President Richard Nixon, aka Trick Dick, launched his War on Drugs in June of 1971. Seeing what’s going on in Mexico right now, you can see that, on the surface, it’s gone as well as his Vietnam War strategy. But there’s more here than meets the eye.

Look at the beginning and end of Nixon’s political career and an even uglier picture emerges; worse than his public persona. In his initial race for Congress in 1946, he received campaign money and support from powerful LA mobster, Mickey Cohen. Cohen had been sent West by Meyer Lansky to keep an eye on Bugsy Siegel. Siegel was murdered by the Mob for skimming from the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas. Cohen then took over. Mickey Cohen received press as Hollywood’s celebrity gangster. But he was powerful, ruthless and prone to violence. If he helped subsidize Nixon’s career, it wasn’t out of altruistic motives.

Fast forward to the summer of 1974. Nixon is politically on the ropes from the Watergate scandal. The release of the so-called ‘smoking gun’ tape shows Nixon had foreknowledge of the original Watergate break-in. This erodes most of his remaining GOP support including Congressman Charles Wiggins who had been his eloquent defender on the House Judiciary Committee. Nixon’s told that the Impeachment resolution will pass the House by a near unanimous vote. Goldwater tells him that he’s down to no more than 18 supporters in the Senate and that even he, Goldwater, might vote for one Article of Impeachment.

Still, Nixon won’t budge, even when faced with certain impeachment and removal from office. Seemingly, he’s down to his two daughters and Pat Buchanan as his remaining supporters.  But he’d been here before.   His ‘Checkers’ speech in 1952, defending himself against corruption charges, had kept him on the ticket with Eisenhower. Ike in 1956 had tried to dump him, offering him the Secretary of Commerce job. But Nixon was tough and held on, knowing he had the Republican National Committee behind him. (He also was popular with a good chunk of the Republican rank n’ file which has always grooved on thugs probably because they’re pussies themselves.)

But here’s the clincher: In the meantime, the White House Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig, authorizes the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division–the plain clothes detectives of the Military Police–to check on Nixon’s ties to Organized Crime. The report, which comes back, is shown to Nixon and Vice-President Ford. Only then does Nixon resign.

So it turns out that Richard Nixon, Ol’ Tricky Dick himself, a major force in American politics for 25 years, had always played footsie, and then some, with the Mob.

With this in mind, let’s take another look at Nixon’s War on Drugs. Elements of the intelligence community and US narcotics enforcement have always been involved in regulating, NOT interdicting, the illegal trade in narcotics. In the Nixon regime, these same elements diminished the role of Corsican gangsters–the French Connection–in the international heroin trade in favor of American gangsters. Those gangsters were, not coincidentally, connected to both the Nixon Administration and the CIA. Danish journalist Henrik Kruger calls this The Great Heroin Coup in his 1980 book of the same title.

A good chunk of the drugs were sent into the black community. That’s one way to forestall ghetto riots. In addition, Kruger argues that the apparent “crackdown” by the Nixon Regime was, in fact, a covert operation. A terror operation was devised not only to eliminate drug traffickers competing with Nixon organized crime allies, but as a front for supporting death squad activity against Left (or Nationalist forces) in Latin America. This use of narco-terrorism continues to the present day.