Smuggler Nation (46 page)

After the war, Luciano, along with many other American crime figures of Italian descent, were shipped off to Italy. Bringing with them their illicit business knowledge and connections, many of these deported mobsters proceeded to help revive the postwar international heroin trade and supply the U.S. market. As a
Rome Daily American
article reported in 1951, “An estimated fifty men deported from the U.S. to Italy on narcotics charges since the war are believed to have formed the nucleus of a far-flung dope smuggling network.”
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Luciano was singled out by the FBN as the heroin smuggling ringleader, giving Anslinger a familiar face to blame for the country’s drug problem. But the FBN certainly knew that Luciano was just one of many traffickers feeding America’s drug habit.
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And some of these suppliers, including CIA-backed Chinese nationalists using dope money to help fund their anticommunist campaign along the southern Chinese border, were simply overlooked by Anslinger because it was too geopolitically awkward to do otherwise.
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Cold War geopolitics also inadvertently helped transform Marseille into the main source of U.S.-bound heroin in the 1950s and 1960s. Marseille, France’s second largest city and biggest port, was a key entry point for Marshall Plan aid shipments to Europe. It was also a French communist party stronghold and the epicenter of the country’s labor movement, which launched strikes that threatened to disrupt shipping and the postwar economic recovery. Viewing French labor struggles through the prism of the East-West conflict, the CIA secretly recruited and funded Corsican gangs to harass local communist leaders, intimidate trade unionists, and break the picket lines. The CIA’s covert operation worked as planned—communist influence and labor activism in Marseille were greatly reduced—but left a lasting unintended legacy: newly empowered and politically protected, these very same gangs and their leaders came to dominate the Corsican underworld and control the Marseille waterfront.

Corsican-run heroin laboratories soon sprang up around Marseille, turning morphine base shipped in from Turkey and elsewhere into high-grade U.S.-bound heroin. The product was of such high quality
and purity and the business was run so efficiently that Luciano and his Sicilian partners also turned to the Marseille labs to process their heroin. From there, Luciano’s old business partner Lansky, and mafiosi such as Santo Traficante, helped move the product into the U.S. market. This infamous “French Connection”—the inspiration for the 1971 Hollywood film by the same name—was America’s main heroin supplier until the early 1970s.
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Some of this heroin supply arrived in the United States via South America—brought in on the same private planes that smuggled large quantities of tax-evading American contraband goods (ranging from cigarettes and whiskey to Levi’s jeans) to Paraguay for regional black market distribution.
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Meanwhile, the FBN shrewdly tied the drug threat to the foreign threat of communism. “Red China” was publicly accused of trying to destroy Western society and of generating hard cash through heroin sales to U.S. drug pushers.
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Anslinger charged that Mao’s China was the “greatest purveyor in history of habit-forming drugs” and was “reaping tremendous amounts from its network of narcotics smugglers operating on a worldwide basis.”
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In reality, China had launched a draconian crackdown on drugs, jailing or executing thousands of drug traffickers and dealers and largely removing the country from the narcotics trade. Along with remnants of Chinese nationalist forces, opium production had been pushed to remote areas of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. These rebels not only received covert military supplies from the CIA-owned Civil Air Transport (later renamed Air America) but also used their politically protected transportation link as a cover for drug shipments.
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While denouncing China, Anslinger was silent in public about the influx of drugs from allied France even as his own field agents were increasingly preoccupied by it.
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The political atmosphere of the 1950s created a Congress receptive to Anslinger’s designs: Americans were absorbed by hearings on the Mafia and organized crime and were consumed by fears of communist aggression and subversion, heightened by McCarthyism. In the Senate, the subcommittee chaired by Texas Democrat Price Daniel embraced Anslinger’s assertions about the Chinese communist threat, concluding that “subversion through drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China.”
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Daniel’s subcommittee recommended tougher penalties, arguing that the offenses
of “heroin smugglers and peddlers” amounted to “murder on the installment plan.”
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The resulting Narcotic Control Act of 1956 raised mandatory minimum penalties (five to twenty years for the second offense; ten to forty years for the third offense) and permitted juries to impose the death penalty on any adult who sold heroin to a minor.
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Nixon’s Drug War

Anslinger’s decades-long antidrug campaign was just a warm-up to the “war on drugs” declared by President Richard Nixon. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the country experienced dramatic growth in both drug use and drug enforcement. In 1967
Life
magazine described the suddenly transformed American drug scene: “Almost overnight the U.S. was embarked on the greatest mass flouting of the law since Prohibition.”
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The new drug culture was part of the new youth culture of the Sixties, one in which defying drug laws mirrored the larger rebellion against traditional authority. Consequently, even as the counterculture revolution rejected mainstream consumerism, illicit drug use became an increasingly important part of American consumer society.

Marijuana was the drug of choice, with “Acapulco Gold” imported from Mexico the most popular. Customs agents seized only seven thousand pounds of marijuana in 1964, most of it coming in from Mexico, but by 1968 seizures had skyrocketed to sixty-five thousand pounds.
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Even factoring in such seizures, the smuggling incentives in a booming consumer market were overwhelming. Consider, for instance, that a ton of marijuana at the time was worth about $12,000 in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, increased to about $25,000 by the time it reached Tijuana, then increased to $65,000 across the border in San Diego, and sold for as much as $100,000 a ton in Los Angeles and $200,000 a ton in San Francisco. This meant that even if a smuggler were to lose half a shipment it was still hugely profitable.
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The biggest transportation challenge to the marijuana smuggler was that the product was both bulky and smelly—and therefore vulnerable to nosy border inspectors and the noses of drug-sniffing dogs. Many smugglers simply played the odds, betting that their pot-filled vehicle would not be searched at the border by blending in with the high
volume of regular cross-border traffic. Other smugglers increasingly bypassed border inspections entirely by using small aircraft to deliver their loads.

Heroin was even more profitable than marijuana, pound for pound, and far less cumbersome and detectable. And like marijuana, consumer demand was growing. Whereas the profile of the average American heroin user for much of the 1960s was young, lower-class, and black or Hispanic, by the end of the decade the profile broadened to include returning Vietnam war veterans and suburban whites. By the early 1970s more than half a million people in the United States were estimated to be heroin addicts. In 1971, public opinion polls indicated that Americans considered heroin addiction to be the country’s third most serious problem, after Vietnam and the economy.
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It was in this changing societal context that President Nixon made drugs a central policy concern and the drug war as we know it today began in earnest. Until then, executive officials above the rank of Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry Anslinger had rarely occupied themselves with drug-control issues. In 1969 Nixon catapulted drugs to the center of the political stage, declaring it a “national threat.” The president helped spearhead new laws, pushed for dramatic funding increases, and reorganized and expanded the federal antidrug bureaucracy. In June 1971 Nixon informed Congress, “The [drug] problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency.”
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Media executives received a similar call to arms: “Drug traffic is public enemy number one domestically in the United States today and we must wage a total offensive, worldwide, nationwide, government-wide, and, if I might say so, media-wide.”
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The president backed his rhetoric with legislative initiatives. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 merged previous federal antidrug regulations under one statute. Whereas the 1914 Harrison Act based jurisdiction of drug control on the constitutional power to tax, the 1970 act based jurisdiction on the much more expansive interstate-commerce powers of the Constitution. Antidrug spending ballooned. The federal budget for drug enforcement climbed from $43 million in fiscal 1970 to $321 million in fiscal 1975.
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A vast new antidrug bureaucracy emerged with the rise in federal spending. The previous thirty years had seen only
a slow reorganization and growth in the drug-control apparatus. By the late 1960s the FBN still had a relatively modest budget of $6 million (about twice its 1932 budget) and a staff of some three hundred agents (roughly the same number as in 1932). A second agency, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, had been created in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1965 to regulate hypnotics and stimulants. And in 1968, the last year of the Johnson administration, the two agencies were merged to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) and placed in the Justice Department.
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Nixon moved forcefully to expand the bureaucratic base for his war on drugs. In 1973 he consolidated all agencies involved in drug control, including the Customs Service Drug Investigation Unit, into a new drug superagency—the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)—with operational reach around the globe.
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Nixon’s initiatives expanded the nation’s drug war to include an ambitious campaign abroad. The foreign drug war was designed, in Nixon’s words, to “strike at the ‘supply’ side of the drug equation—to halt the drug traffic by striking at the illegal producers of drugs, the growing of those plants from which drugs are derived, and trafficking in these drugs beyond our borders.”
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The concern over foreign supply had long been a focus for nativist and other antivice crusaders. But before Nixon the government’s approach was largely rhetorical, diplomatic, and low-profile. Nixon turned foreign supply into a far more prominent issue.

Nixon first went after the Mexican marijuana supply. “Operation Intercept” deployed two thousand agents to the Mexican border in September 1969 to search automobiles and trucks crossing the border in what was officially described as “the country’s largest peacetime search and seizure operation by civil authorities.” Predictably, the main results were massive border traffic jams, jolts to the economies of border cities, and strongly worded protests from Mexican officials. Few drugs were seized during the two-week operation—smugglers simply took a break, rightly calculating that the crackdown would be short-lived—but the Mexican government got the message that it would have to show more antidrug cooperation and resolve.

Nixon’s next foreign target was Turkish opium production, the main morphine base supply source for the Marseille heroin labs.
The United States applied intense diplomatic pressure, threatening to cut off aid if the Turkish government did not stop production and offering reimbursement for losses resulting from reduced poppy cultivation. The Turks complied, and Nixon declared victory. The temporary scarcity of heroin in 1972 and 1973, however, was soon reversed as the slack was taken up by supply from Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia.
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And once again, Cold War geopolitics—especially in Southeast Asia and later in South Asia after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—only made things more awkward and complicated, since key U.S. anticommunist allies were also entangled in drug trafficking. As historian Alfred McCoy documents, the CIA was complicit not through corruption or direct involvement in the drug trade but rather through what he describes as a radical pragmatism that tolerated and even facilitated drug trafficking by local allies if it served larger Cold War goals.
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Politically protected traffickers included suppliers of heroin to tens of thousands of American troops in Vietnam—who in turn helped to smuggle the drug into the United States through a variety of conveyances ranging from GI care packages to body bags.
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Meanwhile, the marijuana trade continued to boom in the 1970s, with Colombia rising as a competitor to Mexico as a supplier to the U.S. market. “Santa Marta Gold” from the northern coast of Colombia attracted a higher-end American consumer willing to pay a premium over the price of the competing Mexican product. Colombian suppliers received a huge boost thanks to the fallout from a U.S.-sponsored Mexican marijuana crop eradication campaign in the mid-1970s. Since uprooting marijuana plants by hand was slow and labor-intensive, the Mexican government turned to spraying marijuana fields with the herbicide Paraquat. But farmers simply went ahead and harvested their sprayed crops, and American consumers ended up smoking it—with many getting ill from poisoned pot.
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The resulting public panic and outcry prompted a federal government investigation, which found that one-fifth of seized marijuana along the border was tainted with the chemical. Marijuana dealers and consumers scrambled to find an alternate supply source, and the Colombians were more than willing to step in. By 1978 they had reportedly taken over an estimated three-quarters of the U.S. market.
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And it was an enormous market: by 1979, an
estimated fifty-five million Americans had used some type of cannabis, including about two-thirds of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds.
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