(1)
Richard
Case Nagell, interviewed
by Dick
Russell
(1977)
I conducted inquiries
relative to 'dissident' members of several Cuban refugee groups
based in the United States; I checked out an alleged connection
between a Miami resident named Eladio Del Valle and New Orleans
CIA informant Sergio Arcacha-Smith; I investigated an associate
of the now deceased right-wing extremist David W. Ferrie of New
Orleans... I conducted a surveillance on a man, said to have been
an ex-CIA employee, observed talking to (exile) leader Manuel Artime
and former Cuban senator/racketeer Rolando Masferrer.
(2)
Dick
Russell,The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1992)
Nicknamed "The Tiger" after his ruthless private
army of the Batista era, Masferrer was an ex-Cuban senator and newspaper
publisher who reportedly
fled the island with as much as $10 million. "A guy
who could slit your throat and smile while doing it," as U.S.
Senate aide Al
Tarabocchia put it.
In Miami,
Masferrer was an FBI informant who maintained connections to the
Trafficante underworld. His "30th of November" exile organization
kept up efforts to eliminate Castro all through 1963 and beyond.
Cuba seems to have responded in kind; Castro was known to have a
substantial bounty out on Masferrer. As we saw in Chapter Ten, before
leaving Mexico
City Nagell obtained a weapon, with Masferrer as the original
target.
And who
was the unidentified man - "said to have been an ex-CIA employee"
- whom Nagell observed talking with Artime and Masferrer that
January 1963 day in Miami? Based on other material supplied me by
Nagell, I believe
it was a Cuban exile who used the "war name" of "Angel"
(pronounced On-hel).
He, along with a partner, would later come into direct
contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.
(3)
William
C. Bishop, interviewed by Dick
Russell
(1990)
I was to obtain
additional funding, I'll say this and no more, from the (crime)
Syndicate out of New Orleans, for Alpha 66. At that point in time,
Rolando Masferrer was the key bagman, for lack of a better term,
for Alpha 66. Primarily the funding came through the Syndicate,
because of Masferrer's connections with those people back in Cuba.
He had ties with Santos Trafficante, Jr., and other criminal elements.
Organized crime, pure and simple. He also had different ties with
Jimmy Hoffa. As far back as 1962,1 think. But Rolando, from time
to time when it came to large sums of money, had sticky fingers.
I think that's why he was killed, eventually. Either that, or the
Kennedy assassination. Because he knew about it.
(4)
Saul Landau, Anti-Terrorism
Update (20th September, 2003)
In
the 1960s, Guillermo and his brother had linked their political
fortunes with an overtly fascist anti-Castro group called the Cuban
Nationalist Movement. According to FBI Agents Carter Cornick and
Scherrer, whose police work helped crack the Letelier Moffitt assassination
case and point the finger at the highest levels of the Pinochet
government, Novo pursued his violent anti-Castro activities throughout
the 1960s and early 1970s. Scherrer claimed that “he tried
to finance through drug dealing. But we could never make a charge
stick.” Guillermo’s reputation as a tough guy included
an incident where, to show his courage and machismo, drove his car
into a brick wall at high speed.
In 1975
Guillermo and Ignacio had already forged links with General Pinochet’s
secret police. Indeed, FBI Agents Scherrer and Carter Cornick, who
was the point man on the Letelier case, were convinced that the
Novo brothers had played key roles in the assassination of anti-Castro
exile Rolando Masferrer whose death directly benefited Jorge Mas
Canosa, the man who went on to lead the Cuban American National
Foundation, the most powerful anti-Castro pressure group in the
nation.
Masferrer,
a Senator in Batista’s Cuba, won his notoriety for leading
a small army known as "Masferrer's Tigers." Prior to Castro’s
assumption of power in January 1959, these thugs attacked violently
factions that opposed the Batista regime. In exile in Miami, he
bought and published a Spanish language newspaper named Libertad.
But he also continued his better-paying occupation: the extortion
of small and easily intimidated business people in south Florida.
Masferrer,
a master of anti-Castro slogans, supported violence against the
Cuban revolution. But his efforts had brought no results and the
more ambitious exiled Cubans began to think of his rhetoric and
his purported militant actions as a front for his “business”
activities. Masferrer stood as an obstacle to Mas Canosa’s
plans to forge an effective and unified counter revolution, which
would include meaningful violence and political pressure.
