American Desperado (44 page)

Lieutenant Mazzarella explained to me that he had a lot of leeway in his department to help friends of his. He was the number two guy in the department. He said the force was divided between cops like him and “bozos.”
Bozos
was his word for clean cops. He said if I ever needed to do something illegal in his little village, he would make sure there were no bozos on the shift when I did it. Simple as that.

This was before I’d met Fabito. During that time I’d started working with my partner in the rental car business, Ron Tobachnik, to move coke up to Chicago, where he was from. I’d buy a few keys from Albert, and Tobachnik would pay some kids to run the keys up there in rental cars. To test out Lieutenant Mazzarella, I asked him if we could use a parking lot in his village to park our cars with coke in the trunks for our drivers to come and pick them up. He assigned his cops to watch our cars for us.

After I saw what a good job he did, I gave him and his cops
more work. By the time I met Fabito, I was paying one of Lieutenant Mazzarella’s cops to use his house in North Bay Village as a stash house for my coke. This was even better than using Poppy’s retirement home. There’s no safer place than a cop’s house for storing large amounts of drugs or cash.

O
NCE
I met Fabito, I had the idea to use the North Bay Village police to unload the boats coming in from the Bahamas with cocaine. Unloading drugs was where you faced the most risk. In those days, when the Customs Service and Coast Guard got suspicious of a speedboat coming into Biscayne Bay,
^*
they often didn’t stop it on the water because suspicion alone wasn’t enough probable cause to search a boat. They’d wait until the boat came in to unload, then make their move.

The North Bay Village police department was ideal for unloading boats. When I tell you why, you’ll fall over laughing. The department was on the water. They had their own dock just a few blocks down from the top wiseguy hangout, the Place for Steak.

When I proposed to Lieutenant Mazzarella that I had a way for him and his cops to make more money than they ever dreamed of—by helping me unload drug boats—he agreed immediately to help. He even gave me cops to physically unload the boats, put the shit in their cop cars, and deliver it to the stash house.

They were a full-service police department.

When I told Fabito I could give him a dock inside Biscayne Bay protected by the police, he thought I was an American criminal mastermind—not a guy who’d gotten friendly with a cop after my pal broke a ketchup bottle on another guy’s head.

• • •

I
NSTEAD OF
being hired as a boat driver for the Colombians, I became the guy who hired drivers for them. I wouldn’t hire the yahoos who hung out at Don Aronow’s. I looked for guys I met in the sportfishing world, since they were more skilled with boats. I got the boats unloaded and put the product into a stash house, then I got it delivered. The Colombians had their own distributors who I brought the coke to, and I kept supplying my distributors—Bernie Levine in California, my uncle Jerry on Miami Beach, and Ron Tobachnik in Chicago. Less and less did I sell to individual blowheads.

I got a transport fee off of every kilo I moved—about 5 percent of the wholesale value. When Fabito and I started smuggling through North Bay Village, we started moving a couple hundred kilos a month and, some months, a thousand kilos or more.

I couldn’t have done it without those cops. It was nuts what we did. One night I was talking to Lieutenant Mazzarella after we’d finished unloading a boat, and I happened to mention the speeding tickets I was getting in Miami. Lieutenant Mazzarella said, “Jon, are you stupid?”

I got a little uptight being called “stupid” by a dirty cop, but he explained, “Anytime you want to race, I’ll close down main street so you can do it safely.”

North Bay Village had two bridges on either side, and it was a straight shot through the town, perfect for drag racing. So a few days later I called Merc Morris. “Merc, let’s see who’s faster, your Ferrari or my Porsche.”

Lieutenant Mazzarella’s cops closed the street and used their radar guns to clock the winner. Anytime I wanted to race one of my friends, we’d go to North Bay Village. We’d bet bags of cash. We bet our cars. We bet women. It was really just good fun. That little town was my playground.

F
ABITO SAW
I never ripped him off. I kept my word. It built up the bond between us. We used North Bay Village from 1978 until about 1980. We pushed thousands of kilos through the police department
dock. Right down the street from the dock was the headquarters for NBC News in Miami. Reporters would drive their news vans past my cops unloading drugs. The newshounds had no clue.
^*

I never got caught in North Bay Village. In the years I employed Lieutenant Mazzarella, I paid him a couple million dollars. After I moved on, he started working with some real scumbags. They set him up, and down went Lieutenant Mazzarella and the North Bay Village police department.
^†
Mazzarella never ratted on me. You won’t hear me say this often about a man in blue, but he was a good cop.

*
Unless otherwise stated, “the Cartel” Jon refers to is the Ochoas’ Medellín Cartel.

*
North Bay Village, connected to Miami Beach by the 79th Street Causeway, is a separate municipality consisting of three islands. At the time Jon “owned” the police department, the entire force consisted of about two dozen officers.

*
Authorities described Richard “Ricky” Cravero as a “vicious killer” after they arrested him in the mid-1970s for running the original “Dixie Mafia” gang believed to be responsible for forty murders. Cravero was convicted of three murders and given multiple life sentences. He escaped from a maximum-security prison in 1987 and spent five months on the run. As reported by Dan Christensen in the January 28, 1988,
Miami News
, “Hiding Was Rough on Escapee,” Cravero was rearrested when spotted in a 1977 Cadillac driven by a former member of his gang, Charles Grasso, who himself had been previously convicted of beating an eighteen-month-old infant to death whom his girlfriend had foolishly asked him to babysit. Cravero died in 2005 while in prison.

*
Cravero went to prison in 1975 for the murders detailed in a previous note.

*
The Customs Service and Coast Guard both tracked smugglers along the Florida coast. But the Customs Service, which through the 1970s and 1980s built a fleet of increasingly sophisticated boats and airplanes aimed at stopping smugglers, was more focused on the “War on Drugs.” The Coast Guard, which is responsible for maritime safety, could never completely devote its resources to drug interdiction. As a result, smugglers perceived the Customs Service as a bigger threat than the Coast Guard.

*
Until the late 1980s, the local NBC affiliate’s news studios were located in North Bay Village, almost within sight of the dock used by corrupt police to smuggle drugs. Today, the studios belong to WSVN Fox 7.

†
Albert San Pedro tried for several years to open a casino in the Bahamas, going so far as to plan the purchase of a local newspaper to influence public opinion in favor of his scheme.

†
The Place for Steak was a mobster hangout where in 1967 Miami gangster Thomas Altamura was executed by a rival while waiting for his table. Dino’s was a nightclub owned by the entertainer Dean Martin.

†
As noted in “Three Officers Charged with Protecting Cocaine Shipments,”
St. Petersburg Times
, February 28, 1986.

‡
The “corrupt black guy” Jon refers to is Lynden Pindling, revered in the Bahamas as the British colony’s first prime minister following its independence in 1969. He led the nation until 1992 and died in 2000. Pindling began taking bribes from Bannister in 1977 to allow Lehder’s use of an island for cocaine smuggling. He was later caught taking $56 million in bribes in one sting operation. In 1982 the U.S. government accused Pindling of turning the Bahamas into a major cocaine-shipping and money-laundering center and imposed economic sanctions on the island nation. Pindling nevertheless retired from office as a popular leader and an extremely wealthy man. The island Lehder used was Norman Cay, on which he built air and boat transport facilities. He had a staff of about forty workers to maintain planes and boats and storehouses for cocaine.

‡
Jon’s story about his encounter with Paul Hornung—the 1956 Heisman Trophy Winner who was once known as the “Golden Boy” of the NFL—cannot be confirmed. But in 1963 Hornung was suspended from football for his role in a gambling scheme, which ESPN ranks as number four on its list of the ten biggest betting scandals in American sports history. Though Hornung’s suspension was for betting small amounts of money, the league was concerned about possible Mafia connections he had through the bookies he employed to place bets.

45

J
.
R
.:
When I started my relationship with Fabito, it meant I was done buying from Albert. The Medellín coke was better quality, and they had more of it. But it would be very dangerous for me to offend Albert. I had to massage the situation.

One thing I had with Albert was personal trust. Even though Albert was a cross-eyed psycho, the man had feelings, and loyalty counted. I’d done little extra things that proved myself to him. One night Albert came to me and said, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Okay.”

“I need you to let Blondie live with you for a while.” By “Blondie” he meant Rubio, his enforcer.

I said, “Why does Blondie got to live with me?”

“He shot a guy in the brains and killed him. He needs to hide out.”

What happened was that Rubio fell in love with a girl. Rubio was a boxer. Boxers have big hearts. It keeps
them going in the ring. As physically strong as boxers are, they get their hearts broken very easily. The girl Rubio fell in love with got his heart in her fingers, and she twisted it up. She left him for another guy. Rubio loved this girl so much, he got emotional and shot her new boyfriend in the face.

Unfortunately, he did this in front of a bunch of witnesses. He walked in and did it at the dinner table where the whole family was eating. My belief is, if your woman is fucking another man, what good does it do to shoot him? It’s not going to make her like you more if you kill her boyfriend. But that’s my view. I’m not judging Rubio. He was a traditional man in the way he handled the situation.
^*

I took Rubio in at the house Phyllis and I had on Indian Creek. Nobody would think of looking there for a big blond Cuban wanted for murder. Rubio moped around the house for a couple weeks, but he couldn’t take the inaction. He snuck out one night to go to the fights. The cops knew how much he loved boxing, and they were waiting for him. Rubio was a real man. He never told the cops where he’d hid out. He did his time and moved on.
^†

Grateful as Albert was that I’d helped Rubio, I could not count on a good vibe to make him feel better when I took away my business. Albert made at least a couple hundred thousand a month off the coke he sold me. With him, it didn’t matter if it was a dollar or ten million dollars, he was a cheap motherfucker. One time I was at his house when I realized I’d left my wallet at home. I asked Albert to lend me some cash for the night. The motherfucker handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

I reasoned the best way to handle him was to bring him a new customer to replace me. I had a friend, Joey Ippolito, who wanted to move kilos in Los Angeles. Joey was from Newark, New Jersey. His family was in the garbage business, but he got into weed smuggling and came down to Florida. Later, he bounced to L.A. and got hooked in to movie people. Going from garbage to celebrities, Joey was a big success.
^*

Joey told me he could move fifty or more kilos a month in L.A. My idea was that he could buy his coke from Gary Teriaca and Bobby Erra, who were buying from Albert. For Joey, buying from them made sense because they were moving coke out to Gary’s friend in Aspen, Steven Grabow. He could pick it up out there, which was closer to L.A. than Miami. Obviously, it would have been simpler to sell Joey Ippolito coke directly from the Ochoas, but my aim was to keep Albert happy.

The other part of my idea was that I would go to Albert and suggest that he start buying his coke from the Ochoas. They would beat any price. Albert was a proud Cuban in some ways. But like most people, his greed was stronger than his pride, and he decided to buy from the Medellín Cartel.

By 1978 I’d traveled in a circle with Albert. I went from robbing
him, to buying his coke, to making him into a customer of the Cartel. What I liked about this was, I earned my transport fee for the kilos I smuggled in for the Cartel. The more their business grew, the more I earned, and their business kept growing because Americans couldn’t shove cocaine up their noses fast enough. Everybody wanted more and more.

*
Records indicate that Roberto “El Rubio” Garcia was initially shot at by a jealous husband whose wife he was involved with. Garcia subsequently lured the husband and his father to his house and fatally shot the husband in front of his father. While Jon’s version of the story garbles some of the details, he is probably correct that Garcia handled the situation in a “traditional man” way—assuming that man is a violent psychopath.