Frank Sturgis

Frank Anthony Sturgis (December 9, 1924 – December 4, 1993), born Frank Angelo Fiorini, was one of the five Watergate burglars whose capture led to the end of the presidency of Richard Nixon. He served in several branches of the United States military and in the Cuban Revolution of 1958, and worked as an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.Jim Hunt and Bob Risch, ''Cuba on My Mind: The Secret Lives of Watergate Burglar Frank Sturgis'' (New York: A Forge Book, December 30, 2009, p. 35.

Early life and military service

When still a child, his family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On October 5, 1942, in his senior year of high school, 17-year-old Frank Angelo Fiorini joined the United States Marine Corps and served under Colonel "Red Mike" Merritt A. Edson in the First Marine Raider Battalion in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War.

"On April 14, 1942, William Donovan, as Coordinator of Information (forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services), activated units charged with gathering intelligence, harassing the Japanese through guerrilla actions, identifying targets for the Army Air Force to bomb, and rescuing downed Allied airmen." This was what led to Stilwell's Chinese forces, Wingate's Raiders, Merrill's Marauders, in the war, and Frank got trained in Guerrilla tactics and gathering intelligence which became useful in his later events.

Honorably discharged as a corporal in 1945, he enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute but left college and joined the Norfolk Police Department on June 5, 1946. He soon discovered a corrupt payoff system and brought it to the attention of his superiors, who told him to overlook the illegal activities. On October 5, 1946, he had a confrontation with his sergeant and resigned the same day. For the next 18 months, he managed the Havana-Madrid tavern in Norfolk that catered to foreigners, mostly Cuban merchant seamen.

On November 9, 1947, Fiorini joined the United States Naval Reserve at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and learned to fly while still working at the tavern. He was honorably discharged on August 30, 1948, and joined the United States Army the next day. He was sent immediately to West Berlin, where the USSR had closed the land routes during the Berlin Blockade, and he became a member of General Lucius Clay's honor guard. Two weeks after the USSR reopened the land routes on May 11, 1949, Fiorini was honorably discharged. As a Marine Raider, Fiorini had worked behind enemy lines gathering intelligence, and during his Army tenure in Berlin and Heidelberg, he had a top secret clearance and worked in an intelligence unit whose primary target was the Soviet Union. Fiorini started to believe Russia was a threat, and he became a lifelong militant. Returning to Norfolk in 1952, he took a job managing the Cafe Society tavern, then partnered with its owner, Milton Bass, to co-purchase and manage The Top Hat Nightclub in Virginia Beach.

On September 23, 1952, Frank Fiorini filed a petition in the Circuit Court of the City of Norfolk, Virginia, to change his name to Frank Anthony Sturgis, adopting the surname of his stepfather Ralph Sturgis, whom his mother had married in 1937. His new name resembled that of Hank Sturgis, the fictional hero of E. Howard Hunt's 1949 novel, ''Bimini Run'', whose life parallels Frank Sturgis' life from 1942 to 1949 in certain salient respects.

Moves to Cuba, joins Castro forces

In 1956, Sturgis moved to Cuba, and went to Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama and Honduras. Sturgis moved to Miami in 1957, where the Cuban wife of his uncle Angelo Vona introduced him to former Cuban president Carlos Prío, who joined with other Cubans opposing dictator Fulgencio Batista to plot their return to power. They were sending money to Mexico to support Fidel Castro. Prio asked Sturgis to go to Cuba to join up with Castro and to report back to the exiled powers in Miami, so he went down and met with Castro. In 1958, he made contact with the Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba at the US Consulate in Santiago. He worked as an informer for the agency with his control officer Sam Jenis. Sturgis also became involved running guns to Cuba, along with mobster Santo Trafficante, and not surprisingly was arrested for illegal possession of arms, but released without charge. In 1959, Sturgis had contact with casinos in Cuba and some say met Lewis McWillie, mobster Traficante's man in Cuba, and the manager of the Tropicana Casino who by his own testimony was a known acquaintance of Jack Ruby.

Sturgis met up with Castro and his 400 rebels in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Sturgis offered to train Castro's troops in guerrilla warfare. Castro accepted the offer, but he also had an immediate need for guns and ammunition, so Sturgis became a gunrunner. Using money from anti-Batista Cuban exiles in Miami and some suspect the CIA, Sturgis purchased boatloads of weapons and ammunition from CIA weapons expert Samuel Cummings' International Armament Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia. Sturgis explained later that he chose to throw in with Castro rather than Prío because Fidel was a soldier, a man of action, whereas Prío was a politician, more a man of words.

In March 1958, Sturgis opened a training camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where he taught Che Guevara and other 26th of July Movement rebel soldiers guerrilla warfare. When Castro seized power, a rebel firing squad on San Juan Hill executed 71 of their opponents on January 11, 1959, into an awaiting 40-foot (12.2 m) ditch that had been opened with a bulldozer. Although Sturgis did not take part in the execution, he was photographed afterwards holding a rifle on top of the covered mass grave.

Castro then appointed Sturgis gambling czar and director of security and intelligence for the air force, in addition to his position as a captain in the 26th of July Movement. Sturgis went to Miami on June 2, 1959, with Alan McDonald while "supervising the investigation of several American gamblers with criminal records that operate casinos in Havana." They requested from Metropolitan Criminal Intelligence Supervisor Frank Kappel information on " Meyer and Jake Lansky, Joe Silesi aka Joe Rivers and Santos Trafficante," that was provided to them six days later after the Cuban government sent an official written request. He was introduced to two men that were transported to Cuba from Venezuela to assist in the organization of the revolution and Frank saw they were clearly communist. He began to sound out those that he knew were anti-communist including Camilo Cienfuegos, as he knew leaders like Raúl Castro and Che Guevara were communist, but he was unsure about Fidel Castro. Sturgis defected the following month with Revolutionary Air Force chief Commandant Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz and they joined the anti-Castro exile opposition.

Sturgis participated with him a few months later in an anti-Castro leaflet-dropping raid over Cuba. Sturgis formed the Anti-Communist Brigade which Hans Tanner in his book "Counter-Revolutionary Agent", says the organization was "being financed by dispossessed hotel and gambling owners" from Cuba. The Border Patrol in Miami reported that Sturgis was involved in a CIA operation being financed by Sergio Rojas (former Cuban Ambassador to Great Britain) to overthrow Castro. It has been claimed, with little in the way of evidence, that Sturgis was involved in helping the CIA organize the Bay of Pigs Invasion, for whose ultimate failure he blamed President Kennedy. Sturgis recruited 19 year old Marita Lorenz, who was close to Fidel Castro, and she took CIA pills, which she hid in her face cream, to poison Castro, but the plot failed. According to Lorenz, she met Sturgis again before the Kennedy assassination in 1963 with others planning a big event. Lorenz stated that she joined Sturgis traveling to Dallas after the meeting. Lorenz later testified about this Kennedy assassination plot before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

Sturgis was claimed to be a member of Operation 40, a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored counterintelligence group composed of Cuban exiles. The group was formed to seize control of the Cuban government after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The operation was concentrating on Cuba and were operating out of Mexico.

Despite his claimed involvement in numerous CIA sponsored operations including the Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1975 Rockefeller Commission
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