Ojeda told Idalia that he was there to warn her about the potential dangers ahead if she were to testify.
“You could have told me that over the phone,” said Idalia.
Ojeda said that he did not want there to be any record of their having communicated.
After Ojeda departed, Idalia was not reassured. The visit from the convicted ex-detective was unnerving. He was a dirty cop. She didn’t know that Ojeda was now working for Battle’s attorney. If she had known, it would have made his appearance even more ominous.
A couple of weeks later, Idalia was visited by another cop—Detective Richard Kalafus of the NYPD. She knew Kalafus from Ernestico’s murder case. She told him about Ojeda’s visit. Kalafus seemed concerned; he told Idalia to contact him immediately if Ojeda tried to contact her again.
In September, Idalia heard that Charley Hernandez had been deposed for the upcoming trial in Miami. The deposition had taken place at the 19th Precinct station house in Manhattan, and was conducted by prosecutors from Miami. Idalia was told that she would likely be deposed the following month.
Idalia wondered whether Battle would let her live long enough to testify against Chino Acuna.
At times, the anxiety was crippling. She tried to live a normal life. Each day, she sent her two children off to school. Then she spent the rest of the day selling and smoking weed.
One day, she was at a supermarket on West 97th Street near her apartment when she saw a man she thought was José Miguel Battle. How could that be? She followed the man, sneaking between the aisles of the market. Yes, it was Battle. She was certain.
Even though she was terrified, Idalia kept up appearances. She had a boyfriend, a forty-three-year-old Cuban named Armando who worked at an auto garage farther uptown. Armando was not the father of either of her children, but he helped her out financially in exchange for sex.
For Idalia, sex was something of a survival mechanism. Her children were all from different men. She used sex because she could, in the hope that it would improve her situation in life, but her relationships usually made things worse.
In her building, many of her neighbors knew that she was occasionally sleeping with a tenant named Roberto. She had met him through Angie, her babysitter. At first, Roberto was a customer; he bought weed from her. They got high together and had sex a few times, but it was only casual.
There was another guy in the building who was sweet on Idalia. His name was Ramon. He had moved into the building earlier that year after being released from Sing Sing prison and lived in an apartment next door to Idalia (she was in 11D and he was in 11C).
Ramon often saw Idalia in the hallway, and he liked what he saw. He once encountered her in the building stairwell. They talked, and he leaned over to give her a kiss. She did not resist. Ramon took this as a sign, and he began following her. Eventually, Idalia had to tell him, “Look, I’m not interested in having a relationship with you. Stay away from me, stay away from my kids.” She told him she was already having an affair with Roberto, whom Ramon knew from having seen him around the building.
This did not go down well with Ramon, who was the jealous type. He cursed at Idalia and threatened her. Idalia was frightened enough to tell a neighbor, Brenda, in 14A, that she believed the guy who lived next to her, Ramon, was going to try to get her and stab her.
“Why?” asked the neighbor.
“Because he wants to have an affair, but I have no interest in that man.”
Unbeknownst to Idalia, Ramon began following Roberto around the neighborhood. He did not like that Roberto was sleeping with Idalia, while he had been rejected.
On the night of November 24, Ramon and Roberto had it out on the sidewalk in front of their building. Roberto, who was young and bigger than Ramon, kicked his ass. He gave him two black eyes and a bloody nose.
Ramon was humiliated, and he was irate. On his way back to his room, he stopped outside Idalia’s apartment and spread blood from his battered nose all over her front door.
Idalia was not flattered to hear that the two men had had a fight over her. She was more frightened than ever about Ramon.
The day after the fight, an older tenant named Juan, who was part of a tenant patrol group, ran into Idalia in the lobby of the building. She was coming from the laundry room in the basement, carrying a bag of laundry. She asked Juan if he would escort her to her apartment.
“Is there a problem?” Juan asked.
She explained that she had a neighbor, Ramon in apartment 11C, who had been bothering her and banging on her door. Juan walked Idalia to her apartment.
In times of stress, Idalia lit up a joint. She had men all around her— lovers, wannabe lovers, gangsters, cops, ex-cops, and prosecutors. Few of them had her best interests in mind. Some wanted to use her, and some wanted to do her harm.
THE ARSON WARS HAD BEEN GOING WELL, AS FAR AS THE CORPORATION WAS CONcerned. Yes, there had been some bad publicity, but the feeling was that it would all blow over eventually. Meanwhile, the death of Jannin Toribio brought about a cessation of arsons for the time being.
Willie Diaz stayed busy. He did some goon work for Lalo Pons, roughing up deadbeats who owed money to the Corporation, or doing some vandalism to deliver a message on behalf of the organization. He felt as though his stature was rising, especially after he was introduced one day to Nene Marquez, who was basically the New York boss of the Corporation. “I hear you been doing good work,” Nene told Willie.
For a street hood like Willie Diaz, a Puerto Rican, to be recognized by the Cuban Mafia was flattering. He felt as though he was being groomed for something special. That “something” arrived on a day in mid-November when Lalo Pons approached him in Brooklyn and asked, “There’s a very important contract I want to ask you about. It involves shooting someone, finishing them off. Do you think you can do it?”
Willie said that he could.
“Good,” said Lalo. “El Gordo himself will want to talk to you about this. Meet me here tomorrow. I’ll take you to see the guy you’ll be working with.”
The next day, Pons and Willie drove to a small park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Willie met a guy named Angel. Later, Willie would remember, “I thought he was a faggot. He had makeup all over his neck and some on his face. It was weird.”
There was a pay phone in the park. Pons dialed a number and spoke to someone, then he handed the phone to Willie. “He wants to talk to you.”
Willie took the phone and said, “Hello.”
It was El Padrino on the line. “He told me what a great job I had been doing for the organization, first as a bolitero and then for the arsons. He asked me, ‘If I need you to do something special for me, you would do it?’”
Willie said yes, he would. He was proud to be doing a hit for the Corporation, but then he was startled when Battle explained that his first job would involve the killing of a woman. “He told me he wanted me to kill a woman going by the name of Maria Castro. He said that she had testified against him years ago and she’d been in hiding using this name. I later found out her real name was Idalia Fernandez.”
Battle was very clear about how he wanted the hit done. “I want no mistakes,” he said. “Deliver a coup de grâce . . . shoot her directly between the eyes. And you’re going to have to get rid of the body. Burn it or bury it, I don’t care how you do it. But I don’t want the police to find that body, much less be able to identify it . . . Listen to me: we found this woman because she’s a marijuanera, a pothead. We have a plan. Lalo will tell you all about it. He’ll give you anything you need—money, guns, cars.”
“Okay,” said Willie, “sounds good.” He hung up the phone.
Willie, Pons, and Angel discussed the plan. Pons explained, “The reason we’re in this park is because the target lives right over there.” He pointed out Idalia’s building, which was across West 90th Street and half a block away. He pulled out a manila envelope and produced some pictures. One of them was an old Polaroid photo of “Maria Castro”
that appeared to be a police mug shot. Then Pons showed Willie some more recent photos that were of the woman entering and exiting her apartment building.
Pons told Willie, “You’re gonna pose as a weed dealer, to gain her confidence. You’ll meet her here in this park. She comes here with her kids almost every day. Be friendly, offer her a hit off your joint. Tell her there’s plenty more where that came from. You just bought a pound of Colombian Gold. You wanna give her a free sample, but you don’t want to pull it out in a public place. Ask her if she lives in the neighborhood. What you want to do is drop it by her place.”
Willie listened carefully. He was picturing the hit in his mind.
Angel spoke up, with self-assurance, like someone who had done this kind of thing before. “Once you get to her apartment, there’s two ways we can handle this. You can kill her yourself, and I’ll come in behind you to help get rid of the body. Or you can get her to open the door, let you in, then I’ll burst in and kill her. Either way.”
Pons interrupted, saying to Willie, “You do the shooting yourself and you get the larger share. That’s how it goes.”
Willie said, “Let me think about it.”
They went to a nearby coffee shop to have something to eat. As they were sitting there talking, it came out that Angel supposedly knew the target from a time when she lived down in Miami.
“Oh, so she knows you from Miami?” asked Willie.
“Yeah, she knows me,” said Angel.
Willie thought about it and said, “Well, in that case, you do the shooting. I’ll take the smaller share.”
Two days later, Willie met with Pons to get the money to buy the pound of weed to trick Idalia. Again, Pons put Willie on the phone with the boss down in Miami. As Willie remembered later, “[Battle] told me that he changed his mind . . . that he wanted the woman’s body left in the apartment afterwards as a message to the feds.”
After Willie and Battle were off the phone, Pons gave Willie some money for the weed. “I’ll have a car for you tomorrow. And clean guns. Listen to me: it’s important that you don’t use any gun I may have given you before. And the one I give you tomorrow, if you use it for any reason, bring it back here to me.” Pons explained that guns, if used, would have to be destroyed. He told Willie that the Corporation had their own “armorers” whose job it was to line up guns—.45s, .38s, and 9mm automatics. It was also their job to make the murder weapons disappear by melting them down after they were used.
The next day, the getaway car and guns never arrived. Willie checked with Pons, who told him, “Stand by. I’ll get you those items when the time is right.” Then another day went by, and then another.
Willie was ready to take part in the hit. At first he had misgivings about being involved in the killing of a female, which was frowned upon in some circles, like on the streets or in prison. But in the interest of getting ahead in life, he was willing to do it. He would be acting on direct orders from the boss, El Gordo, the man in Miami. What could be more prestigious than that?
ON THE AFTERNOON OF NOVEMBER 30, IDALIA WAS HOME WITH A SLIGHT HEADACHE. After getting the kids off to school that morning, she had gone back to bed and slept in late. Rising around noon, she did what she often did after rolling out of bed: she lit up a joint.
Idalia needed to do some shopping, but she was hesitant to leave her apartment alone. Ever since she had seen the man she thought was José Miguel Battle in her neighborhood, she was afraid to go out. Also, there was Ramon next door, who had splattered her door with blood. You could say she was paranoid—but with good reason. If someone knocked at her door, she looked through the peephole to make sure it was someone she knew.
That morning there was a knock at Idalia’s door. A neighbor down the hall from her would later say that she saw two men, well dressed in suits and ties, at the door of apartment 11D.
Idalia answered the door and let the two men into her apartment. It was unlikely that she would have done that if she did not know them. She knew them well enough that she let them in and turned her back on them. She did not notice that they were wearing gloves.
With her back to the two men, Idalia heard a click. She turned around to see one of the men fiddling with the chamber of a gun. The click had been the sound of the man pulling the trigger, but the weapon—a .22-caliber automatic with a silencer attached—had jammed. This required that the shooter eject the bad round and manually feed a new round into the chamber.
Idalia ran frantically for the kitchen, toward the phone.
The shooter raised his gun and fired two quick shots, hitting Idalia in the back of the neck and the back of the head. As she fell, he fired two more times, hitting her on the right side of the head and on top of the head.
Idalia slumped to the floor, her blood and brain matter smearing the wall.
The gunman reracked his gun, stepped forward, and pressed the cold barrel of the silencer to Idalia’s face. He pulled the trigger, splattering more flesh and bone matter.
There were five shots in all to Idalia’s neck, head, and face, with immediate traumatic injury to the brain and spinal cord. She was likely dead before the two hit men quietly exited the building.
That afternoon, Idalia’s children, Erika and Freddy, arrived home from school around 3:30 P.M. Mommy had told them that she would be there when they got home. When they arrived at the apartment, they thought it was strange that the door was slightly ajar. The two kids opened the door and entered the apartment. Immediately they saw their mother’s body lying on the floor, faceup. At first they thought she might be playing some kind of joke. But as they approached, they saw the blood.
The two children stood over their mother’s bullet-riddled body. Blood was flowing from her mouth.
The kids screamed and ran out of the apartment. They knew better than to bang on the door of 11C; that’s where the man who had been hassling their mother lived. They ran to door on the other side, 11B, and banged with all their might. “Please, help us! There’s something wrong with Mommy! Help!”
One of the first detectives to receive a call that day was Kalafus. His heart sank. Since the arrest of Chino Acuna earlier that year, he had been the point man in touch with Idalia on a regular basis. After she had seen someone she thought was José Miguel Battle in her neighborhood, Kalafus had suggested she have a round-the-clock police guard stationed at her apartment. She had not wanted that, feeling it would only terrify her children. She wanted to hold on to the illusion that she was living a normal life. Kalafus understood that, but he realized now that, at the very least, they should have stationed a police car on guard duty outside the building, whether Idalia wanted it or not.
In the days following the murder, Kalafus showed up at the building in his usual attire of cowboy hat and leather boots, looking like Mc-Cloud. He interviewed five or six of Idalia’s neighbors, and others in the building. He heard about the fight over Idalia that Ramon and Roberto had just six days before the murder, how Ramon had smeared blood on Idalia’s door. In other circumstances, Ramon might have been suspect number one in Idalia’s murder, but Kalafus knew better. One neighbor he interviewed told the detective that he had seen two men knock on Idalia’s apartment door. They were well dressed and did not appear to be tenants in the building. When Kalafus began showing to the neighbor photos of possible suspects from his Cuban gangster file, the person became nervous and uncooperative. “I don’t want to end up like Idalia,” said the neighbor.
The next day, Kalafus received a call from Charley Hernandez. “I heard a rumor that Idalia was murdered. Is that true?”
“It is,” admitted the detective.
“That’s it. I’m out. There’s no way I will testify.”
“Now, Charley, you’re still under subpoena.”
“I’ve got a family to protect. Do you hear me? I don’t want to be the next one to have my brains blown out. Goodbye.”
The next day, Kalafus tried to call Charley, but his phone had been disconnected. “He’s disappe
ared,” said Kalafus to the prosecutor in Miami.
In truth, Charley had only moved his family eighty-five miles south to Toms River, New Jersey, but if the cops and prosecutors wanted to believe that he had gone into hiding far away in California, or Canada, or Mexico, that was fine with him.
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE MURDER OF IDALIA, WILLIE DIAZ RECEIVED A PHONE CALL FROM Lalo Pons. He was told, “Never mind about that hit. It’s been taken care of.” Lalo never came right out and named Angel as the killer, but he did say, “That guy you met killed her.”
Sensing Willie’s disappointment at losing out on a big score, Lalo added, “Don’t worry. We’ll find another good-paying job for you in the future.”
Willie nursed his disappointment with cocaine and hookers. It was true that he had missed out on a nice payday, but now he was in tight with Pons and the Godfather himself. He had no doubt there would be other opportunities to rise up in the organization.
WITH THEIR MAIN WITNESS DEAD AND CHARLEY HERNANDEZ IN HIDING, AUTHORITIES in Florida had no case against Chino Acuna. The prosecutor, Michael Cornely, told a District Court judge in Miami that he could not produce Idalia Fernandez for deposition because she was deceased. He then told the judge something oddly discordant with the facts: “There is no evidence the murder of Fernandez was an attempt to eliminate a witness in this case.”
The murder of Idalia sent ripples of fear throughout the Latin underworld in the United States. The killing was reported in the Spanish-language press, and it even made headlines in the New York Times and the Miami Herald (“Only Witness to ’76 Murder Slain in New York”). As with the murder of Palulu, given the number of years that had passed, it was a revenge killing of epic proportions. This killing had the added purpose of obliterating the government’s case against Chino Acuna. Coupled with the arson killings of the previous eighteen months, the concept of a violent Latin American criminal underworld was beginning to take shape in the public consciousness.
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