Turner - The Cuban connection : Nixon, Castro, and the mob

So many contributed so much to the production of The Cuban Connection that I don't know where to start. So I'll begin at home with a salute to Marge Turner, who kept cool in the face of the editorial bedlam that surrounds the making of a nonfiction book. This cool led to her intuitive discovery of a lost manuscript from an earlier era that provided background for the current one. Where was it? On a ledge in the garage, of course. And thanks go to my daughter, Lori Turner, for her able assistance in my research. Still in the neighborhood, my fellow author and colleague Marilyn Dineen was kind enough to critique the early text to start it on its way. One more neighborhood support was Linda Hepworth, our local waitress and author of Turning the Tables, who emulates Dorothy Parker at the informal Chalet Basque Round Table.

To make the transition from proposal to contractthe bridge of sighs, I call itthe author more often than not needs some outside help. I recall my first book, The Police Establishment, which was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1968. I was standing around the punch bowl at a holiday party thrown by San Francisco literati when I met John Dodds, the editorial director of Putnam's, and an esteemed figure in the Eastern literary world. At this point I had yet to contemplate writing a bookit all seemed too exotic for Westerners. But John seemed intrigued by my FBI storiesI had spent ten years as one of Hoover's finest, working on everything from counterespionage to bank robbery as well as the Migratory Bird Act. John asked if I had any book proposals prepared, then told me to compose an outline.

A week after I sent him the outline, John sent me a contract and a $3,500 advance. I found out later that the FBI had a snitch inside Putnam's and I was on J. Edgar Hoover's most-wanted list for criticizing his false alarms on the Communist Party USA and his dereliction on organized crime.Bureau wanted not only to silence me but also to make me an example to deter other agents from speaking out. The Bureau was leaning heavily on Putnam's executives to smother the book. Initially there was a tendency to cave in to Hoover, but in the end, the American tradition of a free press prevailed. The Police Establishment went on to literary and financial success. One national reviewer titled his piece, Pull Over, Officer.

I owe a tip of the cap to Dr. Cyril Wecht, a foremost pathologist and friend for over thirty years. When I learned that Cyril's latest work bore the imprint of Prometheus Books, I contacted him, and Cyril was kind enough to put in a good word for me with the publisher.

I was very fortunate to be granted an interview with Carlos Pro Socarrs, president of Cuba until ousted by Batista. In the interview, Pro provided the information about Castro's plan to offer a strategic alliance with the United States and his rebuff at Nixon's hands, which is the tipping point of this book. Pro played a significant role in Cuban politics in the 1950s; his graft-fed fortune was thought to be the largest in Cuban history. His showplace estate, La Chata, was the guesthouse for many international celebrities.

When I interviewed Mike McLaney, proprietor of the Casino Internacional in Havana, he was reluctant to talk because he said the federal government has a long memory. But he poured me a drink and settled down to talk. His language was colorful, as when he called one of the pilots he had retained for his own operations all flaps and no throttle. I later found out that one of the hangers-on with McLaney was a tall, thin man with horn-rimmed glasses named Sam Benton, who was actually an assassination broker. (Yes, he took a percentage of the price of the hit contracts he sold.) So I am grateful to McLaney, not for what he didn't say, but for what he put me onto: the involvement of Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia boss, and his underlings in the snuff Castro crowd.

I was also the beneficiary of the great paramilitary journalist Andrew St. George's ceaseless digging for the core of the story. Andrew was the golden boy of Time-Life's Henry Luce (the Founder, as Luce was sarcastically referred to inside the organization). Warren Hinckle, the bad-boy journalist who founded Ramparts, kept a parakeet christened Henry Luce in his San Francisco office. Hinckle had apprenticed at the San Francisco Chronicle, and his incomparable nose for news endowed me with my cub credentials by some strange osmosis.

Enrique Harry Ruiz-Williams was a commanding presence when I interviewed him in 1974 at his office papered with maps and geological charts. I published some of his story in Deadly Secrets but recently discovered pertinent information that Harry was forced to withhold from me. As it turns out, Harry was playing lifeguard to Commander Juan Almeida Bosque, a hero of the Cuban Revolution. Along with Che Guevara, Almeida had grown disillusioned with Fidel Castro. They took action. Almeida with the aid of the Americans would arrange a coup. Che would leave Cuba and build his own forces as he traveled through the hinterlands of South America. The Almeida story was a time bomb, and I'm deeply in debt to Harry Williams for briefing me on the existence of the defection without betraying the commander.