The Corporation

by T. J. English

  According to Carlos “Trio de Trés” Rodriguez, Battle’s longtime socio (associate), El Padrino made numerous cash contributions to the Contra effort. On one occasion, Trio de Trés himself delivered $10,000 from Battle to the Fuentes brothers. These payments were to help with operational costs, and also, according to Sergeant Oscar Vigoa, to purchase guns and ammunition. Battle was philosophically predisposed to align himself with the Contras, as were the majority of 2506 Brigade veterans. But El Padrino’s reputation as a gangster, and the negative publicity from his having been so prominently mentioned at the Presidential Crime Commission hearings in New York, mitigated against his being more directly associated with the cause.

  FULL-THROTTLE GOVERNMENTAL HEARINGS WERE ALL THE RAGE IN THE 1980S. THE Iran-Contra hearings—much like the Watergate hearings in the mid-1970s—proved to be of great local interest in Miami. The long-standing clandestine relationship between the CIA and anti-Castro militants reached its apotheosis in the Reagan administration’s efforts to crush the Sandinistas.

  For the president’s people, it became a problem when the public first learned that the NSC, with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North acting as point man, had diverted money from an arms deal with Iran to underwrite the Contras. This had been done as a means to skirt the Boland Amendment. Congress, which up until now had exerted little oversight of Reagan administration activities in Central America, called for hearings into what would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.

  One of the star witnesses at the hearings was a legendary ex-CIA man who operated under the name “Max Gomez”; his real name was Felix Rodriguez.

  Rodriguez was born in Havana but raised in the small city of Sancti Spíritus. His uncle was a minister of public works in the Batista government. At the age of twelve, he was sent to the United States to attend a private school in Pennsylvania. He was there in 1959 when the Batista government collapsed and Castro took over. Just twenty years old, Rodriguez became active in the Anti-Communist Legion, which engaged in military training in the Dominican Republic. In early 1961, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rodriguez, as a member of Operation 40, undertook at least three CIA-sponsored missions to assassinate Castro. None of the missions panned out, but Rodriguez began a relationship with the CIA that would lead him on many adventures over the following decades.

  For the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rodriguez had been infiltrated into Cuba, where he attempted to organize Cuban resistance in anticipation of the invasion. It was a dangerous assignment that necessitated operating under a false identity and living a clandestine lifestyle. Rodriguez was able to escape Cuba in the wake of the invasion, but like so many others who took part, he was haunted by the disaster.

  Following the invasion, Rodriguez, like José Miguel Battle and others, joined the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Benning. The Cubans at Fort Benning thought of themselves as an elite squad, and they all knew one another. Rodriguez met and got to know Battle. In personality and temperament, they were different. Rodriguez was a political zealot determined to become a soldier in combating communism around the globe. Battle paid lip service to the cause, but he was a gambler by nature, engaged in poker games that continued late into the night.

  And yet they were metaphorical brothers, Cuban exiles who remained devoted to the same goal: the assassination of Fidel Castro and reclaiming the island as their homeland.

  The event for which Felix Rodriguez would enter the history books was the execution of Che Guevara. Rodriguez was there as a CIA special agent assigned to liaison with the Bolivian military, which had been hunting for Guevara in the jungle during the rebel leader’s attempt to stage a political uprising in Bolivia. In 1967, Guevara was captured and interrogated by Rodriguez and others. Representing the CIA, Rodriguez was the last man to speak with Guevara before he was taken out and shot dead by a Bolivian soldier.

  Rodriguez remained an active agent in the CIA until 1976, when he retired. Afterward, he never gave up on his commitment to fight communism wherever it reared its head. By the early 1980s, this meant providing support to the Contras. In his memoir, Shadow Warrior, published in 1989, Rodriguez wrote, “I had a commitment to the Contras—getting them some supplies that I had accumulated in Miami . . . Like many of my friends in Miami, I’d been actively helping the Contras since the early eighties . . . I’d acquired equipment to help them make supply drops at night (with infrared lights that a friend of mine built from Radio Shack parts), that I’d advised them on radio-telegraphy equipment, bought them a photocopy machine and other office supplies—and had even sent them several sets of domino so the fighters could entertain themselves at their camps.”

  By 1985, Rodriguez was in El Salvador, where he had set up a secret camp to conduct bombing raids against communist rebels in that country’s civil war. It was there that he was reunited with another Cuban cold warrior, Luis Posada Carriles.

  Following the in-flight bombing of the Cuban airliner on October 6, 1976, in which seventy-three people were killed, Posada was charged in Venezuela with having planned the attack. He remained incarcerated until 1985, when he escaped by bribing a prison official and walking out of Venezuela’s San Juan de los Morros prison disguised as a priest. Using forged documents, he escaped to the island of Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles and then Central America under the nom de guerre Ramón Medina.

  According to Rodriguez, “He was there when I was contacted by an individual who explained Posada’s predicament and asked if I would help. My reply was to ask Posada to make his way to San Salvador. When he arrived, I gave him a job . . . I never told the Salvadorans with whom I worked, or the American supply crews, or Oliver North, about Ramón Medina’s real identity. I put him to work as the day-to-day manager of the supply operation.”

  Later in 1985, Rodriguez was contacted by Lieutenenat Colonel North, and his efforts to bolster the military junta in El Salvador against a rebel insurgency were shifted to supporting the Contras, a rebel insurgency attempting to overthrow a military junta. A massive warehouse was constructed and an assortment of mercenaries descended to take part in what was essentially an elaborate resupply operation sponsored by the Reagan administration.

  When the Iran-Contra debacle was exposed and congressional hearings began, Rodriguez, who had spent most of his adult life in the shadows as a covert operator, was dragged into the light of day. His nationally televised testimony was riveting. Before a rapt panel of Senate investigators and a television audience in the millions, he detailed how he had, since his involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, been involved in perhaps hundreds of covert political operations. Many of these undertakings were dangerous, and in some cases people had been killed (most notably Che Guevara). Most of the operations had been initiated by the CIA and the U.S. government.

  LIKE MOST EVERYONE IN MIAMI, JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE WATCHED THE IRAN- CONTRA hearings with rapt attention. The Contras had begun at training camps in the Everglades, just miles from where Battle lived in South Miami. Once again, as with the Watergate burglary and hearings that followed, people whom Battle had known since the invasion, or from his time at Fort Benning, were now reluctant players on the national stage. It was as if Cuban exile politics, intertwined with the anticommunist agenda of the Republican Party, were on a loop, replaying every decade or so through covert actions that were never supposed to be known by the public at large.

  Over the years, many Cubans whom Battle knew from la lucha became embroiled in controversies. These were men who had survived the invasion and met at Fort Benning as young recruits for the U.S. Army. Afterward, they had chosen different paths, but they remained a brotherhood of sorts. Now it was Felix Rodriguez on the hot seat, as Rolando Martinez and other Cuban members of the Watergate crew had been a decade earlier.

  These men—Posada, Martinez, Rodriguez, Battle, and others—were part of a generation that saw themselves as combatants in the Cold War. They felt compelled to embark on a journey that some might have interpreted as morally ambiguous at best, or
downright criminal at worst. But their efforts had a built-in self-justification. Whether it was Rodriguez the freedom fighter, Posada the terrorist, or Battle the gangster, they all had something in common. They had convinced themselves they were engaged in an epic struggle not only for their own personal liberty, but also for the liberty of the Cuban people.

  IN JANUARY 1988, MIAMI POLICE OFFICER DAVID SHANKS WAS TRANSFERRED FROM the city’s South District, where he had worked as a uniformed officer for four years, to the Vice Investigations Section. Vice was a division of the Organized Crime Bureau (OCB). It was a prestigious assignment for Shanks, who was now a fourteen-year veteran of the department.

  It had been nine years since Shanks stumbled upon one of the worst shootings in the history of the Miami police department, which had resulted in the death of his friend and fellow officer Billy Cook and the permanent disabling of another officer. The tragedy had a strange effect on Shanks, making him more dedicated than ever to the job but also something of a loner. He was hesitant to become overly attached to his fellow cops, for fear that at any moment they could be lost in an outburst of violence.

  In his new assignment at Vice, Shanks would be working under Sergeant James “Jimmy” Boyd, a legendary figure in the Metro-Dade PD. Boyd was a Florida good ol’ boy, built like a bull terrier, with a pronounced southern accent. He had married a local Cubana, and he spoke fluent Spanish, but with a Florida drawl. Few cops knew greater Miami better than Boyd. As chief of the Vice Squad, he was on a first-name basis with all of the prosecutors in town, most of the criminal defense lawyers, and a fair number of tier one criminals such as Santo Trafficante and others.

  Shanks was enthused by the prospect of joining Boyd’s squad, especially when he learned he would be partnered with James “Jed” Leggett. Shanks had known Leggett since their days patrolling the tough Liberty City neighborhood back in the 1970s. They had gone on to other assignments, and now they were being reunited at Vice.

  Leggett had already established himself as something of an expert on the subject of bolita. In fact, three years earlier he had been the lone representative from the Metro-Dade PD summoned to testify before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime in Manhattan. At the time, Leggett was assigned to OCB’s Lottery Investigation Squad. He was the one who uncovered the Corporation’s use of the Puerto Rican lottery to launder bolita proceeds from the United States.

  From their time together in Liberty City, Shanks admired Leggett, though they had different personality types. Shanks was laconic and introspective by nature, whereas Leggett was another southern good ol’ boy, a proud Florida “cracker” with blond hair and blue eyes, whose family had roots in the state going back to before the Civil War. Leggett liked bass fishing, NASCAR, and Busch beer. Shanks knew him to be one of the sharpest cops he had ever met.

  Jimmy Boyd ran an aggressive squad. He liked to have his cops execute at least one or two search warrants every week. This meant assigning different teams to different investigations, and then calling them all together when it was time to do a search. Boyd liked to maintain a strong camaraderie within his squad, but he also fostered a kind of internal competition between teams that was sometimes combustible.

  On a morning in April, Boyd assigned Shanks and Leggett to investigate an anonymous tip that had come over the department’s Crime-Stoppers hotline. The caller had identified a coin laundry that they said was being used as a bolita writing location. The first thing Shanks and Leggett did was set up a surveillance of the location. They quickly determined that the place was indeed a front of some kind. There were many people coming and going, none of them carrying laundry.

  “We need to penetrate, get somebody in there,” Shanks said to his partner.

  “Right,” said Leggett. “This is a job for Miss One Hundred.”

  Miss One Hundred was a large, grandmotherly black female who sometimes worked for Boyd’s Vice Squad as a paid informant. Her real name was Mildred. She had been given the code name because that was her informant documentation number: OCB-100.

  The goal of the cops was to get enough information about the place, and evidence that something illegal was going on, that they could obtain a search warrant. They met with Mildred, who, for a modest weekly retainer, seemed willing to do almost anything. The idea was for her to enter the fake laundry. Not only would she play a number, but she was also supposed to strike up a conversation with the bolita writer and find out when the place closed for the day. That way the cops could get an idea of when the pickup man came by to retrieve the lottery stubs and cash.

  Shanks and Leggett picked up Mildred at her house and dropped her off a block from the location. They told her what number to play so that in court, should it come to that, the cops could explain there was no way the informant could have “rigged the buy.” From a surveillance van, they watched Mildred go into the location. She was there for about fifteen minutes. She came out and walked down the street. A couple blocks away, the cops picked her up

  “Here’s my ticket,” said Mildred, handing to the cops the record of her bet. “They said no more bets after six o’clock in the evening.”

  The cops paid the sweet old lady her informant fee, and she went on her way.

  Two nights later, Shanks and Leggett were again at the bolita location. This time, Mildred entered shortly before the 10 P.M. deadline. She stayed inside for a while, engaged in conversation, and then, as planned, exited the location right behind the pickup man. This way the cops would know which customer he was. On this occasion, two surveillance teams were required. Shanks scooped up Mildred a few blocks away from the fake laundromat, while the other team followed the pickup man to a maroon truck. They ran a check on the license plate and determined that the truck was registered to a man named Henry Lee.

  The cops followed Lee and watched as he made pickups at other locations—a bar, a mom-and-pop store, an auto garage. They knew that the accumulated cash and betting slips were destined for a counting house. But the Cubans did not normally want the bagman to know the location of the counting house, for fear he might set up the location to be ripped off. For safety reasons, the “pass,” or transfer of cash and betting stubs, was set up to take place on a street corner, the location of which was unknown to the bagman until the last minute. The pass usually happened quickly, with a Latino worker from the counting house showing up to retrieve the bag that contained various bundles of cash and lottery tickets collected from the bolita locations.

  The cops positioned themselves to be able to see the transfer of the package, a necessity for them to fill out an affidavit in furtherance of a search warrant. They watched Lee hand off what he had to another bagman. Shanks and Leggett stayed with the bagman. They followed him to a duplex located at 2140 NW 34th Street. They saw the man enter a particular unit.

  The cops followed this same routine over the course of a few nights. Eventually, a Latino male in his early fifties exited the duplex unit and entered a late-model gold Cadillac. Shanks ran a check on the Cadillac.

  Bingo.

  The owner of the vehicle was José Pulido, who, they learned after running a check through criminal records, had been arrested by the City of Miami Police Department a few years earlier, in 1985. The charge was operating a bolita enterprise.

  Shanks and Leggett began to prepare for a raid. Through the county building and zoning department, they obtained a floor plan of the duplex. They were able to determine all entryways and exits. The cops knew that their entry and seizure of documents at the location had to be sudden and immediate. The moment they entered the counting house, bolita employees would attempt to destroy documents. There was usually a shredder at the location. The success of the raid would depend in part on how quickly they were able shut the place down without evidence being destroyed.

  Shanks wrote up the affidavit. It had become one of his strengths as an officer. Not all cops have this skill. It requires that the criminal information that had been gathered so far be condensed into a
concise narrative; otherwise a judge might cast the affidavit aside, and the chances of securing his or her signature on the warrant might take days. In high-intensity cases, the passing of days is sometimes the difference between the element of surprise and a compromised investigation.

  For this case, Shanks created a solid document, which was immediately signed by a judge. The affidavit was good for ten days. The squad went over their plans: the raid would require three search teams. Shanks and Leggett would be part of the entry team, with Shanks wielding a sledgehammer and Leggett a Remington 870 shotgun.

  Standing at the front door to the duplex, Shanks announced, “Open up! This is the police! We have a warrant!”

  The sound of rustling came from inside. Shanks saw a woman peek out the front curtain, then turn and run.

  “I’m taking down the door,” Shanks yelled to the rest of his crew. He drew back the sledgehammer and pounded the lock on the door. The lock disintegrated and the door swung open. Shanks withdrew his weapon; he and a half dozen other cops flooded into the apartment. More cops rushed into the location from a rear door.

  It was a successful raid. José Pulido and a couple of employees at the location were placed under arrest. There were tons of documents. Apparently, not only was the location a counting house, but it was some kind of central office for a sizable bolita operation. For Shanks and his squad, it was a dream come true.

  As is often the case with a raid that netted a significant amount of evidence, it took days and weeks for the investigators to figure out exactly what they had. Cash totaling in the hundreds of thousands had been seized, but also computer hard drives, disks, and financial documents. A retired agent from the Internal Revenue Service was hired by Metro-Dade police to examine records and financial documents that had been seized. It was often a case of looking for a needle in a haystack to find that one incriminating document amid boxes and boxes of paperwork.