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NEW YORK: Louis Cirillo, 48, posed as a Bronx bagel baker making $200 a week. In fact, police say, he was one of the biggest narcotics distributors in the U.S., supplying a ton a year to street pushers. Cirillo got his heroin from a French ring that smuggled it into New York concealed in expensive automobiles. After intercepting a heroin-laden car that had been shipped to the U.S. from Europe, French and American agents indicted 28 members of the ring, including Cirillo, another Bronx man, John Anthony Astuto, 20 Frenchmen and an Austrian national; a number of them are still at large. For his role in the case, Cirillo was sentenced in May to 25 years in prison. After his conviction, federal agents dug up $1,078,000 in cash from his backyard.
LA PAZ: When three men and two women checked into a La Paz hotel in February, an alert desk clerk recalled that one of the men had checked in four years before under a different name and passport. Bolivian police arrested the man, who turned out to be a Uruguayan wanted in Miami for drug trafficking. The cops let the others go, but BNDD agents were convinced that the ones who got away were important and traced the two couples to Mexico City. There they were identified as Jean-Paul Angeletti, 28, a Corsican, and Lucien Sarti, 34, a native of Marseille, and their mistresses. The two men were top operatives for the notorious Auguste Joseph Ricord. Their mission: to set up a new route for getting drugs into the U.S. Agents moved in on them after two months' surveillance. Angeletti, who was nude in bed when agents kicked in the door, surrendered and was extradited to France. Sarti shot it out and was killed. In his possession were ten stolen passports from four countries, which enabled him to pose at will as a Uruguayan diplomat, a Panamanian student or an Italian businessman.
ANKARA: Turkish Senator Kudret Bayhan told friends in Ankara last February that he was going to France to buy a dress for his daughter. Nothing unusual about that. The high-living Senator was well off, and he had made frequent trips to France in the past. This time Bayhan failed to reckon with the newly coordinated French and Turkish narcotics enforcers. The Turkish Ministry of the Interior had sent out an all-points bulletin for Bayhan's rented Turkish-made Anadol automobile. When the Senator got to the French-Italian Mediterranean border, the "Route 66" of drug traffic to Marseille, police stopped the car and found 300 Ibs. of morphine base. The case has led to three other Senators, although, said Turkish police last week, "it is too early to make an announcement."
The classic example of greenhorn clumsiness is that of a former Vice President of the Laotian National Assembly, Prince Sopsaisana, who arrived in Paris in April 1971 as his country's new Ambassador to France. One key item of his luggage was not passed by customs at Orly airport: a valise containing 123 Ibs. of pure heroin. Informed of the incident, President Georges Pompidou refused to accept Sopsaisana's credentials and the smuggler-prince was soon back in Vientiane.
Amateurs are frequently recruited to smuggle drugs, particularly between Latin American cities and the U.S.