Out of this violent political maelstrom a number of young Cuban males emerged as either feared gangsters or capable political leaders. One man who initially straddled both worlds was a young law student named Fidel Castro Ruz.
The twenty-two-year-old Castro burst onto the scene in June 1948 when he was accused of murder. A police sergeant at the University of Havana was shot in front of his house, and before dying he allegedly identified Castro as his assassin. An unnamed witness corroborated the claim. Castro had been accused of murder once before, just five months earlier. The allegation had been cooked up by a student rival at the university. Although Castro was arrested, he was never formally charged. This time, when Castro heard on the radio that he was once again being blamed for a political murder, he went into hiding. Eventually the witness recanted, telling newsmen that he had been bribed by the police to name Castro. The charges were thrown out.
Although not yet famous across the island, Fidel was well known at the University of Havana. Since the uprising against the presidency of Gerardo Machado in the early 1930s, the university had been a major source of political agitation and organized dissent. Castro had proved himself a dynamic orator and a future leader to be reckoned with, but he was also, according to some, overly enamored with the trappings of gangsterismo. He carried a fifteen-shot Browning pistol on his person at all times and was more than willing to engage rival gangs in confrontation. Despite his intellect and obvious leadership talents, he was thought to be somewhat reckless.
Tall and strapping, with curly black hair and a traditional, finely manicured Cuban mustache, Castro cut a dashing figure. He had been an exemplary student athlete and had a self-confidence that was attractive to women. He came from a prosperous family (his father owned land in Oriente Province) and married a young woman from a politically connected family. He borrowed money from his father so that he and his wife could honeymoon in New York City. They stayed at least one night at the Waldorf-Astoria, which had by then, at differing times in history, served as accommodation for nearly all the major players in the story of the Havana Mob.
By the latter months of 1948, having survived murder accusations and at least one assassination attempt, Castro was ready to settle down. He approached Max Lesnick, national director of the Youth Committee for the Ortodoxo Party, and declared that he would like to be a member of the twelve-person committee. Apparently Castro had begun to formulate the idea of entering politics and knew that he would have to be aligned with a formal party. Lesnick knew of Castro’s talents as a leader, but he also knew that Fidel had been involved in various aspects of political gangsterismo.
“No member of the committee may be armed when he goes to the university,” Lesnick told Castro, knowing that he always carried a pistol.
“Well, I won’t carry it anymore,” replied Fidel.
Through his association with Lesnick and the Ortodoxos, Fidel disowned his gangster past. In a dramatic speech before a gathering of administrators and students at the University of Havana, Castro proceeded to name all the gangsters, politicians, and student leaders profiting from President Prío’s “gangster pact.” Before the speech was over, automobiles filled with armed thugs had begun to materialize around the university. Castro finished his dramatic denunciation and was whisked away by Lesnick, who hid him because “he would be killed if he went out in the street.” According to Lesnick, who would eventually leave Cuba and go into exile in Miami, it was Castro’s first revolutionary act: “He made a courageous decision to take a stand against gangsterismo, and his position never wavered. From that point on, Cuba was changed forever.”
One person who had watched Castro’s emergence on the political stage with growing interest was Fulgencio Batista. Always on the lookout for young talent he could co-opt into supporting his personal agenda, Batista arranged a meeting with Fidel through Fidel’s brother-in-law, who was an active supporter of Batista. Castro was brought to Kuquine, Batista’s baronial estate outside Havana, and made to wait in a private office. In the office was a large painting of Batista from his days as a sergeant. There were other accoutrements of Batista’s life and career: a bust of Abraham Lincoln and one of José Martí; a solid gold telephone that had been given to Batista by the president of IT&T; and a telescope used by Napoleon on Saint Helena.
Batista finally arrived. According to one account of this meeting, he kept the conversation away from politics and sought only to take full measure of this voluble new star on the scene. Another account has Castro telling the senator that if he were to stage a coup d’état against President Prío, Batista would have his support. Anyone who knew Fidel would have recognized this offer for what it was: the act of an agent provocateur who wanted to pit Batista against Prío and foster discord, or even rebellion, after which he, Castro, would emerge as a possible successor.
The meeting was congenial. Fidel left without Batista having offered any commentary or predictions on his political future.
To the senator from Daytona, there was no indication that the man he had just met would one day become his dreaded enemy and, by extension, the primary nemesis of the Havana Mob.
chapter 4
WELL-CHARACTERED PEOPLE
MEYER LANSKY FELT HE OWED HIS OLD FRIEND LUCKY Luciano a visit. It was the summer of 1949, more than two years since Luciano had been forced out of Cuba by the U.S. government. Lansky and his wife, Teddy, had not yet had a formal honeymoon, so why not Europe? They could charter a cruise across the Atlantic, travel leisurely through southern Italy, and meet up with Charlie Lucky in Rome. Among other things, Lansky could fill Luciano in on the latest developments with Batista in Cuba and reassure him that, in the hearts and minds of American mobsters everywhere, he was still Gangster Number One.
Luciano certainly could have used the companionship. Since being forced into exile, he had become isolated and bitter. Even though he was far away from New York and Havana, Harry Anslinger and the Narcotics Bureau continued to hound him. Just as Anslinger had used U.S. influence to force the hand of the Cuban government in deporting Luciano, so he kept up pressure on the Italian authorities to keep the Mob boss under constant surveillance.
Lansky knew that a visit to his old friend in Italy would attract law enforcement attention, but he wasn’t concerned. The trip was for pleasure, not business. He booked passage on the Italia, a luxury liner scheduled to leave New York City on June 28.
Agents of the Narcotics Bureau kept a close watch on the passenger lists of ocean liners traveling to and from the United States, since it was believed that steamer trunks were a common mode for smuggling narcotics. The Bureau also believed that Luciano had used commercial ocean liners to transport heroin. When the name of Meyer Lansky—a known associate of Luciano—appeared on the manifest for the Italia, the Bureau took an interest. On Monday, June 27, the day before Lansky and his wife were scheduled to depart on their honeymoon, narcotics agents John H. Hanly and Crofton J. Hayes called Lansky on his home phone in Manhattan. They were surprised when he invited them up to his apartment across from the leafy splendor of Central Park at 40 Central Park South. The agents met Lansky in apartment 14C.
Meyer informed Hanly and Hayes that he was embarking on his European holiday “solely for pleasure.” Yes, he would probably be seeing Charles Luciano while in Italy. Luciano was an old friend, said Lansky, but they had no current business relationship. Lansky explained that the bulk of his income these days came from gambling interests in Florida, where he was part owner of the Club Bohème and Greenacres casinos, both managed by his brother Jake. In New York, Lansky said, he kept his business “in his hat.” This was a favorite expression of Lansky’s to explain his mode of business, in which there were no central office, no accountants, and no record keeping of any kind.
When asked by the agents to characterize his current activities, Lansky replied, “Common gambler, I guess. I don’t try to fool or impose on nobody. If I had met you casually, I would call myself a restaurant operator. If we warmed u
p to each other, I would tell you I was a common gambler. I don’t sail under no false colors.” As the agents continued to probe Lansky on his finances, he parried like a fleet-footed middleweight but always remained polite and civilized.
Eventually the conversation turned to Cuba. For the first time during the interview, Lansky stumbled a bit. The agents asked why his phone number in Hallendale had turned up repeatedly on Luciano’s phone log while the Mob boss was living in Havana. Lansky suggested that the calls were between him and either Chester Simms or Connie Immerman, two former associates from his days running the casino at Oriental Park Racetrack. The two Americans had stayed on in Cuba and frequently called Lansky to compare notes on the credit of certain high rollers. Luciano may have come on the phone at some point, said Lansky, but his memory was vague on that.
Lansky’s hesitation when talking about Cuba was understandable. His past involvements managing the casinos at Oriental Park Racetrack and the Hotel Nacional were entirely legal, but his relationship with Batista was not yet fully realized. Nor was it something the notoriously close-mouthed Lansky would have wanted to divulge to a couple of federal agents—no matter how polite he wanted to appear.
The conversation lasted more than an hour. The agents left and filed their report. The subject of Cuba aside, the report stands as an artifact of perhaps the most open dialogue Meyer Lansky ever had with American law enforcement.
Throughout his five-week trip to Europe, Lansky and his wife were followed by federal agents. Teddy was incensed at the invasion of their privacy, but Meyer tried not to let it bother him. At times he even engaged the agents:
I used to recognize them and invite them to have a drink with me. They weren’t even embarrassed—they used to accept my hospitality. They were trying to bug our hotel rooms, but they did it very incompetently, and I kidded them about their lack of professionalism.
The Lanskys traveled to Palermo in Sicily, Naples, and on to Rome, where Lansky had originally planned to meet with Luciano; however, Charlie called to say that, with the restrictions that had been placed on him by the Italian authorities, it was better that Meyer meet him in the Sicilian village of Taormina. Lansky and his wife therefore headed south again, where they finally met Meyer’s old friend at the sun-drenched resort.
The last time Lansky and Luciano had seen one another was in the days and weeks following the Mob conference at the Hotel Nacional. Although Luciano was no longer the day-to-day boss of the Syndicate, he was still a kind of emeritus in exile. His ego required that he be treated as if his opinions still mattered, though his removal from Cuba had rendered him mostly powerless. Luciano listened as Lansky filled him in on the latest business developments with the Syndicate and also their updated plans for Havana. Recalled Luciano: “[Meyer] said things was goin’ very good with all our gamblin’. He told me he was goin’ to Switzerland to open up some new bank accounts for a few of the guys, like Joe Adonis and our good friend Batista.”
After Lansky and his wife said good-bye to Luciano in Sicily, they continued traveling around Europe: the French Riviera, Paris, and Switzerland, where Lansky opened his first numbered bank account. When they returned to the United States, the world was turned upside down.
To begin with, Lansky’s European trip garnered attention in the local press. By traveling overseas to meet with the notorious Luciano, Lansky had inadvertently elevated his underworld profile. The New York Sun, a newspaper that had made a name for itself through copious coverage of local gangsters, ran a photo of Lansky on the front page. It was the first time Lansky’s picture had appeared in a major newspaper. The accompanying article identified him as “one of the nation’s public enemies…once described by a police investigator’s report as ‘the brightest boy in the Combination.’”
Until then, Lansky’s name had rarely appeared in the press. If it had, it was usually as an associate or “sidekick” of some more famous mobster, such as Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, or Frank Costello. Now Lansky had been outed as a major crime figure.
And there was more to come. The article in the Sun was the opening salvo in an investigation into the activities of Lansky and the nation’s entire constellation of mobsters and gangsters. In the months ahead, this inquisition would move beyond the newspapers to the halls of various senate chambers throughout the United States. By the time the dust settled, not only were Lansky’s plans for Cuba in serious jeopardy, but the entire Syndicate had taken a hit. Fortunes would be lost, indictments handed down, and, for the first and only time in his life, Meyer Lansky—the wiliest operator in the American underworld—would find himself pondering his future from behind the bars of a prison cell.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S WAR on organized crime had been brewing for some time. Ever since Prohibition, the American Mob had been a perennial favorite in newspapers and on the radio, where commentators like Walter Winchell made a career out of gossipy, sensationalized crime reports. But until the early months of 1950, the Mob’s activities were usually portrayed as those of isolated gangsters in major cities with little or no intercity affiliation. The theory that there existed a Commission or Syndicate of Mob leaders who coordinated underworld activity had been belittled by no less a personage than J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. Hoover stated bluntly that there was no national crime syndicate and that the major threat to American values was not from organized crime but from a national Communist conspiracy.
Conversely, Harry Anslinger of the Narcotics Bureau had for years been pushing the national syndicate theory. His dream was to bring about the formation of a federal investigative committee headed by a like-minded U.S. senator, in which his agency would be prominently featured. Anslinger found his man in Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee.
The Kefauver Committee, as it would become known, was constituted on January 5, 1950. The purpose of the committee, according to the Senate resolution under which it was created, was to direct “a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities and of the manner in which the facilities of interstate commerce are made a vehicle of organized crime.” Unlike later organized crime committees based in Washington, D.C., the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce was designed to be a barnstorming tour, with subpoenas served and public and private sessions held in many major cities throughout the United States. In seeking to establish the existence of an underworld commission governed by mobsters in various jurisdictions, the committee wound up focusing heavily on organized gambling. Inevitably, the subject of Cuba would emerge as a titillating example of the Mob’s far-reaching influence in the gaming trade.
The hearings kicked off in Chicago and then quickly moved on to St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Tampa, and other cities. From the beginning, Kefauver had an agenda. A plain-speaking politician with a rural pedigree, he had campaigned for senator wearing a coonskin cap and preaching “simple American values,” though he was, in fact, a highly skilled attorney based in Chattanooga. With Kefauver as chairman, the hearings took on the trappings of a crusade. The members of the committee were primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, while those subpoenaed to testify were mostly urban ethnics: Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and Jews.
Of the committee’s many sessions spanning the next eighteen months, among the most explosive were those held in South Florida. On July 13, 1950, the operating director of the Miami Crime Commission was called to present a series of charts showing that no fewer than thirty-two illegal gambling establishments flourished on the Dade–Broward County line between 1946 and 1950. Of these, the most successful were those owned and operated by Meyer Lansky. Among the men named by the crime commissioner as having become part of the Lansky syndicate in South Florida were Vincent Alo, alias “Jimmy Blue Eyes,” William Bischoff, alias “Lefty Clark,” and Jake Lansky, all of whom would later become key players in Meyer’s Havana operations.
The lengths to which the Lansky syndicate would go to buy off local officials
was detailed for the committee by a former city assessor from Hollywood, Florida. The former assessor was part of a citizens’ group that was trying to close down the illegal gambling clubs through an injunction. In open session, before the committee, the former assessor testified that one night there had been a knock at his front door. He answered and was greeted by an attorney who he knew represented gambling interests and gave free legal advice to Hollywood cops.
“There’s someone in the car who would like to see you,” said the lawyer.
The former assessor walked out to a black Cadillac sedan parked at the curb and opened the door. Inside, behind the wheel, sat burly Jake Lansky.
“This is Mr. Lansky,” said the lawyer. “Mr. Jake Lansky.”
Meyer Lansky’s brother said to the former city official, “Let me ask you, don’t you think you’re taking on more than you can manage?”
“I don’t know,” said the man. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“Would you be interested in twenty-five thousand dollars?” asked Jake.
The man turned and went back into the house. The car drove away.
Two or three nights later, another car drove up. A man came to the door and asked the former city official to come out to the car, there was something he wanted to show him. The former assessor complied. Two men were sitting in the rear of the car. One held a white shoe box.
“We have twenty-five thousand dollars here,” said the man with the shoe box. “You know how these things end—either with a silver dollar or a silver bullet.”
According to the city official, he walked back to the house and picked up a shotgun he kept near the door. “I told them, ‘I’m going to count to five, and then I’m going to start shooting.’” The car drove off, but that wasn’t the last of it. Weeks later, an anonymous letter was circulated in Hollywood accusing the man of accepting a ten-thousand-dollar bribe from gamblers.
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