“In the weeks following Rothstein’s assassination, Treasury narcotic agents questioned material witnesses in the case, one of whom, Sidney Stajer, provided critical information about the organization’s international dimensions.
Under arrest on another charge and unable to make bail, Stajer, “in exchange for his freedom, told investigators that he had gone to Europe in 1927, as Rothstein’s purchasing agent, to buy narcotics that had been diverted from pharmaceutical firms in Germany. Stajer also revealed that he had been in China, Formosa, and Hong Hong in 1925, establishing contacts and buying opium for Rothstein on the unregulated Far East market.”
“Treasury agents also questioned an uncooperative witness identified in the New York Times as Charles Luciano. A Sicilian immigrant (real name Salvatore Lucania), Luciano was being held in connection with an armed robbery. The federal agents knew that he had been a dope peddler since 1916, when he was arrested for possession of a small quantity of heroin, and that he and his partners
– Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Louis Buchalter – were the self-appointed heirs to Rothstein’s drug-trafficking operation.
They also knew that Luciano and associates had formed ties with America’s major new sources of narcotics: the Ezra brothers in China, and the Eliopoulos ring in Paris.
By 1929, these two gangs were the primary exploiters of the economic forces that drove illicit drug “drug manufacturing deeper underground and opened up the Far East as the main source of narcotics in the wake of the Rothstein investigation.
A Greek national and cosmopolitan conman whose father had been a diplomat in Turkey, Elie Eliopoulos launched his drug-smuggling operation in 1927, when he visited China and contacted Greek nationals involved in the opium trade.
He arranged to ship raw opium to two complicit manufacturers in France, purchased police protection in Paris, and by May 1928 was selling diverted pharmaceutical grade narcotics to America’s major illegal drug distributors.
In 1930 he financed a clandestine laboratory in Turkey, and thereafter narcotics from Turkey and China were routed to Paul Ventura (alias Paul Carbone), the Corsican crime boss in Marseilles, and then forwarded by American Express to Parisian restaurateur Louis Lyon for packaging and shipment to America. In 1930 and 1931, on behalf of the Eliopoulos syndicate, Peruvian diplomat Carlos Fernandez Bacula made six trips to New York, each time carrying 250 kilograms of narcotics under the protection of his diplomatic passport.
