A Quiet Vendetta (24 page)

The greasy-haired man placed his left hand on my knee.

I flinched, I could not help it.

The hand with its fat fingers, with its single gold ring with a blue stone set within, traced a line from my knee towards my crotch. I could feel the pressure against my leg, could feel the weight of sin that was intended, and I closed my eyes as that same hand reached between my legs and started rubbing me, just as Sabina had done, but this time different, this time with a motion that made me sick inside.

What Ruben hit the man with I do not know. But he hit him hard. I didn’t even see him coming, but through the open window on the other side of the car a dark shape came rocketing in towards us, and collided with the back of the man’s head.

His anticipatory leer became a wide-mouthed expression of shock – but just for a second, nothing more than a heartbeat – for he swayed backwards suddenly, and then his head rolled sideways on his shoulders and he fell against the dash.

I came out of the passenger door as if I had been ejected with great force. I fell to the road, fell to my hands and knees, and though I wanted to puke I could manage nothing more than a dry choking cough. My instinct told me to drag the greasy-haired gold-toothed man out of the car and kick him, to kick him hard and fast, to kick him in the head until he would never wake up, but Ruben was then beside me, lifting me from the road, standing there to support me, to start me laughing as he pointed at the unconscious form of the man in his tailored suit, in his expensive car, the sickening pervert smile wiped from his face with one swift blow to the head.

‘Quick!’ Ruben said, and together we entered the car.

We took the man’s ring, his pocketbook, his watch, even his shoes. We took his leather belt, his keys, his cigarettes and a half bottle of whiskey we found beneath the driver’s seat. We ran from the side of the car laughing like schoolgirls, and we kept on running – down San Miguel and across Gonzalez, across Padre Valera and Campanario – and we kept on running until I felt my lungs would implode with the pressure.

Later that night, as we smoked the man’s American cigarettes, as we drank his whiskey, as we counted once more the sixty-seven American dollars we had found tucked into the back of his pocketbook, I realized that everything I could ever wish for could be taken with violence.

Back so many years before – in deciding to kill a man for the knowledge he had brought, deciding to do something that would make my mother proud of me, but in some way had made me a reflection of my father – I had taken my first step down a lonely road. There were those, people such as Ruben, who would walk with me for some time, but even Ruben Cienfuegos, with his wide smile and riotous laughter, with his whiskey-fueled bravado that night in
La Habana Vieja
, was not among those willing to take the necessary extra step. I could have killed the man, could have dragged him from his car and beaten him just as my father had beaten so many men before. But my father had only ever killed a man out of passion, out of the fury born of his sport, whereas I had killed a man for something I believed I could own. I believed then that such things were in my blood, and it would only be another two weeks before the blood rose once more, before I realized that what I was doing was not simply a matter of ability, but more a matter of
necessity
. I could kill, and so I did, and the more such killing I carried out the more necessary it became. It was like a virus that gripped me, but it came from the mind and the heart and the soul, not from the cells or the nerves or the brain. It was there within me, perhaps had always been, and it was merely an issue of eventual provocation, the
force majeure
, and Cuba – its lights, its heat, its promise, its emotion – seemed to fuel that provocation without effort.

I became a man in Havana. I became my own hurricane. Seemed to me that every life I extinguished was in some way a repayment to God for how He had mistreated me. I was not so naïve as to consider myself piteous or worthy of special vindication, but I was not so ignorant as to believe that what I possessed was anything but valuable. There were men who would pay for what I could do. Rare is the soul who will take another’s life, and then walk home, his hands steady, his heart quiet in his chest, taking only sufficient time to consider how well he had executed the act, how professional he had been. It became the semblance of a vocation, a calling, and I followed the calling with a degree of natural response that served to excite me.

Ernesto Cabrera Perez was a killer by nature and by choosing.

I made my choice. I wore it well. It suited me, and I suited it.

I consummated my craft in the first week of February of 1960.

The intervening year was one of real life. During those months, as Cuba stretched through her growing pains, as Havana reestablished itself beneath the new regime, Ruben Cienfuegos and I lived life like there was no tomorrow. We stole and cheated and conned our way through many hundreds of American dollars, much of it finding its way between the legs of hookers, down the necks of bottles, and out at the bloody mid-afternoon cockfights and nightly jai-alai contests. We believed we were men; we believed that this was how
real
men behaved, and we felt little responsibility for our actions and significantly less scruples.

Castro was the Premier of Cuba,
el Comandante en Jefe
, and with his own breed of communistic vision he had ousted the Batista-owned and run casinos. He was not blind to the ravages of hedonism that had raddled his homeland, and even on the eve of his assumption of power the peoples of that same homeland had stormed the multi-million-dollar hotels that had once served the tourist trade and lined the pockets of Batista’s family and the organized crime cohorts. In downtown Havana the crowds were frenzied and enraged. They stormed in their hundreds to the doors of the casinos and hotels, and broke their way into the empty air-conditioned, plush-carpeted foyers to wreak havoc. Inside they found roulette, dice and card tables, bars and slot machines, ten thousand of which had been controlled by Batista’s brother-in-law. Batista’s Mafia-financed palaces were destroyed. The military and the police stayed in their barracks, senior officers knowing all too well that their own troops would merely join the mobs, and no-one stepped forward to prevent the people from tearing the hotels and gambling joints apart.

Castro abolished gambling as one of his first decrees as the new dictator. Even as the decree was passed, even as the boats bringing tourists from Florida and the Keys sat idle and empty against the jetties and docks, Castro knew he could not win. That money, the same money that had been creamed as graft from these dens of iniquity, was the finance that had kept Cuba alive. Castro also knew that the Syndicate possessed the only people who could make the casinos and hotels run at a profit, and thus he retracted his decree and gambling was legalized once more. Now state-run and overseen, where Batista had charged $250,000 for each license, and more again beneath the table, Castro’s regime levied a fee of $25,000 plus twenty percent of the profits from each casino. He made it illegal for anyone other than naturalized Cubans to act as croupiers, and the Americans came in as ‘official teachers’. Castro hired advertising agencies to promote the high-life of Havana; the hotels were rebuilt and refurbished after the ravages of his people on the eve of his assumption; the tourists came back in their thousands, and with them a reputed annual revenue exceeding fifty million dollars.

A little more than twenty years earlier a different sequence of events had begun that would bring to Havana one of the most influential organized crime figures in history. In January 1936 a government special prosecutor named Thomas E. Dewey began a series of raids on New York’s brothels. The raids continued until March when a ninety-count indictment was brought against Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Luciano fled New York to a gambling club in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and this was where he was arrested. He was extradited to New York City, and on 13 May 1936 his trial began. On 7 June of the same year a jury found Luciano guilty of sixty-two counts of prostitution, and he was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in Dannemora Prison in upstate New York. On 7 May 1945, a petition for executive clemency and freedom was made to the now governor, Thomas Dewey, and Dewey agreed to a reduction of sentence. On 3 January 1946, Dewey announced that Luciano would be freed, but he was to be deported to his native Sicily. Luciano was released from Great Meadow and taken to Ellis Island. Here he boarded the vessel
Laura Keene
, which set sail on its two-week voyage to Genoa. Between February and October Luciano moved from his hometown of Lercara Friddi to Palermo, thence to Naples and on to Rome. Here he obtained two passports, and aboard a freighter he made his way to Caracas in Venezuela. He flew from Caracas to Mexico City, where he chartered a private aircraft for his flight to Havana, Cuba. He was ninety miles from the coast of Florida, a stopover on his planned return to the United States.

In Havana Luciano was met by his childhood friend and ally Meyer Lansky, and taken to the Hotel Nacional. It was in that same hotel that Luciano and Lansky arranged what would later be known as the Havana Conference for the third week of December 1946. Luciano moved into a plush and extravagant home in the Miramar suburb. Lansky traveled back and forth between Miami and Havana, keeping Luciano informed of the arrangements for the Conference.

On Christmas Eve the Conference took a break. Wives and girlfriends arrived and a party in honor of Frank Sinatra – an up-and-coming star who had arrived with the Fischetti brothers – was held.

The Havana casinos flourished, even under Castro’s regime, and Meyer Lansky, the man Batista had employed to make Cuba the place for America to gamble away its hard-earned millions, now made those millions for Castro. He had cleaned up the Sans Souci and Montmartre clubs, had leaned on major operators like Norman Rothman and forced them to straighten up their acts, had had many of the crooked American casino managers deported, and instigated the practice of dealing blackjack from a six-deck shoe, a practice which stacked the odds heavily in favor of the casinos and prevented cheating by both players and dealers.

The Italians carried gambling in their blood and bones, they were the most proven and successful impresarios in the business, and their willingness to pay government officials for the right to operate their business was legend. Lansky brought with him the cream of the crop from Vegas, Reno and New York. At his right hand was his own brother, Jake, installed as the floor manager in the Nacional’s casino. From Florida came Santo Trafficante who was given an interest in the Sans Souci, the Comodoro and the Capri. Joseph Silesi and the actor George Raft bought pieces of the business, along with Fat the Butch from New York’s Westchester County and Thomas Jefferson McGinty from Cleveland. There was no opposition, and thus there was no need for the heavy-handed tactics employed on the mainland. The tourists had no worry about loaded dice, stacked decks or magnetic clips beneath the roulette wheels. The business was as clean as it could get, and with decades of experience behind them the Syndicate established Cuba as the place to be. Pit bosses, dealers and stickmen were ferried in from the States, and they trained the Cuban croupiers and house-staffs in the ways of the world. Castro’s denunciation of gambling had at one time sent the tourists out to the La Concha Hotel in San Juan or the Arawak Hotel in Jamaica, but his reversal had brought them home once more, and it was into this world that Ruben and I stepped unknowingly in the beginning of 1960.

The scam still ran, the ‘little bird’ scam for the queer businessmen and switch-hitter Cubans, and while Fidel Castro Ruz curried favor with the USSR, while he instigated agreements to buy Russian oil, while he generated friction with the US by taking American-owned properties and giving insufficient compensation, Ruben and I were busy making our mark and loading our own dice.

It was a Friday night, 5 February, and it was Ruben’s idea that we head up to the car lot back of the Nacional and check out the trade. It was new territory, but Ruben had heard that the tricks up there were prepared to pay upwards of twenty dollars a time to get their balls emptied by some young Cuban stud. If they carried that much for a blowjob, Ruben said, then what kind of bankroll had they pocketed when they went out for the night?

I was twenty-two years old, I looked no more than eighteen or nineteen, and when I walked from the car to the edge of the lot, when I stood leaning against the railing that separated the lot from the walkway, dressed in white linen pants, an oversized ivory-colored shirt and canvas boat shoes, when I lit my cigarette and flicked the hair from my eyes, I could tell that there weren’t many of those old boys that could have resisted me. It was an act, a performance, a face I wore for the world, and I wore it well. Like a professional.

The car that drew alongside me was a deep burgundy Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, a hardtop, and the way the silk paintwork shined, the way the chrome runners and wheel-hubs reflected a million lights from the Nacional behind me, I knew I was right up there with the players.

The driver was no Cuban. His manner, his voice, his clothes – everything about him told me he was Italian. He smiled wide. He winked. He told me ‘Hi there’, asked if I was waiting for someone in particular, if he could give me a ride somewhere.

‘Kind of ride would you be speaking about?’ I asked him.

‘Any kind of ride you might be interested in,’ he said.

‘Kind that pays maybe twenty dollars?’ I asked.

‘Maybe,’ the man said, and again he smiled, and then he winked, and I walked around back of the car and slid in through the passenger side door.

‘I got a little place,’ the man said, and then he placed his hand on my knee.

I pressed myself against the seat, and there in the rear waistband of my pants I could feel the handle of my shiv. I smiled to myself. He was not a big man. He dressed too well to be a heavy hitter for the mob. Dressed well enough to carry a handsome bankroll for his night out on the town.