Even when I was writing about mysteries every week, I never spent much time on non-fiction, true-crime, books. Unless they were also histories, like The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, which was a fascinating read. I stumbled upon tonight’s true crime book when looking for books about Cuba, after President Obama announced the current thaw in our relations with that nation in December of 2014. And it sat on my kindle for over a year, until I finally got around to reading it (well, listening to it, actually) a few weeks ago. I had no idea it would be so much fun.
TJ English is a crime writer who started out as a journalist by day and taxi driver by night. In 2011 he published The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge about corruption and crime in New York City during the 60s and 70s. His 1995 book, Born to Kill, followed the Asian gangs of the 1980s and 90s in New York’s Chinatown.
His debut work was 1990’s The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob which also forms the first entry in his trilogy on the Irish-American mob. The Westies were a particularly violent gang that flourished between the 60s and 80s, although their roots went much further back in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York. The second book was Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster and went back into the origins of the Irish American gangs in the nineteenth century. This book was adapted by the History Channel in 2006 and is repeated annually around St Patrick’s Day, so keep an eye out for it this year. The latest entry in the trilogy is Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him. It has been nominated for the 2016 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, as were The Savage City, Born to Kill, and tonight’s book, Havana Nocturne.
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution
by TJ English
Published by William Morrow/HarperCollins (NY)
June 1st 2008
416 pages
In a blog entry, English wrote about why he preferred to explore the criminal underground instead of the world of the white-collar criminal class. In a word, because they are boring.
When I write about the criminal underworld – be it from the POV of my own Irish American culture, or Cuban American culture, or African American, or Mexican – it is from a place of respect and curiosity (curiosity being the highest form of respect) for the culture I’m writing about. I write about an aspect of that culture in which people are shut out from the mainstream, and they are struggling to become a part of that tapestry. In the underworld, violence and crime are the dominant transactional methods available; they always have been. The means by which outcasts and “suspicious characters” navigate this world is endlessly fascinating to me. It is the true American story.
…
I would much rather spend my creative energy or my time with a street hoodlum than a CEO. I would rather do research in a Kingston tenement yard or a colonia in Ciudad Juarez than in a corporate boardroom. White collar crime may be an important subject, it may be worthy of discussion, but for a storyteller, it is about as nourishing as a speech by Donald Trump.
For all his disclaimers, it was clear to me, while reading this book that the Havana Mob had more in common with the corporate criminal minds in our society than English appeared to realize.
The idea formulated by Luciano, Lansky, and others was for Havana to serve as the front for a far more ambitious agenda: the creation of a criminal state whose gross national product, union pension funds, public utilities, banks, and other financial institutions would become the means to launch further criminal enterprises around the globe. The Havana Mob could then bury the profits from these criminal operations underneath the patina of a “legitimate” government in Cuba and no one would be able to touch them.
Or as the Kochs call it, Wisconsin.
But since he does not directly draw those parallels in his book, I should probably not either. His first and last concern is the men of the Mob; who they were, where they came from, and what they hoped to, and did, accomplish in Cuba.
With the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919, bootleggers used the hidden bays along Cuba’s coast as transshipment points in the smuggling of rum from the Caribbean to the United States. Al Capone was the first mobster to set up shop in Cuba, opening a pool hall in 1928. It didn’t last long as Cubans, unlike his fellow Chicagoans, were apparently not that interested in pool. However, the Roaring Twenties blossomed in Havana’s gambling casinos, nightclubs and racetracks. By 1928-1929 visitors to the island spent some twenty-six million dollars.
That presented a tempting target to gangsters Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. With the end of Prohibition, US mobs needed to diversify and Havana seemed an ideal place to do that. A suitcase full of cash, the promise of $3 to $5 million a year, and a cut of the profits was all that it took to buy the cooperation of Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar who would become the dictator of Cuba during the 1950s. During the 1930s his military connections (he started as an enlisted man and rose to the rank of Major Colonel) enabled him to become the power behind the throne.
The Great Depression and World War II postponed the Havana Mob’s takeover of the gambling casinos, but by 1946 they were ready to sit down and divvy up the city. In December of 1946 mobsters from all over the US met on the two top floor of the Hotel Nacional between the 22nd and the 26th of the month. During the conference the disposition of Bugsy Siegel, whose Las Vegas Flamingo Hotel/Casino had been backed by the mob, and was well over budget and behind schedule, was also discussed. But most of the meetings were spent talking about the future of the gambling paradise they were planning for the Caribbean. And enjoying entertainment provided by Frank Sinatra.
Between 1952 and 1958 the mob ran the city. Money poured in as travelers, mainly from the States, spent their time in the casinos, race tracks, hotels and nightclubs. Men often traveled to the island without their wives; there was no “family friendly” aspect to Havana but there were plenty of clubs that featured live, on-stage, sex acts. And speaking of sex, there was plenty of that, with bordellos all over the city.
Batista, meanwhile, having lost the 1952 election staged a coup d'etat and took over the government.
The casinos and nightclubs generated capital, which was used to build elaborate public works and attract investors, who were then fleeced by Batista and his underlings. All Batista had to do was keep the Cuban rabble in their place.
While he sold off the rights to the nation’s resources to foreign investors, he used the military, intelligence officers, and police torture squads to keep the rabble in their place. That in turn fueled the small group of anti-Batista guerrillas led by Fidel Castro Ruz.
Comandante William Gálvez Rodríguez was a young rebel leader entrenched in the Sierra Maestra during the Revolution. Years later, he recalled: “It would not be accurate to say that the [mobsters] in Havana were the reason for the Revolution—there were deeper reasons that went back to the beginning of Cuba’s formation. But it is a fact that the casinos and the money—and most importantly the connections among the U.S. gangsters, U.S. corporations, and the Batista regime—became a symbol of corruption to us. Even though we were away in the mountains, we knew of the prostitution, the stealing of government funds, the selling of the country to outside interests. We vowed that when—not if; when—we were in power, this was going to change.”
Because the tale of the Havana Mob cannot be told without the story of Fidel Castro, English includes his background, influences, and his revolution which cleaned the Havana Mob out of his city and off of the island.
Overall, it is an enlightening look at a city that was. Well documented, English fills his work with anecdotes of the rich and famous. Like the time a troop of Girl Scouts, accompanied by a nun was inadvertently allowed into Sinatra’s suite at the Nacional in the middle of an orgy he was attending with Lucky Luciano, and Al Capone’s younger brother Ralph, and “a planeload of call girls.” John Kennedy was also treated to a sexual orgy by the mob during a visit to Havana. The mobster who hosted was later regretful that he had not had a camera rolling.
For those who enjoyed the Godfather trilogy, there is much here that will sound familiar. While Mario Puzo may have changed the timing and the names of characters, some of the incidents actually did happen.
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