Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  Pressure continued to build up. One grim day followed another. The department threatened to kidnap his children, then he was arrested by the police on the orders of the Venezuelan security service and interrogated.

  Immediately afterwards he was visited by Rafael Antonio Collodo, an agent from the Intelligence Department who brought another proposition from Dr Sosa with him. If Perez handed over the documents the chief would hand in his resignation. Wearily, Perez sent the agent away with a curt refusal.

  It was at this stage in the proceedings that I arrived. I must have cut a ridiculously lightweight figure in my denims and t-shirt after the procession of professional heavies that Perez had been dealing with. But I was the last chance. Although I had arrived in Caracas apprehensive and ready for anything, I was blissfully unaware of the immediacy of the danger Perez was in.

  It was only as I returned to New York that I experienced a little of the paranoia that was Perez’s daily lot. A customs official refused to let me leave the country, saying that my visa was not in order. It meant I would have to go back into Caracas and visit various offices to fill out the necessary forms - a process that would probably take days. I felt panic. Did Sosa’s long hand reach to me?

  A comforting tweedy voice spoke gently into my ear. ‘If I were you, old boy, I’d slip 50 pesos into your passport and see if that does any good.’ I did what I was told and the official wielded his rubber stamp. If I had known what was really going on in Perez’s life I would have paid thousands to get out.

  Perez joined me in New York a few days later. His natural leaning towards hysteria was not helped by Pan Am, who had overbooked the flight which involved him in a last minute attack of nerves when he had to jettison his luggage to get a place on the plane. He arrived in New York with only the clothes he stood up in. The documents he had stuffed beneath his shirt.

  I found him checked into the Lexington Hotel, squatting uncomfortably on the bed in a drab provincial room watching television and clutching a Gideon Bible. As usual, his nerves were not carrying him through the situation and he explained that he had left his wife in a flood of tears convinced that he would never return alive.

  The lack of luggage had added yet another worry on to Perez’s tiny frame and seemed to have taken away the last vestige of his confidence. He had the Latin American’s horror of looking scruffy or badly dressed, although he always looked both, and implored pathetically that the first thing on the agenda should be a shopping expedition. He drew himself up and made a formal statement of faith: He had decided I was to be the one to tell his story and have access to all of his material. But first, a change of underclothes.

  Fresh underwear seemed a small enough down payment on a story other men were prepared to kill for. We spent the first day shopping. Perez bought a collection of cream coloured, short-sleeved nylon shirts, the crucial underwear and a couple of pairs of tiny shoes for his children. I shunted him around from shop to shop and spent most of the time in the car listening to the radio. It was humid and in the high eighties. Nevertheless, when Perez had completed his shopping, and returned to the car a new man, he presented me with an umbrella as a present. The only reason I could make out for this totally unsuitable gift for a steaming New York summer was that I was English.

  Back at the Lexington Hotel the diminutive secret agent changed into his new clothes, shaved and smothered himself in cologne. After a long and elaborate toilet we had dinner together and then returned to the room to begin the long process of sorting out the material, translating the documents and taping lengthy interviews.

  As the interview progressed, a high-pitched whine became noticeable. I ignored the noise but it soon worried Perez who thought the room was somehow bugged. He flung himself around in the grip of a horrible panic, pulled open drawers and ran his fingers under ledges, pulled the pictures down from the wall and even peered under the bed.

  Meanwhile, I had been inspecting the cassette and saw that the whine had been made by the tape itself and not by a bugging device. Perez would not accept that explanation. The noise had really shaken him and he sat down unsteadily in a chair, put his head in his hands and in a pitiful voice said that he had to sleep. It was the end of the interview.

  He stood up, went into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, and spoke of the nightmare he was plagued with waking or sleeping. It was always the same - the death of his children and of himself. I lay on the bed and listened. After a while the water was turned off and the silence was broken only by the unmistakable sound of Perez sobbing.

  I expected him to change his mind again and again during the next few days but he never did. When he left for Caracas he gave me the documents and the diary. He wanted some part in freeing his country from the thieves and killers who had it by the throat, he said. I never saw him again. By parting with his material Miguel Perez had cashed in his life insurance.

  Ten

  I now find it difficult to believe that I never met Dr Sosa and have to strain to remember that I have no clear idea of what he looks like, having never seen a photograph of him, and would not know his voice if I heard it over my shoulder.

  I have to remind myself of this because I have collected so many folders full of notes and tapes about him, and he has grown so large a figure that I often catch myself imagining that I have met him. So fixed in my mind is the image of the doctor dining in the open air by the pool of the Hotel Embajador in Santo Domingo, or sitting out on the verandah of his villa in the evening drinking Scotch and soda, that it is only with an effort of will that I remember I do not really know the shape of that pool and the arrangement of its sun umbrellas, or how many chairs there are on his verandah.

  I first heard of Dr Sosa from Carlos Evertsz. Evertsz had been contacted by the head of the CIA in the Dominican Republic and asked whether he could get close to Castro if he was sent to Cuba. ‘He asked me if I was willing to take a chance for big money and get into Cuba and loll Fidel Castro - just like that.’ The plan was outlined to him briefly and he was told that the details would be provided by Dr Manuel Perez Sosa, a Cuban who knew the country well. Evertsz said that he remembered Sosa from the old days when he had been in charge of SIM, the dictator Trujillo’s intelligence service. Evertsz heard no more about the plan and nothing ever came of it. At the time Sosa’s name was just one in a gallery of Latin-American villains and as it did not crop up again in the assassin’s story I paid it scant attention.

  But it was through Miguel Perez that I really got to know the doctor. The bureaucrat’s account of events in the offices of Presidential Intelligence is dominated by his chief and there is hardly a page in the diary that does not mention him. Dr Sosa looms over every word and thought that Perez has and the bureaucrat shrinks into insignificance against him.

  ‘But for politics the island would be a paradise,’ an English journalist wrote of the blighted Caribbean Dominican Republic. It is a most unhappy paradise, where fear hangs over every Dominican.

  But Dr Sosa is not merely an evil baron in some dark kingdom which history has left behind. He is archetypal of the army of anonymous gangsters, licensed to rob, torture and kill, who are behind the seats of power in every Latin-American country today. And his sad, insignificant island is a microcosm of Latin America and a symbol of everything that is wrong with it. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it can also be considerably cruder; the world portrayed here of this modern-day Doctor Death is one where the backroom boys operate in cells awash with blood and human excrement.

  Dr Sosa himself grows in the telling. His grandiose schemes, spectacular greed and lust for power transcend the scope of most political gangsters. He had banks robbed, businessmen blackmailed and opponents tortured and killed; he met with Haitian voodoo priests and had women raped in a room he had set aside as an espiritista temple in his villa. There are few characters in literature who can compete with this stage villain who stars in his own melodrama. And yet Sosa is alive today and goes about his business still.
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  But, as I say, I only know the doctor by reputation.

  Eleven

  The early history of Dr Sosa is sketchy as Perez’s diary only deals with the recent past. Occasionally it refers fleetingly to earlier days under the dictator Rafael Trujillo when Dr Sosa was in charge of intelligence. He is simply described by Perez as a ‘tall, middle-aged man, a ruthless and bloody murderer with a taste for torture, who liked to join in the brutal acts he ordered’. Perez does not give details but records one specific instance which haunted him. A 17-year-old girl called Margarita Gonzalez had been brought in for questioning to the gaol ‘Carcell de la 40’ which had a reputation as a torture centre. Sosa rushed to make the interrogation himself and finally ordered the collective rape of the girl which he stayed on to witness. The girl later died and a Dr Scott, a European, provided a bogus certificate giving the cause of death as haemorrhage (Scott also provided a service where ‘enemies of the régime’ were given injections which made it seem as if the victim had died from heart attacks).

  Miguel Perez himself had grown up under the ogre Trujillo’s shadow and had been instilled with an immense admiration for the man by the father. So when he was offered a minor post in SIM, the dreaded Intelligence Department of the régime, after he left High School, both he and his family were honoured. He started work on 8th September 1952 and his job was to deal with reports brought in by informers.

  But Perez calmed himself with the thought that while others plotted and murdered in the struggle for power, he pushed a pen as a simple clerk in the employ of the government. This attitude, though hardly courageous, was common enough under Trujillo.

  The dictator had made fear almost palpable and every Dominican had learnt to live with it as a daily companion. The world of Trujillo was the only one the young Perez knew and it was a brutal enough place to blunt any man’s sensibilities. Those who strayed from the shelter of the violent man’s wing were put down like dogs.

  It has been estimated that Trujillo eliminated half a million people during his rule, which in ratio to a population of just over three million puts him considerably further ahead of Hitler and in the same league as Stalin. His political opponents either died in the dungeons of his secret police or in mysterious and spectacular auto ‘accidents’ and faked ‘suicides’.

  Political opponents apart, Trujillo also conducted a rigorous policy of suppression and wholesale butchery against the numerous Haitian immigrants in the country. It is not always easy to tell the difference between Haitians and Dominicans but one deficit the Haitians possess is an inability to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley.

  So when Trujillo ordered his army to massacre Haitian squatters living on the North West border of the Republic they armed themselves not only with guns but also with sprigs of the plant. Careful not to make mistakes, the militia held them up before the uncomprehending peasants and killed those who answered incorrectly. The army massacred between fifteen and twenty thousand squatters in a 36-hour bloodbath.

  Trujillo’s power was total and his perverted logic made it natural that he should expect his subjects to worship him as a god. He indulged himself in a policy of maniacal self-congratulation. The dictator’s titles included “Benefactor of Fatherland’, ‘Chief Protector of the Dominican Working Classes’, ‘Father of the New Fatherland’, ‘Rebuilder of the Financial Independence’ and ‘Genius of Peace’. Roadside placards carried the message ‘Thank you, Trujillo,’ while hospitals had signs reading ‘Trujillo Cures Us’. A ‘spontaneous petition’ from 600,000 citizens changed the name of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo and in the houses of the faithful - including that of Miguel Perez - a mass-produced plaque was hung on the wall which read, ‘In this house Trujillo is Boss’. The generalissimo began to compare himself favourably with Pegasus and Plato until eventually he put himself on a par with the Almighty himself. The populace of Ciudad Trujillo had a neon slogan flashed at them day and night, ‘Trujillo and God . . . Trujillo and God’.

  The mad, chilling world of Trujillo was where Dr Sosa cut his teeth, and when the dictator was assassinated in 1961, it dissolved. For Miguel Perez it had been the only reality he had known. Anybody closely involved in the régime was in danger of his life and a revengeful population was not inclined to differentiate between clerks and torturers. He fled to New York in the wake of what he describes as the ‘communist persecution of ex-Trujillo men who were shot down in the street, in restaurants and in their homes’.

  Dr Sosa went to earth as well, although Perez does not say where. It was most probably Miami where the doctor had many friends among the emigré Cubans. Perez stayed in New York for nine months and then judged it safe to return, but he was mistaken. The new government, a Military State Council, imprisoned him for a further 14 months.

  Out of gaol it was difficult to find work but eventually he became a clerk once more - this time in a more prosaic government department which dealt with agrarian reform. ‘I had a very low salary but I was happy.’ He struggled along on 250 pesos a month for five years and for the first and last time of his life the pressure was off.

  The years that Perez was out of politics were erratic for the country. Government had followed government. At the end of it all President Joaquin Balaguer, a lacklustre, unprepossessing man and one-time puppet vice-president of the dictator, headed a government as a result of elections which were widely held to be rigged.

  The country slouched back into the ways of the dead dictator. One by one the exiled Trujillo men came out of exile and gaol and slowly took up their old positions of power. Dr Manuel Sosa was personally reinstated by the president himself as the head of a newly created Presidential Intelligence Department. And the doctor remembered the quiet obedient clerk who had worked for him in the old days.

  Twelve

  There was quite a party the night that Dr Sosa gathered his old cronies around him as the future core of Presidential Intelligence. The grim merrymakers met at the Hotel Embajador, in itself a monument to the Trujillo era. Built at great expense to the personal order of the dictator it was meant to house the flood of rich Americans who never came. It oozes a seedy, provincial luxury and no Dominican can claim to be among the country’s upper class unless he has money in the casino, spent ostentatiously in the restaurant and cha cha’d with Cuban whores by its poolside. It is the place where Dominicans show the world they have made it and give a heavy-handed display of their chic.

  Dr Sosa gathered the rat pack around him. Perez had been summoned by a drunken agent and was warmly welcomed and embraced by his old chief. He was in an expansive mood and told Perez that he desperately needed him in his new operation which had been converted into a ‘completely technical affair’.

  Perez glanced miserably about him. With sinking spirits he recognized the old crew: Manolo Santamaria, a brash Cuban with gold teeth and loud suits, whom Perez describes, bluntly as ‘Responsible for a lot of deaths’; Viterbo Alvarez, known as ‘Pechito’ - small chest - who was a master at murder; and an array of agents with similarly disquieting pasts.

  Sosa named Perez as his personal assistant and immediately went into details of the appointment. A permanent leave of absence from his present job would be arranged, securing him two salaries: the 250 pesos he already earned plus the 1,500 pesos he was to be given by the department. Perez voiced a diplomatic objection, said he would have to think about it, and noted in his diary that he did not really intend to accept it at all.

  The gathering of the rat pack was an affair full of bonhomie and Dr Sosa bellowed at the waiters for fresh glasses of Scotch, the chic drink of the Republic. To convince his new assistant further that they were all friends together Sosa took him to another room in the hotel where he was induced to join in an orgy with Cuban whores. He did not arrive home until 5.30 in the morning and dutifully jotted in his diary that the whores’ salaries were 750 pesos a month.

  More than two weeks passed uneventfully after the meeting until Perez went to work one morning to find tha
t he had been fired: ‘By direct orders of the Presidency’. He went to see Sosa to discuss the loss of his job and when confronted with the awesome doctor he realized that he had no choice but to work for him. Sosa faked delight at Perez’s decision and there was no doubt a sense of irony in his request to his assistant to celebrate. Perez refused glumly and told his chief that he needed a money-lender to help alleviate the problems caused by his dismissal from his previous job. Sosa was magnanimous and took four 100 pesos bills from his wallet and told Perez to sort out his personal affairs and buy himself some clothes. ‘You must look smart, Miguel, for you will be working in my office.’

  The following morning Perez went to work. Pathetically, he was barred from entry to the Presidential Palace, where the department’s office was, by the guards on the gate and had to phone his new chief from a public call booth. Sosa ordered his admittance and issued him with an identity card.

  The routine began. At first it really did seem as if the department had become a ‘purely technical affair’. Sosa was busy re-organizing the office’s administration and allocating group chiefs with twenty agents each to the various zones he had split the country up into. Perez left home at 7.30 each morning and drove to the palace where his first task was to pick up reports which arrived in the library and take them through to Sosa’s office. They were mostly tame stuff, giving details of communist movements and making the routine accusations of subversion against the opposition party (PRD).

  Slowly, as the weeks went by, even Perez’s dull bureaucratic mind grasped what lay behind Dr Sosa’s elaborate plans. He aimed to control all information reaching the president which would put him in a position of tremendous power and was to come to mean that in many instances Balaguer became the unwitting puppet of his Intelligence Chief. It was his intention to replace the president’s trusted officers with his own men as the opportunities presented themselves.