American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Those were good times up there. I give Toni credit for that. She wasn’t like most lazy-ass, buying-shit-at-the-mall women I’d known. She was different.

  TONI MOON: Do you know what it’s like to love somebody beyond belief, to be passionately and madly in love with them? Jon was madly, passionately, wildly in love with me, and I felt exactly the same way for him. If he says anything different today, it’s because of his pride. He can’t admit to anything that he thinks shows weakness, and it’s a shame because his capacity to love is the only worthwhile thing he’s ever had, and that’s what he fights the hardest to destroy.

  J.R.: I’d finally learned by then that when you do illegal things, you should not get all the way close to your woman. Prisons are filled with guys ratted out by their women. I’d learned about a woman’s wrath with Phyllis. When I got with Toni, I knew the best course was to have fun together but to always keep her at arm’s length. Still, we had a very good life.

  Have you ever seen a real Florida electric storm? In Delray the most amazing storms in the world would push out from the Everglades and swallow the house. I used to lie in the glass room with Toni, my cat, my dogs, and watch for hours. There was nothing like it. That was my life when I had my reign at the top.

  * Though only about sixty miles north of Miami Beach, Delray Beach in 1980 was still largely an agricultural area and relatively undeveloped. It stretches west from the beach to the roughly four-hundred-square-mile Loxahatchee wildlife preserve in the heart of the Everglades.

  * The Hole in the Wall feed store is still in Delray.

  * The homicide rate for the Metro-Dade region soared from about 50 murders per year in 1975 to more than 600 in 1981.

  * Cucha is Spanish slang for “pussy.”

  * Frank Stella is one of the most acclaimed artists of the second half of the twentieth century, and in 2009 President Obama presented him with a National Medal of the Arts at a ceremony in the White House. In the 1980s he was also known for flaunting his love of racehorses and Ferrari sports cars. He frequently visited Miami and stayed at the Palm Bay Club.

  † The Ponderosa was the Cartwrights’ ranch on Bonanza.

  † The term Marielitos refers to the 100,000 Cubans who arrived by boat in South Florida in 1980.

  † Erté, a master of Art Deco in the 1920s and 1930s, is known for his stylized paintings of women who are draped with jewels and feathers and are often accompanied by leopards.

  ‡ The 1980 Liberty City riots were sparked by the acquittal of five white police officers who beat a black motorist to death. In a retrial one of the accused officers agreed to a deal in which he provided information about corruption in the North Bay Village police department, which led to a two-year investigation of Jon’s friend Lieutenant Mazzarella and his arrest.

  51

  J.R.: Without her realizing it, Toni helped introduce me to the man who put me at the top of the Medellín Cartel’s operations in America. The whole time I was working with Fabito, I knew there were other Americans helping out the Cartel, but I didn’t know who they were until about 1980, when I met Max Mermelstein. Max did what I did for Fabito, but he worked for Fabito’s brother, Jorge, and for Pablo Escobar. They had a separate line of importation that was bigger than Fabito’s. Soon enough, Max and I combined what we were doing, and our joint operation became the biggest part of the Colombians’ smuggling effort.

  When I met Max, it was getting more and more difficult to run boats out of the Bahamas. Everybody was turning to pilots who could haul coke from Colombia into the United States. I had Barry Seal, but I was looking for more people to fly for me. Toni knew many pilots. Being a model, she got jobs where she was flown to different places. And just being a beautiful woman, she got plenty of offers from rich assholes who wanted to fly her to a party in the Bahamas or the Keys. Before she met me, she’d become friendly with a pilot named Shelton Archer.

  Shelton was actually a very bad pilot. Before I met him, he had almost killed Toni when he crashed a plane he was flying her in. But he was kind of a character, and Toni and he stayed friends despite his nearly killing her. Shelton was an Englishman, which helped him get away with being such a moron. People heard the accent and believed he was more intelligent than he was. Shelton wasn’t actually an upper-class Englishman. He was the low-class kind you always meet in warm places like Florida and California. If you’ve ever been to those places, you know the type. Maybe the guy was a cabdriver back home in London, but in America he uses his accent to pretend he’s an English lord. Shelton was true English scum. The best way to explain him is to tell you what his favorite thing was besides crashing planes. He’d take a camera, with no film in it, and go to the mall and pretend to be an English fashion photographer so he could pick up high school girls and fuck them. That was Shelton at his finest.

  Shelton reminded me of Phyllis’s father. He’d start off with a good idea or piece of luck, and then completely blow it. He was the type of guy who stepped in dog shit every time he put his shoes on. He’d get a scheme going, and sure enough the next week you’d hear the plane went down or his connection got busted or he fucked the wrong guy’s wife or daughter. I’m amazed he wasn’t killed many times over.*

  The one thing Shelton had was that he knew everybody. I tolerated him because even though he was a stupid jerk, he knew other pilots who were good. Most important, Shelton knew Max Mermelstein.

  When Shelton met me, I started asking him about pilots, and soon enough he figured out that real estate wasn’t my main business. He hinted around that he could fly anything I ever needed, and I put him off. Obviously, I wasn’t eager to hire a guy who’d crashed my girlfriend.

  So Shelton tried a different angle. He came to me one night and said, “Johnny”—the English jerk always called me Johnny—“I’m going to do you the favor of your life. You’re going to owe me for this one.”

  “What am I going to owe you for?”

  “For introducing you to the biggest smuggler in Miami.”

  A week later Shelton told me his guy wanted to meet me at a Howard Johnson’s on Collins Avenue. That’s how I first got to know Max Mermelstein.*

  I MET Max over a plate of Howard Johnson’s clam strips. It was disgusting food, and I’m glad that chain of restaurants went out of business, but Howard Johnson’s would be Max’s favorite place to meet the next several years that we worked together. The lazy slob lived down the street from it in Sunny Isles.†

  Shelton had told me Max would be a large man with a mustache. I got there first and waited. In walked a guy with a mustache. He was a couple years older than me, and he wore a tweed jacket. I first thought he was another English bullshitter like Shelton. He walked up to my table in a hurry, like he was doing me a big favor by giving me his time. “You Shelton’s friend?” he said.

  I could hear he was American. Under his tweed coat he wore a silk shirt with a gold Jewish star around his neck. He sat down and puffed his cheeks out, looking at me like I should think he was a man of importance. Max was a fat fuck. He was maybe five-nine, 220 pounds. He waddled when he walked. He was very nervous, lighting cigarette after cigarette. His fingers shook. His big-shot act was not successful. To me, he was just a nervous fat guy with a mustache.

  Normally, when I tried to feel out who other guys were, we’d do lines and chase broads. Max didn’t do coke. He barely drank, and he chased women very quietly because he was terrified of his wife. So he ordered the clam strips and talked about Papucci, a shoe shop he owned at the Four Ambassadors Hotel.* The shop was for laundering money, but Max talked like he was the shoe king of Miami. When I talked about boats, Max made sure to tell me he had one that was bigger than mine.

  That was my first meeting with Max. He told me if I ever went to Papucci, he’d give me a discount on some fine shoes imported from Spain.

  I’d soon find out Max was everything Shelton said he was, and at the same time nothing at all. Inside that fat body was a very small man. Max was like the emperor’s new cl
othes of crime bosses. He was for real, but he was also the scaredest bitch I’d ever met. He sucked on every cigarette he smoked like it was going to be his last breath.

  Max’s fear would be my in with him. We’d become partners because he was too chicken to be a drug lord on his own. He needed somebody to hold his hand.

  * Shelton Archer (who also uses the name Sheldon) was arrested and incarcerated numerous times on drug-trafficking-related charges, beginning in the mid-1980s. According to law-enforcement sources, Archer began working as a snitch after his earliest arrests, but his information often proved to be unreliable. His last conviction was at age sixty-five in 1999 for running a marijuana farm in northern Florida. After serving two years in prison, Archer relocated to Indonesia and married a woman forty-nine years his junior. As of 2011, he is running an Asian bride service at Indonesian-wife.com.

  * In his interview in the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, Jon stated that he met a Colombian associate of Max’s first. Jon now believes his encounter with Max at the Howard Johnson’s was his first. In her interview with me, Toni Moon also recalled that Shelton Archer introduced Jon directly to Max.

  * The hotel is still located at 801 Brickell Bay Drive in Miami.

  † Sunny Isles is an upscale housing development on the western side of Sunny Isles Beach, north of Miami Beach.

  52

  J.R.: Soon as I met with Max, I had Danny Mones do a criminal record search on him through a friend in the Miami police. If a guy is a snitch, often he’ll have a long record. Max came up clean.

  Then I sat down with Fabito. We met in the Omni shopping center at a raw bar that served the best oysters in all of Florida. When I brought up Max, Fabito gave me a funny look and said, “I knew it had to happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He does what you do, but for my brother Jorge and for Pablo Escobar.”

  At that time I didn’t know who Pablo Escobar was. I found out Pablo was the hands-on guy in Colombia who ran the coke factories, and Max was his guy in Miami who was running coke planes into Florida and landing them in fields outside of Miami. When Fabito and I first talked about this, Fabito’s main worry was that I’d be offended that his family had another guy doing the same work as me, or that I’d see Max as a rival.

  I told Fabito I didn’t care about Max. I didn’t have the appetite to fight my way up the organization and push guys aside. I was content doing what I was doing.

  IT WAS Max who worked to bring me deeper into his organization. After our lunch at Howard Johnson’s, Max invited me out to his farm in Davie.* Max on the farm was ridiculous. He wore a cowboy hat and boots and showed off his collection of Paso Finos. I didn’t yet know that these high-stepping midget horses were the favorites of Fabito’s father, Don Ochoa, and were a symbol of the Ochoa family. Max bragged that he got them from a “friend” in Colombia. When we were walking around his farm, Max noticed me looking at a wooden porch swing by the house. It was a very large swing for two people to sit on. Max asked me if I liked it. I said, “Sure.”

  A few days later, I was at my house in Delray with Toni when a truck drove up with a giant wooden porch swing on it. Max called me and said, “I thought you and your girl could enjoy the view from the swing.”

  “Okay, Max. Thanks for the fucking swing set.”

  It was comical. The guy tried to win me over with a swing set. To understand why Max was so eager to have me helping him, you need to know how Max started working for the Cartel.

  MAX WAS from New York, but in the early 1970s he moved to Puerto Rico to take a job at a hotel. Max always bragged that he was an “engineer,” like he was a guy who built rockets or bridges. But what I believe is, he was the kind of “engineer” they have in the hotel who comes to your room and fixes the lightbulb when it’s broken, or brings a new battery for the remote.† Max’s in with the Colombians came in Puerto Rico, where he met a beautiful dancer at a strip club. Her name was Cristina, and she was a few years younger than Max, but she already had two children. Max fell completely in love with her and married her. Max raised her kids like his own, and he would always tell me how lucky he was to have Cristina.

  Cristina brought Max something else besides her smile and her beautiful body. She had a cousin back in Colombia named Pablo Escobar. I don’t know if she was an actual cousin of Pablo’s or if she just used that word, the way Henry Borelli and I used to say we were “brothers,” but Cristina and Pablo were close enough that Max got special trust with Pablo Escobar. I believe Max Mermelstein is the only American who could claim he was married into the Medellín Cartel. That was his strength.

  When Max married Cristina, the Cartel barely existed. Max was a mostly straight, working guy bringing lightbulbs to people in hotels. On the side he dealt a few bags of weed to make pocket money, but that was the extent of his criminal career. In 1976 he and Cristina moved to Queens, and when they got there, Max had no money.

  They arrived in Queens just as a little community of Colombian immigrants was getting started in cocaine. It was small-time. Their relatives would send over a few kilos at a time in suitcases on regular commercial flights from Colombia, and these newcomers would sell it around New York. As the operation grew, Pablo Escobar sent over a street guy named Rafa who was his trusted lieutenant.* Rafa’s job was to oversee the importation business. When he got to Queens, he looked up Pablo’s cousin, Cristina, and that’s how he met Max.

  From the start Max had that trust of being in Pablo’s family through Cristina, and he was useful because he was a gringo. Max could drive and pick up a kilo of cocaine somewhere and not look as suspicious as a Colombian.

  In 1978—the same time Fabito came to Miami and met me—Rafa decided Max and Cristina should move to Miami to build up the business. Max started helping with boats and planes and pilots and cars, just like I did. By the time I met him, he and the pilots he had working for him were moving more than me, because inside the Cartel, Pablo was more aggressive in pushing cocaine out.

  Years later Max made the most ridiculous claim I’ve ever heard. He told people he never wanted to be in the cocaine business, but Pablo Escobar’s guy, Rafa, “kidnapped” him and forced him to do everything he did.* Please. I never saw anybody put a gun to Max’s head and force him to smuggle coke.

  Max loved money, and he loved being “El Jefe”—the boss. That’s what he liked to be called by the Colombians who worked for Rafa, El Jefe. Nobody loved being a big shot more than Max.

  I’ll concede that there was some element of truth in Max’s story that he was kidnapped by Rafa and forced to smuggle cocaine against his will. Rafa always had a house near where Max lived, and he was always with him. Rafa would say his job was to “help” Max, but Rafa was Max’s true boss. Rafa carried the orders from Pablo Escobar. Rafa had to treat Max with respect because of his marriage and the position he had for being a gringo. But Rafa was a mad dog who left bodies everywhere he went, and he terrified Max.

  Underneath his El Jefe act, Max was a nervous fat guy who accidentally married into a job at the top of the Medellín Cartel. I believe Max sent me swing sets and brought me in to help him because he wanted protection. He never put it like that, but I could see, as I got to know him, that he didn’t want to be the only gringo surrounded by insane Colombians. If he had me with him and something went wrong on a shipment, he could blame me. That was a big help to Max. And he knew I could never fully take over his position because of his marriage, which made him royalty to the Colombians. Max was like a king who wanted somebody to help him run his country. As long as he got to be the figurehead king, he’d be happy.

  WHEN YOU hung out with Max, you saw that everything he did was to show what a tough guy he was. On his ranch in Davie, he dressed in his cowboy outfit. When you went to his house in Sunny Isles, he’d show off his gun collection. He owned a full arsenal that included everything from antique rifles to machine guns. When he first showed me them, he said, “Do you like to hunt?”

  “Not r
eally my sport,” I said.

  Max fancied himself a big-game hunter. He used to go to a farm in Texas where some mad scientist mated cows with buffalos and made giant freak animals called beefalo. Max and a bunch of other idiots would pay to go there with their asshole rifles and hunt these ridiculous animals. To this day I don’t understand what the reward could be in that. To kill an animal in a captive fucking area? It’s like going to a zoo and looking over at the lion and shooting the lion in the head. Is that a joy? Does it really show how skillful you are? One time he gave me a freezer-load of beefalo meat that he’d killed. I hauled it out to the swamp and fed it to the alligators. I’d rather eat Bambi than eat a beefalo.

  Later Max got into cockfighting. He’d have cockfights at his farm with all the Colombians who worked for Rafa. But the more Max tried to show how tough he was, the more I saw he was a man with a big pussy between his legs.

  Much as I found Max to be distasteful, we were a good fit. He wanted to be the figurehead who did no work, and I wanted to run things but not be the boss of an organization. Max and I together became the top Americans in the Medellín Cartel.* I don’t claim I put the Colombians on the map. I don’t claim Max did. The Colombians put themselves on the map. But Max and I took them to a level they hadn’t been able to reach before.

  * Davie, in Broward County, was a cattle-ranching community that grew in the 1970s to include residential developments. Today it prides itself on its Old West flavor and features a main street laid out like a Wild West frontier town.

  * Rafael “Rafa” Cardona-Salazar was about twenty-two years old when Mermelstein met him in 1976. Rafael was more likely taking orders from Jorge Ochoa in 1976 than from Escobar, whose rise in the Cartel was just beginning.

  * In The Man Who Made It Snow, by Max Mermelstein as told to Robin Moore, published by Simon & Schuster in 1990, Mermelstein indeed claims that he lived in such fear of Rafa that he was his virtual prisoner for nearly a decade.