American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  * Schwartz was shot once in the torso, once in the head, and at such close range that wadding from the shotgun shells was embedded in his chest.

  40

  J.R.: My grandfather, Poppy, died before Christmas in 1977. He died in his bathtub. He liked to take baths. He took one, and his heart stopped. Poppy worked hard his whole life and had a good time fishing and writing his stupid poems. He was a good man. He loved water, and he died in a tub of warm water, so that was that.

  Poppy kept a jar with our grandmother’s ashes. He wanted my sister and me to mix them and spread them on the ocean in New York where we used to fish. He wanted to lie in the water with our grandmother by the city where they met and fell in love.

  I did not want to go out and freeze my balls off in the middle of the winter in New York dumping ashes off a boat. My idea was to wait until summer, but my sister got really freaked out and made things difficult.

  JUDY: I dreamed that Poppy was trapped in the ash jar and he couldn’t be with our grandmother until we mixed their ashes in the water. It was a terrible dream. I called Jon and said, “Poppy wants to go into the ocean now. We can’t wait.”

  Jon can be such a good brother. He dropped everything and flew to New York and rented a helicopter, and we went up over the water with the ashes. The pilot told us it was illegal to put ashes in the ocean where we wanted, but Jon informed the pilot the only way we were going to do it was his way.

  J.R.: When my sister called and told me about her nutty dream, I said, “This is ridiculous. This ain’t our grandparents no more. It’s a couple of coffee cans full of ashes.”

  But my sister can have a very strong will, and it’s easier not to battle her. So I came to New York. I got the helicopter. I argued with the pilot to let us dump the ashes where we wanted. We opened the door up to spread the ashes, and it was a mess. Freezing cold. Ashes blowing every which way. At least it got my sister off my back.

  JUDY: Did Jon tell you he cried? He became very emotional when we put our grandparents’ ashes in the water. Jon was so close to Poppy. I used to fly down and stay at his house on Indian Creek. As Poppy grew weaker, Jon had to carry him from the car in his arms. We had wonderful meals together. Jon can be volatile, but he was never volatile around Poppy. He was so caring around him.

  I know why Jon cried after Poppy died. He let go. Jon held everything in when our mother died. With Poppy, he felt safe because he knew Poppy loved him. Once he started crying, everything came out that he’d been holding back for years. He broke down. He finally cried for our mother. My dream was right. But it wasn’t just our grandfather trapped in that jar, it was Jon. His best side came out that day. I was so glad to see it. It became a joyful day.

  J.R.: My sister makes that nightmare helicopter ride sound like Gone With the Wind. I wasn’t crying. I had tears in my eyes because the wind was blowing Poppy’s ashes back in my face.

  41

  J.R.: I was twenty-nine when Poppy died. My whole life I’d used the thought process I learned from my father to survive. To say “crime doesn’t pay” is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I made $400 a month digging trees and $400,000 a month moving coke.

  I had so much money, I could have taken a couple of years off. But I never rested. Money was not my priority anymore. Coke dealing had become a kick for me, like the robberies I used to do in New York. Then, around the time Poppy died, the excitement I got from selling coke started to fade. I got bored. Luckily, in 1978 a new challenge came along. I shifted from being a seller to an importer. It happened when I hooked up with the Colombians.

  My connection with them came through one of the sons of Don Aronow. Aronow was the greatest racer and boatbuilder of all time.* His company built the Donzi boat I had up on Fire Island that Jimi Hendrix tried to water-ski off of. Remember my maroon Cigarette boat that Bobby Erra wrecked? I bought that in 1976 after I saw it at a boat show in Miami. At the time I hadn’t met Aronow. I saw the boat, fell in love with it, and when I told the salesman I wanted it, he said it wasn’t for sale.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “You’ll have to talk to Mr. Aronow.”

  Aronow’s showroom was also his factory. It was on Thunderboat Row, where the best racing boat companies in the world were located.† Aronow was the top guy on Thunderboat Row. When you walked in his shop, one wall showed pictures of him with famous people who bought his boats—Lyndon Johnson, Steve McQueen, the shah of Iran, George Bush.‡

  Don was a phenomenal salesman. He was tall. He looked like a movie star. He came off like a man’s man. When I introduced myself and told him I wanted the maroon Cigarette, he invited me upstairs to his office.

  This was like a luxury apartment. It had windows looking down on the floor where you could watch your boat being made. If you were a good customer, Don would invite you to parties up there. There’d be beautiful girls left and right. All beautiful women love riding on fast boats, so they’d beg to come to his parties. You could party all afternoon with one of these girls while you watched them lay the keel on your boat. That was Don’s secret to selling boats. It wasn’t just the boat you were buying. You were buying every beautiful woman you’d ever seen or ever would see, on top of the kick of driving the fastest boat in the world.

  When we met, Don told me he couldn’t sell me the maroon Cigarette because he’d made it for one of his girlfriends. That got me so hot for it, I offered him ridiculous money, and he finally agreed to take it.

  A month after I took the boat, I went back to his shop to tell him how happy I was with it, and when I came in, he accused me of screwing his girlfriend. It was one of the few times in my life a guy said something like that to me and it wasn’t true. I don’t know if his girl made this up to get him jealous or what, but he came on so strong, I never had a chance to defend myself. He shouted, “You’re a piece of shit. I sold you my best boat, and look what you did to me.”

  “Who the fuck are you, bro? A boat guy? You can take your boats and shove them up your fucking ass.”

  I was more hurt than angry. I’d just become friends with the best boat maker in the world, and now he wanted me out of his life. A couple days later Don asked me back to his shop. He said, “After you left, I spoke to somebody about you. I had no idea who you were. I apologize.”

  We never had a problem again. Don was not a bad guy. He grew up in Jersey. He did not come from money, but he married a wealthy girl whose father started him in home building. He did good with that and moved to Florida to make his name in boats.*

  Don was a born hustler. He sold boats to smugglers because his engineering and design made them so fast. And he used his friendship with George Bush to sell the government boats to catch the smugglers. What made Don a genius was, he sold the government boats that were a hair slower than the ones he sold the smugglers.† No way could he let the smugglers get caught. They were his best customers.*

  At the same time that Aronow was helping the government fight the war on drugs, he installed a fifty-thousand-pound boatlift behind his shop that he rented to weed smugglers. The smugglers would drive up to his shop with tons of weed in their boat, and he could lift the whole boat out of the water and put it on a truck that could then be unloaded in the privacy of a warehouse. Unloading boats exposed smugglers to the greatest risk of being caught. Don’s boatlift solved the problem. In the end, smuggling caused some problems for him, but he had a good run.†

  I never used Don’s boats for smuggling. They were strictly for pleasure. But his shop was like the main smuggler’s den in Miami. Everybody in the drug business hung out there. Once in a while Don would have to clear out the shop when his buddy George Bush would visit. The rest of the time, the place was ours. Everybody got to know Don’s sons. They were great kids. One got crippled in a car accident but managed to become a very good horse trainer after that. As far as I know, neither of his boys was ever involved in the coke business, but they had an idea what I was about. One day one of them came to me and said he
’d met a guy at the boat shop who he thought I ought to meet.

  By that time in 1978 Phyllis and I were still together, but I kept my own condo in Coral Gables for partying. I told Don’s kid to send the guy he wanted me to meet over there. In walks a stocky little Colombian guy in his twenties named Pancho. He looked like a peasant who someone had bought a suit and tie that they stuffed him into even before teaching him to tie his shoes. His English was terrible. When he smiled, he showed crooked gold teeth. He was a rough guy. I liked him.

  My Spanish, which I’d learned from hanging out with Cubans, was better than Pancho’s English. We went out to some clubs. We chased some girls, we did some lines. After a few nights of this, he said to me, “You know, I can get coke really cheap.”

  I hadn’t told him what my line of work was, but it was obvious enough. I asked what price his coke would be, and he named something that was way too high. I laughed at him. He said, “Okay. I’m going to bring you a friend. Maybe he can help you get a better price.”

  A week later Pancho shows up at my place driving a Rolls-Royce convertible. Next to him is a little kid with a face that probably couldn’t grow three beard hairs. The kid has long black hair. He almost looks like a girl.

  When I step up to the street, Pancho walks around and opens the door for this kid. The kid is wearing an electric blue jacket. He walks up to me, reaches his hand in, and pulls out a flask. “Beve, beve, beve”—drink, drink, drink—he says.

  I think he’s amusing, so I take the flask and drink. It tastes like I’ve swallowed a Molotov cocktail. My whole chest is on fire. I found out they call that drink aguardiente,* and it’s like the national drink of Colombia. They drink it like Gatorade.

  I’m coughing and fucking dying, and the kid laughs. He pats my back and says, “Hey, man. I’m Fabito. Let’s go have some fun.”†

  FABITO WAS twenty-one years old when I met him. He had recently arrived in Miami to help out with his family’s business. His father was Don Ochoa, the godfather of the Medellín Cartel.* In 1978 the Cartel was getting started. There were three sons in the family, Jorge, Juan, and Fabito, the youngest. Fabito came to Miami to help grow the family’s business. They were looking for people to help move their coke—to import it and distribute it. They already had Colombians in Miami and other cities moving coke. The harder part was getting it into the country. So Fabito was sending his bodyguard, Pancho, around to scout for guys to help him, and if they seemed reliable to Pancho, Fabito would meet them.

  I connected with Fabito at the time the coke business was taking off. He was in Miami to build his family’s empire, and I helped him make it. In this, I found my true life passion. It was beating the U.S. government. That’s what smuggling was about. It got me off harder than anything I’d ever done. I was never addicted to coke, but I definitely got hooked on smuggling it.

  * “Between 1963 and 1975, Aronow won two world powerboat racing championships, 3 U.S. titles, set numerous speed records, and became known as ‘the godfather of the powerboat industry.’ ” Elizabeth A. Ginns, “The Tale of Two Cities,” Power & Motor Yacht Magazine, June 2003.

  * Aronow moved his family to Florida in the early 1960s, after he became obsessed with the idea that New Jersey was going to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Shortly after he arrived in Miami, the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed Florida to the brink of a nuclear attack. But Aronow stayed, because by then he had taken up his new obsession, racing boats.

  * The powerboat industry was decimated by the oil shocks of the 1970s. Purchases by drug smugglers were key to the industry’s survival.

  * Aguardiente is a contraction of the words meaning “water” and “fiery.” In Colombia it is mainly consumed by people from the mountainous parts of the country—also where the coca leaves grow the best.

  * His name was Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, but he went by the honorific nickname “Don Ochoa.” Ochoa, who died in 2002, was from a long line of wealthy landowners and politicians in Colombia. For his entire life he denied he had any involvement with the Medellín Cartel. His sons, Fabio, Jorge, and Juan, were all key members.

  † Thunderboat Row, along the main channel into Biscayne Bay on 188th Street, was “a quarter mile long street once redolent with the smell of curing fiberglass and the sound of big engines.” From the previously cited “The Tale of Two Cities.”

  † There is no evidence that George H. W. Bush had improper dealings with Aronow. However, when Bush became vice president and served as President Reagan’s point man for the war on drugs, the Customs Service did award Aronow’s firm a lucrative contract. He built them a fleet of trimarans, which were theoretically faster than his Cigarettes, but only on flat seas. On rougher seas the Cigarettes that Aronow sold to smugglers easily outran the boats he sold to the Customs Service. The program was widely regarded as a boondoggle, as well as an embarrassment to Bush, who had, with great fanfare, personally run vice-presidential speed trials of Aronow’s boats and had pronounced them “unbeatable.”

  † Aronow was gunned down outside his Thunderboat Row boat shop on February 3, 1987, by a drug dealer who felt he’d been swindled by him.

  † Fabio Ochoa Vasquez. Jon refers to him as Fabito, the affectionate form of his name, which loosely translates as “Little Fabio.”

  ‡ George H. W. Bush, then CIA director, was—like Jon—a devotee of Aronow’s race boats and has owned several.

  42

  J.R.: Fabito’s father, Don Ochoa, was a great big fat man who loved to ride those small white horses, Paso Finos. Some fat guys, when they ride horses, look ridiculous. Don Ochoa was not a ridiculous figure. He was a fine breeder of racehorses,* but his greatest accomplishment was building the Medellín Cartel. The Colombians made more money in a few years than the Mafia did in a hundred years.† To understand what the Ochoas did, I need to break down a few things for you. Drug smuggling in Florida was invented by the Cubans. Many of the Cubans that the Mafia brought to Miami when Castro came in got recruited by the government to fight in the Bay of Pigs.* When the invasion didn’t work out, they went back to working the nightclubs on 79th Street.† When American kids started smoking weed in the 1960s, the Cubans, trained by the CIA in how to use boats and planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion, decided to put their skills to use by smuggling weed.‡ That’s how the smuggling business started. They’d go down to wherever the pot grew in Jamaica, Colombia, or Mexico and pick it up and take it to Miami.

  With pot, the easy part was growing it, and the hard part was smuggling it. Cocaine was different. Coca leaves only grow in certain parts of Colombia and Bolivia, and you can’t just pick the leaf and snort it up your nose. Making cocaine is a process. It takes chemicals. It takes workers. It takes time. You need a factory to make it in.

  At the end of that process you get a product that in the 1970s was worth ten times its weight in gold.* Many Colombians rose to the challenge of making cocaine. The smarter ones didn’t just want to throw a $50,000 kilo onto a boat driven by a Cuban and wave good-bye. They wanted to control the whole process.

  When Don Ochoa, who was based in the town of Medellín, started off, he had advantages. He was already rich. He owned ranches all over Colombia. He owned a chain of restaurants. The guy had judges and politicians in his pocket from the start. As a businessman, he knew how to run an organization.

  Other Colombians weren’t as smart. They’d harvest the leaves but couldn’t make factories to process them properly. That was why Albert’s cocaine had quality problems. His cocaine was made by half-assed Colombians.

  Don Ochoa ran his business like IBM. If he sent five hundred kilos into the United States, each one was marked with a symbol. The symbol told the people smuggling it who that kilo was going to and how much money the Colombians were supposed to get for it. The symbol also told the Colombians where that kilo was made, how much the chemicals cost to make it, where the leaves came from, what kind of purity it had. Ochoa’s people knew everything about every fucking kilo they ever shipped. They controll
ed the kilo from the time it was leaves on the tree until right before it got snorted up some idiot’s nose in a bathroom in Los Angeles or Des Moines. They had their business correct.

  Don Ochoa was like the CEO of the business. His oldest son, Jorge, was like the president. When they started off, everybody in Colombia was fighting each other. But the Ochoas ran their business so good, when they went to their competitors in Medellín and said, “Let’s band together, and we’ll all make out,” the other guys decided to join them. Obviously, the Ochoas had to fight a few battles to get on top, but that’s basically how the Cartel started.

  People in the Cartel had different skills. In the beginning Carlos Lehder was their best transport guy.* Pablo Escobar was a street guy who started off fighting the Ochoas, but they made peace and he took over running the processing labs.† Tough as Pablo was, the Ochoas always had the upper hand because they owned the leaves.