American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  When we took off, I crouched behind my pilot with two fire extinguishers—one aimed at him, the other aimed at me. If I saw one spark, I was going to set them off, so we’d at least get a half second to outrun the fireball that would have erupted around our plane.

  Those Colombians could screw up a wet dream. From then on I built out the fuel tanks in my planes so in a pinch they could make the round-trip without gassing up. I gave my pilots handheld pumps. I put a kit in every plane with tools and spare parts.

  Jon has a high opinion of the Colombians. I have a low one.

  J.R.: Mickey always complained about the Colombians. Great as Mickey was, his planes never carried more than four hundred kilos. I had pilots like Roger and Barry who were carrying two-thousand-kilo loads by 1982. Mickey’s planes carried so much gas and extra engine parts, he barely had room for cocaine. It was an advantage that Mickey’s planes would always get through while my other pilots had to wait for weeks sometimes to get in, but I got sick of Mickey’s looking down on the Colombians.

  The coke factories Pablo ran were unbelievable. The first one they ever took me to was in the middle of the jungle. It was bigger than Don Aronow’s boat factory. They had vats for fermenting the leaves that were as big as swimming pools. They had one room containing hundreds of microwave ovens that they used to bake the coke. There were power generators, guys walking around in masks and chemical hazard suits, dormitories for workers. One factory could make something like a thousand kilos a day.

  The chemicals from the factory were so strong, you could smell them from high up in an airplane. They’d run a factory for a week, then shut it down and switch to another. They could take the factories apart and move them in trucks to a new location. The Colombians weren’t idiots. They didn’t do things like Americans. They weren’t in air-conditioned offices, with their tools all lined up on workbenches, as Mickey would have them. But when they decided to do something, nobody could stop them.

  I STARTED traveling to Colombia every few months. Rafa owned a car dealership in Medellín. The showroom had like one 1980 Cadillac, one 1979 Corvette, one Audi with no VIN numbers on it. They all leaked. A couple times a day, kids who worked there would push the oil around with a mop.

  Rafa had an office upstairs. There was a kitchen next to the office with a long table, and that’s where I had my next few meetings with Pablo Escobar. The question was always the same: “Can you move more coke?”

  On a couple of visits Pablo had me stay an extra day so one of his guys could show me around Medellín. Medellín was like a frontier town compared to Barranquilla or Bogotá. But Pablo was very proud of the soccer fields that he’d paid for in the slums. Pablo was vain about his charitable work. He’d run for congress in Colombia and won.* He was a politician in addition to being a criminal, no different than an American judge or congressman.

  At night Rafa always wanted to go out to a disco where they played terrible, terrible Spanish rock. Even in the early 1980s before it got really bad, there was a lot of violence in Medellín. Inside the discos we’d have so many bodyguards, it was never relaxing.

  One night we were driving to the disco when we pulled up to a light and I saw kids on the street run up to the car. They reached in the window and grabbed the driver’s arm to steal his watch. When he put up a fight, one of the kids chopped off his hand with a machete. That’s how they stole a watch in Medellín.

  • • •

  MY THIRD or fourth meeting with Pablo, he said, “Can you get me chemicals—acetone or ether?”

  Those chemicals were used to make cocaine. Pablo explained that the U.S. government had restricted selling them in Colombia. I was thinking, What do I know about getting industrial chemicals? Colombians had an inflated view of Americans—it was as if we had magical powers.

  “If you help me with this, you’ll be my friend for life.”

  Obviously he was a treacherous motherfucker, and I didn’t believe a word he said, but I told him I’d do my best for him.

  When I got back to Miami, I asked everybody about these chemicals. I asked doctors who bought coke from me. I asked pilots. Weeks later I was visiting my friend Bernie Levine in San Francisco, and I asked him about getting chemicals. He said, “I got a cousin in Germany who trades all kinds of shit for factories.”

  It turned out Bernie’s cousin knew a guy who could buy thousands of gallons of this shit and send it on a boat from Germany to Colombia.

  Danny Mones set up a dummy firm to place the orders and get them through the port at Colombia. For about six months we did a huge business. We got Pablo so much acetone, he finally said, “Stop. I’ve got enough for fifty years now.”

  Getting Pablo his chemicals brought me respect in the Cartel.

  FABITO STARTED inviting me down to Colombia for more social visits. I’d visit him in Bogotá, where the Ochoas had one of their family restaurants—the one I used to call to reach Fabito or his brother, Las Margaritas. They served incredible steaks. Fabito’s father, Don Ochoa, started as a rancher, and they served his cows.

  What made Las Margaritas unique was that it had a ring inside where they’d bring out a live bull and kill him while the customers were eating their steak. To the Colombians this was elegant dining. Myself, I don’t want to see a bullfight when I’m eating. I like fishing, but you won’t see me gutting a fish at the dinner table.

  Fabito took me up to his family’s finca—or ranch—to meet his father, Don Ochoa. The finca was on thousands of acres. To me, it was like driving into a real-life Ponderosa. If there ever was a true-life Cartwright family, the Ochoas were it. They had the ranch, the father, and the loyal sons all running the family business.

  Their finca was like its own town. The family had so much money flowing in that the sons were building their own mansions across the land. There were bulldozers and cranes everywhere. Fabito’s brother Jorge was building a garage that could hold his collection of two hundred cars and motorcycles. It was ridiculous, the money this family was making.

  The place where Don Ochoa lived was just a big country place that looked almost like a fancy barn. When we went there, Fabito said, “We can’t do any shit in front of my father.”

  In front of his dad, he was like a little kid on his best behavior. We had a couple of sit-down dinners there. Nobody mentioned cocaine. There were no orgies or whores running around like at a Miami party. Men dressed like gentleman cowboys. Women wore conservative dresses, or fancy riding clothes.

  The big entertainment in the house was watching Don Ochoa ride his Paso Finos. He got fatter as the Cartel grew and must have weighed more than four hundred pounds when I last saw him. Everybody would stand outside at sunset and watch the big man climb on his horse. Then he’d canter past, and everybody would applaud and talk about how good his form was, insisting that he was a true caballero. They should have been clapping for that poor horse that had to carry his fat ass.

  Whenever I went there, Don Ochoa would make a point to come over to me and ask about racehorses. Fabito had told him I owned some racehorses. We’d talk a little bit about the kind of horses I liked, and Don Ochoa would laugh. Colombia didn’t have horse-racing tracks like we have in America. Every time we spoke about American racehorses, he’d say, “Why do the horses always run around in a circle?”

  He’d wave his finger in a circle and laugh. I’m not saying he was an imbecile, but I never had an intelligent conversation with him about anything. A few times he said, “I know you do a good job.” But that was it.

  The guy sat on top of the most successful criminal organization there was. He had people like Escobar, his sons, Rafa, Griselda Blanco, Mickey Munday, and me doing all the dirty work, and the money just flowed. Don Ochoa was one of the happiest people I’ve ever seen. Everything was a joke to this man. They say crime doesn’t pay. What a farce.

  * Colonel Manuel Noriega seized control in Panama in 1981 after his boss, Omar Torrijos, the Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution, aka the dictator of Pa
nama, died in a plane crash—one that Noriega’s lieutenants claimed was caused by a bomb he placed on the aircraft. Noriega cemented his grip on power in 1983 when he stole a national election, promoted himself to general, and became the new dictator of Panama.

  * Barry Seal was familiar with Central American airports from his days flying arms for the CIA in the 1960s and early 1970s.

  * In 1982 Escobar was elected as a representative in Colombia’s national congress.

  61

  J.R.: In some ways Mickey had it easy. His job was clear-cut. Either the plane had enough gas or it didn’t. Most of what I did was manage relationships. Everybody had to be massaged. If situations weren’t handled properly, things could blow up.

  After Gary Teriaca got killed, Bobby Erra and Albert took over distributing coke to Steven Grabow in Aspen, Colorado. Joey Ippolito came to me. He didn’t want to buy the coke he was selling in L.A. through Bobby Erra. He didn’t want to pick it up anymore. Gary Teriaca had been his friend, and now that he was gone, he wanted to get it direct from the Cartel.

  But I wanted him to buy from Bobby and Albert and keep running it through Colorado because this kept those guys happy, and I wanted to keep them happy because I had to share Miami with them.

  Joey argued that Steven Grabow in Aspen was no good now that his friend Gary was gone. To keep Joey happy, I promised to go out to Aspen and check up on Grabow. I had to do this to show Joey respect.

  It turned out that my dog Brady, whom I’d had all these years, got cancer of the jaw. My vet in Miami sent me to the Angell Clinic in Boston to treat Brady.* But when I flew him there, they said the best clinic for him was at Colorado University. So I took Brady out there on a chartered jet and arranged for Grabow to pick me up in Denver.

  After we took Brady to the clinic, I went with Steven to Aspen. He didn’t know for sure that his friend Gary Teriaca was dead. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to him either, but I knew the story we were telling people—that he was traveling in Europe—was bullshit.

  When I looked in Steven’s eyes, I could see him growing a little nervous when I brought up Gary, but other than that he seemed fine. He was a blowhead like Gary, but he wasn’t strung out. He had a good life in Aspen with his lovely wife, Linda. We went out a few nights and had some meals. Grabow sold the coke Bobby and Albert shipped to him to the beautiful people in Aspen. But mostly his job was holding the coke that had been sent up in cars from Miami so guys from California could pick it up and take it to L.A. for Joey Ippolito and other distributors. The guys from California brought money to Steven that he put in the cars returning to Florida. He did a good job. He used garages at a few different condos to hold the cars and make the transfers. He was moving a good amount by then—two or three hundred kilos a month. That was half a billion dollars a year in coke passing through his hands, and nobody ever had a problem.

  Even after he lost his friend Gary, I could see he was still steady.

  I went back to Joey Ippolito and said, “Don’t rock the boat. You got a good thing going in Aspen.”

  Unfortunately, I learned on that trip that Brady couldn’t be treated for his cancer, and I had to fly him back and put him down.

  JOEY IPPOLITO couldn’t complain how I handled him. But he never gave up trying to worm out of me a direct connection to the Cartel. He used to come to Miami all the time and work on me. Joey was a good friend of Donny Soffer’s, who built the Turnberry Towers* and most of Aventura. In the past Danny Mones and I had put money into Soffer’s business when he had trouble getting normal financing. Joey Ippolito had done the same.† In the early 1980s, when Soffer reached out for more financing to expand his Turnberry properties, Joey talked me into going in with him on condos in one of the towers. When the building was finished, we got our money back plus four corner units in a tower. My thought was to flip the condos.

  But Joey had another thought: “How about we fix them up nice and rent them to celebrities I know from L.A., so they got a nice place to stay when they visit Miami?”

  Joey introduced me to a broad who claimed she was an expert decorator. She met me at one of the condos we were going to fix up. It was brand-new, but the lady decorator wanted to put in a sunken floor and bigger windows and buy furniture suitable for movie stars. She said, “I can do it for a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I said, “Lady, that’s more than the condo cost.”

  “You’ll make up for it when you charge more for the rental.”

  I said, “Okay. But I got one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re a very attractive decorator. I’ll hire you. You can decorate your brains out. When you’re done, you’re going to take me here, and I’m going to fuck the shit out of you.”

  “Deal.”

  This broad really hustled me. By the time she was done, I paid way more than her quote. Before I could see the place and make her fulfill her end, I got called out of town on business. When I got back, Joey said, “Good news. I rented our place to my friend Jimmy.”

  I don’t know who Jimmy is, but great, if he signed a two-hundred-year lease, maybe I’ll make up what that lady decorator cost me. A month later Joey calls me, “Can you bring your boat down to Turnberry Isles Marina and pick up me and Jimmy, our tenant? I want to take him out and show him a good time.”

  “Okay, Joey. You’re my friend. I’ll be there.”

  Coming into Miami and getting my boat out from my marina was a hassle, but Joey Ippolito isn’t just a friend, he’s business. When I dock at the Turnberry, Joey walks down with Jimmy, our tenant. The guy is halfway familiar, but I can’t place him.

  Jimmy shakes my hand and says, “Hiya, Jon,” like we’re old friends.

  I figure it out. “Jimmy” is James Caan, the actor. That’s why Joey was hot to have me come down. He wanted to show off getting James Caan as our tenant.

  Soon as we get out on the water, Joey asks if I brought some coke. I always have something on my boat for recreation. Joey has brought some girls. Everybody does some lines. We’re all laughing. The vial I’d brought my coke in is sitting on a mirror tray where everybody has just done their lines. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Caan put a straw up his nose and stick it in the vial. The movie star is sitting there like a slob snorting up all my party-blow.

  Joey sees me looking at Caan and says, “I’m sorry, Jon. The guy’s a Hoover. I can’t believe he don’t got holes in his nose.”

  Soon as he finishes my blow, Caan starts to jones. “You got any more?”

  “That’s all I had, bro.”

  “Take me over to the Palm Bay Club. I can get some. People give it to me because of who I am.”

  “Okay, chief.”

  I drive the boat over to the Palm Bay, and as we dock, Caan says, “You’re a great guy. Gimme your number for when I come back. I want to be able to call you when I’m in Miami.”

  “I ain’t giving you my number.”

  “Why wouldn’t you give me your number?”

  “Because I want you to leave me the fuck alone.”

  Caan’s in a bathing suit and flip-flops, but he steps up to me like he means something. “You’ve got a piece-of-shit attitude.”

  “I remember you in The Godfather,” I say, “and I remember you beat up some guy with the garbage cans or whatever the story was, but you’re not a tough guy. You may think you’re a tough guy because you’re wacked out of your mind on coke, but you’re just an asshole in flip-flops.”

  Caan says nothing, just turns and steps off the boat. Joey says, “Jon, you really blew it. Jimmy don’t like you now.”

  “Joey, that guy’s beneath you.”

  Jimmy remained a tenant the next couple of years. After he went back to L.A. that first time I met him, I called up that lady decorator and reminded her she still owed me her end of our deal. “But the place is rented,” she said.

  “The tenant’s out of town, and I got the master key.”

  “Okay.”


  When we meet at the apartment, she says, “I hope you don’t think anything of me, but sometimes to loosen up I like to take a Quaalude. I brought some.”

  “How about I mix them up in some drinks?”

  “That would be delightful.”

  I throw a bunch of Quaaludes in the blender. We toast her beautiful decorating job, and half an hour later she turns into a total freak. She’s touching herself. She’s begging me to eat her pussy. She’s incredible. We fuck for hours like we’re in a porno movie. At four in the morning I need to get home to Toni in Delray, so I carry this broad down to my car and drive her to her place.

  The next day she calls. “Jon, I don’t remember a thing about last night. I know we must have had fun. I’m sore all over. I hope I did nothing too unladylike.”

  “Not a bit. All we did was I fucked you in your ass for about seven hours in James Caan’s bed.”

  “Goodness,” she says.

  That was her word, “goodness.” It made me laugh.

  Much as I liked spending time with Joey and having our little adventures together, he was work because he bought ridiculous amounts of coke from Bobby and Albert. I had a dozen other relationships like this that I constantly had to manage.

  IN 1983 Steven Grabow got arrested on a cocaine charge in Aspen.* He didn’t give up Albert or Bobby or Joey or me, but nobody was taking any chances. He got blown up outside his gym. They put a bomb in his car, and that was it.† The police found a pile of shit in his car, and his body in the bushes.‡ His arrest was a close call for all of us. I was sure he would have talked, had he lived, because he was facing a lot of prison time. Getting rid of him was the right thing to do. But I felt bad for the kid.