The Corporation
Page 38
About a week after the raid, Shanks was in the office one day when the former IRS agent said, “David, can you come over here a minute? I need to show you something.”
Shanks walked over to the ex-agent, who was surrounded by stacks of documents and opened file boxes. The ex-agent, who was holding what looked like a spreadsheet, said to Shanks, “This guy Pulido works for José Miguel Battle. Everything points that way. I’m connecting the dots, and it’s all pointing in the same direction. Battle.” The ex-agent showed Shanks a document that indicated large payouts being made to El Zapotal, Inc., Battle’s company.
Shanks had heard the name. He knew who Battle was, but he’d only recently begun working organized crime. He knew his partner Jed Leggett had been up in New York a few years earlier testifying about Battle, so he immediately took the information to Jed.
“Hey, partner, the IRS guy says these records come from José Miguel Battle’s organization.”
Leggett looked up from his desk in the squad room. In his Florida drawl, he said, “Well, I kind of figured that already.”
“Okay,” said Shanks. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“You can talk to Boyd. But I don’t think you’ll get much satisfaction. Boyd thinks that Oscar Alvarez, not Battle, is the ultimate bolitero in Miami. Boyd thinks Battle came down here to retire.”
Shanks was dumbfounded. He didn’t know much about Battle, but he knew he was a major player. If the evidence suggested that Battle’s organization was involved, why would they sit on their hands?
Shanks approached Boyd. For a subordinate to seek out his boss on a matter of investigative priorities was touchy, to say the least, but with Boyd’s reputation as a legendary Miami cop, Shanks could not believe he would pass up the opportunity to catch a big fish.
After Shanks explained what had emerged from the investigation, Boyd responded by saying, “Listen, Battle may be big-time in New York and New Jersey, but down here the bolita king is Oscar Alvarez.”
Alvarez was indeed a big-time Cuban bolita operator with roots in South Florida. Boyd had a personal stake in catching him. Four years earlier, the sergeant had been part of squad that had arrested Alvarez in his home. But the bolitero slipped through their fingers when he was given a sentence of probation—no jail time—and Boyd had been on his tail ever since.
“Yeah,” said Shanks, “but according to Jed’s testimony up in New York—” He wasn’t even able to finish his sentence; Boyd cut him off.
“I don’t want to hear any more about Leggett. You understand? Ever since he testified in front of that damn commission he thinks he’s a big shot. He doesn’t make the decisions around here. I do. And I’m telling you the guy to go after is Alvarez, not Battle.”
Shanks stood in the sergeant’s doorway for a beat or two. He didn’t know what to say. They had just discovered evidence linking their investigation to a guy who was believed to be the biggest bolitero in America, and his supervisor was blowing it off.
Shanks had a few things he would like to have said. Instead, he said, “Okay, boss,” and returned to the squad room.
BY THE LATE 1980S, ABRAHAM RYDZ HAD BEGUN TO SOUR ON THE BOLITA BUSINESS. One of the main reasons was Nene Marquez, Battle’s brother-in-law, who Rydz felt had no business being in charge of the Corporation’s operations in New York. Though Rydz was living comfortably in Miami, tending to the daily operations of Union Financial Research and other companies owned by himself and Battle Jr., he had to deal with Marquez on a near daily basis. The entire financial structure of Rydz and Battle Jr.’s operation in Miami was like a house of cards dependent on the bolita proceeds flowing from New York. Even after the bad publicity of the arson wars and the Presidential Crime Commission hearings and the prosecution of Conrad Pons, bolita still flourished. The Corporation was still clearing tens of millions on an annual basis, funneling that money to offshore accounts.
The arson wars, in particular, had sickened Rydz. Around the time of the Jannin Toribio killing, he had a baby of his own. Susan Rydz was born on April 5, 1986; she was El Polaco’s first and only child with his second wife, whom he had married in 1981. He had an older daughter, Vivian, from a previous marriage, but she was long since grown and gone.
From the time Susan was born, Rydz—who was fifty-two years old—doted on her as though she represented a new lease on life. As a child, and even into young adulthood, she was ignorant of his life as a gambling impresario. She would know him only as a successful businessman. It was Rydz’s intention that she remain innocent of his long criminal career.
The killing of Jannin Toribio—a child, burned to death in an arson fire—struck a chord with Rydz. He read about the death in the newspaper and couldn’t believe that any organization he was a part of could have committed such a heinous act. Then came the crime commission hearings, at which his name was mentioned as a high-ranking official in the Corporation. Rydz began to lie awake at night with ominous premonitions that it was all going to end badly; they were going to wind up in jail, or dead. His biggest fear was that his own daughter, Susan, would grow up without a father.
Rydz felt powerless. At one time, he had felt as if he could control the financial fortunes of the organization, but those days were over. At the core of his dissatisfaction was the belief that the bolita business had gone from being a financial venture to a gangster enterprise. That side of the business—revenge and punishment killings, turf wars with the Italians, having to maintain a reputation for brutality—was, to Rydz, in the process of destroying it. Many times he said to Battle Jr. and to Nene, “We are in the business of making money. That’s what a gambling business is supposed to be about, not getting our names in the newspapers or on the six o’clock news. That is bad for business.”
When Rydz talked this way, Nene’s eyes glazed over. It was as if he wasn’t listening. Nene took orders from one person—Battle Sr., the Bay of Pigs hero, not Abraham Rydz, the Polack.
On flights to and from New York, Rydz complained to Junior, who agreed with him. But there was nothing either of them could do about it. Decisions were being made at the street level in New York. In fact, Rydz got the impression that the more he complained, the more Nene Marquez deliberately went against his wishes. If he complained about the arsons bringing bad publicity and heat from the police, Nene sent a crew out to torch another bolita hole. If Rydz complained about gangland-style murders perpetrated by the Corporation as something that could have a negative impact on their business, three dead bodies from a rival bolita organization would be found dumped on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. For a while now, Rydz had begun to feel that when it came to crucial decisions about the daily running of the bolita business, he had become expendable.
And so he did something that startled even his best friend Miguelito Battle. He retired from the bolita business. Not from the financial side of things—he would still run an operating office and be paid half a million dollars a year by Union Financial Research. He would still oversee the various shell companies that were being used to launder the organization’s profits. But he would no longer be a part of the bolita business, which meant he was relinquishing his 17 percent cut. He was giving up millions of dollars in annual proceeds to be done with the headache of dealing with Nene Marquez.
Miguelito tried to talk Rydz out of it. “What about your family, your daughter?” he said. Miguelito also had young children. Every decision he and Rydz had made, they told themselves, was to provide a legitimate future for their kids.
“What good am I to my daughter if I go to jail?” Rydz answered. Perhaps he was engaging in magical thinking. The fact that he was leaving the bolita business in 1988 was not going to exonerate him from having already been involved with the Corporation for decades. Nevertheless, he set a date for when he would no longer be involved. On that date, he would stop receiving his cut and also would no longer have responsibilities as a bolita banker.
The decision by Rydz sent a ripple through the organization
. Not long after it was announced, there was a funeral attended by many members of the Corporation. Sergio “Richie” Battle, the second-youngest Battle brother, had died from a drug overdose. It wasn’t exactly a shock. Richard had been struggling with a cocaine and heroin addiction for years.
The memorial service was held at the same funeral parlor in Union City where, sixteen years earlier, Pedro Battle had been laid to rest. José Miguel, Miguelito, Rydz, and most of the members of the organization had flown up from Miami for the service.
Also among the attendees was a young bolitero named Luis Perez, an up-and-coming banker who would eventually be put in charge of the Corporation’s main office in Manhattan. Perez was there as a guest of Willie Pozo, his boss and the current jefe of the Corporation in Manhattan.
Perez had met Miguelito and Abraham Rydz before. At one point during the service, he stood off to the side as Rydz spoke with Willie Pozo. Rydz had taken a calendar out of his wallet and was showing Pozo the exact date he was leaving the business. “This is the day I’m leaving,” he said, circling a date on the calendar. “Have my totals ready on that date.”
“Well,” said Pozo, “that’s when we give out the holiday bonuses. You want your totals before or after we distribute the bonuses?”
The business was based on percentages. Rydz’s piece of the pie would be much bigger if he took his payment before the bonuses were paid.
“No,” said Rydz. “Make sure everyone gets their bonus first, then give me my totals.”
Eavesdropping on the conversation, Perez thought, Wow, this is a fair guy. He’s going to give bonuses first and then leave.
The date that Rydz set to leave fell on a Sunday. On that day, the Corporation took a major hit. A number that had been wagered on by an unusually high number of customers came in. The organization had to pay out $2 million that day, the single largest daily payout in the history of Cuban bolita in the United States. On that day, Abraham Rydz cashed out of the business. He took it as a good omen that he was getting out at just the right time.
For the Corporation, the $2 million hit was not insurmountable. It was perhaps a testament to the business that Rydz was leaving behind that it could absorb a payout of unprecedented proportions and hardly miss a beat.
DAVE SHANKS AND HIS PARTNER, JED LEGGETT, WERE FRUSTRATED THAT THEIR supervisor seemed to have little interest in going after José Miguel Battle Sr. But they were not about to give up. Leggett suspected that Battle was involved locally in bolita and who knew what else. Maybe he was even involved in narcotics. By the late 1980s, it was pretty much impossible for a major gangster to be operating in Miami and not be involved in the narcotics business to one degree or another.
Leggett contacted an old informant named Angelo who had known the Battle brothers since the 1960s. Angelo was on the outs with the Battles. He didn’t have much to offer regarding bolita, but he did tell the investigators that since relocating to South Miami, Jose Miguel had become a major impresario of cockfights throughout Dade County. In fact, Angelo had seen Battle recently at some of the major vallas, or arenas, in Key Largo, and also at Club Campestre, a cockfighting venue in suburban Miami.
Shanks was intrigued by the idea of using cockfighting as a means to, at the very least, arrest Battle and use what was a misdemeanor crime to create an opening for a more serious prosecution.
It was only in 1986 that the state of Florida had banned cockfighting outright, meaning that it became a misdemeanor crime even to attend an event. Facilitating the operation by supplying the roosters or managing the venue was, however, a felony, as was the charge of “cruelty to animals.”
To raid a cockfight was a massive undertaking. The fights were generally held in the western part of Dade County, where the residential areas thinned out and gave way to agricultural land and horse farms. A cockfighting event might be attended by over two hundred people and usually lasted hours, with dozens of fights. The venues were set up like a poor man’s dog or horse track, with makeshift cantinas and Cuban food for sale. Sometimes prostitutes worked these events, and all manner of illegal transactions were known to take place. Some men came armed and ready for anything. The volume of betting was sometimes huge, depending on who was supplying the roosters and who was doing the betting. Sometimes the cockfights went on for days at a time, twenty-four hours a day, like a casino that never closed.
With a big-time bettor such as Battle in attendance, whom Luis Posada Carriles claimed to have seen place a $1 million wager on a single match, the collective purse for a night of cockfighting could be substantial.
Shanks and his Vice Squad determined that there were a series of upcoming cockfights to be staged at an arena in Hialeah Gardens, off of NW 122nd Street. The first order of business was to send a couple of undercover cops into the venue to case the location. This required Latino officers, as the cockfights were attended almost exclusively by Hispanics, mostly Cubans, and a gringo would stand out.
A male-female duo of cops was sent into the venue. It was their job to visually establish that it was indeed a cockfighting venue and that illegal betting was taking place. Equally important, they were to take in the physical characteristics of the venue—entrances and exits, where the animals were stored in relation to the main arena, a description of the organizers and main gamblers, and any other illegal activity that might be taking place on the premises.
After a couple visits, the undercover cops were able to draw up a detailed schematic of the cockfighting venue. Shanks and his Vice Squad—led by Sergeant Jimmy Boyd—teamed up with detectives from a Tactical Squad and also a SWAT team to organize a raid. It was going to be a sizable operation, with over sixty cops. With nearly two hundred participants at the cockfight—some of them intoxicated and armed and revved up from a night of high-stakes gambling—the potential for disaster was significant.
In late 1988 and into early 1989, Miami police conducted numerous raids. Each one netted considerable gambling proceeds and resulted in hundreds of misdemeanor and felony citations. But at none of them was Battle in attendance. The cops were about to give up. Then, on February 3, 1989, at Club Campestre, a commercial warehouse in the suburb of Perrine, they hit pay dirt.
As with the previous raids, the cops hit the location clad in black camouflage gear and carrying shotguns, handguns, and automatic weapons. Some of the attendees thought of making a run for it, but cops had secured the perimeter so that no one could escape.
Shanks and his team arrived with processing equipment to charge and fine attendees right there at the site. In the process of rounding everyone up, the detectives came upon El Padrino himself.
Police officer Willy Vigoa was a part of the team that raided Club Campestre. The younger brother of Sergeant Oscar Vigoa, who earlier had worked the case involving the kidnapping of Battle Jr., he had heard a lot about El Padrino. Vigoa had monitored a couple of wiretaps involving Corporation bookmakers and boliteros and was part of the extended team of cops working the Battle investigation. But he had been beginning to wonder if the legendary El Padrino really existed. Remembered Vigoa, “Far as we were concerned, this was just another cockfight raid. We weren’t expecting the main target of our investigation to be there. It was a surprise. . . . Battle was upset that he was going to lose his birds. He had two gallos (roosters) there, and those birds can be worth twenty thousand dollars or more. So it was a big loss for him.”
As one of the supervisory investigators, Dave Shanks was one of the first cops to enter Club Campestre. What he remembered vividly was that one of Battle’s bodyguards, a fifty-year-old cockfight attendee named Adalberto Irizarry, pulled out a .357 Magnum revolver as the SWAT team entered the location. A few tense moments passed before Irizarry lowered his weapon. He was taken into custody and charged with aggravated assault and carrying a concealed weapon.
The birds kept fighting. Oblivious to what was going on around them, in the arena they flapped their wings, squawked, and slashed one another in a battle to the death.
Battle was a celebrity. He did not object to having his picture taken with the cops, who afforded him the respect of an OG, original gangster.
Noted Shanks, “I was struck by the similarity of Battle’s voice to the gravelly rasp of Marlon Brando’s ‘Don Corleone’ in The Godfather. The resemblance was almost eerie. I began to wonder if this was his real voice or if it was something he had practiced.
“In later years, I heard his voice on many more occasions, and I noticed that when he got excited, the raspy Corleone quality disappeared.”
Shanks did not speak directly with Battle or call attention to his own presence. He did not want Battle to know that he was being studied like a lab rat.
At Club Campestre, Battle assumed the identity of the Don, and everyone played along. He was served with a PTA, a promise to appear. He would have to appear on a designated date and pay a nominal fine. The whole thing was a minor inconvenience.
For Shanks, it felt like the beginning of a larger-than-life adventure. He was Captain Ahab, and he had just laid eyes on his Great White Whale. The hunt was on.
14
DEAD BUT NOT DEAD
DAVID SHANKS WAS NOT THE FIRST COP TO SET HIS SIGHTS ON JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE. Throughout his career, Battle had handled the police. He had been a cop himself, after all. Not that he was immune. He had been indicted and done a cumulative total of three years in prison. Cops like Detective Kalafus in New York had linked him—in theory—to many crimes.