American Desperado (67 page)

J
UDY
:
I first met Toni when she and Jon came to New York. She had a group of men who fawned over her—the writer Noel Behn and Bob Fosse
^*
—and I remember seeing Jon with them at the Russian Tea Room, thinking she’d really spun his head around. With her looks and figure, she was quite the package. But I wasn’t impressed. She was friends with literary people, but I didn’t think she was very well read or educated.

And forgive me for saying this, Toni was a lousy housekeeper.

Everything my brother did was to make that woman happy. Jon is insecure about himself. Don’t let his macho side fool you. Inside,
he is a little boy who doesn’t think he has enough to offer people. This is why money was always so important to him. He believed it could make up for the things he thought he lacked. Toni was a woman who knew how to press all his buttons.

On one of my visits they had a terrible fight. The next morning I went to Toni and said, “If you kept the house a little better, my brother would be happier, and you wouldn’t argue as much.”

That woman threw me out of the house. Jon did nothing to stop her. I was very hurt. I still am.

J
.
R
.:
My sister didn’t help things in our house. Toni’s mind started to get unstrung. She was prone to rages of jealousy. At first it was over imaginary women, even when I wasn’t cheating. She’d get paranoid that I was hiding girls in the closet. She’d come in the bedroom when I was sleeping and shout, “Where are they?”

One time Bryan was in the driveway, and she ran out and made him open his trunk at gunpoint because she thought he was smuggling girls in there. Another time she set off the tear-gas cannons by the front gate to chase imaginary girls from the bushes. She got extreme.

Toni decided to put me in my place by having an affair with one of the grooms in my barn. When I found out, that sorry asshole ran off and disappeared off the planet. On principle I would have to give him a beating, but I didn’t take it personally. I was more mad that I’d lost a good groom.

I saw more and more cocaine inside our house going into people’s noses.

L
ISA “BITSY” BENSON
:
When I first started working for Jon, I didn’t know he and Toni did coke. Then my dad started dating a girl who was closer to Toni’s age, and they became friends. They’d invite me into the house, and those ladies really racked up the rails. Toni wore a chain on her neck with a gold pickax for breaking up
the coke. The more she chopped with the gold pickax, the wilder it got. Toni would get paranoid and break out guns, and we’d have to march around the yard searching for intruders. She called it “rat patrol.”

J
.
R
.:
Toni and her family were excessive people. Liquor ran freely through that family. Anybody that tells you that alcoholism doesn’t run in the genes is full of shit.

Toni’s mother got completely wacked out on booze. I sent her to doctors. I sent her to AA classes. Finally I told Toni’s mom, “If you can stay without a drink of alcohol for a month, I’m going to buy you a brand-new Mercedes.”

That woman put all of her will into it. She struggled. She was shaking for days. But she finally got the poisons out. At the end of that month, I’d never seen her look so good. I had a guy send up a new Mercedes. She cried when she saw it.

I said, “You deserve it. You stayed clean. God bless you.”

She said, “I’m going to show all my friends the car.”

She drove off, and the next morning I got a call from a cop in Delray. He said, “We found your mother-in-law pulled over by the road. She told us that spiders had filled her car and made so many webs that she couldn’t see.”

The poor woman had gotten drunk, and with her body clean as it was, it made her flip. They had to give her special injections at the hospital to bring her mind back.

T
O GET
away from the madness in Delray, I started an affair with a girl from Fort Lauderdale named Karen. She was a little stripper, with dark hair and a sweet heart. When Toni would go nuts and chase me around the house kicking down doors, I’d escape in my helicopter. I’d pick up Karen. We’d fly to a place by Cape Canaveral where you could skim over the water to watch the porpoises. That was my out.

But it never lasted. I was in the barn one day and found burned
Coca-Cola cans that someone had poked holes in. I asked one of the kids who worked in the barn what they were for. “They’re homemade pipes for smoking crack.”

I’d never heard of crack. He explained it was cocaine made into special rocks so you could smoke it easily. That was a new one on me.

It turned out that Toni’s brother, Lee, was smoking it in the barn with some other guys who worked for me. At first I didn’t think nothing of guys blowing off steam, smoking a little crack.

Then my stepdaughter, Amber, whom I’d helped raise, told me someone had stolen the ATVs that I’d bought for her and her friends to play with. I went into the barn to ask the guys in there if they knew about the missing ATVs. At ten in the morning, they were smoking crack. I knocked them around and said, “Where are my ATVs?”

They told me Lee had sold them to some guys in town to buy crack cocaine. This was a shocker. Lee was moving hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilos for me a month. He was one of my most trusted drivers. I also had an airport security guy I’d bribed at Fort Lauderdale airport to let Lee pass through the screenings without a hassle. A couple times a month I sent Lee to Chicago with forty keys in his luggage.

I put it together that Lee was a smart enough kid that he wouldn’t steal from my business. But he was such an addict that he was stealing shit from around the house to sell to dealers. I started to worry that he’d given crack to Amber. All I needed was the whole family on drugs. I wanted to make an example of Lee. I’d blow his brains out and show them that’s what happened when you got hooked on drugs. I went a little nuts.

F
ATHER BRADLEY PIERCE
:
I’d received the strangest call from Jon. I’d barely heard from him since I’d entered the seminary.

Jon was in torment. He said he had a family member involved in drugs. He wanted to lash out at them for stealing from him and
bringing drugs into his house. I’ll never forget what Jon said, “Help me. Save me from killing this person.”

We talked for a few minutes. He thanked me and abruptly hung up.

J
.
R
.:
I didn’t kill Lee. I went in the barn and beat the shit out of his friend. I made him tell me where the crack dealer was who had my ATVs.

I drove to the guy’s house with Bryan. We went inside, and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. There were people wacked out everywhere. There was trash. There were bottles filled with urine because these guys were too high to get up and piss in a toilet. Bryan and I knocked them around and found my ATVs in the garage. Some crackhead had taken them halfway apart, like he thought he was going to strip them for parts. He was such a moron. You could sell a stolen ATV as is and get more money for it. These guys had no brains left.

After we got the ATVs in my truck, I lit the garage on fire. We drove off with crackheads running out of the burning house.

That was my part for community improvement.

I was trapped by Toni. I never talked to her about my business, but she knew enough that, if I left her, she could make real problems for me. The only proper way to break up with her would be to put her in the ground along with her whole family. I didn’t have the stomach for that. So I lived like a hostage in my own house.

*
Still located at 9641 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

*
Both establishments were celebrity hotspots in the L.A. of the 1980s.

*
Philip Michael Thomas.

*
Behn was a playwright and novelist best known for
The Kremlin Letter
and for his work at the Cherry Lane Theater in the 1950s and 1960s. Fosse was the choreographer and Academy Award-winning director of
Cabaret
and
All That Jazz
.

†
Officially called Nate ’n Al of Beverly Hills Delicatessen, it remains a popular spot on 414 North Beverly Drive.

†
Thomas released two albums in the 1980s, neither of which did quite as well as efforts by the Beatles.

‡
Jon Roberts’s untitled film project of the early 1980s involved a successful producer-screenwriter still active today, and according to other sources I interviewed, Jon sank two to three million dollars into it.

68

J
.
R
.:
My business functioned almost mechanically. The planes and boats made it in. The coke got pushed out. The money got flown to Panama. Sometimes I’d have to beat on somebody.

I started making little dumb mistakes. One time I was in San Francisco with Bernie Levine. He mentioned some asshole in Marin County who’d ripped him off. The guy had been a partner in Bernie’s recording studio, and when they closed it down, this jerk stole a gold record from the wall.

Bernie thought it would be funny if he brought me to the guy’s house for a drug deal, and I pretended to rob them in order to take back his gold record.

I hadn’t done a rip-off in years. Why not, for old times’ sake?

We drove up to the guy’s house in Bernie’s Volvo. He’d introduce me as a new supplier, and I’d do my thing. Then I’d “steal” Bernie’s car, and he’d meet me later.

The victim had a beautiful hillside house. Big sliding-glass doors with a wooden deck hanging over a canyon. The gold record was in a frame in the living room. We sit down, exchange some chitchat, and I reach into a briefcase for my gun, and
bang
—as I’m pulling it out, I hit the trigger and shoot out a window. The guy jumps up and runs right through a glass sliding door. He smashes the glass out and runs off the deck. I go out and see him rolling down a cliff into a culvert. He was a real Houdini.

I go back inside, and Bernie is panicking. “Oh my God! Let’s go.”

I smash the frame to grab the record, but Bernie screams, “Leave it!”

“Leave the gold?”

“It’s not made out of actual gold, Jon.”

We tore out of the neighborhood with Bernie worrying the whole time. “How could you try to shoot him?”

“How could you not tell me the gold record wasn’t actual gold?”

“I live here, and you tried to kill him?”

“What’s the worst these pussies do in San Francisco? Not invite you to a wine tasting?”

Bernie never forgave me. He was a criminal but not violent. Years later, after Bernie quit the drug business, he committed crime by scamming rich ladies. He was fifty years old, but he’d date seventy-five-year-olds. He took ballroom dancing lessons so that he could make these old biddies happy and take their money. Bernie had the same criminal mind as me, only he used dancing shoes where I used a gun.

The one thing I never admitted to Bernie was that I’d shot the gun by accident. I’d embarrassed myself. My reflexes were dull.

M
Y JUDGMENT
was slipping, too. Mickey and his friend Delmer—“Dad”—kept hiring a kicker who’d freeze up when the time came to push the loads out of our plane. Two times we almost had to ditch our loads. Mickey and Delmer tried to cover it up, but I knew about it from listening on the radios.

If we’d lost those loads, it would have been up to me to explain the loss to the Colombians, not them. I didn’t pay this half-wit to fly around in the sky and enjoy the view. I found out that Mickey and Delmer kept hiring the guy because he was some kind of cousin of Delmer’s.

I decided to fire him. I go down to Ultimate Boats on a day when I know the guy is working on boats with Delmer. I walk up to this half-wit cousin—a stringy kid in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt—and say, “You’re a piece of shit, and if it was up to me, I’d beat the piss out of you. Unfortunately, your cousin is Mickey’s partner. But you’ll never go in a plane again.”

This kid is so stupid that he pulls a knife on me, but instead of stabbing me, he runs to the stairs to the radio room. He gets about five feet up the stairs and I yank him down by his foot. He flips backward onto the floor. I say, “Whoops. I was wrong. It looks like you did fly again.”

I kick the half-wit in the face, and then I lose my head. A kicker needs good hands to throw the loads out. I wanted to make sure this kid never got put on a plane again, so I stomped his hand bones. I broke both his hands to pieces.

It was the right thing to do, because this kid put my ass on the line with the Colombians. If he screwed up bad enough, they’d break more than my hands.

But it was the wrong thing to do because he was Delmer’s cousin. That poisoned things for me. Delmer never talked to me the same again. It was bad judgment to strain my business like that, and it did cause problems for me down the road.

I should have beaten Delmer’s relative in private.

I
GOT
lackadaisical because it didn’t feel like I could get caught. I saw this in Bryan, too. One day we worked out together at the gym. I walked out past his car, and there was a terrible smell coming from it.

At the time Bryan drove the smallest car he could fit in, a Nissan
Z car, with the hatchback. I got twenty feet from his car and smelled a terrible stink. I said, “Bryan, did you leave some workout clothes or shoes in there?”