PALULU ENRIQUEZ WAS LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. HE HAD KILLED PEDRO BATTLE, BROTHER of El Padrino, and lived to tell about it. He had survived being machine-gunned in Central Park by Ernesto Torres and having lost his leg. If he could survive the street, surely he could handle a court of law.
In May 1976, Palulu went on trial for the murder of Pedro Battle at the Guanabo bar in Washington Heights. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, led by Robert Morgenthau, had a case, but it wasn’t a very good one. The owner and staff of the bar claimed that they could not identify the shooter. Pedro’s widow, Elda, took the stand and testified that Palulu shot her husband in cold blood. But the defense countered with witnesses who claimed that Pedro fired first. In the back-and-forth of “he said, she said,” the seeds of reasonable doubt found fertile soil. On June 3, 1976, the jury deliberated for a few hours and delivered a verdict of not guilty on the murder charge and guilty on one count of illegal possession of a firearm.
The judge sentenced Palulu to serve two to three years on the firearms charge. It was a relatively light sentence. With time off for good behavior, he could be out in less than a year.
Given that there was an open contract on his life that stood at $100,000, Palulu may have felt that his incarceration was propitious. On the surface, it would seem that the circumscribed routine of life in prison was a safer alternative than the wide-open streets of New York City. Out there, anyone could take a shot at you. Inside, ostensibly, only the guards were armed.
Palulu was shipped out to serve his time at the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora after the town in Clinton County, New York, where it is located. Built in 1844, the prison is a bleak maximum-security facility located in the northernmost reaches of the state, near the Canadian border. The walls are made of concrete, and the circular watchtowers, added to the grounds in the 1870s, give the building the look of a Gothic fortress. Chilly both inside and out, for a long time Dannemora was the home of the state’s electric chair, before New York State did away with capital punishment in the 1960s.
Palulu did not expect to be there for long. He kept to himself and made few friends.
In mid-July, after he had been at the prison for six weeks—and less than a month after Ernesto Torres was murdered far away in Miami— Palulu was in the exercise yard one afternoon. From seemingly out of nowhere, an inmate walked up and plunged a homemade knife into his back. Palulu dropped to his knees. Blood gushed from his wound, forming an expanding stain on his prison jumpsuit. An alarm sounded, and guards rushed to the scene.
Palulu was taken to the prison’s medical ward. He had lost a lot of blood, but the knife had not penetrated any vital organs. He would survive.
As with many prison assaults, no one talked, and the assailant was never identified.
During an investigation of the incident, prison authorities discovered a second plot to kill Palulu. It seemed that someone was determined to use his incarceration as an opportunity to go duck hunting, with Palulu as the sitting duck. The warden at Dannemora decided to segregate the inmate in an isolated wing for special prisoners, such as cops, celebrities, or convicts whose crimes were so notorious that they could not be left to the wolves in general population. Palulu was assigned there to serve out the balance of his sentence.
News of Palulu’s survival would have reached José Miguel Battle like a fetid breeze blowing downriver from the city dump. Not what he wanted, but eventually the winds would change direction. He was going to get Palulu, whether it was inside or outside prison walls.
IN THE YEAR 1976, THE IDEA THAT FIDEL CASTRO WAS STILL ALIVE, FOR MANY CUBAN Americans, was like a horrible case of gastritis. The pain was surprisingly acute, and it would not go away. Every day, there it was, like a dagger in the intestines. What was needed was a thorough cleansing, the mother of all bowel movements, but it wasn’t happening. The discomfort had backed up to the point where it was affecting other vital organs—the kidneys, the liver, the heart. There was no pharmaceutical remedy for what had become a nagging existential reality.
It had been sixteen years since the CIA and various components of the militant Cuban underground committed itself to eliminating Castro and taking back Cuba. With the murder of Kennedy, the CIA officially disengaged from assassination efforts, but it remained involved in other anti-Castro activities. To the Agency, this effort was a subset of the Cold War. Using Cuban exiles as covert proxy warriors in this ideological battle between communism and capitalism was to become part of history’s connective tissue.
No one was supposed to know. When the Watergate scandal exploded, lawyers from the special prosecutor’s office approached the CIA. An investigator had noticed that four of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It dawned on the lawyers that perhaps the CIA-Cuban connection was a more important aspect of this strange covert op than anyone realized. The lawyers demanded to see the full file on Eugenio Rolando Martinez, who they learned had been a paid CIA operative for many years leading up to the burglary. The CIA refused and the file was kept buried for four decades.
In the mid- to late 1970s, the secret war against Castro heated up. The idea of actually killing Fidel—attempted and thwarted many times in the 1960s—now gave way to a conspiracy of terror against Castroism. In this war, any country, individual, or group of individuals that expressed support for the Castro government was a target.
One of the most notorious salvos in this war occurred on September 21, in the nation’s capital.
Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Marxist economist, and political activist, had arrived in Washington, D.C., to speak at a gathering of the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist think tank. Letelier had been imprisoned in Chile, and tortured, for speaking out against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Since his release one year earlier, he had become popular among leftists. He had also recently made a trip to Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro.
Letelier was driving in a car that morning with Ronni Moffitt, an American associate, and Moffitt’s husband of four months. They were on Embassy Row, in morning traffic, with Letelier driving, when a bomb affixed to the car’s undercarriage exploded. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed; Moffitt’s husband was critically injured but survived.
Earlier that morning, Letelier’s wife had been awakened by a phone call. A voice asked, “Are you the wife of Orlando Letelier?”
“Yes, I am,” she sleepily answered.
“No. You are his widow.”
The caller hung up, and the line went dead.
It was an audacious political assassination. In some ways, it seemed like the culmination of a recent bombing campaign by anti-Castro activists, both in Miami and the New York City area. Groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7 let it be known that both candidates in the upcoming presidential election of 1976—Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford—were likely to sell out the movement, but the militants were not going to let up in their efforts to undermine the Castro regime.
The Letelier bombing was unprecedented, but it was exceeded just two and a half weeks later. On October 6, a Cuban airliner flying from Panama City, Panama, to Havana was blown out of the sky. All seventy-three people on board were killed, including the entire Cuban fencing team, which had been performing at an exhibition in Panama.
The FBI’s Cuban Terrorism Task Force had been busy in recent years, and these two recent events seemed to be part of an escalating pattern. In recent months, five different anti-Castro militant groups had coalesced into a governing body called the Coalition of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Among the ruling council of this group were some familiar names, including Orlando Bosch; the Novo brothers, Guillermo and Ignacio; and Luis Posada Carriles.
In the Letelier/Moffitt murder investigation, the FBI had an informant high up in Pinochet’s notorious intelligence service (DINA) who helped them construct a case. The hit had been authorized by General Pinochet himself, who gave the order to his secret police. To carry out the hit, DINA agents turned to a growing network of anticommunist terrorists, among which CORU now played a major role.
An article in the Washington Post touched upon the conspiracy. Under the headline “Evidence Links Letelier Death to Anti-Castro Unit,” a team of Post reporters wrote:
Within the last two weeks . . . at least six members of a Miami-based anti-Castro Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, known as the 2506 Brigade, have been called as witnesses before a federal grand jury . . . Brigade 2506 has been reported to have taken part in the formation of a right-wing, anti-Castro umbrella organization known as CORU.
The FBI learned that the man who authorized both the Letelier murder and the bombing of the Cuban airliner was Luis Posada Carriles. Among the men who carried out the Letelier hit—planting the bomb under the former ambassador’s car—were Guillermo and Ignacio Novo.
Arrest warrants were issued for all of these men. Posada remained out of the country and became an international fugitive from the law; he was later arrested and incarcerated in Venezuela. The Novo brothers were arrested in Union City and charged with murder. Their case became a cause célèbre in the exile community, with rallies and fund-raisers in support of their legal defense both in Miami and along the Union City– West New York–Weehawken corridor in New Jersey.
For some, these new tactics represented an untenable escalation. The bombing of the Cuban airplane, resulting in the death of innocent civilians, was a bridge too far. A heated debate began within the militant community and also the Cuban American population at large about the morality of these actions. Polls showed that most Cuban Americans favored an open dialogue with Cuba, but the extremists had a method for squelching such opinions: violence. For those who spoke out against the bombings and assassinations, there were repercussions.
In Miami, an influential news director at WQBA-AM radio, Emilio Milián, publicly condemned the “terrorism.” In April 1976, he was on the receiving end of a car bomb that blew off both his legs. A former leader of the 2506 Brigade Veterans Foundation, Juan José Peruyero, spoke out in defense of Milián. Peruyero had been one of the earliest presidents of the foundation comprised of brigade veterans; he was revered by many in the community.
On the night of January 6, 1977, Peruyero called Emilio Milián at his home in Little Havana. He told Milián that he had some new information about who might have been behind the bombing of his car, which, though he had survived, left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Milián was curious and asked Peruyero to come over right away to discuss it, but the former brigadista said it was late. He would come by Milián’s home the following day.
Peruyero never made it to Milián’s house. The next morning, he was assassinated in front of his house in a drive-by shooting that had all the earmarks of a professional hit.
There had been acts of violence against organizations and people believed to be sympathetic to an open dialogue with Castro, but the assassination of a popular brigadista who had devoted his life to la lucha was something new. Anti-Castro militancy had turned into an internecine battle among Cuban exiles.
Between 1975 and 1978, according to an internal analysis by the Organized Crime Bureau of the Dade County Public Safety Department, there were forty terrorist bombings in Dade County, all of them Cuban-related. The report also noted that in New York City and New Jersey, there had been forty-one Cuban-related “terrorist incidents.” The report stated:
Cuban exile terrorists have blown up ships in Miami harbor; they have placed bombs on Russian ships in Puerto Rico and in New Jersey; they have blown up an aircraft in the air, killing all seventy-three souls on board; they have placed a bomb on an airliner in Miami, this bomb being set to explode while the plane was in the air, full of passengers; they planted a bomb in a car owned by a former Cuban senator and later the editor of a newspaper in Miami, killing him instantly; they have blown off both legs of the news director of the largest radio station in Florida . . . In one twenty-four hour period in December 1975, a Cuban exile terrorist placed eight bombs in the Miami area. Most of these bombs were placed in government buildings such as Post Offices, Social Security offices, the State Attorney’s Office, and even the Miami FBI office.
Within the community, there was fear, and among academics and commentators there was much discussion about the concept of shame and what role it played in the stoking of violence. It was noted that the legacy of the Bay of Pigs invasion, both for some of the men who had participated and also for many in the community who felt obligated to defend the brigade no matter what, had created a psychological justification for violent action.
Whether or not José Miguel Battle was motivated by shame is not known; he never expressed as much to anyone who knew him. If he did feel shame, it likely had more to do with the fact that he had been unable to play a more active role in la lucha. The FBI suspected that he had undertaken some political assassinations, and he was certainly a supporter of the cause. But while others he knew were on the front lines of the anti-Castro campaign, Battle had become consumed by the daily operations of his bolita empire, which increasingly involved revenge plots and killings that were more personal than political.
AS A GANGSTER, BATTLE HAD SOME ISSUES TO DEAL WITH THAT THE MILITANTS DID not, most notably the Mafia.
Ever since the Cubans had begun to expand their bolita operations in the New York City area, the Mob boss they dealt with the most was Fat Tony Salerno.
Since the death of renowned mafioso Vito Genovese in 1969, Salerno had become the face of the Genovese crime family based in East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem, as it was sometimes called, especially after Aretha Franklin recorded her megahit of the same name in 1971. You could hear that song coming from phonographs or transistor radios along 115th Street near the Palma Boys Social Club, where Salerno and other underbosses sat in folding chairs in front of the club.
With his felt fedora, jowly cheeks, and ever-present cigar, Fat Tony was a mobster from the old school. He was not seen in high-class nightclubs like the Copacabana or the Stork Club, as were more famous mafiosi. Salerno was a proletarian gangster who gave the impression of being a man of the streets. Nonetheless, he was rich. He had a home in Miami Beach, a hundred-acre estate in Rhinebeck, New York—horse country—and an apartment in Manhattan near ritzy Gramercy Park. He made the most of his millions from the city’s numbers racket.
You did not address him as “Fat Tony.” “Big Tony,” maybe. But “Mr. Salerno” was even better. In later years, Salerno was heard on a wiretap bemoaning a disrespectful young gangster who had called him Fat Tony to his face: “If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be no Mob left,” he complained. “I made all the guys.”
In late 1976, Salerno was indicted on federal tax and gambling charges. Prosecutors noted that Fat Tony had been accepting at least $10 million annually in illegal policy wages but reporting only $40,000 on his income taxes. The Mob boss’s lawyer, the infamous Roy M. Cohn— formerly co-counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s—described his client as a “sports gambler,” but the Internal Revenue Service wasn’t buying it.
All of the early Cuban bolita bankers—Angel Mujica, Isleño Dávila, Battle, and others—had made the pilgrimage to the Palma Boys Social Club, which looked like a storefront club from the Prohibition era. There, the Cubans received Salerno’s blessing, with the understanding that the Mafia would receive a piece of the action.
Throughout 1976 and into 1977, Battle made semiregular stops at the social club, especially during the holidays. At Christmas, he came by with an envelope filled with $10,000 in cash, which he handed to Salerno, who remained out on bail. This was not the Mob’s cut of bolita, but rather a holiday gift.
Everybody was happy to see Mike Battle. By having Battle serve as a numbers boss, they were carrying on a tradition that went back to Alejandro Pompez, the Mafia’s Cuban numbers king back before the war. Of course, the arrangement was based on the Cubans regularly greasing palms at the Palma Boys Social Club, and in light of Salerno’s recent indictment, the price of doing business had gone up. A boss facing criminal charges meant costly legal expenses, a good excuse for increasing operating costs and taxes paid by various subsidiaries.
Battle never minded paying the money. He knew that you got what you paid for, and Salerno was the man in charge of the numbers racket in New York. It was money well spent. His concern was not Fat Tony, it was the other Cubans who had been cultivating the Mafia boss themselves.
Isleño Dávila, in particular, had formed an alliance with the Italians to establish a network of “bolita holes,” or shops, in neighborhoods along the Brooklyn-Queens border. Isleño’s contacts were mostly with the Lucchese crime family based in Brooklyn. But the Luccheses would have cleared everything with Fat Tony, the man who had been designated within the Five Families structure as the overseer of the numbers racket.
Isleño and Battle had coexisted peaceably for close to a decade. Battle was believed to have approximately one hundred bolita spots around New York, and many “runners” in Hudson County, New Jersey. Isleño probably had just as many shops in New York. They each employed hundreds of people. They each made multiple millions, which was used to finance their operations and also line their own pockets. This peaceful coexistence was based on their not stepping on each other’s toes. Battle was concerned that with Isleño Dávila presenting himself to the Mafia as a Cuban bolita boss, he was sowing the seeds of confusion. In Battle’s mind, he was the Cuban Godfather. There was no other.
So far, none of this was affecting business. Battle had not heard anything from Fat Tony Salerno about Isleño Dávila, or any other Cubans, intruding on his territory. But Battle was a strategist. As a leader, he liked to anticipate problems before they happened. He could see himself getting caught up in a war with Isleño. And not only that, but Isleño was in a position to complicate his relationship with Fat Tony and the Italians, which would become an existential threat to his organization. In all of this, Battle saw dark clouds forming on the horizon. And he was beginning to suspect he might need to take action.
BY THE CHRISTMAS SEASON OF 1976, CHARLEY HERNANDEZ WAS A WRECK. FOR SIX months—ever since first hearing about Ernestico’s murder—he had been living in fear. When he first heard about it, he didn’t believe it. At Tony’s Barbershop, a friend, Luis Valdez, told him, “Hombre, did you hear? Your friend Ernesto Torres is dead.”
Charley remained in denial, until the next day when he read an article about the murder in El Diario, a Spanish-language newspaper, with a picture of Ernestico and everything. Then Charley received a call from Chino Acuna: “We took care of your friend in Miami. He won’t be making any more orphans. Keep your mouth shut or you will wind up just like him.”
Later, Charley was put on the phone with El Padrino, who told him the same thing: “We took care of the kid.” You talk, you die.
Charley went into hiding. He stayed with his girlfriend, Lydia Ramirez, in Washington Heights, and rarely left the apartment. On one occasion when he did try to visit Carol Negron and his kids in Union City, he was jumped in the courtyard outside the building and beaten to a pulp. His son and three young daughters were shocked when he arrived at the apartment bloodied and bruised, though it was not the first time they had seen him in this condition. Charley had become something of a punching bag for the Battle organization.
By winter, Charley had returned to the neighborhood; he watched his back and was always armed.
On the night of December 20, he thought he would hide away for a couple of hours in a movie theater. He was carrying his burglary tools in a knapsack, as he often did. And he was carrying a gun. He was spotted by a police detective he knew well—Lieutenant Frank Mona, who had arrested him a couple times over the years. Instinctively, Charley ran. Mona chased after him. Charley ditched his burglary tools in the bushes. He also got rid of his gun.
Mona saw all this. He caught up with Charley, cuffed him, and placed him under arrest, then he retrieved the illegal items. Charley was taken to the Union City police station. It was a place he knew well; he’d been pinched numerous times for possession of marijuana and possession of burglary tools. Just walking into the place gave him the creeps, because he believed that Battle owned the Union City Police Department.
It was late on a Friday night. The courts weren’t open until Monday. As was often the case in these situations, Lieutenant Mona asked Charley—a known professional criminal—if he wanted to make a deal. Who did he know that he could provide information on? Charley said he had nothing to offer, and so he was left to stew in a rancid station-house cell.
Late that night, two uniformed police officers came into the station. One was white, Irish American, and the other Hispanic. The white one said, “Carlos Hernandez, we need to speak with you for a minute. Come with us.”
Charley was suspicious. He said, “Do I need to bring my coat?”
The cop said, “No. Leave your coat there. It might get messed with blood.” Then the two cops chuckled.
The hair stood up on Charley’s neck; he went with the cops, feeling as though he might be walking into an ambush.
The cops sat him down in an interrogation room. The Hispanic one said, “Do you know who ordered the killing of a guy named El Morro?”
Charley knew that was one of Ernestico’s hits, ordered by Battle. “No, I don’t know who killed him,” he said.
“Do you know who ordered the hit on Ismael Alvarez?”
Again, that was a killing ordered by Battle. “I only know what I read in the papers,” said Charley.
The other cop asked, “Do you work for José Miguel Battle?”
“Are you kidding me? I’m a burglar, he’s a banker. You think he’s going to trust me with his money?”
“You mean to tell me you would rip off Battle’s money? You have the heart to do that?”
“You better believe it. If I knew where the money was, I would take it.”
The cops smiled. They took Charley back to his cell and left him there.
The entire weekend, Charley thought about those cops. It entered his body like a virus: Those cops are with Battle. They were telling me that I’m going to be hit by the same man who killed El Morro and Alvarez. I’m going to be hit right here in this police station.
First thing on Monday, Lieutenant Mona came to Charley’s cell.
“Did you send some cops to talk to me?” asked Charley.
“No,” said the lieutenant. “Why?”
Charley was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said, “I have information that will blow your mind. But I’m not talking to anybody here in this station house. I wanna see somebody from the FBI.”
Mona made some pro forma remark about being able to guarantee Charley’s safety.
Charley shouted loudly, his voice ringing throughout the precinct, “I don’t even feel safe right now in this police station. Get me out of here!” He reiterated that he would not talk until they removed him from the precinct house.
Mona did not call the FBI, but he did call in an assistant U.S. attorney from Newark and the lead organized crime investigator for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office. Also, once Charley hinted at what he was willing to talk about, the investigators contacted Detective Richard Kalafus from the NYPD.
Kalafus had worked the Pedro Battle murder case, the Palulu shootout in Central Park, and a number of other Cuban-related homicide cases. He was considered to be a local expert on the Cuban Mafia in and around New York City. Kalafus had already begun looking into the murder of Ernesto Torres. In July 1976, he flew down to Miami and took a statement from Idalia Fernandez, while she was still recovering from her wounds. Again, Idalia identified Chino Acuna as the assailant. She also told Kalafus all about Charley Hernandez. What she did not tell Kalafus was that José Miguel Battle had been one of the assailants that day.
For Kalafus, roping in Charley Hernandez was like ordering the daily special: you weren’t sure what you were getting, but you hoped it was good.
The investigators moved their perp from the Union City police station to a hotel in Newark. The next day, he sat in a back room at the Renaissance Restaurant in Newark and spilled his guts.
There were a half dozen investigators, agents, and detectives in the room that day, but the lead questioner was Detective Kalafus. He was the most knowledgeable.
Kalafus was a bona fide character. In his early fifties, he presented himself as a cowboy, with leather boots, a western-style belt buckle, and a cowboy hat. He had a craggy face that made him resemble the actor Ben Johnson, who had won an Academy Award a few years earlier for his performance in the movie The Last Picture Show. He spoke with a slight Texas drawl, though the rumor among some in the NYPD was that he was from the Bronx (he was actually born in a small town outside of Amarillo, Texas). Kalafus may have been modeling himself on the TV series McCloud, about a marshal from New Mexico who is temporarily assigned to the NYPD. The show was immensely popular, and the character of Sam McCloud, played by actor Dennis Weaver, had reached iconic status in pop culture.
Kalafus took off his cowboy hat, sat back, and said to Charley, “I’m always interested in homicides. Especially homicides involving Ernestico. Are you a friend of Ernestico’s?”
“I was a good friend of his, yes,” said Charley.
A cassette recorder sat on the table in front of Charley, the tape whirring round and round, recording it all for posterity.
Said Kalafus, “You’re a good friend of Ernestico, who was shot sixteen times.”
“Sixteen times,” repeated Charley. That was a big number: sixteen bullet holes.
“We know that Ernestico committed upwards of thirteen homicides. Is that about the right number?”
“It’s probably the right number, yeah,” answered Charley.
“And how many do you have knowledge of that Ernestico did?”
Charley told about his friend, who in death continued to cause him as much trouble as he had in life. Only now the lawmen seemed to want to know about Ernestico’s murderous history so that they could clear many unsolved homicide cases. Charley would use his friend’s criminal legacy to save his own neck. He guessed that Ernestico would not have minded.
He told the cops about how Ernesto had killed a guy named El Raton, the drug dealer who had been a competitor of Pedro Battle. He told them about the murder of Pedro by Palulu, how Ernestico had approached El Padrino at the funeral service for his brother and pleaded that he be given the contract to find and kill Palulu. Charley explained to the investigators how Ernestico was paired with Chino Acuna, and then the killing really began. “There was a lot of work for [Ernesto],” said Charley. “Every night he had a different car. He cut his hair and used a lot of wigs, and every night they were kidnapping somebody. Anybody who was a friend of Palulu’s got it. They went into every bar, and I read the newspaper sometimes, and I see that so-and-so got killed, and I knew they were doing the killing. They were getting paid for it.”
Charley went on and on. Occasionally, Kalafus or one of the other investigators asked a question, but mostly it was a monologue. Charley had a lot to get off his chest.
The grilling continued for two straight days. Charley slept at the hotel in Newark with an armed detective outside his door. During the day, he was brought to the back room at the restaurant. Each day there was a different configuration of agents, prosecutors, and cops, though Detective Kalafus was always there.
The more Charley talked, the more comfortable he became. He was a natural storyteller, relating episodes like the kidnapping and shooting of Luis Morrero as if it were a scene from a movie. The investigators were mesmerized. Eventually, Charley got down to a specified retelling of the events leading up to Ernestico’s murder, his dealings with José Miguel Battle; his contract to murder his friend; the transfer of money; his traveling to Miami to meet with Ernestico; returning to New Jersey to tell Battle and Chino Acuna that he had not been able to complete the job.
As the days passed, it was as if Charley had fallen off the face of the earth. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day came and went, and his family wondered where he was. His children had become accustomed to their father’s sudden unexplained absences, so they should have been used to it, but it was an especially empty Christmas at the Hernandez home that year.
On December 28, at 11:45 A.M., Charley was brought to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in Newark to give an official statement. Present were Deputy Chief Charles Rossiter; an investigator with the prosecutor’s office named Lieutenant Steve McCabe; and two detectives from the Union City Police Department. Charley repeated what he had been going over ad nauseam throughout numerous interrogations with Detective Kalafus, only this time the chief deputy prosecutor narrowed in on criminal activities related solely to the murder of Ernesto Torres.
With the statement from Charley, investigators in New Jersey and New York were aware that, given what Miami detectives had already been learning from Idalia, a big piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Idalia knew about the murder from the point of view of a victim, but Charley had been privy to the initial conspiracy. Together, they connected the sequence of events that led to the brutal killing of Ernestico.
Nonetheless, the New York–New Jersey people wanted to make sure they had squeezed every last bit of Cuban gangland intelligence out of Charley Hernandez before turning him over to the district attorney in Dade County, where any trial for the murder of Ernesto Torres would take place.
In the hierarchy of Cuban American organized crime, Charley may have been a small fish, but he had learned a lot from Ernesto, El Padrino’s prodigal son. And he liked to talk. All in all, Charley had the potential to be a devastating witness for the prosecution.
JULIO OJEDA WAS A MIAMI DETECTIVE WITH AN IMPRESSIVE RÉSUMÉ. WHEN THE Ernesto Torres murder occurred, Ojeda had been on vacation. But as soon as he returned on June 29, 1976, he was assigned to the case. Before long he was bumped up to lead investigator. It was clear that the investigation needed a lead agent who spoke fluent Spanish. Ojeda was a solid detective, but even he would admit that perhaps the biggest advantage he had as a cop in Miami was that he was bilingual, especially back when he first came on the job, in 1969, when there were maybe three Julios in the entire Public Safety Department.
As soon as he looked over the case file—crime scene reports; preliminary eyewitness interviews; a bedside statement from Idalia Fernandez identifying the gunman—he knew the case against Chino Acuna was strong. Idalia knew Chino. She’d had him in her home in New Jersey, and she’d been present on many occasions when Chino and Ernesto were present together. They were partners in crime.
Once a first-degree murder warrant was issued for Chino Acuna, an all points bulletin went out for his arrest. Local law enforcement and the Florida Highway Patrol were notified, as were the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, the NYPD, and the Union City Police Department. Also notified were the FBI, which issued an UFAP (unlawful flight to avoid prosecution). Wanted fliers were circulated, though after a thorough search by all of these agencies it was believed that Chino Acuna had likely already fled the country.
Even without their prime suspect in custody, Ojeda and the others continued to build their case. Already, some startling evidence had been uncovered. At Idalia and Ernestico’s apartment in Opa-Locka, the investigators confiscated a trove of tape recordings that Ernesto had made before he was killed, phone conversations with various criminal associates, including Chino Acuna, José Miguel Battle, Charley Hernandez, and others. The detectives had not yet been able to identify all the voices on these taped phone calls, and the conversations were in code to a point where it wasn’t always possible to understand what was being talked about, but there were some extraordinary exchanges.
One conversation was between Ernesto and his mother in Cuba. The cops sat in the office of the state’s attorney Henry Adorno and listened to the voice of Ernestico.
“Listen, Mami, did you receive the telegram I sent you?” Ernestico asked his mother.
“Yes,” said the mother, “and I waited for the phone call, and I went to call you on the nineteenth. I sent you a telegram yesterday. Didn’t you receive it today?”
“No, no. But none of that matters. How you are feeling is what’s important.”
The mother knew from having spoken with Ernesto Sr. that Ernestico was being hunted by killers.
Ernestico explained, “You know, Mami, remember I spoke with you on the fourth of December? Thirteen days afterwards, on December seventeenth, they made an attempt on me . . . It’s a phenomenon, you know. The seventeenth of December, Saint Lazaro Day. I was born that day, you know. But you don’t have to worry. I’m just telling you so that you know, okay?”
“Yes. Imagine that, Ernestico.”
“So pray for me. A lot. And play for me a lot of buemba, because they are playing a lot of buembas on me over here, you hear me?”
Buemba is a vernacular word for a spiritual ritual common in Santería referring to sainthood. In Santería, a saint can be either a positive spirit or one with bad intentions, depending on the buemba.
“I got a fucking war over here with some saints,” said Ernesto to his mother.
“And the names,” she asked, “don’t you know them?”
After some prodding, Ernestico gave his mother some names that she could use in her buemba. He was telling her that should he be murdered, these were the people who had done it. He gave her the actual birth names of Tati and Monchi, the hit men associated with Omega 7. And then he said, “Here’s another one, write this down. José Miguel Battle. Do you understand? José Miguel Battle.”
“Battle?”
“Battle. B-A-T-T-L-E. José Miguel Battle. And now, listen, another one. Julio Acuna.”
“Julio Acuna.”
“Yes. My war is with these saints.”
Ojeda, along with other detectives and the prosecutor, listened to this taped conversation and marveled. It was as if the victim were speaking from the dead to identify his killers.
Charley Hernandez was a name that had come up in their interviews with Idalia. Charley was on the tapes too, speaking in code about how he had been given a contract by Battle to kill Ernestico. Idalia filled in the blanks, telling them about Charley staying with them in Miami and then hatching a scheme to supposedly kill Ernestico for money. She told them how Charley cried at the prospect of killing his best friend, how the two men had said goodbye to one another at the train station and vowed to reconnect somewhere down the line.
So the Miami detectives knew that Charley Hernandez was a key person of interest. But they had no idea where he was. Until Detective Ojeda received a phone call from Detective Kalafus that changed the direction of their investigation.
Ojeda and a fellow detective flew to New York City. As Ojeda remembered it in a deposition years later, “On April 23rd, 1977, we left Miami and arrived at LaGuardia Airport. We were met at LaGuardia Airport by Detective Kalafus, who took us to a horrible hotel in New York City.”
That night, at the office of Sam Mandarin in the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey, Ojeda and his partner met Charley Hernandez. Ojeda liked what he heard. Charley was a talker, and he directly linked Ernesto to Battle. Right away, the Miami detectives realized that with what Charley was giving them they could make a murder conspiracy case against the Godfather, whether Chino Acuna was ever found or not.
The detectives made arrangements for Charley Hernandez to be transported to Miami. It was a tricky negotiation, with one jurisdiction handing off a coveted witness to another, but it was believed that the case against Battle could only be made in Dade County, where the murder took place.
In Miami, Charley was set up in a motel near the airport. The investigators brought him food and supplies. Over the next week, he led them to many of the locations he had been telling them about: apartments in Allapattah and Hialeah where he had stayed with Ernestico and Idalia; the home of the retired cop that he and Ernestico had burglarized; the apartment complex where Ernestico Sr. had been living; the motel where Charley stayed when he was in town to “murder” Ernestico.
Concurrently, the detectives went about building their case. They tracked down and interviewed tenants at the apartment building where Ernesto and Idalia had lived in Opa-Locka. They sought to find the delivery boy who delivered groceries to the apartment, and discovered that he had only recently died in an automobile accident at the age of seventeen. The investigation was frequently interrupted by the fact that Ojeda and his partner were busy working other cases at the same time as this one.
One of Ojeda’s open cases was the murder of Rolando Masferrer, a notorious gangster from the 1950s era in Cuba. Masferrer had been the leader of Los Tigres (the Tigers), a political assassination squad affiliated with the government of President Fulgencio Batista. After the revolution, Masferrer escaped from Cuba and became a political firebrand in Miami’s volatile anti-Castro universe. He published a newspaper titled Libertad, in which he called for the car bombing of his political enemies. On October 31, 1975, Masferrer was himself blown up by a bomb attached to his car.
Political assassinations in the anti-Castro underground were like Mob hits. Everyone had a theory about who did it, but the cases almost always went unsolved. Ojeda felt that Masferrer had likely been killed by Castro spies in the United States. FBI agents working the case believed it had been done by rivals within the anti-Castro sphere, most likely the Novo brothers out of Union City. With little hard evidence, the case remained open.
Another case that Ojeda became involved with was the murder of mafioso Johnny Roselli. On August 9, 1976, Roselli’s decomposed body was found stuffed inside a fifty-five-gallon steel drum floating in Dum-foundling Bay in Miami. The murder of Roselli was no small matter. Having partnered with fellow mafioso Santo Trafficante and the CIA in efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the mobster had been an underworld operative at a very high level.
On June 24 and September 22, 1975, Roselli had been called to testify in front of the U.S. Select Committee on Investigations in Washington, D.C. Known as the Church Committee, because it was chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the committee had been unraveling, for the first time in public, Operation Mongoose and other anti-Castro efforts from the 1960s. Days before Roselli was scheduled to testify, one of his other partners in Operation Mongoose—mafioso Sam Giancana—was shot dead in the basement of his Illinois home. This murder had motivated Roselli to move from his homes in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and settle in Miami, where he felt he was safe.
It was a logical assumption, as traditionally Miami was a safe haven for mafiosi. Mob hits took place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and other places. Miami was where mobsters like Meyer Lansky came to retire, and no one in the underworld bothered them. Apparently Roselli was a special case. His testimony before the Church Committee had been so riveting and explosive, with many juicy details about the CIA-Mafia efforts to kill Fidel, that the committee had called him back for a third appearance on April 23, 1976. The date came and went and Roselli was nowhere to be found, until he was discovered—to paraphrase the old Sicilian phrase—asleep with the fishes.
Like the Masferrer murder, the Roselli case was one about which there were many theories and little hard evidence to secure an indictment, much less a conviction.
Ojeda thought that one person who might know something about the murder was Santo Trafficante. How could he not know? Since he was the most powerful mafioso in the state, the murder could not have taken place without his approval. If someone had done that murder without his blessing, they would certainly wind up dead as a result.
Trafficante was based in Tampa, but he had a house in North Miami, and he was there often. Ojeda simply went to the house and knocked on the door. Trafficante’s wife answered.
Said Ojeda, “How are you, ma’am? My name is detective Julio Ojeda with the Dade County Public Safety Department. I’d like to speak with your husband, if he’s at home.”
The wife invited Ojeda in, then she went and got her husband. Years later, Ojeda remembered, “Santo was very cordial. ‘You want coffee?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, ‘Cuban coffee?’ He spoke in fluent Spanish. We talked about Roselli. He was very friendly. He said, ‘You know, I really like you. But you need to talk to Henry.’ Henry Gonzalez was his lawyer.”
So Ojeda did talk to Henry Gonzalez. He said to Gonzalez, “Look, I’d like to take a statement from your client. Honestly, it’s a smart thing for him to do. Everyone from the FBI to the CIA will be on him about the Roselli murder. If he gives a statement, he can say, ‘That’s it. I gave my statement. I have nothing more to say.’ ”
The lawyer agreed.
Trafficante was concerned that no one see him giving this statement, not even other people in law enforcement. So the mafioso was brought to the First Union Building, the southernmost building in downtown Miami. They set up a table and stenographer in the garage, with fold-out chairs for Trafficante and his lawyer.
Remembered Ojeda, “It was the first time anyone had taken a statement from Santo Trafficante. He was shrewd, extremely smart.” Trafficante gave away nothing useful.
Ojeda came away from the incident believing that the Mafia boss was an impressive individual, even though it was almost certain that he had sanctioned the murder of his good friend and former partner in crime, Johnny Roselli.
THE ANTICS OF CHARLEY HERNANDEZ HAD WREAKED HAVOC WITH HIS FAMILY. HIS young children knew very little of what was going on with their father, except that it was causing major disruptions in their life.
Within weeks of Charley’s moving to Miami, Carol Negron, his common-law wife, received a visit from two men in suits, one of whom was Sam Mandarin from the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office. They told Negron that for their own safety it was likely her family would need to be relocated to Florida, where Charley was being prepped for a big trial. The investigators were introduced to the children—three girls and son Carlos—as Tom and Sam, friends of their father, who would soon be reuniting them with their dad.
Carol and Kelly, the two oldest girls, were eight and nine. They didn’t really pay much attention until a few days later when Tom and Sam showed up at their school and removed them from class. They were told they were being taken home for lunch. At home, they saw that all their things had been packed up. Kelly, the oldest and most inquisitive of the girls, said, “What is this?” Tom and Sam told her that they were going down to the Jersey Shore for the weekend. It was all very strange, and young Kelly wasn’t buying it.
What neither Kelly nor any of the other girls knew was that that morning, someone in a car had tried to snatch their six-year-old brother, Carlos, off the street. Carlos had escaped. The investigators believed it was Battle’s henchmen. Battle must have learned that Charlie was cooperating with authorities. The investigators told the children’s mother, “Your family is in danger. There’s no choice here. You cannot stay. You cannot run. Listen to us and we will protect you.”
As the children readied to leave, they noticed that their aunt and grandmother were crying hysterically. They didn’t understand it. The aunt grabbed Kelly by the hand and said to her, “Kelly, take care of your sister.”
The elevator was loaded with suitcases, so Kelly and Carol took the stairwell. In the stairwell, Kelly took her sister by the hand and said, “Something is not right here. We need to run.”
It was a pivotal moment; these two young girls were about to have their childhood snatched away from them. They could run and live as feral animals in the street, or they could submit to their fate.
Carol didn’t understand what her sister was talking about. “You’re scaring me,” she said. They continued down to the car. There, they were crowded into a van, four young kids, the mother, and two investigators.
Once the van was under way, Kelly noticed that they were not going in the direction of the shore. “Where are we going?” she asked. Sam the investigator told her that there had been a fire at the Meadowlands blocking their route to the shore. They would have to take an airplane. Even to a nine-year-old, that sounded bogus. Then Kelly felt the gun of Tom the investigator poking into her side.
“Why do you have a gun?” she asked.
There was silence in the car. Tom said, “Well, in the United States of America you can have a gun. I choose to have a gun. It’s not breaking the law.”
They arrived at Newark airport and boarded a commercial flight. The girls still believed that they were going to the Jersey Shore, though it seemed strange that these two men in suits and patent leather shoes were coming with them.
As they were landing, an announcement was made: Welcome to Miami.
The children were startled. The mother said, “Surprise! We’re going on vacation.”
They still did not know they would be seeing their father, until they disembarked into the terminal and there was Charley Hernandez down on one knee, arms wide open and a big smile on his face. On each side of their father were two men who looked the same as Tom and Sam, lawmen dressed for work.
The three girls and the boy hugged their daddy, and thus began their life in Miami, which became more unusual with each passing day.
At first it seemed as though it might be fun. They lived in a nice hotel with a big pool, which was where they spent most of their time. Tom and Sam tried to help them learn new names; they made a game of it. “Think of a name you always wanted, your favorite name.” Then the two agents trained them not to react if anyone called out their old names.
It was a weird fantasy life. They were kept out of school. Kelly never finished fourth grade, and she was kept out of fifth grade.
It was fun at the hotel, but one day Tom and Sam showed up and said, “Get out of the pool now. We have to go.” They told Carol Negron to get all the kids together. They would bring their clothes and belongings later. They had to go. A grandparent of one of the girls’ friends had called local authorities and said, “Something’s not right. My granddaughter has these girlfriends, they never go to school.”
The agents loaded Negron and her family into a van. Years later, daughter Kelly remembered, “They drove us around for hours, all day and all night. They didn’t know where to put us. They took us to one of those two-story apartments you see in Florida, with a pool in the front. They put us on the first floor and said, ‘You’re going to stay here for the night.’ Until they could figure out what to do with this family. No extra clothes, no anything. They kept us there for a while. They told us we were vacationing. It was a surprise. Our father came home sometimes, but not every day. He was always in the company of other men who would sit outside; they never came in the house.”
After a few months, the kids adapted. They were unaware that in July 1977, authorities in Florida were ready to make their move on José Miguel Battle. A warrant for his arrest was issued, though it wasn’t acted on immediately. Lawmen in New York and New Jersey followed him around for days, waiting for the opportunity to make the arrest.
JULY 13 WAS A SEASONABLY WARM AND HUMID DAY IN MANHATTAN. BATTLE HAD JUST come from one of his bolita operation’s main offices on West 79th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. It was incumbent upon a bolita king to occasionally visit his minions at work—at least in the offices, where the money was kept. He rarely, if ever, visited the actual bolita holes where the bets were placed. It would be unwise for a banker or boss to be seen there; those places were sometimes under police surveillance. It would be like the CEO of a supermarket corporation visiting one of his retail outlets; it was unnecessary and would only diminish the CEO’s stature as his company’s great and powerful chief.
Battle arrived at a restaurant in Washington Heights, located at 163rd Street and Broadway, and settled in for a meal. The investigators had been tailing him most of that day. Their entire operation was based on his not detecting the surveillance. It wasn’t until he was inside the restaurant that they alerted the other units.
Detective Kalafus was the lead officer; he was executing the warrant on behalf of the Dade County Prosecutor’s Office. Detective Ojeda was on vacation and unable to attend the party, but there were police officers from Miami. One of them, a special guest, was Diego Mella.
Mella was the cop who as a member of the Union City Police Department had arrested Battle and two of his brothers on illegal gun possession charges back in 1974. Mella had been so shocked to discover the depths of Battle’s influence with the police department and political structure in Hudson County that shortly thereafter he resigned as a cop. He moved to South Florida and joined the Dade County Public Safety Department.
Late in the Ernesto Torres murder investigation, when Detective Ojeda and the others learned of Mella’s history in Union City, they arranged for him to be assigned to the investigation as part of the apprehension squad. Having Mella involved was a tip of the cap to the officer, and a middle finger to Battle.
The cops waited until the Godfather finished his meal and walked out of the restaurant. On the sidewalk, he was surrounded by dozens of New York City police officers and Miami detectives. Kalafus served the warrant, and Mella was there to place the handcuffs on Battle.
Said Kalafus, “José Miguel Battle, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder and for the murder of Ernestico Torres.”
Battle looked out over the sea of arresting officers and said nothing. Within the hour, he was on the phone with his esteemed criminal defense lawyer. He would not go down without a fight.