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WORLD FOCUS: Havana harvest

In an earlier interview with The Virginia Gazette and the Lake Placid News, Robert Landori, author of “Fatal Greed,” said, “I am quite confident that readers of ‘Fatal Greed’ will be able to revisit the characters in this book. I am already at work on a sequel.”

Four years later, many of those characters have reemerged in his just released Havana Harvest. The book is a “roman a clef,” real life behind a facade of fiction.

As Landori, in the preface, in 1984 rumors reached the CIA that the Cuban government had become involved in narcotics and money laundering. At first the rumors were discounted. Then in 1989, the state-controlled Cuban press announced the arrest of an army general, a deputy minister of Interior, and twelve accomplices.

All stood accused of high treason and of having participated, for their own benefit in drug and money-laundering operations involving Colombian, Panamanian, and U. S. citizens. They were tried in special military tribunals and found guilty. Four of the accused were executed. The rest sentenced to long prison terms.

Those facts serve as the basis for Landori’s fascinating fiction. What makes this book such a page-turner is not only that it is packed with fast-pacing action, but that each event is made believable by the author’s intimate knowledge of an underground world were false passports are bought and sold, and secret offshore banking with numbered and coded accounts is the rule.

Although his official biography identifies the Montreal-based Landori as a senior public accountant and a merger-and-acquisition specialist, and a trustee in bankruptcy in the Cayman Islands, he is known also as an experienced financial forensic expert. Someone, who combines criminal investigation with financial auditing.

Add to this his having been imprisoned in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the late 1950’s, accused of espionage. “In fact, I wasn’t a spy,” Landori said. “I was just representing Canadian companies doing business with Cuba. And Castro, to save money, was determined to cut out the middlemen. He made a scapegoat out of me.”

His stay in a Communist prison provided Landori with a window into the Cuban regime’s methods that he skillfully incorporated into his book, lending authenticity to events described.

Andre Link, chairman of Lions Gate Films, blurbed: “This story would make a dammed good movie.”

Author LaFlorya Gauthier notes, “Havana Harvest gives an exciting, fictionalized insight into how the Castro brothers attempted to perpetuate their control over Cuba. A page-turner, it is very topical, given what is happening within the Cuban leadership today.”

What makes Havana Harvest such a good read is Landori’s ability to incorporate the know-how he gathered during his travels throughout South America and the Caribbean. There, according to his biography, he “came into contact with international financiers, notorious con men, well-known artists and entertainers, and members of several countries’ intelligence communities.”

Recalling his entry into the literary world, Landori said, “I started writing first for fun. But it became my passion. I was always considered a good story-teller, with imagination. My head was full of stories that just wanted to see the daylight.”

Thus, he conceived Havana Harvest, a tale that unwinds across North America, Canada, Europe, Africa, Mexico, the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Cuba.

It features Robert Londsdale, as the main character, working for the CIA, and “follows a twisted trail of partially obscured clues until finally pieces together a very credible story that involves collusion between intelligence communities that have the potential to change dynamics of governments at the top where politics and political favors meld and blur right from wrong, good from bad.”

Frank Shatz lives in Williamsburg, Va. and Lake Placid. His column was reprinted with permission from The Virginia Gazette.

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