American Desperado (16 page)

I once offended Andy. I hadn’t included him in a social event. Jon showed up at the club without Andy a few nights later. I asked him, “Where’s Andy?”

“He’s upset. His feelings are hurt,” Jon said.

Andy was at home sulking, so I phoned him. I said, “Andy,
please come out to the club. Jon’s here. We’re having a wonderful time.”

Andy said, “I’ll only come if you put on ‘My Way,’ by Frank Sinatra. I want the deejay to play it, so I can hear it over the phone.”

We played it on the dance floor so Andy could hear, and he came. Jon and Andy were both like that. They were playful, and they were sensitive. There was a little boy inside each of them. Of course, they were tough boys, too.

J
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R
.:
My father’s only belief was that evil is strong. But I was learning I could go further if I reached out to people like Bradley who had abilities I lacked. We never fucked over Bradley because without Bradley, we would’ve had nothing. He was friends with Jimi Hendrix, not us. People loved Bradley, not us. To other celebrities, he was their celebrity. They’d beg to come to his parties.

Bradley used to say that our business was about putting more love in the world. Can you believe this shit? He was taking six hits of LSD a day, so he was gone. He was blind to us. Bradley was half business genius, half out of his mind. He did not understand what the Mafia meant. We started to teach him.

Because Andy and I were a part of the Gambino family, there were wiseguys we could not keep out of our clubs—friends of the family we could not say no to. As we got more successful, more of them came to our clubs. They would not come to fight. They would bring dates. They came with respect.

But wiseguys, even when they’re out for fun, will always start fights. And once the wiseguys start fighting, wiseguy girlfriends always do the same thing: they stand on chairs, scream at the top of their lungs, and throw bottles. It’s in the genes of Italian girls.

If wiseguys hurt other wiseguys, that was not a problem. None of them would call the cops. But when you mix wiseguys with society people, you end up with people calling the cops. The cops would come, but Andy and I wouldn’t deal with the cops. It was not good for the cops to see us as involved in the business of the clubs.
Bradley would deal with the cops. Bradley would have to clean up the mess.

It must have been hard on Bradley as he got more exposed to my kind of people. He started to see who we were. But he got over it. Bradley stayed our partner as we expanded control of New York’s discos for the Gambino family.

*
Located at the site of a former jazz club at One Sheridan Square.

*
The Stork Club was the place for everyone from the Duke of Windsor to Marilyn Monroe to Groucho Marx.

*
Auchincloss, the writer known for chronicling the rich, was related to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jacqueline Onassis.

*
In the 1960s Joshua White Light Shows, featured at concerts by the Jefferson Airplane, pioneered psychedelic lighting. White is now considered a fine artist of light.

*
Here is how the show was described on page 395 of the previously cited
Electric Gypsy:
“Jimi came onto the stage at around 12:15 a.m. with the Woodstock band and, although the crowd was expecting Hendrix pyrotechnics, he stood there calmly, the band working pretty well, Jimi trading solos with Larry Lee, who according to a reviewer from
Rock
magazine was ‘wonderful’.”

**
According to deejay Terry Noel in an interview published on
djhistory.com
, Pierce gave Hendrix work as a busboy at Ondine’s. When Hendrix asked to perform and demonstrated his ability to play the guitar with his teeth, Pierce told him, “I don’t know what to do with you. You’re like a freak act.” But Pierce did let him play, giving Hendrix his first significant show in New York. Pierce had the Doors perform for a month at Ondine’s in 1966, before their first album was released.

†
Describing the business relationship between Wood and Jon (who is referred to by his birth name, “John Riccobono”) on page 94 of
Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy
, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek write, “Things took a more serious turn when Wood was persuaded to take on as club manager John Riccobono, a relative of ‘Staten Island’ Joe Riccobono, a key figure in the Carlo Gambino family … Mafia associates were put on the payroll, large sums of money were going out of the club while Wood tried rather foolhardily to resist this take-over.”

†
P.J. Clarke’s is still located at 915 Third Avenue.

†
Jack Warner was head of Warner Bros. Studios and son of the founder.

†
In
Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy
, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek describe negotiations to get Hendrix to play at Salvation differently. “Knowing Jimi was a regular in the club, [Bobby Wood’s] associates suggested Jimi perform the opening night. Jimi didn’t want to do it.” The authors claim that Hendrix only changed his mind after a bizarre incident in which a mafioso arrived at his temporary house in upstate New York and began firing a gun at a tree outside his window. I asked Jon about this story and he said, “Andy and me used to shoot guns off all the time just playing around. It’s possible we went up there and did that, but I don’t remember needing to shoot a gun to make Jimi Hendrix play for us. He liked Salvation because he could get drugs there.”

‡
Pierce was profiled in Albert Goldman’s
Disco
, a history of nightclubs in New York, published by Hawthorn Books in 1978. In it Goldman writes, “Bradley’s stock-in-trade was his great personal charm. It was said that when a mobster would come into one of his clubs and start waving around his gun, Bradley would take the piece out of the hood’s hand, make him laugh, and end up with the killer kissing him.”

‡
Coquelin is credited with being the originator of the disco in the United States. His Le Club was modeled after the Whiskey au Go-Go in Cannes.

‡
When they launched Salvation actress Faye Dunaway, who was very close with Schatzberg, served on the board of directors.

§
Schatzberg was a top fashion photographer of the 1960s. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan used his photos for their album covers. In the 1970s Schatzberg became a leading film director, known for his gritty, realist style, starting with
Panic in Needle Park
. That film, written by Joan Didion, launched the career of Al Pacino. Ondine’s was a club that blended deejays with live music at 308 East 59th Street. Michael Butler was heir to a Chicago industrial fortune, theater producer, and confidant of John F. Kennedy, who at one point made him a special adviser on the Middle East.

16

J
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R
.:
After Salvation we took over Directoire.
^*
Andy and I put up $100,000 of our own money to redecorate it, and Bradley went to town.

B
RADLEY
:
Directoire was named after the Directoire period of France, and the club was all about that style.
^†
When we redesigned Directoire, we didn’t change the theme but we made it fresh. I brought in Jackie Kennedy’s designer, Oleg Cassini, to supervise the redesign, and, of course, he made it even more fabulous.

J
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R
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When Bradley introduced me to Oleg Cassini, I had my doubts about this little half-a-fag Frenchman. He cost us a lot of money. But his work was top-notch.
They put in big fly chairs, with cushions all around. Bradley always liked cushions for people to lie on. It was very tasteful. There was no club like it. Even the bouncers we got were celebrities. We had Ray Robinson, Jr., whose father, Sugar Ray Robinson, was one of the greatest boxers of all time, and Richard Roundtree
^*
working the door. Backing them up were my guys.

Petey, when he was not in prison, always worked as a bouncer for me, and so did Jack Buccino. With his desire to be in show business, Jack loved working the nightclubs, but he was always a problem. At Directoire, Jack nearly shot a customer. Jack was checking the ID on a kid, and Jack’s own gun fell out of his pocket and fired when it hit the ground. The bullet went straight up and into Jack’s leg. Petey and my other guys all took their guns out to shoot the kid. They didn’t realize Jack got shot by his own gun. But doped up as Jack was, he had the presence of mind to say, “It was my gun. He didn’t shoot me.”

Poor Bradley. He came out to everybody screaming, my guys with their guns out, and Jack on the ground with blood pouring out of his body. Bradley was beside himself.

W
HEN WE
had parties at the clubs, Andy and I started spiking the punch with LSD. We’d have the old mustache Italians show up, and we thought it was hilarious to get them high on acid and lose their minds without knowing what was up. At one of these parties at Directoire, we dumped handfuls of LSD blotter paper into the punch.

“This is going to be the funniest shit ever,” Andy said.

No old wiseguys came like we expected, but Ed Sullivan did.
^†
He came in looking like he did on TV, like a corpse in a suit. First thing he did was take a cup of LSD punch from the bowl. Andy and I followed him while he walked around, talking with the models and singers hoping to get on his TV show. He held the cup the whole
time, without taking a drink. Andy and I were going nuts watching him. Finally Sullivan remembered he was thirsty and drank the cup.

Andy and I continued following him around, watching him like he was a science experiment. He was known to be very against drugs,
^*
and we wanted to see the effect LSD could have on Mr. Clean. He walked around chatting like normal. Then his face got a wild look. He grabbed at something in the air that didn’t exist and began holding the walls with his hands.

Andy and I always stocked our parties with whores. We sent a whore girl over to Ed Sullivan to ask what he was feeling. He went paranoid on her. He yelled, “Who are you?”

She smiled at him and calmed him down. Sullivan lost his paranoia. He stepped closer and put his hand on her tit. He started twisting it like a doorknob. Andy and I got a brainstorm. What if we could get Sullivan to take his clothes off and fuck the whore in a back room? If we got it on film, we could blackmail him. I told the girl to take Sullivan into the back. Andy and I asked around for a camera. But who had a camera in a discotheque? There were no security cameras back then. We sent a guy out to find one.

Andy and I peeked through the door to the back room on Sullivan and the whore. She took her tits out of her shirt so he could play with them better, but when she tried to get him undressed, he freaked. He went into the corner and started crying.

Andy and I got worried. We couldn’t have Ed Sullivan lose his mind in our club. We sent for Sullivan’s driver and brought him into the back room. We told him, “We don’t know what happened to your boss, but he attacked a girl in there. You’ve got to get him out of here.”

The driver said, “Mr. Sullivan has never acted like this in his life.”

We hustled him out a side door, and a few days later I called his
driver to find out how he was doing. “Mr. Sullivan has been locked up in his apartment for three days,” he said.

Andy and I did not think this was good news. What if we had destroyed Ed Sullivan’s brain? This could be a scandal. It could bring heat into our club. Sullivan’s driver told me a doctor had seen Mr. Sullivan in his home. I got the doctor’s name from him and called my uncle Sam to see if he knew a way to get to this guy. My uncle didn’t even ask why. Two hours later he called back. He had a guy I should take with me to talk to the doctor. He explained that if I took my uncle’s guy, the doctor would talk to me.

The next morning I met my uncle’s guy. He was a very tall man. His face was all pockmarked and scarred. Maybe he was somebody the doctor malpracticed on. Whoever he was, when we called on the doctor at the office, he saw us right away.

I’m wearing my platform boots and velvet pants with a gun in the waistband. Next to me is this scarred freak. The doctor looked from him to me, took a deep breath, and asked how he could help.

I said I wanted to know how Ed Sullivan was doing.

The doctor told me Ed Sullivan had called him and told him he had been drugged. When he went to his house, he found Mr. Sullivan barricaded in his bedroom.

“My God, is he all right now?” I asked.

“He’s thinking about filing a complaint with the police. He thinks he was drugged at a nightclub.”

“Did you run any tests to make sure Mr. Sullivan’s cock is all right?” I asked.

“What are you saying?” the doctor asked.

“Mr. Sullivan attacked a girl. He got her alone, and she was screaming her guts out. We had to pull him off of her,” I said.