Havana Nocturne

How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution

By: T. J. English

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

In Havana Nocturne, T. J. English offers a riveting, multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution, and international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the mob in Havana and the event that would overshadow it: the Cuban Revolution.

Bringing together long-buried historical information and English's own research in Havana - including interviews with the era's key survivors - Havana Nocturne takes listeners back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders Meyer Lansky and Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Thanks to strong ties with the island's brutal dictator, President Batista, the mob soon owned the biggest luxury hotels and casinos and launched an unprecedented tourist boom.

But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government and its foreign partners - an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory.

©2008 T. J. English (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"English's engaging narrative reads with the gripping quality of fiction: the dark underworld of Havana comes to life....Highly recommended." ( Library Journal)
"Crime writer English...unfolds a story whose main outline will be familiar to any fan of The Godfather: Part II, but whose twists and turns no screenplay could keep up with." ( Kirkus Reviews)

Interesting history of gang mobsters in Havana

Would you listen to Havana Nocturne again? Why?

Would have to wait for couple months.

What did you like best about this story?

In depth background history of gang mobsters from 20s throujgh early 50s.

What does Mel Foster bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Pulls relationship of Myer Lansky et al with Fidel Castro. Very interesting dual path within one story

If you could give Havana Nocturne a new subtitle, what would it be?

Havana rock n' roll, sex and drugs of the 30s-through 50s

Any additional comments?

none

Page turner (so to speak)

Really loved this "like fiction" drama. Captivating and as gripping as a fiction novel.

Enlightening

Loved the story not the narrator. Narrator did not speak spanish and butchered almost all the spanish words.
Almost stopped listening but wanted to know the history of Cuba. Needs updating now that the embargo is lifted and Fidel died.

Great read definitely recommend

great read love the book and would definitely recommend it has great information and a good narrator

Myths of the Mob, Told Effectively

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.

Fascinating

Godfather part 2 + Bugsy + the Untouchables, + JFK + Frank Sinatra + Cuban history and revolution + Cuban culture. Outstanding.

Don’t care about the mob as much as I’d thought I would

I expected this book to be engaging and offer insight into the mob in Havana. I did learn a good deal about the mob and about life in Havana for the mob but it turns out I don’t care very much. I guess I anticipated a salacious tell-all but there was a lot of focus on how the mob was corporatized. Incongruity between these business details and the details of sex shows attended by those entertained by the mobsters in Cuba just felt bizarre. I’ve never read deeper in to the mob than “The Godfather” so I did gain insight into the roles of a lot of the players but as a novice, I think a book focusing on the earlier days and Las Vegas would have been more interesting - as I think those names are more commonly recognized.

A mixed bag

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Fascinating subject matter turned largely in to a dry slog.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Havana Nocturne?

The last 1/3 of the book salvages the rest. As the threat of revolution becomes real, Castro is closing in and the mob is imploding-it all makes for an exciting story. The prior 2/3 felt largely like a dry inventory of facts and figures.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Mel Foster?

ANYONE. Absolutely no sense of drama. And his voice grates-the guy needs a cough drop and an espresso.

Could you see Havana Nocturne being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

Possibly.

Any additional comments?

I will go out of my way to avoid this narrator in the future. The last 1/3 of the book tips the scales to make it worth while.

Historical drama

I loved the detail and historical content. Very good. The reader was pleasant and excellent with the pronunciation of names.

Poor narration.

r e a l l y p o o r n a r r a t I o n.