John R. DeSilva, CEO of Caribbean Pictures Entertainment presents

 

   

THE SILENT DON

Scott M. Deitche

The Silent Don will tell the story of one of the most powerful and enigmatic mob bosses in history, Santo Trafficante Jr. the boss of the Tampa Mafia. He was the only son of a Sicilian mob boss to successfully inherit the crime family business and lead to unparalleled heights for over 30 years. He was a mob boss who never spent a night in an American jail and died the way so few in this life do, as a free man.

 

Santo Jr. was a CEO of an extensive corporation. But this corporation was involved in illegal gambling, political corruption, extortion, and murder. Santo Jr. could be a smart and ruthless businessman, but was also quite a family man, respected by the citizens of Tampa, even by the FBI agents who tailed him around Florida and the world. He was a generous benefactor to his friends, and a ruthless adversary to his enemies.

 

This is a story with intrigue, suspense, partnerships with the CIA, the assassination of a United States President, national and international territorial disputes, gangland violence, and, at the center of it all, one of the most interesting gangland figures in American history.

 

It’s a fresh angle on the mob boss story. What also makes The Silent Don stand out from other mob stories is the sense of place. The setting isn’t the gritty, dark, dense neighborhoods of New York City, or the post-industrial Rust belt towns of the Midwest. The setting are the blue skies, palm trees, and pastels of Tampa, Miami, and pre-Castro Havana. From the transparent aqua blue waters of Cuba and the emerald green waters of southern Florida to the white sandy beaches of the Gulf Coast, the visual aspect of this project is as much a part of the story as the characters.

 

Cuba Libre

 

The end of the Mafia’s reign in Cuba came on December 31, 1958 when Fidel Castro and his rebels defeated President Fulgencio Batista’s army in the city of Santa Clara. Upon hearing the news of his army’s loss, Batista decided to leave. He boarded a flight to the Dominican Republic, fleeing Cuba and effectively handing the country over to Fidel Castro.

 

In January 1, 1959 citizens took to the streets of Havana. Many of the casinos and hotels were ransacked, slot machines smashed and thrown into the streets. To many in the city, they were a symbol of corrupting foreign influence.

 

Santo Trafficante Jr., the Mafia boss of Tampa and Havana, was at his place, the Sans Souci when he heard about the defeat of Batista. At one of his other hotels, the Capri, rebels stormed into the gaming room, where greeter George Raft, the well-known actor, hopped up on the gaming tables and pleaded with them not to destroy anything.

 

Trafficante said of Castro’s success, “Well, even before [Fidel Castro] reached Havana, because he didn’t come down from the mountains until after Batista had left, and he had a walkathon, you would call it, from the mountains to Havana, and they kept interviewing him and he kept saying the casinos would close, statements to that effect, the casinos closed without even being notified officially to close. Everything was in turmoil. There were people all over the streets, breaking into homes, there was complete enmity and the only thing at that time was to try and stay alive.”

 

On February 19, 1959 a decree from the Castro regime allowed for the reopening of the casinos, but the damage was done. The American tourists stopped coming, the casino and hotels sat empty. And US Mafia figures, like Santo Trafficante Jr. could only sit and watch their grand dream of a Mafia state just 90 miles off the Florida coast, evaporate in front of their eyes.

 

 

Santo the Boss

 

Santo Trafficante Jr. was born in 1914 in Tampa Florida. He became one of the most powerful, yet least known, mob bosses in American history. From the 1940s through his death in 1987 he ran Florida and Cuba, controlled a vast swatch of state government, did businesses with Corsican mobsters in Europe, Asian mobsters in Saigon and Hong Kong, financed narcotics operations, ran lucrative gambling enterprises, all without spending a single night in an American prison.

 

By the time Santo Trafficante, Jr., known as the Silent Don, showed up in intelligence reports in the late 1940s, he had earned the respect of racketeers from other cities through his leadership style and ability to mediate disputes and settle scores. An arbitrator of disputes, Trafficante earned a reputation that far exceeded his stature. But his expertise on matters relating to racketeering and his knack for knowing what would and wouldn’t make money were prized among his fellow gangsters.

 

He cultivated an image of refinement and sophistication. Even when the Florida and Cuban heat and humidity brought most men in short-sleeved shirts to their knees, Santo Jr. was rarely seen without a jacket: “He was very tall. Wore clothes well. I’m talking Brioni suits. They cost a fortune back then. He looked spectacular when he walked in a place.” Santo Jr. was vain about his appearance. When he started losing his hair it drove him crazy: “He tried a bunch of wacky concoctions like rubbing olive oil on his head.” He also devoured biographies and history books, looking for inspiration from some of the great military and political leaders: “He was an avid reader. He loved discussing books. He had a very intelligent view about the books he read.”

 

His reign was not bullet-proof. On January 3, 1953, while a passenger in a 1951 Mercury sedan, buckshot flew into the car and hit Trafficante in the right arm as he ducked and reached for the handle. He pushed open the door and fell onto the street. With only minor injuries, Trafficante told the State Attorney, “I don’t have an enemy in the world. I think it was a case of mistaken identity.”

 

Havana Nights

 

Santo Trafficante, Jr. was at the top of his game in Cuba. He was in his element, overseeing a vast legal as well as criminal empire from the safety of a country in which he felt protected. No matter how many times his name was in the papers back in Florida, Trafficante was in a place where a friendly government and layers of insulation offered him protection.

 

That protection derived from his close relationship with various political figures, up to the president, Fulgencio Batista (as well as his predecessors).

 

Post-WWII Cuba was enjoying a renaissance from the planeloads of American tourists eager to gamble, drink, and be entertained 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

 

The nightlife in Havana was legendary. As described in a 1956 issue of Cabaret Quarterly, “The tourist is caught in a heady torrent of rich laughter and swept along in swirling freshets of gaiety. The music is everywhere. Time is an endless round of dark rum and rhumba, light rum and marimbas, for Havana is the mistress of pleasure, the lush and opulent goddess of delights.”

 

The mix of nightclubs, casinos, cabarets, golf courses, and restaurants brought throngs of tourists from the United States to the island. Flights from Miami were less than an hour and special Cuban flights served drinks and had floor shows on the plane to get the tourists in the mood. Gamblers flocked to the numerous casinos and the massive clubs like the Tropicana, which held over 8,000 people.

 

There was also the seedier side, complete with burlesque shows, shag film houses, and brothels. Then there was the infamous Shanghai Theater in Chinatown, where lavish live sex shows would take place. Many of those featured “Superman” a performer known for his sizable endowment.

 

Music and dancing were the glue that held the nightlife together. Cuban music stars introduced the rhumba, cha-cha, and the salsa to a wider audience. Performers like Dorothy Dandridge, Cab Calloway, Desi Arnaz, Eartha Kitt, and Nat King Cole would be regular fixtures in the nightclubs. Mixing with the regular tourists were movie stars and celebrities from Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra to Marylyn Monroe and George Raft.

 

By the 1940s and 50s mob-run resorts, like the Hotel Capri, Sans Souci, and Hotel Nacional de Cuba, were centers of not only nightlife, but cocktail culture. There was even a Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian themed bar in the Havana Hilton. There was the classic, and still standing, El Floridita, the “Cradle of the Frozen Daiquiri”. The frozen daiquiri was made popular here when bartender Constantine Ribalagua blended shaved ice into the cocktail. Another pre-Castro era bar that is still a tourist draw is La Bodeguita del Medio, which claims to be the birthplace of the mojito.

 

National Airlines operated a direct hour and a half flight from Tampa to Havana every day. Many of Santo Trafficante, Jr.’s friends, associates, and acquaintances flocked to Havana for a weekend trip. Trafficante’s hospitality toward Tampa travelers was legendary. He would set them up in suites, take them out to dinner, buy them drinks, and get them seats to the best shows in Cuba: “If he knew you were from Tampa, everything you wanted in Cuba was on Santo.”

 

Trafficante provided some of the pit bosses and dealers, straight from the streets of Ybor City. Says Ralph Rubio, who worked at the Riviera for Meyer Lansky instead of at one of Trafficante’s casinos, “Santo took a bunch of Ybor guys down to Havana. Sam Mondello and Benny Fernandez both worked at the Comodoro, Santo took at least six or seven people to work with him.”

 

The Silent Don will take viewers inside the world of pre-Castro Havana, and inside the casinos and hotels owned and operated by Trafficante:

 

The Sans Souci – Trafficante purchased the property in 1955 from the Mananrino brothers, Gabriel and Kelli, two power players in the Pittsburgh family. The manager of the Sans Souci was Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman. The Spanish-style structure was located in a wooded area, seven miles outside Havana. Dating back from the First World War, the Souci was falling into disrepair after a drop in tourism. Trafficante refurbished the casino. The Souci had to have something special to make the tourists drive outside of town to gamble. The big draw was entertainment. Marquee acts from Dorothy Dandridge to Marlene Dietrich to Liberace were booked into the casino’s outdoor nightclub, and “in addition to the name stars, the nightclub had staged the spectacular shows which have become a trademark of the big Havana nightclubs….Sans Souci also boasts a 14-voice choir. This is an innovation in nightclubs.”

 

Deauville– Built in 1956, the “$2,300,000, 14-story Deauville” was a 140-room casino hotel and one of the grander casinos in the city with “a lush Gay Nineties type of casino on its main floor, just 20 feet from” where the guests register.” Located on the Malecon, overlooking the Straits of Florida, the Deauville was a popular tourist destination as well as a meeting place for the local political elite. It was the kind of place “that never closes. It does a roaring Alaska gold-rush type of business from each noon until 7 or 8 o’clock the next morning.”

 

The Capri – The Capri’s nightlife was well known throughout the city. After gambling the early evening away, players would “hustle off to catch the floor show in the outdoor gardens of the Tropicana or at the Capri’s Red Room nightclub.

 

Tropicana – The Tropicana was “an ultra-modern, half indoor and half outdoor, multi-million-dollar club. It offers glittering extravaganzas on the stages of its two main rooms, succulent food at the table, and a fast-moving casino.” The retro modern feel was enhanced by a lush tropical décor and, like the Sans Souci, it boasted an outdoor stage for the endless parade of entertainment. The Tropicana was owned by close Trafficante friend, Martin Fox.

 

The Havana Hilton – Trafficante was reportedly a silent partner. “There is a ‘circle’ between Santo Trafficante, Chili Mendoza, and Nicolas Arroyo, and other ‘American gangsters’ in the opening of the Havana Hilton Casino.”

 

El Comodoro – Located in the exclusive Miramar section of Havana, the El Comodoro employed Tampa mob figures like Ralph Reina and Benny Fernandez.

 

The Riviera – Meyer Lanksy’s magnum opus, this stunning piece of mid-century modern architecture was a popular hangout for all mob guys.

 

 

Apalachin

 

While he was reigning over Havana, Trafficante was also caught up in an embarrassing raid that brought to the American people, the realization of how powerful and widespread the Mafia in America was.

 

Trafficante took Eastern Airlines Flight 818, leaving Tampa on the afternoon of November 12, 1957, and arrived at Idlewild Airport in Queens at 8:15 p.m. He spent the night at a hotel near the airport and made arrangements the next morning to fly to Binghamton, New York for the day. He drove from the Broome County airport to the estate of Joe Barbara, boss of the Pittston-Scranton Mob family, located in the upstate hamlet of Apalachin.

 

Trafficante was greeted by over fifty of the most influential figures in the American Mafia. But when state police arrived to check out what was going on at the house, the mobsters fled. Santo bolted into the woods behind the house. He was apprehended and his name was now splashed across newspapers nationwide.

 

 

Last Days in Havana

 

On the evening of June 9, 1959, Trafficante was relaxing in his Havana apartment, but his mind was weighed down with the loss of casino revenue and the general direction in which the country was headed. Forces in America were working against him, as well. Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Narcotics, had wired the Cuban government a list of major narcotics figures from the U.S. who resided in Cuba; Trafficante was among them.

 

But a more immediate concern was a detention order he had heard was imminent. He eschewed his normal nightclub routines and made himself scarce at the casinos. Feeling trapped for the first time in his life, Santo Trafficante, Jr. thought that he could reason with Cuban authorities in the same way he had reasoned with crooked cops and judges in Tampa. He sent a casino employee to visit Cesar Blanco, Cuba’s Director of Public Security. The employee had $4,500 in cash on him. When he offered Blanco the money to make the detention order disappear, he was arrested.

 

A few weeks later, the Cuban government announced that Trafficante was going to be deported. They made reservations aboard a National Airlines flight out of Havana at 7:45 p.m. on July 15^, 1959. The flight was expected to touch down in Tampa at 9:10, where Sheriff Ed Blackburn and his deputies were ready to receive Trafficante back on American soil. But in a last-minute turnabout, the deportation order was “suddenly held up on orders from a higher authority.”

 

Then an event not widely known, yet fodder for decades of conspiracy theories. Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, visited Trafficante in Cuban prison in 1959.

 

John Wilson Hudson/Carlos Juan Wilson-Hudson, a British journalist who reportedly worked for Batista, claimed that he saw Jack Ruby visit Trafficante at Triscornia. Hudson also stated that “while in prison an individual named Ruby would come to prison with persons bringing food.” A 1963 CIA report repeated Hudson’s claims that, “Santo was visited frequently by an American gangster-type named Ruby.”

 

Jack Ruby did visit Cuba with Lewis McWillie; official records and testimony from various witnesses, including Ruby himself, back up the story. Ruby told the Warren Commission interviewers that he was only there once, but “transportation records show that he was there twice in 1959, and CIA files report him there at least twice more after it became illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba.”

 

 

Miami in the Swinging Sixties

 

Miami was the vacation capital of the country in the 1960s. Everyone who was anyone went there. Frank Sinatra was a regular at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, actors and politicians frequented the restaurants and lounges that lined Collins and Ocean Avenues. And then there was the mob. As an open city, mobsters from across the country came down to operate in the sun. When Santo Trafficante, Jr. was released from Cuban detention, he knew that the heat from law enforcement and the media was directed at Tampa. Trafficante felt that going to Miami would be a better move for him. It was here that he became the man to see in the Magic City.

 

Trafficante used his political connections to smooth over immigration issues and zoning regulations and helped wise guys “cut through the red tape of state regulatory bureaucracies to obtain liquor and other licenses.” The corruptible law enforcement and political element was as present in Miami as it was in Tampa: “The Miami police department was riddled with corruption in the fifties and sixties. Miami was wide open.” And Trafficante had placed himself in a strategic position to gain the best advantage from the situation. “He called the shots and pulled all the strings in bolita.”

 

Up and down Collins Avenue, along the beach, Trafficante took a taxi back and forth to the clubs; “[t]he Eden Roc, the Fontainebleau, the Deauville, and the Americana. Those were the main four places up and down Collins Avenue. They had lounges and presented shows. You know, whoever the celebrity would be. Usually Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, all of the big ones. It was a pretty opulent era. Women dressed exceptionally beautiful, in cocktail dresses and furs. People had money and they were spending money.”

 

Trafficante was a regular fixture at Capra’s Restaurant, located on Biscayne Boulevard, just off hotel row on Collins Avenue. Capra’s was the epicenter of the Miami nightlife scene. In an interview, Attorney Frank Ragano goes on to say, “At the time it was the ‘in’ place in Miami. Anybody who was anybody went to Capra’s, from the mayor to movie stars. It was the place to go and the place to be seen. When Santo walked in, everyone came up to him. In Tampa he was a quiet family man, but in Miami he was a celebrity. He would tip like $200 to $300 to the maître d’ or the cab driver.”

 

 

The CIA-Mafia Plots

 

The Silent Don will dig into one of the strangest partnerships in American history, between our intelligence community and the mob.

 

In the early 1960s, the Miami area was the epicenter of a growing number of anti-Castro organizations ranging from those who believed in change through diplomacy, to those who believed that change could only come about through force. It was the latter group that Trafficante gravitated toward because they often blurred the line between a legitimate political organization and a de facto Mob family.

 

The first meeting between the CIA and Mafia leaders Trafficante, Johnny Rosselli, and Chicago boss Sam Giancana, took place at the Fontainebleau Hotel in March 1961. The CIA, represented by Robert Maheu, gave the gangsters money and support to kill Castro. Trafficante had the contacts to make it happen.

 

The mobsters were given poison pills and a pile of cash, but the go-ahead from the CIA was never given. Rosselli later said that Trafficante was smart for simply taking the money and not actually working toward getting rid of Castro.

 

Trafficante said that he was motivated by an altruistic loyalty to the U.S. government to carry out the plots against Castro: “Well at the time I think that it was a good thing because he had established a communistic base 90 miles from the United States and being that the Government of the United States wanted it done, I go along with it, the same thing as a war, I figure it was like a war.” But later told the FBI that “I was nothing but a messenger boy.”

 

Though the Castro plots didn’t materialize, the CIA continued their working relationship with Trafficante through the Bay of Pigs: “When the CIA called for volunteers for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Trafficante supplied his quota.”

 

 

The JFK Assassination

           

The night of the assassination, while the country was glued to their televisions, eager for every tidbit of new information coming out about Kennedy, Trafficante met with his lawyer, Frank Ragano, and his wife at Tampa’s International Inn for a dinner celebration: “Frank called and asked me to meet him for dinner that night around 6 p.m. The whole world was talking about what happened in Dallas that day. So I walked into the lounge of the restaurant. When I walked in Santo was there with him. They were laughing and toasting and cutting up as I approached the table. I was a freshman at the University of Tampa so I was very naïve about all this stuff. The laughing died off and they both stood up to pull my chair out. The waiter came over and took my order. Then they toasted to the death of John Kennedy. It just was awful. I couldn’t believe they were laughing. I couldn’t believe they were happy he was gone.”

 

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HCSA) was formed in 1976 as an offshoot of the Church Committee, which investigated the CIA plots against foreign heads of state, including Fidel Castro. The HCSA’s mission was to investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Trafficante appeared twice. The first time he refused to answer any questions, instead taking the Fifth. The Committee came back at him in September 1978, compelling him to testify. His quiet demeanor surprised many of the HCSA staff, expecting the usual brash, tough-guy mobster portrayed in movies. Instead, the meek, mild-mannered elderly gentleman from Florida showed them why he was so often underestimated.

 

But while Trafficante came out of the hearings unscathed, some of his compatriots from the CIA-Mafia plots did not.

 

• June 19, 1975 – Sam Giancana killed in his house.
• July 30, 1975 – Jimmy Hoffa disappears.
• October 31, 1975 – Roland Masferrer- blown up by car bomb – Trafficante Cuban mob contact
• August 3, 1976 – Johnny Rosselli car found at Miami airport
  • August 7, 1976 – Rosselli body found in oil drum in Biscayne Bay

 

Loren Hall, another figure in anti-Castro plots and the Kennedy Assassination, told the HCSA, “As it stands right now, there’s only two of us left alive—that’s me and Santo Trafficante. And as far as I am concerned we’re both going to stay alive—because I ain’t gonna say shit.”

 

 

Aftermath

 

The late 1970s/early 1980s saw Trafficante slowly releasing the reins of his crime family, as the aging Don faced multiple issues, from his declining health to federal authorities looking to finally put the Boss of Florida behind bars. Ensnared in the famous Donnie Brasco case, it looked like the end, but Trafficante and his lawyers managed to get out of a massive RICO case. When Santo Trafficante Jr. died in March of 1987, he died a free man, never spending a single night in an American jail.

 

He left a legacy in organized crime and the Sicilian Mafia that baffled law enforcement agencies worldwide for over three decades. He was respected and feared and his uncanny ability in every facet of international crime extended far beyond the borders of Tampa Florida to include multiple countries and several Governments throughout the world.