Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  At the trial of Santo and Henry Trafficante, Ragano was a spectator, watching from the sidelines as their case was handled by Pat Whitaker, a famous criminal defense attorney and lead counsel at Ragano’s firm. The primary witness for the prosecution was a police sergeant detective who testified that Henry had tried to bribe him for protection against raids and that Henry and Santo were paying off high-level law enforcement officials in Saint Petersburg, the town on the other side of Tampa Bay. After a two-week trial, Santo and his brother were both found guilty of bribery, and Henry was convicted of operating an illegal lottery. But the conviction was quickly overturned because the prosecuting attorney made a bonehead mistake during his summation. By making an issue of the fact that neither Santo nor Henry had taken the stand to testify in their defense, the prosecutor violated criminal procedural law, which states that no negative motive can be imputed by a defendant’s choice not to take the witness stand.

  Ragano attended the post-trial celebration at Santo’s favorite restaurant—the Columbia—in the Cuban-Sicilian neighborhood of Ybor City. It was there that Trafficante informed Ragano that he, not Pat Whitaker, would from now on be his personal lead counsel. Ragano was ecstatic. Only years later did it cross his mind that it was no fluke that Santo won his bolita trial on a technicality.

  “It occurred to me,” wrote Ragano in his memoir, “that Santo had somehow managed to bribe or influence the prosecutor into making the fatal mistake in his closing argument. There could be no other explanation.”

  Trafficante had dodged a bullet. He was a free man. Even so, his organization had been dragged into the light of day and exposed as never before. As with Meyer Lansky, the fallout from the Kefauver hearings had damaged Santo. His legal expenses were considerable, and there was a good chance that the bolita racket, which had sustained the Trafficante organization for generations, would be forced into a period of remission from which it might never recover.

  On December 26, Santo returned to Cuba. The holiday season had arrived, and it was time for the Mafia boss to once again turn his attention to the best thing he had going: Havana, a place where gambling was legal, mobsters were welcome, and profits were virtually guaranteed by the government. Before Santo’s trial, Cuba had seemed like a luxury, just one of many business opportunities that provided the Trafficantes with additional profits in an already thriving Mafia enterprise. But now the Pearl of the Antilles was looking like Santo’s salvation. Just like Lansky before him, he’d been hit hard at home, suffering major losses, and was looking to heal his economic wounds in a land where “everybody…has a mistress,” even the president.

  Now, more than ever, Trafficante needed the Havana Mob, and the Havana Mob needed him.

  chapter 7

  GAMBLER’S PARADISE

  NOTHING CLEANS UP THE IMAGE OF A FRAUDULENT GOVERNMENT quite like a good old-fashioned election. Fulgencio Batista knew this to be true. In the twenty years since he first rose to power in Cuba, Batista had presided over many so-called democratic elections in which the results were a foregone conclusion. The military controlled the elections in Cuba, and Batista controlled the military. With the notable exception of the golpe of March 1952, there were few surprises come election day. Batista’s ability to maintain order and deliver uncontested results at the polls had always been part of his appeal to his neighbor, the great colossus to the north.

  The United States was very much on Batista’s mind in the autumn of 1953. A new U.S. ambassador—Arthur Gardner—had been appointed by the newly elected Eisenhower administration. Gardner was an enthusiastic supporter of Batista, as had been virtually every U.S. government representative who came into contact with El Mulato Lindo. Batista was a friend to American corporations and investors, and he was, in keeping with the tenor of 1950s Cold War politics, increasingly anti-Communist. In case anyone had doubts about that, in November 1953 Batista outlawed the Communist Party in Cuba and shut down its various newspapers and publishing outlets. Ambassador Gardner registered his approval but also noted that for Batista to “legitimize his standing in the eyes of the world” he needed to bury the memory of his golpe with an “open election.” Thus, in late 1953, it was announced to the Cuban people that a presidential election would take place one year later, on November 1, 1954.

  From his prison cell on the Isle of Pines, Fidel Castro denounced the prospect of elections as a sham. In a series of letters to his supporters—some of which were published in underground newspapers—he now wrote less of replacing the existing government and more of Revolution, with a capital R. Cuba needed an entirely new system of government, Castro surmised, and a new kind of political leader. “The Revolution cannot mean the restoration to power of men who have been utterly discredited by history,” he declared.

  The problem for Castro was that he was locked away on a small island in the Caribbean Sea behind a stone wall and concertina wire, with a round-the-clock phalanx of armed guards. Another problem for the opposition was that, economically speaking, Cuba appeared to be doing quite well. The sugar crop that year was measured at 4.75 million tons, better than it had been in more than a decade. At an international economic summit in London, it was agreed that Cuba would supply more than half the world’s sugar market—a return to the economic glory years of the Dance of the Millions. Cuba had a higher standard of living than anywhere else in the Caribbean and most of Latin America. Major construction projects were booming on the island, including one massive project: a tunnel that would pass under the Havana Bay canal and link the city with its easternmost neighborhoods. Under Batista, Havana was literally expanding, becoming a world-class metropolis. There was poverty, illiteracy, and social inequity, of course, but it was skillfully hidden behind a veneer of prosperity that made it appear as though all of Cuba was in the midst of good times.

  It was in this atmosphere of rosy economic prognostication that the presidential election of November 1954 approached. Batista was given a major boost by his northern partner, the United States, when in May his most potent challenger, ex-president Carlos Prío, was indicted in Miami for violating the U.S. Neutrality Act. He stood accused of plotting to smuggle a cache of weapons to anti-Batista operatives in Cuba. Another potential challenger, ex-president Ramón Grau San Martín, pulled out of the election when it became clear that the voting process would be controlled not by a neutral organization but by the Cuban military. Batista stood uncontested on election day. Less than half the population voted, even though they were required to do so by law. For Batista’s supporters in the Cuban and U.S. governments, his victory was a handy propaganda tool, but it did little to assuage those who felt his regime was and always would be unconstitutional and therefore illegitimate.

  On Inauguration Day, February 1955, the sound of gunfire could be heard in the outskirts of the city. Havana police had tracked down an old enemy of Batista’s—Orlando León Lemus, known to the public as El Colorado. León Lemus was a political gangster from the glory days of the MSR who was now considered sympathetic to former president Prío. At the end of a bloody gun battle that raged for hours, Cuba’s public enemy number one was dead. A large stash of weapons was also uncovered. Police officers bragged that they had most likely foiled an assassination attempt on the president. Batista himself declared the death of El Colorado as a fitting first act of his new term, in which the city’s premiere gangster had been eliminated.

  For those in the know, the irony was palpable: Batista was taking credit for eliminating Cuban-born gangsters, while at the same time extending his relationships with professional mobsters from New York, Miami, Tampa, and elsewhere around the United States.

  Having engineered an electoral victory, Batista was feeling emboldened. In keeping with his political philosophy of “repression and reward,” he began to lessen some of the more egregious restrictions on civil liberties brought about by his golpe. Censorship was temporarily relaxed. Curfews were lifted. Organized labor activities—i.e., strikes—were now allowed under the law. Batis
ta began to appear more readily in public, especially at charity and ceremonial events, where he once again assumed the role of benevolent dictator that he had relished during his earlier tenure as president.

  One glittering event that Batista attended in early 1955 was a gala for La liga contra el cáncer, Cuba’s anticancer league. The president and his wife, Marta, were the guests of honor at this prestigious charity gathering, attended by the top members of Batista’s cabinet and the cream of the social register. To anyone affiliated with the Havana Mob, the event was significant not so much because of its purpose but because of where it was held—the Tropicana nightclub. Although few could have recognized it as such at the time, this event marked the beginning of an epoch in which the city’s most famous nightclub became a dazzling symbol for the Mob in Havana and the era it helped to create.

  IF HAVANA IN THE 1950S was a soufflé of unbridled gambling, extravagant showmanship, hot music, and brash sexuality, the Tropicana was the special ingredient that gave it its buoyancy. Located in the midst of a tropical jungle on the outskirts of the city, the club had for years been one of Havana’s most innovative show palaces for dance, music, and a particular brand of Cuban sensuality. The showgirls at the Tropicana were renowned the world over for their voluptuousness, and the cabaret showcased a kind of sequin-and-feather musical theater that would be copied in Paris, New York, and Las Vegas. With the outdoor floor shows (“Paradise Under the Stars”) as a main draw and the club’s adjoining casino as a virtual license to print money, everyone who was anyone wanted to be seen at the Tropicana. Amid the city’s burgeoning constellation of cabarets, hotel-casinos, and nightclubs, the Tropicana was the North Star, a magnet for international celebrities, musicians, beautiful women, and gangsters.

  The club’s connections to the underworld ran deep, and they began with the owner, Martín Fox. Built like a longshoreman, with a thick torso, leathery skin, and meat hooks for hands, Fox was the kind of man who could handle himself around tough guys and mobsters. He resembled the actor Anthony Quinn and spoke with a kind of knowing, salt-of-the-earth Cuban slang that came from years of operating on the fringes of polite society. Fox was a skilled impresario, a man who knew how to conduct himself around movie stars, presidents, and kings, yet he often carried a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson tucked into the waistband of his well-tailored linen suits, a throwback to his days as an up-and-coming bolitero.

  In Tropicana Nights, a picaresque history of the nightclub, cowritten by Rosa Lowinger and Ofelia Fox—longtime wife of Martín—Ofelia is quoted saying, “The defining feature of a Cuban is a person who will do just about anything for a minute of pleasure.” Her husband, Martín, was a man who devoted himself to supplying those minutes, both to Cubans and to the tourists who flocked to the island. In doing so, he formed a partnership with the Havana Mob, though Ofelia Fox would deny the larger implications of this arrangement until her dying day. In her memoir, she describes being wined and dined by Frankie Carbo, a notorious mafioso affiliated with Lansky’s New York crime syndicate: “People say and write a lot of things. I don’t know about [Carbo] killing anyone, and if Martín did, he couldn’t do anything about it, either. These men were part of the business world. Carbo treated us like royalty in New York.”

  There was a reason Martín Fox and his wife were treated like royalty by mobsters in faraway New York City; it was because Fox was an important business partner and conduit between the Cuban and U.S. underworld figures who came to make up the Havana Mob.

  Like Batista, Castro, and almost every other Cuban who came of age in the early and mid-twentieth century, Fox was a child of the zafra. In Ciego de Avila, the midsized town in the middle of Cuba where he got his start, the harvest ruled all. As a young man in his early twenties, Martín worked in a sugar mill as a tornero, or lathe machinist. A minor industrial accident damaged his left hand and cost him his job. Young Martín needed to find a new way to make a living, so he turned to Cuba’s other national pastime—gambling, or more specifically, la bolita.

  Bolita had been a huge moneymaker for the Trafficantes among the Cuban émigré population in Tampa, and it would prove to be a wise career move for Fox. In Cuba, the game was played all over the island as a kind of black market alternative to the official national lottery. Fox made his living through apuntando terminales, or “the taking down of bets.”

  The game kept the young man busy. Part of the attraction of bolita was its so-called secret code, which, of course, everyone knew. Each day’s winning number was based on the last three digits of the national lottery, which was published in the local newspaper. Anyone could bet on a number or number combination, but they usually did so by using an agreed-upon word that represented each number. Number one was el caballo (horse); number two, la mariposa (butterfly); eleven, el gallo (rooster); forty-eight, la cucaracha (cockroach), and so on, with different words representing different numbers all the way up to one hundred. Thus, when a bettor told Martín, “Cinco a la cucaracha,” he knew the person wanted to bet five centavos on number forty-eight.

  Ostensibly, this system was devised so that if a policeman stopped a listero (numbers runner) and confiscated his list of bets, there was no way anyone could prove that this litany of colorful words had anything to do with illegal gambling. In truth, local police almost always received a piece of the action for allowing bolita to operate—an example of grassroots corruption that would prepare young Martín Fox for his days as a Batista-era cabaret owner.

  Bolita was good to Fox, who rose through the boliteros’ hierarchy, from listero to banquero, the one who financed the bets. Fox would now make the bulk of the profit, but he also assumed the largest risk. A number wagered on by many people—say, 8 for September 8, the date of the Feast of Charity, or 17 for December 17, the Feast of San Lazaro—could spell disaster for a banquero. Fox proved to be adept at spreading the risk of popular numbers, even if it meant giving up some of his profits. He also eventually consolidated most of the bolita operations in Ciego de Avila until he was the region’s biggest banquero.

  Like Lansky, Trafficante, and other professional gambling men he would come to know, Fox was not much of a bettor. He preferred to stack the odds in his favor. Gambling for Martín was a livelihood, but it was also an entrée into a broader social universe. His “bank” on Calle Independencia, the town’s prime commercial street, was little more than a storefront with a kiosk in front. The kiosk sold cigarettes, cigars, sweets, and official lottery tickets, and was also where a person could place bolita bets. All kinds of men—rich and poor—came by Martín’s kiosk to gamble, smoke, and gossip. Before long, Martín Fox was so popular he could have run for mayor. Instead, the former factory worker did what any young man with ambition might do—he headed out for the big city.

  In Havana, Fox was known as El Guajiro, the country boy. Some might have taken it as a gibe, but not Martín, who was now operating in a crowded field where being known by any name was a help. In the early 1940s, the city’s gambling underworld was thriving, though the city itself was about to enter the lean years of the Second World War. Fox’s first operation was running bolita numbers in Central Havana. His banco, which he called La Buena, had no fixed location. As a new operator in the city, he needed to move around to avoid being busted.

  Before long, Fox was presiding over a sizable underground network of card games, bolita, and casino-style gambling. This was an era in Havana before many of the large hotel-casinos had been constructed. The only major venues in town—the Gran Casino Nacional and the Jockey Club at Oriental Park Racetrack—were upscale establishments open only six months of the year. Common cubanos needed a place to indulge their habit year-round. Using many of the contacts he made as a bolita king, Martín offered private poker games out of the homes and apartments of friends. Eventually he expanded his operation to include roulette, baccarat, craps, and monte de baraja, a popular four-card game of Spanish origin.

  By 1943, Fox was successful enough as an underground gambling czar
to buy his way into the Tropicana. At the time, the club’s casino operations were open to individual concessionaires. Fox rented two tables, one for monte and one for baccarat. With the Second World War under way, the club was not doing well, but that didn’t matter to Fox. He now had an in at the city’s largest club.

  First opened on December 30, 1939, the Tropicana had always been a place with international pretensions. Constructed on a six-acre estate in Marianao, the club’s setting was gorgeous. Surrounded by a natural jungle paradise, its main cabaret was outdoors and from the beginning showcased the largest orchestra in Cuba. In its first two years of operation, tourists from around the globe flocked to the Tropicana. After the war set in, tourism in Cuba plunged from 126,000 annual visitors in 1941 to a mere 12,500 in 1943. Nonetheless, Fox was able to maintain a decent trade at his two gaming tables because he had established a strong following among local gamblers.

  The owner of the Tropicana was so frustrated by the club’s dwindling fortunes that one afternoon, after a week of losses left him with insufficient funds to make his regular payoff to the military officers who provided “protection,” he made a proposition to Fox: “Give me seven thousand [pesos] and the casino is yours.” Martín jumped at the offer and purchased the club’s casino concession. A few years later, in what amounted to a hostile takeover, he bought the estate on which the club had been built and squeezed out the other owners. It was only when Martín Fox became sole owner of the Tropicana in 1950 that the club began to develop the reputation for which it would become world-famous.