Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  In the first issue to appear after the Anastasia hit, the magazine devoted numerous pages to the event. On the cover was a picture of Anastasia’s prostrate body on the barbershop floor, alongside a photo of Trafficante with the caption “Santo Traficanti o Traficante,” a play on Santo’s name, which means “smuggler” in Spanish. There was also a photo of Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, with a caption suggesting that he might be arriving in Havana to “avenge the death of his brother.” Inside the magazine was a two-page spread with more photos and more provocative questions. The coverage was so inflammatory that Amletto Battisti felt compelled to take out an ad in the magazine, proclaiming, “Amletto Battisti never has, does not, nor will he ever, at any time, have business relations with gangsters.”

  The Anastasia hit stirred things up in Cuba, bringing an unprecedented level of awareness to the public of the mobsters in their midst, but this was nothing compared to the reaction within the Mob itself. The attention garnered by the killing brought about something that had not taken place in eleven years—a major sit-down by Mafia bosses from around the United States.

  In Apalachin, a small town in upstate New York some 200 miles from Manhattan, sixty mobsters arrived on the morning of November 14—just two and a half weeks after the barbershop murder. The conference was to take place at the home of Joseph Barbara, a soldier in the upstate New York Magaddino crime family. Many Mafia heavyweights were in attendance, including Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, and Sam Giancana from Chicago. Also there was Santo Trafficante.

  Trafficante had departed from Tampa under the alias B. Klein, switched planes in Newark, New Jersey, and landed in the town of Binghamton in upstate New York. He was then picked up and driven to Barbara’s 58-acre estate in nearby Apalachin. There, he joined a group that included bosses and capos from New York to California.

  The topics of discussion at the meeting were varied, but tops on everyone’s list were the Anastasia murder and financial developments in Cuba.

  The fact that Meyer Lansky was not in attendance spoke volumes. In recent months, a rift had developed between the Frank Costello and Vito Genovese factions of the Mob in New York. Ever since the Havana conference of 1946, Genovese had been vying to establish himself as capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses. Costello, who had been viewed by many as the top man ever since Luciano was deported to Italy, was Genovese’s primary competition. Five months before the gathering at Apalachin, a Mob-hired assassin had taken a shot at Costello as he arrived home at his Manhattan apartment on Central Park West. The bullet grazed Costello’s head, wounding him slightly.

  Lansky was strongly identified with Costello. Along with Luciano and Ben Siegel, these four men were largely responsible for having created the Commission—the governing body for the Mob as it was constituted in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Lansky put out the word that he was too sick to attend the Apalachin meeting. Costello was also a no-show. The meeting was looking a lot like a gathering of mobsters who were partial to Vito Genovese.

  Trafficante’s presence at this gathering suggested once again that he was staking out a position contrary to Lansky. The two men did not like each other, though they were inextricably bound together through their mutual interests in Cuba.

  The Apalachin meeting never got off the ground. As the dozens of mobsters arrived by car in the tiny hamlet, a local state trooper became suspicious. He set up a roadblock and then approached the house. The mafiosi panicked. Nearly all of them had police records; some were out on parole, the terms of which specified that they were not to consort with known felons. The mobsters scattered, running into the woods surrounding Barbara’s estate.

  State trooper Fred Tiffany stopped Trafficante as he attempted to pass a roadblock behind Barbara’s residence. Santo was apprehended along with Gambino family member Carmine Lombardozzi and Genovese family capo Mike Miranda, and they were brought to the local courthouse for booking. When he was questioned, Santo gave his name as Louis Santos.

  All in all, fifty-eight men were detained that day. Of these, fifty had arrest records, thirty-five had convictions, and twenty-three had served prison sentences. All were Italian American.

  The aborted gathering at Apalachin was a fiasco for those in attendance, though not for any immediate legal reasons. A number of the mobsters were brought up on minor charges, but most of these were later thrown out of court by a district judge. The real disaster was that for the first time in history, a major gathering of mafiosi from around the country had been busted and exposed as it was happening. Many in the press and U.S. law enforcement—including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—had been claiming for years that there was no such thing as a national underworld commission. Even though the Kefauver hearings had established that organized crime did, in fact, exist, the Mafia was a different story. The FBI director and others continued to downplay the notion that there was an organized Mafia in the United States. In this regard, the busted meeting at Apalachin was a landmark. It established irrevocably for the first time that the American Mafia was, in fact, a national brotherhood.

  In later years, it was suggested that someone tipped off local authorities that the meeting was to take place. Vito Genovese, organizer of the event, had been made to look like a fool, so whoever ratted out the meeting was most likely an enemy of the ambitious mafioso. One possible culprit was Lansky. It is curious that there were no members of Meyer’s “Jewish Mafia” in attendance at Apalachin. And Lansky despised Genovese—for good reason. Genovese was behind the attempted assassination of Frank Costello. Also, Genovese had called the meeting partly to stir up resentment about the division of spoils in Cuba, giving Lansky another compelling motive for wanting to sabotage the event. In 1977 Doc Stacher—Meyer’s lifelong friend and associate—confirmed to an interviewer that the Jewish Mob boss was the one who spilled the beans: “Nobody to this day knows that it was Meyer who arranged for Genovese’s humiliation.”

  The ploy was effective: Genovese was ruined by the fiasco at Apalachin and later became enmeshed in a career-ending narcotics prosecution. Trafficante, Lansky’s other sometime competitor, was put in his place; his efforts to form an alliance against Meyer were scuttled. The Mafia’s desire to muscle in on the Havana Mob was derailed. Once again the Little Man was riding tall in the saddle.

  BACK-TO-BACK, the Anastasia murder and the busted Mob meeting in upstate New York were a bonanza for the press. Not since the Kefauver hearings had the Mob been such a hot topic of speculation in newspapers and in radio and newsreel reports. Since Cuba figured prominently in both stories, the reputation of the island as “the Mob’s playground” reached new heights. Murder and mafiosi were now part of the draw, along with gambling, fabulous entertainment, and the three Ss—sex, sun, and sand.

  In Havana, the 1957–58 tourist season would prove to be the most popular ever. The city grew from a destination for gamblers, conventioneers, and sex tourists to a showcase for international celebrities.

  The island had long been a vacation spot for movie stars and famous writers. Back in 1951, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner had come to Havana on their honeymoon; their visit was photographed and commented upon in the English-language Havana Post, where Walter Winchell had a column. “Word is The Voice has a special hankering for the Pearl of the Antilles,” wrote Winchell. Sinatra, of course, had his own reasons for promoting Cuba as a destination. He was friendly with Lansky, Trafficante, and others in the Havana Mob and had expressed interest in investing in a casino-nightclub, as he later would in Las Vegas.

  Sinatra blazed a trail. Later in the 1950s, he was followed by, among others, Marlon Brando. The brooding movie star and 1954 Academy Award winner for On the Waterfront was at the height of his fame when he came to Havana looking for a good time. An aficionado of Latin music, Brando made a point of checking out the band at the Tropicana. Led by Armando Romeu, the orchestra at the Tropicana was the biggest and most accomplished on the island. Brando was mesmerized. “Discovering Afro-Cuban music alm
ost blew my mind,” he wrote years later in his autobiography.

  Brando was an amateur conguero (conga player). While in Havana, he went on a wild nocturnal hunt to find the perfect tumbadora. He offered to buy one from Romeu but was turned down. Brando left the club with two of the Tropicana’s most beautiful modelos and headed out into the night. His guide in Havana was Sungo Carreras, the same ex-baseball player who had been valet for Charlie Luciano during his time in the city a decade earlier. Sungo took Brando to Club Choricera, where the actor was allowed to play conga alongside the great timbalero Silvano “El Chori” Echevarría. Later, Brando found and purchased a pair of congas. In an interview with Carteles magazine, he was quoted as saying, “I really like Havana…The sea is strange. It’s like the sky. You can see the things you want to imagine.”

  The British writer Graham Greene was a regular in Cuba. On a trip to the island in 1957, he tried to secure an interview with Fidel Castro but was unable to make it happen. Instead, he stayed in Havana and put the finishing touches on a novel that would eventually be published in 1958 as Our Man in Havana. The novel mentioned many of Greene’s favorite Havana haunts by name, including Doña Marina’s bordello, where the writer indulged his longtime proclivity for prostitutes. Greene also liked to drink añejo and had the occasional taste for cocaine. He once bought a small packet of what was supposed to be coke from a Havana taxi driver. When he tasted it, Greene discovered that it was mostly bicarbonate of soda. A few days later, the taxi driver he’d bought it from tracked Greene down to pay him back; he too had been fooled. The famous writer often told this story to friends to illustrate, as he put it, “the honesty of the Cuban people.”

  The actor Errol Flynn also blew through Havana in 1957. Flynn was known as an international playboy. He spent much of his time in the casino at the newly opened Hotel Capri and at the adjoining Salón Rojo nightclub. Flynn was fascinated by the Revolution and professed a desire to meet Fidel in the Sierra Maestra. He later bandied about a scarf inscribed with the insignia of the 26th of July Movement, which he claimed was given to him by Castro himself. Later, the famous movie star again visited Havana and announced his intention to produce a docudrama entitled Cuban Rebel Girls, which would trace the political education of a young peasant girl. The film was made, with financing by Flynn, starring his then-eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Beverly Aadland. Flynn played an American journalist covering the Revolution. Released in late 1959 at barely sixty-eight minutes in length, Cuban Rebel Girls stands as an odd, amateurish coda to the career of a major Hollywood star (Flynn died in October 1959; Cuban Rebel Girls was his last movie).

  Of all the celebrities who came to be identified with Cuba in the 1950s, none was better known than Ernest Hemingway. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author had been coming to Cuba since the late 1920s. Fishing and drinking were his primary passions, though he also found time to write. He wrote most of For Whom the Bell Tolls in room 551 on the fifth floor of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, with a picturesque view of the Plaza de Armas in Old Havana. The writer discovered many sensual pleasures on the island, including lush tropical fruits, fragrant coffee, and world-famous tobacco—all of which he commented upon in a magazine article, “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” which was published in the debut issue of Esquire in 1933.

  By the mid-1950s, Hemingway was a legend in Cuba. He’d published The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which was set in the fishing village of Cojimar, outside Havana. When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, he dedicated it to the people of Cojimar. Hemingway bought a home outside the city, and he frequently ventured into Havana to drink at El Floridita, an atmospheric restaurant-bar known as the birthplace of the daiquiri.

  Hemingway’s international celebrity status led to the creation of numerous myths about his time in Cuba, including the belief that he drank at another well-known Old Havana watering hole, La Bodeguita del Medio. This story was started by a Cuban gossip columnist named Fernando Campoamor, also known as “the Walter Winchell of Old Havana.” Campoamor, who owned a piece of La Bodeguita, is believed to have been the one who scribbled on the wall, “I drink my daiquiris at El Floridita and my mojitos at Bodeguita,” graffiti that was disingenuously attributed to Hemingway. In truth, the writer only visited the bar once at the behest of an underground tour guide named Bruno, who catered to rich Americans.

  Hemingway was not an aficionado of the casinos and nightclubs, but that’s where most of the celebrities spent their time. By the fall of 1957, the universe of the Havana Mob was the hottest entertainment scene on the planet. In a place where celebrities and movie stars merged, it was perhaps logical that the Mob would have as their mascot a person who embodied both traditions. That person was George Raft.

  Raft was a character actor who was also a leading man. Suave and handsome, he was a tough guy who could walk the walk. Throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, he’d made a career of playing hoodlums and gangsters alongside stars such as Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. He was now so closely identified with his mobster roles that the FBI compiled a file on the actor that identified him as a “known associate” of the Mob. Raft’s image as the epitome of gangster chic made him the perfect symbol for the Havana Mob.

  In November, the actor was hired as a “meeter and greeter” at the Hotel Capri casino and nightclub. Raft didn’t really have to do anything except hang out and be seen. He was paid to be George Raft, gangster movie star, the public face of the Havana Mob. It was a match made in heaven.

  Born and raised in the rugged West Side Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, George Ranft (later changed to Raft) came from German and Italian stock. The oldest of ten children, George took to the streets at an early age to escape the stifling tenement apartment and rigid Catholicism of his parents. By the time he was in his early teens, Raft had fallen in with an infamous street gang known as the Gophers, so named because they liked to meet in tenement basements to hatch their criminal schemes.

  In the early 1920s, with New York in the throes of Prohibition, Raft found work as a Broadway actor and dancer, while at the same time running booze for West Side racketeers. He became an active member of the Broadway set that included stars like Mae West, writers like Damon Runyon, and the gangsters Arnold Rothstein and Charlie Luciano. When the young hoodlum, hoofer, and thespian made the move to Hollywood in the 1930s, he was able to parlay his intimate knowledge of the gangster life into a thriving career. In movies such as Hush Money, Each Dawn I Die, I Stole a Million, Loan Shark, and many others, Raft perfected his image as a tough, urbane mobster. He was a sharp dresser, self-possessed to the point of cockiness, and a hit with the ladies—the perfect front man for American mobsters in Cuba.

  With Raft presiding at the Casino de Capri, the celebrities flooded into town. Like Paris in the 1890s or Berlin in the 1930s, Havana was a nonstop party. Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Edith Piaf, Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Cesar Romero—many of the biggest stars of the day made the short flight “down Havana way.” The island had arrived as the place to be.

  THE STARS WERE A BIG DRAW for the tourists, but the big draw for the stars was something else. Marlon Brando wasn’t the only celebrity with a yen for Latin music. Torrid and complex, sophisticated and primitive, Afro-Cuban music in the 1950s was the hottest thing since ragtime.

  Music had always been part of Cuba’s appeal. In the late 1920s—at the same time Capone, Lansky, Luciano, and other mobsters were first discovering the island—Cuba produced its first crossover hit with “El Manisero” (The Peanut Vendor). The song was so popular that it was lampooned by Groucho Marx in the movie Duck Soup (1933). By the time the mambo craze took hold in the late 1940s, Cuban-influenced music had entered the American mainstream through the Xavier Cugat orchestra, among others, and would be followed by the popular success of Desi Arnaz.

  Arnaz was a Santiago-born musician and actor who came to the United States. He married comic actress Lucille Ball, and together they launched the wildly successful television sitcom I Love L
ucy. The show introduced American audiences to the conga and bongo drum, which Arnaz played exuberantly on the show, and also to Babalú, the Santeria orisha, or god, of percussion whose name Arnaz frequently invoked. The popularity of I Love Lucy served as a bridge—albeit an incongruous one—for Americans who traveled to Cuba during the era of the Havana Mob.

  Music and dance were the draw for a new generation of tourists who filled the hotels, casinos, and nightclubs. The mambo was reconfigured as the cha-cha-chá, a rhythmically simplified version of the music that was easier for North Americans to dance to. The rumba, a traditional music and dance culture that came from the Cuban countryside, was either languid or torrid, depending on the band. Singers such as Celia Cruz and Beny Moré rose out of the firmament to become major stars. Orchestras led by Pérez Prado, Arsenio Rodríguez, and Israel “Cachao” López became the home base for some of the best musicians in the world.

  Of all the musical styles that became associated with the era of the Havana Mob, none was more representative of the underworld than Afro-Cuban jazz, also known as cubop or, more commonly, Latin jazz. Jazz music was the classic American art form that had accompanied virtually every “glorious” era of mobsterism in the United States since the end of the nineteenth century. In Storyville, the legendary turn-of-the-century red-light district of New Orleans, ragtime gave way to a freer, more blues-influenced form of jazz as practiced by the likes of Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong. The music had its roots in the African-American experience; it was also the music of the bordello, the speakeasy, and Mob-owned nightclubs from Boston to Los Angeles. Jazz was race-mixing music, through which rich and poor alike came together out of a desire to skirt the placid white-bread veneer of American life (that is, until jazz itself was co-opted by white-bread America).

  It is probable that jazz would have been born without the influence of the Mob, but it is unlikely the music would have grown and flourished as it did without the economic framework provided by organized crime. Particularly in the era of the Roaring Twenties (i.e., Prohibition), when jazz became an international obsession, money from bootlegging rackets made it possible for nightclubs to hire large orchestras. Jay McShann, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington all created world-renowned orchestras that were financed by Mob-controlled nightclubs. These orchestras spawned many legends of jazz who developed their talents and headlined in smaller clubs, some of which were also Mob owned.