The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Through it all, José Miguel Battle Sr. watched with a wary detachment. At times it seemed as though he was enjoying having his life laid out in such a comprehensive and dramatic fashion. A life lived in fragments, or stages, is often hard to comprehend. To have it dramatized, complete with witnesses and accumulated evidence, might seem like the Greatest Story Ever Told, particularly for someone with such a grandiose ego and personal sense of drama as El Padrino. It was, undeniably, a larger-than-life story, but even so, Battle’s health deteriorated noticeably as the trial wore on. At one point the trial shut down as he was rushed to the hospital for emergency dialysis treatment. One week later, when he returned to the courtroom, it was in a court-designated Barcalounge chair, almost like a bed with an electronic headrest. Now heavily medicated, Battle sometimes dozed off during the proceedings and began to snore in court.

  On April 27, almost two months into the trial, Blumenfeld stood before Judge Gold and said, “You Honor, my client is ready to plead guilty to certain charges.” Blumenfeld had worked out a deal with Tony Gonzalez and the prosecutors. If they agreed to drop the charges against Evelyn Runciman and Valerio Cerron, and knowing that evidence presented against him might bring down his son, he was ready to plead guilty on the RICO counts in the indictment. He did so with the full knowledge that it would bring about a sentence that guaranteed he would die in federal custody.

  Without El Padrino, the remainder of the trial was anticlimactic, though it dragged on for another four months. In the end, like most RICO cases, it resulted in guilty verdicts on many of the counts and not guiltys on some of the others. On most of the major racketeering counts, the defendants were found guilty across the board.

  At sentencing, Battle Jr. faced time ranging from five years to fifteen. Since Jr. had not been found guilty on the murder counts, he and his family were expecting a light sentence. But at the sentencing hearing, Shanks once again engendered the enmity of the Battle defense team by taking the stand and arguing strenuously for the stiffest sentence to be imposed against the man who, he said, had more than any other used the criminal actions of the Corporation to make himself rich.

  Judge Gold agreed with the prosecution. He gave Battle Jr. the maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison.

  As for Senior, given his age and declining health, it hardly mattered. But the dictates of the state concede favor to no man, and so José Miguel Battle Sr. was also, on the charges for which he had pleaded guilty, given the maximum sentence—twenty years in prison, which for him was the same as a life sentence.

  FOR SUSAN RYDZ, THE TIME OF THE CORPORATION TRIAL WAS A PERSONAL HELL NOT of her making. For one thing, ten months before the trial began, on June 5, 2005, her mother died from a brain tumor caused by the spreading of her cancer. Her mother’s death had come sooner than either she or her father had anticipated, and it threw Susan into a state of deep concern about her father. For a time, he seemed to have a lot of anger. Eventually the anger turned into concern for Susan, who, he noticed, was becoming withdrawn and perhaps overburdened by the distressing turn of events in her young life.

  Susan was stressed, but she soldiered on. In September, she began her first year at college in Boston. Occasionally she flew back to Miami to be with her father. He had moved out of their house in Key Biscayne (which had been seized by the government) into a small apartment. For a while, he was required to wear an ankle bracelet, until the trial got under way and he was moved to a separate location and kept under guard.

  One day, Susan was in court when he testified. He acknowledged her presence with a slight nod. On the one hand, Susan found it difficult to see her father on the stand being grilled by lawyers. But she also felt pride that he was doing what he had needed to do to be with his wife and daughter at the time. All they had now was each other.

  Seeing the defendants, Battle and the others, Susan felt no resentment or judgment toward these men. Now that she was learning for the first time what her father had done with them, she half admired their ingenuity and moxie, though it clearly had not ended well. Her father, Battle Sr., the others—they were exiles who had done what they needed to do to provide for their families. Susan didn’t pretend to know the ins and outs of everything that had taken place, but she knew her father was a good man, and she believed him when he told her that he had not been involved in any of the killings.

  Susan returned to school in Boston. She spoke with her dad on the phone almost every day. As the trial neared an end, Rydz often talked of his plans for the future. From the beginning, in exchange for his testimony, he’d been told he would likely be receiving a sentence of three years, and with a friendly ruling from a judge, that was likely to be house arrest with three years’ probation. “Maybe I can get them to relocate me somewhere near Boston,” he told her, “so we can be together.”

  By the time of sentencing, Susan was home from college on summer break. The day before her father was scheduled to appear in court to learn his fate, she met with him, along with her grandmother, at the small house where he now lived. Her father seemed oddly despondent, which she thought was strange given that tomorrow he’d be receiving his expected sentence of three years, with likely probation. Rydz gave his daughter a diamond ring that he always wore, and a gold chain, and told her to put it in a safe deposit box. He told Susan to take her grandmother and go to the bank.

  On her way to the bank, Susan called her father on a cell phone. “I’m coming back there, you know. Is there anything you need from the grocery store? Something I can cook for dinner?”

  “No,” he said sadly.

  Susan hung up. What’s wrong with this picture? she thought.

  What Susan didn’t know was that the sadness in her father’s voice was because he had been told the day before that the government was not going to give him the light sentence they had promised. They felt that he had reneged on his obligation to testify fully and truthfully, that he had deliberately shaded his testimony to benefit Battle Jr. Rydz’s lawyers had told him to expect the worst: fifteen years, with no probation.

  Coming back from the bank with her grandmother, Susan received an urgent call from her aunt. “Something bad happened at the house, something happened at the house.” The aunt didn’t know what it was, but the maid had called, and she was hysterical.

  Susan and the grandmother arrived back at the house just as the aunt was arriving. They entered the house. The maid, who seemed to be in shock, pointed toward the bathroom.

  On the kitchen table, Susan found a note, which she recognized as being in her father’s handwriting. It read:

  Dear Susan:

  I am sorry I am

  ending this way, but I

  am tired of living like this.

  Thank you for being my

  baby and giving me all

  the pleasures that you did

  for me and my wife.

  Thanks to my family

  for all the support they gave

  me. Have a healthy and happy life. (Papi)

  Still carrying the note, Susan went into the bathroom. There she found her father’s body slumped in the tub.

  Abraham Rydz had knelt down and put his head over the tub, so he wouldn’t make a mess. Then he put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains out.

  DAVE SHANKS WAS UNMOVED BY THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM RYDZ. IT WAS UNFORTUnate, even tragic, certainly for his daughter. But as a seasoned detective, he had seen the game played a million different ways. Rydz, along with his attorney, had negotiated a cooperation deal for himself that involved actually cooperating, and Shanks felt that he had reneged on that deal. There had to be consequences. That was how the system worked. The suicide was horrible, but that was a decision that Rydz had made, and as far as Shanks was concerned, it had no bearing on him. A few days after the verdicts had been announced at the trial, the investigator stepped down from his job with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. After three and a half decades in law enforcement, he was now a civilian. He moved
out of the Miami area and became merely an occasional visitor to the city of his birth, but memories of the Corporation case remained permanently embedded in his psyche.

  For El Padrino, life had also been reduced to a series of distant memories. Havana, Brigade 2506 and the invasion, the murders, the women—it was all gone now. He was a slave to his declining health. Initially, after pleading guilty, he had been free on a signature bond of $1 million. Given his various ailments, his mobility was severely limited. Along with kidney failure and COPD, he had developed hepatic sclerosis due to hepatitis B, which diminished his eyesight. He was permanently restricted to a wheelchair.

  Battle was awaiting an available bed at the prison medical facility at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he was scheduled to be incarcerated. Meanwhile, there was among the medical professionals tending to Battle the belief that his COPD and breathing problems required immediate specialized care. There was some discussion as to whether he could be transferred to a specialized unit at an overseas hospital. This would require some sort of “compassionate release,” where a foreign government would agree to take him in even though he was a convict.

  Jack Blumenfeld became Battle’s de facto executor. José Miguel’s brother Gustavo and son Miguelito were now behind bars, and his longtime, estranged wife, Maria, refused to deal with him directly. Blumen-feld was the only person he had left.

  By mid-2007, Battle’s health had reached a critical stage. Being transferred to an overseas hospital would be arduous, but it might be the only thing that would save his life. With his client’s consent, Blumenfeld explored options. At first, Costa Rica agreed to take in Battle, but then they changed their position, Blumenfeld was told, after objections from the U.S. State Department. Then Honduras agreed to take Battle, but they also reneged on the offer after pressure from the U.S. government. Finally, the Dominican Republic agreed to take in Battle, on the stipulation that he would be entering the D.R. by way of a third country. This way, the D.R. would not be in violation of U.S. visa requirements. Given the state of his health, it was not likely Battle would survive a long flight to a third country unless it was somewhere near the D.R.

  Asked Blumenfeld, “How about Cuba?” Given that the United States had no diplomatic relations with Cuba, Battle could be flown to and from that island nation without a visa. But would Cuba, under the guise of a compassionate release, allow José Miguel Battle Sr. to spend a night at a hospital in Havana while on his way to the D.R.?

  Blumenfeld had been representing a notorious client who was accused of being a spy for Cuba and had developed some contacts in their government. Through diplomatic circles, he checked and was told the Cuban government, in the interest of humane considerations, would allow the patient to spend a night in a Havana hospital.

  For anyone who knew Battle and his Bay of Pigs history, it was an astounding proposition. Battle had not set foot on the island of his birth since he was released from the Isle of Pines prison in 1963. For much of his life, resentment toward the government of Fidel Castro had fueled his will to live. Spending time in Cuba, even one night, was a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Castro government.

  When Blumenfeld told Battle that the Cuban government had agreed to take him in, he did so knowing the immensity of what was being proposed. These two men—lawyer and client—had had many discussions over the years about Battle’s feelings toward Castro. Blumenfeld had suspicions about José Miguel’s financial and maybe even tactical support for the anti-Castro movement in New Jersey and Miami. He knew Battle to be a hard man—resolute and stubborn on matters of principle. To his client, Blumenfeld put it bluntly: “Would you be willing to stay over in Cuba on your way to a facility in the D.R.?”

  Wheelchair-bound, partly blind, his breathing labored and sporadic, Battle said, “Better Fidel Castro than George Bush.”

  During the years of his recent incarceration and prosecution, Battle had developed a special animus toward the Bush family. The father, George H. W. Bush, had as director of the CIA relied on Cuban exiles to do many “dirty tricks” in South America and elsewhere. Many exiles believed that later, as vice president, Bush sold them out during the Iran-Contra scandal. Now, in the new century, the son had become president, and, as far as Battle was concerned, had undertaken a prosecutorial vendetta against him and everyone in his orbit. By so doing, he was a betrayer of the Cuban cause.

  Betrayal was a concept that Battle understood. At every turn, he and his generation had been subjected to cycles of betrayal by politicians, community leaders, business associates, lovers—by the very country that had taken them in as exiles. Sometimes the slights and indignities inflicted by one nemesis became overshadowed by newer and more immediate betrayers.

  Better Fidel Castro than George Bush.

  Battle agreed to the unthinkable—spending a night in Castro’s Cuba.

  As it turned out, it was not to be. U.S. authorities would not allow such a transfer to take place. Battle was moved to a private medical facility in Columbia, South Carolina, with a state-of-the-art pulmonary care center. It was there, on August 4, 2007, that he died from what was officially attributed to liver failure.

  The final indignity came when the U.S. government refused to pay for the transfer of Battle’s body from South Carolina to Florida for a burial. Blumenfeld paid the expenses out of his own pocket. The lawyer told a newspaper reporter, “He was a good friend to me, and he was a tough, fearless guy. He was a great friend to his friends and a better enemy to his enemies. He was one of a kind.”

  Battle was buried in a small plot at the Caballero Rivero Woodlawn Cemetery on SW 8th Street—Calle Ocho—in Miami’s Little Havana.

  Down the street from the cemetery, in a small park, is a monument to Brigade 2506. At the top of a stone monolith is an eternal flame that burns day and night, in honor of the men who died during the invasion.

  EPILOGUE

  IN NOVEMBER 2000, WHILE THE U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE IN MIAMI WAS JUST BEGINning to formulate the possibility of a RICO case against Battle and the Corporation, Luis Posada Carriles, age seventy-four, was once again plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro. His three partners in this scheme, who, like himself, were aging veterans of the movement, included his longtime compatriot Guillermo Novo.

  The plot involved bombing the Cuban dictator’s motorcade as he made his first appearance since 1959 at the semiannual Ibero-American Summit in Panama. But the three anti-Castro collaborators must have been slipping. Their plot was infiltrated by Cuban intelligence agents. Posada and the others were arrested in Panama City in possession of two hundred pounds of explosives. Castro held a press conference announcing the sting arrest, at which he described Posada as “a cowardly man entirely without scruples.”

  In 2004, as the arrests of Battle and other Corporation members were being conceived and executed, Posada and his cohorts were tried and convicted in a Panamanian court. At the same time that the Corporation case was making headlines in Miami, Posada’s case was also in the news. Sometimes the two stories ran alongside one another in the local press, as if they were parallel narratives of a final denouement for members of the Bay of Pigs generation.

  The difference was that Posada was seen by some in Miami as a freedom fighter. Powerful Cuban American members of Congress rallied to his cause. They wrote letters on official U.S. Congress stationery to the Panamanian president seeking the release of Posada and the others on humanitarian grounds.

  In August 2004, Posada and his fellow conspirators received a last-minute pardon by the outgoing president of Panama. The president had been lobbied hard by the Cuban American anti-Castro lobby.

  Posada triumphantly returned to Miami. To some, he was a hero. But to the Bush administration he was a thorn in the side. In the wake of 9/11, and the 2002 Patriot Act, it seemed to some as if the United States was being hypocritical. As the U.S. government put pressure on countries around the globe to turn over suspected jihadi terrorists, to play an active role in the war on te
rrorism, here was a man who had admitted in the New York Times to, among other things, playing a role in the bombing of an airplane that killed seventy-two innocent people.

  One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, as the saying goes. In what was viewed by people like José Miguel Battle Sr. and other supporters of la lucha as a blatant act of betrayal, on May 17, 2005, Posada was arrested in Miami by U.S. immigration officials. He was whisked off to an immigration facility in El Paso, Texas, and charged with violations of U.S. immigration law for having entered the country illegally by using a false passport and lying on immigration forms. Supporters in the anti-Castro movement viewed Posada as a political prisoner of the Bush administration. Others saw him as a terrorist who was being protected by elements of the American right wing that had cultivated and exploited Cuban militants since the earliest days of Operation Mongoose.

  Fidel Castro called for Posada’s deportation, so that the “scoundrel” could be tried for his crimes in a Cuban court. But there was never much danger that the Bush administration would allow that to happen—though they were actively looking for ways to make their “Posada problem” go away. It was later revealed that the U.S. ambassador to Honduras had asked the president of that country to grant political asylum to Posada. The president turned down the request, he later said in a newspaper interview, because he believed that Posada was a terrorist.