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Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). He joined the FBN, and through diligence, hard work, and a keen, fair sense of what was right and what was wrong, James made a lot of arrests.
    As well as being physically superior, James was a particularly bright man, a deep thinker, an intellectual who was a voracious reader. He also had a photographic memory, could remember the names and dates and places of most all his arrests. It was uncanny. He was the sharpest knife in a drawer filled with sharp knives. In the FBN, James Hunt was able to put all these talents to use; he quickly rose up the ranks. He was admired and respected by not only his colleagues but his bosses as well. They saw in Hunt a rare individual who had both street savvy and an abstract, intellectual approach to bringing down bad guys, drug dealers—mafiosi.
    Gangsters had learned, during Prohibition, that providing goods and services outlawed by the government could be very lucrative. They began to think of narcotics as they had once thought of illegal alcohol. There was a huge demand for substances that took away pain; for substances that made you feel good; for substances that added lust and fuel to sex. Cocaine became known as an aphrodisiac. Heroin took away all ills, pains, discomforts—failures in life. Men and women, America’s youth, were dying all over the country because of drugs.
    It didn’t take long for organized crime, for the Mafia, to see the great moneymaking potential in illegal narcotics. In that the Mafia was already deeply immersed in all things illegal, it wasn’t a far throw for them to not only pick up the ball but carry it and run far. Through the American Mafia’s connection with mafiosi in Sicily, contacts were made to get heroin from Turkey to Sicily and, ultimately, to the United States for distribution.
    These Italians developed amazingly ingenious ways to bring heroin into the States, disguising it in cans of olive oil, crucifixes, and tall religious statues. They turned pure heroin into molds of candiedfruit, painted and colored and sculpted perfectly. Suddenly the United States government was facing a heroin epidemic coming out of not only Sicily but all of Italy. In 1956, the Mafia realized that Canada would be an ideal place through which to get heroin into the country. There were thousands of miles of unpoliced border, desolate forests, slow-moving rivers.
    As the Mafia’s tactics for narcotics trafficking evolved and became more sophisticated, James Hunt found himself at the epicenter of the war on drugs. He made arrests of major men in the Mafia, personally putting the cuffs on Carmine Galante, a very dangerous war captain in the Bonanno family, a bona fide psychopath, and Big John Ormento, a Lucchese family capo and one of the biggest heroin traffickers of all time. Along with his partner, Frank Waters, Jim arrested the head of the Genovese family, Vito Genovese. Genovese, a tall, gaunt, dead-eyed man with high cheekbones and a wrinkled, hard face, was fond of a particular steak restaurant in Germantown, on East Eighty-sixth Street. He often ate at this restaurant. James Hunt and Frank Waters managed to have a Puerto Rican informer by the name of Nelson Cantaloupes convince a Genovese captain that he was on the up-and-up, one of them, cut from the same cloth. In turn, the captain brought Cantaloupes to meet Genovese at the restaurant. Genovese gave Cantaloupes his blessing to sell drugs, as Frank Waters and James Hunt sat at the bar watching them, the restaurant crowded. The two government men blended in as well as the bottles behind the bar. With this observation, Genovese was arrested and sentenced to ten years hard time, though his heart gave out before his time was up and he died in prison, forlorn and forgotten—a very angry man.
    As a part of this same case, Hunt and Waters also arrested an up-and-coming Mafia star, a former boxer named Vincente “The Chin” Gigante, who, in years to come, would