American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  We went upstairs to big double doors. The bouncer standing there says, “How are you tonight, Your Honor?”

  The bouncer opens the doors, and inside there are green tables with every game you’d see in Las Vegas, except this place is classier. There are guys in tuxedos, women in jewels. Everybody comes up to say, “Hi, Your Honor.”

  Judge Rosenberg turns to me and says, “I’m going to get you some chips. The way it works is, nobody walks out of here with money. If you win, I’ll have somebody bring your cash tomorrow.”

  I shot craps for hours. That’s my favorite game, but doing it with Toni and Judge Rosenberg and all these people who looked like they were in the movies—it was a trip and a half. At the end of the night, I was up $50,000. Next day, good to his word, Judge Rosenberg had one of his cops bring me my winnings.

  A day later we went to Sportsman’s Park to run my horse Best Game. When the race started, he didn’t break right. My heart went to my stomach. Judge Rosenberg must have noticed the look on my face, and he leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about it, Jon. It’s just a horse race.”

  Judge Rosenberg wasn’t just classy, he was a gracious man. I knew he’d bet on my horse, but he was trying to put me at ease. All my worrying was for nothing. Best Game pulled ahead and won.

  We all had a terrific time in Chicago. At the time the judge was hosting me, my partner Ron Tobachnik and I were moving a couple hundred kilos every month in the city. Not that I’d ever mention this to the judge. I’d been some kind of gangster my whole life, but the first time I ever lived like one—like the way I pictured Al Capone living in his heyday—was during those nights in Chicago when Judge Rosenberg took me around town.

  WHEN I first started buying horses, they were like pieces of meat to me. Whether they won or lost, I made money—because I was using them for laundering. But early on I became interested in winning. I had horses gushing cash. I bought a horse called Noholme’s Star for $30,000, and he earned $850,000 for me.

  Sy taught me how to train horses so they’d run their hearts out. But I also learned how to fix races. There were many tricks. I hired what they called witch doctors—crooked vets—who could take a nothing horse and give him hops so he’d run his brains out. In the early days, hops meant heroin. They’d give it to injured horses so they’d run hard on injured legs. Of course, once a horse runs a race or two on hops, there’s no more horse left. By the late 1970s witch doctors were coming up with all sorts of exotic dope. There was the testosterone that Bryan used to shoot up. There was a drug called Sublimaze* that made horses fly like Superman. When they banned it in the United States, I found a guy in Colombia who could get it for me, and I’d fly it up with coke shipments.

  The tracks got wise to doping, and they made a rule that winning horses had to get tested in a “spit barn,” where officials would test their piss. The guys overseeing the spit barns at Florida tracks were state employees. I could usually find one I could bribe into switching the piss cups. That way I could win with a doped horse, no problem.

  If there was no way to pay off the guys at the spit barn, I found a mad-scientist doctor who, the morning before the race, would remove all the horse’s blood and replace it with oxygenated blood. I had another guy who employed a very simple trick. Before the race, he’d blow pure oxygen into the horse’s ass. The oxygen feeds all the veins up there, and the horse will run like a motherfucker, but he won’t test dirty.

  There was always the old-fashioned way to fix a race: pay off the jockey. Some jockeys would sneak charging sticks up their sleeve. A charging stick is like a stun gun. When the horse gets shocked, he runs faster.

  A really good jockey can hold a horse when he’s running him. He’ll whip him like crazy with his crop, but secretly he’s holding back the horse. If you do this with the same horse several races in a row, everybody thinks he’s a nothing horse. The odds go long, then you run him to win.

  Albert San Pedro was into racehorses, and so was Bobby Erra. One time we put our heads together and decided, “Let’s fix a race at Calder by buying off every jockey.”†

  We paid off every jockey and picked the trifecta.

  It went perfect, at first. Everybody hit their marks. Bobby and Albert and I were all slapping hands. It’s one of the few times I ever saw Albert smile. Then, in the final stretch, bam, the lead horse steps in a tiny hole and breaks his leg. He goes down, and the whole pack crashes into him. Horses are falling everywhere, jockeys flying in the air. Disaster. You plan and you plan, and at the last minute your horse slips his foot in a little hole.

  IN MY early days, I ran my horses like I ran my life. If there was an evil way, I’d find it. I got my rewards, and the good people got punished. At Calder I had a jockey named Nick Navarro who worked for me. He was one of the good guys. He wouldn’t hold horses or charge them or run them on dope. He was very skilled, and when I ran my horses clean, I used Nick.

  One day in 1977 he ran a race for me at Calder. I walked up to him after he finished. He put his hand up to wave, and there was a powerful explosion. A bolt of lightning came out of the sky and hit him. It blew him to pieces. It split his helmet in half, threw him out of his boots.* He was one of the best guys. He had a wife, a couple of kids. And there’s me a few feet away. God sends a lightning bolt down. Instead of hitting me, He hits the good guy. Please. Don’t tell me the wicked are punished.

  In the early days there were many things I did that I’m not proud of. Sometimes you’d dope a horse, and then when you used him up, you’d kill him for the insurance. There was a guy who was a hit man for horses. He’d come to your barn and give your horse lethal drugs that couldn’t be traced. It would look like the horse had a seizure. The last time I did this, I put the injection in the horse myself. I went out to eat, came back, and saw the horse legs up in the stall. This dead horse had a terrible look on his face. Even though he was dead, he was looking up at me. I could see in his eyes that in his last minute on earth, I gave him agony, and all he’d ever given me was pleasure.

  I never killed a horse after that. Part of what changed my attitude about horses was Toni Moon. She loved horses. She liked riding them, and she had an eye for racehorses. When she came along, she and Sy got into a pissing match over how to run my stables, and she won. He still bad-mouths the horses she picked, but that’s sour grapes. Toni had good instincts, and she really cared for the animals.

  When you care for your animals they can break your heart. This happened to me with a horse named Desperado. Toni and I found him in Kentucky. We were out at a farm early in the morning. The sun was barely up. There was a heavy mist. Out of it a horse came running. Desperado. He was gray with black dimples.

  Toni and I looked at each other. We knew this was the horse. I’d always had the fantasy of winning the Kentucky Derby. I could dominate many tracks, but winning against all those blue-blood assholes at the Kentucky Derby? There’d be nothing greater. I felt Desperado was my winner.

  He was still a baby when I got him. He hadn’t been trained how to run, but he could already fly on the grass, and he had good instincts. He didn’t like other horses. You don’t want a sociable horse. They stay in the pack. You want a horse who likes to run in front of all the other horses. Desperado was a killer.

  I named him Desperado because I saw myself in his eyes. We took him down to Ocala, because Ocala is the best place in the world to raise baby horses. There’s no snow on the ground to slip and hurt themselves. Ocala’s built on limestone that leaches minerals into the water, and when the baby horses drink, it makes them strong.

  The legs on a baby horse are tender. If you give the horse his head too soon and start running him early, he can buck his shins and injure himself. We found a trainer who was patient, Juan Sanchez. Juan had worked for Horatio Luro when he trained Northern Dancer, which many people believe was the best racehorse that ever lived.*

  I raised Desperado the opposite of how my father raised me. That horse was my son, and I gave him the best. Ther
e were carrot farms near my house in Delray. You could pay farmers to walk on their land and pull carrots from the ground. I used to get up early and pull bunches of carrots and fly up to Ocala in my helicopter to feed Desperado.

  After months and months Juan and I put a boy on Desperado and ran him. We had the boy hold him back, but Desperado moved like lightning. Juan turned to me and said, “He’s really full of himself. He knows how good he is.”

  We decided to breeze him—give him an easy, full run—the next morning. Desperado decided to show off. He took all his head and ran full out. He broke the track record in the morning. We ran him again, and he broke the track record for the afternoon.

  I looked at Toni and said, “We’re going to the Kentucky Derby.”

  A few weeks later we were breezing Desperado out for his first race, and I guess he got cocky. He broke from the gate and twisted his leg. He went down. I ran to him. He tried again and again to get up, but his leg couldn’t hold him. He didn’t understand. I had to hold his head to stop him from fighting to get up. When I looked him in the eyes, that poor horse could see in my face it was over for him. To see this horse go from proud to broken, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

  That horse killed me inside. But I was never mad at him. I tried to let him know he hadn’t disappointed me. I paid for an operation to try to remove a bone chip from his knee. I sent him to a rehabilitation farm where they swam him in tanks. But he was never the same. In the end I gave him to someone who let him live on a farm outside Ocala. I still brought him carrots.

  Toni gave me the idea that I should retire from my business in Miami. She wanted to buy a farm up north. I’d become certified as a horse trainer. We had a vision of living up there and breeding horses.

  I was thirty-four or thirty-five years old then. I had millions and millions of dollars. Since I’d come to Miami less than a decade before, I’d become, along with Max Mermelstein, one of the top two Americans in the Medellín Cartel. I’d helped them build their empire. I’d survived while a lot of people around me ended up in the dirt. A smart man might have walked away, but that wasn’t me. I believed I could have both worlds—my business life with the Colombians and my life with Toni—and this life would never stop.

  But it don’t work that way, bro.

  * Intrigued by Jon’s Frank Stella connection, in the summer of 2010 I phoned the artist at his studio to ask about his relationship with Jon. Stella recalled knowing Jon, but phoned me back a day later in a highly agitated state to say, “Please, don’t ever ask me about Jon Roberts again. He’s a very, very dangerous man. My wife is terrified that we are even speaking about him.”

  * A Fayette County judge from 1968 to 1992, Joe Johnson was descended from local coal barons, and was known for eccentric statements he made from the bench, such as urging local police to shoot robbers on sight and threatening to arrest reporters he didn’t like. “He had this cowboy image, but he was a thoroughly honorable, forthright, trustworthy man,” a Lexington bloodstock consultant and longtime friend was quoted as saying in his obituary published April 3, 2008, by the Lexington Herald-Leader.

  * As noted in his New York Times obituary published June 26, 1991, Alvin “Al” Tanenbaum was an industrialist who founded Yorx Electronics. “An innovator in the electronics business, Mr. Tanenbaum introduced the Space Saver, a compact stereo system, and other audio concepts.” The obituary makes no reference to his girlfriend, Gloria.

  * Saratoga Springs is home to one of the oldest racetracks in the country.

  * In his obituary published on August 21, 1999, in the Chicago Sun-Times, his son Tom says of his father, “He was a wild man. There was no minute that wasn’t filled with entertaining, politics or gambling.” Tom Rosenberg is the Oscar-winning producer of Million Dollar Baby, who was also named as an extortion victim in the 2008 trial of crooked Chicago financier Tony Rezko.

  * Sublimaze is a narcotic painkiller that when blended with amphetamines and illegally injected into racehorses came to be known as “rocket fuel.”

  * The incident made the national wires that day, December 28, 1977, in a UPI story, “Jockey Killed by Lightning.”

  * Horatio Luro is regarded as one of the best trainers, in part because Northern Dancer, the horse he trained with Juan Sanchez, is one of the winningest horses in history.

  † Now the Loew’s Regency at 540 Park Avenue.

  † Judge Thomas Rosenberg served twelve years on the circuit court in Cook County, retiring in 1981. Before that he’d been an alderman for the 44th Ward, closely allied with Mayor Richard Daley.

  † The racetrack outside of Chicago was demolished in 2003.

  † Calder Race Course—which now is also home to a casino—is in Miami Gardens.

  ‡ The Russian Tea Room and Elaine’s epitomized New York sophistication and glamour in the 1980s.

  ‡ An actual water tower near Miracle Mile that has become a landmark.

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  When Jon moved into the neighborhood, people talked about him because he was a New York boy. I’d always see him talking at pay phones along the main road. I wondered about that, but I believe what makes this country great is people are free. Soon enough, we became good neighbors.

  —Earl, Jon’s redneck neighbor from Delray*

  J.R.: When I moved to Delray, I never imagined how well I’d get along with rednecks. I still had my New York prejudice. I believed that most rednecks had an attitude, that they were out there shooting black people and were closed-minded. It took time to know them, but I found out that my redneck neighbors were very open. When they realized I was in the drug business, it wasn’t the end of the world. Several of them got involved.

  Our first few months in Delray, nobody talked to us. Then one day a big man in overalls came to our door and introduced himself as Earl. If you could imagine a Hells Angel in overalls with a hick accent, that was Earl. He was a pig farmer.

  Earl came over to discuss “the gator problem.” Alligators were overrunning a canal that went from his property to mine. Earl wanted to know if I minded him killing gators at night.

  “No problem, man. Kill away.”

  “Good. Come with me Tuesday night, and we’ll kill the gators together.”

  This could be a kick, I thought. I show up at Earl’s house Tuesday night. We drag a canoe and a case of beer into the water and get in. Earl hands me a thirty-aught-six rifle, with a flashlight wired to it. Earl says, “When you see the gator, shine the light in his eyes and blow him away. Hit him in the eye, because if you hit him anywhere else, you’re not going to kill him. The skin on a gator is like metal.”

  Earl passes me a beer and starts canoeing. “One more thing. Gators got red eyes. When you point the light at him, his eyes are going to be bright red.”

  Sure as shit, within about five minutes, I see these fucking red eyes. I aim my rifle, pull the trigger, and boom, I’m pretty sure I hit the motherfucker in the eye. To be safe, I fire another shot. Earl tells me, “Don’t waste bullets. He’s hit.”

  Earl jumps into the water. I hear splashing. I can’t see nothing because my flashlight is attached to the rifle and I don’t want to point it at Earl and accidentally shoot him. The last thing I want is to be alone in a canoe surrounded by angry alligators. I hear bang, and the canoe starts tipping side to side. Earl has thrown the gator in the canoe. Its tail is kicking at my feet.

  “Get it the fuck out of here, man!”

  Earl is standing in the water next to the canoe, clamping the gator’s mouth shut with his arms. Earl is very calm. He says, “Jon, behind the beer cooler, I got my machete. Take my machete and chop him behind the neck where his nerve is.”

  I look at the tail thrashing in the canoe and think, Fuck it. I point my rifle barrel at the gator’s head.

  “If you’re going to shoot him, don’t shoot into the canoe. You’ll sink it,” Earl says. He calmly pulls the gator’s head over the water. I press my gun down into its angry red eye and pull the trigger. One good blast
directly in the eye stops him.

  Earl whoops, “Yeehaw!” Then he says, “Let’s get some more. Use only one bullet next time, not three. You got that, boy?”

  Rednecks are cheap.

  Hours later we go back to Earl’s house and carry three dead gators into his shed. Earl starts chain-sawing the heads off. “Okay, neighbor, next comes the fun part. I’m gonna skin the tails, filet the meat, marinate it, and have you over for dinner.”

  A week later Toni and I went over for a cookout. Earl had soaked the meat in brine for days, then smoked it. I thought it would taste like garbage, but it was delicious. Then Earl did something I’ll never forget. He’d mounted the gator’s jawbone with its teeth showing, and he handed it to me and said, “This is my friendship gift to you.” Later he took me to a guy living in a trailer who turned the skin from the tail into very fine boots.

  After we bonded over killing gators, Earl introduced me to another side of Delray.

  He came by my house one night and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Get the fuck out of my life, bro. I ain’t going gator hunting tonight.”

  “No, neighbor. Tonight is party night.”

  We took his truck up to the shithole diner by the feed shop. I knew the diner because it had pay phones in front that I used to call Max and Rafa from. What I didn’t know was that after closing, the two sisters who ran the diner put on a party. They’d cook up fried chicken and serve beer and untaxed liquor. They brought in girls who did lingerie shows. The main event was a poker game that went all night. The diner owners did this a couple times a month. Earl, two of his brothers, a deputy sheriff, and other farmers all came. A couple of these guys were Baptists. To them this was sin city. By my standards, the stakes were nothing. But this was the local redneck power structure, and I’d been allowed in.

  I found out that one of my gambling neighbors was an old-time marijuana smuggler who’d fallen on hard times because of oversupply in the weed market. I hired the weed smuggler and Earl and his brothers to help me out with cocaine. They found abandoned sheds out in the middle of nowhere that I could use as stash houses. I started flowing kilos of coke to one of these guys that he moved in places like Georgia and Alabama. I eventually had these guys moving hundreds of keys a month in the Deep South.