Giordano, Henry

Henry Luke Giordano (1914–2003) served as the last commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1962 until 1968, when it merged with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. An experienced federal agent, Giordano presided over an difficult period at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that ended with a scandalous flurry of resignations and charges of corruption.

Giordano had been the deputy director of the bureau from 1958 to 1962, under Harry J. Anslinger, who served as director for 32 years (since [Page 317]its inception) and left big shoes to fill. A pharmacist from California, Giordano had joined the bureau as a junior agent in 1941, at the age of 27, and spent years undercover in various guises, such as an escaped convict, a flamboyant racketeer, a sailor with a drug habit, and a small-time drug dealer. He worked his way into the confidence of drug-dealing gangs and busted them from within.

In a 1949 operation, on loan to the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (Mounties), Giordano went undercover as a Seattle drug lord looking for a Vancouver heroin connection. The cover lasted for weeks as he purchased samples of heroin, traveling back and forth in a luxury car between Seattle and an expensive Vancouver hotel room, pretending to mull over his options and the quality of the supply and finally asking to set up a regular order in wholesale quantities—but only if he could negotiate a price at the top rather than with sales associates. His meeting with George and John Mallock, brothers who ran one of the largest heroin syndicates in 1940s North America, resulted in their arrests and those of many of their men. The arrests depended on Giordano having patience: the Mallocks had him tailed when he left with a carload of their heroin, and he kept driving toward Seattle until he was sure the tail had lost interest and returned home—at which point he pulled over at the next pay phone and dialed the Mounties.

There were other reasons for Giordano's appointment to succeed his mentor. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's well-publicized war on organized crime was seen by many as an ethnically charged matter, a fight between a Boston Irish lawman and Italian American criminals, and already there were complaints that the government's approach to handling organized crime painted an unfair picture of Italian Americans. Putting an Italian American at the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics would do something to ameliorate this. Kennedy deferred the decision to his adviser and friend, Carmine Bellino, who narrowed the choices down to Giordano and Charles Siragusa. Siragusa was the bureau's go-to man for Mafia matters, well-versed in their operations, and the CIA had attempted to recruit him as an assassin-recruiter, but he turned them down out of loyalty to the bureau. But in the end, Bellino went with Giordano, known for his toughness and the seriousness with which he took the job, necessary assets in following in Anslinger's footsteps. Giordano served in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs as an associate director until 1969, when he retired.

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