Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Jesse “started to have sex” with the young woman but she “started shaking and crying and I begged him to stop” and he slapped her in the face and told her that “since I am such a lousy lay, that I would be better giving him head,” she testified. He grabbed her head and she “started pushing him and crying and carrying on, and I got very, very sick at that time” and Jesse hit her again and she fell and he dragged her naked and bound across the floor.

  Her roommate testified about Jesse too. She told the jury that she was tied to her bed and could hear Jesse assaulting her friend in the living room, and then Jesse came and found her.

  By Mr. Carhart:

  Q: What happened in the bedroom?

  A: And Jessie sat on the bed and he said, “I want you to take care of me.”

  Q: What happened then?

  A: And he forced me to suck him.

  * * *

  •

  “Oh God, I remember that case!” Edward Carhart, the retired prosecutor, says. I’ve found him at home in South Miami, in the afternoon. He’s an elegant old man in a wheelchair now, vibrant, sparkling. He’s being generous to me with his time.

  Carhart didn’t think that case would ever go to trial, he tells me. The reason? The young dancer that Jesse sexually assaulted was rumored to be the girlfriend of Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura, the bigwig Mafia loan shark. It was Altamura who finally ended the attack that morning. Because of Altamura, Carhart was convinced that Jesse was doomed. “I felt for sure Tommy Altamura would gather his wits about him and go kill them.” But instead Altamura was shot in the head at A Place for Steak on Halloween, just before Jesse’s trial was due to start. It was one of Miami’s most notorious mob executions.

  That is what I’m having trouble understanding, I tell Carhart now. Why would anyone break into the apartment of a known mobster’s girlfriend? Was it part of some larger plot against Altamura and his crew? What was Jesse Tafero involved in?

  Carhart is looking at me with amusement. None of the above, he tells me, when I finally finish my list of possibilities. They broke into the wrong apartment, is what happened. It was all a big mistake.

  See, the lounge at the Gold Dust used to be a mobster hangout, Carhart says. A Place for Steak, Jilly’s South, they all were. A loose group of people who all kept the same hours and met at the same clubs. A group that was just starting to get into cocaine. These guys weren’t the polished pros who took over the cocaine trade a couple of years later; they weren’t the cartels, the savvy and sophisticated kingpins that made Miami flashy during the Vice years. These were more your liquor-store robbers, your breaking-and-entering burglars, a bunch of high school friends who’d stumbled into a high-stakes, high-profit gig. What they lacked in brains they more than made up for in bravado.

  “One of the hallmarks with this group was they’d kill you out in the Everglades and then they’d blow up your body,” Carhart says.

  Jesse was on the edges of the group; the leader was drug dealer Ricky Cravero, Carhart tells me. People were afraid of Cravero, with good reason. One time, Cravero and his friends were partying and talking a little too much and they noticed that one of the girls in the room was getting up to leave. They thought she was going to rat them out, so they ran after her and caught her at the elevator and stomped her. There was that Valentine’s Day when they shot their friend Stanley Harris twenty-three times in a parking lot. They’d planned to lure him to a shag-carpeted crash pad and kill him there, but that plan got fucked up when they accidentally snorted all the cocaine they had set aside for bait and the night dissolved into a huge screaming match that only calmed down when someone got out a machine gun. In the parking lot, after they shot Stanley and he lay bleeding on the pavement, Ricky Cravero kicked him in the face. And then there was the afternoon Cravero’s gang killed a witness who was due to testify against them in court. That murder happened in Burdines, the fancy department store. Something to do with an escalator.

  The break-in by Jesse and his friend was cocaine-fueled, Carhart says now. No doubt about it. Normal home-invasion robbers do not get naked and spend eleven hours torturing their victims. And when Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura showed up and tried to break the door down, there was a gunfight, Altamura was shot in the leg, and Jesse and his friend jumped off a second-floor balcony to make their escape. Police found the apartment torn apart and the two women naked, bleeding, bruised, and sobbing.

  “This was a particularly vicious, vicious group,” Carhart says.

  * * *

  •

  I leave Edward Carhart’s house and walk out into the warm afternoon feeling stunned. The Gold Dust—that was Marianne’s place. Stanley Harris, the Cravero associate who was shot to death—Harris’s home phone records showed Jesse’s number. I’m finding it all a bit difficult to reconcile: pallid Jesse with his dark eyes in the electric chair; the shy, polite, chino-clad Jesse that Marianne remembers; the tragically innocent Jesse of all the recent news stories and The Exonerated; the sexual sadist Jesse of the court testimony; the gangland Jesse of Carhart’s description. In the past, when I’ve thought about Jesse Tafero, I thought he was (a) possibly innocent; (b) guilty but in a wrong-place/wrong-time kind of way; or (c) Clyde. Not real-life Clyde Barrow, but Clyde the charming outlaw as played by Warren Beatty. For twenty-five years, I’ve assumed that the murders were a devastating spur-of-the-moment heartbreak. A cataclysmic catastrophe, not a calculated act.

  But: drug using, drug dealing, home-invasion robbery, rapes, car bombings, witness stompings, escalator murders. A car full of guns and bullets and cocaine and amphetamines. Stolen passports, a rubber mask, a hatchet.

  “Well, when certain people come together, you know, certain things happen. With us it was a bad combination,” Walter Rhodes told me, when I interviewed him in prison. “It’s like when atoms come together.”

  Or split apart. Maybe it was dark and deliberate, like that.

  * * *

  •

  Sunny also had a criminal history on the morning of the murders, according to the Miami courthouse case files. She was arrested in Miami in November 1968 and charged with prostitution; in December 1970 with possession of marijuana and amphetamines and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—her son, Eric, then age four; in November 1971 with forgery; and in July 1974 with violating South Carolina’s gun laws, possessing marijuana and LSD, and possessing with the intent to distribute amphetamines and barbiturates.

  On the South Carolina case, Sunny was arrested with an individual who gave his name as Antonio Martes. A copy of the North Myrtle Beach Police Department mugshot of Antonio Martes is in the court records, and the photograph is of Jesse Tafero, who by 1974 had been paroled from his rape and home-invasion robbery conviction, had absconded from parole, and was living life on the run, with Sunny at his side. “I didn’t understand it, but I was going to help him,” Sunny wrote in her book, about the day Jesse told her he was going to jump parole. South Carolina police found two rifles in their van during the traffic stop, and a loaded .25 caliber automatic handgun in Sunny’s purse. She and Jesse didn’t stick around for the trial. The courts tried Sunny Jacobs and Antonio Martes in absentia in September 1974 and found them guilty of the drugs and weapons charges. By early 1976, Jesse had added the names Nevel Carmack and Tony Caruso to his alias list. On the morning of February 20, 1976, when Trooper Black and Constable Irwin happened across the Camaro in the rest area, Jesse had been a fugitive on the run for more than two years. Both Jesse and Sunny refused to give Black any identification or even tell him their names, but if they had, FHP dispatch could have let Trooper Black know about the active warrant out for Jesse’s arrest.

  * * *

  •

  On Sunny’s 1970 criminal case, the one where she was charged with possession of marijuana and amphetamines and with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she had a codefendant named William D
iCrosta.

  “Billy,” according to his ex-wife, who at this moment is standing on her front doorstep in Fort Lauderdale, looking at me from under a fringe of blond bangs. Her blue eyes are wary and tired, and it hasn’t helped that I’ve just accidentally smashed a clay pot her sister gave her. Billy is now deceased, she says, but in his heyday he played for the St. Louis Cardinals. A good-looking hotshot with a gambling problem, she says.

  A story instantly starts to spin in my head about Sunny and some glamorous god of a ballplayer smoking weed back in the day. But when I get back to our bungalow and look it up, I find it was not that. It was a lot more serious.

  In December 1970, DiCrosta and Sunny were arrested after Sunny was caught on a wiretap negotiating the purchase of a pound of cocaine. In taped conversations with a man by the name of Ivan Hertzendorf, who was under investigation by the Organized Crime Bureau of the Dade County police, Sunny also discussed buying twenty pounds of marijuana and five hundred hits of LSD. On the wiretapped calls, Sunny told Hertzendorf that she’d given her customers a taste of the cocaine and was waiting for further instructions, and then six days later negotiated a purchase price of six thousand dollars for the full pound. Three days after that, and based on the wiretapped calls, police executed a search warrant and arrested DiCrosta and Sunny. Hertzendorf was later convicted on ten counts of narcotics violations. Sunny was described as a “go-between for other customers” and “capable of dealing large quantities of narcotics in a relatively short period of time,” according to the court records.

  In that 1970 arrest, Sunny had a good lawyer. She was, after all, the daughter of well-to-do textile manufacturers, and the lawyer took her case as a favor to her parents, he later told investigators. She pled to a single charge of possession, with adjudication of guilt withheld, and was sentenced to probation. Her attorney, Harold Rosen, later became mayor of Miami Beach. And on the day in February 1976 when Sunny was arrested for the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin, her parents talked to another very well-known, high-profile criminal defense attorney about handling her case. Foremost among that attorney’s other clients: Ricky Cravero.

  “I was representing primarily professional criminals, rather than amateurs,” the attorney, Bill Moran, tells me when I reach him by telephone a few days later. “Ricky was a psychopath. Ricky was a dangerous man, period. You don’t meet a lot of people like that. Ricky Cravero was one of these human beings that if you got involved in a physical altercation with him, the only option you had, other than dying or being beaten to a pulp, was to kill him.”

  And it wasn’t just Ricky. “It was that whole group of lunatics,” Moran said. “It was like a progressively more disturbing, psychotically violent series of episodes fueled by cocaine abuse. They would just feed on each other’s psychosis. And of course the drugs.”

  Moran—who would later count among his clients Colombia’s murderous Cali cartel, “source of most of the world’s cocaine,” according to The New York Times, and who in 1998 was convicted of conspiracy to launder money in connection with his work for the cartel—recalls talking on the phone to Sunny’s parents that day in 1976 and then going and trying to find Sunny at the Broward County jail. The jailers claimed they had no idea where Sunny was, Moran says. It was a cat-and-mouse thing. “They were telling me, ‘We don’t know where the person is that we have in custody.’ ”

  But Moran didn’t end up working on the case. At the time, his clients were coming into his office and dumping garbage bags full of cash onto his desk, he says. “Blinding amounts of money. The money was beyond belief.” He wasn’t inclined to take a pay cut to represent a client facing charges of the first-degree murder of two police officers. He remembers explaining his fees to Sunny’s parents “in that context,” and recalls that they said they understood, but nothing happened after that.

  In her book, Sunny wrote that Moran came to find her at the jail after getting a call from her old boyfriend John, who was also Jesse’s good friend. Sunny wrote that at the jail Moran told her, “I am, shall we say, the family attorney.” I ask him now about this.

  “It wasn’t a family, in the first place,” Moran snaps. He has clearly taken “the family” to mean the mob. “As a general thing, I just don’t need to hear about that shit,” he says. “They were a group of associated people who engaged in joint criminal conduct.” And Sunny Jacobs and Jesse Tafero “were just peripheral figures.”

  But as he tells me this, he’s pronouncing Jesse’s last name with the emphasis on the first syllable, not the second. Not Ta-FER-o, as everyone in the present day does. TAF-ero, which is how the Tafero family themselves said it. How people who knew Jesse in 1976 say it.

  “Okay?” Moran says. And hangs up.

  * * *

  •

  The court in Miami has finally produced Walter’s case files from the archives, and I take a seat in a spare cubicle to review the convictions he was on parole for that morning in 1976.

  When I interviewed Walter in 1990, he explained his prior record to me like this:

  Me: When you were in before—before this all happened—that was for armed robbery?

  Walter: Yeah. I used a toy pistol and threw down some people and stole their car. I was stupid, and I was a kid.

  Me: You used a toy pistol? Where was this?

  Walter: Miami. Homestead. The guy had his paycheck in his wallet and I gave it back to him.

  Me: You used a toy pistol, and—what?

  Walter: I used a toy pistol and I stole the guy’s car. That was one armed robbery. The other armed robbery was, I used that same toy pistol and I robbed a couple of two hundred and something dollars.

  A toy pistol. I asked him twice. He said it three times.

  The court file, though—just as in Jesse’s and Sunny’s cases—tells a different story.

  In January 1969, when he was eighteen years old, Walter used a “.25 caliber automatic pistol” to carjack a young grocery store clerk in the parking lot of the Dadeland Mall. That pistol is a Saturday night special. A classic stickup gun. Wielding the gun, Walter got into the clerk’s 1958 Corvette and demanded his wallet. “Are you going to kill me?” the clerk asked. “Not right now,” Walter replied. The clerk jumped out of the Corvette and Walter took off in the car “at a high rate of speed.” Walter drove the Corvette to Tijuana, Mexico, and then to San Francisco, ditched it, stole another car, picked up a hitchhiker, and drove back to Miami. There Walter and the hitchhiker invaded the home of an elderly couple who had once rented Walter a room, tied the couple to chairs with electrical cords, ransacked the house, and at gunpoint stole two hundred dollars. The file describes Walter as a “vagrant.” Walter was charged with armed robbery in both cases. “Your honor, the only thing I have to say is that I am guilty, and I have got to pay,” he told the judge. Walter was sentenced to fifteen years and in late 1969 he entered Florida State Prison. There he was soon to meet Jesse, sent up two years earlier for his breaking-and-entering, attempted-rape, and crime-against-nature convictions.

  So, inside that Camaro at the rest area that morning were an armed robber on parole, a fugitive rapist with some very dangerous friends, and the fugitive’s gun-owning, gun-toting girlfriend, who apparently knew her way around a cocaine deal. It wasn’t just Walter Rhodes who had a motive to kill Trooper Black. All three of them did.

  * * *

  •

  In January 1974, Walter was paroled from Florida State Prison, and in December 1975, he met with his parole officer in Fort Lauderdale to discuss a special request. Walter had been working as a pest exterminator, but now he told his parole officer that he didn’t like the “dangerous chemicals” involved and requested permission to change his profession. The probation officer wrote: “He related that he would be looking for a new position, perhaps in an Escort Service.” Elsewhere in the files, the name of the company itself.

  I dr
ive west from the Miami-Dade courthouse, past bodegas and warehouses and trash-littered sidewalks flashing with broken glass. I find the junkyard just as the clock pushes five, its metal gate rumbling shut as I pull up, stacks of rusted metal everywhere. I park and dash up a ramp that runs along the side of the junkyard office building to a doorway at the top. The person I’m looking for here might have been, I’m guessing, Walter Rhodes’s boss.

  The doorway opens into a warehouse. In its center is a big wood desk. There is a crowd of young men and women standing around the desk, and sitting at it, in an old office chair that tilts back, is Mark. He’s got white hair and is wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses with dark green lenses. He does not take them off.

  “Never heard of him,” Mark says, when I mention Walter Rhodes.

  “Your name is on the corporate records for the business he was working for,” I say.

  “Never heard of it,” Mark says, when I tell him the company’s name.

  “It was an escort service.”

  “And I ran it?” Mark says skeptically. He’s getting ready to throw me out, I can tell, and all these nice young people are going to help him.

  “You and a guy named Peter Blucher,” I add quickly.

  I have mentioned a magic phrase. Mark laughs uproariously and claps his hands together.

  “Peter Blucher! I knew Peter Blucher. I lent Peter Blucher money to start a gay escort service!” Mark says. He pauses and looks at me anew. “Why do you want to talk to me about this?”

  I explain the electric chair malfunction. I say that I hadn’t known much about any of these guys, and now I was finding out that Walter Rhodes was a for-real armed robber and Sunny may have been involved in cocaine dealing and Jesse maybe wasn’t such a nice person either. That I seemed to have wandered into a darker, stranger world than I’d expected.