by Shawn Levy
By sheer, dumb coincidence, another high-ranking military officer came across the scene soon after and alerted authorities, cutting crucially the amount of time the assassins had counted on to execute the second part of their plan—the actual coup. By an even more dire coincidence, that same officer went directly to the home of General Fernández, the conspirator who had intended to take charge of the country, to tell him the awful news and rally him to the palace. Fernández was thus rendered completely incapable of performing his portion of the plan, and it all began to unravel gracelessly. By the time Ramfis and Rubi stepped off their plane, several of the conspirators had been captured or killed, the others, desperate for their lives, were scrambling for places to hide, the SIM was ransacking the city looking for anyone potentially connected to the tyrannicide (some thirty thousand-plus homes were eventually searched), and General Fernández was sitting amid the extended Trujillo family trying to conceal his involvement in the plot.
In the coming days, power remained divided between Balaguer, the puppet president of surprising mettle and determination, and Ramfis, the presumed hereditary heir with control of the more substantial portion of the military, an immense war chest, and, most of all, the power inherent in the name Trujillo: Not a soul in the country wasn’t to some degree terrified by the very word.
On the morning of June 2, the man who’d built the power behind that name was buried in his hometown, San Cristóbal, amid an enormous display of pomp lent considerable tension by the massive military presence. Partly it was a show of intimidation; partly it was one of fear. No one was sure, after all, that the rest of the Trujillo family wouldn’t be targeted for death. Rubi attended in a blue linen suit, a panama hat protecting him from the sun, standing a little bit away from them, reflecting his status as an ex–son-in-law but also suggesting the tenuousness of the bonds existing between him and the family. (He was so far from the heart of things that he was cropped out of most newspaper photos of the funeral.)*
That afternoon, a reporter in New York got him on the phone and asked questions about the situation in Ciudad Trujillo. Rubi played it cagey, offering vague assurances and saying nothing, really. The following day, at a press conference with Ramfis and Balaguer, he stood silently while the latter explained that Rubi would soon be going to the United States to liaise with various concerned parties there.
The next day, he was in New York. Officially, he was an ordinary citizen on his way home to Paris. That was what he said and that was what Balaguer, still president after all, told the New York Times: Rubi’s visit was “absolutely private,” and anything he did in America would be “on his own.”
But, of course, with or without Balaguer’s knowledge or blessing (but probably with), Rubi was there in hopes of keeping up contact with the Kennedy administration and maintaining the possibility that a Dominican government rid of the Benefactor could be recognized by the United States. Too, in all probability, he was lobbying for Ramfis. Having been so long associated with the Benefactor’s regime, he couldn’t suddenly start speaking for an as-yet-unformed post-Trujillo government. Moreover, his official function was too ill-defined for him to have any authority in speaking for the current government, and he had no especially close relation with Balaguer, a poet and historian in whose copious memoirs Rubi never figures, not even anecdotally. What was more, the Trujillos had him by the purse: In the previous year, the Benefactor, pursuing another profit-making scheme, had requested that Rubi sell him his land holdings in the Cibao in exchange for shares in a new corporate scheme he was organizing; Rubi complied and was now tied in to the fortunes of the Trujillo dynasty to the sum of $200,000. He had a mission, all right: to see after Ramfis’s interests and, by extension, his own.
He played it like the pro he was, sitting down with Igor Cassini for a private update and a public Q and A that was published in the Hearst newspaper and ran the gamut from serious talk of statesmanship to details of his personal situation to questions about his reputation as “the great Romeo and Playboy extraordinaire” (“Incroyable!” Rubi exclaimed).
“We have no single boss today,” Rubi told Cassini’s readers. “The Generalissimo is dead and no man has succeeded him, and no one person intends to succeed him. President Balaguer heads our government, and General Trujillo commands the army, which supports the government.”
As he popped vitamin pills in his rooms at the Stanhope Hotel, he assured the world that the Dominican press had been freed from censorship, that political prisoners would soon be granted amnesty, that no accords existed between Ciudad Trujillo and Havana, that the streets of Dominican cities were safe, that there had not been mass arrests after the shooting, and that free elections were desired by all parties. He especially emphasized the immensity and sincerity of the people’s mourning of their Benefactor. “All you had to do was watch television to see the spontaneous outburst of grief registered by the people,” he said. “But I was in the streets, and even as a Dominican I can tell you I was overwhelmed at the feeling of sorrow demonstrated by the people.”
Mostly, he seemed intent on putting the world’s mind to rest regarding Ramfis. “I can assure you, first of all,” he said, “that General Trujillo doesn’t want to perpetuate the so-called Trujillo dynasty and that he, personally, has no political ambitions whatsoever.… Ramfis agreed to head the armed forces only after I and other friends urged upon him that he was the only man in the crisis who could maintain cohesion and stability with the military.… He has stated categorically that the Army will be used only to maintain order at home, and will positively stay out of politics. The Army will be used to support any duly elected government, and not to enforce any sort of dictatorship.”
As it happened, Ramfis probably didn’t want to run the country. He preferred his idle life of wealthy leisure, drinking, screwing around, playing polo, toying with lackeys, making the scene at nightclubs; his family saw him as their savior, but in the immediate aftermath of his father’s murder he drank and he shut himself up and he worried, sincerely, that he couldn’t handle the massive job of restoring order to the country and rejoining the community of nations as an equal.
The article containing Rubi’s reassuring words was published on June 7. That same day, John F. Kennedy, back from Paris, was briefed on what Rubirosa and Cassini had told Robert Murphy. If he wanted to, the president could have learned a lot more: From the moment his plane touched ground at Idlewild Airport three days earlier, Rubi was under the constant surveillance of the FBI. The Bureau and its voyeuristic director J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping tabs on him since his marriage to Doris Duke; in late 1953, the Department of Justice, guarding Barbara Hutton’s millions, requested anything the FBI had on him and was told that, as there had never been an official investigation, there wasn’t much. In 1960, as signals from the Dominican Republic became more ominous, Hoover’s agents began asking questions about him again, casually, and with the director’s explicit orders that they have “no direct contact with Rubirosa.” As late as March 1961, however, the Bureau seemed to feel that he wasn’t worth watching too closely; a memo that month from New York to Hoover declared “it is not believed that any investigation is warranted at this time.”
That all changed with Trujillo’s death and with Rubi’s arrival in the States as an agent of shuttle diplomacy between the tenuous new Dominican government and people with connections to power in Washington. A more formal investigation was requested, and for the next three years Rubi couldn’t pass through an airport, make a phone call, buy a shirt, or get a haircut in the United States without somebody making note of the fact somewhere and sending word to Hoover’s office. Coordination was established among the FBI, the Department of State, the Bureau of Narcotics, the New York County District Attorney’s Office, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, all of whom had an interest in Rubi’s comings, goings, and activities. Phone records were traced; acquaintances were interviewed; banks, shops, hotels, and airlines were asked to provide information.
In January of the following year, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy requested a copy of whatever Hoover knew about Rubirosa, he was delivered a file thick as a medium-sized city’s phone book.
He was informed, for instance, that Rubi’s visit to New York in the wake of Trujillo’s funeral was followed by a quick trip back to Ciudad Trujillo and a second flight to New York, this time with an official passport and not a visitor’s visa like the one he had used only a few days earlier. It was learned through interviews that Rubi had left New York that first time with good news for Ramfis and Balaguer: Through the efforts of Igor Cassini and Robert Murphy, an open hearing would await the Dominican government when the form of it was finally settled. He managed to get the PR contract with Cassini’s friend’s firm to be extended (probably taking a finder’s fee), and he made an unofficial deal with Ramfis and Balaguer that he himself would get $250,000 if his work resulted in restored recognition of Ciudad Trujillo by Washington. Agents were concerned that Rubi might be a bagman, shuttling money from Dominican sources to people with influence in Washington, but they were assured by a confidential informant that “he never heard of Rubirosa paying anyone off inasmuch as Rubirosa had a reputation for taking all he could for himself.”
To press for a diplomatic result that would also benefit him financially, Rubi spent the summer cozying up to the Kennedys, with and without the help of Cassini. In August, Rubi and Odile were invited to join a Riviera cruise on a 175-foot steam yacht with a whole cadre of their new Kennedy-circle friends: Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia, the president’s sister; Frank Sinatra; Dean and Jeannie Martin; restaurateur Mike Romanoff; agent Milt Ebbins; songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen; and Texas oilman and Sinatra drinking buddy Bob Neal, who had leased the ship and stocked it with the best food and drink. It was a star-crossed plan: Sinatra threw a hissy fit about some perceived insult, swore off the cruise, and went to Germany with Dean and his missus. The boat, to which the rest of the party repaired, along with old Joe Kennedy, who joined them at Antibes, turned out to be a particularly ugly craft, “the worst-looking damn vessel you ever saw,” according to Neal. “It was beautiful inside,” he added. “They’d really done a great job refurbishing the thing.” But when shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos invited them all for lunch at his villa they actually anchored it where it couldn’t be seen.
The following month, there was a second cruise, at Hyannis Port, the Kennedy family playground on Cape Cod. One Friday night in late September, Rubi, Odile, Pat Lawford, Ted Kennedy, and Sinatra flew from D.C. to New Bedford, Massachusetts, on the president’s private jet, the Caroline (like the Angelita, named after the head of state’s daughter). They landed in a thick fog and hired a brace of taxis to drive them to the compound some fifty miles away. Frank bore a trove of gifts for the president and his father: Italian bread, champagne, and coolers filled with ice cream. In the pea soup weather, the little caravan took a few hours to make the trip, stopping at a dive bar where, according to taxi driver Roger Paradise, “Sinatra bought the whole place a drink. He was talking to everybody and didn’t want to leave. He asked to take the drink with him but they said no. He said something really nasty.” By the time they arrived—Peter Lawford bounded out of the house to greet them—Sinatra’s mood had lightened and he tipped each driver $10. Rubi and Odile went with Ted Kennedy to his home on Squaw Island, about a half mile away, while Sinatra stayed in Joe’s house and the president retired to his own cottage. The following day, they all reunited for larks in the sun, capped by a three-hour cruise of Nantucket Sound aboard old Joe’s fifty-two-foot yacht, the Marlin. The next day, all the guests departed.
It was a couple of weeks before news of this little gathering made uncomfortable headlines for the White House. Sinatra, then at the height of his ring-a-ding-ding, thumb-a-nose-at-propriety Rat Pack phase, was enmeshed in a series of skirmishes with the press over his, cough, alleged ties to organized crime, and wasn’t deemed fit by much of the country to be chumming around with the president. Pierre Salinger explained away his presence in Hyannis Port by saying that he was a guest of old Joe’s and was in town to discuss a souvenir record album of the inaugural gala that Frank and Peter Lawford had produced.
What was worse, though, was Rubi’s presence. Again, Salinger explained that the Rubirosas were guests of the president’s brother, but that didn’t wash among those who carefully monitored Caribbean affairs. The sight of the president and his family rubbing shoulders with a man so closely associated with a past—and, potentially, future—Trujillo regime added to anxieties in the Dominican Republic and among groups in the United States, including some in the government, hoping for a peaceful democratization of the island. Fidel Castro went so far as to broadcast radio accounts of the Rubirosa-Kennedy friendship into the Dominican Republic in an effort to make citizens there suspicious of Washington’s intentions.
In fact, it was Rubi’s intentions they should have been monitoring. On the one hand, he had the attention of the Kennedys, who were respectful enough of his knowledge of the situation to listen to him if not take his word as gospel. On the other hand, he had Ramfis, growing more and more sullen and dangerous in Ciudad Trujillo, not really wanting to be there, impatient for a resolution, quietly securing the family fortune (estimated at $800 million in 1961 dollars) and, to keep himself amused, torturing the conspirators in his father’s murder. A tribunal would later learn of electric shocks to the genitals, eyelids sliced off, sodium pentathol injections, beatings; one of the rebels was served a stew made of the flesh of his rebel son; told what it was he was lapping up, he died immediately of a heart attack.
Ramfis expected quicker results from Rubi and was angered by the slow progress that he was making with the Kennedys. (Too, his mother had warned him from Paris not to trust Rubi and his plans.) He could spin into a fury when he read in the Dominican newspapers that Rubi was in Dallas at the end of October to open a new polo pitch there and break bread with Texas oil baron William H. Hudson. And he spoke extremely bitterly of the machinations of Rubi and his chum Igor Cassini. “If they know Rubirosa in the U.S., it’s thanks to the $10,000 he pays Cassini to mention him in his columns,” he groused, characterizing Cassini as a man “who sells his services, his connections, his columns and would sell his body if he could. He’s a pawnbroker who sells only gossip. But you don’t have to pay him more than you think it’s worth.”
Rubi heard about these sorts of outbursts secondhand and knew that the string he was playing was getting shorter and shorter. By the first week in November, certain that the impatient signals he was getting from Ramfis spelled trouble, he insisted to his contacts in the Kennedy administration that they move to recognize one or another government in Ciudad Trujillo or risk seeing Ramfis move in with the army and take over. He might be able, he said, to keep Ramfis from moving for a week or two, but no more. They promised a response, and Rubi went down to the Dominican Republic, where he was to take part in a parade and polo tournament, to wait for it.
On November 15, the ceremonial paraders included Rubi, his nephew Gilberto, a variety of military officers loyal to Ramfis, and a selection of government officials riding up the Malecon, the very road along which Trujillo had been gunned down. The following day, Odile watched as Rubi played polo on the pitch beside the Hotel El Embajador. A journalist asked Rubi if he’d heard anything about Ramfis and the rest of the Trujillos leaving the country. “No, not yet,” Rubi said.
But he was wrong. During the previous night, Ramfis had finished his business with his father’s assassins, personally executing the several who were still alive, including his traitorous uncle. At the same time, the Benefactor’s body had been removed from its crypt, and Ramfis’s house in the beach resort of Boca Chica had been emptied. The family had fled in a series of secret airplane flights, and the yacht Angelita was dispatched to follow them laden with Trujillo’s remains and millions in cash, jewels, artworks, and securities. Dominican authorities managed to get enough cooperation from their Caribbean
neighbors to force the Angelita back to a home port. But the Trujillos had escaped.
Rubi was livid: In the face of the Kennedys and the world he had been made to seem a liar, a puppet, a dupe. He gave an angry interview in the Dominican papers decrying Ramfis as a coward and repeated his outburst in the English press: “I won’t ever see him again in my life. He is not my friend. He betrayed me.” When he came home to Paris, he was still angry. “He was calling Ramfis all sorts of names,” recalled a friend. “‘These guys are no good, they’re fucking cowards.’” Ramfis, who would spend the next months shuttling between France and Spain looking for safe haven, never responded publicly and never spoke to Rubi again.
With no prospect of recouping his investment money from Ramfis or cashing in on the bargain he’d made with him to win the country back its good name in Washington, Rubi cooled his jets in Palm Beach, waiting patiently to see what shape the new government would take and how he might figure in its plans.
It didn’t take long for him to learn. On January 2, 1962, the seven-man Council of State, a newly established interim government that was to help the Dominican Republic make its way toward free, democratic elections, met in its inaugural session.
As its very first action, the council sought not to address relations with Washington or Havana or the OAS, not to settle questions about the military or the economy, not to seek the extradition of the Trujillos or the fortune with which they’d absconded, not to change the name of the capital back to Santo Domingo.