American Desperado (19 page)

J
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R
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After the Bobby Wood murder Andy and I pulled back from the clubs. We still ran them, but we moved into the background. When Bradley founded a new club, Hippopotamus,
^*
we took a piece of the door, but we didn’t keep an office there.

I was trying to settle down by then. In 1970 I got involved with my first serious girlfriend, Phyllis LaTorre.
^†
I had met Phyllis as a result of buying my Donzi boat. One habit I got from my father was I never put my name on anything. Anything I bought, I’d give money to
somebody else, have him buy it in his name. I never wanted to have assets on paper that the government could trace to me. If it was a boat, a car, a place to live, I’d give cash to somebody I could trust or control, and he’d take care of everything. All I wanted were the keys. I bought my Donzi through a man who owned a hippie clothing boutique in Manhattan. After we did the deal on the boat, he said, “Jon, come to my shop anytime. I’ll take care of you. Anything you want.”

Phyllis worked as a manager in this guy’s shop. She was his girlfriend. I met her when I first went in there. She was a petite Italian girl, and she was hot as shit. My friend said take anything I wanted from his shop. I took Phyllis.

I was twenty-one and Phyllis was at least thirty. The way I’d lived my life, I could not relate to girls my age. Though I enjoyed their bodies, their heads were empty. Phyllis was wise into the bottom of her eyes. She knew the things I was going to tell her before I told her. After we met, we wasted no time. Phyllis lived in a brownstone on Central Park West and 73rd Street. A few days after we met, she said, “Come on. Move in here with me.”

Phyllis was the first woman who taught me anything. Not even my mother had taught me anything. I was a savage person when we met. Phyllis was definitely a teacher. She knew about restaurants and cooking. She went to movies, theaters, art shows. She had no hang-ups about showing me what she liked when we had sex. Phyllis had her own mind. She was an Italian girl, but she wasn’t prejudiced like most Italians. She liked black people. She was good friends with the comedian Richard Pryor and with movie people. And it wasn’t like with me and Jimi Hendrix. They were actual friends who truly liked her. She was a very interesting girl.

J
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Everything about Phyllis was interesting. She looked interesting. She was a classic Italian beauty, with olive skin, black hair, and such an incredible bone structure.

Phyllis was very avant-garde. She used to wear really weird outfits.
Bright colors and furs. One summer she wore nothing but white. Whatever she was into, she was striking.

Jon has loved every woman he’s been involved with. But Phyllis was the smartest of them all. She read. She was into politics. She was adventurous. When a friend of mine took me to Transcendental Meditation, she came. She even tried to get Jon to come to our meditation sessions to try to calm him down.

Phyllis did not take any crap from my brother. She dominated the conversations with him, but it didn’t bother him a bit. He enjoyed having a strong woman in his life.

J
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After a few months living in her brownstone, Phyllis and I moved to a penthouse up the street. It was a gorgeous place with cathedral windows overlooking the park. Barbra Streisand was our neighbor. Not that we were friends, but this was the kind of building we were in.

Judy moved into Phyllis’s old brownstone, and they were like sisters. Phyllis and I never got married, but to the people who knew us, we were a husband and wife.

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Jon finally got a family. This was a real positive. Phyllis had a big Italian family who took him in like a son. Jon was very close to Phyllis’s father, her sister Fran, and their cousin Henry. Jon and Henry were like brothers.

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When I first laid eyes on Phyllis, I thought she was a hippie Jew girl. Was I wrong. Phyllis’s family was all Mafia. Her father was a heroin guy out of Long Island, a real funny character who would get into a good scheme and
bang
, he’d fuck it up and end up in prison. He was in and out of prison.
^*
When I met him, he was
into a successful scheme with cocaine. He got pharmaceutical coke from a guy inside Merck.
^*
The first good coke I ever did was the Merck stuff from my father-in-law. One sniff and your whole throat would freeze, then the freeze would spread until your brain felt like a chunk of ice. I never thought coke would end up being my future. Back then it was just a kick for Phyllis’s friends, like Richard Pryor when he came to our house for parties.

My brother-in-law, Henry Borelli,
^†
was a trip and a half. He had tried out to be a New York cop, but they wouldn’t let him on the force. So he went the other way. He was with a crew of Italian kids who later got the nickname Murder Machine. All they did was kill people for hire. They had a pizza shop in Brooklyn where they’d feed the people they killed into butcher machines and take their bodies out in buckets. They must have chopped up fifty guys back there.
^‡
Henry was also a dependable shooter, and he did a lot of work for John Gotti. Henry and I never worked too much together, but we were good friends.

Phyllis’s sister Fran was with a guy named Jack Bliss. He was Puerto Rican–Brazilian. He always wore tropical shirts with toucan birds on them. He loved music. He loved to dance. Everybody called him “Jack in the Toucan Shirt.”

Jack worked for my friend Vincent Pacelli. Vincent had been involved in stealing the bearer bonds from Merrill Lynch, but his main business was heroin. He and his father, Vincent Sr., ran the original “French Connection.”
^*
Jack worked for them as a courier. He drove all over the country, moving their shit in the trunk of his car.

Jack was the first guy I knew to drive a Mercedes 280 SL, the two-seater convertible. I drove a Cadillac Eldorado then, and you could practically fit Jack’s Mercedes in the trunk. We used to laugh at his little car.

But Jack showed me what that Mercedes could do. One day Jack called me from Florida. He was down there to pick up some heroin but had met a guy who had twenty kilos of cocaine. This was an ungodly amount in the early 1970s. Jack asked if I knew anyone in New York who could buy that much coke. The price was a million dollars—a huge, huge sum of money then.

The old mustache Mafia guys still had the mentality that heroin was okay because they thought only the blacks used it. They didn’t know Italians were junkies, too. Other drugs, like cocaine, they didn’t want nobody touching. These old guys were just very set in their ways.

Through my nightclubs I knew a Jewish guy named Ray Mintner
^†
who had a lot of money and was into different illegal things. He was a long shot, but I had nothing to lose by asking him if he was interested in twenty kilos of coke. Ray was nuts about egg rolls, so to get him in a good mood, I took him to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, where they made the best egg rolls in New York. When I told him about my friend with twenty kilos, Ray did not bat an eyelash. He’d have the million dollars as soon as Jack brought the coke back to New York.

I phoned Jack in Florida. He put the twenty kilos in his Mercedes, and sixteen hours later he was in New York. For an investment of a few egg rolls, I made a $50,000 commission off the deal.

What impressed me wasn’t the money I made from cocaine. My eyes were still not open to its potential. I was impressed by Jack’s Mercedes. Until then I had always looked down on foreign cars. When I told Phyllis how fast Jack made the trip in his little Mercedes, she used this to her advantage. She said, “Since you like foreign cars now, buy me an XKE.”

For as long as I could remember, Phyllis had been bugging me to buy her an XKE, the Jaguar with a twelve-cylinder engine and long hood. I went out and bought a matching pair of XKEs.

Poor Jack. He made all that money from his coke deal, and he expanded his heroin business. He hooked up with a black guy in Harlem named One-Eye Willie, who was in business with Nicky Barnes.
^*
Jack started supplying Nicky with heroin he got from Vincent Pacelli and did very well for himself. As he got more successful, he started going around with black girls One-Eye Willie supplied him. Jack was very in the open about it. Guy wearing a toucan shirt driving around in a little Mercedes convertible stuffed full of black whores was hard to miss. Phyllis’s sister Fran saw what he was up to, and she split up with him.

This turned out bad for Jack. He was not Italian. His only protection from the Mafia was Fran and Phyllis’s father. When he lost their goodwill, he was nothing. Next time Jack got a big shipment of heroin, my brother-in-law Henry robbed him and fed him into the meat grinder at the pizza shop. That was the end of Jack in the Toucan Shirt. When you cross an Italian girl, you’ve got to be very careful how you do it.

*
Hippopotamus, which opened on 54th Street then moved to 62nd Street, was arguably the most trendsetting disco in New York until the founding of Studio 54 in the mid-1970s. Hippopotamus was the setting of the Beatles’ farewell party when they dissolved their legal partnership in 1974, and it was a favored hangout of an eclectic crowd that included Frank Sinatra, Mick and Bianca Jagger, and attorney Roy Cohn.

*
Phyllis’s father, Peter Corso, was arrested for the last time in 1987 at age sixty-five on Long Island for cocaine dealing. “Corso—who has a felony record dating to 1938, including a two-year jail sentence for drug dealing—had several pounds of cocaine and papers detailing how the narcotics were distributed when he was arrested at home.” From “29 Arrested in Dope Network Operated from Cell at Attica,” the
Schenectady Gazette
, August 24, 1987. When I shared this news article with Jon, he said, “That’s Phyllis’s dad. What kind of moron would keep papers detailing who his distributors are in his own house?”

*
Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, sold cocaine for medical use until the late 1970s.

*
The 1971 movie
The French Connection
was loosely based on a heroin-smuggling mafioso named Pasquale Fuca. The father of Jon’s friend Vincent Pacelli—Vincent Pacelli Sr.—was involved in a similar French-connection heroin scheme for which he was convicted in 1965. Pacelli Sr.’s trial was notorious in its day because of his attempt to employ a Playboy Bunny to bribe a juror. See “Ex-Playboy Bunny Held in Bribe Plot,”
New York Times
, July 13, 1965.

*
Nicky Barnes was the Harlem heroin dealer on whom Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s, character was based in the 2007 film
American Gangster
.

†
Phyllis’s legal surname was Corso. According to Jon, she adopted the name LaTorre because “it sounded artistic.” Also, she wanted to avoid association with her father, Peter Corso.

†
Though Henry was Phyllis’s cousin, she referred to him as her brother; hence Jon calls him his “brother-in-law.”

†
Ray Mintner is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s friend.

‡
Henry Borelli was part of a Gambino-family crew headed by Roy DeMeo. Borelli earned the nickname “Dirty Henry”—after Clint Eastwood’s .44 Magnum-toting film character—because of his reputed brutality in shooting people. The DeMeo Crew is reputed to have murdered as many as two hundred people in the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom were dismembered not in a pizza shop, as Jon states, but in an apartment next to a bar in Brooklyn. The DeMeo Crew’s exploits were chronicled by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci in
Murder Machine
, published by Onyx in 1993.

20

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Phyllis was always trying to teach me to be more careful. She used to tell me, “Jon, you run around like a wild Indian. You’ll get shot.”

I took many risks, but seeing how Phyllis’s family took care of Jack in the Toucan Shirt, I was careful about seeing other women. Phyllis was wise enough to know I was a young man. I was not a monk. Her point was, I should never rub her nose in seeing other women.

When it came to women, I was crazed. It was nothing for me to fuck a woman five or six times a day. When you threw in the nightclubs, the money, and the clothes, I had a solid game. But underneath it I was still a street kid. At times the women I got surprised even me.

Phyllis turned me on to a restaurant called Serendipity 3.
^*
It was on the first floor of a brownstone, and
when you walked in, they sold weird shit like espresso machines and cuckoo clocks. The restaurant part was pushed in the back of what was almost a basement. But it was where very fancy people went in New York.
^*
They served unbelievable desserts and breakfasts. They made a French toast with cream cheese inside that was out of this world.