by Jon Roberts
AT ONE point I got frustrated with Mickey for moving coke too slowly. There was a two-month period where he shut down shipments to rebuild his planes. My pilot Roger believed he’d learned to beat the Customs Service air patrols as effectively as Mickey, and to prove it he offered to pick up eight hundred kilos in his King Air. The twist was, I had him drop it a couple miles from my backyard in Delray.
My redneck neighbors ran the operation. One of the farmers hired a low-flying crop duster plane the morning of the airdrop to mask the sounds of Roger’s King Air coming in. Roger was going to drop the eight hundred kilos in the Everglades. Earl and his brothers organized canoes and ATVs to pick up the load and bring it to a stash house.
The morning of the drop, I watched Roger’s plane come in as I cooled off in my pool. I swam laps while my army of rednecks picked up all the coke.
I had a level of trust with these hicks, and not just because they’d done a little pot smuggling in the past. The fact is, they all hated the government. They believed it was almost their patriotic duty to show they couldn’t be pushed around. Even the one sheriff’s deputy who played cards with us felt the same way. We didn’t involve him in our smuggling, but all these hillbillies got off on beating the government just as much as I did.
I only did two coke drops in my neighborhood. I didn’t want to push my luck. What mattered was, I had good neighbors. I controlled the rednecks.
IT WAS so safe up in Delray, I used it as a hideout for Griselda Blanco, who by 1983 had murdered so many people that she had to run from Miami. She was one of the Cartel’s oldest and biggest distributors, but she burned up her luck. Rafa, though, was loyal to this beast of a woman to the end. When everybody wanted her dead, he came to me and asked if I could help her hide.
I found a house down the road whose owner took $250,000 in cash and let me have it. Earl had some guys put up a fence and brought in Rottweilers to run in the yard. When Griselda came up to the house, she looked like a pig. She’d packed on forty pounds of ugly. She was shacked up with an Argentinean guy who claimed to be a doctor and shot her up with tranquilizers twenty-four hours a day. He probably kept her medicated hoping she wouldn’t kill him like she usually did with her men.
Griselda and her boyfriend wouldn’t leave the house. I had Bryan bring them groceries. Griselda, the feared killer, lived in terror. She nailed boards over the windows and hid in the dark. I went there once with Bryan. The house smelled worse than a truck-stop toilet. Once inside, I gagged. Griselda flicked on a nightlight. I saw her in the corner, this fat, stinking bitch with red eyes.
My impulse was to shoot her in the eye like a gator. I should have. When she went into hiding in Delray, Rafa cut her off from distributing. Griselda lashed out. She ended up stealing 150 kilos from one of Fabito Ochoa’s cousins and killing her. That finished Griselda. You can’t kill an Ochoa.
Rafa could no longer protect her. Even then he let her flee. Crazed as he was, Rafa had a heart for her. Griselda ran to California and continued her thieving and murdering until they caught her.*
I was just glad the rotten bitch was gone. She was a blight on the neighborhood.
TONI AND I built up our house year by year. We had her little brother, Lee, living with us. Toni’s mom moved in. She brought her stepdaughter, Amber. Amber was the daughter of an ex-boyfriend of Toni’s mom. Amber was fourteen. She was just a sweet schoolgirl who ran around with the kids in the neighborhood. I made sure that Bryan or Lee got her to school every day, and that she didn’t miss her homework.
Bryan loved Delray. Even though he was Italian, he’d grown up in Florida, and the redneck way of life had soaked into him. He and Earl became the best of friends. They hunted gators together all the time. Bryan liked to try to beat them to death with his bare hands.
We added on to the barn to make room for more horses I was buying. I kept my main barn for Mephisto Stables at a racetrack. But I moved my most prized horses to Delray. I had a staff come in every morning to work for me.
LISA “BITSY” BENSON: Just about my whole family worked for Jon and Toni. My father was a trainer for Jon.† My cousin Chris, who was fifteen, rode for Jon. My boyfriend was his blacksmith. I had a company that did cold-laser therapy for his horses.
Jon and Toni were an awesome couple. Toni was so fucking hot, it wasn’t even funny, and Jon was straight with everyone who worked for him. He loved the horses, and he treated us well because we took care of them.
Jon said he was in real estate, but we knew. One time workers were digging by the barn, and they found a bag with $300,000 in it. When Jon came out, he acted like it was no big deal. People said he was involved with drugrunning. But those were the days of Miami Vice. It seemed glamorous to me.
Jon and Toni were glamorous. They had everything, and they seemed so much in love, even when things got stormy. And they would. They definitely had their fights.
J.R.: I’d slam a door. Toni would kick it down. One time she tried to run me over. I’d pulled up in the driveway, and I saw Toni’s black Mercedes racing toward me. She crashed into my car, and I chased her around the property until our cars couldn’t drive. We destroyed everything in our path. That was a spat for us.
It’s how we communicated. We’d laugh about it afterward. We did all kinds of crazy things in the house. I used to put on a helmet when I watched the football games on my big-screen TV. If my team was losing, I’d destroy the TV by running into it. I had a carpenter who lived behind the barn. He’d just follow Toni and me around, rebuilding things behind us.
Our house was Wild Kingdom inside. When you have a couple of dogs and a 150-pound cat like Cucha, things will get broken. Cucha was good with people. You could have little kids or babies in the house, and she was fine. The one thing that freaked her out was jockeys. I guess in her cat mind she could understand the concept of a child or a grown-up, but jockeys—five-foot-tall grown-ups—made her crazy. Jockeys were like catnip to her. Whenever you had a jockey in our house, she’d start creeping around, wiggling her tail, getting ready to pounce.
Angel Cordero used to come by to give Toni riding lessons. It’s no secret Angel liked to smoke out. He’s in our house one day after a lesson, smoking a fat one, when he stands up to get something to eat. I thought Cucha was out in the pen. But boom, the floor shook from the force of that cat’s hind legs jumping up. I see Cucha flying in the air. Angel thought he was going to grab a munchie. Cucha decided he was the munchie. With all the bad things I’d done, I wasn’t going to go down as the guy whose cat ate one of the greatest jockeys who’d ever lived. Luckily, I had a new Doberman, Apollo, who was protective of Angel. He jumped up and blocked Angel. You had 100 pounds of dog hitting 150 pounds of cat. They broke a wall when they collided.
Angel just stood there, still holding his blunt. “Wow” was what he said.
MICKEY MUNDAY: I don’t understand how they kept all those animals. It wasn’t just the cats, the dogs, and the birds. Toni would rescue critters from the side of the road.
Toni was a special person. With her looks she could have been stuck-up, but she was friendly to everybody. She was a tomboy at heart. She was like a frontier gal. She could ride, shoot, cuss. In that house, she was the alpha animal. That’s why those animals didn’t slaughter each other like they should have by the rules of nature. Toni bossed them around. She’d give a look, and that cat would slink off.
They had one hallway in the house that must have been a hundred feet long. Jon and I were standing there one day talking, and over his shoulder I see his favorite bird walking down the hall. Jon was very fond of this bird. It was a green parrot with clipped wings that made it walk like a penguin. Then I saw Cucha, down low behind the bird, stalking it. I said, “Jon—”
“Don’t worry, Mickey.”
How could Jon be so calm? I watched as that cat leaped. There was 150 pounds of death in the air. Then I heard Toni shout, “Cucha!” The cat fell to the floor, turned, and skulked off. The bird kept walking. It had no idea ho
w narrowly it had escaped being eaten.
Toni ruled that house. It was clear. She was a force of nature.
J.R.: At her best, Toni could handle anything. When she went riding in the morning, she’d carry a hunting rifle or one of our AK-47s to deal with gators. My new dog, Apollo, loved riding with her. He was the trailblazer. He’d run ahead to show the horse the way.
One morning Apollo ran into a gator. He’d been trained by Joe Da Costa to believe he was invincible. However big a dog’s heart is, a dog-on-alligator contest isn’t going to end well for the dog. A dog can’t even bite a gator because of its skin being like metal.
Apollo did his best. That gator sliced his stomach open with a hole so big, his intestines fell out. This mighty dog did not give up. He bit with all his strength and locked his fangs in the gator’s back. The gator shook him off and broke Apollo’s fangs. They were stuck in his skin.
That gator didn’t count on Toni. She charged at him with her AK and emptied the whole banana clip into him. Toni put thirty rounds into that gator. He was done.
After the attack Toni came off the trail with the horse behind her. She was carrying Apollo in her arms, holding his intestines in with her hands. That was Toni at her best. In the animal kingdom, she was fierce.
We got a vet to come out immediately. Apollo got stitched together, and he healed fine within two months. Unfortunately, he had no fangs.
I knew a cokehead dentist who I thought could help. He was a human dentist, but I persuaded him to take Apollo as his patient. We brought him in on Sundays so his normal patients wouldn’t freak out at seeing a dog in the dentist’s chair. It took a few weekends, but we got beautiful gold implants made where Apollo’s fangs had been.
Apollo completely recovered and the rest of his life was happy with his gold teeth.
WHEN I first moved to Delray, my aim was to keep our home insulated from my work life. But then I got the neighbors involved, and I had Toni’s brother, Lee, working as a driver for my transport cars. Lee ended up working very closely with Rafa’s enforcer, Flaco. You never would have predicted it, but Lee and Flaco became the best of friends, even though neither spoke a word of the other’s language. Flaco was a psychotic killer from the jungle. Lee was a big, all-American Dukes of Hazzard kid. But they were thick as thieves. It worked out good for me. I didn’t have to deal directly with Rafa as much. Flaco would give Rafa’s directions to Lee about who was getting what from which stash house, and everything got taken care of. It was crazy watching Flaco and Lee work things out. They communicated in a mangled language that wasn’t English or Spanish. It was a mutant way of talking, but they understood each other perfectly. I came to understand that the soldiers Rafa brought from the hills were just Colombian rednecks. Despite all the differences between Lee and Flaco, they could talk to each other redneck to redneck.
There was only one time that mixing my home life with my work ever caused a problem. I’d let Toni’s jerk-off English pilot friend Shelton Archer talk me into flying loads for me. Shelton had started working with another piece-of-shit Englishman who was his kicker and organizer. He was like a poor man’s Mickey Munday. I got them flying loads from Louisiana out to Bernie Levine in San Francisco. Big mistake.
Even though Bernie was one of my oldest friends, he was an untrustworthy guy. Put him with a dirty Englishman like Shelton, and bad things were bound to happen. My mistake was giving Shelton responsibility for bringing back the money from California that Bernie owed the Cartel.
One thing I did not do was count money. Rafa had guys to count it. Even Mickey counted money sometimes. I don’t want to see counting machines. I don’t want to touch the money. I walked into rooms filled to the ceiling with cash ten times a week. That much cash stinks. It has BO from all the humans that have been touching it and perspiring on it. There are germs on it. People roll up bills and stick them in their noses to snort coke. Who knows what other disgusting things they’ve done with our drug money?
When distributors such as Bernie got coke from me, the price was set by the Cartel, and it was up to them to put the right amount of money in the bags they sent back. I told them to bundle the money in $100,000 packs, sometimes even in $1 million bricks. I’d count out my share of the bundles and pass the rest on to Rafa for the Cartel.
I knew Rafa took his bundles apart and counted each bill. I didn’t bother with mine. I knew if there was a problem, Rafa would catch it on his end. I never had a problem with my distributors shorting the cash they owed—until Shelton met Barry.
I didn’t catch the problem directly. It was Rafa who did. In a safe house, he piled up $10 million or $15 million that had come from Barry and counted it one weekend. He found that each bundle was short a couple grand. It added up to a few hundred thousand dollars, stolen.
Instead of telling me what the problem was, Rafa went crazy. He put together a Colombian death squad and sent them to my house in Delray.
What saved me was the close friendship between Lee and Flaco. One morning they were out picking up a car, and Flaco told Lee that Rafa believed I’d ripped him off. According to Flaco, Rafa was sending a “death squad” to my house. Lee called me right away and said, “Jon, Rafa has an escuadrón de la muerte on his way to the house.”
Escuadrón de la muerte—death squad—was the term Griselda used to use when she’d get a bunch of her guys together to kill someone. Somehow Lee’d picked up the term from Flaco. They’d kill everyone in the house—children, dogs. If there were fish in a fish tank, they’d pour bleach in the water. Apparently Rafa had the same thing in mind for me. He used to come up with ideas like this when he smoked too many bazookas.
Soon as I hung up with Lee, I tried to call Max. As I’m dialing, I see Rafa coming up my driveway with three cars following his. He gets out with a bunch of armed Colombians from the hills.
By this time, I had so many people working on the property that the gate was never closed. If I fired the tear gas, these Colombians would all start shooting. I had to deal with the situation. I had Toni in the house. I had Bryan in the kitchen eating. There were a couple guys in the barns, and a Cuban maid who worked for us in the laundry room. That was my army. If there was going to be a shoot-out, we were done. Toni saw the cars from the window. I told her to get her guns out, and I went downstairs.
I got Bryan and walked out to meet Rafa. He walked up to me with his guys fanning out behind him. “Jon, you know why I’m here.”
I actually didn’t know at that time what he was specifically accusing me of stealing. Lee had been unable to figure out from Flaco exactly what it was I was supposed to have done. But if you showed weakness to a Colombian, that was it. They’d run you into the ground. You could not back up an inch. I said to Rafa, “You better think before you make the mistake of your life.”
“I’m not here to talk about my mistake, Jon.”
As I’m thinking of what to say next, I look over Rafa’s shoulders and see pickup trucks, ATVs, horses coming up behind him. Toni has called Earl, and he’s organized every redneck in the neighborhood. They’ve formed a cavalry. Earl’s brothers are on horseback with hunting rifles. There are two pickups with all their inbred nephews riding on the cabs and pointing shotguns. Rafa’s soldiers see them coming and make a hissing sound with their teeth, nudging each other. Then I see the window open in our bedroom, and Toni leans out with an AK. This is like a scene right out of Bonanza, where the Indians come to do a massacre but the settlers turn the tables and surround them.
Toni shouts from the window, “You motherfuckers. Get the fuck off my land.”
Rafa looks from Toni to the armed hillbillies coming up behind him and gets a funny look. As insane as he is, he’s worried. He’s stirred up an angry mob of white people.
“Rafa,” I say. “Please. It’s not relaxed here. Let’s talk about this at Max’s.”
“Okay, Jon.”
“Thanks, Rafa. You’re a good friend.”
They all get in their cars and drive off.
I met Rafa the next day at Max’s, and it was like nothing had happened between us. He told me about the accounting error. I told him I’d correct it.
I knew Shelton was responsible. For six years Bernie had never shorted us a dollar. Shelton started flying his loads, and suddenly they were a few dollars light. I suspected Bernie was also involved because it seemed to me the money had to have been pulled out of the bundles before they were wrapped and put on the plane.
I knew if I confronted Shelton, he’d lie his English ass off. Bernie would act offended, and the matter would remain an unsolved mystery. When you think a person has wronged you, but you can’t prove it, sometimes the best thing is to make your point a different way.
I had Bryan pick up Shelton’s running mate, the guy who worked as his kicker. Bryan tied him up with electrical cord and put him in the trunk of his car. There was a canal in the wilds of Delray where we kept a rowboat. What Bryan did to scare people who caused me aggravation was to drag them behind the rowboat. He called it “gator-dragging.” He’d row a guy past the mud islands where the gators hung out. If I wasn’t too mad at the guy, Bryan would row him back without letting the alligators catch him. We’d pull him out, and the guy would have an adventure story for his grandkids.
With Shelton’s guy, we just wanted to scare him. I wanted him to go back to Shelton and relate his experience as a warning. If Shelton had done something wrong, it would make him think twice. Even if by some chance Shelton was innocent, the dragging would still make the point that I was unpredictable, and that he should always be careful of me.
I came out to meet Bryan the day he was going to gator-drag Shelton’s guy. When I got there, I saw Bryan rowing his ass off. He was rowing so fast, the nose of the little dinghy was pointed up like a speedboat. Every five or six rows, Bryan turned around and beat his paddle on Shelton’s guy. It looked like Bryan was beating the poor asshole to death for fun.
