American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  This made Gary’s mind crazed. His father, Vincent, was crazed, too.‡ Gary came to me and said, “Jon, we got to take care of this.”

  I said, “Gary, forget about it, man. Obviously, you have the right to kill a person who kills your brother, but this is Meyer Lansky’s stepson.”

  “Fuck this shit. I’m going to do what I want to do, and I don’t give a fuck.”

  Gary was beyond reason. I didn’t give a fuck about this personally. Couple of drunk guys get into a gunfight at a bar. Big deal. My worry was our coke business. Me and Gary were not partners exactly, but if he started a war and brought heat down, that could affect me. I’d learned my lesson from all the shootings that went down in New York. I told Gary, “If I can’t talk you out of this, we will work on this together and do it the proper way.”

  Bobby, who was getting more involved in the coke business with Gary, saw things the same way. We’d help Gary, so getting rid of Richard would go as smooth as possible.

  IF YOU’RE going to kill somebody connected to a guy like Lansky, you’ve got to ask permission. If you don’t ask and you just kill a person—even if it’s a guy like Richard, who you have a right to kill because he shot somebody for no reason—then a Lansky-type guy has every right to do whatever he wants to you. That’s how wars get started for no reason.

  In normal times the Mafia would have gotten involved. But the shooting happened right in that period when all the old guys were dropping dead. The old Mafia families were in chaos. So me and Bobby and Gary had to take care of this situation on our own.

  They stuck me with the job of approaching Lansky to get permission to kill his stepson. Gary had seen how Lansky had talked about my father when we met, so in Gary’s mind Lansky and I had a deep connection. In my mind, I wasn’t so sure. Lansky’s story about knowing my father was just words from an old man in the back of a restaurant. But Gary was too involved to make the approach to Lansky. And Bobby, because of his gambling business, definitely wanted to stay in the background. It was up to me.

  In our circle, my lawyer Danny Mones knew Lansky the best. Danny told me the best way to approach him was to go to the beach by the Imperial House where Lansky lived.* His wife had a pair of little yappy dogs that he walked every morning on the beach. That was how the last giant of the old generation lived.

  I went there a couple mornings but just missed him both times. Finally, I saw him come down on the beach. I will hand it to the guy, he walked around with no bodyguards. He was just an old man walking his toy dogs. After the life he’d lived, to be alone on the beach without a worry in his head showed his true power.

  When I walked up to him, he looked like he was expecting me. I said, “My friend is very upset.”

  He said, “My stepson is very stupid, but I told his mother I would do the best I could for him. She wants nothing less. That’s all I can do.”

  Even though he said he was doing his best, the way he spoke sounded the opposite of that—like he’d given up and was washing his hands of the matter.

  I said, “What else can you do? People are upset.”

  “They have a right to be.” Then he said, “You’re a gentleman for coming here while I walk my dog. Let’s talk again sometime.”

  A few days later Danny Mones told me I should go to Pumpernick’s,† where Lansky liked to eat breakfast. I went in the next morning after I spoke to Danny, and Lansky was at a table eating his nova lox. When I walked up to him, he nodded and said, “You’ve got a free hand. God bless you.”

  He knew his stepson was a fucking moron. The poor kid he shot never did nothing to nobody, and we handled this the right way. We asked his permission. He gave us a pass to kill Richard Schwartz.

  ALBERT SAN Pedro was hot to help us. He liked killing people, and as crazy as he was, he was loyal. He was also smart. He was building his empire inside Hialeah, but he always looked for ways to prove his worth to Italians.

  Albert being Cuban was an advantage. The cops were so stupid, they did not imagine Italians and Cubans could work so closely together. Anyone could see the Cubans parking cars at Italian nightclubs, but the idea that they could also be partners in a high-level hit did not occur to the cops. They still looked at Cubans like they were monkeys.

  Albert said he would give us his best shooter, Ricky Prado. Ricky was clean. He’d never been arrested. He had his day job at the fire department, and he worked at the detective agency Albert ran. He was above suspicion.

  I worked with Ricky when he delivered cars to us with Albert’s coke. He was very dependable, and he was a quiet, clean-cut kid.* But I didn’t have confidence in him to commit murder. Ricky had embarrassed me a few months earlier. It was a little incident, but since I was getting involved in a murder with the guy, it stuck in my mind.

  Albert had asked for my help in getting him a dog. I called my friend Joe Da Costa in New Jersey, and I said, “Joe, I need a very bad dog.”

  Joe came to Miami with Sarge, a monster German shepherd. As you know, if you want your dog trained good, you need to be trained with him. Albert understood this and had Joe stay for a week in his house to work with him. Joe was a monster of a guy, and he brought a couple of his guys, who were also monsters, with him. I’m over there one day, and Ricky’s sitting with me, Joe, and his monster guys. Ricky’s a little guy, and I guess he wants to show how big he is, because he starts talking about the special training he has to kill people, the karate he knows.† It’s odd, because Ricky almost never talks. Suddenly, he’s telling these guys his hands are lethal weapons and garbage like that. He’s such a joke that when Ricky turns to leave, one of Da Costa’s guys points to Ricky’s gun and says, “Should we steal his lollipop?”

  They laughed about that for days. I was not at all happy that Albert wanted Ricky to be the shooter. But I couldn’t say to him, “Albert, I lack confidence in your hit man.” He would have taken that as a personal affront.

  When I met with Ricky, he was very excited about the job. He told me he was going to dress up in disguises for the hit—put on a tourist shirt, wear a fake beard—and I got a sinking feeling. I thought, This kid has watched too many spy movies.

  Of course, I was proved wrong. Ricky did an excellent job killing Richard Schwartz.

  * Craig Teriaca was killed at the Forge on June 30, 1977.

  * Bay Harbor Island was and is a fashionable shopping, nightlife, and residential district by Miami Beach. It is a series of islands connected by causeways and bridges to the wealthy residential islands where Jon and his friends congregated.

  * Not long after Schwartz’s arrest, recordings of emergency calls from the bar to the police—which would have been helpful to the prosecution—were mysteriously destroyed in the evidence room.

  * The building where Lansky lived is still located at 5255 Collins Avenue.

  * Prado was twenty-seven at the time.

  † Though witnesses differ as to whether the shooting stemmed from gunplay gone bad or from a serious argument, most agree that Schwartz appeared under the influence and out of control.

  † Schwartz’s mother, Thelma, had been with Lansky since the late 1940s, and he was, by some accounts, devoted to her.

  † A Miami Beach deli that closed down in the 1980s.

  † During this period Prado was involved in a martial arts training gym in Miami with another of San Pedro’s enforcers, Miguel “El Oso” Ramirez.

  ‡ Prado, who was a full-time Miami-Dade fireman at the time he was moonlighting for San Pedro, has a note in his employment files with the fire department that on the night of the shooting he took time off “for an emergency to give blood.”

  ‡ Miami-Dade police investigators have speculated that the attempted car bombing of Forge owner Al Malnik in 1982 was carried out on the order of Vincent Teriaca, who held Malnik personally responsible for the shooting of his son. This theory was never proved.

  39

  AUGUST 2010—BAY HARBOR ISLAND

  E.W.: Jon and I step out of his Cadillac
near the murder scene at East Bay Harbor Drive and 96th Street. The summer heat is softened by a breeze from Biscayne Bay. Jon wears shorts and a festive blue-and-white-striped shirt that looks like something Simon Le Bon could have worn in a 1980s Duran Duran video. He gestures to a footpath by the nearby Seascape Club apartments. The path leads to a small dock, but we can’t see it because it’s hidden by dense, flowering bushes. “That’s where I waited in my boat the morning Ricky shotgunned Richard Schwartz,” Jon says.

  We cross the street to a row of shops along a brick, tree-lined sidewalk. We pass a real estate office and a pet-grooming clinic, then reach Asia Bay Restaurant. In 1977 this was Richard Schwartz’s gourmet hamburger shop, the Inside Restaurant. “He came in to work here every morning,” Jon says.

  We walk to the parking lot behind the restaurant. Jon stops by a parking space near the rear entrance. Jon says, “This is where Richard Schwartz would park his car. This was the place to get him.”

  From where we stand, it’s about seventy-five feet to East Bay Drive and the footpath to the dock on the other side of the flowering bushes. Jon says, “After Ricky shot him, all he had to do was walk to the dock where I was with my boat. My job was to dump the murder weapon in the ocean.”

  J.R.: In an ideal world, you would murder somebody in private. It’s safer that way. You can take your time and make sure there are no witnesses. But Richard Schwartz must have at least suspected somebody was going to kill him, and when a person’s expecting to be murdered, it’s harder to get close to him in a private place.

  It’s not easy to shoot somebody on the street. You’ve got witnesses. Unexpected things can go wrong. Bay Harbor only has a couple bridges to get on and off. But one advantage of shooting somebody in the open is that’s where they least expect it.

  What made the parking lot by Richard Schwartz’s restaurant good was that the dock was close, so Ricky could give me the gun after he used it. The first thing you want to do when you shoot somebody is get rid of your weapon. I can’t emphasize this enough. Separate the shooter from his gun. If they catch the shooter, they don’t got the weapon. If they don’t got a weapon, it’s much harder to make a case. Always eliminate the gun, and your life will be a lot easier.

  Me and Ricky rehearsed the murder on many different days. When we first started watching the hamburger shop, we couldn’t believe that Richard, after he bonded out, came in to work every morning. He lived in an apartment with his family a couple blocks away, but the lazy fuck always drove to work in his blue Cadillac. Maybe he felt safer driving. Sometimes he came at nine. Sometimes later. But he always came.

  Ricky timed everything. He was going to carry a sawed-off shotgun in a Bal Harbor Mall shopping bag. He was going to use a double-barrel, break-action gun because it wouldn’t eject shells. He didn’t want to leave nothing behind. It would take less than a minute to walk from the parking lot to the dock. The dock had bushes by it, so nobody could see Ricky hand the gun off to me. Then Ricky would walk through a half-empty lot to 96th Street and East Bay Harbor Drive. Albert or one of his guys would pick him up and drive him off the island.

  I have to say, Ricky impressed me. When he first talked to me about using disguises, I thought he was out of his mind. But when we practiced, he always looked different, but normal, not like a freak you’d point at or remember.

  Gary and Bobby decided they were going to come on my Cigarette boat with me. Gary obviously wasn’t going to miss this. Bobby came along to keep an eye on Gary. We had to talk Gary out of doing the actual shooting. Then he wanted to take his boat to dispose of the weapon. He wanted to have that connection to the murder. What good is revenge if it’s not personal? But Gary’s boat only had one engine. If, God forbid, it threw a rod or blew a gas line when we were making the getaway, we’d be sunk. We went with my boat, because I had twin engines.

  We killed Richard on a weekday.* Me and Gary and Bobby docked my boat before nine. We brought some fishing gear and goofed around on the boat, like we were getting ready for an outing. Gary was clowning around. He snorted spoonfuls of coke whenever he thought Bobby wasn’t looking. Both of them were laughing. Then boom boom. Not thirty seconds later Ricky came down the path. He had on a tourist shirt and a Panama hat. He carried the shopping bag from the Bal Harbor Mall. When he got a few steps from my boat, I saw a little smile on his face. And why not? He’d done his part correctly.

  When Ricky pulled the sawed-off gun from his shopping bag, Gary stuck his arm up and waved, like he wanted Ricky to throw it. He was almost close enough to hand it over, but Ricky threw it. He was done. He walked off and caught his ride out.

  Gary was so high, he dropped the gun into the water. Bobby was pissed. The water’s not deep, but he had to push the boat back from the dock so Gary could dive in and get it. While we were doing our Three Stooges act on the boat, we started to hear sirens and then this god-awful screaming. Some girl was just yelling her guts out in the parking lot. At least we knew Ricky must have hit the mark.*

  Witnesses said they heard gunshots and ran to the rear parking area where they found Schwartz dying on the pavement next to his blue Cadillac. A passerby said he thought a man had walked up to the Cadillac just before the shooting.

  —Verne Williams and Bill Gjebre, “Lansky Stepson Murdered,”

  Miami News, October 12, 1977

  The killer fired from about 16 inches away, and the blast went through him, shattering windows on both sides of the car.

  There were no shell casings left behind and no tire marks.

  Schwartz’s daughter, Debbie, ran from the [family’s] apartment just blocks away. “I knew this would happen,” she screamed when she saw him lying in the street. “Daddy is dead.”

  —“Revenge Thought Murder Motive,” UPI, October 13, 1977

  What a bunch of knuckleheads we were. We must have spent five minutes fishing the gun from the water. By the time we got the boat going, all hell was breaking loose in the parking lot. But nobody paid any attention to us.

  I drove the boat a mile south to Haulover Cut and out to Biscayne Bay. I got up to speed, and ten miles out Gary dropped the gun into the bottom of the ocean. Gary was beside himself. He got rid of the gun that killed the guy who’d killed his brother. Bobby opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Gary and he started whooping and high-fiving each other, like we’d won the big game.

  It was strange. I got a little blue that morning. I looked at Bobby and Gary and thought, There’s been so much killing. People disappeared all the time in Miami, and it didn’t make the news. Some of the people who died deserved it. Some didn’t. A few were my friends. If the swamps and the oceans ever dry up down here, I’d be curious to see what they find at the bottom.

  The morning we killed Richard Schwartz, I got tired. But you shake that off. We had a nice steak dinner that night. I heard from a cop Danny Mones knew that Richard Schwartz’s teenage daughter was the first to find him after he got his face blown off.* Now his little girl could feel how Gary felt when he lost his brother. Fair is fair. I wasn’t glad, but I hope Richard Schwartz felt good for what he made us do.

  * Tuesday, October 11, 1977.

  * Prado’s employment records at the Miami-Dade fire department indicate that the Schwartz murder occurred on one of his days off. In 1991 Prado became the target of the same federal task force that was investigating Albert San Pedro for racketeering. Witnesses and forensic evidence linked Prado to arsons, assaults, and three murders allegedly carried out on San Pedro’s orders, in addition to that of Richard Schwartz. In July 1991 federal investigators interviewed Prado at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, about his relationship with San Pedro. He admitted having worked for him in the 1970s but denied any involvement in or knowledge of criminal wrongdoing carried out by San Pedro. Following the intervention of E. Page Moffett, a top CIA attorney who later became the general counsel for the National Security Agency, the investigation into Prado’s alleged activities with San Pedro was abruptly dropped. Moffett made at
least one visit to Miami and lobbied the U.S. Attorney’s office there. Sources I interviewed who were involved in the matter say that Moffett argued that prosecution of Prado jeopardized “national security.” The CIA also refused to provide Prado’s major case prints to help FBI investigators match them to partial prints, believed to be Prado’s, found at a scene of another murder. But Prado received his greatest protection from the prior immunity deal U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen negotiated with San Pedro. When a judge determined in 1992 that San Pedro’s prior immunity deal shielded him from prosecution in the racketeering case, it became difficult to pursue charges against Prado. After the racketeering and murder cases against Prado disappeared in Miami, he rose through the ranks of the CIA and went on to become chief of operations at the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center, for which he was given the George H. W. Bush Award for Excellence for his service in the War on Terrorism. He retired from the Agency in 2004 as an SIS-2, the equivalent rank of a two-star general. In 2005 he became a senior officer in Blackwater, the private contracting firm now known as Xe. In 2009, after CIA director Leon Panetta informed Congress that the agency had created a possibly illegal “targeted assassination unit”—or “death squad” program as the media dubbed it—aimed at killing terrorists around the world, Prado was identified as the head of it. He was also outed as the man responsible for moving the “death squad” program to Blackwater in a no-bid contract. More recently, Prado has been the subject of an investigation into efforts he allegedly spearheaded at Blackwater to use dummy companies to procure weapons and commit other possibly illegal acts. Reporting on Prado’s activities at Blackwater on September 4, in the New York Times article titled “30 False Fronts Won Contracts for Blackwater,” James Risen and Mark Mezzitti wrote, “Among other things, company executives are accused of obtaining large numbers of AK-47s and M-4 automatic weapons, but arranging to make it appear as if they had been bought by the sheriff’s department in Camden County, N.C.” They added, “It is unclear how much of Blackwater’s relationship with the C.I.A. will become public during the criminal proceedings in North Carolina because the Obama administration won a court order limiting the use of classified information.” For the record, Jon Roberts first told his story of murdering Richard Schwartz with Prado to FBI agents in 1992—years before Prado had been publicly outed as a CIA officer. At the time Jon made his statements regarding Prado’s alleged role in the murder, investigators still hoped to bring federal racketeering or state murder charges against Prado, despite legal setbacks in their case against San Pedro. As one of those investigators, a former Miami-Dade Police Department detective and federal organized-crime-squad task force member, recently told me, “I am still hoping to put Prado away for murder.”