American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Andy, with his sense of humor, would laugh his ass off. As many times as we’d do it, it was always a little different. You’d watch a guy’s face when he saw the dog and realized it was coming for him. You cannot outrun a dog. Some guys were smart enough to hold still and get the attack over as quick as possible.

  Others would try to outrun the dog, which is good for the dog because then he gets to practice chasing. We were happy when they ran. One time we had a hobo who was fast. You wouldn’t have thought it, this guy dressed in rags. But he shot around the corner like lightning, and so did my dog. We jumped in the car and drove around the block. No dog.

  I got out and heard the hobo screaming. He’d jumped into the entrance of a basement apartment. He was shaking the window bars, screaming for help. Every time he grabbed the bars, Brady would bite his hands. With this guy, we didn’t call off my dog for a long time. We let him have fun. The motherfucker made us come around the corner after him. That’s against the rules.

  I used Brady in the clubs. I’d keep him in the office. If a fight broke out on the floor, I’d let him go on the brawlers. If somebody was giving me a really hard time, I would take him into my office and put the dog on him.

  I drove with Brady in the car. In New York, there’s always some jerk on the street wanting to get into an argument. If a stupid moron gave me the finger, I’d open the door and let Brady out. He’d jump in the guy’s car window and bite his face.

  BRADY WAS such a good dog because I took dog-training lessons from Joe Da Costa. Joe was a professional killer. He was also a dog breeder and a really good guy. There are all kinds of assholes who say they know how to train a dog. Joe is the only guy I ever met who really knew how. He was so good they used his dogs in the movie The Doberman Gang.*

  I spent a lot of time at his place in Jersey learning about dogs. I would put on a padded sleeve, and he’d have his dogs attack me so I could learn how to fight against a canine. He trained Brady to smell for gun oil. If somebody came to my place with a gun on him, my dog would pin him to the wall. I wouldn’t tell people he was trained to sniff the gun oil.

  He’d pin the asshole with a gun to the wall. “How does he know I got a gun?”

  “He just knows,” I’d say. “He’s a good dog.”

  Joe showed me how to train my dogs to shit on command. In the winter when it was ten below zero, I could walk out with my dog, tell him “Shit,” and he would do it. No fooling around.

  Most important, Joe knew how to train a dog’s heart by building his confidence, just like a boxer. When he had a new dog, he would get in his face and make weird noises like ssssss, ssssss to agitate the dog until he snapped at him. When the dog snapped, Joe would run away, like he was scared. This builds heart in the dog. Then Joe would fight the dog with a bamboo stick. He would hit the dog harder and harder until the dog believed in himself. If the dog was good, Joe would fight him with a rubber hose. He could beat the shit out of the dog, and that dog would not back down, because by then that dog was fearless and he thought of himself as a monster. A dog who thinks like that will attack and attack because he’s got such a big heart.

  All the dogs I ever owned had heart.

  I wound up being a Good Samaritan because of my dog. If you wanted to get a really good slice of pie in New York—I don’t care if it’s apple, cherry, pecan, whatever—there was only one place to go: Better Crust Bakery, way up in Harlem by 139th Street.* They had a sweet potato pie nobody could beat, and some really unusual recipes, like a cream cheese berry pie with a crust made out of pretzel dough. It was crazy what they could do with a pie.

  Better Crust was in the worst part of Harlem. You couldn’t even go inside the shop. They had a Plexiglas window like at a bank. You’d slide your money into a slot, and they’d spin your pie out through a little door. Customers would line up like drug addicts, take their pies, and run.

  I was up there one day in the summer getting a pie, and it was so good, I couldn’t wait to get it in my car to eat it. I’m on the sidewalk chowing down a slice when a big Cadillac pimpmobile pulls up. Even though it’s ninety degrees out, a black guy gets out in a fur coat. I think nothing of him. I’m happy with my pie.

  I see a kid walk up the sidewalk carrying a paper bag. I assume he’s a drunk, with a beer in the bag. Then I see flames coming from the bag. I think, The bag’s on fire.

  The pimp goes down before I even hear the shot. The kid had a gun in his bag and shot the pimp through the paper. Brady sees this and jumps out the back window of my car. He leaps on the shooter and knocks him over. This guy is so panicked, he drops his gun and screams.

  Dobermans bite people all over. Other dogs will lock onto your arm or your neck and won’t let go until you break them off. Not Dobermans. If you can take pain, you can beat a Doberman eventually in a fight because as much as they hurt, they aren’t consistent in their bites. But this poor kid didn’t know that. He’s on the ground flailing. Brady is biting his face, his stomach, his arms.

  I yell at the kid to calm down. I want my dog back before the cops come. But the more this kid screams, the more worked up Brady gets. I have to take my gun out and jam it in the kid’s face. I tell him to calm the fuck down. Finally I get Brady off of him. The kid’s chewed to pieces. He’s a piece of meat on the sidewalk. He isn’t going anywhere. Me and Brady get back in the car and drive home.

  Later, they had a story on the eleven o’clock news, how a Good Samaritan helped capture a man who’d shot a “Harlem businessman”—the pimp—outside of Better Crust Bakery. Andy saw this and laughed his ass off. I’d helped the police solve a shooting.

  But for all the fun I’ve had with dogs, I never had a situation where one actually saved my life. Great as dogs are, shooting a person in the leg is still the most effective way of making your point. Dogs are mostly just for companionship.

  * A member of the Genovese family, allied with Gambino.

  * The 1973 exploitation film about criminals who use a gang of dogs to rob banks. Jon’s assertion that Joe Da Costa or his dogs were involved in the making of the film could not be verified.

  * The Better Crust Bakery was a fixture in Harlem since firing up its pie ovens in 1946. After a glowing profile by the New York Times in 1996, it shut its doors—an apparent victim of New Yorkers’ waning interest in its signature sweet potato pies.

  † The theft of the bearer bonds from Merrill Lynch provoked a scandal and resulted in Jon’s uncle Joe being ordered to testify before a hearing by the New York State Legislature. He refused to testify and no charges were filed against him. See Richard Phalon, “Hooded Informer Reveals Stock Theft,” New York Times, December 12, 1969.

  18

  J.R.: When you run a nightclub, you will always get heat from the cops. The liquor license gives them an automatic reason to come into your place and snoop. Within a year of getting into the business, Andy and I started to draw real heat—not from New York cops, who could always be bought, but from the FBI. Two incidents made them nosy about us.

  The first was the kidnapping of Jimi Hendrix. Jimi and I were never great friends. He was so far gone, I don’t think he was truly friends with anybody. Jimi was a bad junkie. Jimi had people around him all the time, too. He was suffocating from these hangers-on. After we met at Salvation, he came to our house on Fire Island so he could get away from it all. We’d make sure nobody would bother him except for his real friends. Jimi really liked Leslie West,* and one night the two of them played in our living room all night long. Jimi had to shoot speed in his arm to keep up with Leslie. That’s how good Leslie West was. A few times, we took Jimi water-skiing off the back of my Donzi. He liked getting out and doing things physically, even when he was stoned.

  He nearly drowned one time. Jimi’s out there—no life vest on—and he falls off the skis. He’s in the water thrashing around. I swing the boat past and throw him the rope. It’s floating a couple feet from his hands, but he’s waving his arms like crazy. Suddenly, I’m wondering if he can even
swim. Andy has to jump in the water and swim the rope over to him, because Jesus Christ, if this guy dies while out with us, what a headache that would be.

  I had some good times with Jimi, but he was a disaster on water skis.

  I got involved in Jimi’s so-called kidnapping after he was grabbed by some guys out of Salvation. Later on some people accused me of being involved in kidnapping him.* They said I was involved with kidnappers who tied Jimi to a chair and forced him to shoot heroin. Please. Nobody would have had to force Jimi to shoot anything. Just give him the heroin and he’d inject it himself. It was Jimi going out searching for drugs that got him into trouble. Andy and I were the ones who helped get him out of it.

  Jimi had people who would usually buy dope for him. But sometimes he’d get so sick, he’d come into our clubs looking for drugs on his own. One night two Italian kids at our club—not Mafia but wiseguy wannabes—saw Jimi in there looking for dope and decided, “Hey, that’s Jimi Hendrix. Let’s grab him and see what we can get.”

  These guys were morons. They promised Jimi some dope and took him to a house out of the city. I don’t know if they wanted money or a piece of his record contract, but they called Jimi’s manager demanding something. Next thing I knew Bobby Wood called me and said Jimi had been taken from our club by some Italians.

  It took me and Andy two or three phone calls to get the names of the kids who were holding Jimi. We reached out to these kids and made it clear, “You let Jimi go, or you are dead. Do not harm a hair of his Afro.”

  They let Jimi go. The whole thing lasted maybe two days. Jimi was so stoned, he probably didn’t even know he was ever kidnapped. Andy and I waited a week or so and went after these kids. We gave them a beating they would never forget.

  Here I was, the Good Samaritan—once again—in all this, but unfortunately, when Jimi was grabbed, some of his people contacted the FBI. Even after he was returned, the FBI kept poking around. My name came up, and next thing I knew I had two agents calling on me at the club. That was not good. I didn’t have anything to say to them, but now I was on their radar. When the FBI contacted you, they made a new file, and once that file was made, you didn’t know who would be reading it later. Because of the Jimi Hendrix incident, I had my first contact with the FBI.

  OUR PARTNER Bobby Wood was involved in the second incident that brought heat on us. By 1970 he had become a real problem to our business. Any wrong thing you could think of, Bobby Wood was doing it. He was stealing money from us, picking fights with customers, shooting his mouth off. I believed it was Bobby Wood who gave my name to the FBI about the Jimi Hendrix kidnapping. The man was a mess.

  BRADLEY: Bobby had developed a $1,500-a-week cocaine habit. He was acting bizarre. One night he came up to me and said, “Bradley, you’re Jesus Christ to me. I know you can protect me.”

  He was doing funny stuff with the books, skimming money. I told him, “Bobby, you’re a fool because we have guys in this business who can be very tough. Don’t be stupid. You have to be a lover of people and respect them.”

  But my words could not reach Bobby.

  J.R.: Bobby went berserk on coke. He was one of the first people I knew who did a lot of coke where it had a negative effect on him. We could deal with him skimming a little money, even for running his mouth off to the FBI. Who was going to believe that piece of shit anyway? We weren’t going to kill him for that.

  But Bobby got into trouble with other wiseguys who came into our clubs. Bobby was a nobody Jewish guy from Jerome Avenue. He got so out of his mind, he hit on the girls wiseguys brought with them. When they’d comment to him that he should show respect, he’d insult them. Andy and I pulled Bobby aside many times and said, “You need to control yourself, bro.”

  Bobby did not listen. He disrespected the wrong people in our club. It got so bad, my uncles came to me. They told Andy and me to take care of him. Looking back, it’s almost funny. There was no specific thing Bobby Wood did that made people want him killed. He was just an asshole. That was his crime. He was such an annoying asshole, he had to go.

  In early 1970, on a cold winter night, somebody put several bullets in Bobby Wood and dumped his body on the street. Everybody said Andy and I did it. I have no comment regarding the truth of that rumor.

  Unfortunately, prior to his demise, Bobby Wood wrote a letter to his attorney accusing me of terrible things. His piece-of-shit attorney put that letter in the hands of a newspaper reporter, and they made a story from it:

  Federal and local authorities pressed their investigations of the seamy side of New York’s after-dark entertainment following the turning over of “letters from the grave” to law enforcement officials by the attorney for Robert J. Wood, whose bullet-riddled body had been found in a Queens street on Feb. 18.

  Wood, operator of the Salvation discotheque in Greenwich Village, left a legacy of accusations of Mafia control of bars and nightclubs. Wood made his accusation in letters, dated Jan. 16, which he sent to his lawyer with instructions to give them to authorities if he was murdered.…

  The letters relate that Wood “met a young man named John Riccobono”* who inspired such trust that he hired him to manage Salvation, with the option of buying 10 percent of the discotheque. The letters say that Riccobono induced him to hire Andy B. as doorman.…

  John Riccobono is described in the letters as the son of one important Mafioso and the nephew of another, Joseph (Staten Island Joe) Riccobono, who is listed by the Department of Justice as consigliere (counselor) of the Mafia “family” headed by Carlo Gambino.

  —Charles Grutzner, “Slain Man’s Letters Give Impetus

  to Local and Federal Investigations of After-Hours Clubs

  Here,” New York Times, March 23, 1970

  J.R.: It was not good to have my name in the newspaper.

  BRADLEY: I was there when the police came into the club and questioned Jon and Andy the first time about the murder. When they asked, “Do you have any idea who might’ve bumped off Bobby Wood?,” Andy said, “I can give you some names of people who didn’t like Bobby Wood.” Andy picked up a New York telephone directory and handed it to the police. He said, “Any person in here might have had a reason to kill him.”

  I couldn’t believe Jon and Andy were laughing about it to the police like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  J.R.: Andy didn’t give a fuck about the cops. They threw us into jail. They tried to hook us to the murder, but there was no evidence and they couldn’t charge us. My dad had taught me when I was a little kid that you could kill a person and get away with it. He was right.

  * A hard blues guitarist who fronted the band Mountain, best known for the hit “Mississippi Queen.”

  * In The Jimi Hendrix Experience, published by Arcade Publishing in 1996, rock journalist Jerry Hopkins names “John Riccobono” as a possible conspirator in the 1969 abduction of Hendrix from a New York nightclub. According to Hopkins, John Riccobono and other mafiosi kidnapped Hendrix and held him at a house in the Catskills while keeping him tied to a chair and injecting him with heroin in order to force him to sign a record contract.

  * Although John Riccobono had his name legally changed to “Jon Pernell Roberts” when he was thirteen, many in law enforcement still referred to him as John Riccobono, and on the streets Jon himself still went by Riccobono.

  19

  J.R.: After the Bobby Wood murder Andy and I pulled back from the clubs. We still ran them, but we moved into the background. When Bradley founded a new club, Hippopotamus,* we took a piece of the door, but we didn’t keep an office there.

  I was trying to settle down by then. In 1970 I got involved with my first serious girlfriend, Phyllis LaTorre.† I had met Phyllis as a result of buying my Donzi boat. One habit I got from my father was I never put my name on anything. Anything I bought, I’d give money to somebody else, have him buy it in his name. I never wanted to have assets on paper that the government could trace to me. If it was a boat, a car, a place to live, I’d give ca
sh to somebody I could trust or control, and he’d take care of everything. All I wanted were the keys. I bought my Donzi through a man who owned a hippie clothing boutique in Manhattan. After we did the deal on the boat, he said, “Jon, come to my shop anytime. I’ll take care of you. Anything you want.”

  Phyllis worked as a manager in this guy’s shop. She was his girlfriend. I met her when I first went in there. She was a petite Italian girl, and she was hot as shit. My friend said take anything I wanted from his shop. I took Phyllis.

  I was twenty-one and Phyllis was at least thirty. The way I’d lived my life, I could not relate to girls my age. Though I enjoyed their bodies, their heads were empty. Phyllis was wise into the bottom of her eyes. She knew the things I was going to tell her before I told her. After we met, we wasted no time. Phyllis lived in a brownstone on Central Park West and 73rd Street. A few days after we met, she said, “Come on. Move in here with me.”

  Phyllis was the first woman who taught me anything. Not even my mother had taught me anything. I was a savage person when we met. Phyllis was definitely a teacher. She knew about restaurants and cooking. She went to movies, theaters, art shows. She had no hang-ups about showing me what she liked when we had sex. Phyllis had her own mind. She was an Italian girl, but she wasn’t prejudiced like most Italians. She liked black people. She was good friends with the comedian Richard Pryor and with movie people. And it wasn’t like with me and Jimi Hendrix. They were actual friends who truly liked her. She was a very interesting girl.

  JUDY: Everything about Phyllis was interesting. She looked interesting. She was a classic Italian beauty, with olive skin, black hair, and such an incredible bone structure.

  Phyllis was very avant-garde. She used to wear really weird outfits. Bright colors and furs. One summer she wore nothing but white. Whatever she was into, she was striking.