American Desperado (34 page)

Then he’d run into my office and say, “Frank, you need to take the case.”

I was the litigator. I met Danny after he had a case against me in court, and I won. He insulted me in the hallway, and I punched him. Somehow that led to me sharing an office with him.

I was very stupid when I started with Danny, because I didn’t know he was greasing the palms of the judges. I learned of this after I took a case for Danny. I won the case, I thought, because I’d argued it so eloquently. A week later I was walking down Flagler Street and I saw the judge. He brought up the case I’d won in his court, and he said, “Danny is the tightest wad I ever saw. I thought the case was worth a better tip.”

I went back to the office and told Danny what the judge said, and Danny said, “That son of a bitch! I gave him ten grand.”

I’d been practicing law for more than ten years in Miami, and until that day I didn’t know it was possible to grease a judge’s palm. I was scared to death to offer somebody a bribe. But Danny had a gift.
^*
He’d hint to a judge, “I’m available if you need a favor.”
Or he’d give the judge a legitimate campaign contribution after a ruling, so it couldn’t be tied to a specific act.

Danny had funny arms that did not fit in off-the-rack shirts, so all his shirts were custom made. If a judge complimented him on his shirt, Danny would say, “I’ll get you one.” Then he’d send a young lady to the judge’s office. Her job was to take his measurements and do anything else that pleased the judge in his chambers. We had a senior state court judge who used to come into our offices all the time to pick up his shirts. Other judges would come by with requests: “My son is going to get married to a wonderful girl. The newlyweds need a twenty-five-inch color TV.”

It was unbelievable what went on. I knew of at least a half-dozen judges he paid off. Only a few were ever caught. A couple are still on the bench.

Of all of Danny’s clients, there were two he never spoke to on the office phone, Jon Roberts and Albert San Pedro. Danny would run to a pay phone whenever he needed to call them. He said, “With these clients, we have to be careful of the FBI.” Danny later got an office with Jon so they could meet and talk in person. That’s how paranoid he was of speaking on the phone with him.

Because Danny was a pathological coward, he liked to brag about what a tough guy his friend Jon was. When I met Jon, I was surprised. He didn’t talk about what a big shot he was or act tough. I found Jon to be a warm person. I’m several years older than he is. To me, he was a kid who was going places. He was a nice-looking kid. His hair was a little woolly, but that was the way young men looked then. I liked him. He was a one-hundred-percent up-front man. My biggest job with Jon was keeping him out of jail for his speeding tickets. He had a terrible problem speeding. He was compulsive.

Danny ran a lot of businesses with Jon, but I stayed out of those. I wasn’t born yesterday.

J
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Danny and I started buying property in Coral Gables. We bought a hundred-unit building, a sixty-unit building, a bunch
of smaller buildings. Later we got into developing Aventura. We had several companies together—J.P. Roberts Investments, Straight Arrow Investments, Good Deal Autos, Prestige Automotive, Mephisto Stables. We ran all our companies out of an office on Biscayne Boulevard.

We got into car leasing and trading because the car business was a good way to launder my money. We brought in a professional manager from a Ford dealer in New Jersey to run our car businesses. We also partnered with Ron Tobachnik.
^*
Ron was a hit man out of Chicago, but he also had a car business in Miami. He was a very bad guy, with a lot of balls, but unfortunately he was very stupid. He ran a car-rental company out of the Holiday Inn at Fort Lauderdale Airport that I took a piece of.

When it came to growing my legitimate businesses, I never had a vision like “Let’s build a factory and produce lightbulbs and make something useful.” I just wanted simple, easy ways to launder money.

The great thing about the car business was that, as I started moving more coke around the country, I could draw from the business and use plenty of vehicles. I’d give my drivers different rental cars, so they were harder to follow in any kind of pattern. Plus, if, God forbid, one of my drivers was stopped and they found dope in the trunk, he’d then have a defense that it wasn’t his car. How did he know there was dope in the trunk?

I
N MY
first few years in Miami, I only had one non-driving-related problem with the law. My business was growing. I tried to keep my nose clean. But one time in about 1977 I was in the Palm Bay Club with Gary Teriaca. A big-shot jerk at the bar made an obnoxious comment to Gary about something. Gary said something back, and the guy hit him. Gary was a wiseguy who could not fight. I reacted out of instinct to defend him. Gary always drank Johnnie Walker, with the bottle and a shot glass on the bar in front of him. I picked
up his Johnnie Walker bottle and broke it on the guy’s head. My mistake was, after the guy went down, I got on top of him and shoved the broken bottle in his face.

People in the club, they did not want to see that. They weren’t used to seeing how people fight in the real world. They started screaming. Some idiot called the cops. Next thing, I’m being led out of the Palm Bay in handcuffs. It was very awkward for me.

I was going to be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The guy I’d hit just about had his nose cut off his face. The prosecutor told Danny Mones, “This one is going to court.”

But I was so confident in Danny’s bribery skills that the night before the trial, I partied my guts out. The next morning I phoned the clerk of the court and said, “Tell the judge I ain’t coming.”

Danny paid a doctor to write a note saying I was too sick to go to court. Frank Marks argued some bullshit to the judge. Meanwhile, the guy I allegedly assaulted moved out of the state and refused to testify. I made sure of that. The judge realized he had a difficult election coming up, and it would be even worse if we started contributing money to his opponent, so he threw out the case.

When I was younger, I used to believe that the Mafia got all its power from brute force. But as I got more in the world and analyzed how to run my business, I realized that force only goes so far. There’s more power in paying off the right politicians. When I looked back at what my uncles accomplished with Gambino, they got much more done with lawyers and payoffs than by killing people. This is true at any level of illegal work. If you’re going to commit crimes, don’t be a jerk and wait to get a good lawyer. Get your lawyer first, and pay off all the judges and politicians before you do illegal things. If you follow my advice, you’ll thank me.

*
A strip club just over the Hialeah side of the border with Miami, still in operation today.

*
The Puerto Rican lottery-ticket-laundering scheme was probed in the early 1990s racketeering investigations of San Pedro and Erra. Erra’s common-law wife, Marcia Ludwig—the longtime friend of Florida governor Graham’s wife, Adele—testified to a grand jury that on a visit to Puerto Rico she obtained a winning lottery ticket worth a quarter million dollars. She denied that there was any impropriety in her purchase of the ticket. Investigators noted that Ludwig won the lucky ticket about the time of the scandal when she had enlisted Governor Graham’s wife to help persuade him to pardon Albert San Pedro for his 1971 felony conviction.

*
Meyer Lansky worked with Lucky Luciano to forge an Italian-Jewish alliance that dominated organized crime in America through the twentieth century. Lansky’s financial schemes laundered billions of Mafia dollars and helped finance Las Vegas, and he worked closely with Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista to build an Italian-Jewish crime empire in Cuba. With the fall of the Batista regime in 1959, Lansky joined the diaspora of American gangsters who fled the island. To evade prosecution in American courts, he sought asylum in Israel but was kicked out in 1972. After reaching a legal stalemate with U.S. authorities, he came to Miami, where it’s believed he remained a shot-caller in the Mafia’s vast financial dealings. When he died peacefully in 1983, his known assets consisted of little more than suits in the closet of the rented apartment he shared with his wife of more than thirty years, Thelma.

*
Alvin “Al” Malnik was rumored, but never proved, to be a front man for Lansky. After Lansky’s death in 1983, it was alleged that Malnik was heir to Lansky’s criminal organization, though Malnik denied any connection with organized crime. In 1982 a valet was nearly killed when a bomb planted in Malnik’s Rolls-Royce exploded outside the Cricket Club. The crime has never been solved. Malnik, who is seventy-nine years old today, is best known for his relationship with singer Michael Jackson. In 2003, when Jackson was facing trial for child molestation in California, he stayed at Malnik’s home in Miami and named Malnik godfather of his child, Prince Michael Jackson II, aka “Blanket.” Jackson later had a falling-out with Malnik and accused him of scheming to take control of his multimillion-dollar music catalog. After Jackson’s death Malnik claimed that Jackson had named him as executor of his estate. The validity of his assertions have been vigorously disputed by some legal experts.

*
Ronnie Bloom’s father, Harry “Yiddy Bloom” Blumenfeld, was the brother of Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld, a Minneapolis mobster convicted of murder and running a prostitution ring. Both brothers moved to Miami in the 1960s and worked closely with Meyer Lansky.

*
In 1989 Danny Mones’s lawful contributions to judges sparked a statewide controversy, as reported by David Lyons in “Court: Campaign Gift Was Conflict for Judge” in the
Miami Herald
’s September 21, 1989, edition. Mones’s help in financing judges’ campaigns led to a battle in the appellate courts and a call for reform that was subsequently abandoned at the urging of judges and lawyers who preferred the corrupt campaign finance system as it was—and remains.

*
Ron Tobachnik is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s former business partner.

†
Al Mones was an organized-crime partner of Meyer Lansky.

†
“The big negative point [of the Forge] is the cocktail lounge, from which raucous rock music sometimes emanates, to be heard throughout the restaurant, which is not conducive to elegant dining.” From the previously cited
Guide to Restaurants of Greater Miami
.

‡
The Forge, still popular today, opened in 1969 and defined Miami chic in the 1970s: “Lavishly decorated to resemble a San Francisco restaurant circa the turn of the century, the Forge has food and service that is equally lavish, making it one of South Florida’s truly great restaurants. If you’re seeking a fine piece of beef, accompanied by a bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc or 1959 Lafite, served with efficient elegance, this is the place to find it.” From page 84 of Harvey Steiman’s
Guide to Restaurants of Greater Miami
, Los Angeles: Brooke House, 1977.

35

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I never smoked a cigarette in my life. I was always into fitness. I ran at least five miles on Miami Beach every day. Running was how I made friends, too. The 1970s weren’t just about coke and Quaaludes. Fitness was a big craze in Miami. It was how I met Harvey Klug.
^*
He was a runner on the beach. Harvey’s relatives owned a Nathan’s Hot Dog store in New York, and he was one of those nice, straight-arrow kids who grew up without a care in the world. Unfortunately, he got interested in betting, and after I hooked him with Bobby Erra, he ended up owing some money. The truth is, if you were hanging out with me, you weren’t ever a completely straight arrow. But everybody liked Harvey. He was such a good runner, he worked out with some of the top athletes. One day Harvey said to me, “I’ve got to turn you on to my friend.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Mercury Morris.”
^*

Merc was an amazing runner, ballplayer, you name it. I used to play basketball with him and some of his NFL friends, and these guys were so good, they could have played in the NBA. They would kick my ass up and down, but it was worth it just to play top athletes in the world. Merc was also one of the first spokesmen for Nautilus workout equipment. He’d travel around the country promoting fitness.

Merc also loved smoking weed and doing lines. One time we were at a club doing lines right at a table. Some asshole fan came up to him and said, “You’re a professional athlete. You can’t be getting high.”

Merc laughed, “Hey, man. Watch me play on TV. You’ll see how high I am.”

It was a little sad, because Merc was traded, then retired from the NFL right around the time he made that boast. By then I’d started hooking him up with kilos of coke that he was selling to his friends in the NFL with Randy Crowder,
^†
another football great.

I’ll be honest. I probably sold them coke because I liked hanging out with these guys. Movie stars don’t impress me. Athletes do, and one of the magical things coke did was bring these heroes into my world. Merc was a special guy. Not just a great athlete—he had a heart. He went through some troubles. At one point he came to me needing money really bad, and he offered to sell me his Ferrari Daytona. He was so desperate, I gave him a ridiculous amount for the car, like fifteen grand. When they arrested him in 1982 for drug trafficking, he was not caught with my coke, but he could have given up my name anyway, and he didn’t. He was such a good guy,
I felt a little bad for being so rotten to him with his Ferrari. But I’m not the good guy. That’s not my role.