Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  In the early-morning hours of March 10, a convoy of vehicles arrived at Camp Columbia, Cuba’s military headquarters outside Havana. Batista stepped out of one car and was joined by members of a military revolutionary junta that included many top officers. To the gathered men, he said, “We must be very careful that no news gets out until we have this matter properly adjusted. Have the radio stations been taken care of?”

  Batista was informed that all the major radio stations were under military control, as were the newspapers and other sources of information. Satisfied, he gave the order for a formation of tanks and other combat vehicles to proceed to the presidential palace. Once the palace was surrounded, President Prío was given the option of vacating the office of the presidency. He fled with little resistance, first to the Mexican embassy and then into exile in Miami. Batista took over.

  The coup d’état went off without a hitch. There was only one fatality, a military officer who resisted. When the citizens of Cuba awoke that morning, they were informed via radio that Fulgencio Batista was once again their president. At 4 P.M., a manifesto to the people was issued by the new government:

  The military junta have acted to avoid the regime of blood and corruption which has destroyed institutions, created disorder and mockery in the state, aggravated by the sinister plans of the government, which intended to continue further beyond its constitutional terms, for which President Prío had placed himself in agreement with various military leaders, preparing a military golpe [coup] before the elections.

  It was a crystalline example of the “big lie” theory in action. Batista was the one who had used the military to stage a coup. He immediately set about shutting down the levers of democracy: the constitution was suspended, the upcoming elections were called off, all political parties were dissolved, and strikes by labor unions were prohibited for forty-five days by executive decree. To the public, Batista announced, “The people and I are the dictators.”

  Initially, the reaction on the part of the Cuban populace was one of stunned acquiescence. Historian Hugh Thomas described Batista’s coup as “an event comparable in the life of an individual to a nervous breakdown after years of chronic illness.” In Cuba: Pursuit of Freedom, his comprehensive political history of the island, Thomas writes:

  The prostitutes of Virtue Street knew that the substitution of Batista for Prío in the National Palace would make little difference to them…The Cuban political system, such as it was, had already been tortured to death. The accumulated follies of fifty years were bearing their rotten fruit.

  The U.S. government lined up behind its old friend Batista. A mere two weeks after he subverted Cuban democracy, the Truman administration recognized him as the legitimate president, and his government was accorded all diplomatic courtesies. The degree to which the United States was favorably disposed toward Batista’s actions was further underscored by Time magazine, which put on its cover a smiling illustration of El Presidente with the Cuban flag as a near halo, accompanied by the blithe headline “Cuba’s Batista: He Got Past Democracy’s Sentries.”

  U.S. government support for and aggrandizement of a man who had stolen the presidency by force and pissed all over the Cuban constitution was an insult that some Cubans would never forget or forgive.

  Not everyone took matters lying down. One person whose career ambitions had been directly thwarted by Batista’s brazen actions was Fidel Castro.

  As a candidate from the Ortodoxo Party, Castro had been running for congress and stood a good chance of winning when, just eighty days before the election, Batista called everything off. Three days later, in a mimeographed pamphlet that circulated in the streets of Havana, Castro offered a scathing denunciation:

  [Batista’s military coup] is not a revolution but a brutal snatching of power! They are not patriots but destroyers of freedom, usurpers, adventurers thirsty for gold and power…And you, Batista, who basely escaped for four years and, for three, engaged in useless politicking, appear now with your tardy, unsettling, and poisonous remedy, making shreds of the Constitution…Once again the military boots; once again Camp Columbia dictating decrees, removing and appointing ministers; once again the tanks roaring threateningly in our streets; once again brute force ruling over human reason…There is nothing as bitter in the world as the spectacle of a people that goes to bed free and wakes up in slavery.

  Castro’s anger was a manifestation of the frustration and helplessness that many Cubans felt at the time. There had been golpes in Cuba before, but they were usually hard-fought affairs with much bloodshed and political positioning. This one had occurred in the dead of night, more like a surreptitious rape than a murder. Castro and others who saw themselves as part of a movement for social justice in Cuba were caught off-guard. Now, in the face of Batista’s “brute force,” there seemed to be nothing they could do. Secret meetings were held, proclamations issued, and the stockpiling of guns began, but it would be months before Castro or other enemies of Batista would be able to formulate a plan of action.

  In the meantime, El Presidente held all the cards. Batista set about taking over all financial institutions in Cuba and devising a system by which he could plunder the country’s resources for his personal gain.

  Although few recognized it at the time, it was a major step forward in the evolving fortunes of the Havana Mob.

  FAR AWAY IN NEW YORK CITY, in his apartment building overlooking Central Park, Meyer Lansky most likely read about the coup in the papers and watched the television news reports with more than a passing interest. At the same time Batista had made the decision to bugger Cuba, Lansky was in the midst of one of his most fallow periods as a professional mobster. The Kefauver Committee had left him with little to show for himself. In a matter of months, all of his once-lucrative gambling casinos had been shut down. He was facing criminal charges in two states. He had been identified in the final report of the Kefauver Committee as a common gangster and all-round bad citizen. To Lansky, Batista being back in power must have seemed like the one glimmer of hope in a world gone horribly wrong.

  Over the following months the Jewish Mob boss dealt with his legal problems. He was able to get his IRS charges in Florida reduced to a three-thousand-dollar fine, but on September 10, he was formally indicted in New York State on charges of conspiracy, gambling, and forgery. The forgery charge, which had to do with someone else’s name being inserted on the liquor license at Lansky’s Arrowhead Inn casino in Saratoga Springs, was eventually thrown out. The other charges were equally weak. Moses Polakoff wanted to go to trial. “We would have won the case,” Lansky’s lawyer said years later. “But [Lansky] didn’t want it…He didn’t want to risk trial.”

  In order to avoid the publicity that would result from open legal proceedings, Meyer was willing to plead guilty and do the time, if necessary.

  Meanwhile, he kept his eye on events in Cuba and waited for Batista to call.

  chapter 5

  RAZZLE-DAZZLE

  ON AN EVENING IN APRIL 1952—WITHIN WEEKS OF Batista’s seizing power in Cuba—a Los Angeles attorney by the name of Dana C. Smith was gambling at the Sans Souci, one of Havana’s better-known nightclub-casinos. Located in the suburb of Marianao, not far from Oriental Park Racetrack, the Sans Souci was famous for its fabulous floor shows under the stars—exotic extravaganzas advertised as “authentic voodoo rituals.” Scantily clad black and mocha-skinned females danced alongside dark-skinned batá drummers, while a singer chanted in high-pitched Yoruba. To the tourists, it all came under the heading “wild jungle rhythms,” and it often left them excited and ready for anything. After the show, many in the audience flooded into the casinos, which was the case with Dana Smith, who soon found himself hunched over a gaming table with a large crowd gathered around him.

  The game Smith was playing was called cubolo, an eight-dice variation on craps that was popular with grifters and bunco artists in Havana gaming circles. Cubolo was a classic example of “razzle-dazzle,” a catchall phrase used
to describe the numerous local games that had been created to confuse and fleece the tourists. The game was nearly incomprehensible, or at least it was to Smith, but he was excitedly told by bystanders, “You can’t lose if you keep doubling your bet.” So Smith kept rolling the dice and doubling down—and he kept losing—until he’d frittered away forty-two hundred dollars (more than forty thousand in today’s terms).

  The California lawyer wrote out a check to cover the damages, but he wasn’t happy about it. He felt as though he’d been lured into the game and skinned under false pretenses. Not only that, but he later discovered that this game called cubolo was not sanctioned under Cuban law. It was classic razzle-dazzle, in which “steerers” and “shills” worked gullible tourists, leading them to the gaming tables, egging them on until they had no more money to bet, then splitting the take with the house.

  Dana Smith was not your average tourist. He was a close financial adviser of vice-presidential contender Richard M. Nixon of California, and not a man to be taken lightly.

  Within days of being scammed in Havana, Smith had called his bank, stopped payment on the check he’d written, and refused to make good on his debt.

  A loser welshing on a gambling debt was not uncommon in Havana gaming circles. Often the house would be willing to take the loss. But this was a sizable amount of money. There was also the principle involved: the Sans Souci had ripped off Smith fair and square. For years, gambling establishments in Havana had been running crooked games. Those who allowed themselves to be taken were suckers—and what would gambling be without its fair share of suckers?

  The contract for running the gaming at the Sans Souci that season was held by Norman Rothman, a well-known nightclub operator from Miami Beach. Rothman assigned the Beverly Credit Service of California to collect Dana Smith’s forty-two hundred dollars. The credit service filed suit against Smith, who in turn telephoned his friend Senator Richard Nixon. As a courtesy, Nixon wrote a letter to the U.S. State Department, asking them to look into Smith’s contention that he had been cheated by a fraudulent game of chance. The State Department contacted the U.S. embassy in Havana, which launched an investigation into claims by Smith and other American tourists that gambling in Havana was rife with scams and illegalities.

  At the same time, as part of his legal defense strategy, Smith initiated an all-out publicity campaign against Havana gambling. Numerous allegations of American tourists being swindled were made public: a young couple honeymooning in Havana had lost their life savings to the razzle-dazzle; a mother of four had lost her husband’s monthly salary. Later, these and other accusations were given added credence when Smith won his case in a California court.

  As the 1952–53 winter season approached, rumors spread throughout Havana that because of the negative publicity, the government might have to halt gambling and shut down the casinos. In Diario de la Marina, an influential daily newspaper that was pro-Batista, columnist Reinaldo Ramírez-Rosell wrote that unless Cuba wanted to be viewed as a “paradise of vice and an apse in the temple of world corruption,” immediate action was necessary. Under the headline “El Razzle-dazzle, mala publicidad”—Razzle-dazzle, bad publicity—Ramírez-Rosell called for a new strategy to clean up gambling in the casinos or the Cuban economy would suffer the consequences.

  President Batista knew a potential scandal when he saw one. Normally he would have allowed the country’s Institute of Tourism to handle the problem, but as anyone in Cuba knew, the tourism institute had been bought off by the casino operators. Batista needed to bypass his own corrupt tourism apparatus if he sincerely intended to save Havana’s casino-gambling industry from itself. Luckily, El Presidente had an ace up his sleeve—and its name was Meyer Lansky.

  The timing was perfect. Lansky was in New York licking his wounds, dealing with the fallout from the Senate crime hearings, when Batista extended the offer of a lifetime. Would Lansky be willing to come to Havana and serve as the Cuban government’s “adviser on gambling reform” for an annual retainer of twenty-five thousand dollars? The answer was: “You bet.”

  Lansky made his triumphant return to Havana in mid-1952. He rented an executive suite at the Hotel Nacional. It was no doubt tempting for the Mob boss to view his return as a prelude to the wholesale development and plunder of Cuba that he and Luciano had always dreamed about. But in truth, Lansky didn’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on the big picture. In the short term, he had work to do.

  Although Havana’s gaming industry was reaping the benefits of a vibrant postwar rise in tourism, the lack of regulation had been dangerously shortsighted. Perception was everything in the casino trade: if the public had the impression—either through firsthand experience or bad publicity—that the games in Havana were not on the up-and-up, they would look elsewhere. Countries such as the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti were all making efforts to break into the booming postwar gambling business in the Caribbean. Mexico had started offering cheap excursion packages to U.S. tourists, hoping to cut in on the quick-and-easy sun-and-sand market. Batista and Lansky knew that unless they salvaged Cuba’s reputation for providing gambling that was fair, their longtime dream of a mobster’s paradise in Havana might be irrevocably derailed.

  The problem was that in the years Fulgencio had been away from the presidency, Havana’s gaming industry had become something of a free-for-all. The city’s nightclub owners were leasing out their gaming rooms—and sometimes even individual games and tables—to just about anyone with a bankroll. Some were serious professional operators; others had less experience and less bankroll, and to give themselves an edge, they turned to razzle-dazzle, which offered quick returns on a minimal investment.

  At the Sans Souci, the razzle layout was under the control of a grifter from the States named Muscles Martin. Muscles purchased the right to run his racket at the Sans Souci from Sammy Mannarino, a Pittsburgh-based racketeer who owned a piece of the place along with a mobster from Chicago and one from Detroit. Pitching his razzle from the entrance to the casino, Muscles routinely skinned suckers for anywhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand dollars a night. This money was split fifty-fifty with the house.

  Muscles Martin’s razzle-dazzle scheme had been so successful that similar rackets sprang up at the Gran Casino Nacional, the Jockey Club, and even the casino at the Tropicana, Havana’s most fabulous entertainment venue. It was said that one of the only places in Havana where you could be guaranteed not to be hassled by razzle operators was at the “louse ring,” a private game under the grandstand at Oriental Park Racetrack. The louse ring was run by taxi drivers, waiters, laborers, and others of the lumpen proletariat, and razzle was strictly forbidden.

  As the country’s new adviser on gambling reform, it was Lansky’s job to put the kibosh on razzle-dazzle. But the razzle wasn’t his only problem. In the casinos, dealers, pit bosses, and floor managers had become sloppy. Standards were low. Blackjack dealers were allowed to deal cards not from a box—as was the practice throughout the United States and elsewhere where gambling was popular—but from a deck in their hand. Pit bosses were often nowhere to be seen. And floor managers made their rounds but had no way of knowing what was happening in different areas of the casino floor.

  Lansky made changes. He insisted that card boxes be used on all blackjack tables. Floor managers became “ladder men,” hoisted up to sit in little jockey seats, like referees at a tennis match. They were now able to survey the entire room and spot cheaters, and were also highly visible, which inspired confidence among players. The standards Lansky imposed were the same as those he had used for years in his U.S. casinos in Saratoga Springs, South Florida, and New Orleans. He knew that a well-run casino was a profitable casino and—most importantly—that the house did not need to cheat to have an edge. The odds were already overwhelmingly in favor of the house. The only reason for shoddy standards and cheating was pure, unadulterated greed.

  As for razzle-dazzle, Lansky handled this problem
with the kind of brilliance that had long made him one of America’s most successful mobsters. Knowing that the various razzle racketeers were connected to U.S. gangsters such as Pittsburgh’s Sammy Mannarino and others, he did not ride into town and immediately start putting the scam artists out of business. Mobsters were making money from razzle-dazzle. If Lansky were to immediately shut things down, it would create resentment, if not a response of outright violence. Instead, Meyer established a beachhead: he purchased a piece of the Montmartre Club, a venerable casino and show palace just blocks from the Hotel Nacional in the Vedado section of Havana. Meyer became a controlling owner of the club and took over management of the gambling tables.

  The first thing he did was import table crews from his now-defunct Greenacres Club in Florida, people who were accustomed to handling high-stakes games and high rollers. It was Lansky’s intention to set an example, to show the shady operators and scam artists in Havana that the most profitable casino in town would be the one that ran the cleanest, fairest operation.

  The wisdom of Lansky’s approach was borne out in spectacular fashion when in March 1953, near the end of his first season as Cuba’s official gambling czar, the Saturday Evening Post published an exposé on gambling in Cuba. The article was entitled “Suckers in Paradise: How Americans Lose Their Shirts in Caribbean Gambling Joints.” Written by journalist Lester Velie, the article named names, citing Sammy Mannarino and his Chicago mobster partner, Dave Yaras, as the muscle behind the Sans Souci. “Displaced American mobsters figure as partners or concessionaires in four of Havana’s five casinos,” the article stated. Lansky’s Montmartre Club was cited as the only major casino in town that did not countenance razzle-dazzle.