The Corporation

by T. J. English

  The prognosis was good. He would survive. But he was going to lose his leg. The damage was irreparable. The leg would have to be amputated.

  The operation took place immediately, and it went well. Palulu’s left leg was removed just below the hip. After the area healed completely, he would likely be able to use a prosthetic limb.

  On April 5, Palulu had stabilized enough that he was transferred to the prisoner ward at Bellevue Hospital. There he was officially charged with the murder of Pedro Battle.

  Detectives came to his room at Bellevue and did what investigators who are holding a strong hand are wont to do: they hinted to Palulu that if he gave them information on the shootout in Central Park, including the name of the shooter, that would greatly enhance his chances of negotiating a plea deal on the murder charge. Basically, Palulu told them, “No me joda.” Fuck off.

  NEWS OF PALULU’S PREDICAMENT MADE ITS WAY TO UNION CITY. JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE was not happy. He didn’t care that Palulu had been arrested for the murder of his brother. Battle wasn’t looking for that kind of justice. He wanted street justice.

  “The son of a bitch is still alive,” he said to Ernestico and Chino Acuna. El Padrino met with the two hit men at a restaurant on Bergen-line Avenue. “He’s still alive, and that’s not good.”

  Ernestico and Chino ate their carne asada. Not completing the hit was going to cost them money.

  Said the boss, “We’ll just have to get him on the inside.” Battle was confident that wherever Palulu was being held, whatever hospital or prison facility, they could find someone to finish the job. He told his men, “I think I know maybe what the problem has been.”

  Ernestico and Chino looked at him. “Tell us.”

  Battle explained that a member of their organization, Ismael “Loco” Alvarez, ran a bolita counting house in Union City. Working a counting room was a highly trusted position. Suitcases filled with cash were brought from Manhattan, under armed guard, and stored and counted at a specified location, which led Chino to ask the obvious question: “Stealing?”

  No, worse than that, said Battle. He’d learned that Loco Alvarez had been feeding information to Palulu’s crew so that Palulu had been able to stay one step ahead of the hit squads. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Battle heard from an informant of his in the police department that Loco was also a police snitch, supplying detectives with information about their group.

  “Motherfucker,” said Ernestico.

  For Battle, there was a problem, a moral quandary. Loco Alvarez was his cousin by marriage. He was family. Even so, Battle had reached a conclusion: the cousin had to go.

  “I want him taken out,” he said. “Just him. Don’t hurt nobody else in his family. And I want it done in a very public way.”

  Ernestico and Chino were pleased. They would be paid for the hit. And compared to the hunt for Palulu, this promised to be a piece of cake. Loco Alvarez was a visible figure in the neighborhood, and he would likely never suspect that his cousin, El Padrino, would send hit men to have him killed.

  On the night of April 25, 1975, Ernestico and Chino made their move. They had done so many killings together in the last few months, they hardly needed to talk about it. It was all second nature. In a 1970 powder blue Cadillac, they staked out the home of Loco Alvarez at 400 17th Street. Chino was in the driver’s seat, armed with a .357-caliber Smith & Wesson, and Ernestico, sitting in the backseat, had a 9mm Browning automatic.

  Alvarez was at the Rancho Luna restaurant in Washington Heights that night. At around 11:15 P.M., he hopped in his car and drove across the George Washington Bridge into Union City. He parked near his building, and that’s where Ernestico and Chino saw him come strolling down the street.

  Alvarez, fifty-nine years old, was a bit of a dandy. He was dressed in a plaid sports coat, white dress shirt, white slacks, and white shoes. His hair was mostly gray, and he had long sideburns in the 1970s style.

  The hit men cruised up in the Cadillac and opened fire.

  Loco was caught off guard; he tried to run, but it was too late. He was hit seven times and fell to the pavement.

  Ernestico and Chino sped away in the Cadillac. They didn’t get very far. Powder blue Cadillacs are easy to remember. A witness at the scene had not seen the gunmen clearly, but did see the Caddy and gave a description to a couple patrolmen. A radio call went out over police frequencies, and within minutes of the shooting, cops in the area were on the lookout for a blue Cadillac.

  Ernestico and Chino were pulled over on Route 3 in North Bergen. Two cops prepared their weapons and approached the vehicle. “Step out of the car with your hands in the air,” one of the cops ordered. The cop saw Ernestico stuff his gun into the crease of the front seat before stepping out. Chino’s gun was found on the floor of the car. Both men were cuffed and placed under arrest for possession of a dangerous weapon. The charge was later upgraded to attempted murder.

  IDALIA FERNANDEZ WAS PUERTO RICAN, BUT SHE KNEW A THING OR TWO ABOUT Cubans. She had a habit of dating Cuban men, which was why when she first met Ernesto Torres at a bar in Union City, she liked what she saw. He was handsome, in a raffish street hoodlum kind of way, and he had that Cuban swagger. Clearly, he was a hustler, and he seemed like someone who could navigate the world of the streets and make money from various ventures, legal or otherwise. She had no illusions that he was anything but a criminal. She was hoping he was a smart criminal, as opposed to some others she had known.

  Idalia had a child, ten years old, and another one on the way. Ernesto said that he also had a child, Ernesto Jr., who was being raised by his mother in Spain. Not long after they met and started up a romance, they moved into an apartment together in the neighborhood of Cliffside Park.

  She met a friend of Ernestico’s named Pedro Battle. Not long after that, Ernestico told her that Pedro had been murdered. Ernesto was upset, and she was pretty sure that he was caught up in efforts to avenge the murder. Mostly she tried to stay out of these things; the less she knew, the better.

  On the morning of April 26, Idalia received a strange call from a Union City lawyer named Perkins. He told her, “Your friend Mr. Martinez has been arrested. But he will soon be bailed out. He wants you to meet him at the courthouse.”

  Idalia had to think about that. Who the hell was Mr. Perkins? (She later learned that “Mr. Perkins” was an attorney supplied by the Battle organization.) She remembered that Alejandro Martinez was a name that Ernestico used sometimes in his various criminal ventures.

  She left her child with a neighbor and drove to the courthouse. Ernestico was there with his friend Chino, whom she had met before. Ernestico smiled, and before she even had a chance to open her mouth, he said, “Don’t say anything until we get outside.”

  Outside the building waiting for them was a slightly older man dressed in a beautiful suit. Idalia was introduced for the first time to José Miguel Battle. She had heard about the man, whom Ernestico sometimes referred to as El Gordo. She knew he was the boss, and even if she hadn’t known, she would have been able to tell just by looking at him.

  Battle seemed pleased. He said to Ernestico and Chino, “He’s in intensive care, on the critical list. God willing, he won’t make it through the night.”

  Battle told his men, “I want you to go home and get dressed up. Put on your best suit. We’re going out in Manhattan tonight. I want all the bankers to see us out on the town. We’ll drink Dom Perignon and toast our enemies. That’s the way it is with us.”

  Later that night, José Miguel came by Ernestico and Idalia’s apartment. He was with another guy named José Herrera, who was introduced to Idalia as Monino. The men all sat around a table and talked bolita business. Idalia watched from afar. Seeing her man Ernesto talking privately with the boss, she had to admit, she was impressed. Maybe, for once in her life, she had picked the right guy.

  THE SHOOTING OF LOCO ALVAREZ DID NOT GO AS BATTLE AND HIS MEN WANTED. AFTER weeks in the hospital, Alvarez recovered from his wounds and was rele
ased. Aware now that the organization of his cousin, El Padrino, was out to kill him, he made himself scarce. He knew the key players in the organization—especially hit men such as Ernesto and Chino—and he was vigilant to the point of being a ghost in his own neighborhood.

  And so Battle went outside his bolita organization to a team of political assassins known by the nicknames Malagamba, Tati, and Monchi. Tati and Monchi were brothers. These three men were associated with Omega 7, the anti-Castro terror organization that claimed among its affiliate members the Novo brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio, who had once fired a homemade bazooka at Che Guevara while he was giving a speech at the United Nations. Omega 7 would later become notorious for a series of politically motivated bombings and assassinations in furtherance of what the FBI designated the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM). But, in the mid-1970s, their bombing campaign was in its nascent stage. The killing of Ismael “Loco” Alvarez may have been an early practice run.

  On a cold winter morning in January 1976, Alvarez was backing into a parking space on Bergenline Avenue when suddenly his car exploded. Alvarez was killed instantly and the car was destroyed. An explosive device had been placed under the driver’s seat. The inside of the car was blown out, and the force of the explosion was so great that it shattered windows in the surrounding area.

  Ernestico Torres and Chino Acuna may have considered themselves professional assassins, but when it came to getting the job done, they had a lot to learn from Malagamba, Tati, and Monchi.

  6

  THE PRODIGAL SON

  THE BOLITA BUSINESS WAS LIKE A BIG COFFEE- MAKING MACHINE: YOU SET THE AUTOmatic timer, and it started up in the morning and produced a pungent brew all on its own. You did not need to recruit people to play bolita. For those who bet the number, it was a daily ritual like eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Structuring the business, however, did take foresight, and even genius. There were many ways a person could bet a number or series of numbers. The possibilities were nearly endless. In the Latin community, especially among the islanders, betting the number was a tradition that ran deep. Your grandmother did it, and so did your uncle. By playing bolita, you were participating in a cultural tradition as rich as the church and as ubiquitous as the clave, the five-beat rhythm pattern at the base of all Afro-Cuban music.

  At the center of this culture was the dream book, pamphlets that promised that the secret to winning the lottery was to be found in your dreams. Since early in the twentieth century, dream books were sold at candy stores, pharmacies, and bodegas. Under titles such as Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book of Numbers, Dr. Pryor’s Lucky Number Master Dream Book (El Libro de los Sueños), or El Libro de Astrología y Numerología de Zolar, the books were designed to help you interpret your dreams and translate them into numbers.

  The dream books were an extension of la charada, the system in Cuba since the nineteenth century of assigning numbers to certain animals or objects. A horse was the number 1; a rooster was 11; a pocketwatch was 21; opium smoking was number 17—and on and on, an infinite categorization of things, activities, and numbers. The idea was that as certain objects or events occurred in your dreams, if you knew the numbers associated with those objects or events, you were being given a secret formula to win the lottery.

  It was a form of superstition, a kind of black magic, but many who bet the number swore by some form of numerology. The bolita king, then, wasn’t just a racketeer, he was the man who made dreams come true.

  In the New York metropolitan area, the man who made dreams come true and turned this phenomenon into a highly lucrative business was not José Miguel Battle, it was Isleño Dávila.

  Isleño had concerns about Battle. They had spent time together in Spain with their wives and children but had known each other before that, since the mid-1960s, when Battle first arrived in the New York– New Jersey area. Isleño, Battle, Angel Mujica and all the early Cuban bolita bankers had been poker buddies together playing cards primarily at a bar called El Baturro in Washington Heights. It was there that they first divided up various territories in the metropolitan area. It was mostly an agreeable arrangement. Isleño’s concerns about Battle had nothing to do with territorial disputes or the division of spoils. They were about his temperament, and his penchant for violent solutions, which Isleño suspected would one day cause them problems.

  For someone like Isleño, whose roots in the bolita business went back to Cuba, violence was a sign of failure. Bolita was not supposed to be, nor had it been in Cuba, a violent business. Unlike smuggling guns or drugs, or established vices like prostitution or other forms of gambling, the numbers game was not meant to attract a sinister clientele. If it was a vice, it was meant to be a benign vice. And if people were dying over the racket, it meant that something else had taken over—something like greed or avarice or the lust for power and control.

  To Isleño, Battle seemed to have many dubious characteristics. For one thing, he had an overweening compulsion for vengeance that may have had something to do with his personal history as a Bay of Pigs veteran. The mission of the 2506 Brigade had been to overthrow the Castro military and thus reclaim Cuba, but there was another motive: revenge. That desire had been thwarted in a most humiliating manner that included defeat and incarceration. This entire generation of men carried with it the burden of that legacy, part of which was an unsatisfied lust for revenge.

  Isleño Dávila was not a psychoanalyst; he was a sixth-grade dropout with a love for bolita, a proud family tradition going back to his own parents. He had trepidations about Battle based on the man’s personal history. Battle was a man who would use whatever power he had to settle old scores and to leverage his enemies—in other words, activities that had little to do with the business of making money.

  In the first ten years or so that the Cuban consortium had been up and running in New York and New Jersey, Isleño had sat back and let matters take their own course. There were obvious advantages to having Battle as a partner. As a hero from the Bay of Pigs invasion, he had a stature in the community that Isleño lacked. And as a former vice cop from Havana in the 1950s, he had an advanced understanding of graft, how to economically compromise cops and politicians in ways that would mitigate the dangers of unwanted raids or investigations. El Padrino was master of the well-placed payoff.

  It was only lately, since Battle had undertaken his aggressive campaign of terror to get revenge for his brother’s murder, that Isleño had begun to realize he had the capacity to take them all down together.

  Isleño lived with his wife and three children in Union City. Initially the base of his bolita operation was in Brooklyn and parts of the Bronx. He had started his operation on his own, through his own contacts, some of which were similar to Battle’s. Back in Havana, Isleño had also known Santo Trafficante Jr. In the 1950s, Isleño did business with the powerful mobster, who in addition to his many other rackets was an importer of bootleg cigarettes into Cuba. Isleño bought cigarettes from Trafficante to sell at his cafeteria in Mariel Harbor. Tony’s Cafeteria, named after Isleño’s brother, was the epicenter of the Dávila family bolita business in the Havana area.

  Isleño brought a lifetime’s worth of knowledge into the business of bolita. In New York, he introduced the concept of a numbers hole. He introduced other innovations such as pulito, in which a customer could bet a single number, thus greatly enhancing his chances of winning. It was Isleño’s hunch that bettors would immediately use those winnings to spread their bet, and eventually lose, which proved to be the case.

  Isleño also knew that bolita was a grassroots kind of racket. You had to know your clientele, what day of the week they received their pay-check from work or their Social Security checks from the government. You knew better than to open a numbers hole at the top of an incline or hill, because people getting off the bus or subway after a long day at work would be too tired to climb that hill to place a bet.

  In Spanish Harlem, at 117th Street and Park Avenue, Isleño sponsored s
treet festivals with beer, rum, Cuban food, and music. It was known and appreciated by people from all over the city that the boliteros were throwing this party. It was all part of giving back to the community, and creating a community of loyal bolita customers that pretty much guaranteed that if cops came snooping around looking for info about a local operation, they would get nothing out of la gente en el barrio.

  Isleño was allowed to run his own thing, even though Battle was considered to be El Padrino. The partnership was based on the fact that they were all bankers. There would come a time when one of the bankers had a bad day or week, when a particular number hit and that banker incurred big losses. He knew he was covered, because he could lay off part of his action with other bankers. Thus the Cuban bankers protected one another.

  Isleño did better than most, and he accumulated a small fortune. In 1975, he purchased a second home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was a sizable property on the water, a dream home for a Cuban émigré who had come to the United States with very little.

  It is possible that José Miguel Battle was jealous of Isleño’s financial success. In late-night drinking sessions with his young protégé, Ernestico (they usually drank champagne), he used to complain, “We are the true boliteros out on the street taking care of business. We don’t spend our time down in Florida, living like fat cats. We fight for what is ours right here on the streets of New York.”