AS A GANGSTER, BATTLE HAD SOME ISSUES TO DEAL WITH THAT THE MILITANTS DID not, most notably the Mafia.
Ever since the Cubans had begun to expand their bolita operations in the New York City area, the Mob boss they dealt with the most was Fat Tony Salerno.
Since the death of renowned mafioso Vito Genovese in 1969, Salerno had become the face of the Genovese crime family based in East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem, as it was sometimes called, especially after Aretha Franklin recorded her megahit of the same name in 1971. You could hear that song coming from phonographs or transistor radios along 115th Street near the Palma Boys Social Club, where Salerno and other underbosses sat in folding chairs in front of the club.
With his felt fedora, jowly cheeks, and ever-present cigar, Fat Tony was a mobster from the old school. He was not seen in high-class nightclubs like the Copacabana or the Stork Club, as were more famous mafiosi. Salerno was a proletarian gangster who gave the impression of being a man of the streets. Nonetheless, he was rich. He had a home in Miami Beach, a hundred-acre estate in Rhinebeck, New York—horse country—and an apartment in Manhattan near ritzy Gramercy Park. He made the most of his millions from the city’s numbers racket.
You did not address him as “Fat Tony.” “Big Tony,” maybe. But “Mr. Salerno” was even better. In later years, Salerno was heard on a wiretap bemoaning a disrespectful young gangster who had called him Fat Tony to his face: “If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be no Mob left,” he complained. “I made all the guys.”
In late 1976, Salerno was indicted on federal tax and gambling charges. Prosecutors noted that Fat Tony had been accepting at least $10 million annually in illegal policy wages but reporting only $40,000 on his income taxes. The Mob boss’s lawyer, the infamous Roy M. Cohn— formerly co-counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s—described his client as a “sports gambler,” but the Internal Revenue Service wasn’t buying it.
All of the early Cuban bolita bankers—Angel Mujica, Isleño Dávila, Battle, and others—had made the pilgrimage to the Palma Boys Social Club, which looked like a storefront club from the Prohibition era. There, the Cubans received Salerno’s blessing, with the understanding that the Mafia would receive a piece of the action.
Throughout 1976 and into 1977, Battle made semiregular stops at the social club, especially during the holidays. At Christmas, he came by with an envelope filled with $10,000 in cash, which he handed to Salerno, who remained out on bail. This was not the Mob’s cut of bolita, but rather a holiday gift.
Everybody was happy to see Mike Battle. By having Battle serve as a numbers boss, they were carrying on a tradition that went back to Alejandro Pompez, the Mafia’s Cuban numbers king back before the war. Of course, the arrangement was based on the Cubans regularly greasing palms at the Palma Boys Social Club, and in light of Salerno’s recent indictment, the price of doing business had gone up. A boss facing criminal charges meant costly legal expenses, a good excuse for increasing operating costs and taxes paid by various subsidiaries.
Battle never minded paying the money. He knew that you got what you paid for, and Salerno was the man in charge of the numbers racket in New York. It was money well spent. His concern was not Fat Tony, it was the other Cubans who had been cultivating the Mafia boss themselves.
Isleño Dávila, in particular, had formed an alliance with the Italians to establish a network of “bolita holes,” or shops, in neighborhoods along the Brooklyn-Queens border. Isleño’s contacts were mostly with the Lucchese crime family based in Brooklyn. But the Luccheses would have cleared everything with Fat Tony, the man who had been designated within the Five Families structure as the overseer of the numbers racket.
Isleño and Battle had coexisted peaceably for close to a decade. Battle was believed to have approximately one hundred bolita spots around New York, and many “runners” in Hudson County, New Jersey. Isleño probably had just as many shops in New York. They each employed hundreds of people. They each made multiple millions, which was used to finance their operations and also line their own pockets. This peaceful coexistence was based on their not stepping on each other’s toes. Battle was concerned that with Isleño Dávila presenting himself to the Mafia as a Cuban bolita boss, he was sowing the seeds of confusion. In Battle’s mind, he was the Cuban Godfather. There was no other.
So far, none of this was affecting business. Battle had not heard anything from Fat Tony Salerno about Isleño Dávila, or any other Cubans, intruding on his territory. But Battle was a strategist. As a leader, he liked to anticipate problems before they happened. He could see himself getting caught up in a war with Isleño. And not only that, but Isleño was in a position to complicate his relationship with Fat Tony and the Italians, which would become an existential threat to his organization. In all of this, Battle saw dark clouds forming on the horizon. And he was beginning to suspect he might need to take action.
BY THE CHRISTMAS SEASON OF 1976, CHARLEY HERNANDEZ WAS A WRECK. FOR SIX months—ever since first hearing about Ernestico’s murder—he had been living in fear. When he first heard about it, he didn’t believe it. At Tony’s Barbershop, a friend, Luis Valdez, told him, “Hombre, did you hear? Your friend Ernesto Torres is dead.”
Charley remained in denial, until the next day when he read an article about the murder in El Diario, a Spanish-language newspaper, with a picture of Ernestico and everything. Then Charley received a call from Chino Acuna: “We took care of your friend in Miami. He won’t be making any more orphans. Keep your mouth shut or you will wind up just like him.”
Later, Charley was put on the phone with El Padrino, who told him the same thing: “We took care of the kid.” You talk, you die.
Charley went into hiding. He stayed with his girlfriend, Lydia Ramirez, in Washington Heights, and rarely left the apartment. On one occasion when he did try to visit Carol Negron and his kids in Union City, he was jumped in the courtyard outside the building and beaten to a pulp. His son and three young daughters were shocked when he arrived at the apartment bloodied and bruised, though it was not the first time they had seen him in this condition. Charley had become something of a punching bag for the Battle organization.
By winter, Charley had returned to the neighborhood; he watched his back and was always armed.
On the night of December 20, he thought he would hide away for a couple of hours in a movie theater. He was carrying his burglary tools in a knapsack, as he often did. And he was carrying a gun. He was spotted by a police detective he knew well—Lieutenant Frank Mona, who had arrested him a couple times over the years. Instinctively, Charley ran. Mona chased after him. Charley ditched his burglary tools in the bushes. He also got rid of his gun.
Mona saw all this. He caught up with Charley, cuffed him, and placed him under arrest, then he retrieved the illegal items. Charley was taken to the Union City police station. It was a place he knew well; he’d been pinched numerous times for possession of marijuana and possession of burglary tools. Just walking into the place gave him the creeps, because he believed that Battle owned the Union City Police Department.
It was late on a Friday night. The courts weren’t open until Monday. As was often the case in these situations, Lieutenant Mona asked Charley—a known professional criminal—if he wanted to make a deal. Who did he know that he could provide information on? Charley said he had nothing to offer, and so he was left to stew in a rancid station-house cell.
Late that night, two uniformed police officers came into the station. One was white, Irish American, and the other Hispanic. The white one said, “Carlos Hernandez, we need to speak with you for a minute. Come with us.”
Charley was suspicious. He said, “Do I need to bring my coat?”
The cop said, “No. Leave your coat there. It might get messed with blood.” Then the two cops chuckled.
The hair stood up on Charley’s neck; he went with the cops, feeling as though he might be walking into an ambush.
The cops sat him down in an interrogation room. The Hispanic one said, “Do you know who ordered the killing of a guy named El Morro?”
Charley knew that was one of Ernestico’s hits, ordered by Battle. “No, I don’t know who killed him,” he said.
“Do you know who ordered the hit on Ismael Alvarez?”
Again, that was a killing ordered by Battle. “I only know what I read in the papers,” said Charley.
The other cop asked, “Do you work for José Miguel Battle?”
“Are you kidding me? I’m a burglar, he’s a banker. You think he’s going to trust me with his money?”
“You mean to tell me you would rip off Battle’s money? You have the heart to do that?”
“You better believe it. If I knew where the money was, I would take it.”
The cops smiled. They took Charley back to his cell and left him there.
The entire weekend, Charley thought about those cops. It entered his body like a virus: Those cops are with Battle. They were telling me that I’m going to be hit by the same man who killed El Morro and Alvarez. I’m going to be hit right here in this police station.
First thing on Monday, Lieutenant Mona came to Charley’s cell.
“Did you send some cops to talk to me?” asked Charley.
“No,” said the lieutenant. “Why?”
Charley was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said, “I have information that will blow your mind. But I’m not talking to anybody here in this station house. I wanna see somebody from the FBI.”
Mona made some pro forma remark about being able to guarantee Charley’s safety.
Charley shouted loudly, his voice ringing throughout the precinct, “I don’t even feel safe right now in this police station. Get me out of here!” He reiterated that he would not talk until they removed him from the precinct house.
Mona did not call the FBI, but he did call in an assistant U.S. attorney from Newark and the lead organized crime investigator for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office. Also, once Charley hinted at what he was willing to talk about, the investigators contacted Detective Richard Kalafus from the NYPD.
Kalafus had worked the Pedro Battle murder case, the Palulu shootout in Central Park, and a number of other Cuban-related homicide cases. He was considered to be a local expert on the Cuban Mafia in and around New York City. Kalafus had already begun looking into the murder of Ernesto Torres. In July 1976, he flew down to Miami and took a statement from Idalia Fernandez, while she was still recovering from her wounds. Again, Idalia identified Chino Acuna as the assailant. She also told Kalafus all about Charley Hernandez. What she did not tell Kalafus was that José Miguel Battle had been one of the assailants that day.
For Kalafus, roping in Charley Hernandez was like ordering the daily special: you weren’t sure what you were getting, but you hoped it was good.
The investigators moved their perp from the Union City police station to a hotel in Newark. The next day, he sat in a back room at the Renaissance Restaurant in Newark and spilled his guts.
There were a half dozen investigators, agents, and detectives in the room that day, but the lead questioner was Detective Kalafus. He was the most knowledgeable.
Kalafus was a bona fide character. In his early fifties, he presented himself as a cowboy, with leather boots, a western-style belt buckle, and a cowboy hat. He had a craggy face that made him resemble the actor Ben Johnson, who had won an Academy Award a few years earlier for his performance in the movie The Last Picture Show. He spoke with a slight Texas drawl, though the rumor among some in the NYPD was that he was from the Bronx (he was actually born in a small town outside of Amarillo, Texas). Kalafus may have been modeling himself on the TV series McCloud, about a marshal from New Mexico who is temporarily assigned to the NYPD. The show was immensely popular, and the character of Sam McCloud, played by actor Dennis Weaver, had reached iconic status in pop culture.
Kalafus took off his cowboy hat, sat back, and said to Charley, “I’m always interested in homicides. Especially homicides involving Ernestico. Are you a friend of Ernestico’s?”
“I was a good friend of his, yes,” said Charley.
A cassette recorder sat on the table in front of Charley, the tape whirring round and round, recording it all for posterity.
Said Kalafus, “You’re a good friend of Ernestico, who was shot sixteen times.”
“Sixteen times,” repeated Charley. That was a big number: sixteen bullet holes.
“We know that Ernestico committed upwards of thirteen homicides. Is that about the right number?”
“It’s probably the right number, yeah,” answered Charley.
“And how many do you have knowledge of that Ernestico did?”
Charley told about his friend, who in death continued to cause him as much trouble as he had in life. Only now the lawmen seemed to want to know about Ernestico’s murderous history so that they could clear many unsolved homicide cases. Charley would use his friend’s criminal legacy to save his own neck. He guessed that Ernestico would not have minded.
He told the cops about how Ernesto had killed a guy named El Raton, the drug dealer who had been a competitor of Pedro Battle. He told them about the murder of Pedro by Palulu, how Ernestico had approached El Padrino at the funeral service for his brother and pleaded that he be given the contract to find and kill Palulu. Charley explained to the investigators how Ernestico was paired with Chino Acuna, and then the killing really began. “There was a lot of work for [Ernesto],” said Charley. “Every night he had a different car. He cut his hair and used a lot of wigs, and every night they were kidnapping somebody. Anybody who was a friend of Palulu’s got it. They went into every bar, and I read the newspaper sometimes, and I see that so-and-so got killed, and I knew they were doing the killing. They were getting paid for it.”
Charley went on and on. Occasionally, Kalafus or one of the other investigators asked a question, but mostly it was a monologue. Charley had a lot to get off his chest.
The grilling continued for two straight days. Charley slept at the hotel in Newark with an armed detective outside his door. During the day, he was brought to the back room at the restaurant. Each day there was a different configuration of agents, prosecutors, and cops, though Detective Kalafus was always there.
The more Charley talked, the more comfortable he became. He was a natural storyteller, relating episodes like the kidnapping and shooting of Luis Morrero as if it were a scene from a movie. The investigators were mesmerized. Eventually, Charley got down to a specified retelling of the events leading up to Ernestico’s murder, his dealings with José Miguel Battle; his contract to murder his friend; the transfer of money; his traveling to Miami to meet with Ernestico; returning to New Jersey to tell Battle and Chino Acuna that he had not been able to complete the job.
As the days passed, it was as if Charley had fallen off the face of the earth. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day came and went, and his family wondered where he was. His children had become accustomed to their father’s sudden unexplained absences, so they should have been used to it, but it was an especially empty Christmas at the Hernandez home that year.
On December 28, at 11:45 A.M., Charley was brought to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in Newark to give an official statement. Present were Deputy Chief Charles Rossiter; an investigator with the prosecutor’s office named Lieutenant Steve McCabe; and two detectives from the Union City Police Department. Charley repeated what he had been going over ad nauseam throughout numerous interrogations with Detective Kalafus, only this time the chief deputy prosecutor narrowed in on criminal activities related solely to the murder of Ernesto Torres.
With the statement from Charley, investigators in New Jersey and New York were aware that, given what Miami detectives had already been learning from Idalia, a big piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Idalia knew about the murder from the point of view of a victim, but Charley had been privy to the initial conspiracy. Together, they connected the
sequence of events that led to the brutal killing of Ernestico.
Nonetheless, the New York–New Jersey people wanted to make sure they had squeezed every last bit of Cuban gangland intelligence out of Charley Hernandez before turning him over to the district attorney in Dade County, where any trial for the murder of Ernesto Torres would take place.
In the hierarchy of Cuban American organized crime, Charley may have been a small fish, but he had learned a lot from Ernesto, El Padrino’s prodigal son. And he liked to talk. All in all, Charley had the potential to be a devastating witness for the prosecution.
JULIO OJEDA WAS A MIAMI DETECTIVE WITH AN IMPRESSIVE RÉSUMÉ. WHEN THE Ernesto Torres murder occurred, Ojeda had been on vacation. But as soon as he returned on June 29, 1976, he was assigned to the case. Before long he was bumped up to lead investigator. It was clear that the investigation needed a lead agent who spoke fluent Spanish. Ojeda was a solid detective, but even he would admit that perhaps the biggest advantage he had as a cop in Miami was that he was bilingual, especially back when he first came on the job, in 1969, when there were maybe three Julios in the entire Public Safety Department.
As soon as he looked over the case file—crime scene reports; preliminary eyewitness interviews; a bedside statement from Idalia Fernandez identifying the gunman—he knew the case against Chino Acuna was strong. Idalia knew Chino. She’d had him in her home in New Jersey, and she’d been present on many occasions when Chino and Ernesto were present together. They were partners in crime.
Once a first-degree murder warrant was issued for Chino Acuna, an all points bulletin went out for his arrest. Local law enforcement and the Florida Highway Patrol were notified, as were the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, the NYPD, and the Union City Police Department. Also notified were the FBI, which issued an UFAP (unlawful flight to avoid prosecution). Wanted fliers were circulated, though after a thorough search by all of these agencies it was believed that Chino Acuna had likely already fled the country.
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