Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  COMMITTEE MEMBER: Before you got in bed with crooks to finish this proposition, didn’t you look into these birds at all?

  WILBUR CLARK: Not too much. No, sir.

  COMMITTEE MEMBER: You have the most nebulous idea of your business I ever saw. You have a smile on your face but I don’t know how the devil you do it.

  WILBUR CLARK: I have done it all my life.

  White-haired and avuncular, Wilbur Clark’s forte was attracting topnotch entertainers and celebrities, but he had little experience in the day-to-day operations of a casino. For that, Lansky would need to look elsewhere. But he wouldn’t need to look far.

  There was nobody better to manage the gambling concession at the Nacional than Jake Lansky. Jake had been an associate of his older brother going all the way back to their days running crap games on the Lower East Side. Later, they fine-tuned their partnership in South Florida, until Kefauver came along and spoiled the show. Unlike Meyer, Jake spoke a little Spanish. He also had a personality that many described as the opposite of his brother’s. Where Meyer was sometimes taciturn and cold, Jake was a joker and a backslapper. Jake was also taller than Meyer; he was beefy and imposing. The Cubans gave him a nickname, El Cejudo—“the Bushy Eyebrowed One”—a reference to the thick black eyebrows that were his most distinguishing physical characteristic.

  Some questioned the depth of Jake’s intellect. In Little Man, Robert Lacey’s seminal biography of Meyer, a family friend is quoted as saying of Jake: “[He] had a way of chewing on his cigar. He would beetle up his eyebrows, so you thought there must be a lot going on inside there—when, actually, it was pretty dead.”

  Jake may have lacked Meyer’s scholarly pretensions, but he was loyal. And he knew how to run a casino. He had the common touch, which made him especially popular with the dealers, croupiers, pit bosses, and floor managers who made up the casino’s labor hierarchy. He was a highly visible figure, often taking a position atop the manager’s perch, overlooking the floor. Even when Jake wasn’t on the premises, there was no question who was in charge.

  Once, a political official high up in the Batista regime was gambling in the casino at the Nacional. He lost all his chips and quickly ran out of cash. He asked the assistant manager to grant him a credit of twenty-five thousand pesos so he could continue playing. In the past, it was common for members of the political and military establishment to be granted this special privilege. This time, the assistant manager hesitated. He picked up the phone and called El Cejudo. Jake came down to the salon and, in front of everybody, denied the political official the credit he had requested.

  Many native cubanos were surprised and impressed by the degree to which the Lanskys stood up to what had always been the privileged class. But this was very much in keeping with Meyer Lansky’s approach to running a high-stakes gambling operation. And it is unlikely that Meyer or Jake would have enforced such a policy without the approval of President Batista.

  The rules were simple: a substantial percentage of the “skim” from the casino was used to pay off military, police, and political officials. That was their cut, to trickle down through their various pecking orders as they saw fit. Any low-level military policeman or political party hack who came around looking for an extra privilege or piece of the action had stepped over the line. Maybe that had been permissible before Meyer and Jake arrived, when the casinos were haphazardly organized and wide open to extortion—but not now.

  This policy on the part of the Lansky brothers became an operating principle of the Havana Mob. And Meyer rarely passed up an opportunity to show that he was beholden to no one except maybe the top guy: Batista. Once, Meyer was on his way to meet with Amletto Battisti. At precisely 9:00 P.M., Lansky arrived at Battisti’s Sevilla Biltmore Hotel, located just blocks from the presidential palace on the outskirts of Old Havana. He stepped out of the car and entered the palatial Spanish-tiled lobby, where he came upon Santiago Rey Pernas, then minister of the interior. This high government official put out his hand to greet Lansky, who glanced dismissively at the man and kept on walking. The minister was left standing with his hand outstretched, while Lansky continued on to meet with his mobster associate.

  Lansky may have had little time for military and government officials who were looking to feed off the Havana Mob, but he was downright solicitous of Cuban underworld figures he would need to bring his plans for Cuba to full fruition. The suave and debonair Amletto Battisti was one person Lansky met on a regular basis. Battisti’s bank, Banco de Créditos e Inversiones, was located in an arcade on the basement level of the Sevilla Biltmore and would prove to be a vital conduit for laundering the casino skim. Another Lansky contact whose preestablished criminal history in Cuba was essential was Amadeo Barletta.

  Barletta’s bank, Banco Atlántico, had an even more dubious history than Battisti’s. In the years leading up to Fulgencio Batista’s golpe in March 1952, Banco Atlántico had been under investigation by the previous administration of Carlos Prío. The bank’s executive council, which included Amadeo Barletta as president and his son, Amadeo Barletta Jr., as vice president, had claimed that, in accordance with Cuban law, Banco Atlántico had no financial relationship with “affiliated societies or companies.” An investigator from Banco Nacional de Cuba (BNC), however, discovered that this was not the case. In a confidential report to the BNC, the chief of bank inspection wrote:

  Upon carrying out the inspection of [Banco Atlántico] in August 1951, it was determined that the company Santo Domingo Motor Corporation, constituted under the law of the Dominican Republic, represented in reality an affiliated holding company, possessor of more than 50 percent of the stock of Banco Atlántico. Credentials in the name of this company were not shown to the inspectors.

  The BNC inspector went on to say in the report that there were no fewer than eighteen other companies with “unlicensed” links to Banco Atlántico—among them coffee distributors, sugar conglomerates, a department store, and Barletta’s Compañía Editorial El Mundo, which published his newspaper. Amadeo Barletta had established a network of front companies financed by his bank, which was itself the recipient of under-the-table money from a number of sources, most notably the city’s gambling casinos. Crooked banks with hidden links to a vast array of local shell companies—this was exactly the type of financial infrastructure that Lansky, Trafficante, and other U.S.-based mobsters would need if they were to expand their criminal empire in Cuba.

  The BNC continued to investigate Banco Atlántico in the early 1950s, and other fraudulent practices were uncovered. When Batista took over the Cuban government, the investigations stopped. But Barletta still had a problem. There was an investigative paper trail on Banco Atlántico in the files of the BNC that was known to international banking investigators. The way to deal with this was simple: on March 1, 1954, Banco Atlántico announced its liquidation. Overnight, the bank disappeared from existence. Within weeks, a new financial entity—the Trust Company of Cuba—assumed the interests of the Barletta family.

  Banks owned and controlled by Battisti, Barletta, and later one created by President Batista himself were crucial to the Mob in Havana. Already the money had begun to roll in from the hotels, casinos, cabarets, and other tourist-related businesses, but if all went according to plan, this would be only the beginning. For that plan to take shape, a number of key pieces still needed to fall into place.

  One of those pieces materialized in August when the Batista government, by legal decree, created a financial institution known as BANDES (Banco de Desarrollo Económico y Social, or Bank for Economic and Social Development). BANDES was designed to be the ultimate national lending institution. Its objectives were officially explained as:

  To carry out a policy of economic and social development, of diversification of production, assuming for that purpose, among others, the functions of discounting and rediscounting public and private securities, issued with the purpose of increasing the money in circulation, as well as realizing many credit and ban
king operations as may be indispensable in the realization of such objectives, being authorized to subscribe, float, and endorse bonds of companies of economic and social development—whether state run, quasi state run, or privately run—to make loans to said companies and to issue their own securities.

  Hidden within this dense legalese was a powerful reality: banks owned by Battisti, Barletta, and others would invest in BANDES, as would powerful U.S. companies looking to do business in Cuba. As a financial institution, BANDES was being given unparalleled power to finance any and all public works projects, to extend loans and securities, to virtually control the flow of money and social development in Cuba. It was to be, in other words, the economic high command of the Havana Mob; an institution that subsumed all the operations of Battisti, Barletta, Lansky, and the other mobsters into one, and then tied it into the economic and social development of Cuba itself, so that the fortunes of the Mob in Cuba were one and the same with the fortunes of the Cuban people. It was a political directive breathtaking in its corruption, an act of malfeasance that did something mobsters in the United States had rarely dared dream of: officially linking together the Mob and its financial operations with the development of the society in which it operated.

  The financial infrastructure was now in place. The only thing missing was a piece of legislation that would provide an incentive to developers. Batista took care of this by passing a new law—Ley Hotelera (Hotel Law) 2074—which provided tax exemptions to any hotel providing tourist accommodation, and furthermore guaranteed government financing—via BANDES—for anyone willing to commit one million dollars or more toward hotel construction or two hundred thousand for the building of a nightclub. Hotel and nightclub investors were also guaranteed a casino-gambling license without having to be approved by a gaming commission, which, of course, did not exist in Cuba. U.S. investors with criminal records were not turned away. In fact, through Hotel Law 2074 they were encouraged to invest, as long as they were willing to pay the official license fee of twenty-five thousand pesos. The real fee, of course, also included a kickback to Batista amounting to somewhere around two hundred and fifty thousand pesos—equivalent to $1.6 million today. There was also an under-the-table monthly operating fee of two thousand pesos, plus a profit percentage paid directly to Batista or a member of his family.

  The graft proved to be staggering. Once the benefits of Batista’s new hotel law kicked in and rampant hotel-casino construction began in Havana, the profits in kickback payments to Batista were estimated by some to total nearly ten million dollars a year.

  Before the ink was dry on Batista’s Hotel Law 2074, five new hotel-casino projects were announced, including the Havana Hilton, which would be the largest hotel to date in Havana; the Deauville, the first Mob-controlled hotel to open along the Malecón; and the Capri, which would go up in Vedado, just one block from the Hotel Nacional.

  For years it was believed that Havana’s tourism boom had been suffering from a dearth of top-flight hotel accommodation, but that was all about to change. With the passage of his new law, Batista was officially kicking off an unprecedented era of hotel and nightclub development in Havana. And of course, attached to each new hotel or nightclub would be a fully equipped, Mob-owned gambling casino. Let the games begin.

  OF ALL THE U.S. gangsters poised to take advantage of Batista’s new open-door policy toward investment in Cuba, few were as well placed as Santo Trafficante. But in the summer of 1954, as the tourist season approached in Havana, the Mob boss from Tampa was rocked by two events that threatened to knock him off his game. The first was the death of his father, Santo Trafficante Sr.

  Having been diagnosed years earlier with stomach cancer, the elder Trafficante’s passing on August 11 at the age of sixty-eight was no great surprise. Even so, it was a potentially disruptive event for Santo Jr., who had been methodically assuming control of his family’s varied criminal businesses over the previous six or seven years.

  Throughout the history of the Mafia in the United States, the passing of a titular leader had sometimes been an occasion for bloodletting and jockeying for power. Santo Jr. had reason to be concerned that his home base of Tampa might once again erupt in a violent war for control of the lucrative Gulf Coast bolita racket, but it never happened. Partly this was because Trafficante Sr. was such a revered figure in the city’s Sicilian community, where he had long been viewed as a kind of founding father. His Mafia roots were well known. For many decades, he held court at the Nebraska Bar and Package Goods Store on Nebraska Avenue, an old-world social club where the dispensing of underworld favors and the counting of bolita proceeds were a regular afternoon occurrence. Trafficante Sr. was circumspect and soft-spoken. Although often identified by the local press as “patriarch of Tampa’s most notorious underworld family,” he was also a member of L’Unione Italiana Club and Elk’s Lodge No. 708, two of the city’s most influential fraternal organizations. Throughout his life, Trafficante Sr. was never convicted of a crime nor did he ever spend a day in jail.

  The respect that had always been accorded “the Don” was readily apparent on the day of his burial. A crowd estimated at more than five hundred mourners gathered on a sweltering August day at the L’Unione Italiana Cemetery, an immaculate, well-cared-for burial ground built and maintained through the beneficences of Tampa’s Sicilian immigrant population. The Tampa Tribune reported that “underworld faces were sprinkled throughout the crowd,” including that of Santo Jr., who at age thirty-nine was now the undisputed Godfather of the Tampa Mafia, one of the most deeply entrenched and oldest Sicilian criminal fraternities in the country.

  Santo Sr. was laid to rest in a solid-brass coffin with an inner glass sealer. His remains were placed in a marble crypt that, like others at the L’Unione Italiana Cemetery, was aboveground. The framed, oval-shaped black-and-white photo on Trafficante Sr.’s headstone is the only known photo of the secretive Mob boss. The Tampa Tribune reported that Santo Sr. left behind an estate of $36,300. Though that translates to nearly half a million dollars in today’s terms, it was well below what most believed to be his true worth—which included a lifetime of contacts in Cuba that he had bequeathed to his son.

  Santo Jr. mourned the passing of his papa and got on with his life. There were other issues that needed to be dealt with, including the fact that, even as the son witnessed his father’s remains being sealed away in their final resting place, he was facing indictment on state gambling charges.

  The arrests had gone down a few months earlier, in May. Trafficante, along with thirty-four others, had been arrested in a series of gambling raids throughout the Tampa area. Santo and his brother, Henry, were also accused of bribing a police officer to prevent further raids.

  The crusade to eradicate bolita on the Gulf Coast had been building steam ever since the Kefauver hearings, which had blown through Tampa three and a half years earlier and led Esquire magazine to dub the town the “Hellhole of the Gulf Coast.” As they had in other jurisdictions, the Kefauver hearings ushered in a mood of reform. It was estimated by the committee—and repeated often in the local press—that the Mafia in Tampa made an estimated five million dollars a year from bolita—a princely sum in the early 1950s. An ambitious local sheriff spent eighteen months building his case against the Trafficante organization. It would be the first time a Trafficante—senior or junior—faced a trial.

  One of the lawyers handling Trafficante’s defense was Frank Ragano, a young, relatively inexperienced criminal defense attorney who, like Santo, had Sicilian blood. Trafficante and Ragano struck up a close working relationship and friendship that would continue throughout the mobster’s trial, his time in Cuba, and beyond.

  Ragano was impressed with Trafficante, whom he described years later in Mob Lawyer, his published memoir, as being “a different species from the seedy bolita bankers I usually represented. They invariably dressed shabbily and spoke crudely; Trafficante could have passed for a bank executive or an Italian diplomat…His clothes had
a custom-tailored look and he wore distinctive horn-rimmed glasses trimmed with gold. In those days, I didn’t run across too many people dressed as elegantly and expensively as this man.”

  Trafficante liked to pay his lawyer’s fees in cash, usually in untraceable bills stuffed into a brown envelope and delivered to Ragano under the table. The propriety of collecting huge fees in cash troubled the young lawyer. He spoke to a more senior member of his law firm about it; the man laughed and said, “These people always pay cash…They don’t keep [checking] accounts and records of how much money they have.”

  “Is that how they pay you?” asked Ragano.

  “Absolutely,” answered the attorney. If Ragano was going to represent clients like Santo Trafficante—men who made their money from the underworld—he “better get used to it.”

  Ragano was well paid—better paid than he ever dreamed he would be back in his days at law school. His annual salary jumped from ten thousand to one hundred and forty thousand dollars, most of it from various defendants associated with the Trafficante organization that he would represent at trial. Santo and his brother were to be tried separately.

  In the fall of 1954, most of the twenty-eight bolita defendants whom Ragano represented were acquitted or had their convictions overturned on appeal. Trafficante was pleased, but he told Ragano that if he had dreams of becoming a distinguished lawyer he would have to improve his overall appearance. “Stop buying suits and jackets off the racks in ordinary stores,” he said. He recommended a tailor in Miami Beach, where he had his suits made; he also recommended a barber where Ragano could get a more stylish haircut, and also a professional manicurist.