The Fidel Fixation

10. Hop back in the car for a short jaunt over to Little Havana and a specific address: 1925 SW Fourth St. Today five stories of pinkish-peach stucco apartments have completely obliterated the site of one of the neighborhood's weirdest landmarks -- Nelli Hamilton's paramilitary boardinghouse. What JM/WAVE was for the official CIA effort against Castro, the widow Hamilton's place was for the freelance fringe, the amateur adventurers and mercenaries manque who lurked around the edges of the early Sixties secret war, hoping to be let in on the CIA's action. Latter-day cowboys like Gerry Patrick Hemming, leader of the so-called "Intercontinental Penetration Force" (Interpen, for short), and his pals Little Joe Garman and Howard K. Davis used Nelli's as their bunkhouse, packing parachutes on the sidewalk, cleaning weapons in the back yard, and occasionally practicing close-order drills with their mascot, a midget known only as Pete. The Interpen boys' main income derived from training commando wannabes in the mangrove swamps of No-Name Key, southwest of Marathon. They shared the boardinghouse with others at a similar remove from reality, among them recently released mental patients easing their way back into society. Nelli -- a stout, motherly woman in her early sixties -- cooked for them all, asking only that they respect a few simple rules: no cussing, no drinking, and no guns at the dinner table.

11. No tour of the landmarks of Dade's CIA history -- or understanding of its human cost -- would be complete without a visit to the Brigade 2506 museum, a spooky shrine to the men who paid the price for the Agency's folly at the Bay of Pigs. Located at 1821 SW Ninth St., just a few blocks from Nelli Hamilton's boardinghouse, the museum is a modest one-story bungalow that somehow manages to feel like a church. Its holy of holies lies in a large room toward the rear of the building, where glass cases hold relics of the Brigade: photos from the beachhead and Guatemala's Base Trax, fading olive-drab uniforms and broken pieces of communications gear, even spoons used during the nineteen months the men spent in Castro's prisons. Despite its unavoidable kitschiness (the department-store mannequin in Brigade camos and an Australian bush hat is a bit much), the place does its job. Surrounded by images of the men condemned to fight that unwinnable battle, you can't help but ponder the stupidity of the people who put them there.

12. The next several stops are in Miami Beach, so head for the MacArthur Causeway, but slow down as you cross, just long enough to gaze over Government Cut to Dodge Island. There's a story here. Pediatrician-turned-terrorist Orlando Bosch finally went a bridge too far in the early morning hours of September 16, 1968. From a spot along the MacArthur opposite the docks of Dodge Island (when sheltering pine trees grew wild on the causeway), the former leader of the CIA-supported Movement for Revolutionary Recovery fired a homemade "bazooka" at the Polish freighter Polanica. The captain of the 400-foot "communist" ship had been warned that he might come under attack from anti-Castro zealots, so crew members and two U.S. Coast Guardsmen stood watch during the night but were startled by the attack. The damage done was minor -- a dent in the ship's hull seven feet above the water line -- but it proved enough to send Bosch to federal prison, where he passed the time going on hunger strikes to rally community support. Bosch went on to greater fame as a prime suspect in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that resulted in 73 deaths. While being held in a Venezuelan jail in connection with that terrorist act, the Miami City Commission saw fit to declare March 25, 1983, "Dr. Orlando Bosch Day" in honor of the boom-happy baby doc. In 1988 the U.S. government, which had once supported his activities through the CIA, arrested him on parole violation charges.

13. Now turn south on Alton Road and pull in at the Miami Beach Marina. Perhaps following the principle that the best place to hide is right out in plain sight, the Company chose to base part of its secret fleet here, one of South Florida's busiest pleasure-boat ports. For close to a year, the docks of the Miami Beach Marina were home to the Explorer II, a 150-foot mother ship supposedly engaged in "oceanographic research" for Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. A typical infiltration mission saw the Explorer rendezvousing at sea with a specially modified V-20 speedboat based in the Keys. Taking the V-20 in tow, the mother ship would approach to within a few miles of the Cuban coast. There the smaller, faster raider would begin the dangerous run in to the beach, its pilot doing his best to avoid being shot up by the Cuban coast guard. Despite the illegality of her missions under the Neutrality Act, the Explorer had no such problems with the American authorities, of course; one former crewman remembers regularly exchanging friendly waves with Coast Guardsmen at the base directly across from the ship's Miami Beach dock.

14. From the marina it's just a couple of blocks to Joe's Stone Crab restaurant. This venerable Miami Beach landmark has certainly seen its share of the famous and infamous over its 84-year history, but for sheer coincidental weirdness it would be hard to beat the clientele it hosted one night in early April 1961. It was the eve of the Bay of Pigs, and a nervous E. Howard Hunt was having dinner with exile leader Tony Varona after another evening spent wrangling with squabbling anti-Castro politicians. In the middle of the meal, Hunt recalls, Varona caught a glimpse of someone across the room and smiled conspiratorially. "Look, there's your boss," he whispered. "Aren't you going to say hello to him?" Hunt froze. He turned slowly to look, perhaps flashing back to another Miami Beach near-disaster seven years earlier, when he had taken conspirators in the CIA's pending Guatemala coup out for a wild and all-too-public night on the town. But instead of meeting the disapproving gaze of CIA director Allen Dulles, he saw the bullfrog-ugly features of J. Edgar Hoover. "That relieved me considerably," Hunt says today. "I thought, 'If [Varona] thinks I'm working for the FBI, so be it.'"

15. Now drive up Collins Avenue to the fabulously flamboyant Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel. At the dawn of the Sixties the Fontainebleau was more than just the biggest of the big hotels on fun-in-the-sun, cha-cha-cha Miami Beach. It was where the action was -- where headliners like Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, and Jackie Gleason could sell out two shows a night for weeks at a time; where Hollywood came to shoot movies like Goldfinger and The Bellboy, where the most beautiful women on Earth were brought every year for the Miss Universe pageant. But while celebrities, spectacle, and publicity were the lifeblood of the Fontainebleau, the giant hotel also had room for important events unsuited to the glare of the spotlight -- notably, "contract negotiations" between Mafia chieftains and representatives of the CIA meant to produce a cooperative final solution to their mutual Fidel Castro problem. According to testimony given to Sen. Frank Church's select committee a decade and a half later, in October 1960 the hotel's faux-French finery served as the backdrop for discussions of a Castro hit among CIA personnel and mobsters Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli, all of whom had been heavily involved in pre-revolutionary Havana's thriving underworld. Witnesses testified that the meeting led to a later operational rendezvous at the Fontainebleau aimed at killing Castro with poison. While carrying deadly Agency-created botulin capsules, Rosselli and CIA contract agent Bob Maheu (a private eye who did most of his work for Howard Hughes) allegedly made contact with a Cuban exile leader outside the Fontainebleau's famed basement-level Boom Boom Room. Castro, of course, dodged the botulin bullet and other CIA schemes involving poisoned cigars, hallucinogenic drugs, chemicals to make his beard fall out, and a Paper-Mate pen equipped with a poison hypodermic needle. But one has to wonder whether those dining that night on the Boom Boom's exotic cuisine didn't feel just a twinge of sympathetic indigestion.

16. From the Fontainebleau it's back to the mainland via the Julia Tuttle Causeway, site of yet another harebrained scheme. Two months before the Bay of Pigs, five soldiers of misfortune -- four Americans and a Cuban -- decided to stage their own freelance invasion of Castro's Cuba. Lacking the naval resources of the CIA, this band of would-be revolutionaries -- led by a male nurse named Kenneth Proctor, who had the words "Cut on dotted line" tattooed around his throat -- set out to steal a seaworthy vessel from the waters near the Tuttle Causeway, which was then under construction. On the night of February 5, 1961, they boarded the tugboat Gil Rocke, held its chief engineer at gunpoint, and set off on what was to be a voyage to Cuba's Escambray Province to hook up with Cuban rebels. Unfortunately for the pirates, their navigational incompetence drastically shortened their voyage. Pursued by a police boat, ducking bullets, and veering wildly around the bay, they wound up hard aground in the shallows off the exclusive Bay Point neighborhood, less than a mile north of where they had originally hijacked the tug.

17. Take Biscayne Boulevard north to 163rd Street and head east toward Sunny Isles. On the north side of the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway lies Dumfoundling Bay, a special sort of place for Johnny Rosselli, one of the thugs who met with the CIA at the Fontainebleau. Gangster-turned-congressional informant Rosselli laughed when his lawyer told him he should hire a bodyguard. Rosselli's former mob associate and Castro assassination co-conspirator Sam Giancana had just been shot before he could testify before the Senator Church's select committee. Rosselli was scheduled to appear before the same committee in a few days, but he didn't seem concerned that somebody might try to permanently silence him. "If anybody wants to kill me at my age, what difference does it make?" the 69-year-old racketeer observed. He might have had second thoughts if he had known that he would die by asphyxiation while crammed inside a 55-gallon drum headed for the bottom of the Intracoastal. Rosselli's body was found when the drum bobbed back up in Dumfoundling Bay on August 7, 1976 -- a year after his testimony concerning CIA plots to kill Castro and ten days after he had left his sister's house in Plantation, promising he would be back for dinner.

18. For the last stop you'll need to get on the Palmetto heading west from I-95. Your destination: the Opa-locka airport. The former naval air base has a long history of Company operations, beginning in 1954 with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. The same two-story former barracks building used as headquarters for that successful cloak-and-dagger excursion was reactivated during preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion, when Opa-locka served as the point of departure for Brigade 2506 recruits bound for the Agency's secret training base in Guatemala. Arriving at night by a circuitous route in canvas-covered trucks, Brigade members got only a glimpse of the blacked-out airport before being loaded on to C-54 cargo planes with painted-over windows. (Despite the elaborate security precautions, word of suspicious goings-on at Opa-locka got out; the airport's suburban neighbors knew something was up when they were awakened by late-night takeoffs from unlighted runways.) Later, as the invasion itself got under way, the CIA sequestered leaders of the cobbled-together Cuban Revolutionary Council in its Opa-locka facility under armed guard. Issued uniforms and told to be ready for a sudden departure (presumably on a flight to an airstrip near the Bay of Pigs landing area to declare a provisional government), they instead were confined in one small room for three days and given only the barest hints that the "revolution" they were purportedly leading had turned into a disaster.