Free The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine Page B

direction to Whites. The few Black agents we had at any one time,” he says bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities heaped upon us.” 20
    Davis tells how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the 1930s, created a patent medicine called Mother McCree’s Goose Grease. But McCree made the mistake of writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that federal prosecutors in the South were calling Black agents “niggers.” As a result, Anslinger had his legal staff charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine. McCree was fired and his dismissal had the intended ripple effect: it sent a clear message that complaints from Black agents would not be tolerated.
    Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police in the 1970s, explains the situation from local law enforcement’s point of view: “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because it was easy. We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case. So rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”
    Alas, under Anslinger’s bigoted guidance, his agent force often seemed more intent on perpetuating addiction in America’s ghettos than in eradicating it.
ANSLINGER’S DOUBLE STANDARD AND ITS IMPACT
    The FBN was a political animal and political patronage was one of its traits. Matt Seifer recalls the time Eleanor Roosevelt was unhappy with Anslinger and wanted to replace him. So he appointed one of the First Lady’sclassmates as district supervisor in Denver. “She [Elizabeth Bass] always went about in the company of two male agents,” Seifer says, “and she always carried two semi-automatics in her handbag. She’d get to a hotel and plop that bag down on the counter and you could hear the guns clanking inside. She was quite a character!”
    But the fish rots from the head down, and Anslinger’s penchant for patronage, and for asking agents to perform petty favors, created a venal environment that fostered corruption. Charges that Anslinger was abusing his power began in 1939, after Professor Alfred Lindesmith questioned his punitive approach toward addicts and charged that Anslinger’s policy only added a profit motive to trafficking. In retaliation, Anslinger sent Chicago District Supervisor James Biggins to Indiana University to warn the authorities that Lindesmith’s Narcotic Research Foundation, which advocated the treatment of addicts, was sponsored by “a criminal organization,” which it was not. 21
    To justify his punitive stance, Anslinger also (at the expense of making conspiracy cases) focused his agent force on bringing in all known addicts, fingerprinting them, and counting them for statistical purposes. But behind the scenes, some of his agents were handing out dope to the addicts, feeding their habits in order to make cases and inflate the statistics, thus fostering corruption throughout the organization.
    â€œAnslinger got away with murder,” Matt Seifer says. “He catered to the wealthy and instead of prosecuting their kids, he sent them to Lexington [where the Public Health Service drug addiction treatment center was located]. He played politics, but he was smart. Our jurisdiction in Boston covered all of New England into Canada, and some of the houses that were used as depots were half in and half out, and one time one of our men killed a Canadian. But Anslinger