American Desperado (2 page)

Jon shakes his head and sighs, surrendering to his sister.

Julian smiles. You get the idea that agitating Jon is something he likes.

After dinner Jon and Julian shoot hoops in the driveway. When Julian runs for a layup, Jon grabs him and swings him in the air, closer to the rim. Julian makes the shot, and Jon releases him. Jon says, “He’s a monster. He beats kids twice his size.”

There are three dogs in the house. (“My first ring of defense for an intruder,” Jon explains.) The biggest is Shooter, a 150-pound Presa Canario—a fighting breed banned in parts of the country due to the dogs’ well-deserved reputation for fatally mauling humans. Shooter follows Jon everywhere and growls if I make a sudden movement. “He’s very protective of me,” Jon says. “Don’t ever lift your hands high. Shooter doesn’t like that.”

“What will he do if I raise my hands?”

“Just don’t do it. Trust me on this one, bro.”

There is an awkward moment when Jon walks me into the guest room, where I’ll sleep. The carpet is smeared with a five-foot-long trail of blood, bones, and animal guts. Jon curses. It’s the neighbor’s cat, whom Shooter has eaten and vomited up. “What a shame,” Jon says, delicately scooping pieces of cat into a trash can. “I love cats.”

Shooter has also killed two dogs on the block, a pit bull and a chow. Recently, he chased a Haitian gardener into a tree for whistling at Noemi. At sunset, when Jon and Noemi take Shooter for a walk, neighbors greet them with frozen smiles and retreat behind their doors. “Unfortunately, if a dog challenges Shooter, he will kill him. It’s his nature,” Jon says.

Late at night Jon scrubs the house from top to bottom. Judy says he has always been neat. His prison reports state that as a federal inmate, he “went beyond the call of duty in maintaining the sanitation of his sleeping area and the kitchen.”

As he mops the floor one night, Jon explains the secret of a perfect shine, which he learned in prison. “Fill the bucket with ice, put the wax on when it’s almost frozen. That’s how you get the shine.”

I joke that he cleans the house like it’s a murder scene. Jon tilts his head back and laughs, while keeping his eyes on me. The eyes don’t laugh. Jon is a formidable presence, even in his sixties. Though no taller than five foot ten, he wears tight shirts that show off a shredded and always deeply tanned physique. A few years ago, after his release from prison, Jon was involved in a petty altercation on the street. Police were called, and Jon found himself in the back of a squad car. With his arms cuffed behind, Jon kicked out the back window and escaped. When the two officers attempted to rearrest him, Jon badly beat one, and several more were called to subdue him with a Taser. “I overreact sometimes,” Jon explains. “But I don’t want to do that anymore, because of my son.”

Jon avoids talking about his past in front of Julian. But the dark side of Jon’s life intrudes. When Jon sends me to the store in his car to buy milk, I reach for sunglasses under the armrest—and a loaded
.45 falls out. Later Jon shows me the locations of two guns with silencers, sealed in plastic bags and buried not far from his house on somebody else’s property. He says, “I’m not saying these are my guns, but now you know where they are, in case I ever tell you I need one. You can dig them out with your fingers.”

While Jon keeps some secrets from Julian, he doesn’t hide the positive attention he receives for his gangster past. Hollywood übre-agent Ari Emanuel calls frequently to discuss Roberts’s deal with Paramount Pictures and Mark Wahlberg, who plans to portray him in a film. During one such call, Noemi says, “See. People come to Jon because he is evil. Mr. Emanuel and the movie star Mark Wahlberg worship the power my husband has. They wish they could have even one pinkie full of the evil that Jon has.”

Julian tells me, “Mark Wahlberg is going stay at our house. My dad’s the cocaine cowboy.” He adds, “Akon
^*
wrote a song about my dad.” And Julian sings, “ ‘Stone cold killer with a pocket full of triggers, movin’ that shit by the pound, boy. Better watch out, my dad’s the Cocaine Cowboy.’ ”
^†

Later in the week I enter Jon’s home to find Akon himself sitting in front of the TV with Julian playing video games. Jon claims that Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Lil Wayne have all made pilgrimages to visit him. As Julian explains, it’s “because my dad’s an original gangsta.”

Jon and I begin our interviews each morning at eight-thirty, after he drops Julian at school. We sit in the living room by a window overlooking the swimming pool. Jon’s recall of names, dialogue, and small details about people is impressive. Due to the notoriety of Jon’s family and his own criminal career, there is a vast newspaper archive chronicling key events of his life—his name first appeared in
The New York Times
in connection with a murder shortly after
his twenty-first birthday. The format of this book was originally intended to be strictly “as told by Jon,” but when some of the stories he told stretched my credulity—from his tales of hanging out with Jimi Hendrix to his detailed account of committing a murder with a man who later became a high-ranking CIA officer—I sought other sources. Their voices are included here and serve to corroborate or at times challenge Jon’s version of events.

Jon’s language is direct, simple. He generally speaks in what could be called community college–level English, but when recalling past events, he often switches to a syntax of double negatives and
ain’ts
that’s closer to the street. Like many people, when Jon tells a story from the past, he often slips into the present tense for the more action-oriented sequences. In writing the book, I occasionally changed the order of the narrative and cut for length, but I didn’t invent flowery language or put false observations in Jon’s mouth. In some instances, improper grammatical constructions used by Jon are preserved to maintain the authenticity of his voice. It is his story.

In pop culture the rough-edged but almost lovable gangster has almost become a stock figure. Jon does not fit that image. His self-portrait of violent and predatory behavior is far too frank. His is a story that deconstructs the myth of the honorable gangster and along the way does some serious damage to idealized views of American innocence. Jon thrived as a criminal by being a keen observer of people, and his narrative is filled with cutting portraits of the corrupt politicians, dirty cops, fallen celebrities, rogue CIA agents, and other members of the decadent ruling class who populated his world. His story ultimately stands as an unsettling social history of America, from the 1960s through the 1990s, as told from the perspective of a largely unrepentant criminal.

Jon assures me he has no interest in morality, but his conversations always turn to the moral puzzle of who he is. He begins our interview, saying, “If there is one thing my life has been about, it’s the idea my father taught me when I was a boy:
Evil is stronger than good. If you have any doubt, pick the side of evil
. Those are the morals I lived by. It’s how I got power in different situations. Evil
always worked for me. My life is proof that my dad was right. But I hope he’s wrong, too. For my son’s sake. I don’t want to raise my son like my father raised me.”

“I don’t like some of the things my son hears about me from other people. I think it’s strange that we go to Miami Heat games, and when they announce I’m there, everybody applauds, like I’m a hero. If people knew the truth about me, I wonder if they would still be applauding my name.

“When I was born, America was a very straight country. A guy like me wouldn’t have been applauded back then. But I hear the music my son listens to, and it’s all garbage—this gangsta crap—where the singer doesn’t even talk English. This is what people value today, so they probably will still applaud me. I don’t care what they do. The important thing is my son will know the truth about me.”

*
The Grammy-nominated hip-hop performer and producer.

†
The lyrics to the song “Cocaine Cowboys,” written by Akon and performed by Akon and DJ Khaled, do not include the line “Better watch out, my dad’s the Cocaine Cowboy.” Julian added the line after listening to an advance copy of the song Akon gave to Jon.

2

E
.
W
.:
Jon was born June 21, 1948, to Edie and Nat Riccobono. The Riccobono family, which included Jon’s sister, Judy, five years older, lived on White Plains Road in the Bronx. Outside their apartment, the IRT train ran past on trestles. Beneath them the Bronx’s Little Italy was crowded with Neapolitan bakeries, butcher shops, and olive oil merchants. The Riccobonos’ apartment was above Luna Restaurant, a linguini house so quintessentially Sicilian that Francis Ford Coppola used it as the setting in
The Godfather
where Al Pacino marks his entry into the Mafia by murdering two men over dinner.
^*

Most of the residents in Little Italy were law-abiding citizens who wanted nothing to do with the Mafia. The
Riccobonos were not in that group. Jon’s father and his uncles—his father’s brothers, Sam and Joseph—claimed the Mafia equivalent of having come over on the
Mayflower:
They came to New York from Sicily allegedly on the same boat with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a founding father of Cosa Nostra in America. Jon was born a Mafia blueblood.

Of the three Riccobono brothers, Joseph was the most infamous. Uncle Joe (as Jon calls him) made headlines in 1937 when New York special prosecutor Thomas Dewey indicted him as a member of “Murder Incorporated.” Though Murder Incorporated was a mostly Jewish gang headed by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, it worked closely with the Italian Mafia. Joseph served as Lucky Luciano’s emissary inside the Yiddish gang. After his indictment, Joseph went into hiding for seven years. When he finally surrendered to authorities, the press noted that he was “one of the most fastidiously attired defendants arraigned in court in some time.”
^*
Joseph managed to wiggle out of those charges and went on to help engineer Carlo Gambino’s bloody takeover of the mob after Luciano was deported by the U.S. government in 1946. He would serve Gambino as his top adviser—
consigliere
—until his death in 1975.
^†

Jon’s other uncle, Sam Riccobono, was a capo and a successful businessman. While running a Mafia loan-sharking operation out of Brooklyn, Sam operated a taxi company and built a chain of dental labs that grew into a legitimate business.

Jon’s father, Nat, was by all accounts the violent one. He served as one of Luciano’s most trusted killers. By the time of Jon’s birth, he was enforcing the Italian Mafia’s rule over African American businesses. He ran numbers and loan-sharking operations from black bars in New Jersey.

Jon would be influenced by all three men. Like his uncle Joe, Jon developed a taste for flashy attire, an easy rapport with Jewish criminals, and an uncanny ability to slip out of seemingly impossible
legal difficulties. He acquired his uncle Sam’s sense for business. Like his father, he would be violent.

Jon’s mother, Edie, was a blond, blue-eyed knockout whose father was Polish and whose mother was Italian. Her parents had met in New York’s garment center, where her father, Poppy Siloss,
^*
was a fabric cutter and her mother, Honey,
^†
was a seamstress. Though Honey had relatives in the Mafia,
^‡
she and Poppy lived a hardworking version of the American Dream. They raised Jon’s mother in Teaneck, New Jersey, in hopes of shielding her from Honey’s Mafia-connected relatives. Their effort failed. When Edie was in her late teens, she took up with Nat Riccobono and became pregnant with Jon’s sister, Judy. Neither Jon nor Judy knows how their parents met.

J
ON ROBERTS (J.R.)
:
My mother had nothing in common with my father. They were Beauty and the Beast. She looked like Marilyn Monroe. My dad was twenty years older. He was stocky, a balding guy. People who saw him on the street walked in the other direction. He barely spoke English. I don’t think he had any formal education. He could write numbers and names on a piece of paper, and that was about it.

When I was little, I asked my mother what my dad did, and she got upset. She said, “I don’t know. Don’t ask me again.”

In my house no one talked about the Mafia. I had to put it all together myself. In school I’d hear kids say, “His dad’s one of those people.” The teachers treated me differently. Nobody questioned me for being absent. Nobody yelled at me when I acted up.

I would find out my father was a “made” man. In movies they show being made as a big, holy ritual. That’s the movies. When they made somebody in the Mafia, it was because a guy was bringing
them a lot of money. They said a made man couldn’t be killed. Not true. If they wanted to kill a made man, they could find a way. Being made mostly built ego in a guy so he’d be a better earner. The Mafia had a game just like any other organization. Burger King has its employee of the month. The Mafia had made men.

My dad’s main job was controlling black bars in New Jersey. Out of the bars he loaned money and ran the numbers. The numbers game was started in Harlem way back in the early times, when the blacks were starving up there and needed a way to make money. Then it spread everywhere. Here’s how it worked:

The New York
Daily Mirror
printed a circulation number that changed every day. To play the numbers, a person would guess tomorrow’s circulation number. He’d write his guess on a scrap of paper, with his initials and his bet—one dollar or five dollars. Every bar had a cigar box where they’d put the bets. My dad drove around to the bars every day, paid the winners, and collected the next day’s bets from the cigar boxes.