Free The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine Page A

to doctors in South Carolina. More than 1,350 wholesalers were providing doctors with narcotics, and the Direct Sales case put a stop to the practice. As Anslinger proudly proclaimed in
The Protectors
, Bransky was “the instrument through which the Supreme Court hammered home the responsibility of the drug trade and medical profession alike for alert narcotics supervision and control.” 18
    But the most successful of the drugstore men would be Henry L. Giordano. A pharmacist from Seattle, Giordano became a full-fledged agent working on an important undercover case in Canada. More remains to be said about him, but for now it’s enough to know that in 1962 Giordano would replace Anslinger as Commissioner of Narcotics.
RACE RELATIONS WITHIN THE FBN
    After the war, with the resurgence of the Mafia and international drug smuggling, the emphasis shifted from compliance work to undercover work and conspiracy cases, and street agents became more important than the inspectors. Likewise the war brought about desegregation, a mass migration of Southern Blacks to Northern cities, and a rise in drug addiction, much of it among former soldiers and much of it in Black communities. Congress, ever vigilant, declared a heroin epidemic and pushed for results, which Anslinger was happy to deliver. But in order to achieve those results, Anslinger had to increasingly rely upon Black undercover agents, a development that put his personal prejudices on a collision course with his organization’s vital needs.
    Anslinger boasted of having more Black employees than any other federal agency, and in
The Protectors
he claimed that his anti-narcotics crusade against Black musicians had nothing to do with prejudice. He had worked nights as a piano player in a silent movie theater, he liked jazz, and he had compassion for people who ruined their careers with dope. He could even relate to poor folk: “For some,” he acknowledged, “narcotics block out the sights and sounds of poverty.” 19 But throughout his tenure as Commissioner of the FBN, Anslinger’s unstated policy was blatantly segregationist, and he instructed his supervisors to keep Black agents on what they privately and snidely called “the merry-go-round,” which meant sending Black undercover agents from district to district so they could never stay in one place long enough to exert any individual or concerted influence. The result, of course, was that tensions began to build between White and Black agents.
    â€œUndercover agents were used against their own ethnic groups,” Matt Seifer says in defense of Anslinger and the FBN. “Italians went after Italians; Jews went after Jews; Blacks went after Blacks. There was a lot of teasing to ease the tension, so you couldn’t be thin-skinned about your heritage. People even teased Benny Pocoroba because he spoke broken English and urinated in a bottle on stakeouts.”
    But Irish, Italian, and Jewish agents
were
promoted to management positions, while Blacks, though performing an increasingly larger percentage of the undercover work, were not. (The one Hispanic agent to be put in charge of an office, J. Ray Olivera, was fortunate to have Congressman B. Carroll Reece as his rabbi.) Yet in order to keep faith with the White agents who
sometimes
covered their backs, the Black agents were expected to honor the FBN’s sacred code of silence.
    The predicament of Black agents is best expressed by William B. Davis. After graduating from Rutgers University, Davis, while visiting New York City, heard singer Kate Smith praising Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show. “She described him as a Black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a federal narcotic agent, and that was my inspiration. I applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or give