How to Get Away With Murder in America (3 page)

Albert San Pedro, speaking unknowingly into an undercover cop’s tape recorder, once shared the quality he valued most in men who worked for him: “The best man is the quiet man.” Ricky Prado, who has no arrest record, has never given an interview, and spent most of his CIA career in its clandestine Directorate of Operations branch, is the consummate quiet man.

He was born Enrique Alejandro Prado on May 3, 1950, in Santa Clara, Cuba. One source told me his father, Enrique Sr., was a policeman, but I couldn’t confirm this (or reports that Ricky was orphaned and then adopted by the Prado family). Whatever the family’s circumstances, the Prados were on the losing side of the revolution in 1959, and soon afterwards they fled to Miami. They settled in Miami Springs, a 1920s planned community that was fraying by the 1960s but was still considered a cut above nearby Hialeah, where most Cuban immigrants landed. Enrique Sr. opened a lawn-mower shop and later became a locksmith. “Ricky’s parents were old-fashioned Cubans,” says El Oso, the murderer caught by Fisten’s CENTAC, who happens to be one of Ricky’s oldest friends. “All his parents talked about was the nightmare of Castro, how the communists ruined everything.”

Enrique was an only child, a slightly built, fair-skinned, dark-haired boy who seldom spoke. Kids in school anglicized his name to Ricky. A former classmate whom the OCS interviewed described him as a “hothead” who was “always fascinated with weapons.” A schoolmate of his and Albert’s who spoke with me on the condition that I use his nickname, “Teo,” says, “By high school Ricky got interested in karate. It gave him self-control, even though by then he was friends with Albert, who fought everybody.”

Albert was also born in Cuba, a few months before Ricky. His father, Frank, was a racehorse trainer who also worked with the Mafia. Many Cubans who immigrated to Florida had Mafia connections, and such ties were not always nefarious. Until the revolution, the Mafia had run Cuba’s casinos and associated hotels. When Castro kicked out the mob, many mafiosi decamped to Miami Beach and brought their loyal Cuban employees, from bellhops to bouncers, with them.

Frank San Pedro came to Florida before the revolution and found occasional work training horses at Hialeah Park racetrack. He had ties to a Genovese capo named Pasquale “Patsy” Erra, who ran gambling interests in Cuba and owned the Dream Bar in Miami Beach, a haven for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Santos Trafficante. When Frank San Pedro couldn’t make ends meet at the track, he did odd jobs for Erra and his underboss Vincent Teriaca.

By the mid-sixties, Frank had purchased a home in Hialeah, a blue-collar community of nine-hundred-square-foot cinder-block homes, optimistically called “Sun Ray” houses, near the airport. With its own mayor and police department, distinct from nearby Miami’s, Hialeah became one of the first places where Cubans achieved political power. The San Pedros lived on one of the last lots on 12th Street, next to a huge water treatment plant. Here, Frank shoehorned his family into the American Dream.

Pictures of Albert and his brother, John, born in 1962, show well-fed boys with crew cuts, wearing argyle sweaters. Photos also reveal Albert’s disability: He was cross-eyed. His mother, Dulce, a devout Christian and also a practitioner of Santeria, the Caribbean folk religion, would describe her son’s condition as “God’s special mark.” She also saw destiny in the unusual manner of his birth. According to Albert’s third wife, Lourdes, “When Albert was born, his ass was the first thing that came out. His mother would say, ‘My little Albert came into the world seated like a king.’ ”

Children in Albert’s middle school, ignorant of the portentous meanings of his crossed eyes and regal birth, called him El Bizco—“cross-eyed.” In response, Albert squinted and attempted to rebrand himself as El Chino—“the Chinese.” “Albert made himself the toughest kid in school,” says Teo. “Nobody called Albert ‘Bizco’ after seventh grade. He was ‘El Chino.’ ”

Ricky and Albert met around 1966 while attending Miami Springs High School. Both short for their age, they shared a passion for weight lifting. Albert’s father built a weight room in their house, and it became a hangout for a tight-knit group of tough boys who called themselves a fraternity. The biggest of them was Miguel Garcia, known as El Rubio—“Blondie”—because of his fair hair. Six foot two and 240 pounds in high school, he tried to make it as a boxer but would become Albert’s first partner in the drug trade. Carlos Redondo, another member of the crew, would be indicted for cocaine trafficking with Albert in the early 1990s. Two other members, Juan Sosa and Armando Mirabal, would later join in Albert’s coke business, but following disputes over money he would allegedly attempt to kill both of them—and allegedly succeed in the case of Mirabal. Though Ricky would spend nearly a decade after high school working as Albert’s bodyguard, he would be the only member to maintain a clean rap sheet.

In school, Albert also started his first business: For fifty dollars, he would kick anybody’s ass. “If Albert couldn’t take someone physically, he would use a baseball bat, a tire iron, whatever,” says Teo. “He was like a mobster guy already. Ricky was always by his side. He was his lieutenant.” Teo worked part-time at a boxing gym, and he saw more of Albert’s crew when they started to train there. “Everybody would filter out when they showed up,” he says. “When Albert talked, he whispered. Because he was cross-eyed, you never knew if he was looking at you. He was unsettling.” Teo adds, “One time our gym brought in a judo instructor. Albert and Ricky came in, and the judo teacher said, ‘If you want to take my class, put on this judo outfit.’ Albert said, ‘I don’t dress in that crap. Just teach me how to kill people and shit.’ ”

While other kids rode the currents of free love sweeping the nation in the late 1960s, Albert and Ricky went in the opposite direction. They kept their hair short and pomaded it back in ducktails. They didn’t smoke weed. Albert acquired a Chevy Chevelle SS muscle car. “When people saw that car coming,” says Teo, “they ran.”

Ricky did not entirely fit in with Albert’s band of delinquents. He dressed better than the others, cultivated an air of polite respect toward adults, maintained good grades, and worked part-time at a clothing store frequented by cops. One of them encouraged Ricky to enroll in a dog-training course he taught, and Ricky told friends he wanted to become a police officer.

In 1969, after graduation, Albert achieved his first blush of public infamy. In a local park where amateur football teams played each other, Albert and his weight-lifting fraternity took on an undefeated and mostly Anglo team known as the Bonecrushers. According to numerous witnesses, when Albert’s team started to lose, he ran onto the field with an old Thompson submachine gun and sprayed the grass, sending the Bonecrushers running for their lives. Fisten, who read the police report two decades later, says, “The report amazed me. Albert fired a machine gun in a park, and they let him go. At nineteen, he was already above the law.”

Soon thereafter, Ricky left Miami. “Ricky didn’t want to go around beating on people forever,” says El Oso. “He wanted to do something with his life. Ricky is loyal to the end of the earth, especially to Albert. But after high school Albert was like an insane man. Ricky wanted to get away from him.”

He chose as his escape route the U.S. military. “Ricky wanted to go back to Cuba and kick ass against the communists,” El Oso says. “He thought Vietnam would be good practice.” He sought to enter a branch of service that offered a pathway into special operations, but a recruiter talked him into entering the Air Force and trying out for its pararescue jumper program. PJs were originally trained to rescue downed pilots, but in Vietnam their mission grew to include infiltrating enemy territory to help target bombs dropped by Air Force planes. PJs had evolved into the Air Force’s special operations branch, and they trained alongside Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs, as well as in their own course nicknamed “Superman School.” Ricky had bet that PJs would remain active in Vietnam even as the Army was pulling back, says El Oso, but by the time he completed the nearly two years required to become a PJ, U.S. involvement was ending. Instead of kicking communist ass, Ricky spent the early 1970s on training missions, a certified Superman stuck in a peacetime military.

Back in Florida, Albert tried various ways of making money. He attempted to promote concerts by renting a local VFW hall and hiring bands. That venture ended after a dispute with a musician. According to Teo, he “beat the hippie with his own guitar. Albert didn’t like hippies.” But he nevertheless found a way to profit from them: selling marijuana. Within a few weeks Albert was set up by undercover federal agents, whom he subsequently attempted to have killed by a would-be hit man who then ratted on him. Albert pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder a federal agent—a capital offense—but was sentenced to just three years of probation. Back on the streets, he tried his hand at pimping. Soon he was arrested outside a motel for beating a john with a baseball bat. Charges were dropped when the victim declined to testify.

 Anger-management issues persisted. Albert was arrested for attacking a motorist who had cut him off. This victim, too, declined to testify. A few weeks later, Albert was arrested on suspicion of selling stolen car radios and for carrying an illegal firearm—a charge for which he was convicted. All these arrests took place in an eighteen-month period, while Albert was on probation for attempted murder. That he stayed out of prison is something of a judicial miracle, or the result of legal guidance from his father’s Mafia patron, Patsy Erra. Following his twenty-second birthday, in 1972, however, Albert underwent a transformation. He stopped getting arrested. His record would stay clean for the next fourteen years while he became not only a crime boss but also one of South Florida’s most influential citizens. El Oso offers a simple explanation for the turnabout: “Albert hooked up with the Mafia. They taught him how to be better.”

Patsy Erra was a “layoff man”—a banker to bookies—and ran an operation that stretched from Miami to New York to Las Vegas. He ran the operation from the Dream Bar, with a low-level underboss named Vincent Teriaca. Both Erra and Teriaca had sons near Albert’s age. According to federal law enforcement sources, Erra’s son Bobby, born in 1945, began taking over the gambling business in the early 1970s, assuming control in 1973, when his father died. Teriaca had two sons: Gary, born in 1948, and Craig, two years younger. Craig—who would end up shot to death in 1977 by Richard Schwartz—shied away from crime and worked as a golf pro, but Gary started taking bets even before he graduated from high school.

Gary Teriaca and Bobby Erra grew up together, best friends. Mirroring their fathers’ boss/underboss relationship, Gary was subservient to Bobby, although the two never officially worked together on a Mafia crew. Bobby has always denied he was in the Mafia—denials contradicted by other Mafia members who cooperated with the government, though it appears to be true that he never became a made man, as his father did. According to Jon Roberts, the old Mafia formalities didn’t interest him or Gary.

Neither son fit the stock image of a gangster. Roberts, who met them in the early 1970s, described them as “country club wiseguys.” Both attended the University of Miami in Coral Gables. They played tennis and golf, and Bobby was a champion boat racer and sportfisherman. They dressed in Top-Siders and Izod shirts, with knotted sweaters worn over their shoulders. A 1975 MDPD intelligence report stated, “Wherever one is, the other will be. Both subjects hang out at La Gorce Country Club, the Jockey Club, the Palm Bay Club and the Doral Country Club.” Bobby golfed with PGA champion Raymond Floyd. He dated a former Orange Bowl Queen named Marsha Ludwig, from a prominent Dade County family. He was short, with a wide, athletic frame, a mullet haircut, and a claw-shaped left hand, injured in a boat-racing accident. Despite the lofty social circles in which he moved, he had a reputation as a tough guy. In 1974 he was arrested (but not convicted) in Las Vegas for beating a man nearly to death with a water pitcher.

Gary Teriaca was the pretty boy of the two—lean and dark, with fine features. His father bought him his first Porsche when he was in high school. In the early 1970s, Gary moved into a waterfront home in Bay Point Estates, a gated community, with a girlfriend who had inherited an oil fortune. He hung out at the Palm Bay, a yacht-and-tennis club famous for its floating heliport and a popular spot for visiting celebrities such as James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Oleg Cassini. The club served as a launching pad for Gary’s new business—selling cocaine. A user himself, Gary initially kept his business secret from Bobby, who was a Mafia traditionalist when it came to drugs. Marsha Ludwig would later tell federal prosecutors that Bobby “was very antidrug and thought people who did drugs were disgusting and weak.”

Albert came into their world as an awkward Cuban kid. His unnerving physical presence and ferocity were assets when it came to collecting debts, but he wasn’t country club material. No Cuban was. As Italian Americans, Bobby and Gary crossed social barriers their fathers couldn’t have, but it wasn’t yet time for the Cubans. They were still washing ashore in oil-drum rafts. Bobby allegedly gave Albert odd collection jobs but barely acknowledged the cross-eyed kid.

Gary, on the other hand, had a motive for befriending Albert. Albert bragged that he had a source for coke: a Bay of Pigs vet running a smuggling operation. The CIA had trained its Bay of Pigs fighters well. After the agency cut them loose, quite a few put their military skills to use penetrating coastal defenses and moving contraband. They pioneered large-scale smuggling into Florida, and by the late seventies the state had displaced California and Texas as North America’s drug gateway.

But Gary needed Albert for more than just connections. Albert served as a front for wholesale drug buys that might otherwise catch the attention of the Mafia and Gary’s father. The arrangement worked just as well for Albert. The cocaine he obtained for Gary was worthless in working-class Hialeah, and Albert couldn’t get past the doors of the exclusive clubs where top buyers could be found. Standing beside Gary with his freakishly pumped torso and arms, squinting to hide his crossed eyes, Albert looked like Quasimodo. But for business, the two were a perfect match.

Gary built a fast trade out of the Palm Bay, then looked to another hot spot for rich people behaving badly: Aspen, Colorado. He had a college friend, Steven Grabow, who’d moved there to enjoy life as a ski bum, and he offered him a job distributing cocaine from Miami. Within a few years, the two were moving up to a hundred kilos a month into Aspen. By 1980, MDPD intelligence units ranked Albert and Gary among Dade County’s top ten coke distributors.

Gary groomed Albert for criminal success by introducing him to an attorney named Danny Mones. Like Gary, Mones was a second-generation gangster, the son of a top associate of Meyer Lansky’s. It’s said that Lansky paid for Mones’s law-school education at the University of Miami—and made the payoffs necessary for him to pass the bar. Mones, as his former law partner Frank Marks put it, “couldn’t argue a ticket in traffic court,” but he was a ninja in the dark arts of money laundering and political influence. The lavish dinners he hosted for judges and other elected officials at the University of Miami would prompt a statewide call for campaign finance reform by the time of Mones’s death from cancer, in 1997. But as Marks eulogized him to me, “There was nobody better than Danny at corrupting a judge. He had a gift.”

Mones’s guidance contributed to the sophistication that Albert began to show after 1972. Albert also learned from Gary’s sartorial refinement. He wiped the grease from his hair and traded his wifebeater T-shirts for guayaberas worn under tailored jackets, affecting a look later described as “tropical John Gotti.” He never got into the Palm Bay Club, but the old Miami Beach Mafia spots near the Dream Bar became his haunts. Unlike the Cubans busing tables, Albert came in the front door.

Yet he never entirely shed the reputation he’d earned in his youth. When Gary and Steven Grabow discussed their coke operations behind Albert’s back, their code name for him was “the Maniac.”