Senate narcotics hearings, 15 October 1963: Chief Brown on 'Louis Santos of Havana, Cuba' at Apalachin, and Sergeant de la Llana's statement (pp. 525-526)

Printed pages 525 and 526 of Part 2 (NCJRS PDF pages 589 and 590). They continue the statement of Tampa police chief Neil G. Brown of 15 October 1963, whose opening pages, 519 to 524, are filed as their own record. Page 524 carries Brown’s statement that Trafficante “previously lived in Havana, Cuba, where he owned and operated gambling casinos under the Battista regime,” that his operations were stopped when Castro took over and that he “was expelled from Cuba,” and that Cuban police told four American mobsters who meant to kill him in Cuba that “they would have to do it on American soil.”

At the top of page 525 Brown completes his account of why Trafficante was a suspect in the Albert Anastasia killing of 25 October 1957: “there had been reports that Anastasia was then attempting to move in on Trafficante’s gambling operations in Cuba,” and Trafficante, “using the alias ‘B. Hill,’ stayed with Anastasia in the latter’s hotel suite, on the night of October 24, 1957.” That is police suspicion, not a charge. Brown then said the department’s view of Trafficante “was confirmed, of course, by the positive identification of the ‘Louis Santos of Havana, Cuba,’ apprehended at the Apalachin conference in November of 1957, as Santo Trafficante, Jr., of Tampa, Fla.”

Sergeant Jack de la Llana’s written statement, received into the record on page 525 and printed from page 525, concerns a visitor to Trafficante whom the Tampa police called a courier. On page 526 it says: “Coticchia worked as a ‘pit boss’ in gambling casinos in Las Vegas, Nev., and Havana, Cuba.” No dates are given for that work.

“Boss,” “Mafia” and “courier” in these pages are the Tampa police’s labels. This archive does not copy them onto a chart, and it quotes nothing else from the statement about the visitor.