Charles “Lucky” Luciano

One of the great pleasures in reading any chronicle of the Mafia is the rough street poetry of the names. In the pages of T J English’s enjoyable – yet morally uncertain – account of the rise and fall of the Mob’s Caribbean empire of gambling, pleasure, sin, murder and profit, we come across such figures as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, William “Lefty Clark” Bischoff, and Nicholas “the Fat Butcher” di Costanzo.

The hero of the piece, though, is Meyer Lansky, who early on in his career was referred to as “the brightest boy in the combination”, but never did gain a gangster moniker. Instead, as suited his somewhat colourless but gentlemanly persona, he was referred to as “Mr Lansky”.
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“Gambling pulls at the heart of a man,” Lansky once said. He learned much of his trade during Prohibition and much of his wisdom from Arnold Rothstein (“The Brain”, “The Big Bankroll”), especially the importance of bribing politicians. Rothstein had the New York city mayor Jimmy Walker; Lansky had Fulgencio Batista, whom he chose early on in both their careers, long before Batista had become the self-styled “democratic dictator” of Cuba.

Unlike Rothstein, who was gunned down after an acrimonious poker game, Lansky only wanted to profit from other people’s impulses, not to indulge in his own. He became a kind of corporate visionary of gangsterism, one of the inventors of modern Las Vegas, particularly adept both at the “creative” use of money and at leaving no trace back to blood or a corpse.

Between 1952 and 1959, Batista’s second period of rulership of Cuba, “Havana became a volatile mix of Monte Carlo, Casablanca and the ancient city of Cádiz all rolled into one”, English breathlessly writes, “a bitches’ brew of high-stakes gambling, secret revolutionary plots, violent repression and gangsterism”.

Lansky and his associates controlled or owned the casinos and clubs, as well as the police, who often moonlighted as security guards for the Mob’s hotel-casinos, the banks and most of the politicians.

This was the consummation of a plan that Lansky had had for Cuba well before the Second World War, and which was first put into action following a convention of “dignitaries” in 1946, when Cuba’s future was carved up by the East Coast bosses, in between dining on such delicacies as tortoise stew and flamingo breast.

English is good on food – there is a telling image of Batista going crazy in the last days before Fidel Castro’s revolution, dining for hours at his country estate, interrupting the feast only to watch American horror movies and to vomit in the garden.

The author is less good on morality.

English denies any Mafia involvement in the drugs trade – this at a time when VIP members at one of the smarter Havana nightclubs had their own lockers to hold their cocaine stash. The generally held belief that Lansky’s colleague Santo Trafficante was one of the prime movers in the trade is implausibly dismissed as a result of the coincidence of Trafficante being the Spanish term for drugs trafficker.

English tends to praise Lansky’s business sense, while saving his condemnation for the likes of Albert Anastasia, a brutal assassin for the Mob who was in turn brutally assassinated. He is unable, or unwilling, to draw a connection between the gent and the beast.

When the rebels finally took control in 1959, the first things that went were the parking meters that were the personal money machines of Batista’s brother-in-law. The crowds went after them with hammers, lead pipes and baseball bats.

Then they took to the casinos, to demolish the slot machines, before setting a truckload of pigs free in the lobby of Lansky’s latest resort, the Riviera.

Just as Castro irked the US government for geo-political reasons, he outraged the gangsters with his low opinion of the profit motive.

It is a welcome reminder for those with nothing but hatred for Cuba’s current, declining dictator, that the US government and the Mafia frantically and farcically collaborated to get rid of Castro to restore their own vision of paradise.

The mafia paradise that was Havana – David Flusfeder – Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2007 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/20/boeng115.xml

The extraordinary details of the 1960 plot were contained in more than 700 pages of documents that revealed some of the agency’s past illegal activities, including the targeting of foreign leaders, wiretapping of US journalists, CIA break-ins and thefts.

The documents are known as the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and relate to the period between the 1950s and early 1970s, an era of Cold War dirty tricks when successive administrations became obsessed with domestic radicals and the threat from Communism.

In one sheaf of documents that read like a cheap spy novel, the agency’s efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro are laid out in excruciating detail. A CIA memo, entitled The use of a member of the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, states that an agency official, Richard Bissell, approached Colonel Sheffield Ed-wards of the agency’s Office of Security in August 1960 to determine whether he “had assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action”. It adds: “The mission target was Fidel Castro.”

Roselli was believed by the CIA to be a high-ranking member of the crime syndicate, who controlled all the ice-making machines on the Las Vegas strip.

He was approached by a go-between, Robert Maheu, who believed that Roselli had connections leading into Cuban gambling interests. The story that Roselli was to be told was that several international businesses were suffering heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro’s action and that they were willing to pay $150,000 for his removal.

“It was to be made clear to Roselli that the US government was not, and should not, become aware of this operation,” a document states.

The pitch was made to Roselli at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York and Roselli was initially cool to the idea. But the contact led the agency to two top mobsters, Momo Salvatore “Sam” Giancana – Al Capone’s successor in Chicago – and Santos Trafficant, who were both on the US list of most-wanted men.

Giancana, who was known as Sam Gold, suggested that firearms might be a problem and that a potent pill that could be slipped into Castro’s food or drink might work. Six pills of “high lethal content” were provided to Juan Orta, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling interests and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.

“After several weeks of reported attempts, Orta apparently got cold feet and asked out of the assignment. He suggested another candidate, who made several attempts without success,” the document said.

The plot was cancelled shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the pills were retrieved by the agency. In 1976, Roselli’s body was found in a 55-gallon oil drum floating off the Florida coast.

The documents also show that the CIA wanted to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, General Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, and General René Schneider, the Chilean army commander. The CIA has always denied any responsibility for the subsequent murders of all three men.

Michael Hayden, the current CIA director, ordered that the documents be released “to provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.”

Secret papers show how CIA hired the Mafia to hit Castro – Tim Reid and Tom Baldwin in Washington – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1991470.ece

There was no article in the Communist Party daily, Granma, about the Feb. 12 death of Armando Jaime Casielles, at age 75, from lung cancer. There was no mention on state television either, despite the decades he spent promoting Afro-Cuban dance and music in his post-Mafia years.

Casielles’s close friend, Enrique Cirules, got the news through word of mouth. “He liked his cigars, he liked his whiskey, never stopped working,” Cirules said. “He was a very respected man.”

A stout, reserved man with eyeglasses, a goatee and a pinky ring, Casielles was one of the last people alive with firsthand knowledge of Mafia operations in the colorful, decadent Havana that thrived before a young rebel named Fidel Castro seized power.

Stoic and discreet, Casielles was there with Lansky during numerous meetings with the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who protected gambling interests on the island, and accompanied him when the mobster traveled around the Caribbean to talk with such underworld figures as Santos Trafficante Sr.

Casielles helped Lansky hide in the Cuban capital in late 1957 after the Sicilian Mafia families of New York tried to grab control of his Havana operations and violence erupted in Manhattan.

And he was behind the wheel of Lansky’s silver-gray 1957 Chevrolet Impala convertible on New Year’s Eve in 1958. As word spread that Batista had fled the island and Castro’s bearded rebels were close to victory, he helped the gangster scoop up millions of dollars in profits from his Havana casinos.

The next day, Cuban mobs, euphoric over the revolutionary triumph, ransacked the gambling dens, exposing their deep resentment of Mafia control of the island. Bonfires of smashed slot machines and roulette tables raged in Havana’s streets.

Soon thereafter, the revolutionary government outlawed gambling, prostitution and nonprescription drugs and the mobsters retreated.

“The gigantic projects of gaming, drugs and sex; channels of heroin to the United States; and cocaine powder for the consumption of thousands of American tourists who visited the wildest spots in Havana” were condemned to disappear, Cirules wrote in a book titled, “The Secret Life of Meyer Lansky in Havana.”

The book also revealed the life Casielles led before undergoing what he described as a moral conversion, repudiating his Mafia past to become the public relations director of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional dance troupe for more than three decades.

Born in Havana in 1931, Casielles left the island in 1948 to study public relations at Northwestern University in Chicago, perfecting his English. He was a card dealer in a Las Vegas casino when Lansky persuaded him to be his assistant in Cuba.

As Cirules researched his book, the two men spent countless afternoons visiting Lansky’s haunts: the former military base where Lansky and Batista met, the Marina Hemingway where Lansky took his mistress Carmen, the hotels where raucous Americans arriving on 80 daily flights from the United States once crowded around roulette wheels and blackjack tables.

The Capri, the Riviera, the Deauville and the Nacional hotels still stand today, destinations for beach-bound Europeans.

Casielles described how Lansky left Cuba for good with a fake passport in April 1959. Carmen accompanied him to the United States, where he died in 1983, 12 years after he was indicted for allegedly skimming millions of dollars from the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas. The charges were dismissed because of his poor health.

Long after those millions of dollars they collected that New Year’s Eve had been spirited out of Cuba, Casielles underwent a “spiritual, ethical and moral crisis” about the harm organized crime had caused his homeland, Cirules said.

“This was the reality of many Cubans at that time,” agreed a longtime friend, Gregorio Hernández, a musician and dancer. “Jaime became a super revolutionary, an admirer of Fidel Castro and his work.”

Casielles later became interested in Cuba’s African-influenced music, helping the dance troupe begin projects such as Havana’s popular Sábados de la Rumba, which brings families together to enjoy traditional music each weekend.

Casielles did not hide his past, but “his life after that was so different,” Hernández said. “He left behind a life of wealth and shared all these difficult years with us.”

The Associated Press Tuesday, May 29, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/29/news/cuba.php

The 62-year-old Spanish national, whose name was not given, was detained on Gran Canaria Island.

He was believed to be the co-founder of a criminal organization known as The Corporation, which is based in Florida.

The group, which has been engaged in criminal activities ranging from drug trafficking to professional killings, sent money from tax havens to Spain’s Canary Islands in order to launder it mainly through real estate.

Police seized assets worth more than 20 million euros, mainly in the form of real estate property, shares and bank accounts. The property was in the name of the man and his wife, who was also charged with money laundering.

Another ringleader, Cuban-American Jose Rodriguez Battle, has been detained in the US.

DPA 4:08 PM, March 30th 2007 http://www.playfuls.com/news_10_21775-Spain-Captures-Boss-Of-US-Cuban-Mafia-Seize-20-Million-Euros.html

Jose Miguel Battle Jr. was convicted last year on various racketeering conspiracy charges including murder, gambling, arson and money laundering.

Battle Jr. is the son and namesake of the “Godfather” of a 40-year-old organization prosecutors likened to a Cuban mafia, and substituted as head of the crime family when his father was out of the country or in jail.

The elder Battle built the syndicate on illegal gambling in New York in the early 1960s after leaving Cuba, prosecutors said. It later branched out to south Florida — a Cuban population center from those who fled the Cuban revolution — and into drugs, contract killing, arson and money laundering.

Battle Sr. was sentenced in January to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering conspiracy last year.

Prosecutors said The Corporation was responsible for numerous murders, including those of a 3-year-old child killed in a fire and an ex-hit man who was gunned down in the 1970s after leaving the syndicate.

The younger Battle, who was sentenced to 15 years and eight months in prison, oversaw sophisticated money laundering operations in the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Spain and other locations, prosecutors said.

Reuters Fri Mar 16, 2007 5:51PM EDT http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN1623953320070316

Another defendant, Julio Acuña, received life imprisonment. The sentences were handed down Friday.

Battle’s son, Jose Miguel Battle Jr., faces sentencing in March.

The elder Battle was the boss of ”The Corporation,” a Cuban-American crime syndicate that stretched from Florida to New York to Latin America.

In the federal conspiracy case, Battle, his son, Acuña, and three other defendants were accused of five premeditated murders, four arson attacks resulting in eight deaths, and more than $1.5 billion collected during four decades of illicit activity — including drug trafficking, illegal bookmaking and bolita numbers rackets. Battle’s organization began in New York in the mid-1960s with illegal gambling, including the bolita, or ”little ball,” lotteries popular in Cuba.

The Corporation used arson and murder to intimidate or eliminate rivals and other threats, such as witnesses willing to testify against the organization, according to federal prosecutor Tony Gonzalez.

Posted on Mon, Jan. 15, 2007, By JAY WEAVER, MiamiHerald.com, http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16465327.htm