American Desperado (62 page)

I look at the tail thrashing in the canoe and think,
Fuck it
. I point my rifle barrel at the gator’s head.

“If you’re going to shoot him, don’t shoot into the canoe. You’ll sink it,” Earl says. He calmly pulls the gator’s head over the water. I press my gun down into its angry red eye and pull the trigger. One good blast directly in the eye stops him.

Earl whoops, “Yeehaw!” Then he says, “Let’s get some more. Use only one bullet next time, not three. You got that, boy?”

Rednecks are cheap.

Hours later we go back to Earl’s house and carry three dead gators into his shed. Earl starts chain-sawing the heads off. “Okay, neighbor, next comes the fun part. I’m gonna skin the tails, filet the meat, marinate it, and have you over for dinner.”

A week later Toni and I went over for a cookout. Earl had soaked the meat in brine for days, then smoked it. I thought it would taste like garbage, but it was delicious. Then Earl did something I’ll never forget. He’d mounted the gator’s jawbone with its teeth showing, and he handed it to me and said, “This is my friendship gift to you.” Later he took me to a guy living in a trailer who turned the skin from the tail into very fine boots.

After we bonded over killing gators, Earl introduced me to another side of Delray.

He came by my house one night and said, “Let’s go.”

“Get the fuck out of my life, bro. I ain’t going gator hunting tonight.”

“No, neighbor. Tonight is party night.”

We took his truck up to the shithole diner by the feed shop. I knew the diner because it had pay phones in front that I used to call Max and Rafa from. What I didn’t know was that after closing, the two sisters who ran the diner put on a party. They’d cook up fried chicken and serve beer and untaxed liquor. They brought in girls
who did lingerie shows. The main event was a poker game that went all night. The diner owners did this a couple times a month. Earl, two of his brothers, a deputy sheriff, and other farmers all came. A couple of these guys were Baptists. To them this was sin city. By my standards, the stakes were nothing. But this was the local redneck power structure, and I’d been allowed in.

I found out that one of my gambling neighbors was an old-time marijuana smuggler who’d fallen on hard times because of oversupply in the weed market. I hired the weed smuggler and Earl and his brothers to help me out with cocaine. They found abandoned sheds out in the middle of nowhere that I could use as stash houses. I started flowing kilos of coke to one of these guys that he moved in places like Georgia and Alabama. I eventually had these guys moving hundreds of keys a month in the Deep South.

A
T ONE
point I got frustrated with Mickey for moving coke too slowly. There was a two-month period where he shut down shipments to rebuild his planes. My pilot Roger believed he’d learned to beat the Customs Service air patrols as effectively as Mickey, and to prove it he offered to pick up eight hundred kilos in his King Air. The twist was, I had him drop it a couple miles from my backyard in Delray.

My redneck neighbors ran the operation. One of the farmers hired a low-flying crop duster plane the morning of the airdrop to mask the sounds of Roger’s King Air coming in. Roger was going to drop the eight hundred kilos in the Everglades. Earl and his brothers organized canoes and ATVs to pick up the load and bring it to a stash house.

The morning of the drop, I watched Roger’s plane come in as I cooled off in my pool. I swam laps while my army of rednecks picked up all the coke.

I had a level of trust with these hicks, and not just because they’d done a little pot smuggling in the past. The fact is, they all hated the government. They believed it was almost their patriotic duty to
show they couldn’t be pushed around. Even the one sheriff’s deputy who played cards with us felt the same way. We didn’t involve him in our smuggling, but all these hillbillies got off on beating the government just as much as I did.

I only did two coke drops in my neighborhood. I didn’t want to push my luck. What mattered was, I had good neighbors. I controlled the rednecks.

I
T WAS
so safe up in Delray, I used it as a hideout for Griselda Blanco, who by 1983 had murdered so many people that she had to run from Miami. She was one of the Cartel’s oldest and biggest distributors, but she burned up her luck. Rafa, though, was loyal to this beast of a woman to the end. When everybody wanted her dead, he came to me and asked if I could help her hide.

I found a house down the road whose owner took $250,000 in cash and let me have it. Earl had some guys put up a fence and brought in Rottweilers to run in the yard. When Griselda came up to the house, she looked like a pig. She’d packed on forty pounds of ugly. She was shacked up with an Argentinean guy who claimed to be a doctor and shot her up with tranquilizers twenty-four hours a day. He probably kept her medicated hoping she wouldn’t kill him like she usually did with her men.

Griselda and her boyfriend wouldn’t leave the house. I had Bryan bring them groceries. Griselda, the feared killer, lived in terror. She nailed boards over the windows and hid in the dark. I went there once with Bryan. The house smelled worse than a truck-stop toilet. Once inside, I gagged. Griselda flicked on a nightlight. I saw her in the corner, this fat, stinking bitch with red eyes.

My impulse was to shoot her in the eye like a gator. I should have. When she went into hiding in Delray, Rafa cut her off from distributing. Griselda lashed out. She ended up stealing 150 kilos from one of Fabito Ochoa’s cousins and killing her. That finished Griselda. You can’t kill an Ochoa.

Rafa could no longer protect her. Even then he let her flee. Crazed
as he was, Rafa had a heart for her. Griselda ran to California and continued her thieving and murdering until they caught her.
^*

I was just glad the rotten bitch was gone. She was a blight on the neighborhood.

T
ONI AND
I built up our house year by year. We had her little brother, Lee, living with us. Toni’s mom moved in. She brought her stepdaughter, Amber. Amber was the daughter of an ex-boyfriend of Toni’s mom. Amber was fourteen. She was just a sweet schoolgirl who ran around with the kids in the neighborhood. I made sure that Bryan or Lee got her to school every day, and that she didn’t miss her homework.

Bryan loved Delray. Even though he was Italian, he’d grown up in Florida, and the redneck way of life had soaked into him. He and Earl became the best of friends. They hunted gators together all the time. Bryan liked to try to beat them to death with his bare hands.

We added on to the barn to make room for more horses I was buying. I kept my main barn for Mephisto Stables at a racetrack. But I moved my most prized horses to Delray. I had a staff come in every morning to work for me.

L
ISA “BITSY” BENSON
:
Just about my whole family worked for Jon and Toni. My father was a trainer for Jon.
^†
My cousin Chris, who was fifteen, rode for Jon. My boyfriend was his blacksmith. I had a company that did cold-laser therapy for his horses.

Jon and Toni were an awesome couple. Toni was so fucking hot, it wasn’t even funny, and Jon was straight with everyone who worked for him. He loved the horses, and he treated us well because we took care of them.

Jon said he was in real estate, but we knew. One time workers were digging by the barn, and they found a bag with $300,000 in it. When Jon came out, he acted like it was no big deal. People said he was involved with drugrunning. But those were the days of
Miami Vice
. It seemed glamorous to me.

Jon and Toni were glamorous. They had everything, and they seemed so much in love, even when things got stormy. And they would. They definitely had their fights.

J
.
R
.:
I’d slam a door. Toni would kick it down. One time she tried to run me over. I’d pulled up in the driveway, and I saw Toni’s black Mercedes racing toward me. She crashed into my car, and I chased her around the property until our cars couldn’t drive. We destroyed everything in our path. That was a spat for us.

It’s how we communicated. We’d laugh about it afterward. We did all kinds of crazy things in the house. I used to put on a helmet when I watched the football games on my big-screen TV. If my team was losing, I’d destroy the TV by running into it. I had a carpenter who lived behind the barn. He’d just follow Toni and me around, rebuilding things behind us.

Our house was
Wild Kingdom
inside. When you have a couple of dogs and a 150-pound cat like Cucha, things will get broken. Cucha was good with people. You could have little kids or babies in the house, and she was fine. The one thing that freaked her out was jockeys. I guess in her cat mind she could understand the concept of a child or a grown-up, but jockeys—five-foot-tall grown-ups—made her crazy. Jockeys were like catnip to her. Whenever you had a jockey in our house, she’d start creeping around, wiggling her tail, getting ready to pounce.

Angel Cordero used to come by to give Toni riding lessons. It’s
no secret Angel liked to smoke out. He’s in our house one day after a lesson, smoking a fat one, when he stands up to get something to eat. I thought Cucha was out in the pen. But
boom
, the floor shook from the force of that cat’s hind legs jumping up. I see Cucha flying in the air. Angel thought he was going to grab a munchie. Cucha decided he was the munchie. With all the bad things I’d done, I wasn’t going to go down as the guy whose cat ate one of the greatest jockeys who’d ever lived. Luckily, I had a new Doberman, Apollo, who was protective of Angel. He jumped up and blocked Angel. You had 100 pounds of dog hitting 150 pounds of cat. They broke a wall when they collided.

Angel just stood there, still holding his blunt. “Wow” was what he said.

M
ICKEY MUNDAY
:
I don’t understand how they kept all those animals. It wasn’t just the cats, the dogs, and the birds. Toni would rescue critters from the side of the road.

Toni was a special person. With her looks she could have been stuck-up, but she was friendly to everybody. She was a tomboy at heart. She was like a frontier gal. She could ride, shoot, cuss. In that house, she was the alpha animal. That’s why those animals didn’t slaughter each other like they should have by the rules of nature. Toni bossed them around. She’d give a look, and that cat would slink off.

They had one hallway in the house that must have been a hundred feet long. Jon and I were standing there one day talking, and over his shoulder I see his favorite bird walking down the hall. Jon was very fond of this bird. It was a green parrot with clipped wings that made it walk like a penguin. Then I saw Cucha, down low behind the bird, stalking it. I said, “Jon—”

“Don’t worry, Mickey.”

How could Jon be so calm? I watched as that cat leaped. There was 150 pounds of death in the air. Then I heard Toni shout, “Cucha!” The cat fell to the floor, turned, and skulked off. The bird
kept walking. It had no idea how narrowly it had escaped being eaten.

Toni ruled that house. It was clear. She was a force of nature.

J
.
R
.:
At her best, Toni could handle anything. When she went riding in the morning, she’d carry a hunting rifle or one of our AK-47s to deal with gators. My new dog, Apollo, loved riding with her. He was the trailblazer. He’d run ahead to show the horse the way.

One morning Apollo ran into a gator. He’d been trained by Joe Da Costa to believe he was invincible. However big a dog’s heart is, a dog-on-alligator contest isn’t going to end well for the dog. A dog can’t even bite a gator because of its skin being like metal.

Apollo did his best. That gator sliced his stomach open with a hole so big, his intestines fell out. This mighty dog did not give up. He bit with all his strength and locked his fangs in the gator’s back. The gator shook him off and broke Apollo’s fangs. They were stuck in his skin.

That gator didn’t count on Toni. She charged at him with her AK and emptied the whole banana clip into him. Toni put thirty rounds into that gator. He was done.

After the attack Toni came off the trail with the horse behind her. She was carrying Apollo in her arms, holding his intestines in with her hands. That was Toni at her best. In the animal kingdom, she was fierce.

We got a vet to come out immediately. Apollo got stitched together, and he healed fine within two months. Unfortunately, he had no fangs.

I knew a cokehead dentist who I thought could help. He was a human dentist, but I persuaded him to take Apollo as his patient. We brought him in on Sundays so his normal patients wouldn’t freak out at seeing a dog in the dentist’s chair. It took a few weekends, but we got beautiful gold implants made where Apollo’s fangs had been.

Apollo completely recovered and the rest of his life was happy with his gold teeth.

W
HEN
I first moved to Delray, my aim was to keep our home insulated from my work life. But then I got the neighbors involved, and I had Toni’s brother, Lee, working as a driver for my transport cars. Lee ended up working very closely with Rafa’s enforcer, Flaco. You never would have predicted it, but Lee and Flaco became the best of friends, even though neither spoke a word of the other’s language. Flaco was a psychotic killer from the jungle. Lee was a big, all-American
Dukes of Hazzard
kid. But they were thick as thieves. It worked out good for me. I didn’t have to deal directly with Rafa as much. Flaco would give Rafa’s directions to Lee about who was getting what from which stash house, and everything got taken care of. It was crazy watching Flaco and Lee work things out. They communicated in a mangled language that wasn’t English or Spanish. It was a mutant way of talking, but they understood each other perfectly. I came to understand that the soldiers Rafa brought from the hills were just Colombian rednecks. Despite all the differences between Lee and Flaco, they could talk to each other redneck to redneck.