Part 14

“So we were sitting there about three days and then I called that number that Sam gives me and the wife answered. I told her about us. She answered, ‘All right, I’m going to send my chauffeur to bring you over....’ She treated us to a meal and we spent the afternoon there and then went home.

“Gross finally returned and said, ‘Listen, the ship is going to be here in a day or two. I’ll have two trunks for you to take with you. You don’t have to do anything. We will put the trunks on board for you and I will show you what to do when you are on the boat. You forget about the trunks. When you are about three days out of Marseilles, go to the purser and say that you want to have the trunks shipped across France to Cherbourg in transit. Then when you get to Marseilles, there’ll be somebody waiting for you to take care of everything. That way they don’t have to open the trunks when they go through France.’”

The Schisoffs had a gay Christmas party at the home of the Greeks, and four days later they boarded their ship and sailed from Shanghai. They were met in Marseilles by one of Lepke’s henchmen, who handled the trans-shipment of the trunks. Then the Schisoffs left the ship at Marseilles and went by train to Cherbourg to catch the SS _Majestic_ for New York.

Lepke’s man told them, “Don’t put those two trunks on your baggage declaration.”

Schisoff said, “How am I going to do it then?”

The hoodlum said, “You’ve got eight pieces of luggage of your own. You put down everything on the declaration that you bought but leave these two trunks out. They will be taken care of. Don’t you worry about that.”

Schisoff replied, “All right. Whatever you say is all right with me.”

On the night of February 4, 1936, the night before the _Majestic_ was to dock in New York, Jake Lvovsky and Jack Katzenberg registered at the Luxor Hotel in New York. A short time after they went to their rooms they were joined by two Customs guards, John McAdams and Al Hoffman. It was agreed that Lvovsky would meet McAdams and Hoffman at the pier the next morning before the _Majestic_ docked and they would turn over to him the stickers to be placed on the trunks brought in by the Schisoffs. The stickers were issued to the guards each morning and a new color was used each day. For that reason the delivery of the stickers had to be made at the pier.

Lvovsky arrived at the pier as the _Majestic_ was docking. He stopped and chatted casually with McAdams, who slipped him the stickers. When the baggage was unloaded, the Schisoffs’ trunks were sent to the section marked with the initial “S.” Schisoff pointed out the two trunks to Lvovsky, who walked over casually and sat down on a trunk to smoke a cigarette, as though waiting for an inspector to check the luggage. Unobtrusively he took one of the stickers and pasted it to the trunk. He moved to the other trunk, sat down, and pasted a sticker on that trunk. And then he strolled away.

A Customs inspector examined the Schisoffs’ suitcases, but he noted the trunks already had the inspection stickers on them so he permitted them to be carted off. They were loaded into taxis by Lvovsky and Katzenberg and hustled off to an unknown destination.

The system worked like a charm. Each time that Lvovsky notified the two Customs guards of an arrival of a “world traveller” the guards would arrange to be on duty at those hours so that they could obtain stickers and pass them on to Lvovsky. Six times the confederates of the gang made the trip safely from Shanghai without any inspection of the heroin-loaded trunks.

But Treasury agents were closing in on the gang. Narcotics agents, with aid from Customs agents, had opened an investigation of Lepke’s narcotics smuggling ring after an informant had squealed to Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger. The informant--whose name has never been disclosed--was a woman with revenge in her heart. Her boy friend--one of the Lepke mob--had been playing around with another woman and she wanted to get even with him for his infidelity. She gave Anslinger enough information, with facts that could be verified, to start the ball rolling. Bit by bit, the agents closed in on the gangsters. And they discovered by a close check of the stickers issued to all pier personnel that there was an irregularity in the stickers which had been issued to the guards McAdams and Hoffman.

As the agents began to put on the heat, underworld characters started to talk. Those “world travellers” who had helped bring narcotics into the country began to confess. Evidence mounted against the gang, and when the crackdown finally came, a total of thirty-one persons were involved. Lepke was indicted on ten counts of a conspiracy to smuggle narcotics into the United States.

At this time--December, 1937--Lepke was a fugitive. A little more than a year earlier he and Gurrah Jake Shapiro had been convicted on the antitrust charges brought against them four years earlier. They had been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,000. But Lepke appealed. He was released under $3,000 bail and immediately went into hiding.

For almost two years Lepke’s pals hid him from the law. He lived for a time in the old Oriental Dance Hall on Coney Island. Then, twenty pounds heavier and wearing a mustache, he moved to a flat in Brooklyn. Later he occupied a house in Flatbush, posing as the paralyzed husband of a Mrs. Walker. All this time he continued directing the affairs of his criminal organization.

But now, in 1939, the search for Lepke had become the most intense manhunt the country had seen in years. The Federal government wanted him on the narcotics charges growing out of his syndicate operations. And he was the No. 1 man on the most-wanted list of New York’s District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, who then was opening his first bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. Among other things, Dewey was certain he could pin a murder charge on Lepke--who now had “dead or alive” rewards on his head totalling $50,000.

As the pressures mounted, the hunted man became desperate. And desperately he tried to wreck the cases against him by sending witnesses out of the state, by intimidation, and by murder. The heat was on the underworld as it had never been before. The rumor spread that if Lepke did not surrender to the authorities, he would be killed by one of his own kind. Lepke had at last become too much of a liability even to his old pals.

Hunted and frightened, with every day holding the threat of sudden death, Lepke began negotiations to surrender to New York Columnist Walter Winchell--on the condition that he would be turned over to the FBI rather than New York State authorities.

During the evening of August 5, Winchell received a telephone call from a man who refused to identify himself. “Lepke wants to come in,” he said. “But he’s heard so many different stories about what will happen to him. He can’t trust anybody, he says. If he can find someone he can trust, he will give himself up to that person. The talk around town is that Lepke would be shot while supposedly escaping.”

Winchell called FBI Director John Edgar Hoover in Washington and told him of the mysterious call and Lepke’s willingness to surrender if he could be assured of protection.

Hoover told Winchell: “You are authorized to state that the FBI will guarantee it.”

For almost three weeks the dickering continued between Winchell and his mysterious callers until Hoover finally said, “This is a lot of bunk, Walter. You are being made a fool of, and so are we. If you contact those people again, tell them the time limit is up! I will instruct my agents to shoot Lepke on sight.”

Winchell relayed this information to the intermediary. Then it was that arrangements were made for Hoover to be waiting in his automobile on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue at 10:15 on the evening of August 24.

Winchell was parked in his car at Madison Square when Lepke came out of the shadows and stepped into the car beside him. “Hello,” Lepke said. “Thanks very much.”

Quickly, the columnist drove to 28th Street, where he pulled up behind Hoover’s car. Lepke quickly moved into the automobile beside Hoover.

Winchell said, “Mr. Hoover, this is Lepke.”

“How do you do,” Lepke replied. “Let’s go.”

And so ended one of the greatest manhunts in American criminal history.

Four months later, Lepke went on trial in the Federal district court in New York City. He sat in silence, his brown eyes expressionless, as his former henchmen paraded to the stand to tell the details of their narcotics smuggling.

Among the government witnesses, many of them pale from sunless days in prison, were Jack Katzenberg, Ben Schisoff and John McAdams, the Customs employee. No longer were they afraid of the little man who sat there staring at them.

The trial dragged through fifteen days, but in the end Lepke was convicted. He was sentenced to serve fourteen years in prison and was fined $2,500 on ten narcotics charges. Two weeks later in General Sessions Court, Lepke was convicted on thirty-six counts of extortion and sentenced to an additional thirty years in prison.

Among the others involved in the smuggling ring, Lvovsky received seven years in prison and was fined $15,000. Sam Gross was sentenced to six years and fined $15,000, while Katzenberg was given ten years and a $10,000 fine. Both the Customs employees, McAdams and Hoffman, also received prison sentences.

But the final ordeal for Lepke was yet to come. In October, 1941, Lepke was taken from prison and returned to New York to stand trial for his role as mastermind in the operations of Murder, Inc. Specifically, he was charged with ordering the murder of a former garment industry truck driver, Joseph Rosen, who had ignored his warnings to get out of town and out of reach of questioning by District Attorney Dewey at the time Dewey was investigating the rackets in New York.

Manuel “Mendy” Weiss was named by the state as the actual triggerman in the slaying, and a small-time hood named Louis Capone (no kin to Al Capone) was accused of being the man who assisted Weiss in his getaway. Rosen had been found shot to death on the morning of September 13, 1936, lying on the floor of his small candy shop in Brooklyn.

One of the witnesses against Lepke was Max Ruben, whose death Lepke had ordered when Ruben refused to stay out of New York. One of Lepke’s henchmen had shot Ruben through the neck and left him lying near death. But he had recovered to tell his story to Prosecutor Burton Turkus.

Ruben testified that Lepke--two days before Rosen was killed--told him: “That bastard Rosen is going around Brownsville shooting his mouth off that he’s going downtown. He and nobody else are going down anyplace or do any more talking ... or any talking at all.”

Allie Tannenbaum, another of Lepke’s triggermen, supported Ruben’s testimony. He said he had heard Lepke say of Rosen: “There’s one son-of-a-bitch who’ll never go downtown.” By downtown, Lepke meant the office of the district attorney.

Tannenbaum also told of hearing Mendy Weiss describe how he had shot Rosen--after which his pal, “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, had pumped bullets into the body just for kicks.

When Lepke was advised that Rosen was dead, Tannenbaum said his boss replied, “What’s the difference as long as everyone is clean and got away all right.”

A battery of nine attorneys defended Lepke. But this time the king of the underworld couldn’t squeeze out of the trap. Too many of his old gang had decided to talk. They had lived too long in fear that Lepke would order their own deaths in his effort to remove anyone who might be dangerous to him. Now they wanted Lepke out of the way.

Lepke, Weiss and Capone were convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. They went to their deaths on December 2, 1941.

* * * * *

Control of the narcotics traffic in the United States is primarily the responsibility of the Narcotics Bureau. But Customs agents also have a direct responsibility in the government’s efforts to throttle the illicit trade. For this reason Customs agents frequently are teamed with Narcotics agents in investigations which often are international in scope.

It is not unusual for Customs agents to work for as much as two years in tracking down a single narcotics smuggler and removing him from circulation. These cases require endless hours of surveillance and hunting for the one bit of information which will trap the quarry.

Such a case was dropped in the laps of Customs agents in San Francisco and Seattle on August 2, 1954, when an informant tipped Customs agents at Seattle that $30,000 worth of heroin was to be smuggled into the United States aboard the SS _M. N. Patrick_ by a Negro seaman named Robert King. He described King as tall, jug-eared and middle-aged, with a taste for conservative clothes and gaudy night spots. The tipster said King planned to take the heroin ashore in San Francisco when the _Patrick_ completed her run from Hong Kong.

Seattle forwarded a teletype message to San Francisco saying: “Information considered to be very reliable received today that ship _M. N. Patrick_ arriving San Francisco between August 4 and August 8 from India via Hong Kong has heroin valued at about $30,000 on board. Vessel supposed to be in Seattle today but not verified. The suspect, Robert King, in steward’s department, is owner and will try to bring ashore at San Francisco.”

Alerted by this message, San Francisco agents began checking on the probable arrival time of the _Patrick_ only to discover that the ship had changed its sailing schedule and would not touch San Francisco on that trip. A message was forwarded to Seattle saying: “We have just checked here and find that _Patrick_ is not coming to San Francisco this trip. She is due in Seattle today (August 6) and will make two trips from Seattle to Alaska and then back to Far East. Under circumstances consider probable that King will try to unload at Seattle....”

The _Patrick_ had already docked in Seattle when this message was received. Agents rushed to the waterfront. But as the agents were walking aboard the ship, King was walking off undetected, apparently carrying the heroin with him.

A few hours later it was learned that King had contacted a known narcotics peddler in Los Angeles and had arranged for a $30,000 “loan.” It was suspected by agents that King had made his contact successfully and disposed of the narcotics before agents could get on his trail.

Agents began checking on King’s background and on his movements as far as possible in previous years. They discovered that while he had no known source of income, he owned an apartment building in San Francisco valued at $135,000. He maintained a bank account which showed heavy deposits and withdrawals. It was discovered also that in past years he had made frequent trips to Hong Kong and Japan. On occasions he had shipped as a seaman, and at other times he had gone abroad as a tourist.

Treasury agents in Japan found that King often frequented the Port Hole Bar in Yokohama, which was a known meeting place of narcotics peddlers when they were trying to contact seamen to use as carriers.

For more than a year and a half agents kept a periodic check on King’s movements in an effort to trap him in an act of smuggling or trafficking in narcotics. They had no success until a seemingly unrelated incident occurred in Japan.

On February 9, 1956, Japanese postal inspectors at Yokohama seized a shipment of narcotics which proved to be of special interest to Customs agents in San Francisco and Seattle. While making a routine examination of a package mailed by international air mail, they found 167 grams of heroin and 217 capsules of cocaine hidden in the folds of a pair of woman’s pajamas and slippers. The package was addressed to a Mrs. Hazel Scott in Seattle, Washington. The Customs declaration tag gave the name of the sender as W. M. Scott and listed an address in Yokohama. The addresses were written by typewriter. The narcotics were in a manila envelope bearing the words “For Walker.” The Japanese turned this information over to the U.S. Embassy.

During the years of the Allied Occupation of Japan after World War II, American and Japanese authorities had achieved close cooperation in combatting the traffic in narcotics and other contraband. This cooperation was continued after the signing of the Peace Treaty in 1952 formally ending the occupation.

The United Nations made the control of narcotics traffic one of its important objectives soon after its formation, resulting in a combined effort by many nations to strangle the illicit trade by joint efforts which were unknown in the years prior to the war.

Treasury agents were stationed in Tokyo as liaison officers to work with Japanese authorities on any cases involving American interests. And it was a routine matter for the Japanese police to give Treasury agents the information on the seizure of the package addressed to Mrs. Scott. This information was relayed from the U.S. Embassy to Customs agents in San Francisco.

The agents found there had been a seaman named Walter Scott aboard an American naval vessel in Yokohama at the time the package was sent--but Scott had not mailed a package while his ship was in Yokohama. Obviously whoever had sent the package containing narcotics had used Scott’s name without his knowledge. As for the envelope marked “For Walker,” agents suspected that it was probably intended for a known narcotics dealer named Roosevelt Walker, who first came to the attention of Customs in 1940 when he was arrested in Nogales, Arizona, and was charged with smuggling a quantity of marihuana into the country.

And agents found another interesting fact: Walker was a companion of Robert L. King. King had been in Tokyo at the time the package was mailed, but there apparently was no way to link him with this smuggling effort.

And so the surveillance of King was continued. On July 16, 1956, agents trailed King to the International Airport at San Francisco. He had booked passage on Pan American Flight 831 for Tokyo by way of Honolulu and Manila. King was nattily dressed in a brown business suit and he wore a rakish straw hat as he boarded the plane. The agents watched his plane leave San Francisco at 10 A.M., making no effort to stop him. Honolulu and Tokyo were alerted to the fact that King was aboard the plane and that his movements should be watched.

King was permitted to enter Japan unmolested. He also was allowed to leave Japan for a trip to Hong Kong, where he spent several days shopping before returning to Tokyo.

The return to Tokyo was a mistake for King. For months Japanese police had been trying to trace the typewriter which had written the addresses on the package containing the narcotics. They found that King, at the time the package was mailed, had been living in Yokohama at the Tomo Yei Hotel. They also found that King had rented a typewriter--two days before the parcel was mailed--from a Mr. Ono who ran a shop near the hotel. And then they matched a sample of typing from this machine with the typed address on the package containing narcotics. The comparison left no doubt that this was the machine which had been used by the would-be smuggler.

When King returned from Hong Kong on September 20, he was arrested by Japanese police at the Tokyo International Airport and lodged in jail at Yokohama, charged with narcotics smuggling. Unable to raise money for a bail bond, King remained in jail for six months while authorities in Japan and the United States investigated his case. But at last he obtained money from friends in the United States and made bond. He was released, pending a trial. The Japanese held on to his passport as insurance that he would not leave the country.

Passport or no passport, King was determined to get out of Japan before his trial. He went to the Yokohama waterfront and found an old friend who agreed to smuggle him aboard the military transport _General C. G. Morton_. The ship docked at Pier 5 at Oakland on April 14, 1957, and King slipped ashore.

Within a matter of hours, Customs agents were on his trail. FBI agents were called in on the case because King had returned to the country without a passport, which was in the hands of Japanese police. The agents found a seaman who testified he had seen King aboard the _C. G. Morton_. The seaman told agents: “About two days before we got to San Francisco, a friend came to me and said, ‘How would you like to make some money?’ I asked him how and he said, ‘Take a package off the ship for me in San Francisco.’ He showed me the package and it contained ten rubbers filled with heroin. About two days after we got to San Francisco I took the narcotics off at Pier 5, Oakland Army Terminal. My friend walked off just ahead of me. I had the package of heroin under my coat. We got in my car and went to a motel somewhere in the Richmond district and registered. We stashed the package of heroin in our room. I don’t know who picked up the heroin. The next night my friend gave me King’s address and told me to go and see him. I went to the hotel and King gave me $500.”

King denied that he had re-entered the United States illegally and claimed that he had returned on a Pan American flight from Tokyo. But agents were able to prove that King had not been booked aboard the plane which he claimed he had been on. They broke down his alibis and at last King entered a plea of guilty to a charge of conspiracy to smuggle narcotics into the United States and to entering the United States without a passport. He was convicted, fined $13,000 and sent to prison for five years.

But it seems that whenever the Kings and the Lepkes are taken out of circulation, there is someone new to take their place. That is why there is a U.S. Customs force.

12

THE CASE OF THE CROOKED DIPLOMAT

The Case of the Crooked Diplomat had its beginning when an Arab informer whispered a warning to a U.S. Bureau of Narcotics agent in faraway Beirut, Lebanon. And before it was closed, agents of the Customs Bureau, the Bureau of Narcotics and the French Sûreté had teamed up in a cooperative drive to smash a ring of criminals attempting to smuggle $20 million worth of heroin into the United States.

They were an oddly assorted lot, the members of this ring. There were only four known members, but in early 1960 their operations had begun to stir alarm across the country among law enforcement agencies seeking the mysterious source of heroin which at intervals had begun to appear in large lots on the underworld market.

The quartet was composed of:

Mauricio Rosal, forty-seven, Guatemala’s ambassador to Belgium and the Netherlands, and the son of a respected Central American diplomat; a small, portly, balding man known favorably in many countries as a witty conversationalist and shrewd politician of seeming integrity; something of a dandy, he usually wore dark homburg hats, expensively tailored dark blue suits and maroon ties; he affected an air of aristocratic elegance both in dress and manners.

Etienne Tarditi, fifty-five, a short, heavy-jowled, paunchy, gross figure of the Parisian underworld with a cloudy background; addicted to trench coats, pork-pie hats and the notion that he resembled Alfred Hitchcock (which he did); a gambler who played for big stakes in narcotics, with connections in many countries; a manipulator who usually remained in the background.

Charles Bourbonnais, thirty-nine, a slender, dapper steward for Trans World Airways, who had an eye for a pretty girl when his wife was not looking; often seen in the company of Tarditi when in Paris, and a liberal spender for a salaried man; the messenger and fixer for the ring.