The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Ernestico moved ever so slightly. He was still alive.

  José Miguel, the Godfather, bent down and put his 9mm handgun to Ernestico’s forehead, right in the middle, a half inch above the eyebrow line. He positioned Ernestico’s head so the trajectory was straight and true. Then he pulled the trigger, shooting the Prodigal Son right between the eyes.

  The two Battles hurried out of the room, Gustavo dripping blood as they met up with Chino in the hallway. They exited through a rear doorway in the kitchen.

  Later, an eyewitness from across the street, not close enough to identity the assailants by face, did notice that there were three of them, and that two of the men helped the third along, as if he were injured.

  The three men jumped into a Cadillac and sped away. It had been messy, but the deed was done.

  AT THE AGE OF FORTY-SEVEN, BATTLE WAS ARGUABLY A BIT LONG IN THE TOOTH TO BE carrying out hits himself. Normally, Mob bosses in his position would have created a buffer between themselves and the actual killing, for legal reasons, if nothing else. But Battle wanted to let the other bolita bankers know that he was not like them.

  On the night of the shooting, Battle called Oracio Altuve, a Cuban bolitero from New York who had recently moved to Miami. Altuve was from Battle’s generation, in his late forties, living in an apartment in North Miami Beach. At the time Battle called, he happened to have a visitor in his home—Isleño Dávila, who lived nearby in Fort Lauderdale.

  The two men were surprised to hear from Battle, who they did not know was in town. Said Battle to Altuve, “I need you to come over to the place where I’m staying.” He gave his friend the address of a cheap motel in Little Havana.

  “Isleño is here with me,” said Altuve.

  “Good,” said Battle. “Bring him with you.”

  Altuve and Isleño drove to a location on SW 8th Street, Calle Ocho. Battle was in the parking lot waiting for them. He climbed into the backseat of the car. The first thing he said was, “He fought like a lion.”

  Altuve was behind the wheel, Isleño in the front passenger seat. They both turned around and looked at Battle, who explained, “Ernestico. He defended himself with great courage. Until he ran out of bullets. We shot him in the closet.”

  Battle asked them to drive him to the Fort Lauderdale airport. He had a plane to catch.

  Back in New York a few days after the murder, Battle called for a meeting of the bolita bankers at the Colonial restaurant in upper Manhattan. Many prominent members of the organization were in attendance: Abraham Rydz, Luis Morrero, Nene Marquez, and Luis DeVilliers, owner of the Colonial, to name a few. Battle announced to the group, “You won’t have problems with Ernesto Torres no more. It’s been taken care of. I shot him myself.”

  For Battle, it was a matter of principle: if you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself. By handling it the way he did, it was as if he were back on the beach at Playa Girón, at the Bay of Pigs, taking matters into his own hands.

  1 The account of Charley’s meeting with Battle Sr., Acuna, and Battle Jr. comes from Charley Hernandez, who was called upon to give this account on numerous occasions, including three lengthy debriefing sessions with detectives and federal prosecutors, twice in Grand Jury testimony, and once in trial testimony. During his debriefing interviews, Charley gave a detailed description of the interior of Battle’s apartment, which involved drawing a map of the premises. Later, in preparation for trial, he submitted to a lie detector test, which he passed. During his testimony, Charley submitted to rigorous cross-examination on the subject of this meeting and other subjects. He proved to be a credible witness, with his testimony leading to the conviction of Jose Miguel Battle Sr. on murder conspiracy charges. Nonetheless, Battle Jr. contests Charley’s account of this meeting and a subsequent meeting he allegedly took part in. At his father’s trial, on the witness stand, he admitted having met Charley Hernandez once, having been introduced to him by Ernestico Torres, but when asked if he was present at this meeting between his father, Charley, and Chino Acuna, Battle Jr. said, “That is not true. That is a lie.”

  2 As with the previous meeting between Battle et al and Charley, this account comes largely from the recollections and testimony of Charley Hernandez. Rene Avila, like Battle Jr., publically denied, during a legal deposition, that he was present at this meeting. He admitted having met Charley on previous occasions, and having been present at Battle’s apartment numerous times. Avila was never charged with any wrongdoing for any role he might have played—as alleged by Charley in depositions and trial testimony—in this incident.

  Part II

  Venganza/Revenge

  8

  COUNTERREVOLUTION

  PALULU ENRIQUEZ WAS LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. HE HAD KILLED PEDRO BATTLE, BROTHER of El Padrino, and lived to tell about it. He had survived being machine-gunned in Central Park by Ernesto Torres and having lost his leg. If he could survive the street, surely he could handle a court of law.

  In May 1976, Palulu went on trial for the murder of Pedro Battle at the Guanabo bar in Washington Heights. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, led by Robert Morgenthau, had a case, but it wasn’t a very good one. The owner and staff of the bar claimed that they could not identify the shooter. Pedro’s widow, Elda, took the stand and testified that Palulu shot her husband in cold blood. But the defense countered with witnesses who claimed that Pedro fired first. In the back-and-forth of “he said, she said,” the seeds of reasonable doubt found fertile soil. On June 3, 1976, the jury deliberated for a few hours and delivered a verdict of not guilty on the murder charge and guilty on one count of illegal possession of a firearm.

  The judge sentenced Palulu to serve two to three years on the firearms charge. It was a relatively light sentence. With time off for good behavior, he could be out in less than a year.

  Given that there was an open contract on his life that stood at $100,000, Palulu may have felt that his incarceration was propitious. On the surface, it would seem that the circumscribed routine of life in prison was a safer alternative than the wide-open streets of New York City. Out there, anyone could take a shot at you. Inside, ostensibly, only the guards were armed.

  Palulu was shipped out to serve his time at the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora after the town in Clinton County, New York, where it is located. Built in 1844, the prison is a bleak maximum-security facility located in the northernmost reaches of the state, near the Canadian border. The walls are made of concrete, and the circular watchtowers, added to the grounds in the 1870s, give the building the look of a Gothic fortress. Chilly both inside and out, for a long time Dannemora was the home of the state’s electric chair, before New York State did away with capital punishment in the 1960s.

  Palulu did not expect to be there for long. He kept to himself and made few friends.

  In mid-July, after he had been at the prison for six weeks—and less than a month after Ernesto Torres was murdered far away in Miami— Palulu was in the exercise yard one afternoon. From seemingly out of nowhere, an inmate walked up and plunged a homemade knife into his back. Palulu dropped to his knees. Blood gushed from his wound, forming an expanding stain on his prison jumpsuit. An alarm sounded, and guards rushed to the scene.

  Palulu was taken to the prison’s medical ward. He had lost a lot of blood, but the knife had not penetrated any vital organs. He would survive.

  As with many prison assaults, no one talked, and the assailant was never identified.

  During an investigation of the incident, prison authorities discovered a second plot to kill Palulu. It seemed that someone was determined to use his incarceration as an opportunity to go duck hunting, with Palulu as the sitting duck. The warden at Dannemora decided to segregate the inmate in an isolated wing for special prisoners, such as cops, celebrities, or convicts whose crimes were so notorious that they could not be left to the wolves in general population. Palulu was assigned there to serve out the balance of his sentence.

 
News of Palulu’s survival would have reached José Miguel Battle like a fetid breeze blowing downriver from the city dump. Not what he wanted, but eventually the winds would change direction. He was going to get Palulu, whether it was inside or outside prison walls.

  IN THE YEAR 1976, THE IDEA THAT FIDEL CASTRO WAS STILL ALIVE, FOR MANY CUBAN Americans, was like a horrible case of gastritis. The pain was surprisingly acute, and it would not go away. Every day, there it was, like a dagger in the intestines. What was needed was a thorough cleansing, the mother of all bowel movements, but it wasn’t happening. The discomfort had backed up to the point where it was affecting other vital organs—the kidneys, the liver, the heart. There was no pharmaceutical remedy for what had become a nagging existential reality.

  It had been sixteen years since the CIA and various components of the militant Cuban underground committed itself to eliminating Castro and taking back Cuba. With the murder of Kennedy, the CIA officially disengaged from assassination efforts, but it remained involved in other anti-Castro activities. To the Agency, this effort was a subset of the Cold War. Using Cuban exiles as covert proxy warriors in this ideological battle between communism and capitalism was to become part of history’s connective tissue.

  No one was supposed to know. When the Watergate scandal exploded, lawyers from the special prosecutor’s office approached the CIA. An investigator had noticed that four of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It dawned on the lawyers that perhaps the CIA-Cuban connection was a more important aspect of this strange covert op than anyone realized. The lawyers demanded to see the full file on Eugenio Rolando Martinez, who they learned had been a paid CIA operative for many years leading up to the burglary. The CIA refused and the file was kept buried for four decades.

  In the mid- to late 1970s, the secret war against Castro heated up. The idea of actually killing Fidel—attempted and thwarted many times in the 1960s—now gave way to a conspiracy of terror against Castroism. In this war, any country, individual, or group of individuals that expressed support for the Castro government was a target.

  One of the most notorious salvos in this war occurred on September 21, in the nation’s capital.

  Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Marxist economist, and political activist, had arrived in Washington, D.C., to speak at a gathering of the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist think tank. Letelier had been imprisoned in Chile, and tortured, for speaking out against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Since his release one year earlier, he had become popular among leftists. He had also recently made a trip to Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro.

  Letelier was driving in a car that morning with Ronni Moffitt, an American associate, and Moffitt’s husband of four months. They were on Embassy Row, in morning traffic, with Letelier driving, when a bomb affixed to the car’s undercarriage exploded. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed; Moffitt’s husband was critically injured but survived.

  Earlier that morning, Letelier’s wife had been awakened by a phone call. A voice asked, “Are you the wife of Orlando Letelier?”

  “Yes, I am,” she sleepily answered.

  “No. You are his widow.”

  The caller hung up, and the line went dead.

  It was an audacious political assassination. In some ways, it seemed like the culmination of a recent bombing campaign by anti-Castro activists, both in Miami and the New York City area. Groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7 let it be known that both candidates in the upcoming presidential election of 1976—Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford—were likely to sell out the movement, but the militants were not going to let up in their efforts to undermine the Castro regime.

  The Letelier bombing was unprecedented, but it was exceeded just two and a half weeks later. On October 6, a Cuban airliner flying from Panama City, Panama, to Havana was blown out of the sky. All seventy-three people on board were killed, including the entire Cuban fencing team, which had been performing at an exhibition in Panama.

  The FBI’s Cuban Terrorism Task Force had been busy in recent years, and these two recent events seemed to be part of an escalating pattern. In recent months, five different anti-Castro militant groups had coalesced into a governing body called the Coalition of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Among the ruling council of this group were some familiar names, including Orlando Bosch; the Novo brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio; and Luis Posada Carriles.

  In the Letelier/Moffitt murder investigation, the FBI had an informant high up in Pinochet’s notorious intelligence service (DINA) who helped them construct a case. The hit had been authorized by General Pinochet himself, who gave the order to his secret police. To carry out the hit, DINA agents turned to a growing network of anticommunist terrorists, among which CORU now played a major role.

  An article in the Washington Post touched upon the conspiracy. Under the headline “Evidence Links Letelier Death to Anti-Castro Unit,” a team of Post reporters wrote:

  Within the last two weeks . . . at least six members of a Miami-based anti-Castro Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, known as the 2506 Brigade, have been called as witnesses before a federal grand jury . . . Brigade 2506 has been reported to have taken part in the formation of a right-wing, anti-Castro umbrella organization known as CORU.

  The FBI learned that the man who authorized both the Letelier murder and the bombing of the Cuban airliner was Luis Posada Carriles. Among the men who carried out the Letelier hit—planting the bomb under the former ambassador’s car—were Guillermo and Ignacio Novo.

  Arrest warrants were issued for all of these men. Posada remained out of the country and became an international fugitive from the law; he was later arrested and incarcerated in Venezuela. The Novo brothers were arrested in Union City and charged with murder. Their case became a cause célèbre in the exile community, with rallies and fund-raisers in support of their legal defense both in Miami and along the Union City– West New York–Weehawken corridor in New Jersey.

  For some, these new tactics represented an untenable escalation. The bombing of the Cuban airplane, resulting in the death of innocent civilians, was a bridge too far. A heated debate began within the militant community and also the Cuban American population at large about the morality of these actions. Polls showed that most Cuban Americans favored an open dialogue with Cuba, but the extremists had a method for squelching such opinions: violence. For those who spoke out against the bombings and assassinations, there were repercussions.

  In Miami, an influential news director at WQBA-AM radio, Emilio Milián, publicly condemned the “terrorism.” In April 1976, he was on the receiving end of a car bomb that blew off both his legs. A former leader of the 2506 Brigade Veterans Foundation, Juan José Peruyero, spoke out in defense of Milián. Peruyero had been one of the earliest presidents of the foundation comprised of brigade veterans; he was revered by many in the community.

  On the night of January 6, 1977, Peruyero called Emilio Milián at his home in Little Havana. He told Milián that he had some new information about who might have been behind the bombing of his car, which, though he had survived, left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Milián was curious and asked Peruyero to come over right away to discuss it, but the former brigadista said it was late. He would come by Milián’s home the following day.

  Peruyero never made it to Milián’s house. The next morning, he was assassinated in front of his house in a drive-by shooting that had all the earmarks of a professional hit.

  There had been acts of violence against organizations and people believed to be sympathetic to an open dialogue with Castro, but the assassination of a popular brigadista who had devoted his life to la lucha was something new. Anti-Castro militancy had turned into an internecine battle among Cuban exiles.

  Between 1975 and 1978, according to an internal analysis by the Organized Crime Bureau of the Dade County Public Safety Department, there were forty terrorist bombings in Dade Count
y, all of them Cuban-related. The report also noted that in New York City and New Jersey, there had been forty-one Cuban-related “terrorist incidents.” The report stated:

  Cuban exile terrorists have blown up ships in Miami harbor; they have placed bombs on Russian ships in Puerto Rico and in New Jersey; they have blown up an aircraft in the air, killing all seventy-three souls on board; they have placed a bomb on an airliner in Miami, this bomb being set to explode while the plane was in the air, full of passengers; they planted a bomb in a car owned by a former Cuban senator and later the editor of a newspaper in Miami, killing him instantly; they have blown off both legs of the news director of the largest radio station in Florida . . . In one twenty-four hour period in December 1975, a Cuban exile terrorist placed eight bombs in the Miami area. Most of these bombs were placed in government buildings such as Post Offices, Social Security offices, the State Attorney’s Office, and even the Miami FBI office.

  Within the community, there was fear, and among academics and commentators there was much discussion about the concept of shame and what role it played in the stoking of violence. It was noted that the legacy of the Bay of Pigs invasion, both for some of the men who had participated and also for many in the community who felt obligated to defend the brigade no matter what, had created a psychological justification for violent action.

  Whether or not José Miguel Battle was motivated by shame is not known; he never expressed as much to anyone who knew him. If he did feel shame, it likely had more to do with the fact that he had been unable to play a more active role in la lucha. The FBI suspected that he had undertaken some political assassinations, and he was certainly a supporter of the cause. But while others he knew were on the front lines of the anti-Castro campaign, Battle had become consumed by the daily operations of his bolita empire, which increasingly involved revenge plots and killings that were more personal than political.