Heady Nougat

One day last week a furtive man carrying a small, neat bundle came out of a little house in Teheran's Goethe Street.

"May I see what's inside this?" asked an Iranian police inspector, indicating the package. "Oh, it's just some nougat that I wanted to send my brother," said the man casually. "All right," said the policeman, "let's take it to my office, and we'll eat it together." At headquarters the police opened the package. It contained three pounds of heroin wrapped for delivery to a dope pusher in New York City.

Inside the house on Goethe Street police found a well-equipped laboratory complete with all the necessary equipment for making heroin out of opium. Calmly washing her hands after making a fresh batch was the chatelaine, grey-haired, motherly Mme. Kalyopi Kalo-gridi, a Greek woman whose title "Queen of the Smugglers" had been well earned in two criminal convictions and the bet ter part of a lifetime spent in the illicit drug trade. Kalyopi's Teheran plant was capable of turning out each week up to 110 Ibs. of deadly dope worth nearly $500,000 on the wholesale market. Disguised as gift packages, some 90% of Kalyopi's product was shipped to the U.S.

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