Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  The fallout from the article was immediate. Two days after it appeared, President Batista announced that Cuban military intelligence (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM) was being used to arrest thirteen U.S.-born card dealers who were employees of the Sans Souci and Tropicana nightclubs. The event was reported in the New York Times: “Helmeted and bayonet-wielding Cuban troops marched into the gambling joints and ordered the [razzle-dazzle] games out. Gun [sic] in hand, they patrolled the casino entrances to keep the games banished.”

  The following day, all of the thirteen people arrested were deported to the United States. In the Times, a spokesperson for the Cuban government was quoted as saying: “The President of the Republic has given definitive instructions to the various police forces to intensify measures for foreign tourists.”

  It had been beautifully played by Batista’s “adviser on gambling reform.” Lansky did not have to kick out the mobster-sponsored card cheats and razzle artists. He let Cuban military intelligence do it for him, but only after the cheaters’ actions had been exposed in the pages of a major U.S. magazine. This way their mobster sponsors could not object. Lansky had done his job. In a matter of months, he had cleared out the deadwood and reformed gambling in Havana, become co-owner of his own successful casino, and laid the foundation for what would soon become the most storied gambling empire in history. And he did it all without ruffling anyone’s feathers.

  It was Lansky’s own version of the razzle-dazzle.

  In terms of revenue, the tourist season was a good one in Havana that year. A potential crisis had been averted. Lansky was so pleased that on May 2, 1953, he had no hesitation in finally pleading guilty to gambling charges in upstate New York. He was fined twenty-five hundred dollars and sentenced to three months in jail. The judge offered him a few days to put his affairs in order before going into prison, but he declined the offer. He wanted to do his time and have it out of the way by the time the new tourist season in Cuba rolled around.

  From the courthouse in Saratoga Springs, he drove directly to the county jail and began his sentence with two books under his arm—an English dictionary and a revised version of the King James Bible. His wife, Teddy, rented a room nearby and pledged to visit him every day of his brief incarceration.

  The lone inmate to share a cellblock with Lansky was a local man also in on gambling charges. Of Lansky, years later the man said: “I liked him. He was a gentleman; a man of his word. If he told you anything, you felt you could believe it.”

  Lansky exercised every day in jail. Upon his release on July 2—one month early on account of good behavior—he was ready and rarin’ to go.

  THE FULL-SCALE REUNIFICATION of Batista and Lansky was a watershed event. As the people of Cuba struggled to deal with a sudden and ironfisted subversion of constitutional law and democracy on the island, mobsters everywhere recognized the Batista-Lansky alliance for what it was: a call to arms. Most of the mobsters who flooded into Havana over the next several seasons would come from differing parts of the United States, but some were already embedded in Cuban society. Many businessmen, bank presidents, and political operatives on the island had been waiting for this moment for years. Among those who stepped forward to become prominent members of the Havana Mob were:

  Amadeo Barletta Barletta—A beefy, silver-haired Italo-Cubano with business links to the Mafia in Italy, Barletta was a formidable presence in Cuban business and financial circles. He was president of his own bank—Banco Atlántico—which would soon emerge as a conduit by which the American mobsters laundered money and diversified their gambling profits. Barletta had a famously shady past, which only added to his allure in Havana.

  Born in Calabria, Italy, to a wealthy family, he first moved to the Caribbean in the 1920s. He opened the first automobile dealership in the region, in the Dominican Republic. At the same time, he served as Italian consul general in the capital city of Santo Domingo.

  In May 1935, he was accused by the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo of being involved in a plot to assassinate the president. Barletta was thrown in jail, and his holdings, which included a tobacco plantation, were confiscated by the Dominican government.

  The Italian government of Benito Mussolini demanded Barletta’s release. After paying a bail of fifty thousand dollars, Barletta was set free. He fled the island and settled in nearby Cuba, where he worked as a sales representative for General Motors.

  In the early years of U.S. involvement in the Second World War, Barletta was accused by the FBI of being a double agent. He was apparently working as a spy for the U.S. government while at the same time serving as the “administrator of Mussolini’s family in the United States.” Barletta went on the lam and for the duration of the war hid out in Venezuela. When he returned to Cuba following the war, all was forgiven. He went back to work for General Motors and also became a sales agent for Cadillac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and other major U.S. auto manufacturers in Cuba. In Havana, he constructed an eleven-story triangle-shaped building on Infanta Street and the Malecón known as Ambar Motors. He financed Channel 2 on Cuban television and was a controlling partner in El Mundo, a daily newspaper. With the backing of Cuban and U.S. financial institutions, he accrued a dizzying array of businesses, many of which served as fronts for various criminal rackets in Havana, including the trafficking of narcotics and precious gems.

  Amletto Battisti y Lora—Like Amadeo Barletta, Battisti was an influential businessman in Havana who was known to work both sides of the law. As the owner of the Hotel Sevilla Biltmore—second only to the Hotel Nacional as Havana’s most prestigious tourist address—Battisti was a powerful mover and shaker in the city. His restaurant-casino atop the Hotel Sevilla was popular with political functionaries from the presidential palace, located just a few short blocks away.

  A Uruguayan of Italian ancestry who had resided in Cuba since the 1920s, Battisti was tall and lean, with a receding hairline and an impressive collection of linen suits. He presented himself as a dapper international businessman. To finance his many corporate dealings, he had his own bank, Banco de Créditos e Inversiones. Two of Battisti’s side businesses were prostitution and narcotics. He sometimes bragged about how a fresh shipment of prostitutes arrived at his hotel on a weekly basis, to be hired out as high-priced escorts. As for narcotics, Battisti’s Hotel Sevilla was the center of action in a city where cheap thrills and illicit pleasure were never more than a cab ride away.

  According to a confidential memo from an undercover U.S. narcotics agent in Havana, shipments of cocaine arrived at the hotel from Madrid on a weekly basis aboard a commercial airliner. Cocaine and marijuana were sold from the Longchamps Restaurant in the Hotel Sevilla Arcade. The retail price was somewhere between fifteen and fifty dollars a gram, depending on availability. The coca was sold in tubes, or pomos. Larger drug deals were made with a Cuban on the premises known only as “El Guano.” Harder drugs such as opium and heroin could also be purchased, but those usually involved a trip to one of the three or four nightclubs in the vicinity of the hotel.

  Rolando Masferrer—In the two decades leading up to Fulgencio Batista’s return to power, no political gangster on the island instilled fear more effectively than Masferrer. A legendary figure who began his career as a member of the Cuban Communist Party seeking to overthrow the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, he also fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Through his leadership of the notorious political club Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR), he established himself as an efficient hit man. During the heyday of gangsterismo at the University of Havana in the late 1940s, his primary rival was Fidel Castro. He twice tried to assassinate Castro, who returned the favor by sending a hit squad to kill Masferrer.

  An attractive, dashing figure with a pencil-thin mustache à la Clark Gable, Masferrer liked to wear cowboy hats and sing country-and-western songs, affectations from having lived for a time in Texas. He was known to ride around like a potentate in a convertible Cadillac
outfitted with military-issue machine guns, surrounded by bodyguards. He used gangsterism and outright murder as a form of social advancement, and by 1947 he was named to head the country’s secret police. He was a firm believer in graft and was known to have amassed a fortune by enforcing his own private “tax” on commercial establishments. Later, he got himself elected to the Cuban senate as a representative of Oriente Province. He also owned and edited a magazine, Tiempo en Cuba, in which he published scathing diatribes against his political enemies.

  Senator Masferrer liked to form alliances with other corrupt officials. Once, when he proposed a certain minister as a possible presidential candidate, a member of his own Auténtico Party objected. “But he’s a gangster,” the man said.

  “Yes, chico,” replied Masferrer, “but we’re all gangsters. What do you expect? This isn’t Europe.”

  In 1952 the gangster senator threw his weight wholeheartedly behind Batista, whom he recognized as a kindred spirit. Masferrer formed his own private army of approximately fifteen hundred men. In Oriente Province they commenced a campaign of robbing, killing, torturing, and extorting money. They called themselves Los Tigres (the Tigers) de Masferrer.

  President Batista already had the army, the dreaded SIM, and a covert squad within the National Police to repress his enemies, but with Masferrer’s Tigres he now had his own pandilla, or gang—a criminal extension of the state that was beholden to no one except Masferrer, Batista, and the rest of the Havana Mob.

  The island’s cadre of corrupt business and political figures was energized by what promised to be the opening of the floodgates in Havana. But even they knew that the criminal know-how and flow of capital would have to come from outsiders. For those who operated within the island’s nexus of commerce, politics, and corruption, this was no problem. For nearly a century, Cuba’s social elite had been intertwined with outside corporate interests, forming a ruling cartel that was a mix of U.S. industrialists, sugar barons, tourism magnates, and international financiers. President Batista made it clear where his loyalties resided by naming the retired sugar baron Marcial Facio as the head of a newly constituted Tourism Commission and placing its functions in the hands of his own handpicked team—one that included Meyer Lansky.

  The U.S. mobsters arrived in stages. Some were men who had attended the Mob conference at the Hotel Nacional back in December 1946. It had always been understood that when the day came and the money began to flow, these men would get their piece of the pie. From Cleveland came members of the old Mayfield Road Gang, with whom Lansky had formed the Molaska Corporation in the years following the repeal of Prohibition. Prominent among this group were Sam Tucker, Morris Kleinman, and Moe Dalitz, who had attended the Nacional conference and with whom Lansky would also do business in Las Vegas. Also present was Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, who represented the interests of the Chicago outfit. Tall, slender, and balding, Alo would one day be immortalized in The Godfather Part II, where he was portrayed as a sinister character named Johnny Ola.

  Mobster representatives from Buffalo, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and the five families of New York also began making regular trips to the Pearl of the Antilles. In the well-shaded cabanas poolside at the Hotel Nacional, Lansky sometimes met with these men to eat sandwiches, discuss business, and play cards. The games were usually friendly, with small stakes, mostly for kibitzing rather than competition.

  One man who was rarely seen fraternizing with Lansky poolside or anywhere else in Havana was Santo Trafficante. A green-eyed, bespectacled mafioso from Tampa, Florida, Trafficante had roots in Cuba that went back almost as far as Lansky’s. People said Trafficante looked like a bank executive, or even a mild-mannered college professor, but in Tampa’s Italian neighborhoods they knew better. A person who was told, “If you don’t do the right thing, the man with the green eyes will come see you,” often went into hiding. Santo Trafficante was not as harmless as he looked.

  Although he was a generation younger than many of the gangsters who would come to make up the Havana Mob, Trafficante’s contributions to the cause were monumental. He had been the youngest attendee of the 1946 conference at the Nacional and his contacts in Cuba were substantial. Maybe he did not have Batista in his pocket, as Lansky did, but unlike the New York Jew from the Lower East Side, Trafficante was a fluent Spanish speaker with a well-honed familiarity with Cuban culture. As the years passed and a hierarchy within the Havana Mob took shape, Trafficante would rate as the second most powerful mobster in town behind Lansky.

  And therein lay the problem: from the beginning, Trafficante’s relationship with Lansky was complicated and sometimes hostile. Jealousy, bigotry, and underworld competitiveness were all motivating factors for Santo. Lansky, after all, had usurped the patiently cultivated plans of Trafficante’s father, Santo Trafficante Sr. As far back as the 1920s, the elder, Sicilian-born Trafficante had been establishing a domain in Cuba that he intended to bequeath to his son. The Trafficantes were supposed to be the Mafia bosses of Havana, until Lansky came along and reshuffled the deck.

  Frank Ragano, who was Trafficante’s lawyer for most of his life, once asked the mafioso about Lansky. “That dirty Jew bastard,” said Santo. “If he tries to talk to you, don’t have anything to do with him. My father had some experiences with him and you can’t trust him.”

  Trafficante’s connection to Cuba began before he had ever set foot on the island. In Tampa, the largest city on Florida’s Gulf Coast (pop. 125,000 in the mid-1950s), Cubans were the dominant minority. As far back as the 1890s, the city’s population was infused by Cuban immigrants fleeing the turmoil of their native island during the War of Independence. Ybor City, a neighborhood in east Tampa that was once its own city but was later incorporated into the city of Tampa, became a center of political activity for Cuban exiles. In the restaurants and cafecitos around Ybor Square, money was raised and guns stockpiled to be shipped to the mambises, or freedom fighters, in Cuba. The city was a popular rallying stop for revolutionaries, including José Martí. In 1893, while in the city to raise money and give a speech, Martí was the victim of a failed assassination attempt. Two Spanish agents attempted to poison the Cuban renegade, but the plot was foiled. Martí saved the two Spaniards from a lynching and forgave them. In gratitude, the two men joined the revolutionary movement and died alongside Martí in the 1895 skirmish at Dos Ríos in Cuba.

  Along with the political activism in Ybor City, another favorite pastime of Tampa’s immigrant community was a simple game of chance called bolita. In Spanish, the word bolita means “little ball.” The game was played by placing a bunch of numbered balls into a sack and staging a public draw. Players bet on the number they felt would be the last to be drawn. The wagers were usually small—as little as a nickel or a dime—but everyone played, resulting in a substantial daily kitty. The payoff was guaranteed at 90 to 1.

  Bolita had been hugely popular for generations back in Cuba (it was first brought to Florida by a bolita magnate named Manuel “El Gallego” Suarez) and in Tampa the game became the foundation for an entire criminal underworld. Gang wars were waged for control of the racket, and by the 1920s the man who emerged as the overlord of bolita in Tampa was the wily mafioso Santo Trafficante Sr. The elder Trafficante used his bolita bank to underwrite his involvement in rum-running. It was through this activity that Trafficante Sr. first met Lansky and Luciano, with whom he smuggled rum and molasses from Cuba into the United States.

  With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Trafficante Sr. shifted his attention to narcotics. With his Cuban connections through the bolita racket, he traveled to Havana and began cultivating important contacts. Two men who formed a business relationship with Trafficante Sr. were Indalecio Pertierra, the influential congressman and operator of the Jockey Club inside Oriental Park Racetrack, and Senator Paco Prío, brother of the future president of Cuba.

  In 1945, Pertierra was among the founders of Aerovías Q, an airline that initially operated out of military airports.
The idea behind Aerovías Q was for the Mafia in Cuba to have its own airline and not be required to pass through local customs. According to Enrique Cirules, a Cuban author who has closely examined the roots of Mafia influence on the island:

  From early on, Aerovías Q made a weekly flight: Havana—Camagüey—Barranquilla—Bogotá. A powerful laboratory in Medellín produced “powder” destined for Santo Trafficante Sr.; but everything indicates that this intrigue involved the participation of certain figures of the Auténtico party in Camagüey who were associated with pharmaceutical laboratories or drugstores. The Camagüey contacts were an essential link in the drug trade. The cocaine did not always reach the Cuban capital in a direct manner. Rather, the shipments were transferred at the Camagüey airport.

  Trafficante Sr. was the boss, but when Charlie Luciano arrived in Havana in late 1946, things changed. Pertierra and Prío dropped Trafficante to go with the more powerful New York syndicate of Luciano and Lansky, which may explain why the Trafficantes forever after resented the Jew from New York named Lansky.

  By 1950, Papa Trafficante was in semiretirement, due in part to deteriorating health, and his son stepped forward to assume full control of the bolita business, which continued to flourish in Ybor City. In fact, business was so good that it attracted the attention of the Kefauver Committee. In December 1950 the committee held hearings in the Tampa county courthouse. The Trafficantes had somehow avoided being subpoenaed, but one person who was called to testify was their longtime rival in the bolita business, a man named Charlie Wall.

  Wall was an irascible old-timer who had survived numerous attempts by the Trafficantes to wipe him off the face of the earth. In the mid-1940s he had retired from the bolita business and moved to Miami, where he partnered with Lansky and others in a variety of rackets, including dog and horse racing. By the time Wall sat down in front of the Kefauver Committee, he was approaching seventy-one years of age and was slightly hard of hearing, but he still put on quite a show. He did not identify the Trafficantes by name, but he gave a thumbnail history of bolita in Tampa and described in detail several attempts on his life, including one would-be hit that was believed to have been engineered by Santo Jr.: