American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  By 1974 all the heat knew I was into wrong things. When the Gambino family put Andy and me on point to take over clubs, they knew we’d draw heat. If you are in the club scene, the police automatically know something is wrong with you. Nightclubs are not based on lawful people. Except on the weekends, lawful people are not in a club until three or four in the morning because they have to get up and go to work in the morning. During weeknights, any club is going to be filled with illegal people—gangsters, drug dealers, hustlers, pimps. The lifeblood of nightclubs is criminals. The police know this, and you can’t pay off every single cop. When you’re involved in nightclubs, eventually you will get heat.

  I don’t know how I made it five years in the nightclubs. But after all the problems with Hendrix, Bobby Wood, Patsy Parks, Nunziata, and Shamsher, I didn’t see good times no more. I just saw heat coming and coming.

  By then my old Outcast friends had started to fade. Petey got arrested on heroin charges for the millionth time, and he ended up going to prison for a couple years. Big Dominic Fiore kicked heroin by leaving the city. He moved to Connecticut and started a rendering business—which he still has today—where he drives a truck to all the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and picks up their grease. Rocco Ciofani became a very hardworking soldier in the Bonanno family and got promoted to capo. Jack Buccino started hanging out in Asbury Park following around Bruce Springsteen. He had learned the guitar and was finally going to do his own stage act. He married a beautiful blond girl from Teaneck, and after the wedding he was driving her across the George Washington Bridge when he hit a concrete stanchion at a hundred miles an hour. It squashed Jack, dead as a bug. His wife survived, but she was left a cripple and a vegetable who didn’t even know her own name.

  Even Bradley Pierce was affected. After Patsy Parks got whacked, he went crazy and ran away to a monastery.

  BRADLEY PIERCE: I’d started out in the 1960s believing I was spreading a new spiritualism. The murder of my friend Patsy Parks was an awakening. My spiritual interests changed. I was baptized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I entered a Trappist monastery. After I went to seminary, I became a priest.*

  I have contemplated my time with Jon and have prayed about it. I have good memories. But I came to understand the evil in him. Everybody has a dignity given to them by God. Jesus Christ is in Jon. I know Jon struggles within himself. I pray for his soul. We have kept in touch over the years, and I share my love with him every time we speak. I believe Jesus can give anyone a second life. I was born again through Him. We all are given the chance to be born again, even Jon.

  J.R.: My end in New York came when an informant told the cops that I was involved in the murder of Nunziata. He said that if they searched the apartment I kept with Andy, they’d find evidence.

  When they raided the place, they found no evidence linking me to the murder of Nunziata, but they did get about a dozen illegal guns and some pills. In normal times, this would be a nothing arrest. But when I bonded out, my uncles sent a lawyer who told me, “Your family wants you gone. Get the fuck out of New York. They don’t want you to exist anymore.”

  I believe the family made a deal with the New York police. I believe someone in the family told them I was involved in killing Nunziata. If I died, or disappeared off the face of New York, the family could go to the cops and say, “Okay, we got rid of your problem.” And the cops could say, “Okay, we did our best to catch the cop killer.”

  That way everybody could save face and go back to doing business. I was the logical choice to go because there was so much heat on me. I saw this coming before I was popped on the weapons charges. When I bonded out of jail, I called Andy, and he said, “You’re my brother, Jon, but I can’t see you no more.”

  For all I knew, Andy was supposed to whack me. I didn’t think this was the case, but I didn’t want to put him in that position. I hung up the phone, and I ran to Phyllis’s place to grab my dog, Brady. I kept an old Buick Le Sabre parked on the street for emergencies. It was a junk car. I jumped in with my dog and left. I didn’t take nothing. Not my boots, not the clothes in my closet. I was busted out. I had my dog, six hundred dollars in my pocket, and a Beretta .38 pistol. That was it, bro. I got on my horse and split.

  I lost everything, but I wasn’t worried. Tomorrow was another day. At twenty-six, I was dead in New York. But I would live again.

  I’d go to Miami to escape the heat.

  * Jon is referring to the film The French Connection as well as to several Mafia rings smuggling heroin that were not actually the subject of the movie.

  * Nunziata “died of gunshot wounds inflicted by his own revolver. The death was labeled a suicide, but that verdict was challenged by Nunziata’s widow … Mob sources have been saying that Nunziata’s death was a ‘hit,’ ordered by the Gambinos.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,” Time, January 1, 1973.

  * The New York Times later ran a front-page, above-the-fold feature about Shamsher’s ordeal, “A Nightclub Owner Says He Has Woes—The Mafia,” by Nicholas Gage, New York Times, October 10, 1974.

  * Father Pierce is now director of field education at the Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.

  † The Gambinos “set up the looting” of the evidence locker and “pushed 169 lbs. of the stolen drugs in Harlem … Thus far the only suspected police link that has surfaced is Narcotics Detective Joseph Nunziata, whose signature was on the form with which 24 lbs. were signed out.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,” Time, January 1, 1973.

  † Nirvana is still located at 30 West 59th Street.

  ‡ In the Patsy Parks murder trial, Vincent Pacelli attempted unsuccessfully to introduce testimony from Nunziata that he was involved in a drug deal in a New York café at the time of Parks’s murder. See opinion of United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, United States v. Vincent Pacelli, July 24, 1975.

  ‡ Nirvana was a favorite hangout of John Lennon, who used to display his drawings there, using the restaurant as an informal gallery.

  28

  It’s the happy meeting of ocean and shore that has made Miami one of the world’s premier destinations.

  —Fodor’s Miami Travel Guide, 1985 edition

  I heard that my little brother had moved to Miami. Jon became a dog trainer there. He started a very successful business training dogs.

  —Jon’s sister, Judy

  J.R.: I drove straight to Miami. I had no plan. I had no vision, but I had a good feeling about Florida. When I was seventeen, Rocco Ciofani and I once made a big score in a robbery and decided, “Let’s go to the sun and swim and have fun in the Miami paradise.” We had good times on Miami Beach, chasing the girls in bikinis, and when we needed money, we robbed some college kids using only our fists. We didn’t need guns in paradise. That was Miami in my mind.

  Miami was the last big city on I-95, the farthest I could get from New York and stay on the East Coast. If I completely disappeared from New York, the heat would assume I was dead and move on. They didn’t need a death certificate. It was a simpler time. In the 1970s your driver’s license was just a piece of paper. Nobody had Internet computers tracking you from one state to the next. If you used cash, and didn’t get arrested, you were gone, bro.

  My one worry was phone taps. I always assumed in New York that the feds tapped my phones and the phones of people who knew me. If every phone they listened to had people saying I’d disappeared, that would reinforce the idea I was gone for good. I would not contact anybody for many months—and when I did, it would be indirectly.

  When I left New York, I was wearing a “monsignor ring,” a ruby ring I’d gotten when I was running my club Sanctuary and carrying my pimp stick cane with diamonds on the head. (Later, when I pried the diamonds out of my pimp stick and tried to pawn them, I found out Howie, my diamond guy who’d sold them to me, had used blown-out glass like he’d sold to my friends on the Knicks. He’d scammed me like I’d scammed them. You live and learn.) I must have been quite a sight. At a r
est stop in the Carolinas, I got out—with my cane, in my velvet pants—to let Brady run, and people stared like I was the Devil. Little kids with a family pointed at me and ran. My New York look did not cut it beyond the tristate area.

  I reached Miami early in the morning. The sun was coming up like a fireball. Biscayne Bay was liquid gold. I’ve always liked being by the ocean at sunrise. I pulled over, walked into the sand, pulled off my shirt, and let the sun soak into my skin.

  I checked into the Castaways, a Hawaiian motel on Miami Beach that had a corner room I could sneak Brady into.* With my limited funds I could barely afford a week there. My new wardrobe consisted of swim trunks, a tropical shirt, and flip-flops I bought from a dime store. Across from the motel there was an Arby’s, where I lived the next few days on roast beef sandwiches.

  My first full day in Miami, I decided to get some tail. There was nothing at the motel pool but tourist families from nothing places like Ohio—kids and the sunburned parents who were stuck with them. I walked to the beach, and ten steps from the motel there was a very hot girl in the sand. I put my towel next to hers and lay down. She had on white plastic sunglasses that she lifted to look at me, like she was angry I had sat by her. She had the most beautiful green eyes. They were a shock because she had dark hair and olive skin. Finding a girl so beautiful was a sign that my luck was good.

  I started giving her some bullshit New York lines, and ba ba ba, she went from angry to very receptive. Time passed. I said, “You hungry?”

  “You go ahead and eat,” she said. “I love to lie on the beach.”

  I couldn’t understand why she’d brushed me off. I went in the motel pool and swam. Ten minutes later the girl walked past—limping. She had a clubfoot. It was bad, but I had to smile. That was why she gave me the cold shoulder.

  Her bum foot didn’t bother me a bit. Maybe she was payback for making that girl walk like Ratso Rizzo in New York. Besides, it wasn’t like her foot would be the centerpiece of screwing her. I got out of the pool and walked up to her. She said, “I guess you can see now.”

  “Your foot don’t bother me a bit. Let’s have dinner.”

  She agreed to meet later. But she never showed up. I’m sure she just had a bad complex about how she looked. But to me, being blown off was a sign. It was like, I’m new in town. I’m broke. And the girl with a clubfoot won’t even have dinner with me.

  NORMALLY, TO make cash I could do a quick drug rip-off. But I didn’t know the lay of the land down here. I could not risk being arrested at that time with the heat on me in New York. I had to get a square job.

  One of the kids in Long Island who worked for me selling drugs used to tell me about a family that his family knew in Miami. This kid had rich parents, and they knew a family in Miami named the Gendens who owned a big landscaping company. The kid had told me I should meet them someday because the father, Dave Genden, was a character who liked gangsters and had known Al Capone.*

  I looked up the Gendens. If I had to work, I liked being outdoors and using my hands. Why not landscaping? I drove over to meet them at their nursery. On the streets in New York many people knew me by my old family name Riccobono. In Miami, Riccobono was dead. From now on I used the legal name I’d adopted when I was a kid, Jon Pernell Roberts. That’s how I introduced myself to the Gendens.

  Dave Genden was about sixty. He had a son, Bobby, who helped run his company, and another son who became a judge. Dave had been around enough to see I was wise, but he didn’t ask questions. He offered me an honest job.

  They put me on a crew to plant trees, sod, and flower beds at high-end developments. My main job was planting trees. The Gendens took their time to show me the proper way. Other landscapers would dig a hole and throw a tree in it, and that was that. The right way, which they taught me, is you should always dig the hole twice as deep as the roots of the tree you are planting. That way, when you refill the hole, there’s a nice bed of loose soil for the baby roots to grow into. The next thing, which some people neglect, is the first time you water it, soak the soil. Just shove your hose in the hole and let the water run fifteen minutes or more. If you do this, you will grow a successful tree. I don’t care if you’re planting a tree or a shrub or a little flower, it’s the same principle.

  I enjoyed working in the landscaping industry. I like plants. It’s interesting to watch how they grow. All they eat is air, sunlight, and water. My pay was not much more than that—two dollars an hour. It was enough for a small apartment in North Miami Beach.

  I had to be careful because North Miami Beach was crawling with wiseguys, and I didn’t want some jerk blabbing to someone in New York he’d seen me. I even had to watch out for my uncle Jerry Chilli—from my mother’s side of the family—who was a capo and controlled the neighborhood around the Thunderbird Hotel.* I didn’t know him very well, and I stayed away from him. I stayed away from all the wiseguy hangouts.

  Outside of Miami Beach, Dade County was a backwoods. A mile inland from Collins Avenue, there were rednecks in pickup trucks with gun racks. People had rebel flags on their houses. They sold gator meat sausages in the shops. Between the rednecks and the tourists, nobody had a clue to what life was really like in Miami. Even the black people—who were called “coloreds”—were backward. They weren’t like the Super Fly’d–out black dudes you saw in New York. They were zippity-doo-dah black people, like from Old South times, who put on big smiles and called you “sir.”

  In my job I saw how the people with money lived—the doctors, the lawyers, the real estate assholes. I was in their lawns every day. Rich people were very relaxed in Miami. We’d be working, and they’d be by their pools smoking weed. Even then I’d see people sniffing coke. Girls would be lying around with no tops. You know how stiff rich people are in New York? Miami was the opposite. I was working in a rich guy’s yard, and he invited me to smoke a joint. It turned out he was a local judge named Howie Gross,* and we got to be friends. Everybody called him Mouse, because he loved mice. He had a collection of them in his house and his pool was shaped like a mouse. Mouse was the biggest pothead I ever met. He could always party, because judges don’t work long hours and they have every fucking holiday off. You learn this if you ever go on trial. While you rot in jail, the judge is probably out at his pool having a party. But Mouse was a good guy. When I first met him, he blew my mind. I’m on the run, and a judge invites me to get high with him. If only all judges were this good.

  Miami was a little town. People were so friendly and stupid. I remember thinking, Boy, this is an easy place to make a fresh start. I’ll get in on this city before everybody else finds out about it.

  WHILE I was still working for the Gendens, I tried to start a legitimate business. Everywhere I’d go with Brady, people would notice what an amazing dog he was. They’d ask me, “How can I get my dog trained so good?”

  I got the idea, Fuck it. I’ll train people’s dogs for them. I knew what I was doing from working with Joe Da Costa, the hit man in Jersey who trained Brady. I could start up a real business. I could build up a client list, get some trainers working under me, and sit back and run it—like when I had the college kids selling drugs for me. Only this would be legit. None of the stress of wiretaps, paying off cops, shooting people. Just a nice little business, catering to select clients. What would it cost to have a nice place, a decent car, a little boat, and keep a couple of decent broads going? In 1974 Miami not much. You could almost live off the air and sunlight like a plant.

  I named my company Dogs Unlimited. I had business cards printed and hired an answering service. Back then people didn’t have cell phones. You’d pay a company twenty dollars a month, and they’d answer your calls. I put an ad in the paper that said, “Dogs Unlimited. Experienced trainer will come to your house.”

  I got customers right away. I’d bring Brady to people’s homes. I’d show what he could do, and I’d say, “Okay, let’s train your dog to be like my dog.”

  The problem was actually making someone
’s dog act like my dog. The key to training a dog is training the owner. But the average dog owner didn’t want to invest the time. People expected me to sit in their homes drinking coffee and listening to their stupid bullshit. When it came to the work, they either dropped out or they were too dumb to follow my simple directions.

  What I learned is there are a lot of homes with very smart dogs, but the owners are stupid. There are more people who are morons than dogs. I’d be in an owner’s backyard running my ass off with the dog, and the idiot owner would go into his house and watch from the window. Your dog will not learn properly unless you learn with him. When he sees you’re not putting in the effort, he’s not going to do it to either.

  I decided, Fuck it. These people are so dumb, the best thing is to hustle them.

  I’d say, “You want me to train your dog? I need a two-hundred-dollar deposit.”

  I’d take the money and never show up again. If they wanted to call me, all they were going to get was my answering service. One customer did find where I lived and came to my front door. He wanted his money back. I had to beat him up and throw him in the bushes. Now I knew why my father always burned down the legit businesses he owned. The average customer is a jerk.

  * The Castaways Island Motel billed itself as “America’s Most Funderful Resort-Motel.” It was an iconic tiki-theme motel designed by Charles Foster McKirahan. It was torn down in 1981.