The Business of Terrorism [A shorter version of this article appeared in The Dial, January 1982.

] It was November 15, 1979. George Gregory Korkala, New Jersey arms manufacturer and international trafficker in the devices of death, was in an expansive mood. He was sitting in room 2737 of the New York Hilton, doing business with two representatives of a shadowy Latin American guerrilla movement. Korkala promised to take care of all their needs--whether they included American M16 rifles, Soviet AK47s, French sub-machine guns, ground-to-air missiles, laser weapons, or even a variety of poisons. "I don't care where they're going," he assured his terrorist customers. "That's not important. I don't even want to know that. I'm content with helping." He laid down only one proviso: "I'm not interested in buying one or two /guns/ for some would-be assassin. If I'm going to sell, I want to order several hundred thousand." The obliging revolutionaries later handed over $56,000 as a down payment for a $3.3 million order for 10,000 sten machine guns and ammunition warehoused in England. There was one catch, however: The "revolutionaries" were actually two undercover cops, who proceeded to place Korkala and his partner, former CIA agent Frank Terpil, under arrest for illegal arms trafficking. Korkala, Terpil, and their associate Edwin Wilson, have since become notorious as international mercenaries who supplied weapons, explosives, and training to the terrorist forces of Libya, Uganda, and splinter groups of the PLO. Wilson and Terpil are now fugitives in Libya and Lebanon respectively, and Korkala was recently apprehended in Madrid. But the going was great while it lasted. While Terpil made do with a quarter-of-a-million dollar home in a suburb of Washington and another home in England, Wilson lived handsomely on his $6 million, 1500 acre estate in northern Virginia, where he entertained the elite of the nation's capital with hunting, riding, and lavish barbecues. Terrorism hasn't always been so profitable. Michael Townley, leader of the Cuban exiles who blew up former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, and his coworker Ronni Moffit, was on a salary from the Chilean government of $500 a month plus expenses. The average member of the Italian Red Brigades, living an uncomfortable and rootless existence, subsists on about $15,000 a year. But as we enter what Claire Sterling calls "Fright Decade II," with pariah states and extremist movements growing ever more sophisticated in their terrorist tactics, so too have the profits of terrorism grown. The Monteneros urban guerrillas in Argentina, for example, hired their own banker to manage the $40-odd million they amassed through kidnappings and bank robberies. The El Salvadorian guerrillas piled up a similar fortune in the 1970s with identical tactics--enough to support most of their foreign weapons purchases. For many movements, as the profits have grown, the business side of terrorism has begun to overshadow the political rationale. Asked why he left the CIA for his sordid private pursuits, Terpil said, "For fun and profit . . . why should I give money away to those other people when I can make it for myself?" (WP 9-1480) Terpil was unusually candid, perhaps, but he reflects the inherent tendency of terrorist movements to degenerate into criminal enterprises. Some movements have avoided this fate--the El Salvadorian guerrillas among them--but others, whether of the extreme right or the extreme left, have begun to adopt terrorism as a livelihood, where they once saw it only as a tactic justified by moral political aims. Terrorism is costly; estimates of the annual budget of the Red Brigades, in their heyday, ran to about $10 million. Only so much can be raised even from generous donors like Colonel Qaddafi; the rest has to be gleaned from illicit means, often the same ones perfected by organized criminal gangs: drug trafficking, bank robberies, kidnapping, and extortion. Terrorists and revolutionaries are also prone to mix in common criminal circles when it comes to procuring weapons on the black market. (Commander Jonas, and El Salvadorian guerrilla leader, says that mafia contacts in

the United States have been his biggest source of arms, adding that "some Mafiosi are leftists, some are rightists, but most are just businessmen." NYT 1-26-82). As the political demands of these groups remain frustrated year after year, and as the risks of the terrorist life begins to wear down even the most idealistically inclined, terrorists tend to lose sight of their original goals and succumb to the temptation to put their skills to work for common criminal ends. Where politics once legitimized crime as a necessary evil, crime now often subsumes politics. Italy, home of numerous competing terrorist networks and of the original mafia, is perhaps the paradigm of this trend. Says one Italian parliamentarian who took part in the official investigation of the Aldo Moro kidnapping, terrorism in his country is "less and less motivated by ideology and more and more linked to the Mafia, the camorra /the Naples underworld/, common criminals." (Chicago Tribune, 8-9-81) This observation seems applicable to both extremes of the ideological spectrum. A Red Brigades financier, for example, did business with the notorious swindler and "paper hanger" Mel Weinberg (later to become famous as the Abscam "sting man") to obtain phony Certificates of Deposit that could be used as collateral with European banks to raise money for terrorist operations. (Greene, Sting Man, 64) The Red Brigades and other left-wing Italian terrorists teamed up with professional kidnappers and even with the dreaded Calabrian mafia, the N'drangheta, to raise millions through extortion and robberies. (Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, 208-210, 223) But it is the far right in Italy that has had the longest history of ties to organized crime, going back to the early days after World War II when monarchist and neo-fascist separatists in Sicily backed Salvatore Giuliano, a leading gangster, in his massacres of leftist political opponents. (Gaia Servadio, Mafioso) More recently the fascist-mafia alliance was exemplified by the formation, around 1973, of the informal Anonima Sequestri by the former monarchist Carlo Fumagalli, who led the band in kidnapping an industrialist in the north, and also engaged in gold and counterfeit money traffics (Frederic Laurent, L'Orchestre noir, 364). On the mafia side, the organization was said to be headed by the much-feared Luciano Liggio, an experienced kidnapper (Servadio, 260). One of the leading affiliates of Anonima Sequestri was the so-called Italo-Marseilles gang, headed by Albert Bergamelli, perpetrator of the notorious hold-up at the Colombo jewelry store in Milan in 1964. Bergamelli's gang pulled off numerous profitable kidnappings in Italy in 1974 and 1975, including, in the latter year, the seizure of Amedeo Maria Ortolani, a rich businessman. The reason for the Ortolani kidnapping became apparent after Bergamelli's arrest in March 1976 on the orders of Judge Vittorio Occorsio. Bergamelli boasted as he was captured, "I am a Nazi . . . a great family protects me." On March 30, 1976, Bergamelli's attorney, Gianantonio Minghelli, was also arrested and accused of laundering money from kidnappings. Minghelli was a fascist and also an attorney for Adriano Tilgher, chief of the terrorist Avanguardia Nazionale. The "family" that protected Bergamelli turned out to be the P2 lodge headed by Licio Gelli, and whose organizational secretary was Minghelli himself. At the end of 1976 a dissident mason, Francesco Siniscalchi, denounced P2 as a fascist front. Besides Gelli, who had been active with last-ditch Italian fascists in the Republic of Salo in the end of World War II, the lodge included Vito Miceli, former head of the Italian intelligence agency SID, a fascist MSI deputy, and suspected of complicit in the December 1970 coup plot of Prince Borghese; Carmelo Spagnuolo, former chief judicial officer in Rome; Edgardo Sogno, a known coup plotter of monarchist sympathies; and General Ugo Ricci, implicated with the shadowy Rosa dei Venti in terrorist acts and coup planning. The Italian magistrate Occorsio, even before Siniscalchi's revelations, had begun investigating whether Bergamelli's ransoms financed Gelli's paper organization to aid masons, OMPAM. (Laurent, 365; Jean Lesage, L'Italie des enlevements (Paris, 1978), 195-200). It appeared, from Siniscalchi's revelation, that Gelli had ordered the kidnapping of Ortolani to punish Ortolani's father Umberto, a fellow P2 member with whom he was feuding. If so, they soon patched up their differences. Gelli used his Peronist connections to

help Ortolani expand his Argentine business interests, and after Gelli was forced to flee Italy in the wake of the 1981 P2 scandal, Ortolani helped him find refuge in Latin America. Occorsio didn't live long enough to see the investigation completed. It was Judge Occorsio, by all accounts who began and then so tenaciously pursued the inquiry into fascist-criminal ties; it was fitting, therefore, that he died at the hands of that same combine. His chief killer, Pier Luigi Concutelli, was a former leader of the fascist Ordine Nuovo who had become military commander of a new fascist united front formed in the Winter of 1975 out of several organizations, including Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale. Seed money for the new "revolutionary militia" came from the August 23, 1975 kidnapping of the banker Luigi Mariano, which raised a ransom of 280 million lira. Several members of the kidnap plot were arrested, including a top MSI official from Brindisi, Luigi Martinesi, who in turn revealed the name of the political leader of the new fascist front; Clemente Manco, an MSI deputy and permanent member of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. Mariano's kidnapper, it appears, was Concutelli himself. (Lesage, 178-80; Laurent, 365) Shortly before his assassination, Occorsio had requested from Scotland Yard information relating to Universal Banking Corporation in London, where the Mariano ransom had been deposited. Later investigation showed that Universal was one of three family banks registered in Anguila with branches in London, which had been used almost exclusively for laundering money from Italian kidnappings and all manner of international robberies and frauds. British authorities learned that one of Universal's officials, Benito Rosas of the Dominican Republic, was a close associate of Jacques Forcet (arrested in Switzerland for handling financial transactions for fascist kidnappers) and above all of Tomasso Buscetta, a mafia partner of Liggio and a kingpin of the South American heroin traffic organized by August Ricord. Another associate of the bank was Giuseppe Pugliese, who had been entrusted by Ordine Nuovo with financing fascists on the run, including Mario Tuti, who masterminded the notorious Italicus train bombing. Pugliese established a base in Corsica to which fascists from all over Europe congregated, including such notorious Italians as Elio Massagrande and Stefano delle Chiaie. (Pugliese was also friends with Marseilles underworld boss Gaetan Zampa, one of the Nice bank robbers. See L'Express, 2-2177). It was at Pugliese's retreat, apparently, the Occorsio murder was planned. And who was the mastermind behind the Universal Banking network? Scotland Yard's investigation allegedly turned up one name: Meyer Lansky. (Lesage, 237-240; Luis Gonzalez-Mata, Terrorismo Internacional (Barcelona, 1978), 220-223). When Italian police finally caught up with Concutelli in Rome in February 1977, they found in his possession 11 million lira taken from the ransom of Emanuela Trapani, daughter of the Italian distributor of Helene Curtis products. She had been kidnapped by the gang of Renato Vallanzasca, an Italian Dillinger who flouted the mafia and enjoyed the glare of publicity. Vallanzasca had teamed up with Concutelli's crowd because he didn't have the means to launder all the money he was making. Police captured him two days after Concutelli's arrest; the two had apparently been plotting to spring Bergamelli from prison and to kill Occorsio's successor' (Lesage, 208; Laurent, 366; L'Express, 2-21-77) The most notorious of all Italian kidnappers, as we have seen, was mafia boss Luciano Liggio, nominal head of Anonima Sequestri. His organization took in hundreds of millions of lira as it perfected techniques for holding luckless businessmen up for ransom. When Italian police finally arrested him in 1974, they found in his possession the secret telephone number of Ugo De Luca; Liggio's lieutenants also had the number. De Luca was the head of Banco di Milano, which he ran for Sicilian financier Michele Sindona. De Luca apparently specialized in the wholesale export of dirty mafia money, especially to Canada. Sindona was no better; he has recently been indicted in Italy for complicity in narcotics trafficking. But of greater political significance is the fact that Sindona, a member of the P2 lodge, was a key participant at a March 1973 strategy session of Rosa dei Venti, a powerful coup group with members high in the Italian military. Otto

Skorzeny, the Nazi commando turned arms agent, was a key backer of the Rosa conspiracy, just as he had supplied arms to the Borghese putsch attempt of December 1970. (Lesage, 232-233; Laurent, 261; Cuadernos para e Dialogo, 2-5-77) Italian neo-fascists exported their methods to France, where kidnappings had hitherto been rare. The first victim on a long list of kidnappings was Louis Hazan, head of the Philips subsidiary Phonogram. He was grabbed on December 10, 1975 by six men armed with submachine guns. They demanded 15 million francs ransom, but blew the job and were eventually caught. All the kidnappers were denizens of the extreme right--Forces nouvelles, Ordre nouveau, OAS, and so forth. Of the three leaders, two were Italians. Ugo Brunini, an Italian fascist, was said to have belonged to Avanguardia Nazionale and to have worked for PIDE (Portuguese secret police) and BOSS (South African) in Mozambique, and for Jonas Savimbi in Angola. (Gonzalez-Mata, 209). Another leader of the Hazan kidnappers was Daniel Moschini, who had been with Ordine Nero in Italy, then fought with mercenaries from Aginterpress in Angola, and finally moved to France where he served numerous far right groups and acted as the French contact for the Spanish Guerrillas of Christ the King and their anti-Basque front, ATE. (Laurent, 389-391; Liberation, November 3, 1980). The third leader was Jacques Prevost, an Ordre nouveau candidate in 1971 who had fought in Korea, at Dien Bien Phu, and with the OAS in Algeria; he had been imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle but was given amnesty in 1968. He later went into business supplying arms for mercenaries in Africa. (Laurent, 389-91; Wilfred Burchett & Derek Roebuck, The Whores of War (London, 1977), 151-153). One of Prevost's known colleagues was a young mercenary named Jean Kay (Nouvel Observateur, 9-13-76). At an early age, Kay had joined up to fight in Algeria, only to desert and commit himself to the OAS cause. When that terrorist group had spent itself, Kay drifted from one mercenary campaign to another, in Biafra, Angola, and Jordan. While in the Middle East, he became an instructor to the forces of the leader of the Christian Phalange in Lebanon, Pierre Gemayel, an admirer of Adolf Hitler. Kay married an ethnic Armenian and returned to France, only to become active again as a mercenary, this time with the SDECE-sponsored secessionist movement in Angola's Cabinda province, inspired by the ambitions of the French oil company ELF. In 1976 Kay made his mark on French history. He teamed up with a disgruntled accountant who embezzled 8 million francs from Dassault, the leading French aerospace firm. Kay accompanied his partner, M. Vathaire, to Miami in early June, where Kay made a show of contacting the mafia. On their return, Kay left Vathaire in the cold and absconded with the money. In July Kay went to Lebanon, where he apparently rejoined Gemayel and turned at least some of his loot over to the Phalangists. (Le Point, 9-13-76. It is intriguing that Kay split up with Vathaire at the small town of Divonne-les-Bains near the Swiss border, where Jacques Souetre is manager of the largest hotel, according to Henrik Kruger who interviewed him there.) ( London Daily Express, 10-1-76) According to French police sources, Kay is suspected of meeting one Albert Spaggiari in August 1976. Spaggiari had just become notorious as leader of France's greatest bank robbery, the sewer job against the Socit General branch in Nice, over the weekend of July 17-18. (Burchett & Roebuck, 156). Spaggiari got his start in the underworld in 1949, fighting with the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Guiliano, an ally of rightwing politicians and landowners. (Le Monde, 11-2176). He later joined the terrorist OAS and took part in two unsuccessful assassination attempts against de Gaulle. His sewer team included fellow OAS veteran Gaby Anglade, the Marseilles underworld boss Gaetan Zampa who attended the 1970 congress of Ordine Nuovo (Laurent, 397) and was known to Giuseppe Pugliese (see above); and an Italian member of the Italo-Marseilles gang, whom Spaggiari recruited in Rome (Laurent, 400). Their total haul came to upwards of fifty million francs. Some of their loot was later traced to the Spanish coffers of the Guerrillas of Christ the King and the anti-Basque ATE (L'Express, 2-21-77). French police also traced some of the gold to Andre Conges, a former member of the Comit Anti-Terrorist de Nord de l'Afrique (CATENA) and the SDECE-inspired Main Rouge, an anti-Algerian nationalist organization

active in North Africa in the 1950s. Conges was using the gold to stamp out counterfeit coins. (Gonzalez Mata, 215). The remnants of the French OAS have formed a pool of international mercenaries for hire by the highest bidder. Ed Wilson recruited some in order to stage a coup in Chad on behalf of Qaddafi. (London Sunday Times, 12-21-80) (It didn't succeed, so Qaddafi simply invaded the country a few years later). By the late 1960s, many of them had joined up with such guns-for-hire outfits as Aginterpress in Lisbon (a phony news agency that supplied mercenaries for the Portuguese in Africa) and the Paladingruppe in Spain, run by a former German Nazi, which did odd jobs for the Greek colonels and, allegedly, for large German multinational corporations. Numerous French fascists found Lebanon a suitable outlet for their militant ambitions. The Parti des forces nouvelles and Groupe Action Jeunesse were particularly well represented among the forces of Camille Chamoun, a Christian and former president of Lebanon. (Laurent, 412) One Action Jeunesse mercenary, Stephane Zanettaci, lost his life in the Phalangist (Gemayel) attack on the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel-al-Zaatar in 1976. (Burchett & Roebuck, 156). One Australian mercenary quoted by the Guardian of London said "I reckon there are about forty Frenchman fighting with the Falangists. . . . They come over here for three months, get trained, do some fighting. Then they go back and wait to go into action in France." (Quoted in Burchett & Roebuck, 157). Right-wing Phalangist forces in Lebanon have found other sources of international support, aside from a sympathetic community of Lebanese in the diaspora. The fascist Eoka-B movement in Cyprus transshipped arms from Israel to Gemayel's men. (WP 7-21-76). The Italian mafia also routed arms to the Phalangists. (Anthony Sampson, Arms Bazaar, 11). Italian magistrates investigating the bloody bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980 discovered that several suspected neofascists had passed through Phalangist training camps in the company of rightists from Belgium, France, and Spain. Alessandro Alibrandi, leader of the neo-fascist Italian terrorist group Terza Posizione, used to live in East Beirut under Phalangist protection, until he was assassinated during a secret trip to Rome this December. (Middle East, July 1981). In Lebanon, the Christian Phalangists and other warring forces finance their arms purchases in part through the drug traffic. Lebanon has long been a key point in the world narcotics traffic; opium grown in Turkey (where some of it is now smuggled by the fascist Gray Wolves) was refined and transshipped out of Beirut to Marseilles (or now Sicily) for further processing and then final shipment to the United States. Lebanon is also a source of other drugs. Moslem farmers in the Bekaa valley (near the Syrian border) grow hashish in profusion; the crop last year was estimated at 2000 tons, up from a mere 100 tons before the outbreak of the civil war. The crop is then moved to the United States, Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia by the Christian Phalangists and their dire enemies (but fellow Christians) in the Franjieh clan, based in the north and enjoying close relations with the Syrians. A whole string of Christian-controlled ports has sprung up north of Beirut to handle the traffic, drawing millions of dollars of business away from government docks. (NYT 10-5-81) The "French Connection," of which Lebanon was such an important part, was shifted to Latin America in the 1960s under the guiding eye of French and Italian fascists and criminals, including, as mentioned above, Tomasso Buscetta. Through Latin America, drugs could be moved with the help of corrupt governments and military administrations into the United States, evading tight Customs controls on ports in the northeastern United States. The ring was ostensibly headed by Auguste Ricord, a former Nazi collaborator who relocated after World War II to Paraguay, where he was assisted by Nazi escapee Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon" who made his home in Bolivia. (Jaubert, Dossier D comme Drogue, 285n). One of Ricord's closest assistants was Christian David, a former leader of the Gaullist strong-arm squad, Service d'action civique, that battled the OAS in Algeria and France in the early 1960s.

SAC recruited heavily from the underworld, and David was one of those gangsters whose activities was sanctioned by the French state as long as he didn't overstep the bounds. But he was forced to flee to Latin America when, having been implicated in the political murder of Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka and in the shooting of a French police lieutenant, his political allies could no longer protect him. In Latin America, however, he kept in touch with his friends in the Foccart network and, on behalf of local military intelligence agencies, infiltrated the Uruguayan Tupamaros guerrillas and fingered their leadership. Touring around the continent on an Argentine passport, he tried the same tactic in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. But David's real livelihood was crime; in particular, trafficking in heroin. He was joined at the apex of the Ricord network by a former OAS henchman, Francois Chiappe, who, like David, now put politics aside. David and Chiappe were arrested in 1972 after the United States brought enormous pressure to bear on Latin regimes that harbored the traffickers. David was eventually extradited from Brazil to the United States, where he remains in prison. Chiappe, however, was mysteriously freed from prison by Argentine authorities, just in time for him to take part in a military intelligence sponsored massacre of left-wing Peronists at Ezeiza airport in June 1973. Chiappe became an enforcer for the right-wing Peronist minister of social welfare, Jose LopezRega (a P2 member) who, ironically, used U. S. military aid to entrench himself as Argentina's preeminent narcotics trafficker. One of Lopez-Rega's closest allies and the organizer of the Ezeiza massacre, Colonel Jorge Osinde, went on to become Argentina's ambassador to Paraguay, nerve center of the French Connection. (Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup (Boston, 1980); Latin America 12-19-75). The French Connection, with its terrorist ties, lives on in Bolivia, home of the "Bridegrooms of Death," a cocaine syndicate headed by former Gestapo boss Klaus Altmann (a/k/a Barbie). Altmann, wanted for war crimes in France, is a close associate of Bolivian colonel Luis Arce Gomez, who became Interior Minister following the notorious "cocaine coup" that the two men helped organize in 1980. Arce controls a fleet of private planes that he uses to move cocaine; he also commands a force of several hundred agents in the Special Security Service who divide their time between running drugs and torturing political prisoners. According to the New York Times, "reportedly aiding the colonel is a team of more than 20 foreign mercenaries from France, Italy, Belgium, Argentina, and other countries. Some of them say they are neo-Nazis. Last year they helped establish and train the Special Security Service, which became the vanguard in storming Government ministries and labor unions in last year's coup, in which more than 40 people died." (NYT 8-3-81) One Special Security Service trainer is former SS commandant Albert von Ingelom, who served 20 years on a Nuremberg conviction. Other German Nazis from Altmann's contingent, eight of them altogether, were arrested by Brazilian police for bringing six pounds of cocaine across the border; also in their possession were a pair of machine guns and a pile of Nazi propaganda. (High Times, January 1982; Newsweek (international edition), June 8, 1981). Cocaine refined in Bolivia titillates nostrils from Hollywood to Miami Beach. While German Nazis and former OAS terrorists ship the white powder north, Cuban exile terrorists receive it in Miami. Among the leading contacts of the French Connection in the 1960s were Bay of Pigs veterans Francisco and Ronald Condom-Gil. Ronald, prior to his arrest on drug charges in 1973, had been held in a Cuban jail for conspiring to assassinate Fidel Castro. Francisco was recently arrested in Miami as part of yet another huge ring, dominated by Cuban exiles, that imported Bolivian cocaine direct from Colonel Arce. Indicted with Condon-Gil was Frank Castro, said to have been the key organizer in 1976 of the terrorist cabal that plotted such outrages as the Letelier assassination and the bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet, which cost 73 lives. (Castro's coconspirator, Orlando Bosch, was no stranger to drugs; his daughter was arrested in Miami with seven pounds of cocaine and the address of WFC Corporation in her possession. See John Cummings, "Miami Confidential," Inquiry, August 3, 1981).

Yet another exile charged in the Miami drug ring was Rafael Villaverde, beloved in Little Havana for managing a social service center for the elderly, but suspected by authorities of being a major drug trafficker and terrorist. "I am a friend of the terrorists," Villaverde admits. "For me that's not bad when you do it in the defense of liberty." Villaverde, an original member of the Bay of Pigs invasion force, was approached by Ed Wilson in 1976 with a $1 million offer to assassinate the famed terrorist Carlos. Villaverde backed out when he learned the target was actually to be an opponent of Qaddafi's, and that the operation wasn't sanctioned by the CIA. The examples could be extended. Whether the original target was dictatorship in Cuba or democracy in France, however, the means of terrorism have almost invariably corrupted the ends. Yet it would be wrong to stop there and simply decry the evil of terrorist entrepreneurs who keep the world increasingly on edge. They are an easy target of moral wrath. But they are usually only the agents of higher powers--governments--that keep terrorism alive in their own interest. Qaddafi's Libya is only the most publicized example. The alliance between governments, terrorists, and criminal syndicates can be illustrated by incidents on America's own soil. In 1943, for example, the prominent anti-fascist ItalianAmerican editor Carlo Tresca was gunned down on the streets of New York. Reliable police reports fingered as the culprit one Carmine Galante, then a small-time soldier in the New York mafia family headed by Joe Bonnano. Galante, who pulled off the job as a favor to Benito Mussolini's secret police, on instructions from Vito Genovese, went on to become a top crime boss in the 1970s, only to be slain himself in a gangland war for control of the East Coast heroin trade. In 1956, New Jersey mafioso "Bayonne Joe" Zicarelli, who made a fortune selling arms to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, chartered the plane used to kidnap the distinguished migr scholar and democrat, Jesus de Galindez, then living in New York City. Galindez was flown back to the Dominican Republic to be brutally murdered by Trujillo's secret police. Finally, in 1960, the CIA made its notorious pact with leaders of the U. S. mafia to kick off a multi-year campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA counted on its underworld allies using their drug and casino contacts back in Cuba to slip Castro some poison, or to simply shoot him. But not only did Castro survive all the attempts, the mafia dons in turn blackmailed the U. S. government to avoid prosecution for other crimes. By most accounts, one of those CIA collaborators, Florida mafia chief Santo Trafficante, went on to replace the French Connection as the main supplier of pure heroin to U. S. markets. Galante, Zicarelli, and Trafficante, terrorists in the service of three different intelligence agencies, never paid for their political crimes; on the contrary, each gained new power and prestige by an alliance with governmental authority. Governments have helped make terrorism a big business. In a complex, interdependent world, terrorism can probably never be stamped out. But terrorism can only flourish where states encourage the practice by turning to crime syndicates to perpetrate political violence.