Ed Reid.The Grim Reapers
Chapter 7: Bahamas Hoodlum Sea

The first competitive challenge to the Groves-Chesler-Lansky triumvirate came in 1963 from grocery-chain, model-agency, theater-arts magnate Huntington (Hunt) Hartford, who tried to fire a legal torpedo of his own little domain a few miles away across the blue sea at the Freeport empire a-building.

Hartford had control of a smaller island a short sail from Freeport Grand Bahama Island, and just across the harbor from the Bahamian capital of Nassau. Hartford’s island is listed on navigation charts as Hog Island, but, as a step to converting it into a tourist paradise, Hunt renamed his floating platter of earth Paradise Island. Between 1959 and 1963 Hartford said he poured $25 million into Hog, trying to change it into a silk purse, and originally he protested the introduction of any form of gambling in the Bahamas.

Hartford apparently assumed he had the right to speak for the islands, and he still had a substantial part of the A & P fortune to back him up. But he must have reckoned without the ABC’s of modern economics, especially since his attempt to buck both the gambling-eating-sunning-carousing splendor of Las Vegas and other tourist traps and the rapidly developing Grand Bahama Island right in his own back yard was made from an off-the-track island-Paradise.

Finding that a marina, hotel rooms, golf course, and continental restaurant weren’t enough to lure the tourists, Hartford made an about-face in 1963 and said he would like to put a gaming casino on Paradise Island and build a bridge to get the tourists across the bay from Nassau. In a press release issued at the time, making a public plea for the / issuance of a gambling license, Hartford declared that he thought it would be beneficial to the natives on Paradise Island because
babies are occasionally being born blind, and worms and amoebic dysentery and tuberculosis are prevalent due to poor sanitation and over crowding. If gambling would be permitted on Paradise, it goes without saying that there will be employment for thousands and I trust my past record in giving employment will confirm the responsibility of my statement

Hartford’s seemingly good intentions, however, came to naught, for neither the gambling nor the bridge-building permit could be secured. It appears that Hunt had failed to hire the able Sir Stafford Sands as his lawyer and, to add insult to injury, had even contributed $15,000 to the opposing political party; the largely Negro Progressive Liberal party, which scored heavily in the January, 1967, elections and gave the islands their first black premier.

The A & P heir eventually decided to bail out and, in a flash, a buyer showed up for the former Hog Island. Hartford announced in January, 1966, that for $3 million in cash, the assumption of a $9 million mortgage by the buyer, and the retention of a 25 per cent interest in the entire operation (to include the building of a 500-room hotel and casino), he had sold Paradise island and its facilities to the Mary Carter Paint Company.

Since 1962, the Mary Carter Paint Company, a Delaware corporation recorded in October, 1958, with headquarters in Tampa, Florida, had been exceedingly active in swallowing up businesses, increasing her paper assets, and assuaging her thirst in various ways in the Caribbean. There were, by 1964, some one thousand the Mary Carter dealer and company paint stores spread throughout much of the United States and in Puerto Rico and the British West Indies. A subsidiary operated National Biff-Burger System (drive-in restaurant) franchises together with a manufacturing plant that produced everything needed to operate one of the drive-ins, including the portable building-units themselves. Another subsidiary, Bahamas Developers, in 1963, acquired some thirty-five hundred acres of land within the Groves domain on Grand Bahama Island, part of which was developed in 1965 into a residential community called Queens Cove. /

In 1966, therefore, when the Mary Carter—she doesn’t exist but it’s a good feminine handle on which to hang one’s corporate hat—made her deal with Huntington Hartford, she was no virgin in island commerce and already had a more-than-platonic interest in her future playmates. Shortly after Mary disposed of Hunt, she proceeded to make a marriage of financial convenience with the Groves group in order to accomplish something that Hartford had been unable to do: secure permission for gaming oh Paradise Island. The Mary Carter Paint Company was able, through the representations of none other than Sir Stafford himself to purchase for $750,000 the certificate of exemption belonging to the Bahamian Club, a conservative gaming parlor in Nassau owned by Groves’s interests.

The agreement, according to Life magazine of February 3, 1967, called for the Bahamian Club permit to be transferred to the Paradise Island casino when it opened on the condition that Mary Carter relinquish a reported four-ninths of the casino’s profits as well as management of the entire casino to Wallace Groves’s Bahamas Amusements, Ltd. Lansky and his crew, who were at the time, managing the Bahamian Club for Groves as well as the Monte Carlo room on Grand Bahama Island, were slated to run the Paradise Island casino when the change of ownership was made, for a flat 15 per cent of the gross gaming profits.

In reporting the details of the arrangement to her jet-set readers, syndicated gossip columnist Suzy spoke of “nice fresh money” being brought by Hartford’s new partner to alleviate the $59,000 monthly losses he had been suffering. “That’s expected to stop,” she surmised, “because the new group has acquired the gambling permit once owned by Nassau’s Bahamian Club. Now they can play with the big boys.” How right she was!

Since then, Mary Carter’s Paradise Island has joined hands with Nassau on New Providence Island via a $2-million toll bridge. It seemed that, miraculously, Mary Carter was also able to get the bridge-building permit denied Hartford in 1963. The new $15 million Paradise Island hotel and casino opened in January, 1968, in typical ala fashion. Columnist Earl Wilson reported that Lady Astor, Lady Sassoon, Carol Channing, Serge Obolensky, and Huntington Hartford —apparently still comfortably ensconced within his 25 per cent retained interest in what Wilson called / the “Paradise Island, Ltd., Complex”—together with others of the jet set, made quite a night of it.

“It’s all run by James M. Crosby, head of the Mary Carter Paint Co.,” Earl reported, “and there never was any Mary Carter but the paint company thought it sounded like a sweet name.”

Business on Paradise Island has been booming ever since, and plans are going ahead for the building of houses, apartments, a shopping center, and more hotels. Consequently, it is interesting to note that the Paradise Island casino is managed by none other than the brother of the ousted Dino Cellini, Eddie.

Dino Cellini, moreover, although out of sight is anything but out of action. After he was ousted from the Bahamas in 1964, he ran a school in London to train European croupiers for work in the Bahamian casinos. Then, when the British got wise and banned him at the same time as they gave George Raft his walking papers, Cellini returned to Miami to become a highly successful organizer and promoter of international gambling junkets—affairs involving the bringing in of planeloads of “high-rollers” to a hotel-casino, to be lavishly coddled, catered to, entertained, and deprived of their money.

According to Keith Gonsalves’ testimony before the Royal Commission of Inquiry, two-thirds of the Bahamas’ casino profits came from junkets, each of which reportedly costs the casino operators about $50,000. It is therefore not too difficult to picture the brothers Cellini working hand-in-hand, “doing their thing” for the mob.

At any rate, it would now appear to be a toss-up between Groves, Lansky, Mary Carter and the local Bahamian government—officially represented by its newly-elected premier, thirty-eight-year-old Lynden O. Pinding, whose vociferous campaign against allowing the Bahamas to become a “lucrative center of international crime,” has resulted in the royal commission—as to who will roll the vital seven that loses the game and shifts the dice to the next man at the table.

Groves lives in a blue-green tile palace valued at $1 million; Lansky lives in a modest $25,000 house near Hollywood, Florida; and Mary Carter’s J. M. Crosby is rather comfortably situated—when not in Paradise—in Great Neck, Long Island, where, cozily, Lou Chesler is also main- / tains equally elegant lodging. The question at the moment is what kind of residence Pindling is planning for himself.

Pindling’s drawing boards are currently covered with designs for a new approach to the gambling free-for-all—for Groves and friends, that is—espoused by the former Bahamian administration. The new approach is somewhat obscure, for the Bahamian-born, London-educated Pindling plans to reject the royal commission’s ruling barring Americans from casino employment on the ground that “some taint” seems to cover anyone connected with organized gambling in the United States, even persons with no criminal records,

According to Pindling’s enemies, his Progressive Liberal party has accepted money from syndicate sources, in fact, they say that the party must have received payments because gamblers always insure their bets. But Pindling is not alarmed at the reports or criticism, nor does he seem to have to be. Apparently, his philosophy is: if you’re going to run a gambling casino, you need gamblers to run it. The skilled labor needed for such an enterprise will therefore stay.

Pindling has, however, stated that there will be no more certificates of exemption granted for new casinos—which eliminates the competition, at least—and that he will honor a previous law prohibiting Bahamian residents from playing the games. New schools and housing tracts are planned for the impoverished native residents, but Pindling is apparently moving towards a ghetto-style living for his people—Negroes represent 80-85 per cent of the Bahamian population—through his efforts to keep the gambling environment off-limits to the local black electorate.

Appeasement in the form of a flat $500,000 fee charged annually against each casino and increased taxes on a graduated scale for all revenues above $5 million has done little to demonstrate that things will be easier for the locals. The cost of living has gone sky-high, and the Bahamian chamber of commerce has warned that a family of three needs about $19,000 a year to live reasonably, an altogether impossible prospect for the people who voted Pindling into office.

Regardless of politics and the changing of the guard, it would appear that the syndicate holds most of the gaming aces in the Bahamas. After his election Pindling, who demands the islands’ eventual freedom from Britain, apparently not only changed his mind about the facts of gambling life / and related aspects of international crime but also showed up in full dress at the January, 1968, opening of the Paradise Island hotel and casino with a big welcome for the guests. He danced a wild rhumba with actress Janet Leigh and reportedly kept asking orchestra leader Meyer Davis for more of the same. It seems that Pindling, too, is “playing with the big boys,” and it remains to be seen just who is hustling who.

There are hundreds of sunny islands in the warm sea around the Bahamas, and it could be that Lansky and his cohorts may one day spread themselves too thinly. The key point perhaps, is just how far his associates in the States will let him go. A big head is an easy target, and the Mafia is not quite as racially integrated, as it may seem. Meyer Lansky is still the kid on the corner who shines the shoes of the boys in the Sicilian brotherhood. They know without question that he handles the shinola with a dexterity second to none and that he takes out a goodly cut for his services, but they aren’t likely to let him climb on to the stool himself and pretend he’s really one of them.

The Bahamas, however, do not stand as the only gemstones in the Caribbean crown of the syndicate; there are other diamonds in the rough operated by the slick-suited professional gamblers. To the south are numerous other islands, stretching down to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles, where the Mafia boys have decided to settle,

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the depression-ridden, voodoo capital of the Caribbean a gaming casino has been established by the Mafia hoodlums. Run by the Canadian branch of the syndicate and controlled locally, according to U.S. Immigration Department files, by the Volpe brothers, Paul, Albert, and Eugene, the Carib-Haiti was established with the help of the Haitian dictator François (Papa Doc) Duvalier.

Also connected with the Volpe operation in Haiti is John Pasquale Tronolone, alias “Salvatore Tronolone,” also known as “John Rich.” and intimately known to his Mafia colleagues as “Peanuts.” Tronolone is known to have represented Mafia chieftain Frank Costello’s interests in Las Vegas. Some of his more odious associates, in addition to Costello and the Volpes, have been syndicate hearties Joe Massel, John and George Angersola, Joseph DiCarlo, Fred Felice, and Frank Caruso.

Whenever you pry the lid off a Caribbean vacationland nowadays—with the possible exception of Puerto Rico, where the government-run casinos are in the experimental / stage—you generally find that if there are casinos, the cashiers of the mob are in charge. An even more disturbing fact, however, is—as the next chapter shows—that Caribbean gambling is not just a syndicate operation. Representatives of the U.S. government, union officials, executives of American financial institutions, as well as Las Vegas gambling operators—all have set out on their own treasure hunt for the buried gold of the Spanish Main.

pp. 105-124

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