American Desperado (38 page)

Jon receiving a birthday gift from his son, Julian.
EVAN WRIGHT

37

J
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R
.:
When my sister finally came down to visit, I told her I’d gone from my dog-training business into real estate, where I’d gotten lucky on some investments. Thanks to Danny Mones, this was partway true. We had an actual office
^*
and I barely spent any time involved in moving coke. To my sister, it looked like I was in a new world.

By then she was head of personnel at a large company in New York, and she was as straight as could be. She was very happy for my seeming success as an investor.

My sister was worried about our grandfather, Poppy. Our grandmother had passed away, and Poppy was alone in Teaneck. I decided to bring him to Miami. I got him a place in South Beach, which was where all the old
people lived back then. After I got him set up, I’d take Poppy out in my boat and we’d fish. When he got too weak for the boat, I moved him to an apartment by a bridge where old people could stand and drop their fishing lines in the water. Later I moved Poppy to an assisted-living apartment. He even found an old broad who used to come by and hustle him—bake him pies and cook him dinner—because she figured he must have money from the way I helped him live.

J
UDY
:
Poppy was very proud. Jon put him into a place that was way more than Poppy could afford on his Social Security. Jon told the landlord to lie about the rent to Poppy, and he secretly paid the difference. When Jon took Poppy shopping for clothes, he would tell the man in the store, “Don’t tell my grandfather what the price really is.” It was very touching to see Jon and Poppy together.

J
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R
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What I did when I got Poppy down in Miami was, I used his apartments as stash houses for the coke I was getting from Albert. Who would ever think an old geezer in an assisted-living home was holding twenty keys of coke? I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy seeing the old guy, but he served a purpose, too.

The other person from the past that came back into my life was my old Outcast friend Petey. Around the time I fled New York, he’d gone down on a drug charge that got him locked up for a couple years. When I heard he got out, I invited him down.

P
ETEY
:
I was happy to see Jon. I heard he was dead, but there he was. His life in Miami was beyond anything I would have imagined. He had six servants. He lived in a beautiful house, but it wasn’t that big.
Six servants, Jon?
I had to laugh.

I had gone straight. My last year in prison I had joined a drug
program to fake out the parole board, but after a while the things they said on the program started to make sense. When I visited Jon I was trying to clean up my life, and I wanted to tell him about it. I wanted him to know he was still my brother, even though I was leaving our world behind.

J
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R
.:
Petey had got religion. He kept me up one night telling me we’d been living in hell our whole lives and he was getting out. He wanted me to join him. No thanks.

But I understood. He didn’t want to be a bad guy anymore. He was trying to walk away from the evil side.

I left him alone one day, and when I came back, Petey had his face buried in a pile of coke. He’d broken into my party stash and snorted it like a pig. Being in my house, unfortunately, made him feel safe to go back to his old ways.

P
ETEY
:
The last time I ever got high was on Jon’s coke. When I relapsed, Jon told me not to worry, he’d take care of me. I had another friend who offered me a job managing a porno bookstore in Miami. But something inside said,
Leave
. I could see Jon was going far with his cocaine schemes. But I was done. I checked into a rehab in Jersey and started walking in a new direction. My heart is with people from the street. Where I got my happiness after I cleaned up was working with guys in prison and helping any who wanted to escape from hell like I did.
^*

J
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R
.:
Normally, I don’t trust people who go into the straight world, but I was proud when Petey left my house to get clean. I’m happy for him that he was able to leave my world.

T
HE LIE
I told my sister about being in a totally legit line of work almost seemed true. Cocaine had elevated me above the streets. I did business in exclusive clubs. My lawyer was probably more valuable to me than a gun. But as straight as my life seemed, my existence had fewer limits than ever. I went to extremes to amuse myself.

When I look back on what happened with Princess the cat, I have to admit what I did was slightly insane. Princess was my cat. I always liked cats. There’s people that say they’re “dog people” or “cat people,” but I don’t agree you to have to choose one way. A dog is more able physically and mentally to do things with you, but cats have a lot of heart for their size. The way they stalk and hunt shows they have sharp minds. I respect cats as much as I respect dogs.

My yard on Bay Drive was a hangout for stray cats. The vacant lot next door, where I buried my cans of money, was where they played and hunted. Of all the cats there, a calico female rose to the top. She would come into my house and didn’t have any fear with my dogs. They were killers, but this little sassy bitch walked among them. I named her Princess.

One day I found Princess hiding in the corner. She must have been out hunting or fighting another cat, and she got a stick in her eye. She wasn’t complaining, but when she looked at me with that one good eye, it broke my heart.

I put her in my Porsche and drove 120 miles an hour to get her to the vet. Her vital signs were stable, but the vet could not fix her little eye. He turned me on to a lady vet who was a specialist. She couldn’t save the eye, but she stitched it closed, and Princess had a full recovery. Within days she was running around like she still had two eyes.

Not a month later Princess disappeared. I got very uptight. I searched up and down the street to see if she’d been squished by a car. But no Princess. I had Albert’s enforcer, Rubio, come over, and we went down the block banging on doors, asking people if they’d
seen Princess. The last house we knocked on had a nosy broad living in it. She and her husband used to stand in their yard looking at me when I drove past. I always had a bad feeling about them. They claimed they were very successful wine merchants, and they looked down on everybody.

When this broad opened her door, she told me she didn’t know anything about a cat with one eye. No sooner did she speak than Princess ran out from under her legs. I picked up my cat and said, “Thank you very much, you lying snob.”

I went straight to Albert. I said, “Albert, I got these people on my street. I want you to burn their fucking house out of my life.”

Albert said, “You want to buy the property? Is it a good investment?”

I explained to Albert that I wanted their house burned because they stole my cat.

“Are you out of your fucking mind, man?”

“Albert, I want those thieves out of that house. I don’t ever ask you favors, do I?”

Albert waited until my neighbors went out to dinner one night, and he burned their house down. Albert kept his word, and Princess was safe from being kidnapped by my wacko neighbors.

I admit when I saw the smoked-out house a week later, even I thought maybe that was a little extreme.

I was moving from the neighborhood anyway.

P
HYLLIS WAS
on the warpath about finding a home for us. After my experience being chased naked from the Charter Club by that madwoman, I was open to the idea of settling down.

Phyllis teamed up with Danny Mones to find a house. Danny lived over on La Gorce Island
^*
in a wild house where he made a dome over the bedroom that he’d painted like the Sistine Chapel, but with angels that looked like Playboy Bunnies. Phyllis had more respect for his financial advice than for his taste in painted angels.

She fell in love with a mansion on South Beach. They wanted $180,000, and I thought that was a steal. It was a grand Venetian palace. I could picture myself in it. But I showed it to Danny, and he said, “The neighborhood is shit. Never buy in South Beach.”

Danny was wrong about the neighborhood and the house. Years later Versace bought that mansion.
^*
I was a moron for listening to Danny.

As it happened, Danny Mones and I had some business with Donny Soffer, the guy whose girlfriend was cooking me dinner when I was chased out of the Charter Club. Donny was looking to borrow some money for his development in Aventura, and while we were talking about that, he turned me on to a house rental on Indian Creek Island.
^†
It wasn’t the biggest house on the island, but it was built almost over the water. From the dining room it looked like you were on a boat. I paid an ungodly amount to live there, $30,000 a month, but that’s what I made from two or three kilos. Phyllis was satisfied. We tried having a domestic life. We’d have parties. We socialized with the neighbors. I’d take Poppy out of his rest home and have him over for dinners and sleepovers. He loved the dining room because of it being on the water.

But almost as soon as we moved in, Phyllis found another place she liked better, the estate at 121 Palm Avenue on Palm Island.
^‡
The main house was a big Spanish place, and it was next door to where Al Capone retired after prison. Capone used to fish out in the back, and they say he died there fishing, which is a nice way for a gangster to go.

Phyllis talked me into buying it for $275,000.
^*
Her life project became decorating the place. I dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into that house, but the cost was nothing—a couple of buckets of cash I dug out of the ground. Most contractors in Florida back then took cash.

A
NYTHING WAS
possible in my world. I went to every club and knew everybody. First it was because I had the cocaine. Then it was because I had the money. I was happier not bringing cocaine to a club. I made more money off of bulk distribution. I went from being the coke guy to the rich coke guy to just the rich guy.

Money was a different kind of power than being a gangster in New York. I watched rich people and saw they can do anything. They get their power because top politicians in America suck their dicks just for a chance to ride on their yachts or sleep in their mansions. And when the top politicians are your friends, you’ve got it made. Truly rich people make the Mafia look like losers.

I saw how it worked when I was living on Indian Creek. One of my neighbors was a retired politician named George Smathers.
^†
Phyllis and I went to a cocktail party at Smathers’s house, and there I met a guy named Bebe Rebozo.
^‡

Bebe and I became very friendly. We went fishing together many times. He was a major crook, as big as Carlo Gambino, but he owned banks. Bebe helped me launder my money for a couple years.
Everybody said Bebe was Nixon’s main man, but I didn’t understand the power of this until a little thing happened.

One of my favorite spots to eat was Joe’s Stone Crab in South Beach.
^*
There is nothing like Joe’s, because a stone crab is not like a Maryland crab, where you eat the meat off the body. A stone crab, you eat the legs and feet. You won’t find the kind they serve at Joe’s anywhere else. Joe’s has always had their own boats to catch the crabs. Their crabs are colossal, and they serve them with the finest mustard sauce. I turned Bernie Levine on to Joe’s when he visited from San Francisco, and he went nuts for them.

One day I went to Joe’s with Bebe Rebozo. I told him about my friend in California wishing he could eat stone crabs, and Bebe said, “I can take care of it, Jon. You want to send him crabs tomorrow?”

The next day I went to Joe’s and had Calvin, a black guy who worked in the kitchen, cook me a batch of crabs. Bebe told me to load them into a cooler chest. I drove the cooler out to Homestead Air Force Base
^†
and asked to meet a colonel whose name Bebe gave me. This colonel takes the cooler, has his guys strap it into a fighter jet, and they fly it out to California.

A couple hours later Bernie called me. He told me when he got home from the Air Force Base in California and opened the cooler, the crabs were still hot. “How the fuck did you do this?”

“Don’t worry, bro. The government took care of it for me.”

I’m sure that fat slob almost choked himself eating them.

That night Bebe had me come over to his house, and he gave me two cases of Coors beer.
^‡
These they flew back on the jet from San Francisco. Bebe explained, “They started flying things for me when Nixon stayed at my house.”
^§

“What? He forgets his slippers in California, they fly them out here on a jet?”

“That’s how it works, Jon.”

Think of all the people paying their taxes to support this nonsense. They train these guys to be the best fighter pilots in the world, and they’re flying crab legs and Coors beer. That’s the power Bebe had. Even though Nixon was a bum, thrown out of office, he still had enough pull that Bebe could use the air force as a delivery service for his friends. The square, normal people in this world don’t have a clue.