Crime Fiction: The Horn Of The Bull, Part One

The Horn of the Bull

Part One 

By Paul Davis 

I was told that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was thrilled with being a naval intelligence officer back in 1965. 

James Bond-mania was in full swing then and Fay was a huge fan of the Bond films and Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Fay was pleased to learn that his true-life hero, the late President John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, was also a fan of the Bond novels and once dined with Fleming, who had been a British naval intelligence officer in World War II. 

Fay, a thin, baby-faced young man of 28, was stationed in San Diego, California in 1965. His assignment was to coordinate intelligence with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police concerning a Mexican crime lord suspected of smuggling vast amounts of narcotics into the United States via a fleet of merchant ships. 

Fay thought this was the stuff of thrillers. He loved traveling down to Tijuana, Mexico in his "civies" - his civilian clothes - for meetings with the FBN and the Federalies. He told friends that after the Friday meetings, he would drink in local bars, admire the senoritas, and dream of his budding naval career. 

According to the Navy’s investigation report, it was after one of these meetings that Fay was abducted after he stepped out of a Tijuana bar. 

Witnesses reported that Fay was accosted by two pistoleros as he left the bar. The two gunmen beat Fay into unconsciousness and pushed him into the cab of a truck. A FBN informant later reported that Fay was taken to a bull ranch outside Tijuana. He was tied and bound to a chair in a dark room and then revived. The two gunmen, identified by the informant only as Pedro and Alfredo, began to beat Fay. 

Off to the side of the room stood a heavy, thick-set man with a large, flat face that Fay no doubt recognized from the numerous surveillance photos he had viewed the previous months. The man was Neron Rodrigo, the crime lord targeted by the FBN and the Mexican police. Standing next to Rodrigo was the stunningly beautiful Mexican girl that Fay and the FBN agents often lusted over in the photos. 

Fay’s beating was severe, and he eventually answered all of their questions. With a nod from Rodrigo, the two men untied Fay, lifted him from the chair, dragged him out of the house and stood him against the fence of a bull pen. 

"Do you like the bulls?" the informant reported that Rodrigo asked Fay. "Do you come to Mexico for the girls or the bulls?" 

The two gunmen laughed loudly as they bound Fay’s hands tightly behind his back. 

"You, my stupid young friend, chose to face the wrong bull - me," Rodrigo explained patiently to the beaten and bleeding naval officer. "And now you must face this other bull." 

Rodrigo motioned towards the bull pen with his right thumb and the two gunmen lifted Fay and tossed him over the fence. 

With his hands tied behind him, Fay had difficulty getting to his feet, but despite his wounds from the beating, the young officer was up and moving as the powerful black bull charged. The 1,000-pound bull slammed and tore into Fay’s back and Fay was spun violently and fell to the ground. He lay in a twisted heap, trying to catch his breath. 

His abductors leaned on the fence and cheered the bull on. Standing a few feet back from the pen, the girl was expressionless. Fay somehow summoned the strength to get on his feet and move, but the bull charged again and one of the ferocious animal’s horns tore into Fay’s left leg, splitting it open from ankle to knee. Fay let out a chilling scream and collapsed to the ground. 

The bull loomed over Fay, pummeling him as he lay helpless and semi-conscious. His wounds bleed profusely into the sand. With a wave from Rodrigo, the man called Pedro distracted the bull as Alfredo jumped in and dragged Fay out of the pen. 

Rodrigo cursed the young officer and delivered a severe kick to his head. He then pulled out a knife with a six-inch steel blade and a handle made from a bull's horn. He leaned down and spoke quietly to Fay. 

"The horns of that bull have torn you apart," Rodrigo said. "But it will be this horn of the bull that will kill you." 

Rodrigo grabbed Fay's shirt and stabbed Fay in the chest repeatedly. 

"Toss him in the street as a message," Rodrigo told his pistoleros. "I want everyone to know that it will take a stronger man to face this bull." 

Fay’s broken, bloody and torn body was thrown into the street from a speeding truck. The Tijuana police recovered the body and Fay was identified by his Navy dog tags. The Mexican police notified the U.S. Navy in San Diego. 

 

In 1970, five years after Fay’s body was discovered, I was an 18-year-old enlisted sailor serving aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. 

The aircraft carrier was home-ported in San Diego, and we were going to sea every Monday through Friday, performing sea trials, damage control drills and air operations in preparation of our upcoming combat cruise to Vietnam. When the carrier returned to port in San Diego for the weekends, many of the Kitty Hawk's nearly 5,000 men, myself included, ventured down to neighboring Tijuana for the wild and crazy nightlife. 

There were at least a dozen cautionary tales circulating at the time that illustrated how Tijuana was truly a rough town. I recall one often-told, particularly gruesome and seemingly far-fetched story of a Navy officer who was gored to death by a bull and then dumped unceremoniously into the street. 

The story was true, I discovered many years later. I read the Navy’s declassified investigation report, and I heard the details of the decades-old murder directly from the Navy’s investigating officer. The Navy appointed an unusual officer to investigate the grisly murder in Mexico. 

The Navy sent a frogman. 

 

Admiral Gordon Gray was walking history. Affectionately called "the old frogman," Gray was a legend in the U.S. Navy. Like Admiral John D. Bulkley and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, Gray was one of the few post-WWII naval officers who served more than 50 years on active duty. Rising from seaman to admiral, Gray served in three major wars and a dozen conflicts around the globe. He also  participated in numerous intelligence operations and crime and espionage investigations. 

Over the course of his storied career, Gray served as a PT boat seaman, a guerrilla in the Philippines during WWII, an Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogman in WWII and Korea, and later a naval intelligence officer who was often assigned as an investigating officer.  

I was proud and fortunate to have interviewed the old retired admiral over the course of many months. He allowed me to do a series of exclusive interviews with him and he provided me with photos, declassified reports and his old notes. He also allowed me to tape record my interviews with him. 

There was only one proviso. 

I could not publish my interviews with him until after his death. 

Admiral Gordon Gray died peacefully of natural causes. He died in his bed, surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  

He was buried in the Arlington National Cemetary with full military honors. 

 

I first heard of Gordon Gray from my late father, Edward M. Davis, who was a Navy chief petty officer and UDT frogman during WWII. During the later years of the war, Gray was a UDT petty officer who served under my father. My father, who was medically discharged after the war due to combat injuries, often spoke proudly of his former teammate. 

I recall my father being pleased to read my letter in which I described my brief encounter with Gray when he came aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in 1971 while the aircraft carrier was anchored in Da Nang Harbor in South Vietnam. 

I became a writer some years after leaving the Navy. Having been a student of crime since I was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia, I went on to write a weekly crime column for the local newspaper, and I became a contributing editor to Crime and Security, a national monthly magazine that covers crime, espionage and terrorism. 

While on assignment for Crime and Security, I interviewed a good number of World War II UDT veterans and active-duty Navy SEALS for a piece on the UDT frogmen of World War II and how those first frogmen influenced the modern-day Navy SEALs. 

One of the old UDT veterans, a retired commander named Michael Roberts, told me that he served with both my father and Gray. He said he was still in touch with the retired and reclusive admiral, and although Gray did not usually speak to reporters, he gave me the admiral’s e-mail address so I could contact him and attempt to draw him out. 

I e-mailed Gray and requested an interview. Although he rarely granted interviews, I wrote that I felt he owed it to history and his former teammates to speak publicly about his career. I noted that many of the men he served with, like my father, had passed on. 

It must have been a good pitch, as Gray called me a short while later. In an hour-long telephone conversation, he said he fondly remembered my late father. He told a couple of stories about serving under my father as UDT 5 hit the Japanese-held beaches of Saipan, Tinian and Leyte. 

"We swam ashore, wearing swim trunks, face mask and coral shoes, and we went up against 40,000 enemy Japanese soldiers, armed only with a satchel of explosives and our combat knives," Gray said proudly. 

He laughed when he also recalled my father getting him out of jail in Hawaii after he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. 

"My father told me that he knew every police sergeant in Hawaii," I said. 

Gray laughed at the memory of his old chief convincing police sergeants to let the UDT frogmen out of jail so they could go back into combat. Gray also recalled visiting the Kitty Hawk in Vietnam many years later and talking to a number of young sailors, one of whom, I informed him, was me. 

Gray said he did not normally grant interviews, but he happened to read my newspaper column each week, although he didn't know I was his old chief's son, and he also read some of my magazine pieces, including the story on UDT and the modern SEALs. So due to my Navy background and with respect for my father, Gray consented to a series of exclusive interviews with me. I looked forward to interviewing Admiral Gray about his amazing life. 

We arranged to meet a week later at his home. I knew Gray was originally from South Philadelphia, but I didn't know that he settled back in the city after he retired from the Navy, and that he lived quietly in a riverside neighborhood not far from my own South Philly home. 

When I arrived at his home for our first interview, Gray answered the door promptly and welcomed me. I followed him to the back of the house to his office. The room had an old wooden desk and a black leather chair and in front of the desk was a small, round wood table with two chairs. Behind his desk and chair was a set of glass doors that led to a small yard and garden. 

I looked around the room and saw that in between the books on his floor-to-ceiling wood bookcases there were framed photos of his family and a few framed photos of Gray in uniform with other military people. A small model of a PT boat and a small model of a destroyer were also on display on the bookshelves. 

There was also an old combat knife in a black leather sheath on a shelf. My late father's similar old UDT knife, called a Ka-Bar, sat on a bookshelf in my book-lined basement office.

I noted that there were no medals or military awards on display. The office was tidy and neat and would easily pass a Navy inspection. 

The admiral, a big man with short-cropped iron-gray hair and a tanned and deeply lined face, looked fit and healthy for a man of his advanced age. Despite his age and his casual civilian attire, I could see that he retained his military bearing and command presence. I read somewhere that a friend of his noted that Gray moved like a panther. Even as the elderly admiral walked casually around his home, I could see what the friend meant. 

As we sat down at the small table, I also recalled an historian writing about the Alamo who noted that Travis, Bowie, and Crockett all had what the Mexicans called "blue-gray killer's eyes." I saw that the old admiral had blue-gray killer's eyes as well.   

Gray offered me a cup of coffee and a cigar in a deep, rich voice that a stage actor or military drill instructor would envy. I set up my small tape recorder and laid my notebook and pen on the round table and sat in one of the chairs. Gray sat in the other chair, handed me a cigar, and poured us coffee from a carafe. 

We drank the good and strong Navy-style coffee, lit the fine cigars, and Gray asked me about my late father and my family. He said he was sorry to hear that my father had passed. He also asked about my doing security work in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee before I became a full-time writer. 

Gray noticed that on my left wrist I wore a stainless-steel, black-faced Rolex Submariner diver's watch, like the one he was also wearing on his left wrist. He asked me if I were a diver. 

Strictly a sports diver, I replied, and an amateur at that. I spoke of my diving in oceans around the world from the Philippines and Hawaii to the Virgin Islands and Jamaica, places Gray also knew well. I told the admiral that my Rolex Submariner was my prize possession, given to me years ago by a beautiful young woman as a 30th birthday present. I married her a month later. 

Gray cracked a smile at that. He said that like many frogmen, pilots, astronauts, aquanauts and other military men, he'd worn his Rolex Submariner during most of his career.  

Now I’m a proud Navy veteran, an unabashed patriot, and a big supporter of the military, but even after all these years, I still possess my enlisted man’s distrust of military brass. I've always had problems with authority, yet I felt there was something genuine and down-to-earth about this old admiral. 

When I first addressed him as "Admiral Gray," he responded, "I'm retired. Call me Gordon." 

Gray picked a cardboard box up from the floor and slid it across the table towards me. I opened it and saw that it contained records, files and photographs. The box, one of two dozen I would eventually receive, contained Gray’s declassified official investigation reports. The box also contained various other declassified documents.  Gray said he cleared the release of the records to me. 

I looked over a batch of photos that I pulled out of the box, some of which were marked "Mexico, 1965″ and showed photos of Gray as a younger, leaner, dark-haired and ruggedly handsome man. 

I knew the public legend, but I asked Gray to begin our talks by providing a brief overview of his life and career before we concentrated on a specific time or incident in his life to cover in this initial session. 

Admiral Gordon Gray, often described by friends as taciturn, looked uncomfortable talking about himself, but he took a long draw from his cigar and then soldiered on to say that like me, he was born in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. 

His father, a WWI Navy veteran, moved from rural Pennsylvania to South Philadelphia to work on ships at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Gray, an only child, was born in a row home not far from the shipyard. His father instilled in him a love for the Navy and a love of country. 

Gray said he was a city boy, but his father took him hunting up in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains every winter and he spent several summers working on an uncle's fishing boat off the South Jersey shore. This background helped prepare him for his Navy career. 

Gray went on to say that he enlisted in the Navy at 17 and was sent to serve on a PT boat in the Philippine Islands prior to the outbreak of WWII. During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Gray’s PT boat was hit with a shell during an engagement with a Japanese destroyer. 

Blown clear off the boat and into the night’s choppy, black water, Gray quickly recovered and discovered that he was the sole survivor of the PT boat crew. Gray, an all-round athlete who boxed for the squadron, was an excellent swimmer and he swam ashore easily. With only minor injuries from the Japanese shell, he sat on the beach and watched the naval battle rage. 

Refusing to surrender to the Japanese occupying forces, Gray joined the American and Filipino guerrilla bands that were forming an active resistance. The young seafarer learned new skills such as guerrilla warfare and the art of espionage. The guerrillas harassed and spied on the occupying Japanese forces, providing vital information via the radio to the American forces headquartered in Australia. 

Gray excelled in performing acts of sabotage as he became proficient with explosives. He earned a reputation as a fearless guerrilla fighter and a skillful intelligence operative. 

In his last act as a guerrilla in the Philippines, Gray dropped silently into the sea from a fishing boat, swam ashore and penetrated deep inside an enemy garrison. Once inside the garrison he sought out a particularly vicious Japanese Kempei Tai colonel. Armed only with his combat knife, Gray took the brutal Japanese Secret Service officer in swift and close combat, killing him soundlessly. He then escaped back into the sea and swam to the fishing boat without alerting the Japanese guards. 

The Japanese mounted a massive manhunt for the colonel’s executioner. Gray hid out in the jungle, but he was betrayed by a close Filipino friend in the guerrilla band, and he was captured by the Japanese. Defiant in the face of torment and constant beatings, Gray later escaped and rejoined his guerrilla band. With the Japanese mounting another massive manhunt for Gray, the American colonel who led the guerrilla band leader made arrangements for the young sailor to be exfiltrated from the Philippines via an American submarine.   

Gray boarded the submarine secretly and he was examined by a medical corpsman and given dinner. After dinner he had coffee with Commander Brad Hunt, a naval intelligence officer that happened to be a passenger aboard the submarine. 

He was debriefed by Hunt. Considering Gray’s skills and experiences with swimming and explosives, Hunt suggested that Gray volunteer for a new, classified, elite outfit that he heard was forming back in Florida.  

"That elite outfit was UDT," Gray said. 

Thanks to Hunt's letter of recommendation, Gray joined UDT. He served as a UDT frogman in the Pacific for the rest of WWII. Before General MacArthur waded ashore in triumphant return to the Philippines, Gray, along with my father and other members of UDT 5, swam in and performed night reconnaissance of the shoreline and later planted explosives to clear the way for the forthcoming amphibious landings. Gray had made this swim once before, but this time he was at the spearhead of a mighty invasion force. 

Gray remained in UDT after the war and he later fought in the Korean War, where he earned an officer’s commission as an Ensign.  

While serving on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral Arleigh Burke, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gray, like a number of other special operations veterans, recommended expanding the mission of the UDT frogmen. When President Kennedy, the Ian Fleming fan, later supported the Navy' thrust to develop a Special Operations outfit akin to the U.S. Army’s Green Berets, some of Gray’s ideas were adapted in the formation of the SEALs (Sea, Air and land). 

In 1962, the Navy selected a small group of UDT officers and enlisted men and commissioned them as SEALs. The men were formed into SEAL Team One on the West Coast and SEAL Team Two on the East Coast. On track to become a naval intelligence officer, Gray remained a UDT officer assigned to the CNO’s staff. 

Despite his often grim and hazardous duty, or perhaps because of it, Gray was typical of the young men in the Navy at the time. He had a reputation as a fun-loving, hell-raising, hard-drinking, and girl-chasing sailor. Gray modified his personal behavior when he married late in his life. He and his wife had a son who was now a serving naval officer. 

Although Gray did not mention it, I knew that among his many medals and citations, he was awarded the Navy Cross, three Silver Stars and four Bronze Stars. 

Concluding the overview of his career, Gray said that he wanted to begin our interview sessions with a story of an operation in Mexico in 1965. He spoke of being sent to Tijuana, Mexico as an investigating officer after the murder of a young Navy officer.  

"The suspect was an international criminal with his own private navy." Gray said. 

 

Gray began to recount a meeting he attended at the Pentagon in 1965. Gray, then a newly promoted lieutenant commander, was called to the meeting by Captain James Moore, a special assistant to the CNO. Moore, a short, thin, gruff former combat submariner, told Gray that the CNO wanted him to attend a meeting with a FBN official. 

The federal drug agent came to the Pentagon to brief Moore on the vicious murder of Fay in Mexico. The CNO was furious about the murder, and he was dissatisfied with the Naval Investigative Service's report, which concluded that Fay was the victim of a random robbery-murder, suspect or suspects unknown. With the new information from the BDN, the CNO wanted action. His order to send for "the frogman," whom he considered his personal troubleshooter, was a clear indication of that. 

Fay provided valuable assistance to the FBN by coordinating the tracking of the drug smugglers’ ships at sea by the U.S. Navy’s ships and aircraft, FBN Special Agent Tom Cobb told Moore and Gray. He also said that the young, affable officer was well-liked by the FBN agents and the Mexican police officers. 

Cobb, a stocky man with short brown hair and a tight-fitting, rumbled black suit, looked every bit like a hard-nosed, world-weary cop. Cobb began the briefing, occasionally glancing at the folder in front of him. 

"We suspect that Lieutenant Edwin Fay was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Neron Rodrigo," Cobb told the two naval officers sitting across from him. "Rodrigo is the legitimate owner of a fleet of commercial merchant ships, but we believe he is also a major drug smuggler and a psychotic killer. 

Cobb went on to say that Rodrigo’s shipping line provided cover for his crime empire. He was known in the criminal world as “El Toro," the Bull, for his strength, deadly skills and a bull-like physique. Rodrigo made wide use of murder, violence, intimidation, bribery and corruption to protect his growing legitimate and criminal enterprises. His trademark weapon was a razor-sharp six-inch knife with a handle made from a bull’s horn.   

Rodrigo had criminal partners all over the world and the FBN received information from confidential informants that Rodrigo was a partner to Carlos Mendez, a major drug supplier in Mexico, and they planned to partner with American organized crime in the Western United States. This partnership, if established, Cobb explained, would flood the U.S. with heroin. Heroin addiction, the agent explained to the naval officers, was a growing national crisis. 

Cobb helped himself to a class of water from the pitcher on the table. He took a huge gulp as if to wash down the distasteful story he had to tell the Navy officers. 

"Rodrigo was a street urchin who grew up in Tijuana. He had a nasty reputation for targeting American sailors," Cobb explained. "His mother worked the bars and entertained American sailors and when Rodrigo became a teenager he would rob and assault sailors at knife-point, often stabbing them simply for his pleasure." 

According to the Mexican police, Rodrigo hates Americans in general and American sailors in particular, as he believes his father was an American sailor who abandoned him. He also hated American sailors due to one young sailor who refused to be a victim. 

Although the sailor had been staggering drunk when he left a Tijuana bar, closely followed by Rodrigo, the sailor was able to quickly disarm Rodrigo and knocked him out cold. 

"He dragged Rodrigo back to the bar and dropped him in the doorway like a sack of mail," Cobb said bluntly. 

Rodrigo was deeply humiliated, and he soon extracted his revenge by targeting another unfortunate American sailor who was walking tipsily down a back street. Rodrigo, armed with a knife, savagely murdered the sailor. 

The Mexican police went all out to arrest Rodrigo, but thanks to a rising young drug kingpin - his future Mexican partner, the Mexican police suspect - he was spirited away on a cargo ship heading to South American ports-of-call. 

Rodrigo became a merchant seaman and over the years he became involved with criminal organizations in several countries, acting first as a smuggler and later as a paid contract killer for various crime syndicates. His reputation grew steadily, and he invested his considerable criminal earnings into a small shipping line. His shipping holdings were now so clouded in foreign registries and fronts that investigators did not know exactly what he owned or controlled, but they believed his holdings to be vast. 

Cobb passed out surveillance photos to Moore. Moore glanced at them with a disdainful look and passed them to Gray. Gray saw that Rodrigo was in his early 50s and was a big, thick and heavy man. His powerful arms and torso stretched against his shirt. He had a flattened face, slicked back black hair and pitted-olive skin. He was by no means handsome, but with him in nearly every photo was a stunning, raven-haired beauty. Gray wondered who she was. 

"Her name is Adoncia Prado," Cobb offered, reading Gray’s mind. "She is Rodrigo’s girlfriend." 

According to their source, Cobb continued, Rodrigo reacted angrily to the news that American narcotic agents brought in the U.S. Navy to perform naval and air surveillance of his ships. Rodrigo, the source said, personally supervised the torture of Fay and stabbed and murdered him. He bragged about the murder to his chief lieutenants, one of whom was an FBN confidential informant. Although the FBN informant was willingly to provide information about the crime, he would not testify against Rodrigo in a Mexican or American court. 

Cobb said that America had a strong ally in Mexico with Commandante Gregorio Alvero of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. Alvero was an incorruptible police officer who supervised a small, tough squad of drug raiders. Cobb said that Alvero was a fearless career policeman with a keen sense of humor that infuriated the criminals he pursued, such as Rodrigo. 

As Gray listened, he stole another glance at the young woman’s photo. She possessed an angelic face, but Gray also detected an underlying toughness. 

When the briefing ended, Captain Moore was clearly angered. He slapped the wood conference table and stood up. He chewed on his wet, slim cigar for a moment, as if he were chewing on his next words. 

"This man, this murderer," he said slowly, spitting out bits of cigar leaf that hit the tabletop. "Why, he’s a clear threat to American national security. He’s a damn criminal with his own damn navy!" 

Moore told Gray that the CNO had appointed him as an investigating officer and ordered him to go to Mexico and investigate Fay’s murder and Rodrigo's possible involvement. He told Gray that another intelligence officer had been assigned to provide naval surveillance support to the federal drug cops, but he would remain safely in San Diego. 

Cobb thanked the captain. Cobb handed Gray his business card and asked him to call later in the day. Cobb then gathered up his files and left the conference room. 

"If your investigation confirms Rodrigo murdered Fay, we’ll take him down,” Moore told Gray. “He may have gotten away with killing one American sailor when he was a teenage Tijuana street rat, but he sure as hell will not skate on Fay’s murder. You make sure of that.” 

"Aye, aye, Sir." 

As they left the conference room and walked down the Pentagon passageway, Moore advised Gray to remember the Barbary War. 

"The American Navy has fought pirates before," Moore growled. 

 © 2002 Paul Davis   

'Byrne's Sitdown'

Byrne’s Sitdown 

By Paul Davis 

I was sitting in a booth at the Penrose Diner in South Philadelphia waiting for a friend to join me for lunch. 

I was drinking a cup of Penrose’s good coffee and looking out the window to see if my friend had arrived when I received a text on my phone that he could not make it. 

Not wanting to hog a booth by myself, I started to pick up my coffee and move to the counter when someone said my name. I looked up and saw Fred Byrne. 

“Paul, you eating alone? Can I join you?” Byrne said. 

“Sure. I was waiting for a friend, but he just texted me that he can’t make it.” 

Byrne, a stocky man with gray hair, was about 70 years old. He was a retired hardware store manager that I met at a cigar dinner some years ago. He recognized me from my photo that accompanied my crime column in the local newspaper, and he introduced himself. 

As we smoked our fine cigars, we spoke of our military service during the Vietnam War. Byrne had been a Marine at Da Nang and I had been a sailor on an aircraft carrier. 

I liked him and I gave him my card that had my telephone number and email address on it. He wrote his telephone number and email address on a piece of notepaper and handed it to me. But for whatever reason we never contacted each other. 

The waitress stopped by our table and Byrne and I ordered lunch. Byrne had a copy of the Philadelphia Daily News, a newspaper I used to write for, and he showed me an article on the murder of John “Johnny Boy” Grillo, a local mobster who had just been released from federal prison. He had been shot multiple times and died on the street. 

“I read that online this morning,” I said. “I didn’t know him, but I knew his father Dom some years back. I heard the kid was nothing like his father.” 

“I knew them both,” Byrne said. “I knew the father from the neighborhood, but only to say hello to. I knew he was a mob guy, but he was always polite. I knew the kid as he was a friend of my daughter’s. 

“Want to hear a story about my “Sitdown” with Dom over his kid?” 

“Sure,” I replied. 

I didn’t pull out my notebook or small tape recorder, as I didn’t yet know if he was telling me this story for my crime column, and I didn’t want him to shut him down by asking just yet. 

“Well, it wasn’t a formal sitdown, as I wasn’t a member of the mob. Hell, I’m not even Italian. But like I says, Johnny Boy was a friend of my daughter when they was teenagers." 

Our lunch orders arrived and as we ate, Byrne went on to tell me about the time he was returning to his South Philly rowhome years ago when his daughter was a teenager. He was accompanied by his friend Mike Fratelli, a Philly detective. 

Byrne’s daughter and wife and gone to the New Jersey shore and were staying at his in-law’s summer home. Byrne had remained in South Philadelphia as he had to work at the hardware store where he was the manager. He met Fratelli, and they had a couple of beers at their favorite corner taproom. 

They walked from the bar to Byrne’s house and when they got there, Fratelli saw that one of the basement windows and been pushed in. Lights were on in the basement, and they heard music. 

"Your family is down the shore, right?” Fratelli asked. 

“Yeah.”

“Give me your house keys and you stay here,” Fratelli said. 

Fratelli took the keys, drew his firearm, ran up the steps to the front door and let himself in. 

Byrne bent down and looked in the busted basement window and saw about four or five teenage boys and girls drinking his liquor from his basement bar and dancing to the music from his radio. 

Byrne, who had a license to carry a firearm as he handled money at his store, drew his 9mm Beretta and pointed it at the group in his basement. 

“Get the hell out of my house, you punks,” Byrne yelled. 

“Fuck you,” one of the boys said. 

Byrne fired a round into his basement wall away from the teenagers as a warning shot. The teenagers ran up the basement stairs in fright and straight into the arms of Fratelli. Fratelli herded the teenagers out the front door and onto the sidewalk. 

“We thought you were all at the shore,” one of the girls said. “We just broke in as a goof. We weren’t going to steal anything.” 

“I know you. You’re Janice, my daughter’s friend,” Byrne said. “What the heck do you think you all were doing?” 

One of the boys, a big and husky teenager, rushed Byrne and pushed him up against the  wall. Byrne slapped the teenager across the back of his head and face with his Beretta. The kid fell to the sidewalk bleeding. 

“You killed Johnny Boy,” Janice cried out. 

The kid stood up and placed his hand on the back of his head. Byrne told the teenagers to get lost. He told them to never see his daughter again. 

“That kid was Dom Grillo’s kid,” Fratelli said as the teenagers walked away. 

“He shouldn’t have broken into my house.” 

The following evening, Janice and her father visited Byrne. The father apologized for his daughter’s behavior and pleaded with Byrne to not have his teenage daughter arrested. Byrne told the man he did not plan to press charges. 

The father thanked Byrne and assured him that his daughter would be punished. 

The two men shook hands as Janice looked down in shame and embarrassment. 

While at work the next day, a hoodlum strolled into his hardware store and approached Byrne. Byrne’s hand reached behind his back to the holster that held his Beretta. 

The man smiled and said that Dom Grillo wanted to buy him a drink at the Oregon Avenue bar that night at eight o’clock. 

“Tell Dom I’ll be there.”

Promptly at eight, Byrne walked into the dimly lit bar with Fratelli. They began to walk to the back of the bar where Dom Grillo was sitting with his son. 

A young hoodlum stepped in the way and asked if they were armed. 

“Hell, yeah. I got two guns on me,” Byrne said. “And I’m a Marine, so I know how to use ‘em.” 

“I’m a cop, so you know I’m packing,” Fratelli said. 

“Let ‘em through,” Dom Grillo said. 

Grillo, a rugged and gruff man in his 60s, was a captain, or capo, in the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family. He controlled illegal gambling and loan sharking in the neighborhood. But having faced the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers in close-quarter combat, Byrne was not intimidated by Grillo or any other gangster.

 “Sit down,” Grillo offered. 

Byrne and Fratelli sat down across from Grillo and his son, whose face and head were bandaged. 

“I see you brought Mike the cop with you,” Grillo said. 

“Yeah, he’s my friend and he was with me when we caught your son and the other kids in my house.” 

“And you felt you had to pistol-whip my son because he broke into your house.” 

“He attacked me. So yeah, I was defending myself. I could have shot him.” 

“This true?” Grillo asked Fratelli. 

“Yeah,” Fratelli asked. 

Grillo turned his head and faced his son. 

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” 

"This crazy guy threatened us with a gun, so I rushed him and …” 

“Shut up now.” Grillo ordered. “You broke into the man’s house. He had the right to shoot you. Perhaps he should have.” 

Johnny Boy Grillo sat back and remained quiet. 

“I’m truly sorry for my boy’s rash and stupid behavior, and I’m grateful that you didn’t shoot him. I hear you are a decent man, and I hear you was a Marine, so I respect you.

 “Let me pay for the damage to your home,” Grillo said. 

“I manage a hardware store, so the repairs got done. I don’t need or want any money.” 

Grillo rose and shook Byrne’s hand. 

“After this, Johnny Boy still went on to be a pain in the ass to his father, even after the boy joined the mob,” Byrne said as the Penrose busboy cleared away our dishes. “He was always mouthing off to people and making trouble for his father. 

"I think the old man was glad that Johnny Boy was put in prison. Old Dom got to spend his last years not worrying about his brash and stupid son.” 

Byrne added that he was not surprised that someone shot and killed Johnny Boy Grillo the minute he walked out of prison.  

“Apparently, he didn’t get the kind of homecoming he expected,” I said. 

© 2023 Paul Davis 

Foreign Devil: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Richard Hughes, The Far East Correspondent Who Inspired Ian Fleming And John Le Carre

 Back in 2020 I wrote about an interesting man named Richard Hughes (seen in the above photo), a Far East correspondent for the Sunday Times who inspired both Ian Fleming and John le Carre. Both spy thriller writers modeled a character after Hughes. 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:  

The foreign correspondent who inspired Ian Fleming and John le Carre - Washington Times

 

Later this year Casemate will publish Edward Abel Smith’s “Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books.”

 

“James Bond is possibly the most well-known fictional character in history,” Casemate Publishing notes. “What most people don’t know is that almost all of the characters, plots and gadgets come from the real-life experiences of Bond’s creator — Commander Ian Fleming.

 

“In this book, we go through the plots of Fleming’s novels explaining the real-life experiences that inspired them. The reader is taken on a journey through Fleming’s direct involvement in World War II intelligence and how this translated through his typewriter into James Bond’s world, as well as the many other factors of Fleming’s life which were also taken as inspiration.”

 One friend who inspired Fleming was the late Richard Hughes, who was a foreign correspondent for the British Sunday Times. He was the inspiration for the fictional character Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s 1964 James Bond novel “You Only Live Twice.” 

 “He is a giant Australian with a European mind and a quixotic view of the world,” the late Ian Fleming said of Richard Hughes. In 1959, Fleming, then the foreign manager of the Sunday Times, was asked by the newspaper's editor to travel to foreign cities and write about them, as Fleming notes, "through a thriller-writer's eye." The newspaper articles were compiled into a book called "Thrilling Cities" in 1963. 

While visiting Hong Kong and Tokyo, Fleming’s guide was Richard Hughes, whom Fleming called “Our Man in the Orient.”       

 

Ian Fleming later wrote “You Only Live Twice,” which featured a character named Richard Lovelace Henderson. Henderson, based on Hughes, was the British intelligence chief in Japan. He was a big, boisterous and profane Australian who understood the way of the Japanese. Fleming described him as looking like a middle-aged prize-fighter who retired and had taken to the bottle.

Richard Hughes was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1906. He served as a war correspondent in North Africa in WWII and after the war he worked primarily in Japan. In 1956 he filed an exclusive interview in Moscow with the British spies, traitors and defectors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Hughes went on to write several books, including his 1972 autobiography, “Foreign Devil: Thirty Years Reporting in the Far East.”

 

“I had the honor of accompanying my friend, the late Ian Fleming, on his second and last tour of Japan. He was seeking local color, factual detail spiritual inspiration and carnal folklore for his twelfth — and alas, penultimate — James Bond volume, “You Only Live Twice,” Hughes wrote. “I filled the humble role of valet-comrade to Fleming-san. Our odyssey was the most instructive, enjoyable, crowded, leisurely, lively and hilarious trip I ever made in thirteen long and happy years.”

 

Hughes wrote that he discovered what he called “Fleming’s technique of precise and meticulous investigation for the background and action of a James Bond adventure.”

 In the late 1970s, John le Carre visited Hong Kong while doing research for his novel “The Honorable Schoolboy,” the sequel to his novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Mr. le Carre met Richard Hughes, and like Ian Fleming, he based a character on him.

 In the novel, the assembled journalists at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Hong Kong were discussing the closing of the local branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Mr. le Carre wrote that William Craw, like Hughes, was the doyen of Asia’s foreign press corps.

 

“In the tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would walk over; and they were right,” le Carre wrote. “In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place.”

 

Mr. le Carre thanked Richard Hughes in the foreword of the spy novel. “And then there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw.

 

“Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruelest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.”

 

Richard Hughes, who died in 1984 at the age of 77, led a robust and fascinating life, and he fascinated two world-famous thriller writers.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers. 

Don’t Defund The FBI – Change Its Leadership: My Broad + Liberty Piece On How The FBI Is Important To Maintaining Law And Order In America, Even If Change At The Top Is Desperately Needed.

 Broad + Liberty posted my piece on changing the leadership of the FBI, rather than defunding the federal law enforcement agency. 

You can read the piece via the below link or the below text:

 Paul Davis: Don’t defund the FBI – change its leadership (broadandliberty.com)

On March 29th, the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire and humor publication, offered a clever faux news piece that claimed the FBI pledged to commit their full resources to identify, isolate, and destroy whichever Christian beliefs were responsible for the brutal attack at a private Christian school that week.    

Although Christians are not generally known for satire and humor, the piece went on to offer a fake and funny quote from FBI Director Christopher Wray, “Our stated goal is to protect U.S. citizens from foreign and domestic terror threats, such as parents at school board meetings, pro-life demonstrators, and Christians who push innocent trans people toward violence by being mean-heads. I want a halt on all investigations until we figure what Christians did to deserve being attacked.”  

The Babylon Bee is not alone in thinking that the FBI has become “weaponized” by today’s leftist leadership in power. According to a Rasmussen survey last month, 50 percent of likely voters contacted in a national telephone and online survey have a favorable impression of the FBI, which includes 22 percent who have a very favorable impression of the federal law enforcement agency. Of those surveyed by Rasmussen, 45 percent view the FBI unfavorably, which includes 24 percent who have a very unfavorable impression.      

Former FBI special agent Nicole Parker testified on February 9th in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. She stated that the FBI has become “politically weaponized,” from the top leadership in Washington D.C. to the field offices. According to the Rasmussen poll, 64 percent agreed with that statement, including 44 percent who strongly agreed. Just 30 percent disagreed, including 17 percent who strongly disagreed.

To counter the weaponization, some are calling for the defunding of the FBI. Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), angry at the indictment of former president Trump, noted on Fox News that the Republicans now controlling the House would look at defunding the Justice Department and the FBI.

“We control the power of the purse, and we’re gonna have to look at the appropriations process and limit funds going to some of these agencies, particularly the ones who are engaged in the most egregious behavior.”

Jordan mentioned several incidents in which he claimed the Justice Department and the FBI interfered against Trump and the Republicans.

“2016, they spied on his campaign,” Jordan said. “2018, the Mueller investigation. 2020, they suppressed the Hunter Biden story. 2022, they raid his home 91 days before an election. And now, the leading candidate for President of the United States in the 2024 election, they indict the former president and top candidate who’s leading in every poll. Just let we the people decide we wanna elect, and stay out of the election process, for goodness sake!”

Trump has also come out for defunding the FBI. But Trump’s vice president disagrees. Last August, after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago looking for classified documents, Mike Pence advised Republicans to stop attacking the FBI.     

“The Republican Party is the party of law and order,” Pence noted. “And these attacks on the FBI must stop; calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”

Pence stated that Republicans should hold Attorney General Merrick Garland accountable and not attack the FBI’s rank-and-file agents. 

I agree. 

As a law-and-order conservative, I think that the top leadership of the FBI should be given the sack, allowing new apolitical law enforcement officials to take the reins of the world’s most premier law enforcement agency. 

J. Edgar Hoover, despite his flawed character and abuses of power as the first and longest-serving director of the FBI, created the world’s finest and foremost law enforcement agency. In years past, the professionalism of the FBI was the gold standard for the world’s police agencies. Many of the world’s finest police officers have been trained by the FBI. I know several police officers who are most proud of having been trained at the FBI Academy.   

I’ve covered the FBI for many years as a crime reporter and columnist. Several times over the years, I’ve interviewed Joseph Pistone, AKA “Donnie Brasco,” the legendary undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Bonanno Cosa Nostra crime family in New York City. I’ve also interviewed criminal profiler John Douglas, another legendary FBI agent, as well as senior officials at FBI headquarters and street agents in Philadelphia. All of them were dedicated and apolitical law enforcement officers.

The former and active FBI special agents that I’ve spoken to recently disagree vehemently with the current leadership of the FBI. Most want to see a large broom sweep out the political activists in the top ranks of the FBI. Most want to see the FBI go after criminals, spies, terrorists, and other threats to Americans, and not engage in petty party politics.        

Paul Davis is a Philadelphia writer who covers crime.

My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Ben Macintyre On Ian Fleming And James Bond

The Washington Times published my weekly On Crime column on Ben Macintyre’s take on the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming and his iconic character James Bond.

With the release of latest James Bond film “No Time to Die” postponed from April to November due to the COVID-19 outbreak, millions of Bond fans around the world will have to be content to watch the older Bond films, or perhaps they should go back to the original source — Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

They could also read some of the many books written about the popular character and his creator, such as two fine biographies of the late Ian Fleming, John Pearson’s “The Life of Ian Fleming” and Andrew Lycett’s “Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond.”

Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the London Times and the author of “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,” (which I reviewed in these pages) “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” and “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal,” also wrote an interesting book called “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.”

He wrote the book in 2008 as a companion to the Imperial War Museum exhibition that was held to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. The exhibition examined the late thriller writer and his fictional character in historical context. The exhibition also looked at Ian Fleming’s experiences as a naval intelligence officer in World War II and how they informed his plots and characters.

Ben Macintyre was chosen to write the companion book because of his nonfiction books on espionage and his many columns on Ian Fleming and James Bond, including one column that revealed that there was a Nazi plot to rob the Bank of England, which perhaps inspired Ian Fleming to use a similar plot to rob Fort Knox in his great thriller “Goldfinger.”

Ian Fleming admitted his plots in the novels were fantastic (the films much more so), but he also said they were often based on the real world of intelligence.  

I recall Ben Macintyre telling me that his book on Fleming and Bond was a personal investigation of two lives, one real and one fictional.     

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/18/ben-macintyre-on-ian-fleming-and-james-bond/ 

Note: The below photos are of Ben Macintyre, Ian Fleming. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No, and Ian Fleming as a WWII naval intelligence officer:

Operation Underworld: My Washington Times On Crime Column On "Operation Underworld:

 The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up To Win World War II.

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'Operation Underworld' - Washington Times

While serving time in Dannemora State Prison in 1942, New York Cosa Nostra organized crime boss Salvatore Luciano (seen in the above photo), better known among criminals as “Charlie Lucky” and the public as “Lucky” Luciano, was asked to help the U.S. Navy protect New York ports from sabotage from Nazi Germany during World War II. 

New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage from German and Italian agents, and the Navy knew that the Cosa Nostra controlled the unions on the waterfront. 

Matthew Black’s “Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and the U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II,” is an interesting and informative look back at this fascinating alliance between American gangsters and U.S. naval intelligence officers.  

 

I contacted Mr. Black (seen in the bottom photo) and asked him to describe his book.

 

“Operation Underworld is about how the U.S. Navy secured and defended the Port of New York during WWII. Confronted with challenges ranging from spies and saboteurs, to union strikes on the docks, the Navy formed an unprecedented alliance with the mafia to help safeguard ships, war materials, and personnel passing through New York’s harbors. This brought the Navy into a gray area of the law, as the Commander — Charles Radcliffe Haffenden — kept the operation a secret, even as he recruited the top gangster in the country to help — Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano,” Mr. Black said.

 

Here is the rest of the interview:

 

PAUL DAVIS: How did you perform research for the book?

 

Mr. Black: This book was researched and written during the pandemic, and for most writers, that would’ve tanked their research efforts, as libraries and archives were closed all over the country. But the archive I needed to access at the University of Rochester was kind enough to supply digital uploads of everything I requested. Their archive contains the contents of an investigation into Operation Underworld that had been previously classified. It took about a year-and-a-half to upload nearly 3,000 pages of testimony and documents.

Was there anything that you learned that surprised or shocked you?

 

When I first took on this project, I told myself that I’d have to find things that no one else had discovered if I was going to be successful. I’m happy to report: Mission accomplished! Commander Haffenden kept a little black book that contained names of informants and secret agents. For nearly 80 years, several of the agents had yet to be identified, but I was able to not only determine identities, but also find photos of participants such as Agent X and Agent Y. On top of that, I was also able to uncover the entire roster of people who visited Luciano in prison during Operation Underworld. Some of the names I uncovered are shocking, as Operation Underworld granted Luciano access to all of his top capos as he served his term in prison.”

 

How would you describe Salvatore “Charlie Lucky” Luciano?

 

Luciano was tough, calculating, and full of ambition, as he organized crime in America. He ran the mafia like a Fortune 500 company. But when readers meet Luciano in Operation Underworld, he is experiencing the darkest days of his life, serving a 30-50-year sentence in Dannemora prison. As a New York City criminal, his direction had been clear, and his drive unflinching, but in 1942, he was full of doubt, dread, and was losing hope that he would ever get out of prison.

 How would you describe Navy Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden? 

Commander Haffenden (seen in the above photo) was full of ambition, too, and he was an extremely creative thinker. Haffenden was looking to make his mark on history and his legacy with Operation Underworld, and he poured his heart into his efforts. His drive and creativity often took him out of bounds in Navy norms and U.S. law, as he was willing to recruit anyone who could help him protect the Port of New York. This included not only mafia leadership, but other known murderers, and criminals who were under indictment. His unyielding confidence bolstered his unshakeable belief that he could win the war all by himself, and he would stop at nothing to do it.

 

Did organized crime’s involvement with the Navy truly help the war effort?

 

Yes, it most certainly did! The question is: Was it worth the price? Operation Underworld was successful for many reasons that you’ll have to read the book to understand, but the Navy ultimately achieved its objective. But doing so took more than cooperation with the mafia: It took union suppression, beatings of noncombatants, and other violations of worker and human rights.

Mafia members were also successful in setting up a network of informants that helped provide intelligence for the Allied invasion of Sicily. Some of the most important combatants in the first waves that landed on Sicily were naval intelligence officers from New York who used their knowledge of organized crime to contact Sicilian Mafiosi.

 

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.



• • •

Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and the U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II
By Matthew Black
Citadel, Dec. 27, 2022
384 pages, $25.49