American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Bernie thought it would be funny if he brought me to the guy’s house for a drug deal, and I pretended to rob them in order to take back his gold record.

  I hadn’t done a rip-off in years. Why not, for old times’ sake?

  We drove up to the guy’s house in Bernie’s Volvo. He’d introduce me as a new supplier, and I’d do my thing. Then I’d “steal” Bernie’s car, and he’d meet me later.

  The victim had a beautiful hillside house. Big sliding-glass doors with a wooden deck hanging over a canyon. The gold record was in a frame in the living room. We sit down, exchange some chitchat, and I reach into a briefcase for my gun, and bang—as I’m pulling it out, I hit the trigger and shoot out a window. The guy jumps up and runs right through a glass sliding door. He smashes the glass out and runs off the deck. I go out and see him rolling down a cliff into a culvert. He was a real Houdini.

  I go back inside, and Bernie is panicking. “Oh my God! Let’s go.”

  I smash the frame to grab the record, but Bernie screams, “Leave it!”

  “Leave the gold?”

  “It’s not made out of actual gold, Jon.”

  We tore out of the neighborhood with Bernie worrying the whole time. “How could you try to shoot him?”

  “How could you not tell me the gold record wasn’t actual gold?”

  “I live here, and you tried to kill him?”

  “What’s the worst these pussies do in San Francisco? Not invite you to a wine tasting?”

  Bernie never forgave me. He was a criminal but not violent. Years later, after Bernie quit the drug business, he committed crime by scamming rich ladies. He was fifty years old, but he’d date seventy-five-year-olds. He took ballroom dancing lessons so that he could make these old biddies happy and take their money. Bernie had the same criminal mind as me, only he used dancing shoes where I used a gun.

  The one thing I never admitted to Bernie was that I’d shot the gun by accident. I’d embarrassed myself. My reflexes were dull.

  MY JUDGMENT was slipping, too. Mickey and his friend Delmer—“Dad”—kept hiring a kicker who’d freeze up when the time came to push the loads out of our plane. Two times we almost had to ditch our loads. Mickey and Delmer tried to cover it up, but I knew about it from listening on the radios.

  If we’d lost those loads, it would have been up to me to explain the loss to the Colombians, not them. I didn’t pay this half-wit to fly around in the sky and enjoy the view. I found out that Mickey and Delmer kept hiring the guy because he was some kind of cousin of Delmer’s.

  I decided to fire him. I go down to Ultimate Boats on a day when I know the guy is working on boats with Delmer. I walk up to this half-wit cousin—a stringy kid in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt—and say, “You’re a piece of shit, and if it was up to me, I’d beat the piss out of you. Unfortunately, your cousin is Mickey’s partner. But you’ll never go in a plane again.”

  This kid is so stupid that he pulls a knife on me, but instead of stabbing me, he runs to the stairs to the radio room. He gets about five feet up the stairs and I yank him down by his foot. He flips backward onto the floor. I say, “Whoops. I was wrong. It looks like you did fly again.”

  I kick the half-wit in the face, and then I lose my head. A kicker needs good hands to throw the loads out. I wanted to make sure this kid never got put on a plane again, so I stomped his hand bones. I broke both his hands to pieces.

  It was the right thing to do, because this kid put my ass on the line with the Colombians. If he screwed up bad enough, they’d break more than my hands.

  But it was the wrong thing to do because he was Delmer’s cousin. That poisoned things for me. Delmer never talked to me the same again. It was bad judgment to strain my business like that, and it did cause problems for me down the road.

  I should have beaten Delmer’s relative in private.

  I GOT lackadaisical because it didn’t feel like I could get caught. I saw this in Bryan, too. One day we worked out together at the gym. I walked out past his car, and there was a terrible smell coming from it.

  At the time Bryan drove the smallest car he could fit in, a Nissan Z car, with the hatchback. I got twenty feet from his car and smelled a terrible stink. I said, “Bryan, did you leave some workout clothes or shoes in there?”

  We walked up to the hatch on the back. I saw some towels in the window. I opened up the hatch, lifted the towels, and there’s a corpse stuffed in the back. There’s matted hair, dried blood—the whole thing was bloated and congealing.

  “Jesus Christ, Bryan.”

  “Jon, I forgot. I’ll take care of it.”

  That’s how casual we were getting. Bryan killed a guy and decided it was more important to work out at the gym than dump the body.

  THE LAST gun battle I ever had was at a disco at the Coconut Grove. It was started over the honor of a TV star a friend of mine was dating. It was one of the stupidest things I ever did.

  One of my running mates was a kid named Eddie Trotta. Eddie was a wiseguy, but mostly he was into the Florida life of women, boats, and fun.* When I needed to get away from Toni, I’d run with Eddie. He loved strippers like I did. Unfortunately, he got hooked up with a girl who got famous for being on a TV show where she’d spin around in a tight dress.† This idiot TV star was very hot and she tamed Eddie down for a while. When we’d go out, I’d bring my stripper girl, Karen, and we’d make it a foursome.

  We’re in the Coconut Grove disco one night when some jerk comes over to Eddie’s girl and says, “I’d like to spin you like you spin on TV.”

  Eddie and I don’t want to have a fight with this nothing guy. We let him walk off. But his celebrity girlfriend starts digging into this. “What did he mean, ‘spin’ me?”

  Eddie says, “Maybe he meant to spin you like on a merry-go-round.”

  She’s not buying it. “Eddie, should I be offended?”

  Eddie can’t take it. “Are you offended that guy said he wanted to fuck you?”

  “Is that what he meant by ‘spinning’ me?”

  “Yes. He wants to spin you around his dick. Everybody does who sees you. That’s why you’re on TV,” Eddie said.

  Eddie’s girl runs over to the table where the guy is and starts giving him a piece of her mind. She doesn’t have much, but it’s enough that she gets the guy who wanted to spin her and a bunch of his friends to chase her back to our table. Eddie and me should have left the club then. I had my business to think of, and he had his own legal issues.*

  Instead of leaving, we get into a sloppy fight. The next thing you know, one of these jerks has a gun, and I take out mine and shoot one of his friends in the stomach. Another guy gets shot in the shoulder, either by Eddie or someone else.† Who knows? It was madness in the disco.

  I was lucky that Karen got rid of my gun when she fled with Eddie’s girl. There were no witnesses to my shooting anybody. Even the guys who got shot were no use because they’d been drunk out of their heads. So ended the Battle of the Idiot TV Star in Coconut Grove.

  But I was the one who got arrested.

  I didn’t own the cops in Coconut Grove. I couldn’t reach a lawyer for hours. But what saved me was my almost nonexistent criminal record. I’d lived a decade in Miami, but all I had were speeding tickets. To the cops, I didn’t look like a bad guy. I told them I didn’t know what happened at the disco. They believed me.

  It was 1984. I was a top American in the most wanted drug cartel in the world, and they let me walk out of the station after I shot a guy in the stomach.

  Dumb luck.

  * Eddie Trotta now owns Thunder Cycle Design, a premier custom motorcycle shop in Fort Lauderdale. Trotta is a two-time winner of the Discovery Channel’s Biker Build-off. He described his winning design philosophy this way: “I always design my bikes like women, with a waistline. And then the fat tire in the back becomes the big butt.”

  * At the time, Trotta had recently been arrested for his role in smuggling four tons of marijuana in Long Island. He would
later do several years in federal prison for tax evasion.

  † The identity of this 1980s TV icon has been omitted at the request of Eddie Trotta.

  † Trotta denies shooting anyone in a club in Coconut Grove but allows, “Maybe I was shot at outside a club.”

  69

  J.R.: By 1984 the senior partners of the Cartel were having problems. They were starting to fight an open war with the Colombian government.* Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa were on the run. The U.S. government was also going after them with indictments in the hope of putting them on trial in American courts.

  I wasn’t worried, though. I grew up looking at my uncles and Gambino. They proved that when you got big enough, you could live with an indictment on your head. As long as nobody inside your circle ratted, you could beat almost anything.

  You could go crazy worrying about the government getting you, or guys on your own side. I’ve never had a paranoid mentality. My heroes were Al Capone, dying with a fishing pole in his hands, and Meyer Lansky, walking the beach to his last days. I couldn’t see myself living in the stinking darkness like Griselda. My attitude was, you do your best and when you’ve done everything to protect yourself, don’t run around like a scared chicken.

  Mickey was the same as me. He was cautious, but he always focused on moving forward.

  Max was the opposite. He got more scared every day. He began constantly calling on his car phone to say he was being followed.

  “Max, if you’re truly being followed, thank you for calling me and alerting the people following you, you moron.”

  As long as nobody in the top of the Cartel ratted, we’d be fine forever.

  WE ALL knew we’d have to stop smuggling through Florida eventually. At some point the heat would be too ridiculous even for Mickey to handle.

  Mexico was the obvious place to go. The Ochoas had a guy named Gacha who smuggled through Mexico.* The Mexicans had always been good at weed smuggling. They missed out on cocaine only because they couldn’t grow the leaves or process it there.

  In 1982 my pilot Roger introduced me to a friend of his who’d flown planes for Rafael Quintero, a top Mexican weed smuggler. I’d met Quintero in the early 1970s on my vacation in Mexico with my French girlfriend. Roger’s friend reintroduced me to Quintero in early 1983. He was very eager to help the Colombians with coke. There was no competition between the Mexicans and the Colombians because they needed each other. The Colombians had coke, and the Mexicans had good ways to smuggle.

  Mexico was wide open. The whole Mexican air force had like two planes. The beauty of Mexico wasn’t just that everybody was corrupt. The fact was, the higher-up guys in the police departments resented America on principle. When I started working with Quintero, we’d go drinking with federales he owned, and they’d complain about how American officials, like from the DEA, looked down their noses at them. The Mexican cops loved making the stupid gringos look like fools by helping out smugglers.

  When Quintero started helping me, he’d get part of my transport fee, or I’d have the Cartel give him X number of kilos per load that his guys could sell on their own. Quintero helped set up airstrips in Mexico that Roger could fly to from Colombia. Once there he’d refuel and fly over the Pacific into California. Southern California was out because they were watching it. But in a Super King Air, Roger could carry almost 2,000 kilos to northern California. We did a few runs like this, but they had such a big marijuana-growing industry in northern California that the cops were always looking for cars moving any kind of cargo. It made me uneasy.

  In 1984 Quintero told me he had a better way to move coke. He’d built a tunnel for weed smuggling that went from Mexico into Laredo, Texas. I don’t mean a little rathole like the gooks built in Vietnam. This tunnel had lights, paved floors, and elevators at both ends. It was all made by Mexican peons. They’d dig it, and when they were done, Quintero would just shoot the motherfuckers and shove them in a hole in the desert, so only a few guys would know where the tunnels were located. That was the Mexican way of doing a nondisclosure agreement in business. Shoot the poor assholes.

  Now that we had access to a tunnel, we’d fly the coke into Mexico and drive it to an old metal barn by the border with Texas. Inside the barn there was an elevator. We’d use it to haul the coke underground, and then, using the tunnel, we’d push $20 million of coke over the border in a handcart. It came out in an auto paint shop on the Texas side. It worked beautifully.

  Unfortunately, Rafa bragged about my tunnel to Max. I liked to keep Max in the dark about how I was earning his shoeboxes of money for him, but he insisted on seeing the tunnel. We were still making fun of Max for having gotten kidnapped in Mexico, and it probably made him jealous that I’d found a tunnel and he hadn’t. Max had to see it.

  Max decided to go on a beefalo hunting trip in Texas, then drive into Mexico when he was done. I met him in a bakery with some of Quintero’s guys. I was always embarrassed to introduce Max as my “partner,” especially that day. Max walked into the bakery in a corduroy safari suit wearing some kind of Sherlock Holmes hat. I guess that’s how gentlemen hunters dressed in Texas. It only got worse when he started explaining to the Mexicans the concept of hunting beefalo penned up on farms. They couldn’t believe this guy.

  I told the Mexicans we’d play a joke on Max. I had them take him into the tunnel and tell him there were no lights. I wanted Max to go through in the dark so I could surprise him from the Texas side of the tunnel and say, “Hey, Max. Welcome to Texas.”

  I drove over to Texas and got in the tunnel first. I waited in the dark until I heard Max and the Mexicans. I could see a little ember glowing as Max puffed on his cigarettes. Then I heard Max’s scared voice saying, “¿Donde le luces?”—Where are the lights?

  When he got a few feet from me, I jumped up and said, “Max—”

  Max screamed like a girl. One of the Mexicans flipped on the lights. When Max saw me, instead of calming down, he started running back to Mexico. I had to chase him down and grab him. Max was shaking. He was soaking wet. I don’t know if it was sweat or he’d pissed himself. He had a look in his eyes like I’d only seen in Toni’s mom when she thought spiders were chasing her. He was gone.

  The great thing about Mexicans is they love to fuck with people. A couple of them came up to us, and one of them said, “Hey, man. Is that how you hunt a beefalo? You run fast?”

  They laughed their asses off. My partner was now the laughingstock of Mexico. It was embarrassing.

  But I missed the point. Why was Max so afraid? He was beyond reasonable. Having a partner crack up simply from fear of the dark should have been a warning that something was wrong with him, but I totally missed it.

  * In April 1984 the justice minister of Colombia—equivalent to the U.S. Attorney General—was gunned down by assassins controlled by Escobar and his associates. An estimated thirty thousand police and military were soon engaged in hunting Cartel labs and fighting their private armies.

  * José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, a Medellín Cartel member, was listed by Forbes magazine as the eighth-richest man in the world in 1987, right below Pablo Escobar. Gacha was attacked in his fortified compound by more than one thousand Colombian soldiers and gunned down in 1989.

  70

  J.R.: In late 1984 Max experienced a crisis that was even worse than nearly having a heart attack in our Mexican drug tunnel. Rafa came to us and told us we had to kill Barry Seal.

  What I’m going to tell you will blow your mind. In the summer of 1984 Barry Seal flew one of my C-123s, loaded with cocaine, into Homestead Air Force Base. He was also carrying pictures of Pablo Escobar personally loading cocaine into the plane at an airfield in Nicaragua, with guys from the Sandinista government helping him. Barry set up Pablo and the whole government of Nicaragua. It turns out that Barry had been working as a DEA snitch since the middle of 1983.

  What happened is, in April 1983 the DEA busted Barry at Fort Lauderdale airport when he tried to fly in a load of counterfeit Qua
aludes.* They hadn’t even targeted Barry. They’d been going after a big Quaalude smuggler, and Barry had taken a job flying his plane for fun. Barry loved to fly.

  Once they got Barry on the Quaalude charge, they forced him to set up Pablo Escobar. We learned all this late in the summer of 1984, when there were a bunch of news stories about it.* Max was beside himself over this. He had seldom worked directly with Barry Seal, but the story put Pablo Escobar more in the news.

  YOU MIGHT think I’d be freaked out that Barry turned snitch. Looking back, it’s clear that I’d started working with Barry to smuggle guns to Nicaragua a few months after he’d become a DEA snitch. I’d worked with him running guns until about four months before he used a C-123 to set up Pablo.

  But I wasn’t worried. Barry had told me at our first meeting about the C-123s that he didn’t want to smuggle coke with me. Now I understood why. Barry didn’t want to snitch on me. There are two types of snitches: the kind with rat blood who’ll sell out anybody at any time and the kind who’s got his balls in a vise with the government and has been told the only way out is to snitch out specific guys. Barry set up Pablo because that’s what they told him to do, probably to work off his charge for the Quaaludes. If Barry had wanted to snitch me out, he would have said, “Let’s smuggle a bunch of coke this month.” But he said the opposite of that.

  I wasn’t worried about having worked with Barry to fly guns to Nicaragua, either. The one time I flew with him to Nicaragua, I had told him I was uptight. Barry had laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Jon. We’re working for Vice President Bush.”

  I didn’t literally believe what Barry said about working for Bush.* But I understood that someone in the government had hired criminals like Barry and me to fly their guns to Nicaragua because they didn’t want the government to get caught doing what was against their own law. The last thing in the world they wanted was for us to get into trouble over flying their guns to the freedom fighters. They wanted to keep that shit out of the news.