Review: Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A couple points of preamble, I suppose. The kind of organized crime history I write is in more or less direct conflict with what English writes. I take it as an axiom that we can never genuinely know what happened among men who, literally, lied as part of their everyday professional lives. Not only that, but they often depended on those lies having currency. As I like to put it, gangsters worked to make people believe they had power and influence at the same time as they worked to keep proof of that power away from anyone who might be able to prosecute them for it. They misled everyone as a practice, so how can we hope fully to untangle the true story decades later.

As a consequence, I am always at least as interested in the footnotes of a gangster history as I am in the main text of it. As a result, then, I’m not doing this book justice since, in listening to it, I couldn’t indulge my habit of looking for (and evaluating) the quality of the source for each controversial claim. If I’d read this on paper, I might have better things to say about it…or possibly worse.

What English does here, and also in Paddy Whacked which, while never reading in full, I’ve read in often over the years, is flesh the myth of the Mafia into a larger, at least semi-documented story. He’s a storyteller, which is something I admire, but I’m not always convinced that he’s on top of the latest findings of others who – at the price of not telling their stories as smoothly – tell them more accurately and with a greater a awareness of what the sources allow us to say with confidence.

There’s a spot here early where English talks about what’s been called “The Night of the Sicilian Vespers,” a supposed wave of killings that knocked off the old time “Mustache Petes” of the Mafia in favor of the younger generation of mobsters personified by (and purportedly headed up by) Lucky Luciano. Those “Vespers” are a central part of Mafia lore and are acknowledged in FBI accounts as well as in most popular histories of the mob.

The trouble is that, as academic historian Alan Block has shown, there were no such murders. With one possible exception, there are simply no records of potential Mafiosi killed in the months following Luciano’s taking out of Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Joe Valachi may have reported it before the McClellan Committee, but it was either hearsay or myth. It didn’t happen, and English ought to be aware of that.

Or, later, he’ll often quote Luciano’s “last testament,” a quasi-biography he dictated to reporters near the end of his life. Like Meyer Lansky’s interviews with Israeli journalists in the early 1970s, though – interviews that English cites several times – such autobiographical works were highly contextualized. Luciano was trying to interest someone in making a film about his life (and in bringing substantial rights fees with it) so he both glamorized his experiences and downplayed his own crimes. Lansky meanwhile was trying to get the Israeli government to grant him citizenship under the Law of Return that guaranteed it to any Jew who requested it. As a result, he played up his Jewish identity and worked to cast himself as someone who’d always been an outsider.

In the sort of gangster history I value, those accounts do matter, but they matter as part of the larger, contested stories in circulation about each man. They don’t tell us what happened, but they do tell us something about the way these men were trying to shape their own reputations.

To be fair, though, English has a different agenda. He has a version of organized crime history that comes out of the “great man” school. For him, the major players – Lansky above all – had a vision and went on to realize it. I don’t especially buy that Lansky scoped out the situation in the 1930s that would develop in the 1950s, but there is evidence that he did. I read it that Lansky was always looking for opportunities, that he likely explored dozens of other ventures going way back. English can’t be entirely wrong in asserting that Lansky eyed the possibility of taking over the nation of Cuba decades before it actually happened.

And English has an appealing way with words and narrative. I know firsthand how hard it is to tease a narrative out of a range of characters who are working simultaneously toward a mostly shared (but sometimes contested) end. He does a nice job of moving his story forward and then back-tracking to give the biography of some new and essential figure: Batista, Luciano, Lansky, Trafficante, and Castro. No one of those chapters is as strong as the books dedicated to each individual, but those other books don’t weave so broad a story.

In the end, I did enjoy the well-defined scope of the narrative here and, tip-of-the-hat, he even managed to dig up a detail that I wish I’d had for my own book. And that I could have had if I’d read this sooner – Chicago Jewish gangster David Yaras, with, I would claim his partner Lenny Patrick – ran the San Souci casino in the early mobbed up years. I knew that detail, though the FBI gives them a different Mafia partner (Detroit’s Joe Massei according to the FBI, Pittsburgh’s Sam Mannarino here), but I wish I’d known this claim that Yaras was part of first wave of short-sighted thugs as opposed to the subtler, long-term thinking of Lansky and his crew.

So, if you’re curious about this era of Cuba – and it’s often fascinating for the way it helped invent a music and a style that defined much of the era – and if you’re not as hung up on the footnotes as I am, there’s a lot here to enjoy.


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