Part 41

Passersby gawked curiously as the four men were taken from the automobiles with a swarm of agents around them.

“What’s in the trunk of the cab?” Rosal was asked.

“Four suitcases,” he said. “One is mine but the other three don’t belong to me.”

“You brought them into the country, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but they are not mine....”

The cab driver, unable to comprehend what was taking place, was ordered to open the trunk of the taxi. An agent broke open one of the suitcases. It was packed with plastic bags containing a white powder which laboratory tests would later prove to be almost pure heroin.

Rosal himself opened the small case which he insisted was the only bag which belonged to him. Inside was a package wrapped in brown paper--the parcel which the agents had seen Tarditi carry into his room at the Plaza Hotel that morning. It contained $26,000 in U.S. currency.

The men were placed in the agents’ cars along with the heroin-filled suitcases, and taken to the Narcotics Bureau headquarters for questioning.

Agent Frederick Cornetta said to Mike Cozzi, “I’ve got to drive the station wagon to headquarters. Why don’t you ride with me?”

Mike climbed into the front seat of the station wagon beside Cornetta, who took the wheel.

As they moved down Third Avenue, Cozzi looked into the glove compartment and examined its contents. Then he ran his hand into the space beneath the seat and pulled out a paper sack.

“Hey!” he said to Cornetta, “I think I’ve got two more kilos of the stuff.”

He looked inside and exclaimed, “Money! It’s full of money.”

The sack contained $41,949, which Calamaris and Bourbonnais intended to hand over to Tarditi.

At headquarters, Rosal talked freely. He claimed that he first met Tarditi in Paris in the summer of 1959 through a mutual friend. During one conversation, he had told Tarditi that his mother owed $35,000 on some property in Central America and was in danger of losing it if he could not raise the money.

A short time later, he continued, Tarditi had contacted him in Brussels and asked him to carry narcotics into the United States under a cloak of diplomatic immunity. Twice he had made deliveries successfully. The $26,000 found in his suitcase was his commission for the three trips.

Bourbonnais claimed he was only an errand boy for the syndicate. He rambled on vaguely about a mysterious Madame Simone, the wife of a doctor or dentist, whom he had met in Paris in the winter of 1960. Simone had asked him to collect $250,000 from a debtor in New York and to bring the money to her in Paris. He had made the delivery and she had paid him a commission of 1 per cent. Then Simone had asked him to meet a man in New York who would be standing on Fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 3 P.M. on October 2. This man would be wearing a gray suit and brown hat. He would hand Bourbonnais a package which he was to deliver to Tarditi, who would be in New York at this time.

Bourbonnais said he had met the stranger, received the package, and had arranged to have the package delivered to Tarditi, who passed it on to Rosal. Even if the story were fiction, at least it was one explanation of where the money came from to pay Rosal for the use of his diplomatic immunity.

The heroin in Rosal’s luggage weighed 49.25 kilos. And four days later, agents located another 51.89 kilos of heroin which Tarditi had cached in a trunk on Long Island. It was the largest seizure of heroin ever made in the United States, and Narcotics officials estimated it was worth $20 million on the underworld market.

The Guatemalan ambassador to the United States announced that his government had disavowed Rosal. His trip to the United States had not been authorized, nor had it been sanctioned in any official manner--therefore he was not entitled to the diplomatic immunity which he had claimed.

Rosal was indicted along with Tarditi, Bourbonnais and Calamaris on charges of violating the narcotics laws of the United States. The four pleaded guilty. Rosal and Calamaris were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bourbonnais and Tarditi were given nine years each. And in passing sentence, the Federal judge said:

“... I think the death sentence would not be an inappropriate sentence. Under the statute, I can imprison them for up to twenty years. If it had not been for pleas of guilty, I think I would have done so....”

It was only then that the Customs Bureau closed its files on The Case of the Crooked Diplomat.

A STRANGE LITTLE ROOM

On a hot July day in 1941, gray-haired Adrian Grasseley sat at a small table in a room whose window overlooked Fifth Avenue, peering intently through a microscope at a large diamond.

Crowds strolled the streets below. Traffic rumbled along the Avenue. Pigeons sailed about the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Grasseley saw and heard none of this. All of his attention was concentrated on the diamond lying on the table before him--a fabulous stone the likes of which few men had ever seen.

This was the Vargas diamond, discovered two years earlier in Brazil. The stone weighed 726.6 carats. It was Grasseley’s job to divide it into twenty-three smaller stones which would be worth $2 million if he did his job well. The Vargas was one of the largest and most valuable diamonds ever to pass through Customs.

For forty years, Adrian Grasseley had cut, sawed and cleaved diamonds in Antwerp and in New York City. But this slender man with the thin, tapering fingers had never had the responsibility of splitting a Vargas. Few men ever had.