Dear Erick:
I wrote a gangster's novel set in 1958 Havana. Fictional
plot, naturally, but I did extensive research and learned
facts, half-truths, allegations, gossip and probably some
lies as well about the Mafia-controlled gaming industry here.
On many occasions I couldn't separate the wheat from the
chaff, distinguish fact from fantasy, but since I was writing
fiction I thought "what the heck.". For instance, did you
know that --allegedly-- the reason Albert Anastasia ordered
Frank Costello snuffed was that Costello and Meyer Lansky
refused to share Havana with the other New York Mafia
families? Costello survived and had Anastasia assassinated a
couple of months later (fact). One of the main issues
discussed at the 1957 Appalachin crime convention (fact),
held to prevent what threatened to become full-scale war
among families (fact) was the control of the Havana casinos.
Allegedly, Joe (Bananas) Bonnano argued that when he
controlled Montreal during and after Prohibition (fact?), he
shared it with all the other families, so why wouldn't Lansky
and Costello reciprocate? Lansky's response (allegedly
delivered by Santos Trafficante, his personal representative
to Appalachin) was that whoever planned to wrest the control
of gaming in Havana from Lansky and Costello would "sleep in
a wooden pajama 24 hours after landing in Cuba."
For research purposes I recommend a visit to Havana first, to
see the hotels where the casinos operated. The casinos were
closed in 1960, if my recollection is precise, but all the
hotels remain: Nacional, Deauville, Capri, Riviera and Havana
Hilton. There are tons of information in the American press
from the 1950's. Many non-fiction books on the Mafia deal
with this as well. Material abounds and research is
easy.
I don't know about on-line since I can't access Internet. To
my knowledge, no other Latino fictional author has written
about this. Probably my book will be published in 2003, In
Ebglish, of course.
Let me know if you are coming to Cuba. I may be able to give
you a hand.
All best,
José atour
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 15 Jan 2002 EST