The next morning, the Department of Treasury approved Alex’s mission to Cuba. She advised Paul Guarneri, and they made tentative plans to meet in Miami before continuing on to Havana. He gave her an address in Miami where they would rendezvous. MacPhail and Ramirez’s duty would be to get her that far and probably to the sea launch to Cuba as well. After that, she was at the mercy of fate and the man with whom she would be traveling.
“I’ll make arrangements to get us to Cuba by small plane and boat,” Paul said. “I’ve had a scenario set up for months. Now I just need to put it into effect.” He worked with some smugglers, he said. Not the most upstanding of citizens, but efficient people who got the job done.
In the afternoon Alex went out for some air. Walter MacPhail accompanied her. They carried weapons. Ramirez walked about twenty feet behind. They stayed around Third Avenue and the Thirties. “We’ll be driving down to Washington tomorrow morning,” MacPhail announced as they walked. “You’ll have a conference at the CIA in Langley about Roland Violette. We’ll be in D.C. for one overnight, maybe two.”
“Makes sense,” Alex said. “Got anything yet on Guarneri’s old man?”
“Nothing yet. Still trying. Bureaucracy, you know …”
“See if you can kick-start the request,” she said. “It’s not like a year from now will do any good.”
“I’ll make another call.”
Later, Alex went back to the table that supported her secure laptop. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, with the baby Glock on her hip, she clicked into her secure email account. Two items had arrived in the last hour.
The first was an FBI summary on Paul Guarneri’s father, Joseph Guarneri. He had been born in Sicily in 1928, confirming what Paul had said. He had jumped ship in 1944 to remain in the U.S. Records were hazy, but two younger brothers eventually followed him to Cuba. This casual tidbit had been annotated many years earlier, presumably by an agent long since retired or deceased:Examiner’s note: Salvatore Guarneri, 1931 – 1959, was a pit boss and trainer of dealers at Meyer Lansky’s Riviera Hotel; Giovanni Guarneri, 1942 – ??, last known as an active but no longer influential member of the Cuban Communist Party. SpAg P.S.D., 10/17/1973.
Noting the conflicting politics within the family, Alex continued to read. Joseph Guarneri, the file said, maintained houses in New York, Miami, and Cuba while Batista was in power and, it was believed, had two families, one official, one unofficial. The latter was obviously Paul and his mother.
Guarneri controlled criminal operations in Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. He maintained links to the Bonanno crime family in New York but had been more closely allied with Sam Giancana in Chicago. In Guarneri’s day, the east coast of Florida and Cuba had been a tight conglomerate of New York family interests with links to Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. But Giancana, a former Capone associate while in Chicago, also had his fingers in the pie. So Guarneri had operated under Mr. Sam’s umbrella. This organization traced back to 1929 in Cuba and the outset of Prohibition in the U.S. Paying off members of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship, which had preceded Batista in Cuba, the New York underworld built huge rum factories on the island and contracted with Cuban sugar refineries to guarantee an endless supply of molasses, the main ingredient in rum. Upon such a firm foundation did a vast criminal enterprise rise to prerevolutionary glory.
A separate Treasury Department document also indicated that Joseph Guarneri’s business interests had included parts of several legal casinos in Cuba, laundry and catering services to those casinos, a Havana drive-in movie theater, shares in La Sirena Gorda restaurant in Miramar, where Hemingway and the literary set liked to knock back booze, a racetrack in Havana, a catering service in Havana, and several other restaurants and bars in Tampa, Florida.
Alex read the concluding sections carefully:Joseph Guarneri was frequently arrested on various charges of bribery, bookmaking, and loan sharking. He escaped conviction all but once, receiving a two-year sentence in 1954 for bribery of a judge, but his conviction was overturned by the New York State Supreme Court before he entered prison …In 1959, Castro’s revolutionary government seized the assets of Guarneri’s Cuban businesses and expelled him from the country as an “undesirable alien.” Thereafter, Guarneri came into contact with various American and expatriate Cuban organizations that opposed Fidel Castro. He later served in the military brigade that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Captured and held as a prisoner after the failure of the invasion, he was ransomed by the United States. Guarneri either lost his taste for underworld life in later years or was forced out of his businesses and settled in Florida and New York …A fan of thoroughbred and standardbred horse racing, Joseph Guarneri would, when in Manhattan, have his driver stop in front of the sprawling newsstand that once stood at New York’s Times Square. Guarneri would emerge from the rear door, enter, pick up his reserved copy of The Morning Telegraph, hand three dollars to the clerk, climb back into his car and proceed to either Aqueduct or Belmont …He focused on real estate in his later years but still retained some old enemies. His execution took place one night when Guarneri was coming home from Yonkers Raceway in the New York suburbs. On the porch of his house, he was ambushed by three gunmen; two opened fire with pistols, a third with a shotgun. The hit was particularly brutal and was an exception to organized crime’s own rules about not hitting a victim in or near his home if he had family …An additional quirk: even in the New York underworld, there was consternation over the hit. No one knew who had arranged it or who had set it up, especially since Guarneri was believed to have been retired at the time. Yet, for a man with such a career, it wasn’t entirely incredible to have an enemy step out of the shadows of the past, bearing a grievance, either real or imagined, and effect a day of reckoning. The homicide inquiry was never resolved …Alex further noted a short addendum:Examiner’s note: FBI picked up the trail of a known Cuban operative named Julio Garcia who had covertly entered the United States in May 1973 with a Honduran passport. Garcia was a known “verdugo” or executioner for the Cuban Intelligence Serv ices. The FBI lost his trail in New York and had no record of him leaving the U.S., but he was believed to have been in the U.S. when Joseph Guarneri was murdered. Garcia was last known to be in Cuba as a member of Cuban State Security in 1981 and remains a member of the Cuban Communist Party … Notes between FBI and CIA were never compared or correlated at the time. SpAg J.N.H., 07/19/1993.
Julio Garcia, Alex mused. How many Cubans had that name? Five thousand? Ten thousand? She proceeded to the next email. This one, from the CIA, was a series of briefs on Roland Violette. Alex made some coffee, then spent an hour reading the reports and reviewing surveillance photos, the most recent taken fifty-six days earlier.
She noted that Violette had been stationed in Washington, then Madrid, which rang some loud bells for her. Within the last year she had worked out of the U.S. Embassy and the CIA office in the Spanish capital. She wondered if her contacts from those operations might be able to tell her things that might not be in the official summary.
“Okay,” she told herself. Bringing Violette out of Cuba was the assignment. Can do, can do, can do, she told herself. As she started to ease into her new assignment, however, she realized how shaken she still was from the sniper’s near miss. Shock and trauma were like depression, she concluded; you don’t realize how bad it is until you’re past it.
She wasn’t the only one whose brains felt like scrambled eggs these days, she realized. She read a pair of blurbs from a CIA contact with a Honduran passport who had encountered Violette in Havana by chance six weeks earlier.Examiner’s note: HW File 7-TF, 05/14/11: Roland Violette sits in Juanita’s Cafe on the Calle San Rafael … and he tells the old stories over and over. They frequently have no appearance of reality and bear not even a faint resemblance to the truth.But he has told them so often over his morning daiquiris that it’s obvious he’s come to believe them himself. Sad. His head has turned to mush with a destroyed spirit and body to match …
This was followed by another examiner’s note from within the last two weeks.Ronnie the Violet, also known as Ronnie the Deep Purple Red [some recent sorehead had written while reviewing the file] remains a rat bastard. May he burn in hell forever over what he did to this agency in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
She reread that one-line entry. It was fascinating that Violette still elicited such strong feelings. His defection had been a full quarter century earlier, and the damage that he had done went even farther back. But she was intrigued, too, that someone else had preceded her through this file within the last few days. She could feel someone’s hot breath on it. Were the fingerprints from this present operation or some other?
Then she recalled that if Violette was looking to return to America, the file had undergone a Lazarus effect. It was back from the dead. She decided to do a little water testing of her own and threw a few keystrokes onto the computer, trying to make her own comments on the file. But the file was closed and refused to receive any new amendments. She looked at the initials following the examiner’s notation: HW.
She didn’t know an HW, but she would now look out for one. HW was clearly senior enough to add his or her own notes to the file, which meant that HW carried some weight in the CIA.
And since the file was closed to her but not to HW, that told her something too.
Okay, she would double check this herself. Her fingers worked the keyboard. Via secure email, she fired an inquiry to a colleague she had worked with in Madrid. She asked for anything the Madrid office might give her on Roland Violette and his defection. He had worked at the CIA office there in the 1980s, she noted, and the office had been on the top floor of the embassy. So surely Madrid had files. And surely they could share, even if the files didn’t officially exist. Since she wouldn’t have time to read through entire documents, she asked for an overview.
Then, for good measure, she sent the same dispatch to her old friend Gian Antonio Rizzo in Rome. Alex had worked with him on various occasions in the past, including the Madrid assignment. He was a retired municipal policeman who continued to moonlight for the CIA. Rizzo always had his ear to the ground, always had some odd bit of pertinent information. If nothing else, he was always amusing.
If she were lucky – and often she wasn’t – she would be able to compare the three responses. By the time she finished, it was ten minutes to five. She was so deep in thought, searching for implications and inferences, that at first she didn’t hear the three low rings of her cell phone. She stared at it in an unfocused way. It sounded a fourth time before she answered.
“It’s ‘no go’ on Gilberto, beautiful,” Sam purred. “I told you I’d try to call him, since he was my old informant in Havana, but he died seven years ago. His store folded, his son works for the Castro government out in the Sierra Maestra, and another family runs a bodega out of his storefront.”
“So you don’t know anyone else on the island?” she asked.
“Gilberto was my best guy and he’s gone,” he said. “Sorry.”
“But do you hear anything?” she asked. “Unofficial or otherwise?”
Sam shrugged. “Just some low level stuff. The U.S. diplomats are teed off because Cuba gets a free pass on human rights abuses from most of the world’s democracies. Diplomatic visitors from Canada, Australia, and Switzerland never criticize the Castro regime or meet with dissidents while they’re on the island. A friend showed me a confidential diplomatic cable sent to the State Department from Havana. The cable was transmitted in November 2010 and was signed by the top American diplomat in Habanera town. It said there were economic motives behind the suck-up approach. But if so, these countries weren’t getting much in return. The rewards for acquiescing to Cuban sensitivities were laughable: over-pumped dinners and for those who bowed lowest a photo-op with drooling old Fidel or dithering old Raul. Big fat deal, huh? And that’s all I hear, other than the fact that all the Cuban dissidents supported by Washington for decades were old, out of touch and so split petty squabbles that the United States needed to look elsewhere for future leaders. Like Miami, maybe.”
“I appreciate your insights,” she said. She wondered if someone had gotten to Sam in the hours since they’d seen each other. She rejected the notion. Sam was his own man these days.
Then Sam interrupted her thoughts. He said he had also made a few other calls about Paul Guarneri’s father and found an old contact who’d known Joseph Guarneri during the 1961 invasion. The old man had been a good soldier and a stand-up guy to his comrades-in-arms, Sam’s unidentified contact said. And he had been hip deep in a number of anti-Castro endeavors in the late sixties.
“CIA stuff, Sam? Do you think?” Alex asked.
“More than likely,” Sam said. “You can just about take that to the bank.”
“Here’s the funny part, Sam,” Alex said. “I spent two hours going through Joseph Guarneri’s FBI file this afternoon. It mentioned all the racketeering, the family, the contacts, touched on the anti-Castro stuff-but it uttered not a peep about the CIA. The CIA wasn’t even mentioned in Guarneri’s file. What do you think?”
Sam laughed. “Typical. The CIA would never share information with the FBI, and the FBI is too dumb to discover it on their own.”
“Should I make something of the omission?” Alex asked.
“In an FBI file?” Sam said. “No. Forget it. When it comes to the FBI, never attribute to duplicity what can be attributed to laziness, pigheadedness, or stupidity,” Sam said. “They miss the big picture all the time. They probably missed it here.”
“That or they’re keeping a second file they won’t let me see,” she said.
“There’s always that,” Sam said philosophically. “Anything else I can do?”
“Keep my cell number handy if you think of anything else. And I’ll keep yours.”
“God bless,” Sam said, then, “Oh, I remember the other thing I was going to tell you,” he said. “Thought of it right after I got back inside the fortress.”
“What?” She was almost starting to like Sam. Almost.
“A travel tip. Havana has two million people,” he said. “And one million of them are police. So be careful. Don’t get pinched by the Cuban cops. It’ll take you years to get out.” Then he rang off.