Cuba

Organized Crime's Heyday

The most active period for American organized crime in Cuba was the 1950s. Lanksy, the entrepreneurial mastermind behind the American Mafia in the first half of the century, nurtured a strong relationship with Cuba's corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista and was rewarded with the opportunity to open and operate hotel casinos in Havana. Lansky had taken over the gambling tables of Havana's Montmartre Club in the mid 1930s, and soon after Batista assumed power in 1952, he invited Lanksy to expand his operations and even serve as a government adviser to help clean-up the many crooked games of chance and fraud operating in Cuban casinos. This invitation spurred a tidal wave of American mob investment in and control over legalized gaming in Cuba.

In the face of increased law enforcement scrutiny in America and buoyed by the unfettered support extended by Batista, Lanksy and Luciano, along with Frank Costello and Santo Trafficante, Jr., viewed the Caribbean island as an ideal sanctuary within which they could expand their gambling empires. In his 1976 self-published book, The Mafia Conspiracy, John Scarne estimated that during the 1950s, the American Mafia indirectly controlled no less than 19 casinos in Cuba. In return, Batista and his associates were compensated with millions of dollars in bribes as well as a percentage of the revenues of the mob-run hotel-casinos.

In effect, the Mafia's major white-collar criminality was not gambling activities, but rather the bribing and corruption of the Cuban Batista government. A crime that not only led to the end of Batista, but also to the rise of the anti-corruption Cuban Revolution.

Soon after the Cuban Revolution, communist leader Fidel Castro made it clear that American investors were no longer welcome in Cuba; he shut down most of the mob-operated casinos, proclaiming that the gangsters behind them were the ultimate, crooked metaphor of the American capitalist system. In 1959, Castro even briefly jailed Florida mob boss Trafficante, who had financial interests in Havana casinos since 1946.

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