06-01-2014, 12:55 PM
Related threads:
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...d-Interpol
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-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
--[10]--
TEN
THE PURSUIT OF THE CORSICANS BEGINS
When Charles de Gaulle retired and Georges Pompidou was elected president of
France in 1969, improvement of Franco-American relations was high on
Pompidou's agenda. In early 1970 he flew to Washington. There he met with
President Nixon and, on several occasions, publicly cautioned against U.S.
withdrawal from Europe. Upon returning to France he went straight to work
eliminating the greatest obstacle to Franco-American partnership. He
appointed Alexandre de Marenches head of the SDECE and told him to clean it
up. De Marenches responded by firing 815 men throughout the intelligence
agency. He then chose Colonel Paul Ferrer alias Fournier as his right-hand
man, and the two began to reorganize.
Pompidou himself despised several longtime espionage figures, primarily
because of their role in a ruthless smear campaign waged against him prior to
the 1969 election. In the course of the campaign tampered photos were
circulated showing Madame Pompidou in the company of film star Alain Delon's
bodyguard, Stefan Markovic � who had been murdered in 1968�and in
compromising positions with men and women alike. Names that turned up
repeatedly throughout the scandal included Colonel Roger Barberot and SDECE
agents Captain Paul Santenac and Roger Delouette, three arch-Gallists from
Jacques Foccart's inner circle.[1] Santenac had promoted the presidential
candidacy of de Gaulle's son, Real Admiral Philippe de Gaulle, who eventually
refused the nomination. Barberot, who had returned from Uruguay in 1968 to
help smother the May student insurrection, directed the Bureau pour le
Developpement de la Production Agricole (BDPA), a front for Foccart's secret
financial transactions.[2]
Pompidou had to watch his step while eliminating powerful enemies because
most of them enjoyed the support of a large segment of the Gaullist party.
Still, with U.S. help, he used the next couple of years to choke off the
worst of the resistance. The SDECE was ordered to cooperate with the CIA; SAC
was cut back severely, the brunt borne by its criminal contingent; and the
Corsican Mafia's power was systematically reduced.
Foccart himself was too formidable to take on frontally. His economic power,
great influence, and dossiers on other politicians made him effectively
untouchable. Nevertheless, he apparently compromised and went along with
Pompidou on several counts.
Pompidou struck at the gangsters and shadier elements of the SDECE and SAC
through their most vulnerable point -their wallets. One subject Pompidou had
discussed with Nixon on his U.S. tour was the war on drugs. Nixon had
described the dimensions of the problem and asked for Pompidou's assistance
in stopping the heroin flow from Marseilles. Since it suited his plans
perfectly, Pompidou had agreed. Reducing the Corsican Mafia's profits would
also limit its political influence. But a project of that magnitude could not
be accomplished overnight. Preparations had to be made.
Had Pompidou suspected what really lay in store internationally, he would
certainly have had second thoughts. The, outcome of that pact slowly began to
emerge in 1970. In the two years that followed it struck home with the force
of an avalanche.
Auguste Ricord
On 18 October 1970 a Cessna four-seater landed at Miami International
airport. Registered in Argentina, the plane was one of hundreds of Paraguayan
"contrabandistas" smuggling goods to and from eighty landing strips in
Florida. U.S. customs agents, tipped off that the plane would be worth
inspecting, emerged from hiding as the pilot crawled from the cockpit.
"No bandito!" screamed the pilot, Cesar Bianchi.
But he was just that, as the agents discovered three cases containing a total
of forty-five kilos of heroin in the tail of the plane. To save his skin,
Bianchi agreed to cooperate. He continued on his normal route, but with
agents now on his tail. First he met his Miami contact, Felix Becker. Then
Bianchi, Becker and a third man, Aron Muravnik, flew to New York to meet
Pierre Gahou of the Ricord network, and finally the U.S. wholesalers.
By October 27 the heroin deal was closed and Gahou was about to fly to
Paraguay with the money. But before he could depart, agents moved in and
caught six men in their net. The catch was better than anticipated. Bianchi
shot off at the mouth like a machine-gun as wideeyed customs agents heard the
story of Ricord's elaborate narcotics ring.
In the ensuing four months stacks of proof were assembled against Ricord.
Finally, in March 1971 the United States demanded his extradition. But a
military plane dispatched to Asuncion for the gangster kingpin returned
without its prize. Paraguayan President Stroessner had decided that if Ricord
were imprisoned it would be in Paraguay. "El Viejo" Ricord was then set up in
a comfortable cell containing a spring mattress, radio and TV, and was
allowed visits any time night or day. Waiters brought food from his own
restaurant, and he continued managing his businesses in the quiet of prison.
Stroessner only capitulated in the summer of 1972 when the United States
threatened a sharp cutback in aid to Paraguay. On September 3, Ricord was
extradited. The man who put the pressure on Stroessner had been Henry
Kissinger. According to international spook Luis Gonzalez-Mata, himself a
party to the affair, the pressure began in late 1968, a year in which one of
Kissinger's friends also happened to be in Paraguay on a "weapons deal."[3]
The man was CIA. agent /double agent Fernand Legros, a close acquaintance of
several members of the Ricord gang.[4]
Roger Delouette
The case of Roger "French Connection" Delouette involved the greatest
international fireworks and was recreated in print and on screen.
On 5 April 1971 a U.S. customs agent discovered eighty-nine packets of heroin
hidden in a Volkswagen van on board the Atlantic Cognac, a freighter docked
in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. They contained forty-five kilos of the white
gold. Delouette was arrested that same day when he came for the car.
Under interrogation Delouette claimed to be working for French intelligence
agency SDECE, and that his journey with the heroin had been ordered by
Colonel Ferrer alias Fournier, de Marenches' righthand man in the SDECE.
Furthermore, he had been instructed to contact SDECE agent Donald McNabb, who
was working at the French consulate in New York.[5] While that was
sensational in itself, the scandal was far greater than press and public
could know. What really inflamed the Americans was that they had agreed with
French authorities to cooperate against narcotics trafficking, and a key link
was the supposedly reorganized and cooperative SDECE. If Delouette's story
were true, then the SDECE had not only broken its agreement, it had also
pulled the rug from under Pompidou, and much of the Americans' preliminary
work would have been wasted.
French Defense Minister Michel Debre, under whose auspices the SDECE
operated, officially denounced Delouette's claim as a fabrication. While he
admitted that Delouette had earlier taken on occasional assignments, he was
no longer attached to the SDECE.
The Americans subjected Delouette to two lie detector tests, both of which he
passed with honor. Prosecutor Herbert Stern's request to interrogate Fournier
was then refused. As for the French, their three-day investigation of
Fournier absolved him of all suspicion.
At this stage Delouette's past becomes of interest.
He began working for French intelligence in 1946 at age twenty-three. His
first assignment was keeping tabs on a Greek election, under the supervision
of Colonel Roger Barberot. Although their paths appeared to split, the two
stuck together. While Delouette remained with the SDECE, Barberot shuttled
about on various jobs according to the needs of de Gaulle and Foccart. They
were reunited in Algeria, with Delouette an agent and Barberot the leader of
the Black Commandos. They again crossed paths in the Central African
Republic, where Barberot served as French ambassador from 1961 to 1965. When
Barberot became the head of the BDPA after the May 1968 riots, he immediately
hired Delouette, who proceeded to marry his boss's secretary.
In the fall of 1968 Delouette and Barberot went on a mysterious trip to Cuba,
during which Delouette was approached by the SDECE and asked to become its
agent on the island. He agreed and remained an SDECE agent for nearly one
year, after which he and Barberot journeyed once again to Africa.[6] In late
1969 Delouette suddenly contacted the SDECE's Colonel Fournier to demand back
pay and request reinstatement. Both requests were filled.[7]
Following Delouette's arrest in the United States and official refutation of
his statement, Barberot surprisingly told Radio Luxembourg that he believed
the operation to have been led by Paris SDECE figures seeking to do away with
both Delouette and his troublesome past. The Americans evidently believed
Delouette and Barberot more than they did Defense Minister Debre and Colonel
Fournier. For a crime punishable by twenty years imprisonment, Delouette got
off with five.
At the close of 1972 a new chapter was added to the Delouette saga.
Claude-Andre Pastou of Christian David's Latin American organization was
arrested and began to sing for the CIA and U.S. narcotics agents. Pastou
claimed David had ordered him to New York at the beginning of April 1971. On
April 4 he was supposed to meet Roger Delouette at the Park Sheraton Hotel to
discuss Delouette's delivery of the forty-five kilos of heroin to Pastou, who
would then pass them on to the wholesalers.[8]
Pastou said he met Delouette as planned and that the two agreed on a delivery
the following evening. When Delouette, with good reason, ad not appear,
Pastou got the jitters and returned to Latin America.[9]
It's also possible that the above-mentioned forces were aware of the
Nixon-Pompidou narcotics agreement and saw their own financial stakes in jeopa
rdy. They might have sought to thwart its implementation by splitting the
SDECE and its CIA colleagues.
Finally, Fournier, who was "old school" SDECE, might also have been running
drugs and, therefore, not been keen on carrying through the policies of his
boss de Marenches.
Michel-Victor Mertz
On 5 July 1971 a Paris court sentenced two men to five years imprisonment for
trafficking in narcotics. They were Michel-Victor Mertz, fifty-one, and
Achilles Cecchini, forty-nine. Considering that since 1960 they had smuggled
some $3 billion (street value) worth of heroin into the U.S.A., their
sentences were mild to say the least. Moreover, their trial would never have
taken place had French authorities not been under intense American pressure
in the wake of Roger Delouette's expose.
Since 1961, in fact, U.S. authorities had known that Mertz and Cecchini were
smuggling large quantities into the country. Several times the U.S. had asked
the French to act, but to no avail. There were very special reasons for
French resistance.
Michel-Victor Mertz was born in the Mosel region's French community. In 1941
he was drafted into the German army. Two years later he deserted to join the
French resistance. A man who cherished no great love for the Germans, Mertz
soon became an underground legend as "Commandante Baptiste." His squad became
famous for its daring, Mertz himself killing 20 Gestapo agents, freeing 400
prisoners and escaping 4 times in all from the Axis powers.
In 1945 General de Gaulle awarded him the Legion of Honor, which was soon
joined by a Resistance medal and War Cross. Mertz was a hero. After the war
he entered French intelligence with the rank of captain and was stationed
abroad.
In 1960, while in the employ of the SDECE, Mertz began smuggling heroin from
France to the U.S. together with Achilles Cecchini, a Marseilles gangster
tied to the Francisci-Venturi clan. In 1961 the trade was interrupted when
nearly all of France's top gangsters joined de Gaulle's forces in Algeria.
Mertz was among them.
The SDECE sent him on a spy mission to infiltrate the OAS in Algeria. His
mission proved a great success, even though he was mistakenly arrested by his
own side and placed in a detention camp for OAS ringleaders in July 1961. On
July 14 SDECE chiefs were notified that Mertz had important information. He wa
s brought before Jacques Foccart himself. He informed Foccart that the OAS
was planning to blow up the president's car near Pont-sur-Seine, a bridge
across which de Gaulle was driven each day. Mertz was returned to the camp to
determine the exact time of assassination.
At the last moment he succeeded. De Gaulle's car drove over Pont-sur-Seine as
usual, but swerved into another lane, just as the bomb exploded in the lane
normally taken. De Gaulle owed Mertz his life. Following the mission, with
both the president and Foccart indebted to him, Mertz returned to the
trafficking of narcotics.
On 12 January 1962 he shipped an automobile to New York loaded with 100 kilos
of pure heroin. The procedure he followed was a standard one. A sheet-metal
worker opened up the chassis, placed the heroin beyond the scrutiny of
customs officials, and then rewelded the plates. The car was sent to the U.S.
under a fictitious name and picked up by a man with a forged passport in that
name.
Over the next eight or nine years Mertz and Cecchini operated without
interruption and bagged a huge fortune. Their bankroller, a man of high
standing, remained anonymous.
Through the years, Cecchini, like Mertz, had been of great service to the
Gaullist party, UDR, in the SO du RPF as well as SAC, which explains the
reluctance to prosecute them. Despite his five year sentence, Cecchini was
deemed too ill for imprisonment and remained a free man. Mertz first began
serving time in July 1972, but appears to have been secretly released shortly
thereafter.[10]
Ange Simonpieri
On 13 September 1971 the fifty-six year old Ange Simonpieri was arrested at a
private clinic in Ajaccio, Corsica, for smuggling large quantities of heroin
into the U.S. between 1960 and 1970. His partner in crime was the Swiss
banker Andre Hirsch.
Simonpieri had worked for both the SDECE and SAC. Like Christian David, he
had been a barbouze in Algeria directly under Pierre Lemarchand. He became so
close to Lemarchand that, as a local SAC leader, he managed the "physical"
part of Lemarchand's 1963 Parliamentary campaign. Because of his political
connections Simonpieri was known in his birthplace Corsica, and among
Marseilles gangsters, as "The Untouchable."
On 31 August 1967 the freighter Frederico C docked in Miami. Customs agent
John Wroth spotted a hunchback on his way down the gangplank. Finding the
hunch suspicious, Wroth slapped it and jokingly asked if it was a burden. The
man stiffened and sprang towards a taxi in which a sunglassed woman was
waiting. But the cabby refused to depart and Wroth nabbed the couple.
The man was the Swiss banker William Lambert and the woman was Josette Bauer,
an escapee from a Swiss prison where she had been serving time for murdering
her rich father. Customs agents discovered twelve kilos of heroin in
Lambert's hunchback and the couple was slapped with seven-year sentences by a
Miami court. Both claimed to be couriers for a Corsican known to them as
Monsieur Small. They were to have taken the heroin to Boston and handed it to
one Robert Mori of Switzerland. The trail led from Mori to the Swiss banker
Andre Hirsch, but U.S. narks lacked the evidence to nail him.
After this episode, Hirsch and his partner Monsieur Small started the
Panamanian Food and Chemical Company, which exported canned paella to the
U.S.A.�only some of the cans were filled with heroin. Hirsch was finally
trapped in 1969 when U.S. customs agents opened the wrong cans. He was
brought before a Geneva court, but it wasn't until 29 April 1971 that he was
sentenced to six and a half years in prison. On that day his lawyer, the
famous Raymond Nicolet, announced that Monsieur Small was the Corsican Ange
Simonpieri.
The court in Geneva had been pestering French police to question Simonpieri
since 1970, but had been told Simonpieri was in a clinic with a bad heart and
could not take the questioning. When Nicolet's assertion hit French
newsstands, Simonpieri was quickly readmitted into the Grandval clinic with
severe heart pains.
But Simonpieri's number was up. After four months of haggling, on 8 September
1971, with full press coverage, French Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin
ordered court-appointed doctors to examine the patient. Five days later
police put Simonpieri under arrest. In July 1972 a French court sentenced him
to five years imprisonment�a penalty, like those of Mertz and Cecchini, that
bore no relation to the crime. Hirsch and Simonpieri each got less time than
their hapless couriers, Lambert and Bauer.
Once again there was the scent of CIA agent Fernand Legros, an acquaintance
of the Hirsch family, who was seen with Madame Hirsch in Geneva after her
husband had been put away.[11]
Andre Labay
On Sunday, 26 September 1971 U.S. customs agents arrested the Frenchman
Richard Berdin on his way out of the Abbey Victoria Hotel on Fifty-First
Street in New York City. His arrest grew out of the discovery of eighty-two
kilos of heroin aboard the Italian liner Rafaello in New York harbor. Though
Berdin was a small fish in the drug ring they were tracking, the customs
agents had followed him for five days to several of his contacts.
In fact the arrest was a slip caused by fierce rivalry between agents of
customs and the BNDD. For half a year the BNDD had been cooperating with
French narks in search of Berdin's bankrollers and New York customers. Much
to the narks' chagrin, customs agents struck without warning their rivals.
However, luck was with customs. Weeks later Berdin, seeking a reduced
sentence, fingered a French all-star drug ring that included gangsters
Laurent Fiocconi, Jo Signoli, Jean-Claude Kella, Alexandre Salles, Jean
Dumerain, Felix Rosso, Jean Demeester, Raymond Moulin, Patrick Lorenz, Jacky
Martin, Francois Scapula, and Andre Andreani; plus U.S. mafiosi including
Louis Cirillo, Lorenco d'Aloisio, Frank Rappa, and Giuseppe Ciacomazzo.[12]
Their sentences ranged from five to twenty-five years, while Berdin got away
with three and served only one and a half. Today he's living in the U.S.A.
with a new name and a new face, but still fearful of underworld revenge.
On 5 October 1971 one Andre Labay visited the Paris BNDD office, said he was
working for the SDECE, and offered to help bring 100 kilos of heroin into the
United States. He would then make another trip with the same quantity and
lead the BNDD to the wholesalers. As the BNDD well knew, Labay was a
ringleader of the gang on which Berdin had stooled. After telling him to
return the next day, they phoned the French narcotics police. On October 6,
French police arrested Labay and three other heroin traffickers, and found
106 kilos of heroin in Labay's Volkswagen.
Why did Labay show up at the U.S. narcotics office, and what did he really
propose? There has been no lack of answers. Some say Labay was employed on
the same side as Delouette, by forces seeking either to discredit the new
SDECE leadership or to destroy the transAtlantic drug crusade. Others believe
the contrary � that Labay was a CIA-SDECE double agent made into a scapegoat
when Berdin sang.
Andre Labay had been another of Pierre Lemarchand's barboutes in Algeria. Not
known for his fighting, he was sent to spy behind OAS terrorist lines. In
late 1961 Jacques Foccart sent him to Kinshasa (in the Congo), the Ivory
Coast and Gabon. Back in France he immediately joined SAC as a fund-raiser.
For reasons unknown Labay began going his own route in the mid-sixties. With
his close friends, CIA agent Fernand Legros and Thierry de Bonnay, he had his
Ring in the international art trade. He got involved with a Belgian insurance
company that collapsed with $6 million in debts, and, like Legros, he also
produced several movies.
Labay and de Bonnay ran the Parisian hotel at which the Moroccan Colonel
Dlimi stayed in the aftermath of the Ben Barka affair. It was also the hotel
that doubled as a mercenary recruiting station for the Katangese army of
Moise Tshombe, whom the Labay/Legros/de Bonnay threesome helped abduct to
Algeria. And in his Geneva apartment, Labay once hid the Algerian
revolutionary, Belkassem Krim, who was later murdered. [13]
In 1968 Labay went to Haiti, where he made a small fortune from a factory. He
was often visited there by Legros, and the two became personal friends of the
Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Labay ingratiated himself with
Duvalier's daughter MarieDenise, leading some to suspect he was her lover. In
Haiti he served as an SDECE-CIA double agent. He stayed in close touch with
U.S. gangsters Joe Bonnano and Max Intrattor, and one of his Geneva contacts
was the Lansky syndicate's financial brain, John Pullman.[14]
Marcel Boucan
Late in the evening of 29 February 1972 the sixty-ton shrimpboat Caprice de Te
mps sailed out of the cozy harbor of Villefrance on France's Mediterranean
coast. The ship was registered in Guadeloupe. Its skipper was the
fifty-eight-year-old former parachutist Marcel Boucan, a Hemingway type in
more ways than one.
Boucan was a charming old soldier. Since the war he had smuggled alcohol and
cigarettes from Tangiers to France, and weapons the other way, first on board
l'Oiseau des Iles and later the Caprice de Temps. To strangers he was just
another shrimp fisherman. In fact, until 1957 he was the chairman of the
Cagnes fisherman's union, and was also an extraordinarily well-read and
clever man whose cabin featured the works of Kafka, Balzac, Camus, and Kant.
He was married to a woman from Guadeloupe and in his later years he often
sailed through the French West Indies.
As he was steaming out of Villefrance on 28 February 1972 the customs cruiser
Sirocco was leaving Nice. Hours later customs agents hailed down the Caprice
de Temps. Boucan ordered full steam ahead, but changed his mind when the Siroc
co fired a salvo. Aboard the shrimpboat the agents found 425 kilos of heroin,
the largest single shipment ever confiscated. The size of the load suggested
desperation among smugglers following the 1971 roundup of several narcotics
rings. The heroin had been destined for Santo Traffiicante, jr.'s
Florida-based Cuban Mob.[15]
Boucan was slapped with a fifteen-year sentence on 5 January 1973. His
courtroom arrogance and noble coolness irked judges so much, that his appeal
brought three more years. Such severity was unheard of in France. A dozen
Marseilles gangsters were also locked up in the aftermath. They were all from
the same circle of crooks that had participated in the Labay affair, which
made it likely that the men upstairs, who needless to say went untouched,
were also from the same political faction.
The Laboratories
In August 1971 John Cusack, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), declared in Paris that eight Marseilles heroin
laboratories, financed by influential backers, were operating with complete
immunity from prosecution. In return for his frankness Cusack became persona
non grata in France and was recalled to the U.S.A. But his words sank in.
Pressure was put on French authorities by the Americans, who wondered what
good it did to round up narcotics rings when the heroin production itself
went on unabated.
On 27 January 1972 French police stormed a heroin lab in Marseilles'
Montolivet quarter. The laboratory, which produced forty kilos of good
quality heroin each week, was run by Marius and MarieAntoinette Pastore.
Marius got fifteen years on 29 September 1972 while Marie-Antoinette got five.
On 16 March 1972 the police made an impressive arrest that broke the heart of
many a politician, bankroller, and cop. The catch was heroin's grand old man,
Jo Cesari, reputedly the best heroin chemist in the world.
Born in Bastia, Corsica in 1915, Cesari was first a sailor, then a grocer,
bartender, and farmer. In the early fifties he apprenticed himself to his
half-brother Dominique Albertini, the manager of several Marseilles heroin
labs. In 1962 Cesari purchased a luxurious Aubagne estate, La Roseraie, that
included an enormous mansion, a park, a swimming pool and a tennis court. No
one could figure out where the old sailor had gotten his money.
Cesari would leave his estate for long stretches of time. In 1964 narcotics
police shadowed him for several months, and converged on Clos Saint Antoine,
an abandoned estate where he had set up two heroin labs and put four
assistants to work. Police stormed the estate, arresting Cesari and his
staff. They also made an interesting discovery in one of the back rooms: the
nephew of Marcel Francisci.[16] Months earlier the boy's father, on an
unannounced trip back to Corsica, had discovered his wife with a lover, whom
he proceeded to shoot through the throat before returning to France with his
son Jean-Francois.
As head of the family, Marcel Francisci looked after his nephew. He placed
him under the wings of a Cesari laboratory worker and his wife. This is the
same Francisci who denies any involvement with heroin.
Cesari was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released a lot sooner.
As soon as he was out he returned to the synthesis of his favorite organic
compound, and consulted for several laboratories besides his own. His 1971
production was estimated at twenty kilos of heroin daily, which means large
lots were shipped to the United States. Cesari most probably produced the
huge cargos that, according to narcotics police, reached Miami via Marcel
Boucan and the Caprice de Temps.
In March 1972, as Cesari was setting up a lab in the Suzanne building in
Aubagne, police traced him through an assistant and arrested him. Their
prisoner was a haunched, sickly old figure, ruined by years of acid gas
inhalation. Cesari was only fifty-eight. On March 22 he hanged himself in his
Baumettes prison cell, overcome, no doubt, by the spectre of a long sentence.
He knew he'd never come out alive.
Cesari left behind letters making it clear he had planned to settle down in
Latin America and experiment with cocaine, most likely in partnership with
Christian David, whose ring survived as one of the larger remnants of the
once great French narcotics empire. Cesari's death was a hard blow to
Marseilles' heroin industry. No one could fill his shoes.[17] French and
American police alike tried in vain to duplicate his process for producing
pure heroin.
On 15 July 1972 French narks closed out a series of raids leading to the
closing of three labs, all belonging to the Long brothers.
A few days later President Nixon telegrammed congratulations to Pompidou for
the great strides he had made.
Marseilles has never been the same.
pps. 91-103
--[Notes]--
1. The same threesome turns up in several other circumstances, including
Barberot's mysterious trip to Cuba in 1968. He was joined then by Santenac,
Delouette and Gilbert Beaujolin, a well-known financier closely tied to
Jacques Foccart.
2. P. Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme Barbouzes (Alain Moreau, 1975). 3. L.
Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).
4. R. Peyrefitte: La Vie Extraordinaire de Fernand Legros (Albin Michel,
1976).
5. The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Trail (Souvenir Press, 1974).
6. P. Galante and L. Sapin: The Marseilles Mafia (W.H. Allen, 1979).
7. There is doubt as to whether Fournier ever knew Delouette was formally
readmitted into the SDECE. In 1972 Newsday reporters got hold of a 27 October
1969 letter from Defense Minister Debre to Colonel Barberot in which Debre,
vowing to take care of the matter, asked that Delouette's application and
demand not be discussed with other SDECE leaders.
8. A. Jaubert: Dossier D... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974).
9. If Pastou's testimony is correct, then Delouette lied about delivering
heroin to an SDECE agent named McNabb, and there's no truth to Colonel
Fournier's alleged involvement. What remains are one man's word against
anothers and several possible explanations. First, Fournier might not have
wanted Delouette back in the SDECE because he knew him to be Barberot's man
and, therefore, tied to forces purged from the SDECE. Fournier could also
have been pressured from above to rehire Delouette, and then seen the heroin
affair as an opportunity to get rid of him.
That seems rather farfetched, since SDECE narcotics network with the CIA and
BNDD was Pompidou's pet idea. Fournier would hardly have risked his job to
get rid of a single agent. Another possibility is that Barberot, or forces he
represents, welcomed the opportunity to compromise their opposition within
the SDECE -above all Fournier and chief-of-staff de Marenches. That Fournier
later made amends with the Americans is suggested by his opening a restaurant
in New York in 1978.
10. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.
11. Peyrefitte, op. cit.
12. R. Berdin: Code Name Richard (Dutton, 1974).
13. The exiled Algerian politician Belkassem Krim was a former leader of the
revolutionary movement, FLN. After Algeria won its independence, he came into
conflict with the country's first chief-of-state, Ahmed Ben Bella. Together
with the latter's minister of finance, Mohammed Khider, Krim fled Algeria,
while refusing to hand over the FLN's $20 million war chest to the Algerian
regime. Khider had deposited the money in his own name at Geneva's Banque
Commerciale Arabe, and only he and Krim knew the account number. On 3 January
1967 Khider was shot down in Madrid. Krim was murdered in a Frankfurt hotel
room on 20 October 1970. Both had been closely connected with Morocco's
interior minister Oufkir.
14. E. Gerdan: DossierA ... comme Armes (Alain Moreau, 1974). The Mafia's
activities in Cuba were controlled by Joe Bonnano, whose close partners today
in the so-called Southern Rim Mafia are Santo Trafficante, jr. and Carlos
Marcello. Labay was also closely tied to Intra-Bank founder Yussef Beidas.
15. Jaubert, op. cit.
16. L'Express, 14 October 1968.
17.1979 was the year of the rumor. Not only was Christian David alleged to be
back in France, it was also said that the old French Connection was about to
resume the shipment of heroin from Marseilles to the U.S.A. When the heroin
chemist Jacques Masia was arrested in August 1979, French newspapers went so
far as to speculate that he was a revitalized version of Jo Cesari himself!
The latter, it was explained, had not really committed suicide, but had been
"sheepdipped" and used as an undercover agent by the DEA and French narcotics
police (Politiken, 28 August 1979).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listse...29454.html
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...d-Interpol
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...nd-the-U-S
The Great Heroin Coup
Kris Millegan Mon, 22 Nov 1999 14:14:09 -0800-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
--[10]--
TEN
THE PURSUIT OF THE CORSICANS BEGINS
When Charles de Gaulle retired and Georges Pompidou was elected president of
France in 1969, improvement of Franco-American relations was high on
Pompidou's agenda. In early 1970 he flew to Washington. There he met with
President Nixon and, on several occasions, publicly cautioned against U.S.
withdrawal from Europe. Upon returning to France he went straight to work
eliminating the greatest obstacle to Franco-American partnership. He
appointed Alexandre de Marenches head of the SDECE and told him to clean it
up. De Marenches responded by firing 815 men throughout the intelligence
agency. He then chose Colonel Paul Ferrer alias Fournier as his right-hand
man, and the two began to reorganize.
Pompidou himself despised several longtime espionage figures, primarily
because of their role in a ruthless smear campaign waged against him prior to
the 1969 election. In the course of the campaign tampered photos were
circulated showing Madame Pompidou in the company of film star Alain Delon's
bodyguard, Stefan Markovic � who had been murdered in 1968�and in
compromising positions with men and women alike. Names that turned up
repeatedly throughout the scandal included Colonel Roger Barberot and SDECE
agents Captain Paul Santenac and Roger Delouette, three arch-Gallists from
Jacques Foccart's inner circle.[1] Santenac had promoted the presidential
candidacy of de Gaulle's son, Real Admiral Philippe de Gaulle, who eventually
refused the nomination. Barberot, who had returned from Uruguay in 1968 to
help smother the May student insurrection, directed the Bureau pour le
Developpement de la Production Agricole (BDPA), a front for Foccart's secret
financial transactions.[2]
Pompidou had to watch his step while eliminating powerful enemies because
most of them enjoyed the support of a large segment of the Gaullist party.
Still, with U.S. help, he used the next couple of years to choke off the
worst of the resistance. The SDECE was ordered to cooperate with the CIA; SAC
was cut back severely, the brunt borne by its criminal contingent; and the
Corsican Mafia's power was systematically reduced.
Foccart himself was too formidable to take on frontally. His economic power,
great influence, and dossiers on other politicians made him effectively
untouchable. Nevertheless, he apparently compromised and went along with
Pompidou on several counts.
Pompidou struck at the gangsters and shadier elements of the SDECE and SAC
through their most vulnerable point -their wallets. One subject Pompidou had
discussed with Nixon on his U.S. tour was the war on drugs. Nixon had
described the dimensions of the problem and asked for Pompidou's assistance
in stopping the heroin flow from Marseilles. Since it suited his plans
perfectly, Pompidou had agreed. Reducing the Corsican Mafia's profits would
also limit its political influence. But a project of that magnitude could not
be accomplished overnight. Preparations had to be made.
Had Pompidou suspected what really lay in store internationally, he would
certainly have had second thoughts. The, outcome of that pact slowly began to
emerge in 1970. In the two years that followed it struck home with the force
of an avalanche.
Auguste Ricord
On 18 October 1970 a Cessna four-seater landed at Miami International
airport. Registered in Argentina, the plane was one of hundreds of Paraguayan
"contrabandistas" smuggling goods to and from eighty landing strips in
Florida. U.S. customs agents, tipped off that the plane would be worth
inspecting, emerged from hiding as the pilot crawled from the cockpit.
"No bandito!" screamed the pilot, Cesar Bianchi.
But he was just that, as the agents discovered three cases containing a total
of forty-five kilos of heroin in the tail of the plane. To save his skin,
Bianchi agreed to cooperate. He continued on his normal route, but with
agents now on his tail. First he met his Miami contact, Felix Becker. Then
Bianchi, Becker and a third man, Aron Muravnik, flew to New York to meet
Pierre Gahou of the Ricord network, and finally the U.S. wholesalers.
By October 27 the heroin deal was closed and Gahou was about to fly to
Paraguay with the money. But before he could depart, agents moved in and
caught six men in their net. The catch was better than anticipated. Bianchi
shot off at the mouth like a machine-gun as wideeyed customs agents heard the
story of Ricord's elaborate narcotics ring.
In the ensuing four months stacks of proof were assembled against Ricord.
Finally, in March 1971 the United States demanded his extradition. But a
military plane dispatched to Asuncion for the gangster kingpin returned
without its prize. Paraguayan President Stroessner had decided that if Ricord
were imprisoned it would be in Paraguay. "El Viejo" Ricord was then set up in
a comfortable cell containing a spring mattress, radio and TV, and was
allowed visits any time night or day. Waiters brought food from his own
restaurant, and he continued managing his businesses in the quiet of prison.
Stroessner only capitulated in the summer of 1972 when the United States
threatened a sharp cutback in aid to Paraguay. On September 3, Ricord was
extradited. The man who put the pressure on Stroessner had been Henry
Kissinger. According to international spook Luis Gonzalez-Mata, himself a
party to the affair, the pressure began in late 1968, a year in which one of
Kissinger's friends also happened to be in Paraguay on a "weapons deal."[3]
The man was CIA. agent /double agent Fernand Legros, a close acquaintance of
several members of the Ricord gang.[4]
Roger Delouette
The case of Roger "French Connection" Delouette involved the greatest
international fireworks and was recreated in print and on screen.
On 5 April 1971 a U.S. customs agent discovered eighty-nine packets of heroin
hidden in a Volkswagen van on board the Atlantic Cognac, a freighter docked
in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. They contained forty-five kilos of the white
gold. Delouette was arrested that same day when he came for the car.
Under interrogation Delouette claimed to be working for French intelligence
agency SDECE, and that his journey with the heroin had been ordered by
Colonel Ferrer alias Fournier, de Marenches' righthand man in the SDECE.
Furthermore, he had been instructed to contact SDECE agent Donald McNabb, who
was working at the French consulate in New York.[5] While that was
sensational in itself, the scandal was far greater than press and public
could know. What really inflamed the Americans was that they had agreed with
French authorities to cooperate against narcotics trafficking, and a key link
was the supposedly reorganized and cooperative SDECE. If Delouette's story
were true, then the SDECE had not only broken its agreement, it had also
pulled the rug from under Pompidou, and much of the Americans' preliminary
work would have been wasted.
French Defense Minister Michel Debre, under whose auspices the SDECE
operated, officially denounced Delouette's claim as a fabrication. While he
admitted that Delouette had earlier taken on occasional assignments, he was
no longer attached to the SDECE.
The Americans subjected Delouette to two lie detector tests, both of which he
passed with honor. Prosecutor Herbert Stern's request to interrogate Fournier
was then refused. As for the French, their three-day investigation of
Fournier absolved him of all suspicion.
At this stage Delouette's past becomes of interest.
He began working for French intelligence in 1946 at age twenty-three. His
first assignment was keeping tabs on a Greek election, under the supervision
of Colonel Roger Barberot. Although their paths appeared to split, the two
stuck together. While Delouette remained with the SDECE, Barberot shuttled
about on various jobs according to the needs of de Gaulle and Foccart. They
were reunited in Algeria, with Delouette an agent and Barberot the leader of
the Black Commandos. They again crossed paths in the Central African
Republic, where Barberot served as French ambassador from 1961 to 1965. When
Barberot became the head of the BDPA after the May 1968 riots, he immediately
hired Delouette, who proceeded to marry his boss's secretary.
In the fall of 1968 Delouette and Barberot went on a mysterious trip to Cuba,
during which Delouette was approached by the SDECE and asked to become its
agent on the island. He agreed and remained an SDECE agent for nearly one
year, after which he and Barberot journeyed once again to Africa.[6] In late
1969 Delouette suddenly contacted the SDECE's Colonel Fournier to demand back
pay and request reinstatement. Both requests were filled.[7]
Following Delouette's arrest in the United States and official refutation of
his statement, Barberot surprisingly told Radio Luxembourg that he believed
the operation to have been led by Paris SDECE figures seeking to do away with
both Delouette and his troublesome past. The Americans evidently believed
Delouette and Barberot more than they did Defense Minister Debre and Colonel
Fournier. For a crime punishable by twenty years imprisonment, Delouette got
off with five.
At the close of 1972 a new chapter was added to the Delouette saga.
Claude-Andre Pastou of Christian David's Latin American organization was
arrested and began to sing for the CIA and U.S. narcotics agents. Pastou
claimed David had ordered him to New York at the beginning of April 1971. On
April 4 he was supposed to meet Roger Delouette at the Park Sheraton Hotel to
discuss Delouette's delivery of the forty-five kilos of heroin to Pastou, who
would then pass them on to the wholesalers.[8]
Pastou said he met Delouette as planned and that the two agreed on a delivery
the following evening. When Delouette, with good reason, ad not appear,
Pastou got the jitters and returned to Latin America.[9]
It's also possible that the above-mentioned forces were aware of the
Nixon-Pompidou narcotics agreement and saw their own financial stakes in jeopa
rdy. They might have sought to thwart its implementation by splitting the
SDECE and its CIA colleagues.
Finally, Fournier, who was "old school" SDECE, might also have been running
drugs and, therefore, not been keen on carrying through the policies of his
boss de Marenches.
Michel-Victor Mertz
On 5 July 1971 a Paris court sentenced two men to five years imprisonment for
trafficking in narcotics. They were Michel-Victor Mertz, fifty-one, and
Achilles Cecchini, forty-nine. Considering that since 1960 they had smuggled
some $3 billion (street value) worth of heroin into the U.S.A., their
sentences were mild to say the least. Moreover, their trial would never have
taken place had French authorities not been under intense American pressure
in the wake of Roger Delouette's expose.
Since 1961, in fact, U.S. authorities had known that Mertz and Cecchini were
smuggling large quantities into the country. Several times the U.S. had asked
the French to act, but to no avail. There were very special reasons for
French resistance.
Michel-Victor Mertz was born in the Mosel region's French community. In 1941
he was drafted into the German army. Two years later he deserted to join the
French resistance. A man who cherished no great love for the Germans, Mertz
soon became an underground legend as "Commandante Baptiste." His squad became
famous for its daring, Mertz himself killing 20 Gestapo agents, freeing 400
prisoners and escaping 4 times in all from the Axis powers.
In 1945 General de Gaulle awarded him the Legion of Honor, which was soon
joined by a Resistance medal and War Cross. Mertz was a hero. After the war
he entered French intelligence with the rank of captain and was stationed
abroad.
In 1960, while in the employ of the SDECE, Mertz began smuggling heroin from
France to the U.S. together with Achilles Cecchini, a Marseilles gangster
tied to the Francisci-Venturi clan. In 1961 the trade was interrupted when
nearly all of France's top gangsters joined de Gaulle's forces in Algeria.
Mertz was among them.
The SDECE sent him on a spy mission to infiltrate the OAS in Algeria. His
mission proved a great success, even though he was mistakenly arrested by his
own side and placed in a detention camp for OAS ringleaders in July 1961. On
July 14 SDECE chiefs were notified that Mertz had important information. He wa
s brought before Jacques Foccart himself. He informed Foccart that the OAS
was planning to blow up the president's car near Pont-sur-Seine, a bridge
across which de Gaulle was driven each day. Mertz was returned to the camp to
determine the exact time of assassination.
At the last moment he succeeded. De Gaulle's car drove over Pont-sur-Seine as
usual, but swerved into another lane, just as the bomb exploded in the lane
normally taken. De Gaulle owed Mertz his life. Following the mission, with
both the president and Foccart indebted to him, Mertz returned to the
trafficking of narcotics.
On 12 January 1962 he shipped an automobile to New York loaded with 100 kilos
of pure heroin. The procedure he followed was a standard one. A sheet-metal
worker opened up the chassis, placed the heroin beyond the scrutiny of
customs officials, and then rewelded the plates. The car was sent to the U.S.
under a fictitious name and picked up by a man with a forged passport in that
name.
Over the next eight or nine years Mertz and Cecchini operated without
interruption and bagged a huge fortune. Their bankroller, a man of high
standing, remained anonymous.
Through the years, Cecchini, like Mertz, had been of great service to the
Gaullist party, UDR, in the SO du RPF as well as SAC, which explains the
reluctance to prosecute them. Despite his five year sentence, Cecchini was
deemed too ill for imprisonment and remained a free man. Mertz first began
serving time in July 1972, but appears to have been secretly released shortly
thereafter.[10]
Ange Simonpieri
On 13 September 1971 the fifty-six year old Ange Simonpieri was arrested at a
private clinic in Ajaccio, Corsica, for smuggling large quantities of heroin
into the U.S. between 1960 and 1970. His partner in crime was the Swiss
banker Andre Hirsch.
Simonpieri had worked for both the SDECE and SAC. Like Christian David, he
had been a barbouze in Algeria directly under Pierre Lemarchand. He became so
close to Lemarchand that, as a local SAC leader, he managed the "physical"
part of Lemarchand's 1963 Parliamentary campaign. Because of his political
connections Simonpieri was known in his birthplace Corsica, and among
Marseilles gangsters, as "The Untouchable."
On 31 August 1967 the freighter Frederico C docked in Miami. Customs agent
John Wroth spotted a hunchback on his way down the gangplank. Finding the
hunch suspicious, Wroth slapped it and jokingly asked if it was a burden. The
man stiffened and sprang towards a taxi in which a sunglassed woman was
waiting. But the cabby refused to depart and Wroth nabbed the couple.
The man was the Swiss banker William Lambert and the woman was Josette Bauer,
an escapee from a Swiss prison where she had been serving time for murdering
her rich father. Customs agents discovered twelve kilos of heroin in
Lambert's hunchback and the couple was slapped with seven-year sentences by a
Miami court. Both claimed to be couriers for a Corsican known to them as
Monsieur Small. They were to have taken the heroin to Boston and handed it to
one Robert Mori of Switzerland. The trail led from Mori to the Swiss banker
Andre Hirsch, but U.S. narks lacked the evidence to nail him.
After this episode, Hirsch and his partner Monsieur Small started the
Panamanian Food and Chemical Company, which exported canned paella to the
U.S.A.�only some of the cans were filled with heroin. Hirsch was finally
trapped in 1969 when U.S. customs agents opened the wrong cans. He was
brought before a Geneva court, but it wasn't until 29 April 1971 that he was
sentenced to six and a half years in prison. On that day his lawyer, the
famous Raymond Nicolet, announced that Monsieur Small was the Corsican Ange
Simonpieri.
The court in Geneva had been pestering French police to question Simonpieri
since 1970, but had been told Simonpieri was in a clinic with a bad heart and
could not take the questioning. When Nicolet's assertion hit French
newsstands, Simonpieri was quickly readmitted into the Grandval clinic with
severe heart pains.
But Simonpieri's number was up. After four months of haggling, on 8 September
1971, with full press coverage, French Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin
ordered court-appointed doctors to examine the patient. Five days later
police put Simonpieri under arrest. In July 1972 a French court sentenced him
to five years imprisonment�a penalty, like those of Mertz and Cecchini, that
bore no relation to the crime. Hirsch and Simonpieri each got less time than
their hapless couriers, Lambert and Bauer.
Once again there was the scent of CIA agent Fernand Legros, an acquaintance
of the Hirsch family, who was seen with Madame Hirsch in Geneva after her
husband had been put away.[11]
Andre Labay
On Sunday, 26 September 1971 U.S. customs agents arrested the Frenchman
Richard Berdin on his way out of the Abbey Victoria Hotel on Fifty-First
Street in New York City. His arrest grew out of the discovery of eighty-two
kilos of heroin aboard the Italian liner Rafaello in New York harbor. Though
Berdin was a small fish in the drug ring they were tracking, the customs
agents had followed him for five days to several of his contacts.
In fact the arrest was a slip caused by fierce rivalry between agents of
customs and the BNDD. For half a year the BNDD had been cooperating with
French narks in search of Berdin's bankrollers and New York customers. Much
to the narks' chagrin, customs agents struck without warning their rivals.
However, luck was with customs. Weeks later Berdin, seeking a reduced
sentence, fingered a French all-star drug ring that included gangsters
Laurent Fiocconi, Jo Signoli, Jean-Claude Kella, Alexandre Salles, Jean
Dumerain, Felix Rosso, Jean Demeester, Raymond Moulin, Patrick Lorenz, Jacky
Martin, Francois Scapula, and Andre Andreani; plus U.S. mafiosi including
Louis Cirillo, Lorenco d'Aloisio, Frank Rappa, and Giuseppe Ciacomazzo.[12]
Their sentences ranged from five to twenty-five years, while Berdin got away
with three and served only one and a half. Today he's living in the U.S.A.
with a new name and a new face, but still fearful of underworld revenge.
On 5 October 1971 one Andre Labay visited the Paris BNDD office, said he was
working for the SDECE, and offered to help bring 100 kilos of heroin into the
United States. He would then make another trip with the same quantity and
lead the BNDD to the wholesalers. As the BNDD well knew, Labay was a
ringleader of the gang on which Berdin had stooled. After telling him to
return the next day, they phoned the French narcotics police. On October 6,
French police arrested Labay and three other heroin traffickers, and found
106 kilos of heroin in Labay's Volkswagen.
Why did Labay show up at the U.S. narcotics office, and what did he really
propose? There has been no lack of answers. Some say Labay was employed on
the same side as Delouette, by forces seeking either to discredit the new
SDECE leadership or to destroy the transAtlantic drug crusade. Others believe
the contrary � that Labay was a CIA-SDECE double agent made into a scapegoat
when Berdin sang.
Andre Labay had been another of Pierre Lemarchand's barboutes in Algeria. Not
known for his fighting, he was sent to spy behind OAS terrorist lines. In
late 1961 Jacques Foccart sent him to Kinshasa (in the Congo), the Ivory
Coast and Gabon. Back in France he immediately joined SAC as a fund-raiser.
For reasons unknown Labay began going his own route in the mid-sixties. With
his close friends, CIA agent Fernand Legros and Thierry de Bonnay, he had his
Ring in the international art trade. He got involved with a Belgian insurance
company that collapsed with $6 million in debts, and, like Legros, he also
produced several movies.
Labay and de Bonnay ran the Parisian hotel at which the Moroccan Colonel
Dlimi stayed in the aftermath of the Ben Barka affair. It was also the hotel
that doubled as a mercenary recruiting station for the Katangese army of
Moise Tshombe, whom the Labay/Legros/de Bonnay threesome helped abduct to
Algeria. And in his Geneva apartment, Labay once hid the Algerian
revolutionary, Belkassem Krim, who was later murdered. [13]
In 1968 Labay went to Haiti, where he made a small fortune from a factory. He
was often visited there by Legros, and the two became personal friends of the
Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Labay ingratiated himself with
Duvalier's daughter MarieDenise, leading some to suspect he was her lover. In
Haiti he served as an SDECE-CIA double agent. He stayed in close touch with
U.S. gangsters Joe Bonnano and Max Intrattor, and one of his Geneva contacts
was the Lansky syndicate's financial brain, John Pullman.[14]
Marcel Boucan
Late in the evening of 29 February 1972 the sixty-ton shrimpboat Caprice de Te
mps sailed out of the cozy harbor of Villefrance on France's Mediterranean
coast. The ship was registered in Guadeloupe. Its skipper was the
fifty-eight-year-old former parachutist Marcel Boucan, a Hemingway type in
more ways than one.
Boucan was a charming old soldier. Since the war he had smuggled alcohol and
cigarettes from Tangiers to France, and weapons the other way, first on board
l'Oiseau des Iles and later the Caprice de Temps. To strangers he was just
another shrimp fisherman. In fact, until 1957 he was the chairman of the
Cagnes fisherman's union, and was also an extraordinarily well-read and
clever man whose cabin featured the works of Kafka, Balzac, Camus, and Kant.
He was married to a woman from Guadeloupe and in his later years he often
sailed through the French West Indies.
As he was steaming out of Villefrance on 28 February 1972 the customs cruiser
Sirocco was leaving Nice. Hours later customs agents hailed down the Caprice
de Temps. Boucan ordered full steam ahead, but changed his mind when the Siroc
co fired a salvo. Aboard the shrimpboat the agents found 425 kilos of heroin,
the largest single shipment ever confiscated. The size of the load suggested
desperation among smugglers following the 1971 roundup of several narcotics
rings. The heroin had been destined for Santo Traffiicante, jr.'s
Florida-based Cuban Mob.[15]
Boucan was slapped with a fifteen-year sentence on 5 January 1973. His
courtroom arrogance and noble coolness irked judges so much, that his appeal
brought three more years. Such severity was unheard of in France. A dozen
Marseilles gangsters were also locked up in the aftermath. They were all from
the same circle of crooks that had participated in the Labay affair, which
made it likely that the men upstairs, who needless to say went untouched,
were also from the same political faction.
The Laboratories
In August 1971 John Cusack, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), declared in Paris that eight Marseilles heroin
laboratories, financed by influential backers, were operating with complete
immunity from prosecution. In return for his frankness Cusack became persona
non grata in France and was recalled to the U.S.A. But his words sank in.
Pressure was put on French authorities by the Americans, who wondered what
good it did to round up narcotics rings when the heroin production itself
went on unabated.
On 27 January 1972 French police stormed a heroin lab in Marseilles'
Montolivet quarter. The laboratory, which produced forty kilos of good
quality heroin each week, was run by Marius and MarieAntoinette Pastore.
Marius got fifteen years on 29 September 1972 while Marie-Antoinette got five.
On 16 March 1972 the police made an impressive arrest that broke the heart of
many a politician, bankroller, and cop. The catch was heroin's grand old man,
Jo Cesari, reputedly the best heroin chemist in the world.
Born in Bastia, Corsica in 1915, Cesari was first a sailor, then a grocer,
bartender, and farmer. In the early fifties he apprenticed himself to his
half-brother Dominique Albertini, the manager of several Marseilles heroin
labs. In 1962 Cesari purchased a luxurious Aubagne estate, La Roseraie, that
included an enormous mansion, a park, a swimming pool and a tennis court. No
one could figure out where the old sailor had gotten his money.
Cesari would leave his estate for long stretches of time. In 1964 narcotics
police shadowed him for several months, and converged on Clos Saint Antoine,
an abandoned estate where he had set up two heroin labs and put four
assistants to work. Police stormed the estate, arresting Cesari and his
staff. They also made an interesting discovery in one of the back rooms: the
nephew of Marcel Francisci.[16] Months earlier the boy's father, on an
unannounced trip back to Corsica, had discovered his wife with a lover, whom
he proceeded to shoot through the throat before returning to France with his
son Jean-Francois.
As head of the family, Marcel Francisci looked after his nephew. He placed
him under the wings of a Cesari laboratory worker and his wife. This is the
same Francisci who denies any involvement with heroin.
Cesari was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released a lot sooner.
As soon as he was out he returned to the synthesis of his favorite organic
compound, and consulted for several laboratories besides his own. His 1971
production was estimated at twenty kilos of heroin daily, which means large
lots were shipped to the United States. Cesari most probably produced the
huge cargos that, according to narcotics police, reached Miami via Marcel
Boucan and the Caprice de Temps.
In March 1972, as Cesari was setting up a lab in the Suzanne building in
Aubagne, police traced him through an assistant and arrested him. Their
prisoner was a haunched, sickly old figure, ruined by years of acid gas
inhalation. Cesari was only fifty-eight. On March 22 he hanged himself in his
Baumettes prison cell, overcome, no doubt, by the spectre of a long sentence.
He knew he'd never come out alive.
Cesari left behind letters making it clear he had planned to settle down in
Latin America and experiment with cocaine, most likely in partnership with
Christian David, whose ring survived as one of the larger remnants of the
once great French narcotics empire. Cesari's death was a hard blow to
Marseilles' heroin industry. No one could fill his shoes.[17] French and
American police alike tried in vain to duplicate his process for producing
pure heroin.
On 15 July 1972 French narks closed out a series of raids leading to the
closing of three labs, all belonging to the Long brothers.
A few days later President Nixon telegrammed congratulations to Pompidou for
the great strides he had made.
Marseilles has never been the same.
pps. 91-103
--[Notes]--
1. The same threesome turns up in several other circumstances, including
Barberot's mysterious trip to Cuba in 1968. He was joined then by Santenac,
Delouette and Gilbert Beaujolin, a well-known financier closely tied to
Jacques Foccart.
2. P. Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme Barbouzes (Alain Moreau, 1975). 3. L.
Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).
4. R. Peyrefitte: La Vie Extraordinaire de Fernand Legros (Albin Michel,
1976).
5. The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Trail (Souvenir Press, 1974).
6. P. Galante and L. Sapin: The Marseilles Mafia (W.H. Allen, 1979).
7. There is doubt as to whether Fournier ever knew Delouette was formally
readmitted into the SDECE. In 1972 Newsday reporters got hold of a 27 October
1969 letter from Defense Minister Debre to Colonel Barberot in which Debre,
vowing to take care of the matter, asked that Delouette's application and
demand not be discussed with other SDECE leaders.
8. A. Jaubert: Dossier D... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974).
9. If Pastou's testimony is correct, then Delouette lied about delivering
heroin to an SDECE agent named McNabb, and there's no truth to Colonel
Fournier's alleged involvement. What remains are one man's word against
anothers and several possible explanations. First, Fournier might not have
wanted Delouette back in the SDECE because he knew him to be Barberot's man
and, therefore, tied to forces purged from the SDECE. Fournier could also
have been pressured from above to rehire Delouette, and then seen the heroin
affair as an opportunity to get rid of him.
That seems rather farfetched, since SDECE narcotics network with the CIA and
BNDD was Pompidou's pet idea. Fournier would hardly have risked his job to
get rid of a single agent. Another possibility is that Barberot, or forces he
represents, welcomed the opportunity to compromise their opposition within
the SDECE -above all Fournier and chief-of-staff de Marenches. That Fournier
later made amends with the Americans is suggested by his opening a restaurant
in New York in 1978.
10. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.
11. Peyrefitte, op. cit.
12. R. Berdin: Code Name Richard (Dutton, 1974).
13. The exiled Algerian politician Belkassem Krim was a former leader of the
revolutionary movement, FLN. After Algeria won its independence, he came into
conflict with the country's first chief-of-state, Ahmed Ben Bella. Together
with the latter's minister of finance, Mohammed Khider, Krim fled Algeria,
while refusing to hand over the FLN's $20 million war chest to the Algerian
regime. Khider had deposited the money in his own name at Geneva's Banque
Commerciale Arabe, and only he and Krim knew the account number. On 3 January
1967 Khider was shot down in Madrid. Krim was murdered in a Frankfurt hotel
room on 20 October 1970. Both had been closely connected with Morocco's
interior minister Oufkir.
14. E. Gerdan: DossierA ... comme Armes (Alain Moreau, 1974). The Mafia's
activities in Cuba were controlled by Joe Bonnano, whose close partners today
in the so-called Southern Rim Mafia are Santo Trafficante, jr. and Carlos
Marcello. Labay was also closely tied to Intra-Bank founder Yussef Beidas.
15. Jaubert, op. cit.
16. L'Express, 14 October 1968.
17.1979 was the year of the rumor. Not only was Christian David alleged to be
back in France, it was also said that the old French Connection was about to
resume the shipment of heroin from Marseilles to the U.S.A. When the heroin
chemist Jacques Masia was arrested in August 1979, French newspapers went so
far as to speculate that he was a revitalized version of Jo Cesari himself!
The latter, it was explained, had not really committed suicide, but had been
"sheepdipped" and used as an undercover agent by the DEA and French narcotics
police (Politiken, 28 August 1979).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
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