Alvin Ross
Former Tropicana blackjack dealer and Cuban Nationalist Movement member convicted of the Letelier murders in 1979 on a jailhouse informant's testimony, freed on appeal after United States v. Henry, and acquitted at retrial in 1981.
Alvin Ross Díaz had been a blackjack dealer at the Tropicana in Havana before the revolution. Guillermo Novo introduced him to Michael Townley in September 1976 as "a comrade." He was at the meeting in a New Jersey hotel room on the night of September 10 with Novo, Virgilio Paz, and José Dionisio Suárez where Townley asked the Cuban Nationalist Movement to help kill Orlando Letelier.12
Trial
An FBI informant reported in January 1978 that "a young action oriented cell under the control of Francisco 'Frank' Castro of the CORU organization," made up of Ross and Raciel Rodríguez, had bombed the Viasa Airlines office in Miami Beach on December 23, 1977. Indicted for the Letelier murders on August 1, 1978, Ross was tried with the Novo brothers from January 8, 1979. Sherman Kaminsky, a racketeer awaiting sentence who had met him in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, testified that Ross said "he was involved in the murder of Orlando Letelier together with generals in DINA," called Townley "a traitor, a rat, an informer," called Letelier "a rotten Communist Marxist," said he was "glad Letelier was dead," admitted "he had contributed two wires used in the bomb," and said "he would not pay for Letelier's murder because the CIA would be the scapegoat, people would believe anything of the CIA." The sentencing judge had told Kaminsky: "I am going to suspend the operation of that sentence depending on how you come through." Ross was convicted on February 14, 1979, and sentenced to two concurrent life terms.23
On September 15, 1980, the court of appeals reversed: after United States v. Henry, decided that June, testimony so obtained was inadmissible. At the retrial in May 1981 Townley, asked what Ross had done to carry out the assassination, answered: "There is nothing I can think of." The jury acquitted Ross and Novo of the murders.24
Sources
- Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 14. ↩
- United States v. Sampol, 636 F.2d 621 (D.C. Cir. 1980). ↩
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, file 2-471, "CORU," August 16, 1978. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 13.; "USA v. Guillermo Novo Sampol et al., 78-CR-367," case synopsis, latinamericanstudies.org, not verified against the docket. ↩
- "Michael Moffitt, who survived a car bomb that killed his wife," United Press International, May 13, 1981; "New Tactics Led to Acquittal in Letelier Case," CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP90-00552R000403680028-2, as summarized. ↩
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