American Desperado (39 page)

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I knew in Miami was constantly seeking new amusements. I wasn’t finding as much domestic bliss with Phyllis as she’d promised we’d have, so I was up for any excuse to leave the house. Me and Gary Teriaca and Bobby Erra started regular dinners at the Forge restaurant that turned into orgies. This began when a friend of ours, Leonard Codomo,
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got the idea to hold a dinner with only us and Playboy Bunnies. The Playboy Club was big in Miami then, and Bunnies, or wannabe Bunnies, were everywhere. The orgies started by accident. The first time we held our all-Bunny dinner, they put us in the main dining room. Some of the Bunnies downed too many Quaaludes and got rambunctious. They started flashing the normal people out for dinner with Grandma or whatever, and Al Malnik, the owner of the Forge, told us next time he’d seat us in a secluded area.

The next week we showed up for another Bunny dinner, and they put us in a private room. It was the same room where I’d met Meyer Lansky. It had one big table where eighteen people could sit. The walls were covered in colored fabrics. There were chandeliers, oriental rugs. It was an unbelievable room. Once the champagne and Quaaludes started to flow, the Bunnies went wild.

One of them was actually not a Bunny, but a boat-show model named Monique. She had come to Miami to go to college, but she turned into a model and a freak. I had been with her once many months before this dinner, and she was the first girl I ever met who had pierced rings—like for ears—but in her pussy. Everybody starts partying, and I see Monique is missing. I look for her in the main dining room. I send a girl into the bathroom to search for her. No Monique.

I go back in the private room and see under the dining table, there’s Monique. Bobby’s fucking her with a piece of asparagus. Normally, if you think of fucking a girl with a vegetable, you think of a cucumber or a zucchini, but Bobby’s got this little asparagus going in and out. Bobby was a traditional guy, not a freak. What an effect Monique had on him. Her freakiness was contagious. He’s laughing. She’s laughing.

I said, “Bobby, why can’t we all enjoy this shit?”

Bobby says, “You’re right.” He decides to put Monique on the floor in the middle of the room so everybody can watch. Bobby wants to spread the tablecloth on the floor for her to lie on, and to show off his magician skills, he grabs the tablecloth with his claw-hand and yanks it. His idea was, he could pull it and all the bottles and plates would stay on it like when you see this done in the movies. Instead, everything spills over. He reaches out and pushes everything that’s left onto the floor.

That’s how the room started to get destroyed.

The Bunnies now got food and wine all over their clothes, so they start tearing them off. Monique climbs on the table. Bobby picks up the asparagus to fuck her some more, and Leonard Codomo says, “Hey, Bobby, is your dick bigger than the asparagus?”

I couldn’t believe Codomo’s balls in fucking with Bobby. Leonard was not a tough guy at all, and Bobby was someone, if you made fun of him, he would not forget.
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But Bobby just laughed. He pulls his dick out, which was really disgusting to see because he’s holding it with his claw fingers, and he says, “My dick’s bigger than the asparagus, you motherfucker.”

Bobby starts fucking Monique on the table. Then he takes his dick out and pushes the spout of a wine bottle into her. He must have filled her with red wine, because when he pushes his cock back in, wine comes shooting out from her pussy.

I’m so fucked up, I think,
Oh my God, she’s bleeding
.

But another Bunny starts licking Monique’s pussy, and I realize it’s wine.

On the other side of the room I hear
slap slap slap
. Gary Teriaca has another Bunny bent over the table. He’s fucking her from behind, and in each hand he has chunks of prime rib, and he’s slapping the shit out of her ass with the beef. While he’s slapping her, he keeps saying, “It looks like we’re in hell now, doesn’t it, Bobby?”

Gary, with the beef, was out of his mind.

As it progresses, we have a contest where we have the Bunnies kneel on the floor in a row with their asses in the air. We stick cherries in their cracks, like teeing up golf balls, and smack them. We bounce the cherries off the wall, and any girl that can catch a flying cherry in her mouth, she gets five hundred dollars. As you can imagine, the girls are leaping like trained seals to catch the cherries.

At some point Gary starts nailing these girls, moving down the line, poking each one. Me and Bobby and Gary and Leonard follow. We’re fucking the shit out of these Bunnies, when
boom boom boom
—some poor waiter knocks on the doors. Bobby goes so crazy, he picks up his gun and shoots at the ceiling.

Bobby’s gun fills the room with smoke. Now everybody’s coughing and laughing. I stumble over to the door and open it a crack. There’s two waiters on the ground, taking cover.

I tell them, “Do not come in here.”

I go back in, and it’s hours until we are all fucked out. The room is destroyed. The Bunnies are a mess—covered in garbage, food, wine, cum. They start digging through the trash looking for their clothes, combing their hair, putting on makeup—like that will help.
Monique gets upset because she can’t find a gold earring that fell out of her pussy, and she accuses another girl of stealing it.

When we finally open the doors, the restaurant is closed. The waiters who stayed on looked shell-shocked. The maître d’ comes over to say something. I shove a wad of wet money into his hand and say, “I’m too fucked up to talk. Just have Al send a bill. Whatever the fuck it is, I’ll take care of it.”

A few days later I go into my office with Danny Mones. He got the bill from Al Malnik. Danny says, “Al says you destroyed his restaurant. He’s got construction workers coming in to rebuild it.”

“What does he want?”

“Forty-six thousand dollars. Al says the fabric on the walls was very special. So were the rugs. It’s a classy place, Jon.”

Bobby and Gary and me gave Al the money, and he rebuilt the room. We came back and had more orgies and wrecked it again and again. We always paid Al for the damages. To spend fifty grand in a night was worth the amusement we got from it. Hell is expensive.

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Jon’s office with Danny Mones was located in a handsome neocolonial building at 12700 Biscayne Boulevard, which is now home to the Transatlantic Bank.

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Peter “Petey” Gallione became a drug counselor and then a senior director of New Jersey’s statewide prison rehabilitation program. As a sworn officer of the Department of Corrections, he carried a badge, like any other cop. Upon his retirement in 2009, he bought a house in South Florida and moved into a home a few blocks from Jon’s. Unaware that they lived so close, the two met by accident in 2010 and quickly rekindled their friendship, though not their criminal partnership.

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La Gorce Island is among the most expensive areas in Miami Beach.

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Gianni Versace, the Italian fashion mogul, was murdered outside the house in 1997. The home is now a hotel and club called the Villa.

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Records indicate the home on Palm Island was not purchased by Jon but by an individual whose name does appear on corporations Jon formed with his attorney, Daniel Mones. Jon says this person was a front employed to help him hide assets.

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Opened in 1918, Joe’s Stone Crab has been a favorite of generations of customers from Al Capone to J. Edgar Hoover to George and Barbara Bush.

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Leonard Codomo is a South Florida entrepreneur. His father was a Miami hotel developer who in 1951 was arrested for allowing members of the Bonanno crime family to use his hotels for “boiler rooms” where they peddled fake stocks and fraudulent real estate schemes over the phone and also took illegal bets. Codomo Sr. negotiated a plea allowing him to avoid prison.

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Perhaps he did not forget. Police discovered during a 1990 rackateering investigation into Erra that throughout the 1980s he apparently strong-armed large amounts of cash from Codomo by threatening him with bodily injury and death.

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Indian Creek Island is sort of like the Liechtenstein of American municipalities. It is connected to Miami Beach but is an independent community of twenty-three homes. It has the eighth-highest per capita income of any community in America. When Jon lived there with Phyllis, his neighbors included Julio Iglesias, corporate raider Carl Icahn, Don Shula, and retired U.S. senator George Smathers.

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Former U.S. senator George Smathers, who died in 2007, was originally a segregationist Democrat but changed his views. He forged close relationships with both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He sold Nixon the property on Key Biscayne that served as the Florida White House during his presidency.

†
Homestead Air Force Base is about forty miles south of Miami.

‡
Another island enclave with a few dozen homes that today are commonly listed for more than $10 million each.

‡
Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, who died in 1998, founded the Key Biscayne Bank and was among Richard Nixon’s closest friends. Rebozo lived next door to Nixon’s Florida White House residence. Rebozo was implicated in numerous underworld laundering and finance schemes but was never convicted.

‡
In the 1970s, Coors beer was not sold east of the Rockies and was highly sought after on the East Coast.

§
After he resigned the presidency and sold his Florida White House residence, Nixon was a frequent houseguest of Rebozo’s.

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Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones looking for crazed amusements at the Forge. One night in 1977 Gary Teriaca’s little brother, Craig, was shot to death in the bar there.
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This was tragic for the Teriacas. Even though Gary and his father, Vincent, were wiseguys, they had a special thing for Craig. They didn’t want him in the business. They wanted him to be a normal Miami kid having fun on the golf course, chasing girls, whatever. Craig was a nice kid. He would come out with us sometimes, and he truly didn’t have a wrong bone in his body. I always thought Gary was a little bit like him, and that’s why he had trouble being comfortable with himself and tried to hide his cocaine use from Bobby. Both those brothers were a little soft.

For some idiotic reason, Craig used to sometimes drink with a guy named Richard Schwartz at the Forge.
On his own, Richard Schwartz was what I call a “make-believe wiseguy.” He was a nothing guy who owned a hamburger shop on Bay Harbor Island.
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But because his mother was married to Meyer Lansky—making him Meyer Lansky’s stepson—Richard thought he could do anything. If Meyer Lanskey is your stepfather, that is mostly correct.

Nobody really knows why Richard shot Craig Teriaca. They weren’t close friends. They didn’t have any business together. All anybody knows is, Richard was standing by Craig at the bar. Richard went to the bathroom to piss. When he came back, he accused Craig of stealing ten dollars he’d left at the bar. He screamed, “You piece of shit. You stole my ten dollars,” and he shot Craig in the face. My belief is, Richard Schwartz was so drunk and fucked up on coke, his amusement was to shoot his friend.
^†

Gary wasn’t there when his brother got shot, but he found out within minutes. Craig was still alive when they got him to the hospital. Gary had all of us come down to give blood. All of us—me, Bobby, Albert San Pedro, even Albert’s bodyguard Ricky Prado—went to St. Francis Hospital that night.
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This turned out to be a waste. By the time we filled out the papers to donate blood, the kid was dead. He died in Gary’s arms. It broke Gary. He was sobbing like a baby. I’m not judging him. Anyone has a right to act like that if his little brother dies in front of him.

They arrested Richard Schwartz, but with his stepfather being Meyer Lansky, no way would the politicians let him go down for
murder.
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Don’t be ridiculous. Think of all the judges Danny Mones and I owned, and we were little guys compared to Lansky. Judges in that city would rather shoot themselves in the head than put his stepson on trial for murder.

Knowing he was going to be freed put everybody in a difficult situation. This was a Jew-on-Italian murder. Every Italian likes revenge, but Lansky was the Mafia’s top financial guy. He gave them Las Vegas. It’s not that he owned it himself, but he knew who really did. He knew where all the secret bank accounts were.

And something Gary had to face was the fact that his little brother was no wiseguy. Would the Mafia risk pissing off Lansky over the shooting of a nothing kid? Their father Vincent was no big guy. He was a soldier who worked his whole life for Bobby Erra’s father, Patsy, and Patsy was dead. Bobby was running things now, and he didn’t want to start a war.

Italians like honor, but if you compare it to money, they like money even more.

People said that Lansky himself had no feeling for his stepson, but Lansky was crazy about Schwartz’s mother. He’d been with her for years and years, and tough as he was, she led him by the balls.
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