Cops and prosecutors had targeted Battle and made him pay, and yet no one had looked at the totality of his career and stopped to consider the ultimate punishment—a racketeering case under the RICO statutes, otherwise known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
RICO had revolutionized the way prosecutors went after criminal organizations. The concept of a racketeering conspiracy was not new; what was new about RICO was that it afforded the opportunity to establish many little conspiracies within the larger conspiracy of the enterprise. These were known as predicate acts, and they had to be prosecuted as if they were mini-prosecutions unto themselves, with enough evidence—including witnesses—to be proven on their own merits and also contribute to a guilty verdict on the overriding charge of racketeering.
Shanks began amassing a dossier on Battle, not just files from local law enforcement, but also his federal files and, most important, criminal files from New York and New Jersey that memorialized his long and active career. Through his partner, Jed Leggett, Shanks made contact with Kalafus, who probably had more knowledge about Battle and the Corporation than any one cop.
“The only reason I’m talking to you,” said Kalafus to Shanks on the phone, “is because Jed says you’re okay.” Kalafus and Leggett had met during the Presidential Crime Commission hearings a few years earlier. Kalafus was of the opinion that many Miami cops and political figures were on Battle’s payroll, just as they had been in New Jersey.
Through Kalafus, Shanks began to get a sense of the full narrative sweep of Battle’s activities. He listened to the stories of revenge killings, empire building, firebombings, and extortions, related by Kalafus in his modified Texas drawl, as if he was hearing a tall tale. But he wasn’t; all of these crimes were in the files, a saga of Cuban American gangsterism that spanned two decades.
For all the crimes perpetrated by the Corporation in New York and New Jersey, Shanks and Leggett were convinced that much of the action had now shifted to Miami. Those suspicions were confirmed in early 1989 when they learned of the killing of a local bolitero named Juan Paez. According to street sources, Battle was behind the murder.
Paez had been gunned down while making a money pickup at a counting house in Liberty City. He worked for two of Miami’s biggest bolita bankers, Oscar Alvarez and his partner Gerardo Zayas. Word was that Battle was offended that Alvarez and Zayas had not automatically offered him a percentage of their bolita revenues. So now he was muscling in on their territory.
When Paez was murdered, he was carrying with him more than $5,000 in cash. The hit men did not bother with the money. That was the message: We don’t want your money, we want to take over your business.
The Paez hit was still an open case, and though there was plenty of speculation and gossip, it was not likely to be closed anytime soon. The paperwork on the case had barely begun to circulate throughout the Organized Crime Bureau when yet another murder lit up the police frequencies, this one involving one of Battle’s biggest competitors in Miami.
For decades, Oscar Alvarez had been king bolitero in Miami. Sergeant Boyd believed that he still was. Alvarez’s partner, Gerardo Zayas, was his equal. A ubiquitous figure in Miami gambling circles, especially at the ever-popular dog racing tracks, Zayas had the job of placing bets in an effort to alter the odds for a particular race. It was called “bumping the numbers,” a tried-and-true method to minimize large losses by a particular organization.
On an evening in February, Zayas and his bodyguard, Luis Ramos, were at Hollywood Race Track, the area’s premier greyhound racing track. Since 1934, when it was first opened as the Hollywood Kennel Club, the track had become a fixture in the life of local gamblers. Shortly after it opened, a modest casino was added, with legal slot machines and poker games. As in most of South Florida, the clientele at the Hollywood racetrack had transformed over the years from primarily Anglo to Latino, with racing forms printed in Spanish as well as English.
Outside the track, Gerardo Zayas gave the valet his customary heavy tip for keeping his Cadillac parked close to the entrance. Zayas’s bodyguard, Ramos, got in behind the wheel, while Zayas took the front passenger seat. They drove away from the racetrack onto I-95, toward the shiny new skyscrapers of downtown Miami.
Zayas was enjoying the latest technology—a cellular phone, which had drastically altered the day-to-day operations of bookies, bolita bankers, and other foot soldiers in the gambling business. It used to be that someone like Zayas drove around with a pocket full of quarters looking for a pay phone every time he needed to make a call. But not now. A bookie could place bets and relay information on the fly.
Zayas was yakking away. He didn’t see the dark, SUV-style vehicle pull up alongside the Cadillac.
Suddenly, the passenger window exploded, and Zayas’s body lurched toward Ramos, the driver. The right side of Zaya’s face was shredded from particles of glass and pellets from a shotgun blast. Ramos weaved away from the SUV, which he saw recede in the rearview mirror. He caught a glimpse of the barrel of a shotgun being pulled inside the rear window.
Thinking fast, Ramos raced to nearby Parkway Regional Medical Center. His quick response likely saved his boss’s life. Zayas survived the attack, though he would remain in a coma for a month.
At ten o’clock on the morning after the shooting, Sergeant Jimmy Boyd of the Vice Squad received a phone call from a prominent criminal defense attorney named George Nicholas, who represented some of the biggest boliteros in Miami. It was unusual for a defense lawyer to call a cop unless he wanted to cut a deal for a recently arrested client. But Nicholas had something else he wanted to talk about. He made arrangements to come to the Organized Crime Bureau and meet Boyd.
Nicholas was tall and cadaverous, like Basil Rathbone or John Carradine, one of those old Hollywood actors who routinely appeared on late-night television in black-and-white horror movies. He came into Boyd’s office, and the sergeant invited Dave Shanks and a couple of other investigators into the room, then closed the door. Boyd nodded for Nicholas to proceed.
“I’m here on behalf of my client, Oscar Alvarez,” said Nicholas. The lawyer explained that late last night Alvarez had received a phone call from “the large, fat man from the Corporation.” Everyone understood that Nicholas was referring to José Miguel Battle Sr. “The Fat Man says the Zayas shooting was a warning to Alvarez, that if he doesn’t start paying up, he will be next on the hit list.”
First Paez, and now Zayas. Alvarez had reason to be concerned.
Shanks asked the lawyer, “Why are you here? Why are you telling us this?”
Nicholas sighed. “My client wants you to know that for the next two years or so, you don’t have to bother investigating him. For personal health reasons, he and his family will be leaving the area to go on an extended world tour vacation.”
“Wait a minute,” said Boyd. “Would Alvarez be willing to come in and testify about the death threat? With that information we could put El Gordo out of business.”
“No way,” said the lawyer. “He’s not going to jeopardize himself or his family by offering information that might end up in a courtroom. I am here today as a professional courtesy, that’s all. And to relay a message. As of today, Oscar Alvarez has gone into retirement.”
The lawyer departed, and the cops discussed their options. The information from Nicholas came under the heading of hearsay; it wasn’t something that could be used at trial. Plus, the lawyer’s revelation was protected under attorney-client privilege. But it was actionable information, in the sense that Boyd and Shanks could use the tip in affidavits to secure wiretap authorization and search warrants.
What followed was a flurry of activity, with the Vice Squad, often in consort with a tactical unit, conducting surveillances and planting bugs on anybody and everybody they believed had even a modest connection to the Corporation. The effort was even given a name—Operation Tabletop.
The Metro-Dade PD’s Organized Crime Bureau was finally putting in some
real effort to determine the full scope of Battle’s criminal dealings in Miami. The hope was that painstaking surveillance and daily observation might bear some fruit. As was often the case, however, the next break in the case was not the result of hard work and diligence. It was the result of luck, as a potential homicide case involving Battle fell right into their lap.
ON DECEMBER 9, 1989, SERGEANT ED HINMAN, WHO WAS ASSIGNED TO THE OCB’S Tactical Section, came into the Vice office to speak with Dave Shanks. Hinman was lean, bald-headed, and fastidious, a hoarder of information. It was rare for him to walk in the door and share a case unless he was completely stumped and needed assistance.
It turned out that he had been contacted by prison officials at Dade Correctional Institution, which was located thirty miles south of Miami in a town called Florida City. An administrator at the prison had reported to the sergeant his knowledge of a murder plot that was brewing at the facility. An inmate had approached the authorities to tell them that his cellmate, Frank Suarez, was planning to kill another inmate by slipping poison into his food.
Suarez was a Cuban American in his twenties serving a fifteen-year sentence for drug trafficking. The man to be poisoned was a forty-four-year-old inmate named Roque Torres.
Shanks listened to Hinman. It was all very interesting, but Shanks was wondering what this had to do with Vice, which was currently focused on bolita and bookmaking. Then Hinman told him, “The hit is being done on behalf of José Miguel Battle. The man who ordered the hit is a bookmaker in the Corporation.”
As it turned out, Roque Torres, the target, was in the second year of a fifteen-year sentence for the attempted murder of two Corporation figures, Carlos Capdavilla and Aurelio “Cache” Jimenez. These two were familiar to Shanks. Capdavilla was the bookmaker. Jimenez had popped up during occasional surveillances of Battle and his associates. As far as they could tell, Jimenez was Battle’s official chauffeur, driving him around Miami in a new white Cadillac, among other vehicles.
Two years earlier, Jimenez and his partner, Capdavilla, had gone over to the house of Roque Torres, who owed a $50,000 gambling debt to the Corporation. The house was at 451 W 33rd Street in Hialeah, not far from the famous Hialeah Park racetrack. Torres made good money as a car salesman in Miami, but as a gambler, he was a serial loser. To Jimenez and Capdavilla, Torres claimed that he needed more time to pay off his debt. As representatives of the Corporation, the two men let him know that they were not running a charity. They needed to be paid.
Torres had suspected the conversation might go this way, and so he had a .45-caliber revolver hidden between the cushions of the sofa where he was sitting.
Torres thought he saw Jimenez reach for a gun, and so he grabbed his first. He fired multiple shots, hitting both Jimenez and Capdavilla. Bleeding profusely, they stumbled out the front door of Torres’s house and collapsed, Jimenez on the lawn and Capdavilla in the driveway.
A neighbor heard the shooting and called 911. Fire/rescue and Hialeah police arrived on the scene. The paramedics did their job, saving both men. The police did theirs, taking Roque Torres and his gun into custody.
There was a trial. Torres claimed self-defense, that he was afraid that Jimenez and Capdavilla were there to kill him. The jury didn’t buy it; they found Torres guilty on two counts of attempted murder. He was sent to Dade Correctional to serve his fifteen-year sentence.
Out on the street, Carlos Capdavilla wanted revenge, and José Miguel Battle was in accordance. You don’t shoot two prominent members of the Corporation—especially El Padrino’s personal valet—and get away with it. Torres would be used as an example; he would pay with his life.
From what Sergeant Hinman had been told, the Corporation reached out to inmate Frank Suarez because his mother, Rosa Suarez, worked as a bookmaker for Capdavilla. In fact, Rosa Suarez was also part of the murder conspiracy. She and her son had agreed to kill Roque Torres for a fee of $10,000.
At the age of fifty, Rosa Suarez, in her middle age, had a lady friend named Esperanza Arroz. They had known each other since their childhoods in Cuba. These two women became partners on the hit. They visited Rosa’s son Frank in prison and began to sketch out a plan. The first order of business was for Rosa and Esperanza to purchase some poison. After some initial difficulties trying to determine what to buy and where to get it, Frank Suarez turned to his cellmate for help. The cellmate, seeing this as opportunity to endear himself to authorities and maybe get a sentence reduction, snitched on Suarez to the warden, who in turn reached out to Metro-Dade PD and Ed Hinman.
Said Shanks to Hinman, “That’s an amazing story, Ed. Let’s see what we can do with that.”
Shanks arranged for a meeting later that day with him and Hinman, along with Sergeant Jimmy Boyd of Vice and Kennedy “Kenny” Rosario, a cop with the Tactical Section, as well as two other supervisors and Larry LaVecchio, a prosecutor from the State Attorney’s Office.
Already, the Tactical cops had put a plan in motion. They arranged for their informant—Suarez’s cellmate—to tell Suarez that he knew someone who could purchase the poison for them. That person would be Detective Kenny Rosario, working undercover. Rosario was a street-smart Puerto Rican, originally from the Bronx, and a Vietnam vet who had already distinguished himself on various undercover assignments. Years later, remembering the technique for which he would become greatly admired by his police colleagues, he would say, “Working undercover is more of a mind-set than any costume you might wear. [The targets of the investigation] believe it because you believe it.”
Rosario and Rosa Suarez had already spoken by phone and set up a meeting. Tactical was in the process of securing a wiretap on Rosa Suarez’s home phone.
Sergeant Boyd spoke up. “That’s outstanding. You people seem to have this all under control. My question is, what do you need us for?”
Hinman and the Tactical cops admitted that they weren’t sure where to take the investigation. They could nail Frank Suarez and his co-conspirators, his mom, her lady friend, and probably Capdavilla. But the main culprit was Battle. Wasn’t there a way they could lure Battle into the picture, maybe get him on a wire talking with Capdavilla, implicating himself in his own words?
Boyd and Shanks loved that idea. The cops discussed their various options and came up with a scheme that was so outrageous, they became giddy as they ironed out the details.
The plan was that they would go through with a fake version of the murder. Kenny Rosario, acting undercover, would sell some fake cyanide to Rosa and Esperanza. When the two women visited Frank Suarez at the penitentiary, guards in the visiting room—who would also be in on the plot—would pretend not to notice the poison being passed to Suarez.
Once he had the cyanide, Suarez and his cellmate would set out to poison Roque Torres. Here’s where the plan got tricky: Roque Torres would also be in on his murder by poisoning. After Suarez planted the “poison” in Torres’s food, Torres would fake going into convulsions. Prison authorities would play their part. Medical personnel would rush him to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. There, hospital personnel would also be in on the scheme. They would admit Torres into emergency, where, according to plan, he would be reported to have died from cyanide poisoning. If necessary, the city of Miami would issue a death certificate making it official that Roque Torres was dead.
If all of this went according to plan, Rosa Sanchez and her accomplice, Esperanza Arroz, would have the proof they needed that Torres was dead. Ostensibly, they would then contact Capdavilla, the paymaster. The cops would do surveillance and record the payment being made. If they were lucky, somewhere along the line Capdavilla would contact Battle to report that the hit had been successful. The cops would have surveillance records, photos, and wiretap conversations going all the way up the Corporation chain of command.
It was an audacious plot, the cops all agreed. There were a number of ways it could go wrong. For it to work, they had to let a high number of non-cops in on the scheme—Suarez’s cellmate,
prison authorities and guards, paramedics, hospital personnel, people in city administration, and Roque Torres, the target of the murder. There were a lot of opportunities for someone to leak information about the scheme, which would alert Suarez and also the co-conspirators that something was not right. Even if the cops were able to keep the entire plan secret, they still had to pull it off. There were many moving parts, some of them involving skilled acting and deception on the part of the participants. As the planning for the simulated murder got under way, the cops felt as if they were staging an elaborate Broadway show, with a cast of dozens and a cliffhanger of an ending.
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 10, ROSA SUAREZ AND ESPERANZA ARROZ MET WITH Kenny Rosario, the undercover detective, whom they knew only as “the Puerto Rican.” They had been informed by the cellmate of Frank Suarez, whom they knew only as El Perro (the Dog), that the Puerto Rican was his brother-in-law. It had been agreed that he would be paid $5,000 for the poison, which would be delivered in a small vial.
They met at a small bar on Coral Way, in the neighborhood of Westchester. Rosario was wearing a wire. He handed over the vial, which was in a plastic bag marked Caution: Hazardous Material. The vial contained a harmless liquid that had been prepared by the Metro-Dade PD crime lab.
In the parking lot outside the bar, Arroz gave Rosario $1,500 in cash, with the promise that the rest would be paid after it was proven that the poison had done its job.
Nearby, a team of detectives from Technical recorded the entire transaction on video, from a white van parked fifty yards away. An hour later, that same crew recorded Esperanza Arroz calling Carlos Capdavilla to report that they had received the poison from the Puerto Rican, whom she described as having “the coldest, deadliest eyes I have ever seen.”
A few days later, Rosa Suarez and Esperanza Arroz visited Frank Suarez at the Dade Correctional Institution. Rosa had hidden the vial of poison in her bra. When she believed the guard was not looking, she passed it to her son. After about twenty minutes, the two visitors departed and Suarez was led back to his cell.
The Corporation Page 39