American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Just like I knew would happen, one night I was at her place screwing my brains out when we heard the front door open. It had to be Luigi.

  I wasn’t afraid of Luigi. But he was a typical macho Italian guy, and if I confronted him, he would lose face and be forced by his pride to try to kill me. No matter what happened, it would be a losing situation. If he killed me, my uncles would want payback. If I killed him, he had people that would want payback. Two people like us should never try to kill each other. The best thing was for me to try to run out of there.

  Luigi’s footsteps came toward the bedroom door. The only way out was the window to the fire escape. But when I grabbed the window, it had burglar bars on it and was locked with a padlock. I asked Marie, “Where’s the goddamn key?”

  She was lying back, with her legs open showing her bush like she didn’t have a care in the world. She said, “How do I know where the key is?”

  When Luigi came in the room, I had nothing on but my wop T-shirt. His wife was there with her tits out like it’s a normal night at the opera. Luigi pulled out his gun.

  This wasn’t like when the guy shot me outside Hippopotamus. I had no plan in my head. I jumped off the bed and fucking ran. Luigi started shooting.

  I made it past Luigi into the living room, and a shot hit my back. The force of it knocked me down. He had shot me at the coccyx—my tailbone. Everybody has a tailbone. It’s like if you’re a monkey, it’s the bone that you have so when you walk on all fours, your tail sticks up. It’s one of the more useless things a person has on his body. I’d never thought about mine until it was shot.

  This hurt so bad, I thought he’d hit my spine and paralyzed me. Normally, I could take a lot of pain, but my mind checked out. I felt like a bug stuck to the floor with a pin. I could not move. Later I found out that when Luigi hit my coccyx, the bone shattered and the splinters exploded into my intestines. The bullet tore my pancreas and part of my stomach. I had blood coming out of my asshole and my mouth. I was puking blood and bile. I nearly passed out, and if I had passed out, Luigi would have shot me again.

  Luckily when I saw him coming toward me, I got enough control of my brain to try to reason with him. I said, “You know who I am. If you shoot me again, you better put a bullet in your own head, bro. Because you will pay. Everybody will talk about you.”

  That was one positive of dealing with a macho Italian guy. If he killed me, he would have to justify it to my family. To justify it, he would have to tell everybody I was screwing his wife. Luigi knew that, and the last thing he wanted was everybody laughing at him because of what his wife did to him with me. I saw in his eyes he had some reason in his head.

  He walked closer to me and spat. He began kicking me. His natural man reaction took over. He kicked and kicked. I couldn’t fight back. I put my hands over my balls and jammed my head under the couch, so it was harder for him to kick my face in.

  It takes a lot of energy to beat somebody. Luigi’s kicks slowed. He started to wheeze. He stopped kicking and went silent. Then he said, “Well, what do we do now?”

  I looked up at him and said, “Are you a scumbag? Put me on the street and call an ambulance.”

  “I’m not calling you an ambulance.”

  I said, “You got your satisfaction. If you don’t want trouble, you got to fix this.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  This asshole dragged me down I don’t know how many flights of stairs. I’ve seen corpses rolled up in carpets that were treated more gently than me. After he dumped me on the sidewalk, the motherfucker did not keep his word. He never called the ambulance.

  It was the dead of winter. I got nothing on but my T-shirt. I was on the sidewalk bleeding out my asshole, throwing up chunks of shit I’d never seen before. It took a stranger who saw me there to finally call an ambulance.

  I WOKE in the hospital a day or a week later. I don’t know. I felt worse pain in the hospital than when I was shot. I started to scream, it was so bad. Then I heard somebody laughing. I looked over and saw two cops.

  Here’s why I hate cops. I’m screaming bloody murder, pissing in a tube, and they start their typical jerk-ass shit, wanting to know who shot me. They know I’m not going to say a word, but they got to play the game.

  Finally, my uncle Sam showed up with some of his goons to watch over me. With them in the room, I passed back out and slept very peacefully. When I finally woke up, my uncle Sam was leaning over me, laughing. He said, “You little motherfucker.”

  I saw Andy in the room with my uncle. Andy must have told him about me and Luigi’s wife. My uncle said, “I’ll take care of everything with the family, but you’ve got to think of a story for the police.”

  After my uncle left, one of his goons said, “Why do you want to be fucking a lady forty years old?”

  “Don’t knock it until you try it,” I said.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Andy said.

  Andy was laughing, but I could see in his eyes he was tired. People were getting worn down by the trouble I made. When a wiseguy got shot, the police made special reports for the FBI. The heat believed that if one of us was shot, it was the start of a new war, and so they would question everybody for weeks.

  In the family, everybody looked down on screwing another guy’s wife. When I got a little better, my uncle Sam, who normally would laugh with amusement at the things I did, came to me with a black look in his eyes. He said, “You ever screw someone’s wife again, I’ll cut your cock off myself.”

  Phyllis was another one not happy with me. As open-minded as she was, my getting shot for screwing the wife of her father’s business partner was rubbing her nose in it. Phyllis had her natural woman reaction, just like Luigi had his natural man reaction. She sent her sister Fran to tell me not to come home until my wounds had healed. Phyllis did not think it was right she should nurse me back to health for the trouble I got into from screwing another woman.

  I understood why Phyllis put me out, but it caused something to happen that I hadn’t expected. I fell hard for another girl.

  25

  J.R.: Andy and I kept an apartment on the Upper East Side as a party place. We sublet it from a friend of Bradley Pierce’s who had decorated it very weirdly. It looked like a spaceship inside, with plastic chairs shaped like eggs and blinking chrome lights. The walls had paintings of Chinese ladies in dresses. When we first took the place, Andy and me cut holes in the mouths of the ladies in the pictures and stuck cigarettes in them. I went there to recuperate.

  For many years I’d carried a pimp cane—an oak stick with a handle shaped like a dog’s head with diamonds for eyes. Now I had to use the cane for real. Every step I took hurt. Going to the toilet was agony.

  One day I’m lying on the couch snarfing up some Chinese takeout when there’s a knock on the door. I limp over, open the door, and see a beautiful girl standing there, Vera Lucille.* I had met Vera at Hippopotamus a few weeks before I was shot. I met her through Patsy Parks, who was in the group of party girls that followed Bradley Pierce to his different clubs. Patsy Parks was a half-assed model I never thought much of. She only stood out because she wore a cross on her neck like a Catholic schoolgirl. When I saw that cross, I’d usually walk in the opposite direction because she was never my cup of tea. But one night I saw her with a sensational girl, Vera. She was a French girl who was petite and dark haired like Phyllis, but with a personality that was the opposite. There was something warm about her, not hard and scheming like Phyllis. I felt it the first time I met her. But I met many cute girls, and this one fell out of my mind until the day she stood in my doorway with some crescent rolls she’d picked up at the Brasserie.*

  “I heard you were hurt,” she said.

  It floored me that this girl had been thinking about me. When I invited her in, there was nothing I could do but lie around. Vera came every day and sat with me for hours. I was in too much pain to sleep with her. She would sit, and we would talk. She was a smart girl. She had come to
New York to study at Barnard College. But she wasn’t from a rich family. Her father sold fish from a cart by the road in a small town in France. She carried a picture of this man at his stand selling fish. Can you believe that? God, she was unbelievable. Vera had an innocent mind. She truly believed I was a good guy.

  Even before I touched Vera’s body, I started to think about how I could get away from Phyllis. Even though Phyllis had thrown me out, in her mind this was temporary. To her, we were still married.

  When I got my legs back, Vera and I kept a low profile going out. We spent a lot of time in the Village at little places like El Faro*—my favorite Spanish restaurant in New York—and out at a house in the Hamptons.

  IN THE winter of 1971, Andy rented some cottages on the beach south of Acapulco, Mexico. He went with a girl of his, and Vera and I met them there. This was one of the best weeks I’d ever had. The thing to do there was ride horses. Vera loved to ride. I had ridden a couple times in Texas when I lived there with my sister. The horses in Mexico were easy because they knew the trails. We rode them along the surf. You’d see nobody for miles. The waves would roll up, and the horses had confidence in the water, so you could ride them in the ocean. When we got hungry, we’d take a boat out to an island with a shack where they cooked fresh, warm-water lobsters in hot sauce and butter.

  Nobody had a care in the world down there. The other people in the cottages were all from Europe. The women walked around with no tops. But it wasn’t like being at a Playboy Club. They weren’t hustlers. Everybody was relaxed. Vera and I met another couple from France, and we became very friendly. We started this joke that I was going to go to France and work for her father in the fish business. It was a joke, but in my head it was a fantasy I could live in. Maybe I could get away from it all.

  BUT WHEREVER I go, I meet people like me. Illegal people. One day Vera and I were at the pool, and a kid about my age came over and started talking to us. This guy looked American, but he spoke with a Spanish accent. “I’m Carlos Hill,” he said. “I have a club in town called Carlos’s. Please come tonight as my guests.”

  Carlos’s was a Mexican version of a New York steak house. Next door there was an illegal casino. Vera and I went with Andy and his girl. Carlos Hill hosted us the entire night. Obviously, he was a sharp kid, and he was into the same things as Andy and me. Once he broke out the cocaine, we really bonded. Andy and I told him about our nightclub business in New York, and Carlos said, “You work with Gambino?”

  “Why would you say that?” I said.

  Carlos said, “My mom is from the United States. She came here to hide.”

  “Who the hell is your mother?” Andy said.

  “Virginia Hill.”*

  Carlos claimed he was the illegitimate son of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill.† I never found out if his story was true, but he was obviously a connected guy, and I could see in his eyes he had a crazed blood in him, like me.

  Vera had a great time at Carlos’s restaurant and clubs. She was naïve. She really didn’t understand what I was truly about. She didn’t understand that her friend Patsy who had introduced us was a half-a-whore party girl. Vera was a college girl from France. She was clueless.

  As we got friendlier with Carlos Hill, I got a sinking feeling. One side of me wanted to know more about what he was into, and the other side didn’t want Vera involved. I wanted her to stay naïve.

  Vera had classes starting at her college, so she decided to fly back to New York. Andy and his girl went with her. I stayed another week. Carlos wanted to introduce me to a friend.

  The morning after Vera leaves, Carlos calls me. “Come out to the pool.”

  I walk out and see a little Mexican guy sitting by the pool in cowboy boots. Carlos says, “This is my friend, the mayor of Guadalajara. He’s a maniac.”

  Carlos points to six guys sitting with the mayor. “These guys are all his killers.”

  Everybody smiles. The mayor doesn’t speak English, but Carlos is translating. The mayor points to a skinny kid with a fuzzy mustache in his group of killers. “This one is like my son,” the mayor says. “Rafa Carlo Quintero.”*

  The universe has funny rules. I’m on vacation with the girl of my dreams, and the next thing I know I meet a guy claiming to be Bugsy Siegel’s son who introduces me to the biggest drug smuggler in Mexico. A few years later Rafa Quintero would become very important to me and Pablo Escobar.

  But at that time I hung out with the mayor of Guadalajara. He was a character. He had all these young girls with him. He points to one and says, “I fucked her last night, and I found out she lied about her age. She’s sixteen. My limit is fourteen.”

  The mayor wanted to take me to Guadalajara to show me what he promised would be the Greatest Thing in Mexico. He wanted to drive me in his car. In Mexico there were no convertibles that you could order from the factory. The mayor had taken a Ford 500 and sawed off the top. The seats were upholstered with furs from Mexican jaguars. We set off in the mayor’s convertible. Outside Acapulco we get pulled over at a roadblock run by the Mexican army.

  The mayor points to the trunk and says, “Footballs, footballs”—using the English word. He opens the trunk and shows the soldiers ten “footballs” inside. These are packages in brown paper shaped like soccer balls. The mayor cuts one open to show the Mexican soldiers, and the “football” is made of coke. I look at these soldiers and think, Great. I’m going to a Mexican prison.

  But the mayor is smiling. He hands the commander of the soldiers a “football.” The commander sticks his knife into the coke and snorts. He lights up and slaps the mayor on the back for having such good coke. This football is his payoff. Next thing I know, the soldiers are standing next to the mayor taking pictures. The mayor takes one soldier’s rifle and poses like he’s going to shoot him in the head. Mexico was truly nuts.

  We finally get to the mayor’s house in Guadalajara. I had thought “mayor” was an honorary title. But my friend is the actual mayor—or at least the top political guy in town—who lives in a mansion, with police outside guarding it. They unload the footballs from his car. After we clean up and snort a bunch of lines, the mayor says, “Now. I’m going to show you the Greatest Thing in Mexico.”

  It turns out the Greatest Thing in Mexico is located in a Guadalajara whorehouse called Del Noche El Dia. That’s where the mayor takes me. He has a special table at the bar on the first floor. The place is filled with fourteen-year-old girls in bikinis. They’re coming up to him and saying, “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”

  Something about the mayor with these young girls turns my stomach. But the mayor is very happy. He stands up. “Now I will show you the Greatest Thing.”

  “Greater than this?” I say, looking at the roomful of teenybopper whores.

  The mayor is giggling as he pulls me into a theater. At the front is a stage with a band. There’s a singer in a blond wig, and a magician pretending to saw a girl in half.

  The mayor points to the stage. “Here it comes,” he says.

  A curtain opens. There’s a donkey with three whores standing around him. Have you ever seen a donkey cock? It’s not a small thing. These whores start touching it. They are dressed in French lace, but the whores must have come straight from the farm. They know exactly how to handle that donkey. He gets hard, and one of the whores slides under him on a table so he can fuck her.

  I know I’m a freak for sex, but this is disgusting. Enough is enough. I really am not enjoying the Greatest Thing in Mexico. This poor donkey has enough problems pulling a plow, or whatever he does for a living, without these whores making a spectacle of him. I know I’m fucked up, but this sickens me.

  The mayor opened my eyes to why I dislike politicians. People like me, people on the streets, we know we’re bad. Politicians do the same things we do, but they act like they’re such good people, giving speeches, handing out medals to crooked cops. Politicians are the worst scumbags I’ve dealt with.

  I left Mexico with a bad feeling. Vera showed
me the differences between our lives. Her life was riding horses on the ocean. Mine was sitting with a dirty mayor at a donkey show. For the only time in my life—until I had my son—I got the idea of trying to go to the other side. On the plane ride back to New York, I thought about trying to get more serious with Vera.

  * Vera Lucille is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s former girlfriend.

  * The informal yet chic French restaurant located at 100 East 53rd Street since 1959.

  * A Spanish restaurant at 823 Greenwich Street, established in 1927 and still open today. It is better known for the kitschy murals of flamenco dancers on its walls than the quality of its food.

  * Hill was the longtime girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who worked with Meyer Lansky and Jon’s uncle Joseph Riccobono in Murder Inc. and went on to develop Las Vegas. Siegel was murdered in 1947 when his Las Vegas investments on behalf of the Mafia failed to turn profits quickly enough.

  * The Mexican drug lord arrested in 1985 for torturing to death an American DEA agent. He was convicted and remains in prison in Mexico.

  † While Virginia Hill was known to have taken several trips to Mexico, there is no evidence she ever had a son there.

  26

  J.R.: When I returned to New York, I had a problem. My friend Vincent Pacelli was getting married. Vincent was expanding his heroin business into Chicago, and he was marrying the daughter of one of Sam Giancana’s* top bosses from Chicago. The marriage was like a business deal. This is what I hated about the Mafia. Everything people did was decided according to what was best for the families.