American Desperado (63 page)

There was only one time that mixing my home life with my work ever caused a problem. I’d let Toni’s jerk-off English pilot friend Shelton Archer talk me into flying loads for me. Shelton had started working with another piece-of-shit Englishman who was his kicker and organizer. He was like a poor man’s Mickey Munday. I got them flying loads from Louisiana out to Bernie Levine in San Francisco. Big mistake.

Even though Bernie was one of my oldest friends, he was an untrustworthy guy. Put him with a dirty Englishman like Shelton, and bad things were bound to happen. My mistake was giving Shelton responsibility for bringing back the money from California that Bernie owed the Cartel.

One thing I did not do was count money. Rafa had guys to
count it. Even Mickey counted money sometimes. I don’t want to see counting machines. I don’t want to touch the money. I walked into rooms filled to the ceiling with cash ten times a week. That much cash stinks. It has BO from all the humans that have been touching it and perspiring on it. There are germs on it. People roll up bills and stick them in their noses to snort coke. Who knows what other disgusting things they’ve done with our drug money?

When distributors such as Bernie got coke from me, the price was set by the Cartel, and it was up to them to put the right amount of money in the bags they sent back. I told them to bundle the money in $100,000 packs, sometimes even in $1 million bricks. I’d count out my share of the bundles and pass the rest on to Rafa for the Cartel.

I knew Rafa took his bundles apart and counted each bill. I didn’t bother with mine. I knew if there was a problem, Rafa would catch it on his end. I never had a problem with my distributors shorting the cash they owed—until Shelton met Barry.

I didn’t catch the problem directly. It was Rafa who did. In a safe house, he piled up $10 million or $15 million that had come from Barry and counted it one weekend. He found that each bundle was short a couple grand. It added up to a few hundred thousand dollars, stolen.

Instead of telling me what the problem was, Rafa went crazy. He put together a Colombian death squad and sent them to my house in Delray.

What saved me was the close friendship between Lee and Flaco. One morning they were out picking up a car, and Flaco told Lee that Rafa believed I’d ripped him off. According to Flaco, Rafa was sending a “death squad” to my house. Lee called me right away and said, “Jon, Rafa has an
escuadrón de la muerte
on his way to the house.”

Escuadrón de la muerte
—death squad—was the term Griselda used to use when she’d get a bunch of her guys together to kill someone. Somehow Lee’d picked up the term from Flaco. They’d kill everyone in the house—children, dogs. If there were fish in a
fish tank, they’d pour bleach in the water. Apparently Rafa had the same thing in mind for me. He used to come up with ideas like this when he smoked too many bazookas.

Soon as I hung up with Lee, I tried to call Max. As I’m dialing, I see Rafa coming up my driveway with three cars following his. He gets out with a bunch of armed Colombians from the hills.

By this time, I had so many people working on the property that the gate was never closed. If I fired the tear gas, these Colombians would all start shooting. I had to deal with the situation. I had Toni in the house. I had Bryan in the kitchen eating. There were a couple guys in the barns, and a Cuban maid who worked for us in the laundry room. That was my army. If there was going to be a shoot-out, we were done. Toni saw the cars from the window. I told her to get her guns out, and I went downstairs.

I got Bryan and walked out to meet Rafa. He walked up to me with his guys fanning out behind him. “Jon, you know why I’m here.”

I actually didn’t know at that time what he was specifically accusing me of stealing. Lee had been unable to figure out from Flaco exactly what it was I was supposed to have done. But if you showed weakness to a Colombian, that was it. They’d run you into the ground. You could not back up an inch. I said to Rafa, “You better think before you make the mistake of your life.”

“I’m not here to talk about my mistake, Jon.”

As I’m thinking of what to say next, I look over Rafa’s shoulders and see pickup trucks, ATVs, horses coming up behind him. Toni has called Earl, and he’s organized every redneck in the neighborhood. They’ve formed a cavalry. Earl’s brothers are on horseback with hunting rifles. There are two pickups with all their inbred nephews riding on the cabs and pointing shotguns. Rafa’s soldiers see them coming and make a hissing sound with their teeth, nudging each other. Then I see the window open in our bedroom, and Toni leans out with an AK. This is like a scene right out of
Bonanza
, where the Indians come to do a massacre but the settlers turn the tables and surround them.

Toni shouts from the window, “You motherfuckers. Get the fuck off my land.”

Rafa looks from Toni to the armed hillbillies coming up behind him and gets a funny look. As insane as he is, he’s worried. He’s stirred up an angry mob of white people.

“Rafa,” I say. “Please. It’s not relaxed here. Let’s talk about this at Max’s.”

“Okay, Jon.”

“Thanks, Rafa. You’re a good friend.”

They all get in their cars and drive off.

I met Rafa the next day at Max’s, and it was like nothing had happened between us. He told me about the accounting error. I told him I’d correct it.

I knew Shelton was responsible. For six years Bernie had never shorted us a dollar. Shelton started flying his loads, and suddenly they were a few dollars light. I suspected Bernie was also involved because it seemed to me the money had to have been pulled out of the bundles before they were wrapped and put on the plane.

I knew if I confronted Shelton, he’d lie his English ass off. Bernie would act offended, and the matter would remain an unsolved mystery. When you think a person has wronged you, but you can’t prove it, sometimes the best thing is to make your point a different way.

I had Bryan pick up Shelton’s running mate, the guy who worked as his kicker. Bryan tied him up with electrical cord and put him in the trunk of his car. There was a canal in the wilds of Delray where we kept a rowboat. What Bryan did to scare people who caused me aggravation was to drag them behind the rowboat. He called it “gator-dragging.” He’d row a guy past the mud islands where the gators hung out. If I wasn’t too mad at the guy, Bryan would row him back without letting the alligators catch him. We’d pull him out, and the guy would have an adventure story for his grandkids.

With Shelton’s guy, we just wanted to scare him. I wanted him to go back to Shelton and relate his experience as a warning. If Shelton had done something wrong, it would make him think twice. Even if by some chance Shelton was innocent, the dragging would
still make the point that I was unpredictable, and that he should always be careful of me.

I came out to meet Bryan the day he was going to gator-drag Shelton’s guy. When I got there, I saw Bryan rowing his ass off. He was rowing so fast, the nose of the little dinghy was pointed up like a speedboat. Every five or six rows, Bryan turned around and beat his paddle on Shelton’s guy. It looked like Bryan was beating the poor asshole to death for fun.

Then, as the boat got closer, I saw it was being chased by an alligator who was biting the guy’s feet. Bryan was trying to fight it off. He ran that boat up to the edge of the canal and dragged the guy from the water. Shelton’s asshole buddy was screaming, “My toes, my toes!”

Bryan holds him up with one hand like a fish. His one foot is chewed to pieces.

“Bro, forget your toes. You don’t got no foot.”

I laughed my ass off. This man set a good example for Shelton. After the guy got out of the hospital, Shelton paid me back. He never admitted to stealing. He said he’d “misplaced” the money. I never had a problem with him or with Bernie Levine again.

That was the beauty of Delray. I had my life with Toni. I had the rednecks. I even had the alligators helping me. I was untouchable up there.

*
Jon’s former neighbor, whom I interviewed in 2010 outside the Hole in the Wall feed store, still lives in Delray. He asked that he be identified simply as “Earl” or as Jon’s “redneck neighbor.”

*
Griselda Blanco was arrested in California in 1985. Though authorities suspected Griselda and her crew of having been involved in dozens, or hundreds, of murders, and one of her top enforcers testified against her, legal technicalities prevented them from pursuing murder charges. She was convicted on federal drug-trafficking charges, imprisoned until 2004, and deported to Colombia. Recently, photographs purporting to show Griselda alive and well in Colombia have surfaced. Some feature a woman in her late sixties who bears a resemblance to her. Jon believes such look-alikes may be relatives of Griselda but could not be her. As he put it, “Trust me, that bitch was so despised, she was killed the second she stepped off the plane in Colombia.”

†
Harry Benson remains an active trainer and breeder in Florida.

64

J
.
R
.:
In my smuggling operations I did every job at least once. I flew as a kicker and pushed the loads out of the plane. I drove coke cars and money cars. I flew with Roger and Barry Seal, and I took the controls of their planes when we were flying easy, straight lines. But it was unwise to get too involved. After I saw what a job was like, I’d stay in the background as much as I could.

One job I couldn’t stay away from was working the radios. I truly loved Mickey’s radio rooms. You could follow the whole smuggling mission. At Ultimate Boats, Mickey’s shop in Miami, the radio room was upstairs in a little garret. There was a narrow staircase to get to it, and a catwalk. Inside there was a table with the radios and tape recorders, and a bed in the corner. I sometimes spent twenty hours in there, following the progress of a load coming in. Every time one of our loads got past all
the government assholes in their boats and planes and hit American soil, I got off so hard I could feel it in my balls.

That’s why I couldn’t stop smuggling. I had to keep getting off.

T
HE
C
OLOMBIANS
also couldn’t stop. Their addiction wasn’t psychological. It was economic. The more successful we were in smuggling, the less money they made per kilo. That was the twist of it. We flooded the market with so much cocaine that by 1983 the wholesale price of a kilo kept dropping. It had gone from $50,000 in the late 1970s to as low as $6,000 a kilo at one point. That meant that to make the same amount of money in 1983 as they did in 1978, the Colombians had to move almost ten times as much coke.

By combining the efforts of Mickey, Barry Seal, Roger, and the occasional guys I had running coke in boats that came in off the Cartel’s fishing trawlers, I had months where I moved ten thousand kilos. Some months it went down to a trickle, but we always got something through.

The Cartel made life more difficult for itself in some ways by their freewheeling way of distributing coke. They’d sell to anybody. They had their own distributors around the country, and they’d take on anybody else. My distributors—Bernie in San Francisco, Ron Tobachnik in Chicago, my rednecks in Delray, my uncle Jerry Chilli on Miami Beach, Albert and Bobby Erra in Miami as well as people in L.A.—were all together moving a thousand kilos a month just for me. I’d also cut one-off deals where a guy I knew would take five hundred or a thousand kilos in one bump. Now and then, I used to do this with John Gotti in New York and other wiseguys.

But of course the Cartel had many more distributors than me. Most of the coke I imported was for their guys, not mine. They didn’t care if they sold to ten guys in the same city. Their philosophy was that by selling to everyone, they owned the market. What ended up happening, though, was that all their distributors in a given city competed against each other. In Miami this caused wars in the streets. In other cities it just made the prices drop.

From where the Cartel sat, their business would have almost
been better if the government had been able to shut down our smuggling for a few months. That way the prices would have gone back up.

But the government couldn’t stop us.

M
OSTLY, IT
couldn’t stop Mickey Munday. By 1983 the DEA and Customs Service had banded together with the air force to use their radars and spy planes. They tried to build an invisible wall around the coast of Florida.

Pilots I had flying into Florida like Roger and a couple guys he worked with would shut down for weeks at a time. They wouldn’t fly. When they did make a run, they used Super King Air planes that could carry two thousand kilos. Rafa and I would stock up. We filled our stash houses with enough extra coke to keep everyone supplied for months.

Mickey’s philosophy was different. He’d do his four-hundred-kilo loads every week or two. Sometimes he slowed down, but he never stopped. He liked the challenge. If someone had told him he could only smuggle one kilo in a plane, he would have done it, just to do it. In this way, Mickey was the same as me. He smuggled to get off.

When the government tried to wall off Florida with radar and spy planes, Mickey found a hole in their plan. The government had decided to track planes coming into Florida from Colombia. Law enforcement would even track seaplanes if they landed on the water off the coast and tried to hand their coke off to a boat. I knew that because a few times we used seaplanes and had problems with them being chased.

But Mickey came up with an idea. He decided to have his planes air-drop bags of coke into the water. People had done this with weed near the coast. But Mickey’s idea was to do it twenty or thirty miles out to sea. The plane would drop the coke and fly back to Colombia, or land in Florida at an airport as if it were returning from a tourist trip.