American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  † The International Inn is still located at 2301 Normandy Drive in Miami Beach, and if the anonymous reviewers of tripadviser.com are to be believed, it remains the quintessential no-tell motel dump. As one reviewer described it recently, “Worst place on earth. Hores [sic] outside pimps looking at you. I felt I was in a CSI movie where I die.” Or as another reviewer put it, “Views from the room were nice, but I don’t expect blood, hair, and unidentifiable things on the bedsheets.”

  † Richard Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Academy Award in 1977 for his role in The Goodbye Girl. In 1982 he was arrested for cocaine possession after passing out and driving his car into a tree.

  49

  J.R.: My end with Phyllis came when I met a woman named Toni Moon. In 1980 a friend of my sister’s and his wife set me up with Toni. My sister’s friend was a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey who often came down to Miami on business. He and I were friendly because I referred clients to him. On one of his trips to Miami he brought his new girlfriend, who was a model at the Ford Modeling Agency.* She was a beautiful redhead whom he later married. Back then that redhead heard how miserable I was with Phyllis, and she fixed me up with a model she knew from her agency, Toni Moon.

  This couple had me over for drinks at their hotel in Miami, and in walked Toni Moon.† She was gorgeous, really striking. Did I fall in love with Toni Moon? It wasn’t like I’d just smoked a hit of PCP and thought my head would explode when I saw her. I was too old to swoon over a girl. But Toni got my attention.

  Toni was tall. She was better looking than most movie stars. And she had brains. She’d knocked around the world. She’d lived in Paris, New York, Los Angeles. She took acting classes in New York with the top guy teaching it, Lee Strasberg.* But she wasn’t a snob. She was a country girl who’d grown up in the Florida sticks. She rode horses. She knew how to hunt. I’d never met a woman like Toni before. She wasn’t a phony. She was a natural woman.

  As soon as I met her, I got a vision in my mind we’d make a life together.

  My mistake was to tell Phyllis about this.

  I BELIEVED the best way to make a clean break from Phyllis was to tell her I’d fallen in love with somebody else. I couldn’t just say I was moving out or taking a break. I’d done that a million times. I had to say this was final.

  I took Phyllis out to her favorite restaurant for dinner, Café Chauveron, a little place in Bay Harbor—not far from where I’d helped kill Richard Schwartz—that served a roast lamb that was out of this world. We sat down. I waited until Phyllis got some meat in her stomach, and I told her it was over. I told her she could pick one of my houses in Coral Gables to live in, she could keep her cars, keep her credit cards, but we were finished. I’d met a girl, and I was in love.

  Looking back, I see my mistake. It’s bad enough to break a girl’s heart when she’s in love with you. But if you do this to a girl who already hates your guts, it’s not good, bro, especially with a wicked girl like Phyllis. You remember how I told you that back in New York her sister, Fran, got their cousin Henry Borelli to rob and kill her boyfriend Jack in the Toucan Shirt after she got jealous of him? I told you how alike those sisters were in the sack. They were alike in more ways. Phyllis tried to get Henry to kill me.*

  A couple of weeks after Phyllis and I broke up, I’m out romancing Toni Moon like a moron—riding horses on the beach, eating candlelit dinners, living in a dream—when I get a call from a guy who used to run with Ricky Cravero’s gang. He tells me that my ex-brother-in-law Henry has come to town and is staying at the International Inn.

  Henry was getting famous among wiseguys because of all the murders he was doing up in New York. It made no sense for him to come to town without telling me. The fact that he’d checked into a motel—the same place where I used to meet Fran—told me those two wicked sisters had brought him down to Miami for a reason.

  I called my dirty cop friend, Lieutenant Mazzarella, and asked him if he could have some guys watch Henry. The motel was not in his jurisdiction, but he had brother dirty cops in Miami Beach who as a professional courtesy let him and his guys put eyes on the motel.

  After a couple days Mazzarella told me Henry was sharing a room with a man. Henry certainly wasn’t gay. He was lying low with the guy like they were planning something.

  I went to the motel at sunrise. I brought with me a big guy who sometimes helped Bobby Erra with collections. I brought a gun with a silencer. I had my cops open the door to Henry’s room, and I went in with my guy. The cops stayed outside. I put my gun on Henry. “Henry, what’s going on, bro?”

  Henry had balls. He sits up and looks at me with a gun in his face like it’s nothing. “Hey, bro.”

  I say, “You know I love you, Henry. You’re my family. But if you’re not straight with me, this room is where you’re going to see your last piece of daylight. I want to straighten this out now. If you don’t tell me what’s up, that means we can’t straighten this out, and we’re done.”

  Henry tells me that Phyllis had wound him up about all the terrible things I’d done to her, and she told him I was never going to take care of her, despite all my money. So he’d decided to come down and rip me off. Henry wasn’t like me. When I ripped off a person, I liked to keep them alive, so I could came back later and rip them off again. When Henry stole from a person, he’d kill that person. It’s why he was so bad at making money.

  After hearing Henry out, I say, “Henry, you know I would give Phyllis anything I had.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking, Jon.”

  “I wonder how we’re going to solve this. You were straight with me, but I don’t know what to say.”

  “Anything you want, Jon.”

  “You know what, Henry? I got a great answer. Let me do this one thing to help you out of this problem.”

  I go over to Henry’s guy on the bed. My guy is holding him by his neck. Henry’s guy has on Jockey shorts and a wife-beater. He looks like a mook you’d see twirling dough in a pizza shop. He has big muscles and gold chains. I say, “Were you going to rip me off?”

  “Fuck you,” he says.

  “You got nothing, you piece of shit.”

  The dumb fuck comes into my city to rob me, then gives me attitude? What a moron. I aim my gun at his knee and pop. I shoot him once. The guy leaps sideways and bangs his head into the wall, like he’s trying to escape through the plaster. My guy pushes him down on the bed.

  “I’m only shooting your knees,” I say.

  My first shot had been lucky. It had gone into his knee and blown the bones apart. Normally, when you kneecap somebody, you want to press your gun to the side of the knee and feel for a bone that sticks out. If you shoot from the top, the kneecap can deflect the bullet. I once saw a guy in New York walk away after I shot him through the kneecap. He didn’t go far, but it was surprising to see him take just one step. When you shoot in the bone on the side, your guy ain’t going to walk after that.

  After my first lucky shot, I’m more careful for the next one. I grab the good leg of Henry’s guy and feel my way up it with the tip of my gun. I press my gun into the bone, and pop, no more knee. The guy goes limp from shock. I say, “It’s very easy for me to blow your head off, but I think you got the message. Every time you try to walk for the rest of your life, you’re going to remember that I let you live.”

  Henry’s guy lost the wise mouth that he’d had thirty seconds earlier. He gasps, “Thank you.”

  My hand is disgusting. On the second shot, his blood and gristle had burst out and sprayed my arm. I go in the bathroom to wash it off.

  When I come out, Henry has a little speech prepared for me. “Jon, I should have never thought about ripping you off. We never had a problem before. We are brothers. I was stupid. I will leave right away. I will never come back without telling you.”

  “Henry,” I say, “it will break Phyllis’s heart if you don’t visit. Take a night. See your family, then go.”

  “You want to have dinner wi
th us?”

  “Maybe the next time, Henry.”

  I’M GOING to show you what kind of guy Henry is. That night he called me. He said, “Jon, I want you to see something.”

  We met outside the North Bay Village police station, where it’s safe. Henry opened the trunk of his car, and inside there’s his guy whom I kneecapped. Henry had put a bullet in his brain. He said, “Jon, I didn’t want him giving you problems, and I wanted to make this right.”

  The guy in the trunk had been Henry’s friend. But to show me how sincere he was, Henry had gone the extra distance. For all his faults, Henry was basically a good guy.

  The incident had a good effect on Phyllis. Even though Henry didn’t succeed in killing me, it got the poison out of her system. Phyllis and I stayed friends. I kept her in a house for years. Henry and I went back to being like brothers.

  In 1985 Herbie Hancock’s sister, Jean, flew down and stayed at a place I had for Phyllis in Coral Gables. Her last night there, we all had a nice dinner together. The next day Phyllis and I both drove her to the airport to see her off. We kissed her good-bye, and hours later her plane crashed. That was the end of Jean.*

  It made me wonder about my father’s philosophy about evil. Jean Hancock was one of the few good people I knew. And she gets in a plane that blows up. Henry, Phyllis, and I went on with our lives. If there is justice, why would guys like Henry and me get to go on in life?

  Years later, after Henry went to prison,† and then I went to prison, I ran into him inside, where he was working as a barber. We laughed our asses off when we saw each other. He gave me my haircuts for months. It was great seeing him. Obviously, inmate barbers only get electric clippers, so I knew he wasn’t going to slit my throat.

  * The top modeling agency in New York and perhaps the most famous in the world at the time.

  * Lee Strasberg was director of the acclaimed Actors Studio in New York and the godfather of method acting.

  * I spoke to Phyllis several times by phone to confirm this and other stories Jon had told about her. Phyllis appeared to be disassociated from reality and mentally incompetent, as if suffering from senile dementia. I was told by a relative of hers that she was “very ill in her mind.” Jon is the sole source of the story that Phyllis sicced Henry Borelli on him. Phyllis’s sister, Fran, whom Jon implicates in the murder of her boyfriend Jack, passed away before I could interview her.

  * Jean Hancock died on August 2, 1985, when the Delta Airlines jet she was taking from Miami to Los Angeles crashed in Grapevine, Texas, during an emergency landing.

  † “Toni Moon” was the stage name of Toni Mooney.

  † Henry Borelli was sentenced to life in prison plus 150 years in 1986. Though the presiding judge accepted evidence implicating Borelli in 70 to 200 contract killings, due to legal technicalities Borelli was convicted on 15 counts of grand theft auto.

  50

  J.R.: Toni Moon doesn’t know the price I paid to be with her. She never knew about Henry or the guy whose knees I capped. Unlike with Phyllis, I never talked about my main business with her. When we met, I told her I was into real estate and racehorses. She was no dummy, though. Over time she saw I was involved with other lines of work.

  Toni was an old-fashioned girl. She wanted a guy to build a life with. She was staying out in West Palm Beach in a little house with her mom when we met. Her work took her to New York and L.A., but Toni wanted a place with me where we could get away from it all.

  We found a farm up in Delray Beach.* It was an hour’s drive north from Miami. The beach side of Delray was a little town of rich people, but the farm Toni found was inland by the Everglades. The area was nothing but farms and swamps and hillbillies in old trucks. The only civilization there was a Texaco station, a truck stop café, and the Hole in the Wall, a feed store for cattle.* That was it.

  The property we found was in an unfinished development called Tierra Del Ray. What happened is in the 1970s some developer had decided to put in luxury estates—mini-ranches of ten or fifteen acres each. But the economy tanked, and the development never got finished. It was a gated community that ran out of money. Instead of country club people living inside, it was well-to-do rednecks. Some of the mansions were unfinished, and people lived in campers in front. There were cars up on blocks on the lawns, and people driving monster trucks. Behind the houses you’d see rednecks roaring past in airboats. They wore overalls and walked around with rifles. In that neighborhood a constant war was being waged against the alligators, who’d crawl out of the swamps and eat people’s dogs, or try to grab the little hillbilly kids riding around on minibikes. It was redneck heaven.

  The place Toni found was a half-finished Spanish house at the end of La Reina Road. It was on fifteen acres that backed up on the marshlands. We’d gone up there on a hot day. I got out in the hundred-degree heat, with mosquitoes trying to bite my arm off, horseflies so big they looked like birds, and I looked at this falling-down house and thought, What the fuck is this?

  But Toni made me walk around. There were miles of horse trails in the area. There were trees and islands and canals. There were the most incredible birds and wildflowers everywhere. Ever since I was a kid, I’d wanted to have my own ranch like on Bonanza. Fifteen acres in Delray was no Ponderosa,† but it was enough. I bought it for $300,000. It was by far the best place I’d ever lived.

  • • •

  TONI AND I turned that house into a luxury redneck palace. We added a pool, a dock in back, a skeet range, a barn, a six-car garage, a basketball court, and a guesthouse. I got so sick of driving up there from Miami, I bought a Hughes 500 helicopter. I parked it on the lawn and hired a full-time pilot, who lived in the guesthouse. For driving around town I got a Chevy Blazer with lifted suspension, so I blended in with the hicks.

  I was glad to be out of Miami. The city had gotten violent in the past couple of years.* You had the Colombian peasants running around moving coke. Not just Fabito’s guys from the Medellín Cartel. Up until the early 1980s Medellín was just one group of many. On top of them you had all the Marielitos overrunning the city.† Even the blacks staged an uprising in Liberty City over some guy who’d gotten a beating from the cops.‡

  The problem wasn’t a shortage of cocaine. Even when there was an excess of kilos on the street, gangs fought over the money to be made from it. Working with Fabito, I’d moved into what you would call management. Little subdistributors fighting over half-kilos on the street wasn’t my problem. A guy who works in a motorcycle factory doesn’t worry about morons driving those motorcycles he made into lampposts. I worked hard bringing in cocaine. What people did with it after they got it was up to them.

  I turned our place in Delray into the ultimate getaway. I fenced off the main house. I put in mortar tubes that could launch tear-gas bombs at intruders coming up the driveway. The mortars could be fired from switchpads inside the house. They’d slow down anybody coming onto our property looking for trouble, and tear gas was not against the law. I acquired a good number of hunting rifles and AKs. All the rednecks were well armed. We fit in with our neighbors.

  Toni turned me on to the outdoors. I’d liked riding horses since I’d been with Vera in Mexico. We rode all the trails in Delray. Toni got me to take canoe trips around the marshes. We’d paddle around, smoke weed, drink wine, watch the animals.

  I dug a pond in front of the house for ducks to live in. Toni collected exotic birds, and we built an aviary outside and connected it to the house so they could fly around inside.

  We built a cage along one side of the house for our cat, Cucha.* She was a 150-pound cougar. We got her when she was a kitten from a woman who raised big cats at a farm in Broward. Cucha was a beautiful cat. We built a door from her cage so she could roam free from the house. My dogs liked cats since they’d lived for years with Princess, my little one-eyed kitty. Because we got Cucha when she was small, they acclimated to her before she grew into her full 150 pounds.

  Cucha was a people cat. She follow
ed Toni around the house and slept in the bed with us. Our only problem with Cucha was she liked to eat the exotic birds. She would get down low and make little chirping sounds to fool the bird, then she would leap. Cucha could jump ten or fifteen feet in any direction. It was a constant battle with her.

  Our house was beautiful inside. It wasn’t gaudy with chandeliers. It was a country house. The nicest piece was our dining room table, which I had sent to me from Italy. It was made entirely of ebony that was inlaid with ivory. People would look at my dining room table and gasp. It was the most sensational dining room table you’ve ever seen in your life. We had abstract paintings that I got from the painter Frank Stella, who I knew from the Palm Bay Club and was just a fun guy.* I also owned Erté paintings† and a rare series of prints showing the life of the Marquis de Sade that I kept in a velour book in my living room to show visitors.

  My favorite place in the house was the glass room. I built a room off the western side of the house that was made completely of glass—walls, ceilings, even the floor. I put in a giant couch and spent more time there than any other part of the house. I felt secure in a glass room. I had my fences and tear gas and guns and dogs and my 150-pound cat. Cucha was very loyal.

  I used to put a leash and chain around Cucha’s neck and ride around with her in my Blazer. I’d take her into town to eat lunch with me. We’d take an outside table, and I’d tie her to a phone pole. Everybody knew Cucha.

  I’d take her to the beach, too. She liked to bite the waves. One time I was driving down the beach with Cucha poking her head out the window, and I got carried away and drove into the water. Boom. A wave came up and sucked my truck into the sea. Cucha and me had to fight our way out. She towed me out of the water with her leash. I left my Blazer rolling in the waves.

  Later, the city sent me a bill for removing it.