Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  “Lansky once told me,” Jaime remembered, “the worst thing that could happen to a man was that he might lose his footing or be knocked off balance. If he had a philosophy, that was it: to always maintain balance in his life and business dealings.”

  Anastasia had destabilized things in Havana, but according to Jaime, his boss was proactive—he took the necessary steps to restore balance. “The impression in my mind was that he made up his mind what needed to be done. He consulted with his associates, and together they made a decision. And whatever that decision was, it gave Lansky a sentiment of determination, and it gave him a kind of peace.”

  Decisions can be liberating, or they can signify a point of no return. Lansky’s decision was about to rock the American underworld to its core.

  chapter 11

  TROPICAL VENGEANCE

  FOR SANTO TRAFFICANTE, THE HAVANA MOB’S PROBLEMS with Albert Anastasia represented an opening of sorts. The Tampa Mob boss knew that the syndicate in Cuba—as it had come together under himself, Lansky, Batista, and others—was not an autonomous operation: decisions made on the island created a ripple effect, with repercussions for a vast array of “families” who had a vested interest in the casinos and nightclubs. Given all the factions involved, it was perhaps inevitable that developments in Cuba would create layers of intrigue, which sometimes led to jealousies and misunderstandings. Like most high-level mafiosi, Trafficante recognized that rivalries within the underworld were often an opportunity for maneuvering and power plays; they brought out a mobster’s Machiavellian spirit.

  Less than two months after Anastasia’s whirlwind visit to Havana, Trafficante caught a flight from Havana to Tampa, and then on to New York City. He traveled under the name B. Hill, an alias he frequently used. He landed at Newark airport, took a taxi into Manhattan, and checked himself into the Warwick Hotel at West 54th Street and 6th Avenue.

  A few weeks earlier, he’d written a letter to Anastasia asking him to make arrangements for some Cuban business partners of his to stay at the Warwick. “Tell Cappy to take care of these people,” wrote Santo. Cappy was the nickname for Tony Coppola, Anastasia’s bodyguard and right-hand man, whom Trafficante had entertained in Havana on numerous occasions.

  It was Trafficante’s idea to gather together a group that included the Cubans and Anastasia to discuss plans for the casino at the Havana Hilton. Also present at the meeting would be Joe Rivers, a Havana Mob veteran, who flew up to New York because he was also a close personal friend of Anastasia.

  The meeting took place in room 1009, Anastasia’s suite on the tenth floor of the Warwick. Trafficante, Rivers, and Anastasia met with a group of four Cubans, which included Robert “Chiri” Mendoza. Sleek, black-haired, with a perennial tan, Chiri Mendoza was the well-connected contractor who was building the Havana Hilton and also a likely candidate to receive the sublease to operate the hotel’s casino. A business partner of President Batista in several ventures, Mendoza was from an old and prominent Cuban family that owned the Almendares Tigers, one of the island’s most successful baseball franchises. In fact, it had been a dream of Mendoza’s that he might entice the great Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio to serve as a meeter and greeter at the new Hilton casino.

  Joe Rivers knew DiMaggio and helped set up a meeting. Out of respect, the Yankee baseball star met with this group at the Warwick Hotel. He told the men that he could not endorse liquor or gambling because of the adverse effect it would have “upon the youth of the nation.”

  After DiMaggio departed, the group reconvened at Chandler’s, a restaurant nearby in midtown Manhattan. The discussion at the restaurant was about taking control of the casino concession at the Hilton. The price for the concession—to be paid to the Hilton Company—was $1 million, plus another $2 million under the table to Batista to close the deal ($2 million at that time was equivalent to $25 million today). Trafficante was looking for Anastasia to contribute to the closing fees.

  As an underworld veteran, Anastasia would have recognized the Trafficante offer for what it was: a way to bypass Lansky. Albert knew that Santo had his own partners in Havana, Cubans who had business dealings with the Trafficante family going all the way back to the days of booze smuggling. To Anastasia, Santo was an outsider from Tampa, as opposed to Lansky, whom Albert had known since they were young hoodlums together on the Lower East Side. But the underworld was full of partnerships of convenience, men who came together out of mutual interests and the realization of a common enemy. As far as these men were concerned, Lansky had a stranglehold on Havana; by meeting at a restaurant in Manhattan to discuss how they might better their positions, they were exercising their rights as players in the game.

  What these men did not know was that there was another prominent member of the Havana Mob in town. A few days earlier, Joe Stassi, traveling under the name Joe Rogers, arrived in Manhattan and checked into the Park Sheraton Hotel, not far from the Warwick, at West 55th Street and 7th Avenue.

  As day-to-day manager of the Mob in Havana, Stassi was considered to be friendly with all factions. When everyone met at his house near the Almendares River for their regular Thursday and Friday afternoon conferences to discuss developments on the island, there was a feeling they were on neutral ground. Stassi’s tropical mansion was the closest thing the Havana Mob had to an official headquarters, and Hoboken Joe was thought to be an ideal mediator. In truth, Stassi was partial to Lansky.

  The two men had known each other since childhood; Stassi would later refer to Lansky as “the smartest crook I ever knew.” Though Stassi was Sicilian through and through, temperamentally he had more in common with his Jewish brethren from Stanton Street on the Lower East Side. As he put it to an interviewer when he was an old man: “The Jews made the Mafia. Without the Jews, the Italians wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. The Jews were the ones that done the work.”

  To members of the Havana Mob, Stassi may have been a mediator, but his reputation for doing the dirty work went back decades. Stassi had killed for the Mafia on numerous occasions. One of his first killings was when he was in his mid-twenties and he was ordered by higher-ups in the New York Mafia to murder his best friend. He shot the man in the head at close range while sitting in a car. Stassi was not happy about having killed his best friend, nor did he particularly enjoy the other murders he committed for the Mob. As the years passed and he became more prominent in the organization, Stassi no longer did the dirty work himself. Like Albert Anastasia, he became more of an organizer of murders: he put together hit teams, devised plots, and arranged the getaways.

  Stassi had the skills to pull off high-profile hits. That was part of what he did as a member of one of the world’s oldest criminal fraternities.

  Stassi was not in New York City to visit relatives or see the sights. He was in town because his professional services were required. He was in town to facilitate the long reach of the Havana Mob.

  At Chandler’s restaurant, Trafficante, Anastasia, and the Cubans broke bread and talked business. According to all, the meeting went well. Santo and Albert agreed to work out a payment arrangement regarding the Havana Hilton. Chiri Mendoza would be the point man. They all shook hands and said their good-byes.

  Two days later—on the morning of October 25—Albert Anastasia went to get a haircut and walked right into the annals of gangland history.

  HE NEVER KNEW what hit him. The fusillade of bullets came from behind—with no warning. Two assailants wearing handkerchiefs over their faces walked into the barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel, where one of the most feared mobsters in the underworld was sitting in a chair with a hot towel over his face. It was a professional hit, swift and brutal. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam—six shots, with one entering through Anastasia’s back shoulder and continuing in a downward trajectory, piercing lung, kidney, and spleen. Two shots hit him in the hand, as he raised his right arm in a vain effort to protect himself. A shot grazed the back of his neck, and another hit him in the right hip. The last bullet struck hi
m in the back of the head, shattered his skull, and lodged in the left hemisphere of his brain.

  It was 10:20 A.M. Anastasia had come to the barbershop as part of a well-worn routine. He had thick, coarse Sicilian hair; if he didn’t get a trim at least once a week, the hair went wild on him, as it had in a famous early mug shot taken when he was twenty-five years old, follicles askew, eyes cold and empty. By the time Anastasia got himself riddled with bullets at the Park Sheraton barbershop, the hair was speckled with gray and it had begun to thin a bit at the temples. To some, the fifty-five-year-old Mob boss had simply got old and careless. A younger hoodlum never would have left himself unguarded like that; Anastasia had come to believe that he was the king of the hill and therefore impregnable. He had authorized so many murders in his lifetime that he could be forgiven for believing that he was the one who meted out death in the underworld.

  According to a witness, after being hit multiple times Albert bolted forward in his chair. One account had him lunging at his own reflection in the mirror, thinking it was the gunmen. The shooters kept their cool: they were dressed in long overcoats and wore black gloves and fedoras. Their bandanas made them look like bank robbers from the Old West.

  The cacophony of gunfire and emanations of smoke from the .32-caliber Smith & Wesson and .38-caliber Colt revolver lasted less than a minute. Once Anastasia had slumped to the floor next to his barber chair, the gunmen turned to exit the same way they had come in. But the door on West 55th Street had locked behind them, so they left through another doorway, this one leading directly into the lobby of the Park Sheraton Hotel. They removed their masks and disappeared into the morning crowd without anyone realizing what had just happened.

  There were plenty of witnesses in the barbershop: four barbers, three shoeshine boys, a manicurist, and three customers. One of those customers was Vincent Squillante, a Mob associate of Albert’s, who was seated two chairs away when the shooting started. Squillante ducked behind a chair for cover. After the gunmen had taken care of business and fled, Squillante declared, “Let me out of here,” and made for the door in a rush. The other witnesses were still there when the cops arrived.

  A white sheet was thrown over Anastasia’s body on the floor. Detectives on the scene began asking questions. The witnesses were able to describe the incident in detail, but as for motive, this was a question that would occupy the imaginations of higher gods.

  The hit took place early enough in the day to make the afternoon papers: “Mobster Anastasia Murdered” screamed the New York Daily News; “Mob Hit Fells Boss of Murder Inc.” read the Daily Mirror. In the annals of Mob assassinations, this was a doozy. Not since before the Commission was formed back in the early 1930s had there been a hit of this magnitude—a top boss taken out in broad daylight. Who had the cojones to kill Albert Anastasia? Such a person would have to be insane, or connected at the highest levels.

  It didn’t take long for detectives to uncover some promising leads. At the scene of the crime, they searched Anastasia’s body and found a key for room 1009 at the nearby Warwick Hotel. They went to the hotel. They asked many probing questions. In no time the investigation into Anastasia’s murder began to take on a pungent tropical aroma; it began to smell like Cuba.

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of the Anastasia hit, Trafficante checked out of the Warwick Hotel. He flew from New York City directly to Havana’s airport, where, coincidentally, he ran into Joe Rivers, who had also arrived back in Cuba on a separate flight.

  “You hear the bad news?” Rivers asked Santo. “Albert’s dead.”

  According to Trafficante, it was the first he’d heard about the murder at the barbershop.

  In the days that followed, Trafficante’s name was mentioned often in newspaper accounts of the hit. Detectives and reporters established that Trafficante, Rivers, and a group of Cubans had met with Anastasia not long before his murder. It was hinted in the press that perhaps Anastasia had been attempting to strong-arm Trafficante and the Cubans, to muscle in on the Mob’s operations in Havana. For a time, detectives saw the two meetings at the Warwick Hotel and Chandler’s restaurant as their most promising lead. They brought in for questioning one of the attendees at the meetings—Cappy Coppola, Anastasia’s bodyguard. In particular, the cops wanted to know why Coppola was nowhere in sight on the morning his boss was murdered. Wasn’t Coppola usually there when Albert got his haircut and shave? Wasn’t it his job to make sure his boss was never left vulnerable to an attack? Coppola sealed his lips and said nothin’.

  Meanwhile, Trafficante’s attorney, Frank Ragano, saw a picture in the Tampa Tribune of Cappy Coppola being brought in for questioning by detectives in New York City. Ragano knew that Coppola and Trafficante were friends. On a couple of occasions, Ragano had traveled to New York City with Santo and they were always wined and dined there by Coppola, who seemed to revere Trafficante. That Coppola was brought in for questioning led to speculation that he and Trafficante were somehow involved with the murder of Anastasia—the theory being that Albert had made unreasonable demands regarding Cuba and got himself whacked.

  Ragano met with Trafficante in Ybor City during one of Santo’s regular shuttles back and forth between Tampa and Havana. They met at Trafficante’s favorite restaurant, the Columbia, a classic old-world Spanish joint known for its exquisite paella.

  “I suppose you’ve been reading all that nonsense about me,” Trafficante said to his lawyer.

  “Yes,” answered Ragano. “The D.A. in New York is saying some pretty serious things about you—that you were in a showdown meeting with Anastasia and that he wanted to take over your casinos in Havana.”

  With contempt in his voice, Trafficante replied, “These people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Alberto was my cumbate.”

  Cumbate was a Tampa-Sicilian variation on the word cumpari, which in traditional Sicilian meant “baptismal godfather.” Ragano was enough in touch with his Sicilian roots to know that the term was used to mean that two men had established the closest possible bond—a blood-brother relationship based on a deep sense of loyalty.

  Trafficante explained to Ragano, “I went to New York to see Anastasia to get him to invest in a casino deal I’m trying to arrange in Havana. I couldn’t swing the deal without him and wanted him in as a fifty-fifty partner…I told him the Hilton would be a gold mine.”

  As far as Ragano was concerned, Trafficante’s explanation—and especially his use of the word cumbate, which was sacred to any Sicilian male—was enough to convince him that the Anastasia murder was not something his client had engineered.

  The question remained: if Trafficante knew nothing about the murder of a man with whom he had met the previous night, then what sinister plot was in play?

  One obvious mastermind was Lansky, but Trafficante said nothing to Ragano about the Jewish Mob boss who had become both his partner and his competitor in Havana. If Santo suspected Lansky, he kept it to himself.

  In New York, Cuba, and elsewhere, Meyer Lansky was nowhere to be seen. In the days and weeks following the Anastasia murder, Meyer did what he was known for: he laid low and made himself inconspicuous. He had been nowhere near the murder scene on the day Anastasia received his final haircut. At the time, he was in Havana taking care of business. There would be no known evidence linking him to the hit. This was just the way Lansky liked it. He had been in on the decision-making process in high-profile Mob rubouts before, from Joe “The Boss” Masseria to—perhaps—his pal Benny Siegel, and undoubtedly others. Lansky’s ability to insulate himself from prosecution was legendary. He was an undeclared mobster whose criminal activities were often speculated about but rarely proved.

  Back in Havana, Lansky’s driver, Armando Jaime, found it curious that before Anastasia’s death the famous mafioso had been a primary topic of conversation between Lansky and his associates, but afterward the subject rarely came up.

  Joe Stassi returned to Havana and the weekly meetings resumed, free of rancor and distress.


  Somehow, the Anastasia problem had disappeared.

  THE MAD HATTER’S MURDER may have been verboten as a topic of discussion among Havana’s mobsters, but it quickly became the talk of the town among Cuba’s chattering classes. In the past, the subject of U.S. mafiosi operating in Havana had been largely absent from the media. Censorship in Cuba made it nearly impossible for journalists to investigate financial corruption since it was almost always linked to the government. On those occasions when Lansky, Trafficante, or other known gangsters were mentioned in the press, it was almost always as an “American businessman” or “casino operator.”

  The Anastasia murder altered the equation a bit. Since the hit seemed to have been designed for maximum exposure—or at least to deliver a message at the highest and broadest possible level—the result was a greater degree of public speculation. In Havana, the subject started popping up in society columns and casino-gambling reports. One magazine even plastered the story across its cover, under the headline, “¿Operan en nuestros cabarets gangsters americanos?”—Are American Gangsters Operating in Our Nightclubs?

  Confidencial de Cuba was a scandal sheet sold at pharmacies, markets, the airport, and newsstands in Havana and Santiago. The magazine’s slogan was “Todo lo vemos, todo lo oímos, y nada silenciamos”—Everything we see, everything we hear, and nothing left out. In truth, the magazine was little more than a collection of stories and gossip relating to Cuban high society, which inevitably involved personalities and events related to the nightclubs and casinos. Along with profiles and interviews, Confidencial often included full-page ads for the city’s various Mob-controlled cabarets.