The Corporation

by T. J. English

  On the flight from Miami to New York, Shanks thought about how far he had come, and how far he still had to go, in his pursuit of the Corporation. To go after a RICO indictment required the approval of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Shanks and perhaps Gonzalez would have to make their pitch to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. From experience, Shanks knew how tough Reno could be. She had been the nemesis of every lazy cop in South Florida during her tenure there, and now she was the top law enforcement official in the federal government. To Shanks, it seemed only right that he would have to pass muster with Reno to make his case against the Corporation. He had a lot of work to do.

  KALAFUS HAD A TENDENCY TO FREE ASSOCIATE, THROWING OUT CUBAN SURNAMES and nicknames of people Shanks had never heard of. He also had a tendency to mix in gossip with his cold, hard facts. There was, for instance, the rumor that Battle had been given a pardon by President Jimmy Carter. The rumor was intriguing. Shanks recalled the photo they had confiscated during the raid on El Zapotal of Battle together with Carter at some sort of formal campaign event, but there was no evidence of a pardon or even that the men knew each other beyond the single photograph of them at a public event.

  The interviews with Kalafus took place at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Manhattan. For Shanks, the first order of business was to play for the detective two audiotapes that were confiscated at El Zapotal during the raid. The tapes were not from phone calls. They seemed to be of two separate police interrogations done by Kalafus.

  The tapes were lengthy. Kalafus listened to portions of both and confirmed that these were taped interviews that he and Steven Mc-Cabe, deputy chief of investigations for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey, had done with Charley Hernandez back in December 1976. At the time, Charley was cooperating with the authorities, and his revelations on these tapes would lead to the indictment of Battle and Chino Acuna for the murder of Ernestico Torres.

  The question was, how on earth had these tapes fallen into the possession of José Miguel Battle?

  McCabe had passed away in February 1997, so there was no way of knowing his role. As for Kalafus, he claimed to have no idea how the tapes got into the Battle’s hands.

  For ninety minutes that morning, and then again in the afternoon for ninety minutes, Kalafus regaled Shanks with tales of the Corporation.

  Shanks was mesmerized; he could have listened to Kalafus all day long, but he had other important interviews to conduct while in the New York area. One he had hoped to do was with Fish Cafaro. Though Cafaro had been relocated somewhere in the United States under a new identity, Shanks assumed he could arrange for the U.S. Marshals to fly him to New York City for an interview. But Cafaro, it turned out, had a phobia about flying. To interview the former mafioso, Shanks had to fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Cafaro now lived. Shanks arranged to be met there by Kenny Rosario, his Miami police partner. They interviewed Cafaro at the Holiday Inn in Charlotte, where the detectives had booked a room.

  Once Cafaro started talking, he couldn’t be stopped. He had spent nearly a lifetime in the Mafia and had many stories to tell. Though the detectives were fascinated by his many anecdotes, they tried to restrict him to his experiences with the Cubans, and particularly Battle.

  After finishing with Cafaro, Shanks headed back to New York to meet with Robert Hopkins.

  The Hopkins interviews was fascinating to Shanks. For one thing, they met at Hopkins’s apartment at Trump Tower, which had only recently opened as a luxury condominium in midtown Manhattan. Shanks didn’t know it at the time, but Hopkins co-owned the pad with Petey DiPalermo, a member of the Lucchese crime family and Hopkins’s longtime friend and associate.

  Hopkins had recently been arrested on gambling and drug charges. He was interested in cooperating with the government under a “queen for a day” letter, which would give him immunity for whatever he might reveal.

  Hopkins did not look or sound like a gangster. To Shanks, he looked a little like Elvis Presley, which was even more interesting after Hopkins explained that when he wasn’t being a criminal, he was a nightclub singer who had some Elvis songs in his repertoire.

  Like Cafaro, Hopkins had an amazing story to tell. Among the many details that caught Shanks’s undivided attention was that Hopkins said he was among the initial prospective investors in the Casino Crillón in Lima. In 1993, Luis DeVilliers had approached Hopkins to become an investor. Hopkins even flew down to Lima to check out the location at the Hotel Crillón. He had traveled to Lima with none other than Roberto Parsons.

  Hopkins suspected that Parsons had played a role in the murder of Omar Broche, among others, but he didn’t know the details. He had been friendly with Broche and even staked him some money to restart his bolita operation in New York. This angered Battle, who ordered Broche’s murder, a job that was undertaken by Parsons.

  As was sometimes the case in the underworld, the man who eliminates your partner becomes your new partner, whether you like it or not. DeVilliers, who was thankful that he had not been murdered along with Broche, introduced Parsons, the assassin, to Hopkins, the Irishman. At some point, DeVilliers made the decision to go with Battle as sole investor in the Crillón and cut Hopkins and Parsons out of the deal.

  Shanks listened to all this, and recorded it, with a sense of wonder. The various strands of the Corporation story—the seemingly endless cast of characters—were beginning to come together in his mind. Details were beginning to fit together like pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

  On the flight back to Miami, Shanks tried to bend his mind around all that he had learned. From years of investigating Battle and the Corporation, he thought he knew a lot. Clearly, he had a lot more to learn.

  BEFORE SHANKS AND TONY GONZALEZ COULD DEAL WITH THE CORPORATION, THEY had to deal with the criminal prosecution of Raul Fernandez and Luis Bordon. Both had been indicted, separately, along with multiple co-defendants, on illegal gambling and money-laundering charges. These were massive cases involving years of investigation, and the two trials were likely to last many months.

  Some thought had been given to folding these prosecutions into a RICO case against Battle, but it was quickly determined that that would not work. These cases were too large in their own right and needed to be tried separately. It was a daunting task that was simplified somewhat in May 1998, when Raul Fernandez died as a result of complications from diabetes before going to trial. The other defendants accepted plea deals. That left only the Bordon trial for the prosecutors.

  It was a massive undertaking that stretched on for seven months. Though many defendants chose to plead out (between the Fernandez and Bordon indictments, forty-four of forty-six defendants accepted plea deals), the trial involved a staggering accumulation of evidence. Luis Borden and his two sons stood accused of laundering more than $41 million in checks through Gulf Liquors over a four-year period.

  At the trial, two pallets stacked six feet high with 250,000 individual checks were wheeled into the courtroom. Both Shanks and Kenny Rosario testified at length about surveillances and wiretaps.

  Like Battle, Luis Bordon was a Bay of Pigs veteran, a member of Brigade 2506, and there was some concern among the prosecutors that jurors could be swayed or influenced by his personal history. In the end, that was not the case. Bordon and his two sons were found guilty on illegal gambling and money-laundering charges. Later, at a separate forfeiture hearing, the government seized $5.25 million in assets from the Bordons. Luis Bordon was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the sons received sentences of nine years each.

  A money-laundering conviction may not have been as “sexy” as a case with multiple homicides or stacks of brick cocaine seized by agents, but because of the amount of money that was recovered, the Bordon case was a major feather in the caps of Shanks and Gonzalez. Their bargaining position within the institutional hierarchy of the system was greatly enhanced. It was the perfect time for them to make their pitch to the DOJ regarding a RICO case against the
Corporation.

  Shanks would be the lead man to make the pitch. He had become the inheritor of all institutional knowledge accumulated over the years about Battle, and he would be the one responsible for accumulating the evidence and helping to craft a theory of prosecution.

  Battle himself may have suspected as much. Though he had been transferred to a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was receiving dialysis treatments on a weekly basis, he must have known that there were further indictments waiting for him on the other side of his sentence for gun possession. Though he was not healthy, he was not the kind of man to take matters lying down.

  IN NOVEMBER 1998, WITH BATTLE FOUR MONTHS AWAY FROM AN EARLY RELEASE (based on time off for good behavior) Dave Shanks arrived home one afternoon at his house in Key Largo. Though Shanks was currently renting out the house and living in a separate home three blocks away, he still came by to pick up his mail at an old-style roadside mailbox. On this afternoon, as he approached the mailbox and prepared to open it, he heard the unmistakable rattle of an eastern diamondback rattlesnake.

  Shanks pulled his hand away from the box, then stepped back, looking around the base of the wooden mailbox post and in the nearby crabgrass for the source of the rattling sound. Nothing. Again, he reached cautiously toward the lid of the mailbox. Again, loud rattling. Then he heard something moving inside the box.

  Shanks went back to his police vehicle and retrieved a flashlight. He came back to the mailbox and tapped on the side of it with his flashlight. The hissing became more vehement and pronounced. Gingerly, Shanks reached over and opened the box less than an inch. He flashed the light inside. What he saw was a coiled rattlesnake, ready to strike, its tongue flicking in and out.

  Shanks closed the box. He unholstered his department-issue 9mm, took aim at the mailbox, and unloaded his weapon. The sound of rapid gunfire hitting metal resonated loudly and echoed down the street. When the weapon was empty, Shanks put a fresh clip into the gun. He listened carefully and heard rumbling and thumping inside the box, probably the sound of the snake going through its death throes. But the detective was taking no chances. He raised his weapon and fired seven more rounds into the now tattered mailbox.

  With his ears still ringing from the gunshots, Shanks opened the box and saw the dead snake.

  He went back to his car and sat for a while, thinking. Someone had planted a killer rattlesnake in his mailbox. Was it the Bordons? Was it Battle? Or was it someone else among the dozens of other boliteros he had played a role in putting away in recent years?

  And how did they get his address? In the state of Florida, police officers are allowed to have unlisted addresses, with their actual residence not even listed on their driver’s license. The only way someone could know his address was if they had access to his police file. Who was savvy enough to gain access to that sort of information? There was only one answer: Battle.

  There were rules for discharging a firearm. Shanks was supposed to call the local police department and file a report. His supervisor would be notified, and someone from Internal Affairs would investigate.

  Over the years, Shanks had lost faith in the ability of the system to safeguard information. If Battle was behind this, bringing in other cops was not wise.

  He got out of the car and carefully picked up fourteen spent bullet casings from around the mailbox. Then he went home, got some tools, an empty shoebox, and returned to the mailbox. Carefully, he put the carcass of the dead snake into the shoebox. Then, using the tools, he removed the bullet-riddled mailbox and post and threw them into the trunk of his car.

  Later, at home, he cut the rattle off the snake and discarded the dead reptile. He thought for a while about what might be the best way to handle the situation. Eventually, he decided to put the snake’s rattle into an envelope and mail it to El Zapotal. Shanks knew that Battle was away in prison, and he wasn’t even sure if new owners had moved into the house or not. But he was reasonably certain that if he addressed the envelope to José Miguel Battle, he would at least hear about it.

  Shanks wanted to let the old man know that he could not be intimidated.

  Go ahead, put a lethal poisonous snake in my mailbox. Resort to cheap gangster tactics.

  It would only strengthen his resolve.

  21

  CÓMO FUE/HOW IT WAS

  IN THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN AREA AT THE DAWN OF THE NEW CENTURY, the bolita business was alive and well. Though there were maybe half as many bolita holes as there had been fifteen years earlier, there were also fewer boliteros, so the percentage taken in by each banker was larger, making it a viable enterprise.

  Miguelito Battle had followed in the footsteps of Abraham Rydz and divested himself from the business. He no longer collected a percentage. That left El Padrino, Battle Sr., whose percentage had remained at 17 percent. While Battle was away in Peru, he had accepted things the way they were. Now that he was back and facing legal expenses, he wanted more. He put the word out that he was now demanding 30 percent of the cut.

  It was only right. The reputation of the Corporation, which was still the preeminent brand in the bolita business, rested on his shoulders. “I want what I deserve,” was how Battle phrased it.

  Willie Pozo, the current operational manager of the Corporation, heard all about this on a trip to Miami. Pozo met with Rydz, who was still a friend from the old days even though Rydz was out of the business. Rydz told Pozo, “Willie, be careful. I hear José Miguel wants to reclaim the business. He wants to force you out.”

  “What do you mean, force me out?” asked Pozo.

  Said Rydz, “There’s a contract out on your life.”

  Pozo returned to New York. He called for a meeting with Luis Perez, his number two man. “I gotta go into hiding for while,” he told Perez. “The Old Man is trying to have me killed. I want you to take over.”

  To Perez, this was not the greatest of developments. For one thing, the business had not been going well lately. The Corporation had shrunk from three central offices to one. Regional offices had gone from ten to four or five. On paper, the cut was the same among the various bankers, but the totals were getting smaller and smaller every day.

  Willie Pozo went into hiding, and Luis Perez took over, but it seemed to him that everyone was fighting over a diminishing pie.

  The irony was that out on the street the name of the Corporation was bigger than ever. Wherever bolita was happening, the Corporation dominated the business.

  Investigators in New York had been aware of this for years, at least since Detective Tom Farley first began doing bet-and-bust raids in the mid-1990s. More recently, the Brooklyn DA’s Office had become involved in an investigation that suggested there was a new bolita hierarchy in New York.

  In 1997, out of the blue, La Compañía reemerged as a rival to the Corporation. That particular organization had been dormant for nearly a decade, but they were back, especially in Brooklyn. The leaders of this new version of La Compañía were Manny Alvarez Sr. and his son Manny Jr., who had been around since the original formation of La Compañía.

  In July 1999, Alvarez Sr. and Jr. were arrested, along with thirty-seven others, in a joint FBI-NYPD case aimed at the hierarchy of La Compañía. The investigation resulted in the seizure of $5.8 million, including $982,000 in cash from the New Jersey home of Alvarez Sr. and $262,000 from the home of Alvarez Jr. Both men posted bond and were back out on the street, but the arrests had weakened La Compañía. As in the old days, the Corporation, in apparent violation of the two-block rule, began opening bolita holes near locations where La Compañía once operated. This ignited a war between the two Cuban-controlled organizations. It wasn’t quite as violent as the arson wars of the 1980s, but in recent months there had been at least three homicides in New York that were believed to be connected to this new outbreak of the bolita wars.

  These killings caught the attention of a young assistant DA in Brooklyn named Dennis Ring. Born and raised in Queens, the son of an electrical work
er for Con Edison, Ring had only recently become a member of the Rackets Division under supervisor Trish McNeill. They became interested in the murders and also the very real possibility that the Cubans were working in partnership with the Lucchese crime family, most notably with the Iadarola brothers, Victor and Benito. On a wiretap of the brothers, they intercepted phone calls with a bolita banker referred to as Cuban Tony. Eventually, the investigators determined that Cuban Tony was Tony Dávila.

  The name Dávila represented bolita royalty in New York. Isleño Dávila had been a legend before his disappearance back in the 1980s. His brother Tony had remained and was now functioning as a co-boss of the Corporation with Luis Perez.

  With the introduction of Dávila on the wiretaps, Ring and McNeill targeted the Corporation. As a lead investigator on the case, they brought in Tom Farley, who from his years with the Public Morals gambling squad had acquired knowledge about the inner workings of the bolita business at the street level.

  The prosecutors were not yet thinking of their case as a federal RICO prosecution. At the time, Farley, Ring, and McNeill didn’t know much about Battle or the historic roots of the Corporation. Battle may have been a legendary figure in Cuban bolita circles, and the name the Corporation had been around for decades, but as of yet the historical context of the operation didn’t have much bearing on the specific gambling crimes that the Rackets division was investigating.

  That all changed when Dave Shanks came to town. While making the rounds, the Miami cop had learned that the Brooklyn DA’s Office was mounting a bolita case that involved the Corporation. When Shanks returned to Miami, he said to AUSA Tony Gonzalez, “Hey, why don’t we see what Brooklyn is up to? Maybe there’s some way we could incorporate their case into ours.”

  Gonzalez immediately recognized the value of having New York prosecutors involved. Tracking down potential witnesses for, say, the arson crimes of the 1980s would be much cheaper and more practical for a team of investigators from New York than from Miami. In fact, a co-prosecution would make it possible for the two jurisdictions to split the workload down the middle, with Brooklyn prosecutors handling the New York and New Jersey crimes, including those involving the more recent configuration of the Corporation. Miami would handle the financial crimes related to the businesses of Battle Jr. and Rydz, and also, most significant, the casino in Peru, which constituted one big money-laundering conspiracy.