American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Jon has loved every woman he’s been involved with. But Phyllis was the smartest of them all. She read. She was into politics. She was adventurous. When a friend of mine took me to Transcendental Meditation, she came. She even tried to get Jon to come to our meditation sessions to try to calm him down.

  Phyllis did not take any crap from my brother. She dominated the conversations with him, but it didn’t bother him a bit. He enjoyed having a strong woman in his life.

  J.R.: After a few months living in her brownstone, Phyllis and I moved to a penthouse up the street. It was a gorgeous place with cathedral windows overlooking the park. Barbra Streisand was our neighbor. Not that we were friends, but this was the kind of building we were in.

  Judy moved into Phyllis’s old brownstone, and they were like sisters. Phyllis and I never got married, but to the people who knew us, we were a husband and wife.

  JUDY: Jon finally got a family. This was a real positive. Phyllis had a big Italian family who took him in like a son. Jon was very close to Phyllis’s father, her sister Fran, and their cousin Henry. Jon and Henry were like brothers.

  J.R.: When I first laid eyes on Phyllis, I thought she was a hippie Jew girl. Was I wrong. Phyllis’s family was all Mafia. Her father was a heroin guy out of Long Island, a real funny character who would get into a good scheme and bang, he’d fuck it up and end up in prison. He was in and out of prison.* When I met him, he was into a successful scheme with cocaine. He got pharmaceutical coke from a guy inside Merck.* The first good coke I ever did was the Merck stuff from my father-in-law. One sniff and your whole throat would freeze, then the freeze would spread until your brain felt like a chunk of ice. I never thought coke would end up being my future. Back then it was just a kick for Phyllis’s friends, like Richard Pryor when he came to our house for parties.

  My brother-in-law, Henry Borelli,† was a trip and a half. He had tried out to be a New York cop, but they wouldn’t let him on the force. So he went the other way. He was with a crew of Italian kids who later got the nickname Murder Machine. All they did was kill people for hire. They had a pizza shop in Brooklyn where they’d feed the people they killed into butcher machines and take their bodies out in buckets. They must have chopped up fifty guys back there.‡ Henry was also a dependable shooter, and he did a lot of work for John Gotti. Henry and I never worked too much together, but we were good friends.

  Phyllis’s sister Fran was with a guy named Jack Bliss. He was Puerto Rican–Brazilian. He always wore tropical shirts with toucan birds on them. He loved music. He loved to dance. Everybody called him “Jack in the Toucan Shirt.”

  Jack worked for my friend Vincent Pacelli. Vincent had been involved in stealing the bearer bonds from Merrill Lynch, but his main business was heroin. He and his father, Vincent Sr., ran the original “French Connection.”* Jack worked for them as a courier. He drove all over the country, moving their shit in the trunk of his car.

  Jack was the first guy I knew to drive a Mercedes 280 SL, the two-seater convertible. I drove a Cadillac Eldorado then, and you could practically fit Jack’s Mercedes in the trunk. We used to laugh at his little car.

  But Jack showed me what that Mercedes could do. One day Jack called me from Florida. He was down there to pick up some heroin but had met a guy who had twenty kilos of cocaine. This was an ungodly amount in the early 1970s. Jack asked if I knew anyone in New York who could buy that much coke. The price was a million dollars—a huge, huge sum of money then.

  The old mustache Mafia guys still had the mentality that heroin was okay because they thought only the blacks used it. They didn’t know Italians were junkies, too. Other drugs, like cocaine, they didn’t want nobody touching. These old guys were just very set in their ways.

  Through my nightclubs I knew a Jewish guy named Ray Mintner† who had a lot of money and was into different illegal things. He was a long shot, but I had nothing to lose by asking him if he was interested in twenty kilos of coke. Ray was nuts about egg rolls, so to get him in a good mood, I took him to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, where they made the best egg rolls in New York. When I told him about my friend with twenty kilos, Ray did not bat an eyelash. He’d have the million dollars as soon as Jack brought the coke back to New York.

  I phoned Jack in Florida. He put the twenty kilos in his Mercedes, and sixteen hours later he was in New York. For an investment of a few egg rolls, I made a $50,000 commission off the deal.

  What impressed me wasn’t the money I made from cocaine. My eyes were still not open to its potential. I was impressed by Jack’s Mercedes. Until then I had always looked down on foreign cars. When I told Phyllis how fast Jack made the trip in his little Mercedes, she used this to her advantage. She said, “Since you like foreign cars now, buy me an XKE.”

  For as long as I could remember, Phyllis had been bugging me to buy her an XKE, the Jaguar with a twelve-cylinder engine and long hood. I went out and bought a matching pair of XKEs.

  Poor Jack. He made all that money from his coke deal, and he expanded his heroin business. He hooked up with a black guy in Harlem named One-Eye Willie, who was in business with Nicky Barnes.* Jack started supplying Nicky with heroin he got from Vincent Pacelli and did very well for himself. As he got more successful, he started going around with black girls One-Eye Willie supplied him. Jack was very in the open about it. Guy wearing a toucan shirt driving around in a little Mercedes convertible stuffed full of black whores was hard to miss. Phyllis’s sister Fran saw what he was up to, and she split up with him.

  This turned out bad for Jack. He was not Italian. His only protection from the Mafia was Fran and Phyllis’s father. When he lost their goodwill, he was nothing. Next time Jack got a big shipment of heroin, my brother-in-law Henry robbed him and fed him into the meat grinder at the pizza shop. That was the end of Jack in the Toucan Shirt. When you cross an Italian girl, you’ve got to be very careful how you do it.

  * Hippopotamus, which opened on 54th Street then moved to 62nd Street, was arguably the most trendsetting disco in New York until the founding of Studio 54 in the mid-1970s. Hippopotamus was the setting of the Beatles’ farewell party when they dissolved their legal partnership in 1974, and it was a favored hangout of an eclectic crowd that included Frank Sinatra, Mick and Bianca Jagger, and attorney Roy Cohn.

  * Phyllis’s father, Peter Corso, was arrested for the last time in 1987 at age sixty-five on Long Island for cocaine dealing. “Corso—who has a felony record dating to 1938, including a two-year jail sentence for drug dealing—had several pounds of cocaine and papers detailing how the narcotics were distributed when he was arrested at home.” From “29 Arrested in Dope Network Operated from Cell at Attica,” the Schenectady Gazette, August 24, 1987. When I shared this news article with Jon, he said, “That’s Phyllis’s dad. What kind of moron would keep papers detailing who his distributors are in his own house?”

  * Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, sold cocaine for medical use until the late 1970s.

  * The 1971 movie The French Connection was loosely based on a heroin-smuggling mafioso named Pasquale Fuca. The father of Jon’s friend Vincent Pacelli—Vincent Pacelli Sr.—was involved in a similar French-connection heroin scheme for which he was convicted in 1965. Pacelli Sr.’s trial was notorious in its day because of his attempt to employ a Playboy Bunny to bribe a juror. See “Ex-Playboy Bunny Held in Bribe Plot,” New York Times, July 13, 1965.

  * Nicky Barnes was the Harlem heroin dealer on whom Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s, character was based in the 2007 film American Gangster.

  † Phyllis’s legal surname was Corso. According to Jon, she adopted the name LaTorre because “it sounded artistic.” Also, she wanted to avoid association with her father, Peter Corso.

  † Though Henry was Phyllis’s cousin, she referred to him as her brother; hence Jon calls him his “brother-in-law.”

  † Ray Mintner is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  ‡ Henry Borelli was part of a
Gambino-family crew headed by Roy DeMeo. Borelli earned the nickname “Dirty Henry”—after Clint Eastwood’s .44 Magnum-toting film character—because of his reputed brutality in shooting people. The DeMeo Crew is reputed to have murdered as many as two hundred people in the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom were dismembered not in a pizza shop, as Jon states, but in an apartment next to a bar in Brooklyn. The DeMeo Crew’s exploits were chronicled by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci in Murder Machine, published by Onyx in 1993.

  20

  J.R.: Phyllis was always trying to teach me to be more careful. She used to tell me, “Jon, you run around like a wild Indian. You’ll get shot.”

  I took many risks, but seeing how Phyllis’s family took care of Jack in the Toucan Shirt, I was careful about seeing other women. Phyllis was wise enough to know I was a young man. I was not a monk. Her point was, I should never rub her nose in seeing other women.

  When it came to women, I was crazed. It was nothing for me to fuck a woman five or six times a day. When you threw in the nightclubs, the money, and the clothes, I had a solid game. But underneath it I was still a street kid. At times the women I got surprised even me.

  Phyllis turned me on to a restaurant called Serendipity 3.* It was on the first floor of a brownstone, and when you walked in, they sold weird shit like espresso machines and cuckoo clocks. The restaurant part was pushed in the back of what was almost a basement. But it was where very fancy people went in New York.* They served unbelievable desserts and breakfasts. They made a French toast with cream cheese inside that was out of this world.

  Since Phyllis liked to sleep late, many mornings I went to Serendipity alone. I’m sitting there one morning, eating my French toast, and seated at the next table was a girl I’d seen in the movies.† In one movie she played James Bond’s girlfriend. She was a goddess. I was just a nobody twenty-two-year-old, but I decided to give it a shot.

  I said, “I’m sorry to intrude, but I couldn’t stand not saying hello to you, because you are absolutely gorgeous.”

  She smiled at that. Even though she’d been complimented a million times in her life, one more still made her happy. When she smiled, I told her I was surprised I’ve never seen her before at my club, Sanctuary.

  “Oh, that’s your club?” she says.

  “Please come and be my guest sometime. Dance your brains out. Anything you want. The bar is open.”

  A week later she showed up at my club. I wasn’t there, but my bouncer called me and said, “Jon, James Bond’s girlfriend’s here asking for you.”

  My doorman dealt with a lot of famous people, but to him, this girl was a big deal. I had him take her to a special table and bring her a bottle of wine. Not champagne. A bottle of wine and two glasses. I made her wait forty-five minutes before I came over.

  “Do you like to dance?” I asked her.

  “I love it.”

  I said, “I don’t dance. So knock yourself out.”

  “Let’s sit and talk,” she said.

  I sat and talked to her. After a while I said, “I want to watch you dance.”

  So she got up and danced. By four in the morning, she’d danced her brains out, and she’d told me all about herself—how it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re a beautiful woman, blah, blah, blah. I sat there listening, and she was very happy. She said, “What are we going to do now?”

  “Whatever the fuck you want to do, we’re going to do it now.”

  “Let’s go to an after-hours club,” she said.

  I took her to a place downtown. It was a club where rich people and degenerates from the artistic world liked to go. That painter, Andy Warhol, had turned me on to it. I knew this would be just right for an actress. Everybody inside was wacked on cocaine. I said, “Do you like to get high?”

  “I really don’t know,” she said.

  I said, “Stop with your ‘I don’t know.’ Do you like to get high or don’t you like to get high? Obviously, I’m not a fucking cop.”

  She laughed, and we got high on cocaine into the morning. I drove her back to her place in my Jaguar. But I did not try to come in. When I let her off, she said, “I’m going to California to work on a movie, but you can call me here.” She wrote a number on a piece of paper.

  I never called. A few weeks later she came back to my club. She was angry I hadn’t called. I told her to stop being like that. She brightened up. We stayed out all night again. At eight in the morning, she said, “I want to go eat.”

  We go to Serendipity. We order the French toast with cream cheese, and by now I’m aching for her. She takes a bite of her French toast, and the fucking cream cheese squishes out on the side of her mouth. She starts to laugh.

  “That’s it,” I tell her. “Come with me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a mess.”

  I pull her into the bathroom. As soon as I shut the door, I lift her ass up and drop her on the sink, with her legs open in front of me. “Nobody’s ever done this,” she says.

  “I don’t give a fuck what anybody else has ever done in your whole fucking life.”

  We start fucking, and right away the sink busts loose from the wall. My ass is banging the door behind me. The little bathroom in Serendipity was like an airplane toilet. But this doesn’t stop us. I’m not saying I was the greatest fuck in the world, but the urge of the moment was very strong in both of us. When we finish, she gets a frightened look and says, “Oh my God. The noise we made. I can’t go back out there.”

  I leave her alone in the toilet and go back out in the restaurant. It’s a really tiny place. Everybody looks up at me. I say, “I’m sorry, everybody. The restaurant is closed. You have to get the fuck out of here. Now.”

  The half-a-fag waiter who runs the place, he knows me. He comes up to me and says, “Jon, what are you doing?”

  I explained to him there was a lady in the bathroom I’d just fucked, and because of her station in life, she did not want to step out and have a bunch of morons stare at her. I told him I’d pay whatever it cost for everybody to leave. That waiter emptied out the place.

  He made up a new table for us in the middle of the restaurant, and we finished breakfast all by ourselves. I felt invincible. There I was, twenty-two, and I’d just fucked James Bond’s girlfriend in the toilet.

  PETEY: The movie Super Fly came out in the early 1970s, and working at Jon’s clubs, I felt like I was living it. That movie changed everybody’s look. We started dressing in Borsalino hats and tailored sharkskin suits. I was shooting so much junk, there were times I thought I was Super Fly.

  Jon’s club, the Boathouse, became a big hangout for the New York Knicks. Wilt Chamberlain* would show up, and the women would line up for him. Walt Frazier† used to come in a Rolls-Royce he’d customized with whitewall tires and extra chrome like a pimpmobile. We had real pimps that used to come to the club. There was a famous one called the Flying Dutchman. He had gold teeth, gold chains, a big watch, and a cane with diamonds on it that all the Knicks started to imitate. That bling look didn’t start with rap; it started with the Flying Dutchman. Of course, when Jon and Andy saw how the black celebrities were getting into diamonds and gold, they schemed a way to rob them.

  J.R.: I had admired the great basketball players since I was a kid. These guys knew what Andy and I were about, and they would ask us if we knew any deals on jewelry. Being who we were, they assumed we could get them deals on hot items. I didn’t intend to rip them off, but they were asking for it.

  Because my uncle Sam owned dental labs, he bought a lot of gold. Through him I had a good friend in the diamond district named Howie. Howie was a good, good guy. He was into smuggling stones from around the world. Show me any diamond guy in New York, he’s got stones that don’t belong to him or he’s not paying taxes on. It’s how their business works.

  I told Howie how I got all these high-paid athletes who wanted diamond watches and rings. He said, “Send them to me. I’ll take care of them.”

  Howie had a
trick that a lot of diamond guys use. They call it “blowing out the rock.” They take a piece-of-shit stone, even glass, and I don’t know if they use chemicals or what, but they make it shine and feel as hard as a diamond. So Andy and I started sending all our wannabe-pimp basketball player friends to Howie. Even the white guys were into this. Howie robbed them blind with his junk rocks and gave us a cut. We did this for years. These athletes were happy with what they got. It wasn’t our fault they didn’t know they were wearing garbage.

  THERE WERE many nights Andy and I went out just to have a good time. No schemes. No women. We’d just try to soak up the scene. At Hippopotamus we tried to keep very quiet, out of respect for Bradley Pierce, whose name was on the club. But there were always jerks who could make a problem out of nothing.

  One time it was my Granny Takes a Trip boots that got us into trouble. I was at the bar in Hippopotamus one night talking with Andy when a couple of guidos came past. These guys were real hicks from Jersey—their hair greased back, pizza-collar shirts. It’s anyone’s guess how they got past the doorman. But I don’t say nothing. I’m having a quiet night. As they walk by, one of these mouth-breathers makes a comment about my boots.

  Andy gets very uptight. I say, “Andy, what do we care what this asshole thinks about shoes?”

  Now one of the Jersey hicks says, “I told you they were nothing but a couple of faggots.”

  Enough is enough. I grab him by the neck, and Andy breaks a bottle on his face.

  Out of respect for the club, we immediately dragged this guy out a back door to a loading area. His friend came out after us. One of our bouncers knocked him down with a baseball bat. These guys wanted to get wise about my boots, so I decided to show them my boots.

  As good as my Granny Takes a Trip boots looked, they were not just for show. They were made for stomping people. One thing you should know about kicking is, never kick with the front of your foot. I don’t care if you got steel-toe boots, you should never kick with your toes. Never, never, never. If you kick forcefully with your toes and hit a shin, or even ribs, you can break your toes. A rib bone is stronger than a toe bone. Even if the person you are kicking is unconscious, he can still hurt you if you kick him the wrong way. Try running away on broken toes and see how far you get.