by Jon Roberts
She fell in love with a mansion on South Beach. They wanted $180,000, and I thought that was a steal. It was a grand Venetian palace. I could picture myself in it. But I showed it to Danny, and he said, “The neighborhood is shit. Never buy in South Beach.”
Danny was wrong about the neighborhood and the house. Years later Versace bought that mansion.* I was a moron for listening to Danny.
As it happened, Danny Mones and I had some business with Donny Soffer, the guy whose girlfriend was cooking me dinner when I was chased out of the Charter Club. Donny was looking to borrow some money for his development in Aventura, and while we were talking about that, he turned me on to a house rental on Indian Creek Island.† It wasn’t the biggest house on the island, but it was built almost over the water. From the dining room it looked like you were on a boat. I paid an ungodly amount to live there, $30,000 a month, but that’s what I made from two or three kilos. Phyllis was satisfied. We tried having a domestic life. We’d have parties. We socialized with the neighbors. I’d take Poppy out of his rest home and have him over for dinners and sleepovers. He loved the dining room because of it being on the water.
But almost as soon as we moved in, Phyllis found another place she liked better, the estate at 121 Palm Avenue on Palm Island.‡ The main house was a big Spanish place, and it was next door to where Al Capone retired after prison. Capone used to fish out in the back, and they say he died there fishing, which is a nice way for a gangster to go.
Phyllis talked me into buying it for $275,000.* Her life project became decorating the place. I dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into that house, but the cost was nothing—a couple of buckets of cash I dug out of the ground. Most contractors in Florida back then took cash.
ANYTHING WAS possible in my world. I went to every club and knew everybody. First it was because I had the cocaine. Then it was because I had the money. I was happier not bringing cocaine to a club. I made more money off of bulk distribution. I went from being the coke guy to the rich coke guy to just the rich guy.
Money was a different kind of power than being a gangster in New York. I watched rich people and saw they can do anything. They get their power because top politicians in America suck their dicks just for a chance to ride on their yachts or sleep in their mansions. And when the top politicians are your friends, you’ve got it made. Truly rich people make the Mafia look like losers.
I saw how it worked when I was living on Indian Creek. One of my neighbors was a retired politician named George Smathers.† Phyllis and I went to a cocktail party at Smathers’s house, and there I met a guy named Bebe Rebozo.‡
Bebe and I became very friendly. We went fishing together many times. He was a major crook, as big as Carlo Gambino, but he owned banks. Bebe helped me launder my money for a couple years. Everybody said Bebe was Nixon’s main man, but I didn’t understand the power of this until a little thing happened.
One of my favorite spots to eat was Joe’s Stone Crab in South Beach.* There is nothing like Joe’s, because a stone crab is not like a Maryland crab, where you eat the meat off the body. A stone crab, you eat the legs and feet. You won’t find the kind they serve at Joe’s anywhere else. Joe’s has always had their own boats to catch the crabs. Their crabs are colossal, and they serve them with the finest mustard sauce. I turned Bernie Levine on to Joe’s when he visited from San Francisco, and he went nuts for them.
One day I went to Joe’s with Bebe Rebozo. I told him about my friend in California wishing he could eat stone crabs, and Bebe said, “I can take care of it, Jon. You want to send him crabs tomorrow?”
The next day I went to Joe’s and had Calvin, a black guy who worked in the kitchen, cook me a batch of crabs. Bebe told me to load them into a cooler chest. I drove the cooler out to Homestead Air Force Base† and asked to meet a colonel whose name Bebe gave me. This colonel takes the cooler, has his guys strap it into a fighter jet, and they fly it out to California.
A couple hours later Bernie called me. He told me when he got home from the Air Force Base in California and opened the cooler, the crabs were still hot. “How the fuck did you do this?”
“Don’t worry, bro. The government took care of it for me.”
I’m sure that fat slob almost choked himself eating them.
That night Bebe had me come over to his house, and he gave me two cases of Coors beer.‡ These they flew back on the jet from San Francisco. Bebe explained, “They started flying things for me when Nixon stayed at my house.”§
“What? He forgets his slippers in California, they fly them out here on a jet?”
“That’s how it works, Jon.”
Think of all the people paying their taxes to support this nonsense. They train these guys to be the best fighter pilots in the world, and they’re flying crab legs and Coors beer. That’s the power Bebe had. Even though Nixon was a bum, thrown out of office, he still had enough pull that Bebe could use the air force as a delivery service for his friends. The square, normal people in this world don’t have a clue.
EVERYBODY I knew in Miami was constantly seeking new amusements. I wasn’t finding as much domestic bliss with Phyllis as she’d promised we’d have, so I was up for any excuse to leave the house. Me and Gary Teriaca and Bobby Erra started regular dinners at the Forge restaurant that turned into orgies. This began when a friend of ours, Leonard Codomo,* got the idea to hold a dinner with only us and Playboy Bunnies. The Playboy Club was big in Miami then, and Bunnies, or wannabe Bunnies, were everywhere. The orgies started by accident. The first time we held our all-Bunny dinner, they put us in the main dining room. Some of the Bunnies downed too many Quaaludes and got rambunctious. They started flashing the normal people out for dinner with Grandma or whatever, and Al Malnik, the owner of the Forge, told us next time he’d seat us in a secluded area.
The next week we showed up for another Bunny dinner, and they put us in a private room. It was the same room where I’d met Meyer Lansky. It had one big table where eighteen people could sit. The walls were covered in colored fabrics. There were chandeliers, oriental rugs. It was an unbelievable room. Once the champagne and Quaaludes started to flow, the Bunnies went wild.
One of them was actually not a Bunny, but a boat-show model named Monique. She had come to Miami to go to college, but she turned into a model and a freak. I had been with her once many months before this dinner, and she was the first girl I ever met who had pierced rings—like for ears—but in her pussy. Everybody starts partying, and I see Monique is missing. I look for her in the main dining room. I send a girl into the bathroom to search for her. No Monique.
I go back in the private room and see under the dining table, there’s Monique. Bobby’s fucking her with a piece of asparagus. Normally, if you think of fucking a girl with a vegetable, you think of a cucumber or a zucchini, but Bobby’s got this little asparagus going in and out. Bobby was a traditional guy, not a freak. What an effect Monique had on him. Her freakiness was contagious. He’s laughing. She’s laughing.
I said, “Bobby, why can’t we all enjoy this shit?”
Bobby says, “You’re right.” He decides to put Monique on the floor in the middle of the room so everybody can watch. Bobby wants to spread the tablecloth on the floor for her to lie on, and to show off his magician skills, he grabs the tablecloth with his claw-hand and yanks it. His idea was, he could pull it and all the bottles and plates would stay on it like when you see this done in the movies. Instead, everything spills over. He reaches out and pushes everything that’s left onto the floor.
That’s how the room started to get destroyed.
The Bunnies now got food and wine all over their clothes, so they start tearing them off. Monique climbs on the table. Bobby picks up the asparagus to fuck her some more, and Leonard Codomo says, “Hey, Bobby, is your dick bigger than the asparagus?”
I couldn’t believe Codomo’s balls in fucking with Bobby. Leonard was not a tough guy at all, and Bobby was someone, if you made fun of him, he would not forge
t.* But Bobby just laughed. He pulls his dick out, which was really disgusting to see because he’s holding it with his claw fingers, and he says, “My dick’s bigger than the asparagus, you motherfucker.”
Bobby starts fucking Monique on the table. Then he takes his dick out and pushes the spout of a wine bottle into her. He must have filled her with red wine, because when he pushes his cock back in, wine comes shooting out from her pussy.
I’m so fucked up, I think, Oh my God, she’s bleeding.
But another Bunny starts licking Monique’s pussy, and I realize it’s wine.
On the other side of the room I hear slap slap slap. Gary Teriaca has another Bunny bent over the table. He’s fucking her from behind, and in each hand he has chunks of prime rib, and he’s slapping the shit out of her ass with the beef. While he’s slapping her, he keeps saying, “It looks like we’re in hell now, doesn’t it, Bobby?”
Gary, with the beef, was out of his mind.
As it progresses, we have a contest where we have the Bunnies kneel on the floor in a row with their asses in the air. We stick cherries in their cracks, like teeing up golf balls, and smack them. We bounce the cherries off the wall, and any girl that can catch a flying cherry in her mouth, she gets five hundred dollars. As you can imagine, the girls are leaping like trained seals to catch the cherries.
At some point Gary starts nailing these girls, moving down the line, poking each one. Me and Bobby and Gary and Leonard follow. We’re fucking the shit out of these Bunnies, when boom boom boom—some poor waiter knocks on the doors. Bobby goes so crazy, he picks up his gun and shoots at the ceiling.
Bobby’s gun fills the room with smoke. Now everybody’s coughing and laughing. I stumble over to the door and open it a crack. There’s two waiters on the ground, taking cover.
I tell them, “Do not come in here.”
I go back in, and it’s hours until we are all fucked out. The room is destroyed. The Bunnies are a mess—covered in garbage, food, wine, cum. They start digging through the trash looking for their clothes, combing their hair, putting on makeup—like that will help. Monique gets upset because she can’t find a gold earring that fell out of her pussy, and she accuses another girl of stealing it.
When we finally open the doors, the restaurant is closed. The waiters who stayed on looked shell-shocked. The maître d’ comes over to say something. I shove a wad of wet money into his hand and say, “I’m too fucked up to talk. Just have Al send a bill. Whatever the fuck it is, I’ll take care of it.”
A few days later I go into my office with Danny Mones. He got the bill from Al Malnik. Danny says, “Al says you destroyed his restaurant. He’s got construction workers coming in to rebuild it.”
“What does he want?”
“Forty-six thousand dollars. Al says the fabric on the walls was very special. So were the rugs. It’s a classy place, Jon.”
Bobby and Gary and me gave Al the money, and he rebuilt the room. We came back and had more orgies and wrecked it again and again. We always paid Al for the damages. To spend fifty grand in a night was worth the amusement we got from it. Hell is expensive.
* Jon’s office with Danny Mones was located in a handsome neocolonial building at 12700 Biscayne Boulevard, which is now home to the Transatlantic Bank.
* Peter “Petey” Gallione became a drug counselor and then a senior director of New Jersey’s statewide prison rehabilitation program. As a sworn officer of the Department of Corrections, he carried a badge, like any other cop. Upon his retirement in 2009, he bought a house in South Florida and moved into a home a few blocks from Jon’s. Unaware that they lived so close, the two met by accident in 2010 and quickly rekindled their friendship, though not their criminal partnership.
* La Gorce Island is among the most expensive areas in Miami Beach.
* Gianni Versace, the Italian fashion mogul, was murdered outside the house in 1997. The home is now a hotel and club called the Villa.
* Records indicate the home on Palm Island was not purchased by Jon but by an individual whose name does appear on corporations Jon formed with his attorney, Daniel Mones. Jon says this person was a front employed to help him hide assets.
* Opened in 1918, Joe’s Stone Crab has been a favorite of generations of customers from Al Capone to J. Edgar Hoover to George and Barbara Bush.
* Leonard Codomo is a South Florida entrepreneur. His father was a Miami hotel developer who in 1951 was arrested for allowing members of the Bonanno crime family to use his hotels for “boiler rooms” where they peddled fake stocks and fraudulent real estate schemes over the phone and also took illegal bets. Codomo Sr. negotiated a plea allowing him to avoid prison.
* Perhaps he did not forget. Police discovered during a 1990 rackateering investigation into Erra that throughout the 1980s he apparently strong-armed large amounts of cash from Codomo by threatening him with bodily injury and death.
† Indian Creek Island is sort of like the Liechtenstein of American municipalities. It is connected to Miami Beach but is an independent community of twenty-three homes. It has the eighth-highest per capita income of any community in America. When Jon lived there with Phyllis, his neighbors included Julio Iglesias, corporate raider Carl Icahn, Don Shula, and retired U.S. senator George Smathers.
† Former U.S. senator George Smathers, who died in 2007, was originally a segregationist Democrat but changed his views. He forged close relationships with both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He sold Nixon the property on Key Biscayne that served as the Florida White House during his presidency.
† Homestead Air Force Base is about forty miles south of Miami.
‡ Another island enclave with a few dozen homes that today are commonly listed for more than $10 million each.
‡ Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, who died in 1998, founded the Key Biscayne Bank and was among Richard Nixon’s closest friends. Rebozo lived next door to Nixon’s Florida White House residence. Rebozo was implicated in numerous underworld laundering and finance schemes but was never convicted.
‡ In the 1970s, Coors beer was not sold east of the Rockies and was highly sought after on the East Coast.
§ After he resigned the presidency and sold his Florida White House residence, Nixon was a frequent houseguest of Rebozo’s.
38
J.R.: Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones looking for crazed amusements at the Forge. One night in 1977 Gary Teriaca’s little brother, Craig, was shot to death in the bar there.* This was tragic for the Teriacas. Even though Gary and his father, Vincent, were wiseguys, they had a special thing for Craig. They didn’t want him in the business. They wanted him to be a normal Miami kid having fun on the golf course, chasing girls, whatever. Craig was a nice kid. He would come out with us sometimes, and he truly didn’t have a wrong bone in his body. I always thought Gary was a little bit like him, and that’s why he had trouble being comfortable with himself and tried to hide his cocaine use from Bobby. Both those brothers were a little soft.
For some idiotic reason, Craig used to sometimes drink with a guy named Richard Schwartz at the Forge. On his own, Richard Schwartz was what I call a “make-believe wiseguy.” He was a nothing guy who owned a hamburger shop on Bay Harbor Island.* But because his mother was married to Meyer Lansky—making him Meyer Lansky’s stepson—Richard thought he could do anything. If Meyer Lanskey is your stepfather, that is mostly correct.
Nobody really knows why Richard shot Craig Teriaca. They weren’t close friends. They didn’t have any business together. All anybody knows is, Richard was standing by Craig at the bar. Richard went to the bathroom to piss. When he came back, he accused Craig of stealing ten dollars he’d left at the bar. He screamed, “You piece of shit. You stole my ten dollars,” and he shot Craig in the face. My belief is, Richard Schwartz was so drunk and fucked up on coke, his amusement was to shoot his friend.†
Gary wasn’t there when his brother got shot, but he found out within minutes. Craig was still alive when they got him to the hos
pital. Gary had all of us come down to give blood. All of us—me, Bobby, Albert San Pedro, even Albert’s bodyguard Ricky Prado—went to St. Francis Hospital that night.‡ This turned out to be a waste. By the time we filled out the papers to donate blood, the kid was dead. He died in Gary’s arms. It broke Gary. He was sobbing like a baby. I’m not judging him. Anyone has a right to act like that if his little brother dies in front of him.
They arrested Richard Schwartz, but with his stepfather being Meyer Lansky, no way would the politicians let him go down for murder.* Don’t be ridiculous. Think of all the judges Danny Mones and I owned, and we were little guys compared to Lansky. Judges in that city would rather shoot themselves in the head than put his stepson on trial for murder.
Knowing he was going to be freed put everybody in a difficult situation. This was a Jew-on-Italian murder. Every Italian likes revenge, but Lansky was the Mafia’s top financial guy. He gave them Las Vegas. It’s not that he owned it himself, but he knew who really did. He knew where all the secret bank accounts were.
And something Gary had to face was the fact that his little brother was no wiseguy. Would the Mafia risk pissing off Lansky over the shooting of a nothing kid? Their father Vincent was no big guy. He was a soldier who worked his whole life for Bobby Erra’s father, Patsy, and Patsy was dead. Bobby was running things now, and he didn’t want to start a war.
Italians like honor, but if you compare it to money, they like money even more.
People said that Lansky himself had no feeling for his stepson, but Lansky was crazy about Schwartz’s mother. He’d been with her for years and years, and tough as he was, she led him by the balls.†
What most people hoped was, everybody would do nothing. But Richard Schwartz did a dumb thing. Instead of sitting in jail and waiting for people’s emotions to calm down, he bonded out. The moron walked out of jail a couple weeks after the shooting and went back to work at his hamburger shop.