The Corporation
An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
“A mob saga that has it all—brotherhood and betrayal, swaggering power and glittering success, and a Godfather whose reach seems utterly unrivaled. What a relentless, irresistible read.” —Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of The Border
A fascinating, cinematic, multigenerational history of the Cuban mob in the US from "America’s top chronicler of organized crime"* and New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne.
By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as "the Corporation," the Cuban mob’s power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida’s exile community—those who had been chased from the island by Castro’s revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.
An epic story of gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. T. J. English interweaves the voices of insiders speaking openly for the first time with a trove of investigative material he has gathered over many decades to tell the story of this successful criminal enterprise, setting it against the larger backdrop of revolution, exile, and ethnicity that makes it one of the great American gangster stories that has been overlooked—until now.
Drawing on the detailed reporting and impressive volume of evidence that drive his bestselling works, English offers a riveting, in-depth look at this powerful and sordid crime organization and its hold in the US.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Petty gambling leads to grand theft, arson, and dozens of murders in this sprawling true-crime saga. Journalist English (Havana Nocturne) recounts the career of Jos Miguel Battle, aka "El Gordo," a refugee from Castro's Cuba (and Bay of Pigs veteran) who became the boss of bolita, an illegal lottery popular among Cuban exile communities in Miami. By the 1980s, the pastime swelled to a billion-dollar industry and sparked conflicts between rival New York City bolita outfits, with assassinations galore and a rash of arson that killed innocents. Battle's story reads like an ultraviolent mashup of The Godfather, Scarface, and Bugsy, with plenty of gore, colorful characters, and intricate subplots: the loose-cannon prot g of Battle who started going after the bosses; Ernestico, the drug dealer who killed Battle's brother Palulu and survived umpteen retaliatory hit attempts; Battle's Peruvian casino venture, where he wallowed in cocaine and paranoia; mob-linked anti-Castro terrorists; Miami cops who spun wiretaps, stakeouts, and a source code-named "Sexy Cubana" into a RICO case. English stuffs in so much material that the thread sometimes gets lost, but his vast narrative is rich enough to keep the pages turning.