American Desperado (60 page)

Cohen lives in Bay Point Estates, the same gated community where Gary Teriaca once stored cocaine in his home. After Jon and I are cleared for entry at the security gate, we drive past expansive homes set back from the road. Lawns are tended by small armies of gardeners whose gas-powered machines fill the air with buzzing. Cohen’s house has a brightly painted iron lawn jockey in front. When we enter, the housekeeper escorts us down a hallway where the paneled walls are covered by framed photographs of horses. Jon points to a picture of his younger self standing by a horse with Sy, a tall man with a confident grin. “That’s Sy,” Jon says. “See what a good-looking guy he was?”

“I still am, you motherfucker,” booms Sy’s voice from a room nearby.

We enter the back bedroom. Sy, seventy-six, lies propped up on pillows on his bed. Wires and tubes dangle from nearby medical machines. He’s recently undergone surgery. Though his face is ashen, he pushes himself up and greets Jon, “What’s happening, baby?”

Jon slips into banter with him that sounds like dialogue from a movie set in an old Miami Beach nightclub. It’s pure Rat Pack.

“God Almighty, you look good, kid,” Jon says.

“Sure, babe. I still have a cocktail in the evening.”

“Just one? Don’t lie to me, you cocksucker.”

They bring up good times at the old Palm Bay Club, which in the 1990s was converted into a residential community. Sy turns to me and says, “Kid, you should have been there. The Palm Bay was a real live joint.”

Jon sits by the bed and takes Sy’s arm. I notice several Frank Stella paintings—hanging off-kilter and covered in dust—on the walls. I ask, “Are these real?”

“Of course they’re real, kid. I help Frank buy his racehorses.”

“Jesus, I studied him in college.”

“College,” Jon says, amused and disdainful. He rolls his eyes to Sy, then turns back to me. “Frank was a madman. Frank liked to party. He gave me a bunch of those pictures he used to make, where he’d take squares and other shit and put all the shit together. Of all the famous people I ever was friendly with, Frank Stella was the only person who ever gave me anything. He was a good guy.”
^*

“I hope you still got those paintings, Jon,” Sy says.

Jon shrugs. “Those went away when I lost everything.”

I ask Sy what Jon was like when he met him.

Sy reflects a moment, then says, “When Jon asked me to help him with Mephisto Stables, he was serious. Jon wanted to learn. He made an intense effort. He listened explicitly and almost never second-guessed me. Later on, of course, he started to get his own opinions.”

“Fuck you,” Jon says, laughing.

“You want the truth, don’t you?”

“You’re right, Sy. I got my own opinions, and I should’ve stayed with you.”

Sy explains to me. “Jon got involved with that girl, Toni Moon. Jon thought she knew something about horses. It started to happen that I’d find a horse for Jon, and this girl would tell me that she didn’t like it. I wasn’t ready for that.”

“I was an idiot, Sy. I should never have let a girl get between us.”

“We ran some good races, kid. People still talk about Mephisto Stables in Ocala.”

“They really do, Sy?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, babe.”

As we get in the car to leave, Jon says, “I love that man to death because he gave me the most pleasure I had in my life through the horses.”

Jon drives past the Bay Point security gate, lost in thought. He says, “How can I explain a horse to you? Honestly, if you compare racing a horse to fucking the most beautiful woman, it might only last a few minutes with the woman. Even if you screw that beautiful woman for hours, and your horse wins a two-minute race, you’ll still have better memories from the horse. There’s nothing stronger than a winning horse.”

J
.
R
.:
Horses were the one good thing my father turned me on to. He loved the races. After I made my first big score selling coke to Bernie Levine in California, Danny Mones told me racehorses were a good way to launder money. Many horse sellers would take partial payment in cash. I’d claim the horse for a fake price that was low, and write a check for that amount. Then I’d give the owner cash to make up the difference. When I sold the horse later on, I’d sell it at its real price and pay taxes on the profit. Now my money was clean and legal.

Danny Mones and I started Mephisto Stables in 1977. Buying horses was different from buying condos. I liked to look at horses. I liked to watch them run. I liked to talk to the people in the stables. I liked to think about them.

Gary Teriaca introduced me to Sy Cohen at the Palm Bay Club. Sy gave such good advice about horses, I made him the president of my stables. He started taking me to Kentucky, Louisiana, California, and New York to buy horses. It got to where I was flying horses all over the country to run them in races. Obviously I met a lot of good pilots this way who I also got to help with my coke business.

Dealing cocaine had promoted me into high society. Owning racehorses took me into the stratosphere. The first time Sy took me to Lexington, we were picked up at the airport by his friend Judge Joe Johnson,
^*
who hosted horse auctions. Judge Johnson drove us himself in a stretch Mercedes limousine. This judge was drunk off his ass. We blew through red lights and stop signs. Nobody stopped him. He owned the cops. It was nuts. I was in a limo with a shoebox of coke money being driven by a drunk judge.

We stayed at Judge Johnson’s house. He hosted buyers from all over the world. He had Japanese coming in, Arabs. We’d go to claiming races, which was where you’d bid on the horses. Judge Johnson took me under his wing and explained to me how to work cash payments in Kentucky. The judge didn’t know what I did for a living. He helped all his friends out this way. Even normal rich people need to launder cash now and then.

Judge Johnson was the good kind of judge. He was what was called a “Kentucky hard boot.” He spoke his mind. He was drunk when he went to bed at night. He was drunk at the breakfast table, and he was a hell of a guy. I stayed with him for years. It was through him that I got friendly with Cliff Perlman, who owned Caesar’s Palace. When I’d go to Caesar’s and get comped, everybody assumed
it was because of my Mafia connections. No, I was connected to Caesar’s Palace by a Kentucky judge.

Horse-racing people were very genial. They made the rich doctors I used to do coke with look like garbage. No matter how high I rose in Miami, I was always “the coke guy.” In the horse world, I was just a man with a lot of money. One thing I truly learned about America is that once you have enough money to get in with the top, richest people, nobody asks where it came from. That’s one rule rich people live by as a courtesy to other rich people. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

I
T TURNED
out that Toni fit right in with these people. We ended up becoming friends with Al Tanenbaum and his girlfriend, Gloria. Al was a guy who’d made it big in stereos.
^*
He and Gloria were an older couple we met at an auction in Ocala. Al and I were strangers standing next to each other at an auction, and out of the blue he asked if I wanted to go in on a horse with him. I said yes and bid on the horse. I ended up fronting Al $40,000 because he couldn’t write a check that high that day.

“Gentlemen’s agreement,” he said. “I’ll send you the check when I get back to New York.”

“No problem,” I said. Maybe he was a con artist, but I was curious to find out.

A few days later the check came in the mail. After that we all became great friends. Al and Gloria lived in a suite at the Regency Hotel in New York.
^†
Toni and I started going up there, and Al would send his driver to pick us up. All of us would go to Toni’s favorite places—the Russian Tea Room and Elaine’s.
^‡
One night after
Al had a few drinks, he said, “Jon, men should never ask this, but I feel I know you. What’s your game?”

It was very classy, the way he asked me. So I said, “All I’m going to tell you is this. I do real estate. I have my stables. But sometimes I also work in the importation business.”

Al laughed. “Bolivian marching powder?” Funny guy. That was the phrase he used.

“I guess you could say so.”

“Money is money, Jon. Once you have it, what does it matter?” He pointed to his girlfriend, Gloria, and said, “Did you know that she’s divorced from a man who has more money than you and I combined? She’s so wealthy that she has a car and chauffeur just to take her little fucking dog on a drive around the park so he can look at the trees out the window. All the starving people in the world, and that’s what she does with her money. Who are we to judge her?”

These people didn’t give a fuck about anything. They didn’t judge me. They didn’t want anything from me. They just wanted to have a good time.

We bought several horses together and started running them in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.
^*
We’d stay at Al’s house up there, and he and Gloria would come down to Delray and stay with us. It was the best social relationship I’d had with anybody, and it lasted for years.

I
T WAS
through Al that I became friendly with another very interesting man, Judge Tom Rosenberg, who was a top guy in Cook County.
^†
Judge Rosenberg was a houseguest at Al’s place in Saratoga Springs when we met him. He ended up coming down to Florida, and we went in on some horses together. He was a real
gambler,
^*
and I turned him on to Bobby Erra, who would take bets on anything. At the end of Judge Rosenberg’s first visit to Miami, I took the judge to Joe’s Stone Crab for dinner, and he said, “I insist you visit me in Chicago. Come to Sportsman’s Park.
^†
There’s a race called the Color Me Blue that you’re going to love. Bring one of your horses.”

A few weeks later I had my stables send my horse Best Game up to Chicago. The afternooon Toni and I fly in, Judge Rosenberg has us picked up at the airport by a security detail of cops. They take us to a hotel by the Water Tower.
^‡
After we rest, the cops escort us to a restaurant. Inside, it is like the Roaring Twenties. Everybody is dressed to the nines. Judge Rosenberg is sitting like a prince at a table surrounded by ass-kissers and beautiful women. When he stands up to greet us, it is like the parting of the seas. Everybody in the room steps back and stares at him, then at me and Toni. Mostly at Toni, because she was always at her finest surrounded by money. After dinner the judge says, “I’m going to take you to a place I know you’ll like.”

The cops chauffeur us across town to a cabaret theater. One of the goons at the door says, “Good evening, Judge. Would you like your table by the bar, or are you going upstairs?”

“We’ll be going upstairs,” he says.

We went upstairs to big double doors. The bouncer standing there says, “How are you tonight, Your Honor?”

The bouncer opens the doors, and inside there are green tables with every game you’d see in Las Vegas, except this place is classier. There are guys in tuxedos, women in jewels. Everybody comes up to say, “Hi, Your Honor.”

Judge Rosenberg turns to me and says, “I’m going to get you
some chips. The way it works is, nobody walks out of here with money. If you win, I’ll have somebody bring your cash tomorrow.”

I shot craps for hours. That’s my favorite game, but doing it with Toni and Judge Rosenberg and all these people who looked like they were in the movies—it was a trip and a half. At the end of the night, I was up $50,000. Next day, good to his word, Judge Rosenberg had one of his cops bring me my winnings.

A day later we went to Sportsman’s Park to run my horse Best Game. When the race started, he didn’t break right. My heart went to my stomach. Judge Rosenberg must have noticed the look on my face, and he leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about it, Jon. It’s just a horse race.”

Judge Rosenberg wasn’t just classy, he was a gracious man. I knew he’d bet on my horse, but he was trying to put me at ease. All my worrying was for nothing. Best Game pulled ahead and won.

We all had a terrific time in Chicago. At the time the judge was hosting me, my partner Ron Tobachnik and I were moving a couple hundred kilos every month in the city. Not that I’d ever mention this to the judge. I’d been some kind of gangster my whole life, but the first time I ever lived like one—like the way I pictured Al Capone living in his heyday—was during those nights in Chicago when Judge Rosenberg took me around town.

W
HEN
I first started buying horses, they were like pieces of meat to me. Whether they won or lost, I made money—because I was using them for laundering. But early on I became interested in winning. I had horses gushing cash. I bought a horse called Noholme’s Star for $30,000, and he earned $850,000 for me.

Sy taught me how to train horses so they’d run their hearts out. But I also learned how to fix races. There were many tricks. I hired what they called witch doctors—crooked vets—who could take a nothing horse and give him hops so he’d run his brains out. In the early days,
hops
meant heroin. They’d give it to injured horses so they’d run hard on injured legs. Of course, once a horse runs a race or two on hops, there’s no more horse left. By the late 1970s witch
doctors were coming up with all sorts of exotic dope. There was the testosterone that Bryan used to shoot up. There was a drug called Sublimaze
^*
that made horses fly like Superman. When they banned it in the United States, I found a guy in Colombia who could get it for me, and I’d fly it up with coke shipments.

The tracks got wise to doping, and they made a rule that winning horses had to get tested in a “spit barn,” where officials would test their piss. The guys overseeing the spit barns at Florida tracks were state employees. I could usually find one I could bribe into switching the piss cups. That way I could win with a doped horse, no problem.