I recently watched the six-part series, Mafia Spies, on Paramount/Showtime that premiered on July 16. Although I have some disagreements with its content, I believe that it was an entertaining, noble, and sincere effort to present what is known about the events revolving around the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Notably, I investigated the CIA-Mafia plots and published the results in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, about the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa. Mike Ewing, a brilliant researcher and scholar, worked with me in 1977, bringing to my attention the connections between Hoffa and several of his gangster associates who were involved in Cuba before and after Castro took power.
Because this subject is back in vogue, I recount our research from 47 years ago that included my exclusive interviews about the CIA-Mafia plots with, among others, Charles Crimaldi, Irving Davidson, Robert Maheu, Rolland McMaster, Edward Partin, Ralph Salerno, Walter Sheridan, Joe Shimon, Charles Siragusa, and Frank Ragano—all of whom are now gone.
Edward Partin on Jimmy Hoffa and Cuba
Baton Rouge Teamsters leader Edward Partin—who was the key government witness against Jimmy Hoffa at his 1964 jury-tampering trial—told me that Hoffa, along with several Teamster officials and business associates, was trafficking arms from South Florida to various points in Cuba. “I was right there on several occasions when they were loading the guns and ammunition up on the barges,” Partin recalled. “Hoffa was directing the whole thing.”
Partin added: “Hoffa, [corrupt Cleveland Teamsters official] Bill Presser, and another person had bought a bunch of arms and were selling them to anyone who wanted them in Cuba. They bought some planes from the army surplus, and they were ferrying these weapons and planes from Florida to Cuba.”
The other person in the Cuban gun-running triumvirate was Irving Davidson—a dapper Washington public relations specialist and a business associate of Hoffa and New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello. Davidson admitted to me: “I sold a tremendous amount of tanks and whatnot to [Cuban President Fulgencio] Batista. . . . About a month or two before Batista fell, I delivered a big package to [Fidel Castro].''
Davidson shipped arms and ammunition to both sides in the Cuban Revolution—to Batista and Castro. Davidson explained to me that the people he represented, who had financed the arms deals, wanted to ensure they supported the winning side.
Prior to the Cuban Revolution, Jimmy Hoffa’s friends in the underworld viewed Fidel Castro as a potential ally. The organized-crime syndicate had shipped arms and ammunition to the revolutionary forces as well as to Batista, hoping that if Castro seized control of Cuba, then his cooperation could be bought in advance.
After Castro overthrew Batista on January 1, 1959, Hoffa tried unsuccessfully to obtain a $300,000 loan from the Teamsters’ Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund on behalf of a group of gunrunning friends who were directly tied to Bill Presser in Cleveland. They had formed a corporation, Akros Dynamics, which was attempting to sell a fleet of C-74 Globemaster aircraft to the new Cuban government. The Central States loan was originally approved, but the decision was reversed because of a legal technicality.
Partin explained to me: “The whole [Akros Dynamics] thing was purely and simply Hoffa’s way of helping some of his mob buddies who were afraid of losing their businesses in Cuba. So, they were trying to score points with Castro right after he moved in.”
Santo Trafficante
Although Meyer Lansky, aka “the financial wizard of organized crime,” quickly fled from Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution because of his long-standing public commitment to Batista, Santo Trafficante—the Mafia boss of Tampa who was devoted to Lansky—hoped to salvage the mob’s interests and remained in Cuba.
Trafficante was one of the most feared members of the underworld. Succeeding his father, who died in 1954, Trafficante quickly became king of the Florida and Cuban rackets.
Controlling Florida’s “bolita lottery,’’ a Cuban numbers game, Trafficante recruited young Cuban citizens to sell chances. Trafficante was a brutal man who was implicated in but never convicted for his alleged roles in several gangland killings.
Also, Hoffa and Trafficante shared an attorney: Frank Ragano of Tampa.
Rolland McMaster, Dave Yaras, and Local 320
In 1957, Hoffa sent his top union organizer in Detroit, Rolland McMaster, to Miami to establish Local 320, which served as a front for many of the mob’s gambling and narcotics activities in Cuba and South Florida. Trafficante—who, according to union officials, was also instrumental in setting up the local—occupied a small office in the union hall.
McMaster was a wise choice as a frontman. Few government investigators who knew the big, quick-tempered secretary-treasurer of Detroit’s Local 299 suspected that he was as important or as powerful as he really was.
“McMaster was Hoffa’s bodyguard as a front,” Partin told me. “Any time anyone tried to link the two of them together in something, someone would always say, ‘Hell, McMaster is just Hoffa’s bodyguard.’”
According to Partin, McMaster was Hoffa’s personal liaison to Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, as well as to the Chicago Outfit and the Genovese mob of New Jersey and New York. With his collection of muscle from the Midwest to Puerto Rico, the towering, massive McMaster handled most of Hoffa’s rough stuff.
“McMaster and Hoffa were in several businesses together,” Partin continued. “Hoffa would get things done through him since he was under surveillance by the government. McMaster had contact with the strong people directly. So, if Hoffa wanted something done, he would get McMaster to do the contacting. Next to the mob, he was the strongest arm behind Hoffa.”
A former Teamsters local president in Miami told me: “Rolland McMaster was as powerful as he wanted to be. He had a stable of goons that was top-notch. Plus, when you considered his ties with organized crime, he was terribly strong . . . definitely one of the strongest in the union.”
During my interviews with McMaster, he referred to himself as only “distant friends” with various mob figures. But, speaking of Hoffa, he said: “Jimmy really never dealt with organized crime people as such. Jimmy had a very cunning mind. He knew that organized crime people could hurt him and his organization. So, he got along with them. He knew that in our country you have different boss groups. Take those on the East Coast, Florida, New Orleans, Chicago, and out West—you have five groups to go to. I’ll tell you, if you don’t have some of those friends, you could get ate up, and you wouldn’t know what happened to you.
“Hoffa used ’em. He was a short guy and wanted his organization to be tough and strong. He seemed to cater to them.”
The key man who helped McMaster organize Local 320 was an assassin for Chicago mobster Sam Giancana: David Yaras. Robert Kennedy, the chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee, called Yaras “a notorious Chicago racketeer who had been involved with many of the leading racketeers in the Midwest.”
Charles Siragusa, the legendary deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), told me: “Davie Yaras was probably one of the first members of the Chicago underworld to ‘discover’ Florida after Al Capone was sent to jail. During his stay down there, he was second only to the Lansky-Trafficante people in the number of Cuban contacts he had. He ran a number of gambling operations on the island and was also the Chicago mob’s liaison to the Cuban exile community after the fall of Batista.”
Arrested fourteen times and a suspect in several mob executions, Yaras was indicted with his frequent partner, Leonard Patrick, in 1947 for the murder of James M. Ragen, a Chicago racketeer. Back then, both Yaras and Patrick also worked with a local staffer for the Chicago Waste Handlers Union, Jack Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby.
Years later, through electronic surveillance, the FBI overheard Yaras and two other syndicate executioners describe a forty-eight-hour torture session before they killed their victim, a 350-pound suspected government informant. Yaras spoke of having shot the man in the knees, stripped him naked, and, with his colleagues, cut his limbs open with an icepick. Then, they hung him on a meat hook and beat him with baseball bats. Yaras then tormented the informant with a cattle prod, buzzing his testicles—but never enough to kill him. After that, they seared his body with a blowtorch and burned off his penis. Finally, they removed him from the hook and disemboweled him.
The Castro problem
While Hoffa served the underworld and its members as Teamsters president, Fidel Castro was one man who did not. Castro threatened to run American mobsters out of Cuba as part of his effort to nationalize its businesses and institutions.
Mafia leaders, like Trafficante, were skeptical. They did not believe that Castro would ban those who were responsible for bringing millions of dollars of business to Cuba—especially those who had helped arm the revolution.
But then, during the spring of 1959, Castro began systematically shutting down most of the underworld’s casinos and putting drug dealers behind bars.
Among those imprisoned was Santo Trafficante.
To be sure, the Mafia, especially mob boss Trafficante, were furious with Castro—and so was the United States government after Castro declared that he was a communist.
On December 11, 1959, J.C. King, the Western Hemisphere Division head of the CIA wrote a memorandum to CIA Director Allen Dulles advocating the "elimination” of Castro. A portion of the division leader’s letter read:
Thorough consideration [should] be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. None of those close [to] Fidel, such as his brother Raul or his companion Che Guevara, have the same mesmeric appeal to the masses. Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present Government.
Dulles approved of the proposal in a handwritten note. But on January 13, 1960, during the first known serious meeting about Castro’s overthrow, Dulles emphasized that a “quick elimination of Castro” was not under consideration. Others, disagreeing, pushed for a strategy of having Castro, his brother, and Guevara "eliminated in one package.”
Both President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon were allegedly informed of these discussions. Perhaps because he was an experienced gambler and an occasional visitor to Cuba, Nixon was reportedly designated as the White House’s liaison to the CIA on this matter.
The CIA approached Charles Siragusa*
Charles Siragusa of the FBN told me that during the summer of 1960, he was sitting in his Washington office making small talk with a friend from the CIA. Siragusa, the bureau’s liaison with the intelligence agency, told me:
“We were just shooting the breeze, and then out of nowhere he says, ‘We are forming an assassination squad.’
“I thought he was joking around, so I just said, ‘You’re kidding!’ and smiled.
“‘Since you have a lot of contacts with the underworld, we’d like you to put together a team to conduct a series of hits . . . There’re some foreign leaders we’d like dead.’”
Startled, Siragusa said nothing.
‘‘We’re prepared to pay a million dollars per hit,” the CIA official told him.
Somewhat embarrassed, rustling about uncomfortably in his brown vinyl chair, glancing around the room but not at his friend, Siragusa replied softly: “This is peacetime. If we were in war, maybe I could do it. But not like this. I just couldn’t do it.”
The CIA official left soon after and never brought the subject up again.
Siragusa told me: “As soon as he said, ‘foreign leaders,’ I knew exactly who he was talking about—Fidel Castro.”
* The Siragusa revelation was first reported by Jack Anderson in his column on January 4, 1977. Jack—for whom I did occasional freelance reporting between 1976 and 1978—introduced me to Siragusa, who provided me with the additional details of this remarkable story.
Next in Part 2: The CIA-Mafia plots: Bob Maheu tells me what happened
This is an excellent article. The topic is one of my favorites from Dan Moldea. AAAAAAAAAA, all the way!
An important and brilliant revelation of American history.