How to Get Away With Murder in America (4 page)

In 1973, Ricky Prado was posted to Homestead Air Force base, thirty miles south of Miami. He started dating a seventeen-year-old Hialeah girl named Maria and transferred into the reserves. In military terms, his PJ certification was like a Harvard MBA, but in the civilian job market, skills in knife fighting and improvised bomb making weren’t much in demand. The PJ corps had also, however, trained him as a paramedic, which helped him qualify for the Miami-Dade Fire Department. In 1974, Ricky joined the department as a fireman-paramedic assigned to a station near Hialeah. That year, he and Maria married and moved into a small apartment in Miami Springs. A few years later, she would give birth to their only child, a daughter.

The military had changed Ricky. His old schoolmate Teo, who preceded him as a fireman at Station 17, says, “Ricky carried himself like a Green Beret. He was very ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’ He was a straight cadet.” Ricky’s supervisors had a different view. One of them, Captain William McAllister, later told OCS investigators that Ricky “tried to act macho” and would often “talk of his training with special weapons and explosives.” Another supervisor, Lieutenant Dan Alexander, added that Ricky often made clear his dislike for the Cuban situation and his desire to “ ‘kick ass’ there.”

During his first months on the job, the hothead side of Ricky’s personality erupted. Between calls, the firemen slept in racks. Ricky’s was near that of a well-liked African American firefighter named Ron Elliott, a heavily built amateur boxer. According to Teo, Ricky grew irritated by Elliott’s snoring and one night “kicked Ronnie off his bed.” Ricky’s special operations training proved no match for Elliott’s boxing skills. Says Teo, “Ronnie took Ricky outside and kicked his ass.”

On December 16, 1974, Ricky was administratively charged with assaulting a fellow firefighter and briefly suspended.

Albert still lived with his parents, but as his cocaine profits rolled in, he reinvented his image from neighborhood bully to shot caller. With his high school friend El Rubio, the aspiring boxer, standing by as bodyguard, Albert held court on the front stoop of his house. He would sit on a porch swing in the evenings, conducting drug business and meeting with newly arrived Cubans to help them with legal or financial problems. Neighbors began referring to the twenty-four-year-old as the “Mayor of Hialeah.”

His role model was closer to Mafia don. His stepdaughter, Jenny Cartaia, who was nine when her mother (also named Jenny) began dating him in 1974, says Albert read two books over and over:
The Godfather
and a biography of Al Capone. His fixation with the Mafia was so extreme that he affected a guttural whisper like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone.

Around this time, says El Oso, Ricky gravitated back to Albert. Whether he had missed him or simply needed extra cash, he began doing odd jobs for him—providing muscle, delivering packages. In employment forms at the fire department, Ricky listed Albert’s phone number as his primary contact.

The year 1975 was a bumpy one for Albert. Troubles began when El Rubio fatally shot a jealous husband, upset over El Rubio’s attentions to his wife. El Rubio fled, but police arrested him at a boxing match in Fort Lauderdale. Albert paid for his legal defense, but after his acquittal—on grounds of self-defense—El Rubio went straight. According to El Oso, “Albert was hurt.”

Adding to the hurt, in February 1975, heavily armed relatives of El Rubio’s victim ambushed Albert on his front porch, wounding him in the hand and torso and blowing off one of his testicles. When he dove for cover behind his car, a black Corvette, its fiberglass body shattered and lacerated his face. According to statements Ricky made to OCS investigators in 1991, Albert summoned Ricky to the hospital, confessed that he was afraid, and implored him to become his bodyguard, because he trusted him with his life.

With the help of the ingeniously crooked Danny Mones, Albert found a way for Ricky and other toughs who worked for him to legally carry weapons. He founded a detective agency, which issued them gun permits. As a convicted felon, Albert could not legally own a detective firm, but he found a stooge to serve as his front, a self-professed alcoholic limousine driver and licensed private investigator named Ron Reed. Albert paid Reed to incorporate the firm, which he named the Transworld Detective Agency. The company’s corporate filings listed Albert’s house as its headquarters. Ricky was not just an employee; he was listed as a corporate officer, Transworld’s “president of records.”

Transworld’s second hire was El Oso. A year older than Albert and Ricky, El Oso (who at the time went by “Mike”) was also a Cuban immigrant, a former high school football star whose parents had settled briefly in Pasadena, California. Instead of pursuing offers to play in college, he, like Ricky, had joined the Army in hopes of fighting in Vietnam. During training, however, he gunned down a fellow soldier. Initially charged with murder, he squeaked out of the Army with a dishonorable discharge.

He settled in Miami in the early 1970s, just as a Bruce Lee craze was sweeping the country. El Oso had studied martial arts in Pasadena and became fascinated not just with fighting techniques but also with the Japanese warrior code, Bushido. He threw himself into training and became a locally renowned fighter. At six foot three and 230 pounds, he had crushing speed and agility. Ricky met him after El Oso opened his own dojo
in 1973, and he asked El Oso to become his sensei
.
The two quickly bonded. When El Oso had a son, Ricky became his godparent in a church ceremony. “Ricky and I saw ourselves like ronin,” El Oso says, “samurai fighters with no master.” When El Oso’s dojo ran out of money, forcing him to take a job driving a beer truck, Ricky brought him on as a Transworld detective. “Albert paid us two hundred dollars a week,” El Oso says, “plus 10 percent of the collections we did for him.”

Although Ricky obtained permission from the fire department to moonlight for Transworld, he never told anyone he was actually working for Albert. To further shield himself from the business he did for Albert, he adopted an alias, “Alex Padron,” a play on his middle name, Alejandro, and his last name. For years no one would connect Ricky the fireman, then CIA officer, with Alex the alleged drug courier, arsonist, extortioner, and hit man.

Ricky also kept his wife in the dark. When she spoke to OCS investigators in 1991, she detailed a dismal married life. From the OCS report: 

About once a month, Maria told investigators, Albert would take her and Ricky to dinner, usually at the Forge (where Gary Teriaca’s brother would be shot to death in 1977). The Forge’s owner, Al Malnik, was a close friend of Danny Mones’s, and another reputed protégé of Meyer Lansky’s. (Malnik is perhaps best known for his friendship with Michael Jackson in the 2000s, becoming godparent to his son, Prince Michael, a.k.a. “Blanket,” and later falsely claiming to be the executor of Jackson’s will.) Despite occasional outbursts of violence, the Forge was a fashionable and pricey Miami restaurant.

Maria told investigators that she believed Albert, who began buying racehorses with his father in the 1970s, acquired his wealth from winning at the track. Purchasing racehorses was a common means of laundering money in 1970s Miami. Albert not only laundered money though horses; he also founded his own stables and used them as cover to explain his growing wealth. When OCS investigators interviewed Ricky in 1991, he too told them that he “believed that San Pedro made a lot of money off the horses.”

Albert’s shooting, not surprisingly, added new layers of paranoia to his violent personality. He acquired houses adjacent to his parents’ house and razed them. He walled off the enlarged lot, put in guard shacks, and expanded his childhood home until it rose above the blue-collar neighborhood like a fortress. He installed bullet-resistant windows, security cameras, and walls on the upper balconies shaped like gun parapets. Visitors were frisked by his Transworld bodyguards, who also started Albert’s cars to check for bombs. Guard dogs ran the grounds. According to Albert’s third wife, Lourdes, the dogs were so vicious that Albert was once attacked by his favorite and had to be hospitalized. Jon Roberts, a frequent visitor in the 1970s, said, “There was nothing to figure out about Albert. He was a psycho, and everybody knew he was a psycho.”

The shooting also inspired a religious revival in Albert. He embraced his mother’s Santeria and became obsessed with San Lazaro—Saint Lazarus—the biblical figure exalted in Santeria for his purported power over death. Albert filled the house with statues of him, the biggest a nine-foot behemoth covered in a frock that Albert bragged was spun from gold. Others were painted in flesh tones and adorned with human-hair wigs. One room contained a shrine with a cauldron in which toy boats were placed to ensure safe passage of smugglers’ loads coming from the Bahamas. According to Albert’s stepdaughter, Jenny, Albert’s mother served as priestess in family Santeria ceremonies.

Brutality permeated the place. Although Albert and his father were close in public, inside the house they often engaged in violent physical contests. According to Jenny, “Every morning at six they’d wake up and argue. They would beat the crap out of each other. Albert once hit Frank with a glass ashtray so hard, he split his head open. We thought he’d killed him.”

Lourdes says her most unshakable memory was of Albert’s treatment of the dogs. He choked the more recalcitrant ones into submission by hanging them from hooks. It could take half an hour for an animal to lose consciousness and earn its release. “He did it for fun,” Lourdes says. “You’d see dogs with their tongues out, fighting to breathe.”

His stepdaughter Jenny Cartaia—in testimony before a U.S. immigration court in 1996, as well as in interviews with me—offered the most disturbing account of life with Albert. When she was thirteen, she says, Albert began raping her. When she was sixteen, after her mother went to prison on drug charges, Albert “married” her in a ceremony his mother presided over. Though Albert’s lawyer disputes her testimony, certain facts are tough to dismiss. At seventeen, Jenny gave birth to the first of two sons by Albert, whom she raised alongside her half brother (the son her mother had with Albert). As Jenny explains it, “My half brother is my kids’ half brother, but he’s also their uncle, too. It’s like in the movie
Chinatown.
”

Adding to the trauma of life with Albert were regular beatings. “Albert used to beat me with his weight-lifting belts,” Jenny says. “He’d throw me down and kick me. I have a scar where he broke a broomstick over my head. I was pregnant for the third time when he beat me so bad I lost my baby.”

What most confused Jenny about her childhood was the fact that no one intervened. “We’d have dinners and political parties in the house. I was a child. Nobody ever said, ‘Mr. San Pedro, how come you’re married to your daughter?’ Nobody would say such a thing. They worshipped him.”

Public officials led the parade of worshippers. Miami was in the midst of a gold rush, driven by the drug trade, and its political class was eminently corruptible. Into the fertile slime of the civic culture Albert ventured forth, plotting a new order of backroom influence, with himself at the top.

His outreach to the community began in the mid-1970s, when he organized neighborhood cookouts on the feast day of San Lazaro. He made friends in the Hialeah Police Department by hosting Fraternal Order of Police dinners and department judo tournaments at his house; Albert’s brother, John, later joined the department. The Hialeah police parked a cruiser protectively outside Albert’s house, and off-duty cops provided security alongside Transworld detectives. Following Albert’s indictment for cocaine trafficking, a popular Hialeah police lieutenant—later implicated in Albert’s extortion schemes—defended him as an “inspiration to kids” and told reporters that during his visits with Albert their time was spent “practicing martial arts and reading the Bible.”

Albert provided financial backing for a new Spanish-language paper,
Las Noticias,
and then for the English-language
Hialeah Times.
By the mid-1980s Albert had formed a close friendship with local news anchor Rick Sanchez (the future disgraced CNN host who would get himself fired in 2010 for making anti-Semitic comments). Sanchez never did any reporting on Albert, but he was a frequent guest in his home and companion during nights out on the town. Albert used the media he controlled to steer political coverage, which made him useful—or dangerous—to local politicians. One of the first politicians he supported was Congressman Claude Pepper, who had represented Hialeah since 1963 and soon became a guest at Albert’s parties.

In the early 1980s, Albert hired two lobbyists—political bottom-feeders, but well-connected ones—to manage his political contributions. One was Donald Dugan, a short, 350-pound bald man whose other distinguishing features, according to a police report, were “severe rashes on both elbows.” Dugan had worked for Congressman Pepper, and had ties to the drug-smuggling Tabraue family. The other lobbyist was a former top aide to Governor Bob Graham named Ron Book, who would later plead guilty to taking illegal campaign contributions in an unrelated matter.

Inspired by Danny Mones’s lavish dinners for judges at the University of Miami, Albert moved his San Lazaro feasts from the streets of Hialeah to the Doral Hotel. They became major events, drawing local mayors, police officials, and countless judges, county supervisors, and political hopefuls eager for Albert’s support. At the feasts’ peak, more than a thousand guests attended. Albert, who normally eschewed the spotlight, would make a grand entrance with a retinue of bodyguards who carried his nine-foot-tall San Lazaro statue to a place of honor while Catholic clergy offered blessings.

During this time, Albert became closer to Bobby Erra and his girlfriend, Marsha Ludwig. Ludwig, who referred to herself as Erra’s “wife” although they never married, lent her own cachet to Albert’s political standing. She had grown up with a close relationship to Dade County’s most illustrious family, the Grahams, cattle ranchers whose sons Philip and Cap became, respectively, publisher of the
Washington Post
and a Florida state senator
.
Ludwig had gone to high school with Cap’s son, Bob, and had introduced him to the woman he would marry, Adele. Ludwig had remained friends with the couple into adulthood. When Bob Graham became governor of Florida, Ludwig gave Albert a connection to the governor’s mansion, which he would avail himself of when the time was right.

By age thirty, Albert was on his way to becoming a leading citizen of South Florida. But his rising stature in no way crimped his cocaine trafficking. As he entertained police and local political elites, he stored cocaine under a doghouse in the yard. In the 1980s, he relocated his base of operations to a nearby barber shop, and was moving between 100 and 480 kilos of coke every month.

Albert’s growing closeness with Erra and Ludwig didn’t just benefit his social standing. It signaled a seismic shift in the underworld. After Albert’s original partner, Gary Teriaca, disappeared in 1981, Erra (despite his antidrug views) took over Teriaca’s partnership with Albert. He and Albert didn’t just distribute coke together; they also joined in extortion and offshore money-laundering operations. When their partnership was exposed, federal investigators believed it represented a historic first: a criminal alliance in which a Cuban American attained equal footing with a senior member of the Italian Mafia. The success Albert enjoyed in the criminal world while he simultaneously suborned much of Dade County’s political leadership would eventually earn him his most enduring nickname, bestowed by the local media: “The Great Corrupter.”