American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  I phoned a girl who’d worked in my barn when she was seventeen. Her name was Eleanor Roosevelt, just like the president’s wife. Eleanor had always liked me. Now she was twenty-five and living in her parents’ house in Delaware. I asked her to send me $500.

  Instead of sending it, she drove across the country and picked me up. She took me to her parents’ house in the suburbs. She introduced me to her parents but used a fake name. They were very friendly. I told them I was from Chicago and had come east to find a job as a stable hand.

  The next morning I woke up alone in the house. I was curious about who her parents were, so I went in their bedroom to poke around. I noticed that in the closet her dad had a thick, black belt with a holster on it. Then I saw a big Smokey-the-Bear hat, a nightstick, a gun, and a badge. Her dad was the assistant warden of the county jail.

  But her dad liked me. I got a job in the stables at Delaware Park Racetrack.* I liked coming home to dinners with the Roosevelts. I’d been on the run for so long, it was enjoyable having a family.

  I looked exactly like my wanted poster, but these people didn’t see me as that guy. I was almost a son-in-law. Eleanor’s parents helped us get an apartment. Her father picked me up one day and drove me to the county jail. He wanted me to consider getting a job there. I told him I’d think about it.

  I lived with Eleanor until March 1992, when I got recognized by a kid at the racetrack. He’d lived in Florida and was with that little group of kids who were smoking crack with Toni’s brother in my barn. He had a grudge because I’d fired all his friends. I got turned in by an angry crackhead.

  A small army of FBI agents, backed by a local SWAT team, took me from the apartment I had with Eleanor.

  I’d lasted five years as a fugitive. That’s not bad. Mickey beat me. Before his house arrest, he spent nearly seven years in Norfolk, Virginia. He opened a motorcycle-repair shop, moved in with a single mother, and helped raise her kid.

  * Undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena was kidnapped by Quintero, who tortured him during a three-day period during which Quintero employed a physician to prolong Camarena’s life. Quintero recorded the torture sessions on audiotape and sent copies to friends and enemies alike.

  * The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was undertaken chiefly to seize banks that contained billions of narco-dollars and prevent the cartels from using the country as a finance hub.

  * Now a track and casino called Delaware Park Racetrack and Slots on 777 Delaware Park Boulevard in Wilmington.

  † Laz Barrera trained Affirmed, the last horse ever to win the Triple Crown, in 1978.

  77

  J.R.: I was facing nearly three hundred years in prison, based on my indictment. They put me in the Tampa County Jail while the feds tried to figure out what to do with me. The Tampa County Jail was so disorganized that there weren’t even race gangs like a normal prison. It was a free-for-all. My first month there I got into a scuffle with three black inmates, and they threw me off a second-story tier.

  I spent a few weeks in the infirmary. Every week they gave sick inmates an ice cream. They took away our ice cream sticks when we were done eating, but you could buy them back from a crooked guard. I bought three sticks. When I got well enough to stand, I sharpened them by holding them against the wall when they let us walk in a circle around the roof pen every day.

  There’s only one place to hide sharpened ice cream sticks when you leave the infirmary. It’s not a comfortable place, bro. But when I reentered the general population, I had my sticks ready. A few nights after I got back, I attacked the three guys who threw me off the tier. I got them in their sleeping racks. One guy, I scratched his head. One guy, I jammed a stick into his ear and nose before it broke. And the third guy, I got the stick into his eye and blinded him. I lucked out with him because the moron leaped toward me and ran into my ice cream stick.

  They wanted to charge me with aggravated assault, but there was a jurisdictional fight because I was in the county jail on federal charges. They put me in the hole, then moved me to Dade County Metro Jail.

  THE FEDERAL indictment charged Max and me with being “the American representatives” of the Medellín Cartel. They said that working with Mickey and Delmer, we’d smuggled $2.3 billion worth of coke.* If you’re ever indicted, don’t get worked up over things they write in the indictment, or the numbers they throw out. A three-hundred-year sentence? Please. Nobody wanted me to do three hundred years. Nobody wanted a trial. What everybody wanted was a negotiation.

  In a situation like this, they want you to give them things. You got things you can’t give them, but some things you can. They want things from you that are so good, they’ll feel good knocking down your time. And when they feel good doing that, you feel good, because you’re out sooner.

  The best way to start is to feel them out, let them come to you with all the things they want, then figure out the things you can’t give them. For me that was easy. The Ochoas. Albert San Pedro. They were out. They were still strong. Other things I could help them with. General Noriega—that was easy. He was a pedophile who’d lost $150 million of my money. Plus, he didn’t even have a country. He wasn’t coming after nobody. Anything they wanted on him was okay.

  They wanted Ricky Prado on the Schwartz murder. I had no problem giving him up. He was a rat who went to work for the government. They gave me immunity on the Schwartz murder for my proffer statement saying how he shotgunned Schwartz.

  For my cooperation, they knocked 297 years off my sentence. I never testified against Noriega because they realized I contradicted another witness. A few months after I cut the deal on Prado, they dropped the case against him. I got 297 years off for next to nothing. As a bonus, they let my state assault charges for the ice-cream-stick incident disappear.

  I did three years in prison. I’m not going to lie to you and say that was a tough time. After all the things I’ve done to people, that amount of time is a joke. But one thing did happen that stuck with me. I was lying in my cell one night thinking about how other guys in prison had mothers or sons or somebody they thought about. I had people who would do things for me. My sister visited me. But lying in that cell, there was nobody I’d think about. Because there was nobody I ever thought about, I was completely alone. I don’t mean lonely, or by myself in a prison. Rather, I realized I was alone on this earth.

  * The $2.3 billion figure was one estimate used by federal officials based on evidence provided by Max about smuggling flights he supervised—both before and after he began working with Jon and Mickey—that led to the importation of fifty-six tons of cocaine. There were many other flights Jon and Mickey supervised independently of Max. Given that the wholesale value of cocaine fluctuated wildly, reaching an exact figure is next to impossible. The $2.3 billion figure is at the low end. Other estimates from government officials placed the value of cocaine imported by Max, Jon, and Mickey at $15 billion. By any measure, they supervised the bulk of the cocaine smuggled into the United States by the Medellín Cartel during its peak in the first half of the 1980s.

  78

  J.R.: When I got out of prison, I had no plans. I worked at the old Beachcomber Hotel* on Miami Beach. Having the job was a necessary condition of my parole.

  The money I thought I had in Miami was gone. People had spent ten years in Delray with shovels and backhoes treasure-hunting cash I’d buried in plastic buckets. Neighbors, people from the barn, guys who’d driven for me—anybody who knew that I buried money was up there digging away. When I went back to Delray, the places where I thought I’d put buckets in the dirt were looted or had washed away. I know of one neighbor who found $400,000 in the rafters of an old barn I used as a stash house. He moved away.

  While I was on the run and then in prison, my lawyer Danny Mones had transferred or sold the property I had owned. Just as I was confronting him, he died almost overnight of cancer. I saw him one time. He promised to straighten everything out, and he was dead a week later. If you knew Mones, the guy was such a t
hieving piece of shit that he probably was happier dying of cancer than giving back something he’d stolen.

  I went to a bank where I’d left a million dollars in a safe-deposit box under a false name. It took me a year to remember the name I’d used and to get a fake ID made to match it. When I got to the bank, the building was gone. I went to the main branch, presented my fake ID, and they said they’d saved my box from the building they’d torn down. When I opened it, there was a letter from the IRS—addressed to the fake name I’d used—saying I owed a quarter-million dollars in back taxes. Who knew that when they tear down a bank, the IRS opens unclaimed safe-deposit boxes and taxes the contents?

  There were some kids I knew—sons of wiseguys I used to run with—who asked me to help them smuggle weed. I had a friend fly us to Mexico, and I introduced them to people, and when we got the weed into California through a tunnel, I showed them how to put it in five-gallon paint cans and get UPS to ship it anywhere it needed to go. Smuggling’s just as easy today as it was then. There’s just as much cocaine. It’s the same price or cheaper. Nobody won any war on drugs. Drug traffic keeps people employed on the streets and in cop cars. That’s all.

  I retired from the industry.

  When I found my old bodyguard Bryan in 1997, he could only move with a walker, and he barely knew who I was. He died at the age of forty-two. They said it was cancer, but it was probably the horse hormones.

  In 1999 I hooked up with a dancer from Venezuela, and she got pregnant. She had my son, Julian. When he was born, I was proud I’d made a baby, but I had no what you call “human empathy” for him.

  I never cared about my father, and I don’t believe he cared about me. I had no expectation that I’d care about my son. Julian’s mother ended up leaving the country for a while. At that point I was in the apartment alone with this little baby. I was feeding him and changing his diapers.

  I had nobody else to take care of him. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t be flying to Mexico carrying him with me through the tunnel with the dope trolley. I needed a job where I could stay nearby and work flexible hours.

  I knew a guy in New York who ran an escort service in Miami. He was a fat piece of shit who reminded me of Max, only he didn’t smoke. He hired me to straighten out his business.

  The way an escort service works, whether it advertises itself in the phone book or in newspaper ads or on the Internet, it’s all the same. They book the girls from the main office. The customer calls and orders a girl for x number of hours. They have a driver take the girl to the job. He’s there to protect the girl, and to watch her.

  The guy who hired me had a problem. His girls were ripping him off. Some of these girls were great fucks. They’d fuck the guy’s brains out, and he’d ask for a second hour or a third hour. The girl was supposed to report that to the company, so they’d get their end of the extra hours. The drivers were supposed to be watching the girls to make sure they didn’t cheat. But the girls were paying off the drivers. So the owner, whose fat ass was sitting up in New York, was being robbed blind.

  He hired me to watch his drivers. What I did was follow these guys around, and when I caught them cheating the owner, I’d beat the piss out of them. You put the fear of God into a couple of these guys, and nobody rips off the escort agency owner no more. Now, my job was, I’d just ride around and watch everybody, help the whores out if they got into a jam. I’d start at eight o’clock and be done at four in the morning.

  It worked out perfectly because I put a baby seat in my car. It was nice and quiet in there. Julian could sleep. I could feed him, change him. Most of the time I was just sitting outside a hotel somewhere. All the whores fell in love with Julian. One whore had a baby his age. We’d go in together on shit, like buying a thousand diapers from Costco and splitting them. So Julian was raised in my car with whores.

  I did this for maybe eighteen months. I was with Julian every hour. His mom came back, and I dumped him onto her. I figured, now I can have some fun. I was done trying to be the perfect dad.

  A week went by, and I felt sick. Something was wrong with me. I went to visit Julian at his mom’s house. I went in the door. Julian was way across the room. That little fucker could hardly walk. His face lit up. You should have seen those legs spinning and kicking when he ran to me. I grabbed him and looked in his eyes. I realized I was all he had, and he was all I had. I’d never felt that way about a person before. I went from having nobody to having somebody. I was no longer alone on this earth.

  But I’m not saying I’m a good person now. Please. I still believe if I need power in a situation, I’ll choose the evil over the good. The only thing different today is that sometimes I look in Julian’s eyes and I know he’ll lose me someday. That’s nature. But I fear how much it could hurt him not to have a father. I don’t want him to ever feel that. That’s the worst pain I can imagine. I’d rather suffer torture than have my son feel that pain, or any pain. For a lifelong bad guy like me, these feelings I have for my family are not usual. They are probably what normal people call love. It’s not an easy thing to feel. Evil is much simpler.

  * The Beachcomber is a two-star dive at 1340 Collins Avenue.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD not be here today if it were not for my wife, Noemi. She is young in years but old in wisdom. She helped me have a better relationship with my son when there were some very hard times between us. She made me understand things and see things about people that I never would have realized before or ever known. She tried to make my relationship with my sister better, which is a very hard task. Noemi gave me a heart with which to feel. She made me think positively and showed me that whatever time I have left in life I should relax, enjoy, and try to be at peace with myself. This all sounds great, but with a person like me, it is more or less a miracle that Noemi could change me, even a little bit. I owe Noemi everything. I am sure when I leave this earth to see the Devil, who I’m sure will be my partner in Eternity, that any good I’ve found in myself now will disappear forever. But I’m glad that in this small, last part of my life I’ve been able to follow and listen to Noemi’s wisdom, for this brought me closer to my son, Julian. He is my soul, and Noemi is my light for seeing him. That I get to enjoy their love now is probably unfair to all the people I abused, but that’s life. It’s not fair, and maybe if my son reads this when he’s old enough, he won’t make the decisions I did.

  —JON ROBERTS

  EVAN WRIGHT wishes to express his gratitude to Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben, authentic Cocaine Cowboys, whose insane vision got the ball rolling. He wishes to acknowledge Mike Fisten, Steve “Hollywood’s Hollywood” Saito and Joanne Chu for their unstinting support in preparing the manuscript. Thanks to Richard Abate, Rick Horgan, Nathan Roberson, and Melissa Kahn, who actually made the book happen; and to Alex “The Bow Slayer” Kohner, who makes everything else happen. And to Los Bulls a message from El Borrego: you will never win, but muchas gracias for preordering the book. Finally, to Zari, thanks for the gangsta memories. We will always have Lord Barrington.

  —EVAN WRIGHT