11A DIRTY BUSINESS
A cunning and ruthless hoodlum, two crooked Customs employees, two Greek narcotics peddlers in Shanghai and a supporting cast of killers, goons and dupes formed one of the greatest narcotics syndicates the United States has ever known. Over a span of less than two years in 1936–1937, this gang smuggled into the country narcotics believed by Customs agents to have had a retail value of at least $10 million. Their system was so simple that it was almost foolproof. Almost ... but not quite.
The prime mover in this profitable operation was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter—a name which perhaps doesn’t mean much to the younger generation. But in the prohibition era and the years of the depression, Lepke built a fantastic financial empire on a foundation of terror, violence and murder combined with a genius for organizing. He was, in many respects, more powerful and more successful than “Scarface” Al Capone and dozens of other hoodlums of the times who were more publicized in the nation’s press.
Louis Lepke Buchalter rose to power in the shadow of the Jazz Age, the era which evokes sentimental memories for so many Americans. But Lepke’s world was about as sentimental as a tommygun.
He was a small, slender man—5 feet 7—with a dark complexion and black hair which he parted on the side. He was soft-spoken and seemingly humble in manner. He had large brown eyes that appeared as soft and gentle as the eyes of a fawn. But his eyes only masked the evil in this man who schemed and killed until he ranked at the top of the list of U.S. criminals.
By all odds, Lepke was the most brilliant—and the most dangerous—of the criminals. It was Lepke who showed the underworld how to infiltrate and take over control of labor unions, and how to become silent partners in the management of industries. It was Lepke who put murder on a wholesale basis with an organization that became known as Murder, Inc. It was Lepke who found the chink in the U.S. Customs Bureau’s defenses against narcotics smuggling—and who made narcotics smuggling almost a pleasant pastime.
Lepke is worth at least a footnote in any history of our times because he symbolized an era of graft, corruption and violence the likes of which the nation had never known before. He was born on February 6, 1897, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one of a family of eleven children. The family lived in shattering confusion in a small, crowded apartment over the hardware store owned by the father, Barnet Buchalter.
Lepke’s mother called him “Lepkeleh,” the Jewish diminutive for “Little Louis,” and his friends shortened the nickname to Lepke. He was not a bad student in grade school. But he quit school after finishing the eighth grade and for a time worked as a delivery boy at $3 a week.
His father died when he was thirteen. The family broke up and scattered. The other ten children went on to become respectable, useful citizens. But not “Little Louis.” He rented a furnished room on the East Side and turned to crime. He organized raids on pushcart peddlers, stole from lofts, picked pockets, and lived by his wits. He was sent to the reformatory and to prison for short terms for larceny, but he always returned to the old life. He had ambitions to become a big shot in New York’s underworld.
In the early 1920s, Lepke joined an East Side mob headed by “Little Augie” Orgen. But while most of the underworld scrambled to satisfy the country’s unquenchable thirst for bootleg whiskey, Lepke convinced Little Augie that it was safer, smarter and more profitable to specialize in labor racketeering and in selling “protection” to businessmen.
If an employer was having trouble with strikers, Lepke would see to it that the recalcitrant workers were beaten up by his goons and that peace was restored at no increase in wages. If union leaders were having trouble with rank-and-file members, Lepke’s strong-arm squad would bring the rebels back into line with beatings and threats against the men’s families.
Other mobs sold such services on a flat-fee basis. But not Lepke. When his men were hired to put down a union revolt, they remained as members and then slowly muscled their way into the management of the union. The members’ dues were increased to pay for the services rendered.
Businessmen who hired Lepke’s strike-breaking services were ordered to buy the protection on a continuing basis. If they refused, a bomb would be hurled through a window to wreck a plant or a shop. Acid would be thrown onto merchandise, or someone’s face would be splashed with acid as he walked from his place of business to his home.
Those who capitulated—and most of them did—soon found Lepke’s men demanding a voice in management, even to the dictation of contracts (from which they received a kickback) and the placement of a man in the business office to keep a check on the money.
Little Augie was pleased with Lepke’s organizing brilliance and the profits that were rolling in. But the word got around that he didn’t like Lepke’s growing strength in the organization, where he was known as “The Judge” and “Judge Louis.”
Little Augie’s irritation was short-lived. On October 16, 1927, as he stood in a doorway at 103 Norfolk Street talking with his young bodyguard, a sedan suddenly swerved to the curb. A voice called, “Hey, Little Augie!” As the gang chief turned, a burst of machinegun fire cut him down. His wounded bodyguard was identified by police as John Diamond—later to become better known as Jack “Legs” Diamond.
The underworld hummed with the story that Little Augie had fallen victim to Lepke’s ambition. On the basis of an informer’s tip, police picked up Lepke, “Gurrah Jake” Shapiro and “Little Hymie” Holtz and charged them with murder. But no one could prove anything and the case soon was dropped.
With Little Augie out of the way, Lepke set to work to consolidate his empire. He moved more solidly into the leather, baking, garment, fur and transportation industries. At the peak of his power, Lepke personally directed some 250 criminal operations. He rode about New York in a limousine with a liveried chauffeur. He had a staff of 300 men looking after his affairs, plus an assortment of accountants, bookkeepers, gunmen, strong-arm men, and experts in such matters as acid-throwing.
He also put murder on a cash-and-carry basis. If a member of the mob became careless or talked too much, he was executed summarily. Dangerous witnesses were ordered to leave the state under the threat of death—and if they refused to obey, they were killed.
Oddly enough, even at the height of his power, Lepke was virtually an unknown in New York and throughout the country. While other hoodlums gained the headlines, Lepke remained in the shadows with few people realizing the extent of his empire, whose earnings have been estimated at more than $50 million a year. Nor was it known for twelve years—1927 until 1939—that Lepke alone had ordered the deaths of from sixty to eighty men whom he considered a threat to his own safety and prosperity.
By 1933, however, the operations of Lepke and other racketeers had aroused such popular indignation that the U.S. government moved against them. In November of that year a Federal grand jury indicted Lepke on two counts of violating the antitrust laws through his domination of the rabbit-fur-dressing industry. He was arrested and released on bail. He returned home to his wife and adopted son to continue operations as usual while the wheels of justice turned slowly.
It was during this period that another opportunity came to Lepke quite unexpectedly. Three hoodlums—Jack Katzenberg, Jake Lvovsky, and Sam Gross—were allied with other gangsters in the operation of an illicit chemical plant in Newark, New Jersey.The gang was smuggling opium into the country, taking it to the plant and extracting morphine from the opium, to be sold at wholesale across the country. This business was wiped out on February 25, 1935, when an explosion destroyed the chemical plant.
Katzenberg, Lvovsky, and Gross had found the narcotics business too profitable to give up. They began looking around for other ways to get back into the business, and they decided to talk the problem over with Lepke. A mutual friend brought them together in his apartment, where they discussed setting up an international organization which would obtain narcotics in Shanghai and smuggle them into the United States. The sale of narcotics was to be put on the same efficient basis as the sale of murder.
The major stumbling block to the plan was the U.S. Customs. It would be relatively simple to obtain heroin in Shanghai and to bring it as far as the port of New York. The problem was how to smuggle it past the Customs inspectors on a continuing basis that would guarantee a steady supply with a minimum risk.
Lepke was a firm believer in the adage that every man has his price—and he was certain he would have no difficulty in finding someone whose price was reasonable and who would cooperate with the syndicate. This direct approach had always worked in the past and Lepke had no reason to change tactics now.
One of Lepke’s first moves was to investigate the Customs procedures at the New York pier. He found that when vessels arrived at the Port of New York, the passengers’ baggage and trunks were brought to the pier for examination. And when they had been examined, a Customs inspector affixed a colored stamp on each piece of luggage. Once the stamps were affixed, the luggage could be removed from the pier and placed in a taxi or in a truck to be carted away.
Lepke saw that the stamps were the key to his problem. If he could find a Customs employee who would furnish him with the colored stickers, then a sticker could be affixed to a trunk or a suitcase containing narcotics and it would pass through Customs without an actual inspection.
Carefully, Lepke’s lieutenants made inquiries along the waterfront. At last they found their men, two guards who were willing—fora price of $1,000 a trip—to furnish Lepke and his men with the necessary stickers on the day that the narcotics carriers arrived. The price was cheaper than Lepke had expected.
With easy entry for the narcotics assured, Lepke arranged to obtain heroin from two Greek dealers in Shanghai.
This was the state of affairs when Jack Katzenberg made a trip to Brooklyn for a visit with his brother-in-law, Ben Schisoff, a balding, sad-eyed man with the face of a ferret. Ben and his wife Bella operated a Coney Island hot dog concession. They cleared about $1,500 to $2,000 in profit each season, enough to live on through the winter and to take care of the concession rental for the next season.
Katzenberg generously offered to send Ben on an all-expenses-paid trip around the world by luxury liner. All he asked in return was that Schisoff bring back two trunks from Shanghai. “You won’t even have to bother about looking after the trunks,” Katzenberg said, “because there’ll be somebody to do that for you. And when you get back I’ll have some money for you.”
Schisoff was confused. (At least that was the story he would tell Customs agents later.) Why would his brother-in-law suddenly wish to send him around the world with all expenses paid—and then give him money at the end of the trip? He knew his brother-in-law was in the rackets. He knew his reputation as a hoodlum. He also had heard all the rumors that Katzenberg was connected with the narcotics traffic even though he had managed to elude Federal officers. Schisoff told Katzenberg to give him a few days to think it over.
Schisoff finally sat down with his wife and said, “Listen, Bella, I want to go on a trip by myself. You go to Miami. You’ve worked hard and now you are entitled to share the money we have. I want to go alone. You know I am a nervous type of man and I want to go for a couple of months to recuperate. You can stay home or you can go to Miami or do whatever you please. How about it?”
But Bella was having none of this business of her husband taking a vacation alone. She loudly insisted that if he were going on a trip, then she was going with him. She wasn’t going to let him go gallivanting off by himself to get into God knows what sort of trouble. Her answer was “no!”
Schisoff reluctantly told Katzenberg that his sister insisted ongoing along. He expected his brother-in-law to call off the deal. But instead Katzenberg amiably agreed that both of them could go and that he would pay their expenses. And so on November 15, 1935, the couple boarded the SSPresident Lincolnin San Francisco and set sail that day on their voyage around the world by way of Shanghai.
When thePresident Lincolnarrived in Shanghai, Sam Gross was waiting at the pier to meet them. He introduced them to his two Greek companions and then took them to the Metropole Hotel, where he had made reservations for them. Sam said, “Now you two get a good rest. Everything is going all right.”
As Schisoff told the story later: “A few days later, Sam Gross tells me that he is going away for a week. He said to us, ‘Don’t walk too often in the street because it is not so good.’ I said, ‘All right. But what will I do if anything happens? Maybe I’ll get sick. I don’t know anybody around here.’ So he gave me an address. In case anything went wrong I should call that telephone number. I don’t remember the address and the number. It was a Greek fellow, named Jay, and his wife. Finally Sammy Gross puts a scare into me and tells me not to go into the streets.
“And so we stayed in the hotel until we got blue in the face. And so my wife finally says, ‘We have money. Why sit in the hotel? I want to do some shopping. Everything is so cheap here.’
“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 theGreeks, 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 SSMajesticfor 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 theMajesticwas 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 theMajesticdocked 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 theMajesticwas 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 byLvovsky 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 ofquestioning 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 agentsalso 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 SSM. N. Patrickby 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 thePatrickcompleted her run from Hong Kong.
Seattle forwarded a teletype message to San Francisco saying: “Information considered to be very reliable received today that shipM. N. Patrickarriving 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 thePatrickonly 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 thatPatrickis 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....”
ThePatrickhad 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 byjoint 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 10A.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 parcelwas 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 transportGeneral 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 theC. 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 fromTokyo. 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.