Omar Broche had been engaged in a dispute with El Padrino. Broche was the person who, back in 1979, had vouched for Isleño Dávila with Robert Hopkins, the Irishman, who was inquiring on behalf of the Lucchese crime family. That made Broche one of the founding members of La Compañía, which put him on shaky ground with Battle.
Around the time of the arson wars, Broche moved to Spain. He stayed there for close to six years, until the bad publicity from the Presidential Crime Commission hearings and the Lalo Pons prosecution had blown over. Upon his return to the United States, Broche opened a number of bolita spots in northern Manhattan and the Bronx. He adhered to the two-block rule, but only by a few inches. One of the spots he opened was exactly two blocks from a Corporation spot. And this spot was more than just a place to make bolita bets. The location had several video slots and joker poker machines, making it what they called on the street a “ghetto casino.” The place became so popular that it was taking business away from the nearby Corporation spot.
Battle, at his home in Miami, received regular reports about Omar Broche. On one of his many phone lines at El Zapotal, he listened as Nene Marquez filled his head with stories of ungratefulness and betrayal. When it came to the veteran boliteros with whom Battle had begun the business back in the day, it didn’t take much to get him wound up. El Padrino seemed to carry a lingering resentment toward many of these men. His list of grievances was long; it included their unwillingness to help him avenge the murder of his brother Pedro. Broche and the others had started La Compañía while Battle was away in prison. A different kind of man might have let bygones be bygones, but for someone who seemed driven by a deep-rooted need for revenge, the grievance built to a breaking point, and then somebody had to die.
In May, Omar Broche was called to a meeting with Nene Marquez and told in no uncertain terms that he was being offered a choice. Either his place would be burned to the ground, or he could switch spots with the Corporation. They would take over his profitable ghetto casino, and he could take control of their less-profitable bolita hole exactly two blocks away.
It was more of a “fuck you” than a legitimate choice. In a state of humiliation, Broche accepted the offer, but he also began bad-mouthing Battle and the Corporation all over town. Specifically, he was overheard by a Corporation soldier saying that José Miguel Battle was “a despicable piece of shit,” and he referred to Nene Marquez as Battle’s “faggot brother-in-law.”
The Cuban rumor mill was like a tropical tornado; it went around and around. Battle heard what Broche had said, and then Broche heard that Battle had heard. He had reason to be concerned. And so, like Angel Mujica before him, Broche decided he would go and make a personal plea to this man he had known for thirty years. With all that they shared as exiles and boliteros, surely they could reach an understanding.
The roosters were especially feisty on the day Broche arrived in Miami to speak with El Padrino. It was a good day for a cockfight. Broche waited his turn, which was in itself a bit of an insult, but he kept his cool and swallowed his pride, so that he might cut a deal with Battle.
It was a replay of the meeting between Mujica and Battle, which occurred at the same cockfight valla only months earlier. Broche apologized for having disparaged Battle in public. He asked for forgiveness. The two men embraced. Battle told Broche not to worry, that everything was okay.
As Broche was leaving, one of Battle’s underlings said, “Well, at least he had the cojones to come to you and apologize.”
Said Battle, “Too late. The decision has been made. He has to die.”
Broche returned to New York. On June 27, he was at his small storefront restaurant on Lenox Avenue, in upper Manhattan. He was there to meet with Luis DeVilliers Sr., a fellow bolitero who had helped him finance his bolita shops in New York. DeVilliers was worried. He knew Battle; he knew what he was capable of. DeVilliers had heard that Battle had a contract out on Broche and likely on him, too, since he was the one who had financed Broche’s recent ventures in New York.
“Luis,” said Broche. “You worry too much. I spoke with El Gordo. Everything is good.”
DeVilliers left, and within minutes Broche was shot dead, two bullets in the back. He died on the floor of his own establishment.
The Broche murder made it three executions of old-school Cuban boliteros in a span of fifteen months. Though it seemed probable that they had all been killed by the same team of gunmen, there wasn’t much evidence on which to make a case. There were eyewitnesses and forensic evidence that suggested a link, but the gunmen were like ghosts who appeared and then disappeared. Nobody seemed to know who they were. Likely, they were hired killers from out of town.
BEFORE LUIS DEVILLIERS EVER MET JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE, HE HAD HEARD A LOT ABOUT him. He first heard about him in Spain, where the DeVilliers family moved in 1972 after fleeing Castro’s Cuba. They arrived with only the clothes on their backs and very little money. With the help of some friends, DeVilliers opened a meat and produce shop in Madrid. One of his regular customers was a fellow Cuban exile named Angel Mujica.
This was shortly after José Miguel and Pedro Battle, Isleño Dávila, Joaquin Deleon Sr., and the other New Jersey boliteros had left Madrid and headed back to the United States. Angel Mujica had stayed behind in Spain to begin an irrigation business. DeVilliers and Mujica became good friends.
DeVilliers had dreams of moving to New York City. Mujica told him, “I have lots of good connections there. If you go, stay away from José Miguel Battle. The person you want to do business with is Isleño Dávila.”
DeVilliers was surprised to hear Mujica talk badly about Battle; he knew they had been fellow brigadistas during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He heard from others that Mujica and Battle had been like brothers. Mujica spoke of Battle as a brother; he told DeVilliers stories of Battle’s heroism during the invasion. But he also seemed to have some sort of resentment toward Battle that went unexplained.
In 1974, DeVilliers moved with his wife and young son to New York. He took Mujica up on his offer and reached out to Isleño Dávila, who offered him a job taking bets by telephone in various residential apartments, all of which were known collectively as La Oficina, the Office. At first, the money was not spectacular. DeVilliers and his wife made extra money by running a sewing business out of their apartment in upper Manhattan. Eventually, with Isleño’s blessing, DeVilliers began to network the street, creating his own clientele. He took bets acting as a middleman for Isleño, who took 5 percent profit for each bet.
DeVilliers did well for himself. Like Isleño and Battle and the other boliteros, he liked to eat. He was short, fat, and personable, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes, which was unusual for a Cuban. He did so well with his bolita clientele that he eventually broke off from Isleño and became independent.
In 1975, DeVilliers and his son, Luis Jr., opened El Colonial, the restaurant that would become a special meeting place for bolita bankers. It was there that DeVilliers met José Miguel Battle for the first time. DeVilliers mentioned that he knew Angel Mujica from Spain. Battle was impressed. At the Colonial, DeVilliers also met Omar Broche.
Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, DeVilliers continued to operate as an independent bolitero; he used the Corporation as his bank for layoffs. In the mid-1980s, in the wake of the unseemly arson wars, he decided to move to Miami. He left the Colonial restaurant under the management of his son. Like Battle and the other boliteros, he maintained his bolita business in New York while living in South Florida. Once or twice every month, he came to New York to monitor his business. Most of the gambling profits—bales of cash—were stored in an apartment located at 750 Kappock Street in Riverdale. DeVilliers often brought shipments of cash back to Miami on planes and trains.
In 1990, DeVilliers ran into Omar Broche, whom he hadn’t seen in years, at a store in Miami where DeVilliers was buying equipment for a barbecue. Broche had recently returned from Spain and was shuttling back and forth between Miami and New York, loo
king for opportunities.
The next day, Broche came by DeVilliers’s home. They chatted about old times, and Broche expressed a desire to return to New York and open a storefront, or tienda. He asked DeVilliers if he’d be willing to extend him a loan so he could start his business. He promised the bolita banker a high-percentage return on his investment. DeVilliers had mixed feelings about it; he suspected that Battle might react badly. But he went ahead and invested in Broche’s return to New York.
It didn’t take long for trouble to surface. Both DeVilliers and Broche began hearing rumors of Battle’s dissatisfaction and had been told that a contract was out on their lives. That’s when DeVilliers traveled to New York to talk with Broche. He met him at his tienda and said, “Omar, he’s going to come after us. You need to close down your business or you’ll wind up dead.”
After being told by Broche that everything was okay with Battle, DeVilliers left the tienda to go on about his business. About one hour later, he was paged by a friend. He found a pay phone and called his friend, who said, “Luis, Omar Broche is dead.”
“What!” said DeVilliers. “That can’t be. I just left him an hour ago.”
“He was shot dead in his tienda on Lenox. The gunman ran away. Luis, believe me when I tell you, your friend is dead.”
DeVilliers immediately returned to Miami. He hid out in his house, wondering if gunmen sent by Battle would be coming to kill him. But the more he thought about it, the better he felt. If Battle wanted him dead, that gunman in Manhattan would simply have entered the restaurant a few minutes earlier, while he was still there. The hit man could easily have killed them both. He had chosen to wait until DeVilliers departed.
DeVilliers stopped hiding; he circulated openly. In fact, he ran into Battle a couple times at the cockfights. In his spare time, DeVilliers was a breeder of gamecocks, just like Battle. Whenever he saw Battle, they greeted one another. The subject of Omar Broche was not mentioned. Like so much other bloodshed, court cases, and trauma, it was water under the bridge. For the founding boliteros who started in business together long ago and had somehow managed to survive, it was always an occasion for nostalgia and reminiscing when they ran into each other.
A few months later, DeVilliers expanded his ventures into the video game machine business, which was the latest craze in illicit gambling. He started a business called Challenger Games Inc., which purchased the machines and placed them in bars and at bolita shops all around South Florida.
In the course of developing his business, he was approached one day by three businessmen from Peru who claimed to have high-ranking contacts in the Peruvian government. These men were looking to open a casino in Lima, Peru’s capital city. They claimed to have the ability to secure a casino license from the government. They were looking for U.S. investors and also personnel with casino-related experience.
DeVilliers knew an opportunity when he saw one. He told the men that he had casino management experience, which wasn’t true, and he had someone in mind he thought might be interested in making a large-scale investment.
“That is tremendous,” they said. “But before we can proceed, we need to see some proof of your experience in the casino business.”
DeVilliers had a friend who worked in a casino in Las Vegas. Within a couple days of meeting the Peruvians, he was able to secure a forged letter from a casino in Las Vegas that vouched for his “years of experience” in casino management.
The Peruvians were thrilled. They began the process of obtaining a casino license while DeVilliers went hunting for an investor. Luis had only one man in mind—José Miguel Battle.
DeVilliers remembered that over the years, Battle had mentioned how he dreamed of having a casino one day. El Padrino associated the casino business with his years as a cop in Havana, when Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and other mobsters presided over the most prestigious casinos in town. To Battle, being a casino boss was the ultimate status symbol for a Mob boss. For one thing, it was legal. Casinos were the perfect business for laundering money in a way that was nearly impossible to verify or trace. A casino boss reigned over his domain like a feudal lord. When he walked out onto the gambling floor, amid the card tables, roulette wheels, and slot machines, he was a celebrity, a man of power and stature.
It was at a cockfight in Redland that DeVilliers told Battle that he had been approached by the three well-connected Peruvians. Everything was in place, said DeVilliers. All that was needed were investors.
Battle’s eyes lit up. He wanted in. “I hold the key to your dreams,” he told DeVilliers.
DeVilliers said he would relay the message immediately to the Peruvians, though he knew better than to mention Battle by name. With Battle’s criminal record and notorious reputation, this would all have to be handled with discretion.
DeVilliers smiled to himself. Only weeks earlier, he had been in hiding, convinced that Battle wanted to have him killed. Now he was going into business with El Padrino on the grandest business venture either one of them had ever undertaken. If they could pull this off, it would change their lives forever. This wasn’t just a dream come true. It was a godsend.
SHANKS AND HIS SQUAD STILL HAD WIRETAPS IN PLACE, BUT THERE WAS AN ABSENCE of chatter about the most recent bolita murder in New York. The secrecy surrounding the Broche hit was strange. Normally, cops in New York and Miami had street contacts, people who filled them in on the latest bola en la calle (street gossip). There were often rumors about why a murder took place, who was behind it, and who pulled the trigger. In a sense, the Corporation encouraged gossip, because it helped spread the message that there were consequences to being on the wrong side of the organization. But after the Broche hit: silence.
Sometimes, criminal investigations were like the changing of the seasons; if you let nature take its course, a seed became a bud, and a bud became a flower.
In August, just two months after the Broche hit, the cops got a major break in the case. One of the officers on the Miami OC squad had a female informant who came to him with a startling tale. She had recently been in a relationship with an older Cuban who, over many months, related stories to her from his mind-boggling career. The man’s name was Roberto Parsons. He claimed to have been a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion and also a former operative for the CIA. Parsons told the girlfriend, in considerable detail, about his involvement with Operation 40. This unit of trained assassins, Parsons said, included Watergate burglars Frank Sturgis and Bernard Barker, as well as Cuban “freedom fighters” such as Luis Posada Carriles and Felix Rodriguez, former activists on behalf of the Contras in Nicaragua.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy, after Operation Mongoose was discontinued, some members of Operation 40— including Parsons—remained active within the CIA as a covert crew of hired assassins. Parsons claimed to have done off-the-record hits for the CIA, primarily in Latin America. In the early 1970s, he was cut loose by the Agency.
When José Miguel Battle first made the transfer to Miami in the early 1980s, Parsons was serving as the bolita boss’s bodyguard. It was a smart move for Battle to be seen with a personage as storied and feared as Roberto Parsons. It enhanced Battle’s own reputation as a former CIA-trained fighter at the Bay of Pigs who had been stationed at Fort Benning with men who had been prominent members of Operation 40.
By the late 1980s, Parsons was an independent operator who hired himself out as a professional killer. According to the girlfriend, Parsons described to her the murder of Pepe Moranga. He claimed that Moranga had been killed because he had cheated José Miguel Battle on a shipment of Mexican brown heroin. Battle ordered the hit, and Parsons brought two partners into the scheme—his nephew, Juan Carlos Parsons, and a fellow hit man named Jorge Gonzalez.
Roberto Parsons was sixty-one years old, but, as his girlfriend put it, “don’t be fooled by his age. He’s a very dangerous man.” She described how, according to Parsons, he had been the gunman in the Pepe Moranga hit, with Gonzalez serving as a sp
otter and the nephew, Juan Carlos, acting as the getaway driver.
Shanks and his crew ran a NCIC search on Roberto Parsons. The most recent photo on file showed a man with salt-and-pepper hair, gaunt, with a pale complexion and deep-set eyes. He fit the description of the Moranga and Broche shooter and the Mujica getaway driver to a tee.
There were only vague references in Parsons’s file to his CIA activities, but his criminal jacket was telling. In Miami he had been arrested twice, once in 1973 when he ran a stop sign and was pulled over and then held for not having a valid driver’s license. The officers found a 9mm automatic pistol in his car and three stolen credit cards, all under different names. In 1988, he was arrested by the Organized Crime Bureau’s Tactical Section and charged with extortion and kidnapping. He had allegedly kidnapped the girlfriend of a drug dealer who had refused to pay him $9,000 he owed from a narcotics transaction. By the time Parsons was to go on trial, all of the state’s witnesses had disappeared. The defendant pleaded nolo contendere and was sentenced to four months in prison, which he had already served while awaiting trial.
According to Parsons’s ex-girlfriend, the former spook trained his nephew to serve as his partner. Juan Carlos was tall, thirty years younger than Roberto, and, according to the girlfriend, “some say he looks like an Arab.”
One way of assessing an informant is if they are able to provide information that was not publicly known. In this regard, the ex-girlfriend received a high rating. She told Shanks and the investigators a detail that had never been reported in the press or anywhere else, that after the Moranga shooting, the body of the victim blocked the shooter’s escape route. Parsons had to shatter the glass door and climb out through the frame of the door.
“How do you know that?” Shanks asked.
“Roberto told me,” said the ex-girlfriend.
Over the next few days, the cops sought corroboration; some of it trickled in, and some they created on their own. A bolita informant from New York notified a Miami detective he knew that “the Corporation is killing off competitors.” The informant said that they were using an ex-CIA killer named Parsons and his nephew to do the murders. Shanks immediately sent a mug shot of Parsons to the New York detectives investigating the Moranga and Mujica killings. The detectives put together what’s called a “six-pack,” a display of six photos that included one of Roberto Parsons. A six-pack is the photo equivalent of a lineup. The detectives showed it to four separate witnesses of the murders. Two of the witnesses said they could not make a positive ID; two picked out the photo of Roberto Parsons.
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