Uncle Sam is the world’s biggest drug pusher
The deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his partner, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, have led to movie clips of “The French Connection” movie being shared across social media. Hackman, who starred in the 1971 box office hit, was awarded an Oscar for Best Actor.
The movie’s plot involved two New York City police detectives busting a huge heroin smuggling operation known as the French Connection.
Gene Hackman played Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (based on NYPD Detective Eddie Egan). Roy Scheider played Doyle’s sidekick, Detective Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (modeled on NYPD Detective Salvatore “Sonny” Grosso).
The French Connection was real and 112 pounds of heroin were seized in the January 1962 bust. What was left out of the movie was how all of the heroin—valued at $70 million—and hundreds of pounds of other drugs were eventually stolen from the NYPD’s evidence locker. That shows how corrupt police departments are.
Neither did the film reveal how French authorities and the CIA blessed the French Connection. Based in Marseille, gangsters operated laboratories producing heroin and shipped the deadly drug to the United States. It was a gold mine for both French and U.S. organized crime.
As described in “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,” by Alfred McCoy, these gangsters helped break a 1947 French general strike led by the Communist Party. In exchange for their union-busting and anti-communist terrorism, crime lords in Marseille were allowed to make and ship the heroin.
All of this poison was pumped into the Black and Latinx communities. It served as an excuse to jail hundreds of thousands of poor people.
The CIA and crack
While the French Connection imported opium from Turkey, later in the 1960s the center of heroin production shifted to Southeast Asia against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The CIA’s Air America transported the junk.
In the 1980s, the CIA helped finance the Contra terrorists trying to overthrow the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua by starting the crack epidemic. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were killed by the CIA-backed terrorists.
Journalists Robert Parry and Gary Webb helped expose this Contra drug connection. (See Gary Webb’s book, Dark Alliance, the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.)
Webb deserved a Pulitzer Prize for his articles but was driven to suicide—or was perhaps “suicided”—instead.
When Barry Seal—the top drug smuggler for the Contras—was murdered in 1986, he carried the personal phone number of Reagan’s vice president (and future president), George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush had also been a former CIA director.
Drug smuggling is nothing new for the U.S. ruling class. John Jacob Astor, who became the biggest slumlord in the Western Hemisphere in the 1800s, illegally shipped 10 tons of opium to China in 1816.
Another big-time player in the opium trade was Warren Delano. His family fortune, derived from this poisonous drug, helped put his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House.
It was the Chinese Revolution that ended this drug plague.
Hollywood racism
The real Eddie Egan was a vicious racist New York City cop. Gene Hackman, who had to work with the detective, told the movie’s director William Friedkin,
I think he’s a racist, I think he uses his power over people to intimidate them.
This was even shown in the film where Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle character (Eddie Egan) tells his partner “Cloudy” Russo (“Sonny” Grosso),
never trust a (n-word.)
This open racism didn’t stop this film from winning the best picture award.
The French Connection was the start of a whole series of movies that glorified cops who “cut corners” and didn’t hesitate to beat-up people. Almost all of them featured dramatic car chases that in real life can kill bystanders.
Two months after the French Connection was released, the first Dirty Harry movie appeared.
The French Connection movie was based on the novel of the same name by Robin Moore. He was as racist as his hero Eddie Egan.
Moore wrote the novel The Green Berets that glorified the dirty war in Vietnam. It was the basis of the Green Berets film starring the white supremacist John Wayne. (Moore was even a co-writer of the Green Berets ballad sung by Barry Sadler.)
Moore was also a big supporter of the white settlers occupying Zimbabwe, who called their colony “Rhodesia.” Through armed struggle—the Chimurenga—the people of Zimbabwe took back their land.
So will the people of Palestine.