American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  When we took off, he stood that plane on its tail. We went straight up, like in a rocket ship. When we get to the top of the sky, he said, “You think that was good? Wait until we go down.”

  That motherfucker, he turned the plane nose down. Then he turned the plane upside down. I don’t normally get scared, but the motherfucker got me scared. I give him credit for that. After we landed, he said, “The Learjet is the safest plane made. The Swiss originally made this as a fighter plane. Even if we lost power, I could glide it in. It’s the only jet that will do that.”

  That was Barry Seal. He loved flying like I loved robbing people. Some people said he was a cokehead, but I never saw him high. I never saw him chase women. He had a girlfriend, his secretary. She was in love with him. He was in love with her. When he was on the ground, they were inseparable. That was his whole life outside of flying.

  Barry could fly in as much as a thousand kilos at a time—more than most pilots back then. After he landed, he’d stack the coke in his hangar. This used to drive Fabito crazy. He wouldn’t even close the hangar doors. Barry didn’t give a fuck. Ground work was beneath him.

  That was my job—organizing the cars, the drivers, the stash houses, so Fabito’s Colombian distributors in Miami and New York could get their coke.

  I BECAME the guy Fabito turned to when there was a problem. I didn’t have any special skills except that I was a gringo who could operate in America. When it came to the Ochoa family, my word was my bond. I was becoming almost like a straight businessman inside their organization.

  The Colombians the Ochoas brought into the United States to be their soldiers—driving their cars, protecting their stash houses—were Indians from the mountains. They were peasants with gold teeth and guns, and they were the backbone of the Ochoas’ U.S. distribution system. They ran coke to New York, Los Angeles, and anywhere between where they found buyers. These were the guys I delivered the Ochoas’ coke to. In return, they gave me the Ochoas’ money.

  Whenever you have coke flowing in one direction, you get money flowing back. Cash and coke of the same value were about the same size. The only difference was cash was about half the weight. If I moved a hundred kilos of coke, I’d get about fifty kilos of money back.

  These exchanges didn’t go smooth at first. The Colombian soldiers tended to do things like they were in a gangster movie. They’d bring the money in one car, followed by five more cars loaded with guys carrying machine guns and knives. They were good guys, but one day they’re in the jungle and the next day they’re driving around Miami, heavily armed, with trunkloads of money and coke. Most were out of their minds on cocaine and aguardiente. It’s a lucky thing they didn’t have sobriety checkpoints in those days. These maniacs would have just slaughtered the police.

  The first thing a Colombian mountain hick did when he landed in Miami was buy a $500 car and install a $1,000 stereo. The first exchange I did with them, I picked a quiet parking lot. These guys rolled up, drunk, heavily armed, blasting their stereos. They were going to bring the cops on a noise violation alone.

  After that I met with Fabito and told him, “We got to change how your guys work. Let’s have everybody relax. Keep everything low-key. Nobody needs to drive around with guns sticking out of the car. We’re all on the same side here.”

  My way to deliver coke, or pick up money, was to keep everybody anonymous and separate. If I’m delivering coke, I have my guy drive a car with it in the trunk to a normal family restaurant like Denny’s. He leaves the car in the parking lot and hides the keys in a ledge in the men’s room. He walks out and gets picked up down the street by somebody else. The guys bringing money do the same thing with their car at a different restaurant. Once we get the keys to the money car, we tell them where the car with the coke is and where the keys are hidden. This way everybody is safe.

  It would be very hard for cops or a do-gooder asshole citizen at one of these restaurants to see that drug deals were happening. Our activities were invisible.

  As I used more and more drivers for my cars, I avoided hiring street people. I didn’t need armed guys for this. I used kids trying to earn money for school, or working guys who needed a couple extra dollars for their mortgage. They were happy to earn a few bucks driving a car from point A to B. They didn’t want to look in the trunk or ask stupid questions. They just wanted to earn their pay. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I never had a problem with these kids. The few times I did, they were very sorry.

  I gave my drivers fake licenses. I’d found a guy whose cousin worked at the state licensing bureau. For a couple hundred bucks, I could send someone in to him, and he’d take their picture and issue a license in a fake name, and put it all in the main computer so if a cop ran the license, it came up as legit. If one of my guys got arrested, they could use the fake ID. I’d bond them out, and they could skip their bail. Obviously, once a guy was arrested, the heat took their fingerprints, but the system was so slow in those days, a guy could usually get out before they figured out who he really was.

  I always tried to hire people through someone else. If I found one guy who was reliable, I’d have him hire the help he needed. When you do illegal work, you’re better off to keep as much distance as you can from the guys working for you. Use your name as little as possible. Don’t try to show everybody that you’re a big shot. If I happened to pick up a car from one of the kids who didn’t know me, I’d act like I was just another driver. That way if that guy’s arrested, even if he wants to rat, he don’t know who you really are.

  I handled Fabito’s Colombians the same as the Florida kids working for me. I got them fake licenses and had Danny Mones take care of any problems they had. These peasant Colombians were great guys but high-spirited. They were constantly getting arrested for bar fights, shootings, rapes—you name it. Soon as they got arrested, we’d bond them out and put them on a plane back to Colombia. You never want your guys sitting in a jail. That’s when they get the ideas to rat people out.

  My philosophy was the same as the Mafia’s. Always take care of your guys.

  FROM WORKING with Barry Seal, I learned there were small airports all over the United States that nobody watched. In Florida the DEA started to watch even the littlest airfields. In other states they were wide open. A small plane going from Baton Rouge to upstate New York or California could land with no problem.

  Fabito had a Colombian distributor in Los Angeles whom he wanted me to supply with the coke that Barry brought into Baton Rouge. We decided to fly it to the Van Nuys airport.

  My friend Joey Ippolito had his operation out there, too, with the coke he was getting from Gary and Bobby in Aspen, but the market was growing so fast, nobody worried about having more than one distributor in a city. In L.A. people snorted so much, you could carpet-bomb the city with blow and they’d ask for more. In other cities, where the Ochoas supplied more than one distributor, there were wars between them. But that was their problem, not mine.

  When we flew coke into Van Nuys, we didn’t want Fabito’s guys driving into the airport, in case they brought heat with them. I talked to my lawyer Danny Mones about a good way to get coke out of the airport, and he helped me buy a small freight company in California. They had a little fleet of step trucks that they used to move things like furniture and office supplies. I renamed the company JF Transportation, for “Jon” and “Fabito.” Looking back, it was probably stupid to use our initials, but I thought it was comical at the time.

  Now, when we flew coke to Van Nuys, we put it in boxes labeled “office supplies.” We had our drivers come to the airport in Van Nuys with bills of lading. Everything was proper. I started shipping coke to my friend Bernie Levine in San Francisco from Van Nuys using our trucks. He knew people with wineries up there, so our drivers would come back with wine and deliver it to restaurants in L.A.

  Our delivery company actually made a profit. We sold the company after about a year, when one of our drivers drove drunk on the job and had an accident. The com
pany got sued, and it was a nightmare. Moving coke was one thing. Dealing with lawsuits was another.

  Everything I did was aimed at making things run smooth and quiet. In the late 1970s they started talking about “cocaine cowboys” overrunning the streets.* Scarface came out when I was at my peak.* The mayhem of that movie was accurate, but when I saw it, I had to laugh. My goal was to run things very differently from the way Al Pacino ran his business. The backbone of my operation was American guys who did little jobs here and there, earned a few extra dollars, and kept their mouths shut.

  I always tried to do my job with the opposite of violence.

  That was my wish.

  * Baton Rouge was home to a large number of small aviation transport companies that serviced the gulf oil industry. Baton Rouge–bound flights entering from the Gulf of Mexico did not typically arouse suspicion.

  * Opa-locka is the large general aviation and military airfield near Miami.

  * Cocaine Cowboys was the title of Ulli Lommel’s 1979 cult film with Andy Warhol about rock stars battling the Mafia. Almost nobody saw the film except for perhaps an enterprising Miami reporter. Shortly after the movie’s release, the term “cocaine cowboys” began appearing in Miami papers to describe the Latin drug gangs leading a surge in violence in South Florida.

  * Scarface, starring Al Pacino, chronicled the rise and fall of a fictitious Cuban coke dealer in Miami. It was released in 1983.

  † Barry Seal, subject of the 1991 HBO film Doublecrossed, is one of the most storied figures of the early drug-smuggling era. In 1955, at age sixteen, Seal joined the Baton Rouge Civil Air Patrol, a flying club whose members included future presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1963 Seal had been recruited by the CIA to join Operation 40. The group, based in Mexico, included Frank Sturgis, who would later gain infamy as one of the Watergate burglars, and Porter Goss, later a Florida congressman, and then director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006. At the time Seal worked with these men, Operation 40 was a unit set up after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion to funnel arms to anti-Castro militants around Central America and the Caribbean. Seal was employed as an arms-smuggler pilot for Operation 40. Later Seal joined the U.S. Air Force and became a pilot for Special Forces operations in Vietnam. In 1966 Seal became an employee of TWA and was soon certified as the youngest 747 pilot in the world. While working as a TWA pilot, Seal continued his clandestine work for the CIA. In 1972 he was arrested in Mexico for smuggling two tons of C-4 explosive to a Cuban exile group that was planning terrorist attacks on the Castro government. Seal would claim that the CIA disavowed him after his 1972 arrest in Mexico. Seal was subsequently fired from TWA. He turned to drug smuggling to support himself. At the time Jon Roberts met him, Seal had recently been released from prison in Honduras, where he’d been held for marijuana smuggling.

  48

  J.R.: I had very few upsets in my work during my first couple years with Fabito. All the chaos occurred on the personal side. Phyllis was a wicked lady, and I always went back to her. It had been like that since I was a kid in New York. No matter how much I chased other women, I’d come home to her, and out of the blue, I’d want her very badly, and she absolutely would not fuck me. When she pushed me away, it made me crazed. But Phyllis was the kind of woman, if you put a gun in her face, she’d laugh. I could rage at her to the end of the earth, and she had no fear.

  When she finally made up her mind that she wanted to fuck, there was no woman who was better. That kept me on her leash. Whenever she wanted, she jerked me around the corner. I bought her houses, diamonds, horses, anything. When she told me to get her a special Mercedes 6.9 that she saw in a magazine, I had one flown over from the factory in Germany on a cargo plane.

  I took care of her whole family. Every time her father got busted, I paid for his lawyers. Her sister, Fran, was always coming to Miami for shopping trips with Phyllis. It took boatloads of cocaine to pay for the stupid shit they bought. Their cousin Henry—my “brother-in-law”—had become a top killer in New York, but he was a lousy earner. He had no mind for business. One time he got involved with some morons who sent him to Pakistan to pick up some hash. He landed and immediately got thrown in prison. Phyllis went crazy. Henry was her little angel. I spent a quarter-million dollars on lawyers to get him out. We had a welcome-home party for him in Miami, and Henry said, “Jon, if you ever need help down here, bro, we could make some real money together.”

  “Sure, Henry.”

  What else could I say? Even though Henry is the guy who turned a few pounds of hash into an international incident, he was the pride of the family. When I say Phyllis cost me, I mean I paid and paid for that whole family.

  I WILL tell you something about Phyllis. She loved black guys. Most of her boyfriends before me were black. I never had a problem with that. One time they gave me a test where the doctor said I might be a “psychopath.” Could be true. I might be a psychopath, but I’ve never been a racist.

  Going back to Richard Pryor in New York, most of Phyllis’s friends were black. After Phyllis came to Miami, she started spending a lot of time in California with Pryor, Herbie Hancock, and Billy Dee Williams.* She wasn’t involved with these guys as boyfriends. She was godmother to Billy Dee Williams’s daughter. They were her little group. As I bought houses for Phyllis and financed her decorating sprees in Miami, she’d unwind by taking off for California for weeks at a time. I’d visit now and then when I had business out there. The main thing Phyllis and her California friends did was play cards. They had card games that would go on for days. Billy Dee Williams wasn’t a big poker player himself, but he was married to a Japanese girl named Teruko who loved cards. Herbie Hancock’s sister, Jean, was another player. She was a math genius who flew all over the country fixing computers, and she was a musician.* Phyllis was very artsy, so she and Jean were close. Jean stayed at our house in Miami many times. Herbie was a down-to-earth guy. I liked him and his wife, Gigi, and his sister, Jean, and Richard Pryor best in the group. The other player in those games was Richard Dreyfuss. He liked cocaine more than cards.† I fixed up Phyllis with enough cocaine to keep the games going for days. Mostly the coke went to Dreyfuss and Pryor.

  You never knew what Richard Pryor was going to say or do. He wasn’t just a genius, he was insane. He used to go around introducing me to people, saying, “This is Jon, my coke-dealing friend in the Mafia.”

  Only Richard Pryor could say a thing like that in public and get away with it.

  One time Richard didn’t show up for the card game. This was nothing new. Hours later the door bangs open, and Richard walks in completely naked. He don’t even got socks on his feet. “Sorry I’m late,” he says.

  Everybody’s looking at him in shock. Someone says, “Richard, are you all right?”

  “No, man. I’m not. I was raped.”

  This stops everybody. I notice Richard’s hair is matted on one side. He’s got scratches on his arm. He says, “I was crossing Sunset when a pack of black women surrounded my car at the light. They pulled me out of the car and threw me down. They tore my clothes off. One was a gorgeous lady. I reached for her, but the fattest bitch in the pack climbed on top of me. She pinned me down with her big ass, and she raped me. They all took turns. It was horrible, man.”

  Billy Dee Williams just looked at him. “What really happened, Richard?”

  “I got in my car to drive here, and by the time I got halfway, I saw I didn’t put my clothes on. I’m pretty wasted. Can I borrow some clothes, Billy?”

  He was a funny guy, but he went out of his mind on drugs.*

  If it weren’t for my business in California, I never would have gone there. I didn’t like actors. Film actors completely overrate themselves. Other celebrities have to do something—play a guitar like Jimi Hendrix or run like O.J. Simpson. Actors just talk and make faces.

  PHYLLIS SPENT so much time away, it resulted in a thing happening that she never forgave me for. I ended up fucking Phyllis’s sister, Fran. She was alwa
ys at our house, and she looked so much like Phyllis, there were times I couldn’t tell them apart. It didn’t feel like cheating. Those sisters were like Coke and Pepsi. The difference was, Fran didn’t play games. She was always ready to go.

  I only fucked Fran in our house when Phyllis was in California. When she was home, I’d meet Fran at the International Inn, a cheap motel in Miami Beach.† It seemed to be going so well, I had the fantasy that someday I’d get the two sisters together. You know what I thought would have been interesting? If I could have convinced both sisters to lie down in front of me with their asses up, so I could do a comparison by fucking them side by side. I said this to Fran once, thinking she’d find it amusing, and she blew up. Next thing I knew, she told Phyllis, and that was it. I had to hide the guns in the house. I was sure she was going to shoot me. I could fuck a thousand women end to end, and that didn’t bother Phyllis, but with her sister, she drew a line.

  I had to laugh at how Phyllis decided to punish me. She’d poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into fixing up the estate I bought for her on Palm Island. She came to me and said, “You piece of shit. I’ll never move into that house with you.”

  I told her, “Good for both of us. You can shove that house up your ass.”

  I sold it the next day. Phyllis and me seemed to go back to normal. But being a true Italian girl, Phyllis never forgave me. She nursed a secret grudge, and when I pushed her one more time, that poison came out of her and nearly finished me off.

  * Herbie Hancock is the Grammy-winning jazz keyboardist and composer. Billy Dee Williams is best known for costarring with James Caan in Brian’s Song (1971) and for his role as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

  * Jean Hancock, a computer programmer, also composed music with her brother Herbie. She contributed to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Win or Lose” track for their Faces album in 1980.

  * In 1981 Pryor nearly died when he accidentally set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine.