by Jon Roberts
* Representative Ted Jones is a pseudonym for a congressional leader who was one of the most powerful figures in Washington in the 1980s. There is evidence Jon had contact with him, but the allegations of wrongdoing that Jon makes against him cannot be proved.
* Between 1982 and 1984 Congress passed a series of laws known as the Boland Amendments forbidding the U.S. government to provide weapons to the Contras, who were then fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
* The Fairchild C-123 was a military cargo plane, smaller than the C-130s and C-17s used today by the military, but still large enough to drive a small armored vehicle into or to carry seventy armed troops.
* During the 1991 racketeering investigation of Albert San Pedro, investigators learned that San Pedro placed calls to foreign embassies where Prado was stationed as a CIA officer through the 1980s and early 1990s. In a 1991 interview with federal investigators at CIA headquarters, Prado admitted he visited with San Pedro in Miami even after San Pedro had been convicted of cocaine trafficking and bribery of a public official.
* Barry Seal’s history as a CIA-connected weapons smuggler is noted in chapter 47.
* The M-60 is a belt-fed machine gun used by infantry or mounted on helicoptors that was widely used by the U.S. military in Vietnam; the M-79 is a single-shot grenade launcher also used in Vietnam; the LAW rocket was also used in Vietnam. The LAWs provided to the Contras had a design flaw that caused them to occasionally blow up when launched, which was detrimental to the person launching it.
* Jon first told his story of helping the CIA arm the Contras to an attorney in 1986—more than a decade before Prado was outed as a CIA officer. Law enforcement officials involved in the racketeering investigation of San Pedro believed Jon’s statements regarding Prado’s alleged role in the murder of Richard Schwartz were credible. His statements regarding his alleged involvement with Prado in the arming of Contras were not examined as part of that investigation. But three Miami-Dade detectives I interviewed who served on the task force that led the investigation of Prado told me that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami was pressured by the CIA to stop looking into Prado on the grounds that their case threatened to “reopen the Contra scandal.” One assistant U.S. Attorney I interviewed who dealt with the matter recalled that he had meetings with CIA associate counsel E. Page Moffett regarding Prado. But this Assistant U.S. Attorney could not remember what he discussed with Moffett, or why a subpoena his office had served Prado to compel him to testify was quashed. When I asked Dexter Lehtinen—the U.S. Attorney at the time of the investigation—about the matter, he vigorously rejected the notion that his office would ever bow to pressure from the CIA. Jon’s assertions about helping to arm the Contras are plausible because of his previous relationship with Prado, but he has provided no additional supporting evidence. I have attempted to ask Prado about this, but he has not responded to my inquiries.
† Prado’s initial assignment in the CIA, after being hired in 1981, was to help train and equip the Contras. Recently, Prado has publicly stated that he was the “first CIA officer living in anti-Sandinista Contra camps.” In his capacity as a CIA employee living abroad, he appears to have maintained ties with members of the Miami underworld and to have attempted to leverage these contacts for his CIA mission. In the 1991 racketeering investigation of San Pedro, investigators interviewed a Miami gun dealer with a criminal history who informed them that he had met with Prado in Central America and that Prado had asked for his help in acquiring weapons in Miami and shipping them to Central America—presumably as part of his CIA job.
† According to a former CIA official I interviewed, Homestead is home to one of the CIA’s oldest domestic stations. It was opened in South Florida in the late 1950s to oversee preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
‡ According to an FBI report I viewed, as early as 1959, the CIA directed operatives to steal weapons from domestic military bases in order to supply its various anti-Castro activities.
67
J.R.: There were many strains on my relationship with Toni. One of the biggest was her dream to be a movie star. When we met, she’d got a small part in a film with Ryan O’Neal called So Fine. It was a stupid movie about a guy who invents jeans with plastic windows in the back to show off people’s asses. Toni had maybe one line in the whole movie. But because she was so beautiful—and because her ass was so good—when So Fine came out in 1981, they put Toni in the movie poster with Ryan O’Neal. That little success played with her mind, and Toni kept nursing her Hollywood dream.
We were both busy in Delray—with my business and our work with horses—but with that Hollywood dream still burning bright, Toni still did her modeling in New York, and after So Fine she traveled to Los Angeles for auditions. When I went with her, we’d stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel.* They had bungalows where we could bring dogs. Toni and I would hit our favorite spots—Mr. Chow’s and Spago*—and we’d work. She had auditions, and I had my business. I’d usually take Bryan with us, and we’d make sure everything was running smooth with the planes I was landing at Van Nuys airport. Sometimes I’d hold my coke in suitcases in the Beverly Hills Hotel luggage room and do transfers around town. I used Nate ’n Al’s† deli in Beverly Hills because I liked the food, and there was a city lot nearby where my coke cars could be safe. Nobody stole cars in Beverly Hills.
Toni auditioned for Red Sonja, a movie where they wanted a big blonde to run through the jungle in a cape. Toni was perfect for the part, but they gave it to Sylvester Stallone’s girlfriend, Brigitte Nielsen.
It was the same outcome with Clan of the Cave Bear—a film where they wanted a big blonde to run around with wild animals. Toni did a few readings, but it went to another giant blonde, Daryl Hannah.
My friend Joey Ippolito had connections at a company called TriStar Pictures through his coke business. He introduced me to some executives there. I told them, “Let me buy a fucking movie for my girl so she can star in it.”
They agreed to help. What was even better was, these guys liked cash. I gave them a couple million dollars in shoeboxes. I even unloaded a box of small bills on them that I got from the government for flying the guns. These guys didn’t care. Throw in a couple extra bricks of coke to keep them happy, and we were in the movie business. They got a writer to make up a script. Ryan O’Neal agreed to play a role in the movie. But in the end it never got shot.‡ I believed those guys fleeced me, but Joey Ippolito said, “Jon, who the fuck knows? It’s Hollywood. It’s not like the coke business where a kilo’s a kilo.”
I worked every angle for Toni. When they started filming Miami Vice in our hometown, I had a friend introduce me to Don Johnson. We met at a club in Coconut Grove called Mutiny on the Bay. The whole club was glass inside so people could snort coke on any surface. It was blowhead heaven, and I’m in there with people who got to be stars playing cops and smugglers on TV. My friend walks me over to Don Johnson and the black guy who played Tubbs* and says, “Jon, meet the guys who pretend to be hunting you every week on TV.”
Nose powder makes us all instant friends, and the next night we’re at a fish restaurant in South Beach. The black guy tells me, “Don and I are so famous, I can do anything. I can get any part I want. I’m bigger than the Beatles.”†
As I remember, the black guy wasn’t doing coke like the rest of us, but he sure was high on himself. Fame can delude people as bad as drugs. I say, “Are you a fucking wacko? You’re the fucking black-guy sidekick on the TV show. Fuck you.”
Don Johnson says, “I’m sorry about my friend, man. Is there anything I can do to make you forget the dumb shit he’s saying?”
“Can you get my girl a part on TV?”
To his credit, Don Johnson tried, but all Toni got were background parts. Once I hung out with the director and watched him film a show. He gave me a spiel about how he brought realism to TV. “Don’t you think so?”
“You’re filming a drug dealer opening the trunk of a car with coke in it in th
e middle of the street. That’s amateur shit.”
This jackass director says, “No, they do it this way. I have an expert who advises me.”
“Okay. You’re the Hollywood guy. What do I know?”
I told Toni she was better off not making it in the movies if it meant dealing with these full-of-shit morons. But she went to auditions until her dream crushed her. The last time in L.A., I left her alone at our hotel for a week while I went to Mexico on business. When I got back, she was a mess. She’d taken a suitcase from storage with some kilos in it. She got a straw and poked through the kilo packs. They looked like Swiss cheese. I said, “Did you have a good time?”
She was high. She said, “Yeah! I’ve had months of great fun out here.”
I said, “Come home to Florida. Your actressing career is finished.”
Someone had to tell her the truth. Smokey and the Bandit III—that was the only movie she got after So Fine. Nobody was giving her an Oscar for being Background Girl Number Two in a Smokey and the Bandit sequel.
OUR LIFE in Delray was becoming tense. Toni couldn’t get out of bed sometimes. When my sister visited, the aggravation was endless. Those two didn’t get along.
JUDY: I first met Toni when she and Jon came to New York. She had a group of men who fawned over her—the writer Noel Behn and Bob Fosse*—and I remember seeing Jon with them at the Russian Tea Room, thinking she’d really spun his head around. With her looks and figure, she was quite the package. But I wasn’t impressed. She was friends with literary people, but I didn’t think she was very well read or educated.
And forgive me for saying this, Toni was a lousy housekeeper.
Everything my brother did was to make that woman happy. Jon is insecure about himself. Don’t let his macho side fool you. Inside, he is a little boy who doesn’t think he has enough to offer people. This is why money was always so important to him. He believed it could make up for the things he thought he lacked. Toni was a woman who knew how to press all his buttons.
On one of my visits they had a terrible fight. The next morning I went to Toni and said, “If you kept the house a little better, my brother would be happier, and you wouldn’t argue as much.”
That woman threw me out of the house. Jon did nothing to stop her. I was very hurt. I still am.
J.R.: My sister didn’t help things in our house. Toni’s mind started to get unstrung. She was prone to rages of jealousy. At first it was over imaginary women, even when I wasn’t cheating. She’d get paranoid that I was hiding girls in the closet. She’d come in the bedroom when I was sleeping and shout, “Where are they?”
One time Bryan was in the driveway, and she ran out and made him open his trunk at gunpoint because she thought he was smuggling girls in there. Another time she set off the tear-gas cannons by the front gate to chase imaginary girls from the bushes. She got extreme.
Toni decided to put me in my place by having an affair with one of the grooms in my barn. When I found out, that sorry asshole ran off and disappeared off the planet. On principle I would have to give him a beating, but I didn’t take it personally. I was more mad that I’d lost a good groom.
I saw more and more cocaine inside our house going into people’s noses.
LISA “BITSY” BENSON: When I first started working for Jon, I didn’t know he and Toni did coke. Then my dad started dating a girl who was closer to Toni’s age, and they became friends. They’d invite me into the house, and those ladies really racked up the rails. Toni wore a chain on her neck with a gold pickax for breaking up the coke. The more she chopped with the gold pickax, the wilder it got. Toni would get paranoid and break out guns, and we’d have to march around the yard searching for intruders. She called it “rat patrol.”
J.R.: Toni and her family were excessive people. Liquor ran freely through that family. Anybody that tells you that alcoholism doesn’t run in the genes is full of shit.
Toni’s mother got completely wacked out on booze. I sent her to doctors. I sent her to AA classes. Finally I told Toni’s mom, “If you can stay without a drink of alcohol for a month, I’m going to buy you a brand-new Mercedes.”
That woman put all of her will into it. She struggled. She was shaking for days. But she finally got the poisons out. At the end of that month, I’d never seen her look so good. I had a guy send up a new Mercedes. She cried when she saw it.
I said, “You deserve it. You stayed clean. God bless you.”
She said, “I’m going to show all my friends the car.”
She drove off, and the next morning I got a call from a cop in Delray. He said, “We found your mother-in-law pulled over by the road. She told us that spiders had filled her car and made so many webs that she couldn’t see.”
The poor woman had gotten drunk, and with her body clean as it was, it made her flip. They had to give her special injections at the hospital to bring her mind back.
TO GET away from the madness in Delray, I started an affair with a girl from Fort Lauderdale named Karen. She was a little stripper, with dark hair and a sweet heart. When Toni would go nuts and chase me around the house kicking down doors, I’d escape in my helicopter. I’d pick up Karen. We’d fly to a place by Cape Canaveral where you could skim over the water to watch the porpoises. That was my out.
But it never lasted. I was in the barn one day and found burned Coca-Cola cans that someone had poked holes in. I asked one of the kids who worked in the barn what they were for. “They’re homemade pipes for smoking crack.”
I’d never heard of crack. He explained it was cocaine made into special rocks so you could smoke it easily. That was a new one on me.
It turned out that Toni’s brother, Lee, was smoking it in the barn with some other guys who worked for me. At first I didn’t think nothing of guys blowing off steam, smoking a little crack.
Then my stepdaughter, Amber, whom I’d helped raise, told me someone had stolen the ATVs that I’d bought for her and her friends to play with. I went into the barn to ask the guys in there if they knew about the missing ATVs. At ten in the morning, they were smoking crack. I knocked them around and said, “Where are my ATVs?”
They told me Lee had sold them to some guys in town to buy crack cocaine. This was a shocker. Lee was moving hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilos for me a month. He was one of my most trusted drivers. I also had an airport security guy I’d bribed at Fort Lauderdale airport to let Lee pass through the screenings without a hassle. A couple times a month I sent Lee to Chicago with forty keys in his luggage.
I put it together that Lee was a smart enough kid that he wouldn’t steal from my business. But he was such an addict that he was stealing shit from around the house to sell to dealers. I started to worry that he’d given crack to Amber. All I needed was the whole family on drugs. I wanted to make an example of Lee. I’d blow his brains out and show them that’s what happened when you got hooked on drugs. I went a little nuts.
FATHER BRADLEY PIERCE: I’d received the strangest call from Jon. I’d barely heard from him since I’d entered the seminary.
Jon was in torment. He said he had a family member involved in drugs. He wanted to lash out at them for stealing from him and bringing drugs into his house. I’ll never forget what Jon said, “Help me. Save me from killing this person.”
We talked for a few minutes. He thanked me and abruptly hung up.
J.R.: I didn’t kill Lee. I went in the barn and beat the shit out of his friend. I made him tell me where the crack dealer was who had my ATVs.
I drove to the guy’s house with Bryan. We went inside, and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. There were people wacked out everywhere. There was trash. There were bottles filled with urine because these guys were too high to get up and piss in a toilet. Bryan and I knocked them around and found my ATVs in the garage. Some crackhead had taken them halfway apart, like he thought he was going to strip them for parts. He was such a moron. You could sell a stolen ATV as is and get more money for it. These guys had no brains
left.
After we got the ATVs in my truck, I lit the garage on fire. We drove off with crackheads running out of the burning house.
That was my part for community improvement.
I was trapped by Toni. I never talked to her about my business, but she knew enough that, if I left her, she could make real problems for me. The only proper way to break up with her would be to put her in the ground along with her whole family. I didn’t have the stomach for that. So I lived like a hostage in my own house.
* Still located at 9641 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.
* Both establishments were celebrity hotspots in the L.A. of the 1980s.
* Philip Michael Thomas.
* Behn was a playwright and novelist best known for The Kremlin Letter and for his work at the Cherry Lane Theater in the 1950s and 1960s. Fosse was the choreographer and Academy Award-winning director of Cabaret and All That Jazz.
† Officially called Nate ’n Al of Beverly Hills Delicatessen, it remains a popular spot on 414 North Beverly Drive.
† Thomas released two albums in the 1980s, neither of which did quite as well as efforts by the Beatles.
‡ Jon Roberts’s untitled film project of the early 1980s involved a successful producer-screenwriter still active today, and according to other sources I interviewed, Jon sank two to three million dollars into it.
68
J.R.: My business functioned almost mechanically. The planes and boats made it in. The coke got pushed out. The money got flown to Panama. Sometimes I’d have to beat on somebody.
I started making little dumb mistakes. One time I was in San Francisco with Bernie Levine. He mentioned some asshole in Marin County who’d ripped him off. The guy had been a partner in Bernie’s recording studio, and when they closed it down, this jerk stole a gold record from the wall.