American Desperado (48 page)

The place Toni found was a half-finished Spanish house at the end of La Reina Road. It was on fifteen acres that backed up on the marshlands. We’d gone up there on a hot day. I got out in the hundred-degree heat, with mosquitoes trying to bite my arm off, horseflies so big they looked like birds, and I looked at this falling-down house and thought,
What the fuck is this?

But Toni made me walk around. There were miles of horse trails in the area. There were trees and islands and canals. There were the most incredible birds and wildflowers everywhere. Ever since I was a kid, I’d wanted to have my own ranch like on
Bonanza
. Fifteen acres in Delray was no Ponderosa,
^†
but it was enough. I bought it for $300,000. It was by far the best place I’d ever lived.

• • •

T
ONI AND
I turned that house into a luxury redneck palace. We added a pool, a dock in back, a skeet range, a barn, a six-car garage, a basketball court, and a guesthouse. I got so sick of driving up there from Miami, I bought a Hughes 500 helicopter. I parked it on the lawn and hired a full-time pilot, who lived in the guesthouse. For driving around town I got a Chevy Blazer with lifted suspension, so I blended in with the hicks.

I was glad to be out of Miami. The city had gotten violent in the past couple of years.
^*
You had the Colombian peasants running around moving coke. Not just Fabito’s guys from the Medellín Cartel. Up until the early 1980s Medellín was just one group of many. On top of them you had all the Marielitos overrunning the city.
^†
Even the blacks staged an uprising in Liberty City over some guy who’d gotten a beating from the cops.
^‡

The problem wasn’t a shortage of cocaine. Even when there was an excess of kilos on the street, gangs fought over the money to be made from it. Working with Fabito, I’d moved into what you would call management. Little subdistributors fighting over half-kilos on the street wasn’t my problem. A guy who works in a motorcycle factory doesn’t worry about morons driving those motorcycles he made into lampposts. I worked hard bringing in cocaine. What people did with it after they got it was up to them.

I turned our place in Delray into the ultimate getaway. I fenced off the main house. I put in mortar tubes that could launch tear-gas
bombs at intruders coming up the driveway. The mortars could be fired from switchpads inside the house. They’d slow down anybody coming onto our property looking for trouble, and tear gas was not against the law. I acquired a good number of hunting rifles and AKs. All the rednecks were well armed. We fit in with our neighbors.

Toni turned me on to the outdoors. I’d liked riding horses since I’d been with Vera in Mexico. We rode all the trails in Delray. Toni got me to take canoe trips around the marshes. We’d paddle around, smoke weed, drink wine, watch the animals.

I dug a pond in front of the house for ducks to live in. Toni collected exotic birds, and we built an aviary outside and connected it to the house so they could fly around inside.

We built a cage along one side of the house for our cat, Cucha.
^*
She was a 150-pound cougar. We got her when she was a kitten from a woman who raised big cats at a farm in Broward. Cucha was a beautiful cat. We built a door from her cage so she could roam free from the house. My dogs liked cats since they’d lived for years with Princess, my little one-eyed kitty. Because we got Cucha when she was small, they acclimated to her before she grew into her full 150 pounds.

Cucha was a people cat. She followed Toni around the house and slept in the bed with us. Our only problem with Cucha was she liked to eat the exotic birds. She would get down low and make little chirping sounds to fool the bird, then she would leap. Cucha could jump ten or fifteen feet in any direction. It was a constant battle with her.

Our house was beautiful inside. It wasn’t gaudy with chandeliers. It was a country house. The nicest piece was our dining room table, which I had sent to me from Italy. It was made entirely of ebony that was inlaid with ivory. People would look at my dining room table and gasp. It was the most sensational dining room table you’ve ever seen in your life. We had abstract paintings that I got
from the painter Frank Stella, who I knew from the Palm Bay Club and was just a fun guy.
^*
I also owned Erté paintings
^†
and a rare series of prints showing the life of the Marquis de Sade that I kept in a velour book in my living room to show visitors.

My favorite place in the house was the glass room. I built a room off the western side of the house that was made completely of glass—walls, ceilings, even the floor. I put in a giant couch and spent more time there than any other part of the house. I felt secure in a glass room. I had my fences and tear gas and guns and dogs and my 150-pound cat. Cucha was very loyal.

I used to put a leash and chain around Cucha’s neck and ride around with her in my Blazer. I’d take her into town to eat lunch with me. We’d take an outside table, and I’d tie her to a phone pole. Everybody knew Cucha.

I’d take her to the beach, too. She liked to bite the waves. One time I was driving down the beach with Cucha poking her head out the window, and I got carried away and drove into the water.
Boom
. A wave came up and sucked my truck into the sea. Cucha and me had to fight our way out. She towed me out of the water with her leash. I left my Blazer rolling in the waves.

Later, the city sent me a bill for removing it.

Those were good times up there. I give Toni credit for that. She wasn’t like most lazy-ass, buying-shit-at-the-mall women I’d known. She was different.

T
ONI MOON
:
Do you know what it’s like to love somebody beyond belief, to be passionately and madly in love with them? Jon was madly, passionately, wildly in love with me, and I felt exactly the same way for him. If he says anything different today, it’s because of his pride. He can’t admit to anything that he thinks shows weakness, and it’s a shame because his capacity to love is the only worthwhile thing he’s ever had, and that’s what he fights the hardest to destroy.

J
.
R
.:
I’d finally learned by then that when you do illegal things, you should not get all the way close to your woman. Prisons are filled with guys ratted out by their women. I’d learned about a woman’s wrath with Phyllis. When I got with Toni, I knew the best course was to have fun together but to always keep her at arm’s length. Still, we had a very good life.

Have you ever seen a real Florida electric storm? In Delray the most amazing storms in the world would push out from the Everglades and swallow the house. I used to lie in the glass room with Toni, my cat, my dogs, and watch for hours. There was nothing like it. That was my life when I had my reign at the top.

*
Though only about sixty miles north of Miami Beach, Delray Beach in 1980 was still largely an agricultural area and relatively undeveloped. It stretches west from the beach to the roughly four-hundred-square-mile Loxahatchee wildlife preserve in the heart of the Everglades.

*
The Hole in the Wall feed store is still in Delray.

*
The homicide rate for the Metro-Dade region soared from about 50 murders per year in 1975 to more than 600 in 1981.

*
Cucha
is Spanish slang for “pussy.”

*
Frank Stella is one of the most acclaimed artists of the second half of the twentieth century, and in 2009 President Obama presented him with a National Medal of the Arts at a ceremony in the White House. In the 1980s he was also known for flaunting his love of racehorses and Ferrari sports cars. He frequently visited Miami and stayed at the Palm Bay Club.

†
The Ponderosa was the Cartwrights’ ranch on
Bonanza
.

†
The term
Marielitos
refers to the 100,000 Cubans who arrived by boat in South Florida in 1980.

†
Erté, a master of Art Deco in the 1920s and 1930s, is known for his stylized paintings of women who are draped with jewels and feathers and are often accompanied by leopards.

‡
The 1980 Liberty City riots were sparked by the acquittal of five white police officers who beat a black motorist to death. In a retrial one of the accused officers agreed to a deal in which he provided information about corruption in the North Bay Village police department, which led to a two-year investigation of Jon’s friend Lieutenant Mazzarella and his arrest.

51

J
.
R
.:
Without her realizing it, Toni helped introduce me to the man who put me at the top of the Medellín Cartel’s operations in America. The whole time I was working with Fabito, I knew there were other Americans helping out the Cartel, but I didn’t know who they were until about 1980, when I met Max Mermelstein. Max did what I did for Fabito, but he worked for Fabito’s brother, Jorge, and for Pablo Escobar. They had a separate line of importation that was bigger than Fabito’s. Soon enough, Max and I combined what we were doing, and our joint operation became the biggest part of the Colombians’ smuggling effort.

When I met Max, it was getting more and more difficult to run boats out of the Bahamas. Everybody was turning to pilots who could haul coke from Colombia into the United States. I had Barry Seal, but I was looking for more people to fly for me. Toni knew many pilots. Being a model, she got jobs where she was flown to
different places. And just being a beautiful woman, she got plenty of offers from rich assholes who wanted to fly her to a party in the Bahamas or the Keys. Before she met me, she’d become friendly with a pilot named Shelton Archer.

Shelton was actually a very bad pilot. Before I met him, he had almost killed Toni when he crashed a plane he was flying her in. But he was kind of a character, and Toni and he stayed friends despite his nearly killing her. Shelton was an Englishman, which helped him get away with being such a moron. People heard the accent and believed he was more intelligent than he was. Shelton wasn’t actually an upper-class Englishman. He was the low-class kind you always meet in warm places like Florida and California. If you’ve ever been to those places, you know the type. Maybe the guy was a cabdriver back home in London, but in America he uses his accent to pretend he’s an English lord. Shelton was true English scum. The best way to explain him is to tell you what his favorite thing was besides crashing planes. He’d take a camera, with no film in it, and go to the mall and pretend to be an English fashion photographer so he could pick up high school girls and fuck them. That was Shelton at his finest.

Shelton reminded me of Phyllis’s father. He’d start off with a good idea or piece of luck, and then completely blow it. He was the type of guy who stepped in dog shit every time he put his shoes on. He’d get a scheme going, and sure enough the next week you’d hear the plane went down or his connection got busted or he fucked the wrong guy’s wife or daughter. I’m amazed he wasn’t killed many times over.
^*

The one thing Shelton had was that he knew everybody. I tolerated him because even though he was a stupid jerk, he knew
other pilots who were good. Most important, Shelton knew Max Mermelstein.

When Shelton met me, I started asking him about pilots, and soon enough he figured out that real estate wasn’t my main business. He hinted around that he could fly anything I ever needed, and I put him off. Obviously, I wasn’t eager to hire a guy who’d crashed my girlfriend.

So Shelton tried a different angle. He came to me one night and said, “Johnny”—the English jerk always called me Johnny—“I’m going to do you the favor of your life. You’re going to owe me for this one.”

“What am I going to owe you for?”

“For introducing you to the biggest smuggler in Miami.”

A week later Shelton told me his guy wanted to meet me at a Howard Johnson’s on Collins Avenue. That’s how I first got to know Max Mermelstein.
^*

I
MET
Max over a plate of Howard Johnson’s clam strips. It was disgusting food, and I’m glad that chain of restaurants went out of business, but Howard Johnson’s would be Max’s favorite place to meet the next several years that we worked together. The lazy slob lived down the street from it in Sunny Isles.
^†

Shelton had told me Max would be a large man with a mustache. I got there first and waited. In walked a guy with a mustache. He was a couple years older than me, and he wore a tweed jacket. I first thought he was another English bullshitter like Shelton. He walked up to my table in a hurry, like he was doing me a big favor by giving me his time. “You Shelton’s friend?” he said.

I could hear he was American. Under his tweed coat he wore a silk shirt with a gold Jewish star around his neck. He sat down and
puffed his cheeks out, looking at me like I should think he was a man of importance. Max was a fat fuck. He was maybe five-nine, 220 pounds. He waddled when he walked. He was very nervous, lighting cigarette after cigarette. His fingers shook. His big-shot act was not successful. To me, he was just a nervous fat guy with a mustache.