The Mafia in Mexico (Part I)

The Mafia in Mexico: Violence and Controversy

 As a gangster, Harold “Happy” Meltzer was no stranger to being behind bars. Since he had been arrested in New Jersey at the age of 17 for shooting a taxi driver, he had been in and out of the clink.  He was a phlegmatic criminal. He faced his first prosecution “with an air of stolid boredom”; he had to be prodded on two occasions to keep his eyes open. “Even the declaration of not-guilty didn’t wake him up into anything approaching emotion,” claimed the New York Times. It was a useful habit to have. And after beating this charge, he was prevented from leaving the courthouse and immediately accused of another murder. The following year he was arrested for selling narcotics and three years later for running illegal booze.

Harold “Happy” Melzer

But now this was getting ridiculous. This was harassment. It was 6 March 1951. He was on the other side of the country, in the Los Angeles, and in jail yet again.  This was the seventh time he had faced prison in the previous two years. So far he had been accused of stabbing to death a New Jersey racketeer, illegally possessing a firearm, fraudulently claiming U.S. citizenship, narcotics peddling and brutally beating a radio operator. In July 1949 he couldn’t turn up to one court hearing because he had another two on at the same time. And in October 1949 he had even refused his own bail and voluntarily returned to prison to avoid the killers that were after his boss, the legendary Los Angeles mobster, Mickey Cohen.

This time he was charged with narcotics trafficking back in New York. “Why? I haven’t even been in New York in the last five years”, he had complained. ““I have no idea what this is all about” He would soon discover. Over the next three months, a New York grand jury heard how Melzter had masterminded a vast drug trafficking operation that brought opium and heroin from Mexico and into the United States. Chemists, mobsters, FBN agents, and local policemen all testified to his complicity. He was bang to rights and pleaded guilty to all charges. His lawyer asked for leniency for saving the government the expense of a trial. “In a case where a man is a distributor and not a user himself and makes people miserable I cannot give much weight to this argument,” the judge piously replied. He got two concurrent sentences of five years.

During the 1940s U.S. demand for narcotics created a burgeoning Mexican drug trade. In general it was a grassroots movement. As The Dope lays out, it started with a few fields of poppies, a handful of Chinese opium experts, and a small group of tough mountain farmers. Over the following years, the business expanded. It attracted local merchants, ambitious businessmen and the odd female chemistry graduate.  But it remained the preserve of peasants, farmers, shopkeepers, and local cops. No doubt, there was political protection. Yet it was pretty low-level stuff; it was still organized by municipal and state governments.

But with such big returns, Mexico’s growing narcotics trade could not stay in the shadows forever. And during the same decade, two rather more high profile organizations attempted to get in on the game. One was the Mexican federal government. The other was that loose group of interconnected Jewish- and Italian-American gangs known as the “mafia”. It was men like Harold “Happy” Meltzer.

In recent years both federal efforts and those of the mobs have attracted considerable attention. Journalists and historians have woven together elaborate conspiracies  linking New York hoodlums, gangsters’ molls, Mexican presidents, crooked secret agents - and even the CIA. Often they have cast these conspiracies forward to argue that there was an unwavering policy of high-up, officially sanctioned control over the Mexican drug trade stretching from the mid 1940s up to the 1980s.

La Cosa Nostra en México. One of the many books which rather overplays the mafia’s role in the Mexican drug trade.

Just because these are conspiracies, it doesn’t mean that these stories don’t include elements of truth. Both the Mexican federal government and the mafia did attempt to muscle in on the drug business. The U.S. mobsters did cause big changes to the local narcotics business. They brought at least some  – if not all - of the technical know how necessary to transform opium into morphine. They brought the drug trade south to the city of Guadalajara for the first time. And they formed vital intermediaries between the new Mexican suppliers and the extensive American markets. These links meant that Mexican opium sellers didn’t simply serve a border hinterland of desperate junkies, but also the big concentrations of addicts in Los Angeles, Chicago, and most importantly New York.

But the story of both efforts is not really one of change; it is one of failure. Mob attempts to harness the profits of Mexican drug production were distinctly short-lived. They ran aground for many reasons - bloody infighting, a concerted, U.S. anti-mafia drive, a parallel Mexican campaign and new competition from the mafia’s European heroin factories.

Together they highlighted a couple of rather surprising points. First, compared with the Mexican drug business, the U.S. one was a relatively violent affair. As we shall see it was the preserve of career criminals; rivalry was met with force; and double-crossings were frequent. Second, in the 1940s there were clear limits to Mexican corruption. Letting local governments fund schools with American drug money was one thing. Risking the country’s political and economic stability by becoming America’s primary drug source was quite another. It would take another thirty years and a lot more money for thinking to change.

Finding out what the mafia did in Mexico is not easy. Men like Harold “Happy’ Meltzer left little trace. They moved frequently, knew how to evade the authorities, rarely appeared in the pages of the press and used multiple pseudonyms. (Meltzer was also known as Samuel Cohen, Fred Ross, James Meltzer, Harold Fried and Harold Freed). Such changes caused confusion even for the police.

But uncovering the story of the mafia is not simply a case of following a few slippery characters. During the 1940s the mafia’s involvement in the drug trade became deeply controversial. Its presence and relative importance was debated on both sides of the border. During the first half of the decade Harry Anslinger and the FBN pushed the line that the mafia was heavily involved in narcotics - and it was busy carving out a new supply route south of the border. The line was designed to play to a domestic audience, keep the FBN relevant, and distinguish the organization from the FBI, which seemed strangely unconcerned about the mob.

Harry Anslinger, American drug tsar

But in 1947 the FBN’s approach changed almost overnight. As Anslinger sought greater international influence he ditched the mafia story; he even denied it. (Anslinger was nothing, if not inconsistent). Instead, he embraced one that stressed domestic Mexican drug production. In defense, the Mexican authorities now switched to the old Anslinger line and stressed mob involvement. Anslinger would only return to blaming the mafia three years later to take advantage of Senator Estes Kefauver’s exhaustive investigation of the mob.  The question of if and how much the mafia shaped the Mexican trade was now less of a criminal and more of a diplomatic issue.

This rather schizophrenic attitude was perhaps best expressed by the U.S. Treasury’s representative in Mexico. In June 1947 he concluded that “the American underworld gangs have brought their know-how into the business and have their representatives in the field to promote the cultivation, buy up the crop, and arrange for transformation into more valuable and less bulky derivatives thereby facilitating transportation.”  Six months later, after Anslinger’s change of heart, the same representative claimed that Mexican accusations of mob involvement had been “picked out of thin air”. In fact, contrary to his earlier assessment, “all of the known important traffickers and promoters and nearly all of the lesser known figures are Mexicans”.

Next week the Mafia in Mexico (Part 2) - The first networks and the Diarte killing