American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  When Rafa brought hit men from Colombia to kill him, I told him they could find Barry driving his Eldorado on Airport Road between the Waffle House and the Salvation Army. They were nearly across the street from each other. I had Rafa draw them a map.

  MICKEY: I met the Colombians whom Rafa had brought to kill Barry Seal. They were about as bright as Huey, Dewey, and Louie or the Three Stooges. They weren’t hit men. They were gofers with guns.

  J.R.: Rafa gave these wild Indians a pair of MAC-10s that he’d test-fired in Max’s garage,† and they flew commercial to Baton Rouge. They checked the guns through. They took the map we gave them and followed Barry from the Waffle House to the Salvation Army. They shot him in his Eldorado.* The Colombians were arrested within hours. They all got convicted for life. They never talked. They were good Colombian rednecks.

  People say that a search of the briefcase Barry Seal was holding turned up a piece of paper with Vice President Bush’s direct phone number written on it.† A lot of good that did Barry.

  * In 1985 Peabody-award-winning journalist John Camp filmed Seal in an interview he gave aboard a C-123. Seal disclosed details of his role in the CIA sting against the government of Nicaragua, and the interview aired on WBRZ in Baton Rouge in 1985.

  * Seal was shot to death on February 19, 1986.

  † Ballistic tests matched the guns used to kill Seal with shell fragments found in Mermelstein’s garage.

  † The story of Bush’s phone number being on Seal when he died was widely reported but has never been verified.

  73

  J.R.: Everything quieted down after Barry Seal was killed, and eventually Mickey and I both got restless. We wanted to get back into smuggling. I flew down to Colombia and met with a new group of Colombians. Despite the war on the Cartel, they still had their factories going. These other guys were helping the Cartel move its coke.* So I got into business with them.

  MICKEY: I never thought about quitting. I still wanted to run the ideal mission. I wanted to use some small islands that are in Biscayne Bay, so close to Miami that nobody believed anyone could smuggle on them. My fantasy was to drop coke in the water behind the islands and race out from the beach in my stealth boat to get it. I wanted to say I did it. But I never got the chance.

  J.R.: We did a dozen smuggling flights after Max got arrested. One night in 1986 I was working in the radio room at Ultimate Boats when Delmer came in and offered to take over. Mickey was at the farm that night, where we had a pilot bringing in a load from Colombia. The plane wasn’t due for another few hours, so I left.

  But I didn’t feel like going home to Toni in Delray. I decided to go back to the radio room. I wanted be there when the plane came in and we stuck our thumbs in the government’s eye one more time.

  At four A.M. I started to get excited. The plane was coming. Then there was an explosion. The building shook. A bunch of cops in their stupid Darth Vader suits drove an armored truck through the doors of our shop. They charged up the staircase with their guns out.

  You should take it calmly when they come for you. I saw my dad do that when the government men came to our house and deported him out of our living room.

  They handcuffed me on the ground. All these cops had radios on their belts. I could hear other cops talking on the radios about raids they were doing all over.* I heard them say they were moving on our farm. I’m wondering how they’d found our farm.

  Then, over their radios, I hear all hell break loose. Cops are screaming about a helicopter crashing, fires, a shoot-out. The cops arresting us look a little freaked out. They pick up their radios and ask cops on the other end what’s going on.

  We hear cops yelling, “He’s getting away. He’s escaped. We lost him.”

  I don’t know what the hell is going on. But I realize they are talking about Mickey. He got away.

  I’m sitting there chained on the floor, and that makes me laugh my ass off.*

  * By this time, Jorge Ochoa had been arrested in Spain. He was extradited to Colombia, where the government subsequently released him. But the Medellín Cartel was in disarray. Jorge would be rearrested in 1991 and would serve just five years in prison. Pablo Escobar was gunned down in a joint Colombian-U.S. military raid on his hideout in 1993.

  * More than 250 local and federal law-enforcement personnel were involved in coordinated raids on facilities used by Jon and Mickey. They hit a total of 17 locations and seized 12 airplanes, 21 cars and trucks, and 28 boats used in their smuggling operations.

  * Jon was arrested on September 21, 1986, in the radio room of Ultimate Boats. Keeping with his habit of not identifying himself by name when he was working, other men arrested in the boat shop claimed not to know who he was. Jon initially refused to provide his name to arresting officers. In initial reports he was simply identified as “an individual with a beard and pelicans on his T-shirt.”

  74

  MAY 2009—MIAMI

  E.W.: A warm, blue-sky day. Jon pulls into a line of mostly Range Rovers jamming a narrow road outside an exclusive private school in Miami. The parents create a minor traffic jam every afternoon as they arrive to pick up their children. Jon drives Noemi’s Cadillac SUV because it has enough space for Julian’s hockey gear. The boy has practice every afternoon. Sometimes Jon drives other boys on the team. “I’m a hockey dad,” Jon says.

  “Julian can’t stay late. He has extra math homework,” Noemi says from the passenger seat.

  Jon curses the Range Rover ahead. “Wait all day, you stupid moron.”

  “Take a breath, Jon.”

  Noemi tries to calm Jon with tips learned in a parenting class they recently took. Jon prevailed against a suit his previous wife had filed to alter their custody arrangement with Julian, but he, Noemi, and his previous wife were ordered to attend parenting classes. Since finishing the class, Jon has complained that one of the evaluators described him as “domineering and aggressive.” Or as Jon puts it, “Can you believe I had to pay that cocksucker to tell me I’m a bully?”

  “Jon, you are a bully sometimes,” Noemi says.

  “I am?” Jon seems surprised. Then, without warning, he jabs the accelerator, turns sharply, and speeds past the line of cars, driving on the grass to grab a parking spot that has opened up. Jon says, “You said Julian’s got extra math homework. We can’t wait in the line all day with those jerks.”

  As Jon and Noemi get out, I’m curious to see how they will blend in with the other parents. Jon has recently been hanging out with his friend Akon and the rapper Lil Wayne, and he wears baggy shorts, a cap, and gold chains that show the hip-hop influence. Noemi recently shaved her head into a Mohawk and is wearing a plunging tank top with tiny red shorts that seem painted on.

  I notice that many—perhaps a majority—of the other mothers flash tattoos and cleavage that would be the envy of the waitstaff at Hooters. The prep-school moms seem proof that the shimmering, excessive Miami of Jon’s Playboy Bunny–infused past has not so much vanished, but become the new normal.

  One feature of the parents waiting outside the school is very 1950s. There are almost no men among them. Jon is the only father standing on the curb.

  When Julian sees his dad, he runs into Jon’s arms. Jon kisses the top of his head. Noemi throws her arms around him, and they walk to the car playfully, jostling each other with each step. The other children walk beside their parents, some holding their hands, most not.

  In the car, Julian plays with his Nintendo. It bleeps, and Jon says, “Julian, put that away.”

  Jon says to me, “I don’t want him to turn out like me. I want him to learn in school.” Then to Julian, he says, “How was your spelling test today?”

  “I missed one word.”

  “What word?”

  “Emptying.”

  “How did you spell it?”

  “E-M-P-T-Y-”

  “Julian, it’s empting.” Jon pronounces it with a New York accent that elides the y. He spells it for him: “Julian, it’s E-M-P-T-I-N
-G.”

  “Dad, I think there’s a y in there.”

  “Julian, don’t be wise with me. You need to learn. I love you, okay?”

  Jon says to me, “That’s the one thing I learned in prison. I never loved someone. That’s what I missed in life. It took getting arrested to figure that out.”

  75

  J.R.: Months before I was arrested, I knew Max was cooperating. You couldn’t miss that. They made his entire family disappear. The feds put Max into a “submarine”—that’s what they call a place where nobody can touch a witness. It could be a Days Inn in Topeka, but they call it a submarine. For Max, it was a very crowded submarine. He went into it with his wife and fifteen of his Colombian in-laws. Max lived in a submarine for the rest of his life.*

  Everybody said Max cooperated because he was a coward and couldn’t face two years in prison. But I had my own theory. By the time Max was arrested, nobody treated him like El Jefe. We all talked to him like he was a moron. But the cops would have treated him differently. They would have made him feel powerful, told him he was so smart. They’d have to say that, because he was the main part of their case. Once Max got in the submarine with the cops, they probably treated him like the mastermind of the Cartel.

  Mickey and I knew Max could give them a lot of stories about the Colombians, but what he had to say about us would be garbage. We hadn’t told Max where the farm was, about the radio rooms, the Nike sites, what planes we used, the radio beacons. Nothing. I showed him a tunnel once in Mexico, but that was shut down and buried the day Max got arrested. Obviously Mickey and I were overconfident about Max’s ignorance. We should have stopped working. I guess we just loved our work too much.

  It took them a year to find out where the farm was. They infiltrated Mickey by having a DEA agent act like he was a mechanical gearhead the same as Mickey. This guy hung out at a machine shop Mickey hung out at, and they became friends. Mickey’s weakness was, he wanted to show off the farm to the guy—and he flew him over it so he could see it. That’s when they had all the pieces they wanted and did their raid.

  They raided the farm with over a hundred cops. Mickey escaped when some cops flew their helicopter into a power line and crashed. The cops on the ground thought it had been hit by a missile, and they ran in all directions. Mickey shot some flares at them, and it was more confusion than the cops could handle. That’s the mayhem I heard on the cop radios when I was cuffed on the floor of our radio room.

  In the detention center, my criminal lawyer told me that Mickey’s friend Delmer wanted to cooperate against me. That was his payback for how I’d fired his moron cousin. But everybody had to do what they had to do.

  Having Mickey on the run gave me my opportunity. I made a deal with the prosecutors that if they let me bond out, I’d help them capture Mickey. That’s how I walked out of jail.

  I had Danny Mones sell a commercial building I owned, and we took cash from that and posted it as my bond, and I went home to Delray.

  * When Max died in 2008 of cancer, he had lived his last twenty-three years in witness protection, with much of that time spent in Tennessee.

  76

  When I saw the mug shot of Jon, I thought, Here’s the mysterious “bearded gringo.” I put in a request to interview him. By the time it was processed, it was too late. He was gone.

  —Former Miami-Dade Detective Mike Fisten

  J.R.: As bad as you’d think it would be having my partner Max snitching against me, it wasn’t that bad. The cops had nothing on any of my guys—Lee, Bryan, Roger, my redneck neighbors, or Albert. They’d searched the house in Delray and got nothing. Toni made sure there was no coke, no illegal guns. They couldn’t touch the house. We kept our horses.

  I spent weeks jerking the FBI around about Mickey. I’d drive to pay phones and pretend to call Mickey and pass codes to him. I’d tell the FBI agents, “Mickey’s going to snorkel into the lake tomorrow to meet me. You better have your guys in scuba gear hiding under the water.”

  I led them on chases all over the state. Meanwhile I got my affairs in order. Danny Mones had $20 million in properties of mine that he controlled. I had $150 million in Noriega’s banks. I had $30 million in cash buried all over the county, and a few million in bank safe-deposit boxes under fake names.

  I took a couple million dollars in cash and had Roger fly me to Colombia.

  NINETEEN-EIGHTY-SEVEN WAS a bad year to hide out in Colombia. Half the Ochoa family was in hiding. Pablo was trying to blow up the government. I went to go meet Rafa, and somebody shot his brains out. Compared to this, the days when they’d just chop a guy’s arm off at a stoplight to steal his watch were the good old days.

  I caught a plane to Mexico after a few months there. My friend Rafael Quintero had been arrested in 1985 for kidnapping and torturing to death a DEA agent.*

  But Quintero had friends who helped me find a place to live by Mazatlán, which is a beautiful city. I got a little house behind a gate. My face had gone up on FBI most-wanted posters, and these circulated in Mexico. I hooked up with two nineteen-year-old whores and moved them into my hideout. I reasoned that I’d be staying indoors a lot, and that two girls would be better than one. They were best friends in the whorehouse, but when we moved in together, they started to compete and get jealous. I liked them both, but they didn’t see that.

  There was a show on TV that was like the Mexican version of America’s Most Wanted. One day they put my face on this show and warned viewers I might be in Mexico. The girls saw this on a day that one of them was feeling jealous, and she called the Mexican police.

  I’d been on the run for almost two years and had burned through most of my cash. The Mexican police took the rest of it on my way to prison.

  IN A Mexican prison, the warden is like the CEO of a business. His business is to get as much money from the inmates as he can. The good side to this was that, as a gringo, I was viewed by the warden as a good potential source of income. The prison officials didn’t report me to the U.S. embassy. The bad side was that during my first week they put me in a section of the prison that was probably about as comfortable as being aboard an old African slave ship. We were chained to the floors. Everybody was covered in their own filth. At night the guards pulled me out and shocked me with wires connected to a car battery. This was how they warmed me up for the shakedown.

  After a week they hosed me off and brought me in to see the warden. He put his hand out, and I told him that if he let me use the phone, I could have somebody bring money.

  I had no intention of paying this crook. If I did that, he’d hold me longer to squeeze more out. I called my sister with a plan.

  JUDY: Jon told me he was in a Mexican prison and he needed me to come down there dressed like a nun so I could smuggle him clothes and documents to help him escape.

  I did what any sister would do. I found a priest and told him I was making a humanitarian effort that required me to impersonate a nun. He gave me papers I’d need and sent me to a costume store in Manhattan to rent a habit.

  I took some vacation days from work and flew to Mexico. I entered the prison as a nun. When I saw the filthy conditions they were holding my brother in, as if he were an animal, I was outraged. I wanted to pull my brother out of there with my hands. But all I could do was pass him the clothes and fake passport I’d smuggled in under my habit.

  J.R.: I had everything I needed to escape. But an inmate turned me in. They sent me to the warden. This time I noticed he had a picture of a racehorse on the wall. The warden was into racehorses. We got more friendly, and he named a price for my release: two Kentucky-born sprinters.

  I got Toni to drive them to the border in a trailer. She was met by some corrupt federales loyal to the warden, and they brought them to his farm. The warden released me, and we went to his farm. The man cried, looking at those horses I got him. I stayed a few days at his house to teach his guys how to feed the horses and take care of them. The warden wasn’t a bad guy. But that’s Mexicans. Once yo
u’re a friend, they have a lot of heart.

  THE WARDEN had some federales drive me to an illegal border crossing by San Diego. I walked into the United States with a few pesos in my pocket. It was just my luck that the year I came back President Bush invaded Panama and arrested his old friend and my banker, General Noriega. The U.S. government took over Noriega’s banks. I lost $150 million.*

  I avoided my criminal friends like Joey Ippolito. When you’re a fugitive, you’re a get-out-of-jail-free card to anybody who’s got charges over his head. If they turn you in, they can get everything wiped clean.

  The one guy I could trust in California was Larry Barrera. His father, Laz Barrera, had helped train some of my horses in Ocala. Laz was, of course, the greatest trainer who ever lived.† His son Larry was a great kid. I could depend on him, but he was a heroin addict.

  Larry let me move in with him. He had a shack in the Hollywood Hills. Larry had an old lady who lived in a nearby house. He used to help her out—get her mail, bring her milk from the store. About a month before I showed up, the old lady had died. She was a shut-in with no visitors, so Larry left her mummifying on the couch, picked up her mail, and cashed her checks. He ran an extension cord from his shack to her place for free electricity. That’s how we lived.

  You won’t believe this, but Larry was married to Joe DiMaggio’s niece. They were separated, but Larry was still friendly with her uncle, Joe DiMaggio. When Joe was in town, we’d go to a sporting goods store, steal a box of baseballs, and then visit him. He’d sign the balls, and when there was a Dodgers game, we’d sell them in the parking lot.

  I didn’t call Judy or Toni when I got to California because the FBI had started watching them. I contacted my old friend Al Tanenbaum. When I asked him to loan me $20,000, he hung up on me. So much for rich assholes.