The Kennedy administration moved to gain control over CIA-funded Cuban exile commando groups in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union went to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. The CIA cut off its generous subsidies to Cuban exile action groups that launched commando raids in Cuba from bases in Florida. (In 1963, the CIA would covertly arm and fund the “autonomous operations” of Manuel Artime and Manuel Ray.)

Cuban exile leaders had not expected the Cuban missile crisis to end peacefully. They believed the United States would intervene militarily to remove the Soviet missiles and overthrow the Cuban revolution. When U.S. law enforcement agencies cracked down on unauthorized Cuban exile paramilitary operations and terminated its supply of aid and arms for exile action groups, Cuban exile leaders went into a funk.

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Washington, D.C. gangster Joe Nesline cut a dapper figure. Nesline dressed smartly and sported a diamond ring on his finger and diamond cufflinks. At a little over 5 foot 7 inches, he was not a big man. But he had swagger when it came to gambling, boasting to the FBI he was the world’s “best crap-shooter.” He had been arrested more than 20 times for liquor law violations and gambling, yet he only spent three years in jail.

From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, Nesline was D.C.’s best known and best connected gangster. He came up in the tradition of past D.C. crime bosses. From the Warring brothers, who ran bootleg whiskey during Prohibition and numbers in the 1930s in Foggy Bottom and Georgetown to Roger “Whitetop” Simkins, who ran a numbers operation in Petworth, to Nesline’s gambling houses, D.C. underworld operations were local in character and relatively small-scale. The Mafia did not absorb local gangster operations in D.C. as it did in other cities. And the Mafia never became entrenched in D.C. as it did in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, or Philadelphia.

In Nesline’s declassified FBI file, there is no evidence he was a “made man” of a Mafia family. He was not Italian. But Nesline’s close ties to leading Mafia gamblers made him unique among D.C. gangsters.

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Historian Jack Colhoun documented the evolution of the nexus between the American state and organised crime in his exhaustively researched book “Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966”.

Cuba’s debut as what Colhoun called a “neocolony” of the US took place at the end of the 19th century when the latter intervened in the Cuban war of independence from Spain, effectively nipping the whole “independence” option in the bud and appointing itself Cuba’s new master.

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