-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- An excerpt from Of Grass and Snow Hank Messick�1979 Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13-630558-X 190pps. � First/only edition -- Out-of-print ----- 2 In law enforcement as in life, things are seldom what they seem. As the war on heroin continued, the younger men tended to see it as an exciting game of cops and robbers. Others bought the theory that H was a scourge and should be eliminated. Some others, men who had worked under Anslinger, were convinced drugs were but a weapon in the hands of the "International Communist Conspiracy." The story of Joaquim Him Gonzales, chief of air control at Panama's international airport, illustrates. BNDD became sure Him controlled the passage of narcotics through the airport and persuaded a Dallas grand jury to indict him. A softball game in the Canal Zone was arranged, and when Him arrived to watch the game on February 6, 1971, he was arrested and whisked away by air force jet to Texas, where he was convicted and sentenced to prison. In Washington everyone was happy. Some thought it a coup for Nixon, who needed the arrest of a foreign trafficker to give his international drug campaign credibility. Others felt it a victory against drug addiction. And a third group rejoiced because the episode almost wrecked negotiations for a new canal treaty. These men considered proposals for turning the canal over to Panama a communist plot. To wreck the proposed treaty was their goal, and if it could be done by turning the tables on an alleged narcotics trafficker, so much the better. Nixon's goal was, so everyone assumed, obvious. He had won election on a law-and-order platform. If he was to be reelected, then he had to have a track record of successful law enforcement. True enough. Yet a man may sometimes combine business and politics. The war on heroin scored again in 1971 when a new government in Turkey agreed to suspend poppy cultivation temporarily in return for compensation to the farmers. It cost the United States $35 million, but the episode was hailed as a great victory. Another blow at Grupo Frances was struck when Auguste Ricord was indicted by a grand jury in New York. He happened to be operating in Paraguay at the time. Police there arrested him, but insisted that extradition procedures must be followed. The man being hailed as the "international drug czar" had enough money and influence to stall all efforts to bring him to trial. One plan to kidnap him came to light and was frustrated. Finally, some seventeen months later, Nixon sent Nelson Gross, his Coordinator for International Narcotics Affairs, to Paraguay with a secret message to that nation's dictator. Whatever the message, it was effective. Ricord's extradition was suddenly approved, and on September 1, 1972, Ricord was flown by chartered jet to New York accompanied by ten guards, a doctor, and two nurses. Bond was promptly set at $1.5 million. Gross, a New Jersey politician, rejoiced. Ricord, he said, was "probably the highest-placed narcotics trafficker ever indicted . . . he's among the top ten or so in the world on a loose board of directors." A few months later Gross was indicted and convicted of conspiracy to bribe and tax evasion. His part in the great crusade was finished. Despite the victories, the reported number of addictions kept rising, as did the crime rate in general, and the President was unable to make the BNDD under Ingersoll go after the street pusher. Across the country, so-called task forces were set up, consisting of a few federal agents and a lot of local police. Their aim was to make street arrests and thus build the statistics Nixon needed for political purposes. One such task force in New York City was headed by a BNDD veteran of Eagle, Gerard Miller. None too happy to be in a crowded, crumbling Manhattan bossing a bunch of third-grade policemen, Miller didn't get overly excited when Detective Joseph Kowalsky, 130 Clarkson Street, reported he was suspicious of one of his neighbors, a black man named Matthews. A check of police files revealed only that Matthews had been a chicken thief in Durham. "That's about our speed," growled Miller. It was May 18, 1971, and the feds were finally on the trail of the man they would call "the black Lansky." Unable to resolve the conflicts between Customs and BNDD, impatient with the pace of the campaign against heroin, Nixon followed tradition by creating a new agency to achieve what the existing bureaucracy had failed to accomplish. On January 28, 1972, he issued an executive order creating ODALE�Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. Inspiration for ODALE was a memo written by Gordon Liddy, a memo Nixon called "brilliant." Details were worked out by John Ehrlichman, assistant to the President; Egil Krogh, assistant to Ehrlichman; and Myles Ambrose, head of Customs. Howard Hunt served as consultant. Ambrose, his eye still on the day when Hoover would die, became director of the new agency and special consultant to the President on narcotics. Moving swiftly against strong opposition from existing agencies, he drafted attorneys from Justice, investigators from BNDD and Customs, and special agents from the Intelligence Division of IRS. The CIA managed to halt an official transfer of some of its people, yet a number of ex-agents were recruited. Some of them resigned from the CIA to take the job. Financing was a problem until dummy organizations were created to accept phony grants from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and funnel the money to ODALE. At last the President had the man and the agency to go with his "no-knock" legislation. Yet the intriguers wanted more. Again, their motives may have been mixed. Officially, their purpose was to achieve better intelligence data about narcotics traffickers. Hunt suggested an Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI) be formed to act overseas, and he nominated an old friend to head it. Lucien "Three-fingered Louie" Conein was entirely willing, but the death of J. Edgar Hoover on May 2, 1972, delayed things and changed plans. When ONNI was finally created in August, William Sullivan, formerly an associate director of the FBI, was put in charge. Sullivan had worked closely with the White House on various "national security" matters and had been locked out of his FBI office by an angry Hoover. With the old man dead at last, Sullivan was counted upon to assume for ONNI some of the FBI's former duties in protecting the nation from its alleged internal enemies. Conein was assigned to the BNDD as "strategic intelligence officer" and told to take care of the overseas problems originally intended to be handled by ONNI. Later, the activity was formalized by the creation of a Special Operations Branch headed by Conein and, according to some government officials, designed to serve as an assassination bureau. The ultimate solution, so went the thinking, to the narcotics traffic was the murder of the narcotics traffickers. An interesting man was the mysterious Conein. Born in either Kansas or Corsica, take your choice, he joined the French Foreign Legion while still a teen-ager. When the United States entered World War II, he switched to the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. The Union Corse was happily fighting the Nazis as part of the Resistance. Conein worked with members of that blood brotherhood and, allegedly, was accepted into the secret society; he at least boasted of membership on many occasions. After the liberation of Paris, Conein parachuted into Vietnam to join an OSS team fighting the Japanese in that former French colony. There he met Ho Chi Minh and General Nguyen Giap. After the war ended he married a Vietnamese and became accepted by the business and political leaders of the divided nation. Ultimately the CIA was created, and Conein was retained as an agent. He was transferred to Washington, however, until 1954, when he returned as part of an elite counterinsurgency team under General Edward Lansdale. Another member of that team was Daniel Ellsberg of later Pentagon Papers fame. Conein was not the "Quiet American" type in Vietnam. H. R. Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, told of an episode involving Conein. When the jeep in which he was riding blew out a tire, Conein leaped from the vehicle, pulled his revolver, and shot out the other three tires. In 1963 a coup was organized in South Vietnam to over throw Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt President. Conein served as the conduit between the plotters and the State Department. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in cables to McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy's special assistant for national security, noted: "I have personally approved each meeting between General Don [one of the three main plotters] and Conein who has carried out my orders in each instance explicitly.... Conein, as you know, is a friend of some 18 years' standing with General Don, and General Don has expressed extreme reluctance to deal with anyone else. . . . In the event the coup aborts, or in the event Nhu has masterminded a provocation, I believe that our involvement to date through Conein is still within the realm of plausible denial. CAS [code for CIA] is perfectly prepared to have me disavow Conein at any time it may serve the national interest." Ultimately the coup came off as scheduled and Diem was shot. Years later in Washington, the enterprising Hunt decided the story of the fall of the Catholic President of Vietnam would be good political ammunition against Senator Edward Kennedy. The only problem was to find evidence to prove the death of Diem was approved in advance by President Kennedy. Apparently uncertain of Conein, Hunt arranged with the Secret Service to bug Ehrlichman's office. Conein was invited in and given a few drinks. He told his hosts what they wanted to hear, and Hunt was delighted. After Conein departed, the technicians came in to recover the tape recorder. Alas, it had been placed beneath a seat cushion in the very chair where Three-fingered Louie had made himself at home. An old hand was Conein; the recorder had been crushed and not a word retained. Unabashed, Hunt doctored some of the 1963 cables to make it appear that President Kennedy had been directly involved in the conspiracy. Conein then appeared on an NBC television show and discussed the contents of the fake cable. If he knew about Hunt's handiwork, he didn't say anything about it. Later the doctored cables were included in material given Acting FBI Director Pat Gray by John Dean. In obedience to what he understood to be instructions from Dean and Ehrlichman, Gray burned the files with his Christmas garbage. When disclosed, the affair was just one of the many Watergate "horror stories." In his new job with the drug agency, Conein was supposed to conduct "a clandestine law-enforcement" campaign, and, if the lack of confirmed details is evidence, he operated quietly enough. Of nineteen men assigned to him, fourteen were ex-CIA agents. In 1975 it was learned that fifty-three former CIA employees were still working for the DEA, twenty-six in intelligence and twenty-seven in enforcement. The CIA also provided millions of dollars in secret funds for the operation. No official report of the secret war has been made public and perhaps has not been written. unofficially, there are tales of plans for "hits" against heroin traffickers, kidnappings in Mexico and South America, and a plan to kill the President of Panama. The truth must necessarily await Conein's autobiography, and that must wait until he retires. A few years ago he boasted to a reporter that he still had four thousand women to screw. That brought an official investigation, and a reprimand from his boss. Whatever the methods, regardless of mixed motives and bureaucratic infighting, the supply of heroin began to dry up. Even Frank Matthews felt the pinch when BNDD agents in Miami intercepted 385 pounds of heroin early in January 1972. Eight Cuban "mules"�persons who transport the pay loads-were arrested. The H had an estimated street value of $76 million. Hailed as the largest seizure in American history, the Miami "bust" was big news from coast to coast, proof if it be needed that the administration was winning its war against heroin. Yet there were some curious aspects to the matter. No painstaking detective work gave the feds a line on the caper. An anonymous tipster put them on to it, and his or her motives remained unknown. There was apparently no investigation back along the pipeline to determine how the heroin got to South America and then to Miami. The connection to Matthews in New York was not made until later. Only "mules" were arrested, and they went free three months later when Federal District Judge Joe Eaton suppressed the evidence in the case. It appeared that the investigators had made unusually stupid errors in their excitement. For heroin seized at one location, the search warrant was faulty. The name of the agency seeking it had been omitted. For heroin seized at two other locations-one of which was at Miami International Airport-no search warrants were obtained. If someone had wanted the heroin seized but the pipeline left undamaged for possible future use, then that someone achieved his goal. In New York, meanwhile, Jerry Miller and his band of "street cops" got a break. Efforts to tail Matthews had failed repeatedly�the man simply drove like a demon and left expensive cars scattered around town as if they were but broken toys. One day, however, two detectives spotted Matthews in his latest Cadillac and managed to follow him to 101 East Fifty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. Suddenly the car stopped and Matthews leaped out. He was in a fine rage as up and down the block he spotted automobiles belonging to his men. Standing in the middle of the street, he screamed orders until the cars were manned and driven away. The detectives, watching from a safe distance, noted that the drivers of the cars soon returned on foot and entered the apartment house into which the still angry Matthews had vanished. Miller ordered the building watched on a regular basis, and it soon became apparent that it was the site of one of Matthews' major "mills," or factories. Each day as many as forty men and women would be bussed to the location to work an eight-hour shift "cutting" and "bagging" heroin and cocaine. The workers wore masks to avoid accidental snorts of the valuable white stuff, and they filled literally millions of small glassine bags. Investigation later revealed the building was a fortress, reinforced with concrete and steel and equipped with machine guns and even two elephant guns. Obviously, the danger feared was hijackers, since-it became all too apparent-Brooklyn cops were on Matthews' payroll. A second mill was found at 925 Prospect Place, Brooklyn, and it was just as fortified and just as busy as the first. Matthews had put the drug traffic on an assembly-line basis, and his only problem was keeping the machinery supplied with the raw materials. Meanwhile, he lived hugely, enjoying himself and making no effort to hide his wealth. On suitable occasions such as a championship fight he appeared dressed in a floor-length sable or mink coat with a leather safari suit beneath. He enrolled his children in Staten Island Academy, and built a colonial mansion complete with a heated swimming pool and gold-plated plumbing fixtures at 7 Buttonwood Road. Women, like cars, he scattered around town in plush apartments so that wherever he might be when the need for sex arose there was someone close at hand to provide relief. Frequent trips to Las Vegas broke the monotony, but whether he was gambling or "laundering" his money remained uncertain. To lose heavily at the tables has always been considered the mark of a successful man, and Matthews dropped $100,000 at a time and walked away smiling. Indeed, he was considered something of a soft touch where betting was concerned, but, again, he may have been losing as a matter of policy, much as some black numbers writers grow fingernails long to prove they don't have to do manual labor. Little progress was made in finding evidence against Matthews, however, until June 27, 1971, when Miller's group was given permission to tap the elusive black man's telephone. The recorded conversations provided so many leads the investigators scarcely had time to check them out. The scope of Matthews' operations was confirmed, as was the growing shortage of heroin. A trip to Caracas, Venezuela, in a desperate effort to develop new "connections" was made by Matthews in July, and he reported his Various successes in business and in bed by telephone when he returned. The crisis was not without its silver lining for Matthews, however, as one by one his few remaining competitors were forced out of business. BNDD claimed that in the year ending June 30, almost 400 kilos of heroin had been seized. Some got through, of course, and most of what did ended up in Matthews' mills. Indeed, an estimated 180 kilos confiscated by the New York Police Department was returned to the trade by detectives who understood the laws of supply and demand. Apparently fearing his time was running out, Matthews began converting his resources, largely real estate, into cash. When Miller's group learned of this, they renewed their investigative efforts. ODALE got into the act, apparently recognizing the publicity possibilities in an attack on Mr. Big. The two groups feuded awhile, but finally decided the pie was big enough for both. Certainly, Miller could use the seemingly inexhaustible funds available to Nixon's favorite drug buster, and Ambrose was clever enough to appreciate the leadership qualities exhibited by Miller. On September 15, 1972, armed with a search warrant, Miller's squad of New York cops raided the mill on Fifty-sixth Street. They waited until the hired hands had been bussed home, and then busted their way through steel doors with sledgehammers. No one was on guard. They found all the equipment needed for a giant cutting operation, including 2.5 million glassine bags. There were records, a small arsenal of automatic weapons, and a pillowcase with $148,000 in it. Small amounts of cocaine and heroin were found, but it was obvious the mill was running out of processing material. And now men began to talk. One of the first was the erstwhile boss of Durham, Babe Cameron. In trouble when one of his customers died of an overdose, Cameron blamed Peewee Matthews. His developing association with the forces of justice led eventually to a job as cook for the city jail. Well, after all, Matthews had got above his raising up there in New York, and who wants that kind of hassle? In Miami young members of the Cuban Mafia joined the chorus. Some talked to save their own skins; others saw an opportunity to substitute cocaine for heroin and thus end the need for Matthews. He had served in freeing them from the old mob, but in a time of transition things move rapidly and "the Man" was no longer so important. Matthews spent Christmas of 1972 at home with his family, his principal sport being the wrapping of stacks of money in brightly colored paper. On New Year's Day he was in Las Vegas with several suitcases of money and a new girl friend. Appropriately enough, it was in the never-never land of Vegas that the Cinderella story of Frank Matthews reached a climax. A crowd of agents, federal marshals, and policemen arrested him at the airport. Miller was on hand to enjoy his triumph. The affair was very civilized. Matthews remained calm throughout, expressing no surprise and exhibiting no fear. One got the impression the events of the day had long been anticipated. His bond was set at $5 million, but that was only temporary. Miller used the time it gained to persuade the IRS it should slap a $7 million tax hen on the prisoner. That, plus bond, would hold him, he reasoned. Back in New York a federal grand jury returned a flock of indictments against the twenty-nine-year-old man. Ultimately, he got his bond reduced to $2.5 million and then to $325,000. Businessmen in Durham supplied the collateral, and Matthews was released. Word reached Miller that Matthews was hard at work converting his remaining assets to cash. By July 1973 an estimated $20 million had been so converted. Still, few people paid attention as all efforts concentrated upon making cases against Matthews' top lieutenants. The supply of heroin reaching the cities of the East had dwindled and dwindled until it was hardly worth mentioning. It was time to proclaim victory. With the Imperial Presidency toppling about him, Nixon needed a victory. Ironically, the excesses of ODALE and the continuing infighting between Customs and BNDD were getting more publicity than the heroin shortage. The mood of the country had taken a sharp turn against police-state methods and in favor of civil rights. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, chairman of the Subcommittee on Reorganization, Research, and International Organizations, dedared on the floor of the Senate: "The rivalry between BNDD and Customs which, under controlled circumstances, might take the form of healthy competition and better detective work by each agency, instead has degenerated into uncontrolled bitter feuding and the actual sabotaging of each other's investigations. . . ." Ribicoff introduced a bill to turn over enforcement of drug laws to the FBI, explaining that the FBI's "expertise in combatting organized crime" was needed. Anslinger surely laughed out loud at that remark. Senator Jacob Javits got into the act with a new bill to set up one single agency in the Department of Justice to combat drugs. The FBI would not have responsibility, but the new agency would be expected "to draw upon the FBI's extensive expertise and resources." One drug official commented dryly and off the record: "The FBI couldn't find a whore in a whorehouse even with a credit card." But the legend lived on. La Cosa Nostra remained a handy villain on which the misdeeds of all ethnic groups could easily be blamed. The drive by Congress to reorganize the drug program was given a boost when the key defendants in Operation Eagle won freedom. Federal District Judge William 0. Mehrtens, who had carried a gun during the trials of Eagle cases, bitterly assailed Attorney General John Mitchell as on March 23, 1973, he threw out wiretap evidence against Mario Escandar and his buddies on the grounds the Justice Department had not complied with the law in securing court orders for the taps. Under the law any request for a tap was supposed to be authorized by the Attorney General or his designated assistant; Mitchell had refused to designate an assistant for the purpose, telling the press he wanted to maintain close control over all wiretapping. Judge Mehrtens ruled, however, that "the Justice Department fostered a procedure which included ghost-written, false, and misleading memoranda and letters." He continued: "Had the undersigned been the judge to whom these applications were made, and had the falsity of any one in the chain of authorization documents come to the Court's attention, there would have been no wiretap in this case; any wiretap which had already begun would have been terminated and the officials involved would have been called upon to answer to the Court. Can our citizens expect less of our courts when it is beyond rational dispute that similar false and misleading documents would be treated as nothing less than contempt of court?" The Eagle defendants were not alone, it developed. The same illegal procedure had been used in scores of cases against nearly fifteen hundred racketeers of all kinds. Another judge referred to the "Alice in Wonderland world of the Justice Department under Mitchell." Apologists for Mitchell later claimed that the Attorney General had been too busy playing politics to attend to routine duties of his office. Others noticed that once again the heroin was confiscated while the pipeline was left undisturbed: Had the wiretap procedure been installed as a safety valve, perhaps, to accommodate the persons controlling the developing cocaine business? It sounded incredible, but, privately, a lot of people in official positions began to wonder. With Mitchell facing indictment in the Watergate cover-up, however, his mishandling of his law-and-order duties didn't seem all that important. On March 28, 1973, five days after Mehrtens' ruling, Nixon formally submitted his own "Reorganization Plan Number Two" to Congress. It proposed the creation of a super-agency to be known as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). BNDD, ONNI, and ODALE were to be abolished. All functions of Customs relating to drug investigations and intelligence were to be transferred to DEA. To satisfy those congressmen who wanted to utilize the FBI, the new agency was placed in Justice under the Attorney General, who was "required" to coordinate "maximum cooperation" between the DEA and the FBI. Under the plan, personnel of the abolished agencies, some three thousand souls, would be shifted to the DEA. They would be reinforced by a contingent of five hundred special agents from Customs, which would retain only its power to interdict and thus would have no need for investigators. In practice, most of the Customs men were lower grade, less experienced, and�if the survivors are to be believed�less capable. Ambrose was given the job of organizing the new agency, but he was shrewd enough to realize he was too closely connected to a skidding President to have an immediate future in federal service. In any case, he retired. John R. Bartels, a protege of Henry Petersen, was appointed but proved unable to control the polyglot organization. When he quit in May 1975, a Washington lawyer, Henry Dogin, took the job. Dogin lasted six months and was replaced by Peter B. Bensinger, a handsome, affable politician from Illinois. Meanwhile, the professionals gradually pulled everything together, and DEA began taking on some of the prestige that once had cloaked the FBI. Not everyone was happy, however. A veteran Customs official posed this question in 1978: "What happens when an agency assigned to one law-enforcement function achieves its goal?" Put less politely, the question becomes: "Can an agency be expected to achieve success when success means the agency's reason for being has ceased to exist?" In a sense the question was moot. Ten years after Nixon was elected on a law-and-order platform, the flood of drugs into the United States was greater than ever. Emphasis had changed, of course, from heroin to grass and snow. As a footnote, it should be noted that on July 2, 1973�one day after the DEA became officially activated�Frank Matthews failed to show up as scheduled in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. He, along with a bodyguard, a mistress, and at least $20 million in cash, disappeared, and hasn't been seen since. Two years later many of Matthews' associates, including his aunt, were indicted in New York, but no deals were made, no secrets whispered. The whereabouts of America's first black super-criminal remained a mystery despite a $20,000 rewar�-the largest since Lepke�on his head. The men went to prison, but his aunt was acquitted and returned to Durham. Police spoke of her as a "great lady." Many things have changed in Durham since Frank Matthews was king of chicken thieves. In New York, black successors such as Nicky Barnes carried on, and gradually the heroin shortage eased. The big difference from the old days, however, was that cocaine had created a much larger market of its own. Nixon's war on drugs was a curious failure. Instead of saving America from narcotics, and Nixon from his political enemies, it had eliminated competition to the development of the Cuban Mafia and permitted cocaine to be smuggled into the country on a massive scale. pps. 28-39 ===== Heroin is known variously as boy, brown, caballo, Chinese red, chiva, crap, doojee, H, Harry, horse, junk, Mexican mud, scag, smack, and white lady. The Mexican variety is often called shitfrom both its color and its low grade of purity. The price of heroin depends on the supply, and increases dramatically at every step in the long journey from the poppy fields to the customer. The unit of measurement is the kilogram, which equals 2.2046 pounds. In 1965 farmers in Turkey were receiving $350 for ten kilos of raw opium. The buyers reduced the opium to one kilo of morphine base and sold it for $700. After processing in France to create heroin, the kilo was sold for $3,500. By the time it reached a wholesaler in New York the price was $18,000. It was then cut and recut, and divided into small packets containing five grains of 5 percent heroin. The packets sold on the street for $5 each, bringing the total value of the kilo on the retail level to $225,000. It is an unfortunate fact of life that the principal market for heroin has been, and remains, the black ghettos of America. just as some blacks have played the numbers racket in hopes of getting cash in their pockets, some also have used heroin to shut out the brutal squalor of ghetto life. For many decades they were exploited by white men, remaining a captive market for both the numbers racketeer and the dope pusher. In many large cities, but not all, the Mafia handled both numbers and drugs, rigging the one and adulterating the other, drawing millions in dimes, quarters, and dollars from the hopeless. During the days Luciano lived in Italy, it was easy to assume the Mafia controlled the flow of narcotics across the Atlantic. Perhaps it did, but things have changed on both wholesale and retail levels. On June 1, 1958, Charles de Gaulle, utilizing right-wing army forces in Algeria, averted civil war by a sudden coup which overthrew the Fourth Republic of France. Six months later, on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro's army sent assorted Cuban and American gangsters fleeing from Havana. On April 17, 1961, hopes of Cuban exiles were crushed at the Bay of Pigs, and one week later, de Gaulle defeated a right-wing rebellion in Algeria. As a result of these events, two things happened. French exiles made alliance with the Union Corse, an ancient secret society based on the island of Corsica, where Napoleon was born, and formed Grupo Frances. And in Latin America, Cuban exiles saw an opportunity to develop the cocaine business and the so-called Cuban Mafia was born. When the French Group began looking for an alternate route for heroin, bypassing the old Mafia, the Cubans were happy to cooperate. Credited with organizing the South American route was Auguste Joseph Ricord, born in Marseille in 1911. He became a petty crook as a juvenile, and grew up to become a minor punk. Released from jail when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, he served the Nazis as informant and collaborator. When the end of the Third Reich approached, Ricord fled to Argentina, where a lot of Nazi war criminals found homes. Ultimately he moved into prostitution and then into narcotics. Displaying unusual organizing ability, he persuaded local businessmen that smuggling should be a two-way street. For years the contraban dista had been flying to the United States to pick up loads of stolen goodies�cigarettes, liquor, electrical appliances, television sets-and smuggling them back to South American merchants. Why not carry heroin and cocaine when going up and thus make a double profit? The pilots, operating from hidden airstrips south of the border, knew the routes intimately, and the program was an instant success. The enterprising Ricord also established a route via Canada. New York City, once the port of entry for 90 percent of the heroin, was bypassed for delivery purposes, but the city on the Hudson remained the major market. Some of the people there decided, however, that if the French didn't need the Mafia to bring horse to America, the blacks didn't need any help in distributing it. pps. 23-24 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! 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