Messick, Hank. Of Grass and Snow: The Secret Criminal Elite. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 190 pages.

This book is Messick's attempt to expose the new elements behind the drug trade: blacks and Cubans, South Americans, and the counterculture. He describes the trade in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and the efforts of U.S. federal and local authorities to curb the supply. Richard Nixon's war on drugs -- which involved Lucien Conein and 14 ex-CIA agents assigned to him, all operating through the DEA -- is discussed in one chapter. Rumors that this was some sort of assassination squad are still circulating today.

Hank Messick's many books on organized crime are widely respected. In 1965 he was hired by the Miami Herald for a series on Meyer Lansky, and his first book, The Silent Syndicate (1967), reported on crime and gambling in Kentucky and Ohio. Messick makes a distinction between the syndicate and the Mafia. The former is international and multicultural, and often includes the latter as a subset. But beginning with the Joseph Valachi hearings in 1963 and J. Edgar Hoover's "La Cosa Nostra" hype, the Mafia got all the attention while Lansky was left alone. Messick was the first to hint at the reason for this: Hoover had been compromised by Lansky, as Anthony Summers recently confirmed in "Official and Confidential" (1993). This debate is significant today for assassination theorists, because most "Mafia did it" authors still give Lansky a mere footnote or two at best.
ISBN 0-13-630558-X

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