American Desperado (41 page)

When Ricky pulled the sawed-off gun from his shopping bag, Gary stuck his arm up and waved, like he wanted Ricky to throw it.
He was almost close enough to hand it over, but Ricky threw it. He was done. He walked off and caught his ride out.

Gary was so high, he dropped the gun into the water. Bobby was pissed. The water’s not deep, but he had to push the boat back from the dock so Gary could dive in and get it. While we were doing our
Three Stooges
act on the boat, we started to hear sirens and then this god-awful screaming. Some girl was just yelling her guts out in the parking lot. At least we knew Ricky must have hit the mark.
^*

Witnesses said they heard gunshots and ran to the rear parking area where they found Schwartz dying on the pavement next to his blue Cadillac. A passerby said he thought a man had walked up to the Cadillac just before the shooting.

—Verne Williams and Bill Gjebre, “Lansky Stepson Murdered,”
Miami News
, October 12, 1977

The killer fired from about 16 inches away, and the blast went through him, shattering windows on both sides of the car.

There were no shell casings left behind and no tire marks.

Schwartz’s daughter, Debbie, ran from the [family’s] apartment just blocks away. “I knew this would happen,” she screamed when she saw him lying in the street. “Daddy is dead.”

—“Revenge Thought Murder Motive,” UPI, October 13, 1977

What a bunch of knuckleheads we were. We must have spent five minutes fishing the gun from the water. By the time we got the boat going, all hell was breaking loose in the parking lot. But nobody paid any attention to us.

I drove the boat a mile south to Haulover Cut and out to Biscayne Bay. I got up to speed, and ten miles out Gary dropped the gun into the bottom of the ocean. Gary was beside himself. He got rid of the gun that killed the guy who’d killed his brother. Bobby opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Gary and he started whooping and high-fiving each other, like we’d won the big game.

It was strange. I got a little blue that morning. I looked at Bobby and Gary and thought,
There’s been so much killing
. People disappeared all the time in Miami, and it didn’t make the news. Some of the people who died deserved it. Some didn’t. A few were my friends. If the swamps and the oceans ever dry up down here, I’d be curious to see what they find at the bottom.

The morning we killed Richard Schwartz, I got tired. But you shake that off. We had a nice steak dinner that night. I heard from a cop Danny Mones knew that Richard Schwartz’s teenage daughter was the first to find him after he got his face blown off.
^*
Now his little girl could feel how Gary felt when he lost his brother. Fair is fair. I wasn’t glad, but I hope Richard Schwartz felt good for what he made us do.

*
Tuesday, October 11, 1977.

*
Prado’s employment records at the Miami-Dade fire department indicate that the Schwartz murder occurred on one of his days off. In 1991 Prado became the target of the same federal task force that was investigating Albert San Pedro for racketeering. Witnesses and forensic evidence linked Prado to arsons, assaults, and three murders allegedly carried out on San Pedro’s orders, in addition to that of Richard Schwartz. In July 1991 federal investigators interviewed Prado at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, about his relationship with San Pedro. He admitted having worked for him in the 1970s but denied any involvement in or knowledge of criminal wrongdoing carried out by San Pedro. Following the intervention of E. Page Moffett, a top CIA attorney who later became the general counsel for the National Security Agency, the investigation into Prado’s alleged activities with San Pedro was abruptly dropped. Moffett made at least one visit to Miami and lobbied the U.S. Attorney’s office there. Sources I interviewed who were involved in the matter say that Moffett argued that prosecution of Prado jeopardized “national security.” The CIA also refused to provide Prado’s major case prints to help FBI investigators match them to partial prints, believed to be Prado’s, found at a scene of another murder. But Prado received his greatest protection from the prior immunity deal U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen negotiated with San Pedro. When a judge determined in 1992 that San Pedro’s prior immunity deal shielded him from prosecution in the racketeering case, it became difficult to pursue charges against Prado. After the racketeering and murder cases against Prado disappeared in Miami, he rose through the ranks of the CIA and went on to become chief of operations at the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center, for which he was given the George H. W. Bush Award for Excellence for his service in the War on Terrorism. He retired from the Agency in 2004 as an SIS-2, the equivalent rank of a two-star general. In 2005 he became a senior officer in Blackwater, the private contracting firm now known as Xe. In 2009, after CIA director Leon Panetta informed Congress that the agency had created a possibly illegal “targeted assassination unit”—or “death squad” program as the media dubbed it—aimed at killing terrorists around the world, Prado was identified as the head of it. He was also outed as the man responsible for moving the “death squad” program to Blackwater in a no-bid contract. More recently, Prado has been the subject of an investigation into efforts he allegedly spearheaded at Blackwater to use dummy companies to procure weapons and commit other possibly illegal acts. Reporting on Prado’s activities at Blackwater on September 4, in the
New York Times
article titled “30 False Fronts Won Contracts for Blackwater,” James Risen and Mark Mezzitti wrote, “Among other things, company executives are accused of obtaining large numbers of AK-47s and M-4 automatic weapons, but arranging to make it appear as if they had been bought by the sheriff’s department in Camden County, N.C.” They added, “It is unclear how much of Blackwater’s relationship with the C.I.A. will become public during the criminal proceedings in North Carolina because the Obama administration won a court order limiting the use of classified information.” For the record, Jon Roberts first told his story of murdering Richard Schwartz with Prado to FBI agents in 1992—years before Prado had been publicly outed as a CIA officer. At the time Jon made his statements regarding Prado’s alleged role in the murder, investigators still hoped to bring federal racketeering or state murder charges against Prado, despite legal setbacks in their case against San Pedro. As one of those investigators, a former Miami-Dade Police Department detective and federal organized-crime-squad task force member, recently told me, “I am still hoping to put Prado away for murder.”

*
Schwartz was shot once in the torso, once in the head, and at such close range that wadding from the shotgun shells was embedded in his chest.

40

J
.
R
.:
My grandfather, Poppy, died before Christmas in 1977. He died in his bathtub. He liked to take baths. He took one, and his heart stopped. Poppy worked hard his whole life and had a good time fishing and writing his stupid poems. He was a good man. He loved water, and he died in a tub of warm water, so that was that.

Poppy kept a jar with our grandmother’s ashes. He wanted my sister and me to mix them and spread them on the ocean in New York where we used to fish. He wanted to lie in the water with our grandmother by the city where they met and fell in love.

I did not want to go out and freeze my balls off in the middle of the winter in New York dumping ashes off a boat. My idea was to wait until summer, but my sister got really freaked out and made things difficult.

J
UDY
:
I dreamed that Poppy was trapped in the ash jar and he couldn’t be with our grandmother until we
mixed their ashes in the water. It was a terrible dream. I called Jon and said, “Poppy wants to go into the ocean now. We can’t wait.”

Jon can be such a good brother. He dropped everything and flew to New York and rented a helicopter, and we went up over the water with the ashes. The pilot told us it was illegal to put ashes in the ocean where we wanted, but Jon informed the pilot the only way we were going to do it was his way.

J
.
R
.:
When my sister called and told me about her nutty dream, I said, “This is ridiculous. This ain’t our grandparents no more. It’s a couple of coffee cans full of ashes.”

But my sister can have a very strong will, and it’s easier not to battle her. So I came to New York. I got the helicopter. I argued with the pilot to let us dump the ashes where we wanted. We opened the door up to spread the ashes, and it was a mess. Freezing cold. Ashes blowing every which way. At least it got my sister off my back.

J
UDY
:
Did Jon tell you he cried? He became very emotional when we put our grandparents’ ashes in the water. Jon was so close to Poppy. I used to fly down and stay at his house on Indian Creek. As Poppy grew weaker, Jon had to carry him from the car in his arms. We had wonderful meals together. Jon can be volatile, but he was never volatile around Poppy. He was so caring around him.

I know why Jon cried after Poppy died. He let go. Jon held everything in when our mother died. With Poppy, he felt safe because he knew Poppy loved him. Once he started crying, everything came out that he’d been holding back for years. He broke down. He finally cried for our mother. My dream was right. But it wasn’t just our grandfather trapped in that jar, it was Jon. His best side came out that day. I was so glad to see it. It became a joyful day.

J
.
R
.:
My sister makes that nightmare helicopter ride sound like
Gone With the Wind
. I wasn’t crying. I had tears in my eyes because the wind was blowing Poppy’s ashes back in my face.

41

J
.
R
.:
I was twenty-nine when Poppy died. My whole life I’d used the thought process I learned from my father to survive. To say “crime doesn’t pay” is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I made $400 a month digging trees and $400,000 a month moving coke.

I had so much money, I could have taken a couple of years off. But I never rested. Money was not my priority anymore. Coke dealing had become a kick for me, like the robberies I used to do in New York. Then, around the time Poppy died, the excitement I got from selling coke started to fade. I got bored. Luckily, in 1978 a new challenge came along. I shifted from being a seller to an importer. It happened when I hooked up with the Colombians.

My connection with them came through one of the sons of Don Aronow. Aronow was the greatest racer and
boatbuilder of all time.
^*
His company built the Donzi boat I had up on Fire Island that Jimi Hendrix tried to water-ski off of. Remember my maroon Cigarette boat that Bobby Erra wrecked? I bought that in 1976 after I saw it at a boat show in Miami. At the time I hadn’t met Aronow. I saw the boat, fell in love with it, and when I told the salesman I wanted it, he said it wasn’t for sale.

“Are you kidding me?”

“You’ll have to talk to Mr. Aronow.”

Aronow’s showroom was also his factory. It was on Thunderboat Row, where the best racing boat companies in the world were located.
^†
Aronow was the top guy on Thunderboat Row. When you walked in his shop, one wall showed pictures of him with famous people who bought his boats—Lyndon Johnson, Steve McQueen, the shah of Iran, George Bush.
^‡

Don was a phenomenal salesman. He was tall. He looked like a movie star. He came off like a man’s man. When I introduced myself and told him I wanted the maroon Cigarette, he invited me upstairs to his office.

This was like a luxury apartment. It had windows looking down on the floor where you could watch your boat being made. If you were a good customer, Don would invite you to parties up there. There’d be beautiful girls left and right. All beautiful women love riding on fast boats, so they’d beg to come to his parties. You could party all afternoon with one of these girls while you watched them lay the keel on your boat. That was Don’s secret to selling boats. It wasn’t just the boat you were buying. You were buying
every beautiful woman you’d ever seen or ever would see, on top of the kick of driving the fastest boat in the world.

When we met, Don told me he couldn’t sell me the maroon Cigarette because he’d made it for one of his girlfriends. That got me so hot for it, I offered him ridiculous money, and he finally agreed to take it.

A month after I took the boat, I went back to his shop to tell him how happy I was with it, and when I came in, he accused me of screwing his girlfriend. It was one of the few times in my life a guy said something like that to me and it wasn’t true. I don’t know if his girl made this up to get him jealous or what, but he came on so strong, I never had a chance to defend myself. He shouted, “You’re a piece of shit. I sold you my best boat, and look what you did to me.”

“Who the fuck are you, bro? A boat guy? You can take your boats and shove them up your fucking ass.”