[CTRL] [12] The Great Heroin Coup

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism
Henrik Kruger
Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980
Box 68 Astor Station
Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
--[12]--

TWELVE:
THE LIQUIDATION

With Christian David behind bars in Illinois' Marion prison, only one
important French narcotics ring remained active, and that was run by the
Francisci-Venturi mob. Their network consisted of such pillars of the
Marseilles underworld as Paul Mondolini, Jean-Baptiste Croce, Albert Bistoni
and, until mid-1972, Etienne Mosca. Intelligent, experienced gangsters who
left nothing to chance, they were considered untouchable. Mondolini, the most
highly respected of all, is considered Marcel Francisci's crown prince.

On 7 July 1972 Mosca was arrested in Lyons, stunning the entire French
underworld. Were the untouchables really to be hit? But when there was no
follow-up, all sighed in relief.

Lightning struck six months later on 19 January 1973. French narks shadowed
Croce and Bistoni to the Gondolier bar in Marseilles' old harbor quarter.
Both were arrested on the way out of the bar, police having blocked the main
road. Disbelief gave way to suspicion when Bistoni was released shortly
thereafter. Had he talked?

Croce's arrest proved to be the trigger for a desperate, ruthless gangland
war that measured up to prohibition Chicago. In the first half of 1973,
thirty French mobsters were murdered -primarily in Paris, Marseilles, and
Lyons.[1[

On March 31, Bistoni was at Marseilles' Tanagre restaurant with two of his
strongmen. The door opened and in walked three men, pistols drawn. Seconds
later Bistoni, his thugs and the restauranteur were goners. The killings were
common knowledge by the time police arrived.

Among the many sensational shootouts of early 1973, several were connected to
Christian David.

      Police fished a drifting trunk from the Seine on 28 July 1973. Inside
was the corpse of a man with bullets in his heart and neck. It was Andre
Condemine, the David gang's minister of transportation and its only member to
avoid arrest. Police investigation established he had been dead since
February. Perhaps Condemine had had something to do with the arrest of
Jean-Baptiste Croce. It was no secret that Condemine had sought to
reconstruct a Latin American narcotics network and had settled on Mexico,
Croce's territory.

Among David's other friends who were knocked off in those hectic months, the
first to go was Roger Dadoun. A former member of both Felix Lesca's gang and
the international gunrunning Mob David had joined upon arrival in Latin
America, Dadoun was shot down in the Paris suburb of Neuilly on 13 March
1973. Dadoun's best friend (and a close one of Beau Serge's as well) was
Louis Nesmoz. He had sheltered Georges Figon during the Ben Barka affair and
later helped the Orsini brothers smuggle heroin via Barcelona to David in
Brazil. Nesmoz avenged Dadoun's death by shooting Joel Arfoiulloux and
Raymond Elbaz in Paris's Clemence bistro on 7 April 1973.

Next it was Nesmoz' own turn to taste lead. On May 19, as he and two of his
men dined at the Gentilly restaurant in Paris, two men entered and shot the
three of them.

Yet another was killed on 15 June 1973. Jean Auge, the Lyons area SAC chief
and crime syndicate boss who had been in touch with Ricord in Paraguay and on
good terms with David, Nesmoz, and Dadoun, was found after a slow and painful
death with eight bullets in his stomach.[2]

While the gangsters were cutting each other down, the police were not exactly
on vacation. On 10 April 1973 the Marseilles and Paris forces teamed up on a
major drive that sent thirty mobsters behind bars.

The gang war subsided by mid-1973, but has never completely ended. With
heroin no longer a viable commodity, there are more pockets than can be
filled by other underworld operations, and so the murders continue at regular
intervals. The 1975 toll included gangland boss William Zemmour, who was
given a royal burial and escorted to his grave by anything able to walk,
creep, or crawl in the Parisian underworld.

Several big names resorted to untraditional means of survival. Francois
Chiappe, the David gang heavy stationed in Argentina, was arrested in
Cordoba. He was imprisoned in 1972, just as the rest of the gang was being
nabbed in Brazil. But Chiappe had excellent connections in right wing
Peronist circles. A former OAS Commando Delta member in Algeria, he had
remained in touch with other OAS figures assembled in the Paladin group, a
Fascist terrorist combine founded in Spain by the Nazi war criminal Colonel
Otto Skorzeny.[3] It was among the organizations to which Juan Peron's grey
eminence, Jose Lopez Rega, allied himself when he formed the dreaded
terrorist group, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA).

When the Peronist Hector Campora became president of Argentina in May 1973,
Chiappe was released and immediately recruited into the AAA. When Peron
himself returned a month later from eighteen years of exile in Spain, an
enormous crowd gathered at Ezeiza airport on June 20 to greet him. Among them
was a large contingent of Montoneros and other leftists. Security police were
well aware of their presence. Police and AAA terrorists led by Colonel Jorge
Osinde attacked the demonstrators with machine guns and hand grenades. Some
100 were killed and 300 were badly wounded. The AAA's prisoners were dragged
to the airport parking lot and tortured. Two of the more zealous hatchet men
were Chiappe and former OAS colonel Jean Gardes.[4]

On August 6, Chiappe's wife visited the Argentine prison commissioner on her
husband's behalf, to request that he be placed in protective confinement.[5]
Chiappe had gotten the jitters after the discovery of his friend Condemine in
the Seine. Besides, he was in constant danger of abduction by the Americans,
who had long been demanding his extradition. The prison commissioner
contacted the highest political authorities, and Buenos Aires' Villa Devote
prison soon opened its doors. There Chiappe led the same charmed life as
Auguste Ricord in Paraguay, and Fernand Legros in Brazil. His "cell" was
outfitted with elegant furniture, TV and a radio, and first class food was
brought in from town. Naturally he was "paroled" whenever Lopez Rega or
Isabel Peron threw a party, and the threat of extradition ended when the new
Argentine regime, on orders from Peron, said a final no to the United States.
Instead cooperation between the two countries took a different form. In May
1974 the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert C. Hill, and Lopez Rega
—with whom he had worked closely for years — publicly signed an agreement to
wage common war against the drug traffickers. At the signatory ceremony,
Lopez Rega declared that the drug war would automatically be an antiguerilla
campaign as well, under the rationale that the Montoneros were the real
traffickers. Pursuant to the agreement, the U.S. sent to Argentina a large
number of narcotics agents trained at the CIA's special school in
Georgetown.[6]

One year later, a report of Argentina military intelligence revealed a giant
narcotics network responsible for smuggling cocaine to the U.S. market. Its
leaders were none other than Lopez Rega; his son-in-law Raul Lastiri; Senator
Juan Carlos Cornejo; Robert Romero, managing editor of Argentina's largest
provincial newspaper, El Tribuno; and Colonels Osinde and Raul Lacabanne,
both of whom fled to safety in Paraguay.[7]

When a military coup deposed Isabel Peron, who had assumed the presidency on
the death of her husband, power was seized by General Jorge Videla, who
professed a strict, albeit selective, morality. He refused to harbor a
hardened criminal like Chiappe in spite of the many leftists he had disposed
of. In late April 1976 Videla extradited Chiappe to the U.S.A. to share the
fates of Ricord, David, Nicoli, and Pastou.[8]

Simultaneously with the 1972-73 attrition in French underworld ranks,
President Georges Pompidou took the opportunity to purge SAC of its
undesirables. Though it seemed as if SAC was being eliminated altogether,
such was not the case. No angel himself, Pompidou would call on the corps at
election time and whenever else he saw fit. But Pompidou did eliminate those
elements opposed to him personally, who had continued to make trouble for the
new regime. Some 7000 men were weeded out, many of them criminals who had enjo
yed SAC protection and now became easy marks for the police.

Many of the barbouzes booted from SAC fled to Spain to join the Paladin
group, where they learned to work side-by-side with their former arch
enemies, the OAS terrorists.

Not all SAC agents were as fortunate. Charles Lascorz, a charter member of
SAC and its chief for southeastern France, was among the many hunted down by
the police. Along with his SAC activities, he had also headed a large
smuggling and swindling mob comprised exclusively of SAC agents, as had his
colleague Jean Auge in Lyons.

Police tracked Lascorz; to a Paris apartment in early 1972 and sent two
officers to fetch him. Just how he did it is not known, but Lascorz managed
to lure them to a cellar and lock the door behind him. He then fled to Spain,
taking the SAC archives with him. But Spanish police arrested him on 23
January 1972 and put him in Carabanchel prison. They extradited him to France
two months later, but not before the Spanish intelligence agency DGS had
photocopied the archives. Lascorz; was sentenced in France to three years in
prison a4ong with eight of his SAC cohorts.

Between mid-1971 and mid-1973 the French espionage and underworlds suffered
staggering losses. A succession of untouchables bit the dust, most prominent
among them Joseph Orsini, Jo Cesari, Jo Attia, Georges Boucheseiche, Julien
le Ny, Pierre Dubail, Andre Condemine, Lucien Sarti, Albert Bistoni, Jean
Auge, Louis Nesmoz, and Roger Dadoun. Between forty and fifty gangsters
perished in the French heroin war during that interim, only two of them of
natural causes.

In addition, a horde of French heroin smugglers, the entire elite included,
was put behind bars. The big names were Auguste Ricord, Christian David,
Michel Nicoli, Roger Delouette, Andre Labay,[9] JeanBaptiste Croce, Jo
Signoli, Ange Simonpieri, Jean Claude Kella, Jean Orsini, Roch Orsini, Martin
Orsini, Laurent Fiocconi, Etienne Mosca, Marcel Boucan, and Richard Berdin.

A glance at French arrest figures reveals the magnitude of the slaughter of
the French heroin Mafia. Twenty-five traffickers were arrested in 1969-70. In
1971 alone the number was 26 and in 1972 it shot up to 108. With the
exception of a lone behind-the-scenes bankroller, all were active,
professional smugglers. An even greater number of French traffickers were
arrested in 1972 in the U.S. and elsewhere.

More than half the gangsters killed or imprisoned during those two fateful
years were connected to intelligence agencies SDECE and/or SAC. Whether or
not the two organizations had directly profited from heroin trafficking and
actually managed and financed part of it remains a subject of speculation.

Nearly all French narcotics syndicates then in existence were smashed beyond
recognition. Those that tried comebacks did not succeed very well. Dead or
imprisoned smugglers could be replaced with time. More serious was the
shortage of heroin labs in the aftermath of the great raids. The good
chemists, like the smugglers, were either deceased or behind bars.[10]
Moreover, French narcotics police placed an iron collar around Marseilles.
Their force increased by more than 1000 percent between 1970 and 1973, and
the French port became a stalking ground of U.S. narks.[11]

Equally disastrous, Turkey halted its illicit opium production by an
agreement with the U.S. which ensured the Turks compensation. In 1973, of
course, there were stocks of morphine base to be found in Turkey, Lebanon,
and Marseilles. However, the frequent seizure of heroin shipments had thinned
them out badly.

In 1970 Marseilles supplied roughly 80 percent of the heroin on the U.S.
market. Fifteen percent came from Mexico and only five percent from Southeast
Asia. By 1973 the French share had fallen below 50 percent, and in 1975 it
was estimated at less than 15 percent. From the law enforcement standpoint,
the French heroin Mafia was effectively crushed, and the U.S. narcotics
intelligence agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), considered
moving its European headquarters from Paris to Amsterdam.[12]

The French underworld and its more "respectable" bankrollers were deprived of
an annual income of some $150 million for a quantity of heroin which when cut
in the U.S. could bring a street price of $20 billion.

But did the supply of heroin to the international market really fall by an
amount equal to the French share? Did it fall at all?

Wasn't it true that pure heroin could only be produced in Marseilles and that
the world's drug habit would be largely relieved if only one could smash the
French and Turkish suppliers? Isn't that what Nixon told Pompidou?

Yes, but how often did Nixon tell the truth?

pps. 111-117

--[Notes]--

1. Various sources claim that some of these murders were "liquidations"
executed by a special "assassination squad" set up by the White House and led
by a former CIA agent, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein—see, for example, E.J. Epstein:
Agency of Fear (Putnam, 1977); J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978); and
chapter fifteen of this volume.

2. A fifth member of this circle, Didier Barone, was also involved in heroin
trafficking with both Jean Claude Kella and Christian David. What is
especially interesting about Barone is his connection to Fernand Legros, with
whom he was involved in art deals.

3. P. Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme Barbouzes (Alain Moreau, 1975).

4. Liberation, 19 July 1976.

5. L'Aurore, 31 May 1976.

6. Counterspy, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1976.

7. Latin America Political Report, 19 December 1975. 8. L'Aurore, 31 May 1976.

9. Andre Labay and Jo Signoli got thirty and twenty years respectively in a
Paris court on 7 December 1973.

10. The Long brothers were sentenced on 11 October 1973. Armand and Marcel
each got eighteen years and Louis got twelve. Another "lab-owner," Louis
Ambrosiono, was sentenced to twenty on November 30.

11. The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Pail (Souvenir Press, 1974).

12. John Cusack in Drug Enforcement, Spring, 1976. The last two major trials
of Corsicans were held in Marseilles. In July 1974, twenty-seven men and two
women were sentenced. They were the remnants of the Francisci empire run by
Jean-Baptiste Croce. Finally on 26 May 1977, eleven men were sentenced in
connection with the Marcel Boucan affair.
A key figure in the last-mentioned case was Laurent Fiocconi. With the aid of
a prison chaplain he fled from Manhattan's Federal House of Detention in 1974
together with six other major narcotics traffickers -Ernest Malizia, Enrique
Barrera, Gilbert Fornsztejn, Mario Perna, Nelson Garzia, and Amado Lopez.
Fiocconi was arrested in Bogota, Colombia in 1975 only to escape once more (Ne
w York Times, 14 April 1977).
The last of the Ricord organization to be arrested was Dominique Orsini. In
1975 he was tracked down in Senegal, Africa by DEA agents and brought back to
the U.S. On 12 April 1978 he was found murdered in his isolation cell in the
Federal pen in Atlanta (France Soir, 13 April 1978). Months earlier his
cellmate Vincent Papa had been murdered, as had their lawyer, Gino Gallina.
Like Orsini, Papa had been mixed up in The French Connection. He was the key
to the theft of 398 pounds of heroin from the New York City Police
Department's property room (Boston Globe, 10 August 1978). Orsini and Papa
had allegedly been negotiating with the FBI via Gallina for reduced sentences
in return for information (France Soir, 13 April 1978). Perhaps the
information concerned policemen involved in the theft. Ironically, all three
men were rubbed out shortly before the publication of P. Rosenberg and S.
Grasso's Point Blank (Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), in which Papa's name has
clearly been changed to "Larry Boston."
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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