American Desperado (27 page)

Dave Genden was about sixty. He had a son, Bobby, who helped run his company, and another son who became a judge. Dave had been around enough to see I was wise, but he didn’t ask questions. He offered me an honest job.

They put me on a crew to plant trees, sod, and flower beds at high-end developments. My main job was planting trees. The Gendens took their time to show me the proper way. Other landscapers would dig a hole and throw a tree in it, and that was that. The right way, which they taught me, is you should always dig the hole twice as deep as the roots of the tree you are planting. That way, when you refill the hole, there’s a nice bed of loose soil for the baby roots to grow into. The next thing, which some people neglect, is the first time you water it, soak the soil. Just shove your hose in the hole and let the water run fifteen minutes or more. If you do this, you will grow a successful tree. I don’t care if you’re planting a tree or a shrub or a little flower, it’s the same principle.

I enjoyed working in the landscaping industry. I like plants. It’s
interesting to watch how they grow. All they eat is air, sunlight, and water. My pay was not much more than that—two dollars an hour. It was enough for a small apartment in North Miami Beach.

I had to be careful because North Miami Beach was crawling with wiseguys, and I didn’t want some jerk blabbing to someone in New York he’d seen me. I even had to watch out for my uncle Jerry Chilli—from my mother’s side of the family—who was a capo and controlled the neighborhood around the Thunderbird Hotel.
^*
I didn’t know him very well, and I stayed away from him. I stayed away from all the wiseguy hangouts.

Outside of Miami Beach, Dade County was a backwoods. A mile inland from Collins Avenue, there were rednecks in pickup trucks with gun racks. People had rebel flags on their houses. They sold gator meat sausages in the shops. Between the rednecks and the tourists, nobody had a clue to what life was really like in Miami. Even the black people—who were called “coloreds”—were backward. They weren’t like the Super Fly’d–out black dudes you saw in New York. They were zippity-doo-dah black people, like from Old South times, who put on big smiles and called you “sir.”

In my job I saw how the people with money lived—the doctors, the lawyers, the real estate assholes. I was in their lawns every day. Rich people were very relaxed in Miami. We’d be working, and they’d be by their pools smoking weed. Even then I’d see people sniffing coke. Girls would be lying around with no tops. You know how stiff rich people are in New York? Miami was the opposite. I was working in a rich guy’s yard, and he invited me to smoke a
joint. It turned out he was a local judge named Howie Gross,
^*
and we got to be friends. Everybody called him Mouse, because he loved mice. He had a collection of them in his house and his pool was shaped like a mouse. Mouse was the biggest pothead I ever met. He could always party, because judges don’t work long hours and they have every fucking holiday off. You learn this if you ever go on trial. While you rot in jail, the judge is probably out at his pool having a party. But Mouse was a good guy. When I first met him, he blew my mind. I’m on the run, and a judge invites me to get high with him. If only all judges were this good.

Miami was a little town. People were so friendly and stupid. I remember thinking,
Boy, this is an easy place to make a fresh start. I’ll get in on this city before everybody else finds out about it
.

W
HILE
I was still working for the Gendens, I tried to start a legitimate business. Everywhere I’d go with Brady, people would notice what an amazing dog he was. They’d ask me, “How can I get my dog trained so good?”

I got the idea,
Fuck it. I’ll train people’s dogs for them
. I knew what I was doing from working with Joe Da Costa, the hit man in Jersey who trained Brady. I could start up a real business. I could build up a client list, get some trainers working under me, and sit back and run it—like when I had the college kids selling drugs for me. Only this would be legit. None of the stress of wiretaps, paying off cops, shooting people. Just a nice little business, catering to select clients. What would it cost to have a nice place, a decent car, a little boat, and keep a couple of decent broads going? In 1974 Miami not much. You could almost live off the air and sunlight like a plant.

I named my company Dogs Unlimited. I had business cards printed and hired an answering service. Back then people didn’t have cell phones. You’d pay a company twenty dollars a month, and
they’d answer your calls. I put an ad in the paper that said, “Dogs Unlimited. Experienced trainer will come to your house.”

I got customers right away. I’d bring Brady to people’s homes. I’d show what he could do, and I’d say, “Okay, let’s train your dog to be like my dog.”

The problem was actually making someone’s dog act like my dog. The key to training a dog is training the owner. But the average dog owner didn’t want to invest the time. People expected me to sit in their homes drinking coffee and listening to their stupid bullshit. When it came to the work, they either dropped out or they were too dumb to follow my simple directions.

What I learned is there are a lot of homes with very smart dogs, but the owners are stupid. There are more people who are morons than dogs. I’d be in an owner’s backyard running my ass off with the dog, and the idiot owner would go into his house and watch from the window. Your dog will not learn properly unless you learn with him. When he sees you’re not putting in the effort, he’s not going to do it to either.

I decided,
Fuck it. These people are so dumb, the best thing is to hustle them
.

I’d say, “You want me to train your dog? I need a two-hundred-dollar deposit.”

I’d take the money and never show up again. If they wanted to call me, all they were going to get was my answering service. One customer did find where I lived and came to my front door. He wanted his money back. I had to beat him up and throw him in the bushes. Now I knew why my father always burned down the legit businesses he owned. The average customer is a jerk.

*
The Castaways Island Motel billed itself as “America’s Most
Funderful
Resort-Motel.” It was an iconic tiki-theme motel designed by Charles Foster McKirahan. It was torn down in 1981.

*
“David ‘Dave’ Genden, landscaper to the wealthy, pool hall impresario, world traveler and social rebel, died Sunday morning in hospice care in Pembroke Pines. He was 97. While landscaping was his longest-running business venture, it wasn’t Dave Genden’s first. In the 1930s, he served gangsters and literary figures alike in the pool hall he opened on South Beach.” From Dave Genden’s obituary, written by Christina Vieira in the
Miami Herald
, January 18, 2010.

*
Gerard “Jerry” Chilli has a lifetime of convictions for racketeering, conspiracy, forgery, and attempted manslaughter. He has also been linked—but never charged—with the 1989 murder of an undercover DEA agent in New York. His most recent arrest came in Florida in 2005 for his alleged involvement in running illegal gambling machines, loan-sharking, stock market scams, offshore sports betting, dealing in stolen property, the distributing of narcotics, and orchestrating the theft of more than $300,000 worth of veal, liquor, and smoked salmon. In 2009, while awaiting trial for his 2005 arrest, he was indicted on separate racketeering charges in New York. He is currently awaiting trial in the Eastern District of New York.

*
Dade County circuit court judge Howard Gross was arrested in 1987 for accepting a bribe, but was acquitted of all charges against him in a 1988 trial. Five years later he was disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court.

29

J
.
R
.:
I was tired of being a ghost. After weeks of sweating my balls off in Miami, I contacted Phyllis in New York. Hearing from me was no big deal to her. She understood, when I disappeared, why I did it. She never thought I was dead. That was Phyllis’s good part. You never had to explain anything. She already understood.

Phyllis told me I was out of everybody’s minds in New York. I had some breathing room. It was time to put some feelers out in Miami. I wanted to start earning again.

If you want to do illegal things, you need other people. You rob a bank, you need a driver. You deal drugs, you need a supplier. There are very few criminal fields where one guy works by himself. Even a counterfeiter needs help getting special inks. When you need other guys to do something illegal, you got to trust each other.

Trust is in short supply on the street. Obviously street people got to be careful of each other. We’re all
criminals. The other problem we got is snitches. How do I know the other guy is not setting me up? How do I know he’s not going to rat me out if we get heat? Does he got balls, or does he shit his pants when we got a problem? You need to know all these things before you start working with somebody.

To build trust takes time. You need to get high with a guy, joke with him, chase women with him, get into fights with him to see how he carries himself in different situations. It can take months and months to figure out who the other guy is.

The Mafia was many things. It was paying taxes and rules and old mustache guys telling you what you couldn’t do. The Mafia was also a trust organization. If someone in the Mafia you knew pointed to a complete stranger and said, “He’s a good guy,” you could take that to the bank and rob it. You didn’t need to spend months with the guy. You and he could immediately focus on making money together.

I’m sure the legitimate world works the same way. If you were in the stereo business starting off in a new city, it would probably help if you had a friend to introduce you to a big stereo seller in your new place and say, “This guy is okay. He knows a lot about stereos.”

That was me. But I didn’t sell no stereos.

Phyllis understood I wanted to reach out to wiseguys in Miami but I needed to keep it quiet. Phyllis had the idea I should talk to a friend of her father’s named Two Fingers. Two Fingers got his name because he had fired a gun one day to shoot somebody, and the gun blew up and burned his fingers off. He lived in New York, but he had worked in Miami with a man named Patsy Erra.
^*
Patsy had run casinos in Cuba before Castro kicked everybody out. Now he ran some of the biggest hotels and clubs in Miami, including the Dream Bar, which was a famous gangster hangout.
^†
Phyllis called Two Fingers and asked him if he knew any good guys I could meet in Miami who would keep quiet about me because of my trouble in New York. A few days later Two Fingers called me. He told me I should meet Patsy Erra’s son, Bobby. He said, “Bobby’s a crazy kid like you, and he’s a good guy.”

Bobby Erra was very friendly when I called him. He said, “I’ll meet you tonight. I’ll take you to a club, a restaurant, whatever you want to do. Meet me at the Dream Bar.”

Going to the main gangster bar made me a little uptight. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Dream Bar was in the heart of “79th Street”—a ten-block area in North Miami Beach where all the nightclubs were. It had been wiseguy paradise since the 1930s. Bobby assured me, if we met early enough, there’d be nobody in the bar.

I had to laugh when I walked into the Dream Bar. It was your classic guinea shithole. It was gaudy as shit. Golden chandeliers. A giant sphinx on one wall. The place was dead inside. I guess the old generation of mustache wiseguys were getting too old and infirm to go out. I’d barely reached the bar when three guys dressed like college kids walked over to me: Bobby Erra and the brothers Gary and Craig Teriaca. They were dressed in shorts, Izod shirts, and Gucci slip-ons. I could not believe these were wiseguys.

But the fact was the fact. Bobby was Patsy Erra’s son. His friend Gary was the son of Vincent Teriaca,
^*
who worked for Patsy. Bobby and Gary were both wiseguys. The exception was Gary’s little brother, Craig. He partied as much as anybody, but he was not wise. Craig worked as a golf and tennis pro. He was a straight kid.

Me and Bobby and Gary were all about the same age. Once I got over the surprise of how these guys looked, we became very
comfortable. We’d all grown up with fathers who were in the Mafia. They were “new Italians,” like Andy Benfante and I had been, but even more so. Bobby and Gary had gone to the University of Miami and had been in fraternities. Imagine that. College-educated wiseguys.

Both of them played golf and tennis. They hobnobbed with upper-crust people. They always dressed “country’d out.” That’s what Gary Teriaca called his look, like he was ready at any time to play tennis at a country club. They always wore sweaters over their backs, but without their arms in the sleeves. If it was warm or cold, it didn’t matter. The sweaters were on their backs. All they talked about was golf, tennis, boats, nice cars. Everything with them was “Relax. Don’t you worry about it.”

That first night they took me around 79th Street. Bobby’s father had a piece of another club down the street called Jilly’s Top Drawer, which was guinea heaven. Jilly was hooked up with Frank Sinatra,
^*
and Jilly was very high on himself because of this. I went there a few times to see Frank Sinatra, but that was it.

One thing that stuck out about 79th Street was all the Cubans working the doors at Italian clubs. Cubans were bouncers. Cubans were car parkers. In New York Italians did not put anybody on the door but Italians. Andy and I used black guys at our clubs, but that was not normal. In Miami, Italians and Cubans were very close. Italians had run the nightclubs in Cuba, and when Castro kicked out the Mafia, the Italians brought the Cubans who’d worked for them in Cuba over to Miami. It worked out good because Cubans and Italians are good at doing wrong things together. It’s the same with Jews and Italians. By themselves, Jewish people are no
more criminal than anybody else. But you put a Jew and an Italian together, a crime is going to happen.