American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  * Max and Jon would be indicted by the federal government as the Cartel’s top “American representatives.”

  † Max Mermelstein was a mechanical engineer who claimed to have a degree from the New York Institute of Technology in Manhattan. If true, Max’s employment history as a low-level maintenance engineer at hotels and country clubs suggests he did not maximize the career potential afforded him by his degree—at least, not until he became chief of transport operations for the Cartel.

  53

  J.R.: The first thing I ever did with Max came at the direction of Fabito. In late 1980 I’d stopped using the cop’s stash house in North Bay Village. I’d started paying some of the drivers I used to rent their garages. I’d use guys with the most boring, normal suburban homes I could find. We’d just park the coke car in the garage until we needed to deliver it. I ran into a problem when one of my drivers worried that some cops were watching his house. We had a big shipment come in, and I had no place to hold it. Fabito told me that Max’s guy, Rafa, could let me use one of his stash houses.

  Rafa lived around the corner from Max in Sunny Isles. Rafa was a wiry kid, and he was very hyper because he constantly smoked what the Colombians called “bazookas.” A bazooka was a normal cigarette, except half the tobacco was squeezed out and replaced with cocaine. Rafa had a bodyguard named Flaco whose main job was to follow him around and roll bazookas.

  When I went to see Rafa, he’d heard already that I was coming. I’d met him a few times with Max, and he was very personable. He drove me out to his stash house in Kendall, a suburb built in the 1970s for white people fleeing Cubans in Miami. It was now being taken over by Colombians like Rafa.* It looked like the Colombians in Kendall had all used the same architect Albert had used to build his madhouse in Hialeah. In Kendall they’d buy a house on a normal suburban street, add a couple stories to it, cover the whole thing in burglar bars, and build a fifteen-foot wall around it. Rafa’s stash house was a fortress.

  When he took me inside, he showed me something I’d never seen, except in a movie. We walked into a normal-looking den. Rafa picked up a garage door opener and clicked it, and the wall slid open. Inside there was a stack of at least a thousand coke bricks, and bundles of cash piled to the ceiling.

  “Is this good?” he asked.

  “Sure, Rafa.”

  That’s where I had my driver deliver our coke.

  Later I found a redneck neighbor of mine in Delray who was a master electrician and contractor and could build hiding places like Rafa’s. Unlike Rafa, I selected stash houses in anonymous neighborhoods all over Dade and Palm Beach counties. I picked houses belonging to people who worked regular jobs and didn’t have criminal records.

  RAFA AND I were very tight from the start. He was easier to deal with than Max. I’m not saying he was a barrel of laughs. He was like Albert in that he’d sometimes kill a person for no fucking reason. He was almost like a little kid, though. A lot of the Colombian street guys were like that. They could shoot someone one minute and the next minute be laughing or crying. If Rafa saw a sad episode of Little House on the Prairie—which was his favorite American TV show—he’d bawl his eyes out. Rafa’s favorite fucking place on the planet was Disney World. To me, that place is like a fucking prison, with children and the guy in the rat suit.* But Rafa and his guys loved that shit. Even Pablo Escobar, when he was the most wanted man in the world, once snuck into Florida just to visit the Magic Kingdom.

  The secret to handling Rafa was knowing how coked out he was at any given time. This was easy to determine based on watching how either he or Flaco, his bodyguard, rolled bazookas. When they rolled one, they’d pinch tobacco out of it, and they’d always pile the tobacco on the table. If the pile was small, Rafa was okay. If the pile was big, he might be out of his mind.

  Rafa was married to a very petite Colombian girl, Odelia. We’d be out at dinner somewhere, and she’d look at him wrong, and he’d punch her. I’d never seen anything like it. One time he broke her face and put her in the hospital. She came out with wires on her jaw to hold it together. It looked like a birdcage on her head. A month after that, she and Rafa were at Disney World laughing like kids.

  Rafa was the most unstable person you’d ever meet. But he always kept some reason in his brain. He knew he couldn’t touch Max because Max had Pablo Escobar on his side. Rafa understood the force that Pablo had. If someone didn’t have force backing him up, Rafa would cut that guy to pieces.

  I never had any problems with Rafa, except once or twice. My main problem with Rafa was partying. Since Rafa smoked coke, when you partied with him, he wanted you to smoke it. He’d be after me, “Fume, fume, fume!”—smoke it.

  I’d say, “Rafa, I don’t smoke cigarettes. It’ll choke me.”

  “Fuck it! Smoke with me.”

  There were times I’d sit in his house with him, and I’d be so fucked up, I couldn’t move. My arms and legs would be numb, and I’d be thinking, What have I done to myself?

  Rafa would sit across from me covered in ashes. He’d smoke his bazookas down, not noticing as the ashes fell on his chest. I’d be paralyzed. I’d hear my heart beating, but I could barely move my eyeballs. Rafa would want to do more.

  I’d tell him, “No more.”

  “Oh, no, no, no! You don’t leave now,” he’d say. “You sit here until I’m done.”

  “I’m leaving, Rafa.”

  “What do you want? You want a girl? You want whores?”

  I once spent two days trapped at his house. I’m not sure it’s medically possible, but I think the two of us smoked an entire kilo. Maybe Flaco helped. Other guys who worked for Rafa came in to ask a question, and he’d yell, “Get the fuck out,” and shoot at the walls and ceiling. We’d do target practice by shooting at the chandeliers. I saw myself in the mirror, and I was covered in bazooka ashes, too. I looked like a mummy. All I could do was laugh at this crazy fucker. Rafa was wacko, wacko, wacko. The party didn’t stop until Rafa passed out. Once he was out, I wouldn’t even check his pulse. I’d tell Flaco, “Get me the fuck home.”

  Flaco and his guys would put me in a car and deliver me to Delray like a piece of beefalo meat. You wouldn’t see me again for two days. Rafa was unbelievable. I’ll be honest, 50 percent of my job when I started with Max was babysitting Rafa.

  * Kendall was originally a white-flight enclave that in the 1980s attracted large numbers of Colombians involved in the drug trade. Police eventually nicknamed it “Doperville.”

  * Jon means Mickey Mouse.

  54

  J.R.: While I was getting more friendly with Max and Rafa, I was still working with Barry Seal. One day Max asked if I could manage to get a load of coke flown from Colombia into Florida for him. Max had another guy he worked with who ran flights for him, but he wanted to try me out.

  What Max wanted was different from what I did with Barry Seal. He wanted me to have a plane pick up a load of four hundred kilos from an airfield near Barranquilla* and fly it to Florida. Instead of landing the plane at an airport, he wanted me to have the pilot deliver it to an empty field. That was the method Max was using back then.

  Shelton Archer, the jerk-off Englishman, was still hot for me to give him a job. In those times pilots often didn’t get hired directly to smuggle. They usually had somebody managing their work, like I did with Barry Seal, so the pilot could focus on flying. But I had no confidence in him, so I went to another pilot.

  This pilot was a guy I’d met through Shelton, but unlike Shelton he was talented. I’d been using him to fly from Baton Rouge to Van Nuys. This guy was the best pilot I ever worked with. What made him so good? He never got caught. He flew hundreds of loads, made a fortune, and retired. That’s the best smuggling pilot there is.

  Today he’s married, a grandparent and a pillar of his community, so I’ll call him Roger. Roger was from an old Florida farm family. Dirt poor. He learned to fly by becoming a crop duster. He’d done weed smuggling before I met him. He was a big, quiet redneck.<
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  He lived almost at the top of the state. When I called him to talk about this new job, he said, “Come up to Yeehaw Junction, and we’ll talk.”

  I said, “Roger, come on, man. You’re making this shit up. There is no place on earth called Yeehaw Junction.”

  “No, Jon. There is. I want you to see it. We’ll meet at the restaurant.”

  I got in my car, and I drove a couple hours north, and there really was a Yeehaw Junction. There’s only one restaurant. Inside it was decorated with dead frogs hanging on the ceiling and alligator mouths sticking out from the walls. Every fucking redneck in the world was sitting in this shithole restaurant eating, happy as fuck.

  I sat down with Roger and ordered a bowl of grits. Yankees think grits are like a bowl of cereal for dumb southerners, and that you eat them by putting sugar on them. That’s the wrongest thing there is. Rednecks taught me that you eat grits with butter and a little salt. That way they’re very good.

  To Roger I floated the idea of his picking up four hundred pieces in Barranquilla, and he said it would be no problem. He flew King Airs that could handle the load and go the distance.* But when he crossed into Florida, Roger didn’t want to land, unload coke, and then take off again. He wanted to do an airdrop. He brought me up to Yeehaw Junction to show me a suitable place, a farm outside the town. We drove out to a field with trees around it so nobody could see his plane from the main highway when it came low to drop the bales of coke.

  Roger had a kicker from his marijuana-smuggling days who was very good. A kicker is the guy who pushes the cocaine out of the plane. He’s key to an airdrop. A plane has a little door on it, and the kicker has to move fast so he doesn’t scatter the load over several miles. But he can’t move so fast that he falls out the door. Many times kickers got so excited throwing out the loads, they fell from the planes, or their feet would get tangled in a strap and they’d get pulled out. Of all the people it took to smuggle a load, kickers had the shortest life span. Roger’s guy had smuggled weed with him for years.

  Roger wanted the coke in twenty-five-kilo bales. He had a little crew of guys who’d bring ATVs up to the farm in pickup trucks. They’d park their trucks in an old barn and race out in the ATVs to grab the coke.

  All I had to do was send my drivers to the barn, and they’d pick it up. Roger had never done a coke flight before, and I’d never picked up coke in a field, but he was confident, so it made me confident.

  I went to Max and told him I could run the flight from Barranquilla. Max told me he had a car I should use to pick up the coke in Yeehaw Junction. I had to stop him there. One car for four hundred kilos was not right. Four hundred keys was a half-ton. The weight could bust the axle. Even if it didn’t, the car would sink so low, cops would pull you over just to see what was in your trunk.

  “I don’t need your car, Max. I got plenty.”

  “Jon, you want this car.”

  Max took me into his garage and showed me his green Continental. It was an ugly piece-of-shit Lincoln with a landau top—vinyl over the roof—like old people drove back then. “Max, I ain’t taking this Jew canoe.”

  Max smiled and opened the trunk. It was so deep, you could have stood a tall midget in there and closed the lid. Max explained he had a guy who custom-made the car. He’d made the trunk deeper by taking out the gas tank underneath it. He’d put in an aluminum gas tank from a racing car that he’d hidden under the backseat. The car had special air shocks that jacked up the rear when you put a load in it. The car could carry a half-ton load and look normal. The engine was a blown-out monster, but from the outside you’d never know it was a hot rod. The guy who made this car for Max was a genius. His name was Mickey Munday. Soon I’d meet him, but not soon enough.

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE Continental Mickey made for Max was so good, I got overconfident. I had a lackadaisical attitude toward the job. I thought it would be fun to watch the drop, so my plan was to go up there in the same car with my driver. I’d have him drop me at the restaurant in Yeehaw Junction and eat grits while he picked up the coke in the barn. Since I didn’t like to ride in a car with coke in it, I’d send my driver back to Miami alone and have my helicopter come and get me.

  I decided to use my new brother-in-law as my driver: Toni Moon’s little brother, Lee, who’d recently moved into our house in Delray. Lee was a big, blond redneck kid about nineteen or twenty. He reminded me of those guys on that TV show Dukes of Hazzard. First time I gave him the keys to one of my cars, he pancaked it within half an hour. Somehow, after rolling it on the street, he flipped it back over and drove it back with the smashed roof. The windshield was six inches lower. “Sorry, Jon,” he said.

  What could I do? The kid was my brother-in-law. I decided to teach him responsibility by giving him work. I said, “Lee, can you drive without wrecking the car or getting pulled over for speeding?”

  I made him my driver for the Yeehaw Junction job. The morning of the drop we left before sunrise. We pulled up by the restaurant with the dead frogs inside. I was all set to go in and eat a nice hot bowl of grits when I opened the door and heard a plane buzzing in the sky. I said, “Stay. Don’t move the car.”

  I stepped out. I couldn’t see Roger’s plane, but it was so loud, it sounded like a kamikaze plane in the movies. That wasn’t right. He was supposed to come in slow and quiet. The whole town was buzzing. Then I noticed that there were other sounds mixed in—a jet, helicopters, sirens.

  I opened Lee’s door on the driver’s side of the Lincoln and said, “Move over.”

  I didn’t want Lee doing any of his Dukes of Hazzard driving stunts.

  “Is that cop cars?” Lee said as the sirens became louder.

  “I’m going to slowly drive us the fuck out of here,” I said.

  Now we see cop cars driving into town with their lights on. We make it two miles out of the town. One cop car whips around and comes behind us. He puts his lights on, and I pull over.

  There’s nothing in the car, obviously. But I didn’t know what the hell is going on in the sky, and if a cop poked around and saw the special shock absorbers and fuel tanks, that could lead to some questions.

  The cop who walks over to my window is the worst kind of redneck. Sunglasses. A bushy mustache. An Adam’s apple like a fist. I play it cool. Lee and I both have fake licenses. I hand mine over to the cop. He asks my name, and I tell him whatever name was on my fake license. He asks Lee a couple of questions, and being a southern boy, Lee is very good with the cop, saying, “Yes, sir. No, sir.”

  The cop asks what we’re doing up in Yeehaw. I tell him I’m test-driving a car that a guy in Miami souped up, and I wanted to ride her on a long-distance trip.

  The cop says, “Why’d you come to Yeehaw?”

  “I drove past here once on my way to Disney World, and I’ve stopped here ever since because it’s so hilarious.”

  The cop gets a little offended. “What’s funny about it?”

  “The name Yeehaw. It’s like that TV show, Hee Haw.”

  “I live in this town, and I have never compared it to the TV show,” he says. Now I got a cop trying to pick a fight, so I decide to handle him very carefully.

  “Officer, with all due respect, are you going to tell me Yeehaw isn’t a funny name? Plus, you got a restaurant filled with dead frogs.”

  “You’ve been there?” he asks.

  “I eat there all the time. You can’t get grits like that in Miami.”

  “You eat grits?” he says.

  I tell him how I’d grown up in the North, and I didn’t know about grits until I moved to the South and somebody showed me the right way to put butter in them. This changes his whole attitude. He hands back my license and tells me I’m welcome anytime in Yeehaw Junction. Now that we’re best friends, I’m dying to ask him what’s going on with all the sirens and helicopters, but before I can ask he says, “Are you going to buy the car?”

  I almost forgot my bullshit story about the test-drive. I say, “Maybe. It’s fast.” />
  The cop smiles. “I’m going to ask you a favor. When you pull back on the road, would you floor it? I want to see how fast your car goes. I’ll drive behind you so you won’t get in no trouble.”

  I look at Lee. I’m wondering if this is some kind of redneck trick, like he’s going to write me a ticket after I speed. Lee just shrugs.

  Fuck it. When the cop gets in his car, I drop my car in gear and floor the motherfucker. I take it right up to 110. Then I slow down, let the cop catch up in his car. He pulls alongside us and rolls down his window. We’re both going 80 miles an hour down the two lanes of the road. The cop has a big, shit-eating grin. He gives a thumbs-up and shouts, “Yeehaw!”

  Then Lee leans across me and sticks his head out the window and shouts “Yeehaw” back at the cop. I almost smash into the cop car. The two rednecks are laughing. The cop turns on his flashing light and gives us a redneck escort all the way to the main highway. Unbelievable.

  THAT NIGHT I found out from Roger that as he was coming to Yeehaw Junction, a Customs Service jet started chasing him.* Roger had been chased before off the coast, and he knew what to do. Pilots called it “outslowing” the government jets. If a jet flies too slow, it’ll fall out of the sky. A King Air or any plane with propellers can fly a lot slower than the jet. So when they were chased, they’d cut their speed. The Customs Service jet would then have to fly in circles to follow the slower smuggler plane. What the smuggler pilot would do, if he was good, was wait for the government jet to make its turn away from him, then slip under a low cloud and escape beneath the radar. Roger had found a cloud that morning and slipped away. He’d dumped his coke far away from the farm where his guys were waiting, and everybody got away. But the Customs Service had called in helicopters and cops, and they were searching the ground for the drugs. To us, those drugs were gone.