The Corporation

by T. J. English

  Moranga sat with his friend at a table near the back of the restaurant. He was old school; he did not yet have the newfangled technology of a cell phone. He received a message on his beeper, checked it out, and then excused himself to go make a call at the pay phone, which was located just inside the front door.

  As Moranga dialed a number, a man slipped in the door. He was tall and gaunt, a ghostly figure in his late fifties. As Moranga stood facing the pay phone, the man pulled out a .32 automatic, put it to Moranga’s head behind his right ear, and pulled the trigger.

  The loud pop! startled the handful of patrons in the restaurant. Moranga slumped to the floor. The gunman bent down and put the gun to Moranga’s forehead, pulling the trigger and shooting him between the eyes.

  Moranga’s body had fallen in such a way that it blocked the front door of the restaurant. Calmly, the gunman whacked the butt of his gun against the glass of the door. The glass shattered into shards, which the man cleared away. He stepped through the frame of the door and, walking briskly but not running, crossed the sidewalk to a car that was waiting for him in front of the restaurant. He was gone in a matter of seconds.

  It was a clean, professional hit. Among the relevant details was the likelihood that whoever had paged Moranga on his beeper was in on the hit. The number on the pager was one he recognized and felt the need to respond to immediately. The gunman had been waiting on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant for the exact moment when the victim stepped up to the phone. The killer, or killers, knew where the pay phone was located within the restaurant and in relation to the front door. They knew that once Moranga stepped up to the phone, they could shoot him dead and make a quick getaway.

  NYPD homicide detectives handling the case weren’t able to make much headway. They determined that Pepe Moranga’s real name was José Gonzalez, and that he was a professional gambler and a coke dealer. Since Moranga had been carrying a Florida state driver’s license, with his address listed as 102-51 SW 66th Street in Miami, they contacted cops in Dade County. What they learned was that Pepe Moranga fit the profile of a Cuban gangster affiliated with the Corporation, but that only made the possibility of solving his murder more of a long shot.

  There had been a couple of witnesses, but the shooting had transpired so quickly that the descriptions of the gunman were sketchy. One physical description of the shooter that was consistent, however, was that he had deep-set eyes with dark rings around them, and that his complexion was unusually cadaverlike.

  That description was very much on the minds of local detectives when, months later, another shooting occurred just a few blocks away, at West 180th Street and Broadway, again in the middle of the afternoon. This time, the reasons for the killing were easier to establish, though the likelihood of closing out a successful murder investigation was equally slim.

  Few people over the years had been closer to José Miguel Battle than Angel Mujica. Back when he was in his twenties, he was a gangly cop with big ears who revered José Miguel Battle. His devotion to the man was absolute. Later, they were side by side during the Bay of Pigs invasion and at the Isle of Pines prison. El Gordo y El Flaco, Laurel and Hardy: they guarded the door to the prison patio together. Later, they reunited in New Jersey to launch what would eventually become the biggest bolita business ever seen in the United States.

  From the beginning of their criminal ventures together, there was a problem, a structural flaw. Battle was an outsized personality, and Mujica was not. Battle insisted on dominating every situation. He became El Padrino, and Mujica became an afterthought. Few people knew that Mujica was the one had who laid the foundation for the Corporation.

  It was when they were all hiding out in Madrid in 1970 that Mujica first recognized that Battle would always be the center of attention. It was one of the reasons why Mujica stayed behind in Spain. He did not want to be Battle’s partner anymore, but economic necessity had brought him back to the United States, back into the realm of El Padrino.

  Mujica had cashed out of the bolita business in 1979 when Abraham Rydz and Battle Jr. took over the Corporation. It was not the first time he felt as though he was finished with bolita, and it would not be the last. Mujica’s legitimate business ventures in Spain all followed a similar pattern: they started out great, with adequate investment from his bolita savings, and then they crashed.

  In 1989, Mujica had returned to New York once again. He was back into bolita. He started out small, with a dozen bolita holes, mostly in the Bronx, where he had first begun his numbers business two decades earlier. When José Miguel was told what his old friend was up to, he was not pleased. Mujica had been paid $300,000 to cash out of the business. He sold his entire operation to Rydz and Miguelito. He was not authorized to be opening up competing bolita holes in New York.

  Over the phone from El Zapotal, Battle told Nene Marquez, “I don’t want to have to come up there. Talk to my old friend. Tell him he needs to shut down his operation, or we will shut it down for him.”

  Marquez talked to Mujica. “If El Gordo says you are out, then you’re out.”

  Mujica wasn’t buying it. In view of his long history with Battle, he couldn’t believe that he wasn’t deserving of special consideration. And so he did something he had never done before, something he told himself that he never would do—he went to El Padrino, hat in hand, and begged for the right to continue his career as a bolitero.

  The meeting took place in Miami. Mujica flew down from New York. Arrangements had been made for Mujica to speak with Battle at a cockfight somewhere not far from El Zapotal, in Redland. The cockfights had become Battle’s favored location for conducting business. In an area separate from the valla, the fighting arena, people from the community waited their turn to meet with El Padrino. It was the Cuban version of The Godfather, people asking for favors from the Man, with the sound of roosters squawking and gamblers throwing their money around in the background.

  “We go back a long way,” Mujica said to Battle. “We started this business together. Times are tough for me right now, and I need to make some money. I’m asking you: let me have my little piece of the pie.”

  It could not have been easy for Mujica. He was the one who initiated the business, and now here he was begging for his right to exist.

  Battle was nothing if not sentimental. He said to Mujica, “You’re right. We go back a long way.”

  “Then you agree,” said Mujica. “I’m free to have my bolita holes and stay in business.”

  Battle nodded his head.

  It was a great relief to everyone. The boliteros cracked open some Dom Pérignon and placed more bets on the cockfights. It seemed as though everything was good, except that Mujica noticed his old friend was being unusually quiet, staring at him out of the corner of his eye. Needing reassurance, Mujica asked Battle, “El Gordo, we’re good, right? Everything is understood between us?”

  Again, as he had before, Battle nodded and assured his old friend that everything was okay. As Mujica left the cockfight arena that day, he and Battle embraced, just like old times.

  As Mujica left, Battle turned to a couple of associates standing nearby and said, “There goes a dead man. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  THE HIT ON MUJICA WAS CONDUCTED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. THIS WASN’T LIKE the attempts on Palulu, which had been the result of an open contract, where everyone and his mother was looking to do the job and collect the money. This hit would be organized within a tight-knit group of co-conspirators.

  On the afternoon of May 8, 1992, Mujica was in Reynold’s Bar in Washington Heights having a drink with a friend. His pager was going off incessantly. He used the pay phone in the bar, but at a certain point he told his friend he was going to use the phone across the street, at Broadway and 180th Street. He crossed the street, slipped a coin in the phone, and began dialing. That’s when a man approached him from behind and fired one shot.

  It was a magic bullet of sorts, penetrating his back and hitting two ribs, fracturi
ng them both, then ricocheting upward, penetrating the chest cavity, perforating the left lung, severing the pulmonary vein and artery. The bullet continued upward to perforate the esophagus and eventually lodged in the right ventricle, causing extensive hemorrhaging. Mujica groaned, a kind of elongated death rattle, and collapsed to the pavement.

  There were some witnesses on the street who saw the shooting. They chased after the gunman, who was later described as a Hispanic or Arab male, twenty-five to thirty years old. The man ran to a waiting car, a black Cadillac, and jumped in on the passenger side. Two witnesses caught a glimpse of the getaway driver—a man in his fifties, salt-and-pepper hair, gaunt, with a pale complexion and dark, deep-set eyes.

  As soon as it was discovered that the victim was a person with deep-rooted connections to the Corporation, Detective Richie Kalafus was called in.

  Kalafus looked over the file for the Mujica shooting and also the shooting of Pepe Moranga. He was struck by the similarities. Killings carried out, it appeared, by two men, one young, one older. They had possibly switched roles for the two shootings. The older man—gaunt, dark rings around the eyes, salt-and-pepper hair—had been the gunman for Moranga and the driver for Mujica. These appeared to be professional hits carried out by a team of skilled assassins.

  Kalafus knew enough about the Cuban Mafia to suspect that these hits had been ordered by José Miguel Battle. The victims were veteran boliteros, partners and rivals of El Padrino. Through street sources, Kalafus learned all about Mujica’s having had a falling-out with his former best friend. Though no one was willing to come forward and testify in court, the common belief was that Battle was behind the killing. The problem was that he had insulated himself from these acts. Battle was down on his farm in South Florida, feeding his roosters, while the bodies were dropping in New York. The possibility of holding Battle responsible for these hired killings seemed remote.

  DAVE SHANKS ARRIVED IN THE BIG APPLE WITH HIS PARTNER, BERT PEREZ, IN JUNE 1992. Kalafus met them at LaGuardia Airport. Shanks had been speaking with the NYPD detective by phone on a regular basis. Kalafus had informed them about the Moranga and Mujica hits, which they both surmised were cases of Battle settling old scores.

  The death of Mujica, in particular, had touched off plenty of chatter on the wiretap in Miami. Many in the Cuban bolitero universe were shocked that Battle might have arranged for the murder of his fellow brigadista. Battle and Mujica had been like brothers. The idea that El Gordo might have killed Mujica meant that nothing was sacred. Word spread of Battle’s comment at the cockfight—“There goes a dead man”— but many chose simply not to believe it. The cops believed it, but they were a long way from being able to prove anything.

  Shanks and Perez were taken straight from the airport to the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village, where Kalafus had based a number of his homicide investigations. For the cops from Miami, the urban cowboy detective pulled out his massive Cuban Mafia Task Force file, which he had been compiling over the course of nearly two decades. Kalafus had a trove of background information on various key players in the Corporation, and he had a photo album with nearly two hundred mug shots and other photos. For a veteran investigator like Shanks, this was a gift from the heavens, a veritable gold mine of intelligence on Cuban American gangsterism going all the way back to Battle’s first gambling indictment in the late 1960s.

  In the midst of perusing the files, Bert Perez became bored. The young detective stood up and began pacing, which appeared to annoy Kalafus.

  Afterward, Shanks said to Perez, “Didn’t you say you have family in Connecticut?” Shanks and Perez were staying at a Holiday Inn in Yonkers, a suburb north of New York City, not far from the Connecticut border.

  “Yes,” said Perez. “I was hoping I might have a chance to see them.”

  “Go ahead,” said Shanks. “Spend some time with your family. Tomorrow, Kalafus and I will do what we need to do and I’ll fill you in later.”

  Truth was, Shanks was embarrassed by the young detective, though he was not surprised. Perez still had that gung-ho attitude from his days on patrol. Detective work required patience and attention to detail. If his partner could not sit still during debriefings and important exchanges of information, Shanks did not want him in the room.

  The next day, Shanks met Kalafus—without Perez. Together, they made a trip to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and spoke with the chief of their Organized Crime Section. Prosecutors there had convicted Lalo Pons on arson and murder charges. Later, Shanks and Perez met with detectives in the 34th Precinct, in the heart of Washington Heights. They were shown the locations of the Pepe Moranga and Mujica murders, and taken around to various restaurants and bars known to be meeting places for Cuban boliteros. The following day, the Miami cops rented a car and drove out to Newark to meet an investigator with the New Jersey Commission of Investigation. They had compiled a thirty-four-page booklet they called “The Corporation Profile,” which contained biographical information and criminal histories for all known members and associates. Later, Shanks and Kalafus drove around Union City, once the home base for Battle and others who had created the largest illegal numbers operation in America.

  The cop from Miami found the experience to be amazing. For nearly four years now Shanks had been studying Battle. But these locations had existed only as names and addresses in a police report or newspaper article; seeing them up close and personal was a revelation. It was like having spent years studying the Civil War, reading all the history books, and then for the first time visiting the actual battle sites. You could almost see and feel the ghosts from the past.

  ON THEIR FOURTH AND FINAL DAY IN THE NEW YORK AREA, SHANKS AND PEREZ checked out of the Holiday Inn and headed north toward the town of Beekman, in Dutchess County. The brick-and-mortar congestion of White Plains gave way to maple trees and rolling farmland of the agriculturally rich Hudson Valley.

  After eighty minutes or so, they arrived at their destination—Green Haven State Prison. It was an incongruous sight. Spread out like a medieval estate on forty-eight acres, with thirty-foot-high stone walls and circular guard towers, the prison evoked the literary metaphor of “the machine in the garden.” Built in 1939, at a time when American prisons were designed to look like industrialized fortresses, Green Haven held nearly two thousand inmates, most of the hard-core variety who had been locked up for murder, rape, robbery, arson, and other serious crimes.

  Shanks and Perez were there to see Lalo Pons, who five years earlier had been convicted on arson and murder charges stemming from the Corporation’s infamous arson wars. It was Shanks who had come up with the idea of trying to “turn” Pons. They would offer him an opportunity to provide them with information against Battle in exchange for the possibility of reduced prison time. It was a common tactic that sometimes bore fruit, though in the case of Pons they were warned by the assistant district attorney in Manhattan that he was a hard case and not likely to snitch.

  Prison authorities were cooperative with the cops, who, they were impressed to hear, had come all the way from Miami. They allowed Shanks and Perez to look over Pons’s prison records, which included a visitors’ log and a record of deposits to the inmate’s prison commissary account. Shanks had heard that Pons was still receiving monthly payments from the Corporation, standard practice for high-ranking members of the organization. Among other things, the money was designed to keep the incarcerated gang member fat and happy and therefore less likely to cooperate with authorities. Judging from Pons’s list of regular visitors—which included some known boliteros—and the fact that his commissary account was every month replenished to the maximum limit, it appeared that he was being taken care of.

  Pons did not know the detectives were coming. He was told that he had two visitors but had no idea who they were. He was escorted from his cell through a series of metal security doors to the massive visiting area, which included a row of enclosed interview rooms reserved for prisoners to meet privately with lawye
rs or policeman.

  Shanks and Perez were already there when Pons, wearing a brown prison jumpsuit, was brought into the interview room. Shanks had seen mug shots of Pons from the time of his arrest; he was struck by how much Pons had aged in the five years he’d been inside. He was only forty-two years old, but his hair was gray and thinning, and he was smaller than the detective expected.

  Shanks was already seated; he motioned for Pons to take a seat across the table. Pons chose not to sit.

  The detective began to speak. “My name is Detective David Shanks—”

  Upon hearing that Shanks was a police officer, Pons began shouting. “Cops! These are detectives in here! Police in here! I’m not cooperating with them! I’m no rat! You hear me? Take me back to my cell! I wanna go back to my cell!” Pons was shouting to the guards, but he also wanted to make sure everyone in the visiting area could hear him. He was not a rat.

  Shanks and Perez were not exactly surprised. They had hoped Pons might listen to what they had to offer, but they knew it was a long shot.

  The guards arrived to escort the prisoner back to his cell. As he was being led out of the room, Shanks delivered a parting shot. “Enjoy spending the next twenty years of your life locked up in here.”

  Shanks and Perez watched Pons being taken down the hall, back to his cell deep within the bowels of the penitentiary.

  AFTER FOUR DAYS IN THE BIG CITY, THE DETECTIVES WERE EXHAUSTED. THEY ARRIVED back in Miami at midnight. The next day, they came into the office and were barely able to have their first cup of coffee before a call came from detectives at the 34th Precinct in Washington Heights. “We got another dead body,” said one of the New York cops.

  “You’re kidding,” said Shanks.

  “Same deal. Shot in a restaurant in the Heights. Gunman described by an employee as in his fifties, tall and gaunt. He fled to a large black American-made sedan. Driver was waiting.”

  The victim was Omar Broche, another of the founding members of bolita in New York, just like Pepe Moranga and Angel Mujica. These murders all pointed in one direction—Battle.