American Desperado (17 page)

“Does the girl want anything from Mr. Sullivan?” the doctor asked.

“This girl would rather everybody forget about the whole thing,” I said.

The doctor promised me he would explain the situation to Ed
Sullivan. Two days later he called me and said, “I talked to Mr. Sullivan. He’s much better now, and he’d rather forget the whole incident.”

A week later my uncle Joe tells me to meet him at La Luna in Little Italy.
^*
He had heard from my uncle Sam about my seeing Ed Sullivan’s doctor. When I sat down in the restaurant, he said, “What the fuck is this shit about?”

I told him we’d drugged Ed Sullivan as part of a plan to blackmail him. I didn’t say that we’d originally done it just for kicks. When I got to the part about the whore trying to take Ed Sullivan’s dick out and him going bananas, my uncle slammed his drink on the table. “You fucking young kids, you’ve got to do every fucking thing in the world. Stick to your business. Leave Ed Sullivan alone. I watch his show.”

Who knew my uncle Joe’s favorite program was
The Ed Sullivan Show
?

M
Y UNCLE
was right about sticking to the business. Between Directoire and Salvation, Andy and I were making good money. We went to Bradley and Bobby Wood and said, “Let’s go get another club.” And that’s what we did. We turned The Envoy East restaurant on 44th Street into a club. We opened a place called the Boathouse in midtown and Salvation Two near Central Park West. We took over another place called the Church, which was an actual church. We named it Sanctuary.
^†
We took cuts of other clubs up and down Manhattan.

Everybody came to our clubs—Mick Jagger, Teddy Kennedy, Johnny Carson. I met people I never imagined existed, like that freak artist Andy Warhol, who used to come to our clubs all the time. He tried to get Andy to pose as a model. I gave Andy a lot
of shit for that because Warhol was obviously very gay for him. Bruce Lee was one of the nicest people I met in our clubs. He wasn’t famous yet, and he was small, but you could see from the way he carried himself that he was in phenomenal condition. I used to joke that I was going to fight him. I’m glad I never fought Bruce Lee. After I saw his movies, I realized I probably couldn’t have taken that guy with a baseball bat. Another man I found interesting in our clubs was John Cassavetes.
^*
He’d ask a lot of questions about how Andy and I ran the clubs, what we did for fun. Even though he was in the movies, he did not put on airs.

None of these people would have given me the time of day if it weren’t for Bradley Pierce. If we didn’t have Bradley, we’d have been out of business in a week. As much as he was into peace and love, Bradley was shrewd. One of his tricks was getting certain girls to follow him—a group of fashion models who went wherever he told them to go. He would tell them, “Come to this club for a week or two and drink your brains out.” If a club was dying a little, he’d send his army of models, and it would get hot again.

Bradley had other tricks, too. He told us, “Always keep a line of people outside on the street. I don’t care if the club is empty inside. I want people outside dying to get in.”

No matter how much LSD he took, Bradley knew his business better than anybody.

O
NCE WE
were in the club world, in the summer we did what everybody else did. We left the city. Everybody went to the Hamptons or Fire Island. Andy and I rented houses in both places at different times, but on Fire Island we found an incredible old farmhouse on the water that we got for nothing because the owner was a degenerate gambler who owed my uncle. I bought my first nice boat, a Donzi
^†
that we used for water-skiing. Both Andy and I had dogs,
and they wouldn’t let you take dogs on the ferry to the island, so we’d hire a helicopter or a seaplane.

The seaplanes picked us up by the East River. One time Andy and I got in the plane wacked out on PCP. The thing that fascinated me about flying over New York was the bridges. That day we got up in the air, and I told Andy, “I’m going to force this motherfucker to fly our plane under a bridge.”

Andy laughed. “He ain’t gonna do it, Jon.”

“Oh, I’m going to make him do it.”

“What do you mean you’re going to ‘make him do it’?”

I pulled my piece out. “Andy, I’m going to put this up that pilot’s ass if he don’t do it.”

“Don’t do that to the pilot, Jon. He’s flying us.”

But I’m tripping hard. Everything is becoming out of proportion in my mind. I’m going crazy because I want to fly under a bridge. My dog, a beautiful Doberman named Brady, could feel my aggression.

Brady gets uptight and lunges at the pilot.

The pilot screams, “Control your dog.”

I say, “Look, man. I communicate with my dog. My dog wants to fly under the bridges. He’s scared to go over the bridges at this point in time.”

Andy starts laughing his ass off. He takes his gun out, aims it at the pilot, and says, “Do what the dog says.”

This poor pilot. He flies under every bridge for us.

The next week when we called his company for another plane, the owner apologized for the pilot. “He should not have argued with you,” he said.

This man knew who we were. I was barely twenty-one, and Andy and I lived like kings—if you can imagine kings who smoke PCP every day.

*
The original Directoire was on 48th Street between Third and Lexington.

*
An aspiring actor in the late 1960s, Roundtree found fame in 1971 playing Shaft in the film of the same name.

*
Sullivan banned the Doors from his show after Jim Morrison sang “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” from the song “Light My Fire.”

*
Not the same Luna restaurant in the Bronx below Jon’s parents’ apartment. La Luna was a classic Neapolitan eatery off Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy.

*
The actor, director, and screenwriter who died in 1989.

†
Directoire fashions rose out of the French Revolution and emphasized a classless informality that influenced the styles of the 1970s.

†
Ed Sullivan was host of
The Ed Sullivan Show
, which ran for twenty-three years on CBS and introduced America to such performers as Elvis and the Beatles.

†
Sanctuary, located in an old Baptist church on West 43rd Street, featured a mural with fornicating angels. It billed itself as the “most decadent discotheque in the history of the world.”

†
The Donzi was a premier small racing boat made by legendary boat racer and builder Don Aronow.

17

J
UDY
:
Of course I went to Jon’s clubs. I loved to dance. Everybody loved Directoire. It was such a wonderful time to be in New York.

When Jon first came back from Vietnam, I worried so much for him. He was so withdrawn. I was living in Boston then. I’d divorced my husband and was finishing my degree at Emerson College. I moved to New York a year later.

What a difference that year made. Jon was so successful in the nightclub-management business. He was on top of the world. He had impeccable clothes. Everything was tailored. He wore custom boots and carried a cane. He had the craziest collection of canes.

I got to know Jon’s friend Andy. They were inseparable. Andy was a very nice guy. I was not clueless. I knew Andy was not a nice, nice guy. Maybe he was a bad guy. But he was a nice bad guy. To me, he was a man of his word. I could look in Andy’s eyes and see he
wasn’t all bad. He was a caring person. He was a genuine person. I believed he was a good influence on my brother.

J
.
R
.:
Andy woke up every day with a new scheme. Andy had a guy in the main U.S. post office. When the credit card companies sent out new cards, they’d arrive in duffel bags at the post office. Every few weeks Andy’s mailman would steal a duffel bag of new credit cards and sell them to Andy. He’d roll up to my apartment in his Lincoln and yell, “Come on, Jon. Let’s go burn some cards.”

We’d buy thousands of dollars of merchandise up and down Manhattan. We made money from the scheme, but we did it mostly for kicks.

Any information we found, we’d figure out a way to use it.

We had that maître d’ at Maxwell’s Plum who was a degenerate gambler. When he fell behind on his debts, he earned his way out by telling us where they kept the safe at Maxwell’s Plum. We sent guys in to rob it.

When I worked those two weeks at E. F. Hutton, I made friends with a stockbroker about my age. We met again after I was into the nightclubs. He had moved to Merrill Lynch and had an idea as to how to steal bearer bonds. This scheme was so big, I took it to my uncle Joe. He brought in a kid from another family, Vincent Pacelli,
^*
who had done broker-firm rip-offs before. They stole a million in bearer bonds. Everybody made out, though later on that scheme ended up causing some problems for my uncle.
^†

Every day Andy and I were like sharks looking for more people we could swallow.

• • •

A
NDY AND
I both loved dogs. He had a little bitch Doberman named Nicky, and she was best friends with my Doberman, Brady. We used to train our dogs together. You have to work to keep your dog aggressive. If the dog doesn’t bite somebody occasionally, the dog will get rusty.

What we used to do with our dogs was not very nice, but I was not a nice person back then, and this is what we did: We would drive down to the Lower East Side. There was an area where all the bums would build fires in trash cans and stand around drinking. We’d pull up. I’d get out of the car with a twenty-dollar bill and say, “Hey, man. Here’s twenty.”

“Twenty dollars?” The bum would be all happy.

“In a few seconds you’re going to do me a favor,” I’d explain.

Andy would let out one of our dogs from the car and yell, “Get him!”

His dog or my dog would go after the bum. The dog would knock these bums to the ground and bite them all over. When the dog got his senses resharpened by attacking a person, we’d pull him off. If the bums were really bitten bad, I’d throw them an extra twenty.

Andy, with his sense of humor, would laugh his ass off. As many times as we’d do it, it was always a little different. You’d watch a guy’s face when he saw the dog and realized it was coming for him. You cannot outrun a dog. Some guys were smart enough to hold still and get the attack over as quick as possible.

Others would try to outrun the dog, which is good for the dog because then he gets to practice chasing. We were happy when they ran. One time we had a hobo who was fast. You wouldn’t have thought it, this guy dressed in rags. But he shot around the corner like lightning, and so did my dog. We jumped in the car and drove around the block. No dog.

I got out and heard the hobo screaming. He’d jumped into the entrance of a basement apartment. He was shaking the window bars, screaming for help. Every time he grabbed the bars, Brady would bite his hands. With this guy, we didn’t call off my dog for
a long time. We let him have fun. The motherfucker made us come around the corner after him. That’s against the rules.

I used Brady in the clubs. I’d keep him in the office. If a fight broke out on the floor, I’d let him go on the brawlers. If somebody was giving me a really hard time, I would take him into my office and put the dog on him.

I drove with Brady in the car. In New York, there’s always some jerk on the street wanting to get into an argument. If a stupid moron gave me the finger, I’d open the door and let Brady out. He’d jump in the guy’s car window and bite his face.

B
RADY WAS
such a good dog because I took dog-training lessons from Joe Da Costa. Joe was a professional killer. He was also a dog breeder and a really good guy. There are all kinds of assholes who say they know how to train a dog. Joe is the only guy I ever met who really knew how. He was so good they used his dogs in the movie
The Doberman Gang
.
^*

I spent a lot of time at his place in Jersey learning about dogs. I would put on a padded sleeve, and he’d have his dogs attack me so I could learn how to fight against a canine. He trained Brady to smell for gun oil. If somebody came to my place with a gun on him, my dog would pin him to the wall. I wouldn’t tell people he was trained to sniff the gun oil.

He’d pin the asshole with a gun to the wall. “How does he know I got a gun?”

“He just knows,” I’d say. “He’s a good dog.”

Joe showed me how to train my dogs to shit on command. In the winter when it was ten below zero, I could walk out with my dog, tell him “Shit,” and he would do it. No fooling around.

Most important, Joe knew how to train a dog’s heart by building his confidence, just like a boxer. When he had a new dog, he
would get in his face and make weird noises like
ssssss, ssssss
to agitate the dog until he snapped at him. When the dog snapped, Joe would run away, like he was scared. This builds heart in the dog. Then Joe would fight the dog with a bamboo stick. He would hit the dog harder and harder until the dog believed in himself. If the dog was good, Joe would fight him with a rubber hose. He could beat the shit out of the dog, and that dog would not back down, because by then that dog was fearless and he thought of himself as a monster. A dog who thinks like that will attack and attack because he’s got such a big heart.