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PARAMOUNT, APPIAN WAY
NAB CUBAN MOB SAGA
THE CORPORATION WITH
BENECIO DEL TORO TO STAR

Career Girls Slains- Daily News

By Rebecca Ford

Film rights to T.J. English's upcoming nonfiction book about the Cuban mafia had multiple studio bidders.

After a massive bidding war, Paramount and Appian Way have won the film rights to T.J. English's upcoming Cuban mob crime book The Corporation for seven figures. Benicio Del Toro is attached to star.

David Matthews, a staff writer on Vinyl, will adapt. Appian Way’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson are producing, along with Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman of The Picture Company.

Jaydee Freixas and Tony Gonzalez, who hold the rights to the book that was repped by Paradigm in the deal, also will produce.

A bidding war broke out over the book earlier this week, with multiple studios — and some top talent attachments — interested. English's book is based on the real-life saga of the Cuban mafia from the 1950s to the 1980s in Miami and New York. It is slated for publication in 2017 via HarperCollins' William Morrow.

The story centers on Jose Miguel Battle Sr. (Del Toro), the leader of the powerful Cuban mafia "The Corporation." Born in Havana, Battle and other Cubans were trained by the CIA to fight in the Bay of Pigs invasion, where Battle was captured and served nearly two years in a Cuban prison. When he was released, he went back to the U.S. and began building a crime empire that dabbled in gambling, drug trafficking and murder. Battle rose to become one of the most powerful crime bosses in America.

English is a journalist and author known for writing about organized crime and the criminal underworld. His previous books include Born to Kill (1995), Paddy Whacked (2005), The Havana Mob (2008) and The Savage City (2011). He is also a screenwriter who worked on the TV series NYPD Blue.

The Hollywood Reporter,
4/7/16

The Corporation cover
The Books sectionhead

THE CORPORATION:

The Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld

HARDCOVER: 584 pages
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Co. (2018)
LANGUAGE: English
ISBN-10: 0062568965
ISBN-13: 978-0062568960
ONLINE PURCHASE: Harper | Amazon | Indiebound

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Jose Miguel Battle, El Padrino, the Godfather. Battle in the U.S. Army in 1963. Omega 7, a militant wing of the anti-Castro movement. In the early-1990s... off to Lima, Peru. Palulu: Indomitable nemesis of the Battle family.

Synopsis

A fascinating, cinematic, multigenerational history of the Cuban mob in the US from "America’s top chronicler of organized crime"* and New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne.

By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as "the Corporation," the Cuban mob's power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida's exile community—those who had been chased from the island by Castro's revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.

An epic story of gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. T. J. English interweaves the voices of insiders speaking openly for the first time with a trove of investigative material he has gathered over many decades to tell the story of this successful criminal enterprise, setting it against the larger backdrop of revolution, exile, and ethnicity that makes it one of the great American gangster stories that has been overlooked—until now.

Drawing on the detailed reporting and impressive volume of evidence that drive his bestselling works, English offers a riveting, in-depth look at this powerful and sordid crime organization and its hold in the U.S.