The Corporation

by T. J. English

  On December 19, the following day, everything was in place. Roque Torres, who had been anticipating this day, arrived in the facility’s communal dining hall at 5 P.M. The plan, according to the co-conspirators, was for El Perro, Suarez’s cellmate, to get into an argument with Torres just as he was sitting down to eat. While he was distracted, Suarez would discreetly put the poison into Torres’s food.

  It all went according to plan: El Perro hurled an insult at Torres. The two inmates stood up as if to face off in a fight. During this tense exchange, Suarez dumped the poison into Torres’s food. Within seconds, guards quelled the disturbance between El Perro and Torres. They were separated and allowed to finish their meals.

  Less than thirty minutes after all the inmates had finished dinner and been escorted back to their cells, an inmate yelled loudly from his cell, “Guards! Guards! We got a medical emergency!”

  The guards responded to the cell of Roque Torres, who was spread out on the floor, having convulsions. He was foaming at the mouth and writhing in pain. Later, the responding guards and cops who were in on the ruse would say that Torres deserved an Academy Award for his performance that day.

  Shanks and the other investigators had set up a command center at Dade County Fire Station in the town of Homestead. A medical response team was set to go. The paramedic team included two undercover Miami police officers, just in case Torres tried to use the occasion to attempt an escape. Siren wailing, the fire/rescue vehicle rushed to the prison; paramedics spilled out and entered the facility. They administered emergency first aid to Torres. Inmates in the area gathered around as he seemingly fell into unconsciousness. The paramedics loaded him on a gurney. Judging by the response from the paramedics, Torres was dead already. He was wheeled out of the prison and loaded into the waiting ambulance.

  Once the vehicle left the prison grounds, Torres opened his eyes wide and smiled. The paramedics gave each other a high five. The mood was jubilant. The fake homicide had gone off without a hitch.

  The ambulance drove past James Archer Smith Hospital and continued to the fire station command center. Detectives took Torres, handcuffed, and loaded him into an unmarked police car. He was driven a half block away to the adjacent Homestead police station, where he gave a lengthy statement about the events of the last few weeks, including a blow-by-blow account of his “murder” by poisoning. He was then turned over to a team of U.S. marshals, who escorted him to the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, where he was admitted under a new identify. The next day he would be transferred to a federal prison located far away in the Florida panhandle.

  Roque Torres’s work was over, but for Shanks and the other cops who had hatched this elaborate scheme, the post-homicide part of the investigation was crucial. The response on the part of the various co-conspirators would be scrupulously recorded through surveillance and wiretaps. Their hope was that the aftermath would lead them to José Miguel Battle. Among other things, OCB had planted a pen register device, or trap-and-trace, on the phone box down the street from El Zapotal. Battle had five separate phone lines in his house, which he felt made it next to impossible for the feds to record all of his conversations. But a pen register device recorded the phone numbers of any and all calls made to a specific address, and a catch-and-trace made it possible to overhear certain conversations.

  Approximately an hour after the fake murder, Rosa Suarez received a call from her son in prison. “It’s done,” he said.

  “What do you mean, done?”

  “It’s done. They took him away on a stretcher.”

  Rosa was astounded. She hadn’t been expecting it to happen so quickly. “But was he already dead?” she asked.

  “Well, no one knows yet. They took him to the hospital outside. He was wearing an oxygen mask, and his stomach was being pumped.”

  Suarez put El Perro on the line. He explained that with the amount of poison they used, the prospects for Roque Torres’s survival were minimal. “That was a deadly dose. That’s what they kill animals with.”

  “So,” said Rosa, “he was taken away? To the hospital?”

  El Perro said yes and gave the phone receiver back to the son. “Hey, gotta go,” said Frank. “I’m going to church now.”

  Rosa laughed. “Okay.”

  “ To the feast.”

  “Yes,” said the mother. “Go to church and ask God for forgiveness.”

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “Go to church and ask for forgiveness from God.”

  Annoyed, Frank said, “Ah, let it go!”

  “Okay,” said Rosa.

  “Bye,” said the son.

  Within minutes, Rosa was on the phone again, with a team of detectives listening in and recording every word. First, she called James Archer Smith Hospital. “Happy holidays,” said the female operator. “How can I help you?”

  Rosa asked if they had a patient named Roque Torres. She spelled out the name.

  “I’ll check, sir.”

  Rosa had a raspy voice that sounded more male than female. On the phone, she was often mistaken for a man.

  “Sir? Yeah. I believe that was the patient but he was transferred to the Medical Examiner’s Office. Do you want the number?’

  Asked Rosa, “Oh, so he passed?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Would you like me to give you the number?”

  Rosa said yes and wrote down the number.

  The next day, Rosa called the Medical Examiner’s Office. “Is this Jackson Memorial?” she asked.

  “No,” answered an operator.

  “What place is this?”

  “This is the office of the Medical Examiner at Dade County Morgue.”

  “Oh, it’s the morgue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God. So if somebody tells you that they released over there, it’s because the person is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! Okay, thank you.” Rosa hung up.

  Now she immediately called Carlos Capdavilla, who had been dragging his feet about making the $10,000 payment until there was verifiable proof that Torres was dead. Capdavilla still objected until the following day, when a brief death notice appeared for Roque Torres in El Herald, the Spanish-language version of the Miami Herald. The notice, which listed Torres’s death as a possible suicide, had been submitted for publication by an undercover detective from the police department’s Technical division.

  The cops were there in a surveillance van when Rosa and Esperanza Arroz received a payment of $10,000 in cash from Carlos Capdavilla.

  For Shanks and the cops at Vice, this was where the good part began. It was their hope that Capdavilla would call the Battle residence and report the hit. They had in place their pen registers and trap-and-traces, which would print out and itemize all calls to and from the five phone lines at Battle’s home.

  The morning after Capdavilla paid the two women, Shanks walked into the office of the bolita squad and was met by a number of solemn faces. Something was not right.

  “Big problem,” one of the detectives told Shanks.

  “What is it?”

  “All our pen registers on Battle—they went dead yesterday.”

  “What do you mean they went dead? All of them?”

  “Yeah, all of them.”

  “What the hell caused it?

  “I don’t know,” said the detective.

  Later that day, a technician from Technical Services conducted an investigation and reported back to Shanks. “Somebody opened the lock on the telephone company switch box down the street from Battle’s residence. It wasn’t forced. They had a key.”

  “Okay,” said Shanks. “Tell me more.”

  “Whoever did it, they knew to remove the slaves.” The “slaves” were small devices that boosted the signal emanating from Battle’s phone lines, so that the police could identify incoming and outgoing calls back at police headquarters and at the main office of the phone company, fifteen miles away.

  Shanks knew this m
eant that their ability to trap and trace calls into Battle’s home had been disabled. “So we lost everything,” he said.

  The technician nodded.

  Shanks and the other investigators were in a state of shock. Yes, they would still be able to make an attempted murder case against Frank Suarez, his mother, Esperanza Arroz, and possibly Carlos Capdavilla, but the main goal of their elaborate sting—to entrap Battle—had, after months of preparation and hard work, just gone down the drain.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Now Shanks and his colleagues had to ponder the very real possibility that José Miguel Battle had an informant, or informants, inside the police department.

  EL PADRINO HAD A BAD KNEE. IT WAS AN OLD INJURY FROM HIS DAYS IN THE ARMY, but now, at the age of sixty-one, and because he was normally somewhere between twenty to fifty pounds overweight, the old ailments were catching up with him. A date had been set for surgery to take place, and despite a limp and considerable pain, Battle had increased his visibility. He made the rounds at a number of locations where he liked to meet people and do business—restaurants, bars, and Cuban diners. Usually at his side was his bodyguard and valet, Cache Jimenez.

  It was not always an easy job being Battle’s valet. One of Jimenez’s responsibilities was to start Battle’s car in the morning. It was an occupational hazard for Mob bosses that they were frequently the targets of assassination attempts. In the Cuban underworld, especially among those with military or espionage training, the likely method for a gangland hit was explosives. C-4 was good, because it could be affixed to the undercarriage of a car and triggered by a remote-controlled device. But as history had shown with the bombing of Ernestico Torres’s car, or the murder of Loco Alvarez in Union City, or the more sophisticated and high-level assassination of former ambassador Letelier, any number of jerry-rigged devices could be used to blow up a car.

  The most common method was to plant a bomb that could be ignited through the car’s ignition. Turning a key to start the car created a spark that could be used to automatically set off an explosive device. For the average Mob underling, it was a startling realization that being the driver for a boss put him in a vulnerable position. Gangland history was littered with instances of drivers being killed along with or in place of their infamous employers.

  On certain occasions, Battle stood in the distance, behind a concrete pillar or across the street, and watched as Jimenez stood alongside the car and reached through the driver’s side window. With his arm outstretched, standing as far away from the car as he could, Jimenez reached in and turned the key in the ignition. Often there was sweat on his brow when he did this. Later, in a state of relief, he would sometimes joke about the absurdity of this routine. If there was a bomb, and it was to be triggered by the turning of the ignition, it’s not likely that his standing outside the car was going to save his life.

  Jimenez liked his job. He revered José Miguel Battle and was proud to be at his side, most of the time. But there were petty grievances that had to do mostly with being taken for granted. Once, in a phone conversation, Jimenez tried to explain his situation to a Corporation bookmaker named Gilberto Borges Sr.

  Jimenez and Borges spoke nearly every day. They liked to complain back and forth about their duties as sycophants and errand runners for El Padrino. Jimenez noted that, unlike Borges, he had no set salary for what he did, including serving as driver and bodyguard. He did receive tips, which were alternately extravagant and nonexistent. “But you,” said Jimenez, “you make a regular living.”

  Jimenez also complained that “I do things for [Battle] that I wouldn’t do for my own family,” like pick up his dry cleaning and deliver flowers to his girlfriends.

  Along with the bitching back and forth, the detectives picked up some valuable information off the wire. It was through the Borges wire that they learned the details about Battle’s knee surgery, which was to take place at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach.

  Knowing the date ahead of time gave Shanks and other detectives in his squad the opportunity to set up a multilayered surveillance of the location. They learned that following his operation, Battle would stay in a private room on the fourth floor.

  The cops held an impromptu summit meeting at the listening post for the Borges wire, a sparsely furnished apartment in Westchester. It was decided that the half dozen detectives would rotate shifts and divide their time between the listening post, where the wire was being monitored, and the hospital, where they would conduct surveillance starting at 7 A.M.

  Luckily for the cops, Battle’s room was adjacent to the fourth-floor visiting area. Since none of the cops were known to Battle’s people by face, they were able to pose as worried family members of a patient. “It was almost too good to be true,” Shanks remembered. “We took turns playing roles and were able to sit amongst Battle’s visitors as they came and went. They hardly noticed we were there. They spoke freely between themselves.”

  Among many valuable details that the cops were able to glean was who exactly constituted Battle’s inner circle of advisers and friends. Trio de Trés was a constant presence at the hospital, as was Cache Jimenez. Also there was Luis DeVilliers Sr., a longtime Battle associate from his earliest days in New York, former owner of the Colonial restaurant in Washington Heights, who had recently moved to Miami. From the Borges wire the cops had learned that DeVilliers and Battle’s brother Gustavo had formed a company that distributed illegal gambling machines in South Florida and the New York area. The machines created yet another lucrative revenue stream for the Corporation.

  On the second day of the surveillance, Battle Jr. and Abraham Rydz showed up at the hospital. Junior seemed agitated, and when he discovered that Borges was the only member of his father’s entourage at the hospital, he was outraged. “Where are my father’s friends?” he said to Borges. “Where are all the guys who depend on him for their lives? They need to be here. I’m here. Where are they?”

  Borges got on the pay phone in the visiting room and started making calls. Shanks and the other undercover detectives listened in. “Get over here now,” Borges barked into the receiver. “Migue is here, the son. He’s angry. Pick up Beto and Nuñez and Carlos and get your ass over here.”

  Discreetly, Shanks kept his eyes on Battle Jr. This was the first time he’d seen the son, and, again, the detective felt as though he’d walked into a real-life version of The Godfather. Battle was Don Corleone in the hospital bed, and Mike Battle Jr. was Mike Corleone, as played by Al Pacino. The similarities were surreal, and as he had when he first heard El Padrino doing a veritable Marlon Brando imitation at the cockfight they raided, Shanks found himself wondering to what extent Battle Jr. was consciously playing a role.

  Among others things, the surveillance confirmed for the detectives that they weren’t chasing their tails. The scene at the hospital was like a casting call for the inner circle of the Corporation, many of whom were people the cops had heard about but never seen in the flesh. In the visiting area and fourth-floor hallway, they were able to overhear conversations, mostly personal discussions or family gossip. They heard some of these people refer to Battle as “Padrino,” and they witnessed much ass kissing and kowtowing to the Battle family. Shanks, in particular, noticed the close relationship between Battle Jr. and Rydz, which seemed far more like a father-son connection than what Miguelito had with his own father.

  Said Shanks, “It was exhilarating to be sitting there listening to people I had been investigating for two years. It was a rare chance to watch and listen. We didn’t learn much about criminal activity, but we got to see how everyone interacted. José Miguel Battle was treated as if he were a king.”

  Back at the listening post, El Padrino’s stint in the hospital had “tickled the wire.” When he was home, Borges was on the phone constantly making sure that everything was being attended to in the Battle universe. Mostly, Borges and Cache Jimenez continued their ongoing dialogue about who was being asked to do more for the boss. Said Borges,
“Last night I had to take the grandchildren, Miguelito’s kids, to the movies for two hours while Miguelito was at the hospital.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Jimenez. “El Gordo called me late, after ten. Said he had an unquenchable desire for a media noche [a Cuban sandwich]. I had to drive from my house in South Dade to find a sandwich—do you know how hard it is to find a media noche at that hour?—and then deliver it to the boss at the hospital.”

  I can top that, said Borges. “Today he had me looking all over Miami for silk boxer shorts, extra-extra large, because the hospital gown was making has balls itch.”

  Jimenez listened in awe.

  “I called him an hour ago. I said, ‘How do they feel?’ ‘Excellent,’ he said. I said, ‘Do you need any more [silk boxers]?’ He said he was okay for now, but it depended how much longer he was going to be there.”

  Listening on the wire, the detectives cracked up laughing, partly because it was hilarious, and partly to break the tedium of long, incessant hours wearing a set of headphones, listening to mostly meaningless chatter.

  Even after Battle left Mt. Sinai, the Vice Squad kept the wire in place. Borges’s phone seemed to serve as command central, at least in terms of the personal relationships that constituted the Corporation’s “kitchen cabinet.”

  Everything was going fine until one day the detectives, having just sat down at their monitoring station, heard the phone ring. Borges was not home, so the call kicked over to his answering machine. The voice of a male caller came on the line. He sounded young and spoke in Spanish, clearly and concisely, as if he were reading from a script. “Mr. Borges, you don’t know me,” he said. “But the police are listening to your telephone conversations, and your cellular phone conversations, too.” Then he hung up.

  The cops were stunned.

  Sergeant Boyd was supervising the listening post at the time. He immediately called in Shanks to discuss the situation. Everyone was slack-jawed by the larger implications, once again, of there being a mole in their midst, but the more immediate issue was, how would they salvage the wire?