American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  Bryan jumps out.

  I say, “Think, Bryan. They got a shotgun.”

  He don’t care. He reaches in the driver’s side and pulls one kid out by the neck. I go carefully to the other side of the car with my gun.

  But the kid in the passenger seat is knocked out. I open the door, grab the shotgun at his feet, and pull him out. I drop him to the ground and smash his face with his shotgun. I beat him and beat him. I don’t check his pulse when I’m done, but I believe he isn’t going to wake up and steal anybody’s coke again. I look across at the kid Bryan’s been strangling, and he’s gone from red to blue to white. Bryan drops him. He says, “I want to strangle your guy.”

  “You don’t have to, Bryan. He’s not moving.”

  “I want to strangle him anyway. I want to see the difference in how their necks feel.”

  To Bryan, strangling was like a science experiment. That was his mentality.*

  BRYAN WAS extreme. One time Bryan made a guy eat his gun. I’d never seen anything like this. It happened with a Cuban who thought he was an actual wiseguy, but was really just another punk. Somehow Rafa got hooked up with this Cuban and wanted me to sell him some coke. By the 1980s Cubans had moved onto 79th Street and were taking over the old Italian clubs. This guy wanted to meet me in an old Italian place now run by greaseball Cubans. When I sat down, this clown started arguing with me about the price, trying to beat down what he’d already negotiated with Rafa. I told him, “If you don’t like it, nobody’s forcing you to buy from us. Good-bye. Nice knowing you.”

  As I walk off, this punk said, “If you don’t sell to me, I’m gonna fix your ass.”

  I say something back to this greaseball turd, and he follows me outside to shoot his mouth off. Bryan, who is waiting for me outside, sees this guy reach for something. Bryan comes up beside the guy and wraps his hand around his hand. Bryan’s hand is so big, the other guy’s hand looks like it belongs to a tiny baby, but inside that little hand is a little .38 snub-nosed revolver.

  Bryan squeezes the Cuban’s hand harder and says, “What do you got there?”

  “Nothing, man.”

  “It feels like a gun.”

  Bryan uses his other hand to lift the guy by his throat and jam him against the side of the building. He pulls the gun from the guy’s hand—which I’m sure was already broken—and holds up the gun. Bryan says, “I’m not real sure how to use a gun. Is this what you do with it?”

  Bryan pushes the barrel into the guy’s mouth. I’ve seen that before, but then Bryan does something new. He pushes the pistol all the way in the guy’s mouth. It don’t go all the way in until Bryan pounds it with the flat of his hand. That gun disappears down the guy’s throat. His jaw must have been broken. He’s got blood pouring out of his mouth. He’s trying to kick Bryan and fight him off, but with a gun jammed in his throat, he’s already going weak.

  I say, “Bryan, don’t do that. Just pull the trigger.”

  “Jon, I don’t like guns, man.”

  What Bryan used to love was to pick people up and throw them on the pavement. He liked to see if he could bounce them. So now he lifts the guy over his head and starts bouncing him.

  I say, “Bryan, careful that gun don’t go off in his throat and shoot one of us.”

  Bryan throws the guy and looks at me, laughing. Ha ha ha! He picks him up and bounces him again. Bryan is like a big dog with a toy he doesn’t want to let go of.

  DON’T GET the wrong idea about Bryan. He did more than just mangle people. He had a brain. He was no Mickey Munday, but he could count numbers. He could remember things I told him. When I had orders for my drivers, he was the guy who gave them. He became my face.

  Bryan was not a person you looked at and thought, There must be some kind of nice part to him. The older he got, the steroids and horse testosterone and the cutting of his face with razors made Bryan an increasingly scary-looking guy. Most people who saw him could perceive it was best to stay the fuck out of his way, and if they set him off, whatever was going to happen with him was going to happen.

  But because Bryan could count very well, and he had a good memory, he helped me count the kilos at the stash houses. I kept three or four going at all times.

  All my stash houses were owned by people who had regular jobs. The houses didn’t look like drug houses on the outside. I’d come by during the day when the owners were at work. I’d have my own remote control for the garage. We’d park my car and go in.

  I kept the stashes in secret closets that were about half the size of a bedroom. We kept them locked to protect the house owner from temptation. His mind wouldn’t have to bother with how much coke or cash was stored there.

  I’d go from house to house every week to divide up loads for the different distributors I was moving the coke to. When we were taking loads out of the house, I’d have Bryan bring the empty car to the garage, and we’d fill the trunk.

  Only one time did I have a problem. Bryan and I were carrying kilos to load a car in the garage, and Bryan said, “These pieces feel funny, Jon. They’re light.”

  Back then we didn’t have these magical little electronic scales you could carry in your pocket. In every stash house I kept a triple-beam scale like you’d find in a high school chemistry lab. I got out the scale and started weighing the kilos and found every one was five to ten grams light. Bryan had been exactly correct.

  His ability to feel the kilos and notice they were a few grams off shows that, despite looking like a monster, he was on the ball. I sometimes wondered if taking horse hormones gave him sharper senses, like those of an animal.

  When the Ochoas sent a kilo, it was always exactly one thousand grams. I knew I had a rat in that house. The kid who owned the house was a smart guy. He ran a successful sign-painting business in South Beach, and he got paid $10,000 a month by me to rent his closet. But something made him go stupid. He’d figured out a way to break into the closet we’d made, and he’d poked a straw into each kilo. He’d cut into each package along a seam and put a piece of tape on the fold, so it was difficult to see what he’d done. If he did it to a thousand kilos, that was five or ten thousand grams he’d stolen—five or ten keys.

  Bryan and I drove right to his place of business. It was lunchtime when we walked in. “What do you want?” he asks.

  “Relax,” I tell him. “I’m taking you to the Forge.”

  We drive him to the restaurant. We make small talk. I’m looking at this kid, trying to see in his eyes how scared he is, but he’s not showing anything. We go into a private dining room. We order our food. Bryan, because he’s had all that horse testosterone pumping in him, eats like a horse. You’d order a meal and start eating like a civilized person, and Bryan would shout to the waiter, “Hey, bring me my third lunch.”

  Bryan’s shoveling food in his face, but in the atmosphere of the fine dining room the kid relaxes.

  That’s when I say, “I’ve noticed you’re breaking into my closet, stealing my coke.”

  “I’m not doing anything like that,” he says. “It’s got to be your drivers.”

  I’ve already thought of that. But my drivers, even if they wanted to steal, didn’t have the time to carefully poke a tiny hole in each bag and reseal it. It has to be this kid is the rat. I say, “I pay you good money, and now you lie to me?”

  I don’t say nothing else. Bryan grabs the kid by the neck with his left hand and, while squeezing him, keeps eating.

  This kid is in his twenties. He works out. He’s 190 pounds. But he can’t budge Bryan’s hand. He’s swatting at him, kicking. His eyes are bugging out.

  I look at the kid and say, “Before he fucking kills you, admit what you did.”

  Bryan relaxes his grip, and the kid nods.

  “Thank you very much,” I say.

  The kid starts to speak, and Bryan decides to give him one last squeeze. Just a flick of his fat fingers, and I hear a sound like when you tear apart a raw chicken. It’s the gristle in the kid’s neck tearing.<
br />
  I tell Bryan, “Stop! Not in the restaurant.”

  When he lets go, the kid drops into his plate. Bryan grabs him by the hair and slaps his face. He’s lifeless. I run to the front desk and tell the maître d’, “Call 911! My friend’s choking on his food!”

  By the time the ambulance gets there, the kid’s breathing. But he’s out of it. The medics start giving him oxygen, and they see the horrible marks on his neck.

  “What happened here?” The medics look at me and Bryan like they’re ready to call the cops. The kid points to Bryan and gasps, “He’s my friend. He showed me a wrestling maneuver before lunch, and I moved wrong, so I got hurt.”

  The medics don’t believe our story. Then one of them looks at Bryan and says, “Are you The Thing?”

  “Yeah,” Bryan says. He puts his hands up and makes his Thing face that’s popular with his fans.

  “My son loves you,” the medic says.

  Now the medics are all joking and laughing with us. Bryan always carries pictures of himself dressed up in his Thing costume in case he runs into fans. He goes out to my car and gets them, and by the time he comes back and signs them, the medics are having the time of their lives. The medics still have to take the guy Bryan choked to the hospital, but there’s no longer any question of their calling the cops.

  Lucky for me, kids loved Bryan.

  * Equipoise, an anabolic steroid that mimics the effect of equine testosterone, is sold in Canada with the warning “For horses only. This drug is not to be administered to horses that are to be slaughtered for use in food.”

  * Bryan Carrera was arrested numerous times for assault and was convicted the first time in 1978. None of his arrests included use of firearms.

  * A former Florida law-enforcement official who reviewed this passage stated that records indicate an incident like this did take place in the early 1980s. He noted that there was a report from a witness who described seeing two men, one of whom was “extremely large,” assaulting one or more motorists at the scene of an accident by the freeway. Police who responded found a wrecked car and evidence of a struggle, but no bodies.

  60

  J.R.: The Ochoas were so smart. Their cartel did something I would never have thought of in a million years. If I had a business, and I had a competitor, I’d get rid of him by getting rid of him. But the Ochoas handled it differently: they sold cocaine cheaper than anybody else. Instead of killing off people one at a time, they undercut everybody’s price.

  I saw this when I brought them Albert as a customer. Fabito told me they’d sell him kilos at any price to win him over. At times I saw them sell coke for $3,500 a kilo—less than what they paid me to transport it. Once they had a customer locked in, they could start raising the prices. They destroyed more people by cutting their prices than with guns. They had a reputation for violence. But it was price that made them so dominant.

  My father’s belief that evil is stronger than good worked on the streets. But the idea of killing my competitors by offering the lowest price? My father would never have thought of that in a million years. The Medellín Cartel was beyond evil. They were like Walmart.

  Transportation was the key to their dominance. They needed volume to keep their competitors down. Rafa was always coming to me and saying, “You’ve got to move more, more, more.”

  Early on Rafa told me his boss, Pablo Escobar, wanted to meet me to discuss how to increase our volume. Mickey had already met Pablo, and he believed such business meetings were a waste of his time.

  MICKEY: I had better things to do. If you traveled with Max and Rafa, they’d get two feet out of town and immediately call 1-800-GET-A-WHORE. That was their mentality. “We’re away from our wives, let’s have a party.”

  J.R.: I believed Mickey’s contempt for the Colombians was partly an act. The less he got along with them, the more I had to deal with them. Mickey was no dummy. And trust me, he was not a complete Boy Scout. If a rat crossed the street and showed him its pussy, Mickey would chase after it, just like any other normal guy.

  So not only did I have to deal with Rafa in Miami, I had to take time to go see Pablo for meetings. The first one I had was in Panama. Pablo felt safe there because he was friends with General Noriega, who was rising up as the dictator of Panama then.*

  Because Max insisted on coming, and since Max—the El Jefe of smuggling—was afraid of flying in small planes, we had to fly commercial. I had a fake passport. I flew under the name “John Epstein” and ate kosher with Max.

  Max liked the Holiday Inn in Panama because the rooms had little strips of paper on the toilets that said “sanitized for your protection,” and he thought this meant the whores in that neighborhood were cleaner, too. Mickey was right about one thing. You always had to add extra travel days with Max so he could get in his whore time before going back to his wife.

  We met Pablo at an American coffee shop near the hotel. He had a couple guys with him who sat at tables nearby, but he was low-key. He felt safe in Panama because of his friendship with General Noriega.

  Even though Pablo Escobar was from the street, he was a good-looking guy—a little on the heavy side—and he was more polished than I expected. He asked me a few personal questions. Was I married? Did I like soccer? He asked how Mickey was doing. Pablo and the Colombians I met had a high opinion of Mickey. To them, he was like a German scientist who built their moon rockets. It’s too bad Mickey looked down on them. If he’d asked, they would have given him his own island to control like a mad-scientist bad guy in a James Bond movie.

  Pablo was very confident, very focused. He reminded me of Albert, but not as psycho. In that first meeting he brought up what I’d learn was his favorite theme. He wanted us to move more coke. He was making more and more in his factories.

  Then he hits me with his big idea. Pablo says, “What about using dolls? Put cocaine in dolls and ship them.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Max says. If Pablo had told him to get on the floor and lick his asshole, Max would have been on all fours with his tongue out.

  “Dolls?” I say. “I’ve seen plastic shoe hangers used for smuggling.”

  “No, I was thinking dolls. Mickey could do it.”

  “Mickey should focus on planes. If you have a guy who wants to work with dolls, I’ll talk to him. Let’s not distract Mickey. We don’t want him playing with dolls.”

  “Okay,” Pablo says. “Maybe I got a guy you can talk to about dolls.”

  That was my first meeting with Pablo Escobar. We talked about dolls. I never ended up talking to his guy who knew how to make them, and he never brought them up again. That’s how upper management is in a big organization. Everybody’s got to jump when they come up with a bright idea, no matter how dumb it is.

  THE PROBLEM Mickey had, and the problem my pilot Roger had when I sent him to Colombia, was obtaining fuel to fly back into the United States. Roger wanted to do more flights. I sent him there for another try after Yeehaw Junction, but when he landed in Colombia, they kept him on the ground for a day waiting for fuel. Barry Seal was the only pilot I worked with who didn’t need fuel when he landed in Colombia. That’s because he had deals at other airports in Central America where he’d stop along the way to top off his tanks.* What made the fuel problem worse was that many times pilots couldn’t find landing strips in the middle of the jungle. They’d fly around burning gas while looking for the place they were supposed to land. Mickey finally went down there and mapped out the whole country to make it easier for our pilots.

  MICKEY: Many landing strips were in triple-canopy jungle. There were no GPSs then. The Colombians would mark the fields with cars pointing like arrows, or they’d light flares. But pilots couldn’t see through the coverage. We had planes come back empty because the pilot couldn’t find the field.

  Eventually I flew down to Colombia with Dad, my pilot, on a commercial flight. We carried fishing gear and rented a plane, as if for a fishing trip. We flew around the general areas where the Colomb
ians put landing strips. I brought standard navigational charts and marked them with supplemental terrain features that could assist pilots looking for a particular spot.

  Back then planes used radio compasses as navigational aids. There were stations around the world that broadcast navigational signals. A radio compass tunes in to those stations and tells you where you are relative to the signal strength. In Colombia there were places where these signals were weak. So I also looked for normal, commercial AM radio stations in Colombia that put out strong signals. If you charted the exact position of the AM radio station, you could use its signal as a navigational aid.

  Dad and I spent a week flying around Colombia, adding to the charts every supplementary navigational aid I could find. Once I’d marked the charts, I pinned them to the wall in my hotel and photographed them. Then I burned the charts and flew back with the film in my camera. I didn’t develop the film until I was home in the USA.

  With the charts I’d made, pilots I sent to Colombia could locate landing strips anywhere in the jungle. But fuel remained a problem. It had been this way since before I worked with Max.

  The first time I flew on a smuggling mission to Colombia, my pilot and I came in low and found a landing strip that looked like a junkyard. There were crashed planes strewn on either side of it—piloted, probably, by Colombians flying drunk or high. They had a sloppy attitude through and through.

  When you landed, the Colombians would ride out in old farm trucks. We’d want to load the plane, and they’d want to have a party. They’d offer us drinks, girls. I’d say, “Gas. Petrol. Fuel.”

  That first time, the Colombians pointed down a trail in the jungle. There was an old tractor pulling a trailer tank for pesticides that they’d loaded with avgas. It was moving so slowly, there was a guy walking next to it, and he had to stop now and then so the tractor could catch up.

  When the tractor pulled the fuel tank alongside our plane, another guy ran up with a portable pump—basically a fire hose on a water pump powered by an old lawn mower engine. It had no muffler and was throwing sparks everywhere. But why worry about sparks? The fuel guys were all smoking cigarettes anyway. After they started the piece-of-poop pump, they let go of the hose, which started dancing around like an anaconda snake, spraying fuel everywhere. They covered the entire side of our plane with avgas.