IN THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN AREA AT THE DAWN OF THE NEW CENTURY, the bolita business was alive and well. Though there were maybe half as many bolita holes as there had been fifteen years earlier, there were also fewer boliteros, so the percentage taken in by each banker was larger, making it a viable enterprise.
Miguelito Battle had followed in the footsteps of Abraham Rydz and divested himself from the business. He no longer collected a percentage. That left El Padrino, Battle Sr., whose percentage had remained at 17 percent. While Battle was away in Peru, he had accepted things the way they were. Now that he was back and facing legal expenses, he wanted more. He put the word out that he was now demanding 30 percent of the cut.
It was only right. The reputation of the Corporation, which was still the preeminent brand in the bolita business, rested on his shoulders. “I want what I deserve,” was how Battle phrased it.
Willie Pozo, the current operational manager of the Corporation, heard all about this on a trip to Miami. Pozo met with Rydz, who was still a friend from the old days even though Rydz was out of the business. Rydz told Pozo, “Willie, be careful. I hear José Miguel wants to reclaim the business. He wants to force you out.”
“What do you mean, force me out?” asked Pozo.
Said Rydz, “There’s a contract out on your life.”
Pozo returned to New York. He called for a meeting with Luis Perez, his number two man. “I gotta go into hiding for while,” he told Perez. “The Old Man is trying to have me killed. I want you to take over.”
To Perez, this was not the greatest of developments. For one thing, the business had not been going well lately. The Corporation had shrunk from three central offices to one. Regional offices had gone from ten to four or five. On paper, the cut was the same among the various bankers, but the totals were getting smaller and smaller every day.
Willie Pozo went into hiding, and Luis Perez took over, but it seemed to him that everyone was fighting over a diminishing pie.
The irony was that out on the street the name of the Corporation was bigger than ever. Wherever bolita was happening, the Corporation dominated the business.
Investigators in New York had been aware of this for years, at least since Detective Tom Farley first began doing bet-and-bust raids in the mid-1990s. More recently, the Brooklyn DA’s Office had become involved in an investigation that suggested there was a new bolita hierarchy in New York.
In 1997, out of the blue, La Compañía reemerged as a rival to the Corporation. That particular organization had been dormant for nearly a decade, but they were back, especially in Brooklyn. The leaders of this new version of La Compañía were Manny Alvarez Sr. and his son Manny Jr., who had been around since the original formation of La Compañía.
In July 1999, Alvarez Sr. and Jr. were arrested, along with thirty-seven others, in a joint FBI-NYPD case aimed at the hierarchy of La Compañía. The investigation resulted in the seizure of $5.8 million, including $982,000 in cash from the New Jersey home of Alvarez Sr. and $262,000 from the home of Alvarez Jr. Both men posted bond and were back out on the street, but the arrests had weakened La Compañía. As in the old days, the Corporation, in apparent violation of the two-block rule, began opening bolita holes near locations where La Compañía once operated. This ignited a war between the two Cuban-controlled organizations. It wasn’t quite as violent as the arson wars of the 1980s, but in recent months there had been at least three homicides in New York that were believed to be connected to this new outbreak of the bolita wars.
These killings caught the attention of a young assistant DA in Brooklyn named Dennis Ring. Born and raised in Queens, the son of an electrical worker for Con Edison, Ring had only recently become a member of the Rackets Division under supervisor Trish McNeill. They became interested in the murders and also the very real possibility that the Cubans were working in partnership with the Lucchese crime family, most notably with the Iadarola brothers, Victor and Benito. On a wiretap of the brothers, they intercepted phone calls with a bolita banker referred to as Cuban Tony. Eventually, the investigators determined that Cuban Tony was Tony Dávila.
The name Dávila represented bolita royalty in New York. Isleño Dávila had been a legend before his disappearance back in the 1980s. His brother Tony had remained and was now functioning as a co-boss of the Corporation with Luis Perez.
With the introduction of Dávila on the wiretaps, Ring and McNeill targeted the Corporation. As a lead investigator on the case, they brought in Tom Farley, who from his years with the Public Morals gambling squad had acquired knowledge about the inner workings of the bolita business at the street level.
The prosecutors were not yet thinking of their case as a federal RICO prosecution. At the time, Farley, Ring, and McNeill didn’t know much about Battle or the historic roots of the Corporation. Battle may have been a legendary figure in Cuban bolita circles, and the name the Corporation had been around for decades, but as of yet the historical context of the operation didn’t have much bearing on the specific gambling crimes that the Rackets division was investigating.
That all changed when Dave Shanks came to town. While making the rounds, the Miami cop had learned that the Brooklyn DA’s Office was mounting a bolita case that involved the Corporation. When Shanks returned to Miami, he said to AUSA Tony Gonzalez, “Hey, why don’t we see what Brooklyn is up to? Maybe there’s some way we could incorporate their case into ours.”
Gonzalez immediately recognized the value of having New York prosecutors involved. Tracking down potential witnesses for, say, the arson crimes of the 1980s would be much cheaper and more practical for a team of investigators from New York than from Miami. In fact, a co-prosecution would make it possible for the two jurisdictions to split the workload down the middle, with Brooklyn prosecutors handling the New York and New Jersey crimes, including those involving the more recent configuration of the Corporation. Miami would handle the financial crimes related to the businesses of Battle Jr. and Rydz, and also, most significant, the casino in Peru, which constituted one big money-laundering conspiracy.
On behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, Gonzalez contacted Trish McNeill and Dennis Ring in Brooklyn. Then he flew up to New York to meet them face-to-face. The three prosecutors went out for pizza together and discussed the case.
Said Gonzalez to McNeill and Ring, “If your office comes on board, you’re not here just to back us up. I want you to have skin in the game.”
Speaking for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, McNeill and Ring were all for it. This was a chance to finally take down the Corporation and make it pay for decades’ worth of crimes. Their boss was pledging total cooperation.
To make it official, Ring and McNeill were deputized as U.S. attorneys, so they could co-prosecute the case in court, if need be.
The very next day, the Brooklyn’s DA’s Office brought on NYPD detective Tom Farley as lead investigator. Farley would be in New York what Shanks was in Miami, their ace in the bullpen. His first job was to find and interview all of the various witnesses to the arson fire-bombings fifteen years earlier, including Willie Diaz, who had long ago disappeared into WITSEC, the U.S. Marshals’ witness protection program.
JOSÉ MIGUEL BATTLE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON IN SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, ON March 5, 1999. While he’d been away, the sale of El Zapotal had been finalized. The place was no longer his. Battle moved into a condominium in The Hammocks, a bland, affluent suburb west of Miami.
He remained a dichotomy: on the one hand, still engaged enough in the business to be ordering hits from prison, and on the other, a sick old man.
He still required dialysis twice a week, and in Missouri he’d been diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). His daily regimen of medications and physical therapy required a full-time caretaker. By mutual consent, Evelyn Runciman had moved on. She remained loyal to Battle, but she had gotten her green card and was living on her own and seeing other men.
People wanted to believe that Battle was a sickly old man, but from what Dave Shanks was hearing, El Padrino was still in the game. According to Sexy Cubana, Battle took pleasure in the fact that his ultimatum of “pay up or die” to Willie Pozo and others had created a frenzy in New York, just like the old days, when the mere mention of his name evoked fear. With Luis Perez and Tony Dávila now calling the shots in New York, Battle was having to deal with a new cast of characters, and it was wasn’t always clear how the new Corporation made its payouts.
Shanks was relieved that the Brooklyn DA’s Office was now involved. They could handle the current investigative work, which included surveillance and wiretaps on Perez, Dávila, and the ongoing activities of the Corporation. Shanks’s job was to delve into the past, especially as it related to the Casino Crillón, which, it appeared, was going to be a major component of any indictment of Battle.
In December 1998, Shanks went to Lima for the first time. There would be many more trips after that. The bankruptcy of a venture on the magnitude of the Crillón created a kind of sinkhole, with financial institutions, government officials, and international financiers all with a vested interest in making the casino’s shady financial history disappear.
Operating as a cop in a foreign country was complicated. Shanks had to go through the U.S. State Department, which connected him with the Regional Security Office (RSO) of the U.S. embassy in Lima. All overtures to government people in Lima or financial institutions were made by agents of the RSO known as Foreign Service Nationals, or FSNs. Two FSNs were assigned to the case and would be working with Shanks as partners throughout his time in the country.
Shanks took along Kenny Rosario, who would serve as a translator, if needed. The first potential witness they interviewed was General Guillermo Castillo, who had served as the casino’s first director of security, until he was fired by Battle. Castillo lived at a sprawling estate outside of Lima; he met with Shanks, Rosario, and the two FSNs in full military dress, dripping with medals and armed with handguns.
A formal man in his late seventies, Castillo described how Battle, once it emerged that he was the casino’s primary shareholder, liked to throw his weight around. He fired many people in his first few months on the scene. Castillo took pride in the fact that he had been right about Sendero Luminoso. The car bombing near the hotel, he believed, was what began the venture’s downward spiral into financial oblivion.
On subsequent visits to Lima in 2000 and again in 2001, Shanks tracked down many other significant players, including Ferer, Chau, and Chiang, the three Peruvians who had secured the government license that first made the casino possible. They spoke only under threat of subpoena, which would have seen them extradited to the United States. They told terrifying stories of Battle threatening their lives and the lives of others. Eventually, they felt lucky to have divested themselves of the venture before it went under.
Throughout 2001 and into 2002, Shanks tracked down many other witnesses. Many of them had left Peru, which necessitated Shanks making trips to Aruba, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, and Paris. He logged hundreds of frequent flyer miles in pursuit of interviews with, among others, Harold Marchena and Chito Quandas, former managers of the Crillón; Juan Solano Loo, the accountant who had had an affair with Effugenia Reyes; Mario Masaveu, Battle’s loyal head bodyguard; and Salvador Ramirez, the account manager from Banco Banex who had worshipped Battle, dressed like him, and adopted his gangster demeanor, until he gave El Padrino an honest picture of the casino’s prospects for survival and Battle threatened to kill him.
Shanks took down notes and recorded statements from all of these people. He listened to tales of cash shipments being flown by body courier from Miami to Lima, and Battle threatening his partners and employees with death if they didn’t submit to his will. It was a staggering story that took the prosecution of Battle above and beyond anything Shanks had imagined before. Most of all, the cop in Shanks was excited, because he felt as though they were getting the goods. These were witnesses for the prosecution who would testify in court. The case against the Corporation—as it would play out in court—was beginning to take shape, and it was a beast.
BACK IN MIAMI THERE HAD ALSO BEEN SOME BREAKTHROUGHS. THE INVESTIGATIVE team had grown in size, and a key piece of the puzzle fell into place when a connection was made between Maurilio Marquez, the casino, and the business operations of Battle Jr. and Rydz. From what Shanks had been hearing in Lima and from his source, Sexy Cubana, he knew that Maurilio was one of the original shareholders at the Casino Crillón. Other than that, the investigators knew little about the older Marquez brother, who up until then had lived mostly in Venezuela.
The investigators uncovered a Suspicious Activity Report from 1985 that had been filed against Maurilio and Orestes Vidan. The two men had been detained on April 2 of that year while attempting to body carry $700,000 in cash through Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on their way to Zurich, Switzerland. They had arrived in Paris on the Air France Concorde from JFK Airport in New York the previous evening. Maurilio was eventually charged in federal court for failing to report the cash incident.
While investigating this incident, investigators discovered that Maurilio was listed as the president and sole corporate officer of two Florida-based corporations, Stanara Company Corp. and Aztec Financial. The primary shareholders of both these companies were Battle Jr. and Rydz.
This was the discovery that Abraham Rydz had always feared. Now that Maurilio Marquez was financially linked on paper to Battle Jr. and Rydz, the jig was up. The connection had now been made that linked Maurilio to the casino and to many of the shell companies that were at the root of the Battle Jr.–Rydz partnership. This led the investigators to subpoena the financial records of YMR Fashion Corp., Ambar Industries, Tyma Inc., and many other subsidiaries that Battle Jr. and Rydz had been using to launder money for more than a decade.
The Corporation’s entire house of cards was about to fall. Shanks and Tony Gonzalez were now ready to make their pitch to the DOJ.
Back at the Fort Lauderdale office of the U.S. attorney (and at nearby Il Molina restaurant), Shanks, Gonzalez, and the rest of their team spent countless hours going over their strategy. One of the key decisions was deciding exactly who would be included in the indictment. Most of the names were obvious. Shanks’s wish list included El Padrino, Battle Jr., Abraham Rydz (consigliere), Nene Marquez (financial manager), Maurilio Marquez (financier), Gustavo Battle (in charge of illegal gambling machine business in Miami), Julio Acuna (hit man), Conrado Pons (hit man), Luis DeVilliers Sr. (financier, money launderer, and also operator of joker poker machines in Florida and New Jersey), Orestes Vidan (accountant), Cache Jimenez (bodyguard who perjured himself during Battle’s shotgun possession trial), Luis Perez and Tony Dávila (having taken over leadership of the Corporation in New York), Rolly Gonzalez and Orlando Cordeves (New Jersey bosses of the Corporation), and José Aluart (bodyguard and money courier to Lima). Also on the list were Evelyn Runciman and her stepfather, Valerio Cerron, for their money-laundering roles with the casino, and Vivian Rydz, the elder daughter of Abraham Rydz, who back in 1977 had once been arrested by the NYPD for running one of her father’s bolita spots.
There were another ten names on the list of people who had been involved over the years to varying degrees. Tony Gonzalez ruled out four of them, including Conrado Pons, who was already in prison for the arsons and would be for at least another ten years.
In early October 2003, Tony Gonzalez crafted a five-hundred-page prosecution memo, which was approximately four hundred pages longer than most prosecution memos. Included were the various counts of the indictment, including all the predicate acts, and the list of twenty-five potential indictees. The memo was sent to the hierarchy of the South Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office, and also to DOJ headquarters in Washington, where it would be reviewed by the Organized Crime Section and also U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had been appointed by President George W. Bush.
Now it was a waiting game. The investigators allowed for the time it would take for the bosses to absorb the complexity of the case. This was a joint prosecution involving jurisdictions in two separate states, Miami and New York. It was not your usual case. Though Gonzalez had not been in the game as long as Shanks, his career had been remarkably far-reaching for a man of his age. They both knew that when you threw something new at the bureaucracy, it didn’t always respond well, and certainly not quickly. They surmised that it might take days or even weeks before they heard back from the powers that be.
Two weeks went by, and then three weeks, and then a month. Gonzalez and Shanks were trying to determine if the delay was the result of bureaucratic inefficiency or cowardice. There wasn’t much they could do. But then an incident occurred that startled anyone from within the system who had been following the Corporation case. It seemed to evoke the worst, most violent impulses of the Corporation since the organization was first formulated in the mid-1960s, almost forty years earlier.
MANNY ALVAREZ SR., AGE SIXTY-FIVE, AND HIS SON MANNY JR., AGE THIRTY- SEVEN, were among the last of the old-school boliteros. They weren’t as old as Battle and his generation, but they were among the generation that had inherited much of what had been created in the 1970s and 1980s. After a series of New York–area bolita indictments in the late 1990s, the Alvarezes had sought to consolidate their power under the umbrella of La Compañía.
On the morning of November 23, Alvarez Sr. and Jr. were driving in their Cadillac, the de rigueur vehicle for boliteros since at least the early 1970s. They were on the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, Junior at the wheel and Senior in the backseat on his cell phone. Near 145th Street, the Alvarezes found themselves boxed in by a truck in front of them, another vehicle behind them, and the railing on their right side. A white van abruptly pulled up on their left side. The side door of the van flew open and two gunmen brandishing MAC-10 submachine guns cut loose with a barrage of gunfire. The bullets riddled the side of the Cadillac and lacerated the car’s occupants. Alvarez Jr. was hit in the head, and his father was hit more than twenty times. The Cadillac veered out of control and crashed into a barricade at 146th Street.
The three cars that had taken part in the hit sped away.
The Alvarezes survived the hit, though the injuries were catastrophic. Junior got the worst of it; he suffered brain damage from which he would never recover. The father spent a week in a coma. When he came out of it and learned what happened, he vowed vengeance against the Corporation.
Craven acts of violence have a trajectory all their own, with residual consequences that often reverberate well beyond the intended target. In Miami, Tony Gonzalez heard about the shooting, and he was livid. From his partners in the Brooklyn DA’s Office he’d heard that La Compañía and the Corporation were at odds. Gonzalez suspected there were likely to be casualties; he indicated as much in his voluminous prosecution memo.
Gonzalez and AUSA Jack Blakey got on the phone with the higher-ups at DOJ and let them have it. Said Gonzalez, “We have to hit the Corporation now! Or there’s going to be an old-fashioned street war. And it won’t just be boliteros getting killed. There’s going to be collateral damage. Innocent people are going to die!”
Gonzalez’s harangue was effective. DOJ’s Organized Crime Section gave their approval. The time to execute search and arrest warrants had finally arrived.
SUSAN RYDZ LOVED HER FATHER. IN HER YEARS GROWING UP IN KEY BISCAYNE, DOWN the street from Battle Jr. and his family, she was blissfully unaware of any criminal activity on the part of her dad or his best friend, Miguelito Battle. She knew they were well off, which she assumed was a result of her father’s success as a businessman. He often took her to the textile plant—once in the Dominican Republic—where his company made clothes sold at Arnold Stores, among other well-known retail outlets.
By late November 2003, Abraham Rydz seemed to be home more than usual. Susan, who was in her senior year of high school, had the impression that perhaps her dad had retired from the clothing business. His ability to spend more time at home turned out to be a godsend, because in March 2003, tragedy entered the Rydz home when El Polaco’s wife, Margaret, was diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer.
On the day that her mother received the news, Susan saw a side of her father she had never seen before. He asked his daughter to join him out on the balcony at their house, and he told her the news. “Your mother only has, at most, a few years to live.” He was on the verge of tears.
Susan was stunned. Her mother was twenty-two years younger than her father. None of them could ever have suspected that she would die first.
Four months later, in late November, Susan was in her bedroom, home from school, when she heard a loud ruckus from the front room of the house. She went out to see what was going on and was met by a phalanx of more than twenty federal agents and cops, with guns drawn. Before she could even process what was happening, her father was brought down the stairs by four agents who had him surrounded. Rydz was cuffed, with his head hanging low. Susan’s mother, who had begun chemotherapy treatment for her cancer, was distraught and yelling hysterically at the lawmen.
Taking a cue from her mother, Susan also became combative with the cops, who were being aggressive.
A local Key Biscayne cop took Susan aside and explained, “Look, your father is being arrested. The way these things go, he’ll be taken in for processing and he’ll probably be back home in a few hours. I know this is stressful, but you have to remain calm.”
Back in the house, some of the agents were engaged in a search, going though closets and drawers. Others had taken Rydz and his wife to the dining room and sat them at a table. One of the agents said to Rydz, “Have you eaten anything?”
Rydz shook his head.
The agent said to Susan, “Why don’t you make your dad some breakfast. He might not get a chance to eat for a while.”
Susan made her father some eggs and toast and placed it on the table in front of him. He said, “Thank you,” but was distracted, trying to take in the full dimensions of this nightmare that had descended upon his peaceful home.
The agents and cops took Rydz away. Susan was stunned. To see her father so vulnerable, to think that he was going to be scared and in distress, was more than she could handle. “What’s going on?” she demanded of her mother. “What is this all about?”
Her mother said, “It’s not anything you need to know about.”
Susan felt the frustration choking at her throat. Her mother had cancer and was dying; she seemed to be overwhelmed by everything that was happening. Susan’s father was the rock in her life, and now he was gone.
Still, Susan’s mother would tell her nothing. Susan insisted on going with her to her father’s arraignment in court. Maybe there she would learn some things.
At the federal courthouse in Miami, Susan and her mother waited. Rydz was brought into the room. They had a chance to speak briefly with him as he waited for the judge to appear. He did not say, “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.” He was nervous and worried.
The prosecutors came into the room, and then the judge. To Susan, it was like a dream. She didn’t hear any of the names mentioned nor notice the faces. She looked only at her father. In a strange, disembodied voice, she heard the prosecutor say that Abraham Rydz, also known as El Polaco, was being charged with racketeering and conspiracy for his role in an ongoing criminal enterprise.
Susan had no idea what any of those words meant. When she got home, she looked them up on the Internet.
OTHER ARRESTS AND SEARCHES WERE COORDINATED TO TAKE PLACE SIMULTANEously with that of Rydz. Given the name “Operation Corporate Raider,” the undertaking was massive: various arrest teams involved 170 detectives and sergeants and 66 federal agents.
Nene Marquez was taken into custody by the Policía Nacional at his home in Spain.
Luis DeVilliers was arrested at his home in Miami. His son, Luis Jr., was arrested at Challenger Video, their warehouse filled with illegal joker poker machines.
Hit man Chino Acuna was taken, without incident, on a Miami street where he was being followed by undercover cops.
Orestes Vidan, the accountant, was arrested at his office, which was filled with ledgers and documents related to the operation of the Corporation going back decades.
Evelyn Runciman was arrested at Gables by the Sea, an exclusive gated community where she lived with her new husband, one of the richest men in Miami. Runciman had recently given birth to a child. She was allowed to change clothes and then taken into custody.
In New York, Tony Dávila was arrested at his home in Queens. Luis Perez was served with an arrest warrant at Rikers Island correctional facility, where he was already being held on other criminal charges. The detectives who served Perez then drove by El Baturo, a bar and book-making spot in the Bronx that was popular with Cuban boliteros. They entered the bar and announced, “All of your Corporation buddies just got arrested all over the world. The government also took every penny they have and every piece of property they own. So unless you want to cooperate with us, you’ll be next.”
In the suburb of The Hammocks, west of Miami, José Miguel Battle woke up and prepared to have his live-in nurse drive him to the local Publix supermarket to buy groceries. Battle had been feeling better, but his condition was problematic. Aging was a bitch. Going to the supermarket was his biggest adventure of the day.
As he left his condominium, he first stopped by a series of kennels on the property where he kept his dogs. Two dozens dogs had been preserved from El Zapotal, a small number compared to what he used to own. El Padrino fed the dogs. He watched them jump around and slobber all over one another. It was one of the last remaining pleasures he had in his life.
Battle got into in the front passenger seat of his Cadillac. The nurse got in behind the wheel and drove them both to the market. Neither Battle nor the nurse realized that they were being followed by a surveillance team of detectives.
At the market, in the produce section, Detective Doug Mew walked up to Battle and informed him of his rights. He was placed under arrest.
They drove back to Battle’s condo, where he was allowed to change his clothes and retrieve his identification and some other incidentals. As he walked out the front door of his condo surrounded by detectives, he turned to his nurse and said, “Please take care of my dogs. I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”
ONE FINAL ARREST NEEDED TO TAKE PLACE, AND THAT WAS OF MIGUELITO BATTLE. When the team of cops arrived at his home on the morning of Operation Corporate Raider, they discovered that Junior and his wife were not there. They were on a cruise ship currently out on the Caribbean. At his home, the search team found their itinerary. The couple were in the Presidential Suite aboard the Celebrity Summit. According to their itinerary, the ship’s next port of call was Costa Rica the following morning.
Shanks, Gonzalez, and other lead investigators met at the mobile headquarters in downtown Miami. It was around noon, and a press conference was scheduled to announce the arrests at 3 P.M. They needed to make a decision about Battle Jr.
It was determined that the Summit had Internet access. Shanks figured that Miguelito would hear about the arrests of his father and everyone else before they reached Costa Rica and was therefore a flight risk. They would have to arrest him at sea before the ship arrived in port.
On a day filled with complicated maneuvers and an unprecedented use of manpower, the investigators now set out to arrest Battle Jr. on the high seas.
The U.S. Coast Guard had no cutters in that area of the Caribbean. Shanks contacted the Pentagon and spoke with a captain from the U.S. Navy. He was told that naval warships on cruises in the southern and western Caribbean usually carried a Coast Guard law enforcement contingent on board. The captain told Shanks, “We have two ships in the area. But unfortunately they are not positioned between your cruise ship and the port. Even at full speed, I’m not sure we could catch them before they arrive in Costa Rica.”
Shanks told the Pentagon Navy captain that he would get back to him. When he did, it was on a conference call with the chairman of the board of Celebrity Cruise Lines.
Shanks explained the predicament to the chairman, placing an emphasis on Battle Jr.’s role in the Cuban Mafia and that he was likely facing a life sentence, meaning that when faced with arrest he might resort to desperate means. Initially, the cruise line chairman was not impressed. “My vessel can’t just heave to in the middle of the ocean and come to a halt. We have thousands of passengers to consider.”
Said Shanks, “Sir, if we can’t do this at sea, I will arrange for armed guards from the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica to be on the pier. They, along with naval personnel, will obstruct your vessel from disembarking until after we have boarded what we now consider a hostile vessel to arrest Mr. Battle. We would rather not subject your passengers to that, but unless you order the Summit to slow down so that we can intercept at sea, you give us no other choice.”
The cruise line chairman was quiet, and then he said, “Is there a way to arrest this Mr. Battle while it’s still dark out?”
“Affirmative,” said the Navy captain. He gave the chairman a course and speed for the Summit, plus a longitude and latitude so that the cruise liner would rendezvous with the USS Thomas S. Gates, a guided missile cruiser of the Ticonderoga class. The Gates would maintain a distance of one mile and send out a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment to make the arrest of Battle at 2:30 A.M., under cover of darkness. If all went according to plan, the operation would be conducted without most passengers on the vessel even knowing that it had taken place.
Everyone agreed. Shanks went to a nearby hotel and took a nap (he hadn’t slept in nearly two days). He awoke, showered, and went back to headquarters. It was an astounding experience. Shanks and the other lead investigators of Operation Corporate Raider were piped into all radio transmission between the Navy and Coast Guard vessels, as well as being in on an open mic on one of the arresting officers. They listened to the sound of the Coast Guard ship’s engine and the splashing of waves as the officers approached the cruise ship, where they were met by security personnel who allowed them on board and led them to the Presidential Suite. Using a passkey to enter the cabin, the officers surprised Battle in bed and placed him under arrest.
From their post in downtown Miami, it was, for Shanks and his fellow investigators, as if they were there. They could even hear Battle’s wife, Grace, crying as her husband was informed of his rights and taken into custody.
THE FIRST TO FLIP WAS LUIS DEVILLIERS, WHO FEARED THAT IF HE REMAINED IN lockup, Battle would find a way to have him killed. Oracio Altuve, who had been flirting with becoming an informant for fifteen years, also agreed to testify. Luis Perez cut a deal and agreed to testify. A woman named Consuela Alvarez, who had been a bookkeeper and secretary for the Corporation in New York and in Miami, was in jail at the time of the arrests. She reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered her services as a witness.
The biggest fish of all was Abraham Rydz, whom Shanks and Gonzalez had set their sights on from the very beginning. Rydz’s older daughter, Vivian, had been arrested and charged with being a member of the Corporation on what even the prosecutors, if they were being honest with themselves, would admit was a bogus charge. Her involvement in one of her father’s bolita spots back in the late 1970s was ancient history, but the investigators had acted on the expectation of using her arrest as a bargaining chip with Rydz. And they had another bargaining chip. On the day after El Polaco’s arrest, they set up surveillance cameras at the safe deposit boxes of DeVilliers, Battle, Rydz, and others. On camera, they caught Margaret Rydz stuffing a carrying bag with cash. After she emptied out the account, she left behind a newspaper article in the safe deposit box about the arrest of her husband.
Shanks and Gonzalez met with Rydz in an isolated room at the federal lockup. They told him that not only were they charging his daughter, but they were also going to charge his wife with money laundering for removing ill-gotten proceeds from their safe deposit box. What the two men did not know, until Rydz told them, was that she had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and didn’t have long to live. Getting Rydz to flip was not difficult. In exchange for his cooperation, the charges against his daughter and wife would be dropped, and he would be released pending his testimony at trial, so that he could spend her remaining months with his dying wife.
As the trial date approached, it sometimes seemed as though the case might become ungainly and get out of hand. Coordinating the efforts of so many different jurisdictions was difficult, with investigators in New York not always aware of what the Miami investigators were doing, and vice versa.
In New York, ADA Dennis Ring and Detective Tom Farley were responsible for tracking down Willie Diaz, who would be an essential witness on the subject of the arsons. The only problem was that nobody knew where Diaz was. For a time, he had been relocated into the witness protection program, but in the 1990s he had voluntarily left the program and disappeared from the radar. The New York investigators had been looking, but they were stumped. Then one day Ring was at a family party speaking with a postal inspector he knew who was involved in a criminal investigation in Brooklyn. The investigator asked him, “Hey, you’re working a big Cuban Mafia case, right?”
Ring said, “Yes, I am.”
“Well, I got this guy we’ve been using on one of our investigations. This probably won’t mean anything to you, because everything he’s telling us is old news from the 1980s, but he’s loaded with stories about an arson war between the Cubans and the Italians back in the day.”
Ring listened to the postal inspector, not saying anything until he was sure. “You’re talking about Willie Diaz.”
“That’s not the name he uses.
“Brown-skinned Puerto Rican, about three hundred pounds, surly disposition?”
“Well, yeah, that does describe him pretty well.”
Willie Diaz had returned to Brooklyn under a different name, had gotten himself into trouble with the law, and was now cooperating with postal investigators as a way to avoid criminal charges.
Detective Tom Farley and an NYPD apprehension team picked up Willie Diaz and brought him into the office of Dennis Ring, on Jay Street, near the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Guess what?” said Ring. “There’s a big racketeering case about to take place down in Florida and you are going to be one of the star witnesses.”
Willie Diaz wasn’t happy to hear it; he cursed and said, “No.”
Ring explained that he would either be a witness or a codefendant. “Your state cooperation agreement from the 1980s isn’t binding with the federal government. You could now be charged with everything you admitted to on the stand at the Lalo Pons trial.”
Diaz was livid, but he had no choice.
Willie was immediately taken into the custody of the Brooklyn DA’s Office; he was put up in a hotel and kept under twenty-four-hour guard. But he still had a phone, and on a number of occasions he called the office phone of Dennis Ring and left messages saying “I will fuck you up,” among other threats. Diaz blamed Ring for all his problems.
Certainly, when a man who has admitted to playing a role in the killing of eight people threatens your life, you take it seriously. But the prosecutors needed Willie Diaz. And since they had him under lock and key, they felt they could monitor his every move. Still, it was unnerving for Ring and the other investigators.
THE TRIAL GOT UNDER WAY IN FEBRUARY 2006, TWENTY-THREE MONTHS AFTER THE arrests of the defendants. By the time jury selection began, many of those indicted had become cooperators or copped pleas and been dropped from the case. Left standing were nine defendants, and two of those—Evelyn Runciman and her stepfather, Valerio Cerron—had been severed from the case. They would be prosecuted at a separate money-laundering trial.
On the day opening statements were scheduled to begin, Battle Jr., surprisingly, tried to negotiate a plea deal. The prosecutors, including Tony Gonzalez and co-prosecutor David Haimes, were for the deal. Miguelito would plead guilty to most of the charges against him. Some of the charges would be dropped. In exchange, he would receive a two-year sentence, which meant, if he were given credit for time served, he could be out of prison in months. Plus, the deal specified that the government could not go after his share of a $100 million real estate deal in the Canary Islands that the investigators had learned about after his arrest.
Shanks was against the deal. In fact, he was outraged that the government would even consider it.
A few months before trial prepartions began in earnest, Shanks had retired from the Miami-Dade Police Department. More than thirty years had been devoted to the department, with the last half of those years working cases related to Battle and the Corporation. Upon his retirement, Shanks was immediately employed as a special investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, so that he could see the trial through to the end. Though he was not a supervisor on the case, merely a hired gun, Gonzalez and the other prosecutors recognized Shanks’s singular devotion to the case. He had been given veto power, which meant that his insistence that Battle Jr. be prosecuted to the full extent of the law be given deference.
Said Gonzalez to Shanks, “Okay. We’ll do it your way. But if we lose on the Battle Jr. counts at trial, it’s on you.”
On March 2, the presentation of evidence finally commenced in the courtroom of Judge Alan Gold—the same judge who had scolded Shanks and Gonzalez for having tried to use RICO-type evidence against Battle at his gun possession trial. Now the tables had been turned and they were all involved in one of the biggest RICO trials ever presented in the Southern District of Florida.
Tony Gonzalez gave the opening statement for the prosecution. From his first words to the jury, Gonzalez went for the jugular, the emotional main vein of the case. Before even mentioning bolita or Battle or the Corporation, he told the story of Jannin Toribio, burned to death in an arson fire on her fourth birthday. It was a startling opening, unsettling, some might say a cheap stunt, but it certainly worked by establishing the horrific image of that child’s death as a motif that would haunt the trial for the six months of its duration.
To say that the government’s case was ambitious was like saying an astronaut hopes to get off the ground. The investigators had succeeded in putting together the case that Dave Shanks had always dreamed about—a sprawling assemblage of racketeering acts and conspiracies spanning forty years. The danger was that the size of the case—the sheer number of witnesses and predicate acts and criminal charges involving multiple defendants—would overwhelm the jury, making the trial narrative too dense or complicated for anyone to follow. Another issue was the ages of the defendants and many of the witnesses. Battle Jr. was the only defendant under the age of seventy. Looking at the defendants, so clearly in their final years, begged the question: why not just let these old codgers die of old age and save the government the massive cost of prosecution?
The answer to that question was Jannin Toribio, a child whose death cried out for justice.
If the trial had a star witness, it was Abraham Rydz, El Polaco. From the stand, Rydz talked with a wistful nostalgia about the vagaries of the gambling business, what a crapshoot it was, how you could be up one minute and down the next. “It was a Sunday morning about nine-thirty, ten o’clock, and we were bragging with each other about how much money we had. And he told me, ‘I have something like one hundred fifty or two hundred thousand dollars,’ and I said I had about the same. That same day, Sunday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, we had to go looking for people to borrow money from to pay the hits. So, that’s the kind of business we’re talking about. We’re talking about even when you made money, it wasn’t a sure thing, you were gambling. The word is ‘gambling.’ You could get hit very big, and you could lose everything.”
Most of all, Rydz talked of the highly personal nature of the relationships between the generation of Cubans who had come from the island, in the wake of revolution and displacement, and formed a tight cultural bond around the concept of bolita, a game of chance and business partnership based on each banker’s willingness to cover for the other in times of need.
To Rydz, it was about business, making money, and it was on this account that he eventually parted ways with José Miguel Battle.
During cross-examination, Jack Blumenfeld asked Rydz, “Let’s talk about when the three of you would discuss business or policy issues or have to make decisions.”
“What do you mean, the three of us?”
“You, José Miguel, and Migue.”
“The truth is, sir, José Miguel was out of it. José Miguel was not interested in making money. José Miguel was interested in his name, in his pride, in the way he dressed, and other things. But he was not interested in the business at all.”
Rydz, during his cross-examination by the attorney for Battle Jr., seemed to pull his punches, hedging his testimony to give the impression that Junior was not involved in many of the crimes for which he had been indicted, especially as it related to the murders of Ernestico Torres and Palulu Enriques, and also the many arson deaths. This angered the prosecution team, especially Shanks, who whispered under his breath to Tony Gonzalez things like “this is bullshit,” and “this is a violation of the terms of his cooperation agreement.”
As annoyed as Shanks was by Rydz’s covering for Battle Jr., the defense lawyers in the case became disgusted by Shanks. At numerous times during the trial, when the prosecution, due to scheduling conflicts, was unable to have one of their many witnesses at the courtroom when they were scheduled to testify, Shanks was put on the stand. Having been designated as the prosecution’s primary “expert witness,” he was used to stall until the original witness was able to arrive. The defense lawyers got sick of hearing from Shanks, and his longtime involvement in the investigation became an issue at the trial. One lawyer suggested that Shanks’s “vested interest” in a guilty verdict was what the case was all about, the need of one cop, on behalf of the entire criminal justice system, to justify a career devoted to virtually only one case.
Through it all, José Miguel Battle Sr. watched with a wary detachment. At times it seemed as though he was enjoying having his life laid out in such a comprehensive and dramatic fashion. A life lived in fragments, or stages, is often hard to comprehend. To have it dramatized, complete with witnesses and accumulated evidence, might seem like the Greatest Story Ever Told, particularly for someone with such a grandiose ego and personal sense of drama as El Padrino. It was, undeniably, a larger-than-life story, but even so, Battle’s health deteriorated noticeably as the trial wore on. At one point the trial shut down as he was rushed to the hospital for emergency dialysis treatment. One week later, when he returned to the courtroom, it was in a court-designated Barcalounge chair, almost like a bed with an electronic headrest. Now heavily medicated, Battle sometimes dozed off during the proceedings and began to snore in court.
On April 27, almost two months into the trial, Blumenfeld stood before Judge Gold and said, “You Honor, my client is ready to plead guilty to certain charges.” Blumenfeld had worked out a deal with Tony Gonzalez and the prosecutors. If they agreed to drop the charges against Evelyn Runciman and Valerio Cerron, and knowing that evidence presented against him might bring down his son, he was ready to plead guilty on the RICO counts in the indictment. He did so with the full knowledge that it would bring about a sentence that guaranteed he would die in federal custody.
Without El Padrino, the remainder of the trial was anticlimactic, though it dragged on for another four months. In the end, like most RICO cases, it resulted in guilty verdicts on many of the counts and not guiltys on some of the others. On most of the major racketeering counts, the defendants were found guilty across the board.
At sentencing, Battle Jr. faced time ranging from five years to fifteen. Since Jr. had not been found guilty on the murder counts, he and his family were expecting a light sentence. But at the sentencing hearing, Shanks once again engendered the enmity of the Battle defense team by taking the stand and arguing strenuously for the stiffest sentence to be imposed against the man who, he said, had more than any other used the criminal actions of the Corporation to make himself rich.
Judge Gold agreed with the prosecution. He gave Battle Jr. the maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison.
As for Senior, given his age and declining health, it hardly mattered. But the dictates of the state concede favor to no man, and so José Miguel Battle Sr. was also, on the charges for which he had pleaded guilty, given the maximum sentence—twenty years in prison, which for him was the same as a life sentence.
FOR SUSAN RYDZ, THE TIME OF THE CORPORATION TRIAL WAS A PERSONAL HELL NOT of her making. For one thing, ten months before the trial began, on June 5, 2005, her mother died from a brain tumor caused by the spreading of her cancer. Her mother’s death had come sooner than either she or her father had anticipated, and it threw Susan into a state of deep concern about her father. For a time, he seemed to have a lot of anger. Eventually the anger turned into concern for Susan, who, he noticed, was becoming withdrawn and perhaps overburdened by the distressing turn of events in her young life.
Susan was stressed, but she soldiered on. In September, she began her first year at college in Boston. Occasionally she flew back to Miami to be with her father. He had moved out of their house in Key Biscayne (which had been seized by the government) into a small apartment. For a while, he was required to wear an ankle bracelet, until the trial got under way and he was moved to a separate location and kept under guard.
One day, Susan was in court when he testified. He acknowledged her presence with a slight nod. On the one hand, Susan found it difficult to see her father on the stand being grilled by lawyers. But she also felt pride that he was doing what he had needed to do to be with his wife and daughter at the time. All they had now was each other.
Seeing the defendants, Battle and the others, Susan felt no resentment or judgment toward these men. Now that she was learning for the first time what her father had done with them, she half admired their ingenuity and moxie, though it clearly had not ended well. Her father, Battle Sr., the others—they were exiles who had done what they needed to do to provide for their families. Susan didn’t pretend to know the ins and outs of everything that had taken place, but she knew her father was a good man, and she believed him when he told her that he had not been involved in any of the killings.
Susan returned to school in Boston. She spoke with her dad on the phone almost every day. As the trial neared an end, Rydz often talked of his plans for the future. From the beginning, in exchange for his testimony, he’d been told he would likely be receiving a sentence of three years, and with a friendly ruling from a judge, that was likely to be house arrest with three years’ probation. “Maybe I can get them to relocate me somewhere near Boston,” he told her, “so we can be together.”
By the time of sentencing, Susan was home from college on summer break. The day before her father was scheduled to appear in court to learn his fate, she met with him, along with her grandmother, at the small house where he now lived. Her father seemed oddly despondent, which she thought was strange given that tomorrow he’d be receiving his expected sentence of three years, with likely probation. Rydz gave his daughter a diamond ring that he always wore, and a gold chain, and told her to put it in a safe deposit box. He told Susan to take her grandmother and go to the bank.
On her way to the bank, Susan called her father on a cell phone. “I’m coming back there, you know. Is there anything you need from the grocery store? Something I can cook for dinner?”
“No,” he said sadly.
Susan hung up. What’s wrong with this picture? she thought.
What Susan didn’t know was that the sadness in her father’s voice was because he had been told the day before that the government was not going to give him the light sentence they had promised. They felt that he had reneged on his obligation to testify fully and truthfully, that he had deliberately shaded his testimony to benefit Battle Jr. Rydz’s lawyers had told him to expect the worst: fifteen years, with no probation.
Coming back from the bank with her grandmother, Susan received an urgent call from her aunt. “Something bad happened at the house, something happened at the house.” The aunt didn’t know what it was, but the maid had called, and she was hysterical.
Susan and the grandmother arrived back at the house just as the aunt was arriving. They entered the house. The maid, who seemed to be in shock, pointed toward the bathroom.
On the kitchen table, Susan found a note, which she recognized as being in her father’s handwriting. It read:
Dear Susan:
I am sorry I am
ending this way, but I
am tired of living like this.
Thank you for being my
baby and giving me all
the pleasures that you did
for me and my wife.
Thanks to my family
for all the support they gave
me. Have a healthy and happy life. (Papi)
Still carrying the note, Susan went into the bathroom. There she found her father’s body slumped in the tub.
Abraham Rydz had knelt down and put his head over the tub, so he wouldn’t make a mess. Then he put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains out.
DAVE SHANKS WAS UNMOVED BY THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM RYDZ. IT WAS UNFORTUnate, even tragic, certainly for his daughter. But as a seasoned detective, he had seen the game played a million different ways. Rydz, along with his attorney, had negotiated a cooperation deal for himself that involved actually cooperating, and Shanks felt that he had reneged on that deal. There had to be consequences. That was how the system worked. The suicide was horrible, but that was a decision that Rydz had made, and as far as Shanks was concerned, it had no bearing on him. A few days after the verdicts had been announced at the trial, the investigator stepped down from his job with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. After three and a half decades in law enforcement, he was now a civilian. He moved out of the Miami area and became merely an occasional visitor to the city of his birth, but memories of the Corporation case remained permanently embedded in his psyche.
For El Padrino, life had also been reduced to a series of distant memories. Havana, Brigade 2506 and the invasion, the murders, the women—it was all gone now. He was a slave to his declining health. Initially, after pleading guilty, he had been free on a signature bond of $1 million. Given his various ailments, his mobility was severely limited. Along with kidney failure and COPD, he had developed hepatic sclerosis due to hepatitis B, which diminished his eyesight. He was permanently restricted to a wheelchair.
Battle was awaiting an available bed at the prison medical facility at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he was scheduled to be incarcerated. Meanwhile, there was among the medical professionals tending to Battle the belief that his COPD and breathing problems required immediate specialized care. There was some discussion as to whether he could be transferred to a specialized unit at an overseas hospital. This would require some sort of “compassionate release,” where a foreign government would agree to take him in even though he was a convict.
Jack Blumenfeld became Battle’s de facto executor. José Miguel’s brother Gustavo and son Miguelito were now behind bars, and his longtime, estranged wife, Maria, refused to deal with him directly. Blumen-feld was the only person he had left.
By mid-2007, Battle’s health had reached a critical stage. Being transferred to an overseas hospital would be arduous, but it might be the only thing that would save his life. With his client’s consent, Blumenfeld explored options. At first, Costa Rica agreed to take in Battle, but then they changed their position, Blumenfeld was told, after objections from the U.S. State Department. Then Honduras agreed to take Battle, but they also reneged on the offer after pressure from the U.S. government. Finally, the Dominican Republic agreed to take in Battle, on the stipulation that he would be entering the D.R. by way of a third country. This way, the D.R. would not be in violation of U.S. visa requirements. Given the state of his health, it was not likely Battle would survive a long flight to a third country unless it was somewhere near the D.R.
Asked Blumenfeld, “How about Cuba?” Given that the United States had no diplomatic relations with Cuba, Battle could be flown to and from that island nation without a visa. But would Cuba, under the guise of a compassionate release, allow José Miguel Battle Sr. to spend a night at a hospital in Havana while on his way to the D.R.?
Blumenfeld had been representing a notorious client who was accused of being a spy for Cuba and had developed some contacts in their government. Through diplomatic circles, he checked and was told the Cuban government, in the interest of humane considerations, would allow the patient to spend a night in a Havana hospital.
For anyone who knew Battle and his Bay of Pigs history, it was an astounding proposition. Battle had not set foot on the island of his birth since he was released from the Isle of Pines prison in 1963. For much of his life, resentment toward the government of Fidel Castro had fueled his will to live. Spending time in Cuba, even one night, was a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Castro government.
When Blumenfeld told Battle that the Cuban government had agreed to take him in, he did so knowing the immensity of what was being proposed. These two men—lawyer and client—had had many discussions over the years about Battle’s feelings toward Castro. Blumenfeld had suspicions about José Miguel’s financial and maybe even tactical support for the anti-Castro movement in New Jersey and Miami. He knew Battle to be a hard man—resolute and stubborn on matters of principle. To his client, Blumenfeld put it bluntly: “Would you be willing to stay over in Cuba on your way to a facility in the D.R.?”
Wheelchair-bound, partly blind, his breathing labored and sporadic, Battle said, “Better Fidel Castro than George Bush.”
During the years of his recent incarceration and prosecution, Battle had developed a special animus toward the Bush family. The father, George H. W. Bush, had as director of the CIA relied on Cuban exiles to do many “dirty tricks” in South America and elsewhere. Many exiles believed that later, as vice president, Bush sold them out during the Iran-Contra scandal. Now, in the new century, the son had become president, and, as far as Battle was concerned, had undertaken a prosecutorial vendetta against him and everyone in his orbit. By so doing, he was a betrayer of the Cuban cause.
Betrayal was a concept that Battle understood. At every turn, he and his generation had been subjected to cycles of betrayal by politicians, community leaders, business associates, lovers—by the very country that had taken them in as exiles. Sometimes the slights and indignities inflicted by one nemesis became overshadowed by newer and more immediate betrayers.
Better Fidel Castro than George Bush.
Battle agreed to the unthinkable—spending a night in Castro’s Cuba.
As it turned out, it was not to be. U.S. authorities would not allow such a transfer to take place. Battle was moved to a private medical facility in Columbia, South Carolina, with a state-of-the-art pulmonary care center. It was there, on August 4, 2007, that he died from what was officially attributed to liver failure.
The final indignity came when the U.S. government refused to pay for the transfer of Battle’s body from South Carolina to Florida for a burial. Blumenfeld paid the expenses out of his own pocket. The lawyer told a newspaper reporter, “He was a good friend to me, and he was a tough, fearless guy. He was a great friend to his friends and a better enemy to his enemies. He was one of a kind.”
Battle was buried in a small plot at the Caballero Rivero Woodlawn Cemetery on SW 8th Street—Calle Ocho—in Miami’s Little Havana.
Down the street from the cemetery, in a small park, is a monument to Brigade 2506. At the top of a stone monolith is an eternal flame that burns day and night, in honor of the men who died during the invasion.