THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

“Hey! It’s just Vlad being Vlad.”
• •
“Drop it!” Morgan hesitated, then, like a
character in a dime novel, spun the pistol
on his finger, so that the butt faced the
officer, and handed it over. “It didn’t take
you long to get here,” Morgan said, and
asked for a cigarette.
On January 15, 1948, at the age of
nineteen, Morgan was sentenced by a
court-martial to five years in prison. “I
guess I got what was coming to me,” he
said.
His mother, in her statement to the
Red Cross, pleaded for help: “I sincerely
want him to be a boy that I can justly be
proud of, not one to hang my head in
shame for having given him birth.”
Morgan was eventually transferred to
a federal prison in Michigan. He enrolled
in a class on American history;
studied Japanese and German, the languages
Takeda spoke; attended “religious
instruction classes”; and sang in
the church choir. In a progress report, a
prison official wrote, “The Chaplain has
noticed that inmate Morgan has developed
a sense of social responsibility” and
“is doing everything possible to improve
himself and be an asset to society.”
Morgan was released early, on April 11,
1950. Though he had once hoped to reunite
with Takeda and their son, the relationship
had been severed. Morgan
eventually moved to Florida, where he
took a job in a carnival, as a fire swallower,
and mastered the use of knives.
He began a romance with the carnival’s
snake charmer, Ellen May Bethel. A
small, tempestuous woman with black
hair and green eyes, she was “gorgeous,”
a relative says. In the spring of 1955,
Morgan and Bethel had a child, Anne.
They were married several months later,
and in 1957 they had a son, Bill.
Morgan struggled to be an “asset to
society,” but he seemed trapped by his
past. He was an ex-con and a dishonorably
discharged soldier—a stain that he
tried, futilely, to expunge from his record.
Morgan later told a friend that, during
this period, “he was nothing.”
According to an F.B.I. informant,
Morgan went to work for the Mafia, running
errands for Meyer Lansky, the diminutive
Jewish gangster known as Little
Man. In addition to overseeing rackets
in the United States, Lanksy had become
the kingpin of Havana, controlling many
of its biggest casinos and night clubs. A
Mob associate once described how Lansky
“took Batista straight back to our
hotel, opened the suitcases and pointed at
the cash. Batista just stared at the money
without saying a word. Then he and
Meyer shook hands.”
Morgan drifted back to the streets of
Ohio, where he became associated with
a local crime boss named Dominick Bartone.
A gangster whose Mafia ties reputedly
went back to the days of Al Capone,
Bartone was a hulking man with thick
black hair and dark eyes—a “typical
hoodlum appearance,” according to his
F.B.I. file. He classified people as either
“solid” or “suckers.” His rap sheet eventually
included convictions for bribery, gunrunning,
tax evasion, and bank fraud,
and he was closely allied with the head of
the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, whom he
called “the greatest fella in the world.”
One of Morgan’s friends from Ohio
described him to me as “solid.” He said,
“Do you know what ‘connection’ means?
Well, Morgan was connected.” The friend,
who said that he had been indicted for
racketeering, suddenly grew quiet, then
added, “I don’t know if you’re with the
F.B.I. or the C.I.A.”
Some members of the Mafia, including
Bartone, prepared for shifting alliances
in Cuba, shipping guns to the rebels.
Morgan’s father thought that his son
first got caught up in the whole Cuba
business in 1955, in Florida, when he apparently
met Castro, who had travelled
there to garner support from the exile
community for his upcoming invasion.
Two years later, with Castro ensconced in
the Sierra Maestra, Morgan left his wife
and children in Toledo and began acquiring
weapons across the U.S. and arranging
for them to be smuggled to the rebels.
Perhaps he was motivated by sympathy
with the revolution, or by a desire to make
money, or simply by an urge to flee domestic
responsibilities. Morgan’s father
told the F.B.I. that his son had run away
“from his problems since he was a youngster,”
and that his Cuban escapade was
just another example. Morgan, who before
heading to Havana had told another
gunrunner that he would see him again in
Florida “when this damn revolution is
over,” later gave his own explanation: “I
have lived always looking for something.”
To this day, some scholars, and even
some who knew Morgan, speculate that
he was sent to the Escambray by the
C.I.A. But, as declassified documents reveal,
Hoover and his agents had discov-
54 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012