Free The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine

Appropriations. Most of the old-timers knew that and had grown jaundiced. They were just plodding along, serving out their time as administrators. The only active old-timer was Benny Pocoroba, who did special projects for Anslinger. Benny had enormous patience: he’d feed pigeons on a stakeout, then trap, cook, and eat them.
    â€œThere were twenty-five agents in Chicago when I got there,” Pera continues, “and it was fascinating to learn how the system worked. My first group leader gave me fifty dollars and said, ‘Go buy pot. You have a week.’ So I ventured into Chicago alone and started buying pot and less often heroin. I’d make two or three buys, then we’d hit the pad. I was getting pretty good at it and eventually made what I thought was the perfect case: three buys, marked bills, no defense. Well, the judge throws it out. ‘It’s too pat,’ he says.”
    Pera rolls his eyes. “Chicago was an incredibly corrupt place, so I wasn’t too surprised when one of my cases led to a sergeant on the vice squad. I followed him on his route, and everywhere he went he collected money and/or junk. So I went to our district supervisor, R. W. Artiss, but he told me to shut up. So I learned there are limits set by big-city vice squads – which are usually run by some paunchy disreputable guy working with whores, degenerate gamblers, and drug dealers – and that kickbacks are funneled to the top through them. In big cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, in the days before the Kennedys, certain neighborhoods were controlled by political machines working with the vice squad and the Mafia. There wasn’t a drug deal on the South Side of Chicago that didn’t pass through the police to the politicians.”
    Pera was determined to find a better way, and his solution was the Special Endeavor conspiracy case, in which agents followed cases across districtlines and used all the investigative tools available to them, including undercover agents, wiretaps, and informers. Serving as a model was George White’s case on the Hip Sing T’ong.
    But Pera became disillusioned with undercover work. “Only four or five agents in the whole organization were any good at it. Most were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You’re talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses, and undercover work became the credo – and a source of boundless, profitable hype. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways.”
    The profane nature of undercover work spilled over into competition for the fourteen district supervisory jobs, and only four districts were large enough to have group leader positions. Competition for these jobs was fierce. At the same time, budgetary restraints made promotions hard to come by, especially for the aging, tainted agents from the Old PU. In addition to that a battle royal was being waged by the drugstore inspectors and the street agents. At the time the inspectors had the advantage, because most of the dope that hit the streets during the war had been diverted by crooked doctors and pharmacists. As a result, registrant and compliance work had become more important than undercover work, and pharmacist/agents like Joseph Bransky and Henry Giordano had emerged from the rank and file to get supervisory positions.
    Bransky in particular was one of Anslinger’s favorite agents. Not only had he arrested Lucky Luciano in 1923; more importantly, Bransky had made the 1941 case on the Direct Sales Company, which was selling morphine tablets through the mail