Although he had succeeded in murdering, lying, and litigating his way to freedom, the legal costs for Anastasia were considerable. When he got out of prison, he needed to find new sources of revenue. This may have had something to do with his focusing on Havana. Another motivating factor may have been his close relationship with Luciano. According to an FBI report, Anastasia sneaked into Italy in May 1957 and met with Luciano and Joe Adonis, another mafioso who had been deported from the United States back to Italy. Luciano had become isolated and bitter in Italy. The exploitation of Cuba had been partly his idea, but he’d been forced to read about it from afar, with nary a word from his old pal Lansky. Luciano may have egged Anastasia on by encouraging him to persist in his demands for a fair share of the Cuban profits.
Soon after his secret trip to Italy, Anastasia requested a sit-down in New York City with the leaders of the Havana Mob. The meeting took place at the Warwick Hotel, a venerable edifice from the Prohibition era on West 54th Street in midtown Manhattan. Anthony “Cappy” Coppola, Anastasia’s chauffeur and bodyguard, rented room 1009 for the occasion. According to an account printed months after the fact in the New York World-Telegram & Sun, the meeting was attended by “a half dozen American and Cuban hoods.”
“Everybody’s getting rich down there in Havana ’cept me,” Anastasia said. When it was pointed out that Albert had a piece of the recently refurbished Oriental Park Racetrack, he answered, “Yeah, but what about the casinos? That’s where the money is, and you know it.”
Lansky and the others had already devised a plan. The details had been ironed out at the regular weekly meetings at Joe Stassi’s house in Havana.
“The Hilton is yours,” Lansky told Albert.
It was a seemingly substantial offer. The Havana Hilton had been under construction for almost two years and was scheduled to open in mid-1958. It would be the largest hotel in Havana—with a 660-room capacity—and a massive casino. Giving Anastasia a sizable share would cut into everyone else’s profits, but it was worth it if it could head off a major confrontation with the Mad Hatter. The deal was agreed to by all the major players of the Havana Mob.
Anastasia seemed satisfied with the offer, but he said that he wanted to come down to Havana and see the operation for himself. He had not been to the island since December 1946, when he attended the big Mob conference at the Hotel Nacional. “The offer sounds good,” said Albert. “I’ll be down there in the next few months to check it out for myself.”
Lansky left the Warwick Hotel thinking he had averted a major crisis. It was yet another example of his ability to resolve underworld contretemps in a dignified manner, without bloodshed. Anastasia had been bought off and brought into the fold.
All was right with Meyer, except for one thing: back in Cuba, events had taken a startling downturn for his partner and benefactor El Presidente Batista. The world of the Havana Mob was in the process of being turned on its head.
THE PROBLEM FOR THE BATISTA REGIME was that it had stuck its neck way out by proclaiming—with absolute certainty—that Fidel Castro was dead. In late February, Batista was made to look like a fool when the New York Times printed the first of a three-part series in which Castro was dramatically raised from the grave. Before, the so-called Revolution had been a scattershot affair. Now, with the news that Castro was alive and well and plotting in the Sierra Maestra, it was as if the opposition had lit the fuse of a 10-ton powder keg. Nothing would ever be the same.
The manner in which the story unfolded was as dramatic as the story itself. In early February, a fifty-eight-year-old Times reporter named Herbert L. Matthews was contacted by revolutionary operatives in Havana. Matthews was not the regular Times correspondent in Cuba, but he had written about the island before and had a good understanding of the local politics. When Matthews was informed by a member of the 26th of July underground that Castro was alive, he found it hard to believe. It was arranged for Matthews to trek deep into the Sierra Maestra, where he would see for himself and also conduct the exclusive interview of a lifetime.
The meeting was Castro’s idea. In late January, he’d been hiding in his mountain camp, attempting to put together the beginnings of a communication network that would link his small band of surviving insurrectionists with revolutionary forces throughout the island. One day Castro asked a campesino who had just returned from the lowlands, “What do they say about me [in Havana]?”
“Well, actually, they say you are dead,” the man answered.
“That I’m dead?”
“That’s what they say.”
Castro knew the history of Cuba’s revolutionary struggle and understood how words could be powerful weapons. General Máximo Gómez, one of Cuba’s heroes during the War of Independence, had said, “Without a press we shall get nowhere.” Therefore, plans were made to smuggle a U.S. reporter into the mountains so that word could be spread to the world that the Revolution was still alive and kicking.
When Matthews arrived at Castro’s mountain camp early on the morning of February 17, Fidel appeared through the dense guaguasí trees and underbrush like a spectral vision. El Comandante en Jefe wore fresh army fatigues and an olive-colored cap, and he carried a rifle with a sharpshooter’s telescopic lens. “We can pick [soldiers] off at a thousand yards with these guns,” he told the reporter.
The interview lasted three hours, with Castro doing almost all the talking. Matthews was no neophyte; he’d reported on Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s forays into North Africa and covered the Spanish Civil War for the Times. But the writer was obviously dazzled by Castro. “Taking him, as one would at first, by physique and personality, this was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard,” wrote Matthews in the first of his three articles.
Castro stage-managed the interview with consummate skill. Of the twenty or so men who made up Castro’s revolutionary “army,” he had ordered some to change their fatigues and strut around the camp, giving the impression that there were more soldiers than there actually were. He told Matthews, “I will not tell you how many soldiers we have, for obvious reasons. He [Batista] works in columns of 200; we work in groups of ten to 40, and we are winning. It is a battle against time, and time is on our side.”
At the end of the interview, the two men smoked Cuban cigars together. Matthews asked Castro to sign his notepad, accompanied by the date, to prove that the two had actually met. Matthews then left the mountains and flew back to Havana, where he was staying at Amletto Battisti’s Sevilla Biltmore Hotel. Days later, he returned to New York City and filed his story, which appeared with a photograph of Castro looking much as he had when Matthews found him, complete with fatigues and telescopic rifle. The article and photograph were prominently displayed on page one.
Under Batista’s censorship laws, an individual censor was assigned to every newspaper circulated in Cuba. The censor responsible for the Times immediately ordered the article, along with Castro’s photo, to be cut by hand out of each copy before it was distributed. But in this case there was no way to stop the flow of information. Tourists and businessmen traveling from the United States to Cuba brought copies of the paper with them, and within no time Matthews’s scoop was the talk of the island.
The response by the Batista regime was another in a series of arrogant miscalculations that would eat away at the credibility of the dictatorship. Cuba’s minister of defense issued a statement that read in part:
It is the opinion of this Government and, I am sure, of the Cuban public also, that the interview and the adventures described by Correspondent Matthews can be considered as a chapter in a fantastic novel…Mr. Matthews has not interviewed the pro-Communist insurgent, Fidel Castro, and the information came from certain opposition forces.
The statement went further, implying that the photo used by the Times was a fake.
It is noted that Matthews published a photograph saying that it was Castro. It seems strange that, having had such an interview, Matth
ews did not have a photograph taken of himself with the pro-Communist insurgent in order to provide proof of what he wrote.
Arrogant miscalculation number two: Matthews did have a photo of himself and Castro in the jungle. In the photo, the two men are seated together, Castro lighting his cigar, while the correspondent smoked a cigar and jotted down notes in a notepad. The Times printed the statement of Cuba’s defense minister alongside the photograph, with a quote from Matthews: “The truth will always out, censorship or no censorship.”
The Cuban government had shot itself in the foot: its insistence that Castro was dead when the world was being informed otherwise created a “Lazarus effect.” In the eyes of the public, the mythology of Fidel Castro was born. The bearded ex-lawyer with a surviving army of fewer than twenty soldiers was now the most famous revolutionary in the Americas.
News of Castro’s survival in the mountains touched off a flurry of activity. In Oriente, bombs went off every few hours and power lines were cut. In Havana, the Directorio Revolucionario hurried to carry out an audacious plot that had been in the pipeline for months.
On the afternoon of March 13—two weeks after the last part of Matthews’s series appeared in the Times—Batista was in his second-story office at the presidential palace. He was reading a book—The Day Lincoln Was Shot—when he heard the sound of gunfire from outside and was informed that the palace was under attack. He slammed shut his book and, under armed guard, quickly made his way to a secret elevator that would take him to a higher floor.
The presidential palace was less than a block away from the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel, on the outskirts of Old Havana. A half-dozen narrow streets skirted the large stone structure with cascading concrete steps that led past marble pillars to the front door. The attackers arrived in delivery trucks and on foot. Dressed mostly in street clothes, the squad of fifty men crashed the front gate of the palace and, with pistols, machine guns, and grenades, fought their way into the building. Resistance was fierce; military guards fired back with rifles and revolvers. The shooting, sounds of shouting and explosions, and smoke from grenades engulfed the area.
At the same time rebels from the Directorio were attacking the palace, another armed group commandeered the broadcast studio of Radio Reloj, a popular radio station. This squad was led by José Antonio Echevarría, leader of the Directorio. The two attacks were coordinated to take place at approximately the same time, with the goal of assassinating the president, overthrowing the Batista government, and announcing it over the radio, all in one dramatic flourish.
It was something of a suicide mission. For one thing, Batista knew the attack was coming, though he had no idea of the precise date or time. Agents of SIM had infiltrated the Directorio. The president’s security detail had been doubled in size. When the attack came, the army was ready.
Even so, the insurgents were able to penetrate the palace and—using submachine guns and grenades—shoot and bomb their way to Batista’s second-floor office. By the time they burst into the office, he had narrowly escaped to the top floor and established a solid defense. The insurgents were forced to shoot it out with government soldiers in the marble lobby of the building. They were expecting backup from a second wave of attackers, but that group was unable to break through a perimeter of tanks and armored vehicles that had cordoned off the area once the attack began.
All in all, the attack on the palace was a bloody mess. Fifty people were killed—five soldiers and forty-five insurgents. Many more insurgents were injured or captured, and would later be tortured and used as an example by the regime.
Meanwhile, at the Radio Reloj studio, Echevarría and his crew of insurgents took over the station and announced over the airwaves: “People of Havana! The Revolution is in progress. The presidential palace has been taken by our forces and the dictator has been executed in his den!” After blowing up the station’s control panel, Echevarría then headed out into the street, where he was immediately shot dead by police.
For a time, the audacious attack on the palace and radio station created a wave of sympathy for Batista. Business and financial leaders, the mainstream press, and foreign diplomats rallied to his support, denouncing the attacks as a threat to democracy. Batista, for his part, downplayed the severity of the attacks. Meanwhile, his secret police hunted down and murdered four students who were believed to have played a role in the attack. El Presidente could claim a major victory in his battle against political agitation, but his assessment of the larger picture on the island remained as delusional as ever.
One week after the attack, at the inauguration ceremony for a sparkling new twenty-five-million-dollar Shell Oil refinery in Cuba, Batista answered a question from a reporter by stating flat out: “There are no rebels in the Sierra Maestra.” It was an astounding statement given what was now known about Castro and his burgeoning 26th of July Movement.
The Havana Mob were willing to accept Batista’s assessment, though they did hedge their bets by developing a strategy of their own for winning over the Cuban public. Just as mobsters like Luciano, Trafficante, and Lansky had sought to endear themselves to key associates in Havana by showering their wives with cars, mink coats, and diamond bracelets, the Mob attempted to win over the populace through elaborate giveaways. At the Tropicana, where the gambling salon was now advertised in Diario de la Marina and the Havana Post as “Lefty Clark’s Casino,” a bingo game was instituted. Among the top prizes to be won were six brand-new 1957-model automobiles, a bonanza cosponsored by Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Mercedes-Benz, Pontiac, and Chevrolet.
In a country where the average monthly income was twelve dollars, giving away high-end American cars was a level of extravagance that rivaled the waning days of the Roman Empire.
If Batista could not capture the hearts and minds of the Cuban people, the Havana Mob and its corporate affiliates were prepared to do it their way. Giving away sleek new capitalist machines was a drop in the bucket for Lansky & Co., who never lost sight of the big prize: a gambling and racketeering empire that could not be denied, no matter how many bombs were set off or bullets fired by the expanding circle of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary compañeros.
chapter 10
CARNIVAL OF FLESH
SANTO TRAFFICANTE KNEW A GOOD THING WHEN HE SAW one. Although he was not the top man in Havana, as he was back in Tampa, he was sitting pretty in the spring of 1957. His new hotel—the Deauville—had opened along the Malecón. Built at a cost of $2.3 million, with a 140-room capacity, the 14-story hotel was nowhere near as lavish as Lansky’s highly anticipated Riviera, but it was nonetheless a solid moneymaker for Santo. Along with bolita banker Evaristo Garcia Jr., he was a major investor in the hotel, and he owned the gambling concession outright. Havana Mob veteran Joe Rivers managed the casino for Trafficante.
Overall, business was going so well for the Mafia don from Tampa that on March 12 he applied for permanent residency in Cuba, the better to oversee his various assets. Included among those assets was not only the Deauville but also the Comodoro hotel and casino, the Sans Souci nightclub and casino, International Amusements, Inc., and a piece of the gambling concession at the Tropicana. He also had another major hotel-nightclub-casino—the Capri—scheduled to open within the next six months.
To run his many business enterprises in Cuba, Trafficante assembled a crew within the Havana Mob that was primarily loyal to him, not Lansky. His most visible partner was Jimmy Longo, his longtime bodyguard and driver from the Tampa Mob. A key associate at the Deauville was John Martino, a Miami-based former loanshark and nightclub operator. Martino was also a specialist in electronic gaming machines, designed to increase the profits of casino owners. Another favored member of the crew was Ralph Reina, a former bolita partner of Trafficante’s father who ran the Hotel Comodoro. Later, Reina would become Trafficante’s bagman, with the all-important job of transporting suitcases filled with cash from the Havana casinos directly into Santo’s private bank accounts in Florida.
In
Cuba, Trafficante was legendary for not only taking good care of his crew but also extending that hospitality to their family and friends. He would sometimes set them up in suites, take them out to dinner, or get them prized seats for floor shows at the Sans Souci or Tropicana. Tampa born and raised Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who would later acquire fame as boxing champion Mohammad Ali’s cornerman, knew of Santo from his days in Ybor City. As a thirty-year-old doctor, Pacheco visited Havana, where Trafficante presided over his domain like a Sicilian prince. Remembered Pacheco: “If he knew you were from Tampa, everything you wanted in Cuba was on Santo.”
With Santo’s obsequious following and seemingly autonomous financial base, speculation circulated within the Havana Mob about his potential side deals. The most heated topic of discussion within criminal circles—and also within the halls of U.S. law enforcement—was whether or not the Tampa Mob boss was using Cuba as a transshipment point for the smuggling of narcotics into the United States.
Havana Nocturne Page 22
