American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Bernie explained that people in California had their noses up in the air and only did the finest cocaine. He showed me some tricks about cocaine. I believed that if coke had more rocks than powder, it was pure. Bernie explained that rocks are bullshit. Anybody can press shitty coke into rocks, just as guys can blow out glass to make it look like diamonds. A good test for coke purity that Bernie showed me involved buying a hot plate from an appliance store. You put your coke on the hot plate and slowly turn up the heat. Any shit that starts to melt below 180 degrees is not coke but the junk it’s cut with. Good coke should melt at about 180 degrees. Later, people found shit to mix with coke that also melts at 180 degrees, so melting will not always tell you the truth, but back then what Bernie showed me gave me an edge.

  I took my hotplate over to Albert’s and showed him how he could test his coke scientifically. Albert thought I was a genius. He used what I showed him to demand better coke from the people supplying him. Within a month I had a quality half-kilo to sell Bernie. He flew down again and picked it up. Two days after he got back, he told me he’d sold the entire half-key.* Jerry Garcia was one happy blowhead.

  Bernie and I began building our business. Our problem was transporting the coke to California. Miami was filled with stewardesses in the 1970s. Because of the warm weather, the airlines had stewardess training centers in Miami, and these girls were everywhere—at the beaches, in the bars and clubs. I got friendly with a stewardess named Susie who worked for National Airlines—and later for Pan Am—and flew the route to San Francisco. I asked her how easy it would be to carry a small package onto the plane.

  She said, “There’s no security for me. I put on my little outfit, carry my little bag, and nobody even asks to see an ID.”

  I paid her a hundred dollars the first time. I gave her a half-kilo that fit in her flight bag. Bernie met her at a hotel near San Francisco airport, and the next day she brought back my money. This was too easy.

  Within a few months Bernie was taking a few kilos from me every week. Sony had started selling Betamax videotapes, and I discovered that a half-kilo of coke fit perfectly in a tape container. In her roll-on luggage, Susie could fit a box of twenty Betamax tapes holding ten kilos of coke. She did this for years, and she never got questioned.

  The only problem I ever had was one time Susie got drunk on the plane to San Francisco and was picked up by a passenger. When she landed, instead of meeting Bernie with the coke, she went with the guy from the plane and got fucked silly for two days. Ten kilos of coke, gone.

  People were freaking out. Susie had a boyfriend in Miami. This poor kid, not only did his girlfriend fuck this guy behind his back, but me and Albert’s guy Rubio picked him up and broke his arm, then held him in the trunk of a car until Susie turned up. But it ended well. Susie showed up with all the coke a couple days later. She brought back the money to me so I could pay Albert. Her boyfriend got to live.

  THE WAY I worked it with Bernie was, I marked up his price 10 to 30 percent over what I paid Albert. The price Albert charged me per kilo changed week to week, going anywhere from $18,000 to $50,000. In the early days coke was usually at the higher end because nobody could ever get enough. Sometimes the cops or Customs Service would get lucky and bust a smuggler. Then the politicians would go on the news and announce, “We got all this dope, and we’re winning the fight against drugs.”

  Were they really that stupid? When they made a bust, it sent prices higher. Even when everybody like Albert or me was holding coke, and our prices hadn’t gone up, we’d raise them anyway. After a big bust, I’d add on a surcharge and tell Bernie, “Look at the news. They’re arresting everybody. You’re lucky I got this. I want five thousand dollars more.”

  I was always happy when they caught some dumb fuck with a boatload of coke. That meant more money for me. Thank you, cops.

  Once Bernie got up to five or ten kilos a week, I had a hundred grand a month rolling in easy. I did very little work compared to running clubs in New York. I paid no tax to my uncles. Once a week Albert would have Rubio or Ricky Prado leave a car with cocaine in the trunk at a market. I’d have Susie’s boyfriend pick it up and pack it into Betamax cases. After we broke his arm, this kid was very dependable.

  MY BUSINESS was like any other business. You meet people. You build connections. I was constantly looking for bigger customers and bigger suppliers than Albert. I wasn’t going to sell grams of coke to some jerk in a disco, but if I met interesting people who amused me, I’d sell them smaller amounts. I liked rich people. They were into the same things I liked—beautiful women, boats, horses, cars.

  The thrills I used to get from drug rip-offs I now got from meeting different, strange people. For example, I liked to run on the beach. One day out running, I met a wealthy Jewish kid, Lev Davis.* We got to talking, and I found out he was hooked up with models and Playboy Bunnies. He had a beautiful boat that he used to take them on. Lev was a real cocksman. He and I wound up partying together with many ladies. All his friends were doctors, lawyers, and dentists, and they all wanted coke. In that day—1975—normal, wealthy Americans just wanted to live the good life. People didn’t have hang-ups. They had money. They had nice houses on the water. They had boats, and coke made all these things even more enjoyable. Nobody was thinking about cops, or is this person an addict? None of that existed. This was just good times.

  One day Lev called me and said, “Jon, I’m bringing you to a party. I’m going to turn you on to more beautiful girls than you’ve ever seen. We’re going to my friend’s house. He’s going to love you, but I want you to bring him an ounce of coke.”

  “What’s so special about your friend?”

  “Jon, he’s the greatest tit doctor in the world. Every model, stripper, and beautiful woman who wants to take care of herself is dying to get a pair of tits from him. He’s got women flying in from Hollywood just to get his tits.”

  I’ll tell you the truth. I did not see my first pair of fake tits until after I got to Miami. It was a girl I picked up at Sammy’s Eastside, maybe a year before I met Lev. I had her at my place, spinning her around, turning her this way and that, and those tits stuck up like rockets. I had to ask her about them. I thought I was seeing things. She explained they weren’t the breasts she was born with. They had been given to her by a special kind of doctor. I’d never heard of such a thing. It was like putting a man on the moon. You can make big, beautiful tits from nothing?

  Obviously, I was intrigued when Lev invited me to a party at a prestigious tit doctor’s house.

  The doctor had a sensational three-level place on the water. There were gorgeous women everywhere. Half were flat-chested. Half had big racks. These were the doctor’s Before and After girls.

  Lev introduces me to the doc. I toss him an ounce. The doctor says, “Come up to my bedroom, and we’ll try it out.”

  There are people doing lines everywhere. Why hide out upstairs? I think. But I go upstairs with him. We throw some lines on a mirror and get high. The doc says, “This shit’s great, but usually I don’t like to put it in my nose.”

  He gives me this funny look, like he wants me to ask where he normally puts it. But I don’t need to know. Whatever people do, that’s their business.

  I spent the rest of the night partying with the After girls. As I was leaving, the doctor said, “Come to my office sometime. I’ll show you pictures of all the women I gave tits to in Miami.”

  I never took him up on that. I didn’t want to go to some doctor’s office and look at surgical pictures, even if they were of tits.

  I went to more parties at the doc’s house, and I saw he always went off alone to get high. It didn’t make sense.

  One day Lev and I go out on a boat with the doctor and five or six girls. They all have their tops off and are swimming, having a good time, and the doc pulls me aside and asks, “Is it okay if I go down by the head and shut the door for a moment?”

  “What are you going to do? Fuck somebody?” I ask.

/>   “No, no, no.”

  “Look, doc. You always disappear at your house. What do you do? Do you jerk off before you fuck someone, so you don’t have to come quick? Are you a gay? I’m not judging you. I just want to know.”

  The doctor walks me behind the cabin and pulls out a little bag with a syringe in it. Instead of a needle, the syringe has a plastic thing on the end. “Don’t tell anybody,” he says. “This goes up my rectum. I mix the coke into a solution, and I shoot it up my ass.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m a doctor. If you looked into the ass of a person, you’d see there are more connections to your blood system than anywhere. When I shoot the coke up my ass, it gives me the most explosive high you could ever imagine. Then I run and I fuck somebody, and it’s the greatest high in the world.”

  “You swear you’re not bullshitting me?”

  “You want me to do it to you?”

  I laugh at him. “Get the fuck away from me. I’m not a faggot, okay? But go ahead and knock yourself out.”

  These wealthy people, you never knew what they were going to do or say next. They were not uptight people at all, and they didn’t look down on me. I fit in. Not that I was putting shit up my ass. Between Gary Teriaca and me, we were probably moving another five to ten keys of Albert’s blow just to Miami’s upper classes every month. This was not a world Albert could enter so easily. Politicians would take Albert’s money, but nobody was going to invite that crazy-eyed Cuban to a fun party. He’d have been a disaster. If a doctor had offered to put a syringe up Albert’s ass, he would be dead. Everybody on the boat would be dead. The whole party would be chum on the water.

  * Garcia was lead singer for the Grateful Dead.

  * Key is shorthand for “kilo.”

  * Lev Davis is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

  33

  J.R.: Cocaine put me back in the good life. I got a beautiful new dog, a Doberman, to keep Brady company. I named him Chulo, which is Spanish for “pimp.” I got a nice wardrobe, but with a Miami flavor. Sneakers were in. The more sneakers you had, the better you were. Everybody wore white Adidas, with the stripes on the side. To me, Puma Bananas were the end-all of sneakers. I loved my Bananas. The Puma Banana was a yellow sneaker with black on the side. They lasted maybe a month, and then you had to throw them out and get a new pair. I went crazy with Bananas. Then it was saddle shoes. I couldn’t get enough saddle shoes.

  People in Miami had a casual but classy look, Armani jackets and jeans. When Miami Vice came on TV, people said Don Johnson invented the Miami casual look. Not true, bro. He was copying us. Not me personally, but everybody I knew.

  One thing I liked about Miami was the weed. I personally smoked weed all the time. In New York there was a prejudice against wiseguys smoking weed. People looked funny at Andy and me when we smoked out. In Miami nobody cared. I could be myself. I was lucky with pot. It never dulled my senses. I was never so high that I couldn’t shoot somebody or beat him when I needed to.

  My friend Mouse, the pothead judge, turned me on to a nice little Spanish house up the street from him on North Bay Drive. I planted gardenias in the front and bougainvillea along the sunny side of the house. I love the explosion of red and purple in a bougainvillea, and to me the fragrance of the gardenia is un-fucking-real. In my backyard I had a little pool. Beyond that I had all of Biscayne Bay.

  I put in a dock and a boatlift and got my first Cigarette racing boat—a beautiful maroon and gold 28, with twin engines. I got into diving for conch and for lobsters. Some mornings I’d wake up before the sun and drive my boat to the Bahamas. If the sea was flat, I could make it there in ninety minutes. In Bimini there was a bakery where they made bread that was out of this fucking world. Because of how the air is down there, you could taste the sea in the bread. It went perfect with lobster. That was my life. I’d drive to Bimini to pick up a loaf of bread.

  The first club I got active in was the Palm Bay. It was built on pillars over the water, and you would dock your boat at the club by driving it through a tunnel underneath. All the celebrities visiting Florida played tennis at the Palm Bay. I went because it was the easiest place to get to by boat from my house, and they served a fantastic lunch.

  Gary Teriaca was into Porsches, and he turned me on to the 911. I fell in love with that car. My first was champagne with a black interior and a turbocharger. We had a terrific Porsche-Audi dealer in town who never had a problem accepting a shopping bag of cash for payment. Over the years I probably bought a hundred Porsches. Many I gave away to different women.

  Bobby Erra knew a lot about boats and boat engines, and he turned me on to a custom shop run by Butch Stokes, who’d been the racing-team mechanic for Porsche.* I told Butch, “I want my Porsche to be faster than any other Porsche on the road.”

  Two weeks later I picked up my Porsche. Everything looked the same except Butch had put in a little dial on the dashboard. The dial had numbers on it, from one to fourteen. Butch explained the dial was to set the air boost in the turbo. A factory Porsche comes with a turbo boost of six.† Now I had boost that I could dial up to fourteen. My cylinders were bored out. I got special oil coolers. Butch said, “I’m going to have to teach you how to drive this car because, honest to God, this car is ridiculous.”

  “Okay, bro.”

  We drove it out to I-95, and I stopped it in the middle of the highway. We had all these cars honking and pulling over to the side. But fuck those assholes, I needed to see what my car could do. I turned my dial up to fourteen and punched the gas. The front tires rose off the fucking ground. I did a wheelie down the highway like my car was a motorcycle. Butch started yelling, because a car doing a wheelie you can’t control, so I let off the gas, and boom, the front wheels smacked the ground. We easily hit 160 or 180. Butch did not lie. That car was ridiculous.

  I got thirty-six speeding tickets in the next four months. I had more legal trouble from tickets than I ever got from doing a murder. That’s a fact.

  GARY TERIACA was becoming a high-flyer. He and his girlfriend Carol Belcher moved into a $400,000 house on Sabal Palm Drive, in Bay Point Estates.‡ Carol was close friends with a state attorney, Dick Gerstein,§ who lived nearby. When I first went to Gary’s house and he invited me to have drinks with his new best friend, the top crime fighter in the county, I was a little bent out of shape. Gary would have Dick Gerstein downstairs laughing at the bar, and upstairs in the study was where we kept the cocaine we got from Albert. Gary felt his house was a safe place to hold coke because Bay Point was a gated community. But it made me uptight. I remember sitting in the kitchen once holding five keys of coke in a gym bag while I chatted with State Attorney Gerstein. It was not a comfortable feeling. Gary always said Gerstein was a good guy. Later I found out Gerstein was a degenerate gambler who placed bets with Bobby Erra, so maybe he was right.*

  NEXT TO cocaine and pussy, tennis was Gary’s favorite thing. He was always trying to get me to play. One time he insisted I bring my racket.

  “Okay, okay.”

  I show up and see some very attractive girls hopping around the court in their little tennis whites. Then this guy skips over with a sweater over his shoulders. He’s a pretty boy like Gary, an old friend from college. His name is Steven Grabow.

  Gary says, “Why don’t you and Steven partner up?”

  We knock the ball around for a couple hours, do some lines, have a few laughs. Later that day I bang one of the tennis girls in a little clubhouse by the court, which Gary’s friend Steven thinks is comical. He’s a total pussy hound. We’re all joking about this later, and Gary says, “My friend Steven has been living in Aspen, Colorado, the past couple years working as a ski instructor.”

  “What’s it like out there in the mountains?”

  “It’s like Miami, except nobody can get any coke.” That’s how Gary’s friend Steven put it.

  Gary knew I was working with Bernie Levine to supply San Francisco. He
wanted to run the same kind of setup with his friend Steven in Aspen. But the airport was small in Colorado, and there were rumors that the heat watched it. We decided the best way to move kilos to Aspen was to have guys drive it out. I helped Gary get started—got him cars to run the coke, and later hooked him up with a good customer out there. Gary would move a billion dollars of coke through that Grabow kid. It started with a tennis game. That’s how the business was sprouting up then.

  FOR A couple of years, me and Gary and Bobby had good times in Miami. Bobby stayed away from the coke business and from Albert San Pedro for a couple years, but we all partied together. The old nightclubs around 79th Street were dying.* Cubans were moving into the neighborhood. It was one thing for them to park your car at a club. Nobody wanted to sit next to them in a club.

  Everybody moved to new hot spots—the Jockey Club, the Coconut Grove, the Bombay, and later the Cricket Club, the disco in the Quayside Towers.† People called the Quayside Towers the “Quaalude Towers.” Quaaludes were the other great drug that people were taking along with coke. Quaaludes were more underground when Andy and I snuck them into the punch in our New York discos. In Miami you’d go out for drinks with a broad, and she’d bring her own Quaaludes. It wasn’t like today, where a guy will sneak roofies into some poor broad’s drinks so he can have his way with her. Back then broads would knock themselves out on purpose.

  Me, Bobby, and Gary all had boats. We’d get six or seven girls, take them out on the ocean, tie our boats together, get the girls fucked up on Quaaludes and coke, and have a party. We had a girl get so wasted one time, she passed out, rolled off the deck, and fell into the water. Her girlfriends were so fucked up, they didn’t even notice that she’d fallen off the boat. Finally I saw this stupid girl floating facedown in the water. Me and Bobby panicked. With all the shit we were into, a girl drowning from our boat could be very bad.