33. A key event of course was the publication of Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). McCoy’s copious footnotes make it clear that he interviewed such important U.S. CIA officers as Lucien Conein and William Young. My own book The War Conspiracy, published shortly before McCoy’s, was able to reveal further details of the drug traffic (including the key role of Paul Helliwell, not mentioned by McCoy until 1991). I too was helped in part by conversations with an author and former CIA officer whom I met accidentally (as I then believed) in the library at the University of California, Berkeley.
34. The best essay is by Jonathan Marshall, “CIA Assets and the Rise of the Guadalajara Connection,” in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 197–208.
35. Testimony of George Gaffney, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Hearings, 88th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964; henceforward cited as Narcotics Hearings), 899. Cf. Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection (Ottawa: Optimum, 1976).
36. Lansky had been a major player in the so-called Operation Underworld of the OSS and the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II to use information from Lucky Luciano in operations on the New York waterfront and later in Sicily (Scott, Deep Politics, 100, 145, 165). His opposite number in Mexico, the Corsican Paul Mondoloni, was likewise protected by the French government (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs [London: Verso, 2004], 323).
37. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 44.
38. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 443.
39. Narcotics Hearings, 81, 989. Lansky was an unindicted coconspirator (and conceivably even an informant) in the case that convicted Meltzer (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 95).
40. Alan A. Block, Perspectives on Organizing Crime (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 230–31.
41. Scott, Deep Politics, 140–41. One syndicate representative in Mexico City was Paul Roland Jones, who opened a casino there. Jones was later convicted in a major drug bust that involved both Jack Ruby (the future killer of Lee Harvey Oswald) and his brother Hymie (Scott, Deep Politics, 138–41). A Dallas detective, Lieutenant George Butler, taped Jones discussing how the U.S. government had stopped his activities in Mexico City, “at least until Aleman gets in” (Butler notes, in records of Senate Commerce Committee; cf. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Appendix to Hearings, vol. 9, 516).
42. Thirty minutes after Luciano’s death from a massive heart attack, FBN Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano announced that the FBN “had been on the point of arresting the powerful Mafioso for having introduced $150 million worth of heroin to American territory over the previous ten years” (Charbonneau, Canadian Connection, 168, quoted in Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 247). No, arrest does not necessarily prove dismal failure.
43. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 269, citing Mason Cargill Memorandum to the File, Subject: Project ZR/RIFLE and QJ/WIN, April 30, 1975, HSCA.
44. Peter Lupsha, “Drug Lords and Narco-Corruption: The Players Change but the Game Continues,” in McCoy and Block, War on Drugs, 177–79, 181.
45. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 104.
46. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 43, cf. 10, 46.
47. “Balkans Products, Ltd.,” Time, April 3, 1933, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753621,00.html.
48. Luís Astorga, “Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment,” Management of Social Transformations—MOST, Discussion Paper No. 36, UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/most/astorga.htm.
49. Astorga, “Organized Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 63.
50. Luís Astorga, “The Limits of Anti-Drug Policy in Mexico,” 428, http://www
.justiceblind.com/drugwar/mexicolimits.pdf.
