

There was one Customs informer working in Europe who received the top reward of $50,000 three times by uncovering the smuggling of huge shipments of diamonds into the United States. He refused to accept payment in Europe--but waited until he had $150,000 in credits with the U.S. Treasury. Then he came to the United States, received the money, and settled down to live the life of a country gentleman in the West.

And the rewards were tax free--as are all payments made to informers.

10

THE VIOLENT BORDER

Customs agents in the Laredo Tenth Customs Agency District--which includes the 2,000 miles of border and Gulf coastline from New Mexico into part of Louisiana--spend much of their time battling the smuggling of narcotics and marihuana from Mexico.

Federal officers estimate that the business of peddling narcotics to addicts grosses at least a half billion dollars a year for the underworld, and the total may be much more. No one actually knows the amount of narcotics which is smuggled successfully into the United States. Some Customs agents estimate that law enforcement officers seize less than 10 per cent of the total. One agent said, “If I thought that I was getting ten per cent of the total being smuggled, then I could sleep well at night.”

Even though the size of the narcotics traffic is unknown, there is no doubt about the tremendous profits to be made from the illegal sale of drugs. Addicts will beg, borrow, steal and kill to obtain money with which to satisfy the terrible craving for narcotics once they are “hooked.”

Unofficial estimates place the number of narcotic addicts in the United States at about 50,000. The average heroin addict requires something like ten grains per day to satisfy his needs. This means that over a period of a year the average heroin addict will use about 7.6 ounces of the drug--or a total for all addicts of about 380,000 ounces of heroin or a substitute drug. In their best years, Federal and state law enforcement officers have been able to seize only a fraction of this estimated total.

Several years ago the Mexican marihuana dealers took no responsibility for delivery into the United States; all arrangements for smuggling across the border had to be made by the purchasers who came from the States. But in recent years there has been a change, and the Mexican operators have been willing to make deliveries to New York, Chicago, Detroit and other cities. Jack Givens, Supervising Agent for the Laredo district, believes this change in delivery method is an indication that the supply of marihuana in Mexico has outgrown the demand. This has put the pressure on the Mexican operators to give their customers better service, resulting in the delivery system.

In recent years some of the United States marihuana operators have begun to bypass border operators. They have been driving to the interior of Mexico, making their own deals with the growers and bringing the stuff back into the United States themselves. Customs inspectors are always on guard against marihuana being smuggled in automobiles--hidden in upholstery, in luggage compartments, in door panels, or in secret compartments built into the cars.

Customs agents believe that most of the heroin and other narcotics smuggled into the United States come by way of Europe from the Middle East and Far East. But Mexico still is one of the favorite routes for the narcotics syndicates seeking to reach the American addicts. In addition, Mexico remains the major exporter of marihuana. The Mexican government has been cooperating with the United States in seeking to suppress the traffic, and there is a close working relationship between the American agents and the Mexican police. But the long and rugged boundary between the two countries makes it impossible to cover every smuggling point on the border.

Supervisor Givens has only thirty-nine agents and seventeen Customs enforcement officers assigned to him for the entire territory. The enforcement officers are a police force used primarily for guard duty and surveillance work under the agents’ direction.

This small force, despite the geographic difficulties, has a high esprit de corps. Each man works many hours overtime each month with no expectation of compensation. The records show that the agents average approximately 120 hours of overtime each month in excess of the overtime required of them and for which they are paid. Often the men find themselves working overtime knowing that their extra effort will be rewarded with pay averaging 19 cents an hour.

Why do they do it? One agent explained it in this way: “There’s more than money in this work once you become involved in it. Once you start working on a case, you simply cannot walk away from it at the end of eight hours. You have a feeling of achievement when you do break up a marihuana ring or pick up someone who is dealing in heroin.”

Patrolling the Mexican border has been a major problem for Customs since the frontier days. In 1853 the Customs Mounted Patrol was organized, and horsemen rode across the deserts and through the mountains on lonely patrols to intercept cattle rustlers, smugglers and aliens trying to slip across the border. The mounted guard inevitably gave way to the automobile. But the horsemen rarely had more hair-raising experiences than those of the modern agents mounted on wheels. Such an incident occurred on August 7, 1960, in one of the wildest chases in the memory of Customs agents along the Texas-Mexico border.

It began when Agent Fred Rody, Jr., received a tip that an American was in the red-light district of Nuevo Laredo, trying to arrange for the purchase of 20 pounds of marihuana--obviously to be smuggled into the United States.

Further checking disclosed that the man was John Vaccaro, a known narcotics dealer working out of New Orleans. Vaccaro had been convicted of a marihuana violation in New Orleans and been placed under surveillance earlier in the year when he had visited Laredo. At that time agents had tried to intercept Vaccaro, suspected of smuggling marihuana, but in a wild chase on the highway Vaccaro pulled away from their car, even though their speedometer was registering 120 miles an hour. He also succeeded in eluding the police roadblocks which had been thrown up in front of him.

Agents kept a close watch on Vaccaro’s car after Rody received his report. Finally they saw someone approach his automobile and place a suitcase in the front seat of his car. Then they saw Vaccaro, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old daughter enter the car.

When Vaccaro drove down San Bernardo Avenue and then onto U.S. Highway 59, he was followed by agents in three automobiles. When the Vaccaro car slowed in heavy traffic, the agents bracketed his car with one car in front, one behind, and the other alongside. Agent T. S. Simpson leaned out of his car and shouted, “Stop! We are Customs agents.”

Vaccaro pulled his car to the side of the road and slowed down as though to stop. Suddenly he slammed his foot on the accelerator. His car leaped forward between two of the agents’ vehicles and roared off on the left side of the highway, forcing terrified drivers to swerve into the ditch to avoid a collision. The agents gunned their cars in pursuit.

Simpson and Rody watched the speed indicator on their automobile reach 110 miles an hour, but Vaccaro’s car still pulled away from them.

Agent Grady Grazner in a 1957 police interceptor-model Chevrolet moved past the Rody-Simpson car and slowly began gaining on the Vaccaro vehicle. His speedometer was reading 130 miles an hour when he moved up behind Vaccaro’s automobile with his siren screaming. Grazner nudged Vaccaro’s automobile with his bumper and signalled for Vaccaro to pull over and stop. The woman and girl in the car were looking out the rear window, screaming and motioning Grazner to pull away from their car.

For several miles the cars raced along at well over 100 miles an hour. Grazner fired four warning shots into the air trying to force Vaccaro to stop. He was afraid to fire directly into the vehicle because of the women inside.

Gradually Grazner’s car moved up on the fleeing automobile. As the front wheels of Grazner’s car reached the left rear wheels of Vaccaro’s car, the marihuana dealer suddenly swerved. The blow of his car knocked Grazner’s vehicle to the side of the road. The car rolled over six times and bounced a distance of 471 feet. The only thing that saved Grazner’s life was the fact that he was strapped into the seat by a safety belt.

Police had been alerted ahead by radio. In the little town of Ferret, Texas, Vaccaro saw the roadblock ahead. He tried to bypass it by darting down a dirt road, but he was overtaken and brought to a halt.

Police found only fragments of marihuana in the Vaccaro car. When a search of the highway was later made by a helicopter, the pilot spotted a suitcase lying beside the road. Vaccaro had left his fingerprints on the suitcase when he tossed it out of his speeding automobile. It was stuffed with marihuana.

When Customs agents took Vaccaro into custody, Grazner said, “Why did you try to kill me? You might have killed your wife and little girl too.”

Vaccaro spat on the agent and said insolently, “What in the hell are you talking about?”

Vaccaro was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for this venture into violence.

* * * * *

The city of Laredo, Texas, dozed in the blazing noonday sun on an August day in 1957. Not many people were on the sun-baked streets at this hour, and even the Rio Grande had slowed to a lazy trickle. The only visible activity was at the Customs stations at the International Bridge spanning the river between Laredo and its twin city, Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican bank of the river. The bridge was one of the major communications links between the United States and Mexico, but with the sun high in the heavens even the traffic across the bridge was moving at a listless pace.

At this hour, Dave Ellis, agent in charge, walked from his office in the old courthouse and sauntered to a battered automobile parked on a side street. He slipped behind the wheel and drove at a leisurely pace to the eastern edge of the city, where he turned off the street and parked beside the loading platform of a vacant warehouse. He switched off the engine, lit a cigarette and sat waiting.

When Ellis arrived at the office that morning he had found a cryptic note on his desk which said: “Meet me at the usual place.” It was signed with the code name of one of the most reliable informers in all of northern Mexico.

Ellis hardly looked the part of an experienced Customs agent. He was nearing forty, but he looked ten years younger. The horn-rimmed spectacles he wore gave him an appearance of grave studiousness.

What few people knew was that Ellis’ boyish face was deceiving. He had been toughened in a hard school of experience. He had survived a bullet through his chest leading a platoon into battle on Okinawa in World War II, and he had been with the first contingent going into Korea at the end of the war when no one was quite certain whether the Japanese were going to surrender or make a fight for it. He had returned home in 1946 to pick up his interrupted career as a Customs agent and had earned a reputation as one of the hardest-driving men in the field.

One lesson he had learned well was that no agent could operate successfully without reliable sources of information. That was why he waited patiently on this hot day to hear what it was that his tipster had on his mind. He had been at the rendezvous point only a few minutes when a car drove up beside his own and a Mexican got out, entered his car and began talking rapidly.

The Mexican was one of the key figures in a network of informers which the Customs agents had organized south of the border to help combat the smuggling of heroin and marihuana. The informers were a part, or on the fringe, of the Mexican underworld. They cooperated with the American agents for one reason only--U.S. dollars. If the information they provided resulted in the arrest and conviction of a smuggler, along with the seizure of the contraband, they were paid for the information from a special Customs contingency fund. In the case of marihuana, the payment was $5 for each pound of the weed, _cannabis sativa_, which was seized.

Ellis talked with his informant for perhaps thirty minutes. After the man returned to his car and drove away, Ellis headed back to the courthouse.

As he entered his office, an agent asked, “What was it all about?”

Ellis said, “My man tells me Muno Pena has a big marihuana deal going--one of the biggest. He’s getting ready to send a million dollars’ worth of the weed across the border--and we’ve got to stop it.”

The agent gave a low whistle. “So Muno Pena’s at it again. I thought he had had enough.”

“His kind never give up,” Ellis said.

At the end of World War II, Pancho Trevino had been the kingpin in the Mexican marihuana and narcotics traffic, operating out of Nuevo Laredo. Muno Pena was a competitor but on a fairly small scale until, in 1952, the Mexican government got on Trevino’s trail and threw him in jail. With Trevino behind bars, Muno Pena moved to the top. Pena remained on his home grounds in Mexico and never ventured north of the border. He had a highly organized syndicate and lieutenants who carried out his orders in the United States.

Ellis first ran into the Pena syndicate’s operations in 1955 when he was transferred to Houston, Texas, and went to work to break up a marihuana smuggling ring which included a former Houston police officer. After weeks of collecting evidence during days and nights of tailing suspects and checking records of tourist courts, hotels and telephone calls, Ellis and his colleagues had pieced together a case against the smuggling ring. In a Christmas-night raid they seized 75 grams of heroin, and in two other raids seized 250 pounds of marihuana. Eleven men and women were arrested and convicted in this operation, which was one of the biggest roundups ever made by Customs officers in the Southwest.

The Houston raids had hurt Pena badly, but now he was back on the scene with a scheme to make a quick fortune--if the tipster who had called Ellis knew what he was talking about. Ellis was reasonably certain the information was correct.

According to the Mexican informant, Pena had gone to the farmers in the Monterey district south of Nuevo Laredo and purchased their entire crop of marihuana, a ton of the stuff. He had brought it to his ranch near Nuevo Laredo and processed it in one of the adobe sheds on the place.

Trusted workers had placed armfuls of the dry weed on fine-mesh screens and rubbed it by hand. The fragments of leaves filtered through the screens onto sheets, leaving on the screens only the rough stems which later were burned. The fragmented leaves, as fine as cigarette tobacco, were carefully weighed into one-pound lots. Each lot was placed in a paper bag, which in turn was placed inside a plastic container and sealed with strips of adhesive tape. Then the plastic bags, in lots of thirty, were placed in cotton sugar sacks and stacked in a shed to await shipment. Now Pena was working on a deal to ship the entire lot to a distributor somewhere in the vicinity of Chicago. He had decided not to parcel out the processed marihuana in small amounts to buyers from the United States. Instead, he was going to bypass the middlemen and take the lion’s share of the profits himself.

Ellis knew that a ton of “wheat” (the underworld term for marihuana) would produce about 1,000 pounds of the narcotic weed suitable for rolling into cigarettes. A pound of marihuana would make approximately 1,000 cigarettes. This meant that the retail value of Pena’s shipment would run somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Never before had so bold a scheme been attempted in marihuana smuggling.

The important element missing in the informant’s information was how and when Pena planned to move the marihuana. Ellis had sent his man back to Nuevo Laredo to get this information if possible. Without these facts, Pena held the upper hand. Ellis had only fifteen agents to cover the 400 miles of border in his district--and there were thousands of places where marihuana might be smuggled across the river.

This time the tipster ran into a blank wall. He learned that the sacks of marihuana were still stacked in the shed on Pena’s ranch. But that was all he could learn, except that in the past Pena had smuggled shipments of marihuana across the Rio Grande at a bend in the river about five miles upstream from the little West Texas town of San Ygnacio. When the water was low, the carriers were able to walk across the stream. If the river rose from sudden rainfalls, the marihuana was floated across the river on inflated inner tubes or on inflated rubber boats. In each case, an automobile was waiting at a designated spot to receive the contraband.

Ellis ordered a continuous surveillance of the river bend. For more than three months agents kept watch in relays, hiding in the mesquite near a small roadside park on top of a hill overlooking the sweep of the river. But the watches were fruitless. Each time Ellis inquired about the sacks of marihuana at Pena’s ranch, he was told they were still there.

In December, Ellis was reading the routine reports from New York of marihuana seizures that had been made in the city. These reports were circulated periodically to all agents-in-charge throughout the United States. There seemed to be nothing unusual in this particular batch of reports until Ellis came across an account of the arrest of one Wilfredo Fernandez, who had been caught with 16 pounds of marihuana in his possession. The line which drew his attention said that the marihuana was packed in one-pound lots in paper sacks which had been enclosed in plastic and sealed with adhesive tape. Ellis sensed that, somehow, Muno Pena had outwitted him, and the very thought enraged him. He sent a message to New York for more information on the arrest of Fernandez and where he had obtained the marihuana.

Fernandez, it developed, had been arrested in November for possession of cocaine. When his apartment was searched, agents came across the packaged marihuana. Fernandez sullenly admitted that he had bought it in Chicago from a dealer he knew only as “The Lawyer.” The Lawyer had taken him out on Lawrence Avenue, where they had met a man who appeared to be a Mexican, driving a stake truck with a green body. The Mexican had taken the marihuana from a large cotton sack--and then driven away. He had never seen the Mexican before and didn’t know where he lived.

“He was a skinny fellow about five feet eight tall, and he had black hair and a pale complexion,” Fernandez said. “That’s all I know.”

Ellis knew in his heart that this marihuana had come from Pena. And later he was to learn how cleverly Pena had outwitted him. Pena had stacked the sacks of processed marihuana in the shed on his ranch where any of the workers could see them as they passed by. But what the workers didn’t know was that one night Pena had removed the marihuana to a hiding place known only to himself and substituted other sugar sacks which looked identical.

One night Pena had taken the sacks to the river, where he met a confederate. They had carried the sacks across the river to the highway where the confederate had hidden his automobile, to which was attached a U-Drive-It trailer. The marihuana was stacked in the trailer and then covered with a mattress, a set of bed springs and a few household articles. These were lashed down with a tarpaulin over them--and then the driver headed north. To all outward appearances, he was a worker moving with his household goods from one job to another.

Ellis asked Chicago Customs agents to check on long distance telephone calls made in November by The Lawyer. And within a few days he received a list of names ranging from barkeeps to uncles, aunts, and cousins, horse track bookies, and pool parlor operators.

Meanwhile, agents in Laredo had been checking on Pena’s associates and on his family. They made a list of everyone known to have any connection, even casually, with Muno Pena.

It was when Ellis checked these two lists of names that he found there was one name which appeared on both lists. The name was Isuaro Garza. The agents’ information was that Garza was married to Muno Pena’s sister. Mrs. Garza and her three children lived in Laredo and maintained a home there. But Garza, for some months, had been living on the outskirts of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Occasionally Mrs. Garza and the children would drive north to spend a few days with Garza. They never stayed for long and always returned to their Laredo home. No one seemed to know what Garza was doing in Kenosha.

Ellis thought he knew what Garza was doing there. He was certain that Garza was the man from whom The Lawyer had obtained the marihuana--and that Garza was Pena’s man, making deliveries in Chicago from the 1,000 pounds of marihuana smuggled across the Rio Grande.

Ellis was so positive of this connection that he appealed to Washington for permission to take six agents from the Laredo office--men long accustomed to working on this type of case--for an investigation of Garza. But headquarters was in the midst of an economy wave. Ellis was told that funds were tight and that it would be impossible for him to take six men from Laredo on an uncertain mission. However, he was given authority to go to Kenosha himself and to take along one aide. If he could make a case against Garza within ten days, well and good. But at the end of ten days he must return at once to his post in Laredo.

Ellis chose Agent G. L. Latimer to accompany him. The two set out for Kenosha, driving day and night, through a snow storm which was sweeping the Middle West. They located Garza’s home. He was living in a small white frame house just outside the northern edge of the town.

“There were two or three feet of snow on the ground,” Ellis recalls, “and it looked like we were going to have to stake out the place by living in sleeping bags. But there was a motel nearby which was closed for the winter. We got permission from the owner to slip into the court from which we could see Garza’s house. We were sure he was our man--but we wanted to know who was calling for the marihuana and where it was hidden. We wanted to catch the whole apparatus if possible. So day and night we watched Garza’s house.”

Occasionally Garza would leave the house for a trip to the grocery store, to go to a movie, or to visit in the city. The agents were unable to detect him making any deliveries. But on the tenth day--the last day of grace for Ellis and Latimer to be away from their Laredo posts--a car drove up to the white frame house. A man entered and shortly came out carrying a package which he stowed in his automobile. When he had driven a short distance from Garza’s home, he was halted. Ellis found the package filled with marihuana. It was in a paper sack enclosed in plastic and taped with adhesive.

With this evidence, a search warrant was obtained and the agents advanced on Garza’s house. It was nearing midnight when Ellis knocked at the door. A light came on and then the door was opened and a voice said, “Who is it? What do you want?”

Ellis shoved the door open, revealing a skinny Mexican standing in his long-handled underwear, shivering from the cold.

“We are U.S. Customs agents,” Ellis said. “We have a warrant to search this place.”

Isauro Garza submitted meekly. A loaded pistol lay on a table near his bed, but he gave no resistance. The agents found 720 one-pound sacks of marihuana hidden in closets and in the attic--the largest haul of marihuana ever to be made in the United States. Its retail value was $720,000.

Garza feigned surprise over the discovery of the marihuana. He told officers he “had no idea what was in the sacks.” He said a man named Tony called at his home one day and left a truckload of sacks. Tony asked him to keep them for him. Another fellow named Pepe came from Chicago three or four times. “He picked up some of the stuff and gave me $600 for rent and expenses--but I didn’t know what it was all about,” Garza said.

A jury thought otherwise. Garza was sent to prison for five years. And Muno Pena? He had lost another round to Dave Ellis, but he continued his operations on a smaller scale. Customs agents are waiting for the day when he places one foot across the border--and then he’ll be out of circulation for quite a while.

11

A DIRTY BUSINESS

A cunning and ruthless hoodlum, two crooked Customs employees, two Greek narcotics peddlers in Shanghai and a supporting cast of killers, goons and dupes formed one of the greatest narcotics syndicates the United States has ever known. Over a span of less than two years in 1936–1937, this gang smuggled into the country narcotics believed by Customs agents to have had a retail value of at least $10 million. Their system was so simple that it was almost foolproof. Almost ... but not quite.

The prime mover in this profitable operation was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter--a name which perhaps doesn’t mean much to the younger generation. But in the prohibition era and the years of the depression, Lepke built a fantastic financial empire on a foundation of terror, violence and murder combined with a genius for organizing. He was, in many respects, more powerful and more successful than “Scarface” Al Capone and dozens of other hoodlums of the times who were more publicized in the nation’s press.

Louis Lepke Buchalter rose to power in the shadow of the Jazz Age, the era which evokes sentimental memories for so many Americans. But Lepke’s world was about as sentimental as a tommygun.

He was a small, slender man--5 feet 7--with a dark complexion and black hair which he parted on the side. He was soft-spoken and seemingly humble in manner. He had large brown eyes that appeared as soft and gentle as the eyes of a fawn. But his eyes only masked the evil in this man who schemed and killed until he ranked at the top of the list of U.S. criminals.

By all odds, Lepke was the most brilliant--and the most dangerous--of the criminals. It was Lepke who showed the underworld how to infiltrate and take over control of labor unions, and how to become silent partners in the management of industries. It was Lepke who put murder on a wholesale basis with an organization that became known as Murder, Inc. It was Lepke who found the chink in the U.S. Customs Bureau’s defenses against narcotics smuggling--and who made narcotics smuggling almost a pleasant pastime.

Lepke is worth at least a footnote in any history of our times because he symbolized an era of graft, corruption and violence the likes of which the nation had never known before. He was born on February 6, 1897, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one of a family of eleven children. The family lived in shattering confusion in a small, crowded apartment over the hardware store owned by the father, Barnet Buchalter.

Lepke’s mother called him “Lepkeleh,” the Jewish diminutive for “Little Louis,” and his friends shortened the nickname to Lepke. He was not a bad student in grade school. But he quit school after finishing the eighth grade and for a time worked as a delivery boy at $3 a week.

His father died when he was thirteen. The family broke up and scattered. The other ten children went on to become respectable, useful citizens. But not “Little Louis.” He rented a furnished room on the East Side and turned to crime. He organized raids on pushcart peddlers, stole from lofts, picked pockets, and lived by his wits. He was sent to the reformatory and to prison for short terms for larceny, but he always returned to the old life. He had ambitions to become a big shot in New York’s underworld.

In the early 1920s, Lepke joined an East Side mob headed by “Little Augie” Orgen. But while most of the underworld scrambled to satisfy the country’s unquenchable thirst for bootleg whiskey, Lepke convinced Little Augie that it was safer, smarter and more profitable to specialize in labor racketeering and in selling “protection” to businessmen.

If an employer was having trouble with strikers, Lepke would see to it that the recalcitrant workers were beaten up by his goons and that peace was restored at no increase in wages. If union leaders were having trouble with rank-and-file members, Lepke’s strong-arm squad would bring the rebels back into line with beatings and threats against the men’s families.

Other mobs sold such services on a flat-fee basis. But not Lepke. When his men were hired to put down a union revolt, they remained as members and then slowly muscled their way into the management of the union. The members’ dues were increased to pay for the services rendered.

Businessmen who hired Lepke’s strike-breaking services were ordered to buy the protection on a continuing basis. If they refused, a bomb would be hurled through a window to wreck a plant or a shop. Acid would be thrown onto merchandise, or someone’s face would be splashed with acid as he walked from his place of business to his home.

Those who capitulated--and most of them did--soon found Lepke’s men demanding a voice in management, even to the dictation of contracts (from which they received a kickback) and the placement of a man in the business office to keep a check on the money.

Little Augie was pleased with Lepke’s organizing brilliance and the profits that were rolling in. But the word got around that he didn’t like Lepke’s growing strength in the organization, where he was known as “The Judge” and “Judge Louis.”

Little Augie’s irritation was short-lived. On October 16, 1927, as he stood in a doorway at 103 Norfolk Street talking with his young bodyguard, a sedan suddenly swerved to the curb. A voice called, “Hey, Little Augie!” As the gang chief turned, a burst of machinegun fire cut him down. His wounded bodyguard was identified by police as John Diamond--later to become better known as Jack “Legs” Diamond.

The underworld hummed with the story that Little Augie had fallen victim to Lepke’s ambition. On the basis of an informer’s tip, police picked up Lepke, “Gurrah Jake” Shapiro and “Little Hymie” Holtz and charged them with murder. But no one could prove anything and the case soon was dropped.

With Little Augie out of the way, Lepke set to work to consolidate his empire. He moved more solidly into the leather, baking, garment, fur and transportation industries. At the peak of his power, Lepke personally directed some 250 criminal operations. He rode about New York in a limousine with a liveried chauffeur. He had a staff of 300 men looking after his affairs, plus an assortment of accountants, bookkeepers, gunmen, strong-arm men, and experts in such matters as acid-throwing.

He also put murder on a cash-and-carry basis. If a member of the mob became careless or talked too much, he was executed summarily. Dangerous witnesses were ordered to leave the state under the threat of death--and if they refused to obey, they were killed.

Oddly enough, even at the height of his power, Lepke was virtually an unknown in New York and throughout the country. While other hoodlums gained the headlines, Lepke remained in the shadows with few people realizing the extent of his empire, whose earnings have been estimated at more than $50 million a year. Nor was it known for twelve years--1927 until 1939--that Lepke alone had ordered the deaths of from sixty to eighty men whom he considered a threat to his own safety and prosperity.

By 1933, however, the operations of Lepke and other racketeers had aroused such popular indignation that the U.S. government moved against them. In November of that year a Federal grand jury indicted Lepke on two counts of violating the antitrust laws through his domination of the rabbit-fur-dressing industry. He was arrested and released on bail. He returned home to his wife and adopted son to continue operations as usual while the wheels of justice turned slowly.

It was during this period that another opportunity came to Lepke quite unexpectedly. Three hoodlums--Jack Katzenberg, Jake Lvovsky, and Sam Gross--were allied with other gangsters in the operation of an illicit chemical plant in Newark, New Jersey. The gang was smuggling opium into the country, taking it to the plant and extracting morphine from the opium, to be sold at wholesale across the country. This business was wiped out on February 25, 1935, when an explosion destroyed the chemical plant.

Katzenberg, Lvovsky, and Gross had found the narcotics business too profitable to give up. They began looking around for other ways to get back into the business, and they decided to talk the problem over with Lepke. A mutual friend brought them together in his apartment, where they discussed setting up an international organization which would obtain narcotics in Shanghai and smuggle them into the United States. The sale of narcotics was to be put on the same efficient basis as the sale of murder.

The major stumbling block to the plan was the U.S. Customs. It would be relatively simple to obtain heroin in Shanghai and to bring it as far as the port of New York. The problem was how to smuggle it past the Customs inspectors on a continuing basis that would guarantee a steady supply with a minimum risk.

Lepke was a firm believer in the adage that every man has his price--and he was certain he would have no difficulty in finding someone whose price was reasonable and who would cooperate with the syndicate. This direct approach had always worked in the past and Lepke had no reason to change tactics now.

One of Lepke’s first moves was to investigate the Customs procedures at the New York pier. He found that when vessels arrived at the Port of New York, the passengers’ baggage and trunks were brought to the pier for examination. And when they had been examined, a Customs inspector affixed a colored stamp on each piece of luggage. Once the stamps were affixed, the luggage could be removed from the pier and placed in a taxi or in a truck to be carted away.

Lepke saw that the stamps were the key to his problem. If he could find a Customs employee who would furnish him with the colored stickers, then a sticker could be affixed to a trunk or a suitcase containing narcotics and it would pass through Customs without an actual inspection.

Carefully, Lepke’s lieutenants made inquiries along the waterfront. At last they found their men, two guards who were willing--for a price of $1,000 a trip--to furnish Lepke and his men with the necessary stickers on the day that the narcotics carriers arrived. The price was cheaper than Lepke had expected.

With easy entry for the narcotics assured, Lepke arranged to obtain heroin from two Greek dealers in Shanghai.

This was the state of affairs when Jack Katzenberg made a trip to Brooklyn for a visit with his brother-in-law, Ben Schisoff, a balding, sad-eyed man with the face of a ferret. Ben and his wife Bella operated a Coney Island hot dog concession. They cleared about $1,500 to $2,000 in profit each season, enough to live on through the winter and to take care of the concession rental for the next season.

Katzenberg generously offered to send Ben on an all-expenses-paid trip around the world by luxury liner. All he asked in return was that Schisoff bring back two trunks from Shanghai. “You won’t even have to bother about looking after the trunks,” Katzenberg said, “because there’ll be somebody to do that for you. And when you get back I’ll have some money for you.”

Schisoff was confused. (At least that was the story he would tell Customs agents later.) Why would his brother-in-law suddenly wish to send him around the world with all expenses paid--and then give him money at the end of the trip? He knew his brother-in-law was in the rackets. He knew his reputation as a hoodlum. He also had heard all the rumors that Katzenberg was connected with the narcotics traffic even though he had managed to elude Federal officers. Schisoff told Katzenberg to give him a few days to think it over.

Schisoff finally sat down with his wife and said, “Listen, Bella, I want to go on a trip by myself. You go to Miami. You’ve worked hard and now you are entitled to share the money we have. I want to go alone. You know I am a nervous type of man and I want to go for a couple of months to recuperate. You can stay home or you can go to Miami or do whatever you please. How about it?”

But Bella was having none of this business of her husband taking a vacation alone. She loudly insisted that if he were going on a trip, then she was going with him. She wasn’t going to let him go gallivanting off by himself to get into God knows what sort of trouble. Her answer was “no!”

Schisoff reluctantly told Katzenberg that his sister insisted on going along. He expected his brother-in-law to call off the deal. But instead Katzenberg amiably agreed that both of them could go and that he would pay their expenses. And so on November 15, 1935, the couple boarded the SS _President Lincoln_ in San Francisco and set sail that day on their voyage around the world by way of Shanghai.

When the _President Lincoln_ arrived in Shanghai, Sam Gross was waiting at the pier to meet them. He introduced them to his two Greek companions and then took them to the Metropole Hotel, where he had made reservations for them. Sam said, “Now you two get a good rest. Everything is going all right.”

As Schisoff told the story later: “A few days later, Sam Gross tells me that he is going away for a week. He said to us, ‘Don’t walk too often in the street because it is not so good.’ I said, ‘All right. But what will I do if anything happens? Maybe I’ll get sick. I don’t know anybody around here.’ So he gave me an address. In case anything went wrong I should call that telephone number. I don’t remember the address and the number. It was a Greek fellow, named Jay, and his wife. Finally Sammy Gross puts a scare into me and tells me not to go into the streets.

“And so we stayed in the hotel until we got blue in the face. And so my wife finally says, ‘We have money. Why sit in the hotel? I want to do some shopping. Everything is so cheap here.’

“So we were sitting there about three days and then I called that number that Sam gives me and the wife answered. I told her about us. She answered, ‘All right, I’m going to send my chauffeur to bring you over....’ She treated us to a meal and we spent the afternoon there and then went home.

“Gross finally returned and said, ‘Listen, the ship is going to be here in a day or two. I’ll have two trunks for you to take with you. You don’t have to do anything. We will put the trunks on board for you and I will show you what to do when you are on the boat. You forget about the trunks. When you are about three days out of Marseilles, go to the purser and say that you want to have the trunks shipped across France to Cherbourg in transit. Then when you get to Marseilles, there’ll be somebody waiting for you to take care of everything. That way they don’t have to open the trunks when they go through France.’”

The Schisoffs had a gay Christmas party at the home of the Greeks, and four days later they boarded their ship and sailed from Shanghai. They were met in Marseilles by one of Lepke’s henchmen, who handled the trans-shipment of the trunks. Then the Schisoffs left the ship at Marseilles and went by train to Cherbourg to catch the SS _Majestic_ for New York.

Lepke’s man told them, “Don’t put those two trunks on your baggage declaration.”

Schisoff said, “How am I going to do it then?”

The hoodlum said, “You’ve got eight pieces of luggage of your own. You put down everything on the declaration that you bought but leave these two trunks out. They will be taken care of. Don’t you worry about that.”

Schisoff replied, “All right. Whatever you say is all right with me.”

On the night of February 4, 1936, the night before the _Majestic_ was to dock in New York, Jake Lvovsky and Jack Katzenberg registered at the Luxor Hotel in New York. A short time after they went to their rooms they were joined by two Customs guards, John McAdams and Al Hoffman. It was agreed that Lvovsky would meet McAdams and Hoffman at the pier the next morning before the _Majestic_ docked and they would turn over to him the stickers to be placed on the trunks brought in by the Schisoffs. The stickers were issued to the guards each morning and a new color was used each day. For that reason the delivery of the stickers had to be made at the pier.

Lvovsky arrived at the pier as the _Majestic_ was docking. He stopped and chatted casually with McAdams, who slipped him the stickers. When the baggage was unloaded, the Schisoffs’ trunks were sent to the section marked with the initial “S.” Schisoff pointed out the two trunks to Lvovsky, who walked over casually and sat down on a trunk to smoke a cigarette, as though waiting for an inspector to check the luggage. Unobtrusively he took one of the stickers and pasted it to the trunk. He moved to the other trunk, sat down, and pasted a sticker on that trunk. And then he strolled away.

A Customs inspector examined the Schisoffs’ suitcases, but he noted the trunks already had the inspection stickers on them so he permitted them to be carted off. They were loaded into taxis by Lvovsky and Katzenberg and hustled off to an unknown destination.

The system worked like a charm. Each time that Lvovsky notified the two Customs guards of an arrival of a “world traveller” the guards would arrange to be on duty at those hours so that they could obtain stickers and pass them on to Lvovsky. Six times the confederates of the gang made the trip safely from Shanghai without any inspection of the heroin-loaded trunks.

But Treasury agents were closing in on the gang. Narcotics agents, with aid from Customs agents, had opened an investigation of Lepke’s narcotics smuggling ring after an informant had squealed to Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger. The informant--whose name has never been disclosed--was a woman with revenge in her heart. Her boy friend--one of the Lepke mob--had been playing around with another woman and she wanted to get even with him for his infidelity. She gave Anslinger enough information, with facts that could be verified, to start the ball rolling. Bit by bit, the agents closed in on the gangsters. And they discovered by a close check of the stickers issued to all pier personnel that there was an irregularity in the stickers which had been issued to the guards McAdams and Hoffman.

As the agents began to put on the heat, underworld characters started to talk. Those “world travellers” who had helped bring narcotics into the country began to confess. Evidence mounted against the gang, and when the crackdown finally came, a total of thirty-one persons were involved. Lepke was indicted on ten counts of a conspiracy to smuggle narcotics into the United States.

At this time--December, 1937--Lepke was a fugitive. A little more than a year earlier he and Gurrah Jake Shapiro had been convicted on the antitrust charges brought against them four years earlier. They had been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,000. But Lepke appealed. He was released under $3,000 bail and immediately went into hiding.

For almost two years Lepke’s pals hid him from the law. He lived for a time in the old Oriental Dance Hall on Coney Island. Then, twenty pounds heavier and wearing a mustache, he moved to a flat in Brooklyn. Later he occupied a house in Flatbush, posing as the paralyzed husband of a Mrs. Walker. All this time he continued directing the affairs of his criminal organization.

But now, in 1939, the search for Lepke had become the most intense manhunt the country had seen in years. The Federal government wanted him on the narcotics charges growing out of his syndicate operations. And he was the No. 1 man on the most-wanted list of New York’s District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, who then was opening his first bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. Among other things, Dewey was certain he could pin a murder charge on Lepke--who now had “dead or alive” rewards on his head totalling $50,000.