Reply #109: Mafia helped Uncle Sam fight NAZIs...

[Octafish]

... starting on the docks of the Port of New York. For a while, the Allies were losing dozens of ships every couple of days just as soon as they started out into the North Atlantic. It turns out the NAZIs had a great spy network and passed the embarcation times along to the wolf packs.

Well, after the US government agreed to give Lucky Lucciano a get-out-of-jail free card, in exchange the Mafia tightened down on the people who worked the docks. Straight away, the numbers of lost merchant ships went way down. Of course, the Mafia and Uncle Sam stayed in business from that time on... Ever hear of the Bay of Pigs Thing?


A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking:

WORLD WAR II


 The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA's parent and sister organizations, cultivate relations with the leaders of the Italian Mafia, recruiting heavily from the New York and Chicago underworlds, whose members, including Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, help the agencies keep in touch with Sicilian Mafia leaders exiled by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Domestically, the aim is to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, while in Italy the goal is to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions and to suppress the burgeoning Italian Communist Party. Imprisoned in New York, Luciano earns a pardon for his wartime service and is deported to Italy, where he proceeds to build his heroin empire, first by diverting supplies from the legal market, before developing connections in Lebanon and Turkey that supply morphine base to labs in Sicily. The OSS and ONI also work closely with Chinese gangsters who control vast supplies of opium, morphine and heroin, helping to establish the third pillar of the post-world War II heroin trade in the Golden Triangle, the border region of Thailand, Burma, Laos and China's Yunnan Province.

http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/congress-cia-drug-history-doc.html