by Jon Roberts
The cocaine business was ideal for Albert because of the Mafia hypocrisy about not dealing most drugs. The old Mafia bosses left cocaine wide open for the Latins.
When I started buying from Albert, he kept his source secret from me. I knew he got it from Colombians running it through the Bahamas, because everyone did back then. Every couple of weeks he was getting maybe two to five kilos. Between my uncle Jerry and the country club people I was selling to, I could move half a kilo in a good week.
Once I met Albert, Gary Teriaca was actually kind of relieved. Gary was not a street kid, and Albert scared him. So now I started picking up the coke from Albert, but we’d store it at Gary’s house. That made Gary feel like he was still in control. I did not sell to Gary’s customers, and he didn’t sell to mine. We got along fine.
• • •
BESIDES BEING tough, Albert was just a really strange guy. Even though he acted Italian, he always had a stupid-ass Cuban cigar in his face. He was truly the king of the Cubans in Hialeah. Albert’s big cause was San Lazaro. Do you know who San Lazaro is? San Lazaro was a guy who got wounds all over his body and was left in the street to die, but some dogs licked his sores, and instead of dying he got better. I’m not saying this is a true story. It’s what they say is true in the Catholic Church,* and Albert really believed it. San Lazaro was his protective saint. He was nuts about his saint, because he thought San Lazaro kept him alive when he got ambushed behind his Corvette.
Albert paid off the priests at the local churches in San Lazaro’s name. When he started buying racing horses, Albert named his stables San Lazaro. Inside his house it got even nuttier. Albert lived with his parents, and his mom, a very devout lady, was always shouting blessings to San Lazaro when she’d serve us food. To please his mom, Albert filled the house with life-size San Lazaro statues. They were made of porcelain and painted like living people. His mom put human-hair wigs on them. Albert bought a robe made by monks that was supposedly spun from gold. He told me it cost $30,000, and he kept it on his favorite San Lazaro statue.
When you get friendly with most guys, they want to show you their sports cars, or their illegal machine guns, or they got women on the couch that will flash their tits and go down on each other when you snap your fingers. Not Albert. You got friendly with him, and he and his mom would take you into the special room to show you his robe of San Lazaro. His house was a madhouse.
Every year Albert held a party for his patron saint. In the early days he would put a San Lazaro statue on the back of a truck and parade it through the streets of Hialeah. Then his crew would drive it to a vacant lot and feed everybody roast pork. Later it got fancier. He started renting the rooftop ballroom at the Doral Hotel for his San Lazaro dinners, and he invited all the judges and politicians he was bribing.*
As Albert and I did more work together, he introduced me to his other religion: Cuban voodoo Santeria. That was some crazy shit, bro. His mother would make witches’ brews in the back of his house, and he had African Cubans who would come over dressed in white suits and cut the heads off of chickens and goats. One time Albert and I were involved in a murder together,† and he had his voodoo priests come over to cut the heads off of chickens to make sure it went right.
You can imagine how his house was decorated. I’m not saying Albert didn’t have taste, but the way he was brought up, he liked things that were disgusting. There were these giant disgusting couches and gold shit everywhere, mixed in with his crazy San Lazaro statues. In one room he kept a voodoo caldron, filled with voodoo dolls and crosses. His house was like mixing together the gaudiest Italian restaurant with a horror movie.
Albert had no sense of humor. He didn’t laugh or play jokes. Me, Gary Teriaca, Bobby Erra, we all had boats. But Albert never wanted to go on anybody’s boat. He was not into chasing women like a normal guy. When I first met him, he had one wife. Then he moved a much younger girl into his house, his second wife.‡ Albert prided himself on being a family man. For the guys that worked for him, he went to their weddings, christenings, all that. He was a devout guy, with the Catholic Church and with voodoo.
Did you ever see Goodfellas? Albert was like Joe Pesci’s character when he starts whacking everybody around him. When Albert would get paranoid, he would have to kill somebody. Without a doubt, he was nuts. He was gone. I mean, there was nothing to figure out. He was out of his mind. He was a psycho, and everybody knew he was a psycho. One day, you’d be with him, and everything was great. The next day he’d be screaming, “This motherfucker has got to get killed.”
One time it was the poor Cuban kid who washed his cars. All of a sudden he had to be killed.
“Albert,” I said, “he’s barely eighteen. What did he do?”
“He was looking around under my car. What the fuck was he looking at?”
“Albert, this kid is very thorough. He was probably looking for more dirt to clean.”
“I’m telling you, man. There’s something very wrong with him.”
When Albert got something in his mind, that was it. The next day, or even the next hour, that person would be gone. There’d be somebody new out there washing his car.
They never proved anything,* but this one disappeared and that one disappeared. He called it “feeding the swamps.” That’s how everybody got rid of bodies in Florida. Whack the guy, chop him into chunks with a chain saw, throw the parts into the swamps, and let the gators do the rest. In the movie Scarface they showed the Colombians killing people with chain saws. They didn’t invent that shit.
Everybody around Albert was petrified of him. He burned so much shit down, he corrupted so many mayors, so many police. If he couldn’t buy you with money, he burned your house down. That was it. There was nothing to talk about. “You don’t want to sell me your thing? Okay, nice meeting you.”
Next day everything you have is burned to ashes. No maybes about it. He got mad one time because they ran out of his favorite sweet rolls at the bakery. That night his guys poured gasoline down the bakery air shafts, and boom, problem solved. No more bakery.*
Albert did not take drugs that I saw. He was straight as a motherfucker, and he went to church, but he was completely gone.
AS FAR as we went, I never had a problem with Albert. He made my life a lot easier. When I started working with the Colombians, I always had Albert to back me up. After Mariel,† Miami filled up with the guys that came over on the boats and didn’t give a fuck about nothing. They were wild Indians. There were a few situations where I’d come across one of these guys, and I’d think, I’m going to have a problem with this asshole.
I’d go visit Albert and say, “I’ve got a problem with these Cubans over there.”
Within a matter of two, three hours, those Cubans would be walking into Albert’s house with their heads bowed, apologizing to me. Albert controlled the Cubans. Hialeah was his own world. Nobody could touch him there.
Now, as soon as Albert crossed the little bridge from Hialeah into Miami, he went from being king to just another crazy Cuban in a piece-of-shit Corvette. Upper-class society had gotten liberal enough in the 1970s that wops like Bobby Erra and Gary Teriaca could go join the top golf courses and clubs, but not an insane cross-eyed Cuban like Albert. Please. To the upper-crust people, Albert was, pardon the expression, the same as a nigger.
That boxed Albert out of the main part of the coke market. It wasn’t poor Cubans in Hialeah that were buying it. It was rich assholes. Albert needed people like Gary and me to move the cocaine he was getting, because the people who wanted to buy it wouldn’t let Albert in their clubs.
That’s why I always felt reasonably safe around Albert. He needed me. And with him backing me up, I was able to grow my distribution business.
* North Bay Village is a small municipality on three islands connected by a causeway to Miami Beach.
* San Pedro was shot outside his house in 1975.
† According to his ex-wife, Lourdes Valdez, San Pedro was born with a birth defect that made
him cross-eyed. She claims San Pedro made up the story of his eye being injured in the shoot-out because he thought it sounded better than being born with a birth defect. One of Albert’s childhood friends told me that in grade school kids taunted him by calling him Bizco—a derogatory Spanish term for “cross-eyed.” To hide his eyes, young Albert squinted, earning a somewhat improved nickname, El Chino—“The Chinese.”
* According to former Miami-Dade detectives I interviewed, San Pedro’s first significant run-in with the law occurred in 1969 when he discharged an antique Thompson submachine gun toward members of an opposing football team in a park after his team lost a pickup game. Nobody was injured, and according to police, San Pedro disposed of the weapon and evaded prosecution. In 1971, after shooting at two undercover cops making a drug buy, San Pedro was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and received probation. Anger management problems persisted. Police say San Pedro was arrested for beating a motorist with a tire iron following a traffic dispute. Later, San Pedro was arrested for pimping, assault, and robbery revolving around a scheme in which he used hookers to lure tricks to motel rooms where he would then rob them. Other assaults were connected to a freelance business San Pedro ran in which he offered to beat the crap out of anybody for $50. In 1988 he was convicted of cocaine trafficking and of bribing public officials in Dade County, for which he served three years in prison.
* San Pedro was later dubbed “The Great Corrupter” by the Miami press. From his earliest arrests, he skillfully evaded punishment by intimidating witnesses, destroying evidence, and paying off police, judges, and at least one mayor. By the late 1970s, he employed two professional state lobbyists to manage his political contributions. He is alleged to have paid reporters from the Miami News to write articles favorable to the politicians he supported. He also cultivated a friendship with local TV news reporter Rick Sanchez, who later went to work for CNN until he was fired in 2010 for making anti-Semitic comments. Years before that scandal, Sanchez was put on leave from a Miami TV station when police wiretaps revealed that Sanchez, a frequent guest in San Pedro’s home, had introduced San Pedro to officers of a local bank in return for unspecified favors. San Pedro’s efforts at community outreach paid off. He developed a close relationship with U.S. Representative Claude Pepper, who lobbied the state to pardon San Pedro for his 1971 felony conviction. In a letter to the state parole board, Representative Pepper described San Pedro as a “friend, a conscientious young man, and a very responsible businessman.” San Pedro received similar help from the state’s attorney general, Robert Shevin, who filed a letter with the parole board stating that he found San Pedro’s “integrity, character, and personal conduct to be irreproachable.” After his 1988 cocaine trafficking and bribery conviction, San Pedro cut a deal with U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtenin to provide evidence for a federal corruption case against Hialeah mayor Raul Martinez. At the time of this deal, Martinez was the leading opponent of Lehtinen’s wife, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in a congressional race. Lehtinen’s corruption case against Martinez damaged his credibility as a candidate in the race that Lehtinen’s wife subsequently won. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is today the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The corruption case against Raul Martinez was later thrown out because, in the words of San Pedro’s own attorney, “They had nothing on Martinez, because San Pedro gave them nothing. He tricked Dexter Lehtinen and the entire federal government.” Lehtinen resigned his position as U.S. Attorney after the Justice Department investigated him for ethical violations unrelated to the San Pedro case. The immunity deal Lehtinen gave to San Pedro was so extraordinarily broad, it protected him from a subsequent 1991 federal racketeering case that tied him to drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder. San Pedro, one of the most significant crime figures of Miami in the ’70s and ’80s, went free in 1996. But he never received American citizenship, and in 1996 he was brought before an immigration court. During the hearing, San Pedro’s stepdaughter testified that he began raping her at age thirteen. Her allegations of child molestation—supported by the fact that San Pedro fathered two sons by her—were deemed credible enough by the judge to issue a deportation order. Yet because the U.S. government does not have normal diplomatic relations with Cuba, the deportation has not been enforced. San Pedro still lives as a free man, and according to his attorney, currently he is a significant player in the outdoor advertising business in Miami.
* In the federal racketeering case against San Pedro, one of his former bodyguards testified that San Pedro ordered him to burn down his aunt’s home on the adjacent lot after she refused to sell it to him. The house in Hialeah, which San Pedro still inhabits, is a multi-story structure of approximately 8,000 square feet, surrounded by walls and occupying several adjacent lots. The rest of the street is occupied by single-story, 1,100-square-foot homes.
* Enrique “Ricky” Prado served in the air force from 1971 to 1973. In 1974 he joined the Miami-Dade Fire Department. While working as a fireman and paramedic, he also became a corporate officer in San Pedro’s Transworld Detective Agency. When Prado worked at the fire department, his personnel records indicated he periodically lived at San Pedro’s house. In 1981 Prado was hired by the CIA, and he was stationed in Central America until the mid-1980s, where he is believed to have been involved in training Contra paramilitaries.
* In Cuban Santería, San Lazaro—Saint Lazarus—is a key figure. But the Santeria version of Saint Lazarus combines elements of two different Lazarus characters who appear in the Bible and melds them into a single narrative.
* “The last two of [San Pedro’s] $50,000 parties were held at the posh Doral Hotel in Miami Beach, and among the guests were Hialeah mayor Raul Martinez, Representative Claude Pepper, Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud, WSVN-Channel 7 weekend anchor and reporter Rick Sanchez, Miami police major Jack Sullivan, ordinary cops, political fund-raisers, lawyers, various right-wing bravos, and a load of judges. San Pedro brought along a nine-foot statue of the saint, dressed himself in a tuxedo, was flanked by bodyguards, and posed with the assembled celebrities.” This account is from page 82 of Pete Hamill’s book Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was, New York: Back Bay Books, 1997.
* The 1991 racketeering case against San Pedro was to include an indictment for four predicate act murders until it was struck down on the basis of the immunity deal U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen provided him. In addition to the slack the U.S. government cut San Pedro to commit mayhem, even the Mafia gave him a wide berth. In 1984 San Pedro shot reputed mobster Carmine Scarfone in the arm while having drinks with him at Capra’s Italian restaurant in Hallandale. A couple of days later, Scarfone’s home was riddled with machine-gun fire and set ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Despite there being witnesses, Scarfone declined to testify against San Pedro for shooting him.
* According to San Pedro’s former bodyguard Miguel Ramirez, on orders from their boss in 1975, he and future CIA officer Rick Prado burned down San Bernardo Bakery on Flagler Street, using so much gasoline that the initial flash burned their eyebrows off.
** In 1989 Miguel “El Oso” Ramirez was convicted of shooting and beheading undercover DEA informant Larry Nash.
† Hialeah is a working-class community near Miami International Airport that became almost entirely Cuban in the 1970s.
† San Pedro’s younger brother, John, was a police officer in Hialeah. In 1986 San Pedro was caught bribing several officers in the department—but not his brother, who continues to serve today.
† San Pedro kept a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather in his bathroom and Al Capone’s biography on his office desk.
† Jon discusses this in chapter 38.
† During the Mariel boatlift in 1980, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro allowed a hundred thousand Cubans to leave for Florida, declaring, “I have flushed the toilets of Cuba on the United States.” Many were violent inmates released from Cuban prisons.
‡ In 1
975 San Pedro purchased Transworld Detective Agency.
‡ San Pedro’s stepdaughter Jenny Cartaya began living with him as a “wife” when she was fourteen or fifteen. Cartaya, whose testimony in 1996 led to San Pedro’s pending deportation order, described the house to me much as Jon did. She alleges that San Pedro first raped her under a statue of San Lazaro at age thirteen and used to beat her regularly with his leather weight-lifting belts. She became his wife after, according to her, San Pedro set up her mother in a cocaine bust and sent her to prison. Cartaya gave birth to two sons by San Pedro, whom she raised along with her mother’s son. The sons were raised as brothers, though they were simultaneously half brothers and uncle-nephew—a family situation right out of the film Chinatown. When Cartaya was nineteen, San Pedro had the Hialeah Police Department arrest her for being a danger to herself and attempted to confine her to a mental hospital. Cartaya eventually fled the state.
§ El Rubio was convicted of manslaughter shortly after Jon met him.
32
J.R.: You remember Bernie Levine, the fat little Jewish kid from Jersey who turned on the Outcasts to heroin in his mom’s basement? By the early 1970s, Bernie had moved to San Francisco and was managing a recording studio that the Grateful Dead used. We got in touch, and he told me people were crazy about coke in San Francisco. He could sell anything I could get him for an outrageous amount because he was hooked in with celebrity blowheads like Jerry Garcia.*
I said, “Bernie, come to Miami.”
Bernie got on the next plane. He had gone from being a pudgy kid to a fat fuck of a man. He must have weighed three hundred pounds. I knew a Chinese restaurant in Coral Gables that was sensational. They had duck that was so tender, you could touch it with a spoon and the meat fell off the bones. Bernie inhaled two whole ducks and became a very happy fat man. We went to his hotel, and I showed him some coke I was getting from Albert. Bernie did a line and said, “Your coke is no good for San Francisco.”
