American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  When I got on the street with Herbie, I said, “You moron. Why didn’t you tell me there was ten people in there?”

  “We were lucky, man,” he says. “There was four or five other cats in the back room.”

  I couldn’t believe it. This guy was supposedly street smart, and he sets up a robbery where it’s me against fifteen people. If Herbie had ever made it back to Africa like he planned, he would have been eaten by a lion his first day in the jungle.

  BUT I liked Herbie because he was always up for anything. One time I needed somebody to play robber in a rip-off I had set up. I was meeting two guys in an alley to sell them heroin, and since I wanted to keep them as customers, I wanted to make it look like I was robbed along with them. My plan was to drive up in my car, get out, then have a guy jump out with a gun and rob us. Herbie agreed to play the robber.

  I picked an alley off of Avenue D on the Lower East Side. I drive up in a Buick I used for street work. The guys I’ve set up are there. I get out of my car, and Herbie jumps out from a doorway. He’s got his gun out. It’s perfect.

  These two idiots we’re trying to rob see Herbie with his gun, and instead of handing over their money, they run. This makes me mad. For all these guys know, they’ve left me holding the bag with Herbie. In their minds, they think they’ll get away while he robs me.

  I decide to give them back what they think they’re giving me. I jump in my car and chase them. I have no plan to actually run them over, but as soon I got behind them, I think, This will be a cinch.

  I punch the gas and zoom. I’m so close, I can see the bottoms of their shoes as they’re running. I assume when I hit them, they’ll go under my car. But it don’t work like that, bro. What I’ve learned is when you run somebody over, they fly over your car. I’m going maybe forty-five miles an hour. I hit these guys, and they shoot over the top of the car. I see them flying in my rearview mirror. It’s wild.

  This is a kick and a half. Normally, when you punch somebody, you feel your physical strength. Hitting somebody with a machine is like, Wow. People are nothing. These guys flew over my car like pieces of paper.

  I jam on the brakes, back up, and get out of the car. The two guys I hit are lying in the trash like mangled toys. Herbie runs over. He’s upset, because he’s worried I’ve killed them. They’re not dead, just broken. As I empty their pockets, Herbie gives me attitude about how reckless I am. I say, “If you had done your job, I wouldn’t have had to run them over.”

  After preaching to me how wrong it is to run people over, Herbie gets in the car with me and takes his cut. People love to tell you how moral they are, but they’ll seldom turn down money, no matter how you got it.

  IT’S MY belief people show their true colors when you put a gun in their face. In the 1960s I robbed hippies who’d look at my gun and say, “Hey, man. Your karma’s gonna come back at you. You’ve got to love people.”

  Even if I didn’t agree with them, I respected people who stuck to their beliefs even when they thought I might kill them. But as the 1970s rolled in, I came across more people I called “make-believe hippies.” I’d take out my gun, and they’d offer to set up their friends if I’d let them keep their money. They’d sell their brothers to hold on to a dollar.

  I once hooked up with a group of rich college kids who lived out in the Five Towns area of Long Island. They fancied themselves revolutionaries. They wore little Che Guevara beret hats and army boots. They were white kids who thought they were Black Panthers. They had an idea to go into hash dealing to pay for the revolution. They pooled the money they got from their parents and decided to buy $10,000 of hash from me.

  When the day came for me to rob them, I brought Jack Buccino and Dominic Fiore with me. The leader of the revolutionaries lived in an apartment over the garage at his parents’ house.

  This guy had a girlfriend who was the one that wore the pants in the revolution. She was a tough little Jewish broad who was studying to be a lawyer.

  I show up in this apartment with Jack and Dominic. The kids bring out the $10,000, and we take our guns out and explain that there’s not going to be any hash deal.

  There’s three guys and this girl. Everybody is very quiet, very respectful. They know me a little bit, but they never met Jack and Dominic, and these guys are very intimidating with their guns out. But this little girl, she has the balls to say, “Can I talk to you alone?”

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

  “Please,” she said. “I promise it will be worth it.”

  The girl walks me into a bathroom. As soon as I shut the door, she pulls up her top. Normally, when I’m doing a robbery, getting my rocks off is the last thing on my mind. But this girl’s tits are popping at me, and I can’t believe her audacity. I have my gun out, and she moves close enough to brush her tits against the backs of my fingers by the trigger. Feeling her skin on my gun hand was very distracting. If she’d known how to fight, she could have taken my gun then.

  She says, “Don’t take the whole ten thousand. Leave two thousand for me. That’s my money. Let me keep it, and I will give you the best blow job of your life.”

  I couldn’t believe this girl going behind her boyfriend’s back like this. If she’d offered to blow me for her and her boyfriend’s money, I might have respected her. But this was very sleazy.

  I say, “You want to give me a two-thousand-dollar blow job?”

  She kneels down and starts working on me. This revolutionary college girl puts everything she has into it. She breaks a sweat. But me, I’m used to some very fine women. Maybe what this girl is doing could impress her teachers at law school, but her technique is nothing special.

  As soon as I finish coming on her, she looks up at me and says, “Well?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  “I can’t believe you’re being such an asshole.”

  “I can’t believe you got the balls to say that.”

  “My father gave me that money for law school.”

  “Tell your father somebody robbed you in the street.”

  “I can’t lie to my father.”

  “Get the fuck out of here before I shoot you.”

  She had no fear, this mouthy girl. She wipes herself off, and when we get back in the room with her comrades, she says to her boyfriend, “He promised if I sucked him off, we’d get our money back.”

  She’s some lawyer already. One sentence out of her mouth, and she’s made two lies. Her boyfriend is so beaten down by this broad, he don’t say nothing. But another guy in this revolutionary group gets mad at her. He says, “Did you try to suck him off for my money, too?”

  It’s obvious this girl’s been working all these guys. They start arguing with each other while we still got our guns on them. They’re entertaining to me. But Dominic is dope sick and needs a fix. He turns to me and says, “Jon, please. We got to go before I shoot these assholes.”

  We go out, and as I reach the door, I drop a hundred dollars on the floor and tell the girl, “Here’s for the blow job.”

  “Fuck you, you pig,” she says.

  That girl, I got to hand it to her. She was a tough broad. I bet she made a good lawyer.

  WHEN I ripped off people who had drugs, I ended up with shit I didn’t need. Selling drugs wasn’t my business. When I got twenty pounds of hash or ten thousand hits of LSD, I did something I called “reverse rip-offs.”

  After I robbed people, I’d save their addresses and phone numbers. If I robbed a dealer who seemed on the ball, I’d go back to his house later on and invite him to go into business with me selling drugs I stole from other people. Obviously, when I knocked on the door of a recent victim, this person was not usually happy to see me. But the smart ones understood I offered an opportunity. I’d sell them shit at cheap prices. And if they had rival dealers, I’d rob them, and we’d all profit when they sold their shit. I built up a group of college kids on Long Island who became regular dealers for
me.

  I found it was easier to work with college kids than street people. Street people will always try to rip you off at some point. College kids were completely dependable. They were frightened of me, but like any other people, they were greedy, and I offered them good profits. The other benefit they got from me was, if they were hassled by other punk college kids, I’d beat the snot out of them.

  I had four different kids out in Long Island who worked for me in the early 1970s. A few of them paid for college through our business. One kid even invited me to his graduation ceremony.

  I’M NOT going to try to pretend I was a saint because I helped some kids through college. I was not a saint. I was a bad person. I never thought for a second about wrong things I did to get my kicks. My view of life was to take the money and laugh.

  There was only one time I had a second thought about how I was to people. I was walking down the street one day in Manhattan, and I noticed a pretty girl coming toward me. What caught my eye was, she had a limp. It stood out, seeing a cute girl limping along in her miniskirt. As she got closer, she seemed to recognize me and started to hobble away in the opposite direction. At first this was comical to me, seeing this girl furiously limping away like Ratso Rizzo.*

  Then I wondered, who was this girl? Why’d she run from me? It came to me. She was the hippie girl I shot in the foot when I did the robbery in the railroad apartment with Herbie. For a second or two, standing on the street watching this girl I’d crippled run away made me feel sick.

  Many guys I’ve met, they do bad things and become afraid to look at what they’ve done. They pretend it wasn’t them who did those bad things. Or they tell you they had a good reason to do it. I’m not afraid to look at what I’ve done. I can tell you I did many wrong things to people for absolutely no reason. Even that day on the street when I saw that little girl limping, I didn’t feel bad for long.

  This is why I say my real calling in life is Satan. I don’t know what Satan is. Maybe Satan is just an organizing principle, like gravity. Whether Satan is a real person or something else—whatever He is—His is the side I am definitely on.

  Even though I care about my son today, I still have no heart for most people. I remain evil. When I tell you about the bad things I’ve done, I generally don’t feel bad.

  I feel worse thinking of football games I lost money on.

  * Character with a pronounced limp played by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy (1969).

  23

  J.R.: By 1972 there was tremendous pressure on the family because of the Bobby Wood murder. They never charged me or Andy, but the FBI was all over our clubs. To my uncles, heat was just a cost of doing business.

  They had no idea I was running around like a maniac doing stickups in the streets. But it did get back to them when I robbed wiseguys. This was another side of how crazy I was then. Robbing hippies wasn’t enough. I liked ripping off wiseguys.

  I didn’t invent this. Wiseguys will always rob each other if they think they can get away with it. I had a guy tell me about a wiseguy poker game in Brooklyn where they had $50,000 on the table. The information I got was, these were nothing guys to Gambino. Andy said it would be okay to rob them. The challenge was, the game was on the fourth floor of a building in Brooklyn. They had guards on the ground floor, so nobody could get in—they thought.

  I wanted to make fools of them. That was my kick. I got some guys who weren’t afraid of heights, and we went onto the building next door. We put boards from the roof of one building and walked over to the other. We climbed in a window of the bathroom to the apartment where they had the game. We walked into the front room and did the stickup.

  We wore ski masks, but the next day Andy told me one of the guys at the table recognized my voice. He was a friend of my uncle Sam. I had to give the money back. Nobody was mad at me. They understood I’d been given bad information about who was playing the game. People could accept an honest mistake.

  YOUNGER SOLDIERS were going crazy in the 1970s as they saw all this money flying in the streets for pot, acid, and cocaine, while they still had these old-fashioned bosses who would not let them deal in anything except heroin. The soldiers who were stuck with bosses like this were easy to rip off. If they lost their money in a drug deal, they couldn’t go whining to their bosses. So I’d approach these guys, tell them I could let them invest in a drug deal, and then make up some reason how I’d lost their investment. “Hey, bro. The cops arrested the courier at the airport. It’s all gone.”

  I did this many, many times to wiseguys. Through Jack Buccino and his concert promotions, I found a print shop where they could make fake newspaper articles. I’d tell some guinea soldiers I was sending a guy to Mexico to buy ten kilos of cocaine. They’d give me their money, and I’d make a fake news clipping from a fake Texas newspaper about a guy busted at the border with cocaine in his car. This would be my proof. Even if they suspected I’d tricked them, they could not take it to the family.

  Finally I ripped off some wiseguys who earned the name “wise.” They figured out how to get their money back from me. After I took their money to make a drug score that supposedly went bad, these guys got smart. They went to their capo and said I’d ripped them off by promising to sell them stolen bearer bonds that I never delivered. Everybody knew I had helped steal the bearer bonds from Merrill Lynch, so their story was believable.

  After they told their capo, he took it up to my uncle Joe.

  Even Andy couldn’t help me out of this one. I met my uncle Joe at a coffee shop by his house on Staten Island. By then my uncle was so old, his bodyguards had to practically carry him to the table. When he ate, it was a disgusting mess the way he drooled. Because he was half deaf, you had to lean in to his ear and shout. But when he spoke, he was as sharp as ever. When we sat at the table, he said, “Tell me the fucking truth. Did you rob those guys?”

  “Yeah, I did. I pretended like I had bearer bonds to sell them.”

  There was no way I would tell my uncle I had set these guys up in a drug deal.

  My uncle looked at me for a couple of seconds like he forgot who I was. His eyes got very dull. But then the lights flashed back on. He said, “You got to pay their money back and give me an extra ten percent for the trouble you made.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My uncle still looked at me. He had cream cheese all over his face from the bagel he was trying to eat. But his mind was as evil as ever. He said, “Jon, something ain’t right. I don’t believe none of this trash about bearer bonds. Don’t bullshit my ass here.”

  Andy and I thought we were the smart, new Italians. But the old mustache Italians, like my uncle Joe, even with his brain half gone, could not be fooled.

  What could I do? I told him these guys wanted drugs, and I robbed them.

  My uncle Joe actually smiled. “You’re a little motherfucker. You’re a cocksucking prick. You do this all time, I’m sure. And you don’t give me a cut?”

  I told him the truth, that anything I did I paid a cut to Andy, and he always pushed this up to the family. I did not pay the IRS, but I paid Gambino.

  My uncle did not want to hear how loyal I was. He said, “Jon, next time you rip somebody off, I don’t give a fuck if it’s drugs, or if you take teeth out of their mouth, you bring me my fucking end, you little prick.”

  Then he asked, “How much money have you made in the last year robbing people like this?”

  I told him I’d made $100,000 in robberies.

  “That means you’ve made at least three hundred thousand,” he said. “I’m going to teach you a lesson. From now on, you steal any money in the street, I’m your partner. I want twenty-five percent off the top.”

  That old prick. My uncle Joe was shaking me down. The man had no heart.

  Just like the Mafia guys I ripped off couldn’t tell their bosses they were into drugs, I also couldn’t say nothing about my uncle shaking me down for my drug rip-offs. Drugs is what really fucked up the Mafia. They made all the
se idiotic rules against them, and then everybody went crazy scheming against each other. The Mafia should have known better. All the old guys got their start when the American government tried to enforce Prohibition. They saw how idiotic that was. Then they went and made a Prohibition of their own against drugs.

  I’ve never liked rules. I am a criminal because I hate rules. But there I was sitting across from this old fucker, my uncle, telling him I’d follow his rules. I saw no choice at the time. I was a part of the family.

  To live in New York, I had to be in the family. I could not imagine being in any other city. I had no concept of any other place. Within a year of my uncle shaking me down, it would become obvious to me, and to everyone, that I couldn’t be in New York anymore. It would take a girl breaking my heart—if I can use that term—as well as a few more murders to make me leave the city and the family for good.

  But first I would have to get shot in the ass.

  24

  J.R.: What I was thinking by getting involved with the wife of an older wiseguy is beyond me. I wasn’t thinking with my brain, obviously.

  The woman’s name was Marie. Her husband had a guinea name like hers: Luigi. Luigi worked with Phyllis’s father. That’s how I met him and his wife. He was an older man in his fifties and she was in her forties.

  I can’t account for why I started fucking Marie. She was the oldest lady I’d ever been with, but I could not get enough of her. She did things I’d never imagined could be done. While we were fucking, Marie could wrap her feet behind my head and give me a toe massage. This old broad could fuck for hours—fucking me, massaging me. Marie taught me this: Some women have a great pussy, no matter how old they are.

  Marie and Luigi had a little rathole apartment off of Mulberry Street. Luigi had never been a big earner. He was just a big dumb greaseball who did whatever his boss told him. I hated going to that place. It was depressing. But Marie had to stay home so she could answer the phone whenever Luigi called. I swear to you this old lady could fuck, give me a massage, talk to her husband on the phone, and smoke half a pack of Pall Malls at once. I knew in the back of my mind I should not go there. But I’d fall into that pussy of hers for hours. It felt like she had golden wheels inside her pulling me in.