PALULU.
All you had to do was say the name and Battle would tighten up; he would breathe in deeply, his ears would turn red, and his blood pressure would rise to levels that were clinically unhealthy for a man of his girth. Palulu was the stone in his shoe, the thorn in his side. If one of Battle’s men mentioned the name of Palulu in his presence, he would find himself on the receiving end of a stare so chilling, so filled with bad intent that his gonads would inadvertently shrivel up in his scrotum.
It had been eight years since El Padrino first called for Palulu’s head. Now the mere fact of Palulu’s existence was, in Battle’s mind, a rebuke to his manhood. If someone had put Fidel Castro and Palulu in front of him and said to kill whomever you must, Battle would first have to kill Palulu and then go after Fidel. Palulu had killed his brother in a very public way. Palulu had pissed on his family’s name. Palulu, who by now had already survived half a dozen attempts on his life, just by the fact that he breathed the same air as José Miguel was an abomination. Palulu was making José Miguel Battle and the Corporation look foolish. This was a problem that had to be dealt with—pronto. Or Battle might as well retire to his finca in South Miami and spend the rest of his days stroking his rooster.
On April 30, 1982, Palulu Enriquez walked out of Dannemora prison after having served two years and five months for illegal possession of a weapon. From the moment he hit the streets, he must have felt like violating the terms of his release by doing the very thing that got him incarcerated. A gun was certainly what he needed. He knew there was a bounty on his head.
And yet, like a creature of habit, he returned to the streets of New York.
Throughout his legal troubles, Palulu maintained ownership of a condominium at 3240 Riverdale Avenue, in an upper-middle-class section of the Bronx. Riverdale was a pleasant neighborhood, mostly Jewish, with tree-lined streets. Over the years, Palulu had rented out the condo and lived off the proceeds. Ever since he had fallen afoul of the Battles, he had resided mostly in small one-room studios spread out around the boroughs of New York.
In December, eight months after his release from Dannemora, Palulu was limping along a street in Brooklyn, where he now lived. For a man who had lost a leg, suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and been stabbed on two occasions, he still got around.
The weather was unseasonably warm. December 2 had set a record of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, and the mild temperatures continued throughout the month.
Palulu was overdressed, wearing a heavy overcoat, which is what you expected to wear in New York in the winter. He was accompanied by his new bodyguard, Argelio Cuesta, who was a recent refugee from Cuba, part of a wave known as the Mariel boatlift.
The “Marielitos” were refugees whose exodus had been negotiated by President Jimmy Carter. At the time, Cuba was experiencing one of its periodic refugee crises. In Castro’s Cuba, securing a travel visa to leave the country was a near impossibility. It was one of the more pernicious aspects of modern Cuba that the island had become like a penal colony. If you wanted to leave for any reason, it became necessary to create some kind of homemade vessel—a raft or inner tube or makeshift boat—and attempt to cross the ocean at nightfall. Already, thousands of Cubans had died attempting to make this journey, and in the decades ahead thousands more would perish.
In April 1980, President Carter announced that the United States would take in refugees from Cuba if Castro would allow them to leave. A week later, Fidel announced that anyone who wanted to could leave. They would be allowed to embark from Mariel Harbor.
Over the next six months, from April through September, Cuba would experience an exodus unlike anything that had been seen before. Packed onto boats and other sailing vessels, a total of 125,000 asylum seekers flooded into the United States. They were processed primarily at immigration camps in Miami and elsewhere in South Florida. The majority were granted political asylum. Some journeyed beyond Miami to other localities with sizable Cuban populations, such as Hudson County in New Jersey, and New York City.
The Marielitos came from extreme economic deprivation. Some were criminals and mental defectives, whom, unbeknownst at the time to the United States, Castro had taken the opportunity to release as part of the exodus.
In the Cuban American underworld, the Marielitos represented an influx of desperate men, some of whom were willing to do anything for a price. They were recruited as gangland hit men, criminal errand boys, or, in the case of Argelio Cuesta, as bodyguards for someone with a longtime bounty on his head—a job not many people would want to undertake.
In Brooklyn, Cuesta and his boss, Palulu, were enjoying the mild December air when a team of hit men drove up and opened fire. Both men returned fire. Palulu was hit, but the wound was not fatal. Having Cuesta as his bodyguard probably saved his life. Palulu was rushed to the hospital.
Gunshot wounds; hospital emergency room; a visit from the cops; and once again charged with possession of a weapon—a routine so familiar to Palulu. But at least he was alive; he had survived another hit attempt.
Upon learning of this latest failure, Battle was angry enough to cause the earth to rumble. In a way, he blamed himself. It had been a half-assed attempt, one that was beneath the dignity of a true Mob boss. Partly it was because he had put out an open contract on the street. The attempts to kill Palulu had become like a turkey shoot, where anyone with a gun had an opportunity to collect the $100,000 fee.
Battle needed to step up his game. And so he turned to Lalo Pons, the head of his SS squad, who had distinguished himself as an organizer of hits and other acts of mayhem on behalf of the Corporation. Pons was given the assignment to exterminate Palulu.
By April 1983, Palulu had been released from the hospital and was out on bond awaiting yet another trial for possession of an illegal weapon. He had done something he did not want to do: he had moved into his condo in Riverdale. The condo was Palulu’s symbol of achievement that he had not wanted to tarnish by dragging into his life of crime and violence. But he had no choice. The condo was the closest thing he had to a sanctuary. Far removed from the teeming Cuban enclaves of Union City, Brooklyn, or the South Bronx, it created for him the illusion of safety.
On a blustery evening, Palulu returned to the condo with Cuesta, his trusty Marielito. He entered the building, using his key, and pushed the button for the elevator.
Neither Palulu nor Cuesta noticed that there was a man hiding in a mass of artificial shrubbery that decorated the lobby. The man crept out from behind the shrubbery and rushed up on the two men from the rear.
Clearly this attempt had been designed so that the gunman could get as close to his target as possible. This would not be a drive-by shooting, or someone taking potshots from a distance. This would be up close and personal.
The gunman put the gun to the back of Palulu’s head and pulled the trigger. Blood sprayed on impact, and Palulu fell to the marble floor. The shooter then quickly fired two shots at Cuesta, hitting him twice in the back. The bodyguard also collapsed onto the floor. The gunman ran out of the building.
A first-floor neighbor heard the gunshots and came into the lobby, where the two men were lying in pools of blood. Fire/rescue units arrived, and Palulu and Cuesta were rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, across the Harlem River at the upper tip of Manhattan.
There, in the emergency room, it would be determined that the bullet that entered Palulu’s head had miraculously skirted around his skull and never penetrated his brain. He was alive. In fact, it wasn’t even that bad an injury. The bodyguard, Cuesta, had also survived.
From his hacienda south of Miami, Battle received the news of yet another failed attempt on Palulu. Each time that his nemesis survived, Battle felt as if it took years off his own life.
Rumors circulated that Palulu was somehow protected by the orishas, the Santería spirits. He was protected by a bembe. This necessitated that Battle visit a babalawo and do his own bembe to overpower Palulu’s bembe. The effort to kill the one-legged gangster was now not just a matter for mortal men; it was a war between the spirits, competing babalawos, who conjured the power of various deities to manipulate the course of events in their favor.
Even after a full Santería ceremony with lots of candles, a sacrificial chicken, chicken’s blood, some rum, and lots of cigar smoke, Battle left nothing to chance. He got on a plane and flew to New York.
This time, the hit would be painstakingly plotted out. Lalo Pons recruited a hit team of two Cuban American brothers, Gabriel and Ariel Pinalaver. The brothers were considered to be fearless killers who could get the job done. They would be backed up by a second team of hit men.
The hit would take place in a section of the Bronx known as Belmont, a working-class Italian neighborhood. Palulu had recently opened a lottery office on East 180th Street, from which he ran a modest bolita operation. After Palulu was followed for weeks to establish his routine, it was determined that he arrived at his lottery office late at night. The hit men would stake out the location, wait for Palulu, and shoot him outside his office.
Battle wanted to be there, near enough to the location so that he could respond immediately when the shooting occurred and verify for himself that Palulu was dead.
On the night of September 28, an hour before midnight, Palulu arrived in Belmont in his car. He drove around the block a few times looking for a parking space and eventually wound up having to park a couple blocks away from the building where his office was located, near the corner of 180th Street and Arthur Avenue. He got out of his car, locked the car door, and began limping along 180th Street. When he got near the intersection with Arthur Avenue, suddenly two cars approached, coming from different directions. One car pulled up in front of Palulu, blocking his way; Palulu turned to flee, but the other car screeched to a halt from behind, blocking that direction. Out of the car popped the Pinalaver brothers, armed to the gills with assorted weapons. They opened fire on Palulu, riddling him with eleven bullets.
Palulu twisted in the street and fell face-first onto the pavement.
He was pretty sure he was dead. Or maybe not. He could hear the sound of voices, feet walking on the pavement. He heard someone walk over to him, sensed the presence of someone looking down at him, felt someone put a foot underneath his torso and flip kick his body over onto his back. He could feel the blood oozing from his body, blood gurgling from his mouth. Barely able to open his eyes, in a haze, he looked up and saw someone hunched over looking down at him. He squinted, tried to focus. Looked like . . . could it be? It was. El Padrino. José Miguel Battle. The boss was standing over Palulu. And he was laughing. This was the last thing Palulu saw before his whole world descended into darkness, and he fell unconscious.
Was this the end for Palulu?
A fire/rescue unit arrived and rushed Palulu to the hospital. One miscalculation made by Lalo Pons and his hit team was that there was a hospital just three blocks away. Palulu arrived at St. Barnabas Hospital already on life support. A trauma team began immediate heart surgery. They were able to restart his heart, but he soon lapsed into a coma and stayed that way, in grave condition, for the next few days.
Battle stayed in the New York area, at his condominium apartment in Union City, which he maintained even though he had now fully relocated to Miami. He intended to remain in New York until he received word that Palulu was dead.
On October 2, five days after the shooting, Battle received word from a contact in the Bronx. The prognosis was not good. Not only had Palulu come out of his coma, but that afternoon Detective Kalafus of the NYPD had made a visit to his room. The pendejo was alive, and he was talking. Word was that he was in critical condition, but he had survived the shooting and given a statement to the New York detective who dressed like he was a cowboy from out west.
Battle and his people were stupefied, El Padrino most of all. He had seen Palulu for himself, riddled with bullets, bleeding to death in the street. He saw what he thought was Palulu expiring, savoring that moment as if it were a sweet kiss from the Angel of Death, the taste of revenge lingering in his gullet like fine Santiago rum. But now, it seemed, it was as if his eyes had played tricks on him. It was like many of his underlings had said: Padrino, he can’t be killed. He’s El Diablo. I shot him in the head. I know he was dead. But he’s alive. Incredible. I don’t even think he’s human.
Among other things, Palulu’s continued existence was causing great consternation for the Corporation, most notably the two men who were currently handing the day-to-day operations of the organization. Abraham Rydz and Miguel Battle Jr. had also recently moved to Miami. The move was motivated by Rydz’s needing to be near his dying mother, who lived in Miami Beach. Rydz and Miguelito purchased plots of land within a half block of one another in Key Biscayne, where they planned to build their dream homes. In Miami, the two men established a company called Union Financial Research. Ostensibly it was a mortgage lending company, but it was also a front for the bolita business in New York. Proceeds from bolita were being funneled into the company, which was based out of an office in Miami, with real employees, including secretaries, an accountant, and Rydz and Battle as CEOs.
Battle Sr. was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the bolita business, though he still collected his cut and took care of various matters of strategy, development, and, most of all, discipline and retribution.
The Palulu matter had been an issue for many years. Now, as far as Rydz and Junior were concerned, it had become a major distraction. El Padrino hardly talked about anything else. It was in everyone’s interest that the Palulu matter be resolved so that they could get on with their lives.
For the first time, Abraham Rydz, along with Battle Sr., Lalo Pons, and others among the ruling council of the Corporation, became involved in the planning of the hit. Everyone felt they needed to act fast. The idea was to kill Palulu while he was still in the hospital. The hit was planned quietly, so as few people as possible would know about it. The plan was devised by Rydz, among others, and Lalo recruited the gunman, a Cuban named Domingues.
On the night of October 7, two nurses were working the late-night shift at St. Barnabas Hospital, where Palulu was an inpatient on Wing Seven South, in room 711. Deloris Edwards and Romana Bautista were at the front desk. It was late—around 3:35 A.M.—a time when the hospital was at its most quiet.
Suddenly, from down the hallway came a sound—Pop! Pop!
“Did you hear that?” one nurse said to the other.
They agreed that it was likely the sound of an oxygen line popping off its wall fixture, which was a chronic problem on their wing. Nurse Edwards headed off to check the rooms, while Nurse Bautista stayed at the nurses’ station working on paperwork.
At that moment, there appeared in the hallway a male nurse—or at least someone who the nurses assumed was a male nurse. He was wearing a hospital smock, like the other male nurses. But it was not anyone the nurses had seen before. He was Hispanic, with a caramel complexion, curly black hair, and a thin mustache. He had not checked in at the nurses’ station, as all nurses are required to do at the beginning of their shift.
“Hey there, hold up a minute,” Nurse Bautista called to the man.
The man did not respond; he quickly disappeared into a stairwell.
Meanwhile, that popping sound earlier had awakened Leroy Middleton, a patient in room 711, which he shared with Palulu. Middleton roused himself from a medication-induced slumber, got up, and headed to the toilet to urinate. As he walked past Palulu’s bed in the semidarkness, he saw what he thought could be blood, but he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He went into the bathroom, peed, then walked back out to the room. By now, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, he walked over and looked at Palulu, whose face was covered in blood. Leroy pushed the emergency call button.
The nurses rushed into the room and flipped on the light. What they saw was a ghastly sight: Palulu Enriquez had been shot multiple times at close range.
The hit was diabolical but effective. Domingues, disguised as a male nurse, had sneaked into Palulu’s room and done the deed. No doubt there were people in security at St. Barnabas who had been bought off to facilitate his entering the hospital and making his way to Palulu’s room without being stopped or questioned.
Palulu was finally dead.
It had been part of the plan that none of the originators of the hit— Battle Sr., Rydz, or Lalo Pons—would be in the New York area when the killing occurred. In the interest of plausible deniability, they were to be as far away as possible. Both Battle and Rydz had returned to Miami days before the hit was scheduled to occur.
On the afternoon of October 7, Battle, Rydz, and a handful of others were engaged in a card game at El Zapotal, Battle’s home in South Miami. It had become one of the ironies of the Corporation that the brain trust of the organization was now almost completely based in Miami, while the business—and most of the events that shaped its fortunes—still emanated from the New York metropolitan area. And yet the universe of the Corporation was clearly defined and circumscribed; it had become a mind-set not necessarily defined by geography but by mutual interests. The Corporation had become an entity that defied time and space.
At the card game, Battle received a phone call. He left to take the call and then returned, grinning from ear to ear.
“It’s done,” he announced to the handful of men at the table. “Palulu is dead.”
Abraham Rydz breathed a big sigh of relief. He immediately got on the phone with Nene Marquez, the Brooklyn boss of the Corporation, and authorized the release of $100,000 from the UNESCO fund to be paid to Domingues and a couple of others who had helped with the logistics involved in carrying out the hit.
Battle had stored on ice a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon. He cracked open a few of them and poured champagne for everyone in the room. The men extended their glasses, and El Padrino proclaimed, “Let’s drink champagne and raise a toast to our enemies. Drink up.”
It was an auspicious occasion. After all these years, José Miguel had finally avenged the murder of his little brother.
The partying did not stop there. For the next week, Battle celebrated the death of Palulu. There were impromptu parties at a couple of favored restaurants in Miami, and parties at El Zapotal. Guests at the house noted that as they arrived, there was a new wrinkle, something they had never seen before. Upon entering the front door, each guest was individually presented with a small pouch. What is this? they asked. When they opened the pouch, they found out: cocaine. Each pouch was filled with cocaine.
Let the festivities begin!
THE DEATH OF PALULU WAS IN ONE SENSE MONUMENTAL. IT WAS AS IF A PRESSURE valve had been released, and everyone associated with the Corporation could breathe again. On the other hand, it had little effect on the daily running of the bolita business, which continued to grow throughout the early 1980s.
As partners and joint overseers of the organization, Abraham Rydz and Battle Jr. solidified a personal relationship that had been developing over the years. Rydz was more than a mentor; he had become a surrogate father to Junior, whom he referred to as Migue.
When Battle Sr. had first asked Rydz to “look out for my son” while he was away in prison, he had to have known that he was effectively switching his son’s loyalties to El Polaco. His own relationship with Junior had been distant, though he often professed love for his son, and his loyalty was sacrosanct. But Battle knew that he would never have the closeness that Rydz and Junior had—a closeness based on an innate reserve and cautiousness they shared, as opposed to his own impulsiveness and blunt leadership style.
When Rydz first approached Junior, he had been characteristically shrewd. He did not tell Migue, “Your father wants me to take care of you.” Instead, he said, “Migue, I need a favor. I’m going to say in the street that we have become partners so that I get protection by using the Battle name.” Using the name was like life insurance. As Rydz said years later, “People were really afraid of José Miguel Sr.; they wouldn’t fool around with Mr. Battle . . . I needed the name Battle for the protection . . . the respect.”
Junior understood. He said to his friend, “Okay, do that, and maybe someday we will really become partners.” The partnership became a real thing shortly thereafter.
By the early 1980s, Rydz’s previous partner, Luis “Tinta” Rey, had left the business. Rydz and Migue spent nearly every day together. A year after they both moved to Miami, construction began on their dual homes located so close together they could share a cup of sugar. Rydz had a new wife and, from a previous marriage, an adult daughter who lived separately. Junior had two young sons. Their families shared personal time together as well as the time the two men spent reconfiguring the financial structure of the Corporation.
One of the first orders of business was to establish a number of offshore companies into which they would deposit cash overflow from the bolita business. There was a company called Lindseed, and another called Stenara, based in the Dutch Antilles. There was Voltaire and Darmont, based in Panama City. There was a company called Aztec, also based in Panama, and half a dozen others around the globe. The names of neither Rydz nor Battle were associated with these shell companies; the names listed as owners or CEOs were merely front men for the Corporation. And the companies themselves were designed solely as fraudulent financial entities that lent money to real companies in the United States owned by Rydz and Miguel Battle. In this way, tens of millions of dollars were laundered on an annual basis.
In addition to Union Financial Research, Rydz and Battle started a company in Miami called YMR, a clothing manufacturing company. This was a legitimate company; YMR had a factory in the Dominican Republic that manufactured women’s apparel. Other companies owned by Rydz and Migue included Arnold Stores, a popular chain of stores throughout South Florida that sold women’s clothing at affordable prices. They also bought into a company called Trends, and a subsidiary called Yes U.S., both of which manufactured clothing and sold their products to large retail stores like Target and Wal-Mart.
What Rydz and Migue created in a short number of years constituted a massive financial structure. “To operate these companies,” Rydz would later say, “you need to have hundreds of millions of dollars. You have money tied up in inventory, money tied to the factories, and money tied up in the manufacture and distribution of merchandise.” To sustain these operations, in addition to the money coming in from bolita, YMR took out a loan of $8 million from the Republic Bank of Philadelphia.
In Miami, both Rydz and Migue received a salary from YMR. Both were officially taking in around half a million dollars as owners and operators of the business. José Miguel Sr. was not a party to these endeavors. In time, the success of Rydz and Migue’s financial empire would cause resentment between Battle Sr. and his two underlings, but in the 1980s there was so much money flowing down to Miami from New York that no one had any complaints.
Even with Isleño Dávila’s organization, La Compañía, expanding into Harlem and forming a partnership with the Lucchese family, the Corporation suffered no loss of business in New York. If anything, the existence of La Compañía alongside the Corporation created a bolita frenzy in the city. As more and more Latinos from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as other Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti, flooded into New York—alongside native New Yorkers, black and white, who had been playing the number for much of their lives—the volume of players was likely the highest it had ever been in history. This was truly the era of bolita in New York. There was no way to officially calculate the volume of business; every three months or so, records from the various offices were shredded and destroyed. Though it was a business that generated huge cash flow in the underground economy, there was no way to accurately quantify the numbers. Even so, it was likely that bolita was generating billions of dollars annually.
This created a problem: what to do with all that money? Bank accounts were opened in Switzerland and various other overseas locations. Rydz and Battle were careful to make sure that, given the criminal notoriety of José Miguel Battle, the Battle name was not linked to any of the accounts. Instead, they used Maurilio Marquez, the brother of Nene Marquez, as a front man. Maurilio was a Venezuelan citizen, a foreigner, and therefore could legally make investments to Union Financial Research and YMR from the various shell companies without triggering an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
The enterprise created by Rydz and Miguelito was airtight. It had been brilliantly conceived, designed to make them and their offspring rich for generations to come.
Prerequisites of this fraudulent financial empire were caution and secrecy. Rydz and Battle Jr. never discussed business on the phone or in the car. To talk with each other, or with business associates, they only used public pay phones. Miguelito was especially paranoid. Anything to do with the financial structure of the bolita business was communicated mostly in person, with almost nothing written down on paper. Members of the Corporation would fly from Miami to New York and back simply to talk about business. Battle Jr. told everyone, “Act as if we are already under investigation, as if your phone is bugged, your car is bugged. Take every precaution. You can never be too careful.”
The Swiss bank account was in Maurilio Marquez’s name. Rydz and Battle flew to Nassau, in the Bahamas, or to Caracas, Venezuela, just to get on the phone to talk to the bankers in Switzerland. No calls to Switzerland were ever made from the United States.
The organization also had an accountant, Orestas Vidan, a Cuban who was partial to guayabera shirts. Vidan was known as “El Cocinero,” the Cook, because it was his job to “cook the books.”
At the root of this fulsome tree, with its many branches extending into multiple areas of high finance, was a nutrient as old as the republic: little green pieces of paper. Cash was the elixir that fed the beast. Stacks and stacks of bills came into the counting rooms of the bolita operation, and they needed to by moved out of New York to Miami and other destinations far beyond.
It all started at the street level in the money rooms where proceeds were stored. It was an unwritten rule in the business that the money was always kept at a separate location from the betting holes or even the offices where the record keeping took place. Usually the Corporation would have rented out a series of unfurnished apartments in a building; one might be set up as an office, and elsewhere in the building would be a money storage apartment. The storage apartments, or “banks,” were heavily protected by armed soldiers of the organization. Typically the only people allowed in those rooms were the organization’s “counters,” people who used counting machines to count the cash and store it in envelopes, bags, and suitcases. The counters were often family members or relatives of people in the organization, the theory being that they could be trusted.
One person who counted money for La Compañía—Dávila’s organization—was Jorge “George” Dávila, Isleño Dávila’s nephew. George was the son of Jorge “Tony” Dávila, Isleño’s brother, who was also a seasoned bolitero. As a teenager, George had become fascinated by the business, and, as only a young person can, he soaked up knowledge and information about bolita as if he were learning a new language. One of the things that caught his attention was the money.
“We had a saying about this era; we called it La época de los sobres, the season of the envelopes,” remembered George Dávila. “There was so much money that by the time you had picked it up from the stores, traditionally in envelopes, you needed a large brown paper bag or even a satchel to carry the envelopes . . . I remember walking as a kid, my dad would take me on his routes to the best stores, or to a new store that had recently opened. He would go to the numbers offices and look at the ledgers, see what’s going on. Then we would go to the money . . . The money office was usually a one-bedroom apartment where the living room or bedroom was the counting area, and the money was stored in the other room. I mean, the whole apartment smelled like money. Imagine that smell you get when you put a stack of bills to your nose. The whole room was like that. Especially for a teenager, a kid, it was an amazing experience.”
From there, the cash was divided up and distributed, usually in hundred-dollar bills. Many people received a cut. With the Corporation, much of the cash was destined for Miami. José Miguel Battle received a monthly take of 17 percent. Battle Jr. received the same, as did Rydz. In total, the Miami brain trust received approximately 50 percent of the weekly take, which could be anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million. The other half was divided between people like Nene Marquez, Lalo Pons, the Mafia, and thirty or forty other entities that worked for or facilitated the organization, including dirty cops, lawyers, and judges.
Transporting the cash outside the city was often tricky. There was really no other way to do it than by human courier. Cash was constantly being transported by trains, planes, and automobiles to Miami and points beyond. Usually, underlings in the organization were assigned the task of transporting packages, briefcases, or suitcases, often not knowing what they were carrying. Sometimes, in emergencies, the bosses themselves were forced to serve as couriers.
One day in June 1983, Rydz and Miguelito made a run to New York to pick up half a million dollars in cash. It was nothing unusual. The two were so often in each other’s company that even though there was an age difference of twenty years between them, they were referred to by family and friends as “the twins.” On this occasion, the plan was to catch a flight in the morning to John F. Kennedy Airport, pick up the money from Nene Marquez, and then return on a flight later that evening.
It was not illegal to transport large amounts of cash from state to state. Sometimes the airlines even assigned an armed guard to a customer to take the cash to and from the terminal. On this occasion, how-ever, Rydz and Battle were unaware that they were on an international flight that was leaving from Kennedy Airport, stopping in Miami, and then continuing on to Colombia. Different laws applied to international flights; the money needed to be declared.
The men were carrying the money in two shopping bags. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills had been wrapped in festive paper to give the impression that they were carrying birthday gifts. Rydz and Battle hadn’t even noticed that the bills were wrapped in Christmas paper, which was oddly out of season.
“What is this?” said the female security person. “Christmas presents in the middle of June? Can I take a look at this?”
Battle Jr. was in front of Rydz. He froze and said nothing.
Seeing what was going on, Rydz stepped in front of Battle Jr. and said to the woman, “That’s mine. It’s money, that’s all. We’re taking money to Miami.”
The woman peeled open one of the packages, then another. The realization that the dozens of brightly wrapped packets were filled with cash caused the other security personnel to gather around. This was definitely something out of the ordinary.
One of the male security people said, “How much money is here?”
“I don’t know,” said Rydz. “Maybe five hundred thousand dollars.”
By now, the female guard had called a supervisor on a walkie-talkie, and more security people were arriving.
The male guard said to Rydz, “You can’t just carry this on a plane. This money has to be declared.”
“I do it all the time,” said Rydz. “It’s not illegal. We’re going to Miami.” Rydz held up his ticket, which showed that he was flying from New York to Miami.
“You may be stopping in Miami, but this is an international flight,” said the guard. “This money has to be declared through customs and reported to the IRS.”
While everyone was talking, Battle Jr. slipped away from the group. One of the things he was most worried about was that before he and Rydz parted ways with Nene Marquez, their junior partner had given him a ledger sheet, or invoice, with numbers for the bolita business that month. He had that sheet of paper in his pocket. It would have been indecipherable to anyone who didn’t know what it was, but it occurred to him that if he and Rydz were searched, the security people would find that paper and start asking questions.
With no one looking, Battle Jr. tore the paper up into little pieces. As he sauntered over to a waste bin and threw away the pieces, one of the guards said, “Hey, you, what is that?”
“What?” said Battle Jr., acting oblivious.
The guard came over and moved Battle Jr. aside. He began digging in the garbage to retrieve the bits of paper. Not much was thought of this at the time, but they would be safeguarded, pieced together, and eventually decoded. One day far in the future, they would be used as evidence to take down the Corporation.
The various guards and supervisors were now somewhat alarmed; these guys were acting like they had something to hide. The airport police were called, and the money was confiscated. Rydz and Battle Jr. were not arrested—nobody knew of any crime they could be charged with—but they were detained. The cops brought them downstairs to a police office, where they were held for the next six hours.
At one point, an airport cop counted the money, while other cops stood nearby. After counting out $460,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the cop looked at Rydz and Battle Jr. and said, “For this amount of money, I would kill my mother.”
A security lady came to the two men with a form to sign. She said, “The IRS will hold this money until you are ready to make a claim for it. Do you understand?”
Rydz and Battle nodded yes. They were allowed to go. They boarded a later flight back to Miami—without the money.
They were told by a lawyer, “If you try to reclaim the money, the IRS is going to come after you. If I were you, I would say, ‘The money is not mine.’ ”
When contacted by a representative of the government, Rydz and Battle Jr. had their lawyer say, “My clients don’t want the money.”
“What do you want us to do with it?” asked the representative.
“Do whatever you want. Give it to the Cancer League. Give it to charity. That money does not belong to my clients.”
In the end, Rydz and Battle Jr. simply wrote off the money. It was the price of doing business. To the Corporation, half a million dollars was chump change.
FOR MONTHS, ROBERT HOPKINS HAD BEEN TRYING TO SMOOTH THE WATERS. HE HAD brokered the deal between Isleño and Battle Sr. at Isleño’s estate in Fort Lauderdale. Battle Sr. had proven to be a man of his word, delivering to Hopkins, in person, $50,000 in cash, which the Irishman passed on to Isleño. This should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.
Recently there had been at least two firebombings of bolita spots, one belonging to the Corporation and one to La Compañía, which the Lucchese family viewed as an act against them. The torchings were done late at night, so no one was hurt. No group claimed responsibility. But it was clear that someone was attempting to deliver a message. To Hopkins, it was as if they were one matchstick away from all-out war.
In the fall of 1983, Hopkins successfully arranged a high-powered meeting between himself, a partner of his named Kevin Quinn, Isleño Dávila, Abraham Rydz, and José Miguel Battle Jr. Having flown up from Miami, Rydz and Battle were there representing the Corporation. Hopkins said that he was speaking on behalf of his partners in the Lucchese crime family when he said, “The two-block rule must be honored.”
Battle Jr. noted that in Brooklyn, a bolita spot had opened up a half block away from a Corporation spot. “Well,” said Hopkins, “that spot was opened by La Compañía. That’s a Cuban spot. You need to work that out between the two of you. I can guarantee that my people will not violate the two-block rule.”
Rydz and Battle Jr. were suspicious. After the meeting, they spoke separately with Isleño, who told them, “Look, that spot a half block away from your spot, we did not open it. The Italians opened that spot. If you want to burn out that spot, you will get no objection from me.”
After Isleño departed, Rydz and Jr. stood on a busy street corner in midtown Manhattan. “Isleño,” said Miguelito, shaking his head. “He’s sneaky. He wants us to take out that spot so he can take advantage of it. Whatever we do, make sure we leave that spot alone.”
It may have been strategic thinking or paranoia on Jr.’s part, but it was a reflection of how duplicitous the bolita terrain had become.
Rydz noticed that at a movie theater across the street, emblazoned on the marquee was the title of the movie currently playing: Gandhi. Rydz thought, Gandhi, wasn’t he all about peace and nonviolence? That was a philosophy far removed from where the boliteros seemed to be headed.
In an attempt to resolve the conflict, there were other meetings, including one at the Palma Boys Social Club in Spanish Harlem with Fat Tony Salerno and Fish Cafaro. Battle Sr. flew in from Miami for that meeting. Rydz and Battle Jr. also attended. Salerno, chomping on his ubiquitous stogie, warned the Cubans to keep the peace.
Battle said, “Tony, I’m never the one to throw the first stone. You know that. But if somebody crosses me, they’re gonna be in trouble.”
Salerno promised his Cuban associates that the Italians would honor the two-block rule.
There was one final meeting, in late 1983, a major summit of Cuban and Italian mobsters with controlling interests in the numbers racket. The meeting took place at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at Third Avenue and 72nd Street, and it was attended by the reigning bolita elite at the time. Among those present were Isleño Dávila, Omar Broche, Spanish Raymond Marquez, and Pedro Acosta, all representing La Compañía. Bob Hopkins and his partners were present, as were representatives of the Five Families.
The Italians had a complaint, or “beef.” It was alleged that the Cubans were deliberately tipping off the police about their spots, so that they would be raided and shut down. Then the Cubans would open their own spot at a nearby location. It was, the Italians complained, a sneaky way to get around the two-block rule.
The Cubans denied they had been doing this.
As everyone spilled out of this dinner meeting, it was clear that nothing had been resolved. The two sides were refusing to back down. As the group of Cubans stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, a car drove by and someone in the car opened fire with an automatic weapon. Everyone ducked for cover. The car peeled away from the scene.
One of the Cubans, Pedro Acosta, was hit. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room.
Hopkins had been standing with the Cubans at the time the shooting began. He had taken cover like everyone else. Later, when he heard that Acosta had died, he knew his attempts to be a peacemaker were over. He had failed. The war was on.
EVEN THOUGH NEITHER JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE SR. NOR ANY OTHER REPRESENTATIVE OF the Corporation had been at the meeting, El Padrino took the killing of Acosta as a personal affront. A Cuban bolitero had been brazenly murdered by the Italians. Battle told Lalo Pons, the leader of his SS squad, “We are at war with the Mafia.”
Over the next nineteen months, what became known to police as “the arson wars” exploded like a long-dormant volcano that had rumbled to life. In a city that was already experiencing a spiraling homicide rate due to the scourge of crack cocaine, the arson wars were an unwelcome addition to a hyperviolent era.
At first the arsons hardly made the newspapers. The city had famously weathered a previous era of arson, in the 1970s, when the torching of buildings, especially in the Bronx, became a common insurance scam. From the press box at Yankee Stadium, sportscaster Howard Cosell had witnessed the phenomenon and announced to a nationwide audience, “The Bronx is burning.” It became a phrase that seemed to define the era.
So arsons were not particularly new or notable in New York. But it soon became apparent that these were not insurance fraud burnings. Something different was happening here. This became especially apparent when innocent people began to die.
From September 1983 to June 1985, there would be sixty fires set at dozens of locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In these fires, eight people would be burned to death, including a four-year-old girl and her teenage babysitter. By the time it was over, the city would be repulsed, and the reputation of the Corporation would be dragged into the gutter.
Lalo Pons organized the team of arsonists who carried out the attacks. One of his key operatives was a hulking, nearly 350-pound lifelong street criminal named Willie Diaz.
A Brooklyn native, Diaz was Puerto Rican. When he was a baby, his parents moved from Puerto Rico to the neighborhood of Bushwick, where Willie was raised in a housing project. By the time he was fifteen, he was a member of a gang called the Champions. After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School, he embarked on a life of petty crime. At the age of seventeen, he stole two hundred pigeons from a neighbor’s coop and sold them to a pet store. Later that year, he got arrested for hitting his girlfriend in public. He was also caught stealing Social Security checks. By the age of nineteen, he had advanced to dealing drugs, mugging people, and robbing liquor stores to support himself.
At six foot one, with dark, sunken eyes, Willie had the sort of menacing look that helped him land a job as a nightclub bouncer. Not long after that, he became a pimp and even lived in an apartment with three prostitutes who worked for him.
Money was hard to come by. Willie was a low-level hustler, a punk. Left to his own devices, he was destined for prison, which is why when his Cuban girlfriend’s mother, Grace, suggested he come work for her at a local bolita spot, Willie jumped at the chance. The place, an anonymous storefront designed to look like an OTB (off-track betting) outlet, was located on Greene Avenue. At first, Willie wasn’t even paid. He was there as Grace’s understudy. She taught him all about the business; eventually he was working at the bettor’s window taking bets and reporting to a bolita manager named Manuel “Manny” Guzman.
Willie knew little about the organization he was now working for, and he didn’t ask too many questions. In June 1981, he was to get an education when the bolita hole where he worked was raided by cops and he was arrested on a policy violation. He was cuffed and taken to arraignment court, where, out of the blue, a lawyer showed up and told him he was there to take care of everything. “The boys sent me,” explained the lawyer. Willie pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge; the $250 fee was paid for by the Corporation. Willie was free to walk out of court.
Manny Guzman explained it: “Our organization is like a Mafia family of Cubans.” He told Willie that he now owed the Corporation, and that they would call upon him someday to do “something special.”
That opportunity presented itself in September 1983, when Lalo Pons put out the word within the organization that he was looking to assemble an “enforcement crew” whose first order of business would be to burn down rival bolita spots. Manny Guzman recommended Willie to Lalo Pons.
When Willie met Pons, the physical disparity between the two was comical: Willie was huge and fat, and Pons was short and wiry. Not only was the little man the boss, but he was fond of referring to himself as “Napoleon,” a nickname he encouraged others to use.
Pons told Willie to put together a crew. They would be paid $1,000 for the first arson and $2,500 for each job after that. Though ostensibly the arson campaign began as a war against the Italians, eventually Pons was ordering hits on locations belonging to La Compañía as well. Willie would later admit to having undertaken upward of thirty arson contracts on spots in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Among the most notorious of these crimes were:
According to Willie, “I used a friend named Hector Aviles, because he needed the money. This was Hector’s first arson for me, but we had run together growing up, and I knew Hector was bold.” On September 29, 1983, as he always did, Willie first scouted out the location by going inside the bolita hole and placing a bet, always betting the same number—5-7-6. He placed his bet with Evelyn Herrara, the bolita writer behind the counter. Willie looked around the store to see who was present, where the entrances and exits were located, and how best to torch the place. “I saw the back door and figured the girl [working there] would have a way to get out. So I went back to the car and sent Hector in with the gas.”
The technique was basic: Hector carried a pail of gas into the place, splashed it around, and lit it on fire.
Outside, half a block away, Willie had the hood of his car up to make it look as though he had stopped the car because he had engine trouble. He saw Hector come running out of the store with flames already visible behind him. “I slammed the hood down and we drove away. As we left we saw a guy go into the place, like to try to rescue the girl. We drove back to the old neighborhood slowly . . . I found a pay phone and paged Lalo with a ‘ten-four,’ the signal that the fire was done. It was the signal I always used.”
Later that day, Grace called Willie and told him that a woman had died in the fire. The official cause of death, according to the medical examiner’s office, was asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide inhalation, as well as burn trauma to her body.
“Lalo was pissed,” remembered Willie. He thought the death of the girl would cause them problems with the police. But then it was reported in the newspaper that the man who Willie and Hector had seen running into the store was Evelyn Herrara’s fiancé. It was reported that the fiancé earlier on the day of the attack had had a loud public argument with Evelyn. The cops believed that he was the primary suspect.
Sure enough, a few days later, the fiancé was wrongfully arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Herrara. Willie noted that Lalo, his boss, was “happy about that. Real happy.”
By March 25, 1984, Willie had assembled a more professional crew of arsonists. Among his people were two African Americans, Anthony “Red” Morgan and Calvin Coleman, who preferred to be known by the nickname “Truth and Understanding.” Coleman was a spiritualist who sometimes spouted quotes from the Old Testament.
Willie owned an old yellow cab that was no longer operational as a taxi. The three men loaded into the car and drove to the location identified by Lalo as the place they were supposed to torch. It was a bolita spot disguised to look like a bodega. Willie went in first to scout out the location; he placed a bet on 5-7-6 and checked the place out. There were three people in there at the time, two boliteros—Carlos Rivera and Angel Castro—who were behind bulletproof glass, and a customer, Prudencio Crespo, who was there to place a bet.
Crespo became suspicious when he saw the two black guys enter carrying a pail of some kind of liquid. He saw one of them dump the contents of the pail. Crespo smelled gas and saw a liquid spreading across the floor.
“Let’s go!” yelled Red Morgan to Calvin Coleman. They ignited the gas and bolted toward the door.
Crespo saw the eruption of the flames and ran. He was right behind the two arsonists, dashing through the fire.
Outside, Willie Diaz was standing by the taxi getaway car, watching the front of the store. As he later remembered it, “I heard a loud explosion . . . I saw [Coleman] fly right out the front door and land right on the street, the concrete . . . He got up. His feet were on fire. So he pounded them out and ran straight toward where I was at . . . He was running so fast he almost ran right past the car. I had the door open for him. He jumped in the car.” Morgan, the other arsonist, also got in the car. Said Diaz, “The place was engulfed in fire. There was a lot of fire coming out of the place.”
Prudencio Crespo was lucky to have escaped. The two boliteros inside were not so fortunate. Carlos Rivera and Angel Castro choked to death on the thick black smoke, and their bodies were incinerated in the fire.
It had been a sweltering summer in the city when, on August 23, Edna Rodriguez entered the bolita spot on a busy stretch of Westchester Avenue to place a bet. The location was a legitimate bodega with the policy operation in a rear room. Edna visited the place a couple times every day. Inside, she saw many familiar faces, including Trinidad “Trini” Rodriguez (no relation to Edna), who was taking the bets, and another woman, seventy-four-year-old Blossom Layton.
Down the street, Willie Diaz and Red Morgan exited the subway. Morgan was carrying a pail lined with a plastic bag that was filled with gas. Given the density of traffic on Westchester Avenue, the two arsonists decided it would be better to do this burning on foot, using the subway as their getaway vehicle.
Inside the bodega, Edna Rodriguez noticed a black male enter, carrying what she thought was a plastic bag. He set down the bag and bent over as if he were tying his shoe. Nothing seemed strange to Edna, until she saw the man leave the location and break into a run. The next thing she knew, the store was engulfed by smoke and flames.
Edna was able to help a customer out of the store, but the fire was too intense to help the others. Trinidad Rodriguez and Blossom Layton were trapped inside. Fire department units arrived and battled the blaze, but there was little they could do to rescue anyone. The charred bodies of Rodriquez and Layton were removed from the scene. A third woman, Marlene Francis, had fled to a bathroom to escape the flames. She survived for a week in the hospital burn unit, but the poisoning from the carbon monoxide and the infection from the first-degree burns on her body destroyed her immune system. She died a slow and painful death.
A shoe repair shop in Hell’s Kitchen, on West 56th Street between 9th and 10th avenues, served as a popular Mafia-controlled numbers spot. Victor Hernandez, who ran the place, had previously received a threatening phone call that he needed to stop taking bets or there would be trouble. Knowing that there were tensions between the Cubans and the Italians, and that there had been a rash of arsons at bolita spots around the city, Hernandez took the call seriously. It was his intention to shut down bolita operations in the back of the shoe repair store within the next couple days.
Willie Diaz was given the assignment to hit this spot by his boss, Lalo Pons. Willie put together a team that included himself, Red Morgan, Hector Aviles, and Nelson Guzman.
On the afternoon of October 27, following the usual routine, Willie went into the bolita location to place a bet and check it out. Then he departed and retrieved his car to serve as the getaway driver. The plan was for Aviles and Guzman to block the front door to the shop so no one could enter, while Red Morgan lit the fire in the rear of the shop.
Just before the arsonists arrived, Victor Hernandez received a visit at the shoe store from his girlfriend, nineteen-year-old Laura Sirgo. She had brought along a little girl she was babysitting that day, Jannin Toribio, who happened to be celebrating her fourth birthday.
Victor was so pleased to see Laura and the little birthday girl that he hardly noticed a guy with a gas can slip by him toward the back of the store.
Suddenly, there was a loud explosion that knocked Victor off his feet. By the time he stood up, smoke and flames had engulfed the store. Victor found Laura and Janin and tried to lead them out of the store. Somehow the flames had circled in front of them and were blocking the exit. Victor and the two females were separated. His eyes singed in the fire, Victor was able to crawl out of the store, but the girls did not make it.
Little Jannin Toribio died from smoke inhalation. Laura Sirgo lived for twelve days at St. Clare’s Hospital, in a coma, until she also succumbed to her injuries as a result of the fire.
ALL IN ALL, IT WAS AN UNPRECEDENTED CAMPAIGN OF TERROR AND DEATH, CULMINATING in this unfathomable tragedy, the killing of an innocent four-year-old child.
Lalo Pons was concerned. This latest atrocity received extensive coverage in the city’s tabloid newspapers, the Daily News and the Post, and on the television news.
By this point, the Corporation’s crews had committed more than fifty arsons, and Willie Diaz’s team had done at least half of them. The Italians had retaliated and burned down nearly forty of the Corporation’s spots. Twenty-five people had died on both sides, forty more had been injured, many seriously, and one man had been wrongfully convicted for the murder of his fiancée. Among themselves, many of the boliteros expressed revulsion. These were family men, with wives and children. The deaths of innocent women and children was sickening. And yet through it all, no one called for it to be stopped. No one demanded that the arsons be immediately discontinued.
The war between the Corporation and the Mafia had become a scourge of biblical proportions, an uncontrollable conflagration of smoke and flames tearing through the House of Bolita.