R. J. Ellory

by A Quiet Vendetta

  Killing your own father is a truly spiritual experience: such a thing cannot exclude killing a little of yourself, yet at the same time it is an exorcism. There are some I have spoken with who talk of carrying the faces of the dead, as if some small part of their spirit enters you as they die, and from that point forward they will always be there. If I close my eyes and think hard enough I can remember all their faces. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can look in the mirror long enough and see their reflections in my own eyes. Imagination plays a part I am sure, but I believe there is some truth in what I have been told. We carry them all, but I – at least – carry the image of my father the most.

  When he died he was all of forty-six years old. I had arranged a job for him at one of the smaller nightclubs in Old Havana, a club owned by Don Ceriano’s brother-in-law, a wild-eyed and aggressive gambler called Enzio Scribani. Scribani had married Don Ceriano’s youngest sister three or four years before, and though his promiscuity and perverse sexual tastes were legend, there was something about the way in which such things were handled that denied the possibility that he would be anything but family. Later, six or seven years after I had left Havana, Don Ceriano’s sister, Lucia, a beautiful innocent-looking girl, killed her own husband by driving a pair of pinking shears through his right eye. She had then taken her own life.

  My father, his reputation as the Havana Hurricane still to some degree intact, was employed as a doorman at the Starboard Club, a relatively minor concern in the grand scheme of things. Here the walk-on players and bit-piece actors in the grander theater of Havana’s Mafia operations came to flirt with the hostesses, to gamble hundreds instead of thousands of dollars, to sometimes wander through the rear curtains where worn-out Cuban housewives would dance and take their clothes off for ten or fifteen dollars a time. It was a shabby place in reality, and though Enzio Scribani was the owner and proprietor of the establishment he seemed to make it his business to be there as infrequently as possible.

  My father did his job. He turfed out the drunken Cubans; he protected the dancers from their irate brothers and lovers and husbands; he escorted the money couriers from the club to the bank; he made little noise, he did not complain, he took his dollars at the end of each week and he drank them away before Monday rolled around again. With the money I earned from my Havana work with Don Ceriano I had rented a five-room apartment off Bernaza near the Old Wall Ruins. Here, my father had a room where he would sleep off his drunk until it was time to wake and return to work. I saw little of him, and with this arrangement I was satisfied. He spoke little, and when he did there was always an underlying apologetic tone, and as the months drew on I became less and less interested in what he had to say, and more intent that at some point soon he would cease to be my responsibility. I did not hate him. Hate was too strong an emotion for someone towards whom I felt nothing. Less than nothing. I often imagined that, in attempting to eject an undesirable from the Starboard, he would embroil himself in a fight that would get him shot or stabbed or beaten to death. But there was no such event. It seemed that my father, in relinquishing his arrogance and conceit, had also relinquished his right to be involved in anything of moment at all.

  In the latter part of August 1961, a few days after another engagement had been organized for myself and an adversary of Don Ceriano’s, after another small matter had been perfunctorily despatched, I received a visit at my apartment from Giorgio Vaccorini. To me he was known as Max or Maxie, after Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom the boxer. The nickname had been earned as a result of an incident outside the Hotel Nacional when a parking attendant had tried to take Giorgio’s keys from him in order to park and valet the car. Giorgio, drunk and incoherent, had believed he was being robbed, and he turned and let fly with a roundhouse that broke the kid’s neck. One punch and the teenager was dead. The matter was closed within half an hour with the delivery of ten thousand US dollars to the home of the Cuban National Chief of Police. So Maxie came to see me late afternoon. He looked serious, a little tense, and he asked me to sit down as he had some news for me.

  ‘A little problem,’ he started, and again he assumed a serious expression. When these guys got serious then life was serious.

  ‘Your father,’ he went on. ‘There seems to be some kind of problem with your father.’

  I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs. I looked around for my cigarettes but could not see them.

  ‘He went with the delivery guy to the bank this morning,’ Maxie said, his voice hushed, a little hesitant. ‘They took the usual kind of money, maybe five or six grand, and they went off to the bank just like regular.’

  I sat patiently, waiting for the problem to be voiced.

  ‘Seems they never reached the bank, Ernesto. Seems that your father and the courier never arrived at all, and we got to thinking that perhaps they did a runner with the money.’

  I nodded understandingly.

  ‘An hour or so ago we found the courier. You know Anselmo, young guy with the scar on his face here—’ Maxie raised his right hand and indicated a point above his left eyebrow.

  I knew Anselmo Gamba; had fucked his sister one time.

  ‘We found Anselmo with his throat cut down an alleyway off of one of the sidestreets near the Starboard, maybe two or three blocks away. There was no sign of your father. Not the money neither. So Don Ceriano . . . Don Ceriano said I should come down here and speak with you and see if you couldn’t take a look for your father and take care of things, you know?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So that’s what I came to tell you,’ Maxie said, rising awkwardly from the chair. ‘See if you can’t find him, sort out what happened, okay?’

  I smiled. ‘Okay Maxie, I’ll sort things out. Tell Don Ceriano that whatever the problem is isn’t a problem any more.’

  Maxie smiled back. He seemed relieved to be going. I showed him to the door, placed my hand on his shoulder as he stepped into the hallway, and noticed that he flinched. I noted this inside. Even Slapsie Maxie, a man who had hit a kid with a roundhouse and busted his neck, was a little scared of the Cuban. This pleased me, confirmed once again that I had become someone.

  I waited until Maxie was out of sight and then collected my coat and my cigarettes. I left the apartment and started towards Old Havana and the watering holes where I knew my father would be hiding.

  It took me three hours to find him, and by then it was evening. The sky was black, almost starless.

  Even as he saw me coming towards him across the floor of a beat-to-shit rundown joint on the coast side of the quarter he started to cry. I felt nothing. This was business pure and simple, and I had no time for over-emotional performances.

  ‘The money?’ I asked him as I slid in beside him on the seat.

  ‘They robbed it,’ he slurred. ‘Robbed the money and killed the kid . . . I tried, Ernesto, I tried to stop them, but there were three of them and they were quick—’

  I raised my hand.

  ‘Ernesto . . . they came out of nowhere, three of them, and there was nothing I could do . . .’

  ‘You were supposed to protect the courier,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s your job, Father. They send you along to protect the courier, to make sure that the money gets to the bank, that nothing happens to him on the way.’

  My father raised his hands as if in prayer. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ he whined. ‘I know why they send me, and every time I have done my job, every time I have protected him and nothing has happened—’

  ‘You have the money with you?’

  My father opened his eyes in shock. ‘The money? You think I took the money? You think I would kill someone for money? I am your father, Ernesto, you know I would never do something like that.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I know you, Father. I know you would kill someone for no money at all.’

  He did not reply. There was nothing he could have said. All these past years the death of my mother, his wife, had sat between us like a third person. It had always been
there, spoken of or not, it had always been there.

  My father shook his head. ‘You have to tell them . . . you have to tell them what happened. You have to make them believe that I did not steal the money and kill the boy. I didn’t do it, Ernesto, I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘You have to tell them, Father. You have to stop running away and hiding. The longer you stay away the more they will believe that you took the money. If you come with me now and tell them what happened, how these men robbed you and killed Anselmo, I will support you, I will make them understand that there was nothing you could have done.’

  My father nodded. He started smiling. He was already rising to his feet. He reached out and gripped my arm. ‘You are my son,’ he said quietly. ‘I will never forget what you have done to help me. You brought me here, you got me a job, a place to live, and I will remember this for the rest of my life.’

  My father, the Havana Hurricane, did not have to remember how much he owed me for very long at all. A little more than twenty minutes later he lay dead in an alleyway two blocks from the Starboard Club. He did not question me when I turned right and walked him down that alleyway, which he would have known went nowhere at all. He did not cry out when I hit him across the back of the head and he fell awkwardly to the ground. He lay there for a moment, stunned and speechless, and in his eyes was an expression of such resigned inevitability that I knew he was aware of his own death coming fast like a freight train.

  From the ground I took a brick, and squatting down with one knee on his chest I raised the brick above my head.

  ‘For your wife,’ I told him quietly. ‘For your wife and my mother this is long overdue.’

  He closed his eyes. No sounds. No tears. Nothing at all.

  I think he was dead after I hit him the first time. The corner of the brick destroyed much of the right hand side of his face. I imagined the subsequent repeated blows to his head and neck would not have been felt at all. It was like killing a dog. Less than a dog.

  Three days later it was discovered that Anselmo Gamba and my father had been robbed on the way to the bank. They had been robbed by three Cuban brothers – Osmany, Valdés and Vicente Torres. I was not despatched to attend to them, for such things as the killing of three small-time Cuban hoodlums was considered beneath my talents, but someone was despatched and the money was recovered, and a month and a half later an oil drum was recovered from the Canal de Entrada with three heads and six hands inside.

  Don Ceriano had been the one to tell me that my father had not lied, that they had in fact been robbed on the way to the bank.

  ‘I sent you to attend to this matter for my own reasons,’ he told me. ‘I sent Maxie over to tell you so that you could help us find your father and discover what had happened.’

  I did not reply.

  ‘I wondered what you would do when you found him,’ he went on. ‘I wanted to know what action you would take.’

  Again I said nothing. I was asking myself if there was a point to what he was saying.

  ‘And you killed your own father,’ Don Ceriano said.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘You have nothing to say, Ernesto?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you want me to say, Don Ceriano?’

  Don Ceriano looked both surprised and perplexed. ‘You killed your own father, Ernesto, and you have nothing to say?’

  I smiled. ‘I will say three things, Don Ceriano.’

  Don Ceriano raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Firstly, my father murdered his own wife, my mother. Secondly, his punishment was both appropriate and overdue.’ I paused for a moment.

  ‘And the third thing?’ Don Ceriano asked.

  ‘We shall not talk about it again as it deserves no importance.’

  Don Ceriano nodded. ‘As you wish, Ernesto, as you wish.’

  It was not mentioned again. Not a single word came from Don Ceriano’s lips, nor any of those who worked with us while we were in Havana. My father’s murder was as effortlessly forgotten as his life.

  During the coming months I was to understand more of the connections between Florida and Cuba than I had believed existed. Of these things Don Ceriano spoke, but it was also from conversations between the members of his family and those who attended the house in Miami that I learned much of the background. Mafia money had been moving into Florida since the 1930s, with investments in such places as the Tropical Park Race Track in Coral Gables and Meyer Lansky’s Colonial Inn. During the 1940s the Wofford Hotel had been a base for both Lansky and Frank Costello, Costello having close ties with a man called Richard Nixon who would later become president of the United States. Ironically, during the Watergate investigation some years later, an outfit called the Keyes Realty Company was identified as having been the intermediary between organized crime and Miami-Dade County officials. In 1948 Keyes Realty had transferred ownership of a property to a Cuba-Mafia investment group called ANSAN. Later, that same real estate interest passed in ownership to the Teamsters’ Union Pension Fund and Meyer Lansky’s Miami National Bank. Subsequently, in 1967, ownership was signed over to Richard Nixon, and it was discovered that one of the Watergate burglars, a Cuban exile, was a vice-president of that same Keyes Realty Company. Lou Poller, one of Meyer Lansky’s trusted confederates, had taken over control of the Miami National Bank in 1958, and it was through this bank that Mafia money was laundered, often used to purchase apartment buildings, hotels, motels and mobile home companies. The house in which I stayed during those six years in Miami was one of those real estate interests, and it was to here that many of Don Ceriano’s people would come to talk business, to pass details on about who ‘needed their ticket punched’, or who should ‘get a letter on the Chicago typewriter’.

  I heard word of Santo Trafficante Jnr again. His name had been mentioned in Cuba, but I had not appreciated that he had in fact been born right there in Florida. Trafficante had operated the Sans Souci and Casino International operations in Havana, and possessed interests and influence in the Riviera, the Tropicana, the Sevilla Biltmore, the Capri Hotel Casino and the Havana Hilton. In Tampa he controlled the Columbia Restaurant, the Nebraska, the Tangerine and the Sands Bars. Trafficante had fled to Havana in 1957 after Grand Jury subpoenas were issued for his arrest and questioning. In the early part of 1958 he had been questioned by the Cuban National Police regarding the Apalachin Meeting, which he denied having attended. He was still wanted in New York for his alleged involvement in the killing of Albert Anastasia, but the Cuban National Police were interested in his manipulation of the bolita numbers for Cuban operatives on behalf of Fidel Castro.

  Whatever may have been the allegations against him, Don Ceriano said enough for me to understand that Santo Trafficante Jnr had overseen all Mafia-related operations in Florida since the death of his father in August 1954. As far back as 1948 and 1949 Trafficante had been involved with Frank Zarate, the principal defendant in a case instigated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who collaborated with US Customs and the New York City Police Department to break a Peruvian cocaine supply coming into the US through Cuba. Irrespective of this matter, Trafficante was granted resident status by the Cuban Immigration Department in October 1957. In a memo issued by a narcotics agent called Eugene Marshall in July 1961, it was made clear that Castro had operatives working in Tampa and Miami who made significant bets on Cuba’s bolita through Trafficante’s organization. Trafficante himself was observed meeting several times with a man called Oscar Echemendia. Echemendia was not only a part-owner of the Tropicana Night Club in Havana, but also one of the most influential controllers of the bolita in Dade County, Miami. It was rumored that after Castro’s seizure of power, after he ousted organized crime from the casinos and hotels in Cuba, he kept Santo Trafficante Jnr in jail as he so disliked the man. This was a cause for amusement among the families in Miami, for they knew that Trafficante was an agent for Castro, and he was influential in establishing the terms upon which the Mafia could return to Cuba.

  Thus th
ere was a connection between Florida and Cuba, and thus I was accepted as a member of their family. Ceriano was a main player, a heavy-hitter, and I played my part for Ceriano. I consorted with an organization called Cuban Americans in Miami; I relayed inside information from employees of Radio Martí, a US-government sponsored station, and soon I could utter the words Chi se ne frega with as much conviction as the rest of them. I was young, I was willing, I could wear a silk Italian suit with as much panache and style as anyone, and I felt no compunction. I believed these people, I believed their motives and rationale, and if the instruction came that someone needed to be excommunicated from the world, I executed that request with punctuality and professionalism. To me it was a job that had to be done. I did not ask questions. I did not need answers. In some small way I wanted for nothing.

  Once upon a time, as a child perhaps, I had been driven by the urgent desire to become somebody. Among these people, these crazy hot-headed Sicilians and Genovese, I was somebody. I believed I had arrived, that there was a purpose to my life, and considering my natural ability to do things that no-one else was prepared to do, I was afforded a degree of respect and camaraderie that was ordinarily reserved only for blood relatives.

  I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, adoptive son of Don Giancarlo Ceriano, soldier of Santo Trafficante Jnr, head of the Mafia in Miami. There were people here who would figure more prominently as the months became years. It was an era of tension and political subterfuge. Anti-Castro feelings were high amongst some factions of the families, and it was in Miami that wealthy Cuban exiles collaborated with Sam Giancana to oust Castro from Cuba. From what little I could gather, both the CIA and the FBI were instrumental in funding such operations. A man called Robert Maheu, apparently ex-CIA, had hired Sam Giancana to form assassination squads to go after Castro, and Giancana had put his Los Angeles lieutenant, Johnny Roselli, in charge of the operation. Years later, in 1978, when the House Select Committee questioned Roselli he said that those teams were trained for the Kennedy assassination as well. That was all but part of the truth. Kennedy was a different story, a story that would not emerge for more than a year. From Roselli the Select Committee never established any further details. His body was found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast. Sam Giancana was shot in Chicago. There were three different assassination teams in Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed, and only one was known by Roselli. The other two came from within the United States Intelligence community, and those that filed reports for the Warren Commission, those that handled the legal implications of all subsequent investigations, were far more informed as to what actually occurred than they ever said. They had their own cosa nostra, and they kept their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves, and have done to this day.