IN THE YEARS SINCE SANTO TRAFFICANTE HAD BEEN KICKED OUT OF CUBA, HE HAD been a busy man. There were the revenge plots against Castro with Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and the CIA. They had not borne fruit, but they were fun, gangsters and spooks putting their heads together out of a mutual lust for revenge. In retrospect, it might have been more of a fantasy than anything, but for the mafiosi, it had the added benefit of maybe helping to mollify AG Robert Kennedy. How could RFK persist in persecuting Trafficante and his friends if they were out on a limb, doing their patriotic duty, with another branch of the same tree? That was the thinking, anyway. Things hadn’t worked out that way. Even as the mobsters were plotting with the CIA to kill Castro, they were being arrested, tried, and convicted at an alarming rate. This, perhaps, had necessitated a change in strategy, a shifting of targets. You don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.
In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Trafficante had been interviewed by the FBI at his home in Tampa. Unsurprisingly, he had an ironclad alibi for that day. He was nowhere near Dallas on the date in question. If and when the boys from the Bureau learned that Trafficante had been in bed with the Agency is not known. What the G-men did know was that Santo was deeply embedded with the Cuban exile junta, and that he was fleshing out the ranks of his own criminal operations with Cuban exiles, a group the FBI was beginning to see as a potential new criminal threat.
Meanwhile, José Miguel Battle sought and was given a conference with Trafficante. He surmised that it would be a good idea to bring along his brother Gustavo. In recent months, while José Miguel had been awaking to reveille and playing cards at Fort Benning, Gustavo had been spotted by FBI surveillance teams meeting on a semiregular basis with Trafficante at various restaurants in Dade County. It may have been José Miguel, the older brother, who first established a partnership with Trafficante back in Havana, but it was Gustavo who up until now had kept things cozy in the Sunshine State.
In the absence of any one person with the stature or power to call himself “the Cuban Godfather,” Trafficante was it (even though he wasn’t Cuban). Partly this had to do with the reputation of his father, Santo Trafficante Sr., who had been working with Cuban racketeers going back to the days of Prohibition. During those years, the Sicilian-born Trafficante Sr. had established political connections in Cuba that made it possible for him to use the island as a transshipment point for narcotics coming primarily from the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. Back at his home base in Tampa, Trafficante Sr. used heroin smuggling proceeds to establish himself as the preeminent bolita banker on the Gulf Coast.
Bolita was big in Tampa. Long before Miami established itself as a haven for post-Castro Cuban refugees, Tampa, nicknamed “Cigar City,” had been on the receiving end of Cuban immigration since at least the Cuban War of Independence in 1898. The immigrants settled primarily in an area known as Ybor City, which was originally its own municipality but eventually became part of Tampa.
In Ybor City, cigar-making factories and Cuban cafecitos and restaurants were one manifestation of the influx; another was bolita. In 1950, the city’s bolita empire was dissected during the Kefauver hearings, an unprecedented congressional investigation of organized crime chaired by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. Trafficante Sr. had somehow managed to avoid being subpoenaed by the committee, but many notable Tampa crime figures were called to testify, setting off a chain reaction that led to many local gangland slayings. Public exposure of the city’s bolita racket was a primary cause of the upheaval.
In the early 1950s, even before Santo Sr. died after a protracted illness, the son already had been assuming control of the business. Santo Jr. was respected by the Cubans, and he had underworld connections at the highest levels throughout Tampa, South Florida, and all the way to New York. As someone who had attended all of the major Mob conferences over the years, including the infamous gathering at the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1946, he had the ability to open doors and smooth the waters in various criminal jurisdictions well beyond his home city.
Battle revered Trafficante; he expressed as much to friends and associates. He had watched the Tampa Mob boss, along with Meyer Lansky and a few others, glide through 1950s Havana like royalty. In the Cuban realm, there was no mobster more exalted than Trafficante. His pedigree as a businessman/gangster was beyond reproach.
Though there is no record of the two men having met since their days together in Havana, Trafficante would have been well aware of the burgeoning Battle legend. He likely had heard the stories of his former police bagman’s heroic exploits at the Bay of Pigs. He had heard the stories from many of his Cuban friends about the prisons in Cuba, at the Isle of Pines and elsewhere.
For his part, Battle may or may not have known the full extent of the Mafia kingpin’s collaboration with the CIA to kill Fidel, but it hardly mattered. These men constituted a mutual admiration society that had been tenderized during the abomination of a communist revolution and similarly flavored with bitter doses of betrayal and a sometimes psychotic compulsion for revenge.
Trafficante welcomed the men into his house. Likely, Cuban coffee was served.
José Miguel laid it all out. “I’m here to talk about bolita,” said Battle to the Man.
Santo adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, sipped his coffee, and said, “I’m listening.”
José Miguel was not the most verbally dexterous of men, but he was on solid turf, talking about a subject he knew and loved.
So, okay, here’s the deal . . .
Tampa already had a solid bolita structure in place—numbers runners who reached out to el pueblo; a system of corruption among politicians and police that helped facilitate the operation; bankers, auditors, and counting rooms to take in money and maintain the books; and a solid financial structure to deal with the occasional crisis, like when a specific date or occurrence led every Tomás, Ricardo, and Harry to bet the same number and then that number came in, meaning the bank had to be solvent or the entire racket would collapse under a crimson cascade of stabbings, beatings, and shootings, topped off by an ugly trail of raids and federal prosecutions.
Miami also had its bolita structure in place. Things were changing down there; the influx of Cubans fleeing Castro’s revolutionary paradise was transforming the city. The Battle brothers—Gustavo, Pedro, Aldo, Sergio, and Hiram—were making inroads in Miami. Maybe there was room for expansion there. But that’s not what José Miguel was there to talk about. He wanted to talk about the granddaddy of all bolita possibilities, the Big Show, where the density of the population and number of daily bettors made it a gold mine just waiting to be buggered: New York.
What made the Big Apple especially attractive, noted José Miguel, was Union City, across the river, close, but in a different state. In Union City, you could stand in Memorial Park, high on a bluff looking straight across the Hudson River at the majestic skyline of Manhattan. It was one of the most breathtaking views of the city in the entire metropolitan area. Almost literally, Union City was in the shadow of the greatest city on earth. For Battle, it was an empire to be conquered.
Furthermore, using Union City as a base of operations, the Cubans believed, would insulate the business from prosecution. Cops in New Jersey would not have jurisdiction to arrest them in New York, and vice versa.
Battle was basing this theory on the knowledge that investigations and prosecutions of policy rackets had heretofore been undertaken primarily by local law enforcement. In many ways, policy was considered to be small potatoes. Even after the public Kefauver hearings, federal prosecutions for this kind of gambling were few and far between. And local prosecutions were easy to manage—cops, judges, and politicians could be bought off. Battle was confident that through political connections and graft, he could make himself virtually untouchable in Union City.
It didn’t take much convincing for Trafficante to see the value in what Battle was proposing. Along with everything else, there was a historical precedent to putting a Cuban in charge of the Mob’s numbers ventures.
Back during Prohibition and into the 1930s, one of the preeminent numbers bankers in New York City was Alejandro “Alex” Pompez, a Cuban American born in Key West and raised in Ybor City. As a young man, Pompez moved to New York and became a key operator in the numbers racket of Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Shultz, one of the most powerful gangsters of his day. Having made a fortune off of bootlegging, a business that was regulated through extortion, violence, and murder, Shultz in 1931 parlayed his financial fortune into becoming perhaps the biggest numbers banker in America.
The center of betting activity was Harlem. Wagering coins or small bills on a series of numbers was largely a poor person’s activity, easily accessible to people of limited means—especially those with dreams of a better and more prosperous world beyond the horizon. The man who became the face of Shultz’s policy empire in Harlem was Alex Pompez, an elegant Afro-Cuban operator with a pleasant manner and organizational skills who also spoke fluent Spanish.
To the various Sicilian, Italian, and Irish Mob bosses in New York, Pompez was recognized as a valuable asset. Money was the common denominator, not racial enlightenment. A 1929 article in New York Age, a local newspaper, was headlined “The Spanish Menace in Harlem.” The article decried the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean and cited gambling as a threat to the stability of the community. Pompez countered the negative publicity by becoming a legitimately successful businessman in other areas, particularly as the owner of the New York Cubans, a baseball team in the Negro League whose home stadium was in the nearby Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.
The numbers operation financed by Pompez, which in turn was financed by one of the most prominent Mob bosses in the city, set a precedent for Cuban American racketeering in the United States.
José Miguel Battle would be following in the footsteps of Pompez, but still he would need the proper introductions. If Battle was going to operate in New Jersey, not to mention the highly competitive boroughs of New York City, he would be doing so in territory that was already spoken for by various factions within the Five Families. He could not go anywhere near the New York City area without first having someone of Trafficante’s stature make it happen.
“I could open some doors for you,” said Trafficante to Battle.
“You would do that for me?” replied José Miguel.
Trafficante set up some important meetings for Battle, and José Miguel headed north, where he had already established a home with his wife and kid in Union City.
The first meeting was with Sam DeCavalcante, known as “Sam the Plumber,” the powerful Mob boss who controlled gambling, loan-sharking, and racketeering in northern New Jersey. DeCavalcante claimed to have descended from an Italian royal family in Naples; he liked to have underlings refer to him as “the Count.” If Battle were to set up shop in Jersey, DeCavalcante would get a piece. Their meeting took place in Newark, the mobster’s home base.
Another important meeting took place in upper Manhattan, in the neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. This was the territory of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, acting boss of the Genovese crime family. Fat Tony always had a cigar in his mouth, and he spoke the language of the streets, motherfucker this and cocksucker that (some of it captured in later years on FBI wiretaps). The meeting was at Patsy’s Restaurant on First Avenue and 117th Street. Trafficante also attended this meeting, traveling from Tampa, as he was a personal friend of Salerno’s. Another meeting was held with representatives of the Bonanno family in Brooklyn.
In all of these meetings, José Miguel was introduced as “Mike.” He was paraded around like a beauty pageant contestant who didn’t need to do much but sit there and look pretty. The mafiosi knew what bolita was all about, and they knew that, if properly organized, it was a license to print money. Hey, paisano, meet Mike Battle, the Cuban from New Jersey, the guy who’s gonna make us all rich by breathing new life into the Spanish lottery.
The Italians all liked Mike Battle. He was a tough guy who was conversant with the practices of the underworld. He spoke their language— that is, the language of black market capitalism. From now on, he would be un nostro amico, a friend of the family.
IT WAS GOING TO TAKE A LOT OF PEOPLE TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL BOLITA OPERATION IN the greater metropolitan area of New York and New Jersey. At the street level would be dozens of runners, people out there taking bets, writing them down, and bringing them back to various “offices” or calling them in over the phone. The offices were mostly cheap apartments turned into work areas, with a few tables, chairs, and a half dozen phones. Recording equipment was used to record each and every call, in case of disputes over transactions.
Then there were the accountants, those with a head for math, who maintained the all-important ledgers. The organization paid out a percentage of the money flow to hundreds of people. The various Mafia factions received their cut. The bankers—some of whom were mafiosi in the area and some Cubans back in Miami—also received a cut. Then there were payouts to various members of the organization, the street runners, bookkeepers, underbosses, and bosses, all the way up to Battle himself.
Money was constantly in motion, flowing in and out of the barely furnished apartments that served as counting rooms, and so there were those whose job it was to safeguard and transport the cash. In 1966, less than two years after Battle took over and expanded upon the business started by Angel Mujica, the organization was taking in between $30,000 and $60,000 a day. That money was often gathered in the smallest of denominations. Money was gathered in one of three main counting rooms, one in the Bronx and two in Manhattan. At the end of the day, the cash was placed in suitcases, and the suitcases were brought out to a caravan of cars, which were driven and protected by an assortment of armed men. The middle car was the money car, with the front and back cars serving as protection. The three vehicles drove through the Midtown Tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, destined for Union City. The cortege was never disturbed, because the Battle organization had paid off cops in upper Manhattan and throughout Hudson County, New Jersey, the kind of payments that were designed to reach into the upper structures of law enforcement.
It was a vibrant, multilayered operation, based on a simple principle. There were a number of ways a person could wager, but the payout was the same—six hundred to one. Those odds were better than anything seen before in the area; the payout before had been four hundred or five hundred to one. Battle’s operation offered the best return. People flocked to his runners to place their bets.
The winning number was based on the total mutual handle from the racetrack, published each day in the morning newspapers on the sports page. This was the way it had always been. In the metropolitan area, there was the Brooklyn number and the New York number, based on daily results in those jurisdictions, with a person’s winning number determined by where they placed their bet. In order to make rapid payoffs, Battle’s organization did something different—they had spotters at the racetrack monitoring results as they came in. Thus they had that day’s track totals at the close of the day. If you bet with Battle’s organization, you didn’t have to wait around till the next day to find out the winning number when newspapers hit the newsstands. And, most important, if you hit the number, you got paid immediately, unlike with the Italians, where the payout was always on their terms and could take days.
Battle liked to reward hard workers. If you were a low-level runner who hustled, bringing in a lot of bets and money on a daily basis, you would be promoted to a midlevel banker. This way you had your own bank, which was cofinanced by a higher bank within the organization. You were now midlevel management; you had your own runners, your own little area of operation, and you were a big shot in your domain.
Word went out on the Cuban immigrant pipeline—the Battle organization was hiring. La bola en la calle (street gossip) spread from New Jersey all the way to Miami and even Havana. If you were someone the Battle brothers already knew, you were in a good position to secure a role in the operation. If you were a veteran of the 2506 Brigade, like José Miguel and Mujica and others, you were royalty, likely to come into the business as a high-level banker. If you were blood, you were also in a privileged position. Most of the Battle brothers were involved, and eventually the man who married the Battle brothers’ only sister—Nene Marquez—became a high-level banker, as did Marquez’s father (Battle’s father-in-law), who became what was known as a superbanker, with the privilege of sitting back and stockpiling their proceeds while out on the streets the minions hustled for a living.
In the mid- to late 1960s, Battle’s organization was usually referred to as “the Cuban Mafia.” This was partly in recognition of the group’s alliance with the Italians—the traditional Mob—and all the muscle that implied. Clearly, Battle’s operation was protected. It operated mostly out in the open. And, given that the Cuban Mafia was connected at the highest levels, there were few problems with robberies of money couriers or attempts to muscle in on Battle’s turf. The word was out—you mess with the Cubans, you were taking on the entire Five Family structure.
Still, José Miguel knew that his entire business was based in large part on the reputation of the man at the top. He assumed the role of the Padrino, the Godfather, from the very beginning. Only in his late thirties at the time, he projected the image of a more mature man who conveyed leadership through his demeanor and gravitas rather than inspiring rhetoric or brilliant business strategies. It was a role he seemed destined to play and had been rehearsing ever since he’d first witnessed the likes of Santo and Meyer lording over the casinos and nightclubs in Havana. Partly that role required that the boss project an image of magnanimity and fairness; partly it had to do with his being tough.
Battle had a temper. Those who knew him well had seen that temper in action. Though he was generally friendly and calm, his anger could emerge suddenly, with ugly consequences.
One person who witnessed this was Jesús, the black market gun merchant who had first encountered José Miguel as a cop back in Havana. Battle had been impressed that Jesús did not rat on his partners, and it formed the basis of a mutual respect that proved to be long-lasting.
Like so many Cubans whose lives had been scattered far and wide by the upheaval of the revolution and what came after, Jesús and José Miguel had parted ways and then were reunited years later in the United States. In 1962, Jesús fled the Castro regime and became a small-time criminal in Miami. La bola in the city was that things were hopping up in New York and New Jersey. Though Jesús had never been to New York, he headed north and settled with his brother in an apartment on 135th Street and Broadway. Soon he hooked up with the Battle organization, working mostly in Manhattan, but he routinely hitched a ride or took a bus across the Hudson River to Union City.
One afternoon in December 1968, Jesús was in Tony’s Barbershop, located at 137 48th Street, half a block from Johnny’s Go Go Club. The barbershop was owned by Nene Carrero and had become something of a social club for members of Battle’s bolita organization. Wagers were made there, payments dropped off, and information passed back and forth.
That day, a local Cuban was sitting in a chair getting a haircut and a shave from the barber. Jesús was looking over a newspaper, checking out the previous day’s racing results. Along with the barber and his customer, three or four others were in the shop waiting for a haircut or just hanging out.
José Miguel Battle came into the shop. Jesús said hola to the boss. The others nodded a greeting.
The customer in the barber chair saw Battle and, incredibly, started “talking shit” about Battle’s wife. Battle had opened a jewelry store on Bergenline Avenue in the adjacent New Jersey town of West New York. The customer had done some business in the jewelry store and wasn’t happy about something.
“If you know what’s good for you,” said Battle to the hombre, “you’ll shut your fucking mouth right now.”
Apparently oblivious, the guy kept talking—loudly, so everyone in the place could hear him.
Jesús couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He looked at Battle, knowing that the guy in the barber chair was treading on thin ice.
Battle wasn’t even looking at the guy, but Jesús could see that his boss was steaming. The guy in the chair kept yakking.
Suddenly, Battle pulled out a snub-nosed .38-caliber handgun. He rushed over to the guy in the chair, stuck the gun under his chin, and pulled the trigger. Boom! The sound of the shot reverberated through the barbershop.
Fortunately for the guy, he jerked his head back at the moment the shot was fired, so the bullet did not go through his head. It entered at an angle, piercing his neck. There was blood everywhere.
Jesús, acting as an underling should, helped rush his boss out of the location before the police arrived.
In the days that followed, Battle realized that he’d created a problem for himself. The shooting victim told the cops exactly what happened, and on December 12, 1968, Battle was charged with aggravated assault with a firearm. It would be the first of many criminal charges filed against him over the following decades.
It was Jesús who helped resolve the problem. Many years later, he remembered how it occurred. “I went to the guy with ten thousand dollars in cash. The shot caused the guy to be paralyzed in one arm. I told him that El Gordo regretted what had happened. He wanted to make a payment—an offering—to make the charges go away. The guy wanted more money. I told him, no, it was ten thousand or nothing. He took the money. When the date for his court appearance came up, the guy didn’t show up. The case was dismissed.”
For Battle, it was a close call. Much like the hombre he shot, he had dodged a bullet. Some might say it had been a mistake, a stain on his reputation, but like so many things in the criminal world where violence was involved, it also had a reverse effect. The moral of the story was clear: Don’t mess with José Miguel Battle. He will not send others to do the dirty work for him. He will take matters into his own hands and shoot you in the face.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN MIAMI, SOME OF THE BATTLE BROTHERS WERE STAKING THEIR claim. Not so much with bolita, which in Miami was already under the control of a consortium of Cubans associated with Santo Trafficante, but through another racket on the rise: the importation and selling of cocaine.
Publicly, José Miguel Battle’s position was that he was against narcotics as a business. It was a dirty way to make money, with a high body count. He told his underlings that he didn’t want anyone dealing drugs—heroin, cocaine, or marijuana. How serious he was with this edict against narcotics is hard to determine, but what is known is that his brothers Gustavo and Pedro were active players in the Miami cocaine business.
Their benefactor was none other than the Man, Santo Trafficante, and their direct boss was Evaristo Garcia Sr., Santo’s primary under-boss in Florida’s growing Cuban underworld. Garcia had been the Mafia don’s number two man back in Havana. He’d co-owned a hotel with Trafficante and had been one of the key people to help line up women and entertainment for visiting “dignitaries,” including in 1957 a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy.
In the late 1960s, cocaine trafficking in Miami was not yet the megabusiness it would become, but it was substantial enough that there were turf wars and territorial disputes. Unlike bolita, where it was felt that there was enough activity to go around, cocaine at the time was in the hands of only a few operators, and the competition was fierce.
It was this competition that would engulf the Battle brothers in Miami and nearly bring about their immediate demise.
One local player in the city’s nascent cocaine underworld was a man named Hector Duarte Hernandez. His slight, almost gaunt physique was in contrast to his reputation, which was fearsome. Back in the 1950s, Duarte had been politically active in Cuba. He was a member of a revolutionary student federation aligned with the Auténtico Party, led by Carlos Prío Socarrás.
On the afternoon of March 13, 1957, Duarte had taken part in one of the most extraordinary events in the Cuban Revolution. He was one of a large group of student insurgents who attacked the presidential palace and made a kamikaze attempt to assassinate President Fulgencio Batista. With pistols, machine guns, and hand grenades they stormed the majestic palace, its broad cascade of steps making the approach to the building akin to climbing the steps of an ancient temple.
Batista’s people had been hearing rumors of an attack, so military personnel and police were nearby to repel the onslaught. But the fighting was fierce. There were over fifty student attackers and nearly one hundred soldiers. A palace guard opened fire on the students with a machine gun, mowing down more than a dozen. In the shootout, numerous guards and soldiers were also killed.
A group of student gunmen actually penetrated the perimeter and made their way into the building. There, in the massive interior lobby, another shootout took place, with more men on both sides being killed. President Batista, whose office was on the second floor, heard the commotion and escaped out a back exit into a stairwell. Some of the attackers made it all the way to the president’s office before being shot dead.
Forty student rebels were killed that day, as well as ten soldiers and policemen. The steps of the palace were littered with dead bodies and splattered with blood. Though the primary purpose of the attack, to assassinate the president, had been unsuccessful, the number of students involved and the level of carnage that ensued shocked the country and would forever after be remembered as a seminal event in the Cuban Revolution.
Hector Duarte was one of only a handful of rebels who survived and escaped. For weeks and months afterward, Batista’s military police went on a rampage attempting to hunt down Duarte and the other survivors. People were tortured for information by the notorious SIM, Batista’s repressive secret police. Duarte hid out, protected by the urban underground. And he fought back. Duarte was believed to have been involved in the killing of at least two Havana cops in his years on the run.
Duarte was a revolutionary, but he was not a communist. The student underground had been in alliance with Castro’s 26th of July Movement, but when Castro came into power and revealed himself to be a communist, Duarte, like many others, felt betrayed. He fled Cuba and settled in Miami.
For those in Cuba who had been actively caught up in the revolution, living a life of guns, clandestine activities, and guerrilla warfare, adjusting to life afterward was not always easy. Duarte may have become involved in criminal activity because he had the skills to do so; he may also have needed to find a way to make a living. Either way, upon his arrival in Miami, he became a gangster and a narco peddler. A classified CIA dispatch from the chief of station in Miami described him as “a dangerous hoodlum.”
In the middle of 1960, the Cuban government tried to have Duarte extradited back to their country. The United States had not yet severed diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba (the embargo against it would be imposed by President Kennedy on October 19). Duarte was brought before federal judge George Whitehurst. His attorney argued that sending him back to Cuba would be the equivalent of sentencing him to death. Judge Whitehurst denied the plea for extradition and instead levied a $300 fine for illegal entry.
In America, cocaine may have been the substance that brought the former revolutionary into conflict with the Battle brothers, but no doubt the ghosts of the past also had something to do with it. Back in Havana, Duarte and the Battle brothers had been on opposite sides of the political divide. Likely, Duarte was aware of José Miguel’s reputation as a vice cop in Havana back in the day. The Battles certainly knew Duarte’s history. It was a conflict waiting to happen.
On the day after Christmas, December 26, 1969, Gustavo Battle was in a car dealership located at NW 27th Avenue and 30th Street. It was late in the day, around 4:30 P.M. He had just treated himself to an extravagant after-Christmas gift, a new four-door Buick sedan, which he paid for in cash. Apparently his cocaine business was doing well. As he completed his purchase and prepared to leave the dealership, he noticed three cars filled with men parked outside. They seemed to be waiting for something. Gustavo could see that in one of the cars was Hector Duarte.
“Could I use your phone?” Gustavo asked the car dealer.
“Sure,” said the dealer.
Gustavo called his brother Pedro and said, “I think we got a problem.” He explained that Duarte and a few carloads of gunmen had surrounded the dealership. “I need you to get over here pronto,” he said. “And come well armed.”
Gustavo was thought to be a bit of a wild man. Though he was loyal to his older brother, José Miguel, he sometimes resented being told what to do. His dealing narcotics against his brother’s wishes was one example. Leaner and more rough around the edges than José Miguel, Gustavo seemed often to be looking for ways to demonstrate his independence.
Pedro, on the other hand, seemed to worship José Miguel, but he was also close to Gustavo. With thick black hair and bedroom eyes, six feet tall and trim, Pedro was considered the most handsome of the brothers. But as a force on the street, he did not have the fearsome reputation of either José Miguel or Gustavo.
Upon ending the phone call with his brother, Pedro hopped into his late-model Plymouth Valiant and drove to the Buick dealership. It took twenty minutes. He parked as close to the entrance as he could and entered the building, where he met Gustavo. Through the plate-glass windows of the dealership’s show floor, they could see Duarte and the others waiting for them. They got their weaponry together: Gustavo and Pedro each had a pair of .45-caliber pistols. Said Gustavo, “We’re gonna make a run for it. I’ll go first in the Buick. You follow.”
The Battles headed toward their cars, jumped in, started their engines, and pulled out of the parking lot, with Gustavo in the lead and Pedro following in his Valiant. They were immediately chased by the other cars—a Mustang, a Chevy sedan, and, in the lead, a VW Beetle. In each car were two men; Duarte was in the VW.
In was nearing rush hour and traffic was substantial, but that didn’t matter to the hunters and the hunted. The chase was on. A wild pursuit ensued through the streets of Little Havana, with shots fired from all vehicles. The high-speed shootout continued for nearly half an hour, with much squealing rubber, reckless navigation, and the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire echoing through the streets.
Eventually, Gustavo’s Buick and Duarte’s Beetle arrived on Flagler Street, heading west. The Mustang and Chevy had apparently gotten lost during the chase.
Pedro Battle, who had been trailing behind, arrived on Flagler just as the VW crashed into his brother’s brand-new Buick. The driver of the VW, Manuel Chacon, stumbled out of the VW first; he was brandishing a 9mm handgun. Then came Duarte with a .30-caliber military carbine, which had been modified to shoot automatically and handle a thirty-round banana clip.
Gustavo ducked behind his Buick and opened fire. An insane shootout followed, with Duarte standing in the middle of the street blasting away with the machine gun. Gustavo was hit, but he still returned fire. Bleeding heavily, he took aim at Duarte. The former student rebel, who had survived the attack on the presidential palace of Batista a decade earlier, took three .45-caliber bullets in the chest and died instantly.
It wasn’t over yet. Duarte’s accomplice, Chacon, was still firing from over the hood of the VW. He and the Battle brothers traded gunfire, and then Chacon ran off on foot, northward on Red Road. Gustavo, badly wounded, stumbled back into his now damaged Buick. With metal scraping the pavement and the engine smoking, he floored it and took off after Chacon.
Running down the street, Chacon fired shots over his shoulder at Gustavo’s vehicle. Gustavo sped up and ran over him. Then his Buick veered out of control and crashed into another car.
Pedro, following the pursuit in his car, saw his brother’s car slam into the other vehicle. He wasn’t sure what to do. Police and emergency sirens were sounding from all directions. Believing that his brother was dead, he fled the scene. It was an act he would regret the rest of his life.
Gustavo was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital. After police sorted out all the mayhem, it was determined that there was one man dead: Duarte. Chacon, who had survived being run over by Gustavo’s Buick, was charged with aggravated assault. But Gustavo refused to cooperate with police, so the charge was dropped.
The shootout on the streets of Little Havana lit up the Miami underworld. Everyone was talking about it. To some, the incident would become a historical signpost, an opening salvo in the city’s cocaine wars, a notorious era that would become even more crazed and homicidal in the decades ahead.
LIKE MANY GANGLAND EVENTS, THE BATTLE- DUARTE SHOOTOUT HAD A RESIDUAL effect for those involved. Gustavo’s reputation as a badass in Miami may have been enhanced, and the name Battle, if it was not known before, was now uttered with reverence among some in the underworld. But there were also negative consequences: Gustavo Battle would spend a month in the hospital recovering from his gunshots wounds, and he also had legal issues to deal with that would change the direction of his criminal career.
With all the attention garnered by the shootout, local prosecutors were inclined to charge Gustavo with something. For law enforcement, it was bad business to have a wild shootout take place in broad daylight during rush hour and not have somebody be held accountable. Consequently, on February 5, 1970, a Miami coroner’s inquest was held in the courtroom of Judge John V. Ferguson.
José Miguel Battle flew down to Miami for the occasion. Though he himself would not testify at the inquest, El Padrino had arranged for a number of Bay of Pigs veterans to speak at the hearing. These men were iconic figures in the community, and to have them testify on Gustavo’s behalf was powerful.
Hector Duarte’s checkered career as a rebel was explained to the judge. Along with his political and criminal activities, it was noted that Duarte had recently been recruited by Castro’s Cuban Intelligence Service as an operative in the United States. It was surmised by Gustavo’s Bay of Pigs defenders that Duarte was on a professional assassination mission to kill the Battle brothers. The attempted murder of Gustavo, they explained, was a kind of political hit.
Given the climate of the times, it was not a difficult case to make. Ever since the release of prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban exile underground had been swarming with spies and counterspies, with acts of espionage and murder that few were aware of outside the corridors of the CIA, or the cafecitos and bars along Calle Ocho in Miami and Bergenline Avenue in Union City.
Judge Ferguson had no trouble grasping the implications. He concluded that the assailants had fired first and that Gustavo Battle acted in self-defense. The case was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Gustavo had avoided a homicide or manslaughter charge, but the victory was short-lived. The forces of the law had set their sights on Gustavo Battle, with a high degree of prosecutorial scrutiny. The Drug Enforcement Agency quickly threw together a case against Gustavo. In July, just five months after having been cleared in the Duarte shooting, he was arrested for the sale and possession of cocaine.
The case against him was strong enough that he admitted guilt and took a plea deal. He was sentenced to six to eight years in prison. He would be the first of the Battle brothers to do time in America.
José Miguel was beside himself. Gustavo was going off to prison; that was bad enough. But also, the Godfather had been telling his men not to deal narcotics. It was wrong, and it was too risky. Given his own brother’s violation of that proclamation, he had good reason to be upset, and he was not above telling anyone who would listen: I told you so.
FOR THE CUBAN MAFIA, THE TEMPORARY LOSS OF GUSTAVO WAS UNFORTUNATE, BUT as a new decade dawned, José Miguel had other problems to deal with.
Since the mid-1960s, the FBI had been tracking the militant Cuban exile community in the United States. Partly this was a result of the Bureau’s JFK Task Force, which sometimes overlapped with the Cuban Task Force.
The American public had been spoon-fed a theory of the Kennedy assassination as presented by the 888-page Warren Commission Report. That report concluded that the murder was the act of a lone gunman, with no conspirators. Many in the intelligence community suspected otherwise. The CIA–Cuban exile militant alliance was a source of rumor and confidential investigation within the FBI, and would remain so for decades.
In May 1966, an internal memo was sent from the Miami office of the FBI to the regional office in Newark. Special agents in Miami had been tracking a number of Cuban exiles, including a suspect named Bernardo de Torres. Through an informant, Miami agents had garnered a piece of information they felt would be of interest to the Newark office:
C.I. (confidential informant) advised SA FRANCIS J. DUFFIN on 4/28/66 that JOSE MIGUEL BATTLE is rumored to be a very big bolita banker in New Jersey. He is reputed to be very rich. BERNARDO DE TORRES, the brother of CARLOS DE TORRES, was in La Brigada during the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. BERNARDO is a very good friend of Battle.
The Miami agents further noted that they had been investigating Battle “in connection with possible espionage and security activity.” As a result, they contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to follow up on details regarding Battle’s status, and they were informed by an INS investigator that their office “would not be conducting an active investigation with regard to the subject since it is their belief that the subject is anti-Castro and anti-communist in his beliefs.”
The Cuban Task Force in Miami was not closing the books on Battle, but they thought it important to pass along what they were hearing about his bolita activities.
Normally, FBI agents do not get too excited about gambling or policy cases. These investigations and prosecutions are usually left to local law enforcement. But what they were hearing from Miami coincided with what they were hearing in New Jersey—that in a few short years the Battle organization had become substantial, and that the so-called Cuban Mafia was conducting their business with the full cooperation of the Italian Mafia.
Starting in June 1966, the Newark office of the FBI began sending out surveillance teams to follow José Miguel Battle and others. The idea was to accumulate working knowledge about the structure of the organization and determine where they did business.
One of the more startling discoveries of the FBI investigators was that Battle was seen meeting with Peter Kelly, a man in his sixties, an old-time policymaker, or bookie, going back three decades in northern New Jersey. In the towns of Union City and West New York, Kelly and his brothers—Peter, James, Thomas, and Joseph—were well known to many in the police departments and political clubhouses of Hudson County. Back when the area was largely Irish and Italian, before the Cubans arrived, the Kelly brothers, an Irish American clan, were major conduits between the bookmakers and the cops. In 1936, they had been arrested together in a major policy raid, which only enhanced their reputations. Peter was the last remaining Kelly with ties to the old structure of gambling bosses making payoffs to people in the police and political precincts so that their operations would not be busted.
Battle’s meeting with Kelly was like a passing of the baton, from the Irish to the Cubans. Battle may not have needed an old-timer like Kelly to rustle up customers; they were everywhere among the area’s growing Latino population. But if he hoped to control the cops, it was wise to reach out to an old-school gambling kingpin like Pete Kelly.
It didn’t take long for the agents to figure out what the Battle-Kelly relationship was all about. On June 23, 1966, an FBI agent who had Battle’s apartment building under physical surveillance filed the following report:
9:50 A.M., Jose Battle walked down the steps of 405 New York Ave. and entered a 1966 Buick Wildcat. Battle was carrying a brown paper bag. Battle drove north on New York Ave. . . .
At 9:55 A.M. Battle parked across from the side entrance of the Union City, N.J. Police Department and entered the basement carrying the brown paper bag.
At 9:59 A.M. Battle left the Police Department carrying the brown paper bag. He entered his car and drove north on Hudson Ave.
It was a eureka moment for the investigators. Battle was either making payoffs to the Union City police, or taking betting action, or probably a combination of both.
The agents followed Battle. He drove to a Tony’s Barbershop on 48th Street. He parked and entered the barbershop, then almost immediately reappeared.
At 10:05 A.M. Battle came out of the barbershop and walked east on 48th. He was carrying the above brown paper bag which appeared half full as he was swinging it as he walked.
They followed Battle as he entered a nearby bank, approached a teller, and completed a transaction. Then he returned to the barbershop.
The agents had captured Battle on his usual morning routine, collecting and dispensing cash among cops and other customers in his town.
Eventually, the FBI surveillance expanded well beyond Battle. Slowly and methodically over the next fifteen months, the agents began to formulate a set of target subjects who they felt comprised an inner circle of what was shaping up to be a large-scale gambling operation.
Angel Mujica emerged as a prime suspect, as did Battle’s two younger brothers, Aldo and Hiram, who had only recently arrived from Miami.
The agents monitored these men and a dozen others as they met in places like the Cuban Coffee Shop on 22nd Street in Union City, at Mujica’s home in West New York, at Battle’s home, and at other locations. They documented the transfer of cash, mostly in brown paper bags and manila envelopes, and betting slips. More important, they followed the various suspects as they traveled over the bridges and through the tunnels to Manhattan.
In terms of the FBI’s investigation, this was the most significant activity. By traveling from New Jersey into New York, the boliteros were engaging in a conspiracy involving interstate commerce in furtherance of an unlawful activity. That alone was enough to put Battle and his people away for five years or more.
It was something of an irony: the reason that Battle believed Union City was such a good location for starting a bolita business in New York City was because the two locales were in different states. He felt that that would make it harder for competing prosecutors to make a case against him. Apparently he was not aware of laws pertaining to interstate commerce. The very thing he thought would protect him from being prosecuted was exactly the thing federal investigators were using to build a case against him.
To document the existence of a conspiracy with multiple co-conspirators, it would take the FBI agents many months of observing and recording activity—trips back and forth by Battle and his minions between the two states. But they were definitely on the trail.
Battle was unaware of it, but his newly prosperous gambling operation was being monitored by the feds on a near daily basis.