The CIA and Fidel Castro
In 1946 organized crime members from the United States and Europe held a meeting in Cuba which became known as the Havana Conference. Organized and allegedly chaired by the recently deported Lucky Luciano, the conference discussed the mob’s activities in Cuba, the disposition of the New York crime families in Luciano’s absence, and recent Mafia activities in Las Vegas. Meyer Lansky represented the Jewish mob delegation along with his silent partner in the Jewish mob’s Havana activities, Fulgencio Batista.
A decade later the American organized crime-owned casinos in Havana were generating over $100 million per year. When Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in 1959 the mob bosses, having been aligned with Batista, were forced to flee leaving behind their lucrative financial empire, useful not only for cash generation but for laundering money from other illicit activities, including the narcotics trade. The Mafiosi fled determined to return, after first eliminating Fidel Castro. They soon learned that their desire to kill Castro was shared with the United States government, through the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mob leaders had already worked with CIA operatives in Havana and South Florida, smuggling stolen weapons to Batista supporters in 1958. The weapons had been stolen from a National Guard Armory in Ohio by associates of Pittsburgh organized crime leaders and flown to Cuba from Miami in CIA airplanes for distribution to fighters opposing Castro. One of the operatives involved in the operation was Frank Sturgis. (Sturgis was later one of the burglars arrested in the Watergate complex, triggering the investigation which brought down Richard Nixon).
Although a congressional commission later denied that Sturgis had ever been an employee of the CIA, he moved in a murky world which included US agents and Mafia contacts. In a conversation with Meyer Lansky after Castro had forced many of the mobsters to leave Cuba Sturgis, who was then going under his birth name of Fiorini, was told that it would be worth $1 million to Lansky and his Italian compatriots if Castro were to be taken out.
Lansky’s comment, whether serious or hyperbole, set in motion a series of events coordinated by the Mafia and the CIA to eliminate Fidel Castro. These included assassination plots to kill Castro by diverse means and in different locations. The CIA-Mafia connection regarding Castro continued through the last year of the Eisenhower administration and through the Kennedy administration, and when revealed beginning in the 1970s led to the conspiracy theories of mob/Cuban/CIA involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.