On the Coat Tales of a Gambler
Scarpone had a brand-new Lincoln, and he had a road trip planned. It was late October, my first road trip as Scarpone’s driver. We were on our way to a cockfight in West Virginia, just across the state line. Two other guys in the back seat, Tim Gunns, “Gunner” and “Mike Knoff, “Blade” were with us. Gunner was not into guns, but “Blade,” was never without a switch blade and another knife strapped to his ankle. It was a long road trip that would conclude after three days of gambling. After the cockfights, I drove to an out of the way juke-joint. We took two rooms over the Branch Inn. The owner of the Branch Inn had the cops on the take and operated a small casino-like gambling hall in the basement. He had card tables, a craps table, a roulette wheel, and about a dozen or so nickel slot machines that never paid out. It was during that road trip, driving all night, that Scarpone shared his family story with me, while the other two guys slept in the back of the Lincoln. Here is that story, the way Scarpone told it to me. It’s the short story of how this gambling man, of Spanish descent, came to America.
Being Catholic, the Ladrón’ family tree was recorded and handed down in the family’s bible. Don Miguel José Ladrón, was the first male name in the bible, and according to Scarpone, Don Miguel was his great, great, great grandfather, and it’s where the known ancestral roots began. Perhaps it is also where Scarpone’s passion as a risk taker began too. Scarpone opened his story several years after the American Revolutionary War.
The American Colonists having won independence from England was fast becoming a country of wealth and much interest was sprouting with European enthusiasm of “risking it all.” In the late 1700’s, an ambitious and daring Don Miguel operated a few merchant ships from the port of Cadiz, Spain. From Cadiz, Don Miguel supplied goods inland to the flourishing city of Seville. Don Miguel had a partnership with a freight hauler who he trusted with any cargo. That was a good thing, as not all of Don Miguel’s freight was of a legitimate nature.
Cadiz was strategically located just across from Tangier, Morocco. Don Miguel’s ships traded with North Africa and other Mediterranean ports. With the English out of Spain’s way, Don Miguel was setting his sights on the Americas. Additionally, Don Miguel was looking for a safe and timely exit from Cadiz.
You see, Don Miguel had his fingers in several different businesses, besides shipping. A lot of money passed through his hands. Some of the businesses were legal, some involved gambling and some were of a questionable nature. It was because of the gambling and questionable income that influenced Don Miguel to make plans to sail away. His plan was to embezzle much of the money he owed, and he would buy a new life in the Caribbean. Don Miguel planned to take part in the lucrative slave trade, joining up with other Spanish slave traders in Havana, Cuba.
As a merchant, Don Miguel traded spices, cloth, wine, olive oil, pottery, salted fish, dried fruit, and other essentials. However, the larcenous Don Miguel was involved with the selling of women from Morocco into prostitution in Spain. Don Miguel was in over his head fueled by his greed. He felt no need to honor debts to the low-life associates of his criminal business dealings. This could obviously result in a mistake.
Don Miguel was large in stature, ambitious, with a big ego. In so many ways, one could see how Scarpone was a chip off the old block. Ruthless to the end, Don Miguel did whatever was necessary to assure his hand in any profit. In its last years of tyranny, Don Miguel had to take every precaution to avoid the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition. However, he knew that his unscrupulous dealings were about to catch up with him and purportedly became the motivation for him to leave Spain, with as much money as he could possibly take away. With his wife and then three children, Don Miguel disappeared with four ships, and his equally ambitious crew, and sailed west for Havana.
After his arrival in Havana, one of Don Miguel’s ships was re-fitted to transport slaves from Cuba to southern states in America. He sold the other three ships and with the embezzled money, bought two much larger slave ships. The slave ships could cross the Atlantic, to Africa and sail back to Havana, with slaves bound for American plantations. (Sailor made a side note, referencing the movie “Amistad” to help understand the Spanish slave trade with America.) Don Miguel soon became an extremely wealthy man and diversified his business with Cuban tobacco, sugar cane and rum. The Ladrón plantation continued long after Don Miguel’s death and the abolition of slavery in America.
The Ladrón family survived successfully and affluently in Cuba. However, about the turn of the twentieth century, discontent caused Scarpone’s father, Fidel Juan José Ladrón to leave Havana for Miami. He made the voyage just after the Mexican Revolution. Fidel was the youngest of six children. With four older brothers and one spoiled sister, he was all but left out from the family’s inheritance. Although he was treated well, and would never be short of money, his position in the family predicted that he’d never be in line for a fair portion of the family’s wealth. Seeing the writing on the wall, even though he was just a young boy at the time, Fidel made plans for his departure to America. Scarpone placed his father’s age at fifteen or sixteen years of age, when he ran away from home to Miami.
Fidel had grown up well educated and spoke both Spanish and English. His infatuation with stories of Poncho Villa and the Mexican Revolution fueled his imagination for adventure in the wildness of Northern Mexico. He idolized the Mexican hero, Poncho Villa and the way Poncho sought equality for the poor of his country. It was his dream to go to Durango, Mexico and meet the famous General. It took Fidel longer than he planned to make the pilgrimage from Miami to Villa’s village in Durango. In 1923, Poncho Villa was gunned down in an ambush early one sunny morning. Fidel was still in Texas when he read the newspaper headlines proclaiming Villa’s death. As a student of Poncho Villa’s escapades, Fidel was strongly influenced by the revolutionary’s ruthless ways of “getting what he wanted, simply by just getting it.”
Fidel made his way to Galveston Island. He worked there on the docks long enough to get his finances together and then he headed back to Miami to seek his fortune.
In Miami, Fidel met his wife, Camellia. She was fair-skinned, with blazing red hair. Together, their fiery passions burned insatiably. Fidel Juan José Ladrón and Camellia Maria Aguilera had five children, three boys and two girls. John Ladrón, born in 1932, was the youngest of the three sons and he was Fidel’s favorite. Scarpone said it was probably because of Fidel’s experience of being the youngest, he would ensure that his youngest would not be disregarded. It was from his father’s worldly ways and special attention that John Ladrón came to know about business, money and taking risks. He also learned the intricacies of the human nature of people, and their tendencies to be lured by money motivated by a weakness for greed.
Fidel and Camellia operated a bar and restaurant, Cantina Sevilla. From the outside, the cantina appeared as any typical “mom and pop” business, in Little Havana, Miami. Camellia prepared the food and Fidel worked the front of the house and the backroom. The children grew up in the business and worked at different tasks helping their parents. Under the watchful eye of his father, John came to know the workings of the business, above and below board. His father bought and sold illegal liquor, purchased from bootleggers in Georgia. In the backroom, Fidel ran a seven-card stud, poker game with two tables. In his teenage years, John spent a lot of time hanging out in the backroom, watching the games, and fetching drinks, cigars, and food for the gamblers. Some nights there would be more than twenty gamblers hanging out in the cantina’s back room, spreading money around. Scarpone said that he accumulated his first real money from the tips he earned working in the backroom.
John continued to work for his father through the war years, but he wanted to join the marines. His two older brothers had already enlisted, after Pearl Harbor, and were somewhere fighting in the Pacific. In 1948, needing his father’s written permission because of his age, John enlisted with the marines when he was sixteen. Three years with the marines delivered the fortunes to a worldly wide eye John Ladrón. It would prove to be his training, for the boy who would become the streetwise, calculating gambler known as Johnny Scarpone.
On The Coat Tales of a Gambler continue in Episode 16 – Going to Memphis