by Jon Roberts
We had an incident where a college kid pulled a gun. He was so excited, he shot himself in the leg. We took the gun from him and shot him in his other leg. When it comes to defending himself, the average college kid isn’t worth three dead flies.
There are not a lot of tough people in normal society. Many guys will act brave for a few seconds, but as soon as you hurt them, all that bravery goes out the window. You bite someone’s ear off, you break his fingers, shoot his legs, and he will come around. A guy who fights every day of his life reacts differently. This guy, when you hurt him, he fights harder. Very few men react like this. And those who do are dangerous people.
For me, robberies were my amusement. Jack Buccino was as sick as me. Since he fancied himself an actor, his enjoyment was the acting we did to befriend our victims. Jack always thought he was on stage. After we were done, he was so out of his mind, we’d be in the attic of his mother’s house counting the money, and Jack would ask me, “You think I played the part good?”
Sometimes, just to eat his guts out, I’d tell him, “You didn’t do a good job acting today.”
When Jack and I went out to set up different kids, we would have contests to see who got bigger rip-offs. That was our game. Most kids our age were competing in things like “Hey, I got six home runs.”
With Jack it was “I stole $2,200.”
“I got $3,000.”
“You won, motherfucker.”
That was our fun.
MY SISTER did not give up on me. When I was seventeen, she came down to New York. She saw my apartment, the nice clothes I had, and she knew I was not doing things legally. She begged me to get a real job. She actually believed I could go into the straight world. That’s how good my sister was. Good people can’t understand how truly bad a bad person can be. Good people are good, but they’re also a little bit stupid. That’s why my sister never lost hope in me. She was good.
JUDY: There was a boy I had dated in high school, Walter Hutter,* who had gone on to work at E. F. Hutton as a stock trader. I called him up and asked him, “Please, can you find a job for my little brother?”
J.R.: Walter Hutter had always been in love with my sister. He had been a great athlete in high school. He was signed to play pro baseball, but he fucked up his arm and went into the stock business. When he agreed to hire me, my sister begged me, “Do me this one favor, Jon. Go in and work for Walter. Try it.”
I said, “Judy, I love you. You’re my sister. I’ll do it for you.”
I thought it would be interesting to get inside a brokerage house and see how they made money. I bought a suit and tie and nice shoes to look proper. I went down to Wall Street the next morning. I find the building, ride up the elevator, and there’s Walter. He’s in his suit. I’m in mine.
“Hey, Walter.”
“Jon, I’m going to teach you how to chart stocks.” He led me into his office.
“Okay, what do I do?”
“Take this blank paper and read these numbers. Write this into a chart.”
I charted stocks all morning. By lunchtime I was getting uptight with this bullshit work. I thought, God Almighty, when do I start to make money? I’m not going to sit here for a fucking month and make charts.
Walter invited me to have a sandwich with him in the lunchroom, but I went down to the street to smoke a joint so I could relax. I came back to the office lit out of my mind. But I was calm.
Walter said, “Jon, I made some transactions this morning. You’re going to post them in the book. When you finish, I’ll explain to you what we just did.”
“Walter, I’m not stupid. I can figure out what we’re doing.”
He told me to watch myself.
I tried to calm things down by explaining myself. “Walter, I want you to teach me how to buy stocks and make money. Don’t make me do this shit-ass paperwork, man.”
Walter told me I had no choice. The walls were becoming tighter. My pot wore off. I was starting to lose it. I was not on the level. I was feeling violent. I said, “Walter, I don’t feel good. I better go home.”
“On your first day of work?”
“Walter, listen to me. For your sake and my sake, let me leave early.”
Lucky for him, he agreed.
I went home. I told my sister, “Judy, I don’t think a stockbroker job is a wise thing.”
“Please, give it a chance.”
“All right, Judy. I’ll give it a chance.”
I went in for a whole week, maybe two. Finally, I can’t take it. I go one morning, and Walter says, “Okay, Jon. Here’s the paper. Chart ten stocks.”
“I’ll tell you what, Walter. Here’s your paper. Use it as toilet paper. Shove it up your fucking ass.”
Walter stands up.
“Walter, sit down, please,” I tell him. “You’re my sister’s friend. Don’t do this. Sit down and let me walk the fuck out the door.”
He steps in front of me. I grab an adding machine and knock him on the head. His friends run in. I bang them with the machine. A security guard comes in. I run the fuck away, get on the elevator, and I’m gone. That was my stockbroker experience.
A couple days later Walter called my sister. “Your brother almost killed me. How could you send that maniac into my office?”
JUDY: I became so angry when Walter called Jon a “maniac.” I told him, “How dare you call my brother a maniac.” I was overprotective, but Jon was my baby brother.
J.R.: My Outcast friends got more wacked out on heroin. Petey, Jack Buccino, and Dominic Fiore were needle-in-the-arm junkies. Their minds were gone, but their muscles could still destroy anybody on the street. When they did rip-offs, it wasn’t for fun anymore, it was because they had to.
My uncle Sam knew something was up. I came around a few times with my Outcast friends, and he told me maybe I should stop using my friends to help with collections. He said, “Jon, take my meat guys.”
The “meat guys” weren’t Mafia. They were actual meatpackers in the union my uncles controlled. The union thugs were loyal to my family. But I was loyal to the Outcasts. This caused me some aggravation in the spring of 1965.
My uncle Sam had a dry cleaner who got behind on a loan. Dominic and I grabbed him off the street and took him into an apartment I kept off of Lexington and 48th. Obviously, you couldn’t beat people on the streets of Manhattan, so I had an apartment for collections work. We developed a method. We’d strip the guy naked, tie him to a chair, gag him, and beat him. I didn’t say a word. Just beat, beat, beat. We’d beat a person on and off for hours. It was like marinating a piece of meat. Everybody softens over time. When we’d finally pull the electrical cord from his mouth and tell him to get money, he’d be grateful he was being talked to like a human. I’d hand him a phone and tell him to call somebody—his wife, his in-laws, his rabbi, anybody—and get the money he owed. That person would deliver the money to one of my guys at a coffee shop. We’d let the guy go, and everybody’d be happy.
This time I stepped out during our beating to meet a girl I was seeing. While I was out, Dominic shot up a load of heroin and nodded off. He fell on the floor like a dead man. The guy managed to escape—crawl down the stairs and roll onto the street—still naked, and tied to the chair. Some asshole Good Samaritan called the cops. They came into the apartment and found Dominic on the floor. He was comatose, and they actually drew a chalk outline around his body before they realized he wasn’t dead. They took him to the hospital, and when I walked back in, two cops threw me on the floor. I saw the chalk outline of a body, and I said a very stupid thing. “Where’s Dominic?”
The cops had Dominic’s name from the ID in his wallet. If I had been wise, I would have said I’d walked into the wrong apartment. But I’d let them know I knew Dominic. My own mouth gave them the evidence they needed to arrest me. Every cop in the room laughed at me.
I fucked up. Evil is stronger than good, but it don’t beat stupid. I was young. Young people make mistakes. Mistakes can help you learn. As l
ong as you don’t do it a second time, anybody’s entitled to a mistake. Because of my mistake, I was charged as an adult for kidnapping and attempted murder.
* Walter Hutter is a pseudonym to protect Judy’s friend.
8
J.R.: They took me to the Manhattan Detention Center on White Street, the “Tombs.” In 1965 the Tombs was made of stone and iron, like a jail in medieval times. The cells had metal shelves on the walls for inmates to sleep on. Two guys had to sleep on the floor. It was overrun with rodents. You’d wake up with a rat tail dragging across your mouth. We slept with our shoes in our hands to fight the rats.
The Tombs exposed me to new things. There were hippies in there who were part of a movement headed by Timothy Leary. He got all these kids to take acid, and they’d trip out on the streets and get arrested. The hippies believed in revolution, but some of them were so blown in their minds, they could hardly put two words together. There were also Black Muslims in jail. I had never been aware of the Muslim situation until then. They weren’t friendly to white people, but they didn’t look to pick fights. They would preach, “You whiteys are going to get it because it’s all going to come back around. You’re all going to kill yourselves.”
What the Muslims and hippies had in common was they all talked about overthrowing “the man” and the Vietnam War. I had never heard about this war before. A few years earlier I was bored because everybody in America was into the Beach Boys and was squeaky clean. Now it was like the whole country was flipping out.
My legal case got complicated. The bail bondsman decided not to write my bond, and my uncles had somebody beat him up. The attack made the TV news, and the prosecutors decided to come down harder on me.
My family sent a lawyer to see me. He sat me down and said, “You’re dead here. They got you cold. In the State of New York, kidnapping’s a serious offense. You’re also going to get charged with usury. And you had a gun on you. On top of this, you have an outstanding gun charge in New Jersey.* They’re not offering any deals.”
The army sent recruiters to the Tombs every week. They didn’t bother talking to the hippie acid cases. They came to violent guys like me and said, “If you join the army, we’ll erase your criminal record.”
At first I told them to get lost. But I saw that the Black Muslims, even though they hated whitey, they were signing up. I watched twenty of them get on a bus one day to go join the white man’s army. After my talk with my uncle’s lawyer, I had a change of heart.
I told the recruiters I was interested in their offer. A few days later, they did a physical exam right in the jail. Next thing I knew, I was walking out the gate to a bus. They didn’t put chains on us when we got on the bus, and I respected them for that. I’d thought we’d be treated like prisoners. But we were on our way to being soldiers.
• • •
I DID my basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia. A military base is like a low-level security prison. There’s fences and people telling you what to do. One guy from the Tombs wound up in my training company. He told me, “I had the perfect crime going when I was outside.”
“It must have been genius for you to end up here,” I told him.
This moron told me he’d robbed a supermarket by walking unarmed into the manager’s office and telling him his partner was holding the manager’s wife and kids hostage. He told the manager if he did not open the safe, he would never see his family again. The only problem was, the manager wasn’t married. The manager beat him up and called the cops. “Next time,” this idiot told me, “I’ll make it work.”
These were the kinds of morons I met in the army. But basic training was a breeze. I was in good shape. At the end of two months they separated us. Some guys they sent to school for trades like truck repair. Some, they said, “You’re going to Vietnam.”
I was in a different group. They told us we could volunteer to go to “advanced school” and get more training. I didn’t see the advantage of it. I wanted to go to Vietnam quick and get it over.
But the night before we had to make up our minds, they let us go out in the town and get drunk. There was a club where you brought carry-in booze in paper sacks. I was sitting there with these guys with a few weeks’ training, and I thought, “I’d be stupid to go into a war with these dopes.”
I signed up for advanced school. Only after I signed up did they tell me that advanced school meant jumping out of a plane. I told them, “Are you crazy? I’m from New York. I don’t jump out of airplanes.”
THEY MOVED us to a different area of the base where they had steel towers to practice jumping. My first time jumping, they had to push me off the tower. I did not like heights.
In the offices by our barracks I’d overhear officers talking about how bad Vietnam was. They’d told us this in boot camp, and I’d assumed they were trying to scare us. I started to wonder if they were telling us the truth. I became serious about training. I’d been focused when I played basketball in school. Now I focused my mind on the army.
They put us in a plane for our first real jump. On the inside it was like a boxcar. When we got in the sky, we formed up along a cable leading to the door and they started pushing us toward it. The guys in front were already jumping out.
Each guy was supposed to jump when a red light by the door blinked, but a guy ahead of me wouldn’t jump. The instructors told him, “Here’s your choice: if you want to be in airborne, we’re throwing you out of the plane. If you don’t want to be in airborne, sit down and you’re done. You’ve failed.”
The guy screamed, “You push me out, I’ll sue you!”
What a moron. Sue the army? That’s like suing the Mafia. They sat that asshole down. When my time got closer, I was shaking. The guy directly in front of me said, “Don’t worry. I’ve jumped before. If you jump immediately after me, I’ll watch you.”
I trusted this guy so much, when he jumped, I rushed after him ahead of the blinking light. An instructor held me back. When they finally let me out, I couldn’t see where the guy was who was watching me, but he made me feel confident. After I hit the ground, I saw the guy. I said, “Thank you.”
He fell over laughing. “I never jumped in my fucking life, man.”
He was fucking with me to build up his own courage. But he gave me the balls to do my first jump. After that I was excited to get in the air. Jumping is euphoric.
They sent us to Kentucky for more training—from living on berries in the woods to knife-throwing. With knife-throwing, I never got consistent results. In Vietnam I worked with a guy who could throw a knife from twenty feet and put it in someone’s chest. I would throw a knife, and the wrong end would hit the guy. I tried once on a Vietnamese. Dinged my knife right off his chest. Luckily, my buddy was able to shoot him.
Through the army training I learned that running around on the streets of New York hadn’t given me much advantage. I was not as good as I thought I was. The farm boys shot rifles better than me. The only advantage I had was that I was mentally prepared. The people who recruited me knew my history. They knew I hurt people. My emotional responses were different. I could withstand pain better than other people. I could inflict it. That’s something many people can’t do. The army recruiters had been smart about me. When I got to Vietnam, they put me with some guys as bad as me, and God Almighty, we went fucking crazy over there. The sickest part of it was, we enjoyed it.
* In 1965 Jon was also arrested after an assault in New Jersey and convicted of carrying a concealed weapon. He was on probation for this at the time of his kidnapping arrest in New York.
9
JUNE 2009—HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA (JON’S HOUSE)
E.W.: A hard rain falls outside. The windows in the living room thump as raindrops as big as marbles hit them. The surface of the lake out back looks like it’s boiling.
Jon approaches the couch where we do our morning interviews. His hair, normally meticulously combed, is disheveled. He says he barely slept last night. We have the following dialogue:
JON: Noemi had to leave our bed. Many times she can’t sleep through the night with me. She says I move around and I sweat. It’s very bad some nights.
EVAN: Do you have any idea why?
JON: Because I dream. They’re not really dreams. I relive bad things I’ve done. How can I explain it to you?
EVAN: You say you never had a problem sleeping no matter what you did to people.
JON: My dreams aren’t like I’m picturing things. I wake up, and my heart pounds. If I could associate it with anything, it’d be the times in Vietnam when I had to hide in the mud to wait for people we were ambushing. I dream of the adrenaline. I don’t dream about specific bad things I did, like “Oh my God, I skinned that guy in Vietnam. I hung him from a tree. I took off his skin and watched him suffer.”
EVAN: Wait, did you actually skin somebody alive?
JON: Oh, yeah, bro. Not one person. We used to do it all the time.
J.R.: I flew into Danang with a bunch of guys I didn’t know. The way the army ran things was, your platoon was already in Vietnam. It stayed there forever. They brought in replacements like me as other guys in the platoon died or finished their tour. So we all came in as replacements. Our flight landed at a time when they were moving the dead soldiers in body bags onto planes for the trip back home. The military was so coarse and stupid, they had us walk past the body bags. I turned to a soldier waiting to load them and said, “Jesus. Bad day?”
“It’s like this every fucking day,” he said.
After all the training and buildup to the war, they had me wait in a hut by the airport for ten days. We played cards and drank Cokes until one day someone said, “You got five minutes to grab your shit and get on the bird.”