It was not illegal to transport large amounts of cash from state to state. Sometimes the airlines even assigned an armed guard to a customer to take the cash to and from the terminal. On this occasion, how-ever, Rydz and Battle were unaware that they were on an international flight that was leaving from Kennedy Airport, stopping in Miami, and then continuing on to Colombia. Different laws applied to international flights; the money needed to be declared.
The men were carrying the money in two shopping bags. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills had been wrapped in festive paper to give the impression that they were carrying birthday gifts. Rydz and Battle hadn’t even noticed that the bills were wrapped in Christmas paper, which was oddly out of season.
“What is this?” said the female security person. “Christmas presents in the middle of June? Can I take a look at this?”
Battle Jr. was in front of Rydz. He froze and said nothing.
Seeing what was going on, Rydz stepped in front of Battle Jr. and said to the woman, “That’s mine. It’s money, that’s all. We’re taking money to Miami.”
The woman peeled open one of the packages, then another. The realization that the dozens of brightly wrapped packets were filled with cash caused the other security personnel to gather around. This was definitely something out of the ordinary.
One of the male security people said, “How much money is here?”
“I don’t know,” said Rydz. “Maybe five hundred thousand dollars.”
By now, the female guard had called a supervisor on a walkie-talkie, and more security people were arriving.
The male guard said to Rydz, “You can’t just carry this on a plane. This money has to be declared.”
“I do it all the time,” said Rydz. “It’s not illegal. We’re going to Miami.” Rydz held up his ticket, which showed that he was flying from New York to Miami.
“You may be stopping in Miami, but this is an international flight,” said the guard. “This money has to be declared through customs and reported to the IRS.”
While everyone was talking, Battle Jr. slipped away from the group. One of the things he was most worried about was that before he and Rydz parted ways with Nene Marquez, their junior partner had given him a ledger sheet, or invoice, with numbers for the bolita business that month. He had that sheet of paper in his pocket. It would have been indecipherable to anyone who didn’t know what it was, but it occurred to him that if he and Rydz were searched, the security people would find that paper and start asking questions.
With no one looking, Battle Jr. tore the paper up into little pieces. As he sauntered over to a waste bin and threw away the pieces, one of the guards said, “Hey, you, what is that?”
“What?” said Battle Jr., acting oblivious.
The guard came over and moved Battle Jr. aside. He began digging in the garbage to retrieve the bits of paper. Not much was thought of this at the time, but they would be safeguarded, pieced together, and eventually decoded. One day far in the future, they would be used as evidence to take down the Corporation.
The various guards and supervisors were now somewhat alarmed; these guys were acting like they had something to hide. The airport police were called, and the money was confiscated. Rydz and Battle Jr. were not arrested—nobody knew of any crime they could be charged with—but they were detained. The cops brought them downstairs to a police office, where they were held for the next six hours.
At one point, an airport cop counted the money, while other cops stood nearby. After counting out $460,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the cop looked at Rydz and Battle Jr. and said, “For this amount of money, I would kill my mother.”
A security lady came to the two men with a form to sign. She said, “The IRS will hold this money until you are ready to make a claim for it. Do you understand?”
Rydz and Battle nodded yes. They were allowed to go. They boarded a later flight back to Miami—without the money.
They were told by a lawyer, “If you try to reclaim the money, the IRS is going to come after you. If I were you, I would say, ‘The money is not mine.’ ”
When contacted by a representative of the government, Rydz and Battle Jr. had their lawyer say, “My clients don’t want the money.”
“What do you want us to do with it?” asked the representative.
“Do whatever you want. Give it to the Cancer League. Give it to charity. That money does not belong to my clients.”
In the end, Rydz and Battle Jr. simply wrote off the money. It was the price of doing business. To the Corporation, half a million dollars was chump change.
FOR MONTHS, ROBERT HOPKINS HAD BEEN TRYING TO SMOOTH THE WATERS. HE HAD brokered the deal between Isleño and Battle Sr. at Isleño’s estate in Fort Lauderdale. Battle Sr. had proven to be a man of his word, delivering to Hopkins, in person, $50,000 in cash, which the Irishman passed on to Isleño. This should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.
Recently there had been at least two firebombings of bolita spots, one belonging to the Corporation and one to La Compañía, which the Lucchese family viewed as an act against them. The torchings were done late at night, so no one was hurt. No group claimed responsibility. But it was clear that someone was attempting to deliver a message. To Hopkins, it was as if they were one matchstick away from all-out war.
In the fall of 1983, Hopkins successfully arranged a high-powered meeting between himself, a partner of his named Kevin Quinn, Isleño Dávila, Abraham Rydz, and José Miguel Battle Jr. Having flown up from Miami, Rydz and Battle were there representing the Corporation. Hopkins said that he was speaking on behalf of his partners in the Lucchese crime family when he said, “The two-block rule must be honored.”
Battle Jr. noted that in Brooklyn, a bolita spot had opened up a half block away from a Corporation spot. “Well,” said Hopkins, “that spot was opened by La Compañía. That’s a Cuban spot. You need to work that out between the two of you. I can guarantee that my people will not violate the two-block rule.”
Rydz and Battle Jr. were suspicious. After the meeting, they spoke separately with Isleño, who told them, “Look, that spot a half block away from your spot, we did not open it. The Italians opened that spot. If you want to burn out that spot, you will get no objection from me.”
After Isleño departed, Rydz and Jr. stood on a busy street corner in midtown Manhattan. “Isleño,” said Miguelito, shaking his head. “He’s sneaky. He wants us to take out that spot so he can take advantage of it. Whatever we do, make sure we leave that spot alone.”
It may have been strategic thinking or paranoia on Jr.’s part, but it was a reflection of how duplicitous the bolita terrain had become.
Rydz noticed that at a movie theater across the street, emblazoned on the marquee was the title of the movie currently playing: Gandhi. Rydz thought, Gandhi, wasn’t he all about peace and nonviolence? That was a philosophy far removed from where the boliteros seemed to be headed.
In an attempt to resolve the conflict, there were other meetings, including one at the Palma Boys Social Club in Spanish Harlem with Fat Tony Salerno and Fish Cafaro. Battle Sr. flew in from Miami for that meeting. Rydz and Battle Jr. also attended. Salerno, chomping on his ubiquitous stogie, warned the Cubans to keep the peace.
Battle said, “Tony, I’m never the one to throw the first stone. You know that. But if somebody crosses me, they’re gonna be in trouble.”
Salerno promised his Cuban associates that the Italians would honor the two-block rule.
There was one final meeting, in late 1983, a major summit of Cuban and Italian mobsters with controlling interests in the numbers racket. The meeting took place at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at Third Avenue and 72nd Street, and it was attended by the reigning bolita elite at the time. Among those present were Isleño Dávila, Omar Broche, Spanish Raymond Marquez, and Pedro Acosta, all representing La Compañía. Bob Hopkins and his partners were present, as were representatives of the Five Families.
The Italians had
a complaint, or “beef.” It was alleged that the Cubans were deliberately tipping off the police about their spots, so that they would be raided and shut down. Then the Cubans would open their own spot at a nearby location. It was, the Italians complained, a sneaky way to get around the two-block rule.
The Cubans denied they had been doing this.
As everyone spilled out of this dinner meeting, it was clear that nothing had been resolved. The two sides were refusing to back down. As the group of Cubans stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, a car drove by and someone in the car opened fire with an automatic weapon. Everyone ducked for cover. The car peeled away from the scene.
One of the Cubans, Pedro Acosta, was hit. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room.
Hopkins had been standing with the Cubans at the time the shooting began. He had taken cover like everyone else. Later, when he heard that Acosta had died, he knew his attempts to be a peacemaker were over. He had failed. The war was on.
EVEN THOUGH NEITHER JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE SR. NOR ANY OTHER REPRESENTATIVE OF the Corporation had been at the meeting, El Padrino took the killing of Acosta as a personal affront. A Cuban bolitero had been brazenly murdered by the Italians. Battle told Lalo Pons, the leader of his SS squad, “We are at war with the Mafia.”
Over the next nineteen months, what became known to police as “the arson wars” exploded like a long-dormant volcano that had rumbled to life. In a city that was already experiencing a spiraling homicide rate due to the scourge of crack cocaine, the arson wars were an unwelcome addition to a hyperviolent era.
At first the arsons hardly made the newspapers. The city had famously weathered a previous era of arson, in the 1970s, when the torching of buildings, especially in the Bronx, became a common insurance scam. From the press box at Yankee Stadium, sportscaster Howard Cosell had witnessed the phenomenon and announced to a nationwide audience, “The Bronx is burning.” It became a phrase that seemed to define the era.
So arsons were not particularly new or notable in New York. But it soon became apparent that these were not insurance fraud burnings. Something different was happening here. This became especially apparent when innocent people began to die.
From September 1983 to June 1985, there would be sixty fires set at dozens of locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In these fires, eight people would be burned to death, including a four-year-old girl and her teenage babysitter. By the time it was over, the city would be repulsed, and the reputation of the Corporation would be dragged into the gutter.
Lalo Pons organized the team of arsonists who carried out the attacks. One of his key operatives was a hulking, nearly 350-pound lifelong street criminal named Willie Diaz.
A Brooklyn native, Diaz was Puerto Rican. When he was a baby, his parents moved from Puerto Rico to the neighborhood of Bushwick, where Willie was raised in a housing project. By the time he was fifteen, he was a member of a gang called the Champions. After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School, he embarked on a life of petty crime. At the age of seventeen, he stole two hundred pigeons from a neighbor’s coop and sold them to a pet store. Later that year, he got arrested for hitting his girlfriend in public. He was also caught stealing Social Security checks. By the age of nineteen, he had advanced to dealing drugs, mugging people, and robbing liquor stores to support himself.
At six foot one, with dark, sunken eyes, Willie had the sort of menacing look that helped him land a job as a nightclub bouncer. Not long after that, he became a pimp and even lived in an apartment with three prostitutes who worked for him.
Money was hard to come by. Willie was a low-level hustler, a punk. Left to his own devices, he was destined for prison, which is why when his Cuban girlfriend’s mother, Grace, suggested he come work for her at a local bolita spot, Willie jumped at the chance. The place, an anonymous storefront designed to look like an OTB (off-track betting) outlet, was located on Greene Avenue. At first, Willie wasn’t even paid. He was there as Grace’s understudy. She taught him all about the business; eventually he was working at the bettor’s window taking bets and reporting to a bolita manager named Manuel “Manny” Guzman.
Willie knew little about the organization he was now working for, and he didn’t ask too many questions. In June 1981, he was to get an education when the bolita hole where he worked was raided by cops and he was arrested on a policy violation. He was cuffed and taken to arraignment court, where, out of the blue, a lawyer showed up and told him he was there to take care of everything. “The boys sent me,” explained the lawyer. Willie pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge; the $250 fee was paid for by the Corporation. Willie was free to walk out of court.
Manny Guzman explained it: “Our organization is like a Mafia family of Cubans.” He told Willie that he now owed the Corporation, and that they would call upon him someday to do “something special.”
That opportunity presented itself in September 1983, when Lalo Pons put out the word within the organization that he was looking to assemble an “enforcement crew” whose first order of business would be to burn down rival bolita spots. Manny Guzman recommended Willie to Lalo Pons.
When Willie met Pons, the physical disparity between the two was comical: Willie was huge and fat, and Pons was short and wiry. Not only was the little man the boss, but he was fond of referring to himself as “Napoleon,” a nickname he encouraged others to use.
Pons told Willie to put together a crew. They would be paid $1,000 for the first arson and $2,500 for each job after that. Though ostensibly the arson campaign began as a war against the Italians, eventually Pons was ordering hits on locations belonging to La Compañía as well. Willie would later admit to having undertaken upward of thirty arson contracts on spots in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Among the most notorious of these crimes were:
99 Schenectady Avenue, Brooklyn
According to Willie, “I used a friend named Hector Aviles, because he needed the money. This was Hector’s first arson for me, but we had run together growing up, and I knew Hector was bold.” On September 29, 1983, as he always did, Willie first scouted out the location by going inside the bolita hole and placing a bet, always betting the same number—5-7-6. He placed his bet with Evelyn Herrara, the bolita writer behind the counter. Willie looked around the store to see who was present, where the entrances and exits were located, and how best to torch the place. “I saw the back door and figured the girl [working there] would have a way to get out. So I went back to the car and sent Hector in with the gas.”
The technique was basic: Hector carried a pail of gas into the place, splashed it around, and lit it on fire.
Outside, half a block away, Willie had the hood of his car up to make it look as though he had stopped the car because he had engine trouble. He saw Hector come running out of the store with flames already visible behind him. “I slammed the hood down and we drove away. As we left we saw a guy go into the place, like to try to rescue the girl. We drove back to the old neighborhood slowly . . . I found a pay phone and paged Lalo with a ‘ten-four,’ the signal that the fire was done. It was the signal I always used.”
Later that day, Grace called Willie and told him that a woman had died in the fire. The official cause of death, according to the medical examiner’s office, was asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide inhalation, as well as burn trauma to her body.
“Lalo was pissed,” remembered Willie. He thought the death of the girl would cause them problems with the police. But then it was reported in the newspaper that the man who Willie and Hector had seen running into the store was Evelyn Herrara’s fiancé. It was reported that the fiancé earlier on the day of the attack had had a loud public argument with Evelyn. The cops believed that he was the primary suspect.
Sure enough, a few days later, the fiancé was wrongfully arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Herrara. Willie noted that Lalo, his boss, was “happy about that. Real happy.”
291 Evergreen
Avenue, Brooklyn
By March 25, 1984, Willie had assembled a more professional crew of arsonists. Among his people were two African Americans, Anthony “Red” Morgan and Calvin Coleman, who preferred to be known by the nickname “Truth and Understanding.” Coleman was a spiritualist who sometimes spouted quotes from the Old Testament.
Willie owned an old yellow cab that was no longer operational as a taxi. The three men loaded into the car and drove to the location identified by Lalo as the place they were supposed to torch. It was a bolita spot disguised to look like a bodega. Willie went in first to scout out the location; he placed a bet on 5-7-6 and checked the place out. There were three people in there at the time, two boliteros—Carlos Rivera and Angel Castro—who were behind bulletproof glass, and a customer, Prudencio Crespo, who was there to place a bet.
Crespo became suspicious when he saw the two black guys enter carrying a pail of some kind of liquid. He saw one of them dump the contents of the pail. Crespo smelled gas and saw a liquid spreading across the floor.
“Let’s go!” yelled Red Morgan to Calvin Coleman. They ignited the gas and bolted toward the door.
Crespo saw the eruption of the flames and ran. He was right behind the two arsonists, dashing through the fire.
Outside, Willie Diaz was standing by the taxi getaway car, watching the front of the store. As he later remembered it, “I heard a loud explosion . . . I saw [Coleman] fly right out the front door and land right on the street, the concrete . . . He got up. His feet were on fire. So he pounded them out and ran straight toward where I was at . . . He was running so fast he almost ran right past the car. I had the door open for him. He jumped in the car.” Morgan, the other arsonist, also got in the car. Said Diaz, “The place was engulfed in fire. There was a lot of fire coming out of the place.”
The Corporation Page 32