American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  ‡ The Belcher family owned the northern half of Great Stirrup Cay, a private island in the Bahamas. They sold it to the Norwegian Cruise Line in 1977 to be developed into a resort.

  ‡ In 1986 then-governor Graham endured the biggest political scandal of his career after state troopers discovered that his wife had taped a note to the mirror of his bathroom in the governor’s mansion urging him to pardon Albert San Pedro, a criminal associate of Erra’s. Graham did not issue the pardon. But according to Mike Fisten, a former Miami Dade Police Department detective who, while serving on a federal task force, investigated Erra’s gambling operations in the early 1990s, numerous calls were placed between a phone used by Erra’s organization to take illegal bets and a private line at the governor’s personal home in Miami. Fisten says his request for a subpoena to tap Erra’s phone line and record calls to the governor’s private phone line was denied by his superiors.

  30

  J.R.: I was not thrilled to do a drug rip-off. Since all the chaos in New York, my appetite for stickups had gone away. But in the position I was in, even making a thousand dollars would be a big score. And it gave me a way to bond more with Bobby and Gary.

  Bobby and Gary had a country club friend who was into coke. Gary told the guy I was a new connection. I would bring coke to his house. He lived in an apartment off Sunset Drive in South Miami. They told me he might want to frisk me for a gun. Since coke is so small, I couldn’t carry a package big enough to hold a gun. I used an old trick. Before I went in the victim’s apartment, I hid my gun in a fire extinguisher box by his door. I’d put him at ease, make an excuse to step out, and get my gun.

  I walked into the victim’s apartment clean. I had bought an Izod shirt and Sperry Top-Siders like country club people wore. I had a sweater on my back. The victim didn’t even search me. Bobby and Gary were already there. We acted like we’d never met before in person. The victim had a nice pad. One wall had shelves with a quadraphonic stereo and big speakers in tall wooden cabinets. The victim offered me a drink. We sat on his nice chrome and leather couches, talked about the Dolphins, his quadraphonic sound system, blah blah blah. Then I say, “You got the money?”

  “What about what you got?”

  “No offense,” I say, “but there’s three of you and one of me. I didn’t carry nothing in here. You show me the money, and I’ll get my product.”

  I’m supposedly selling him four ounces of blow for $8,500. The victim walks into his laundry room. I hear him open his washing machine. That’s the moron’s hiding place. He comes out and shows me his cash.

  “Thanks, bro,” I say. “I’ll get the shit from my car.”

  I step in the hall, take my gun from the fire extinguisher box, and go back in the apartment. When I push my gun in the guy’s face, he almost pisses his little tennis shorts.

  Bobby and Gary put their hands up. I push everybody against the wall. I tell Bobby and Gary I want the money from their pockets. I see in their eyes, they’re almost pissing their pants, too, but from trying not to laugh. I decide to give them something even funnier. I say, “Now, take off your pants and get on the ground.”

  Bobby says, “What do you mean, take off my pants?”

  “I don’t want you assholes running after me.”

  Bobby’s angry now. I look in his eyes and let him see now I’m the one laughing inside. Then I leave them all ass-naked on the floor.

  When we met up at Sammy’s Eastside to divide up the money, Bobby said, “You motherfucker! Take my pants down?”

  We laughed, but I wanted Bobby to know I didn’t give a fuck who he was or who his father was. Now he knew I wasn’t like Gary. I wasn’t his little brother asking for approval.

  • • •

  NOW THAT we’d had our fun, I told Gary I liked the coke business. I wanted to hang out with rich people at country clubs and supply them, like he did. Gary didn’t see it the same way. He didn’t want a partner, but he’d figured out by now I wasn’t the kind of person he could brush off.

  He told me if I found customers, he’d supply me. Obviously, Gary wasn’t going to tell me where he got his coke from. He mentioned it was from a Cuban, but that was all. Every few weeks Gary would get a hundred grams* from the Cuban, and that’s what he sold to me and to his customers. That’s how small the business was in 1974.

  The only rich degenerates I knew in Miami were people I met when I did landscaping. One was a man named Judge Alcee Hastings.† I bought a quarter ounce of coke from Gary and went to Judge Hastings and asked him if he’d like to buy some.

  “Are you kidding me?” he said. “I’ll take the whole quarter.”

  He was a happy judge.

  That proved it to me. When you got into the coke business, you were promoted in the social world. Selling coke, now I was best friends with a judge.

  I then made contact with my uncle Jerry Chilli. We met at the coffee shop at the Thunderbird Hotel on Collins Avenue, which was his unofficial main office. My uncle Jerry was in the old mustache generation, but guys in his crew were moving coke. If I could obtain coke in quantity, his guys would move it.

  I was in a sweet spot with the Mafia. In New York people had forgotten about me. In Miami people were coming to know me. But I wasn’t in anyone’s crew. I had the benefit of being connected to wiseguys, but none of the downside of being in the Mafia.

  SEVERAL MONTHS after Gary, Bobby, and I ripped off his friend with the nice quadrophonic hi-fi, Gary found out the same guy had got his hands on a kilo of coke. I said, “Gary, we got to get that kilo.”

  Our plan was, Gary would go visit his friend, and I’d pretend that I’d followed him, then rob the two of them. The victim recognized me as soon as I kicked open the door. He tried running, and I knocked him down and gave him a few kicks. He whimpered like a girl.

  I said, “Gary, how do you put up with this?”

  The victim looked at Gary and said, “You mean, you’re in on this?”

  I said, “You idiot. He was in on the first one.”

  The victim said the strangest thing: “Now I’ve got nobody.”

  He started to physically cry. He was shaking. He was bawling his eyes out. He wasn’t psychologically fit to be a criminal.

  Gary said to me, “He knows who I am now.”

  Just to put some fear into the victim, I said, “Let’s put him in the dirt.”

  “Please, don’t kill me!” The victim started to cry so hard, he vomited.

  I said to Gary, “Does this weepy bitch have a mother?”

  “What about my mom?” the victim said.

  “I will let you live, but if you ever give me or Gary any trouble, I will skin your mother alive.”

  I knelt down and put my gun in his mouth and made him listen to the details of how you skin somebody, based on my experience. He shit his pants. It was disgusting, but I knew he was never going to be a problem for me or anybody.

  After I joined the Palm Bay Club, I started to run into the guy, who was a member, and we got friendly. His mother was a member, too. But he never introduced us.

  GARY GOT pissy with me about ruining his friendship with his Palm Bay friend. I was irritated that even though I’d taught Gary how to rob people, whenever he sold out his coke to his customers, he left me high and dry. But things worked out in a funny way. I found some wacked-out hippies selling coke in Coral Gables, and they led me to Gary’s Cuban supplier.

  The hippies lived in a commune house. They had Indian guru pictures on the walls. The guys walked around in swami diapers. The girls had dots on their foreheads. People would go nude in the house. They didn’t care who walked in. They’d sit on the floor nude and meditate. They’d fuck in the bedrooms with the doors open. They were real freaks. They actually preached that nudism was mentally healthy. It takes all kinds to make the world go.

  The nudist I dealt with was a skinny guy. When I first met him, he wore the guru diapers like the other hippies, but as he relaxed he got more open. I’d meet him in a side
room, where he’d sit on a pillow with a poncho over his lap. Then he’d start talking and the poncho would fall off. Please. I do not want to do a business deal with some freak with his dick hanging out. This was not my scene.

  I made a few buys from this kid and hinted that maybe we could all do business together, if he turned me on to his supplier. The kid would only tell me he got his shit from a Cuban. I was tired of that game. On my next visit, I put my gun on the kid and said, “Give me all your shit.”

  “Be cool, man,” he said. “This coke is from Albert San Pedro.”

  “I don’t care if it’s from Ricky Ricardo.”

  “You don’t want to piss off Albert. He’s a crazy Cuban. He’ll kill you.”

  The nudist kid did not lack confidence. He stayed calm with my gun on him. He obviously thought the Cuban was such a bad guy, I should be afraid. That was his error.

  “Fuck you. You’re a jerk-off sitting there with your dick hanging out. I’m fed up with your hippie bullshit.” I kicked the kid so hard on his dumb little pillow, he flipped back and his head went into the plaster of the wall. The nudist kid had balls. He said, “Fuck you.”

  I laughed. “I did you a favor. Now when you show your busted-up face to the Cuban, he’ll believe you when you say you got robbed.”

  As a favor, I kicked him again on the way out.

  It wasn’t two hours later that I got a call from Gary Teriaca. “Did you take coke from some kids in Coral Gables?”

  “What if I did?”

  “They went to the Cuban and told him what you did.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Their Cuban is the guy I get coke from. He says he wants to kill you.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “He’s willing to meet you.”

  “He wants to meet me or kill me?”

  “Probably both.”

  * A hundred grams is roughly four ounces, or a quarter pound. Jon, like most drug dealers, freely mixes his use of the metric and English systems for weights.

  † Judge Alcee Hastings was a Miami circuit judge when President Carter appointed him to the federal court in the Southern District of Florida. In 1981 he was indicted for taking a $150,000 bribe from a reputed mafioso. In 1988 the U.S. Congress impeached him, and the Senate convicted him of bribery and perjury—making him only the sixth federal judge in history to have been so removed. Disbarred and seemingly unfit for decent society, he found refuge in the United States House of Representatives in 1992. He persuaded the voters of Florida’s 23rd District to elect him to Congress, where he serves today. Still a complete dirtbag in the estimation of many, on August 31, 2010, the Wall Street Journal identified Representative Hastings as one of the most profligate and possibly unethical spenders of junket money in Congress, and on March 8, 2011, in the article “Alcee Hastings’ Scandals Collide in Sexual Harassment Lawsuit,” Bob Norman reported for the Broward Palm Beach New Times that Representative Hastings was the subject of a sexual harassment suit.

  31

  J.R.: I met Albert at the Fun Fair in North Bay Village.* The Fun Fair was a hot dog stand with an arcade of amusements behind it. I’d just ordered my hot dog—no mustard, extra kraut—when I saw a big pockmarked Cuban with really strange white-blond hair approach me. He was Albert’s main bodyguard, El Rubio—which is Spanish for “Blondie.” Later Rubio and I got to be friends. He was a really good heavyweight boxer. Not that he was going to win the title or anything, but he knew how to punch. After Rubio checked me out, Albert stepped out of a black Corvette by the curb.

  I judge a person by how he carries himself. Albert was short, but he had a big upper body like a weight lifter. He was twenty-five years old, but he had the face of a man. He dressed nice, but not in country club Izod shit. He wore a suit, like you’d picture John Gotti after he got famous, only Albert had a tropical look, with a bright shirt. He didn’t have any kind of Spanish accent. He sounded more like a New York wiseguy than me.

  Albert wore sunglasses, but you could see that one of his eyes was not right. A few months before we met, he was ambushed outside his house and shot five times.* Albert said he had taken cover behind his Corvette and when the guys who were trying to kill him shot his Corvette, pieces of the fiberglass body splintered off and took out his eye.† He was blinded by his own Corvette. They put in a piece-of-crap plastic eye, and it never looked right. No matter how much money he got, Albert’s eye was a piece of shit. It looked like an eye from a cheap doll a kid would have, and it wandered around in his head. Trust me, you did not want to look at Albert when he had his sunglasses off. With his eyes going in different directions, it always looked like he might be staring at you. And once you figured out how crazy Albert was, being stared at by him—even if it was from a plastic eyeball—would make you feel uptight.

  The fact that Albert was walking around a few months after he got shot five times showed he was a tough guy. No matter how disgusting his eye looked, you couldn’t take that toughness away from him. There was no bullshit at our meeting. He said, “I know you took the coke from that kid. He can’t pay me my money because you robbed him.”

  “Did you know this kid you got helping you, he walks around in his house with his dick flopping out? He’s a fucking nudist.”

  Rubio nodded. Obviously, he was the one who dealt with the naked commune bullshit.

  “I don’t care if these kids got cocks growing off their faces, they work for me.”

  “I don’t want to have a gun battle with you,” I said.

  “Let’s work it out the best way for both of us.”

  Albert and me decided that the most fair way for him to get his money back was for me to start supplying the nudists with his coke. I became Albert’s distributor. I’d charge them twice the normal price until Albert got his money back, plus interest on his loss. That was their punishment for being stupid enough to get robbed. What did they need money for? They lived in a commune and didn’t wear pants.

  THAT’S HOW it started with Albert and me. We worked together for more than a decade. He was a good guy. He’d been into wrong stuff his whole life. He was born in Cuba, but his parents took him to Miami when he was in diapers. His father had been a horse trainer at a track in Cuba controlled by Patsy Erra. In Miami, Albert’s father got a job as a milkman, and he did odd jobs for Patsy Erra. When Albert grew up, he was loyal to Italians, but he didn’t want to be a gofer parking cars at the Dream Bar and breaking knees for pocket money.

  Albert did some collections for Bobby Erra, but he also built up his own power in the Cuban community. He’d been running around with guns since he was a kid, getting his reputation as strongman.* By the time I met him, people called him “the Fixer” because he could make any problem go away. He was a genius at working the system.*

  From the time I knew him, Albert lived in Hialeah,† in a house by a water-treatment plant. When I first went there in 1975, it was a little cinder-block working-man’s house. As Albert grew more successful, he took over the lots next to his and built his house bigger and bigger. He turned it into a truly fucked-up mansion that looks more like a prison than a home that a normal human being would want to live in.* You would have to be a deranged maniac to live in a house like the one Albert built. Plus, even if he made it nice, it was still next to the water-treatment plant.

  Because Albert was paranoid, he built walls and guardhouses around his house. He put in cameras. He made his windows with bulletproof glass. He kept a weapons armory, hidden in secret closets behind his bookshelves. He paid off the police to keep a squad car parked outside the house.† He owned his own detective agency so the thugs who worked for him could be licensed professionals and legally carry concealed weapons.‡ His inner-circle enforcers, who lived at his house, were all Cubans he’d grown up with. They’d started off in high school playing football and bodybuilding at the gym together. Rubio was the one I got along with best, but he went away after he got in some trouble.§ Albert also had another big Cuban named El Oso, which
means “The Bear.” El Oso was a tough kid,** and his job, in addition to collections and burning down buildings, was to start up Albert’s cars and make sure they didn’t blow up. Albert’s most trusted guy was Ricky Prado. He was a shorter person like Albert, but he was into martial arts and had served in the military in Special Forces. Ricky did not come off like a thug. He was quiet and professional. He was so good that after he worked for Albert, Ricky was hired by the CIA.*

  Albert was his own one-man mafia. Even as a twenty-five-year-old kid when I met him, he thought of himself as the Cuban godfather.† He was into many, many schemes. He put money in the street, ran card games and betting. He operated a bolita—a Cuban numbers game. He ran whores at airport hotels. He set buildings on fire all over Miami. He was a famous arsonist. He did it to take over properties or just to instill fear in people he didn’t like. My father would have understood Albert.

  But even as he rose up in his neighborhood, he stayed loyal to Bobby Erra. Anything he did that might be in competition with the Italians—like betting and the vig—he kept it inside Hialeah, where the Mafia didn’t give a shit.