And it seemed that way, for a while, until car bombs started being detonated all over Lima. The most horrific had been bombs planted in two vans in a popular section of Miraflores, the city’s most fashionable neighborhood. In July 1992, just as the Casino Crillón was beginning to formulate as a gleam in the eyes of its investors, the bombs, each packed with 1,000 kilograms of explosives, detonated at 9:15 P.M. The target was a bank on Tarata Street, but the collateral damage was immense. Twenty-five people were killed and 155 injured by the blast.
Two days later, the government responded with the La Cantuta massacre, in which nine students and a teacher from the National University of Education, believed to be Shining Path operatives, were kidnapped and disappeared during the night by members of the Grupo Colina death squad. In the press, they were accused of having perpetrated the Miraflores bombing.
If all of this wasn’t enough to send a chill up the spine of a capitalist businessman in Lima, it was also a fact that the Hotel Crillón held a special place in the dark heart of Sendero Luminoso. In 1986, when a group of government ministers were meeting at the Crillón to discuss terrorism, a Shining Path guerrilla accidentally blew herself up attempting to fire a mortar round into the lobby of the hotel.
In being forced to absorb the recent history of the Shining Path, José Miguel Battle may have been experiencing a sense of déjà vu. He had been a cop in Havana in 1958, during the Night of One Hundred Bombs. Cuban rebels set off a series of bombs all around the city, and there wasn’t much local authorities could do about it. Afterward, the government responded with a commensurate level of violent repression, the inevitable result being more rebel activity. In Havana, as in Lima, the citizenry were caught in between.
Now, to the management of the Casino Crillón, it appeared as though Sendero Luminoso had delivered a threat. Battle knew enough to take it seriously; the question was, how seriously? It was Battle’s belief— informed by attitudes commonly expressed by followers of the Fujimori government—that Sendero Luminoso, despite the occasional car bombing, had been defeated. According to the government, the group simply didn’t have the audacity or power they once had. Thus perhaps this written threat was a bluff, a toothless missive from a once terrifying terror group that now didn’t have the collective cojones to stage a terror campaign against the Crillón.
Not being Peruvian, Battle called in his security director, General Guillermo Castillo, to discuss the situation. Along with being in the employ of Battle, Castillo was still an active officer in the Peruvian military.
Castillo read the letter and looked at the bullet. Battle was expecting the general to adopt the position of the Fujimori government, that these pesky Marxist hoodlums had been stamped out and were no longer a threat. But Castillo expressed the opposite. “Look,” he said. “What this is is a threat from Sendero Luminoso. You have to take this seriously. I suggest that you pay the money. Give them what they want, or they could start setting off bombs and bring your business to a standstill.”
It was not the answer Battle had been hoping for, but he was inclined to listen to the general. He was ready to make the payment, but then, out of the blue, he was quietly approached by a member of his security staff who had some information about the letter that he felt might be useful.
Mario Masaveu was a black belt in karate who had been hired by General Castillo himself. Once Battle got a look at Masaveu, who was musclebound and solid, he made him one of his three bodyguards—or, as Battle liked to call them, deputy security directors. It was an attorney for the casino who told Masaveu, “Listen, you need to be on the lookout for anything suspicious. We’ve received an extortion letter from the Shining Path. It came with a bullet.”
Masaveu was startled. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I know about this letter.”
“What are you talking about?” asked the lawyer.
Masaveu explained that a few days earlier, he had overheard two staff members of the hotel talking about a letter from the Shining Path accompanied by a bullet. It was in a basement hallway in the hotel. Masaveu wasn’t clear whether they were talking about sending or having received the letter. He hadn’t thought much about the conversation until now.
The lawyer immediately brought Masaveu to Battle, in the casino office, to relay his story. The bodyguard told Battle the story, and then added, “Boss, I think these are the guys who sent you this letter. This smells like a scam. They’re not Sendero Luminoso.”
Battle sent Masaveu and his two other private guards to find the two hotel employees and bring them to him, which they did. The two young hotel workers, terrified, stood in front of Battle, who said, “I know what you did. I want you to admit it. Your lives depend on it.”
The two hotel workers admitted their guilt. They were not Peruvian terrorists, merely hustlers who had come up with a plan to extort money from the casino. Battle asked them if General Castillo had been in on the scam. They said no, but Battle wasn’t sure he believed them.
The two workers were fired. General Castillo was also fired. Mario Masaveu took over his job as director of security for the Casino Crillón.
It was a big promotion for the young black belt. He basked in the glory of his elevated status in the universe of El Padrino. He was the guy who had exposed the bogus extortion plot, which, it seemed, had nothing to do with the dreaded Shining Path.
A couple of weeks later, on Jirón Ocoña, a narrow street behind the Hotel Crillón, a car bomb exploded with a thunderous sound that rattled through the lobby and lower floors of the building. In the casino, the blast cracked plaster and shattered glass. George Croes, the head cashier, remembered that “everyone stopped what they were doing. We had to evacuate the casino.” Outside, three passersby were killed, and thirty people were wounded. The lobby of the hotel was used as a makeshift triage center to deal with the injured, one of whom had had a leg blown off.
The bombing had all the earmarks of Sendero Luminoso.
EFFUGENIA REYES HAD HUNG AROUND THE CRILLÓN FOR A FEW WEEKS AFTER HER public argument with Battle. She was in no hurry to leave. She insisted that she be put up in her own room, and there she stayed, running up her tab at the hotel until finally leaving in a huff. She flew to Miami to collect her belongings from El Zapotal.
She was there on a night in July 1994, packing her clothes and other belongings into suitcases and, with the help of a friend, moving them out to a car in the driveway. She had a flight leaving later that night for Guatemala, where she would be met by her family. She was finished with her life as the mistress of El Padrino.
As she loaded her belongings into the car, a couple of police cars pulled up. Out stepped four Metro-Dade cops, one of them with a police dog on a leash.
The cops were from the department’s Narcotics Bureau. An informant of theirs, who was jammed up on a narcotics charge and looking to better his situation, had given them a tip that José Miguel Battle was known to store large amounts of illegally obtained cash in the walls of his house. Everyone in law enforcement knew that many bills in Miami, by that time having been used to snort cocaine by a sizable portion of the population, were known to have traces of cocaine on them. The cops figured they would see if they could gain entry to the house. They brought along a dog from the canine unit. The dog wasn’t trained to smell money, but it was trained to smell cocaine. If there was cocaine on those bills, the hound would sniff it out.
The cops weren’t expecting much. They didn’t even have a search warrant. They arrived to find Effugenia and her friend busily packing. The lead detective asked if they could do a “consent search” of the home.
“What’s that?” asked Effugenia.
“Well, pretty much just like it sounds. We ask to search the premises, and you give us your consent. It’ll only take a few minutes. We promise not to damage anything. Just wanna run the police dog through the house.”
Effugenia had been through the wringer with Battle, who had humiliated her in front of everyone at the Crillón and treated h
er like a puta. Whether she was driven by a desire to get revenge or was simply busy packing and not fully focused on what the cop was suggesting, she gave her consent. She even signed a document that allowed the officers to search the premises.
The cops couldn’t believe their luck. They did a run-through with the dog but found nothing.
A few hours later, Effugenia was on a plane to Guatemala, where she hoped to find refuge in the loving embrace of her family.
In Lima, Battle received the news about Effugenia’s signing a piece of paper letting the cops search his house. He was livid. How could she do that? Okay, the cops hadn’t found anything incriminating, but still, it was the principle. On top of everything else, she had violated his trust. Again.
Maybe it was also residual anger at the public way in which the relationship with Effugenia had ended, which was embarrassing to Battle. His anger at his former “wife,” as she was known around the Crillón, was teetering in the danger zone. People like Nene Marquez and Luis DeVilliers in Lima, and Abraham Rydz in Miami, knew that when Battle became this angry, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that somebody was going to die.
18
DOWN AND OUT IN LIMA
THERE WERE NO SUBSEQUENT BOMBINGS BY SENDERO LUMINOSO IN THE AREA ADJAcent to the Hotel Crillón, though there were other explosions around the city. For Battle, that was somebody else’s problem. The war between Marxist-Leninism and capitalism was no longer the primary focus of his life. He had more immediate issues to contend with, namely the survival of his casino.
In the casino gambling business, as with all gambling enterprises, there is always risk. As Abraham Rydz would say, “That’s why they call it gambling.” The Casino Crillón had gone up like a balloon filled with helium, but by the seventh or eighth month of operation it began to deflate just as quickly. This was not entirely unexpected. The bombing had not helped, though over the years Peruvians had become hardened to overt acts of terrorism. More pertinent to the Crillón’s downward financial turn was the opening in 1994 of two additional casinos in Lima. The Crillón was no longer the only game in town.
A gambling venture will ebb and flow; that is the nature of the beast. The important thing is that during the fallow period there be sufficient cash flow, a salve to stem the bleeding until fortunes shift and the enterprise is again taking in more money than it is dispensing. The problem with the Crillón was that it was being financed entirely with dirty money. Getting cash into the casino on a daily basis to cover operational costs was not as simple as a wire transfer between banks. Loading up human money couriers on flights from Miami may have been enough to get the operation off the ground. But keeping up with the daily expenses required more than a bunch of fifty- and sixty-year-old Cuban émigrés with shipments of U.S. currency stuffed in their underwear.
The government entity that served as the regulatory commission overseeing casino gambling in Peru was called CONACA (Confederación Nacional de Agencias Comerciantes). CONACA had a rule that each morning a casino had to have at least $250,000 in its coffers in order to operate. An inspector from CONACA came to the casino every morning and counted the money in the “cage,” the central location for cash on the casino floor. If the minimum money requirement was met, the inspector gave authorization for the casino to begin business for the day.
More and more, the Casino Crillón did not have the money in its coffers. What they did then was lean on their bank.
Banco Continental was no longer associated with the Crillón; they had pulled out. The new bank was Banco Banex, which was located just blocks away from the casino. Banex had opened a teller exchange window in the casino, making it easy for customers to access their accounts while gambling and also change currency from U.S. dollars to soles, the Peruvian currency.
Knowing that the inspector from CONACA was arriving every morning at a certain time, casino management simply borrowed money from the Banex teller and put it in the cage. Once the inspector had finished with his duties and left the premises, the money was moved back to the bank teller’s vault.
When the management at Banco Banex learned what was happening, they were concerned. This practice constituted bank fraud, and, if discovered, would cost the bank its license. Plus, Banex had already extended to the Casino Crillón a number of overdraft loans that were past due. The financial situation at the casino was headed in a bad direction. Executives at Banex felt that it was time that bank management had a talk with the owners of the Crillón to put an end to the practice. As their emissary, they sent Salvador Ramirez, a managing director.
Ramirez had become familiar with the Crillón and particularly familiar with Battle. Perhaps unbeknownst to his employers, Ramirez had fallen under the thrall of the American Mob boss. He became part of Battle’s posse, drinking, snorting, and partying late into the night. He began to dress like Battle and started carrying a loaded .45-caliber handgun stuffed in the back of his pants, under his jacket, just like El Padrino.
Now Ramirez was being given the unpleasant task of informing José Miguel and the other owners that certain things needed to change at the Casino Crillón.
The meeting took place in the lobby of the hotel, which had been remodeled expressly for these kinds of important meetings. There was a reserved area with a glass door, for privacy.
There to meet with Ramirez, along with Battle, were Luis De-Villiers and Nene Marquez. Ramirez brought up the overall financial condition of the business, which had become alarming, but first he delivered the message that bank executives were insisting that whoever was responsible for using his teller outlet to commit bank fraud be fired and replaced.
At the start, the meeting went well. DeVilliers and Marquez listened quietly as Ramirez spoke. But when he got to the part about firing the casino manager, Battle went ballistic. He stood up and shouted, “Who do you think you are to come in here and talk like that to me!? You think you can tell me how to run my casino?” Nene stood and tried to calm Battle, but he wasn’t having it. “Salvador, do you realize what you have done here? I can even order to have you killed, and nothing is going to happen if I do.”
The room went quiet. Ramirez turned pale. DeVilliers stood to escort him out of the room.
Even though he was clearly rattled, Ramirez had the presence of mind to say, “Gentlemen, the bottom line is that for the casino to remain solvent, you need an infusion of capital of two million dollars.”
“Get him out of here,” said Battle.
Later that day, Ramirez spoke with the Peruvian investors, Ferer, Chiang, and Chau.
“What happened?” asked Ferer.
“He threatened to kill me.”
Chiang and Chau were exasperated. Ferer put a hand on Ramirez’s shoulder and said, “That’s the way it is, I’m afraid. He believes he is El Padrino, the Godfather.”
“What can we do about it?” said Chiang.
“I know what we can do,” answered Ferer. “Get out of this business before we all wind up in jail, or dead.”
That day, the three Peruvians divested themselves from the Casino Crillón. They agreed to a buyout of $100,000 each, money they would possibly never see unless the casino was able to get back on a winning streak.
Another person who was worried about how things were going with the casino was Harold Marchena. When he returned to work at the casino, Marchena had at first been impressed that it was able to function at all given the inexperience of the owners. He had his concerns; he knew about the efforts to fool the inspectors from CONOCA. In his entire career, he had never seen anything like that being done. But he chose to overlook a number of warning signs, believing, perhaps wishfully, that the kinks would be ironed out and the casino would soon be run as a legitimate operation.
A major sign that things were not right was when Nene Marquez announced that casino management and employees would temporarily not be paid; the payroll expenses had not been met. Whatever money they had would be used to pay bills—electrical, water, maintenance, and so
on. Management employees would have to forgo salary for a few weeks.
This made Marchena nervous, and it also reminded him that he had not yet received any profit share, as he had been promised. He demanded to see the books. Reluctantly, Nene Marquez allowed Marchena to look at the ledgers. There were many fraudulent line items and obviously fake invoices. Said Marchena, “These books are nonsense. We need to have an independent auditor come in here and do an evaluation. This is not right.”
Nene closed the books and told Marchena he’d bring it up at the next shareholders’ meeting.
Before then, Nene told Battle, “I think we have a problem.” He relayed the news that Marchena was demanding that an independent auditor be brought in to examine the books. Battle made the decision to fire Marchena.
Nene Marquez told Marchena to pack up his things and leave. Marchena thought to himself, I’m not going to take this lying down. A few days later, he went to see a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against the Casino Crillón for unfair termination. He was asking for $160,000 in damages.
When Battle and the other owners were informed about the lawsuit, they became concerned. A lawsuit of this type could force the casino to open its books in a courtroom, which would be disastrous for the owners. At first, casino management tried to intimidate Marchena. At his apartment in Lima, he received phone calls from Evelyn Runciman, Battle’s new bride, who was now listed as a shareholder of the casino. Using vile language, Runciman cursed out Marchena, telling him that if he persisted with his lawsuit he would never again work in the casino business.
When the harassing phone calls didn’t work, the casino bosses tried to buy him out. Nene Marques contacted Marchena and told him they wanted to pay him off. “We’ll give you twenty-five thousand dollars to drop your lawsuit,” said Nene.
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