Now, during dinner at the hotel, El Rubio received a call on his cell phone. He spoke English into the phone. After he hung up, he said that the person on the line had been a representative of a major league franchise. Despaigne recalls El Rubio mentioning the names of several teams he’d been personally communicating with, but only the Phillies and the Dodgers have stuck in his memory. (Mike Brito says he neither met with nor spoke over the phone to anyone in Mexico City other than Jaime Torres and Yasiel Puig.) Various abstractly gigantic sums were bandied about by El Rubio during the dinner: maybe $32 million, maybe $38 million. “Listen, don’t worry, I’m taking care of this,” El Rubio told Puig over the lobster, according to Despaigne. “They’re going to get crazy over you.”
On June 28, word hit the U.S. media: Puig and the Dodgers had struck a deal. “We signed for $42 million!” one of the Rubio partners said when breaking the news to another. “We’re out of poverty,” said the other. They had their major league score: $8.4 million divided among the partners, payable upon Puig’s receiving his signing bonus.
It would take some time before Puig would leave Mexico City for good. When he did, El Rubio arranged for him to enter the United States in the same way as any regular Cuban migrant on the Isla Mujeres route. Puig had no passport; it was in the possession of the Cuban government. So instead of trying to secure a U.S. entrance visa as a Mexican resident who had become so through bribery, instead of spending who knows how long attempting to extract a Cuban passport for Puig from a Cuban government likely unenthusiastic about granting such a document, instead of forging a passport and risking a felony arrest for Puig at an American airport, the Rubio group had him do something much simpler: he would walk across the international bridge spanning the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande between Reynosa, Mexico, and Hidalgo, Texas, enter the Immigration and Customs patrol station on the U.S. side, and, with only his Cuban national ID card to prove his citizenship, declare for asylum under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, paroled into the country—no American laws apparently broken, no act of smuggling, it would seem, at all.
5. Everybody Knows, Nobody Cares
Though the specifics and logistics are not common knowledge, the notion that ballplayers are brought out of Cuba by clandestine means is as open a secret as there is in sports. In the words of Mike Brito, the legendary Dodgers scout, born in Cuba in 1934, he of the perpetual Panama hat and pencil-thin Mambo-King mustache, who played a key role in landing Puig for L.A.: “How he got from Cuba I don’t care. I don’t wanna find out, either. I never ask any Cuban player that. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. Only thing we care about is when a guy is in a territory where we can sign him. Sign players and keep my mouth shut. The less you talk, the less you get in trouble.”
Unsurprisingly, most Cuban players now in the U.S. prefer not to discuss the subject publicly. Their reluctance is easy to understand. They don’t want to get family and friends—who may very well be attempting to escape the island at any moment—in trouble with the Cuban government. (The Cuban government, every Cuban émigré says, scours the American media for information on Cubans in America.) They don’t want to destroy the chances of other ballplayers—or friends and relatives—making it out by saying too much about the smuggling networks and how they operate. They fear reprisals from the smugglers. The result of all this is a kind of omertà. When Cuban players in the U.S. do break their silence, it’s mostly with vagueness or outright subterfuge.
For years, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, now a kind of elder statesman of the Cuban ballplayer-defector fraternity, allowed any number of fictions to propagate about his escape in 1997, though they all had the same basic plotline: that he’d fled the island on his own by shoving off on some form of improvised raft. In fact, as is fairly well known by now, he worked with Miami-based lancheros to get off the island. Even today, despite the fact that the real story has mostly come out, El Duque would not elaborate to me on how he escaped; he’s saving the tale, he says, for his memoirs.
If Cuban ballplayers are reluctant to discuss all this, U.S. law enforcement seems more committed to its end of the business. Two separate federal criminal investigations into two separate (and sometimes competitive) alleged smuggling rings are now under way, one led by the FBI, the other by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. The FBI probe has already resulted in the indictments of several people who, the government contends, brought both regular civilians out of Cuba, charging $10,000 a head, as well as baseball players out of Cuba, charging quite a bit more: 30 percent of their eventual MLB contracts. The second investigation, the one led by ICE, has yet to result in charges. According to people familiar with that probe, it has been ongoing since at least last summer, and its targets include El Rubio and his partners. Raul Pacheco has lawyered up. Puig himself has been interviewed. In fact, only one baseball-player-smuggling case has ever been successfully prosecuted in U.S. courts. In 2007, Ben Daniel, a former federal prosecutor and a specialist in alien trafficking, won a five-year conviction against a Cuban-American agent who had paid smugglers to extract a handful of players. “Everybody in the world knows this is going on, but apparently, nobody cares,” Daniel says.
It seems, after all, a victimless crime. If the rates charged by the smugglers appear extortionate, consider the risks they’re running in driving boats right up to the coast of Cuba in order to snatch highly prized talent from an authoritarian regime. To some in Miami, the smugglers and the agents who work with them are heroes of the Cuban counterrevolution. What are the smugglers doing, after all, but liberating human potential from an unjust Communist state so that it might find its true value on the free and open market? In certain quarters in Miami, the smugglers are viewed almost as political activists—anti-Castro, pro-freedom—and each player they help defect as another score against a despised regime. “The embargo has created this whole absurd situation,” Daniel says. “There are all these silly rules in place that make it too tempting not to circumvent. Basically, the value of Yasiel Puig outweighs the Cuban embargo. He trumps the embargo. He’s bigger than life, and he trumps it all.”
Almost as soon as they’d all arrived in the U.S., the threats started to come. A phone call to Yunior Despaigne’s mother in Cuba. A call to Yunior Despaigne’s new American cell phone with the Miami area code. Calls to Pacheco and to El Rubio and his partners—so many calls that El Rubio was forced to change his number. Calls even, according to Despaigne, to Yasiel Puig. The messages left had a common theme: “What you did is not a joke. Give us our money or we’re going to kill you.” Tomasito wanted to be made square. And so, too, by extension, did Tomasito’s underworld tax man, Los Zetas.
Yasiel Puig sat in the passenger seat, Despaigne in the back, El Rubio driving. The car was a Maserati. It was late in the summer of 2012. They’d arranged this in-car meeting to discuss the escalating threats from Tomasito and his crew. Despaigne recalls El Rubio, hands on the wheel as the car blazed across western Miami, saying something close to “Don’t worry about these people. We’re not going to pay them.”
One night in early October 2012, the body of Yandrys Leon, aka Leo, one of Tomasito’s key lanchero associates, principal helmsman of the cigarette boat that brought Puig and the others out of Cuba, was found facedown on the side of a road in a fashionable Cancún neighborhood. He’d been shot to death. El Rubio directed Puig and Despaigne and his smuggling partners to the local Cancún news coverage of the murder.
Within a few months, though, the threats began anew. During Dodgers spring training camp in 2013, according to a source close to Raul Pacheco, at least one man representing Tomasito’s ring showed up in Arizona, found the rookie’s hotel room, knocked on his door, and told Yasiel Puig the boss wanted his money.
By this point, too, Despaigne was harried. Starting in June, following Puig’s fast-track promotion to the Dodgers, as his Ruthian exploits were making him more famous by the day, Miami’s robust Spanish-language, Cuba
n-émigré-focused media somehow discovered the identity of one Yunior Despaigne, who had accompanied Puig on his defection, and began hounding him. Meanwhile, Pacheco, then living in Puig’s Miami house and serving as a kind of all-around gofer and confidant for the Dodger, refused to make good on what Despaigne says he was promised as compensation. It was around this time that a car wildly honking its horn pulled right up to Despaigne’s rear bumper one day as he was driving home from work. Both cars pulled over. Both drivers opened their doors. Both strode toward the other with dark intent. This was not an uncommon scene in Hialeah: machismo on the road.
“What’s your problem?” Despaigne yelled, steeling himself for a fight.
“The problem here is me,” the other man said, and he pulled an automatic handgun from his waistband, jammed the piece into Despaigne’s left side, and backed Despaigne against his car. “Don’t be a guapo. Tell Puig to pay. Because if he doesn’t, all of you are going to die.” The man had a Cuban accent.
Despaigne managed to get a few words in: “I’m not the millionaire. The millionaire is Yasiel Puig.” And: “I’m not Puig’s padre. I can’t force him to pay. I can’t grab him by the neck.”
“For the well-being of you and for everyone, speak to Puig,” the gunman said before heading back to his car. “Then everything will turn out con paz y tranquilidad”—with peace and tranquility. Despaigne swears that’s what the man said.
6. “This Abogadito in Miami”
By the time Despaigne finished his story, Avelino Gonzalez knew that it could help his cause. In addition to providing important details regarding Puig’s previous attempts to defect, the cinematic tale of the ballplayer’s escape—moving among Raul Pacheco, Tomasito, and the Rubio group—allowed Gonzalez to make a case for who Puig’s real smugglers were. Real smugglers, the story suggested, are a sophisticated lot—not just guys like his clients, who had the misfortune to stumble into one of the country’s Kafkaesque holes.
If Danilo Curbelo Garcia, the client he was representing in the Aroldis Chapman case, was unfortunate, then he was unfortunate to an absurd degree. A U.S. permanent resident who ran an animal farm near Okeechobee, Florida, Curbelo had gone missing while on a trip to Cuba to visit family in July 2008. Like almost all Cuban men, Curbelo was a baseball fan, and while in Cuba, a friend had offered to introduce him to an acquaintance: Aroldis Chapman. According to the complaint, the two men then chanced on the pitcher in the Cuban municipality of Frank País, near Chapman’s hometown. Chapman was riding his bike down a road. The men pulled over. Curbelo asked Chapman, half-jokingly, when he planned to leave the island. This was a dangerous idea to articulate to strangers in Cuba, most of all, perhaps, to a star baseball player. His friend told Curbelo to pipe down but not before Chapman replied, according to the complaint, that he’d learned his lesson after his foiled escape earlier in the year; he wouldn’t be making any such attempts again. The exchange lasted for only a few minutes. Within a day, Curbelo was under arrest on charges of human trafficking. (Chapman, according to Cuban court documents, relayed a different version of events, saying that Curbelo came to him with a specific plan to defect.)
Six months later, in custody the whole time, he was standing trial. According to the complaint filed by Gonzalez, the prosecution’s direct evidence consisted entirely of Chapman’s testimony and that of his father. The trial lasted half a day. He was sentenced to a decade in prison. Curbelo spent the first four in a maximum-security prison called Las Mangas, notorious for its cholera outbreaks and hunger strikes, and another year at a kind of Bridge on the River Kwai work camp two hours from the closest city and reachable only by dirt roads, where the inmates were forced to erect their own prison.
When Curbelo’s wife, Maylen, came to Gonzalez’s law office in May 2011 to seek representation, the lawyer was far from intimidated by the prospect of battling with the Cuban Communist machine. From the moment he graduated from the University of Miami law school in 1995—after defecting from Cuba in 1991 when he was 25 years old—Gonzalez has made himself into a tiny yet irritating barb in the side of the Cuban government. When members of an anti-Castro organization based in Miami were shot down in 1996 by the Cuban military while looking for refugee boats, Gonzalez was brought in as an expert when the families of the dead sued the Cuban government in U.S. court. When an Olympic-level kayaker defected from Cuba to the U.S. and wanted to participate with the American team in the Sydney Games in 2000, Gonzalez played a key role in persuading the International Olympic Committee to disregard the opposition of the Cubans. Soon after that case unfolded, Gonzalez heard from a Cuban friend who held a position in the government about a recent meeting of elite regime officials. “So who’s this abogadito in Miami anyway?” one person at the meeting is said to have asked. Abogadito translates as “little lawyer.” That person was Fidel Castro.
All the attorneys Maylen approached had turned her away. It was unclear how, in a United States court, a Cuban could sue another Cuban over an incident that occurred in Cuba. But in Gonzalez she found the abogadito for the job, one familiar with an obscure law: the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS. It entered the books in 1789, and it appeared to give U.S. civil courts jurisdiction over cases where a non-U.S. citizen might want to seek redress for a tort issue, even if the abuse occurred in another country. Gonzalez knew, as well, that the ATS had a more recent offspring, the Torture Victim Protection Act, signed into law in 1992, and designed to provide an avenue of justice for the families of people tortured or killed by authoritarian governments overseas.
At its core, the complaint that Gonzalez ultimately filed contends that Chapman made a deal with Cuban officials in 2008 after a failed escape attempt, for which he was suspended from the national team: by becoming a productive government informant, Chapman could prove his loyalty, earn his way back into the good graces of the regime, and eventually return to the squad’s A-list travel roster. With the government thus off his back, he could then plan his next actual defection attempt. The complaint’s bottom line: Chapman, in order to grease the skids of his eventual escape, conspired with the Cuban government to frame an innocent man.
When the complaint hit the public domain in May 2012, it received instant coverage by the Miami Spanish-language media. In fairly short order, Gonzalez began receiving phone calls from people with stories similar in substance to that of Danilo Curbelo. One of those calls came from the family of Miguel Angel Corbacho Daudinot, a Cuban citizen who split his time between the island and the Dominican Republic. While in Cuba with his wife and child, he had the bad luck, according to the story he later told Gonzalez, of agreeing to drive the son-in-law of an old friend to Cienfuegos for an important errand. The son-in-law’s errand, it turned out, was to meet Yasiel Puig. Corbacho was sentenced in Cuba to seven years in prison in 2010 on charges of attempted human trafficking. So was the son-in-law, who, according to the complaint, actually was trying to recruit Puig to defect—much like Yunior Despaigne would, a year later, begin to do. His family presented to Gonzalez a report from the Unidad de Delitos Contra la Seguridad Del Estado, a unit of the country’s largest domestic spy agency. It is, essentially, Cuba’s secret police. Obtained by Corbacho’s Cuban lawyers and provided by his family to Gonzalez, the report included a photograph of a young man pointing at a mug shot among other mug shots on a page—apparently picking Corbacho out of a photo lineup. The identity of the young accuser in the photograph is difficult to discern, but the police report contains a helpful caption: “Obsérvese al testigo Yasiel Puig Valdes . . .”
Despaigne’s story—later compressed into an affidavit affixed to an amended complaint in the suit against Puig—was also valuable because it included details that, if true, seemed to suggest that Yasiel Puig had become something of a serial informant for Cuban state security. According to Despaigne’s affidavit, as far back as 2009, Puig, then just 18 years old, had denounced two other people for approaching him with smuggling-defection plans. Those two people were with Puig when, together, th
ey made a failed lanchero escape attempt earlier in the same year. All were caught by Cuban police. Despaigne’s affidavit also claims he had conversations with Puig during which they discussed several meetings Puig had with a certain high Cuban official named Higinio Velez. Velez was then and remains today the national director of Cuban baseball. In Despaigne’s telling, Puig described to him an offer that Velez had made during these meetings. Though Puig had been kicked off the national team as punishment for that 2009 defection attempt, he could nonetheless “prove his loyalty and clean his name if he worked with the state to expose persons who were stealing Cuban athletes through trafficking,” according to Despaigne’s affidavit. About two years later, in 2011, Puig traveled with the national team to the World Port Tournament in Holland, where he reportedly made another defection attempt, resulting in another team suspension. Further meetings with Velez, Despaigne says, led to further denunciations.
To win either case, Gonzalez faces many challenges. He needs to sway judge and jury that his clients were indeed innocent of the charges they were accused of and that they weren’t actually seeking to earn a bit of coin (like Despaigne himself had) by striving to recruit Puig and Chapman to defect on behalf of some smuggling group. Moreover, he needs to show that the players basically aided and abetted the Cuban government in committing “violations of international law—that is, torture.” Gonzalez will get his chance to pass these hurdles in the Chapman case; it goes to trial on November 17. In the Puig case, the judge is still deliberating on a motion to dismiss.
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