American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  I get them lying on the floor with pillows. I sit down and say, “Okay, Max. What did you want to talk about?”

  “Jon, I can’t talk at a time like this. It hurts too much.”

  That was it. He never told me what the meeting was about. There was truly no need for Max to have any kind of meeting, but by calling one, it made him feel important.

  After they left, Rafa checked into a hospital. His surgery got infected, and it nearly killed him. He was Pablo Escobar’s man in Miami, and Max nearly killed him with unnecessary surgery.

  ANYTHING MAX tried to do on his own ended in disaster. One time Max met a guy who told him if he came to Mexico, he could set him up with guys who could smuggle coke into Texas. Max went to Mexico and brought his wife. As soon as they checked in to their hotel, the federales busted into his room and demanded a ransom. The whole thing was a setup. It took Max two days to raise the money. The whole time the federales had him in the hotel, they were having a party—ordering liquor, whores, you name it—putting it all on Max’s tab. After Max paid the ransom to the federales, the hotel held him until he raised a second round of money to pay the bill.

  Obviously, Max never found a way to smuggle through Mexico.

  PART OF what Max did to remind everybody he was married into the Cartel was to have all these illegal Colombian kids stay at his house. He claimed that everyone in the house was somehow related to Pablo Escobar or Don Ochoa. In reality, most were just peasants from the mountains. They would mow his grass, wash his cars. Some would move on to become bodyguards for the Colombian distributors in Miami or other cities.

  One time Max told me I needed to give his “nephew” a job. This kid was different from the peasants who stayed at Max’s. He was soft. He looked like a rich kid. None of the Colombians wanted him. Max told me I needed to train him as a driver.

  I went in the room where the kid was staying. He was twenty years old, watching Sesame Street on TV, laughing at the big bird. I shut the TV off and told him to meet me the next day in blue jeans, a work shirt, and a baseball cap. I explained that I’d pick him up, drive him to a car. He was to drive that car to a Burger King and leave the keys in the bathroom.

  “Oh yeah, man. That’s real easy. No problem,” he said.

  The next day I pick up Max’s asshole nephew in my Buick Riviera that I used for work. He’s got the cap on, the jeans, the work shirt. Very good. I drive him to the car he’s going to take to Burger King. It is one of Mickey’s special cars with half a ton of cocaine in the trunk. I handed this turd the key and told him, “Okay. Drive it to Burger King.”

  The kid freezes. He won’t even close his hand over the key.

  I say, “Good-bye!”

  I reach over to push the kid out, and he starts slapping me like a girl.

  The Buick Riviera has a wide center console and a fat gearshift. I take the kid by the hair and I smash his face into the center console. I bounce his head a couple times and knock him out. I drive down a side street and push him out. If you won’t work, you’re fired.

  I ended up running the car to Burger King myself. I didn’t like it, but I had no choice. When I finished, I called Max and I said, “I’m going to tell you something. You’re a fat fuck. Your nephew’s a piece of shit. You’re all assholes. Have a nice day.”

  The next day Rafa has me meet him at a dive bar on the Miami River, where a lot of the Colombian smugglers used to hang out. He says, “Come on, let’s go get laid. Let’s go get high.”

  We go inside the place in the middle of the day. We do a few lines, send the whores away. I ask him what’s going on.

  Rafa says, “The Jewball is very upset.”

  Rafa had started learning English, and his new nickname for Max was “the Jewball.”

  “What’s wrong with Max?”

  “The Jewball’s crying that you beat up his nephew.”

  I explain to Rafa what happened. Instead of cooling him down, now he wants to kill Max’s nephew. “That kid is a piece of shit. He’s a nobody. I’m gonna take care of him. Fuck the Jewball.”

  “Rafa, forget about that kid. He got a beating. It’s over.”

  But there was no reaching Rafa. I never saw that kid again. In the end Max couldn’t complain because, as much as he tried to throw his weight around, everybody knew he was nothing on the inside.

  • • •

  THE WORST part of working with Max was his parties. Sometimes he’d have them at his farm in Davie. The centerpiece of a Max party was when he would put on a Spanish caballero outfit and hoist his big ass onto a Paso Fino and greet everybody like a cowboy clown. Max had a picture of Don Ochoa on a horse like this, and in his mind he was trying to show everyone he was the same kind of guy.

  Part of the reason I didn’t like going to Max’s parties was that many of the people who attended were the Colombian distributors I delivered coke to. Everything was set up—using different cars, having the drivers drop the keys at restaurants—so I’d never have to see them. The distributors were the ones going wild in the streets. They all had heat on them. I didn’t want them to know my face.

  But I went to the parties to keep Max happy. One time I was in his house, and I saw Rafa talking to an older lady, maybe thirty-five. She reminded me of a Colombian version of Phyllis, but this lady wore gaudy clothes. One thing about her intrigued me. Normally, when Rafa talked to a woman, he was either flirting with her or bossing her around. With this woman, he was subdued.

  I went up to Rafa and said, “What’s her story?”

  He said, “Forget about her. That’s Griselda.”

  Griselda Blanco ran a gang that was moving hundreds of kilos a month. It was coke that I delivered to her guys, but I’d never met her. I later found out that she knew Rafa from back in the slums in Colombia. She supposedly committed her first murder when she was eleven. In the early 1970s she came to New York and worked as a whore. When Rafa showed up in Queens in 1976, she became one of his first big distributors. Rafa and Griselda were very loyal to each other. Rafa treated every woman I saw him with like garbage, but Griselda was his princess. She could do no wrong. I did not know when I met her that she was already wanted for the Dadeland Massacre or that she was well on her way to supposedly murdering two hundred people.* Had I known this, I would have been furious that Max had her at a party because a woman that scandalous would have a lot of heat on her.†

  But when I asked Rafa about her, all he said was “That bitch is a little bit crazy.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her, which made no sense. Griselda was already going fat. In a couple of years she’d lose all her looks and turn into a real beast. Despite her not being the most attractive woman at the party, she turned me on. I couldn’t put my finger on it. There’s something about a woman in her killing prime.

  I told Rafa I was going to pick her up.

  He said, “Jon, they call her the Black Widow because after she uses a man, she kills him.”‡

  “Come on. I’m not going to let her kill me.” I’m thinking, A bitch that mad might give the best fuck in the world. I went over to Griselda and started talking. She said, “I’ve never talked to a gringo who speaks Spanish so natural. You must be a funny gringo.”

  It was a stupid joke, but I laughed along with her because I was going out of my mind for this broad. My balls were aching for her. I guess I’m just weak for evil women. Rafa came back over and pulled me away. He said, “Jon, forget her. If you fuck her, it is bad for our business.”

  Can you believe it? Rafa was the voice of sanity.

  • • •

  MY LAST social event involving Max was his Christmas party. Max wanted me to bring Toni Moon with me. What a farce. I wasn’t going to bring her to a gathering of Colombian psychopaths. Max liked to think of himself as a Jewish version of Joe Kennedy. I didn’t even know who Joe Kennedy was until Max told me he was the father who founded the family’s fortune by smuggling liquor and using the money to make his son the president. Max always talk
ed about Joe Kennedy. I don’t think he planned to make his stepkids president, but in his mind Kennedy was his hero because he proved that being a smuggler was respectable.

  I didn’t care if what I did was respected by society or not. My idea of a party was a bunch of Playboy Bunnies on Quaaludes in the back room of the Forge. But Max had a different idea. For his Christmas party he’d decked out his house with lights. There was Christmas music. There was mistletoe. Max wore a Santa Claus hat to entertain the little kids crawling around the carpets, who belonged to the Colombians. When I arrived at his house and saw Max in his Santa hat, I thought, This is going to be a terrible party.

  The food was good. Colombians don’t have turkey on Christmas, or a normal ham you slice up. They served arepas, beans, rice, long sandwiches with cheese and olives on them. They laid the food out in a buffet, and that part was good.

  Everybody started drinking, getting high. I ate some food, had a few laughs, and told Max, “Okay. I need to go.”

  “Come on, Jon. Stay.”

  “All right, Max. Half an hour more.”

  Twenty minutes later I heard bang bang. Normally, if somebody shoots a gun in a crowded room, women will scream. But everybody goes silent. I see at one side of the room, one of Max’s party guests is on a table with his face blown off. Rafa is standing a few feet away with a gun, talking to himself and laughing. He’s out of his mind, smoking bazookas. Nobody says anything because they know Rafa. Nobody wants to make a noise and be the next person he shoots.

  Rafa lowers his gun and says, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

  Some people try to go back to acting normal, talking and laughing, like Hey, what a fun Christmas party this is.

  I see Rafa talk to Max, then Max comes over to me, smoking his cigarette like mad, and says, “Jon, he wants me to help move the body out. You’ve got to help me.”

  “Fuck you, Max. I wanted to leave half an hour ago.”

  I go over to Rafa and said, “Is it okay if I leave?”

  Rafa says, “Hey, man. Thanks for coming.”

  As I walk outside, Max and Flaco are dragging out the body of the guy Rafa shot. Max is whimpering like a little puppy because he’s so fucking terrified.* I say, “Enjoy your Christmas, buddy.”

  Two days later I see Max at his farm. He’s got five cigarettes going at one time. He tells me Rafa and Flaco drove him around all night long in a van with the dead Colombian. Every time they found a good place to dump the body, they would stop, get the corpse halfway out, and Rafa would change his mind. Rafa would give Flaco orders to drive to a different spot. At dawn Max said they finally drove back to his house to chop the body up in the garage. Rafa and Flaco then fed it to a swamp somewhere. Max told me the guy Rafa shot was married to a woman Rafa knew. He’d offended Rafa by disrespecting his wife. Honor is important to Colombians like anybody else.

  In the end, the shooting benefited me. I always had it to hold over Max. Now, whenever he asked me to do something idiotic, I’d say, “Is this gonna be like your Christmas party, Max?”

  The other good part was I had an excuse to never go to another party at Max’s.

  * In 1979 Griselda Blanco and her crew are believed to have ambushed Cubans from a rival coke gang at the Dadeland Mall, raking several shops and a nearby parking lot with gunfire from automatic weapons. The brazen daylight shoot-out, which resulted in three deaths, was dubbed the “Dadeland Massacre.” Authorities believe that Blanco and her crew killed as many as two hundred people. Her top enforcer admitted that when murdering a rival, they’d often seek out his wife and children and kill them, too.

  * In the previously cited book The Man Who Made It Snow, Max places this Christmas shooting in 1978 and cites it as a turning point in his becoming Rafa’s virtual kidnapping victim—a sort of Patty Hearst—forced to run Cartel operations in the United States. Jon places the shooting in 1981. He says that Max moved up the date so he could better make the “ridiculous claim” in his book that he was kidnapped into cocaine smuggling.

  † Contrary to Jon’s worries, police had no idea who Griselda was until years after her Miami murder spree ended, when she was arrested for another crime. Only then did one of her accomplices fill in police on the full extent of the gang’s activities.

  ‡ Griselda is reputed to have murdered three of her husbands.

  58

  J.R.: Obviously, when you’re in an illegal business, you need to assert your dominance with enough force that nobody will fuck with you. The Colombians took this idea too far.

  One time Rafa asked me to help collect from a Colombian who owed him money. We were out driving around one night, and Rafa found out that the guy was in a bar. “Go in the bar, Jon. Make friends. Tell him you have good coke. He’ll trust you because you’re a gringo. When he comes out the door, Flaco and I will grab him and get our money.”

  “Okay, Rafa. We’ll see what happens.”

  I spent one hour with the guy in the bar, and in that time Rafa changed his mind. I walked out the door with him, and two Indian fuckers—the peasants with flat faces who Rafa used to do his dirty work—hopped off of a motorbike. They walked up with MAC-10s and shot the guy five feet behind me.* Rafa’s thought process was, he’d rather kill a guy than get the money the guy owed him.

  You can imagine how angry I was. I could have been shot. When I found Rafa the next morning, I said, “You crazy fucker. Where would you be if you got me killed?”

  “Jon, I got carried away.”

  That’s how they were. The Colombians were aggressive. One time Griselda sent her guys to blow up the car of someone she had a feud with. They put so much dynamite in the car, it blew up the house it was parked in front of. That was the Colombian way.

  People in Miami got very uptight about all the bodies piling up. The Colombians got a reputation for being crazy. At the street level Colombians fought among themselves. Higher up, there were guys like Rafa who smoked a little too much cocaine and went crazy sometimes. Despite their balls, the Colombians could not dominate the streets in Miami. They were outnumbered by the Cubans twenty to one. In the long run the Cubans would always kick their asses.

  From the start, smart Colombians like the Ochoas understood they could not work alone. They were happy to sell to Cubans, Italians—anybody with money. They weren’t completely irrational people.

  In my view, the Colombians weren’t more murderous than other people. They just were more open about it. They’d shoot people and leave them on the streets. They didn’t pick up after themselves.

  I WAS in no position to look down my nose at the Colombians for being violent. Look how we took care of Richard Schwartz at his hamburger shop. People could say we did that killing for Gary Teriaca’s honor, to avenge his little brother’s murder. But we were no better than the Cubans or the Colombians.

  In the early 1980s, Bobby Erra got involved in the jukebox and pinball machine industry. When some pizza shops wouldn’t pay him what he wanted for his coin machines, Bobby hired Albert to blow up all their pizza shops.* All this over coin machines. The money was nothing to Bobby. He just wanted to impress people by showing he could blow up their businesses.

  Gary Teriaca found out about a guy in Miami’s diamond district who was importing cocaine with some Colombians we’d never heard of. Gary didn’t like this diamond guy because he was trying to sell coke to the same people in Miami that Gary sold to. Gary wanted to rob him.

  Gary was really out of his mind by this time. He was the first “cocaine junkie” I’d ever seen. He had been such a good-looking athletic kid. Now he was pale and skinny, his nose would start bleeding, and there was no way to stop it. He’d plug his nose with tissues, and the blood would bubble out of his mouth. He was a mess. I told him many times he should start smoking bazookas like Rafa. That way, at least, his nose would get a rest.

  But Gary was right about the diamond guy. He was getting hundreds of kilos of coke. And he was bringing it in in a very smart way. He found a factory that ma
de plastic shoe hangers—bags you hang in your closet for holding shoes. He got the factory to make special shoe hangers with seams in the back that they could put a kilo of coke in. They’d flatten the kilo so you wouldn’t even feel it in the plastic. They’d send these shoe hangers to Colombia empty, and the Colombians would ship them back loaded.

  The diamond guy was a competitor, so it made sense to rob him. You always want to fuck up your competition. I wasn’t at a point in life where I wanted to be ripping off people in Miami, but I had an idea.

  My ex-brother-in-law, Henry Borelli, was always begging to do business with me. We’d left on good terms after the incident at the International Inn where I had to kneecap his guy, and I was happy to do Henry a solid. I invited him to come down and rob this diamond guy for us. He’d make out and nobody would connect the robbery to us.

  Henry came down with a couple of his guys. Boom. Boom. They ripped off the guys working for the diamond guy. A man of his word, Henry gave a cut to Gary and me. End of story.

  The weak link in this was Gary Teriaca. He ended up bragging about his New York heavies he called in to do the rip-off, and this got back to the diamond guy, who had his own heavies. A couple weeks later Gary was walking down 79th Street in broad daylight, and somebody opened up on him. Gary was hit three times. He was fortunate that though they shot him in the chest, they missed his heart.

  Unfortunately, Gary never really recovered mentally. He’d never been the same since his little brother got shot at the Forge. Being shot on the street weakened him more. When guys get weak, people inevitably start to turn on them.

  ALBERT SAN PEDRO feared weak people. Gary had become very important to Albert. Gary was buying hundreds of kilos a month from him to ship out to Colorado. Some went to his friend Steven Grabow. A lot went on to Joey Ippolito or other guys in California. There were some months people in California took a thousand kilos. That meant a great deal to Albert. When he saw Gary, his main partner in this, with his nosebleeds, getting shot up on the street, it made him uptight.