Friday, October 10, 2003
Obit: Henry L. Giordano, 89: Former Commissioner of Bureau of Narcotics
The ANNOTICO Report
Thanks to Francesco Castellano

HENRY L. GIORDANO DIES; LED DRUG FIGHT

Washington Post
By Patricia Sullivan
Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 7, 2003; Page B06

Henry L. Giordano, 89, an undercover agent who became the head of the Treasury Department's Narcotics Bureau during the 1960s, died of cancer Sept. 19 at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney. He lived in Silver Spring.

Mr. Giordano was commissioner of the federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1962 to 1968, and for a year was associate director of the succeeding agency in the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. After his 1969 retirement from government, he was a security consultant for major pharmaceutical firms.

Mr. Giordano, born in San Francisco, earned a pharmacy degree from the University of California at San Francisco and was a pharmacist for seven years. He took a civil service exam and was accepted into the Bureau of Narcotics in 1941 and assigned to Seattle.

He enlisted in with the Coast Guard's intelligence unit in 1943 and rejoined the Bureau of Narcotics in 1946. Working undercover with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Mr. Giordano posed as a heroin buyer in 1949 in Vancouver, B.C., making a purchase that allowed the Mounties to arrest the notorious Mallock brothers, whose narcotics ring was beginning to expand into the Pacific Northwest. The brothers later escaped, but one was caught when he sneaked into New York to visit a girlfriend, and the other was killed in a car chase in Mexico.

Mr. Giordano went undercover for 10 months in Portland, Ore., to investigate a tong, a Chinese secret fraternal society. He was described at the time as compact, with pleasantly rugged features, which allowed him to pose as a down-at-the-heels narcotics peddler, a flashily prosperous racketeer, a small-time gambler, an escaped convict or a sailor on the beach.

He became supervisor of the regional office in Minneapolis in 1950 and later in Kansas City. He was considered instrumental in opening foreign offices of the bureau in Rome; Paris; Marseilles, France; Istanbul; Beirut; Bangkok; Singapore; Mexico City; and Monterrey, Mexico. He worked during the 1950s as chief investigator for the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Traffic in Narcotics, Barbiturates and Amphetamines and served on the delegation for several U.N. commissions on drugs.

He became deputy commissioner of the bureau in 1958 and was appointed commissioner in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Giordano won awards from the International Narcotic Enforcement Officers Association; alumnus of the year from the University of California Pharmacy Alumni Association; and the Treasury Department's Exceptional Service Award

Survivors include his wife of 64 years, E. Elaine Watson Giordano of Silver Spring; two daughters, Marjorie Vincent of Bethesda and Anne Brehm of New Jersey; three grandsons; and two great-grandchildren.

Henry L. Giordano Dies; Led Drug Fight (washingtonpost.com)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53688-2003Oct6.html