In 1977, the House Committee on Assassinations, as part of its investigation into the Kennedy assassination, asked the Cuban Department of State Security if they would undertake a joint investigation into the killing of Kennedy. Through a thorough examination of declassified files of the U.S. intelligence community and the Cuban Security Agency, it was felt that a more complete account of the conspiracy could be formulated. The man in charge of this investigation on the Cuban side, Fabián Escalante, published a number of books based on the joint investigation in a series subtitled The Secret War. In a section of the book where the author speculates on the many co-conspirators, including those who may have been among the alleged backup shooters on “the grassy knoll,” at least two were described by an underworld source as “Cuban exile friends of Trafficante.” Writes Escalante, “It was rumored that one of the Cubans was a former police agent from the Havana vice squad who had gone on to become a gangster.”
There is no verifiable evidence, or even credible rumors, that Battle was among the men who assassinated JFK. In fact, the evidence that Cuban exiles were involved in the assassination is intriguing but hardly conclusive.
Certainly there were people within the militant core of the exile underground who hated Kennedy enough to want him dead, and some of those people had the skills to plan and attempt such a plot. But the exiles had nothing to gain by killing President Kennedy. The Kennedy brothers had been steadfast benefactors of Operation Mongoose.
As for Battle, like some other veterans of the 2506 Brigade, it was said that following Kennedy’s appearance at the Orange Bowl he had developed some degree of affection for the young president. Particularly, the appearance of wife Jackie Kennedy was fondly remembered. Now to see on television the famous “Zapruder film,” eight-millimeter footage from November 22 of JFK’s head being blown open by gunfire, the First Lady sprayed with brain matter and then hysterically attempting to climb out of the convertible limousine, was poignant bordering on heartbreaking. Some brigade members may have felt that given how they had been betrayed, Kennedy got what he deserved. But others were horrified.
FOR WEEKS, MONTHS, AND DECADES TO COME, THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION REVERberated like an atom bomb, with a centrifugal force that threatened to expose the nation’s darkest secrets. The immediate effect was that it shut down all official U.S. government efforts to kill Castro. Operation Mongoose was terminated. If indeed the assassination was somehow related to Cuba and the multilayered efforts to destabilize Castro’s government and eliminate the Bearded One, the prospect of unprecedented blowback sent shock waves throughout the intelligence community. The mandate now was to cover up the previous years of intensive clandestine activity, little of which had been authorized by Congress or the American people. It was to be buried away under a cloak of secrecy, and would stay that way for more than a decade.
At Fort Benning, activity didn’t exactly halt, but there was a cessation of CIA training for clandestine purposes.
José Miguel Battle still had four months left on his tour of duty, but they were not especially distinguished. In January 1964, he accidentally ran a tank over an Army truck during training. He was reprimanded, and it was noted that he had “failed” his training in the area of “automotive.” On the other hand, in arms training he was rated “exceptional.”
In March, Battle had come to the end of his one-year military commitment with a less than sterling overall record. In the areas of training that might have been useful to an ambitious covert operator— “counterinsurgency” and “survival, escape, and evasion,” for example—he hardly showed up. When it came time for his evaluation for promotion from second-grade to first-grade lieutenant, he had not accrued the necessary points for advancement. His promotion was denied.
At the age of thirty-five, Battle was older than many of the men with whom he’d been training. His military record listed his weight at 234 pounds, hefty for someone who stood five feet nine inches tall. Crawling in ditches and submitting to extensive physical training may have lost their appeal to him. By mutual consent, after serving one full year in the armed service, he received an honorable discharge from active duty. He would remain in the Army Reserves for three more years.
With his wife and son in tow, Battle was first discharged to an address in New York City, at 137 West 83rd Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There he was reunited with Angel Mujica, who had left the Army a few months before and settled in New York. Recently, Mujica had started a gambling operation that was based in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. It was a small-time operation—late-night poker games, sports betting, and, most notably, the numbers racket, what the police call “policy” and what Cubans and other Latinos refer to as bolita.
Mujica suggested that he and Battle could become partners. Not having Battle’s social or leadership capabilities, or his reputation as a Bay of Pigs hero, Mujica saw the advantage of letting Battle build on what he had already started. And for Battle, having spent the last four years of his life in some form of military service, combat, or prison, it was time to create a life in America with his wife and kid—at least until his militant exile compadres succeeded in killing Castro and they could all move back to Cuba.
In the meantime, he set his sights on the modest bedroom community of Union City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Five years earlier, when Battle first fled Cuba, he’d spent some time there. Though there was nothing physically attractive about Union City, Cuban émigrés were settling there in large numbers. The town of some forty thousand people was known as “the Embroidery Capital of the World,” and there were many garment-related factories and jobs. In an earlier era, Union City had also been a significant stop on the vaudeville circuit, and it still held many large theaters—now defunct—along Bergenline Avenue, the town’s main commercial thoroughfare.
Coincidentally, the town’s overlords—its politicians and police force—had a reputation for corruption. They could be bought—which is what you wanted if you had the idea of setting up a system of money-making based on an illegal venture such as the numbers racket.
Battle and his family had no furniture and little in the way of belongings. Through Cuban contacts in New Jersey, they were able to find an apartment near Union City’s central commercial area. With little in the way of money, the former Bay of Pigs hero was able to put down roots, but when it came to establishing a gambling business, he had a problem.
One characteristic of a bolita operation was that people who liked to bet the number—whether it was with dimes or dollars—preferred to do so with people they knew. For one thing, if you happened to hit on a given day, you had to know that you would be paid without delay. It was a relationship based on trust. Partly, this was an extension of how the system operated back in Cuba. It was a grassroots business, deeply entwined with the community. Nearly everybody liked to bet the number: little old ladies, priests, cops, teachers, nurses, and those with a more serious gambling habit. You could bet a nickel, or you could bet a hundred dollars, and if the system was set up properly—if it was expertly designed and user-friendly—when people won, they immediately funneled their winnings back into betting on a new set of numbers. Because doing so was irresistible.
With his reputation as a Bay of Pigs legend, Battle had the stature and the know-how to build an effective operation. What he didn’t have was money. A numbers operation needed to have a banker, or a series of them, to guarantee payment and cover potential daily losses. Cash money ebbed and flowed on a regular basis; it was the lifeblood of a whimsical game of chance. An organization was only as successful as its ability to absorb sudden and drastic swings in financial fortune.
Mujica’s bolita operation was low-end, operating on a shoestring, but it had great potential. Battle recognized the possibilities. He’d seen the way bolita was supposed to be run back in Havana. He’d been friendly with Martín Fox, owner of the Tropicana nightclub and the most successful bolitero in Cuba. Fox made it happen by using as his ben
efactors some of the most respected—and feared—gangsters in Havana at the time. Battle knew what every cop knows, that people are attracted to power. A bolita operation was like other businesses: to be successful, you needed to have a reputation that was above reproach. You needed to have an operation where no one could challenge you, because they knew it would be against their best interests to do so.
It was time for José Miguel to cash in some chits, to utilize the contacts he’d made and the reputation he’d established over the previous five or six tumultuous years. It was time for him to rekindle his relationship with the man who had helped make it possible for Fox back in Havana, a man who knew his way around the Cuban exile community and would know a stellar business opportunity when he saw one.
From his new base in Union City, Battle knew that it was time to reach out to his old friend Santo Trafficante.
3
SANTO
IN THE YEARS SINCE SANTO TRAFFICANTE HAD BEEN KICKED OUT OF CUBA, HE HAD been a busy man. There were the revenge plots against Castro with Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and the CIA. They had not borne fruit, but they were fun, gangsters and spooks putting their heads together out of a mutual lust for revenge. In retrospect, it might have been more of a fantasy than anything, but for the mafiosi, it had the added benefit of maybe helping to mollify AG Robert Kennedy. How could RFK persist in persecuting Trafficante and his friends if they were out on a limb, doing their patriotic duty, with another branch of the same tree? That was the thinking, anyway. Things hadn’t worked out that way. Even as the mobsters were plotting with the CIA to kill Castro, they were being arrested, tried, and convicted at an alarming rate. This, perhaps, had necessitated a change in strategy, a shifting of targets. You don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.
In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Trafficante had been interviewed by the FBI at his home in Tampa. Unsurprisingly, he had an ironclad alibi for that day. He was nowhere near Dallas on the date in question. If and when the boys from the Bureau learned that Trafficante had been in bed with the Agency is not known. What the G-men did know was that Santo was deeply embedded with the Cuban exile junta, and that he was fleshing out the ranks of his own criminal operations with Cuban exiles, a group the FBI was beginning to see as a potential new criminal threat.
Meanwhile, José Miguel Battle sought and was given a conference with Trafficante. He surmised that it would be a good idea to bring along his brother Gustavo. In recent months, while José Miguel had been awaking to reveille and playing cards at Fort Benning, Gustavo had been spotted by FBI surveillance teams meeting on a semiregular basis with Trafficante at various restaurants in Dade County. It may have been José Miguel, the older brother, who first established a partnership with Trafficante back in Havana, but it was Gustavo who up until now had kept things cozy in the Sunshine State.
In the absence of any one person with the stature or power to call himself “the Cuban Godfather,” Trafficante was it (even though he wasn’t Cuban). Partly this had to do with the reputation of his father, Santo Trafficante Sr., who had been working with Cuban racketeers going back to the days of Prohibition. During those years, the Sicilian-born Trafficante Sr. had established political connections in Cuba that made it possible for him to use the island as a transshipment point for narcotics coming primarily from the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. Back at his home base in Tampa, Trafficante Sr. used heroin smuggling proceeds to establish himself as the preeminent bolita banker on the Gulf Coast.
Bolita was big in Tampa. Long before Miami established itself as a haven for post-Castro Cuban refugees, Tampa, nicknamed “Cigar City,” had been on the receiving end of Cuban immigration since at least the Cuban War of Independence in 1898. The immigrants settled primarily in an area known as Ybor City, which was originally its own municipality but eventually became part of Tampa.
In Ybor City, cigar-making factories and Cuban cafecitos and restaurants were one manifestation of the influx; another was bolita. In 1950, the city’s bolita empire was dissected during the Kefauver hearings, an unprecedented congressional investigation of organized crime chaired by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. Trafficante Sr. had somehow managed to avoid being subpoenaed by the committee, but many notable Tampa crime figures were called to testify, setting off a chain reaction that led to many local gangland slayings. Public exposure of the city’s bolita racket was a primary cause of the upheaval.
In the early 1950s, even before Santo Sr. died after a protracted illness, the son already had been assuming control of the business. Santo Jr. was respected by the Cubans, and he had underworld connections at the highest levels throughout Tampa, South Florida, and all the way to New York. As someone who had attended all of the major Mob conferences over the years, including the infamous gathering at the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1946, he had the ability to open doors and smooth the waters in various criminal jurisdictions well beyond his home city.
Battle revered Trafficante; he expressed as much to friends and associates. He had watched the Tampa Mob boss, along with Meyer Lansky and a few others, glide through 1950s Havana like royalty. In the Cuban realm, there was no mobster more exalted than Trafficante. His pedigree as a businessman/gangster was beyond reproach.
Though there is no record of the two men having met since their days together in Havana, Trafficante would have been well aware of the burgeoning Battle legend. He likely had heard the stories of his former police bagman’s heroic exploits at the Bay of Pigs. He had heard the stories from many of his Cuban friends about the prisons in Cuba, at the Isle of Pines and elsewhere.
For his part, Battle may or may not have known the full extent of the Mafia kingpin’s collaboration with the CIA to kill Fidel, but it hardly mattered. These men constituted a mutual admiration society that had been tenderized during the abomination of a communist revolution and similarly flavored with bitter doses of betrayal and a sometimes psychotic compulsion for revenge.
Trafficante welcomed the men into his house. Likely, Cuban coffee was served.
José Miguel laid it all out. “I’m here to talk about bolita,” said Battle to the Man.
Santo adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, sipped his coffee, and said, “I’m listening.”
José Miguel was not the most verbally dexterous of men, but he was on solid turf, talking about a subject he knew and loved.
So, okay, here’s the deal . . .
Tampa already had a solid bolita structure in place—numbers runners who reached out to el pueblo; a system of corruption among politicians and police that helped facilitate the operation; bankers, auditors, and counting rooms to take in money and maintain the books; and a solid financial structure to deal with the occasional crisis, like when a specific date or occurrence led every Tomás, Ricardo, and Harry to bet the same number and then that number came in, meaning the bank had to be solvent or the entire racket would collapse under a crimson cascade of stabbings, beatings, and shootings, topped off by an ugly trail of raids and federal prosecutions.
Miami also had its bolita structure in place. Things were changing down there; the influx of Cubans fleeing Castro’s revolutionary paradise was transforming the city. The Battle brothers—Gustavo, Pedro, Aldo, Sergio, and Hiram—were making inroads in Miami. Maybe there was room for expansion there. But that’s not what José Miguel was there to talk about. He wanted to talk about the granddaddy of all bolita possibilities, the Big Show, where the density of the population and number of daily bettors made it a gold mine just waiting to be buggered: New York.
What made the Big Apple especially attractive, noted José Miguel, was Union City, across the river, close, but in a different state. In Union City, you could stand in Memorial Park, high on a bluff looking straight across the Hudson River at the majestic skyline of Manhattan. It was one of the most breathtaking views of the city in the entire metropolitan area. Almost literally, Union City was in the shadow of the greatest city on earth. For Battle, it was an empire to be conquere
d.
Furthermore, using Union City as a base of operations, the Cubans believed, would insulate the business from prosecution. Cops in New Jersey would not have jurisdiction to arrest them in New York, and vice versa.
Battle was basing this theory on the knowledge that investigations and prosecutions of policy rackets had heretofore been undertaken primarily by local law enforcement. In many ways, policy was considered to be small potatoes. Even after the public Kefauver hearings, federal prosecutions for this kind of gambling were few and far between. And local prosecutions were easy to manage—cops, judges, and politicians could be bought off. Battle was confident that through political connections and graft, he could make himself virtually untouchable in Union City.
It didn’t take much convincing for Trafficante to see the value in what Battle was proposing. Along with everything else, there was a historical precedent to putting a Cuban in charge of the Mob’s numbers ventures.
Back during Prohibition and into the 1930s, one of the preeminent numbers bankers in New York City was Alejandro “Alex” Pompez, a Cuban American born in Key West and raised in Ybor City. As a young man, Pompez moved to New York and became a key operator in the numbers racket of Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Shultz, one of the most powerful gangsters of his day. Having made a fortune off of bootlegging, a business that was regulated through extortion, violence, and murder, Shultz in 1931 parlayed his financial fortune into becoming perhaps the biggest numbers banker in America.
The center of betting activity was Harlem. Wagering coins or small bills on a series of numbers was largely a poor person’s activity, easily accessible to people of limited means—especially those with dreams of a better and more prosperous world beyond the horizon. The man who became the face of Shultz’s policy empire in Harlem was Alex Pompez, an elegant Afro-Cuban operator with a pleasant manner and organizational skills who also spoke fluent Spanish.
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