Mafia driver's death unnoticed in Cuba, where gambling days long faded into history

CUBA: Mafia driver's death unnoticed in Cuba, where gambling days long faded into history

HAVANA (AP) - The man who was Meyer Lansky's driver and bodyguard during the Mafia's heyday in pre-Revolutionary Cuba died earlier this year, a curious footnote in a communist-run country whose past as a gambling Mecca for vacationing Americans is all but forgotten.

There was no story in the Communist Party daily Granma about the Feb. 12 death of Armando Jaime Casielles, at age 75, from lung cancer. No mention on Cuban state television either, despite the decades he spent promoting Afro-Cuban dance and music in his post-mafia years.

Casielles' close friend, Enrique Cirules, got the news through word of mouth.

"He liked his cigars, he liked his whiskey, never stopped working," Cirules told The Associated Press. "He was a very respected man."

A stout, reserved man who sported eyeglasses, a goatee and a pinky ring, Casielles was among the last people alive with firsthand knowledge of Mafia operations in the colorful, decadent Havana that thrived before a young rebel named Fidel Castro seized power.

Stoic and discreet, Casielles was there with Lansky during numerous meetings with Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who protected gambling businesses on the island, and accompanied him when the mobster traveled around the Caribbean to talk with underworld figures such as Santos Trafficante Sr.

Casielles helped Lansky hide in the Cuban capital in late 1957 after the Sicilian Mafia families of New York tried to grab control of the mobster's Havana operation, and violence erupted in Manhattan.