Assassin: The Terrifying True Story Of An International Hitman

by Robbins, Christopher

  Dr Sosa mixed a drink for himself and told his assistant, ‘Get a telephone directory and pick out the names of any firms or people who you think might help us and we’ll compose a letter to them.’ It took Perez all the morning to draw up a suitable list and in the afternoon Dr Sosa sat down at the typewriter with him and together they worked on the letters.

  Each letter was brief and to the point. It ‘kindly’ asked for ‘spontaneous co-operation’ stating a figure up to 10,000 pesos, saying the department needed to buy equipment. The request was made in the name of the honourable president and in the interest of the country. It added that the department expected an immediate answer and that the letter was to be returned with the carrier.

  Immigrants, mostly Spanish or Italian, were especially vulnerable to the department’s attention. The threatened businessmen, well aware of what might be in store for those not spontaneously co-operative, were not tardy in their response and a flood of cash came into the office. It was certainly not used to buy equipment and Perez notes without humour that the cash went towards the doctor’s ‘expenses or for shopping expeditions by his wife’.

  But even the large amounts that were pouring in did not cater for Dr Sosa’s spending and property investments. Sheer greed had taken him over. He was rushing around the town from one business deal to another and enthused about his plans to his assistant. ‘What a marvellous opportunity! A friend of mind is selling some property but he needs to be paid at once because it’s in a wonderful situation in Altagracia.’ Sosa turned to his assistant and asked quite seriously, ‘Do you know anybody who could lend me 23,000 pesos?’

  The demands made on local businessmen were intensified. Larger businesses were approached for 20,000 pesos at a time, and Perez records that one unfortunate paid out 60,000 pesos before he was left alone. Those who paid out quickly were quickly asked for more; those who reacted sluggishly were asked for the earth.

  Despite Perez’s constantly reiterated disgust over his chief’s low-handed schemes, his ruffled feelings were miraculously soothed by a share of the booty. As the collector of much of the blackmail money, some of the businessmen took trouble to ingratiate themselves with him. One gave him a cheque for 500 pesos. ‘It was rather handy for I was rather short of cash at the time,’ Perez says easily.

  When one much-bled businessman paid 20,000 pesos in cash to the department Dr Sosa generously encouraged his assistant, ‘Take some for yourself.’ Perez said there was ‘really no need’ but his chief ‘insisted’. ‘Take 3,000 pesos’ the doctor told him. ‘It’s a present to you from me.’

  It meant that he had made 3,500 pesos in a single day and he wrote without shame in his diary, ‘It seems that this was my lucky day. I hadn’t asked for anything but nevertheless had been given plenty.’

  During these days when the department was involved in acts of terrorism, blackmail and robbery, Perez noted that many of the Cuban agents were often heavily drugged. They would stagger into his office stoned blind and, as far as the bureaucrat could make out, a hard core of them were addicted to either opium or heroin and seemed to have a constant supply. It was some time before he discovered that the pusher providing the numerous Cubans with their dope was none other than the department’s chief, Dr Sosa himself.

  One day Juan Aguiler brought in a fairly large package to the chief. The two men opened it and inspected the contents and Sosa told the Cuban to go immediately to his friend. ‘Tell him that I have the package and from what I have seen it is pure opium - absolutely unadulterated.’

  ‘Okay—how much do you want for it?’ Aguiler asked.

  ‘You’re the expert in these things, but I think you could ask for 40,000 pesos or even more,’ Sosa replied.

  Such packages arrived frequently, Perez says, and the good doctor would dish out some to his agents and sell the remainder to one of the illegal laboratories in the Republic which processed the raw opium into heroin and then smuggled it into the U.S.A..

  Fourteen

  Even in the Dominican Republic bank robbery, blackmail and dope dealing are not considered the natural province of an intelligence department. The excesses of Presidential Intelligence did not bear inspection and Dr Sosa knew that if his position was to remain secure he would not only have to keep his agents under a tight rein, but would also have to neutralize anyone within the government capable of pointing an accusing finger.

  As the size and extent of the department’s operation had grown, so had the influence and power of Dr Sosa’s arch-enemy, Colonel Luis Ney Tejeda, the police chief. The colonel was trusted by the president and had compounded that trust when he arrested 33 people involved in a plot to overthrow the government.

  Among his enemies in the palace was Dr Quezada, who informed Presidential Intelligence that the colonel’s own personal assistants would help in their master’s downfall.

  Dr Sosa invited them to his villa. Dr Mario Jerez Cruz and Fermin Marte Polanco were old schemers from the Trujillo era. Mario Jerez had worked as a legal advisor in the intelligence department and had infiltrated the communist party which was not only legal under Trujillo, but had been founded by intelligence in order to unmask the unfaithful. Fermin Marte Polanco was notorious because he had reached his position by denouncing his own brother as a spy in the pay of Fidel Castro and he had subsequently been sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour.

  The cold and treacherous assistants were perfect for the plot against their boss, particularly as they found his attempts to centralize the administration of the palace an inconvenient efficiency. Dr Sosa planned to discredit him by bombarding the president with reports damaging to Tejeda from all quarters.

  Dr Sosa knew from his CIA contacts that the Americans would welcome a change in the leadership of the police and sent Anthony Ruiz a report the following day telling him of the meeting at the department, the people present and the decision that had been arrived at - Colonel Tejeda Alvarez needed to be dismissed from his post as he was considered ‘negativo’.

  The colonel made occasional trips to Miami to visit relatives and Sosa and his colleagues decided to weave a sinister and devious meaning into these journeys. Reports arrived at the department, signed by Dr Jerez Cruz and Fermin Marte Polanco, charging the colonel with the old chestnut of smuggling arms into the country from Miami. He was also accused of making contact with leftists whom he was supposed to have met at 2 Second Street off the Barrio Santa Maria Auxiliadora. The department knew that when the police raided this house they would find a radio transmitter and equipment which could be used to tape telephone calls.

  Further reports came in from agents accusing Tejeda of training personnel and being involved in a conspiracy with other military leaders. Meanwhile, Dr Sosa had gone to considerable trouble and expense to produce a tape with the faked voice of the police chief talking of conspiracy based in Miami.

  The president was showered with reports which built up a damning case against the Chief of Police, and also implicated the head of the secret police who had accompanied him on several trips to Miami. Tejeda pleaded innocence and reminded Balaguer of his loyal service but there was little he could do to defend himself. He had been in Miami on the dates in question and the excuse that he had been visiting relatives sounded pathetically weak. The colonel was relieved of his post immediately, and so was the head of the secret service.

  The night that the news of the dismissals was announced there was a riotous party at the villa for those who had been involved in the plot. With the police chief out of the way Dr Sosa could now move from strength to strength. In the meantime the post of Head of the Secret Service had been given to Colonel Arseno Regaldo, the close companion of the intelligence chief. ‘So another of Dr Sosa’s plots against honest officers succeeded,’ Perez wrote in his diary.

  Loyalty to the department was no guarantee against the intrigues of Dr Sosa. Agents who fell on hard times found their chief outwardly sympathetic, while behind their backs he made arrangements to rid himself of them. On
e of the Cuban agents, Otilio Martinez, approached Sosa asking for compassionate leave and a loan. He explained that his wife was ill in Miami and urgently needed an operation. He needed to raise 3,000 pesos and wanted twenty days’ leave to enable him to take care of his three children while his wife was away. Sosa listened to the agent’s plea, put a comforting arm around his shoulder and promised to fix everything by nine the same night.

  As soon as the agent had left Dr Sosa sent for Juan Aguiler and the two men closeted themselves in the study for half an hour. Perez could not hear what they said but when they emerged Sosa seemed to be in a good mood and offered his assistant a glass of Scotch. He sat out on the verandah and spoke to Aguiler of horse racing; it was a Friday and the superstitious doctor liked to gamble as he believed it was his lucky day.

  The following day Perez went into the office and found the sentries reading a newspaper and talking of murder. Perez looked at the paper and saw a photograph of the victim. He was naked and, according to the report, the dead man’s hands had been mangled to make it impossible for him to be identified by his fingerprints. The newspaper thought that he was probably a communist but suggested that he could alternatively be a member of the armed forces, or a government official, assassinated by extreme leftists.

  Perez read the report vaguely. It was just another murder. He looked again at the photograph and his heart stopped. The dead man was unmistakably Otilio Martinez.

  In the office he skimmed over the documents which had come in during the night. His mind was overwhelmed by the murder and he found it impossible to concentrate. It was unbelievable that Sosa would have a man murdered merely for requesting 3,000 pesos and compassionate leave.

  ‘I thought about handing in my resignation to Dr Sosa and telling him that I was too ill to go on working. But then I thought of my children, my wife and my mother. What would be done to them if I took such a decision? What would become of them if anything happened to me? I was sure that by resigning I would be condemning not only myself but all of my family.’

  Sosa came into the office and acted as if nothing had happened. When it was reported to him that the murdered man seemed to be Martinez he expressed surprise and ordered the mobilization of the department to look into the case. He told his men that the agent must be avenged, for not only was he a member of the department, but also a man whom he had regarded highly. They were to be discreet in their investigations as he did not want it known that the dead man had been an agent.

  Perez listened to the speech and sat quietly at his desk. Later he wrote, employing his talent for understatement, ‘As well as being a murderer Dr Sosa was also a hypocrite.’

  The department was thorough and swooped on the area where Martinez had been murdered and ‘shot several people’. Others were arrested, including a number of children and pregnant women, and were badly beaten up on their way to the interrogation centre. The most vile tortures were used on several men in an attempt to make them confess to the murder but Sosa was unable to find a credible scapegoat.

  ‘The death of Martinez was soon forgotten,’ Perez wrote. ‘But they eventually found some innocent person who was convicted of his murder whom I think is still in La Victoria prison - or maybe is already dead.’

  Nothing more was heard about the Martinez murder for a considerable time. Perez’s routine at the office continued but his chief grew stranger and stranger. The usual flow of cronies and the intimate, private meetings had stopped altogether. Dr Sosa spoke to no one. ‘I began to think he was going mad,’ Perez says.

  Then one day a woman arrived at the department and announced that she was Otilio Martinez’s sister. The doctor agreed to see her and the girl explained that normally she lived in Miami but she was worried as her brother had stopped writing to her. She knew that he was employed by President Balaguer’s Intelligence Service and wondered if anything had happened to him.

  ‘You’re right,’ Sosa told her. ‘Your brother does work for me, but at the moment he is on a mission in a foreign country.’

  The girl was still baffled because she had not heard a word from her only relative, a brother whom she described as her ‘right arm’ and to whom she was very close. Sosa replied that Otilio was engaged in very secret work and was forbidden to write to anyone but that he would be back within two months.

  When the girl had gone Sosa sent for Juan Aguiler and the Cuban arrived wearing a white suit and a red tie with wide, white stripes. ‘Otilio’s sister has been here looking for him,’ Sosa said. ‘She seems very intelligent. What do you think we should do?’

  Aguiler knew the girl from Miami and told Sosa, ‘She’s a pretty girl all right but she’s got no money. She could work for us. I’ll think of something, but remember she’s well-liked by the Cubans in Miami and if anything were to happen to her it could mean worse problems for us. I’ll have to look for a way to put this over. We could compromise her in some way so that she couldn’t talk.’

  Dr Sosa had murdered the brother and now prepared to seduce the sister. He was impressed by her chestnut hair and black eyes and was keen to add her to his stable. That night he invited her to dinner at the Embajador and Perez notes discreetly in his diary that he is not sure what happened. It soon became clear, however, that the girl had become one of Sosa’s mistresses. She started to work for the department and was put on the payroll.

  ‘We received two reports from her which were signed with the pseudonym ‘Rosa’, as she had not been allotted an identification number at that time. She obviously had no experience of this sort of work because in these two reports there was nothing of any value. I remember one of them was about three women in a café who were criticizing the president. The department didn’t take any notice of this sort of information but they accepted it to keep her happy. She could not have guessed that the people she was working for were those who had murdered her brother and were planning God only knows what for her.’

  As time went by the girl grew uneasy. She asked Perez where her brother had been sent and he was forced to lie. He told her that Otilio was not far away and would soon return. ‘I could see from her face that she had been crying and her eyes were red,’ Perez recorded sadly.

  Sosa began to treat the girl like a slave. On one afternoon he ordered her to go back to the house ‘where we were the other night,’ and said that he would join her there later. Perez felt trapped in the middle of the affair but dared not tell the girl what might be in store for her. ‘I got home with such a headache that I thought I was going out of my mind,’ he remembers of this day.

  The daily round went on until a particular report on Perez’s desk caught his attention. It accused Martinez’s sister of bringing drugs into the country and selling them on the outskirts of the city. Copies of the report were to be sent to the president and also to the Secret Police with a note to say that the girl should be arrested, interrogated and held in prison until deportation could be arranged.

  She was duly imprisoned. Perez felt sorry for her and decided he would try to help. One afternoon he had to exchange his 45mm pistol at the police arsenal and while the officials there were filling in the necessary forms he asked one of the guards to take him to the cell where they were holding the girl.

  ‘He checked my credentials and then saluted me and took me to where the poor girl was locked up. I very nearly cried when I saw her, her face was so badly beaten up. She begged me for help, swore she was innocent and asked me to take a note to Dr Sosa. I gave her a few pesos to enable her to buy something decent to eat because the food in prison was barely fit for dogs. When I got to the office and told Dr Sosa where I had been he said, ‘How could you do such a thing? It’s not nice to go and see this drug addict. As far as I’m concerned she can drop dead.’

  Sosa tore up the girl’s letter without even reading it. ‘She’ll get ten years you know,’ he said laughing.

  ‘I should have liked to have shot him,’ Perez remembers, and adds lamely, ‘but it wouldn’t have achieved anything exc
ept to harm me and my family.’

  He decided, in his whipped cur’s wisdom, that out of sight was out of mind. He made no more enquiries about her welfare and never mentions her again in the diary. When questioned about the episode he could not even recall the girl’s name.

  Fifteen

  Dr Sosa had a dream. It was a vision of the Republic returning to the ‘golden age’ it had enjoyed under Trujillo, whom the doctor had looked upon as a god. And, naturally, Sosa cast himself as the man who could bring about the transformation.

  President Balaguer’s administration, while corrupt and inefficient, was half-hearted in its tyranny. In Sosa’s view it was ridiculously soft and ineffective when dealing with the left and allowed various revolutionary organizations to exist as a sop against growing opposition. Sosa dreamt of a power where the president was neither opposed nor threatened, but ruled absolutely with a grip that never relaxed. And he wanted to feel its raw strength in his grasp.

  Dr Sosa was approached by the CIA with the suggestion that the Republic would benefit from an organization dedicated to the complete elimination of the country’s communists. It would need to be organized on similar lines to groups like MANO in Guatemala, the Falcons in Mexico and the Death Squadron in Brazil, which all operated under full police protection. The chief immediately grasped the advantages of using an unofficial, right-wing terrorist group which could be given the discreet support of the government and yet be publicly denounced at the same time.