American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  The grass was maintained beautifully at these sites. They were empty, but the lawns were still cut regularly. In case of nuclear attack, no one could have complained that the lawns weren’t well kept. Everything was gated and locked.

  The military used a padlock that looked like a number five Master Lock, but the key had a groove on the side. I had a friend who supplied me with identical locks. When I found an area I wanted to come back to, I’d cut off the government lock with my torch and replace it with one of mine. Now I could come and go as I pleased.

  When I replaced a government lock with one of my own, I made sure that there was a secondary way in. That way when caretakers came to the site, and their key didn’t work in one lock, they could enter through another gate. They might file a report about a “malfunctioning lock,” but being the government, it would be months or years before anyone would look into the matter.

  The other sites I found to land planes on were federal lands along the Aerojet canal. In the 1960s when they started the moon rocket program at Cape Canaveral, they dug a canal through the Everglades to move rocket motors up there made by Aerojet.* They shut down the program and closed the Aerojet facilities along the canal. When they dig a canal in Florida, they always make a “spoils bank” alongside it—a pile of excavations that is graded flat and turned into a road. The Aerojet facilities had miles of spoils-bank roads that made excellent landing strips. These were fenced off like the Nike sites, so I just put in more of my own locks so I could come back and visit whenever I needed to.

  The Nike and Aerojet sites gave me numerous 12,000-foot-long runways. That length was my holy grail, because you needed only 6,000 feet to land or take off. When my plane landed, my crew met it in the middle of the 12,000-foot runway. When my pilot took off again, he didn’t need to turn his plane. That saved time. We could land the plane, unload it, fuel it, clean it out, refit it, and get it in the air in under six minutes.

  There were workers who came onto the government sites we used, but they worked government hours—nine to five, at best, and all the holidays off. The rest of the time these sites belonged to me.

  J.R.: After we landed drug planes on the government property, we still had to fly them to airports and service them. Mickey got the idea to make his own service hangar. We bought a 280-acre farm in Lakeland about two hundred miles north of Delray in the middle of nowhere, with barns Mickey converted into secret hangars. We started a fake crop-dusting company and kept the planes there. Sometimes Mickey’s pilot did crop dusting for farmers, so no one could say it wasn’t a real business.

  At times, the Colombians would put thousands of kilos of coke on a fishing trawler and send the vessel into the Gulf of Mexico. Then we’d send speedboats out to unload it.

  Ultimate Boats was the boat shop Mickey started to make smuggling boats.* His boats were the opposite of Don Aronow’s. Instead of being made for getting laid, they looked like garbage. Mickey built boats that, I guarantee you, no girl would get on, with or without Quaaludes. But he put huge engines in them and secret cargo holds. Mickey was so sure of his boats that one time, when he was driving in a load of coke and saw a Coast Guard boat that was having engine trouble, he threw the Coast Guard a line and towed them in. This, with a half-ton of cocaine in his boat. Of course, Mickey was friends with half the Coast Guard because he went for all the voluntary boat inspections and took special classes they gave in boat safety.

  Mickey put spotters everywhere. He had people watching Homestead Air Base, where the Customs Service flew its jets, to tell us how many were in the sky. He had people watching their docks. We rented an apartment overlooking Haulover Cut in Biscayne Bay and put a girl there to watch and tell us when the government boats were coming in. When we had a drug plane returning from Colombia, Mickey sent up spotter planes to look for government jets.

  What put us over the top was Mickey’s listening in on government radios. Mickey tuned in to them and recorded them twenty-four hours a day. We knew when they were sending patrols and where. If they were going south, we went north. If one day they were looking for a red smuggling plane, we made sure to fly only green planes.

  We had a radio room at Ultimate Boats. For entertainment I’d go there and listen to the idiots in the Customs Service talk about what they were doing that day to stop us.

  MICKEY: I didn’t know about radios when I started in the smuggling business. One of the best schools I found was the local RadioShack store. My education began when I bought a police scanner, and the people who worked there explained how you could tune it in to the Coast Guard. The key was finding what frequency their radios were on. It turned out, RadioShack sold a book for five dollars that listed frequencies used by most government agencies.

  The FAA gave public tours of its main air traffic control center in Miami. They’d show you their radars and maps and radios. You could ask questions, and I’d ask about their radios. That was very helpful.

  All the agencies kept some channels they used a secret. But I took public tours of Coast Guard facilities and boats, and I noticed that Coast Guard radio operators wrote down the frequencies they used to talk to the Customs Service on pieces of tape that they stuck to their gear. One time I brought a lady I knew who was an accountant and had almost a photographic memory for numbers. She was also a very chesty young lady, and while the sailors were ogling her assets, she was ogling their frequency numbers and memorizing them.

  Something basic to radios is that the frequency you communicate on determines the length of your antenna. I started driving around to different Coast Guard and Customs Service facilities around Florida and visually measured their antennas. I couldn’t get the exact lengths, but I got close enough to know what range of frequencies I should be tuning in to.

  Then I found a device called a frequency scanner. If you get a line of sight to an antenna and aim it, this scanner will tell you the exact frequency of whatever radio is hooked up to it. Lo and behold, the Customs Service had one of its main antenna farms near the old Dupont Plaza Hotel.* I could rent a suite in the Dupont Plaza that gave me line of sight to the Customs Service antenna farm. I’d check in there every few weeks with my frequency scanner and pick off the latest frequencies they were using.

  As I collected more radio frequencies, I built radios that I connected to voice-activated recorders. Any one channel might only have people talking on it for a few minutes in a twenty-four-hour period. When I had a lot of chatter on one tape, I learned to fast-forward but still pick up key words.

  The Customs Service and Coast Guard would talk to each other and to local police. They talked openly about operations they were running against us. They’d gripe about things that the DEA and FBI were telling them to do. They had no idea anybody was listening. They didn’t even encrypt their channels.

  Sometimes I’d miss what they were doing even while listening to the radios. But I also watched the local news stations, and they’d show a press conference where some bigwig in the government would announce, “This weekend we’re launching operation Orange Thunder”—they always picked corny names—“to stop drug smugglers along the coast.” They wouldn’t say where they were going to be operating, but since the idiots gave out their code name for the operation, I’d go back through my tapes and listen for “Orange Thunder” to get the details of where they were setting their traps for us.

  I liked it when the Competition mounted really big operations. We’d just stand down for the week or ten days they ran it and let them catch the other smugglers. When it was over, I knew everything would be wide open, because they’d have to bring in their boats and planes for maintenance. Their personnel would have burned up their overtime. The agencies would have used up their budgets for extra fuel. They’d drop to skeleton operations for the next month.

  All the agencies were jealous of each other. Customs would bicker with the Coast Guard. And they’d both trash-talk the DEA or the FBI or the local police. The Customs Service was really out for glory. They hated
the other agencies because they’d spend weeks tracking a smuggling ring, and at the last minute the FBI or DEA would swoop in, make the arrests, and steal the credit. Everyone would fight over who was going to get to be on camera in the press conference.

  As much as Jon and I argued at times, we didn’t have those problems. We weren’t as infantile. To be clear, I don’t want to bad-mouth the Coast Guard here. They were always more focused on the safety of boaters and on disaster response than on arresting smugglers. Every person in the Coast Guard is a hero every day of the week, as far I’m concerned.

  I could make fun of the Competition because we beat them time and time again. But when we beat them, they went home at night. If they beat us once, we were finished. I lost sleep over that. I focused all my waking hours on the Competition.

  J.R.: One thing Mickey could not do was speak Spanish. It used to irritate me. I believed he purposefully didn’t learn it so that he would have an excuse to not deal with the Colombians. That fell to me.

  MICKEY: Rafa was one crazy little son of a gun. Everybody was scared to death of Rafa. Max was terrified of him, and Rafa was in charge of Max. What Rafa said was the equivalent of Pablo Escobar’s word.

  Rafa barely spoke English, and he had his bodyguard, Flaco, who spoke none. One of the worst times I ever had was going to Max’s house and having to tell Rafa there was a problem with a plane of mine being delayed. When I came in, the Colombians in the house were really nervous. Max was out, and Rafa was in the dining room at a long table with Flaco. It was filled with smoke because they were smoking cocaine, and they were wound up.

  I started to tell Rafa I had a little problem with a plane—a problemo. Rafa began shouting in broken English to me and in Spanish to Flaco. Flaco started shouting back. It became increasingly terrifying because the more Rafa shouted, the less I could understand what he was saying. It wasn’t the kind of situation I ever wanted to be in again.

  J.R.: Mickey came to me and said, “The less I deal with Colombians, the better.”

  I could handle Rafa. I could handle Max. All Max wanted was to sit on his fat ass, and a couple times a week I’d bring him shoeboxes of money. The key was to always defer to him as the great king, El Jefe. The key to Rafa was to smoke coke with him and never show him weakness.

  The more Mickey and I worked together, the less we told Max. We didn’t tell him where our farm was or where I put the stash houses. Nothing. Mickey and I just made everything work. Mickey’s job was technical things. I was the people person.

  MICKEY: Jon was a tough guy. He had gone through a lot of craziness in Vietnam, and it showed. Jon had some anger. People feared him. I’m nonviolent. I didn’t allow my pilots to carry guns on the planes. I saw guns as having the potential to make most situations worse. Jon could handle difficult situations. My job is to get the packages from point A to point B. One reason we worked well together is, Jon was really good at what he did and I was really good at what I did.

  Let me get something clear. I never did it for the money. Little green pieces of paper mean nothing to me. I did it because I got to play with awesome toys, and it was one heck of an adventure.

  J.R.: That’s one difference between Mickey and me. I’m a criminal and I know it. Mickey, he believed he was a pirate. He was kind of like a child. We succeeded because it was like combining someone who lived by my father’s philosophy with a Boy Scout. We were almost unbeatable together.

  MICKEY: If you added up all the money I spent on radios, boats, cars, and aircraft, it probably didn’t exceed $5 million a year. Jon and I had no more than forty people helping us. By contrast, the Competition had thousands of people. When they declared the “War on Drugs,” they committed hundreds of millions of dollars a year to stopping us. I hate to sound arrogant, but they were seldom a worthy opponent.*

  J.R.: The joke of it was, the harder the government tried to stop smugglers, the better it was for us. When they arrested smugglers, they eliminated our competitors. When Mickey and I started together in 1981, there were a lot of other smugglers. By 1985 we were it. The “War on Drugs” helped make the Cartel into a true monopoly.† Thank you, government.

  * The federal indictment of Jon and Mickey described the division of labor between Max, Jon, and Mickey as follows: “Medellín Cartel and its controlling members Jorge Ochoa-Vasquez, Fabio Ochoa-Vasquez, Juan David Ochoa-Vasquez, Rafael Cardona-Salazar and Pablo Escobar-Gaviria were represented in the United States by co-conspirators Max Mermelstein and Jon Roberts. Mermelstein and Roberts would and did make arrangements with the Munday Organization [which included Mickey’s friend ‘Delmer’] to transport drugs from secret locations in Colombia.” It further states that “Jon Roberts served as the intermediary between the owners of the cocaine in Colombia and those who were distributing the cocaine once it arrived in the United States, coordinated with the Munday Organization the transportation of the cocaine to the United States, and received the cocaine once it was brought into the United States.”

  * The federal indictment of Jon and Mickey offers this version of the “cover girl” scheme: “The Munday Organization utilized as one of its transportation methods a Piper Navajo aircraft, N9096Y (hereinafter ‘Navajo’), which was flown by its pilots from the United States to the Bahamas carrying various female passengers known as ‘cover girls,’ who were paid to travel to facilitate entry of the Navajo through Bahamian and United States Customs. The pilots frequently wore uniforms to create the appearance that each flight was a legitimate charter flight. The cover girls would remain in the Bahamas while the Navajo was flown to Colombia to pick up drugs.”

  * Nike missiles were nuclear-tipped tactical weapons designed to detonate atomic bombs off of America’s coastline in the event of a Soviet attack. They would theoretically destroy incoming missiles or planes. The system was dismantled in the late 1960s when officials realized that detonating hundreds of small nuclear bombs over America’s coastline might be as bad as or worse than the Soviet attack they were designed to thwart.

  * Aerojet, now a division of Rancho Cordova, California–based Gencorp, remains the nation’s leading builder of civilian and military rocket motors.

  * Ultimate Boats was located in an industrial area of Miami at 3254 N.W. 38th Street.

  * The Dupont Plaza Hotel was a landmark property at 300 Biscayne Boulevard Way that closed its doors in 2004.

  * In contrast to Mickey’s contemptuous assessment of government efforts to interdict his smuggling flights, the American government’s appraisal of his efforts, as laid out in its indictment of him and Jon, has an almost breathless quality: “The Munday Organization provided spot or cover planes to conduct countersurveillance activities. The Organization used sophisticated electronic equipment to monitor law enforcement radio communications, communicate with its aircraft and boats, and locate the shipment of drugs. The Organization also sought the design, development, manufacture, and testing of a remote-controlled electronic beacon device to be placed with hidden loads of drugs to facilitate the pickup of the drugs by boats. The Organization also acquired, possessed, and used other electronic devices, including night-vision goggles, radar detectors, forward-looking infrared devices and radios which scrambled communications in order to avoid detection by law enforcement agencies in the United States.”

  † From the early to mid-1980s—the period when Jon and Mickey and Max came together to run the Cartel’s transportation efforts, it rose to control an estimated 80 percent of the U.S. cocaine market.

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  J.R.: When the Colombians saw me working with Max, Fabito stepped back. I dealt more with Rafa. But I still ran planes with Barry Seal and worked with my pilot, Roger. I helped Mickey with radios. I moved the coke on the ground and ran the stash houses. I was going in eight different directions at once.

  The most annoying part of my job was dealing with Max. If I could have overthrown Max, I would have pushed a bullet into his fat head with my bare fingers, but because of his marriage that was imposs
ible. Even though we were taking on more of the work, Max would sometimes have to throw his weight around as El Jefe.

  He did this by calling meetings with me at strange times. These were ridiculous because we kept Max in the dark about what we were doing. What could he possibly tell me in a meeting? But to humor him, I’d always say, “Sure, Max. Let’s talk.”

  One time Max called me in the middle of the night to insist we meet as soon as possible.

  “Okay, Max. Come up to my house in the morning. I’ll make breakfast.”

  The next day he shows up late in the afternoon. Max arrives in the backseat of his Mercedes station wagon, with Rafa beside him. Rafa’s guy, Flaco, is at the wheel. Flaco gets out of the car laughing. Flaco had a reputation as a real bad guy. When he had to kill somebody, they said he liked to put his knife in the person’s face and cut a smile into it. That was his joke. Flaco himself wasn’t a smiley kind of guy. But on this day he’s laughing. He whispers to me, “Max and Rafa got surgery this morning.”

  “What happened? Did they get shot?”

  “No, they paid a doctor to vacuum the fat out of them.”

  “Get out of here.”

  Flaco explained he took them to a doctor, and he stuck tubes in them and sucked out their fat. This was before I’d ever heard of liposuction.

  “They had a doctor suck fat out of them with a hose?”

  Flaco opens the back door, and Max and Rafa can hardly get up. He has to pull them out. They’re both howling in pain. Rafa points to his stomach and says, “The doctor did bliff bliff bliff,” which I guess was the sound the liposuction made.

  “But Rafa, you’re skinny.”

  Max explains that when Rafa heard Max was going to get surgery, he decided to get it done for “fun.”

  When we get in the house, Rafa lifts up his shirt. He rips off a bandage and shows me these disgusting holes in his stomach. That’s where the doctor stuck the suction hoses in. Rafa starts yelling, “That fucking doctor. I’m gonna kill him!”