by Jon Roberts
Jon assures me he has no interest in morality, but his conversations always turn to the moral puzzle of who he is. He begins our interview, saying, “If there is one thing my life has been about, it’s the idea my father taught me when I was a boy: Evil is stronger than good. If you have any doubt, pick the side of evil. Those are the morals I lived by. It’s how I got power in different situations. Evil always worked for me. My life is proof that my dad was right. But I hope he’s wrong, too. For my son’s sake. I don’t want to raise my son like my father raised me.”
“I don’t like some of the things my son hears about me from other people. I think it’s strange that we go to Miami Heat games, and when they announce I’m there, everybody applauds, like I’m a hero. If people knew the truth about me, I wonder if they would still be applauding my name.
“When I was born, America was a very straight country. A guy like me wouldn’t have been applauded back then. But I hear the music my son listens to, and it’s all garbage—this gangsta crap—where the singer doesn’t even talk English. This is what people value today, so they probably will still applaud me. I don’t care what they do. The important thing is my son will know the truth about me.”
* The Grammy-nominated hip-hop performer and producer.
† The lyrics to the song “Cocaine Cowboys,” written by Akon and performed by Akon and DJ Khaled, do not include the line “Better watch out, my dad’s the Cocaine Cowboy.” Julian added the line after listening to an advance copy of the song Akon gave to Jon.
2
E.W.: Jon was born June 21, 1948, to Edie and Nat Riccobono. The Riccobono family, which included Jon’s sister, Judy, five years older, lived on White Plains Road in the Bronx. Outside their apartment, the IRT train ran past on trestles. Beneath them the Bronx’s Little Italy was crowded with Neapolitan bakeries, butcher shops, and olive oil merchants. The Riccobonos’ apartment was above Luna Restaurant, a linguini house so quintessentially Sicilian that Francis Ford Coppola used it as the setting in The Godfather where Al Pacino marks his entry into the Mafia by murdering two men over dinner.*
Most of the residents in Little Italy were law-abiding citizens who wanted nothing to do with the Mafia. The Riccobonos were not in that group. Jon’s father and his uncles—his father’s brothers, Sam and Joseph—claimed the Mafia equivalent of having come over on the Mayflower: They came to New York from Sicily allegedly on the same boat with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a founding father of Cosa Nostra in America. Jon was born a Mafia blueblood.
Of the three Riccobono brothers, Joseph was the most infamous. Uncle Joe (as Jon calls him) made headlines in 1937 when New York special prosecutor Thomas Dewey indicted him as a member of “Murder Incorporated.” Though Murder Incorporated was a mostly Jewish gang headed by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, it worked closely with the Italian Mafia. Joseph served as Lucky Luciano’s emissary inside the Yiddish gang. After his indictment, Joseph went into hiding for seven years. When he finally surrendered to authorities, the press noted that he was “one of the most fastidiously attired defendants arraigned in court in some time.”* Joseph managed to wiggle out of those charges and went on to help engineer Carlo Gambino’s bloody takeover of the mob after Luciano was deported by the U.S. government in 1946. He would serve Gambino as his top adviser—consigliere—until his death in 1975.†
Jon’s other uncle, Sam Riccobono, was a capo and a successful businessman. While running a Mafia loan-sharking operation out of Brooklyn, Sam operated a taxi company and built a chain of dental labs that grew into a legitimate business.
Jon’s father, Nat, was by all accounts the violent one. He served as one of Luciano’s most trusted killers. By the time of Jon’s birth, he was enforcing the Italian Mafia’s rule over African American businesses. He ran numbers and loan-sharking operations from black bars in New Jersey.
Jon would be influenced by all three men. Like his uncle Joe, Jon developed a taste for flashy attire, an easy rapport with Jewish criminals, and an uncanny ability to slip out of seemingly impossible legal difficulties. He acquired his uncle Sam’s sense for business. Like his father, he would be violent.
Jon’s mother, Edie, was a blond, blue-eyed knockout whose father was Polish and whose mother was Italian. Her parents had met in New York’s garment center, where her father, Poppy Siloss,* was a fabric cutter and her mother, Honey,† was a seamstress. Though Honey had relatives in the Mafia,‡ she and Poppy lived a hardworking version of the American Dream. They raised Jon’s mother in Teaneck, New Jersey, in hopes of shielding her from Honey’s Mafia-connected relatives. Their effort failed. When Edie was in her late teens, she took up with Nat Riccobono and became pregnant with Jon’s sister, Judy. Neither Jon nor Judy knows how their parents met.
JON ROBERTS (J.R.): My mother had nothing in common with my father. They were Beauty and the Beast. She looked like Marilyn Monroe. My dad was twenty years older. He was stocky, a balding guy. People who saw him on the street walked in the other direction. He barely spoke English. I don’t think he had any formal education. He could write numbers and names on a piece of paper, and that was about it.
When I was little, I asked my mother what my dad did, and she got upset. She said, “I don’t know. Don’t ask me again.”
In my house no one talked about the Mafia. I had to put it all together myself. In school I’d hear kids say, “His dad’s one of those people.” The teachers treated me differently. Nobody questioned me for being absent. Nobody yelled at me when I acted up.
I would find out my father was a “made” man. In movies they show being made as a big, holy ritual. That’s the movies. When they made somebody in the Mafia, it was because a guy was bringing them a lot of money. They said a made man couldn’t be killed. Not true. If they wanted to kill a made man, they could find a way. Being made mostly built ego in a guy so he’d be a better earner. The Mafia had a game just like any other organization. Burger King has its employee of the month. The Mafia had made men.
My dad’s main job was controlling black bars in New Jersey. Out of the bars he loaned money and ran the numbers. The numbers game was started in Harlem way back in the early times, when the blacks were starving up there and needed a way to make money. Then it spread everywhere. Here’s how it worked:
The New York Daily Mirror printed a circulation number that changed every day. To play the numbers, a person would guess tomorrow’s circulation number. He’d write his guess on a scrap of paper, with his initials and his bet—one dollar or five dollars. Every bar had a cigar box where they’d put the bets. My dad drove around to the bars every day, paid the winners, and collected the next day’s bets from the cigar boxes.
When I was about five or six, my dad started taking me around with him instead of driving me to school. My dad had a driver, Mr. Tut, who was always with him. Mr. Tut was a black guy who’d boxed in the ring but never made it big because whenever he started to lose, he’d revert to street fighting. He was a giant, with huge fists, and I liked him because unlike my father, he’d smile and seemed like a happy guy.
To my father, black people were “moolies.”* That’s not to say my dad was prejudiced. He didn’t like anybody. He didn’t even like himself, probably. To have a black driver served a purpose. It was a lot easier walking into a black bar with a black guy than with a white guy because then the blacks didn’t get attitude. It helped that Mr. Tut was a tough man.
I don’t want to dishonor my father, and I don’t judge him, but I don’t have fond memories of him. He wasn’t a happy-go-lucky guy. He was not nice.
My dad always had a big Mercury or Cadillac. He would ride up front with Mr. Tut and put me in the back. Some mornings they’d drive me to school. Other mornings my dad would take me with him to work. Since my dad didn’t talk, I never knew where I was going until I looked out the window.
There was a day in about 1955 when we left early in the morning. We headed toward the bars in New Jersey. I was dozing in the back and felt the car stop. I looked
up and saw my dad and Mr. Tut staring ahead.
We were in a half-residential, half-farm area of Jersey. The road led to a one-lane bridge. A car was stopped on the bridge facing ours, blocking the way. Mr. Tut started to open his door, and my dad said, “I’ll take care of this.”
My dad got out and walked up to the car on the bridge. He always carried a gun. I saw him take it out from his waistband and say something to the man in the car. Then he pushed his gun into the window and shot the man. Boom, boom, boom.
Mr. Tut said nothing. We watched as my dad opened the door to the guy’s car, pushed the man he’d shot sideways, and got in. He backed the car off the bridge. We drove across it, and my father climbed back in our car.
My father turned to me and asked, “What just happened? Did you see anything?”
I said, “No. I didn’t see anything.”
I was lucky, I guess, because I made the right response. My father studied my face, the way you’d look at a map. I was studying him, too, like he was the map of my future. I was scared, but I felt close to him like I hadn’t ever before. He’d done something that I’d have to keep a secret from everyone. I felt like he was treating me like a man.
I believe the shooting changed me. It made my reactions different from a normal person’s. I learned not to get emotional. I learned to observe without reacting or crying. My father trained me in that incident to be like a soldier: not to let what I saw get to me, to move on. I was a little kid. I didn’t reason this out. It seeped into me as instinct.
After the shooting I watched the news on TV. I expected to hear a story like “Man gets shot in the head,” but there was nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. In the movies it was a big deal if someone got shot. The police investigated. There were trials, arrests, headlines. I’d seen a real shooting, and nothing happened.
I became interested in holding a gun, to see what it felt like. We had a big, yellow-wood cabinet in the living room. I noticed my father put things behind the top ledge of the cabinet when he thought nobody was looking. I climbed up there and found a gun. It was a .38 revolver. I remember holding it, being amazed. When he shot that man in the head, it wasn’t a little pop like in the movies. It was an explosion. I felt the tiny gun and thought, This is unbelievable, the force of this.
By doing a murder in front of me, my dad taught me another lesson. He showed me you can get away with things. It’s not like they teach in school. My father did what he did, and he didn’t go to jail. It wasn’t like God punished my father, made him lose a leg or get cancer. What my father did made no difference to the universe. It showed me that if you’re careful not to get caught, you can do anything. It was a very good lesson, maybe the best lesson I ever got. It made all the violence that was to come my way a lot easier.
AROUND THE time of the shooting, my family moved to Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. It was a walk-up apartment in an old building. When you came in, you saw we had a lot of nice things. The furniture was new. We had two TVs. We had air-conditioning. It was obvious we were different. All of a sudden mink coats would show up in our house, guys with guns were dropping off expensive food, liquor. I’d go out on the street with my father, and people would move aside.
My parents fought constantly. I never saw my dad hit my mother. But she was afraid of him. I couldn’t understand what put them together. What had attracted her to him? She never told me.
My mother and father’s beliefs were at the opposite ends of the world. She had compassion for people. He had zero. All they had in common was that they made two children, me and my sister, Judy. She was a good girl. She didn’t get into trouble. She liked school. She watched American Bandstand. As different as she was from me, Judy was always loyal. No matter what I did, she never looked down on me.
JUDY: Our mother was artistic. She could draw. She always had flowers in the house. Her parents, Honey and Poppy, were full of life. Poppy was born speaking Polish, but he learned to write poetry in English that he’d recite to Jon and me. Honey was a seamstress for Claire McCardell,* and she’d bring me beautiful dresses she made. Our mother drew so much from her own parents. When our father wasn’t around, she had a wonderful sense of humor. She loved laughter and music. She taught me to play the piano.
Our mother worked at giving Jon and me a normal childhood. She and Honey used to take me to Philadelphia, where they filmed American Bandstand, so I could dance on the show.
Our mother adored Jon. He was obsessed with cowboys and Indians. He watched all the westerns on TV. She got him cowboy outfits, toy guns, and figurines. When Jon was sick in bed, she would sit with him for hours and play cowboys and Indians with his little stupid figurines.
Jon was generous with me. If he got a cookie, he’d share it with me, which is unusual for a boy and his older sister. He was physically rambunctious. He was a daredevil, always jumping off things, running all the time. He jumped off a ledge and split his head open. He came back from the hospital with giant clamps on his head and ran around like crazy. I worried the clamps would get stuck on something and his head would fall open.
Jon loved sports and memorized all the statistics. He had a very good mind for numbers. He was a little wild, but he had a sweet heart. He was a normal boy.
Our home was not normal at all. We had a dual life. Our mother was light. Our father was darkness. When Jon was in grade school, he changed. He started to act out and scream and bully our mother. She shrank from him. She would not stop him from acting out. I asked her why, and she said, “I can’t say anything to your brother. Your father won’t let me.”
I don’t believe my father loved anyone, but he took an interest in Jon. I believe our father was pulling him into his darkness. Jon was so small, and such anger started to come out of him. It would grow and grow.
J.R.: My mother wouldn’t tell me to do homework, to pick up my room, nothing. She stopped talking to me. I didn’t understand. After I got older, I realized my mother was terribly afraid of my father. I was afraid of him, too. How could I not be? I saw him shoot a man because he blocked his way on a bridge. What normal person would not put the car in reverse and back up? Is it easier to shoot somebody in the head or back up? To my father, it was easier to shoot the guy. I did not ever want to piss this man off. Even when he would say or do something that made no sense, I never would say a word back, nothing.
But our bond was tighter after the shooting. He and Mr. Tut took me on their rounds more and more. I’d barely go to school. In the summer my dad took me to the Jersey Shore. I’d look around at other kids who were there, and they’d be with their mothers, playing little games. I’d be with my dad and his friends—guys with guns, monster bodyguards—all hanging out in the middle of the day playing cards. Nobody had a nine-to-five job.
Many days my father would take me to the racetrack. It was the one thing he did that made him look almost happy. He loved the horses and was an excellent handicapper. I got my love of horses from him. Years later, when I bought my first horse, I thought of my father. It’s the one good thing he turned me on to that I thank him for.
My father really liked black music. Obviously, he ran the black bars, and that music is what we heard when we went in them. My father also liked black women. When he’d take me into the bars to collect the cigar boxes with the numbers money, he would tell Mr. Tut, “Watch Jon.”
Mr. Tut would sit me at the bar, get me a Coke, and my dad would disappear with a woman. He liked black music and black, black women. Italians don’t like to admit this, but in ancient times there was a black migration into Sicily. That’s why you see a lot of Italians with very dark complexions. There’s African blood mixed in all of us.
Another part of my father’s job was looking for people who owed him “vig”—interest on the money he lent. My dad put a lot of money out on the street to blacks and whites. When a guy didn’t pay on time, my father would have to chase him down and give him a beating.
It was easy to find people in those days.
It was a simpler world. People didn’t have the means to pack their bags and take off. If you owed my father money, he and Mr. Tut would drive around until they found you. They’d ask around in the bars. There was always somebody in the bar who would rat out a deadbeat. “The motherfucker that owes you the money is over here.”
We’d drive to wherever he was, and my dad would beat the guy. He’d take whatever was in his pockets. If he had a car, he’d take that from him, too.
My dad had big arms and hands, but he didn’t believe in using his hands on people. He always hit people with objects. My dad kept a baseball bat in the car. Sometimes he carried brass knuckles. If he had nothing else, he’d beat the guy with the end of his gun. He didn’t believe in punching it out with the other guy. My dad was there to give a beating.
Even as a kid, I understood my father’s thought train: The quicker you do a beating, the less problems you’re going to have. If you stand there and punch somebody back and forth, you don’t know how long it’s going to last. My father’s belief was to hit the guy with something hard and end it as quickly as possible. Make your point physically and move on.
My father was careful not to hit people in the face who owed him money. You hit somebody in the face with a baseball bat, you might kill him, and then you won’t collect your money. My dad focused on breaking people’s arms, or cracking their shins. I can tell you, when you break someone’s bones, they will scream bloody murder. But I never saw my father get excited when he beat people. For him violence was a business tool.
