Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets of America after the program was official cancelled, the United States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter Whites connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.

Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between Luciano and the United States War Department.

Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and from underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active leadership in organized crime in America.

The U.S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's underworld connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their invasion of Sicily, the beginning push into occupied Europe. General George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of territory that was fraught with difficulty, booby trapped roads, snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of 60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four days, a military "miracle" even for Patton.

Senate Estes Kefauver's Senate Sub committee on Organized Crime asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mussolini smashed it through the use of police repression.

Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very prominent and well-documented role in the American military occupation of Italy.

The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S. Intelligence alliance, an alliance that lasts to this day and helped to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra operations. In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the Contras.

One of the Allies top occupation priorities was to liberate as many of their own soldiers from garrison duties so that they could participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this, Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into service, and in July of 1943, the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor of Villalba and other Mafia officials as mayors of other towns in Sicily.

As the northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelligence became very concerned over the extent to which the Italian Communists resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian politics to the left. Community Party membership had doubled between 1943 and 1944, huge leftist strikes had shut down factories and the Italian underground fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to the Italian Resistance, and started appointing Mafia officials to occupation administration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern Italy.

Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and deported to Italy, where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at his hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly deported within a couple of years.

Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950's, Marseilles, in Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the Corsican syndicate began to actively cooperate with the Mafia in the heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.

In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles. American strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely important for their Naval bases as a counterbalance to the growing naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO/AFL organizer Irving Brown testified that by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, U.S. support was no longer needed because the profits from the heroin traffic was sufficient to sustain operations.

When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and hide out in the mountains.

Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the international drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping surveillance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's release from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.

Go To Part Four of the Series

Notice: TGS HiddenMysteries and/or the donor of this material may or may not agree with all the data or conclusions of this data. It is presented here 'as is' for your benefit and research.