But it had taken a long time to get here, and at this point, he wasn’t going to leave. He didn’t give a damn what anyone said. Just days earlier, he had walked out of his family home in Toledo, Ohio. It had been the day after Christmas 1957, and his sixty-two-year-old mother pleaded with him not to leave his wife and kids.
He had walked past the lights still glowing on the Christmas tree and the gift wrappings still strewn on the floor. He had walked past his father reading in his library and his two little kids, Annie and Billy, tucked in their beds. He couldn’t explain to his wife, Terri, why he was leaving. All it would do was cause a fight in front of everyone.
It was hard enough living in his parents’ home with his wife and children. But he couldn’t tell them why he was splitting. Upstairs in his room was his last rejection letter from the army, a clear statement that he was not going to be reinstated.
It had been ten years since he was dishonorably discharged and sentenced to prison for going AWOL. Ten years since he was shipped to Milan, a forlorn prison in the frozen cornfields of southeastern Michigan. Ten years since he got out of the joint without a job or any prospect of a future.
He had tried to get back into the army even while he was locked up, but his first effort was turned down. Then he got the second letter in March 1957, telling him that unless they made a legal mistake during the court martial, he was a goner. Damn it, doesn’t anyone understand? he would say.
Little Billy Morgan in 1934 at age six, playing Cowboys and Indians Courtesy of Morgan Family collection
The only one who ever understood was his mother, Loretta. Whenever everyone else ignored him in prison, she stuck by him. Even when it drove everyone else crazy in the Morgan household, especially his father, Alexander.
A brilliant engineer and ardent Republican who set up his family nicely in their gabled home in Toledo’s fashionable Old West End, Alexander Morgan never understood why his wife gave the boy so many chances. In a neighborhood that included some of the wealthiest families in America—inventors of the spark plug, commercial scale, and Jeep—Billy Morgan was a train wreck.
By the time he was a junior in high school, he had been booted out of two schools and twice ran away from home after getting into scraps. “He liked to pick fights,” said his only sibling, Carroll. He was eventually picked up by the cops for carjacking a man and going for a joyride with the guy gagged and bound in the backseat.
Maybe it was the blue marks left on his temples after he was born at the hospital in Cleveland in 1928—the doctor squeezing the forceps too tightly. He was like a blasting cap, ready to explode.
He would spend hours playing his favorite game—army, with make-believe guns and real knives. His mother once stopped him from jumping off the roof of their home with a homemade parachute strapped to his back.
So it came as no surprise when he called her from Arizona with the news shortly after his eighteenth birthday: He had joined the army. On the one hand, it was the sense of adventure, but on the other, he was about to take on responsibilities that went far beyond anything he was prepared to handle.
Loretta had expected him to phone her when he arrived at camp in California, but he had another surprise: He was married. On the way to camp, he met a twenty-one-year-old woman on the train and spent the next twenty-four hours wooing her. When the train stopped in Reno, they hailed a cab at night, woke up a justice of the peace, and spent the next two days in a motel room. “It was such a romantic thing,” recalled Darlene Edgerton, who was engaged to another man. “Neither one of us took time to think of the long-term consequences.” After they arrived in California, he was sent to Japan and she stayed behind. By the time he settled into his new army life, the marriage was over.
Loretta wasn’t happy about the union, but she was more concerned about her son adapting to a military regimen. “I was in for trouble,” she recalled. Months later, her fears came true when she got a call from the army’s Company B of the Thirty-Fifth Infantry Regiment: Bill had been caught going AWOL and had escaped in dramatic fashion—overpowering a guard, stealing his .45, and forcing him to strip off his clothes so Morgan could disguise himself.
He later told a military court he was trying to help a girlfriend he had met shortly after arriving in Japan. She had become suicidal, he explained. But it didn’t matter to the judge.
Morgan was sentenced to five years, first to Camp Cooke in California and later Milan federal prison in Michigan. Unable to adjust, he was labeled a troublemaker. “He is irresponsible, impulsive and untrustworthy,” said a disciplinary report. “Does not deserve parole.”
Morgan would later tell army psychologists his problems had nothing to do with any childhood issues, but rather a deep sense of boredom. “I was never satisfied with the sameness of anything,” he said.
By the time he was released two years later, Edgerton had gotten an annulment and Morgan returned to his parents’ home. On the outside, he acted tough, but on the inside, the dishonorable discharge—a black mark in the patriotic 1950s—cut deeply. No one knew his pain more than his mother. She would watch him as he left her home each day to search for work and see the look on his face when he’d return. His prison record kept coming back to haunt him.
For days after his release, he walked the streets. His mother pleaded with the monsignor to give him a job as a janitor at Our Lady, Queen of the Holy Rosary Cathedral, but weeks later, he chucked the broom and went on a bender, drinking with his old street buddies and violating his parole.
He eventually decided to leave Toledo and found his way to Florida, where he landed a stint in the circus. He became a fire-eater, devouring flames in front of heckling audiences during tent shows in the Deep South.
There he met Ellen May Bethel, known as Terri, a petite brunette who played the snake charmer—a favorite in front of drunken crowds. They married in Miami in 1954, and a year later, their daughter, Anne Marie, was born.
Needing a more stable job, Morgan and his family moved into an apartment in downtown Miami, where he landed a job as a bouncer and escort at Zissen’s Bowery comedy nightclub. He would dress up as a clown and meet patrons at the curb while occasionally breaking up fights in the bar.
Patrons soon discovered the new bouncer was quick with his hands. Charlie Zissen was working behind the bar one night when three drunks came in and demanded to be served. When the owner refused, one of the men whipped out a knife and was about to plunge it into the old man’s back. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Morgan jumped up, slammed the man to the floor, and took away his knife. The three then ran out. “I don’t know how he did it,” Zissen recalled. “He saved my life.”
The Bowery was a hangout for the underground of Miami: gamblers and gun runners. And Morgan soon got to know many of them. One night, a shadowy figure came into the bar to offer Morgan a deal: Help him move guns to the Upper Keys and earn some cash. When Morgan showed up at the designated spot with the weapons, he was met by young Cubans in a boat.
It was his first exposure to a network of men who were joining a fledgling underground movement in their country. Riding in small boats, the men would come up to shore, pile the weapons under tarps and inside oil drums, and then vanish into the night. Their destination: the rebel camps in the mountains of Cuba.
One of the rebels was Roger Rodriguez, a young medical student who had put everything in his life on hold. Sickened by the poverty of his country—people in the mountains suffering from cases of malnutrition and leprosy—Rodriguez had joined the movement spreading across the island. The rebels needed money and they needed guns to fight the soldiers of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar.
Morgan sat in silence, listening to the young intern talk about the desperation of his country. Some of the gun runners would make it to the hills, while others would get caught, never to be seen again. But it didn’t stop them.
Morgan couldn’t sha
ke the image of the young men on the rickety boats pulling up to the shore under the moonlight. And as he spent more time at the Bowery, his marriage began to unravel. He and Terri were arguing at night. A second baby was on the way.
Both decided it would be better to pack their bags and head to Ohio to try to salvage what was left. But once again, Morgan struggled to find a job. He began venturing alone into the bars along the riverfront, where Toledo’s gambling figures cavorted.
After a night of heavy drinking, he woke up and discovered he had nearly beaten a man to death. He swore he would never drink again, but his reputation as a tough guy was growing. He eventually caught the attention of Leonard “Chalky Red” Yaranowsky and Anthony “Whitey” Besase, local mob bosses.
At the time, Toledo—which once hosted the largest casino in the United States—was a mecca for illegal gambling. Gamblers from as far away as Chicago and New York would drop thousands on the crap tables at the Devon Club.
What separated Toledo from other mobbed-up towns was that it was a safe haven for wiseguys to hide out when the heat was on in Detroit and Chicago. Gambling was virtually in the open, with sawdust joints in every ethnic neighborhood and cops who took their share.
Morgan started as a bouncer in the clubs and quickly earned the criminal element’s trust. Whenever there was trouble, he would jump in. It wasn’t long before he became the muscle, collecting debts for the bosses.
With money in his pocket, he began dressing in suits and carried .38s in each shoulder holster, earning the street name Two-Gun Morgan. He could be intimidating, but also charming—a prankster who would quietly sneak up behind his street buddies and poke a gun barrel in their ribs. “I could have killed you right now,” he would say, laughing.
Things were looking up for Morgan until a team of federal agents began to focus on illegal gambling across the country. One of their targets: Toledo. During a nationally televised hearing of a US Senate committee investigating organized crime, a Toledo mobster took the stand and admitted to everything: the clubs, the players, the cops. His confession spurred a massive crackdown, and by 1957, the gaming halls had shut down.
For Morgan, there was nothing left. If he continued to work for the local kingpins, it was just a matter of time before he’d be hauled in by the feds.
One day, he showed up at his parents’ door, his wife and kids in tow. “Just for a few days,” he said. His mother could never say no. He and Terri moved into his old bedroom down the hall, but nothing went right. The two bickered and on some days didn’t even talk.
Morgan would storm out of the house and walk the neighborhood, past the old Victorian mansions and the manicured lawns where he grew up. He would walk by the Ryans and the Rosenblatts, but his buddies who once lived in those homes had moved away, graduating from college and working for the city’s Fortune 500 companies.
When Morgan finally walked out of the house the day after Christmas 1957, he had few places to go. He knew he could always return to Miami, where he could crash in an apartment above the Bowery. His old friend Charlie Zissen would never turn him away.
There was something else drawing him back to Miami, something that he couldn’t seem to shake. He had never forgotten the young Cubans who had come to shore to pick up guns, and then vanish over the horizon.
News reports of the unrest in Cuba were heating up on television, with footage of demonstrations in the streets of Havana. Morgan didn’t know much about the politics in Cuba, but he remembered the look on Roger Rodriguez’s face and the passion in his voice when he talked about the struggle to free his country. The young intern could have embarked on a medical career, and yet he was donning fatigues and fighting a war he had little chance of winning.
After arriving in Miami, Morgan walked around the block of the Paula Restaurant several times before venturing inside. He had made his decision.
He knew he would stand out. He had always been impetuous, acting on gut instinct. But this was his only chance of drawing the attention of people who could get him to Havana. All he needed was to get by Tony Chao.
The baby-faced kid with freckles stared across the table at Morgan, demanding to know why he had intruded into their world. If it meant squaring off with him inside the restaurant, Chao was ready. So was Amado.
Morgan could see that it was getting tense. He inched closer to the teenagers. If he could just show that he was on their side, he might be able to get them to listen.
Morgan knew all about the revolution and even helped deliver weapons to the rebels. The more he heard about their struggles, the more he wanted to join their cause, he said.
If they wanted to throw him out after he made his pitch, then so be it. But he had come too far to just walk. He told them that he had served in the army and had gone through combat training. He could fire an M1 with crack precision and take on anyone with his hands and feet. What he didn’t tell them was that he was booted from the army before his first year, but no one needed to know.
Amado looked at Chao. First, no one knew this Americano. That was even less of a reason to trust him. From across the counter, old man Paula was still glaring at the table and looking at his watch.
Neither one of the teenagers could afford to make a mistake.
Amado may have already been under watch by FBI agents. He had gone to revolution rallies in Miami that had been attended by undercover agents. At sixteen, a photograph of him at an anti-Batista rally had just appeared in the Miami News. He had dropped out of Miami’s Robert E. Lee Jr. High School and was working two jobs to save enough money to return to his country and join the barbudos.
Chao had already joined the revolutionary cause, running guns in Havana months earlier until the cops put him on their wanted list. If not for a sergeant who took pity on him and sent him back to Miami, he’d probably be dead. Chao was now itching to return.
While most teenagers in Miami were heading to sock hops, surfing, and dancing to Elvis, Amado and Chao were angry young men in a world where they didn’t belong.
Morgan looked up and could see that he wasn’t getting anywhere. If he left the restaurant now, there was probably less of a chance he’d be able to connect to the rebels. Then, he would really have nowhere to go.
Like so many other times in his life, he had to think fast. He had better come up with a good one. He had to show them that he had a real reason to throw himself into their fight.
He decided to spin a tale—one that he knew would capture the attention of the teenagers across the table. He said he wanted to go to Cuba to avenge the death of an old army buddy.
It happened during an uprising in March, he said, when a band of rebels stormed the presidential palace. At the time, his friend was standing on a hotel balcony watching the mayhem unfold when he was shot by one of Batista’s soldiers. “He wasn’t doing anything,” Morgan told them.
Morgan said he was devastated by the shooting. His buddy was not just a friend—he had actually saved Morgan’s life during combat in Korea. Morgan had never forgotten. He needed to go to Cuba as much as anyone.
For a moment, everyone at the table was quiet. The teenagers looked at each other, not knowing what to say.
Even as a young man, Amado could see Morgan was hurting. Maybe—just maybe—there was a way they could help. They both excused themselves and walked over to Paula. For several minutes, they talked in the old man’s ear and then came back to the table.
The teenagers told Morgan they were getting ready to leave for Cuba, Amado the next day and Chao a week later. Both had saved their money to return to their country and join the revolution.
They might be able to take Morgan with them. But even if they managed to get him to Havana without drawing attention, there was no guarantee they could deliver him to the mountains. And even if they could, he might not be accepted by the guerrillas.
But if this Americano was intent on fighting, th
ey’d find a way to get him there.
2
The sun crested over the rooftops of Santa Clara as Olga Rodriguez scurried up the steps of the crowded bus. Clutching the bag to her side, she moved to the back row, head down, and slumped in a seat.
The bus was just seventeen miles from Manicaragua, but she still had to pass by government sentries and roadblocks. She just needed to get the supplies to the rebels—medicine, food, and letters. Then she’d be able to turn around and come back.
Please, God, just get me there, she whispered.
If the Cuban government agents boarded the bus and searched the passengers, she would be yanked off the vehicle, beaten, and more than likely executed. She peeked out the window as the bus began to roll slowly out of the station. Outside, the streets, normally bustling with cars and pedestrians, were now filled with soldiers and guns.
Her friends at the Normal Teachers School in Santa Clara begged her not to do this. But with every passing day, she had been getting pulled deeper into a movement that was burrowing its way into the heart of Cuba.
She had led protests on the steps of the teachers school, where she was elected student government president in 1956. Months later, she was leading walkouts during classes.
The area surrounding Santa Clara had always been a center of political unrest, but in early 1958, it was nasty. For months, fellow students from the Student Directorio had been going missing and turning up dead, their butchered bodies found in ditches. Just weeks earlier, a seventeen-year-old friend of Olga had been tortured so badly by Batista’s secret police that his heart gave out.
She found herself roaming to places like Leoncio Vidal Caro Park, spending hours listening to people rail against the government and the leader who had been in place since Olga was born: Batista.
What a betrayal.
His name alone was enough to inflame passion among the young students who saw him as a corrupt dictator beholden to US business owners and mobsters. In his quest for power, Fulgencio Batista had cut secret deals with companies like International Telephone and Telegraph and organized crime figures like Lucky Luciano, taking kickbacks and leaving most rural Cubans to wallow in their own misery.
The Yankee Comandante Page 2