| Jaques Voignier | |
| Birth Place: | Corsica or New Orleans |
| Known For: | Art Theft, Fencing, Larceny, Illegal Immigration, Narcotics trafficking, Smuggling, Assassination |
| Spouse: | Rene LaFitte |
| Children: | Phen LaFitte |
Jaques Voignier, also known as Jean Pierre LaFitte, was a prolific French and American criminal and confidential informant, eventually operating as an undercover spy for the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in the pursuit of criminal narcotics and mafia organizations around the world.[1] Notoriously, Voignier used the connections he made as an undercover operative to participate in the criminal underworld while also investigating it - but some historians suggest this was part of a deception invented by the FBI in 1951. Controversially, Voignier was also involved in the MK Ultra experiments, and was one of the two men in the room with Frank Olson on the night that Olson died.[2]
Voignier was most likely born on the island of Corsica.[3] However, he also once told reporters once that he was born in New Orleans.[4] Voignier spent his youth in Marseilles, France, where he would move of his mother's house as an early teenager when she was murdered, her body never being found. He was placed in the care of relatives, but ran away from home soon after.[5] In Marseilles, Voignier worked in restaurants and learned to be a chef. By all accounts, Voignier enjoyed cooking, and would work in restaurants around the world throughout his life, under several of his assumed aliases.
Around this time, Voignier met a French-Italian gangster named Francois Spirito, who had started his own gang in Marseilles at the age of 14 and would become the "father of modern heroin trafficking."
At this time, Voignier was inducted into the criminal enterprise of the Corsican Brotherhood, where he would eventually earn the Brotherhood Medallion and the Napoleonic Imperial Eagle.
Voignier was involved in the French criminal underworld of Marseilles, selling drugs for Spirito in New York, Montreal, Boston, New Orleans, and Paris. Another person who worked for Spirito at this time was named Joseph Dornay, who went by the alias Joe Orsini. Other members of the gang included Paul Bonaventure Carbone and Antione D'Agostino.
Voignier also learned the craft of smuggling from Jean Voyatzis, Ellie Eliopoulos, and August Del Grazio.
During World War I, less than 16 years of age himself, Voignier adopted the alias Jean Pierre LaFitte in the employ of Colonel Ralph H. Van Deman, fighting for his elite group of raggedy "former criminals and morons" called the Army Counterintelligence Police (CIP), that would eventually become the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID).
In the Interwar Period, Voignier returned to running drugs for Spirito.
In the 1930s, Voignier joined the French Foreign Legion, which gave him the opportunity to erase his past. He wound up deserting the legion shortly afterwards -six times - and returning to his criminal life.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Voignier joined the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to defeat the Axis powers in Europe. During this time, Voignier first met agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) which had been tasked by Harry J. Anslinger to the ranks of the COI and OSS for the duration of the war.
One of the FBN agents that Voignier met was Garland H. Williams, who ran the COI and OSS schoolhouses. Williams enrolled Voignier in the program at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, where he became an expert in close quarter infiltration, disguise, and silent killing.
Voignier was involved heavily in espionage and sabotage operations against the Nazis.
After the war, Williams arranged a meeting with FBN agents Arthur Giuliani and George Hunter White, and Voignier became an undercover operative for this organization, and would be handled by White. Voignier became indispensable for the agency, joining their efforts around the world in hunting down narcotics networks.[6]
However, White and Voignier did not really interact until 1948, when they were both stationed in Tehran, and had lengthy conversations about Voignier's dream of becoming a world-renowned restaurant owner.
Sometime in the 30's or 40's, while operating in the criminal underworld of the Italian mafia in the US, Voignier was also approached by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to assist the agency in tracking down stolen art, going undercover with the alias "Gus Manoliti."
In 1950, Voignier was part of the FBI investigation into the theft of 1.2 million dollars from the Brinks headquarters.
Later that year, Voignier joined White and Siragusa at the Kefauver Committee for the Senate.
In 1951, Voignier was placed by White into the jail at the Ellis Island Detention Center, as cellmate to his old friend Joe Orsini. Voignier was assigned by White to take down Orsini's criminal enterprise, the Orsini Group, that he was still running out of the jail.[7] At this time, the federal government created a backstop cover story for Jean Pierre LaFitte - writing that the year 1951 was his first immigration to American soil.
White wrote the following in a letter to Williams in 1975:
"...how absolutely amazing it is that every one and their brother has swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the myth of Lafitte's arrival here... if I didn't know that he'd been around since before they invented iced tea I'd probably believe it myself."
Voignier was involved in the Midnight Climax experiments in New York City, part of Sidney Gottlieb's MK Ultra project, where he worked for White.[8] Under Midnight Climax, gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, and other American citizens were dosed with narcotics without their knowledge. One of these gangsters was Eugenio Gianni, who had been given hard drugs as a part of the experiment, who would later be killed by the mafia because they suspected him of having blown the whistle on Joe Orsini.
In the investigation into the death of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, Voignier's alias Pierre LaFitte was identified as the hotel bellhop on duty by the hotel manager. Later investigations indicate that when White returned home to attend to his sickly mother, he asked Voignier to take over the responsibility of keeping tabs on Olson. After Olson had consumed a quantity of alcohol and nembutal, in a drunk and high state, he got into a tussle with Voignier and Spirito, and wound up falling out of the window to his death.
After Olson's death, Voignier took several weeks of leave to rest and recuperate in Tampa, Florida.
In 1954, nine months after Olson's death, Voignier was sent to Las Vegas by Hank Greenspun at the suggestion of Ed Reid, an employee of Millard Preston Goodfellow's old newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, to investigate a brothel called "Roxies," and the corrupt Sheriff who owned it.
Around this time, Voignier was sent to Cuba in to investigate heroin networks there, but also to help counter the rise of communism in the country. Voignier would also investigate any suspicious links between Fidel Castro and communism.
Voignier was heavily involved in the French Connection case with George White and Charlie Siragusa.
In 1957, the Italian Mafia put out a contract for assassination on Voignier's alias Pierre LaFitte.[9]
In early 1962, Voignier recruited contract agents on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency to participate in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.[10]
Voignier was deployed to Vietnam around this time, where he is suspected to have been involved in the death of Ngo Dinh Diem.
In 1969, Voignier's alias Pierre LaFitte was arrested by the FBI in New Orleans where he was working as the head chef of the Plimsoll Club and jailed in Boston, facing charges of diamond smuggling - after the investor Ralph Loomis was swindled of $400,000. His life in undercover work as Pierre LaFitte was over due to the great publicity of his arrest - however, Loomis had died the year earlier, so the trial could not take place.
Voignier worked at the same restaurant that Lee Harvey Oswald worked at in New Orleans, and his name has come up in the investigations related to the death of John F. Kennedy. Voignier was also present during the break-in of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's office to find out any information about the alleged conspirator Clay Shaw.