TJ English and Joey Diaz dive into Cuban-American organized crime, tracing Jose Miguel Battle’s Bay of Pigs-backed bolita empire—worth billions from Jersey to Miami—clashing with the Italian Mafia over violence and greed. Diaz recalls childhood raids, corrupt cops like "Vinnie the Torch," and Santeria’s role in curses and assassinations, including Nicky Girardo’s death. They expose JFK-era payoffs in Havana, Omega-7’s terrorism, and Hudson County’s deep-rooted corruption, from real estate schemes to police collusion. The segment reveals how Afro-Cuban traditions and anti-Castro vendettas shaped a criminal underworld still thriving decades later. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, what I try to do with these books is to tell the macro story, the larger historical, sociopolitical story, and then get intimate and tell the interpersonal stories between the characters that actually live the story.
That's a challenge.
You've got to find people who are willing to talk to you and share information with you that they've kept quiet probably most of their lives.
And then you get at the interpersonal stuff, because these stories really are just human beings caught up in something that's bigger than them.
And how long, when you're writing a book like The Corporation, which is your new book, or Westies, or any of your books, how much time do you spend doing the research, and how much time do you spend actually writing the book?
The corporation is the story of a Cuban-American organized crime organization that began in the mid-1960s and existed all the way to the end of the century.
And it was led by this mobster named Jose Miguel Battle, who was kind of a legendary figure in Cuban-American circles because he was a hero from the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The attempt to reclaim Cuba, take back Cuba, the invasion, 1961, which was a disaster for everyone involved.
Battle wound up in prison along with the rest of the brigade.
And when he got out and came back to the U.S., he was determined to get Castro and take back Cuba.
So he set up this criminal thing and it was based on one racket primarily, bolita, the number, the lottery, the illegal lottery.
Before the lottery was legal, it was illegal and it was controlled by organized crime and it was a huge money maker.
Big money maker for the mob going back to the 1920s.
Everyone bets the number.
Little old ladies bet the number, priests, Cops, you know, you can bet a nickel, you can bet a dime, you can bet $10,000.
Hugely profitable for whoever controls and organizes it.
Well, the Cubans controlled and organized it on the eastern coast of the United States, from New Jersey and New York all the way down to Miami.
And the guy who controlled it was battle, and he became legendary based on that.
Battle had been a cop, a vice cop in Havana in the 1950s.
Before the turnover.
Yeah, during the era when the mob...
Joey was talking about Havana Nocturne.
That's what that book was about.
The era of the mob in Havana in the 50s.
Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and how they controlled that until Castro came along and spoiled the party and the revolution happened and they got chased out of there.
Battle had been a vice cop in Havana during those years and he knew all those high-ranking mobsters and in fact he was a bag man who delivered money from the skim at the casinos in Havana to the presidential palace.
So So Battle knew how the world went round and he made those connections and when he finally gets to the US and wants to start his own thing, first thing he does is go to Santo Trafficante and says, can you make the proper introductions for me?
Proficante introduces him to Fat Tony Salerno in New York City, who controls the numbers racket for all five families.
And Battle says, look, things are changing in Cuba.
Over the next couple of decades, you're going to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Cubans coming to live in the United States.
They all bet the number.
That's a huge market.
If you let me take over this thing and organize it, you will get your piece of everything.
And the Mafia said yes.
And so the Cubans took over.
And they controlled everything.
I mean, in New York City in the 70s and 80s, there were probably 200 to 300 bolita spots where you could go bet the number.
The Cubans called it bolita, a little ball.
And so they controlled it and they took care of the mafia and everybody got fat and happy for a while until it turned bad and they started killing each other.
Very, you know, I come on your show and I tell you, there's a hundred stories I can tell you, and there's a thousand I can't.
And when he told, when I read the thesis for this book, I just knew.
I just fucking knew.
You know, I grew up in numbers.
When I went to Catholic school on Saturdays, when I came home on Fridays, On Saturdays at the age of 8, I was sent to different locations in the city, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and I would make $50 going to run errands, running numbers, go tell this guy the first number of the day is two.
So I grew up in it.
I grew up in a house where the bookie would call my mother by 3 o'clock and go, what's the numbers for the day?
And my mother would give him a fucking laundry list.
And it's very interesting.
In this book, he also covers...
The mysticism of the number.
So if I'm at your house and your daughter walks in with a hockey shirt and her number's 13, I'll look at you and go, Joe, give me a number from zero to nine, five.
And I pick up the phone and I bet 513. If I look out my window and the cop car is 506, I put $5 on 506. If I have a dream about an eagle, When I go down to the Bolita spot, there's books that they sell, books of dreams.
And I take that book and I look up Eagle, and if Eagle's number eight, I pay $8.13.
You were mentioning a couple months ago that your grandmother took numbers.
Your grandmother was Sicilian.
Sicilian people have the same, every day they live, today's the day.
I mean, we're talking about millions of dollars on a monthly basis.
Billions of dollars over the course of the life of this organization.
Billions of dollars.
More than they could.
The hardest thing they had was what to do with the money.
I mean, they would literally strap money to people as money couriers to try to get it out of the country to get it into offshore bank accounts and launder them.
They had more money than they knew.
It was a license to print money.
It was hugely profitable.
That's what made it violent.
Then you started having gangsters vying for territory, territorial disputes, greed.
Between Cubans, between the Cubans and the Italians.
See, this guy, Battle, was a very charismatic leader.
With some great leadership qualities, he'd been a hero in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
He saved some guys' lives.
When I first heard that story, I said, I gotta verify that.
Maybe this is just a story a guy told about himself to burnish his legend.
So I found the guys that he saved.
And I found the guy's two brothers who went with him to save the guys that he saved.
And I went to Cuba, to the Bay of Pigs, to the exact location where he saved these guys, to verify this story.
And it was absolutely true.
In an act of incredible heroism, he saved the life of a number of his platoon members.
And so that was his reputation from then on.
He was revered in the community.
He was a hero.
And people defended him.
Even when it turned ugly and he became a ruthless boss who was killing people left and right, he had his defenders because of his legend as a hero in the community.
And so the power that he had.
But he also had this...
Joey and I were talking about this.
Cubans have this.
Latinos have this.
Everybody has it, but Cubans have it.
Desire for revenge.
This guy, you know, the Bay of Pigs invasion was an attempt at revenge, to get revenge against Castro, and they were humiliated by that process.
And a lot of the guys from that generation had an unfinished agenda for revenge.
So if you wronged this guy battle in any way, he was going to get you, even if it took years and years of calculation.
I mean, there are stories in the book about this one guy who killed his brother named Polulu.
It took 9 years and 12 attempts before they finally killed this guy, Palula.
They shot him in his hospital.
He was in the hospital.
They shot him.
Had an assassin dress up as a male nurse and go into the hospital and shoot him between the eyes.
This operation was started by the Eisenhower administration and the CIA. It was a CIA operation.
Kennedy inherited it, and he never really...
He always had mixed feelings about it.
I mean, it was illegal.
It was an illegal, secret, covert operation, an attempt to overthrow a government...
It would have been seen as an illegal act in the eyes of the world to do it.
So Kennedy was trying to do it so it could be done in such a way that it could never blow back on his administration.
And so he withheld air cover at a crucial point in that war.
It lasted three days.
And they got slaughtered.
And they got imprisoned.
And they had a lot of resentment towards Kennedy.
I mean, I go into the book a little bit about the Kennedy assassination and the belief that a handful of those Cubans may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination along with the Italians, with the mob, because they were working hand-in-hand with the CIA. Yeah, that was one of the leading conspiracies outside of the CIA killing him.
And even the CIA killing him was a part of the Bay of Pigs conspiracy.
And also the idea that he wanted to disband the CIA. There was a really interesting article recently that was dismissing almost every single conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination.
She had a child with him and had an abortion and didn't have the child.
She got pregnant with Fidel.
In fact, Castro admitted as much.
She got pregnant with Castro.
She had an abortion.
And then the CIA Used her to try to assassinate Castro.
She was supposed to slip him a pill and she put it in her face cream and the pill dissolved in her face cream and that was the pill she was going to try to slip to Castro.
Her case agent was a guy named Frank Sturgis who wound up being one of the Watergate burglars.
See, the thing about Bay of Pigs and the Cubans The Bay of Pigs invasion is the key to understanding the whole latter part of the 20th century politics in the United States, the Cold War, because the alliance between the CIA and the Cubans Rears its head constantly throughout the latter part of the 20th century, the Watergate burglary.
Five out of seven of the burglars were Cubans, Bay of Pigs veterans.
They had been recruited by a guy named E. Howard Hunt, CIA agent who was one of the orchestrators of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
So the CIA would come to these Cuban exiles, the militant exiles, and they'd say, go do this operation, go do this burglary at the Watergate, and then we go get Fidel.
Go do this assassination, and then we go get Fidel.
Oh, there's lots of rumors about that, that E. Howard Hunt was one of those men.
There was even a reference that Jose Miguel Battle was one of those men, but that couldn't have been the case because he was in the Army at the time, the U.S. Army.
No, so it's like a subterranean narrative that runs through the latter part of the 20th century, the CIA and right-wing elements in American politics, using the Cuban-Americans to do all kinds of dirty, covert deeds.
And we're talking about terrorist activity, assassination of an ambassador from Chile right in Washington, D.C., blew up his car because he was sympathetic to Castro.
A bomb planted on a Cuban jetliner flying from Panama City to Atlanta.
Seventy-three people killed.
Innocent people, including the fencing team from Cuba, young people.
A dirty war!
A dirty war was waged.
By the anti-Castro underground in combination, in partnership with the CIA. We know about it now because a lot of it has been declassified and it's come out.
We didn't know about it at the time it was taking place.
So, what makes this gangster story of the corporation so interesting and different is this political context, the framework that all this shit was taking place against the backdrop of this desire to kill Castro and take back the homeland.
And anyone who was involved in that was seen as a hero within the community.
Joey can tell you about that.
Union City, New Jersey, and Miami were the hotbeds of the anti-Castro movement.
There was an organization in Union City called Omega 7. There was one in Miami called Alpha 66. These were terror organizations, secret organizations that existed to plant bombs.
They would plant bombs at embassies in New York City.
They would put bombs at Lincoln Center when an orchestra from Cuba was making an appearance.
They were trying to shut down any relationship Between the U.S. and Cuba and governments that were sympathetic to Cuba.
He got in a barroom argument in Union City and he got arrested.
Over what?
Probably politics.
I'm sure it was a political discussion.
So then the revolution happened and, you know, Cuba becomes a repressive, communist, Stalinist dictatorship.
But a lot of Cubans, the way they saw it is, that was a choice they made to go with Fidel.
He did have, I think, the popularity of the people, following of the people.
Some people are quite proud of Castro standing up to the United States.
Cubans are very proud people, and they take a lot of pride in the fact that even though there's so much hardship there, That it's a choice they made to go in this direction.
At least they have their self-pride, which can be said in some ways about Puerto Rico and Jamaica and Dominican Republic, all these other countries in that region that are just as poor as...
Cuba.
So he has his supporters.
He always had his support.
Obviously, he also had his detractors, even within Cuba.
Most of those people are the ones who got on rafts and tried to leave the island at great risk to themselves to do anything to get out of there.
Because they realized Fidel was so popular, from within the country you were never going to be able to take him down.
So they made the decision to go out in the ocean and try to brave the risks of either swimming or sailing across the Florida Straits.
How did Che Guevara all of a sudden emerge as this, like, leftist political icon, but in this really weird, sort of clueless way?
Like, they really didn't understand his background, really didn't understand who he was and what he had done, and the atrocities that he had committed.
But these fucking t-shirts that all these dopey liberal kids...
Like, when she gives me an address and shit, the R's and all that.
I took Italian in high school.
I didn't take basic Spanish.
I learned how to read Spanish in the house by reading little different things.
But I learned how to speak Spanish.
Like, I remember going to a Cuban person's house once in Union City when I was about 12. And they told their son, don't bring this kid over here no more.
Hey, in the narco world, there's cases of what they would do is they would do a videotape.
If there was somebody they wanted to intimidate, they'd videotape their kid being taken to school every morning, being dropped off for school, picked up after school.
They'd videotape the daily routine of the child, and then they'd send the videotape to that person.
And I'd say, I know where your kid is every minute of the day.
What's fascinating to me about this is also fascinating about the mob itself, is that a lot of it is basically dissolved.
That all this came from immigration and that this melting pot of the United States and they all came from all these other places and all this organized crime sort of like was running the cities in the East Coast, but most of it is kind of gone the wayside.
And I'd further make the argument that the corruption that was created during Prohibition in the 1920s, that's where this system was created, during Prohibition in the 1920s.
The alliance between the underworld and the upper world.
The connection between the political apparatus, law enforcement, and the criminal rackets.
That template was laid down during Prohibition and it was in effect for the next 100 years.
I think that template still exists.
You pick up a newspaper in any US city, large or mid-sized city, and what are you going to see on the first couple pages?
Some local representative who just got indicted for taking money from some criminal element to see that they got a law passed or that they got some municipal contract.
That hasn't gone away.
That still exists everywhere.
What happens is there's an ebb and flow, certain rackets come and go, it was legal booze, then it was labor racketeering, now it's narcotics.
It was bolita at one time.
There's always something.
As long as there's commerce being done on a large scale, there's always room for corruption.
The big argument about marijuana laws in the United States is if they made it legal, it would severely limit the power that the cartel in Mexico has and cut all that violence out.
Basically the same shit that was going on with Al Capone and everything during the liquor crisis.
I mean, back in the day, you know, you'd have corruption that was all the way through the chain of command, you know, and everyone was sort of in on it.
I've written about this a lot, you know, through different books and through journalism.
I've come to believe that it's the American story.
This process of going through organized crime and gangsterism before you become accepted as a full-blown American.
Almost every ethnic group has gone through some version of it in the U.S. and is still going through it.
It's part of the American process.
You get here as a group, you're cut out of access, immediate access anyway, to power, and so you create your own path.
And initially, in these organizations, it's usually those ethnic groups preying on their own, preying on each other.
That's usually the first stage of this.
And then it becomes creating a system to try to deal with a larger system of corruption.
I mean, Jose Miguel Battle, what he did was so brilliant by creating the corporation, is he created a path for himself within American organized crime, which was controlled primarily by the mafia.
And he created an alliance with the mafia that made it possible for the Cubans to have their thing and fly below the radar.
I mean, while the Italians were getting busted left and right, the Cubans, this corporation existed for 40 years because they didn't really get messed with much.
In diamond initials you put JJR and that's when you've reached success, okay?
And they need that.
There's so many little things that Cubans did.
But take a guy like Juan, for example.
My stepfather, brilliant.
Brilliant.
You know, Paulie didn't talk on the phone.
Paulie didn't move for anybody.
Paulie had his messages delivered to him.
In 1970, I'm looking at both of you gentlemen, and I'm telling you that Juan would not even have a conversation if there was a phone in the room and it was hung up.
Because in his mind, that phone was fucking tapped.
He was a genius.
If he had to meet Joe Rogan for a meeting at 9, at 5.30 in the morning, he'd come and put a gun under a car, just in case there was a problem with Joe Rogan.
He would hug you and you'd search him.
He would hug you and tap your back for a wire and tell you you were losing weight and rub your belt.
You're losing weight!
They hug you, but they're feeling you for a piece.
Juan, when my mother died, he still had the same car that he had when...
And he died with five million cash, and he lived in a four-story walk-up.
When he died, one of his friends said, what a miserable life to make money and have to hide it like that.
Juan would walk around with jeans and t-shirts, the same shit every day, and a wad of hundreds like this.
The hidden one.
The other one was single, so you thought he was broke.
If he talked to you, he talked to you in English.
Once the cops came, me no piggy.
And you know who was the interpreter for all the attorney meetings with all those high-level guys?
Now, Joe, in answer to your question about the Cubans and why they existed for so long and didn't get busted, you know, the rumor was that they had a certain mystique because of this CIA pedigree and that they were untouchable.
And in fact, I mention it in the book, there's a case where the FBI is thinking about making a case against battle.
This is way back in the 60s.
They contact the U.S. Treasury Department because they figure he's not paying taxes and they can make some kind of case against him on a tax violation.
They get a letter from the Treasury Department saying, we're not going to go after this guy because he's anti-Castro and he's a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
It's right there in a letter from the Treasury Department to the FBI. Wow.
So there were elements within the government that were protecting these guys, particularly Bay of Pigs veterans.
Certain organizations, like the corporation, part of the reason people wanted to bet with them and like to bet with them is they would have somebody at the racetrack so the minute that number was posted, they'd know the number.
So you didn't have to wait around for the newspaper.
Part of the brilliance of Battle and his organization was he didn't do sports betting.
In fact, his arrangement with the Italians, with the mafia, was you get bolita, you get numbers, but you don't get sports betting and you don't get these other things.
And so there's an example in this book of a member of the corporation who starts against Battle's Wishes, starts...
Playing, doing sports betting, that guy wound up dead.
This is a guy, big fat guy, 300 pounds, sitting on his ass in Iowa or somewhere, who was on his device, who figured out a way to intrude on some algorithm, and he started scamming different states.
He scammed the state of Colorado out of $4.8 million.
There he is.
A total of $16.5 million.
Now I'm thinking, if this guy had scammed the corporation led by Jose McGill Battle, he'd be dead.
What is fascinating to me is that this, what you were talking about earlier, what we were talking about, about, like, that this was, it gave them an opportunity for hope, and that it was a part of the community.
There's nothing, like, Seeing that, like I saw that and I saw what goes with it and it may sound ooky spooky to most people but it's not ooky spooky to people who are really really Sicilian And people who are very Cuban.
When you're Sicilian in that culture, there's women that you go to and they tell you things.
They're witches.
They're Sicilian witches.
Whatever the fuck you want to...
In Sleepers.
Remember, he goes, bring the eyeballs to this lady.
It comes on three sheets of paper with copy paper.
So right away, I rip the top one, I give it to you, I keep the other one, and the other one goes upstairs to the department where now there's a big wall with zero to nine on the wall, and I park it there.
So Joe just came up and played 219. There's two, and all of a sudden there's a list that goes down.
I'm a board guy.
I just worked the board.
I got six guys with phones yelling numbers on me.
Oh, yeah!
Rogan fucking just put $100 on that number.
That motherfucker killed me last week!
Fuck that!
Send $50 of that to Miami, because I could unload it to create the utopia.
You know, when I take a sports bet, I'm taking $500 on Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh's playing New England.
I can't take 10,000 on Pittsburgh and 5,000 on New England.
That's not called a utopia.
I'm going to make money on the VIG, the 10 points from you losing.
So if you bet 10,000 on somebody and you bet 5, I unload 5 to another bank somewhere across town.
So this is how...
I mean, when I was a kid, my mother had a bank in the Bronx.
And the guy that cooked was Black Mike.
He was a Vietnam vet.
And I was 5, and he would give me 10 bucks to go get him blackberry brandy.
Black Mike cooked Italian food that was so fucking good.
It was 1970. Even if you hated black people, you ate his spaghetti.
Even Italians came to eat his spaghetti.
On Wednesdays, he cooked corned beef.
On Wednesdays, he made Cuban food.
They have an office.
And every phone has a little tape recorder with a wire connected to the phone so you can't call me and say you played 2-18.
But to see those offices in action when you're a kid and I'm going to get cigarettes and they give me a 10 to go get a $3 pack of cigarettes so I keep seven.
Now, there's also, they move locations every week.
You also have to stay ahead of the cops.
So every week, you got a guy like Joe Rogan that just rents apartments for me.
So every week we move locations, so nobody ever gets comfortable with three months at one place, then with three months at another place, then with three months at another place, because not only do you have to worry about cops, you gotta worry about Jamie getting a little fucking cocky.
Jamie found out from Joe Diaz that they make $40,000 a day.
Jamie's gonna go get two guns.
Go get the two guns and try to go up there and see what happens, because they got two guys on the third floor that just got two guns, waiting for idiots like you to come upstairs to the fourth floor.
It was surreal.
It was surreal.
So in the mornings, my mom would go, you want to go to school tonight?
Or you want to go with mama to the Mets and go, yeah, that's important.
I'm going with you.
Because these bookies would all give me 20, 40 bucks.
At the end of the day, every day that this is going on, because betting is going on every day, seven days a week, this system that Joey's talking about.
So money's coming in.
A lot of money's coming in.
It goes to the counting rooms.
So at the end of the day, you got a lot of money at like two, three hundred different locations all around the New York area.
What they would do is they have people whose responsibility it was to come around, collect the money, that money would go into a van, And that van would have a police escort as it left New York City, went through the tunnel, and in New Jersey it was met by New Jersey police who picked it up and escorted it from there into the apartments or the houses in Union City where the money was kept.
So the first thing he does is he surrounds his estate down in Miami with this fruit from his childhood.
And he lives down there, now far removed from New York.
Meanwhile, back in New York, A war breaks out between the Italians and the Cubans over this thing called the two-block rule.
When the Cubans and the Italians formed their alliance, they established a rule that nobody could open up a bolita spot closer than two blocks to a pre-existing bolita spot.
Somebody violated that rule.
I don't even know, after investigating it, who violated that rule.
But that rule got violated.
And it turned into a nasty war, an arson war.
They started firebombing each other's spots, and a lot of innocent people got killed, man, incinerated.
A four-year-old girl got killed.
It became horrific.
It lasted for about eight or nine months.
There was something like 70 murders, maybe 25 firebombings at different Bolita spots.
It got so ugly, it brought down the heat of the feds.
Nobody could ignore this corporation thing anymore.
The Italians and the Cubans had a major sit-down about it to discuss it, to try to resolve it, to keep it from exploding into a war.
At that sit-down, they didn't resolve anything, and after they came out of the restaurant where the sit-down took place, a drive-by shooting occurred, and one of the Cubans got shot at the restaurant coming out of the sit-down.
And then the war was on, man.
It was on.
Like Battle said, we're at war with the Italians.
That's what he said with his people.
And Battle was ready for it, man.
He was good to go.
I mean, he was ready for that war.
He seemed to want it.
He seemed to cherish the idea that they were going to go to war with the Italians.
And so they were ordering all these horrific, and you know how they did the arsons?
They'd get these mamalukes to fill up a pail with gasoline.
Not even a can, not even a closed can, an open pail.
And, you know, they could spill, and they took that pail of gas, and they'd walk into a bodega, a bolita spot, and they'd dump it on the floor and light it on fire.
And whoever happened to be in there, too bad for them.
And people would die a horrible death.
They got incinerated.
I have some pictures in the book that are almost too horrific.
I had others that were so bad I didn't want to use them in the book.
I think the dominant feeling people will have when they're reading this book is the dominant feeling I had when I was researching it, which was, why don't I know this shit?
This is not only a great story, really interesting, but it's a really important history.
All this political connection to anti-Castro movement and the role the U.S. government might have played in it, and the idea that this criminal conspiracy organization was allowed to go on for 40 years because...
Certain elements in the U.S. government didn't want to go after them because they were afraid it would open the lid on the Cuban relations with the anti-Castro relations with the CIA, the politics of it.
That's not only interesting history, it's important history to understand a certain social-political relationship between the U.S. and Cuba.
The Bay of Pigs, the residue of the Revolution, the way that shaped the Cold War, shaped U.S. politics over a period of about 50 years.
So I was like, why don't I know this?
This is amazing.
This is almost like a hidden history.
I mean, I knew what got reported in the newspapers.
But, you know, you lift up the rug and you look underneath the rug and you start to get into the details of it.
It just makes me so aware that What we're receiving as information on a daily basis from the mainstream media and everything is a version of what's happening.
There's a whole other version of what's happening that we don't see.
And you usually only find out about it 30 years later, 30 years after the fact.
And then what made it worse for me was moving to North Bergen.
Once I moved to North Bergen, I saw...
What they were doing in Union City in a bigger way, which is all political.
I saw things that'll make your tongue drop.
That's why I don't give a fuck about politics.
When I see people talking about politics, I want to go up to them and go, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't say a word because you have no idea what real politics means, how it works.
If it works like that in a micro system, I can't imagine in a real.
Because Joey and I connected when I had more or less written this book already.
If I had come to you way back at the beginning of this, out of the blue, all of a sudden this guy T.J. English, I don't know, I guess you knew the West.
So you knew who I was.
You knew I was legit.
If I had contacted you and said, will you talk to me about this history, would you have done that?
And now they saw I was doing this book and they needed to get it off their chest.
They needed to talk about it.
I met these two girls who were daughters of one of the guys who became a snitch, testified against the corporation, the family went into the witness protection program.
These girls had never talked to anybody.
When I went to meet with them in a bar, they weren't even sure they were going to talk to me.
We were just meeting to talk about whether they were going to talk to me.
I got to meet them.
They talked nonstop for three hours.
Once they thought they could trust me, they just couldn't stop talking about it.
They had all this stuff they needed to get off their chest.
Why I enjoyed this book so much is because no matter how much history this motherfucker dropped on you, He let you know who Jose Battle was.
He kept you reminded who Jose Battle was.
That's big for an author.
He never got away from Jose Battle.
And when you read the book, no matter what type of person you are, you kind of get mad at Jose Battle But there's something about Jose Battle you like, because you want that guy in your corner.
If you knew Jose Battle, and you knew that he got in the truck and said, I'm going out there for my men, that's the guy I want with me all the time.
Why am I going to hang out with this fucking idiot?
He gets scared if an ambulance goes by.
This guy actually went out and saved eight guys.
So he had that Cuban loyalty.
That anti-Castro-Cuban shit, that's big.
So growing up, there were so many things I wasn't allowed to say.
But the thing that fears me, there was so much research to do in this book.
If I would have met Joey, I would have gone down a rabbit hole.
With Joey's stories.
And that might have taken me off the specific research I was doing.
So I almost...
Joey's thing is like a separate thing.
It's almost like a sequel to or the son of the corporation.
Sort of a spin-off of it.
And there's a lot of people probably who have their version of it like Joey does that they could tell.
So, yeah, but let me say about battle, because Joey's saying a very interesting thing, how charismatic he was and how you partly liked him and admired him, which is the case of any good leader, right?
That's what you want from a leader.
But here's how ruthless this guy was.
He had a guy in his organization, Ernesto Torres, Ernestico.
Who he met in Spain.
Battle was on the run in Madrid for a brief period of time when he'd been indicted on gambling charges.
And there were a bunch of Cubans living over there.
And they all hung out together.
And he discovered this 19-year-old kid named Ernesto Torres, who was sort of an orphan.
And one day he tells the kid, he's going to mentor the kid, one day he tells the kid, I've got a guy coming over this afternoon to the apartment.
I want you to watch.
He owes me $10,000.
I'm going to scare the shit out of this guy.
I want you to see what you do, how you treat somebody who owes you money, show them that they can't play around with you.
So he's waiting for the guy to come over, battle, and he's sitting in his apartment.
He hears a pop, pop from out in the street.
He goes down, he goes out.
Ernestico, a 19-year-old, is there with a gun in his hand.
He's shot the guy in the backseat of the cab arriving to meet with Battle and killing him.
And he says, Padrino, Godfather, he says, you'll never have a problem with this guy again.
I took care of it.
And Battle's looking at it going, you just cost me $10,000.
I didn't want the guy dead.
But then again, he looks at Ernestico and he thinks, I can use this guy.
I can use this guy.
So Ernestico becomes what he calls his prodigal son.
And he grooms this guy to maybe be the next godfather when they come back to New Jersey, they come back to Union City.
He sends this guy, Ernestico, out there.
And no one else in the corporation can understand Battle's affection for this guy.
They think Ernestico's a thug.
He's a killer.
He's a street thug.
Yeah, the organization can use guys like that, but you don't put him in positions of authority.
Battle seemed to have a soft spot for this guy.
He makes Ernestico a banker.
He makes the other bankers bankroll, put up $10,000 each so that Ernestico can be a banker.
They don't like it.
Most of them don't like it, but they go along with it.
A couple of them don't go along with it.
Ernestico doesn't have the brains to be a banker.
He fails miserably as a banker.
He's humiliated by that, and so what he does is he starts kidnapping bankers from the organization and holding them for money.
Very self-destructive thing to do.
He turns against the organization.
He goes rogue.
One of them, he shoots.
A banker, he kidnaps and shoots.
Happens to be Battle's brother-in-law.
The bankers come to Jose Miguel Battle and they say, you created this fucking monster.
You brought this kid in.
You created him.
You gotta take care of it.
Battle, being the man he is, realizes that's true.
It's his responsibility.
He hires a few assassins to try to take Ernestico out.
They bomb his car.
In Union City, they try to kill him.
They can't get the job done.
Battle decides he's got to do the thing himself.
By this time, Ernestico has fled to Miami.
He's hiding out with his girlfriend in Opalaca.
Battle gets together his brother, one of his brothers, and another assassin, Chino Acuna.
And they go down to Miami, and in the middle of the afternoon, they burst in this guy.
They find out where he is.
They burst in his apartment.
They engage in a wild shootout with Ernestico, and they shoot him in the closet of his bedroom, and Battle goes in, grabs him by the hair, and shoots him right, puts a bullet right between his eyes.
Now that's a boss.
I mean, aside from the horrible nature of the act, that's a leader.
That's a guy who takes matters into his own hands.
He wants something done.
He goes and does it himself and uses that as an example for the organization.
He comes back to the bosses, the bankers in New York.
He says, you're not going to have a problem with Ernestico anymore.
He says, you know what?
He died like a lion.
He fought to the death.
He fought until he'd emptied his gun, and then we shot him in the closet.
So he's telling all the other bankers, I still admire the kid.
He fought like a lion, but I took care of it.
It's done.
And, you know, the other Bolita bankers were in awe of this guy because he had a certain ability to do that that they didn't have.
Before I piss real quick, you know, in Cuba, the dog is a big symbol.
Remember when I told you St. Lazaro?
Big symbol.
When Michael Vick got convicted, there was a lot of jails he couldn't be sent to because they had an Amacqua population, and they don't play when it comes to dog because their devotion is to St. Lazaro.
St. Lazarus, he's the one with the crutches that got his...
Licks.
And Ernestico was a lot like you, bro.
When people would say to you, why do you bring Ari and Joe Diaz on the road?
Ernest Tico and another assassin are the ones that take on that contract.
And they go out trying to get Polulu.
I mentioned before, there's something like 9 attempts or 12 attempts on Palulu's life.
They had a shootout in Central Park with machine guns in the middle of the afternoon.
Holy shit!
Guys with machine guns shooting with, you know, mothers with baby carriages and stuff.
Palulu got shot up so bad he loses his leg.
He winds up having to have a prosthetic leg.
They still go after Palulu.
When Palulu goes to prison, they hire a killer to stab him in the prison yard twice, two separate times, and he survives that.
He keeps surviving.
He survives so many of these assassination attempts, they think he's not human.
They come to believe that he's got some Santeria spirit who's protecting him.
So when you think someone has, I wish Joey was here for this, when you have someone you think has a Santeria spirit protecting them, you have to counter that with a Santeria spirit of your own.
You have to have what's called a Bembe, where you create a kind of voodoo energy to kill this guy.
So they continue to go after Pelulu.
Finally, Battle, as he did with Ernestico, says, I'm going to take matters into my own hands.
I'm going to be there on this one.
They find out where Palulu is in the Bronx, and they go on one night, and they trap him.
Cars come from all sides.
They trap him.
He gets out of his car.
They shoot him in the street.
They shoot him full of 11 bullets.
He falls in the street, bleeding, loaded with gunshots.
The last thing he sees is Jose Miguel's battle standing over him, laughing at him.
And then he goes unconscious in the street.
They think, great, he's dead.
They're almost ready to celebrate.
The following morning they find out, nah, Palulu was rushed to the hospital.
He's not dead.
He's recovering.
Now they're beside themselves.
They've tried everything.
They say, you know what?
We're not going to give up.
They hire an assassin, dress him up as a male nurse.
He goes into the hospital, shoots Palulu in his hospital bed right between the eyes.
He was talking when you were gone about how if you felt like a guy had a Santeria spirit protecting him, you had to have your own Santeria spirit to combat it.
You know, he says that there's another side to the story.
And, you know, like I told him at dinner last night, my mother hid me for years.
They sent me to Sacred Heart School for Boys.
Yeah, she sent me there to get a good education.
But she sent me there because there was a lot of shit she didn't want me to see at that time.
And when I got out of Catholic school, I was introduced to it.
And one of the things I got introduced in one night was the end of Union City.
The end of that political era where everything was running smooth came to an end like in 76. That's when the allegations started to come up because there was two cops that would shake my mother down.
Very decent people.
They would come in.
One guy came well-dressed, would have a drink, talk to my mother in Spanish.
Now here's how I knew Joey was legit, because when we first started communicating, he mentioned the name of one of these cops, and that name is in the book.
It's because once you get to an understanding of the idea that there are certain spirits within you, and the Orishas represent different spirits, Once you understand that, that's not something you throw away.
Even if you don't follow the religion anymore, you still have belief in that.
You still believe in that.
So my Orisha is Eligua.
Eligua is the saint.
He's a trickster.
Eligua is a trickster.
Plays little tricks.
And also the saint of passages.
So people put Eligua above their door because you're passing from one room into another room.
And so you identify with that spirit and that becomes part of your identity.
You sleep, and then Sunday is when they read your future to you.
And then for a week you just live in a corner, white, they paint your head, you're bald.
So I had to go back to school on Monday bald with a hat.
They said he's not allowed in here with a hat.
My mother gave the principal a small nickel and I was allowed to wear the hat from 9 to 3. But then at 3 o'clock I had to go home and change into white clothes for a year.
In fact, my mother couldn't even say shit to me in front of my godmother.
When in 85, when I moved in with the benders, I couldn't bring my Santeria shit with them.
They're fucking Italians!
So I left it with this gay guy named Martin the Fag, He sold coke at night.
He was a seamstress in the daytime for a big New York play.
But when I was a kid, he would go to CBGB's every night and sell coke.
All these fags walking around today should give thanks to Martin.
Because he was getting his teeth knocked out and black eyes back in the 70s because he was gay.
But I liked Martin.
I left my Saints with Martin.
And then, years later, I ended up robbing Martin in my cocaine fucking hell.
So my godmother asked me in 1985, where's your saints?
I go, they're at Martin's house.
She goes, you know you're not supposed to have your saints at a gay man's house.
I'll go get them.
Listen to me.
I never saw my godmother again after 95. I talked to Duncan about Santeria, and some company approached me from London, and I did their Santeria podcast, and I got an email on Twitter.
Till the age of 11, I thought they were a bunch of hocus pocus motherfuckers.
But there was a lady on 26th and Central, and I grew up with her kids.
Her husband was that big bookie on 118th Street.
And once a month, she passed the Spirit.
And people would go there, ten, eight people who were invited.
And I could tell this cop was eating away at my mother.
First of all, my mother didn't lay down for nobody.
My mother was going to shoot that motherfucker herself.
She was that type of Cuban woman.
She didn't like being spoken to that way.
I could see it in her face.
It was eating her fucking alive.
And one night we went over to this lady's party.
The first time I saw the lady drink a bottle of fire water, you know, that 140 proof agua diente?
So I thought, this is bullshit.
This is bullshit.
She emcees that bottle out in the daytime.
So at night, I would watch her bottles, and they had the label, like they were sealed, because my mother had a bar, so I knew if they were sealed enough.
Bro, this woman would pass a spirit and then tell you what to do and what not to do.
On this particular night, she went up to my mother, and she goes, I know what's bothering you.
And she took a white dish.
She took a white dish that was just there, and she took a candle, and she turned it over.
And she went like this, this circular motion under the candle.
I was 10 or 11, Joe Rogan.
At that time, did I believe?
I didn't believe in dick.
I didn't believe in dick.
I didn't believe in Jesus.
I don't give a fuck.
It's a story they tell you.
She flipped over the dish, and there was a circle with a guy that looked like a beard.
She goes, this what's bothering you?
And my mother goes, yeah.
And she broke the dish, and she goes, seven days.
It'll never bother you again.
Four days later.
Look it up.
Nicky Girardo was his name.
They shot him a thousand fucking times at a place called Rapido Taxi.
It was a front.
There was a taxi thing that was a front for cocaine.
So the drumming you're hearing, and the use of what's called the shake-a-ray, that gourd there, and the chanting that's going on, you would hear all that in a santeria ceremony.
In 1985, I lived in a building in Fort Lee, and there was a Panamanian woman, and she told me that she went to Cuba twice as a young girl, and she wasn't surprised what was going on in Cuba.
It was God's punishment.
She goes, it was such a disgusting fucking place.
And then, it was weird, a couple days after I'm talking to TJ, Somebody on Facebook.
I did a joke for my CISO special about Club 38. The owner of his name was Willie Vandy.
And his claim to fame was that his grandfather had the biggest dick in Cuba.
I grew up with two kids that had a claim to fame.
One of them, his dad was the best pool player in Cuba.
And Americans would go down and he'd beat the fuck out of them in the pool.
They played Chicago.
Eight ball?
Whatever, Chicago.
The other guy's claim to fame was that his grandfather was the guy in Godfather 2 who had the big dick and they called him Superman.
And on Saturday nights at Club 38 in Union City, he would, on Saturdays, he recreated.
And he had people come down And it'd be like a comedy show.
The Shanghai Theater, and in Godfather II, they take Michael there, and all of a sudden he goes, I would have never found this place if it wasn't for Johnny Ola, and that's when Michael finds out.
I had ever read in my life that these white dudes went on a 50-year looking for Superman and the legend of the guy with the big dick.
In fact, Duval went to Cuba to the location, even though it's close, just to see where it was.
And what the story is that us as Americans would go down there every week, and that was our first stop, to see this big black Cuban dude fuck the shit out of some poor white chick, you know.
When I was researching Havana Nocturne, I found out that Santo Traficante had a lawyer named Sam Regano, since deceased.
But Sam Regano used to take a lot of Super 8 videos when he'd go down to Cuba.
His son, who's currently a lawyer in Tampa, Told me that he had Super 8 footage of Superman that his father had made in the 50s.
Superman at a private sex show, fucking a girl.
And I said, ooh, I gotta see that.
Could I see that?
I mean, I think that's the only existing video footage anywhere of Superman.
And he says, yeah, but I'm not gonna give it up.
You gotta come to Tampa and I'll show it for you.
So I go down there.
I'll never forget, he's a lawyer too.
He says, you've got to come at 6 o'clock after the office closes so then we can watch it.
And I get there and the cleaning lady's still there.
So he brings me into the conference room where he's going to show me the film.
And we've got to sit there and wait until the cleaning lady's done because he didn't want to put this film on while the cleaning lady's in the room.
So he puts it on.
The place, the office is completely empty.
And he shows me this footage.
And his father had scored it to, like, Wagner or Beethoven, like triumphant classical music.
And it's at a private show.
It's in somebody's home.
They had private sex salons in Havana where you'd go to, like, some rich person's house.
You'd pay some money.
You had cocktails, and then someone would clap at a certain time, and you knew that was time for the show, and everyone would sit down, and Superman would come out, and he fucked this Cuban woman who was small.
He was big, and she was small, and he's banging her from every conceivable angle.
It was the least sexy thing you've ever seen in your life.
I mean, it looked like some kind of torture, really.
Yeah.
And that was it.
And this guy had this footage, which is probably worth a lot of money.
The thing that freaked me out about Santo that I enjoyed from your first book, Evander Nocturne, and I wanted to tell Joe the story is that one time Kennedy went to Cuba as a senator.
They set him up in a room with a two-way mirror, and they watched it happening, and then one of them turned to the other and said, shit, we should have filmed this.
Well, but you've got to keep in mind, he wasn't married.
He was a young senator.
He used to get this senator from Florida named George Smathers, and the two of them would go down to Havana.
This was around 1955-56, when the whole thing was in its heyday.
And that was a big part of Havana.
Politicians and businessmen would go on junkets.
To Havana, like, you know, paid for by the company, weekend retreat, go to Havana, and they'd go to the Shanghai Theater, and they'd have tris, sexual tris, and they'd go crazy.
And it was out of sight, out of mind.
It was the original, you know, what happens in Havana stays in Havana.
It was a whole different country.
It wasn't going to make the newspapers.
So they'd go there and they'd rub elbows with Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, and they loved it.
My mother died in 79, and whenever I did something, like if I comb my head differently, or if I wore like an orange shirt, my mom would go, what are you fucking, Rock Hudson?
And I go, what the fuck are you talking about, Rock Hudson?
You know, and one day I asked, I go, why do you always call me a Rock Hudson?
And she goes, because Rock Hudson, I don't maricon.
And I go, what the fuck are you talking about?
She told me, she died in 79. My mom told me in 1978, flat out to my face, that fucking he was gay as could be.
And I'm like, you know what?
I've heard, I'm sick and tired of you fucking Cubans.
Because Cubans...
They used to tell me when I was a kid that they smacked Bruce Lee in Cuba one time.
That he went down there talking to shit and one of my uncles smacked him in the face.
Cubans will lie to you just to fucking fuck with you.
So I thought my mother was fucking me.
She's like, Rock Hudson is as gay as a $3 bill.
And I go, what the fuck are you talking about?
She goes, let me tell you what I'm talking about, alright?
When I was a little girl...
Rock Hudson would come to Cuba and we would all go to the hotel.
You know like when Michael Jackson goes to a hotel and people come outside and they clap.
And he shook the kid outside the window.
We would be out there like waiting to see Rock Hudson.
But the hotel guy would tell us he was up there in a room with a man.
And I would go, Ma, are you fucking crazy?
Like I didn't believe her.
My mother died in 79, 85. Rock Hudson comes on and says he's gay.
But I found out from this article, if we would have scrolled down a little bit, it says it, that they asked his neighbors, and the neighbors were like, no, he was bisexual.
And his number one guy that was known every time he came to Cuba was Marlon Brando.
He was Marlon Brando walking there with two showgirls, and then him and fucking Superman would leave by themselves.
A couple of years ago, you were living in Colorado, and I saw a kid with a balloon, and I call you Balloons, and we go for it, me and Eddie.
You come up to an abacoa and call him his nickname, you got a different situation.
They'll pull you aside and go, I don't know you, and don't you ever fucking call me that outside the circle again.
And when they get mad at you, okay, to prove their manhood, they beat you, throw you on the floor, pull your pants down, and slice your ass with a straight razor.
That's worse than fucking a man.
Juan did that to two or three people.
At my mother's wake, the guy couldn't come in because Juan had sliced his ass, and I go, no.
This guy took me to baseball games.
Juan, get the fuck out.
He's staying.
That's their thing.
They don't eat pussy.
They can't be in a room if another man is gay in the room.
Oh yeah, I could pick you up and go, You're no longer Joe.
You're Josephina.
Go get a wig and put lipstick on, and I'll fuck you in the ass, and you're going to suck my dick, but don't you ever fucking think you're going to fucking kiss me or touch me, and they beat you.
My mother used to go, when he picks you up at school, please don't get in the car with him because he's going to get shot one day and I don't People knew battle, and they knew some things about him, but they didn't know.
I text him at 12 o'clock at night, and I go, you have no idea.
But I didn't know.
This guy used to go away every six months, and his wife was tight.
You know the story I told you about my mom would play cards, and then I would put tighty-whities on and dance for the women, and they would give me shots of tequila and make me dance?
Nina was in that book.
Nina is in that book.
When my mother died, I gave Nina my dog.
I couldn't take that dog.
So I used to go to Nina's house on 51st Street and cry in the doghouse.
Like, this is my dog.
So as soon as I saw Tati, I knew he was on to something.
Because Dottie was my father's friend and he was the type of guy that would come visit me every week.
Just because he was my father's friend and give me 50 bucks and take me to the city to get haircuts.
But his claim to fame was in the seventh grade, my mother told him, I don't know what I'm gonna do with him.
He's got some fucking girlfriend.
He won't even talk to me.
This guy came to my house and gave me a capsule.
And right in front of me, he filled it up with coke.
And he goes, let me tell you something.
Seventh grade.
Seventh grade.
He goes, next time this girl comes over here, you sprinkle this coke on a pussy and you lick it.
And I'm like...
I didn't even lick a pussy then.
I had touched it outside the jeans.
That coke capsule was in my drawer for like a year.
Like in the back of my nightstand.
I didn't, you know, I wasn't a drug, nothing.
And one night my mom came home with three cocktails in it and she's like...
I got fucking news today from Tati that he gave you cocaine.
Where the fuck is it?
I go, it's in my drawer.
I didn't use it.
She fucking smacked me.
She goes, don't you ever fucking take drugs.
She went and did it.
You know what I'm saying?
She went and did the blast.
But that guy, when I was in the seventh grade, gave me a capsule of coke.
But when the book came out, I got a call from Battle's longtime lawyer, a guy named Jack Blumenfeld, wonderful guy, interviewed him numerous times for the book, knew Battle as well as anybody, defended him in a number of different cases over the years, knew a lot about him.
I sent the book to him.
He called me.
And I don't know him that well, so he was a little, you know, stiff.
And first he corrected some factual things in the manuscript.
And then he got real quiet.
He said, you know, this was very emotional for me to read this book.
He said, because just all kinds of things kept flooding back.
You would use a name or you'd describe an incident, and all of a sudden it would flood my memory.
Same thing that was happening to you when you read it.
The little detail would go, oh my god, it was almost like an out-of-body experience.
That's the power of literature, man.
That's the power of losing yourself in a book to where it engages your memory and your imagination that you're almost reliving it as you're reading it.