American Desperado
Read American Desperado Online
Authors: Jon Roberts,Evan Wright
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Personal Memoirs
MORE PRAISE FOR
AMERICAN DESPERADO
“A tour de force. The best crime book since
Wiseguy
. Puts you in the middle of a world where it’s wonderful to be a tourist, terrible to be a resident. I am filled with nothing but admiration and envy for Evan Wright. If I thought I could get away with it, I would off Mr. Wright and present the book as my own. But as this story shows, no one really gets away with anything.”
—R
ICH
C
OHEN
,
New York Times
bestselling coauthor of
When I Stop Talking
,
You’ll Know I’m Dead
and author of
Tough Jews
“
American Desperado
is the kind of book crime novelists envy, because it is not only stranger but so much better than fiction. Evan Wright brings the same immediacy and vigor that lifted
Generation Kill
above the many accounts of the Iraq War—only here he gets unfettered access not to the good guys, but to one incredibly bad one. Captivating, addictive, and head spinning, this one-of-a-kind book earns its place on the top shelf of true-crime accounts.”
—C
HUCK
H
OGAN
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Standoff
and
Prince of Thieves
(basis of the Academy Award–nominated
The Town
)
“
American Desperado
is one of the most disturbing memoirs I’ve ever read.… Like many sociopaths, Roberts is a totally charming storyteller, thanks in great part to his coauthor, journalist Evan Wright, who does a brilliant job getting into Roberts’s scary head and letting him tell his tale, as well as vetting his nearly unbelievable life story.… I never want to be in the same room with Jon Roberts, but I couldn’t stop reading his book.”
—S
TEVEN
G
AINES
,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Philistines
at the Hedgerow
and
Fool’s Paradise
“Seldom have I read an account of criminal enterprise that took me so deeply into the blackness of a man’s soul—a scary read, pounding and relentless and irresistible.”
—B
RUCE
P
ORTER
,
author of
Blow
ALSO BY EVAN WRIGHT
Generation Kill
Hella Nation
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Roberts All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress in-Publication Data Roberts, Jon, 1948–
American desperado / Jon Roberts and Evan Wright.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Roberts, Jon, 1948– 2. Drug dealers—United States—Biography. 3. Cocaine industry—United States. 4. Drug traffic—United States. I. Wright, Evan.
II. Title.
HV5805.R637A3 2011
363.45092—dc22
[B]
2011010503
eISBN: 978-0-30745044-9
JACKET DESIGN BY DAVID TRAN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROYALTY FREE/DREAMSTIME
v3.1
TO NOEMI AND JULIAN
Contents
Desperado, the horse that I thought would win the Derby and make me famous as something more than a gangster, was a baby when I got him. He hadn’t been trained how to run, but he could already fly on the grass. He had good instincts. He didn’t like other horses. You don’t want a sociable horse. They stay in the pack. You want a horse who likes to run in front of all the other horses. Desperado was a killer. I named him Desperado because I saw myself in his eyes
.
—JON ROBERTS
1
APRIL 2008—MIAMI
E
VAN WRIGHT (E.W.)
:
During a break in the Heat versus Pistons game at Miami’s American Airlines Arena, an announcer informs the crowd that a “very special celebrity” is in the house. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have Jon Roberts, Miami’s original cocaine cowboy, with us tonight.”
Live images of Roberts seated in the arena splash onto the screens in the arena: a physically fit sixty-year-old with silver hair combed straight back. Unaware that he is being filmed, Roberts gazes expressionlessly. Deep-set eyes give his face a wolfish, predatory appearance. Fans seated near him stand with their camera-phones and take aim. Roberts notices his image on the screens and offers a pained okay-you-got-me grin. He puts his arm on his eight-year-old son, Julian, seated beside him. Julian ducks his head into his father’s shoulder but peeks up, grinning, as cameras flash. His dad is the biggest star in the arena.
Little more than fifteen years earlier Roberts was a fugitive. His face was featured on FBI most-wanted posters at U.S. post offices across North America. He fled Miami after the U.S. government labeled him as top “American representative” of the Medellín Drug Cartel and charged him with overseeing the importation of billions of dollars of cocaine. Roberts and a small band of American partners had created a veritable FedEx of drug smuggling. They employed secret airfields, listening posts to eavesdrop on Coast Guard communications, and sophisticated homing beacons for tracking cocaine shipped by sea that stymied the U.S. government for nearly a decade. That part of Roberts’s story—and the outrageous life he led that epitomized the excesses of Miami’s cocaine-fueled boom of the 1980s—was told in the underground hit documentary
Cocaine Cowboys
, released in 2006.
Key aspects of Roberts’s extraordinary criminal life remained untold—his rise in a powerful New York Mafia clan, the murders that prompted his exile to Miami, his involvement with a CIA official that led to a secret plea deal with the government.
Through it all, he possessed an asset not typical of admitted killers: charm. A man who did business with Roberts in his New York Mafia days—and later joined the priesthood as a result of the experience—told me, “Jon was extremely likable. He was fun to be around. Underneath that was a person capable of very bad things. He is an extreme dichotomy of good and bad. He is a very old story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Roberts’s frankness about himself—usually blended with a sly, sardonic humor—can be disarming. In a phone call before we met to discuss telling his full story, he said, “I might be a sociopath. Most of the time I’ve been on this earth I’ve had no regard for human life. That’s been the key to my success.”
I
ARRIVE
in South Florida the spring of 2008 to begin interviewing Roberts for this book. He insists that I stay with him and his wife, Noemi, and son, Julian, at their house in Hollywood, Florida. He insists that I not rent a car. He’ll pick me up. He’ll drive, always.
“I don’t ever want to be in a car with somebody else driving it,” he explains.
Jon’s accent is New York, but not the tough-guy dialect of the streets. He speaks an urbane New Yorkese, like Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
. We do many hours of interviews in Jon’s car, visiting old haunts—bars, smugglers’ docks, murder scenes—with time out to pick up Julian at school and shuttle him to playdates and hockey practice.
When Julian is in the car, Jon drives at the proper speed and questions him about school, like any other involved parent. When Jon and I are alone in the car, he reverts to old habits. He seems to drive his car, a late-model Cadillac, at only two speeds, 75 mph on surface streets and 110 mph on freeways. As he darts in and out of traffic and squeals out of parking lots, driving with Jon feels like being dropped into a car-chase scene in a 1970s movie. I glimpse the rearview mirror, expecting to see elaborate car crashes in our wake and flashing red lights. But Jon is a precise high-speed driver, never reckless. Rocketing toward a parking space, he flicks the wheel with one hand and backs in. He always parks his car facing out, primed for a quick getaway.
Jon’s home is an expansive Spanish modern, set against a lake on the Inland Waterway. Before we enter, he clips blossoms from a jasmine vine, then places them in a vase in the front hall. A friend from his New York days tells me that Jon has always liked flowers. “In his apartments he always had a bowl of water with a gardenia blossom floating in it.”
Jon’s hospitality is obsessive. Before my arrival he phoned me on a morning when I happened to be eating blueberries. Now a fresh basket of blueberries waits for me in the refrigerator. Every time I visit there will be blueberries.
In the Roberts household, Jon does the cooking—French toast for breakfast, pasta and baked fish for dinner. Unless there is an NBA game on, or a new episode of
Two and a Half Men
—his favorite show—meals are eaten at the long, plank-wood dining table. Noemi is responsible for setting it.
She is an energetic presence, thirty years younger than he. Noemi is African on her father’s side and Hungarian on her mother’s. She and Jon met shortly after she arrived in America, when she was training in a Miami park for a triathlon. There is an athletic bounce to her movements, and she speaks in an exuberant, bubbling accent—not always easily understood. She pulls me aside before my first dinner in the house and says, “I adore Jon. But the day I met him, he touched me and my body went numb, because his energy is black. Jon is not human. I love him, but I live as his prisoner. I cannot leave him because his evil is magnetic.”
Overhearing his wife’s commentary, Jon offers a
Father Knows Best
laugh. “Please, Noemi. You’ll spoil his appetite.”
Jon’s older sister, Judy, who lives nearby, is a frequent dinner guest. A graduate of Emerson College, Judy was a personnel director at a large New York company while Jon pursued his criminal career. After the birth of Julian (by Jon’s previous wife), Judy moved to Florida to help raise him. In her mid-sixties, Judy is slim and stylish. At the dinner table she speaks in a calming voice, directed at Julian when he mumbles about his schoolwork, then at Jon when he shouts at Julian for mumbling. “Let him speak in his own voice, Jon,” she scolds.