The Corporation

by T. J. English

  On behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, Gonzalez contacted Trish McNeill and Dennis Ring in Brooklyn. Then he flew up to New York to meet them face-to-face. The three prosecutors went out for pizza together and discussed the case.

  Said Gonzalez to McNeill and Ring, “If your office comes on board, you’re not here just to back us up. I want you to have skin in the game.”

  Speaking for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, McNeill and Ring were all for it. This was a chance to finally take down the Corporation and make it pay for decades’ worth of crimes. Their boss was pledging total cooperation.

  To make it official, Ring and McNeill were deputized as U.S. attorneys, so they could co-prosecute the case in court, if need be.

  The very next day, the Brooklyn’s DA’s Office brought on NYPD detective Tom Farley as lead investigator. Farley would be in New York what Shanks was in Miami, their ace in the bullpen. His first job was to find and interview all of the various witnesses to the arson fire-bombings fifteen years earlier, including Willie Diaz, who had long ago disappeared into WITSEC, the U.S. Marshals’ witness protection program.

  JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON IN SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, ON March 5, 1999. While he’d been away, the sale of El Zapotal had been finalized. The place was no longer his. Battle moved into a condominium in The Hammocks, a bland, affluent suburb west of Miami.

  He remained a dichotomy: on the one hand, still engaged enough in the business to be ordering hits from prison, and on the other, a sick old man.

  He still required dialysis twice a week, and in Missouri he’d been diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). His daily regimen of medications and physical therapy required a full-time caretaker. By mutual consent, Evelyn Runciman had moved on. She remained loyal to Battle, but she had gotten her green card and was living on her own and seeing other men.

  People wanted to believe that Battle was a sickly old man, but from what Dave Shanks was hearing, El Padrino was still in the game. According to Sexy Cubana, Battle took pleasure in the fact that his ultimatum of “pay up or die” to Willie Pozo and others had created a frenzy in New York, just like the old days, when the mere mention of his name evoked fear. With Luis Perez and Tony Dávila now calling the shots in New York, Battle was having to deal with a new cast of characters, and it was wasn’t always clear how the new Corporation made its payouts.

  Shanks was relieved that the Brooklyn DA’s Office was now involved. They could handle the current investigative work, which included surveillance and wiretaps on Perez, Dávila, and the ongoing activities of the Corporation. Shanks’s job was to delve into the past, especially as it related to the Casino Crillón, which, it appeared, was going to be a major component of any indictment of Battle.

  In December 1998, Shanks went to Lima for the first time. There would be many more trips after that. The bankruptcy of a venture on the magnitude of the Crillón created a kind of sinkhole, with financial institutions, government officials, and international financiers all with a vested interest in making the casino’s shady financial history disappear.

  Operating as a cop in a foreign country was complicated. Shanks had to go through the U.S. State Department, which connected him with the Regional Security Office (RSO) of the U.S. embassy in Lima. All overtures to government people in Lima or financial institutions were made by agents of the RSO known as Foreign Service Nationals, or FSNs. Two FSNs were assigned to the case and would be working with Shanks as partners throughout his time in the country.

  Shanks took along Kenny Rosario, who would serve as a translator, if needed. The first potential witness they interviewed was General Guillermo Castillo, who had served as the casino’s first director of security, until he was fired by Battle. Castillo lived at a sprawling estate outside of Lima; he met with Shanks, Rosario, and the two FSNs in full military dress, dripping with medals and armed with handguns.

  A formal man in his late seventies, Castillo described how Battle, once it emerged that he was the casino’s primary shareholder, liked to throw his weight around. He fired many people in his first few months on the scene. Castillo took pride in the fact that he had been right about Sendero Luminoso. The car bombing near the hotel, he believed, was what began the venture’s downward spiral into financial oblivion.

  On subsequent visits to Lima in 2000 and again in 2001, Shanks tracked down many other significant players, including Ferer, Chau, and Chiang, the three Peruvians who had secured the government license that first made the casino possible. They spoke only under threat of subpoena, which would have seen them extradited to the United States. They told terrifying stories of Battle threatening their lives and the lives of others. Eventually, they felt lucky to have divested themselves of the venture before it went under.

  Throughout 2001 and into 2002, Shanks tracked down many other witnesses. Many of them had left Peru, which necessitated Shanks making trips to Aruba, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, and Paris. He logged hundreds of frequent flyer miles in pursuit of interviews with, among others, Harold Marchena and Chito Quandas, former managers of the Crillón; Juan Solano Loo, the accountant who had had an affair with Effugenia Reyes; Mario Masaveu, Battle’s loyal head bodyguard; and Salvador Ramirez, the account manager from Banco Banex who had worshipped Battle, dressed like him, and adopted his gangster demeanor, until he gave El Padrino an honest picture of the casino’s prospects for survival and Battle threatened to kill him.

  Shanks took down notes and recorded statements from all of these people. He listened to tales of cash shipments being flown by body courier from Miami to Lima, and Battle threatening his partners and employees with death if they didn’t submit to his will. It was a staggering story that took the prosecution of Battle above and beyond anything Shanks had imagined before. Most of all, the cop in Shanks was excited, because he felt as though they were getting the goods. These were witnesses for the prosecution who would testify in court. The case against the Corporation—as it would play out in court—was beginning to take shape, and it was a beast.

  BACK IN MIAMI THERE HAD ALSO BEEN SOME BREAKTHROUGHS. THE INVESTIGATIVE team had grown in size, and a key piece of the puzzle fell into place when a connection was made between Maurilio Marquez, the casino, and the business operations of Battle Jr. and Rydz. From what Shanks had been hearing in Lima and from his source, Sexy Cubana, he knew that Maurilio was one of the original shareholders at the Casino Crillón. Other than that, the investigators knew little about the older Marquez brother, who up until then had lived mostly in Venezuela.

  The investigators uncovered a Suspicious Activity Report from 1985 that had been filed against Maurilio and Orestes Vidan. The two men had been detained on April 2 of that year while attempting to body carry $700,000 in cash through Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on their way to Zurich, Switzerland. They had arrived in Paris on the Air France Concorde from JFK Airport in New York the previous evening. Maurilio was eventually charged in federal court for failing to report the cash incident.

  While investigating this incident, investigators discovered that Maurilio was listed as the president and sole corporate officer of two Florida-based corporations, Stanara Company Corp. and Aztec Financial. The primary shareholders of both these companies were Battle Jr. and Rydz.

  This was the discovery that Abraham Rydz had always feared. Now that Maurilio Marquez was financially linked on paper to Battle Jr. and Rydz, the jig was up. The connection had now been made that linked Maurilio to the casino and to many of the shell companies that were at the root of the Battle Jr.–Rydz partnership. This led the investigators to subpoena the financial records of YMR Fashion Corp., Ambar Industries, Tyma Inc., and many other subsidiaries that Battle Jr. and Rydz had been using to launder money for more than a decade.

  The Corporation’s entire house of cards was about to fall. Shanks and Tony Gonzalez were now ready to make their pitch to the DOJ.

  Back at the Fort Lauderdale office of the U.S. attorney (and at nearby Il Mo
lina restaurant), Shanks, Gonzalez, and the rest of their team spent countless hours going over their strategy. One of the key decisions was deciding exactly who would be included in the indictment. Most of the names were obvious. Shanks’s wish list included El Padrino, Battle Jr., Abraham Rydz (consigliere), Nene Marquez (financial manager), Maurilio Marquez (financier), Gustavo Battle (in charge of illegal gambling machine business in Miami), Julio Acuna (hit man), Conrado Pons (hit man), Luis DeVilliers Sr. (financier, money launderer, and also operator of joker poker machines in Florida and New Jersey), Orestes Vidan (accountant), Cache Jimenez (bodyguard who perjured himself during Battle’s shotgun possession trial), Luis Perez and Tony Dávila (having taken over leadership of the Corporation in New York), Rolly Gonzalez and Orlando Cordeves (New Jersey bosses of the Corporation), and José Aluart (bodyguard and money courier to Lima). Also on the list were Evelyn Runciman and her stepfather, Valerio Cerron, for their money-laundering roles with the casino, and Vivian Rydz, the elder daughter of Abraham Rydz, who back in 1977 had once been arrested by the NYPD for running one of her father’s bolita spots.

  There were another ten names on the list of people who had been involved over the years to varying degrees. Tony Gonzalez ruled out four of them, including Conrado Pons, who was already in prison for the arsons and would be for at least another ten years.

  In early October 2003, Tony Gonzalez crafted a five-hundred-page prosecution memo, which was approximately four hundred pages longer than most prosecution memos. Included were the various counts of the indictment, including all the predicate acts, and the list of twenty-five potential indictees. The memo was sent to the hierarchy of the South Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office, and also to DOJ headquarters in Washington, where it would be reviewed by the Organized Crime Section and also U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had been appointed by President George W. Bush.

  Now it was a waiting game. The investigators allowed for the time it would take for the bosses to absorb the complexity of the case. This was a joint prosecution involving jurisdictions in two separate states, Miami and New York. It was not your usual case. Though Gonzalez had not been in the game as long as Shanks, his career had been remarkably far-reaching for a man of his age. They both knew that when you threw something new at the bureaucracy, it didn’t always respond well, and certainly not quickly. They surmised that it might take days or even weeks before they heard back from the powers that be.

  Two weeks went by, and then three weeks, and then a month. Gonzalez and Shanks were trying to determine if the delay was the result of bureaucratic inefficiency or cowardice. There wasn’t much they could do. But then an incident occurred that startled anyone from within the system who had been following the Corporation case. It seemed to evoke the worst, most violent impulses of the Corporation since the organization was first formulated in the mid-1960s, almost forty years earlier.

  MANNY ALVAREZ SR., AGE SIXTY-FIVE, AND HIS SON MANNY JR., AGE THIRTY- SEVEN, were among the last of the old-school boliteros. They weren’t as old as Battle and his generation, but they were among the generation that had inherited much of what had been created in the 1970s and 1980s. After a series of New York–area bolita indictments in the late 1990s, the Alvarezes had sought to consolidate their power under the umbrella of La Compañía.

  On the morning of November 23, Alvarez Sr. and Jr. were driving in their Cadillac, the de rigueur vehicle for boliteros since at least the early 1970s. They were on the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, Junior at the wheel and Senior in the backseat on his cell phone. Near 145th Street, the Alvarezes found themselves boxed in by a truck in front of them, another vehicle behind them, and the railing on their right side. A white van abruptly pulled up on their left side. The side door of the van flew open and two gunmen brandishing MAC-10 submachine guns cut loose with a barrage of gunfire. The bullets riddled the side of the Cadillac and lacerated the car’s occupants. Alvarez Jr. was hit in the head, and his father was hit more than twenty times. The Cadillac veered out of control and crashed into a barricade at 146th Street.

  The three cars that had taken part in the hit sped away.

  The Alvarezes survived the hit, though the injuries were catastrophic. Junior got the worst of it; he suffered brain damage from which he would never recover. The father spent a week in a coma. When he came out of it and learned what happened, he vowed vengeance against the Corporation.

  Craven acts of violence have a trajectory all their own, with residual consequences that often reverberate well beyond the intended target. In Miami, Tony Gonzalez heard about the shooting, and he was livid. From his partners in the Brooklyn DA’s Office he’d heard that La Compañía and the Corporation were at odds. Gonzalez suspected there were likely to be casualties; he indicated as much in his voluminous prosecution memo.

  Gonzalez and AUSA Jack Blakey got on the phone with the higher-ups at DOJ and let them have it. Said Gonzalez, “We have to hit the Corporation now! Or there’s going to be an old-fashioned street war. And it won’t just be boliteros getting killed. There’s going to be collateral damage. Innocent people are going to die!”

  Gonzalez’s harangue was effective. DOJ’s Organized Crime Section gave their approval. The time to execute search and arrest warrants had finally arrived.

  SUSAN RYDZ LOVED HER FATHER. IN HER YEARS GROWING UP IN KEY BISCAYNE, DOWN the street from Battle Jr. and his family, she was blissfully unaware of any criminal activity on the part of her dad or his best friend, Miguelito Battle. She knew they were well off, which she assumed was a result of her father’s success as a businessman. He often took her to the textile plant—once in the Dominican Republic—where his company made clothes sold at Arnold Stores, among other well-known retail outlets.

  By late November 2003, Abraham Rydz seemed to be home more than usual. Susan, who was in her senior year of high school, had the impression that perhaps her dad had retired from the clothing business. His ability to spend more time at home turned out to be a godsend, because in March 2003, tragedy entered the Rydz home when El Polaco’s wife, Margaret, was diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer.

  On the day that her mother received the news, Susan saw a side of her father she had never seen before. He asked his daughter to join him out on the balcony at their house, and he told her the news. “Your mother only has, at most, a few years to live.” He was on the verge of tears.

  Susan was stunned. Her mother was twenty-two years younger than her father. None of them could ever have suspected that she would die first.

  Four months later, in late November, Susan was in her bedroom, home from school, when she heard a loud ruckus from the front room of the house. She went out to see what was going on and was met by a phalanx of more than twenty federal agents and cops, with guns drawn. Before she could even process what was happening, her father was brought down the stairs by four agents who had him surrounded. Rydz was cuffed, with his head hanging low. Susan’s mother, who had begun chemotherapy treatment for her cancer, was distraught and yelling hysterically at the lawmen.

  Taking a cue from her mother, Susan also became combative with the cops, who were being aggressive.

  A local Key Biscayne cop took Susan aside and explained, “Look, your father is being arrested. The way these things go, he’ll be taken in for processing and he’ll probably be back home in a few hours. I know this is stressful, but you have to remain calm.”

  Back in the house, some of the agents were engaged in a search, going though closets and drawers. Others had taken Rydz and his wife to the dining room and sat them at a table. One of the agents said to Rydz, “Have you eaten anything?”

  Rydz shook his head.

  The agent said to Susan, “Why don’t you make your dad some breakfast. He might not get a chance to eat for a while.”

  Susan made her father some eggs and toast and placed it on the table in front of him. He said, “Thank you,” but was distracted, trying to take in the full dimensions of this nightmare that had descended
upon his peaceful home.

  The agents and cops took Rydz away. Susan was stunned. To see her father so vulnerable, to think that he was going to be scared and in distress, was more than she could handle. “What’s going on?” she demanded of her mother. “What is this all about?”

  Her mother said, “It’s not anything you need to know about.”

  Susan felt the frustration choking at her throat. Her mother had cancer and was dying; she seemed to be overwhelmed by everything that was happening. Susan’s father was the rock in her life, and now he was gone.

  Still, Susan’s mother would tell her nothing. Susan insisted on going with her to her father’s arraignment in court. Maybe there she would learn some things.

  At the federal courthouse in Miami, Susan and her mother waited. Rydz was brought into the room. They had a chance to speak briefly with him as he waited for the judge to appear. He did not say, “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.” He was nervous and worried.

  The prosecutors came into the room, and then the judge. To Susan, it was like a dream. She didn’t hear any of the names mentioned nor notice the faces. She looked only at her father. In a strange, disembodied voice, she heard the prosecutor say that Abraham Rydz, also known as El Polaco, was being charged with racketeering and conspiracy for his role in an ongoing criminal enterprise.

  Susan had no idea what any of those words meant. When she got home, she looked them up on the Internet.