Part 6

Cardoza drew a rough map of the waterfront and showed it to the youth. “You will get off the ship at this point,” he explained. “Walk over to this corner and wait for a bus. When the bus comes along, get aboard and take a seat as near the driver as possible. If anyone approaches you about the heroin, tell them it is still aboard the ship and make arrangements to meet them later. But don’t worry. Finnegan and I will be on the bus with you. Get off the bus at this street and you’ll see a restaurant on the corner. Go in and order a glass of milk--and sit there until we come for you. Is this clear to you?”

“I understand,” Halvorsen said. “I’ll do as you say.”

Cardoza instructed Agent Polcuch to hide the sacks of heroin under his jacket when leaving the ship and to take them to the Customs Bureau’s laboratory at 408 Atlantic Avenue for an analysis. “Tell them it’s a rush job, Oscar, and we would like to know the results as soon as possible. They can reach us at the Customs House this afternoon.”

It was almost noon when Halvorsen walked down the gangway alone and strolled over to the bus stop. The youth boarded the bus and did not even glance at Cardoza and Finnegan when they brushed by him. No one spoke to him on the bus nor did anyone approach him as he sat in the restaurant sipping a glass of milk.

Cardoza and Finnegan lounged in the doorway of a building opposite the restaurant, from where they could see Halvorsen seated at a table. When it seemed apparent that no one had followed him from the waterfront, they took Halvorsen to the Customs House for questioning. The longer they talked to him, the more certain they were that he was telling the truth.

During the afternoon, Cardoza received a telephone call from Acting Chief Chemist Melvin Lerner at the Bureau’s laboratory. “The stuff is heroin, all right,” Lerner said. “It’s a very high grade. What do you want us to do with it?”

“Make the usual report,” Cardoza said, “and hang onto those sacks until we decide what to do next. We may need them in making a case against the buyer. And thanks.”

The questioning of Halvorsen continued until after midnight. When the session was over, the penitent young man knew that his personal nightmare was nearing an end and that there was a way to atone for what he had done. The whole sorry mess could be washed out by helping the Customs agents trap the receiver in San Francisco--the man named Lew Gar Kung Saw.

Agent Finnegan accompanied Halvorsen from the Customs building to the Fernhill and left him. It was agreed he would remain aboard the ship until it reached New York harbor. By that time a decision would be made on the next move.

On May 23, one week after the arrival of the Fernhill in Boston harbor, Agents Cardoza, Polcuch and Finnegan met with their chief, Lawrence Fleishman, at their headquarters at 21 Varick Street in New York City. Fleishman was a lean man with graying hair who had been doing battle with gangs of smugglers, crooked importers, and international con men for almost thirty years. Long ago he had lost count of the number of crooks he had helped send to prison, and the millions of dollars involved in these cases. But he had never lost his enthusiasm for matching wits with those he called “the bastards.”

At this moment, Halvorsen was seeing the sights of New York in company with a young Customs agent. He had been taken from the Fernhill when the ship reached New York harbor and he had registered in a midtown hotel to wait for the next move in the game.

Fleishman said of Halvorsen: “The kid can never make the delivery in San Francisco alone. He’s too nervous and it is too risky. Polcuch had better go with him. We’ll rig up a story that Polcuch is Halvorsen’s shipmate and that they have been working together on the deal.”

Fleishman told them it wasn’t practical to use the original eight sacks of heroin as a decoy in trapping the receiver in San Francisco. He agreed with officials in Washington that there was too much danger of the heroin being lost or stolen and being put back into the illicit market. Also there was the difficulty of obtaining legal clearances for transporting that amount of heroin across the continent.

“We’ll have to ask the laboratory to find a substitute to put in those bags,” Fleishman said. “It will have to be something that looks, feels and tastes like heroin. We can blow this whole case if we’re not careful.”

Fleishman knew the San Francisco receiver would become suspicious if Halvorsen didn’t show up soon. He picked up the telephone and asked his secretary to call the chief chemist in the Bureau’s Boston laboratory....

When Acting Chief Chemist Melvin Lerner put down the telephone after talking to Fleishman, he sent word to the laboratory that he wished to see Chemist Paul Leavitt. Lerner was a tall, brown-haired young man who had been with the Bureau for fourteen years.

Lerner called for Paul Leavitt because this remarkable man had an uncanny sense of taste--and if anyone could find a material which tasted like heroin, it was he. Leavitt could identify accurately an enormous number of materials simply by tasting them, an odd sort of sensory skill which he had had since childhood. It had been a valuable asset in the laboratory, where he had spent almost forty years as a chemist.

The problem was to find a light, white, powdery substance with the same bulk and weight as heroin and the same bitter taste. The taste was particularly important because it was characteristic of narcotics buyers to taste heroin before accepting it in any large amount.

When Leavitt came into the office, Lerner outlined the problem that had been dumped into their laps and he gave him the details of the Halvorsen case.

“How much time do I have?” Leavitt asked.

Lerner said, “It’s a rush job, Paul. They want it in New York on the first plane tomorrow--in the same cotton bags which are out there in the vault. We’ll have to remove the heroin from the bags and refill them with a substitute material.”

Leavitt knew that sacks filled with milk sugar or ordinary sugar would never fool a veteran trafficker in narcotics because the sugar would weigh ten times more than heroin. The substitute had to have the same bulk density as heroin.

For hours the chemist worked on the problem, testing different materials, but each of them was either too dense or did not meet the specifications in appearance or taste. It seemed that the agents in New York had tossed the laboratory a problem that simply could not be solved in so short a time.

Leavitt was still in the laboratory late in the evening pondering the problem when he remembered that several months earlier the laboratory had made a routine test of a white, light, powdery, silica compound produced by the Johns-Manville Company as a filter agent. Somewhere in the laboratory there was a sample of this product.

Leavitt found the sample in a storage room. He also found the product had the bulk density, weight and appearance of heroin. The remaining step was to make the stuff taste like the narcotic--give it the same bitter flavor.

At last Leavitt found the solution in a mixture of quinine and strychnine added to the filter powder in just the proper proportions. The amount of strychnine he used was in safe limits, even if a man should swallow a large amount of the stuff.

The following morning, Lerner supervised the job of emptying the sacks of heroin and filling them with the harmless substitute. He took the sacks to his secretary, Miss Alfhilde Norrman. “I’ve got a job for you, Alfy,” he said. “Can you re-sew these bags so no one can tell they’ve been tampered with?”

“I think so,” Miss Norrman said. Using the same threads with which the bags had been sewn in Hong Kong, Miss Norrman stitched them shut. She was careful to insert the needle in the old thread-holes left in the material. When the job was finished, the eight sacks appeared exactly as they were when young Halvorsen accepted them from the fat Chinese.