American Desperado (25 page)

I was superstitious about Vera. I believed if I took care of Patsy for Vincent, Vera would know what I did by looking into my eyes. So for one time in my life, I chose not to do the evil thing. I took the good side. I went to Andy and I said, “Andy, Patsy’s best friends with my girl. This is really fucked up here. I don’t want to do this.”

Andy did not blink. “Nobody’s going to force you to do nothing, Jon.”

Andy went to the family and said I should not be involved with Vincent’s problem. He pointed out there was still heat on me from the Bobby Wood murder. Everybody agreed I should stay away from this one.

Vincent made an impulsive choice. He decided to take care of Patsy using Barry Lipsky, the moron, to help him. This turned into an absolute disaster. They killed her fine, but when they set her body on fire, they left a matchbook from Hippopotamus next to her burned car. They had witnesses who saw them buying the gasoline. The papers made it a big story that Patsy’s cross supposedly didn’t melt in the fire. Vincent was a good guy, but he screwed up, big time.

B
RADLEY PIERCE
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I would see Vincent Pacelli in the clubs with Jon and Andy. They could pass as nice guys. Vincent looked mean. One just knew he was savage. When Patsy told me she was working for him as a “broker”—moving drugs for him—I knew this was bad news. What happened to her was terrible. Before they killed her, they tortured her. She was a nice girl who came to my
clubs. But she took a trip into the Devil’s territory. When you take a trip down a dark alley, you don’t know what demons you’re going to meet. I began to wonder if the journey I’d started in café society had turned into a dark alley. By the 1970s many of us were staring at demons.

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When Bobby Wood died, everybody knew he was scum. When Patsy died, the papers played her up as “Park Avenue Patsy.” They wrote about her burned up with her cross like she was an angel.

Patsy was also a government witness. If you ever have to kill a government witness, never leave the body. That’s like waving a red flag at the cops. Always make rats disappear. If I’d taken care of Patsy like I’d been asked to, nobody would have heard about it. Making somebody disappear is the easiest thing in the world.

Forget about “cement shoes” and all the garbage in movies. If you need to get rid of a body, the simplest way is to drive it out on the water in your boat, smash the teeth out with a hammer, and sprinkle these in the water. Then take a sharp knife—like a fillet knife for fish—and cut the body from asshole up to the solar plexus. The guts will pop out like Jiffy Pop. The fish will eat this right away, and everything else will sink. The reason bodies float is because the juices inside the guts make gases. Cut out the guts, you don’t have a problem. If it’s warm weather, you can drop the body in the water next to your boat and jump in to do the filleting. You won’t get a single drip of blood on your boat. If it’s colder, you want to push the body right up to the edge of the gunwale so there’s less to clean up when you’re done. Either way, any idiot who knows the basics can make a body disappear forever.

If Patsy had just disappeared, nobody would have noticed. She was the type of girl about whom people would have said, “Maybe she ran away. Maybe she went hitchhiking and met a bad person.”

But Patsy became an even bigger news story after Barry Lipsky
confessed and ratted out Vincent Pacelli.
^*
Now Vera’s eyes were opened. She knew Vincent and I were friendly. We’d just been to his wedding together a few weeks earlier. There was no hiding what I was about. Vera was wise to me.

She would not look me in the eye. I’d catch her in my apartment sitting across the room, staring at me like I was a monster. She cried all the time. Then she accused me of being involved in killing Patsy.

“That’s crazy,” I told her. “Why would I do that to Patsy? She’s your friend.”

“Maybe they’re going to kill me next?”

“They’re not going to kill you. Trust me.”

“How do you know they’re not going to kill me?”

There was no bringing her back around. People also filled Vera’s head with stories about how I must have killed Bobby Wood. I didn’t touch a hair on Patsy’s head, but all of a sudden I’m the bad guy. If I had done the right thing and taken care of Patsy, none of this would have happened. This is what I got for turning away from my father’s philosophy. If the most evil thing in the situation was to take care of my girlfriend’s best friend—and do it right—everything would have turned out better. I was a kid. I had gotten so twisted around by this girl, I forgot who I was. I would never make that mistake again.

W
HEN
V
ERA
came over to my place and said she couldn’t see me anymore, I felt cold to her, but I asked her if we could have one last time together. She said yes, but the way she said it sickened me. I watched her eyes as she took off her clothes. I could see there was
nothing in them. She was throwing me a fuck to get rid of me. This filled me with poison.

Vera had liked to play silly games when we had sex where we’d tie each other up with scarves. I decided to show her what I was truly about. She wanted to look down on me now because she was such a good person and I was such a bad guy, so I would show her the bad guy I was. I tied her wrists up with the silk scarves she liked, but instead of love taps, I turned her every which way on the bed and belt-whipped her. This was not play. I wanted to leave scars. I made her hurt. I wanted to stamp out anything that was left between us. I whipped her for a long time.

Finally all the poisons were out of me. I untied her. This girl was spent. She looked up at me in shock. I said, “Take your shit and get the fuck out of here. Go to the airport, get the fuck out of my country. If you ever say a word, I will skin you. You understand?”

She nodded. Her eyes moved in her head, but there was nothing left. I had Andy come over and take her bloody ass to the airport.

After she left, I felt good. She hurt me, and I got my revenge. But then I didn’t feel good. I went crazy. I started calling her parents’ house in France. They didn’t speak English, but I called every day and shouted at them. They would not put their daughter on the phone.

I went to Andy and told him, “You’ve got to help me find her.”

I drove Andy crazy. Finally he got a guy who worked with Vincent Pacelli’s father—importing the heroin from France—to get some of their guys to look for her. They found Vera at her parents’ house and took her. They did not treat her rough. They were told not to harm her. They took her to a phone and made her talk to me. I just wanted to explain to her that I knew what I did was wrong.

As soon as I heard her voice, it tore me apart. I begged her, “Please come back. Please let me come and see you. Anything you want.”

She wanted nothing to do with me. She was terrified. I heard it in her voice. I’d made things worse by having those guys grab her. I didn’t do it the right way. I told the guys who were
holding her to let her go. That was it. I knew she wasn’t coming back, ever.

I’m sure I damaged Vera. Physically, she probably healed, but mentally, I’m sure this girl was fucked up for the rest of her life. I regretted my mistakes with her. This was not like the time I saw that girl limping on the street and I felt a little bad for a second. I became very dark inside. Why did I have to abuse her physically like I did? I ruined all the good memories I had. If I’d told her to leave when she wanted to, I could have at least remembered the good things. Instead, I felt sick anytime I thought of her.

Certain things get burned into your mind. Vera is burned into mine. The pain I inflicted on her was inflicted back on me a thousand times over. I’m not claiming my mind hurt more than her body hurt when I whipped her. But she comes into my mind every day, and it hurts. That girl is never going away.

There are many days I picture her from the top of her hair to her toes. She comes into my mind exactly the way she looked when we had good times. I picture her on the horse running in the waves, and it breaks my heart. If I could change one thing, I wish I’d not touched a hair on her body.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t have a conscience. I’ve felt a small amount of pain about this one thing I did. If you add up all the things I did to everybody in my life and compare this to the pain I felt for Vera, my suffering has been nothing.

*
Sam Giancana, head of the Chicago Mafia, was a close friend of Frank Sinatra’s and of Sammy Davis Jr.’s, and is believed to have helped secure votes in Cook County for John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960. Also an alleged CIA operative, he had turned secret government informant by the time of the wedding Jon refers to. Giancana was murdered in his home in 1975, a few days before he was to testify to the U.S. Senate about his ties to the CIA.

*
The landmark hotel on Central Park at 61st Street and Fifth Avenue.

*
Jon may be confusing his facts regarding Playboy Bunnies used as drug couriers with the 1965 heroin trial in which Pacelli’s father attempted to use a Playboy Bunny to bribe a juror. It could also be that the Pacellis had a myriad of nefarious uses for which they employed Playboy Bunnies.

*
As reported in the
News and Courier
, June 2, 1973: “Vincent Pacelli, Jr., a convicted dope dealer, was sentenced to life imprisonment Friday for the slaying last year of Patricia ‘Park Avenue Patsy’ Parks, scheduled to be a witness at his narcotics trial.” In the trial, as summarized in the findings of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Appeals, ruling on an unsuccessful appeal filed by Pacelli on November 1, 1973, “Lipsky testified … that arriving at Hippopotamus at approximately 2:00 p.m., they picked up Parks and proceeded to Massapequa, Long Island … Almost immediately thereafter Pacelli stabbed Parks in the throat. Parks pleaded not to hurt her since she was a mother, but he said, ‘Die, you bitch,’ and stabbed her several more times in the throat until she was dead.”

27

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I went back to Phyllis. I crawled into our penthouse, and I told myself I was back to normal. But my mind did not focus properly. Little things tripped me up.

I had stopped doing drug rip-offs when I was with Vera. When I picked these up again to try to have some fun, I made stupid mistakes. I got arrested for assault after I beat up some kids near a house where a cop lived. I got into a ridiculous shoot-out while chasing some guys on the street in Fort Lee and was arrested for discharging a firearm. I got arrested on an illegal gun charge when I was pulled over in my Jaguar and mouthed off to the cop—after I’d forgotten about a gun I had in the glove box. Andy and I also got arrested when we went to a friend’s house who made porno movies. We’d gone for stupid kicks but happened to go on the one day the cops raided the place. These were not the actions of a very wise wiseguy.

While all this was going on, the family was having trouble with a bad cop, Detective Joe Nunziata. He’d been on the payroll for years and years. He’d been helping out with the so-called “French Connection.”
^*
There were two things the movie left out about that case. First, the cops never stopped the French Connection. They stopped a few loads from a couple of smugglers. That’s all. The funnier part is, what heroin the cops did get, the Gambino family stole back from them. They took hundreds of pounds from the New York police evidence locker, and Nunziata was one of the cops who helped.
^†
Nunziata had made many promises to people in the family,
^‡
but he turned into a rat.

No matter how much you pay one off, you can never totally trust a cop. I knew Nunziata very well, and he was the worst kind. He was crooked, but he would bust people, too. That was the bad in him. He went both ways. A cop is much better off if he is all one way or another. You can’t take my payoffs, then try to be a good cop and arrest me. That’s wrong.

Because I knew Nunziata, some people in the family came to me and asked me to deal with him. It was a big deal to kill a cop. It was not normal. But Nunziata was the exception. Not only was he ratting on the family, he was ratting on other cops. Even the cops don’t like a cop who’s that dirty.

I had turned down helping Vincent Pacelli take care of Patsy Parks, but I learned my lesson about picking and choosing what I did. So it happened that Detective Nunziata committed suicide.
I have no direct knowledge of how this happened, but I can tell you it was someone Nunziata knew, a crazed Italian kid. Maybe he was talking to the Italian kid in his car, and in the middle of their discussion the kid was able to take his gun and blow his fucking head off.
^*
Who knows? One thing you can know for sure is, Nunziata was a real asshole who deserved to die. Trust me on that one.

As if things weren’t hot enough then, Andy and I got into another problem with the nightclubs. It started when we were introduced to a man at Hippopotamus named Shamsher Wadud. Shamsher was from Bangladesh, and he had a curry restaurant on Central Park called Nirvana.
^†
When we met him, we were told Shamsher wanted to get into the nightclub business.

People came to us all the time to talk about nightclubs. They knew if they were serious, they would have to deal with us one way or another. After we met Shamsher, I checked him out and found he ran his restaurant very well and even had his own little celebrity following.
^‡
Shamsher also had a liquor license, and his record was clean. Andy and I believed he could be a very useful partner. We sent some guys to Shamsher who offered to sell him our old club Salvation.