The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Another report noted:

  Subject is strongly anti-communist. In addition he sincerely believes in a Democratic/Reform government for his homeland . . . He is strongly pro-American, and believes that when [Castro] is overthrown, the only hope for his country is through U.S. government indirect participation in [Cuban] affairs.

  Posada’s file noted that he traveled undercover as a professional jewelry salesman, and that the CIA was paying him $300 a month. Under the section titled SUBJECT’S PERSONAL HABITS, it read, “Subject does not gamble.”

  Apparently, playing poker for money, as he had at Fort Benning, did not qualify. But the point was well taken. Compared to his friend José Miguel Battle, he was an amateur.

  In 1971, Posada ran into his old friend once again. By then, Posada was heavily active in the war against communism in Venezuela. Castro had sent armed intelligence operatives into that country in an attempt to influence its direction, and Posada was part of an armed Cuban exile unit that resisted. There had been actual combat, and Posada had been shot. Later, the exiled activist was appointed head of Venezuela’s secret intelligence unit, which apprehended and tortured communist sympathizers believed to be enemies of the state. Posada was now on the vanguard of the war to seek out and fight Castroism wherever it reared its head.

  On a visit to Miami for recruitment purposes, Posada ran into Battle at a cockfight. Though illegal in the United States, cockfighting was a strong cultural tradition among Cuban men, and there were often illegal cockfights set up in makeshift arenas around South Florida and in the Keys.

  Posada and Battle embraced. They had not seen each other since their days together at Fort Benning. Through the Cuban exile grapevine, Battle would have known of Posada’s activities in the war against Castro and communism—maybe not the details, but enough to know that his old friend was on the front lines. Posada knew that José Miguel was the bolita kingpin of New York and New Jersey. He knew that Battle had recently been indicted on federal gambling charges. Though the two men were on different career paths, they still shared the common goal of wanting to see Fidel Castro dead. They both believed this was going to happen one day—hopefully soon—and they would all return to their beloved Cuba.

  At the cockfight in Miami, Battle did something that Posada would remember for the rest of his days. He placed a wager of $1 million. “Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Posada years later. In 1971, $1 million was the equivalent of $6 million today.

  Battle lost the bet.

  Posada was astounded by the sum involved. Immediately, Battle rose higher on the list of people he would lean on for financing of anti-Castro operations.

  What Posada did not know at the time was that José Miguel was about to flee the United States for Spain. This bet may have been a last grand gesture before he became an international fugitive from the law.

  LA LUCHA WAS A VAST WEB, AND IT WAS ALIVE ON MANY FRONTS, INCLUDING NEW Jersey, where Battle was king. Two notorious militants who lived in Union City, in the shadow of Battle’s bolita operation, were the Novo brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio. These were the men that Castro’s mistress, Marita Lorenz, claimed to have seen with Frank Sturgis and Oswald in Dallas.

  Their hypothetical involvement in the JFK assassination, if true, was below the surface, known only within the inner sanctums of the Agency, and presumably among the participants. But the Novo brothers had made themselves famous for another event that was undertaken out in the open for all to see.

  Back in 1964, while Che Guevara was giving a speech at the United Nations, the Novo brothers positioned themselves at a location in Queens, across the East River from the U.N. building. From a homemade bazooka they had constructed out of parts purchased at a local hardware store, they fired a missile at the location in the building where Guevara was giving his speech. The missile did not have the range to hit the building; it came up short and fell into the river. The Novo brothers were arrested but did no time for the attempted assassination. They became heroes among anti-Castro Cuban exiles everywhere, but especially in New Jersey. In Union City, they cofounded Omega 7, a clandestine terrorist group that was viewed as New Jersey’s equivalent to Alpha 66 in Miami.

  The Novo brothers and José Miguel Battle knew each other, but because they were all engaged to one degree or another in a clandestine war against Fidel, they knew better than to be seen together in public. The FBI was watching. And yet they somehow managed to interact and perhaps commit crimes together as soldiers in the war against Cuba.

  In April 1974, while Battle was still in prison, there occurred in Miami a notorious political murder. The victim was José Elías de la Torriente, a vocal anti-Castro activist who had been raising money for something he called “Work Plan for Liberation.” On April 25, Good Friday, Torriente, age sixty-nine, was shot dead by a sniper while watching television with his wife in his Coral Gables home. Outside his front door, a message was found, a piece of paper with a large zero and a line drawn through it.

  In recent months, the exile activist had made enemies within his own community by continuing to raise money for a plan that some suspected he had no intention of carrying out. To these people, Torriente was seen as a profiteer, a scam artist, who was using anti-Castro rhetoric to cheat Cuban exiles in Miami and New Jersey out of money.

  The day after Torriente’s murder, a lengthy communiqué, typewritten in Spanish, was delivered to various media outlets in Miami and in Hudson County, New Jersey. It was addressed to “public opinion” and signed by an entity that called itself “Zero Group.” Labeling Torriente “a traitor to La Patria,” the statement spelled out the group’s intention to eliminate any and all exile leaders who “block this process of liberating their homeland by working only to advance their own bastard ambitions.” Within days, another letter went out in which Zero Group listed ten names of prominent exile activists marked with a zero. The letter read, “Each in his own time and in a cool and dispassionate way will start getting his zero. An infinite zero that will adorn their soon to be forgotten tomb . . . Cemeteries are very big and we have more than enough time to fill them.”

  The messages set an ominous tone: many believed that Castro government functionaries were behind it somehow. To others, it was an example of how factionalized the anti-Castro movement had become, with various groups turning against one another. Militant activists weren’t just targeting people and political entities that were believed to be sympathetic to Castro, they were killing each other.

  Like many events within the anti-Castro movement, the Torriente murder remained a mystery for some time, until an FBI special agent in New York City reached out to a well-placed confidential informant in New Jersey. Special Agent Larry Wack filed an intelligence report that read, in part:

  This investigator contacted Source #1 in New York City in regards to an ongoing investigation of Omega 7, a Cuban terrorist organization based in the United States. Source #1 stated that Guillermo Novo is a close associate of Jose Miguel Battle, a known organized crime figure from the New Jersey area and a Bay of Pigs veteran (2506 Brigade). Source #1 said that in the early 1970s, Jose M. Battle contracted Guillermo Novo to subcontract assassination hits on several individuals in the New Jersey, New York and Miami areas.

  One of the assassination hits was of Jose Elias De La Torriente, a Cuban activist that was assassinated at his residence. According to street rumors, a day before the homicide of subject De La Torriente, Guillermo Nova’s brother, Ignacio Novo, was caught in the backyard of the residence of subject De La Torriente; subject Ignacio Novo was stripped [sic] searched at gunpoint by subject De La Torriente.

  The FBI was never able to make a case against Battle, the Novo brothers, or anybody else for the murder of José Elías de la Torriente. To this day, the murder remains an open case.

  The fact that Battle was in prison at the time of the murder ultimately proved to be good cover for the Mob boss. To say that Battle was involved would have been a rebuk
e to security measures at the facility, an indictment of the system itself. Could this murder have been hatched from behind the walls of Danbury prison? Prison authorities might have scoffed at the idea. But there is little doubt that José Miguel Battle had the means, and the motive, to assemble a plan to carry out such an execution.

  Among those in the know, it was a killing that seemed to suggest that there was taking shape within the womb of the exile community a sinister intermingling—a potential dark alliance—between the anti-Castro movement and the Cuban American gangster underworld.

  PEDRO BATTLE WAS THE YOUNGEST AND MOST WELL LIKED OF THE BATTLE BROTHERS. He was not physically intimidating, like José Miguel, nor sometimes surly, like Gustavo. He had a friendly disposition, which some may have interpreted as a sign of weakness.

  Since the infamous shootout between the Battle brothers and Hector Duarte in the streets of Little Havana, Pedro had moved north to New York City. With brother Gustavo having been convicted and imprisoned on cocaine charges, José Miguel, El Padrino, reiterated his ban on narcotics as a source of revenue for his organization. But by early 1974, he was away in prison. Pedro, who had originally transplanted himself to New York to oversee the Cuban Mafia’s bolita operations in the Bronx, had begun selling cocaine on the street. A key partner of Pedro’s in this enterprise was Ernestico Torres, his friend from Madrid. Pedro had served as godfather to Ernestico’s son, and after leaving Spain and returning to the United States, they had remained close.

  Knowing that José Miguel had prohibited the selling of drugs, Pedro and Ernestico were aware that they were treading on thin ice. It was important that news of what they were doing did not travel on the underworld grapevine to El Padrino in prison, or they were going to be in trouble. In the year or so since they had returned from Spain, things had gone well. They were making money by peddling coke, mostly in the South Bronx, and there were few problems. That all changed with the emergence of an ambitious Cuban gangster named José “Palulu” Enriquez.

  Palulu was an old rival of Pedro’s from Miami. Back in the 1960s, while selling coke in the Magic City, the two had territorial disputes that on at least one occasion led to gunfire. By the early 1970s, Palulu had moved north. The New York–New Jersey area was where the money was, and like many enterprising Cuban exiles from South Florida, he came looking for a piece of the action. In Miami, Palulu had mostly been a bolitero. He knew that in New York the Battle organization had that sewn up. And so he focused on the cocaine business, which appeared to be wide open. His primary area of operation was the Bronx. He established a modest system, with cocaine being brought into the country mostly by drug “mules”—body smugglers—across the Mexican border into California. When the product arrived in the New York metropolitan area, Palulu purchased in bulk, warehoused his product in the Bronx, and sold it on the street through a network of dealers.

  It was a solid operation, until suddenly Pedro Battle and his crazy sidekick Ernestico Torres started moving in on his territory. Now here he was in the Bronx, years after his territorial dispute with Pedro down in Miami, having to deal with the Battles once again. To Palulu, the Battles were like the plague; left unattended, they spread like a disease.

  The situation in the Bronx quickly came to a head. A heated dispute developed over one street corner in particular where both organizations were selling their product. Pedro Battle believed that this corner belonged to him. One night, when he received word that Palulu’s people were selling product at the location, he sent out a crew headed by Ernestico. There was a shootout. Ernestico shot and killed one of Palulu’s dealers, a Puerto Rican known as “El Raton,” the Mouse. Not only did Ernestico kill the man, but he and the rest of his crew then absconded with $20,000 worth of Palulu’s cocaine, claiming that it was a legitimate street tax for the rival dealer’s having violated their territory.

  When Palulu heard what had happened, he was deranged with anger and vowed revenge. He was known to be relentless. Born in Cuba, he had—as with nearly everyone else among his generation of exiles, clandestine operators, and gangsters—tried to make a go of it under Castro’s revolutionary regime but soon found out that communism was not conducive to the kind of street-level entrepreneurship he most admired. He fled the island and became a professional criminal.

  He had always harbored resentment, or perhaps jealousy, toward the Battles. José Miguel was El Padrino, and the others rode his coattails. Pedro in particular he saw as a fraud. Back in Miami and also in New York, Palulu had enthusiastically circulated his opinion that Pedro Battle was a coward. In the shootout with Hector Duarte in Little Havana, Pedro had fled the scene, leaving his brother Gustavo bleeding in the street. Palulu’s jealousy toward the Battles was crystallized in his disdain for Pedro.

  Right around the time of the El Raton murder, something happened that altered the landscape somewhat. After having served sixteen months of an eighteen-month sentence, José Miguel Battle was released from prison.

  As always when a boss returns after a stint away in the joint, the news created a buzz throughout the Cuban American underworld. The boss was back. For some, the prospect of once again making big money was the primary stimulator. For others, there were old scores that needed to be settled. In family squabbles, one sibling might say to another, “You just wait until Daddy gets home.” The criminal underworld, especially with racketeering operations that revolved around blood relations and “family,” had a similar dynamic. The return of El Padrino held the promise of old accounts being settled and dormant operations being put into motion.

  It is not clear at exactly what point Battle learned about Pedro’s cocaine business, and Ernestico’s involvement in that business, but when he did, he was livid. Their own brother Gustavo was in prison on drug charges. It was too damn risky. And then there was the killing of El Raton, which created a blood feud with Palulu that Battle suspected would put everyone on edge and become a major distraction. Clearly, what he needed to do was tend to his bolita business. Between his time on the lam and time in prison, he’d been away for three years. The best use of his time was to make a full accounting of his criminal operations and make adjustments, if necessary. Having to deal with a street war that had been generated by an aspect of the black market—narcotics— that he’d forbidden was a headache he did not need.

  Battle was concerned about consequences. He could not have known that those consequences would become apparent almost immediately, just two months after his release from prison.

  The neighborhood of Washington Heights had become a primary locale for the Cuban Mafia in the area. It was an easy drive from Hudson County, New Jersey, where many of them lived. You crossed the majestic George Washington Bridge and you were in the heart of Washington Heights. It was also a short drive from the Bronx. The neighborhood was New York’s version of Miami’s Little Havana, without the palm trees, homegrown cigars, and persistent sunshine. The Colonial restaurant, on 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, was a place where the boliteros— Battle, Mujica, Isleño Davila, Joaquin Deleon Sr., and others—met to discuss business, especially the bankers. But Washington Heights was also a place where the Cubans socialized, in clubs and after-hours locations where music blared and the revelry sometimes spilled out into the street.

  In the early morning hours of December 23, two days before Christmas, the Guanabo Bar and Grill at 1487 St. Nicholas Avenue, between 184th and 185th streets in Washington Heights, was overflowing. Pedro Battle was there with his wife, Elda. Wearing a maroon jacket, a red tie, and a pink shirt, clearly Pedro was not concerned about being noticed in a crowd.

  Palulu Enriquez entered the bar with an entourage of four other men. Palulu had a distinctive look: he was a dark-skinned, Afro Cuban, with a Fu Manchu mustache that made him resemble the famous major league baseball pitcher, Luis Tiant, who was also Cuban. As Palulu often did, he was wearing a hat. Even though it was after 3 A.M., the place was so filled with customers that Palulu was there for a while before he spotted
his nemesis in the maroon jacket, Pedro Battle, seated with his wife in a booth near the entrance to the ladies’ room. Palulu felt the .45-caliber handgun tucked in his waist. He walked over to Pedro and said, “Well, look who’s here, the maricón who had one of my men killed. Didn’t even have the cojones to do it himself, ordered that scumbag Ernestico Torres to do the hit.”

  Pedro tightened; he also was packing heat, a .45 inside his jacket. He was ready for a moment just like this. “Palulu,” he proclaimed, “you been a lambe culo ever since Miami. Get out of my face before I have to teach you a lesson.”

  Raising his voice a couple decibels, loud enough so that he could be heard over the jukebox, Palulu responded, “You gonna teach me a lesson? The guy who deserted his own brother? Left him to bleed in the street while he ran away? You gonna teach me? You and what army, you fucking coward.”

  Being publicly called out for having deserted his brother hit Pedro where it hurt. For years he had harbored guilt and shame about having fled the scene after the shootout on Flagler Street. Now that shame was being summoned by a person he despised more than any other.

  Pedro reached for his gun, and Palulu reached for his; the two men started blazing away.

  Customers in the bar stampeded for the exits. It was not uncommon in a bar in Washington Heights for someone to whip out a gun and start talking trash, but this was the real deal. Boom! Boom! Bullets were flying. The two gunmen traded shots across the bow. Palulu was grazed in the shoulder, but he kept blasting.

  Pedro was hit three times, twice in the left arm and once in the face. He crashed to the floor and did not move.

  Elda cried out. She turned over the body of her husband and saw that he was dead. She stumbled out of the club and said to a gypsy cab driver in front of the place, “My husband is dead, they killed my husband.” The cabdriver quickly drove to the nearby 34th Precinct station house and informed the officer at the front desk about the shooting. The desk officer immediately put out a radio call that included the location of the bar.