WALL: The first time it happened I came out of my garage.
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Yes.
WALL: And my wife was with me, and she was a little in front of me, and I came out on the sidewalk to my front gate, and some folks came by in an automobile, and a fellow began shooting with a pistol—I don’t know whether it was a pistol or a revolver or what it was. But I didn’t realize anybody was shooting until the thing hit me and then, of course—
COMMITTEE MEMBER [interrupting]: Hit you in the back?
WALL: Well, it kind of—as the Negro says—it glimpsed me.
COMMITTEE MEMBER: It glimpsed you?
WALL: Then, I fell down, and somebody shot a shotgun, but of course I was down when they shot the shotgun and the buckshot didn’t hit me. Then the car drove away, and I think I was so scared I shot at it. I think maybe I had a pistol, too. And then I got in the house.
Wall’s testimony riveted the committee and startled many in the Tampa underworld, who wondered if the old man had lost his mind. Although he had not named names, like Willie Moretti in New York he was far too loose with his tongue. Most felt it was only a matter of time before Charlie Wall paid the ultimate price.
Ironically, the old man struck first. In mid-1952, Wall began making moves as if he were trying to work his way back into the bolita rackets. A number of tit-for-tat Mob murders occurred in and around Tampa that harked back to the old days of the bolita wars. A key salvo in this skirmish took place on the evening of January 2, 1953. Santo Jr. and his wife had just come out of their house in Ybor City and were in the front seat of Trafficante’s 1951 Mercury. Out of the corner of his eye, Santo saw a car approaching. Before he could even turn to look—boom!—a spray of 12-gauge buckshot pelted his arm. Another shot hit above the rear window, barely missing Trafficante and his wife. The gunmen sped away.
The attack was remarkably similar to the one Charlie Wall had described before the Kefauver Committee, right down to the buckshot and the fact that Trafficante was accompanied by his wife at the time.
Retaliation came quickly, in the Sicilian manner. Not long after the shotgun episode, Charlie Wall, the old-timer, was found by his wife in their home with his throat slit from ear to ear. Although the murder was never solved, all indicators pointed to the man with the green eyes.
The volley of gangland killings in Tampa made it a good time for Trafficante to hop on a plane to Havana. When he arrived there on a tourist visa in 1953, Lansky was in the process of straightening out the razzle-dazzle.
Trafficante did not need Lansky. Through his father, he owned an interest in the Comodoro hotel and casino, and he also had a narcotics-smuggling partnership with Amletto Battisti at the Hotel Sevilla Biltmore. Trafficante was a force in his own right. But it was also true that the momentum in Havana had shifted in favor of Lansky, who, through his connections to the Cuban government, was seen as the number one man in Havana gaming circles.
In October 1953, Trafficante purchased a controlling interest in the Sans Souci nightclub from the Pittsburgh-based duo of Sammy Mannarino and his brother, Kelly. This major transaction was most likely brokered by Lansky and perhaps even President Batista. The Sans Souci had been at the heart of the razzle scandal, and the moving aside of the Mannarino brothers was part of the cleanup.
It was a good deal for all involved. With Havana’s gambling fortunes on the cusp of a boom, the Mannarinos most likely cashed out at a good price. The stain of razzle-dazzle was purged. And Santo Trafficante was now boss at one of the city’s most prized nightclubs. He formed a company called International Amusements Corporation, which was in charge of booking entertainment at Cuba’s various resorts and casinos. It was a lucrative side business for Santo. He gathered around him a group of men he could trust: Norman Rothman, who was allowed to stay on as gambling manager at the Sans Souci; Joe Silesi, alias Joe Rivers, who would become gambling manager at the Deauville Hotel; James Longo, Trafficante’s Tampa-based bodyguard; and Joe Stassi, the former Manhattan bootlegger by way of New Jersey who served as a go-between for Trafficante, Lansky, and other important mobsters in Havana.
Traveling sometimes under the name Joe Santos, Trafficante shuttled back and forth between Havana, Tampa, and New York, where he maintained his father’s old Mafia contacts. In Havana, he lived in a fabulous upper-floor apartment in the Vedado neighborhood, at Calle 12, No. 20.
Though married, Santo kept a Cuban mistress named Rita, a former showgirl who was twenty years his junior. He told Frank Ragano, his Tampa-based lawyer who visited him, “I’ve got a wonderful wife, but everybody in Cuba has a mistress, even Batista. You’ve got to have fun in this world.”
THE CASINOS WERE in fine fettle and the Havana Mob was beginning to assert itself in the early months of 1953, but all was not right in the land of Christopher Columbus. Batista’s golpe had created a mood of unrest that would not go away. A tradition of rebellion had been reawakened, though it was difficult to gauge the actual level of resistance. Censorship was rigorously enforced on the island. The regime enacted the Law of Public Order, which had as a subset Legislative Decree 997, a law that made it a criminal act to release any statement or information against the dictatorship. Through SIM, the government maintained a network of spies and paid informants who passed along information regarding “subversive activities.” Newspapers were a common target, their offices trashed and editors threatened or imprisoned if they published anything even remotely contrary to the wishes of the government. In fact, anyone who disseminated anything perceived to be anti-Batista—pamphleteers, political activists, or rabble-rousers of any kind—was met with harassment, imprisonment, or death.
Another mollifying factor was that the entire country was occupied with the centennial anniversary of the birth of José Martí. In the years since Cuba had achieved its nominal independence, no single figure had galvanized the populace as much as the poet, journalist, exile, and mambí who died in battle at the age of forty-two. Batista himself had appropriated the image of Martí often in his career, calling him “the greatest inspiration in my life and the life of the Cuban people.” Never mind that Martí preached a doctrine of freedom and liberation that was contrary to everything Batista had come to represent. El Presidente, much like Cubans of all ideological stripes, molded Martí’s words and image to fit his needs.
On the night of January 27, a demonstration occurred that was supposed to be in honor of the Martí centennial. A huge phalanx of citizens that included university students, women’s rights groups, high school students, labor groups, and others marched through the streets of Havana in a torchlight parade. On Calle 23, in Vedado, they passed the many nightclubs, casinos, bodegas, and bars overflowing with sailors and other tourists. The Cuban people and the tourists eyed each other warily, two ships passing in the night, players in a drama that had not yet begun to reveal its true nature.
Among the marchers was a well-organized contingent led by the young lawyer-activist Fidel Castro. Marching in military formation, the group chanted, “Revolution!…Revolution!…Revolution!…” The flaming torches they carried in their hands were outfitted with large, pointed iron nails at the top to be used as lethal weapons in the event of an attack by the riot police. Because of the large number of foreign visitors and international press at the parade, the police did not attack. The event went off with no disturbances.
The island had been remarkably quiet throughout the tourist season of 1952–53. Now that the season had passed and the hot summer months were approaching, many felt that, given the level of anger and resistance in the air, some sort of organized reaction was bound to occur.
In the early-morning hours of July 26, 1953, the other shoe finally dropped.
Shots rang out at the gate of the Moncada army barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba in Oriente Province. It was an attack staged by a group of rebels disguised in Cuban Army uniforms. A corresponding attack also took place in the nearby town of Bayamo at another military barracks. Altogether, 160 rebels
took part in the assault, which had been timed to correspond with a festival that had taken place the night before in Oriente. The thinking on the part of the attackers was that the soldiers would be stretched thin and inattentive at 5:30 A.M. on the morning following the festival. The plan was for the rebels to overwhelm the soldiers and capture the barracks. It was, in other words, a blatant act of armed insurrection against the military dictatorship of Batista, led by—among others—Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raúl.
The attack went horribly wrong almost from the beginning. Although an initial group of rebels did in fact penetrate the barracks, they met strong resistance. Outside the barracks, Castro rammed a car into two soldiers armed with machine guns and tried to rally his troops. It quickly took on the quixotic appearance of a losing cause. The rebels were outnumbered by nearly ten to one, and they were poorly armed. Their entire armaments consisted of three U.S. Army rifles, six old Winchester rifles, one old machine gun, a large number of gaming rifles, small arms in the form of pistols, and some ammunition. The idea from the beginning was to overtake the barracks as quickly as possible and acquire more weapons from within, but that plan backfired when the rebels encountered fierce opposition. A volley of gunfire forced Castro and his men to retreat. Soldiers fired from the first floor of the barracks. The rebels ducked behind cars for cover. At this point, two of Castro’s men had been killed and one was mortally wounded; the army had lost three officers and sixteen soldiers—a total of nineteen fatalities. Both sides had a large number of wounded. The battle had lasted about one hour.
The second attack at Bayamo had gone even worse. There, the battle had lasted fifteen minutes: six rebels were killed.
The surviving rebels tried to escape, but a military dragnet was quickly put into place. Within hours, 80 of the original 160 rebels were captured. Others, including Castro, were able to hide out in the nearby forest before being captured days later.
It would take some time for news of the attack to become known, at least officially. Rumors spread that many of the rebels taken into custody were being systematically tortured and killed by the army. The government announced that more than sixty rebels had been killed. On August 2, the magazine Bohemia printed photographs of bodies, many of them dressed up in fresh clothing to give the appearance that they had been killed while fighting rather than by being tortured and massacred, as the magazine suggested.
At the time of the attack, Batista was at his vacation home at Varadero Beach, a tourist resort 90 miles east of Havana. Six days later, he traveled to Santiago to commiserate with the surviving soldiers. He showed no great signs of concern. The failed attack had been quelled with a minimum of military casualties. Batista denied that there had been any kind of “massacre” of captured rebels; those who had survived and were in custody would be tried in a court according to Cuban law.
It seemed as though the Moncada attack was a minor affair—at least that was how it was portrayed by the government. Bohemia magazine aside, the government was virtually the sole official disseminator of information on the island. Unless you knew someone who was directly involved in the event, there was no way of finding out exactly what had taken place. The “fog of war” generated by the dictatorship had successfully obscured the event.
To the mobsters, casino owners, and businessmen who oversaw commercial activity in Havana, the incident was little more than a distant echo. After all, the Moncada attack and its aftermath had taken place in Oriente, on the extreme far end of the island from Havana. More importantly, it had occurred in July—during the off-season. In fact, given that the attack received little mention in the U.S. press, there was a good chance that Lansky, Trafficante, and other U.S. mobsters didn’t even know it had taken place. From their home bases in New York, Miami, Tampa, and elsewhere, the mobsters had little way of knowing that the Moncada attack and the date of its occurrence—July 26—would go down in history as the opening salvo of an unprecedented revolutionary campaign.
In the months and years ahead, they would be learning more than they ever wanted to know about the man who had organized the attack, a volatile, charismatic rebel leader whom everyone would come to know by his first name: Fidel.
chapter 6
THE GHOST OF JOSÉ MARTÍ
THERE WAS LITTLE IN THE CHILDHOOD OF FIDEL CASTRO Ruz to suggest that he would one day become the bête noire of the Havana Mob. Even by his own accounts, the budding revolutionary had lived a privileged youth. Born on August 13, 1926, into a world of automobiles, fine clothes, plentiful food, and later a private-school education, he was treated with deference by others in his town. Although his father had come from Spain in 1887 as a destitute orphan, by the time Fidel was born the Castros owned a finca near Birán, a village in the fertile agricultural region of Oriente. Birán was not far from where Fulgencio Batista had been born and raised. Like Batista, the Castros lived in the shadow of the United Fruit Company. Unlike Batista, whose father cut sugarcane to eke out a meager living, Castro’s father was a latifundista, a Spanish-Cuban patriarch who made his fortune from the labor of others. As Fidel would one day tell an interviewer:
All the circumstances surrounding my life and childhood, everything I saw, would have made it logical to suppose I would develop the habits, the ideas, the sentiments natural to the social class with certain privileges and selfish motives that make it indifferent to the problems of others…I was the son of a landowner—there was a reason for me to be a reactionary. I was educated in religious schools that were attended by the sons of the rich—another reason for being reactionary. I lived in Cuba, in which all the films, publications and mass media were “made in the USA”—a third reason for being reactionary. I studied at a university in which, out of thousands of students, only thirty were anti-imperialist and I was to become one of those. When I entered the university, it was as the son of a landowner and, to make matters worse, as a political illiterate.
It is an odd quirk of history that the two most powerful forces behind the Havana Mob—Batista and Lansky—were both born into harsh poverty, while Castro was weaned by the social elite. Having contributed to the flowering of lavish hotels, casinos, and cabarets in Havana, Batista and Lansky would devote their lives to the betterment of the bourgeoisie, while Castro, the son of privilege, would become an advocate for the poor and dispossessed. It was an inverse reality that would ultimately push the Havana Mob past the point of moral credibility and help Castro to destroy everything that Lansky and his associates had hoped to accomplish in Cuba.
For Fidel, the road to revolutionary fervor was partly the consequence of a rambunctious adolescence. Although in later years Castro would craft a biography in which his privileged youth was not particularly formative, his behavior suggested otherwise. Early photographs of Fidel show a well-fed, well-groomed child dressed up to look like exactly what he was: the son of a would-be aristocrat. An armchair psychiatrist might surmise that much of Castro’s drive and ambition in his adolescence and young adulthood was a reaction against the aristocratic trappings of his youth. In school, his desire to prove himself played out in daring and even reckless behavior. He was physically assertive: hiking, swimming, and team sports were his favorite pastimes. He liked to challenge himself and others, even adults. In a rare biographical interview in 1959, he said of his grade school years in Oriente:
I spent most of my time being fresh…I remember that whenever I disagreed with something the teacher said to me, or whenever I got mad, I would swear at her and immediately leave school, running as fast as I could…One day, I had sworn at the teacher and was racing down the rear corridor. I took a leap and landed on a board from a guava-jelly box with a nail in it. As I fell, the nail stuck in my tongue. When I got home, my mother said to me: “God punished you for swearing at the teacher.” I didn’t have the slightest doubt that it was really true.
Castro was a good student, diligent and inquisitive, but he had a problem with authority. In his early adolescence, he attended a school
run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order known for its strict discipline. Many times, Castro was on the receiving end of swats and slaps from the Christian Brothers, until one day he exploded. As Fidel remembered it:
We were playing ball one day. The kid who was at the head of the line always had the best position, and I was half arguing over first place with somebody else when the priest came up to me from behind and hit me on the head. This time I turned on him, right then and there, threw a piece of bread at his head and started to hit him with my fists and bite him. I don’t think I hurt the priest much, but the daring outburst became a historic event in school.
Castro fared much better with the Jesuits. In 1941 he was accepted at Belén College, an exclusive Jesuit prep school in Havana. It was a big step, moving from the provinciality of Oriente to the urban maelstrom of Havana, but Fidel was ready. At the Catholic preparatory school, he maintained an interest in sports, excelling in basketball and baseball. He was a dynamic leader and showed great promise as an orator. Later he would credit the Jesuit priests for imbuing in him a thirst for knowledge and a sense of social justice that would change the direction of his life.
By the time he entered the University of Havana at the age of nineteen, Castro was mature for his years. He dressed conventionally in suit and tie, or a plain white guayabera, and grew a wispy, pencil-thin mustache in the Cuban style. He was politically active at a time when political activism at the university was a dangerous endeavor. He formed his own political “action group” and entered into the realm of gangsterismo. A U.S. intelligence report from around this time described Castro as “a typical example of a young Cuban of good background who, because of lack of parental education or real education, may soon become a fully fledged gangster.”
Havana Nocturne Page 13
