American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  “What do you mean, what do we got?” Andy says.

  “You owe Hampton for the restaurant, and Hampton is my friend,” Gotti says.

  We stand there facing Gotti and his guys. There’s no rules in the basement. We all have guns, but our sides are even. If one side shoots, everybody’s dead. This balance is what keeps everybody reasonable.

  Then the door at the top of the stairs opens, and twenty guys come down. They are all there to back up Gotti.

  PETEY: I was right behind Jon in that basement. I was calm because I was on heroin, but I was cognizant. I had no worries that we controlled the situation. But when I saw the door open and all the meatheads pile into the basement, I thought, This is going to turn out really bad.

  J.R.: It turned out Gotti had his meat guys, too. He set us up. Now, it’s us against twenty of Gotti’s guys. After all the shit I survived in Vietnam, the last place I want to die is a basement in Brooklyn. A basement is a terrible place to die in.

  Fear starts to clear my mind. I reason if Andy and I back down and agree to pay money for the restaurant, we’ll be finished on the streets. We have to say no to Gotti. It would be crazy of him to kill us, but we don’t know him very well. When people get their backs up, they can do stupid things. If we make him look weak in front of his guys, he might lose all his reason.

  Andy doesn’t even look at all the meat guys. He steps closer to Gotti and says, “Your friend Hampton is a piece of shit. He’s a rat. He ain’t getting a dime from us.”

  “He’s a rat?” Gotti says.

  “Ask around,” Andy says.

  Gotti’s face doesn’t show if he believes Andy or not. But by telling him that he is defending a rat—a man who is snitching to the cops—Andy has given Gotti an out. He can let us walk out of there without giving him a dime, but his face will be saved.

  I say, “Thanks for having us out here so we could clear the air. See you later.”

  We walk out past Gotti’s meat guys. When we get in the car, I ask Andy if Hampton is really a rat. He laughs and says, “He looks like a rat, don’t he?”

  A few weeks later Gotti came to Andy and me and said, “You guys were right. Hampton is bad.”

  It turned out Hampton really was working as an informant. Andy’s hunch that he pulled out of his ass while we were tripping on PCP proved to be exactly correct.

  Gotti ended up doing a short stretch in prison. We never had a problem again. Our run-in with him taught me a lesson. We should have settled our dispute through the family. That’s what the Mafia was made for. It kept mad dogs like Andy and me and Gotti from wiping each other out. We were wild Indians. The old mustache guys like Gambino and my uncles could impose enough rules on us to keep us from killing each other. Without them, we would have had constant war, and we’d all be dead in a few weeks. That’s when I started to respect the wisdom of my father’s generation. Back in the twenties they were all wild Indians, too. But men like Luciano and Lansky were able to make order out of the madness. Once I became a part of the Mafia that my dad’s generation had made, I got respect for my father that I’d never had before.

  ANDY AND I moved more carefully after our run-in with Gotti. From now on, when we found a club or a restaurant we wanted to take over, we’d make sure the owners had no connection with anybody else in the family.

  Most of the times we took over a club, we kept the same owners. All we asked was they give us a cut, buy booze from the suppliers we chose, put our guys on the door for security.

  Taking over a nightclub was easy. Andy and I would send a bunch of our friends to go as paying customers, and then they’d pick fights. Sometimes the clubs got wise to this. They wouldn’t let a group of eight knuckle-dragging goons come in all together. So we’d tell our friends to get beautiful girls and take them in as dates. Some of the guys we used were Outcasts. Others were half-assed soldiers like Mikey Shits from Little Italy. Mikey was a terrible fighter, but if he had something in his hand, he was okay. So he always carried a can of Campbell’s soup in his pocket. He’d use the can of soup to beat people. They called him Mikey Shits because he used to sit at the bar and get so fucked up he’d shit himself. He always smelled bad. But if we put a pretty girl on his arm, they’d let him in the nightclub.

  Once we got a bunch of our guys inside the club, they’d start fighting. They’d beat up everybody. When the bouncers tried to stop them, my guys would take out their pieces. Click. Click. Click. Just the threat of a shooting and most bouncers would quit, and everybody would lose confidence in their safety. Then Andy and I would go to the owner and say, “We hear you have a problem in your club. Give us a piece, and we can help you out.”

  This was too easy. Andy and I took a piece of half a dozen nightclubs before I even turned twenty-one in 1969. The problem we had was, a lot of clubs we took over died after we got them. What we didn’t understand at first was that the business was based on people, not locations. Clubs were only successful if they could bring the right crowd. There were a few promoters in New York—literally two or three people in the whole city—who could make a club a success. We could take over the clubs, but if we didn’t get one of these guys on our side, we were dead.

  One of the top promoters was a guy named Bradley Pierce.* We made Bradley our partner. When that happened, Andy and I were able to take over the most successful clubs in New York. I’m not saying this to brag. Once we started working with Bradley, me and Andy became part of what they used to call the jet set. Not that we belonged, but nobody could say no to us. Beautiful people bleed like anybody else.

  * Granny Takes a Trip “revived the British mod movement in the late 1960s for young, fashionable people entranced with finery … A notable design is a colorful snakeskin boot patchworked like Joseph’s coat.” New York Times, February 24, 1970.

  * Maxwell’s Plum was created by Warner LeRoy, whose grandfather, Harry Warner, founded Warner Bros. Studios. In a 1971 Esquire profile, LeRoy described Maxwell’s Plum as “a kind of living theater in which diners are the most important members of the cast. The regulars who come—Bill Blass, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie—are players with our other clientele.”

  * John Gotti, eight years older than Jon, became boss of the Gambino crime family in 1985, when he had Paul Castellano murdered. Castellano had run the family since Gambino’s death in 1976. (Indicating how small a world the Mafia was, when Jon’s uncle Joe Riccobono was arrested at Apalachin in 1957, he was in a car with Castellano.) Gotti’s reign as top boss was turbulent and short. He was convicted in 1992 of racketeering and died ten years later in prison.

  * Bradley Pierce was a legendary scene maker in the New York nightclub world of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  † Hampton Smith is a pseudonym to protect the identity of the owner.

  15

  Arthur, the East Side discotheque, whose psychedelic lighting, frenetic music, and chic informality attracted the young and the restless, is closing. The discotheque was opened on May 5, 1965, by Mrs. Jordan Christopher, formerly Mrs. Richard Burton …

  Arthur was owned by a corporation of which Edward Villella, star of the New York City Ballet, was president; Roddy McDowall, vice president. Backers included Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein, Mike Nichols and Lee Remick …

  Arthur will be converted into a supper club, under a new name, by a group headed by Bradley Pierce.

  —Louis Calta, “Party to Mark Closing of Discotheque,”

  New York Times, June 21, 1969

  J.R.: Arthur was one of the clubs Andy and I destroyed. It was run by some real morons. We sent our guys in to wreck the place, and the owners would not cut us in. We drove them out of business and took over with our new partner, Bradley Pierce.

  We had found Bradley at a club called Salvation.* Salvation was a terrific club. The dance floor was sunk into the floor, with tables around it in tiers. When you sat, you could look down at the girls dancing. It was sensational.

  It was run b
y Bradley Pierce and a man named Bobby Wood. Bobby was the money guy. Andy and I came on strong to Bobby Wood, and he made us partners.† We treated Bradley with kid gloves. Bradley was a special guy. I mean unusual. He had long curly blond hair and walked around like Jesus spouting peace and love. Bradley believed in all that crap. He was not a phony. Bradley could get along with anybody, from Mikey Shits to the king of Siam.‡ He was the guy who could make clubs happen. He was a genius at getting the right look, the right music, and he was tied in to all the beautiful people—models, actors, rock stars—who made the clubs go. Nobody had a better mailing list of guests than Bradley, and the list was everything.

  BRADLEY PIERCE: I entered “café society”—as they used to refer to the world of nightclubs—in the late 1950s, when I was a student at Columbia University, and I began working nights at the Stork Club. The Stork Club epitomized New York glamour.* In the 1960s café society began to change. It started with the bohemian folk-music scene in the Village. Café society embraced a new social informality. It turned slummy. P.J. Clarke’s,† a divey Irish bar with sawdust on the floor, became the in place. After John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, his ticker-tape parade ended at a party at P.J. Clarke’s, where I had begun working. About that time Olivier Coquelin‡ opened Le Club in a warehouse on the Upper East Side. Instead of a band, he had deejays spinning records. He made his club difficult to find. Entry was often invitation-only. Inside he brought together an eclectic mix of old-money blue bloods with movie stars and artists. Le Club became the first real scene in New York.

  It took a creative celebrity guest list to make a club, and I had been building contacts since my time at the Stork Club. In the mid-1960s I started working with Jerry Schatzberg, who was a partner in Ondine’s. When Jerry’s partner in Ondine’s, Michael Butler, left to produce Hair, he brought me in as his manager.§ I booked musical acts that shocked people—Jimi Hendrix, when he was still known as Jimi James, and the Doors.** Ondine’s was avant-garde. Andy Warhol and his crowd would come. But we still brought in old café society people like Louis Auchincloss,* Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Jack Warner.†

  A new spirituality was coming alive in the country. In my clubs I wanted everybody to love and respect everybody. I wanted to get rid of that snob factor that predominated in the Stork Club. My secret was to treat everybody like a celebrity, and nobody was above anyone else. When a member of the Rolling Stones called my doorman a “nigger,” I banned the group. If you can imagine it, we sought an atmosphere that was egalitarian and exclusive.

  Jon and Andy came into my life after Jerry Schatzberg and I launched Salvation.‡ We were very successful, but Jerry left to pursue making movies. I took on Bobby Wood as a partner, and he in turn introduced me to Jon and Andy.

  When I first met Jon and Andy, I didn’t believe they were part of the mob. Neither of them looked like a guido from Jersey. They were hip. They were very likable. I could see there was a toughness in them, but they were very sweet to me.

  J.R.: Bradley could not judge people properly. He did not understand us. He did not understand his other partner, Bobby Wood. Bobby Wood was a guy who came out of the used-car business on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. Jerome Avenue was nothing but hustlers. They knew every trick in the world. If they were selling a car that rattled, they’d have you test-drive it on a rainy day, because the rain drowns out the rattles. If the engine ran rough, they’d stuff bananas in the exhaust pipes to make it sound smooth. That was Bobby Wood. He was a piece of shit.

  But he was smart enough to get into nightclubs with Bradley. And through him, Andy and I took a piece of Salvation. Imagine a guy like Bradley who knew the most famous people in the world, and now he’s working with me and Andy.

  BRADLEY: Eventually I figured out that Jon and Andy were with the mob. But I believed in the spirit of the time. I didn’t believe in labels. I saw Jon as a human being. I believed when you reached out with love to people—no matter who they were—you got such beautiful things back.

  After Jon and Andy arrived on the scene, we relaunched Salvation. It was a fantastic event. We remade it as a theater in the round. I had everybody sit on pillows because I wanted to get people into very relaxed positions. It was an Eastern thing I had in mind. We got rid of the abrasive strobe lights, and I hired Joshua White* to create a unique mood through lighting. Jimi Hendrix, who had just played Woodstock and was huge, agreed to play as a favor to me.†

  J.R.: At the reopening we had movie stars, models, and one of the Kennedys all waiting to get in. Andy was always a funny guy. He pulled me aside and said, “Jon, let’s spike the punch. Let them all freak out at our party.”

  We put handfuls of Quaaludes in the punch. People used to call Quaaludes “leg-openers” because of the effects they had on women. Our party was unbelievable. People that had probably never been high on a drug in their life were taking their clothes off. I saw an older lady in a fancy dress bent over a pillow in the middle of the club getting nailed by a guy in a suit. It was like Rome. Jimi Hendrix tried to get me to shoot speed with him, but I wasn’t into needles. He went out and played like crazy.* We had beautiful models walking around naked. But nobody caused any trouble. If anybody was looking for a fight, I had guys who would drag them into the back room and beat them within an inch of their life. That’s how I kept the spirit of peace and love going.

  BRADLEY: Salvation became such a sensation that one of the airlines ran an ad in Life magazine that said, “When you’re in Rome, visit the Vatican. When you’re in Paris, see Notre Dame. And when you’re in New York, find Salvation.” And there was a picture of our club.

  As well as we were doing, I was starting to see the dark side of Jon and Andy. There was a shooting outside the club, and I was pretty certain they were involved. Yet there was always something playful about them.

  I once offended Andy. I hadn’t included him in a social event. Jon showed up at the club without Andy a few nights later. I asked him, “Where’s Andy?”

  “He’s upset. His feelings are hurt,” Jon said.

  Andy was at home sulking, so I phoned him. I said, “Andy, please come out to the club. Jon’s here. We’re having a wonderful time.”

  Andy said, “I’ll only come if you put on ‘My Way,’ by Frank Sinatra. I want the deejay to play it, so I can hear it over the phone.”

  We played it on the dance floor so Andy could hear, and he came. Jon and Andy were both like that. They were playful, and they were sensitive. There was a little boy inside each of them. Of course, they were tough boys, too.

  J.R.: My father’s only belief was that evil is strong. But I was learning I could go further if I reached out to people like Bradley who had abilities I lacked. We never fucked over Bradley because without Bradley, we would’ve had nothing. He was friends with Jimi Hendrix, not us. People loved Bradley, not us. To other celebrities, he was their celebrity. They’d beg to come to his parties.

  Bradley used to say that our business was about putting more love in the world. Can you believe this shit? He was taking six hits of LSD a day, so he was gone. He was blind to us. Bradley was half business genius, half out of his mind. He did not understand what the Mafia meant. We started to teach him.

  Because Andy and I were a part of the Gambino family, there were wiseguys we could not keep out of our clubs—friends of the family we could not say no to. As we got more successful, more of them came to our clubs. They would not come to fight. They would bring dates. They came with respect.

  But wiseguys, even when they’re out for fun, will always start fights. And once the wiseguys start fighting, wiseguy girlfriends always do the same thing: they stand on chairs, scream at the top of their lungs, and throw bottles. It’s in the genes of Italian girls.

  If wiseguys hurt other wiseguys, that was not a problem. None of them would call the cops. But when you mix wiseguys with society people, you end up with people calling the cops. The cops would come, but Andy and I wouldn’t deal with the cops.
It was not good for the cops to see us as involved in the business of the clubs. Bradley would deal with the cops. Bradley would have to clean up the mess.

  It must have been hard on Bradley as he got more exposed to my kind of people. He started to see who we were. But he got over it. Bradley stayed our partner as we expanded control of New York’s discos for the Gambino family.

  * Located at the site of a former jazz club at One Sheridan Square.

  * The Stork Club was the place for everyone from the Duke of Windsor to Marilyn Monroe to Groucho Marx.

  * Auchincloss, the writer known for chronicling the rich, was related to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jacqueline Onassis.

  * In the 1960s Joshua White Light Shows, featured at concerts by the Jefferson Airplane, pioneered psychedelic lighting. White is now considered a fine artist of light.

  * Here is how the show was described on page 395 of the previously cited Electric Gypsy: “Jimi came onto the stage at around 12:15 a.m. with the Woodstock band and, although the crowd was expecting Hendrix pyrotechnics, he stood there calmly, the band working pretty well, Jimi trading solos with Larry Lee, who according to a reviewer from Rock magazine was ‘wonderful’.”

  ** According to deejay Terry Noel in an interview published on djhistory.com, Pierce gave Hendrix work as a busboy at Ondine’s. When Hendrix asked to perform and demonstrated his ability to play the guitar with his teeth, Pierce told him, “I don’t know what to do with you. You’re like a freak act.” But Pierce did let him play, giving Hendrix his first significant show in New York. Pierce had the Doors perform for a month at Ondine’s in 1966, before their first album was released.

  † Describing the business relationship between Wood and Jon (who is referred to by his birth name, “John Riccobono”) on page 94 of Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek write, “Things took a more serious turn when Wood was persuaded to take on as club manager John Riccobono, a relative of ‘Staten Island’ Joe Riccobono, a key figure in the Carlo Gambino family … Mafia associates were put on the payroll, large sums of money were going out of the club while Wood tried rather foolhardily to resist this take-over.”