American Desperado (56 page)

“A giant? Are you kidding me?”

They’d insist, “The gringo works with a giant by his side.”

That’s what we went on for years: John. Gringo with a beard. Travels with giant.

—Mike Fisten, a former lead investigator for the Miami-
Dade Police Department–FBI organized
crime task force, 1986 to 1995

J
.
R
.:
I grew out a beard in the 1980s because many mornings I didn’t have time to shave. I had to focus on the job. Rafa was always telling me we needed to get more coke. I had to deal with Toni and our life in Delray. I had Mickey. He was a genius, but he would never move more than four hundred kilos of coke at a time, and he only moved it when everything was right. He didn’t have to deal with the Colombians always telling him we needed more. I still had my pilots, Barry Seal and Roger, who I was managing. I had the drivers to run and the stash houses. Everything involved different people.

My sister used to complain how hard she worked managing personnel in the corporate world, and I’d laugh at her. Now I was starting to understand what she meant. A lot of my job was managing people. When something went wrong with a person—this guy doesn’t show up, this kid tries to rip us off—it fell on me.

I was on the phone constantly. If I was discussing specific details of a work project, I’d use pay phones. For general calls, Max and I had radio phones put in our cars. Later we got the early Motorola cell phones. Driving back and forth between Delray and Miami, I lived in my car.

As convenient as you’d think it would be owning a helicopter and having a pilot, it was hard to find places to land in Miami outside of the Palm Bay Club, where they had a landing pad. The helicopter was great for flying around in the country and going to farms to look at racehorses. It was a great pussy wagon. You offer a girl a ride in a helicopter, she’ll put out. There’s something about heights that makes women excited. But mostly for my work I was driving everywhere.

I needed a driver. Danny Mones used to tell me that I needed a bodyguard, if only to keep me out of fights. I needed a guy who was reliable, someone I could trust enough to know my business. I needed a guy who could be as feared as I was. What I really needed was an executive assistant who fit in my business world.

I found all of this in Bryan Carrera. Bryan was a knockabout Italian kid raised in Florida. I met him through Bobby Erra, who’d
give him odd jobs collecting debts. Bryan was a couple years younger than I was. He was large. He was six foot six and weighed about 300 pounds. He was a freak of nature. He could squat 600 pounds. Bryan was crazy about steroids. His legs looked like something from an elephant.

When Bryan and I first met, we mostly worked out at the gym together. Sometimes I’d give him little jobs. He was the guy who went to the International Inn and helped me deal with Henry Borelli when I had to shoot out his guy’s knees. We slowly built trust between us, and by the early 1980s he became my full-time driver. Bryan had a heart as big as his monster body. He was the most loyal guy I’d ever had with me.

God Almighty, was he big. Bryan was once seated behind me in my car while I drove. There was an accident ahead of us, and when I slammed on the brakes, Bryan broke the seat behind me and nearly crushed me to death.

M
ICKEY MUNDAY
:
You remember Luca Brasi, the goon in
The Godfather
? Bryan was Jon’s Luca Brasi. Bryan would shadow Jon. It was like he and Jon communicated telepathically. If you were with Jon someplace, he would stand up to leave, and Bryan would appear outside with the car. No words would have passed between them. It was unreal.

Did Jon tell you what Bryan’s day job was? He was a pro wrestler. He dressed up in a costume, went to arenas, and wrestled as a character named The Thing.

J
.
R
.:
Kids loved Bryan. He’d work for me during the week, then Saturday nights he’d go to an arena or gym somewhere and put on his show. He wore his costume. He had a following. He’d give out autographed pictures. He was nuts in the ring. Bryan would put razor blades in his gloves and cut his own face, so he’d bleed and make the fight look better.

Bryan was truly insane. He got addicted to horse steroids. I blame myself for this. I had my racehorse business that I started in order to launder money, and Bryan spent time in the stables with me. Back then they had a drug called Equipoise that you’d give to your horse to make him stronger. Equipoise was not just a steroid, it had horse testosterone in it. You would give it to a gelding—a horse with his nuts cut off—and it would give him back his male hormones. It was a heavy, oily juice that came in IV bags. You’d hang it by the horse and drip it into his veins. I came in the barn one day, and Bryan had a bag of Equipoise hooked into his arm with the needle.
^*
He juiced himself with horse testosterone and steroids every couple of weeks. You can imagine where the guy’s mind was at, to get the idea to do this. After years of shooting up that shit, he had very little mind left.

I’m not judging Bryan, but if I unleashed him on somebody, he would go nuts. I only used Bryan if I absolutely needed him. By the 1980s I went out of my way to avoid trouble. If a guy accidentally bumped my car on the street, I wasn’t going to jump out and kick his ass. Even if the accident was his fault, I’d buy the guy a new car so later on if he ever found out I did illegal things, he’d think,
Wow. This guy bought me a new car. I saw him do something illegal yesterday, but I’m not going to tell on him, because he took care of me
.

That was my theory. Treat people good. I didn’t bully people unless they really decided to fuck with me. If you want to fuck with me, I will make sure that is the sorriest day of your fucking life.

I
T WAS
always these pissant, nothing guys who’d end up giving me the biggest problems where I’d need Bryan’s help. One time it was a couple kids I hired to drive a boat. The Colombians had a commercial fishing trawler in the gulf with several thousand pounds of cocaine. Mickey was tied up with a smuggling job, so instead of using
his boats, I found freelancers with their own boats. Most people who worked for me had fear—either because of my personality or because they knew I was involved with insane Colombians.

Somehow I’d failed to instill sufficient fear in these two kids I hired. They went out to the fishing boat, picked up their load, put it in a car, and left it where they were supposed to. They picked up another car with their fee. The problem was, these kids got wise. Instead of leaving the 400 kilos in the trunk of the first car they’d picked up, they left only 310.

We didn’t count the pieces until after these clowns had already been paid. They claimed that 310 kilos was all they got off the boat, then they went into hiding. They reasoned that I couldn’t call up the fishing boat and ask what had really happened, so that made them feel protected. They could hide out a few weeks, and I’d forget about them. Wrong.

The Ochoas ran a tight system. If I ever had a serious problem, I could call Fabito or his brother Jorge in Colombia. I could talk directly to Rafa, but I didn’t always trust him to handle bad news.

The way I reached the Ochoas in Colombia was funny. Their family had a restaurant called Las Margaritas. The main one was in Bogotá, and the Ochoas had a phone there that was for my calls. When I rang it, I’d get a guy who worked for Fabito and Jorge.

So after I got shortchanged on the kilos, I called the Ochoas’ guy at the restaurant and told him about the problem. The next week I got Fabito on the phone. Fabito used to call me
cabron
, which means “friend.” He said, “
Cabron
. We checked with everybody, and they gave four hundred kilos. You know I wouldn’t lie to you. The problem is with your guys.”

It fell on me to make up those ninety kilos that those kids stole. By this time in my life, the $5 million—or whatever it was that I was out—wasn’t a big deal. It was the principle of the matter. Two punks believed they could rob me. I sent Bryan all over Miami looking for them. But it was like they’d never lived on the planet.

Months and months passed, and one day Bryan and I are driving
out on the turnpike in a new AMG I’d just picked up. Even though I called Bryan my driver, he usually sat beside me. He was my extra set of eyes. Out of nowhere Bryan says, “Jon, it’s those kids.”

They zoom up in a little piece-of-shit Japanese car to our right. They see Bryan’s fat head in the seat next to me and try flooring their car. I let them pull ahead. I’m in an AMG. No way will they lose me. I say, “Bryan, roll your window down and duck, so I can shoot them.”

This was the first time I’d ever tried to shoot somebody from my car with Bryan next to me. Guns were not Bryan’s forte. His strength was in his hands.
^*
He could pick somebody up with one hand and choke him.

I get up beside the kids’ car, and Bryan tries to bend down, but he’s such a big lug, he goes down like two inches. I fire one round, but it makes me uneasy, with Bryan filling up the window.

“I’ll get in the backseat, Jon.” He tries climbing over the back, but he’s got no flexibility.

“Fuck it, Bryan. I’m going to cut these motherfucking kids off and crash them.”

We’re going eighty, ninety miles an hour. Not a cop in sight, thank God. The kids try running their car onto I-95. I cut over to tap their car from the side. If you lightly tap the rear tire of another car with your bumper, you can spin it out of control. As I’m getting closer,
boom!
The kids fire a shotgun.

It misses us, but it makes me so mad, I slam into their bumper. The AMG is so much heavier than their car, they fly off sideways. They spin a half-mile down the road, bouncing off the guardrails.

When we stop behind their car, it’s wrecked, and I can’t see through the broken windows to tell if the kids are alive or dead. They still have a shotgun.

Bryan jumps out.

I say, “
Think
, Bryan. They got a shotgun.”

He don’t care. He reaches in the driver’s side and pulls one kid out by the neck. I go carefully to the other side of the car with my gun.

But the kid in the passenger seat is knocked out. I open the door, grab the shotgun at his feet, and pull him out. I drop him to the ground and smash his face with his shotgun. I beat him and beat him. I don’t check his pulse when I’m done, but I believe he isn’t going to wake up and steal anybody’s coke again. I look across at the kid Bryan’s been strangling, and he’s gone from red to blue to white. Bryan drops him. He says, “I want to strangle your guy.”

“You don’t have to, Bryan. He’s not moving.”

“I want to strangle him anyway. I want to see the difference in how their necks feel.”

To Bryan, strangling was like a science experiment. That was his mentality.
^*

B
RYAN WAS
extreme. One time Bryan made a guy eat his gun. I’d never seen anything like this. It happened with a Cuban who thought he was an actual wiseguy, but was really just another punk. Somehow Rafa got hooked up with this Cuban and wanted me to sell him some coke. By the 1980s Cubans had moved onto 79th Street and were taking over the old Italian clubs. This guy wanted to meet me in an old Italian place now run by greaseball Cubans. When I sat down, this clown started arguing with me about the price, trying to beat down what he’d already negotiated with Rafa. I told him, “If you don’t like it, nobody’s forcing you to buy from us. Good-bye. Nice knowing you.”

As I walk off, this punk said, “If you don’t sell to me, I’m gonna fix your ass.”

I say something back to this greaseball turd, and he follows me
outside to shoot his mouth off. Bryan, who is waiting for me outside, sees this guy reach for something. Bryan comes up beside the guy and wraps his hand around his hand. Bryan’s hand is so big, the other guy’s hand looks like it belongs to a tiny baby, but inside that little hand is a little .38 snub-nosed revolver.

Bryan squeezes the Cuban’s hand harder and says, “What do you got there?”

“Nothing, man.”

“It feels like a gun.”

Bryan uses his other hand to lift the guy by his throat and jam him against the side of the building. He pulls the gun from the guy’s hand—which I’m sure was already broken—and holds up the gun. Bryan says, “I’m not real sure how to use a gun. Is this what you do with it?”

Bryan pushes the barrel into the guy’s mouth. I’ve seen that before, but then Bryan does something new. He pushes the pistol all the way in the guy’s mouth. It don’t go all the way in until Bryan pounds it with the flat of his hand. That gun disappears down the guy’s throat. His jaw must have been broken. He’s got blood pouring out of his mouth. He’s trying to kick Bryan and fight him off, but with a gun jammed in his throat, he’s already going weak.

I say, “Bryan, don’t do that. Just pull the trigger.”

“Jon, I don’t like guns, man.”

What Bryan used to love was to pick people up and throw them on the pavement. He liked to see if he could bounce them. So now he lifts the guy over his head and starts bouncing him.

I say, “Bryan, careful that gun don’t go off in his throat and shoot one of us.”

Bryan throws the guy and looks at me, laughing.
Ha ha ha!
He picks him up and bounces him again. Bryan is like a big dog with a toy he doesn’t want to let go of.

D
ON’T GET
the wrong idea about Bryan. He did more than just mangle people. He had a brain. He was no Mickey Munday, but he could count numbers. He could remember things I told him. When
I had orders for my drivers, he was the guy who gave them. He became my face.