American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Albert got so uptight, he called me over to meet him one day and asked me if I’d have a problem if he got rid of Gary and Bobby. He reasoned that since Bobby and Gary were old friends and had become strong partners in the Colorado cocaine scheme, Bobby wouldn’t let it stand if Albert killed Gary.

  “Would you take my side in this, Jon?”

  I didn’t think he was wise to go after Bobby. He was part of the Mafia, and his father had been very strong. But Albert was stubborn, and he felt strong enough to take out Bobby. Albert’s idea was that with Gary and Bobby gone he’d take over the route to Colorado.

  Albert’s plan put me in an awkward spot. I was loyal to Bobby and Gary. We’d had good times together. But the fact was, Albert was the guy buying coke from the Cartel, and I was with the Cartel. Albert was my customer—not Bobby and Gary—and the customer is always right. On top of this, Albert had more force on the street than Bobby.

  I told Albert, “If you want to get rid of Gary and Bobby, bring in an outsider.”

  Albert had liked Joe Da Costa, my dog guy, ever since he’d sold Albert his dog, Sarge. Joe was also a shooter. I went to New Jersey to meet with Joe to see about his killing Bobby and Gary. Joe wanted to hit them in New York.

  A couple times a year Bobby and Gary went up to New York to visit family. They liked to stay at the UN Plaza Hotel.* When they made their next trip, Joe went looking for them.

  The problem with hit men is, it’s not like the movies. They don’t just pull out their sniper rifles and wack the guy from a rooftop. Professional shooters, even a nasty fucker like Joe Da Costa, could be very finicky. Everything had to be just right.

  Joe Da Costa spent three days watching Gary and Bobby at the UN Plaza Hotel. Finally he called me and said, “Man, it’s going to be a bloody mess. They hardly come out of their room. There’s girls going in and out. I don’t want to kill like five, six people just to get those two.”

  I went to Albert and told him killing Bobby and Gary was not going well. Albert was so nuts, he said, “Good. I don’t want to kill Bobby. I changed my mind.”

  I was relieved. Can you imagine what it’s like being friends with two guys and having to hang out with them all the time so you can figure out how to get a hit man the chance to kill them? It’s not easy, bro.

  Gary and Bobby were my best friends in Miami. The last good time the three of us had together was the second Duran-Leonard fight.* We watched on the big-screen TV at the Cricket Club, and when Duran quit the fight, Bobby threw a bottle of Cutty Sark at the screen and caused a mini-riot. We laughed our asses off. It was just a good time.

  UNFORTUNATELY FOR Gary, Albert cut a deal with Bobby to take over the route to Colorado. They started squeezing him out. By then Gary had moved out of his house with Carol Belcher and was living at a condo in Bay Harbor. Gary had gotten so paranoid, he removed the normal front door of his condo and installed a steel door like something you’d see on a bank vault. He’d lock himself in that condo for days at a time.

  Late in 1981 there was a night he tried calling me a bunch of times, and after that no one ever heard from him again. Albert and Bobby told me he’d stolen $800,000 from them because he was mad that they were taking over his Colorado coke business. Then my lawyer Danny Mones told me that if anyone ever asked, I should tell them, “Gary had run off to Europe.” I knew that was bullshit.

  I believe Albert and his guys killed Gary. But no one ever found a body. Later the cops tried to make a case that Albert and his guys went into Gary’s apartment and beat him to death.† I found out that I was the last person Gary ever called, and it made me feel bad, that I never picked up the phone.*

  After he died, it broke me up inside a little bit. I had no heart for Gary, but I don’t like picturing him being so alone. When they were coming to get him, I was the only person he could think of to reach out to, and a year earlier when Albert asked for my help I’d been just another guy ready to kill him.

  I get tired of hearing about how the Colombians were such animals in the 1980s. We were all animals. Everybody was making corpses. I’d risen above the streets and become more like a businessman. I was the upper management of the Cartel. But I was in a business where if the Cartel were a Fortune 500 company, and you looked in the boardroom, you’d see that the CEO and all the presidents were carrying guns or bats. One minute they’d be discussing a merger, and the next they might be knocking somebody’s brains in. That’s the kind of businessman I was.

  * The MAC-10 was a small, wildly inaccurate machine gun that was popular among Miami’s killers in the 1980s because of its compact size and its ability to take a long silencer tube, making it not much louder than a whisper.

  * In the “Pizza Wars,” from 1980 to 1983, ten bombs were detonated at Pizza Shops in and around Miami. Erra’s and San Pedro’s roles in the bombings emerged in the 1986 cocaine-trafficking case against San Pedro.

  * Still located at One United Nations Plaza on 44th Street.

  * The fight took place on November 25, 1980.

  * Police reports from the investigation of the Gary Teriaca murder indicate that Jon’s number was the last he dialed before his death.

  † Gary Teriaca is believed to have been murdered in early October 1981. His disappearance was ruled a homicide during the 1991 racketeering investigation of Albert San Pedro. Federal investigators involved in the case discovered that shortly after the disappearance of Gary Teriaca, Albert San Pedro had hired an off-duty Hialeah police crime-scene investigation unit to scrub the apartment clean, then had it repainted. In 1991 FBI forensics examiners stripped the newer layers of paint from Teriaca’s former apartment and found blood that possibly matched his in spray patterns on the bedroom walls and ceiling. Witnesses identified San Pedro as having led a group of men who, around the time of Teriaca’s disappearance, broke down the front door of his apartment with a pry bar, after which loud screams were heard coming from within. Among the group of men who came to Teriaca’s apartment at the time of the murder, witnesses identified San Pedro’s enforcer Ricky Prado. Other witnesses identified Prado as the driver of San Pedro’s car on visits he made to the apartment in the days after the murder. Prado moved from Miami and entered the CIA approximately four weeks after the murder of Gary Teriaca. Investigators leading the racketeering investigation of San Pedro planned to include the murder of Gary Teriaca as a predicate act—an earlier offense that can be used to enhance a sentence levied for a later conviction—in their case, and to include Ricky Prado in the indictment, but were prevented from doing so by the prior immunity agreement San Pedro had negotiated with U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen. The state of Florida—not bound by San Pedro’s immunity deal—considered filing separate murder charges against San Pedro and Prado, but San Pedro’s attorney Fred Schwartz filed suit alleging misconduct among Miami-Dade police serving on the federal task force that investigated San Pedro. Schwartz’s suit was thrown out, and he was disbarred for misconduct in another case, but the state declined to pursue the matter any further. In 2010 I interviewed San Pedro’s ex-wives—Lourdes San Pedro and Jenny Cartaya—who presented new evidence that they believe further implicates San Pedro and Prado in the murder of Gary Teriaca. Police involved in the investigation of Teriaca’s murder remain optimistic that charges will be filed against San Pedro and Prado. Bobby Erra was never implicated in the murder of Gary Teriaca, but in 1990 he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges based in part on the cocaine trafficking business he and Albert took over from Teriaca in 1981. Erra served nearly a decade in prison and today has an interest in Mezzaluna, a chain of high-end Italian restaurants in South Florida.

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  We started arresting low-level Colombian dopers who would tell us about a bearded gringo. They’d say the “bearded gringo” was there when they landed the plane. The “bearded gringo” was in the room with the money. The “bearded gringo” was everywhere.

  “Does he have a name?” we’d ask.

  “John.”

  For y
ears, we were looking for “John, the bearded gringo.”

  I never thought he might spell his name without an “h.”

  We’d get little pieces of information. He was a psycho Vietnam vet. He was extremely violent. He traveled with a giant.

  “A giant? Are you kidding me?”

  They’d insist, “The gringo works with a giant by his side.”

  That’s what we went on for years: John. Gringo with a beard. Travels with giant.

  —Mike Fisten, a former lead investigator for the Miami-

  Dade Police Department–FBI organized

  crime task force, 1986 to 1995

  J.R.: I grew out a beard in the 1980s because many mornings I didn’t have time to shave. I had to focus on the job. Rafa was always telling me we needed to get more coke. I had to deal with Toni and our life in Delray. I had Mickey. He was a genius, but he would never move more than four hundred kilos of coke at a time, and he only moved it when everything was right. He didn’t have to deal with the Colombians always telling him we needed more. I still had my pilots, Barry Seal and Roger, who I was managing. I had the drivers to run and the stash houses. Everything involved different people.

  My sister used to complain how hard she worked managing personnel in the corporate world, and I’d laugh at her. Now I was starting to understand what she meant. A lot of my job was managing people. When something went wrong with a person—this guy doesn’t show up, this kid tries to rip us off—it fell on me.

  I was on the phone constantly. If I was discussing specific details of a work project, I’d use pay phones. For general calls, Max and I had radio phones put in our cars. Later we got the early Motorola cell phones. Driving back and forth between Delray and Miami, I lived in my car.

  As convenient as you’d think it would be owning a helicopter and having a pilot, it was hard to find places to land in Miami outside of the Palm Bay Club, where they had a landing pad. The helicopter was great for flying around in the country and going to farms to look at racehorses. It was a great pussy wagon. You offer a girl a ride in a helicopter, she’ll put out. There’s something about heights that makes women excited. But mostly for my work I was driving everywhere.

  I needed a driver. Danny Mones used to tell me that I needed a bodyguard, if only to keep me out of fights. I needed a guy who was reliable, someone I could trust enough to know my business. I needed a guy who could be as feared as I was. What I really needed was an executive assistant who fit in my business world.

  I found all of this in Bryan Carrera. Bryan was a knockabout Italian kid raised in Florida. I met him through Bobby Erra, who’d give him odd jobs collecting debts. Bryan was a couple years younger than I was. He was large. He was six foot six and weighed about 300 pounds. He was a freak of nature. He could squat 600 pounds. Bryan was crazy about steroids. His legs looked like something from an elephant.

  When Bryan and I first met, we mostly worked out at the gym together. Sometimes I’d give him little jobs. He was the guy who went to the International Inn and helped me deal with Henry Borelli when I had to shoot out his guy’s knees. We slowly built trust between us, and by the early 1980s he became my full-time driver. Bryan had a heart as big as his monster body. He was the most loyal guy I’d ever had with me.

  God Almighty, was he big. Bryan was once seated behind me in my car while I drove. There was an accident ahead of us, and when I slammed on the brakes, Bryan broke the seat behind me and nearly crushed me to death.

  MICKEY MUNDAY: You remember Luca Brasi, the goon in The Godfather? Bryan was Jon’s Luca Brasi. Bryan would shadow Jon. It was like he and Jon communicated telepathically. If you were with Jon someplace, he would stand up to leave, and Bryan would appear outside with the car. No words would have passed between them. It was unreal.

  Did Jon tell you what Bryan’s day job was? He was a pro wrestler. He dressed up in a costume, went to arenas, and wrestled as a character named The Thing.

  J.R.: Kids loved Bryan. He’d work for me during the week, then Saturday nights he’d go to an arena or gym somewhere and put on his show. He wore his costume. He had a following. He’d give out autographed pictures. He was nuts in the ring. Bryan would put razor blades in his gloves and cut his own face, so he’d bleed and make the fight look better.

  Bryan was truly insane. He got addicted to horse steroids. I blame myself for this. I had my racehorse business that I started in order to launder money, and Bryan spent time in the stables with me. Back then they had a drug called Equipoise that you’d give to your horse to make him stronger. Equipoise was not just a steroid, it had horse testosterone in it. You would give it to a gelding—a horse with his nuts cut off—and it would give him back his male hormones. It was a heavy, oily juice that came in IV bags. You’d hang it by the horse and drip it into his veins. I came in the barn one day, and Bryan had a bag of Equipoise hooked into his arm with the needle.* He juiced himself with horse testosterone and steroids every couple of weeks. You can imagine where the guy’s mind was at, to get the idea to do this. After years of shooting up that shit, he had very little mind left.

  I’m not judging Bryan, but if I unleashed him on somebody, he would go nuts. I only used Bryan if I absolutely needed him. By the 1980s I went out of my way to avoid trouble. If a guy accidentally bumped my car on the street, I wasn’t going to jump out and kick his ass. Even if the accident was his fault, I’d buy the guy a new car so later on if he ever found out I did illegal things, he’d think, Wow. This guy bought me a new car. I saw him do something illegal yesterday, but I’m not going to tell on him, because he took care of me.

  That was my theory. Treat people good. I didn’t bully people unless they really decided to fuck with me. If you want to fuck with me, I will make sure that is the sorriest day of your fucking life.

  IT WAS always these pissant, nothing guys who’d end up giving me the biggest problems where I’d need Bryan’s help. One time it was a couple kids I hired to drive a boat. The Colombians had a commercial fishing trawler in the gulf with several thousand pounds of cocaine. Mickey was tied up with a smuggling job, so instead of using his boats, I found freelancers with their own boats. Most people who worked for me had fear—either because of my personality or because they knew I was involved with insane Colombians.

  Somehow I’d failed to instill sufficient fear in these two kids I hired. They went out to the fishing boat, picked up their load, put it in a car, and left it where they were supposed to. They picked up another car with their fee. The problem was, these kids got wise. Instead of leaving the 400 kilos in the trunk of the first car they’d picked up, they left only 310.

  We didn’t count the pieces until after these clowns had already been paid. They claimed that 310 kilos was all they got off the boat, then they went into hiding. They reasoned that I couldn’t call up the fishing boat and ask what had really happened, so that made them feel protected. They could hide out a few weeks, and I’d forget about them. Wrong.

  The Ochoas ran a tight system. If I ever had a serious problem, I could call Fabito or his brother Jorge in Colombia. I could talk directly to Rafa, but I didn’t always trust him to handle bad news.

  The way I reached the Ochoas in Colombia was funny. Their family had a restaurant called Las Margaritas. The main one was in Bogotá, and the Ochoas had a phone there that was for my calls. When I rang it, I’d get a guy who worked for Fabito and Jorge.

  So after I got shortchanged on the kilos, I called the Ochoas’ guy at the restaurant and told him about the problem. The next week I got Fabito on the phone. Fabito used to call me cabron, which means “friend.” He said, “Cabron. We checked with everybody, and they gave four hundred kilos. You know I wouldn’t lie to you. The problem is with your guys.”

  It fell on me to make up those ninety kilos that those kids stole. By this time in my life, the $5 million—or whatever it was that I was out—wasn’t a big deal. It was the principle of the matter. Two punks believed they could rob me. I sent Bryan all over Miami loo
king for them. But it was like they’d never lived on the planet.

  Months and months passed, and one day Bryan and I are driving out on the turnpike in a new AMG I’d just picked up. Even though I called Bryan my driver, he usually sat beside me. He was my extra set of eyes. Out of nowhere Bryan says, “Jon, it’s those kids.”

  They zoom up in a little piece-of-shit Japanese car to our right. They see Bryan’s fat head in the seat next to me and try flooring their car. I let them pull ahead. I’m in an AMG. No way will they lose me. I say, “Bryan, roll your window down and duck, so I can shoot them.”

  This was the first time I’d ever tried to shoot somebody from my car with Bryan next to me. Guns were not Bryan’s forte. His strength was in his hands.* He could pick somebody up with one hand and choke him.

  I get up beside the kids’ car, and Bryan tries to bend down, but he’s such a big lug, he goes down like two inches. I fire one round, but it makes me uneasy, with Bryan filling up the window.

  “I’ll get in the backseat, Jon.” He tries climbing over the back, but he’s got no flexibility.

  “Fuck it, Bryan. I’m going to cut these motherfucking kids off and crash them.”

  We’re going eighty, ninety miles an hour. Not a cop in sight, thank God. The kids try running their car onto I-95. I cut over to tap their car from the side. If you lightly tap the rear tire of another car with your bumper, you can spin it out of control. As I’m getting closer, boom! The kids fire a shotgun.

  It misses us, but it makes me so mad, I slam into their bumper. The AMG is so much heavier than their car, they fly off sideways. They spin a half-mile down the road, bouncing off the guardrails.

  When we stop behind their car, it’s wrecked, and I can’t see through the broken windows to tell if the kids are alive or dead. They still have a shotgun.