American Desperado (55 page)

You can imagine how angry I was. I could have been shot. When I found Rafa the next morning, I said, “You crazy fucker. Where would you be if you got me killed?”

“Jon, I got carried away.”

That’s how they were. The Colombians were aggressive. One time Griselda sent her guys to blow up the car of someone she had a feud with. They put so much dynamite in the car, it blew up the house it was parked in front of. That was the Colombian way.

People in Miami got very uptight about all the bodies piling up. The Colombians got a reputation for being crazy. At the street level Colombians fought among themselves. Higher up, there were guys like Rafa who smoked a little too much cocaine and went crazy sometimes. Despite their balls, the Colombians could not dominate the streets in Miami. They were outnumbered by the Cubans twenty to one. In the long run the Cubans would always kick their asses.

From the start, smart Colombians like the Ochoas understood they could not work alone. They were happy to sell to Cubans, Italians—anybody with money. They weren’t completely irrational people.

In my view, the Colombians weren’t more murderous than other people. They just were more open about it. They’d shoot people and leave them on the streets. They didn’t pick up after themselves.

I
WAS
in no position to look down my nose at the Colombians for being violent. Look how we took care of Richard Schwartz at his hamburger shop. People could say we did that killing for Gary Teriaca’s honor, to avenge his little brother’s murder. But we were no better than the Cubans or the Colombians.

In the early 1980s, Bobby Erra got involved in the jukebox and
pinball machine industry. When some pizza shops wouldn’t pay him what he wanted for his coin machines, Bobby hired Albert to blow up all their pizza shops.
^*
All this over coin machines. The money was nothing to Bobby. He just wanted to impress people by showing he could blow up their businesses.

Gary Teriaca found out about a guy in Miami’s diamond district who was importing cocaine with some Colombians we’d never heard of. Gary didn’t like this diamond guy because he was trying to sell coke to the same people in Miami that Gary sold to. Gary wanted to rob him.

Gary was really out of his mind by this time. He was the first “cocaine junkie” I’d ever seen. He had been such a good-looking athletic kid. Now he was pale and skinny, his nose would start bleeding, and there was no way to stop it. He’d plug his nose with tissues, and the blood would bubble out of his mouth. He was a mess. I told him many times he should start smoking bazookas like Rafa. That way, at least, his nose would get a rest.

But Gary was right about the diamond guy. He was getting hundreds of kilos of coke. And he was bringing it in in a very smart way. He found a factory that made plastic shoe hangers—bags you hang in your closet for holding shoes. He got the factory to make special shoe hangers with seams in the back that they could put a kilo of coke in. They’d flatten the kilo so you wouldn’t even feel it in the plastic. They’d send these shoe hangers to Colombia empty, and the Colombians would ship them back loaded.

The diamond guy was a competitor, so it made sense to rob him. You always want to fuck up your competition. I wasn’t at a point in life where I wanted to be ripping off people in Miami, but I had an idea.

My ex-brother-in-law, Henry Borelli, was always begging to do business with me. We’d left on good terms after the incident at the
International Inn where I had to kneecap his guy, and I was happy to do Henry a solid. I invited him to come down and rob this diamond guy for us. He’d make out and nobody would connect the robbery to us.

Henry came down with a couple of his guys.
Boom. Boom
. They ripped off the guys working for the diamond guy. A man of his word, Henry gave a cut to Gary and me. End of story.

The weak link in this was Gary Teriaca. He ended up bragging about his New York heavies he called in to do the rip-off, and this got back to the diamond guy, who had his own heavies. A couple weeks later Gary was walking down 79th Street in broad daylight, and somebody opened up on him. Gary was hit three times. He was fortunate that though they shot him in the chest, they missed his heart.

Unfortunately, Gary never really recovered mentally. He’d never been the same since his little brother got shot at the Forge. Being shot on the street weakened him more. When guys get weak, people inevitably start to turn on them.

A
LBERT
S
AN
P
EDRO
feared weak people. Gary had become very important to Albert. Gary was buying hundreds of kilos a month from him to ship out to Colorado. Some went to his friend Steven Grabow. A lot went on to Joey Ippolito or other guys in California. There were some months people in California took a thousand kilos. That meant a great deal to Albert. When he saw Gary, his main partner in this, with his nosebleeds, getting shot up on the street, it made him uptight.

Albert got so uptight, he called me over to meet him one day and asked me if I’d have a problem if he got rid of Gary and Bobby. He reasoned that since Bobby and Gary were old friends and had become strong partners in the Colorado cocaine scheme, Bobby wouldn’t let it stand if Albert killed Gary.

“Would you take my side in this, Jon?”

I didn’t think he was wise to go after Bobby. He was part of the Mafia, and his father had been very strong. But Albert was stubborn,
and he felt strong enough to take out Bobby. Albert’s idea was that with Gary and Bobby gone he’d take over the route to Colorado.

Albert’s plan put me in an awkward spot. I was loyal to Bobby and Gary. We’d had good times together. But the fact was, Albert was the guy buying coke from the Cartel, and I was with the Cartel. Albert was my customer—not Bobby and Gary—and the customer is always right. On top of this, Albert had more force on the street than Bobby.

I told Albert, “If you want to get rid of Gary and Bobby, bring in an outsider.”

Albert had liked Joe Da Costa, my dog guy, ever since he’d sold Albert his dog, Sarge. Joe was also a shooter. I went to New Jersey to meet with Joe to see about his killing Bobby and Gary. Joe wanted to hit them in New York.

A couple times a year Bobby and Gary went up to New York to visit family. They liked to stay at the UN Plaza Hotel.
^*
When they made their next trip, Joe went looking for them.

The problem with hit men is, it’s not like the movies. They don’t just pull out their sniper rifles and wack the guy from a rooftop. Professional shooters, even a nasty fucker like Joe Da Costa, could be very finicky. Everything had to be just right.

Joe Da Costa spent three days watching Gary and Bobby at the UN Plaza Hotel. Finally he called me and said, “Man, it’s going to be a bloody mess. They hardly come out of their room. There’s girls going in and out. I don’t want to kill like five, six people just to get those two.”

I went to Albert and told him killing Bobby and Gary was not going well. Albert was so nuts, he said, “Good. I don’t want to kill Bobby. I changed my mind.”

I was relieved. Can you imagine what it’s like being friends with two guys and having to hang out with them all the time so you can figure out how to get a hit man the chance to kill them? It’s not easy, bro.

Gary and Bobby were my best friends in Miami. The last good time the three of us had together was the second Duran-Leonard fight.
^*
We watched on the big-screen TV at the Cricket Club, and when Duran quit the fight, Bobby threw a bottle of Cutty Sark at the screen and caused a mini-riot. We laughed our asses off. It was just a good time.

U
NFORTUNATELY FOR
Gary, Albert cut a deal with Bobby to take over the route to Colorado. They started squeezing him out. By then Gary had moved out of his house with Carol Belcher and was living at a condo in Bay Harbor. Gary had gotten so paranoid, he removed the normal front door of his condo and installed a steel door like something you’d see on a bank vault. He’d lock himself in that condo for days at a time.

Late in 1981 there was a night he tried calling me a bunch of times, and after that no one ever heard from him again. Albert and Bobby told me he’d stolen $800,000 from them because he was mad that they were taking over his Colorado coke business. Then my lawyer Danny Mones told me that if anyone ever asked, I should tell them, “Gary had run off to Europe.” I knew that was bullshit.

I believe Albert and his guys killed Gary. But no one ever found a body. Later the cops tried to make a case that Albert and his guys went into Gary’s apartment and beat him to death.
^†
I found out that
I was the last person Gary ever called, and it made me feel bad, that I never picked up the phone.
^*

After he died, it broke me up inside a little bit. I had no heart for Gary, but I don’t like picturing him being so alone. When they were coming to get him, I was the only person he could think of to reach out to, and a year earlier when Albert asked for my help I’d been just another guy ready to kill him.

I get tired of hearing about how the Colombians were such animals in the 1980s. We were all animals. Everybody was making corpses. I’d risen above the streets and become more like a businessman. I was the upper management of the Cartel. But I was in a business where if the Cartel were a Fortune 500 company, and you looked in the boardroom, you’d see that the CEO and all the presidents were carrying guns or bats. One minute they’d be discussing a merger, and the next they might be knocking somebody’s brains in. That’s the kind of businessman I was.

*
The MAC-10 was a small, wildly inaccurate machine gun that was popular among Miami’s killers in the 1980s because of its compact size and its ability to take a long silencer tube, making it not much louder than a whisper.

*
In the “Pizza Wars,” from 1980 to 1983, ten bombs were detonated at Pizza Shops in and around Miami. Erra’s and San Pedro’s roles in the bombings emerged in the 1986 cocaine-trafficking case against San Pedro.

*
Still located at One United Nations Plaza on 44th Street.

*
The fight took place on November 25, 1980.

*
Police reports from the investigation of the Gary Teriaca murder indicate that Jon’s number was the last he dialed before his death.

†
Gary Teriaca is believed to have been murdered in early October 1981. His disappearance was ruled a homicide during the 1991 racketeering investigation of Albert San Pedro. Federal investigators involved in the case discovered that shortly after the disappearance of Gary Teriaca, Albert San Pedro had hired an off-duty Hialeah police crime-scene investigation unit to scrub the apartment clean, then had it repainted. In 1991 FBI forensics examiners stripped the newer layers of paint from Teriaca’s former apartment and found blood that possibly matched his in spray patterns on the bedroom walls and ceiling. Witnesses identified San Pedro as having led a group of men who, around the time of Teriaca’s disappearance, broke down the front door of his apartment with a pry bar, after which loud screams were heard coming from within. Among the group of men who came to Teriaca’s apartment at the time of the murder, witnesses identified San Pedro’s enforcer Ricky Prado. Other witnesses identified Prado as the driver of San Pedro’s car on visits he made to the apartment in the days after the murder. Prado moved from Miami and entered the CIA approximately four weeks after the murder of Gary Teriaca. Investigators leading the racketeering investigation of San Pedro planned to include the murder of Gary Teriaca as a predicate act—an earlier offense that can be used to enhance a sentence levied for a later conviction—in their case, and to include Ricky Prado in the indictment, but were prevented from doing so by the prior immunity agreement San Pedro had negotiated with U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen. The state of Florida—not bound by San Pedro’s immunity deal—considered filing separate murder charges against San Pedro and Prado, but San Pedro’s attorney Fred Schwartz filed suit alleging misconduct among Miami-Dade police serving on the federal task force that investigated San Pedro. Schwartz’s suit was thrown out, and he was disbarred for misconduct in another case, but the state declined to pursue the matter any further. In 2010 I interviewed San Pedro’s ex-wives—Lourdes San Pedro and Jenny Cartaya—who presented new evidence that they believe further implicates San Pedro and Prado in the murder of Gary Teriaca. Police involved in the investigation of Teriaca’s murder remain optimistic that charges will be filed against San Pedro and Prado. Bobby Erra was never implicated in the murder of Gary Teriaca, but in 1990 he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges based in part on the cocaine trafficking business he and Albert took over from Teriaca in 1981. Erra served nearly a decade in prison and today has an interest in Mezzaluna, a chain of high-end Italian restaurants in South Florida.

59

We started arresting low-level Colombian dopers who would tell us about a bearded gringo. They’d say the “bearded gringo” was there when they landed the plane. The “bearded gringo” was in the room with the money. The “bearded gringo” was everywhere.

“Does he have a name?” we’d ask.

“John.”

For years, we were looking for “John, the bearded gringo.”

I never thought he might spell his name without an “h.”

We’d get little pieces of information. He was a psycho Vietnam vet. He was extremely violent. He traveled with a giant.