A Quiet Vendetta

them believe that I did not steal the money and kill the boy. I didn’t do it, Ernesto, I couldn’t…’

‘You have to tell them, Father. You have to stop running away and hiding. The longer you stay away the more they will believe that you took the money. If you come with me now and tell them what happened, how these men robbed you and killed Anselmo, I will support you, I will make them understand that there was nothing you could have done.’

My father nodded. He started smiling. He was already rising to his feet. He reached out and gripped my arm. ‘You are my son,’ he said quietly. ‘I will never forget what you have done to help me. You brought me here, you got me a job, a place to live, and I will remember this for the rest of my life.’

My father, the Havana Hurricane, did not have to remember how much he owed me for very long at all. A little more than twenty minutes later he lay dead in an alleyway two blocks from the Starboard Club. He did not question me when I turned right and walked him down that alleyway, which he would have known went nowhere at all. He did not cry out when I hit him across the back of the head and he fell awkwardly to the ground. He lay there for a moment, stunned and speechless, and in his eyes was an expression of such resigned inevitability that I knew he was aware of his own death coming fast like a freight train.

From the ground I took a brick, and squatting down with one knee on his chest I raised the brick above my head.

‘For your wife,’ I told him quietly. ‘For your wife and my mother this is long overdue.’

He closed his eyes. No sounds. No tears. Nothing at all.

I think he was dead after I hit him the first time. The corner of the brick destroyed much of the right hand side of his face. I imagined the subsequent repeated blows to his head and neck would not have been felt at all. It was like killing a dog. Less than a dog.

Three days later it was discovered that Anselmo Gamba and my father had been robbed on the way to the bank. They had been robbed by three Cuban brothers – Osmany, Valdes and Vicente Torres. I was not despatched to attend to them, for such things as the killing of three small-time Cuban hoodlums was considered beneath my talents, but someone was despatched and the money was recovered, and a month and a half later an oil drum was recovered from the Canal de Entrada with three heads and six hands inside.

Don Ceriano had been the one to tell me that my father had not lied, that they had in fact been robbed on the way to the bank.

‘I sent you to attend to this matter for my own reasons,’ he told me. ‘I sent Maxie over to tell you so that you could help us find your father and discover what had happened.’

I did not reply.

‘I wondered what you would do when you found him,’ he went on. ‘I wanted to know what action you would take.’

Again I said nothing. I was asking myself if there was a point to what he was saying.

‘And you killed your own father,’ Don Ceriano said.

I nodded my head.

‘You have nothing to say, Ernesto?’ he asked.

‘What do you want me to say, Don Ceriano?’

Don Ceriano looked both surprised and perplexed. ‘You killed your own father, Ernesto, and you have nothing to say?’

I smiled. ‘I will say three things, Don Ceriano.’

Don Ceriano raised his eyebrows.

‘Firstly, my father murdered his own wife, my mother. Secondly, his punishment was both appropriate and overdue.’ I paused for a moment.

‘And the third thing?’ Don Ceriano asked.

‘We shall not talk about it again as it deserves no importance.’

Don Ceriano nodded. ‘As you wish, Ernesto, as you wish.’

It was not mentioned again. Not a single word came from Don Ceriano’s lips, nor any of those who worked with us while we were in Havana. My father’s murder was as effortlessly forgotten as his life.

During the coming months I was to understand more of the connections between Florida and Cuba than I had believed existed. Of these things Don Ceriano spoke, but it was also from conversations between the members of his family and those who attended the house in Miami that I learned much of the background. Mafia money had been moving into Florida since the 1930s, with investments in such places as the Tropical Park Race Track in Coral Gables and Meyer Lansky’s Colonial Inn. During the 1940s the Wofford Hotel had been a base for both Lansky and Frank Costello, Costello having close ties with a man called Richard Nixon who would later become president of the United States. Ironically, during the Watergate investigation some years later, an outfit called the Keyes Realty Company was identified as having been the intermediary between organized crime and Miami-Dade County officials. In 1948 Keyes Realty had transferred ownership of a property to a Cuba-Mafia investment group called ANSAN. Later, that same real estate interest passed in ownership to the Teamsters’ Union Pension Fund and Meyer Lansky’s Miami National Bank. Subsequently, in 1967, ownership was signed over to Richard Nixon, and it was discovered that one of the Watergate burglars, a Cuban exile, was a vice-president of that same Keyes Realty Company. Lou Poller, one of Meyer Lansky’s trusted confederates, had taken over control of the Miami National Bank in 1958, and it was through this bank that Mafia money was laundered, often used to purchase apartment buildings, hotels, motels and mobile home companies. The house in which I stayed during those six years in Miami was one of those real estate interests, and it was to here that many of Don Ceriano’s people would come to talk business, to pass details on about who ‘needed their ticket punched’, or who should ‘get a letter on the Chicago typewriter’.

I heard word of Santo Trafficante Jnr again. His name had been mentioned in Cuba, but I had not appreciated that he had in fact been born right there in Florida. Trafficante had operated the Sans Souci and Casino International operations in Havana, and possessed interests and influence in the Riviera, the Tropicana, the Sevilla Biltmore, the Capri Hotel Casino and the Havana Hilton. In Tampa he controlled the Columbia Restaurant, the Nebraska, the Tangerine and the Sands Bars. Trafficante had fled to Havana in 1957 after Grand Jury subpoenas were issued for his arrest and questioning. In the early part of 1958 he had been questioned by the Cuban National Police regarding the Apalachin Meeting, which he denied having attended. He was still wanted in New York for his alleged involvement in the killing of Albert Anastasia, but the Cuban National Police were interested in his manipulation of the bolita numbers for Cuban operatives on behalf of Fidel Castro.

Whatever may have been the allegations against him, Don Ceriano said enough for me to understand that Santo Trafficante Jnr had overseen all Mafia-related operations in Florida since the death of his father in August 1954. As far back as 1948 and 1949 Trafficante had been involved with Frank Zarate, the principal defendant in a case instigated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who collaborated with US Customs and the New York City Police Department to break a Peruvian cocaine supply coming into the US through Cuba. Irrespective of this matter, Trafficante was granted resident status by the Cuban Immigration Department in October 1957. In a memo issued by a narcotics agent called Eugene Marshall in July 1961, it was made clear that Castro had operatives working in Tampa and Miami who made significant bets on Cuba’s bolita through Trafficante’s organization. Trafficante himself was observed meeting several times with a man called Oscar Echemendia. Echemendia was not only a part-owner of the Tropicana Night Club in Havana, but also one of the most influential controllers of the bolita in Dade County, Miami. It was rumored that after Castro’s seizure of power, after he ousted organized crime from the casinos and hotels in Cuba, he kept Santo Trafficante Jnr in jail as he so disliked the man. This was a cause for amusement among the families in Miami, for they knew that Trafficante was an agent for Castro, and he was influential in establishing the terms upon which the Mafia could return to Cuba.

Thus there was a connection between Florida and Cuba, and thus I was accepted as a member of their family. Ceriano was a main player, a heavy-hitter, and I played my part for Ceriano. I consorted with an organization called Cuban Americans in Miami; I relayed inside information from employees of Radio Marti, a US-government sponsored station, and soon I could utter the words Chi se ne frega with as much conviction as the rest of them. I was young, I was willing, I could wear a silk Italian suit with as much panache and style as anyone, and I felt no compunction. I believed these people, I believed their motives and rationale, and if the instruction came that someone needed to be excommunicated from the world, I executed that request with punctuality and professionalism. To me it was a job that had to be done. I did not ask questions. I did not need