American Desperado (31 page)

*
In the federal racketeering case against San Pedro, one of his former bodyguards testified that San Pedro ordered him to burn down his aunt’s home on the adjacent lot after she refused to sell it to him. The house in Hialeah, which San Pedro still inhabits, is a multi-story structure of approximately 8,000 square feet, surrounded by walls and occupying several adjacent lots. The rest of the street is occupied by single-story, 1,100-square-foot homes.

*
Enrique “Ricky” Prado served in the air force from 1971 to 1973. In 1974 he joined the Miami-Dade Fire Department. While working as a fireman and paramedic, he also became a corporate officer in San Pedro’s Transworld Detective Agency. When Prado worked at the fire department, his personnel records indicated he periodically lived at San Pedro’s house. In 1981 Prado was hired by the CIA, and he was stationed in Central America until the mid-1980s, where he is believed to have been involved in training Contra paramilitaries.

*
In Cuban Santería, San Lazaro—Saint Lazarus—is a key figure. But the Santeria version of Saint Lazarus combines elements of two different Lazarus characters who appear in the Bible and melds them into a single narrative.

*
“The last two of [San Pedro’s] $50,000 parties were held at the posh Doral Hotel in Miami Beach, and among the guests were Hialeah mayor Raul Martinez, Representative Claude Pepper, Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud, WSVN-Channel 7 weekend anchor and reporter Rick Sanchez, Miami police major Jack Sullivan, ordinary cops, political fund-raisers, lawyers, various right-wing bravos, and a load of judges. San Pedro brought along a nine-foot statue of the saint, dressed himself in a tuxedo, was flanked by bodyguards, and posed with the assembled celebrities.” This account is from page 82 of Pete Hamill’s book
Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was
, New York: Back Bay Books, 1997.

*
The 1991 racketeering case against San Pedro was to include an indictment for four predicate act murders until it was struck down on the basis of the immunity deal U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen provided him. In addition to the slack the U.S. government cut San Pedro to commit mayhem, even the Mafia gave him a wide berth. In 1984 San Pedro shot reputed mobster Carmine Scarfone in the arm while having drinks with him at Capra’s Italian restaurant in Hallandale. A couple of days later, Scarfone’s home was riddled with machine-gun fire and set ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Despite there being witnesses, Scarfone declined to testify against San Pedro for shooting him.

*
According to San Pedro’s former bodyguard Miguel Ramirez, on orders from their boss in 1975, he and future CIA officer Rick Prado burned down San Bernardo Bakery on Flagler Street, using so much gasoline that the initial flash burned their eyebrows off.

**
In 1989 Miguel “El Oso” Ramirez was convicted of shooting and beheading undercover DEA informant Larry Nash.

†
Hialeah is a working-class community near Miami International Airport that became almost entirely Cuban in the 1970s.

†
San Pedro’s younger brother, John, was a police officer in Hialeah. In 1986 San Pedro was caught bribing several officers in the department—but not his brother, who continues to serve today.

†
San Pedro kept a copy of Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
in his bathroom and Al Capone’s biography on his office desk.

†
Jon discusses this in
chapter 38
.

†
During the Mariel boatlift in 1980, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro allowed a hundred thousand Cubans to leave for Florida, declaring, “I have flushed the toilets of Cuba on the United States.” Many were violent inmates released from Cuban prisons.

‡
In 1975 San Pedro purchased Transworld Detective Agency.

‡
San Pedro’s stepdaughter Jenny Cartaya began living with him as a “wife” when she was fourteen or fifteen. Cartaya, whose testimony in 1996 led to San Pedro’s pending deportation order, described the house to me much as Jon did. She alleges that San Pedro first raped her under a statue of San Lazaro at age thirteen and used to beat her regularly with his leather weight-lifting belts. She became his wife after, according to her, San Pedro set up her mother in a cocaine bust and sent her to prison. Cartaya gave birth to two sons by San Pedro, whom she raised along with her mother’s son. The sons were raised as brothers, though they were simultaneously half brothers and uncle-nephew—a family situation right out of the film
Chinatown
. When Cartaya was nineteen, San Pedro had the Hialeah Police Department arrest her for being a danger to herself and attempted to confine her to a mental hospital. Cartaya eventually fled the state.

§
El Rubio was convicted of manslaughter shortly after Jon met him.

32

J
.
R
.:
You remember Bernie Levine, the fat little Jewish kid from Jersey who turned on the Outcasts to heroin in his mom’s basement? By the early 1970s, Bernie had moved to San Francisco and was managing a recording studio that the Grateful Dead used. We got in touch, and he told me people were crazy about coke in San Francisco. He could sell anything I could get him for an outrageous amount because he was hooked in with celebrity blowheads like Jerry Garcia.
^*

I said, “Bernie, come to Miami.”

Bernie got on the next plane. He had gone from being a pudgy kid to a fat fuck of a man. He must have weighed three hundred pounds. I knew a Chinese restaurant in Coral Gables that was sensational. They had duck that was so tender, you could touch it with a spoon and the meat fell off the bones. Bernie inhaled two whole ducks and became a very happy fat man. We went to his
hotel, and I showed him some coke I was getting from Albert. Bernie did a line and said, “Your coke is no good for San Francisco.”

Bernie explained that people in California had their noses up in the air and only did the finest cocaine. He showed me some tricks about cocaine. I believed that if coke had more rocks than powder, it was pure. Bernie explained that rocks are bullshit. Anybody can press shitty coke into rocks, just as guys can blow out glass to make it look like diamonds. A good test for coke purity that Bernie showed me involved buying a hot plate from an appliance store. You put your coke on the hot plate and slowly turn up the heat. Any shit that starts to melt below 180 degrees is not coke but the junk it’s cut with. Good coke should melt at about 180 degrees. Later, people found shit to mix with coke that also melts at 180 degrees, so melting will not always tell you the truth, but back then what Bernie showed me gave me an edge.

I took my hotplate over to Albert’s and showed him how he could test his coke scientifically. Albert thought I was a genius. He used what I showed him to demand better coke from the people supplying him. Within a month I had a quality half-kilo to sell Bernie. He flew down again and picked it up. Two days after he got back, he told me he’d sold the entire half-key.
^*
Jerry Garcia was one happy blowhead.

Bernie and I began building our business. Our problem was transporting the coke to California. Miami was filled with stewardesses in the 1970s. Because of the warm weather, the airlines had stewardess training centers in Miami, and these girls were everywhere—at the beaches, in the bars and clubs. I got friendly with a stewardess named Susie who worked for National Airlines—and later for Pan Am—and flew the route to San Francisco. I asked her how easy it would be to carry a small package onto the plane.

She said, “There’s no security for me. I put on my little outfit, carry my little bag, and nobody even asks to see an ID.”

I paid her a hundred dollars the first time. I gave her a half-kilo
that fit in her flight bag. Bernie met her at a hotel near San Francisco airport, and the next day she brought back my money. This was too easy.

Within a few months Bernie was taking a few kilos from me every week. Sony had started selling Betamax videotapes, and I discovered that a half-kilo of coke fit perfectly in a tape container. In her roll-on luggage, Susie could fit a box of twenty Betamax tapes holding ten kilos of coke. She did this for years, and she never got questioned.

The only problem I ever had was one time Susie got drunk on the plane to San Francisco and was picked up by a passenger. When she landed, instead of meeting Bernie with the coke, she went with the guy from the plane and got fucked silly for two days. Ten kilos of coke, gone.

People were freaking out. Susie had a boyfriend in Miami. This poor kid, not only did his girlfriend fuck this guy behind his back, but me and Albert’s guy Rubio picked him up and broke his arm, then held him in the trunk of a car until Susie turned up. But it ended well. Susie showed up with all the coke a couple days later. She brought back the money to me so I could pay Albert. Her boyfriend got to live.

T
HE WAY
I worked it with Bernie was, I marked up his price 10 to 30 percent over what I paid Albert. The price Albert charged me per kilo changed week to week, going anywhere from $18,000 to $50,000. In the early days coke was usually at the higher end because nobody could ever get enough. Sometimes the cops or Customs Service would get lucky and bust a smuggler. Then the politicians would go on the news and announce, “We got all this dope, and we’re winning the fight against drugs.”

Were they really that stupid? When they made a bust, it sent prices higher. Even when everybody like Albert or me was holding coke, and our prices hadn’t gone up, we’d raise them anyway. After a big bust, I’d add on a surcharge and tell Bernie, “Look at the
news. They’re arresting everybody. You’re lucky I got this. I want five thousand dollars more.”

I was always happy when they caught some dumb fuck with a boatload of coke. That meant more money for me. Thank you, cops.

Once Bernie got up to five or ten kilos a week, I had a hundred grand a month rolling in easy. I did very little work compared to running clubs in New York. I paid no tax to my uncles. Once a week Albert would have Rubio or Ricky Prado leave a car with cocaine in the trunk at a market. I’d have Susie’s boyfriend pick it up and pack it into Betamax cases. After we broke his arm, this kid was very dependable.

M
Y BUSINESS
was like any other business. You meet people. You build connections. I was constantly looking for bigger customers and bigger suppliers than Albert. I wasn’t going to sell grams of coke to some jerk in a disco, but if I met interesting people who amused me, I’d sell them smaller amounts. I liked rich people. They were into the same things I liked—beautiful women, boats, horses, cars.

The thrills I used to get from drug rip-offs I now got from meeting different, strange people. For example, I liked to run on the beach. One day out running, I met a wealthy Jewish kid, Lev Davis.
^*
We got to talking, and I found out he was hooked up with models and Playboy Bunnies. He had a beautiful boat that he used to take them on. Lev was a real cocksman. He and I wound up partying together with many ladies. All his friends were doctors, lawyers, and dentists, and they all wanted coke. In that day—1975—normal, wealthy Americans just wanted to live the good life. People didn’t have hang-ups. They had money. They had nice houses on the water. They had boats, and coke made all these things even more enjoyable. Nobody was thinking about cops, or is this person an addict? None of that existed. This was just good times.

One day Lev called me and said, “Jon, I’m bringing you to a
party. I’m going to turn you on to more beautiful girls than you’ve ever seen. We’re going to my friend’s house. He’s going to love you, but I want you to bring him an ounce of coke.”

“What’s so special about your friend?”

“Jon, he’s the greatest tit doctor in the world. Every model, stripper, and beautiful woman who wants to take care of herself is dying to get a pair of tits from him. He’s got women flying in from Hollywood just to get his tits.”

I’ll tell you the truth. I did not see my first pair of fake tits until after I got to Miami. It was a girl I picked up at Sammy’s Eastside, maybe a year before I met Lev. I had her at my place, spinning her around, turning her this way and that, and those tits stuck up like rockets. I had to ask her about them. I thought I was seeing things. She explained they weren’t the breasts she was born with. They had been given to her by a special kind of doctor. I’d never heard of such a thing. It was like putting a man on the moon. You can make big, beautiful tits from nothing?

Obviously, I was intrigued when Lev invited me to a party at a prestigious tit doctor’s house.

The doctor had a sensational three-level place on the water. There were gorgeous women everywhere. Half were flat-chested. Half had big racks. These were the doctor’s Before and After girls.

Lev introduces me to the doc. I toss him an ounce. The doctor says, “Come up to my bedroom, and we’ll try it out.”

There are people doing lines everywhere.
Why hide out upstairs?
I think. But I go upstairs with him. We throw some lines on a mirror and get high. The doc says, “This shit’s great, but usually I don’t like to put it in my nose.”