Fidel Castro’s Last Friend In America, Robert McKeown
In September of 1961 Hurricane Carla devastated the San Leon and Bacliff communities in Galveston County. Utilities were off and many people had lost everything they owned. In the midst of the relief effort was a Bacliff man, 48 year old Robert McKeown. Arriving at Captain Henry’s on Bayshore Drive with a truck filled with blankets and food for the victims, McKeown went to work. For several days McKeown, his wife, and several friends ferried relief supplies and people using a Rambler station wagon and a borrowed truck. Few of those who met Bob McKeown in 1961 knew very much about him, except that he owned the J & M Drive Inn, a beer joint on Red Bluff Road. No one would have guessed that he was possibly the only man in America that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro counted as a friend.
Robert Ray McKeown was born in Houston in 1913. He grew up in Galena Park and Pasadena, back when Spencer Highway was paved with oyster shells. Nothing is known about his childhood, except that he graduated from high school in Houston in 1931. His police record started the same year, when he was arrested in LaPorte for assault. Charges were dropped and he stayed out of trouble until August of 1933, when he and another man were charged with the armed robbery of a payroll courier in Baytown. McKeown was given 5 years in Huntsville for his part in the robbery. While in prison, McKeown was assigned to the machine shop, where he learned to operate a lathe and other equipment. By the time he was paroled in 1937, McKeown was good enough to get hired by Warren Machine Works in Houston. He stayed out of trouble, and married Ethel Jane Etie of Seabrook on Christmas Day of 1939.
· When the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred two years later, Robert McKeown immediately tried to enlist, but was turned down because of his status as an ex-con. Never one to be deterred, he went to Galveston, where he enlisted in the Army under the assumed name of a high school classmate, J.T. Brown. Within a few weeks, the Army discovered McKeown’s true identity, and gave him an undesirable discharge. Within days, he was in Tulsa, enlisting in the Navy under another alias, H.J. McAllister. This time he got away with it, and was sent to California and on to the Pacific. After the war, “McAllister” was discharged as a Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class, and offered a job with Bethlehem Steel in Beaumont. He moved his wife and two daughters to a shotgun house on Riverside Drive in Orange and went to work. One weekend in early 1947, “McAllister” and his family vanished from the house. Over $20,000 worth of machine and fabricating tools were missing from the job site. Warrants were issued for “McAllister”, but he had ceased to exist. Bob McKeon next arrived in Pasadena, where he opened McKeown Fabricating Co. in the fall of 1947.
· McKeown then began using the name “Max” McKeown. The business received a contract from Hughes Tool Company the following year, and was soon one of Houston’s busiest shops. McKeown and his wife bought a house in the Shady Lake area of Pasadena and business boomed.
· One day in 1950, a man named Van Zeivander came to see McKeown about building a machine he had created that improved the process of cleaning coffee. The process was very successful. During this time, much raw coffee was processed and packaged in Santiago, Cuba. McKeown and Zeivander went there in 1950, where they set up a plant. Within the first year, they did over $2 million. Soon the McKeowns were well known in Havana and Santiago. McKeown became an investor in casinos, and became friendly with Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarro.
· In 1952, Fulgencio Batista overthrew Prio’s government and became President of Cuba. Prio fled to Miami, but retained ownership of business interests in Cuba. There is evidence that Prio, with McKeown’s help, transferred $19 million in cash to a Miami bank controlled by the mafia.
Batista, aware that McKeown had helped Prio, started extorting money from the Texan. When the demands became too great, McKeown made plans to move his business to the Bahamas. Batista got wind of it and deported McKeown to Miami, seizing his manufacturing plant and bank accounts.
· McKeown went to lawyers, crooks, and the government, seeking to have his business returned. His entire fortune had been taken away, and he was determined to get it back, with some payback for Batista. In Miami, former Cuban President Prio took his friend in and offered to help. The pair believed that only a coup against Batista would restore their fortunes in Cuba. At the time, Batista was having trouble with a group of revolutionaries led by brothers Raoul and Fidel Castro. They found that an organized crime figure in Tampa named Nelson Italiano was already assisting Castro’s forces with small arms and ammunition. Remember, at this time Castro was not affiliated with communism, and was considered a “freedom fighter”.
· In 1956, Castro came to Houston, where he met with McKeown and Prio at the Shamrock Hotel. At the time, Castro had just come from Mexico, where he was training his forces to invade Cuba. He needed a ship. Using Prio’s money, McKeown bought a Chilean freighter at the Port of Houston, which was later used to carry Castro’s army back to Cuba.
· McKeown may have first met Jack Ruby in Miami. Ruby owned half of a Hallandale Fla. night club called the Colonial Inn. His partner was Bernard Baker (later arrested as a Watergate burglar, and also identified by Deputy Constable Frank Weitzman as one of the fake Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza). Baker was Prio’s “straw man” – Prio was Ruby’s true partner.
· Prio’s money and McKeown’s energy were put to use on behalf of organized crime figures. A meeting was held in May ’57 with an attorney from Tampa named Henry Gonzales. Gonzales single client during his career was South Florida crime boss Santo Trafficante Jr. The group started sending weapons to Castro through Valenti & Sons, a fruit shipper located at the Port of Tampa. Cash payment for the weapons was found by McKeown in a safety deposit box at the Pan American Bank in North Tampa. The other key to the box belonged to Henry Gonzales.
When Tampa voters elected a personal friend of Batista to be Mayor (Nick Nuccio), police put the heat on support for the revolutionaries. McKeown suggested moving the operation to Houston, and this was done by December of 1957.
When Tampa authorities discovered the operation had moved, Mayor Nuccio (who had a lot of law enforcement contacts) turned over their investigation to the Feds, who had been watching Prio for several years. Acting on information provided by the Tampa cops, the FBI set up a surveillance of McKeown from a house on the Seabrook waterfront.
· On February 18, 1958 they sprang the trap. McKeown’s yacht, the 38 ft “Buddy Dee” was seized by US Customs and the Coast Guard near Port Bolivar carrying a large gun shipment to Cuba. The Feds arrested McKeown for violating the US Neutrality Act. Arrested the same day were former Cuban President Carlos Prio, McKeown’s wife, and several others.
While he waited to go to trial, McKeown and former Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Carl Jarrett opened the J & M Drive Inn, a bar/marina located on Red Bluff Road at Taylor Lake (later known as Cecil’s Red Lantern). The money to open the club was provided by Prios through Barnard Baker. Because of McKeown’s charges, the place was licensed in Jarrett’s name.
McKeown received 5 years probation for gun-running in October of 1958. His yacht was seized, and once more he was nearly broke. However, Castro had the ship, and the invasion went forward as planned.
· On New Years Day of 1959, Castro’s revolutionaries arrived in Havana to find Batista had fled, and the casinos had been locked up. Two days later, the Houston Post carried a story titled “Convicted Gunrunner Hails Castro Victory” about McKeown.
· After the story was published, Jack Ruby came to visit McKeon. He offered McKeown $25,000 to introduce him to Castro. He told McKeown that he had some surplus Army jeeps in Shreveport he would like to sell – and asked McKeon to assist in getting Santo Trafficante Jr. released from a Cuban jail where he was being held. McKeon met with Ruby at the Edgewater Club in Kemah. Some say they made a deal, some say they didn’t. Anecdotal evidence is that Ruby rented a two story house on Kipp Street in Kemah and shipped the jeeps to Castro within a few weeks.
· In April, Castro arrived at Hobby Field on his last visit to America as a non-communist. His reason for visiting the US was to see Robert McKeown of Bacliff. The Houston Chronicle photographed Castro and McKeown together, and reported Castro had offered McKeon the job of Minister of Industry. McKeon’s probation officer and the FBI told McKeown he would be arrested if he tried to leave the US. Castro told the Chronicle reporter that without McKeon’s help, there would have been no revolution.
Apparently at this meeting, Castro agreed to some kind of ransom terms for Trafficante, but the Mafia suffered a major fiasco in trying to meet them. In early May, 1959, the Mafia allegedly stole $8.5 million from a Canadian bank and also stole a large number of weapons from the Ohio National Guard. A police investigation showed that mafiosi Norman Rothman had spent $6,000 of the money to rent airplanes to smuggle the arms to Castro’s forces in Cuba. On July 3, Rothman was arrested for this series of crimes.
· Within a year, Castro learned that the CIA was trying to kill him, and allied himself with the Soviet Union. McKeown, when he heard this, reportedly exploded. He knew that the possibility of regaining his Cuban business was now practically zero. Like other Cuban exiles, he believed that only a US invasion would suffice. The election of President John F. Kennedy was a further setback. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy made it obvious that he would not be launching an invasion of Cuba.
· The CIA however, continued to train exiles at camps in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. CIA-trained insurgent Sergio Arcacha Smith traveled to Houston in March of 1963 to work with ex-President Carlos Prio, Robert McKeown, and the Free Cuba Committee. The group met at a private club in Dickinson owned by Galveston’s Maceo Brothers. A trailer park compound with a rifle range was set up in Algoa (near Alvin) where potential Cuban liberation forces were indoctrinated and trained by Smith and others, including CIA operatives. Segio Arcacha Smith has been identified by biometrics as one of the men in the “three tramps” photo from Dealey Plaza. McKeown wasn’t personally concerned with the ideology, according to his daughter, Margaret Britt. He just wanted his business returned and was willing to fight for it.
· In September of ’63, a man calling himself “Leon Oswald” visited McKeown at his home on 1st Street in Bacliff, accompanied by a Latin man named Hernandez. The man asked about obtaining bazookas & machine guns. McKeown ran the pair off, but five minutes later they returned and Oswald asked McKeown to acquire 4 Savage .300 automatic rifles with telescopic sights, for which he would pay $10k. Sam Neill of League City was there and has corroborated the story in sworn statements to the FBI. Both said the man was identical to the Oswald they saw assassinated on television by Jack Ruby six weeks later.
· The next time McKeown was reportedly sighted comes from an FBI document that says that two Dallas homosexuals, Breck Wall and Joe Peterson, on Saturday, November 23, 1963, at about 6:00 pm, left their rooms at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, picked a man named William Seymour up at the Abundant Life Temple, and drove him to the Driftwood Motel in Galveston where they turned him over to David Ferrie, Robert McKeown, and others at about 11:00 pm. Seymour was to hide out at McKeown’s house in Bacliff, until a few days later when he would return to his sister’s home in Phoenix, Arizona. Jack Ruby called McKeown in Galveston around midnight of the 23rd to check on Seymour. William Seymour is the man who conspiracy theorists refer to as the “2nd Oswald”, an FBI informant and petty crook who was a ringer for Oswald. McKeown later denied this ever happened. Records showed the room had been rented on that date in the name of H. McAllister, McKeown’s old Navy alias.
· Two weeks later, McKeown’s probation expired and he was a free man once more. However, the JFK investigation brought him back to the FBI several times to answer more questions about Ruby and Oswald. After testifying to the Warren Commission, McKeown moved to Miami, where he and his wife remained close to former Cuban President Carlos Prio. In 1977, Prio allegedly killed himself because of business misfortunes.
· After losing a lung to cancer, McKeown moved in with his daughter in a Miami suburb. In 1989, Robert McKeown died there of emphysema.
· Did Bob McKeown participate in the plot to kill Kennedy? Nobody knows for sure. If he did, he certainly wasn’t in Dallas that day. He was visited by his probation officer, Joe Fields, an hour before the assassination took place. He was no admirer of Kennedy by all accounts. McKeown felt that as long as Kennedy was in office, he would never get his coffee cleaning business or casino shares back. If he didn’t help kill Kennedy, he wasn’t all broke up about the assassination. Despite all efforts, he never did regain his lost fortune in Cuba.
Even if Robert McKeon didn’t help kill Kennedy, he did do a lot of other things that make him one of the most colorful figures in the history of the Bayside area.
