Source – nydailynews.com
– “…According to English, the American Mafia interest in Cuba goes all the way back to Al Capone in the ’20s, but only took shape after the fabled 22-member conference at Havana’s Hotel Nacional in December 1946. Over the following decade, New York-based Jewish mobster Lansky presided over an unprecedented empire of casinos that took over the whole island’s economy. “Literally every tunnel that was built, every highway — and there was a lot of construction going on in Havana at the time — was being financed by money from the mobsters,” says English”
‘Havana Nocturne’, The Mafia’s Cuban Empire and How it was Lost – By Carlos Rodríguez Martorel (Archive)
The allure of the Tropicana and other gambling and entertaining havens provided an incessant pageant of celebrities: Marlon Brando played congas, Frank Sinatra partnered in the casino business, and Sen. John F. Kennedy took part in a three-call-girl orgy at the Comodoro Hotel courtesy of notorious Mafia kingpin Trafficante, according to the book:
Glitzy casinos, a rousing mambo-fueled nightlife and a lurking gue-rrilla have made 1950s Havana the stuff of legend.
“Most Americans, everything they know about this era is from the movie Godfather II,” says writer T.J. English. “Which is 15 minutes of the movie and it’s fictionalized.”
(Don Fulgencio Batista, Cuban president and crime syndicate chief?)
So English set out to find out what American mobsters were really up to for his recently released nonfiction book “Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution” (William Morrow, $27.95).
What he found after years of research and interviews — both in the U.S. and Cuba — make any previous fictional account pale in comparison.
“People didn’t know about the extent in which mobsters owned banks and controlled financial lending institutions in Cuba,” says English.
Cuba’s strongman Gen. Fulgencio Batista emerges in English’s fascinating account as much more than an enabler who allowed the Mafia to build casinos all over Havana’s malecón.
“I would say [Batista] was an equal partner with the mobsters,” says English, a 50-year-old New Yorker of Irish background who is the author of several books about the mob.
“The mafiosi — Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante — couldn’t have done what they did without their relationship with Fulgencio Batista.”
Getty
Don Fulgencio Batista, Cuban president and crime syndicate chief?
According to English, the American Mafia interest in Cuba goes all the way back to Al Capone in the ’20s, but only took shape after the fabled 22-member conference at Havana’s Hotel Nacional in December 1946.
Over the following decade, New York-based Jewish mobster Lansky presided over an unprecedented empire of casinos that took over the whole island’s economy.
“Literally every tunnel that was built, every highway — and there was a lot of construction going on in Havana at the time — was being financed by money from the mobsters,” says English.
The allure of the Tropicana and other gambling and entertaining havens provided an incessant pageant of celebrities: Marlon Brando played congas, Frank Sinatra partnered in the casino business, and Sen. John F. Kennedy took part in a three-call-girl orgy at the Comodoro Hotel courtesy of notorious Mafia kingpin Trafficante, according to the book.
All to the tune of Latin music’s golden age.
“I always say that what drew me to this subject was the rhythm of the clave,” says English, who professes to be an “amateur conguero.”
“Although organized crime and gangsterism is obviously a moral corruption, you have this positive consequence,” he adds. “It made it possible to hire huge orchestras and nightclubs that made this era of entertainment second to none in history.”
The mafiosos biggest miscalculation was, obviously, Fidel Castro, the privileged son of a landowner who provides an enthralling twist to the story.
“It was particularly interesting that someone like Batista and Lansky, who’d come from extreme poverty, wound up being the protectors of the bourgeoisie,” says English. “And yet Castro, who was from the bourgeoisie, became the leader of the downtrodden.”
When Batista fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1959, paving the way for Castro’s triumphant entry in Havana, people took to the streets and looted the casinos, which the revolutionaries had opposed.
But Castro didn’t immediately chase the American gangsters, and even reopened the casinos, following advice that without the gambling revenue the island’s economy would collapse.
But the bearded leader’s tolerance was not to last, and soon afterward the government seized control of all U.S. corporations’ holdings in Cuba, casinos included.
“The problem was the revolutionary government wanted to put rebels monitoring the counting room of the casinos,” says English.
“You can’t have that because that’s where the money is stolen.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/latino/book-reveals-extent-mafia-cuban-empire-article-1.350649
Related…
The FBI was tipped off that the three Kennedy brothers, Marilyn Monroe and members of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack held sex parties in John F. Kennedy’s suite at The Carlyle hotel, according to confidential bureau files revealed yesterday.
An FBI report on the alleged orgies at the Upper East Side hotel was prompted by a July 1965 disclosure from a “reliable” Mafia informant that the mob wanted to use women supplied by “associates of Frank Sinatra” to embarrass the Kennedys in New York.
The women were to “be placed in compromising situations” with Robert and Ted Kennedy and their brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, the confidential memo said.
The mob wanted to smear Robert F. Kennedy because of his war on organized crime as US attorney general from 1961 to 1964, the informant said. But the FBI didn’t investigate the claims, the bureau said.
The documents were among 2,352 pages of FBI files unveiled yesterday on Ted Kennedy, who died last August after a battle with cancer.
The bulk of the material detailed dozens of death threats made against Kennedy over two decades. But among the other disclosures:
* The file on the mob plot began with the informant’s disclosures to the FBI’s Milwaukee office. The FBI added an unsigned statement that said a multimillionaire Manhattan divorcée knew about the orgies.
“It was reported that Mrs. Jacqueline Hammond, age 40, has considerable information concerning sex parties,” the statement said.
Among those who took part were John, Robert and Ted Kennedy, Monroe, Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Lawford and his wife, Patricia Kennedy, it said.
The statement indicated Hammond, who was divorced from a US ambassador, was credible.
It was widely reported in the early 1960s that John Kennedy kept a two-bedroom apartment at The Carlyle, and it was later claimed that he spent the night there with Monroe after she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at his 45th-birthday celebration.
An FBI summary of the documents released yesterday said the bureau didn’t consider the Milwaukee and Hammond information “solid.”
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