But a sizable number of Customs informers are those who seek a money reward. Among these are professional informers, who make a regular business of checking on the sales of jewelry, clothing and other merchandise in Europe, and learning whether the buyers intend to declare their purchases to customs on arrival in the United States.
Most of the large seizures of heroin, diamonds, gold and other contraband have been discovered because some one gave advance information. Customs agents readily concede that most smuggling rings are broken up because of the tips that come from informers who often play a deadly and dangerous game.
Federal agents are taught the art of developing contacts with informers—and the absolute necessity for acquiring information from those with first-hand knowledge of a criminal operation.
The agents cannot often disclose the full story of how an informer was enlisted, and how he aided them in breaking up a criminal combine, because the disclosure could be fatal to the informer. But the story of how Narcotics Agent Pat O’Carroll, a handsome, black-haired Irishman, recruited one informer can now be told.
Shortly after World War II, O’Carroll was assigned to the Bureau of Narcotics’ International Squad in New York City to help with the investigations being made into the narcotics traffic. Two of the squad’s prime targets were Benny Bellanca, who lived in Jersey City, and Pietro Beddia, who resided in Westchester.
Both men were suspected of being involved deeply in the international narcotics traffic—with connections in France and Italy—but agents were unable to make a case against them and they remained untouchable. Perhaps they would have continued their operations for years, except that O’Carroll played a hunch.
The case began to take shape when Agent Angelo Zurlo, tailing a suspected narcotics pusher on New York’s Lower East Side, saw his man enter a small olive oil and cheese shop on Christie Street near Delancey. He noted the name and address of the shop in his notebook and later made a memorandum of the incident which went into the Bureau’s cross-indexed file. Some months later, Narcotics agents following another suspect saw him enter the olive oil and cheese shop on Christie Street. They made a memorandum, also, which went into the files.
In the summer of 1952, O’Carroll was checking the files when he noted the two memos mentioning the small shop on Christie. Further investigation revealed it had been owned by Alphonse Attardi before he was sentenced to serve an eight-year prison term for a narcotics violation in Galveston, Texas, in the early 1940s. Attardi had completed the sentence, but Immigration authorities were studying the possibility of extradition proceedings, inasmuch as Attardi was Italian by birth.
Attardi at this time was sixty years old, 5 feet 3, and weighed about 140 pounds. He had the appearance of a meek and humble little shoemaker, and he scarcely fitted the part of an underworld character. He had an engaging, warm personality, and he was known in the Mafia as “The Peacemaker” because of his knack for compromising disputes—but that was before he had served time in prison.
O’Carroll decided to pay a call on Attardi, who he learned was living in a cheap, transient rooming house on 16th Street just off Third Avenue. It was after midnight one warm night when he strolled down Third Avenue in the shadows of the old El to 16th Street. Even the softness of the night could not hide the shabbiness and the squalor of the area.