Davidson, Bill.The Mafia:
Shadow of Evil on an Island in the Sun

SE Post Feb 25, 1967 vol 204 issue 4 p. 27 - 37 - Part 6

Then the miracle happened. On election day the Negroes poured out to go to the polls with a purpose thy had never exhibited before. Pindling's P.L.P. workers performed their duties like Bobby Kennedy men. Even the taxi drivers organized a communications system for the P.L.P through their car radios. When the results came in, there was literally dancing in the streets. The P.L.P. had won 18 seats. The U.B.P. had also won 18 seats, but the other two seats were taken up by a Labor Party candidate and by a white independent. The Labor Party man, at least, could be counted on to vote with the P.L.P., giving it a majority of one. But by January 13, Pindling felt he had the support of the independent. On January 14 Sands and the rest of the U.B.P. government resigned. On January 16 Pindling and his party took over. A British warship nervously standing by in the harbor, withdrew. There were no riots or recriminations against the former white rulers. A British newspaperman told me, "I guess you'd have to call this a triumph of basic democracy. It was quite a change for this part of the world—a peaceful revolution."
The peaceful revolution was evident, on the surface at least, when I returned to the Bahamas immediately after the election. Wherever I walked in Nassau, the entire Negro population seemed to be smiling again—for the first time in years. Sidney Poitier, a strong Pindling supporter, told me, "Even the flowers will be back."

But in the hard world of realistic politics, the "triumph of basic democracy" was not that clear-cut. The white economic princes of the U.B.P. still hold all the economic power. On the day Pindling took office, Sir Roland Symonette, closed down his shipyard, throwing all of his Negro employees out of work, The U.B.P.-controlled newspapers ran stories indicating that foreign investors, fearful of Pindling's mildly socialist party, were pulling out of the islands—thus posing the threat of a severe eco-/nomic depression. Pindling reacted by doing everything he could to allay the fears of the white community. Instead of firing the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton-as he had promised—Pindling retained the company, and it began to grind out publicity for him just as it had for his archenemy, Sir Stafford Sands, just a few days before. Many Pindling supporters felt this was a serious mistake. It then turned out that Pindling had made other "mistakes." For example, it was discovered that—unknown to Pindling—the American who had loaned him the helicopter for his campaign was Mike McLaney, a former associate of Meyer Lansky in the gangster's Havana gambling empire. Pindling vehemently denies knowing that McLaney was his benefactor.

I spent considerable time with Pindling in the first troubled days of his administration. One interview took place in his home, a tastefully furnished ranch house exactly like those in hundreds of American suburbs. Pindling's wife, Marguerite, a beautiful, intelligent young woman, served us a native lunch of "market fish" on magnificent Jamaican china. Then Pindling and I talked. "I've got to go slow," he said. "I've got to dispel the radical 'black power' image our enemies have created. I want all the economic and agricultural help I can get from the United Nations. I want all the help I can get from the United States."
"Are you going to go slow in rooting the Mafia out of Bahamas gambling?" I asked.

"Yes and no," he said. "In the first place, I feel that the basis of Mafia power lies in the corruption of public officials, and we've already taken steps to make it a conflict of interests for a government official to profit from the casinos. All of my ministers have given up their businesses and professions, We want a full-time government.

"In the second place," he continued, "I'm going to renew my request to the British to send in a Royal Commission to investigate thoroughly the whole mess-and at the same time let them investigate the U.B.P. charge that my government is infiltrated with Communists. I also will ask the United States Justice Department to give us full information on the Americans working in the casinos. There will be no compromise with the undesirable element. They must go. But I don't want to close the casinos right away. That might be disastrous to the economy of the islands. I want to make a careful study pf the well-regulated, government-controlled gambling system in Puerto Rico, and if it can be adopted here, eventually we'll probably adopt it."

The Post team of reporters investigated the Puerto Rican casinos as thoroughly as those in the Bahamas, and we could find no evidence of malfeasance in the American island commonwealth. The casinos are administered under the tight control of a Government department, and George M. Moll, director of the Division of Games and Chance, has the power to withhold licenses and to close down casinos on a moment's notice, if anything suspicious occurs.

The management of the casinos must be investigated and approved by the FBI to make sure that there is no Mafia or otherwise malodorous association through hidden ownership. One hotel lost it gambling license within 24 hours after an associate of Teamsters Union President James R. Hoffa was found to a hidden owner.

All casino personnel-croupiers, dealers, supervisors, managers-must also be cleared by the FBI as well as the local police. No one is allowed to work in any capacity in a casino unless he has been a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico for ten years. "This provision alone has totally discouraged the Mafia," says Moll, "Even they wouldn't wait ten years to infiltrate a man into a casino, provide he could get past the FBI check."

A Justice Department official, who admires the Puerto Rican setup, says: "One thing that has always amused me about the Bahamian situation is that the government has always claimed that it had to use Lansky men as supervisors because no one else knew how to sum American-style casinos. The Puerto Rican gambling personnel are the best and cleanest in the world, but the Bahamas people never made any attempt to hire them."

In the Bahamas the unexpected results of the January 10 election have stirred up anxiety—if nothing else—among the Americans who work in the casinos. On Grand Bahama the Meyer Lansky men confine themselves to their hotel rooms and beaches during the day, and they do not speak to the patrons of the casinos any more than they have to at night. Every arriving convention group is sus-/pected of harboring FBI men in disguise. There are rumors that Scotland Yard men from England are working undercover within the Groves organization. It remains to be seen what will happen to the prostitutes, who now shuttle over from Miami on the weekends.

But there's also a feeling of cautious optimism among the Lansky men. The gamblers seem to feel that this is just an interlude; that after a period of depression and economic uncertainty in the islands, Sir Stafford Sands will return. They are aware of a curious division of sentiment in the United States Government, and the fact that they might have an unwilling ally in, strange enough, the State Department.

Before the Pindling victory on January 10, there was serious disagreement in Washington as to how to handle the developing crisis in the Bahamas. The State department was for maintaining the status quo, preferring to deal with the Sir Stafford Sands-dominated white government rather than to risk another Congo, or worse, just 70 miles from our shores. On the other hand the Justice Department—making one of its rare forays into the foreign-policy area—felt that it was highly dangerous to have a major Mafia stronghold so close to Florida. They pointed to a similar, though less drastic situation in Jamaica, where a Negro government took over—after a British Royal Commission investigation of white corruption—and has ruled ably and well ever since.

The hard-nosed gambling men on Grand Bahama are betting on the eventual triumph of the State Department's point of view. So far the Justice Department has been able to do little to get at the gamblers, other than to call for federal grand juries in New York and Philadelphia to try to trace the flow of casino money to specific members of the Mafia in the United States.

The only American in the operation to receive any punishment recently, however mild, were three close associates of Meyer Lansky who were key employees of the Monte Carlo casino—Max Courtney, the chief supervisor; Charles Brudner, the floor manager; and Frank Ritter, the credit manager. After the Wall Street Journal called attention to their identities, and noted that all three were fugitives from justice in the United States, the Bahamian government moved against them, more or less. They were allowed to remain in the islands as residents. ("I've heard of political asylum," Lynden Pindling said at the time, "but this is the first time I've heard of criminal asylum.") The three men were told to get out of the casinos by January 15.

It so happened that the island's newest gambling establishment, the $2.5 million El Casino, gaudier than anything in Las Vegas, opened on January 1, and Courtney, Ritter and Brudner were on hand to give a two-weeks' cram course in running the place to the new boys who, it so happens, were friends of Lansky's from the old days.

El Casino is a garish structure built to resemble a Moslem mosque. Its exterior is illuminated at night with multiple-colored floodlights, and it was described by one opening-night patron as looking like "a high-class bordello in the Casbah." Another said he expected to see an Arab in one of the minarets summoning the faithful with the cry of "Come seven, come eleven."

In Nassau, the small, dignified Bahamian Club, a club which has been taken over by Groves people, had a full house on New Year's Eve. The Bahamian Club will be closed when Paradise Enterprises, Ltd., begins to operate Groves's third casino-another mammoth structure now rising on Paradise Island, just across Nassau Harbor. "It will have a high dome and look just like St. Paul's church in London," says Ronald Gowlding, Groves's executive vice-president. Workers are halfway through building a multimillion-dollar bridge to Paradise Island, which now can only be reached by ferry.

In addition to all this, several new hotels are under construction both in Nassau and on Grand Bahama. Each is eagerly planning a "convention hall" that could be converted into a casino. In his campaign, Pindling said, "How long will it be before we have a Mafia-run casino in every hotel? It could be Las Vegas all over again-but at least in Las Vegas a good deal of the money gets back to the people."
Every morning in the hovels of Eight Mile Rock on Grand Bahama and "over-the-hill" in Nassau, native Negro workers get up and go to work on the various construction projects, They appreciate the money the work has brought them, but they have mixed sentiments about the future of the structures they are erecting. We talked with one native worker recently as he as putting the finishing touches on the landscaping around El Casino. He looked up at the flamboyant building and frowned. "I don't know," he said in his lilting Bahamian accent, "there's a powerful feelin' of evil here."

Just then a car went by on the highway called The Mall. In it was Dusty Peters, cigar in face, on his way to the airport for his twice-weekly conference with Meyer Lansky in Miami Beach.

< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 °