The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine Read Free Book Online

million.” 18
    The FBN’s headquarters staff knew this about Adonis, but Katzenberg provided an astounding new insight into the relationship between Adonis, his Mafia and Jewish associates, and politicians in New York. According to Katzenberg, Adonis had used his political influence to ensure that Brooklyn policeman William O’Dwyer first became a magistrate, and then Brooklyn’s District Attorney. By 1941, O’Dwyer was a powerhouse in his own right and would successfully run as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, presumably with Mafia backing.
    Anslinger and Harney knew that O’Dwyer, while serving as DA, had investigated the murder of labor leader Joe Rosen. They knew that O’Dwyer’s informant in the case, Abe Reles, a professional hit man for Murder Incorporated (the joint Jewish–Mafia operation that sanctioned underworld murders nationwide) had named Katzenberg’s financier, Louis“Lepke” Buchalter, as having ordered Rosen’s murder. O’Dwyer indicted Buchalter for murder, of course, but what troubled Anslinger and Harney was that Reles had also named Joe Adonis, Willie Moretti, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegel, Frank Costello, and Albert Anastasia as Buchalter’s co-conspirators – and yet they were not indicted. In fact, when prosecutors in California sought Reles’s testimony in order to indict Siegel on murder charges, O’Dwyer declined to send him. 19
    Then on 12 November 1941, Reles (“the canary who couldn’t fly”) took a fatal fall from the sixth floor window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while under the protection of six policemen – all of whom had fallen asleep simultaneously. With no material witness to testify against Adonis and the other members of Murder Inc., the case against them evaporated. 20
    Bigger problems, however, were looming for the FBN, and two weeks after Reles was silenced, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the wholesale reorganization of American society and ushered in a more complicated phase in the FBN’s history. The exigencies of world war would turn Anslinger’s enemies into unwanted allies and would pervert the nature of drug law enforcement for a long time to come.
ANSLINGER’S ANTAGONISTS
    In 1930 the Mafia’s boss of bosses, Charles Luciano, and his Polish-born Jewish partner, Meyer Lansky, incorporated crime in America. As the organization’s financial manager and executive producer of vice, Lansky located and shielded investors in its various rackets and channeled mob profits into an assortment of legitimate business ventures, including Florida land deals, Mexican racetracks, and casinos in Cuba. A financial wizard and a government informant when it suited his purposes, Lansky was a seeker of the respectable façade. But he could never expunge from his lengthy rap sheet a Public Health Act charge for violating drug laws that he incurred in January 1929 with his partner since childhood, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. 21
    Lansky’s other boyhood friend, Charles Luciano, was born in Sicily in 1897 and arrived in New York in 1904. A fifth-grade dropout and compulsive gambler, his first arrest for heroin possession was in 1916. His second occurred in 1923, and this time he cooperated with New York Narcotics Division agent Joe Bransky and set up a rival gang member rather than face charges. Six years later, on a chilly October night, Lucianoearned his famous nickname. As related in
The Luciano Story
, a drug shipment from the Eliopoulos gang was headed for New York on a Greek ocean liner. Unaware that rivals had betrayed him, Luciano went to the pier to receive the load, but was tailed by Narcotics Division agents. He recognized the agents before the exchange was made and backed away, but the agents wanted to know where the drugs were hidden, so they took Luciano to a secluded spot on Staten Island where a brutal interrogation ensued.