Word: havana
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...instructed Edwards to explore the feasibility of the project. For help, Edwards turned to a former FBI agent and later Howard Hughes associate, Robert A. Maheu. Maheu, then a private consultant and investigator, was believed to have a line to Mafia interests that had operated gambling casinos in Havana. Through the connection, Edwards sought to find out whether the Mafia could produce, if need be, a man in Havana in a position to liquidate Castro...
...granting him limited immunity from prosecution. CIA schemes to do away with Castro sometimes reached bizarre proportions. TIME learned last week that in 1960 some agency officials proposed to kill him with poisoned cigars. The CIA's medical section even prepared a box of suitably doctored fine Havana cigars, though the cigars seem never to have left the laboratory; as other CIA employees apparently pointed out, there was no way of making sure that Castro would not pass them out to other people...
...Mafiosi were Russell Bufalino, now the mob boss in Scranton, Pa., and two lesser fry: James Plumeri and Salvatore ("Sally Burns") Granello, of New York City. Before Castro overthrew Dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, the three men controlled a race track and a huge gambling casino near Havana. When Castro took power, he banished the three. The trio left behind $450,000, which they asked friends to hold for them. The money, the take from the casino's last days, belonged to Mafia clans in New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh...
...Mafia trio had good reason to encourage the invasion: if Castro fell, they had a chance not only to retrieve what was left of the $450,000 but possibly to return to their lucrative business in Havana. In addition, Plumeri and Granello had secretly left behind another $300,000, which they had got by short-changing the mob on the take from the gambling casino. The money was buried in a field outside Havana...
...press conference in Havana the next day, McGovern, visibly worn from a post-midnight Castro-conducted tour of the city, proposed that one starting point for bettering relations might be an exchange of baseball and basketball teams between the two countries-a suggestion the Cuban Premier immediately embraced. Added McGovern: "The embargo is foolish and self-defeating. The sooner we lift it the better. The next move where Cuba is concerned is up to the U.S." At week's end White House officials said that they welcomed Castro's conciliatory remarks, but that a formal lifting of diplomatic...