Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  The event is remembered as a fiasco for the anti-Castro movement and also for the U.S. government, which had first hatched the plot in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. Both Eisenhower’s State Department and the CIA had come to the conclusion that the Castro government must be toppled and/or Castro assassinated. The mandate to remove Fidel became one of the worst-kept secrets in the Americas and inspired numerous schemes and plots to take him out. One of the first was allegedly put forth by Meyer Lansky, who offered a contract of one million dollars to have Castro whacked.

  The man who was contacted about devising a plot to murder Fidel was Frank Sturgis, the former 26th of July gunrunner who had become Castro’s minister of games of chance. The new Cuban government didn’t know it yet, but Sturgis had turned against Castro and begun an undercover dialogue with both the Havana Mob and the CIA. Many years later, in 1975, Sturgis would testify under oath before a U.S. government commission that he was approached by casino boss Charles White and offered one million dollars to help the Mob kill Castro. Meyer Lansky was the financier, said White. Sturgis was ready and willing, but he could not get “the go-ahead from his contacts in the American embassy.”

  Of his involvement in a plot to assassinate Castro, Lansky told his biographers:

  A number of people came to me with a number of ideas and of course I had my own suggestions to make. It was no secret that I was well known in Havana and did have influence. But I don’t think I should go into the details of what was said.

  Lansky’s one-million-dollar offer remained on the table throughout 1959, an open invitation to anyone with the means or inclination to take out Fidel.

  By the onset of the new decade, Lansky was gone from Cuba, but the efforts to remove the Bearded One from power were just getting started. The Mob’s reasons for wanting Castro dead merged with the desires of the Cuban exile community and the U.S. government. The April 1961 failure at the Bay of Pigs was not an impediment; in fact, following that disaster the newly elected Kennedy administration inaugurated a clandestine initiative known as the Cuba Project, which included as a subset the CIA-sponsored Operation Mongoose.

  With Operation Mongoose, the CIA took over the role of eliminating Castro. To achieve their goal, they turned to a group that was identified in confidential CIA memos as “the gambling syndicate”—their name for the Havana Mob.

  The CIA-Mob partnership that grew out of the Cuba Project and Operation Mongoose has been chronicled in many books and documentaries. In the mid-1970s the American public was shocked when it was revealed for the first time—through a series of congressional hearings—that the CIA had reached out to the Mob in an effort to assassinate Castro. Many law-abiding citizens found it hard to believe that the U.S. government would work hand-in-hand with the forces of organized crime. Of course, this was nothing new. U.S. naval intelligence had made similar overtures to Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky back in the early 1940s at the onset of the Second World War. Luciano’s top secret partnership with the U.S. Navy made it possible for him to get out of prison and laid the foundation for the entire era of the Mob in Cuba.

  It is hardly surprising that the person who became the CIA’s point man in the Castro assassination plots was none other than Santo Trafficante. Of all the mobsters who lost big in Cuba, few had suffered as ignominiously as the man with the green eyes. Along with losing all his financial holdings to Castro’s communist government, Trafficante had languished for months at Triscornia detention center, been on an execution list, and was most likely forced to pay a substantial cash bribe to see another day. Trafficante had the motive, the CIA had the will: it was a marriage of convenience.

  The intermediaries were fellow mafiosi Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, both investors and occasional guests of the Havana Mob in the 1950s. The CIA first contacted Roselli, who led them to Trafficante—much as Lansky had once led the U.S. Navy to Luciano. A series of meetings took place, the most important of which occurred at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. There, a CIA station chief passed along lethal pills that were to be used to poison Fidel. Contaminated cigars and exploding seashells were also discussed as possible assassination methods. A payment of approximately twenty-five thousand dollars cash was also delivered to the mobsters, down payment on the full fee of a hundred and fifty thousand.

  Castro, of course, was never assassinated. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 led to the disbanding of Kennedy’s “Get Castro” squad. Both Lansky and Trafficante also gave up on any direct involvement in plots to murder the Cuban leader, but efforts to bring about Castro’s removal continued to metastasize. Many people associated with the Havana Mob were involved. Casino veterans Norman Rothman, Dino Cellini, John Martino, and Lewis McWillie all took part in arms-smuggling schemes, assassination plots, and counterrevolutionary coup attempts. Some gave their lives for the cause.

  Rolando Masferrer had survived some of the most violent periods in Cuban history. Ever since the late 1940s, when he emerged at the University of Havana as a formidable student gangster and enemy of Fidel Castro, he cast a dark cloud over Cuban politics. His role as the leader of Los Tigres and associate of the Havana Mob continued well after the fall of Batista. In 1960, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Masferrer was involved in a plan to invade Cuba from the Dominican Republic. The plot also involved Chiri Mendoza, former owner of the Havana Hilton, and ex-senator Eduardo Suarez Rivas. It was to be partially financed by Fulgencio Batista, who anted up two million dollars of his own money—possibly cash left over from the casino skim. The plan was aborted when four members of the plot were arrested in Cuba.

  Masferrer devoted the remainder of his life to Castro assassination plots and dreams of recapturing all that had been lost in Havana. He arranged gun shipments with former Havana casino mobsters Rothman, Martino, and McWillie. He cofounded a paramilitary group known as Alpha 66, which devoted itself to carrying out bombings, assassinations, and other acts of terror in support of the burgeoning anti-Castro underground in Miami. As he had in Cuba, he founded a newspaper, Libertad, which was devoted to attacking his enemies. Masferrer was an effective writer and, according to those who knew him, an intelligent man, but he never shook off the stench of gangsterismo.

  In October 1975, in an editorial in his newspaper, Masferrer advocated bombings as a legitimate political tool. One week later—on Halloween—he was blown to pieces in his car, which had been wired with C-4 explosives. Masferrer died as he had lived—violently. FBI investigators in Miami had no shortage of suspects but no cooperating witnesses. The murder of Rolando Masferrer remains unsolved to this day.

  Compared with the former leader of Los Tigres, other prominent players in this drama passed through their later years in one piece. Their fates were as follows:

  Fulgencio Batista—After fleeing Cuba, Batista lived for a time in the Dominican Republic but soon moved on to Portugal. On the island of Madeira, off the coast of Lisbon, the former major general lived at a resort hotel under constant armed guard. A British journalist reporting for the Miami Herald was allowed to interview Batista in late 1959. On the third floor of the hotel, the journalist was led into a small anteroom. “The door was draped with a Cuban flag,” he wrote. “Two tough-looking men looked up as I entered. One, who was chewing gum, went back to studying the South American football results. The other, puffing on a seven-inch Havana cigar, strolled to the doorway, leaned against it, and eyed me suspiciously. Both looked as if they had read too many Raymond Chandler novels.”

  Batista lived in constant fear of an assassin’s bullet. “Yes,” said the ex-president, “Castro’s men may seek me out even here. But if I thought about that all my life I would never be at peace…Castro is a sick man. How do you say it? He is sick in the head.”

  In the years that followed, Batista wrote a number of self-justifying books that even supporters acknowledged were filled with half-truths and lies. He denied having absconded with tens of millions of dollars, comparing reports of his wealth to th
e Arabian folk tale One Thousand and One Nights. “Every time a new story, every time a new figure,” he said of those who variously placed his personal fortune at thirty-nine million, eighty million, one hundred million dollars, and above.

  Batista lived his golden years in Spain. He had no known contact with his former associates in the Havana Mob. On August 6, 1973—fourteen years after being chased out of Cuba—he died of a heart attack in the town of Mirabel. He was seventy-two years old.

  Santo Trafficante—By early 1963, Trafficante had given up his attempts to assassinate Castro and turned his attention to JFK. Kennedy had angered two powerful underworld constituencies—the anti-Castro Cuban exiles, who felt he had betrayed them by withholding crucial air support during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Mob, who were on the receiving end of a relentless judicial assault engineered by the president’s brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Trafficante was uniquely positioned as an influential player in both of these worlds: the anti-Castro underground and the Mob. According to many subsequent histories of the JFK assassination, Trafficante played a key role in the conspiracy to kill the president, along with New Orleans mafioso Carlos Marcello, who had also been an attendee at the Hotel Nacional Mob conference back in December 1946.

  In his memoir, attorney Frank Ragano contends that Trafficante virtually confessed his role in the Kennedy assassination. “We shouldn’t have killed Giovanni (John); we should have killed Bobby,” said Trafficante to Ragano many years after the fact.

  Trafficante’s relationship with his attorney ebbed and flowed. Ragano’s son, Chris—who was born the year the mobsters were chased out of Cuba—got to know Trafficante in his later years. Santo had never fathered a son and he became obsessed with Chris as an adolescent and young man, lavishing him with attention and expensive gifts. The attention made Chris uncomfortable. Eventually Trafficante tried to endear himself to Nancy, Frank Ragano’s wife, telling her that she should leave Frank, she and Chris could start a new life with him. Mrs. Ragano declined.

  In the mid-1980s, Trafficante became embroiled in two major criminal trials, one stemming from his attempts to bilk millions from the health and pension fund of a labor union, the other for racketeering and conspiracy. Trafficante sought the services of Ragano, with whom he had had a falling out years earlier. Ragano declined to represent his former client, but Trafficante insisted that Ragano take the case or something might happen to his son. According to Chris Ragano: “My father never told me about [the blackmail]. I learned about it from my mother after he passed away.”

  Of Trafficante, Chris remembered, “You could never forget his eyes. You looked into his eyes and you knew you were looking straight into the face of evil.”

  Santo Trafficante died of heart failure on March 17, 1987, at the age of seventy-two. He was buried alongside his father at the L’Unione Sicilione Cemetery in Tampa.

  Meyer Lansky—The final two decades of Lansky’s life brought a level of notoriety that outstripped anything from his pre-Cuba years. In 1969 the Wall Street Journal profiled the sixty-eight-year-old mobster, noting, “of the group that in the 1930s formed the giant conglomerate that is organized crime today, Lansky alone survives and wields power.” His worth was estimated to be near three hundred million dollars, an epic number that elevated his status in business circles around the world. Then came The Godfather Part II. For the first time in his life, Lansky became a cultural icon—a Jewish wizard who was given most of the credit for the corporatization of organized crime in America.

  To Lansky, notoriety was a whore to be kept at arm’s length. It would prove to be his undoing. The federal government designated Lansky as Gangster Number One. He was beleaguered with tax charges, a bogus narcotics charge for carrying prescription drugs through an airport, and threats of deportation. The FBI placed a bug in the Las Vegas office of Eddie Levinson, Meyer’s former casino manager at the Hotel Riviera in Havana. Agents followed Lansky and his wife virtually everywhere they went—including on overseas trips. The feds had little in the way of evidence and they never did mount a serious case against Lansky. The idea was to prosecute the mobster legend outside the courtroom, to make his life miserable.

  Scrutinized by prosecutors and under constant surveillance by federal agents, Lansky sought an escape. He became a modern-day version of the Wandering Jew. He was not allowed to live in England or the Dominican Republic because of his criminal record. The ultimate insult came when he tried to settle in Israel under the Law of Return. He was rejected by an Israeli high court and sent packing. Lansky spent his later years in Miami Beach. He was often seen walking his dog along Collins Avenue, usually with two FBI agents watching from a sedan somewhere nearby. On January 15, 1983, after a protracted battle with cancer, Lansky died in a Miami hospital with Teddy at his side. He was eighty-two years old.

  Stories of Lansky’s wealth persisted. In his waning years, the aging Mob boss told associates and his lawyers that the losses in Cuba had been enormous. In response they would often give him a wry smile. Lansky was the wiliest of all mobsters—“the smartest boy in the Combination.” How could the great Lansky, former boss of the Havana Mob, die with nothing to show for himself?

  Teddy Lansky’s granddaughter Cynthia (Schwartz) Duncan was part of a group of family members who gathered for the reading of the Lansky will. In the chambers of a Dade County judge, the family members’ jaws dropped when they were told that Meyer Lansky’s entire estate amounted to fifty-seven thousand dollars cash. Remembered Lansky’s granddaughter, “Everybody at the reading knew there was no three hundred million, but we thought there would be at least five million…Afterwards, we all went to a nearby bar and had a strong drink.”

  In the following years, exhaustive efforts were made to track down Lansky’s millions, but the money simply did not exist. Lansky meant what he said—he and the Mob had lost a fortune in Havana.

  Fidel Castro—The era of the Havana Mob lived on in the person of El Comandante. Chasing the mobsters out of Cuba became a source of great pride within Castro’s revolutionary government and to the Cuban people. As the years passed, evoking the era became a kind of party trick; slipping a reference to the time of “la mafia en la habana” into a speech or official statement was good politics. As recently as December 22, 2005, when the head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana criticized the Cuban government for its checkered human rights record, Castro publicly denounced the man as “a little gangster.” In a speech to the Cuban National Assembly, Castro said he did not know who was worse, the man who currently held the job or the one who came before, whom he called “the previous gangster.”

  The term was not used lightly. By referring to U.S. government representatives in Cuba as gangsters, Castro was deliberately evoking memories of the Havana Mob. To the Cuban government, American officials on the island came from a long line of gangsters going back to the days when the hoodlums, corporate businessmen, diplomats, and politicians all fed at the same trough.

  As various U.S. presidencies came and went, Castro’s greatest achievement was that he remained in power and aboveground. He survived invasion attempts, internal coup attempts, and assassination plots too numerous to mention. He partnered with the Soviet Union, became a pawn in the Cold War, and attempted to export the Revolution. He was crippled by the perennial financial crisis back home. The U.S. embargo against Cuba succeeded in isolating Castro, but it also turned him into a hero among the world’s downtrodden.

  In Miami, those who fled the island after Castro took over formed into a powerful voting bloc. Fidel routinely referred to these exiles as “the Miami mafia.” American politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—pandered to this group, especially during presidential elections. The most hard-line of the exiles skillfully brokered and safeguarded the U.S. government’s myopic policies on Cuba. In July 2006, when Castro mysteriously disappeared from public view and turned over the reins of government to his brother Raúl, the Miami Cubans danced in the streets. The celebratio
n evoked the early days of 1959, when Cubans reveled over the fall of Batista. The following months revealed that Castro had undergone a series of major gastrointestinal operations and was slowly recuperating. His revival did little to dampen the spirits of the exiles, who continued to dream of the day when they would return to Cuba and reclaim all they had lost in the Pearl of the Antilles.

  In August 2007 the rumors persisted: the dictator is dying. He is dead. Our moment of triumph is near.

  As of this writing, Fidel has survived them all.

  THE PASSAGE OF TIME does not heal all wounds. Like a cheap jailhouse tattoo, the loss of Cuba left an indelible mark on members of the Havana Mob. For Lansky, Trafficante, and many others, there was the humiliation of defeat and there were also the financial consequences that shaped their lives for decades to come. Some became immersed in the never-ending quest to assassinate the Bearded One and reestablish themselves as major players in a post-Castro Havana. In time, the CIA would replace the mafia as the spiritual enemy of the Revolution.

  Organized crime as concocted by Luciano, Lansky, Costello, and company never fully recovered. The Mob survived into the new century, but it was not the same enterprise that had dared to infiltrate a foreign country and establish an offshore empire—which it then intended to use as a base for further criminal explorations. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Mob no longer had the reach or influence to shape world events; it no longer represented the kind of vision advocated by people like Luciano, Lansky, Stassi, and Trafficante. Those men dreamed of a vast criminal state with the power to elect presidents and shape the global economy. In their day, there was seemingly no limit to what the Mob could achieve. That was what Cuba had come to represent: political control, fabulous corruption, and the ability to put on a hell of a show. Owning the place and then losing it to the will of the Cuban people was cruel justice.