“Do you know who I am?” Battle asked Mella.
Mella studied the man through his rearview mirror. Given the way Sergeant Messina had reacted, and Battle’s own privileged attitude, he was beginning to think maybe he should know him. But he was relatively new to the area and had never seen him before.
Battle explained to Mella, “You know, there’s a contract out on my life. I know it’s against the law for me to have those guns, but it was for my own personal defense. They murdered my brother.”
Battle made small talk with Mella. The cop could tell he was an old-school Cuban. Eventually, Battle said, “If somebody could help make this whole thing go away, the gun charges, I would be very grateful. And I know how to show my gratitude to policemen. Just ask around.”
“Are you offering me a bribe?” asked Mella.
“No, no, no,” said Battle. “It’s nothing of the sort. I’m just saying that I would be grateful.” He sank into glum silence for the rest of the ride.
By the time they arrived at the station house, José Miguel seemed angry. As they entered, he saw Sergeant Messina and shouted, “Messina, I want to make a phone call.”
Sergeant Messina tried to avoid him. Later, cops at the station referred to it as “the Messina Waltz,” as Messina tried to sidestep Battle, and Battle sidestepped right along with him.
“I get to make one call,” Battle reiterated. “Call Bolte. Call the chief. I want him here now.”
Officer Mella’s ears pricked up. Herman Bolte was the legendary chief of the department. This guy was claiming to know Chief Bolte. The entire incident had just been kicked up to a higher level.
It was Mella’s intention to charge Battle and the others with possession of a dangerous weapon, but he was told by Sergeant Messina that they had received a call of two more suspicious characters in the area where they had arrested the Battles. “Take your partner and go search the area,” he told the patrolman.
“But we’ve got prisoners to book,” protested Mella.
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of it.”
Reluctantly, Mella and his partner left the station and drove back to the scene. It was 3 A.M.; there was no one there. They discussed how strange it was for them not to have been allowed to book their prisoners. It was against regular procedure. Said Mella, “It’s not right. I’m going back there and insist we are on record as the arresting officers.”
Back at the precinct, there had been a shift change. Mella explained to the new sergeant on duty what had happened. The sergeant said, “Okay. You’re right. Go ahead and book them.”
Mella headed downstairs to the holding area. What he saw was José Miguel Battle sitting with three or four other cops. They were laughing, smoking cigarettes, and telling stories to each other, like old friends at a barbecue.
Patrolman Mella was allowed to book the suspects. He and his partner took statements from the three Battles and Depazo. It dragged on until after 4 A.M. And then the suspects were released. Nothing ever happened. No state gun possession charges were lodged against Battle or the others.
Patrolman Diego Mella later heard that it was the chief himself, Herman Bolte, who had called the desk sergeant and told him to release the suspects without bond.
BEING RELATIVELY NEW TO UNION CITY, MELLA DIDN’T KNOW THE HISTORY OF HOW things operated in his town. The tradition of cops on the take, particularly as it related to illegal gambling, ran deep in Hudson County. For those in the know, cops and gambling bosses were all part of the same consortium. One hand washed the other.
Though it would never be proven in court, many believed that the man who protected the gambling rackets was Chief Bolte. At the station house in Union City, José Miguel Battle had called out that name for a reason. Bolte was arguably the most powerful figure in Hudson County. Mayors and county commissioners came and went, but the Bolte name remained carved in stone.
Herman Bolte had joined the police department straight out of the Army Air Corps in 1946. His father had been a captain in the department before him. Cops who came out of the service were sometimes known as Lucky and Camels guys. They smoked cigarettes nonstop and talked like tough guys out of a Jimmy Cagney gangster movie. Little thought was given to sartorial style or overall physical appearance. There was one detective in Union City who, while you were talking to him, would pop out his false teeth and roll them around in his mouth.
Cops in this part of Jersey were physically intimidating, but mostly they let it be known that they could be bought. “Cabbage” was the preferred term when talking about cash. When it came to maintaining a gambling operation in North Hudson, cabbage made the world go round.
Bolte received his chief’s badge in 1972. The man who presented it to him in a public ceremony, Union City commissioner Paul J. Lombardo, months later was indicted for fraud. Rather than do time in prison, he became a federal witness and disappeared into the witness protection program.
Even before he became chief, Bolte had established a reputation as a daring cop. He had florid reddish-blond hair and the face of a cherub, and though he was of average height and somewhat portly, he had swagger.
The event that sealed Bolte’s legend, especially in the increasingly Cuban enclaves of Union City and West New York, was a night in 1956 when he received a radio call of a fight in a local bar involving a bunch of Latin males. Bolte arrived on the scene and sorted it all out. The primary suspect was a young Cuban who spoke little or no English, named Fidel Castro.
At the time, Castro was touring the Unites States raising money for his revolution in Cuba. He spoke in cities where there was a significant Cuban population—Miami, Tampa, New York City, and Union City. After speaking to a large group at an old vaudeville theater on Bergenline Avenue, he retreated to a bar on 26th Street. The talk at the bar turned political, and a fight broke out between Castro’s people and supporters of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Bolte and other cops separated the two opposing camps. Many of the agitators, including Castro, were taken to police headquarters and charged with disturbing the peace.
Forever after, Herman Bolte dined out on this legendary anecdote, noting that he was the only cop in America who had ever placed handcuffs on Fidel Castro. This would have put him in high standing with the likes of José Miguel Battle and others among his Cuban American constituency in Union City.
Bolte was the chief, but when it came to gambling, the man in charge was Frank Scarafile. There was a reason that when FBI agents came to the home of Trio de Trés, they asked him about Captain Scarafile. The captain was known to be the department’s primary receiver of cabbage from gambling rackets and other syndicate activity. When federal agents conducting a surveillance on Battle saw him disappear into the Union City police headquarters, he was likely on his way to the captain’s office. Behind closed doors, there were handshakes, hugs, and the transfer of cash.
Like Bolte, Scarafile was a tough-talking local boy who’d made good. Born in Union City on August 18, 1928, he went to Emerson High School, where he graduated in 1946 and went directly into the U.S. Army. He spent two years fighting the enemy in Korea before returning stateside, and in 1952 he joined the Union City Police Department. He quickly rose through the ranks, serving as a sergeant, lieutenant, and captain.
Scarafile wore plaid sports coats and striped ties. Twice a month, he made the two-hour-plus drive down the Jersey Turnpike to Atlantic City, where he played cards and bet the ponies. Eventually, he and his wife purchased a summer house on the shore at Seaside Park. On weekends during the summer, that’s where he could be found.
In 1974, just as Battle was returning to New Jersey after serving time in federal prison, Scarafile received yet another promotion, this time to the position of deputy chief of police. That made him the second most powerful man in the department after Bolte, but Scarafile had an avenue of power that Bolte did not: he was the bagman for the city’s mayor, William V. Musto.
Musto was not only the mayor, he
was an elected New Jersey state senator. In the entire state, there were few politicians more popular than Billy Musto. He was part of the Democratic Party machine and was believed to be a progressive in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had been quick to open doors for the area’s Cuban American population, advocating for bilingual education. He was rewarded by the new immigrants, who turned out the Cuban vote for him in election after election.
Like Bolte and Scarafile, Musto was a local product, born in a hospital in West Hoboken, which later became a part of Union City. He served in World War II as an artillery officer under General George Patton and was awarded a Gold Star.
Musto was not a tough guy in the mold of Bolte and Scarafile; he was personable and had a compassionate manner. He was admired by men for his military service but was even more popular among older Italian and Cuban immigrant women who found him charming. He was a strong advocate for his constituents.
Part of advocating for his voters meant that he was in favor of legalized gambling, which in the state of New Jersey brought with it legions of co-conspirators. Ever since the Prohibition era, when games of chance on the boardwalk at Atlantic City had established the state’s bona fides as a gambling mecca, certain local political figures had been pushing to establish the state as the Las Vegas of the East. Musto saw gambling as a relatively harmless vice and a potential source of revenue for the state. Some believed that he was personally benefiting from gambling rackets in Union City.
In January 1975, within weeks of the Battle brothers having avoided gun charges, thanks to Chief Bolte, Musto became the subject of a secret federal grand jury inquiry into gambling and political corruption. Earlier in 1974, FBI agents had raided an illegal baccarat operation at 516 47th Street in Union City. Within a few months, that operation, with some of the same backers, had reemerged as a high-stakes baccarat parlor in a bar on Bergenline Avenue named Coll’s Neck Tavern. This establishment was owned by the wife of the same corrupt county commissioner—Paul Lombardo—who had first presented Bolte with his badge as chief.
The person who sought police protection for the gambling operation at Coll’s Neck was Celin Valdivia, a local Cuban facilitator. Valdivia had reached out to Deputy Chief Scarafile to secure police protection—at a price. Scarafile introduced the scheme to the mayor.
Allegedly, the mayor’s role was to make phone calls “urging” a Union City municipal court judge to acquit several men who had been arrested during the first raid on 47th Street so that they could continue the operation at Coll’s Neck Tavern. Musto also agreed to guarantee the gambling operation’s ongoing protection, for a price, and Deputy Chief Scarafile made the same guarantee to Celin Valdivia—for a price. This was a tried-and-true method of graft in Hudson County going back to the earliest days of the area’s founding.
It was certainly a familiar method to José Miguel Battle, who had been weaned on municipal corruption as a vice cop in Batista’s Havana. Battle’s bolita operation likely operated under a similar system of graft. You would see no photos of the men together out in public. At a benefit for the Patrolman’s Benevolent Society or at a fund-raiser for some Cuban American political organization, Battle and Scarafile and Musto might shake hands and offer one another words of praise and encouragement. But their true bond was surreptitious, based on a belief that in order to protect your people and build a strong organization, you did what you had to do. Being able to line your own pockets with cash wasn’t so bad either.
THE EFFORT TO FIND AND KILL PALULU CONTINUED. IN JANUARY, AFTER PEDRO BATTLE was laid to rest, José Miguel teamed up Ernestico with Chino Acuna, who no longer sought to maintain the fiction that he was a loyal member of Palulu’s crew. He was with Battle now, looking to score big by bringing Pedro’s killer in alive or dead, whichever came first.
They made an odd couple. Chino, though usually dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, had the intensity of an African warrior. Ernesto had a slight resemblance to another Ernesto—Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He thought of himself as a ladies’ man, and perhaps he was, but in the hunt for Palulu, he assumed a number of unflattering disguises. He grew a beard and mustache, and then shaved them off. He cut his hair short and then shaved his head altogether. He wore an assortment of cheap wigs that occasionally made him look foolish. Always when they went to do a hit, he donned leather race car driving gloves with a zipper at the wrist.
Ernestico was having fun, but the effort was no joke. Battle had told the two hit men they would be paid $4,000 to $5,000 for every member of Palulu’s crew they killed. They would be paid $2,000 for every crew member they tortured that led to useful information. Regarding Palulu, Battle told them to “flush that hijo de puta out of his hole.”
Chino and Ernesto were supplied with untraceable firearms and silencers. They were sent to the Amato Gas Station in nearby Jersey City to choose from a fleet of cars, trucks, and vans that Battle’s organization used to conduct criminal business.
For the next three months, in the Cuban American underworld throughout the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, there were screams in the night and the sounds of Palulu’s people crying for mercy. Since Chino had once been part of Palulu’s crew, he knew where they lived, worked, and hung out. Chino and Ernestico snatched people off the street at gunpoint and took them to flophouse apartments and abandoned warehouses, never using the same location twice. Palulu’s crew members were hog-tied or bound to a chair and tortured for information. Others were stabbed in the street, shot at, or shot dead. Bodies were left in car trunks and back alleyways in Union City, Washington Heights, and the Bronx. The idea was to create a reign of terror, to turn Palulu’s world upside down so that he would have to come out of hiding and expose himself to the justice they felt he so richly deserved.
There were eleven murders and at least three torture sessions attributable to the sixteen-week hunt for Palulu. One of those torture sessions, in March, led to a piece of information that was potentially a game changer. Bloodied and beaten, one of Palulu’s dealers informed them that there was a location in Central Park in Manhattan where Pedro Battle’s killer met regularly with his most trusted crew members. In the north end of the park, between 106th and 107th streets, close to one of the pedestrian entrances, was a grassy area covered by trees. That’s where Palulu held semiregular meetings.
Ernestico and Chino began casing the area, and it wasn’t long before they spotted their target. Palulu was sitting on a park bench talking to another man.
Said Ernestico to his partner Chino, “I got this fuck. You my wheel man.” He opened the car door and tucked a MAC-10 submachine gun under his jacket. He started walking toward his target.
Palulu saw Ernestico coming before he even entered the park. He took off running. Ernestico started after him in pursuit. They ran deep into the park, into an area known as the North Woods. It was one of the most bucolic sections of the most renowned urban park in America.
Ernestico, the younger man, was gaining ground. Palulu said fuck it; he pulled out two .45-caliber pistols and started shooting at Ernestico. Ducking behind a tree, Ernestico readied his machine gun, reached around the tree, and returned fire.
It was a fine day. There were many people in the park: mothers pushing baby carriages, joggers, and the occasional cyclist. People were startled to see two men exchanging gunfire in the afternoon. A few people screamed, others ducked for cover behind garbage bins or whatever else they could find. Flocks of pigeons scattered at the jarring sound and movement of people.
Palulu continued running, turning occasionally to fire with his two guns at Ernestico, who answered with bursts of machine-gun fire.
At one point, Ernestico surmised that he might have hit Palulu in the leg, because Palulu began limping.
As long as they were in the park, Palulu had some degree of cover. But as they came to the northern edge of the park at 110th Street, he was exposed. He scampered across the two-way street, almost getting hit by a passing car. Ernestico steadied himsel
f; he had a nice open shot. He emptied a clip on Palulu. He was certain that he had hit his target, but the bastard was still running, sort of. He was dragging his leg, obviously disabled, but he would not go down.
By this time, Chino Acuna, Ernestico’s partner, had come screeching around the corner in the getaway car, barreling toward the scene. Ernestico motioned for Chino to pull over. He jumped in the front seat of the car and said, “He went that way,” pointing north on Lenox Avenue. Chino drove in that direction.
Even before they found Palulu, Ernestico saw the trail of blood on the sidewalk, and judging from the reactions of pedestrians, he knew his target had come this way.
As they approached 112th Street near Lenox, Ernestico commanded Chino, “Stop!” There was his man, collapsed on the sidewalk. He was shot up pretty good. His left leg looked as though it had been through a mechanical shredder; it was sticking out at a strange angle. Palulu had also been hit in other parts of his body, with a lot of blood spreading beneath him on the pavement. He wasn’t moving.
Ernestico thought about getting out, emptying the rest of his clip into the body of Palulu, just to make sure. But there were a lot of people beginning to gather. Cars had stopped to see what was going on. Ernestico figured there was no way this guy would survive, if he wasn’t dead already. To Chino, he said, “This motherfucker is dead. Vamonos.”
Chino hit the gas and peeled away.
Cops arrived shortly thereafter. It was quite a scene: a man shredded with machine-gun fire on a pleasant late afternoon in Harlem. The sun had dipped low in the sky, with the light glimmering off the façades of the brownstones. Palulu was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital.
When news of the shooting went out over police frequencies, the name José “Palulu” Enriquez caught the attention of homicide detectives in the district of Manhattan North. In recent weeks, Palulu had emerged as the number one suspect in the murder of Pedro Battle. Elda, wife of the deceased, had finally given a detailed statement about her husband’s murder, identifying Palulu as the killer. Employees of the Guanabo bar had also come forward and identified Palulu, whom they knew well; he was a regular at the bar. An arrest warrant had been issued for Palulu. He had been hiding from the police at the same time he was avoiding Battle’s henchmen. Now he was in the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street, fighting for his life.
The Corporation Page 15
