The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Aluart walked with Battle into the house, then a short while later, he reappeared, got in his car, and pulled away from the property. He was gone for ten minutes or so and then returned.

  “Let’s see what we can get from this guy,” Kenny Rosario said to his partner.

  They got out of their car and approached Aluart. They showed their IDs and identified themselves as Metro-Dade officers. Aluart said to Rosario, “Yes, I recognize you from one of the cockfighting raids at Club Campestre.”

  Rosario asked Aluart if Battle was home. “Sure,” said Aluart.

  “We would like to speak with Mr. Battle,” said Rosario. “Would you go back into the house and tell him there are a couple detectives who’d like to have a word with him?”

  “Okay,” said Aluart.

  The cops looked at one another. Rosario had been half joking, not expecting Aluart to concede without so much as a discussion.

  While Aluart went inside, the cops waited. Within a few minutes, Battle emerged. He buzzed the front gate so that Rosario and his partner could enter. The cops walked up to him and introduced themselves, and he welcomed them into his home.

  The cops could hardly believe it; they were now inside the lair of El Padrino.

  They had been inside for five mintues when Rosario received a cell phone call from his supervisor, Sergeant Boyd. He was at the front door with two other detectives, and he wanted in.

  “Hey,” said Rosario to Battle, “it’s my supervisor on the line, Sergeant Boyd. He’s at the front door with two other detectives and would like to come in.”

  “I know Sergeant Boyd,” said Battle. “Let him in.” He gestured for Aluart to let the detectives in.

  Boyd and the others were brought into the front room. There were now five detectives in the house. As the ranking officer, Boyd took charge. He explained to Battle that he was not under arrest. “We won’t be reading your rights or anything like that. We’re just here to ask you a few questions.”

  For the next hour, they chatted. Battle readily admitted much of what had been established about his time in Peru. He was able to purchase false documents by bribing a governmental official in Peru, he said. They asked him about Effugenia Reyes, and he said, yes, she had been a girlfriend of his. He had heard she was killed in Guatemala, and this made him very sad. He didn’t know anything else about her death.

  They asked Battle about the Corporation. Are you president of the organization?

  “Look,” said Battle. “I was the president, okay? But that was years ago. I’m retired now.”

  Said Boyd, “Well, does that make you the president in exile?”

  “Yeah,” said Battle. “That would be a good way to put it.”

  The cops mentioned that a lot of people associated with the Corporation had been charged with and found guilty of crimes. Battle said, “I don’t know anything about that. And even if it’s true, what does that have to do with me? It’s like the president of General Motors—if some employees of his are guilty of crimes, does that mean the president is responsible? No. You can’t blame me for something other people have done.”

  Throughout their chat, Battle was respectful and polite. The cops left the house knowing that was one of the most open and unusual conversations they would ever have with a Mob boss.

  SHANKS HAD BEEN ON A RARE VACATION WHEN BOYD AND THE OTHERS INTERVIEWED Battle. He was trying to salvage his marriage. He and his wife had driven up the coast along with his stepson, age fourteen, and the stepson’s best friend. Their destination was Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The point of the trip was for Shanks to separate himself from work, to unplug and show his wife that he could do it, that he could be a devoted husband separate from his job as a cop. But the whole time he was there, he’d been wondering about the case. When he called in to Kenny Rosario and learned that he and Boyd and a few others had met directly with Battle, it was as if Christmas had happened without him.

  The vacation was going well. One morning, Shanks came back to the condo after a round of golf, and at the motel front desk there was a message for him. There was an envelope, left by two FBI agents, with a plane ticket with his name on it. The message said: “Call Larry.” It was LeVecchio from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. When Shanks called LeVecchio, he was told that they needed him in the office immediately. There had been a sudden opening on the judge’s calendar in the Fernandez/Bordon case, and they had much prep work to do.

  Shanks told his wife, “You’re not going to believe this.”

  She knew what it was, and she was not happy. She dropped Shanks off at the nearest airport.

  Forever after, when Shanks thought about the exact moment when his marriage ended, he thought of this moment.

  Back at the office, the investigators had been hit with a tidal wave of work, and it came in the form of canceled checks from Gulf Liquors.

  The Republic National Bank of Miami had been served with a court order to produce canceled checks that had been deposited into the account of Gulf Liquors. This was a staggering request that required they produce literally thousands of checks. When the bank protested, the investigators agreed to narrow down their request to a crucial three-month period where checks from bolita bankers coincided with physical surveillance of the location. Cops witnessed the boliteros cashing checks at the liquor store, which was a rare case of investigators actually seeing the act of money laundering in real time.

  The boliteros used a coded system to mark their checks for identification purposes. The cops had learned that the Fernandez organization used the number 14 written on the check; other boliteros had their own designations. What the cops now had to do was go over each and every check cashed at Gulf Liquors during the three-month period, separate those that had special markings, and determine which checks came from which boliteros. For the cops, it was going to be a mind-numbingly laborious process.

  There was a collective groan from the entire squad when the checks arrived. They were delivered stacked on two wooden pallets, six feet high and four feet wide. A team of seven people would be putting in full workdays going over the checks and devising an indexing system to identify and categorize the bolita markings and codes on each check. It was a painstaking job that took many months to complete. Eventually, Shanks and the investigators would determine that over an eighteen-month period Gulf Liquors cashed $17,659,323.58 in checks, and of that $2,252,474.55 was in checks with bolitero markings.

  At the same time, the cops continued working toward their ultimate goal, the arrest of El Padrino.

  Through the U.S. consul general in Curaçao, the cops had sworn statements from the two Dutch immigration official who had encountered Battle and Evelyn Runciman using false passports when seeking to enter that island. The “Alfredo Walled” passport used by Battle had not yet been recovered. That fact was used as probable cause to apply for and receive a search warrant for the premises of El Zapotal.

  Shanks and his team debated what to do about Evelyn, who was still back in Lima. They were trying to decide whether they should, at the same time they searched El Zapotal and executed the arrest of El Padrino, coordinate Runciman’s arrest in Peru, which would be a tricky international maneuver.

  At the very time they were pondering this decision, as sometimes happens, the cops received a gift from the heavens. Their office was notified that Evelyn Runciman had applied for a U.S. visa to enter the country to visit her “husband.” Normally, the fact that Evelyn’s marriage was bigamous in nature (Battle was still married to his original wife, Maria Josefa) and the allegation that she had already used a forged U.S. passport, her request would have been denied. But upon hearing of the application, Robert O’Bannon, the DSS agent working the Battle case, sent a request to the visa section at the U.S. embassy in Lima to approve the request.

  Evelyn Runciman would be free to waltz through customs into the United States, whereupon she would immediately be placed under surveillance.

  It would take weeks to prepare for the raid on E
l Zapotal. A huge team of cops would be simultaneously executing a search warrant and arrest warrants. The arrest warrant on Battle was for passport fraud, but this was in many ways a pretense for an equally important aspect of the operation: a comprehensive search of the premises. In the ongoing dream of bringing a RICO case against Battle and the Corporation, the raid on El Zapotal would be the cops’ own mini-version of the Bay of Pigs invasion, only they were hoping theirs might be more successful.

  IF AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT WERE TO EVER BRING A COMPREHENSIVE CASE against the Corporation, it would not be made solely in Miami. A unique aspect of the criminal organization that had grown up around Battle over thirty years was that it was spread across a number of jurisdictions. The financial engine of the Corporation was not located in South Florida; it was in New York City, which still—even after Battle disappeared to Peru for a couple of years—continued to generate bolita proceeds for Battle Sr., Battle Jr., Nene Marquez, Luis DeVilliers, and other aging lions of the Cuban bolita generation.

  Up until then, no prosecutorial entity in New York City had ever attempted a major case against a bolita enterprise. The case against Lalo Pons, which involved arson and second-degree murder charges, had focused on street soldiers, not on the bankers.

  For a long time, the NYPD did not view policy or numbers gambling as a serious crime. Beginning in the 1970s, throughout the 1980s, and into the 1990s, New York City had seen one of the most sustained periods of violent crime of any American city in recent history. In 1990, there were 2,245 murders recorded in the five boroughs of New York. Many of these killings were related to the crack cocaine business. Armed robberies and other violent crimes were also at all-time highs. Bolita, viewed mostly as a victimless crime, was small potatoes.

  In 1994, police officer Thomas Farley was assigned to a squad within the Public Morals division that dealt with street gambling. At first, when Farley heard he would be busting local numbers spots, he felt guilty about it. As a kid growing up in the neighborhood of Bayside, Queens, he had heard about people betting on the number. Usually it was little old ladies or unemployed people trying to get lucky at minimal cost. Even off-duty cops sometimes made a wager with the local numbers runner. Said Farley, “Back when I first came on the job, in 1986, if you came in with an arrest for gambling—rackets or promoting—you would get laughed out of the precinct.”

  What changed all that for Farley was when in 1994 he began doing regular “bet and bust” operations at bolita holes in a section of the city referred to as Brooklyn North. Dressed up in the uniform of a bus driver, an auto mechanic, or some other identifiably working-class profession, Farley would enter a spot, place a bet, and leave with his receipt. Sometimes he would hang around the location to see what else was going on. Two or three times a month his squad would make a bust (once on a day when Farley actually held the winning number).

  Through it all, the cop began to get a sense of the amount of money that was passing through the average bolita hole in New York. It wasn’t as much as in a crack house, or from powder cocaine or even marijuana sales, but it was a steadier stream. Using the comparison of the tortoise and the hare, bolita was the tortoise, a slower financial trickle but in the end a steadier flow and nearly as lucrative.

  On a daily basis, making bets and busts, Farley never saw the upper echelon of the organization. Names like Spanish Raymond, Isleño Dávila, and José Miguel Battle did not come up. But Farley could tell that cash left these locations on a daily basis and was transported to a counting house, or “bank.” Money from all over the city was flowing into these bolita banks. Somebody was getting that money. Somebody was controlling the organization from the top, making sure everyone in the hierarchy got his little piece of the pie.

  The case against Lalo Pons had brought home the fact that the stakes were high. Two dozen people burned to death. To Brooklyn prosecutors, it was hoped that the conviction of Pons and others would have inflicted damage on the bolita structure in New York. What Farley and his Public Morals squad learned was that by the mid-1990s, bolita was stronger than ever. And it was still controlled by the Cubans.

  In 1995, around the same time that Battle returned from Peru, an organized crime squad from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office had under investigation a faction of the Lucchese crime family. The targets of the investigation were two brothers, Victor and Benito Iadarola, who ran an illegal betting operation that involved sports betting and numbers. On a wiretap of the Iadarolas’ social club in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene, the investigators overheard a call from a bolitero who identified himself as “Alex from the Corporation.”

  Over a series of phone calls, it was established that Victor Iadarola was having a territorial dispute with the Corporation. “Everyone knows that’s been our turf since the fifties,” said Iadarola. He told Alex to shut down his spots or “we’ll send some people down there to close it for you.”

  Alex did not back down. He said to the mafioso, “You know and I know, if you send ten guys, I’ll send twenty. If you send fifty, I’ll send one hundred. If you send a hundred, I’ll send two hundred and fifty. We have you outnumbered.” And then, in a not-so-veiled reference to the arson wars, Alex said to Iadarola, “We beat you before and we’ll beat you again.”

  The Mafia wasn’t what it used to be. Over the previous ten years there had been a steady stream of major prosecutions, including a conviction of Fat Tony Salerno on racketeering charges that put him away for life. More recently, in 1992, the capo di tutti capi, John Gotti, had been convicted. Fewer and fewer Italian American males viewed the Honored Society as a viable career option.

  Victor Iadarola felt the heat, and he backed down. The Cubans overruled the Lucchese crime family, and the Corporation kept their bolita spots right where they were.

  This conversation indicated to the team of investigators listening in that as far as the numbers racket was concerned, the Corporation in New York had overtaken whatever was left of La Cosa Nostra.

  About the same time that Tom Farley and his squad were making bolita busts at the street level, the Rackets Division of the Brooklyn DA’s Office was beginning to see the bigger picture. It was estimated, conservatively, that the Corporation during the mid-1990s was bringing in half a million dollars on a weekly basis—not as much as the heyday of the 1980s, but still substantial. There were more than four hundred active bolita holes throughout the five boroughs. The concept of bolita money accumulated in New York City making its way to Miami, where it was laundered through Gulf Liquors and other outlets, was not yet on anyone’s radar, but it was only a matter of time.

  Discussions began in New York law enforcement circles about mounting a major racketeering case against the Corporation. Local cops and prosecutors had no idea that there were similar plans afoot in Miami. If prosecutors in these two jurisdictions could get their acts together, it would be the mother of all RICO cases.

  NOW THAT BATTLE WAS BACK IN MIAMI, ABRAHAM RYDZ KEPT HIS DISTANCE. NEITHER he nor Miguel Jr. had much interaction with El Padrino. They were not surprised to hear that the casino in Lima was going down the tubes. At one point, Rydz stepped in and tried to help Nene Marquez, on behalf of José Miguel, negotiate the sale of the casino to a group of investors. Rydz told Nene, “If you’re smart, you’ll take your shares and give them away to those investors, then maybe you get rid of your problems.”

  Rydz and Miguelito had created a life for themselves that was completely separate from the old Cuban bolita culture. They were living the American dream, with luxurious homes in Key Biscayne, half a block away from one another, with Maria Josefa—Miguelito’s mother—also in a home nearby. Their families were close; they had many family gatherings together. José Miguel Sr. and his new paramour, Evelyn, were persona non grata at these gatherings.

  Rydz’s daughter, Susan, was eleven years old at the time Battle Sr. returned from Peru. Though José Miguel Jr. was like an uncle to her, she never met his father. She frequently heard his name menti
oned. Her own mother once said of Battle Sr., “That man is crazy,” but young Susan had no way of knowing what that meant. Was it just a figure of speech? Or was he literally a person with mental problems?

  One time when the family dog developed a bad allergy and it became clear that the animal would have to be removed, her father said, “We’ll take him to the ranch. He’ll be in good hands there.” She later learned that “the ranch” was the home of José Miguel Jr.’s father. Susan thought to herself, How crazy can the man be if he’s kind enough to take in sick animals?

  Sometimes Susan found it unusual that her father and Miguelito were so close, like father and son. How did Battle Jr.’s own father feel about this? It wasn’t something she thought about often, because Battle Sr. was not a presence in her life. Her father treated Miguelito like the son he never had.

  It was clear to anyone who knew Abraham Rydz that he also adored his daughter. He was attentive to Susan’s needs. He ate dinner at home every night and was there to help his daughter with her homework.

  Susan knew that her father liked gambling. He took her to the racetrack, which she loved, and he also placed bets. At home he had regular poker nights with his friends; Miguelito was often in attendance. When he wasn’t at the track or playing poker, he watched sporting events on television. He usually seemed more interested in the result of the game than the game itself, because he had money riding on the outcome. It was the daughter’s impression that he won far more often than he lost.

  For Rydz and his business partner, Miguelito, life was sweet. The fact that the old man’s casino dream was fading out was of no big concern to them. In fact, it was probably a good thing for them. From what they heard, Maurilio Marquez had gone back to Venezuela. Nene Marquez, hearing rumors that he was the target of a murder conspiracy investigation, soon left the United States to live in Spain. It seemed that many of the people who had been in a position to cause problems for Rydz and Miguelito were no longer around. From everything they could tell, they were in the clear from any criminal entanglements that might endanger their highly successful business ventures. They were living the good life, and it appeared it was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.