American Desperado (26 page)

But he decided to stiff us. He went behind our backs and opened a nightclub without our help. Obviously, we had to send in our guys to bust things up and shut it down, which we did. We went back to Shamsher and gave him a second chance to work with us. But he was a proud man and a stubborn man. He told us no.

At some point in the negotiations, we sent our friend Mikey Shits to talk some sense into Shamsher. Mikey Shits was the guy we had who carried a soup can that he used for beating on people,
and when he was talking to Shamsher, one thing led to another, and Mikey beat him so bad, Shamsher had to go to the hospital. If that’s not bad enough, this idiot talks to the reporters, and they make a big story about it.
^*

W
HY WAS
this man such a problem? Andy and I had been running the clubs for nearly five years. On the street, five years is a lifetime. You meet very few criminals who do any one thing for more than five years. Any illegal operation is a finite thing. The bigger your numbers, and the more things you do, the bigger the chances that you’ll have a problem with the law. Smart people can usually get away with an illegal business for maybe two years before they run into a problem. If you make it to two years, you’ve done very well. The really smart guys go a couple years at one thing, wash their hands of it, and move on to something new. I wasn’t like that. I’ve always pushed things as far as I can.

By 1974 all the heat knew I was into wrong things. When the Gambino family put Andy and me on point to take over clubs, they knew we’d draw heat. If you are in the club scene, the police automatically know something is wrong with you. Nightclubs are not based on lawful people. Except on the weekends, lawful people are not in a club until three or four in the morning because they have to get up and go to work in the morning. During weeknights, any club is going to be filled with illegal people—gangsters, drug dealers, hustlers, pimps. The lifeblood of nightclubs is criminals. The police know this, and you can’t pay off every single cop. When you’re involved in nightclubs, eventually you will get heat.

I don’t know how I made it five years in the nightclubs. But after all the problems with Hendrix, Bobby Wood, Patsy Parks, Nunziata, and Shamsher, I didn’t see good times no more. I just saw heat coming and coming.

By then my old Outcast friends had started to fade. Petey got arrested on heroin charges for the millionth time, and he ended up going to prison for a couple years. Big Dominic Fiore kicked heroin by leaving the city. He moved to Connecticut and started a rendering business—which he still has today—where he drives a truck to all the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and picks up their grease. Rocco Ciofani became a very hardworking soldier in the Bonanno family and got promoted to capo. Jack Buccino started hanging out in Asbury Park following around Bruce Springsteen. He had learned the guitar and was finally going to do his own stage act. He married a beautiful blond girl from Teaneck, and after the wedding he was driving her across the George Washington Bridge when he hit a concrete stanchion at a hundred miles an hour. It squashed Jack, dead as a bug. His wife survived, but she was left a cripple and a vegetable who didn’t even know her own name.

Even Bradley Pierce was affected. After Patsy Parks got whacked, he went crazy and ran away to a monastery.

B
RADLEY PIERCE
:
I’d started out in the 1960s believing I was spreading a new spiritualism. The murder of my friend Patsy Parks was an awakening. My spiritual interests changed. I was baptized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I entered a Trappist monastery. After I went to seminary, I became a priest.
^*

I have contemplated my time with Jon and have prayed about it. I have good memories. But I came to understand the evil in him. Everybody has a dignity given to them by God. Jesus Christ is in Jon. I know Jon struggles within himself. I pray for his soul. We have kept in touch over the years, and I share my love with him every time we speak. I believe Jesus can give anyone a second life.
I was born again through Him. We all are given the chance to be born again, even Jon.

J
.
R
.:
My end in New York came when an informant told the cops that I was involved in the murder of Nunziata. He said that if they searched the apartment I kept with Andy, they’d find evidence.

When they raided the place, they found no evidence linking me to the murder of Nunziata, but they did get about a dozen illegal guns and some pills. In normal times, this would be a nothing arrest. But when I bonded out, my uncles sent a lawyer who told me, “Your family wants you gone. Get the fuck out of New York. They don’t want you to exist anymore.”

I believe the family made a deal with the New York police. I believe someone in the family told them I was involved in killing Nunziata. If I died, or disappeared off the face of New York, the family could go to the cops and say, “Okay, we got rid of your problem.” And the cops could say, “Okay, we did our best to catch the cop killer.”

That way everybody could save face and go back to doing business. I was the logical choice to go because there was so much heat on me. I saw this coming before I was popped on the weapons charges. When I bonded out of jail, I called Andy, and he said, “You’re my brother, Jon, but I can’t see you no more.”

For all I knew, Andy was supposed to whack me. I didn’t think this was the case, but I didn’t want to put him in that position. I hung up the phone, and I ran to Phyllis’s place to grab my dog, Brady. I kept an old Buick Le Sabre parked on the street for emergencies. It was a junk car. I jumped in with my dog and left. I didn’t take nothing. Not my boots, not the clothes in my closet. I was busted out. I had my dog, six hundred dollars in my pocket, and a Beretta .38 pistol. That was it, bro. I got on my horse and split.

I lost everything, but I wasn’t worried. Tomorrow was another day. At twenty-six, I was dead in New York. But I would live again.

I’d go to Miami to escape the heat.

*
Jon is referring to the film
The French Connection
as well as to several Mafia rings smuggling heroin that were not actually the subject of the movie.

*
Nunziata “died of gunshot wounds inflicted by his own revolver. The death was labeled a suicide, but that verdict was challenged by Nunziata’s widow … Mob sources have been saying that Nunziata’s death was a ‘hit,’ ordered by the Gambinos.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,”
Time
, January 1, 1973.

*
The
New York Times
later ran a front-page, above-the-fold feature about Shamsher’s ordeal, “A Nightclub Owner Says He Has Woes—The Mafia,” by Nicholas Gage,
New York Times
, October 10, 1974.

*
Father Pierce is now director of field education at the Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.

†
The Gambinos “set up the looting” of the evidence locker and “pushed 169 lbs. of the stolen drugs in Harlem … Thus far the only suspected police link that has surfaced is Narcotics Detective Joseph Nunziata, whose signature was on the form with which 24 lbs. were signed out.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,”
Time
, January 1, 1973.

†
Nirvana is still located at 30 West 59th Street.

‡
In the Patsy Parks murder trial, Vincent Pacelli attempted unsuccessfully to introduce testimony from Nunziata that he was involved in a drug deal in a New York café at the time of Parks’s murder. See opinion of United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit,
United States v. Vincent Pacelli
, July 24, 1975.

‡
Nirvana was a favorite hangout of John Lennon, who used to display his drawings there, using the restaurant as an informal gallery.

28

It’s the happy meeting of ocean and shore that has made Miami one of the world’s premier destinations.

—Fodor’s Miami Travel Guide
, 1985 edition

I heard that my little brother had moved to Miami. Jon became a dog trainer there. He started a very successful business training dogs.

—Jon’s sister, Judy

J
.
R
.:
I drove straight to Miami. I had no plan. I had no vision, but I had a good feeling about Florida. When I was seventeen, Rocco Ciofani and I once made a big score in a robbery and decided, “Let’s go to the sun and swim and have fun in the Miami paradise.” We had good times on Miami Beach, chasing the girls in bikinis, and when we needed money, we robbed some college kids using only our fists. We didn’t need guns in paradise. That was Miami in my mind.

Miami was the last big city on I-95, the farthest I could get from New York and stay on the East Coast. If I completely disappeared from New York, the heat would assume I was dead and move on. They didn’t need a death certificate. It was a simpler time. In the 1970s your driver’s license was just a piece of paper. Nobody had Internet computers tracking you from one state to the next. If you used cash, and didn’t get arrested, you were gone, bro.

My one worry was phone taps. I always assumed in New York that the feds tapped my phones and the phones of people who knew me. If every phone they listened to had people saying I’d disappeared, that would reinforce the idea I was gone for good. I would not contact anybody for many months—and when I did, it would be indirectly.

When I left New York, I was wearing a “monsignor ring,” a ruby ring I’d gotten when I was running my club Sanctuary and carrying my pimp stick cane with diamonds on the head. (Later, when I pried the diamonds out of my pimp stick and tried to pawn them, I found out Howie, my diamond guy who’d sold them to me, had used blown-out glass like he’d sold to my friends on the Knicks. He’d scammed me like I’d scammed them. You live and learn.) I must have been quite a sight. At a rest stop in the Carolinas, I got out—with my cane, in my velvet pants—to let Brady run, and people stared like I was the Devil. Little kids with a family pointed at me and ran. My New York look did not cut it beyond the tristate area.

I reached Miami early in the morning. The sun was coming up like a fireball. Biscayne Bay was liquid gold. I’ve always liked being by the ocean at sunrise. I pulled over, walked into the sand, pulled off my shirt, and let the sun soak into my skin.

I checked into the Castaways, a Hawaiian motel on Miami Beach that had a corner room I could sneak Brady into.
^*
With my limited funds I could barely afford a week there. My new wardrobe consisted of swim trunks, a tropical shirt, and flip-flops I bought
from a dime store. Across from the motel there was an Arby’s, where I lived the next few days on roast beef sandwiches.

My first full day in Miami, I decided to get some tail. There was nothing at the motel pool but tourist families from nothing places like Ohio—kids and the sunburned parents who were stuck with them. I walked to the beach, and ten steps from the motel there was a very hot girl in the sand. I put my towel next to hers and lay down. She had on white plastic sunglasses that she lifted to look at me, like she was angry I had sat by her. She had the most beautiful green eyes. They were a shock because she had dark hair and olive skin. Finding a girl so beautiful was a sign that my luck was good.

I started giving her some bullshit New York lines, and
ba ba ba
, she went from angry to very receptive. Time passed. I said, “You hungry?”

“You go ahead and eat,” she said. “I love to lie on the beach.”

I couldn’t understand why she’d brushed me off. I went in the motel pool and swam. Ten minutes later the girl walked past—limping. She had a clubfoot. It was bad, but I had to smile. That was why she gave me the cold shoulder.

Her bum foot didn’t bother me a bit. Maybe she was payback for making that girl walk like Ratso Rizzo in New York. Besides, it wasn’t like her foot would be the centerpiece of screwing her. I got out of the pool and walked up to her. She said, “I guess you can see now.”

“Your foot don’t bother me a bit. Let’s have dinner.”

She agreed to meet later. But she never showed up. I’m sure she just had a bad complex about how she looked. But to me, being blown off was a sign. It was like,
I’m new in town. I’m broke. And the girl with a clubfoot won’t even have dinner with me
.

N
ORMALLY, TO
make cash I could do a quick drug rip-off. But I didn’t know the lay of the land down here. I could not risk being arrested at that time with the heat on me in New York. I had to get a square job.

One of the kids in Long Island who worked for me selling drugs used to tell me about a family that his family knew in Miami.
This kid had rich parents, and they knew a family in Miami named the Gendens who owned a big landscaping company. The kid had told me I should meet them someday because the father, Dave Genden, was a character who liked gangsters and had known Al Capone.
^*

I looked up the Gendens. If I had to work, I liked being outdoors and using my hands. Why not landscaping? I drove over to meet them at their nursery. On the streets in New York many people knew me by my old family name Riccobono. In Miami, Riccobono was dead. From now on I used the legal name I’d adopted when I was a kid, Jon Pernell Roberts. That’s how I introduced myself to the Gendens.