IT WAS A SULTRY SATURDAY MORNING IN HAVANA ON JULY 12, 1997, WHEN A LOUD BOOOOOM! rocked the lobby of the Hotel Capri, shattering glass and kicking up a cloud of dust that spread out into the street. Police cars arrived at the scene. Apparently someone had planted a bomb in the lobby of the hotel. A number of people were shaken, some with cuts and bruises from having fallen to the ground, but, miraculously, no one was seriously injured.
The Capri was one of the city’s famous hotels from the era of the 1950s. Back then it was owned by Trafficante, and the Casino de Capri, located just off the lobby, was where actor George Raft presided as a meeter and greeter. In its glory days, the Capri had been a meeting place for cops, criminals, and government officials. It is likely that José Miguel Battle, the young vice cop, would have met Trafficante there to pick up a briefcase filled with cash destined for the presidential palace.
While the police were still surveying the damage at the Capri, two blocks away at the Hotel Nacional, there was an even louder blast— another bomb, timed to go off within minutes of the one at the Capri. This one had been planted in the lobby of the hotel near a bank of pay phones. Again, the damage to the lobby of the hotel was substantial, but no one was seriously hurt.
The Nacional was, if anything, even more famous than the Capri. The hotel had been the site of a legendary Mob conference in November 1946, when Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and twenty other high-ranking U.S. mobsters met to discuss their plans for setting up Havana as a base of operations. More recently, the Hotel Nacional had been transformed into a showcase for the Castro government. Whenever a political conference or film festival or cultural gathering took place in Havana, dignitaries inevitably stayed there, on a bluff overlooking the famous Malecón seafront promenade.
No one claimed responsibility for the bombings at the two prestigious hotels, but the Cuban government had no doubt who was behind them. Said the Castro government’s minister of tourism, “Obviously, this was done by our enemies.”
Seven weeks later, more bombs rocked Havana. The Copacabana, Chateau, and Triton hotels in the Playa district were all hit within a period of sixty minutes. The first and worst of the three blasts took place at the Copacabana at 11:30 A.M. The bomb had been planted in the lobby, and the explosion led to the death of Fabio Di Celmo, a native of Genoa, Italy, who was a resident of Montreal. Additional tourists were injured in the blasts.
This time, the Cuban government was unequivocal in its contention that the bombings were the act of “anti-Cuban terrorist groups” in the United States. Said the interior minister of Cuba, “These terrorist acts are encouraged, organized and supplied—both in terms of material and personnel—from within the United States territory.”
It had been thirty-six years since the Bay of Pigs invasion, when anti-Castro forces in the United States secretly launched its campaign to overthrow the Cuban government and take back the island. Since then, the effort had become a clandestine subtheme of the Cold War. Many lives had been lost in countries throughout the world. Average citizens in the United States had grown weary of this struggle. In public opinion polls, it was clear that the majority of Americans wanted to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba and restore diplomatic relations. Many could not understand why the embargo persisted and the strained relations continued. In 1997, the idea that American citizens, of Cuban extraction or otherwise, were still engaged in violent anti-Castro activities seemed like a strange relic from another time.
But for those whose lives were devoted to the overthrow of Castro, the struggle never ended.
The person who had masterminded the most recent spate of bombings in Havana was no stranger to the Cuban government: Luis Posada Carriles, who was described by Castro himself as a “monstrous criminal.”
For decades, Posada had perpetrated his counterrevolutionary war against Fidel mostly in the shadows, but after the hotel bombings he was ready to step into the light. Frustrated that the bombings had not received more attention in the international press, Posada agreed to be interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times. From an undisclosed location in the Caribbean, he sat down with journalist Ann Louise Bardach. Now seventy years old, he was no longer the spry young Army lieutenant who played poker late into the night with José Miguel Battle and others at Fort Benning back in the early 1960s.
Posada proudly confessed to having organized the bombings in Havana, which he described as acts of war intended to cripple a totalitarian regime by depriving it of foreign tourism and investment. “We didn’t want to hurt anybody,” he told the reporter. “We just wanted to make a big scandal so the tourists don’t come anymore. We don’t want any more foreign investment.”
Not only did Posada admit his role in the bombings, but also he claimed that financing for the operation came in part from the Cuban American National Foundation. This claim was denied by a spokesperson for CANF.
Since its inception in 1981, CANF had emerged as the most powerful Cuban exile lobby group in the United States. Not only had the foundation become closely aligned with numerous U.S. presidents, but the group’s founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, had become a powerful figure in his own right.
Mas passed away in November 1997, at the age of fifty-eight. His death perhaps led his longtime compatriot Luis Posada to believe that the time had come to be more open about the involvement of CANF in the anti-Castro struggle. Posada spelled it out: “Jorge controlled everything. Whenever I needed money, he said to give me five thousand dollars, give me ten thousand, give me fifteen. And they sent it.” Posada estimated that over the years Mas had sent him more than $200,000. Mas knew that when he sent money to Posada it was for violent activities—bombings and assassinations—though, Posada said with a chuckle, the money usually arrived with the message, “This is for the church.”
To exiled militants, the effort to destabilize Cuba was a holy war.
For José Miguel Battle, the holy war had shifted. In spite of the efforts to overthrow Castro, the secret plots to assassinate him, the efforts to intimidate and punish people and nations that did business with Cuba, the Bearded One was alive and well. Battle, on the other hand, was hampered by deteriorating kidneys and a persistent officer of the law who was determined to make him pay for what he had done.
In April 1997, Battle pleaded guilty on the charge of passport fraud. By doing so, he could likely avoid jail time on this charge. But the following month, he was indicted on the more serious charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. This charge carried with it a potential sentence of three years, but for Battle, at his age and with his health beginning to wane, a few years could quite possibly be a death sentence. He would fight the charge at trial.
His lawyer, Jack Blumenfeld, was ready to get into the ring. Unlike twenty years earlier, when the lawyer first met Battle at the time of the Ernestico Torres murder trial, this time Blumenfeld would not have Raymond Brown at his side. The legendary New Jersey trial lawyer was now eighty years old. Incredibly, Brown was still practicing law, but he hadn’t tried a case in court in years, and it would have been a burden to have him travel to Florida for what was a comparatively minor case. Blumenfeld, on the other hand, had been Battle’s Miami lawyer for years.
To Blumenfeld, the various charges against Battle smacked of a vendetta. The idea of the Metro-Dade bolita squad bringing a passport fraud case was unusual, to say the least. Then the government had added another charge alleging that Battle had lied on his nationalization forms when reentering the United States. One of the questions was “Have you ever advocated polygamy?” Battle’s answer was no. The government was claiming that because Battle was still married to his first wife while married to Evelyn, he was guilty of polygamy.
Blumenfeld contacted the U.S. attorney and said, “I’m sorry, but you people need to look up ‘polygamy’ in the dictionary. Polygamy is more than two. My client may be a bigamist, but that has nothing to do with polygamy.”
The prosecutors threw out the charge.
Blumenfeld felt that on the gun charge they had a solid defense. He was told by his client that the shotgun belonged to Cache Jimenez, his bodyguard and driver. Jimenez had gone hunting earlier that day and left the gun leaning against the wall in a closet in Battle’s bedroom. Jimenez would take the stand and testify that the gun was his.
A trial date was set for late September. In the meantime, Battle was held in custody without bail.
ONE THING BLUMENFELD NOTICED WAS THAT, IN THE MONTHS LEADING UP TO THE trial, when he met with Battle to discuss legal matters, José Miguel Jr. was often in attendance. This was something new. Blumenfeld knew that the father and son had a fractured relationship. He had been told the stories about how Senior’s philandering had alienated him from Junior, who felt that his mother had been disrespected. Blumenfeld was used to Battle’s having difficult relationships with family members. He was once in the same room with José Miguel and his brother Gustavo when the two men argued over everything from the weather to the price of a newspaper.
With Battle Sr. incarcerated and in need of regular medical attention, power of attorney had been signed over to Miguelito, who was now in charge of El Zapotal, Inc., and other family assets. Evelyn Runciman was still living at the house, with a staff and grounds crew. But the time had come to consider selling off the house. Battle needed money to pay his mounting legal fees.
The idea was to divide up the property into various parcels and sell them off for maximum profit. Battle Jr. posted a sign on the property that read For sale by the owner, with a phone number.
Miguel Cruz, age fifty, was in the market for a house in the South Miami area. In the fall of 1997 he and his son, Ian, were driving around the area when he saw the sign at El Zapotal. He liked the location, the house alongside the grove of mamey trees so redolent of his native Cuba. From what he could see of the house behind the gate, it was a lovely place. He wrote down the number and called the next day.
It was a Sunday afternoon when Cruz and his son met Battle Jr., who arrived with José Aluart, otherwise known as Five Minutes to Six because of his crooked neck. Junior showed them around the property. Cruz and his son immediately fell in love with the place.
Battle Jr. liked that Cruz was a Cuban émigré and that he was with his son. Cruz got the impression that for the Battles, selling the house was more than just an economic proposition. The property had sentimental value, and they wanted to make sure it wound up in the right hands.
When Junior heard Cruz’s personal story, he liked what he heard. Not only was Cruz a fellow Cuban, but his life involved the kind of historical drama that was so common for those of the Bay of Pigs generation.
Cruz had been born in Camagüey, in the town of Sancti Spíritus, in 1945. He was only fourteen years old when the revolution occurred. Initially, his family remained in Cuba, but it soon became apparent that the Castro government was to be a totalitarian regime. In 1961, Miguel Cruz was on the last official Delta Airlines flight out of Cuba before the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with the island and imposed an economic embargo.
After a brief time in Miami, Cruz moved with his family to New Orleans. In August of 1963, he was seventeen years old, with a summer job working in a convenience store managed by Carlos Bringuier. Bringuier was a Cuban exile active in the local anti-Castro movement. He was a delegate for Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, and he lived with Celso Hernandez, another anti-Castro activist.
On the afternoon of August 5, a young man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald came into the store and offered his services in the struggle against Castro. He told Bringuier that he had been a U.S. Marine and was trained in guerrilla warfare, and that he was willing not only to train Cubans to fight Castro but also to join the fight himself. The next day Oswald returned to the store and left for Bringuier a paperback entitled Guidebook for Marines, a book published by the U.S. military.
Bringuier didn’t know quite what to make of Oswald. He told young Miguel Cruz, who worked for him at the store, that he thought Oswald might be some sort of spy or double agent.
Two days later, on August 8, Bringuier’s roommate, Celso Hernandez, came into the store. He said he had just come across Oswald nearby on Canal Street. Oswald was handing out pro-Castro flyers on behalf of a group called Fair Play for Cuba. It was as Bringuier had suspected. Oswald had been presenting himself as anti-Castro when in fact he was an operative for the other side.
Said Hernandez, “Let’s go over there and stop him right now.”
Miguel Cruz tagged along with the two older men. Certainly, he shared their anti-Castro sentiments, but he was hardly an active member of the movement. At the time, he was looking forward to his senior year at Francis T. Nicholls High School, with the new school year beginning in one month.
The three Cubans arrived on Canal Street and immediately came upon Oswald, who was wearing a placard around his neck proclaiming Fair Play for Cuba and was handing out flyers.
They angrily confronted Oswald, calling him a communist and attempting to grab the flyers out of his hands. A tussle ensued, with a small crowd gathering around. Neither the Cubans nor Oswald were backing down.
After a couple of minutes, a police squad car pulled up. Two cops separated the combatants. Everyone was placed under arrest for disturbing the peace. They were all cuffed and put into a paddy wagon together.
Miguel Cruz looked directly at Oswald, who, at age twenty-three, was not much older than him. The young man had piercing blue eyes that seemed vacant and devoid of humanity.
Later that day, the charges against Cruz and the other two Cubans were dismissed. Oswald spent the night in jail and was interviewed the next day by a lieutenant in the New Orleans Police Department. At Oswald’s request, he was also interviewed by a local FBI agent. The arrestee claimed to be a member of the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which he said had thirty-five members. He was in fact the only member of the “New Orleans branch,” which had never been chartered by the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Later that day, Oswald was released on bail. Two days later he pleaded guilty to the charges against him and paid a ten-dollar fine.
Three months later, on November 22, Miguel Cruz was sitting in his physics class at Nicholls High School when the principal entered and turned on the television. There was a dramatic news report under way describing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A picture came on the television of the man who was suspected of having done the shooting. It was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Cruz felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach; the air was sucked from his body, and he felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He was in a state of shock. He gathered himself and said to the school principal, “I know this man.”
After describing his encounter with Oswald to the principal, Miguel was sent home from school. Within a half hour of his having arrived home, he was visited by two FBI agents.
On the grounds at El Zapotal, thirty-four years later, as Cruz related this vivid memory, Miguelito Battle was enraptured. It was, after all, an amazing piece of history, not only for its significance as to the assassination of a president, but also as yet another tributary of the Cuban diaspora.
It would take time for the sale of the house to transpire. Cruz could not afford the asking price. Battle Jr. broke up the property into smaller parcels until the price of the house was within Cruz’s range. It took two years for the deal to be finalized, even though everyone involved felt that it was right that the house should wind up in the hands of Miguel Cruz.
Eventually, the man who had tussled with Lee Harvey Oswald moved into the house of José Miguel Battle Sr. He remains there to this day.
THE TRIAL OF BATTLE ON THE CHARGE OF POSSESSION OF A SHOTGUN BY A CONVICTED felon began on September 29, in the courtroom of Judge Alan Gold. It was not expected to be a lengthy proceeding. The government had one major witness: Ruby De Los Santos Torres, the cleaning lady at El Zapotal who, upon being interviewed back when the raid took place and the gun was seized—and later in front of a grand jury—said that she had seen the shotgun in the closet three months before the raid.
The problem for the prosecution, which included Assistant State’s Attorney Tony Gonzalez and Shanks, was that in the weeks leading up to the trial, Ruby Torres went into hiding. It took numerous court-ordered wiretaps and late-night surveillances for the cops to find out where she was. Most of her time was spent at her mother’s house. She was taken into custody on a material witness warrant and held until the trial. But the prosecutors had no idea if when she took the stand she would stick to her grand jury testimony or say something contradictory.
Before the testimony phase of the trial, the prosecutors and defense lawyer Blumenfeld needed to select a jury. As with many Miami jury pools, there was always the possibility that the prospective jurors would include Cuban exiles or their children. Normally this would be irrelevant, but in the case of Battle, having a juror who was sympathetic to the anti-Castro cause might be a problem for the government.
Prosecutor Gonzalez encountered just such a problem during the phase of jury selection in which the prosecutors and defense lawyer are allowed to question each prospective juror to determine if he or she is able to hear the facts of the case without bias or prejudice. Voir dire is crucial for both sides to lay the groundwork for a fair process. During voir dire, each side is allowed a certain number of “peremptory challenges,” an opportunity to disqualify a juror based on some issue or conflict, such as the person knowing someone related to the defendant, or a familiarity with either of the attorneys or with the victim. There are myriad reasons why a person could be disqualified, but a lawyer is only allowed to use a limited number of peremptory challenges, so they are employed sparingly.
During jury selection, the lawyers came upon a young woman whose father was a veteran of Brigade 2506. During her voir dire, Gonzalez asked a series of questions in open court that were designed to reveal bias on the woman’s part in favor of anyone associated with the brigade. The idea was to make her bias so apparent that the judge would automatically disqualify the woman, in which case Gonzalez would not have to use one of his peremptory challenges.
Judge Gold queried the woman himself. To Gonzalez and Shanks, it appeared obvious that she would respond in an emotional way to the Bay of Pigs history should it come up during the trial. But the judge would not disqualify her, and defense lawyer Blumenfeld was all too happy to have her on the jury. Gonzalez chose not to use one of his peremptory challenges. The young woman wound up on the jury, a development that the prosecutors would eventually regret.
Once the trial began, the first witness on the stand was Shanks, who described the circumstances of the raid on El Zapotal and the discovery of the rifle. Robert O’Bannon testified as the original affiant on the federal search warrant and also described Battle’s use of a false passport. Then Ruby Torres took the stand.
A Honduran immigrant who did not speak English, Torres had been working at El Zapotal for nineteen months at the time of the raid. It had been six months since her grand jury testimony, in which she innocently stated that she had seen the shotgun in the closet. Now, speaking through a courtroom translator, she changed her story, saying it had been less than a week before the raid that she first saw the shotgun, not three months. She also added that she had seen Cache Jimenez, Battle’s driver, bodyguard, and cook, out on the grounds of the ranch using the gun to hunt pigeons—a new wrinkle she had not mentioned in front of the grand jury.
Prosecutor Gonzalez, faced with his primary witness’s having changed her story, was confronted with a delicate proposition. He wanted to show that Torres had changed her story, possibly out of fear or because she had been coerced, but he did not want to destroy her credibility entirely. She was his witness, after all.
Gonzalez confronted Torres with a transcript reading of her previous testimony. She buckled slightly, conceding that it might have been two months before the raid that she saw the gun.
The star witness for the defense was Cache Jimenez, described as Battle’s valet and cook. For years, Jimenez had shown a willingness to do many unpleasant tasks for El Padrino, including starting his car in the morning—the least popular assignment for a Mob underling.
From the stand, Jimenez told a story of meeting Battle for the first time only six months before the raid, when he was at the ranch looking to buy some mamey. He and Battle became friendly. Battle let Jimenez shoot birds on his property, and it was there, a week before the raid, that he was shooting pigeons and doves. Afterward, he retired to a nearby bar on Krome Avenue, where some friends invited him to accompany them on an overnight fishing trip. Jimenez accepted the invitation. He was concerned about keeping the rifle in his car, since he would be leaving the car in the parking lot of the bar. He drove back to El Zapotal and asked Evelyn Runciman (Battle was not home) if he could leave his gun in the house. After the fishing trip, he forgot to retrieve the gun, and there it was on the morning Shanks and the other cops raided the place.
Unchallenged, it might have seemed like a reasonable story. But on cross-examination by Gonzalez, the story quickly unraveled. Gonzalez asked Jimenez, “Why didn’t you just park your car at El Zapotal?”
Jimenez stumbled with his answer. Apparently he had not anticipated this simple question. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I just, uh, well, decided not to.”
Gonzalez then went in for the kill. What Cache Jimenez did not know was that the investigators had surveillance photos and wiretap conversations of Jimenez going back five years, to when the cops first planted a court-authorized tap on the phone of Gilberto Borges.
Gonzalez asked the witness, “Mr. Jimenez, isn’t it true that you would do anything that Mr. Battle asked of you, including lying here today?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Isn’t it true that you have said, ‘I did things for Battle I would not do even for my family’? Did you say that?’
Jimenez answered confidently, “No. I don’t even know him that well.”
Gonzalez asked Judge Gold for permission to play the tape of a conversation from the Borges wire. On it, Jimenez complained about having to get up in the middle of the night to get Battle a Cuban sandwich and deliver it to his hospital room at Mt. Sinai in Miami Beach. The jury listened to Jimenez, in his own words, say on the tape, “I do things for Battle that I wouldn’t even do for my own family.”
Jimenez was stunned. “That’s not my voice,” he said, and then quickly changed direction by adding, “That’s not what I meant when I said that.”
Gonzalez then put Shanks back on the stand to introduce four-year-old surveillance photos of Jimenez and Battle at a restaurant called the Bahamas Fish Market, where they met with a number of boliteros and bookmakers. Not only were the photos shown to the jury, but Shanks and the prosecutors were now able to introduce evidence they hadn’t been able to before, including a recollection by the detective of the time they watched Jimenez lean in the driver’s side window of Battle’s car and turn on the ignition, as if he were anticipating—and dreading—a car bomb explosion. While Jimenez did this, Battle was hiding behind a concrete pillar.
The defense rested on a Friday. The judge gave the jury instructions first thing on Monday, and they were off to deliberate. Gonzalez and Shanks were expecting a quick verdict. It was not a complicated case. Either you believed it was Battle’s gun or you didn’t. Either way, there was not much to deliberate about.
Surprisingly—at least to the prosecutors—the deliberation dragged on all through the first day and into a second day. “This is not good,” Gonzalez told Shanks. Perhaps the jury was deadlocked and could not reach a verdict.
At the end of the second day, the jury foreman notified the court that they were ready to deliver their verdict. Gonzalez and Shanks were tense, until they saw the jurors stream back into the jury box. The young woman with the Bay of Pigs history in her family was in tears. The body language of the other jurors seemed to suggest that they were relieved to have reached a conclusion.
The judge read the verdict: “Guilty.”
Afterward, Shanks ran into one of the jurors outside the courthouse. The juror explained that as soon as they entered the jury room and took their first vote, everyone voted guilty except for the young Cuban woman. She kept saying, “I can’t believe that sweet old man, a Bay of Pigs hero, would be so devious.” It took the rest of the jury sixteen hours to wear her down with the facts of the case until she finally gave in.
A few months later, in February 1998, Battle, Shanks, and the other investigators and lawyers were back in court for a hearing on the issue of sentencing. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Lehner had designated the sentencing as an opportunity to go for an “upward departure,” which involved an unusual quirk of federal law. By legal statute, it was permissible at sentencing to introduce new evidence against a convicted party in an effort to show that he or she was a more serious criminal and therefore worthy of a sentence that exceeded the guidelines for the crime of which he was convicted.
The prosecutors went to great lengths to make their case. Lehner had prepared a thirty-page motion about the upward departure, and he had Shanks prepare a two-hundred-plus-page exhibit packet, tabbed and broken down into various components, all of which were referenced in Lehner’s motion. In addition, the prosecutors were allowed to put witnesses on the stand. At the hearing, they paraded a number of jailhouse witnesses into the courtroom to testify specifically about Battle’s involvement in cocaine trafficking.
Drug dealing had always been a sore subject with Battle. He protested loudly to those around him that he was against dealing cocaine. His public position was perhaps founded on his love of The Godfather, in which the character of Don Corleone contends, “This drug business will be the downfall of all of us.” In reality, Battle’s forays into cocaine dealing, though not extensive by the standards of Miami in the 1980s, were no secret to people in the underworld.
And yet it was also possible that the various jailhouse witnesses being brought into court to make Battle look bad were in fact gilding the lily. These witnesses were not being held to the standard of a criminal trial. The burden of proof was low, and it was impossible to fully verify the facts of their various accusations.
After listening to this testimony for the better part of an afternoon, Battle had had enough. To one of the witnesses in the midst of telling cocaine tales about him, El Padrino shouted, “Mentiroso (liar)!” Then he cursed at the prosecutors and said with a scowl, “Dirty, dirty . . . Drug traffickers.”
Jack Blumenfeld immediately moved to quiet his client. He was surprised. Battle had never lost his cool in court before. He had always been calm and controlled.
The outburst led Blumenfled to do something he’d never done before—put Battle on the stand. He figured he had nothing to lose. He wanted Battle to express his disgust at being called a drug trafficker.
Battle was wearing his best suit, a teal blue linen/cotton combination. On the stand, he was gentlemanly. “I did not address the witness,” he said, in regard to his outburst. “I just said it was dirty to bring him in here . . . Let them sentence me to one hundred years. This kind of thing is just not done.”
Blumenfeld said to the judge, “I can’t defend against a drug case where my client was not indicted, about something that happened nine years ago . . . This is very unfair.”
Judge Gold listened to all the testimony and various legal arguments, and on March 19 he emphatically ruled against the upward departure. In a statement, the judge ridiculed the government’s position, questioning why all that evidence was brought into a sentencing hearing in the absence of a RICO indictment.
Five days later, Judge Gold sentenced Battle to eighteen months in prison—the low end of the guidelines. He cited Battle’s poor health as one reason for not sentencing him to more time.
Once again, the judicial system had smiled on Battle. With time off for good behavior, he could be out in a year.
DAVE SHANKS WAS PISSED OFF BY THE JUDGE’S LIGHT SENTENCE. PART OF THIS WAS the usual cop’s annoyance at “liberal” judges working against the better interests of the public. In Shanks’s mind, José Miguel Battle was a gangster, a murderer of women and children, and a serious menace to society. The fact that he had a good lawyer who was adept at working the system to the advantage of his client only made Shanks angrier. The ability of Battle to commit heinous crimes—murders—and receive only a modest punitive response from the system was to the veteran cop a travesty of justice and a cruel joke.
On top of that, Shanks was especially peeved by the judge’s belittling reference to a RICO indictment. Mostly because he knew the judge was right. If the government wanted to use RICO-type evidence against El Padrino, then they needed to mount an actual RICO case against the Corporation. Shanks had always dreamed of such a reality, but he was one local cop—albeit a pesky cop—without the institutional authority to undertake the kind of massive and expensive investigation required to take down the Corporation.
On March 26, one day after the Battle sentencing, Shanks’s dream moved closer to reality when Tony Gonzalez, perhaps his strongest advocate on the prosecutorial side, left the State Attorney’s Office to become an AUSA for the Southern District of Florida.
Shanks and Gonzalez were now possibly in a position to make things happen, but the truth was, they didn’t yet have the witnesses. They knew that the Corporation’s criminal history stretched back decades, but if they were to establish those early crimes as predicate acts in a RICO conspiracy, they needed to be able to put people on the stand who had firsthand knowledge of these crimes.
There were some likely prospects, among them Willie Diaz, the arsonist who played a key role in the arson wars of the 1980s. Diaz had already taken the stand in the 1987 trial of Lalo Pons. He could be compelled to do so again in a RICO trial.
Also, there was Vincent “Fish” Cafaro. To the astonishment of many, Cafaro in 1986 secretly became an informant for federal authorities. For five months, from October 1986 to March 1987, he was wired up with a recording device, which he wore while attending high-level Mafia meetings. On March 20, 1987, the government revealed in court that Cafaro had been working for them. Many mafiosi were indicted, including Cafaro’s own son, Thomas.
In the late 1980s and in 1990, Cafaro testified at a number of major Mob trials in New York, including two trials involving John Gotti, the capo di tutti capi. Afterward, Cafaro disappeared into the federal witness protection program.
Already, at a Lucchese crime family trial in the early 1990s, Cafaro had testified about how the Cubans—and specifically José Miguel Battle Sr.—were partners with the Mafia in the city’s highly lucrative numbers racket. Cafaro could be a valuable witness against the Corporation—if Shanks was able to track him down.
Finally, there was Robert Hopkins, another organized crime figure who could link the activities of the Corporation to the Mafia. In 1987, Hopkins was put on trial for the murder of a Cuban bolitero, Pedro Acosta, at the summit meeting of the members of the Corporation, La Compañía, and the Mafia. Hopkins was there and, along with everyone else, ducked for cover when a drive-by shooter gunned down the bolitero on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant where the meeting took place. Prosecutors later claimed that Hopkins had arranged the murder, but they had no real case. He was acquitted.
As often happens when a criminal defendant beats the government in court, to “save face,” Hopkins was soon indicted on follow-up charges. Currently under indictment on gambling charges, and out on bail, he might be willing to talk if it would help him out with his legal complications.
Shanks and Gonzalez discussed the prospects of being able to round up these and other crucial witnesses. To begin the process, it was necessary to officially transfer Shanks to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and have him deputized as a special investigator, making him technically an employee of the federal government. The next order of business was to send him to New York to reconnect with Detective Richard Kalafus of the NYPD.
In his thirty-third year on the job, Kalafus had announced his pending retirement. Once he was gone, he would take with him the most encyclopedic knowledge of the Cuban bolita culture in the New York– New Jersey area of any cop who had ever walked the streets. Though Shanks had met with Kalafus before, he needed to do it again, this time with a focus on who throughout the bolita universe—either in prison or still out on the street—could be squeezed into a position where he might take the stand against Battle and the Corporation.
On the flight from Miami to New York, Shanks thought about how far he had come, and how far he still had to go, in his pursuit of the Corporation. To go after a RICO indictment required the approval of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Shanks and perhaps Gonzalez would have to make their pitch to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. From experience, Shanks knew how tough Reno could be. She had been the nemesis of every lazy cop in South Florida during her tenure there, and now she was the top law enforcement official in the federal government. To Shanks, it seemed only right that he would have to pass muster with Reno to make his case against the Corporation. He had a lot of work to do.
KALAFUS HAD A TENDENCY TO FREE ASSOCIATE, THROWING OUT CUBAN SURNAMES and nicknames of people Shanks had never heard of. He also had a tendency to mix in gossip with his cold, hard facts. There was, for instance, the rumor that Battle had been given a pardon by President Jimmy Carter. The rumor was intriguing. Shanks recalled the photo they had confiscated during the raid on El Zapotal of Battle together with Carter at some sort of formal campaign event, but there was no evidence of a pardon or even that the men knew each other beyond the single photograph of them at a public event.
The interviews with Kalafus took place at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Manhattan. For Shanks, the first order of business was to play for the detective two audiotapes that were confiscated at El Zapotal during the raid. The tapes were not from phone calls. They seemed to be of two separate police interrogations done by Kalafus.
The tapes were lengthy. Kalafus listened to portions of both and confirmed that these were taped interviews that he and Steven Mc-Cabe, deputy chief of investigations for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey, had done with Charley Hernandez back in December 1976. At the time, Charley was cooperating with the authorities, and his revelations on these tapes would lead to the indictment of Battle and Chino Acuna for the murder of Ernestico Torres.
The question was, how on earth had these tapes fallen into the possession of José Miguel Battle?
McCabe had passed away in February 1997, so there was no way of knowing his role. As for Kalafus, he claimed to have no idea how the tapes got into the Battle’s hands.
For ninety minutes that morning, and then again in the afternoon for ninety minutes, Kalafus regaled Shanks with tales of the Corporation.
Shanks was mesmerized; he could have listened to Kalafus all day long, but he had other important interviews to conduct while in the New York area. One he had hoped to do was with Fish Cafaro. Though Cafaro had been relocated somewhere in the United States under a new identity, Shanks assumed he could arrange for the U.S. Marshals to fly him to New York City for an interview. But Cafaro, it turned out, had a phobia about flying. To interview the former mafioso, Shanks had to fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Cafaro now lived. Shanks arranged to be met there by Kenny Rosario, his Miami police partner. They interviewed Cafaro at the Holiday Inn in Charlotte, where the detectives had booked a room.
Once Cafaro started talking, he couldn’t be stopped. He had spent nearly a lifetime in the Mafia and had many stories to tell. Though the detectives were fascinated by his many anecdotes, they tried to restrict him to his experiences with the Cubans, and particularly Battle.
After finishing with Cafaro, Shanks headed back to New York to meet with Robert Hopkins.
The Hopkins interviews was fascinating to Shanks. For one thing, they met at Hopkins’s apartment at Trump Tower, which had only recently opened as a luxury condominium in midtown Manhattan. Shanks didn’t know it at the time, but Hopkins co-owned the pad with Petey DiPalermo, a member of the Lucchese crime family and Hopkins’s longtime friend and associate.
Hopkins had recently been arrested on gambling and drug charges. He was interested in cooperating with the government under a “queen for a day” letter, which would give him immunity for whatever he might reveal.
Hopkins did not look or sound like a gangster. To Shanks, he looked a little like Elvis Presley, which was even more interesting after Hopkins explained that when he wasn’t being a criminal, he was a nightclub singer who had some Elvis songs in his repertoire.
Like Cafaro, Hopkins had an amazing story to tell. Among the many details that caught Shanks’s undivided attention was that Hopkins said he was among the initial prospective investors in the Casino Crillón in Lima. In 1993, Luis DeVilliers had approached Hopkins to become an investor. Hopkins even flew down to Lima to check out the location at the Hotel Crillón. He had traveled to Lima with none other than Roberto Parsons.
Hopkins suspected that Parsons had played a role in the murder of Omar Broche, among others, but he didn’t know the details. He had been friendly with Broche and even staked him some money to restart his bolita operation in New York. This angered Battle, who ordered Broche’s murder, a job that was undertaken by Parsons.
As was sometimes the case in the underworld, the man who eliminates your partner becomes your new partner, whether you like it or not. DeVilliers, who was thankful that he had not been murdered along with Broche, introduced Parsons, the assassin, to Hopkins, the Irishman. At some point, DeVilliers made the decision to go with Battle as sole investor in the Crillón and cut Hopkins and Parsons out of the deal.
Shanks listened to all this, and recorded it, with a sense of wonder. The various strands of the Corporation story—the seemingly endless cast of characters—were beginning to come together in his mind. Details were beginning to fit together like pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
On the flight back to Miami, Shanks tried to bend his mind around all that he had learned. From years of investigating Battle and the Corporation, he thought he knew a lot. Clearly, he had a lot more to learn.
BEFORE SHANKS AND TONY GONZALEZ COULD DEAL WITH THE CORPORATION, THEY had to deal with the criminal prosecution of Raul Fernandez and Luis Bordon. Both had been indicted, separately, along with multiple co-defendants, on illegal gambling and money-laundering charges. These were massive cases involving years of investigation, and the two trials were likely to last many months.
Some thought had been given to folding these prosecutions into a RICO case against Battle, but it was quickly determined that that would not work. These cases were too large in their own right and needed to be tried separately. It was a daunting task that was simplified somewhat in May 1998, when Raul Fernandez died as a result of complications from diabetes before going to trial. The other defendants accepted plea deals. That left only the Bordon trial for the prosecutors.
It was a massive undertaking that stretched on for seven months. Though many defendants chose to plead out (between the Fernandez and Bordon indictments, forty-four of forty-six defendants accepted plea deals), the trial involved a staggering accumulation of evidence. Luis Borden and his two sons stood accused of laundering more than $41 million in checks through Gulf Liquors over a four-year period.
At the trial, two pallets stacked six feet high with 250,000 individual checks were wheeled into the courtroom. Both Shanks and Kenny Rosario testified at length about surveillances and wiretaps.
Like Battle, Luis Bordon was a Bay of Pigs veteran, a member of Brigade 2506, and there was some concern among the prosecutors that jurors could be swayed or influenced by his personal history. In the end, that was not the case. Bordon and his two sons were found guilty on illegal gambling and money-laundering charges. Later, at a separate forfeiture hearing, the government seized $5.25 million in assets from the Bordons. Luis Bordon was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the sons received sentences of nine years each.
A money-laundering conviction may not have been as “sexy” as a case with multiple homicides or stacks of brick cocaine seized by agents, but because of the amount of money that was recovered, the Bordon case was a major feather in the caps of Shanks and Gonzalez. Their bargaining position within the institutional hierarchy of the system was greatly enhanced. It was the perfect time for them to make their pitch to the DOJ regarding a RICO case against the Corporation.
Shanks would be the lead man to make the pitch. He had become the inheritor of all institutional knowledge accumulated over the years about Battle, and he would be the one responsible for accumulating the evidence and helping to craft a theory of prosecution.
Battle himself may have suspected as much. Though he had been transferred to a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was receiving dialysis treatments on a weekly basis, he must have known that there were further indictments waiting for him on the other side of his sentence for gun possession. Though he was not healthy, he was not the kind of man to take matters lying down.
IN NOVEMBER 1998, WITH BATTLE FOUR MONTHS AWAY FROM AN EARLY RELEASE (based on time off for good behavior) Dave Shanks arrived home one afternoon at his house in Key Largo. Though Shanks was currently renting out the house and living in a separate home three blocks away, he still came by to pick up his mail at an old-style roadside mailbox. On this afternoon, as he approached the mailbox and prepared to open it, he heard the unmistakable rattle of an eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
Shanks pulled his hand away from the box, then stepped back, looking around the base of the wooden mailbox post and in the nearby crabgrass for the source of the rattling sound. Nothing. Again, he reached cautiously toward the lid of the mailbox. Again, loud rattling. Then he heard something moving inside the box.
Shanks went back to his police vehicle and retrieved a flashlight. He came back to the mailbox and tapped on the side of it with his flashlight. The hissing became more vehement and pronounced. Gingerly, Shanks reached over and opened the box less than an inch. He flashed the light inside. What he saw was a coiled rattlesnake, ready to strike, its tongue flicking in and out.
Shanks closed the box. He unholstered his department-issue 9mm, took aim at the mailbox, and unloaded his weapon. The sound of rapid gunfire hitting metal resonated loudly and echoed down the street. When the weapon was empty, Shanks put a fresh clip into the gun. He listened carefully and heard rumbling and thumping inside the box, probably the sound of the snake going through its death throes. But the detective was taking no chances. He raised his weapon and fired seven more rounds into the now tattered mailbox.
With his ears still ringing from the gunshots, Shanks opened the box and saw the dead snake.
He went back to his car and sat for a while, thinking. Someone had planted a killer rattlesnake in his mailbox. Was it the Bordons? Was it Battle? Or was it someone else among the dozens of other boliteros he had played a role in putting away in recent years?
And how did they get his address? In the state of Florida, police officers are allowed to have unlisted addresses, with their actual residence not even listed on their driver’s license. The only way someone could know his address was if they had access to his police file. Who was savvy enough to gain access to that sort of information? There was only one answer: Battle.
There were rules for discharging a firearm. Shanks was supposed to call the local police department and file a report. His supervisor would be notified, and someone from Internal Affairs would investigate.
Over the years, Shanks had lost faith in the ability of the system to safeguard information. If Battle was behind this, bringing in other cops was not wise.
He got out of the car and carefully picked up fourteen spent bullet casings from around the mailbox. Then he went home, got some tools, an empty shoebox, and returned to the mailbox. Carefully, he put the carcass of the dead snake into the shoebox. Then, using the tools, he removed the bullet-riddled mailbox and post and threw them into the trunk of his car.
Later, at home, he cut the rattle off the snake and discarded the dead reptile. He thought for a while about what might be the best way to handle the situation. Eventually, he decided to put the snake’s rattle into an envelope and mail it to El Zapotal. Shanks knew that Battle was away in prison, and he wasn’t even sure if new owners had moved into the house or not. But he was reasonably certain that if he addressed the envelope to José Miguel Battle, he would at least hear about it.
Shanks wanted to let the old man know that he could not be intimidated.
Go ahead, put a lethal poisonous snake in my mailbox. Resort to cheap gangster tactics.
It would only strengthen his resolve.