The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Battle and his people were stupefied, El Padrino most of all. He had seen Palulu for himself, riddled with bullets, bleeding to death in the street. He saw what he thought was Palulu expiring, savoring that moment as if it were a sweet kiss from the Angel of Death, the taste of revenge lingering in his gullet like fine Santiago rum. But now, it seemed, it was as if his eyes had played tricks on him. It was like many of his underlings had said: Padrino, he can’t be killed. He’s El Diablo. I shot him in the head. I know he was dead. But he’s alive. Incredible. I don’t even think he’s human.

  Among other things, Palulu’s continued existence was causing great consternation for the Corporation, most notably the two men who were currently handing the day-to-day operations of the organization. Abraham Rydz and Miguel Battle Jr. had also recently moved to Miami. The move was motivated by Rydz’s needing to be near his dying mother, who lived in Miami Beach. Rydz and Miguelito purchased plots of land within a half block of one another in Key Biscayne, where they planned to build their dream homes. In Miami, the two men established a company called Union Financial Research. Ostensibly it was a mortgage lending company, but it was also a front for the bolita business in New York. Proceeds from bolita were being funneled into the company, which was based out of an office in Miami, with real employees, including secretaries, an accountant, and Rydz and Battle as CEOs.

  Battle Sr. was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the bolita business, though he still collected his cut and took care of various matters of strategy, development, and, most of all, discipline and retribution.

  The Palulu matter had been an issue for many years. Now, as far as Rydz and Junior were concerned, it had become a major distraction. El Padrino hardly talked about anything else. It was in everyone’s interest that the Palulu matter be resolved so that they could get on with their lives.

  For the first time, Abraham Rydz, along with Battle Sr., Lalo Pons, and others among the ruling council of the Corporation, became involved in the planning of the hit. Everyone felt they needed to act fast. The idea was to kill Palulu while he was still in the hospital. The hit was planned quietly, so as few people as possible would know about it. The plan was devised by Rydz, among others, and Lalo recruited the gunman, a Cuban named Domingues.

  On the night of October 7, two nurses were working the late-night shift at St. Barnabas Hospital, where Palulu was an inpatient on Wing Seven South, in room 711. Deloris Edwards and Romana Bautista were at the front desk. It was late—around 3:35 A.M.—a time when the hospital was at its most quiet.

  Suddenly, from down the hallway came a sound—Pop! Pop!

  “Did you hear that?” one nurse said to the other.

  They agreed that it was likely the sound of an oxygen line popping off its wall fixture, which was a chronic problem on their wing. Nurse Edwards headed off to check the rooms, while Nurse Bautista stayed at the nurses’ station working on paperwork.

  At that moment, there appeared in the hallway a male nurse—or at least someone who the nurses assumed was a male nurse. He was wearing a hospital smock, like the other male nurses. But it was not anyone the nurses had seen before. He was Hispanic, with a caramel complexion, curly black hair, and a thin mustache. He had not checked in at the nurses’ station, as all nurses are required to do at the beginning of their shift.

  “Hey there, hold up a minute,” Nurse Bautista called to the man.

  The man did not respond; he quickly disappeared into a stairwell.

  Meanwhile, that popping sound earlier had awakened Leroy Middleton, a patient in room 711, which he shared with Palulu. Middleton roused himself from a medication-induced slumber, got up, and headed to the toilet to urinate. As he walked past Palulu’s bed in the semidarkness, he saw what he thought could be blood, but he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He went into the bathroom, peed, then walked back out to the room. By now, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, he walked over and looked at Palulu, whose face was covered in blood. Leroy pushed the emergency call button.

  The nurses rushed into the room and flipped on the light. What they saw was a ghastly sight: Palulu Enriquez had been shot multiple times at close range.

  The hit was diabolical but effective. Domingues, disguised as a male nurse, had sneaked into Palulu’s room and done the deed. No doubt there were people in security at St. Barnabas who had been bought off to facilitate his entering the hospital and making his way to Palulu’s room without being stopped or questioned.

  Palulu was finally dead.

  It had been part of the plan that none of the originators of the hit— Battle Sr., Rydz, or Lalo Pons—would be in the New York area when the killing occurred. In the interest of plausible deniability, they were to be as far away as possible. Both Battle and Rydz had returned to Miami days before the hit was scheduled to occur.

  On the afternoon of October 7, Battle, Rydz, and a handful of others were engaged in a card game at El Zapotal, Battle’s home in South Miami. It had become one of the ironies of the Corporation that the brain trust of the organization was now almost completely based in Miami, while the business—and most of the events that shaped its fortunes—still emanated from the New York metropolitan area. And yet the universe of the Corporation was clearly defined and circumscribed; it had become a mind-set not necessarily defined by geography but by mutual interests. The Corporation had become an entity that defied time and space.

  At the card game, Battle received a phone call. He left to take the call and then returned, grinning from ear to ear.

  “It’s done,” he announced to the handful of men at the table. “Palulu is dead.”

  Abraham Rydz breathed a big sigh of relief. He immediately got on the phone with Nene Marquez, the Brooklyn boss of the Corporation, and authorized the release of $100,000 from the UNESCO fund to be paid to Domingues and a couple of others who had helped with the logistics involved in carrying out the hit.

  Battle had stored on ice a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon. He cracked open a few of them and poured champagne for everyone in the room. The men extended their glasses, and El Padrino proclaimed, “Let’s drink champagne and raise a toast to our enemies. Drink up.”

  It was an auspicious occasion. After all these years, José Miguel had finally avenged the murder of his little brother.

  The partying did not stop there. For the next week, Battle celebrated the death of Palulu. There were impromptu parties at a couple of favored restaurants in Miami, and parties at El Zapotal. Guests at the house noted that as they arrived, there was a new wrinkle, something they had never seen before. Upon entering the front door, each guest was individually presented with a small pouch. What is this? they asked. When they opened the pouch, they found out: cocaine. Each pouch was filled with cocaine.

  Let the festivities begin!

  THE DEATH OF PALULU WAS IN ONE SENSE MONUMENTAL. IT WAS AS IF A PRESSURE valve had been released, and everyone associated with the Corporation could breathe again. On the other hand, it had little effect on the daily running of the bolita business, which continued to grow throughout the early 1980s.

  As partners and joint overseers of the organization, Abraham Rydz and Battle Jr. solidified a personal relationship that had been developing over the years. Rydz was more than a mentor; he had become a surrogate father to Junior, whom he referred to as Migue.

  When Battle Sr. had first asked Rydz to “look out for my son” while he was away in prison, he had to have known that he was effectively switching his son’s loyalties to El Polaco. His own relationship with Junior had been distant, though he often professed love for his son, and his loyalty was sacrosanct. But Battle knew that he would never have the closeness that Rydz and Junior had—a closeness based on an innate reserve and cautiousness they shared, as opposed to his own impulsiveness and blunt leadership style.

  When Rydz first approached Junior, he had been characteristically shrewd. He did not tell Migue, “Your father wants me to take care of you.” Instead, he said, “Migue, I nee
d a favor. I’m going to say in the street that we have become partners so that I get protection by using the Battle name.” Using the name was like life insurance. As Rydz said years later, “People were really afraid of José Miguel Sr.; they wouldn’t fool around with Mr. Battle . . . I needed the name Battle for the protection . . . the respect.”

  Junior understood. He said to his friend, “Okay, do that, and maybe someday we will really become partners.” The partnership became a real thing shortly thereafter.

  By the early 1980s, Rydz’s previous partner, Luis “Tinta” Rey, had left the business. Rydz and Migue spent nearly every day together. A year after they both moved to Miami, construction began on their dual homes located so close together they could share a cup of sugar. Rydz had a new wife and, from a previous marriage, an adult daughter who lived separately. Junior had two young sons. Their families shared personal time together as well as the time the two men spent reconfiguring the financial structure of the Corporation.

  One of the first orders of business was to establish a number of offshore companies into which they would deposit cash overflow from the bolita business. There was a company called Lindseed, and another called Stenara, based in the Dutch Antilles. There was Voltaire and Darmont, based in Panama City. There was a company called Aztec, also based in Panama, and half a dozen others around the globe. The names of neither Rydz nor Battle were associated with these shell companies; the names listed as owners or CEOs were merely front men for the Corporation. And the companies themselves were designed solely as fraudulent financial entities that lent money to real companies in the United States owned by Rydz and Miguel Battle. In this way, tens of millions of dollars were laundered on an annual basis.

  In addition to Union Financial Research, Rydz and Battle started a company in Miami called YMR, a clothing manufacturing company. This was a legitimate company; YMR had a factory in the Dominican Republic that manufactured women’s apparel. Other companies owned by Rydz and Migue included Arnold Stores, a popular chain of stores throughout South Florida that sold women’s clothing at affordable prices. They also bought into a company called Trends, and a subsidiary called Yes U.S., both of which manufactured clothing and sold their products to large retail stores like Target and Wal-Mart.

  What Rydz and Migue created in a short number of years constituted a massive financial structure. “To operate these companies,” Rydz would later say, “you need to have hundreds of millions of dollars. You have money tied up in inventory, money tied to the factories, and money tied up in the manufacture and distribution of merchandise.” To sustain these operations, in addition to the money coming in from bolita, YMR took out a loan of $8 million from the Republic Bank of Philadelphia.

  In Miami, both Rydz and Migue received a salary from YMR. Both were officially taking in around half a million dollars as owners and operators of the business. José Miguel Sr. was not a party to these endeavors. In time, the success of Rydz and Migue’s financial empire would cause resentment between Battle Sr. and his two underlings, but in the 1980s there was so much money flowing down to Miami from New York that no one had any complaints.

  Even with Isleño Dávila’s organization, La Compañía, expanding into Harlem and forming a partnership with the Lucchese family, the Corporation suffered no loss of business in New York. If anything, the existence of La Compañía alongside the Corporation created a bolita frenzy in the city. As more and more Latinos from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as other Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti, flooded into New York—alongside native New Yorkers, black and white, who had been playing the number for much of their lives—the volume of players was likely the highest it had ever been in history. This was truly the era of bolita in New York. There was no way to officially calculate the volume of business; every three months or so, records from the various offices were shredded and destroyed. Though it was a business that generated huge cash flow in the underground economy, there was no way to accurately quantify the numbers. Even so, it was likely that bolita was generating billions of dollars annually.

  This created a problem: what to do with all that money? Bank accounts were opened in Switzerland and various other overseas locations. Rydz and Battle were careful to make sure that, given the criminal notoriety of José Miguel Battle, the Battle name was not linked to any of the accounts. Instead, they used Maurilio Marquez, the brother of Nene Marquez, as a front man. Maurilio was a Venezuelan citizen, a foreigner, and therefore could legally make investments to Union Financial Research and YMR from the various shell companies without triggering an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

  The enterprise created by Rydz and Miguelito was airtight. It had been brilliantly conceived, designed to make them and their offspring rich for generations to come.

  Prerequisites of this fraudulent financial empire were caution and secrecy. Rydz and Battle Jr. never discussed business on the phone or in the car. To talk with each other, or with business associates, they only used public pay phones. Miguelito was especially paranoid. Anything to do with the financial structure of the bolita business was communicated mostly in person, with almost nothing written down on paper. Members of the Corporation would fly from Miami to New York and back simply to talk about business. Battle Jr. told everyone, “Act as if we are already under investigation, as if your phone is bugged, your car is bugged. Take every precaution. You can never be too careful.”

  The Swiss bank account was in Maurilio Marquez’s name. Rydz and Battle flew to Nassau, in the Bahamas, or to Caracas, Venezuela, just to get on the phone to talk to the bankers in Switzerland. No calls to Switzerland were ever made from the United States.

  The organization also had an accountant, Orestas Vidan, a Cuban who was partial to guayabera shirts. Vidan was known as “El Cocinero,” the Cook, because it was his job to “cook the books.”

  At the root of this fulsome tree, with its many branches extending into multiple areas of high finance, was a nutrient as old as the republic: little green pieces of paper. Cash was the elixir that fed the beast. Stacks and stacks of bills came into the counting rooms of the bolita operation, and they needed to by moved out of New York to Miami and other destinations far beyond.

  It all started at the street level in the money rooms where proceeds were stored. It was an unwritten rule in the business that the money was always kept at a separate location from the betting holes or even the offices where the record keeping took place. Usually the Corporation would have rented out a series of unfurnished apartments in a building; one might be set up as an office, and elsewhere in the building would be a money storage apartment. The storage apartments, or “banks,” were heavily protected by armed soldiers of the organization. Typically the only people allowed in those rooms were the organization’s “counters,” people who used counting machines to count the cash and store it in envelopes, bags, and suitcases. The counters were often family members or relatives of people in the organization, the theory being that they could be trusted.

  One person who counted money for La Compañía—Dávila’s organization—was Jorge “George” Dávila, Isleño Dávila’s nephew. George was the son of Jorge “Tony” Dávila, Isleño’s brother, who was also a seasoned bolitero. As a teenager, George had become fascinated by the business, and, as only a young person can, he soaked up knowledge and information about bolita as if he were learning a new language. One of the things that caught his attention was the money.

  “We had a saying about this era; we called it La época de los sobres, the season of the envelopes,” remembered George Dávila. “There was so much money that by the time you had picked it up from the stores, traditionally in envelopes, you needed a large brown paper bag or even a satchel to carry the envelopes . . . I remember walking as a kid, my dad would take me on his routes to the best stores, or to a new store that had recently opened. He would go to the numbers offices and look at the ledgers, see what’s going on. Then we would go to the money . . . The m
oney office was usually a one-bedroom apartment where the living room or bedroom was the counting area, and the money was stored in the other room. I mean, the whole apartment smelled like money. Imagine that smell you get when you put a stack of bills to your nose. The whole room was like that. Especially for a teenager, a kid, it was an amazing experience.”

  From there, the cash was divided up and distributed, usually in hundred-dollar bills. Many people received a cut. With the Corporation, much of the cash was destined for Miami. José Miguel Battle received a monthly take of 17 percent. Battle Jr. received the same, as did Rydz. In total, the Miami brain trust received approximately 50 percent of the weekly take, which could be anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million. The other half was divided between people like Nene Marquez, Lalo Pons, the Mafia, and thirty or forty other entities that worked for or facilitated the organization, including dirty cops, lawyers, and judges.

  Transporting the cash outside the city was often tricky. There was really no other way to do it than by human courier. Cash was constantly being transported by trains, planes, and automobiles to Miami and points beyond. Usually, underlings in the organization were assigned the task of transporting packages, briefcases, or suitcases, often not knowing what they were carrying. Sometimes, in emergencies, the bosses themselves were forced to serve as couriers.

  One day in June 1983, Rydz and Miguelito made a run to New York to pick up half a million dollars in cash. It was nothing unusual. The two were so often in each other’s company that even though there was an age difference of twenty years between them, they were referred to by family and friends as “the twins.” On this occasion, the plan was to catch a flight in the morning to John F. Kennedy Airport, pick up the money from Nene Marquez, and then return on a flight later that evening.