by Jon Roberts
Don Ochoa sat in the background. He put everybody out in front of him. Pablo Escobar became the top enforcer for the empire. He took the limelight. But Don Ochoa was the smartest of them all. While everybody else was out fighting his wars, he sat at his ranch and let the money come to him. He rode his horses and ate great food. He was just like any other fat fucker sitting on top of a big corporation.
* In his self-published autobiography, Don Ochoa wrote of himself, “Don Fabio [Ochoa] is to Colombia’s horse world what Garcia Márquez is to Colombia’s world of letters.”
* The Bay of Pigs was the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba undertaken by a CIA-trained army of Cuban exiles. Many of those exiles worked for Mafia-controlled businesses in Miami before and after the botched operation.
* Gold hovered at around $200 per ounce in the mid-1970s, meaning a kilo of gold was worth about $7,000. With a kilo of cocaine wholesaling for up to $50,000 and going for two or three times that amount on the street, it was far more valuable than gold.
* Lehder was a Colombian of German extraction. Originally a car thief in Medellín, he pioneered use of the Bahamas as a transport hub for moving the Ochoas’ cocaine into Miami. He was among the first Colombians to push aside Cuban smugglers. By the late 1970s, he fell out of favor with the Ochoas because of his megalomania—insisting he sit on an enormous gilded throne during business meetings—and because of his adoration of Adolf Hitler, which he expressed by wearing swastikas and greeting associates with Nazi salutes. In 1987 he was extradited to the United States, where he is serving a long prison sentence despite his requests to be transferred to prison in the “Fatherland”—Germany—where he believes he would be more comfortable.
† When Jon uses the phrase “the Colombians,” he is usually referring to members of the Ochoas’ Medellín Cartel, by far the biggest of the cartels based in Colombia, but there were others, such as the Cali Cartel. Comparisons between the American Mafia and the Colombian cartels are not easy. One estimate of Carlo Gambino’s personal wealth at the peak of his power in the 1960s put it at $1.5 billion (adjusted for inflation), but the Mafia’s influence, through its control of unions and its ability to affect the outcome of elections through civic corruption, gave Gambino an impact beyond the sheer economic scale of mob enterprises. The Medellín Cartel is estimated to have netted some $50 billion for its owners during a few years in the 1980s. Pablo Escobar, the number two man in the Cartel, was estimated in 1987 by Forbes magazine to have a net worth of $24 billion, making him the seventh-richest man in the world. Imprecise as comparisons are, one of Jon’s points is undeniable: the Medellín Cartel made one of the largest fortunes in the world, and did so in the span of a decade.
† Escobar was born in 1949 and by the 1980s was by far the most notorious member of the Cartel.
† A federal task force noted that as late as 1975 several of the Cuban car parks employed at the Mafia-run Dream Bar had been members of Brigade 2506, the main fighting force of the CIA-led invasion.
‡ Among the most significant CIA-connected, Cuban-exile smugglers were members of the Tabraue family, who in 1989 were convicted of importing 500,000 pounds of pot. When Guillermo Tabraue, the family patriarch, went on trial, he called a retired CIA officer to testify in his defense. As David Corn and Jefferson Morley reported in “CIA for Defense” in the April 17, 1989, edition of The Nation, the elder Tabraue had served as a CIA-trained mercenary in the Bay of Pigs invasion and continued to draw a $1,400-a-week paycheck from the Agency even when he was running one of the largest dope-smuggling rings in the United States. Another Cuban pot smuggler, Manuel Revuelta, started his career as a money counter in a Havana casino run by Patsy Erra, then worked as a CIA-trained pilot in the Bay of Pigs operation while holding down a day job as a cashier at the Dream Bar and at the Fontainebleau Hotel. In 1982 Revuelta was convicted of running a major pot-smuggling ring. Revuelta’s FBI files, which I reviewed, note his employment history with the CIA. His first arrest was for stealing bombs from Homestead Air Force Base in 1959 that were supposed to be dropped on Havana power stations as part of a CIA scheme. When I interviewed Revuelta in 2009, he told me he got into dope smuggling after the CIA cut off his salary in the late 1960s. At the time of our interview, he had finished serving more than a decade in prison and was working as a cashier at a gourmet bagel shop in Aventura.
43
J.R.: Fabito and me spent weeks forming a relationship. We’d meet at my Coral Gables place and do lines and go to bars and clubs. Pancho always came with us. One afternoon Fabito showed up alone. He said, “Come. You and me, we’re going to go party the way I like to party.”
“How do you party?”
“I’ll show you.”
Fabito and I get into his Rolls convertible and drive to the University of Miami. He parks by a lecture hall. He looks at his watch and says, “Five more minutes.”
Five minutes pass, and all of a sudden hundreds of students pour out of the lecture hall. They must have had a class that mostly girls take, like nursing or poetry, because most of the students are female. We had dozens of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls streaming past our car. They’re smiling at us, curious about these guys in a Rolls-Royce. Fabito looks at me and says, “Watch.”
He takes a bag of Quaaludes from his glove box. He pulls out a pill and holds it up. All these girls stop and watch. “Quaalude,” he says. That’s the only word in English he knows, and it’s all he needs for the college girls. He throws all the pills in the air. It rains Quaaludes in our car. The girls jump in to grab them. It would be like if me and Bobby Erra went fishing and the tuna jumped into our boat. Fabito fills the car with college girls and says to me—in Spanish—“Now let’s go fuck these bitches.”
Fabito drives to an apartment tower near the Omni, a high-end mall they’d just built in Miami.* When he parks the car, Fabito explains he keeps different apartments around the city in different names so if he has trouble, nobody can trace anything to him. “I party hard, so I got to be careful.”
The girls are already pilled out by the time we get up to his apartment. It’s a nice place, high up with a view. The only furnishings are a couple couches, a stereo, and a blender in the kitchen. Fabito goes right to the blender and mixes ice, booze, and fistfuls of Quaaludes. The girls drink down the knockout cocktails while we all laugh and listen to the disco music on the stereo.
Half an hour later everybody’s nude, everybody’s fucking on the couches. We’re really having a good time when one of these doped-up college girls opens her eyes wide and says, “I want to go back to school.”
She crawls over to one of her girlfriends and says, “Let’s go.”
Fabito says, “I’m gonna help this girl out of here.”
This girl is so stoned, she don’t know where she is. Fabito picks her up and carries her out to the balcony. I think he’s going to give her some fresh air, but he carries her to the railing. I watch him from the sliding door.
Fabito says, “Jon, is it okay if I throw her off?”
“Bro, are you nuts?”
“Nobody will know. I can do anything.”
“Okay, Fabito. You’re the host. It’s your house. If you want to throw the girl off the balcony, knock yourself out.”
Fabito drops the girl onto the railing. Her naked ass is hanging over ten stories of air. The only thing keeping her from flipping backward is, her arms are holding Fabito’s neck, and this girl is barely awake. Fabito gets so turned on, he opens her legs up and starts fucking her, pushing her ass farther out on the balcony. When he finished, I guess he took pity on the girl, because he yanked forward, so she fell on the terrace. She hit so hard, the floor shook. I’m sure she woke up later with a big bruise on one side of her body, not knowing how she got it, or how lucky she was to have it. It could have been her little college-educated ass hitting the concrete ten stories below.
Fabito’s mind was clear. He said, “Let’s go. I’ll have Pancho come over and clean up the girls.”
/> Soon as we get in Fabito’s car, he said, “Jon, I like you. You understand the kind of person I am.”
What happened that night built trust between us. Fabito saw I wouldn’t have judged him if he’d thrown the girl off the building. I would have been uptight about being tied to a murder. But you know how I am. I had no heart for the girl. Now Fabito knew that, too. We had our trust.
For the first time we talked business. Fabito said, “I’m going to tell you who I am. I’m the guy who’s going to get you all the coke you ever needed.”
* The Omni International Mall of Miami embodied the city’s aspirations for urban renewal when it opened in a declining retail corridor at 15th Street and Biscayne Boulevard in late 1976. After most major retailers in the mall abandoned it in the 1990s, it has since struggled as a low-rent “zombie mall.”
44
J.R.: What Fabito told me was a white lie. It was true he had all the coke in the world. But he did not have it in Miami. It was in the Bahamas. In 1978 Carlos Lehder was running his scheme to smuggle the Cartel’s cocaine into Miami from the Bahamas.* Lehder got help from a local businessman named Everette Bannister, who owned hotels there. I knew about Bannister because at one point Albert, the cross-eyed Cuban, tried to open a casino in one of the hotels in the Bahamas in order to launder money, but it never got off the ground.† This guy Bannister was very connected. He owned the prime minister of the Bahamas, a corrupt black guy who gave Lehder his own island to bring in coke from Colombia.‡ The advantage of using the Bahamas was that they were less than two hours from Miami in a speedboat. You could have guys watching the Customs Service boats around Miami, and when those guys took a lunch break, they could radio to the guys in the Bahamas and have them send the speedboat up with the coke on it. It wasn’t quite that easy, but it was close. The Cubans had been using the Bahamas for years.
The Colombians had an easy time getting their coke into the Bahamas because they were paying off the government there, but when I met Fabito, they were having a harder time getting their speedboats up into Florida. When they used Colombians to drive their coke boats they kept getting arrested by the Customs Service. Back in those days, the Customs Service practiced racial profiling of Latins, and it being a different era, they weren’t able to complain about their rights being violated.
What the Colombians wanted was gringos to drive their boats for them. I went down to Norman Cay, the island they had in the Bahamas, to talk to Fabito’s associates about driving boats for them, and when I came back, I told Fabito no.
I didn’t want to race powerboats on the water. That was a flunky’s job. I told Fabito that I had a much better idea. I’d give him a safe harbor in Miami.
WHEN I met Fabito, I’d already started working with dirty cops in North Bay Village. I owned the whole police department.* I got to know North Bay Village in my earliest days of coke dealing in Miami. In 1974 when I was looking for sources of coke, I ran into an old friend of mine from Jersey named Pat Pucci. He had come down to Miami even before I did and hooked up with a local wiseguy named Ricky Cravero. Ricky was moving weed and some coke at the time, but we never did much business together. Instead, me and Ricky and Pat all became pretty good friends, and we hung out in North Bay Village because that was Ricky’s home. Unfortunately, Ricky Cravero and Pat got into a business dispute, and they found Pat Pucci in a rock quarry up in Jersey. I don’t know what happened. I was just friends with these guys. Even after Pat Pucci went away, I stayed friends with Ricky Cravero.
Ricky was a good guy. He was a lot of fun to be around. He reminded me of me when I was running wild in New York. He weighed maybe 160 pounds, but he was a tough kid. He would fight anybody. He was a savage. He had three or four guys with him. They were leaving bodies everywhere. Ricky Cravero was truly a bad motherfucker. He was into nothing but bad, bad shit.*
His favorite hangout was the Place for Steak, which was down from Dino’s.† Ricky Cravero loved the guinea spots. One night we were in the bar, and I saw Paul Hornung, the halfback for the Green Bay Packers.‡ Compared to Ricky, Hornung was a giant. But this was how Ricky Cravero was. He walks over to the bathroom, bumps Paul Hornung, and says, “Get out of my way, you fat fuck.”
Paul Hornung stands up, along with two or three of his friends. I’m watching from across the bar with Ricky’s crew. I say, “I guess we’re going to have to help him.”
One of Ricky’s guys laughs. “He don’t need no help from us.”
I hear Paul Hornung say, “Don’t you know who I am?” The words have barely left his mouth when Ricky kicks him in the balls. Hornung doubles over. He doesn’t have a ball protector like they do in a football game, and I can see he’s real surprised at how bad it hurts getting kicked there. He makes a squeaking noise, Eee eee eee!
Then Ricky takes a Heinz ketchup bottle from the bar. In those days Heinz made a solid ketchup bottle. Their bottles wouldn’t break on a person’s head like a normal bottle. A Heinz bottle was like a club. Ricky hits Hornung so hard in the head with the ketchup, he drops him.
Ricky turns to Hornung’s friends and says, “Which one of you clowns is next?”
“No. You made your point,” one of them says.
We hear sirens by the time Ricky comes back over to us. I say, “Listen, man. I think you should leave. They called the cops.”
Ricky laughs. “The cops? Are you kidding me?”
By the time the cops come, Hornung’s friends have him sitting up with a towel on his face to stop the bleeding, and we’re sitting at our end of the bar having another round. I see a police lieutenant walk over and nod to Ricky, like they’re old friends. He says, “What happened?”
“The guy attacked me,” Ricky says. He adds, “You want a drink, Andy?”
Ricky passes him a shot and says, “This is my friend Lieutenant Andy Mazzarella.”
We do shots with the lieutenant as the ambulance guys come in to treat Hornung. Arresting Ricky Cravero for assault is not even a question.
After Lieutenant Mazzarella leaves, Ricky says to me, “Whatever the fuck you want to do in North Bay Village, Andy will take care of it. He’s an Italian from Long Island. He knows who you are, Jon.”
Maybe a year after Ricky went away to prison,* I invited Lieutenant Mazzarella to the Forge. I had Al Malnik set us up in a private room just big enough for me, Lieutenant Mazzarella, and a couple of whores. We had some drinks, ate a nice meal, and one of the girls blew the police lieutenant under the table before dessert. I left him alone with the girls for an hour or two. When I came back, I had one happy cop.
Lieutenant Mazzarella explained to me that he had a lot of leeway in his department to help friends of his. He was the number two guy in the department. He said the force was divided between cops like him and “bozos.” Bozos was his word for clean cops. He said if I ever needed to do something illegal in his little village, he would make sure there were no bozos on the shift when I did it. Simple as that.
This was before I’d met Fabito. During that time I’d started working with my partner in the rental car business, Ron Tobachnik, to move coke up to Chicago, where he was from. I’d buy a few keys from Albert, and Tobachnik would pay some kids to run the keys up there in rental cars. To test out Lieutenant Mazzarella, I asked him if we could use a parking lot in his village to park our cars with coke in the trunks for our drivers to come and pick them up. He assigned his cops to watch our cars for us.
After I saw what a good job he did, I gave him and his cops more work. By the time I met Fabito, I was paying one of Lieutenant Mazzarella’s cops to use his house in North Bay Village as a stash house for my coke. This was even better than using Poppy’s retirement home. There’s no safer place than a cop’s house for storing large amounts of drugs or cash.
ONCE I met Fabito, I had the idea to use the North Bay Village police to unload the boats coming in from the Bahamas with cocaine. Unloading drugs was where you faced the most risk. In those days, when the Customs Service and Coast Guard go
t suspicious of a speedboat coming into Biscayne Bay,* they often didn’t stop it on the water because suspicion alone wasn’t enough probable cause to search a boat. They’d wait until the boat came in to unload, then make their move.
The North Bay Village police department was ideal for unloading boats. When I tell you why, you’ll fall over laughing. The department was on the water. They had their own dock just a few blocks down from the top wiseguy hangout, the Place for Steak.
When I proposed to Lieutenant Mazzarella that I had a way for him and his cops to make more money than they ever dreamed of—by helping me unload drug boats—he agreed immediately to help. He even gave me cops to physically unload the boats, put the shit in their cop cars, and deliver it to the stash house.
They were a full-service police department.
When I told Fabito I could give him a dock inside Biscayne Bay protected by the police, he thought I was an American criminal mastermind—not a guy who’d gotten friendly with a cop after my pal broke a ketchup bottle on another guy’s head.
• • •
INSTEAD OF being hired as a boat driver for the Colombians, I became the guy who hired drivers for them. I wouldn’t hire the yahoos who hung out at Don Aronow’s. I looked for guys I met in the sportfishing world, since they were more skilled with boats. I got the boats unloaded and put the product into a stash house, then I got it delivered. The Colombians had their own distributors who I brought the coke to, and I kept supplying my distributors—Bernie Levine in California, my uncle Jerry on Miami Beach, and Ron Tobachnik in Chicago. Less and less did I sell to individual blowheads.
I got a transport fee off of every kilo I moved—about 5 percent of the wholesale value. When Fabito and I started smuggling through North Bay Village, we started moving a couple hundred kilos a month and, some months, a thousand kilos or more.
