American Desperado (59 page)

But Joey had another thought: “How about we fix them up nice and rent them to celebrities I know from L.A., so they got a nice place to stay when they visit Miami?”

Joey introduced me to a broad who claimed she was an expert decorator. She met me at one of the condos we were going to fix up. It was brand-new, but the lady decorator wanted to put in a sunken floor and bigger windows and buy furniture suitable for movie stars. She said, “I can do it for a hundred thousand dollars.”

I said, “Lady, that’s more than the condo cost.”

“You’ll make up for it when you charge more for the rental.”

I said, “Okay. But I got one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re a very attractive decorator. I’ll hire you. You can decorate your brains out. When you’re done, you’re going to take me here, and I’m going to fuck the shit out of you.”

“Deal.”

This broad really hustled me. By the time she was done, I paid way more than her quote. Before I could see the place and make her fulfill her end, I got called out of town on business. When I got back, Joey said, “Good news. I rented our place to my friend Jimmy.”

I don’t know who Jimmy is, but great, if he signed a two-hundred-year lease, maybe I’ll make up what that lady decorator cost me. A month later Joey calls me, “Can you bring your boat down to Turnberry Isles Marina and pick up me and Jimmy, our tenant? I want to take him out and show him a good time.”

“Okay, Joey. You’re my friend. I’ll be there.”

Coming into Miami and getting my boat out from my marina was a hassle, but Joey Ippolito isn’t just a friend, he’s business. When I dock at the Turnberry, Joey walks down with Jimmy, our tenant. The guy is halfway familiar, but I can’t place him.

Jimmy shakes my hand and says, “Hiya, Jon,” like we’re old friends.

I figure it out. “Jimmy” is James Caan, the actor. That’s why Joey was hot to have me come down. He wanted to show off getting James Caan as our tenant.

Soon as we get out on the water, Joey asks if I brought some coke. I always have something on my boat for recreation. Joey has brought some girls. Everybody does some lines. We’re all laughing. The vial I’d brought my coke in is sitting on a mirror tray where everybody has just done their lines. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Caan put a straw up his nose and stick it in the vial. The movie star is sitting there like a slob snorting up all my party-blow.

Joey sees me looking at Caan and says, “I’m sorry, Jon. The guy’s a Hoover. I can’t believe he don’t got holes in his nose.”

Soon as he finishes my blow, Caan starts to jones. “You got any more?”

“That’s all I had, bro.”

“Take me over to the Palm Bay Club. I can get some. People give it to me because of who I am.”

“Okay, chief.”

I drive the boat over to the Palm Bay, and as we dock, Caan says, “You’re a great guy. Gimme your number for when I come back. I want to be able to call you when I’m in Miami.”

“I ain’t giving you my number.”

“Why wouldn’t you give me your number?”

“Because I want you to leave me the fuck alone.”

Caan’s in a bathing suit and flip-flops, but he steps up to me like he means something. “You’ve got a piece-of-shit attitude.”

“I remember you in
The Godfather
,” I say, “and I remember you beat up some guy with the garbage cans or whatever the story was, but you’re not a tough guy. You may think you’re a tough guy because you’re wacked out of your mind on coke, but you’re just an asshole in flip-flops.”

Caan says nothing, just turns and steps off the boat. Joey says, “Jon, you really blew it. Jimmy don’t like you now.”

“Joey, that guy’s beneath you.”

Jimmy remained a tenant the next couple of years. After he went back to L.A. that first time I met him, I called up that lady decorator and reminded her she still owed me her end of our deal. “But the place is rented,” she said.

“The tenant’s out of town, and I got the master key.”

“Okay.”

When we meet at the apartment, she says, “I hope you don’t think anything of me, but sometimes to loosen up I like to take a Quaalude. I brought some.”

“How about I mix them up in some drinks?”

“That would be delightful.”

I throw a bunch of Quaaludes in the blender. We toast her beautiful decorating job, and half an hour later she turns into a total freak. She’s touching herself. She’s begging me to eat her pussy. She’s incredible. We fuck for hours like we’re in a porno movie. At four in the morning I need to get home to Toni in Delray, so I carry this broad down to my car and drive her to her place.

The next day she calls. “Jon, I don’t remember a thing about last night. I know we must have had fun. I’m sore all over. I hope I did nothing too unladylike.”

“Not a bit. All we did was I fucked you in your ass for about seven hours in James Caan’s bed.”

“Goodness,” she says.

That was her word, “goodness.” It made me laugh.

Much as I liked spending time with Joey and having our little adventures together, he was work because he bought ridiculous amounts of coke from Bobby and Albert. I had a dozen other relationships like this that I constantly had to manage.

I
N
1983 Steven Grabow got arrested on a cocaine charge in Aspen.
^*
He didn’t give up Albert or Bobby or Joey or me, but nobody was taking any chances. He got blown up outside his gym. They put a bomb in his car, and that was it.
^†
The police found a pile of shit in his car, and his body in the bushes.
^‡
His arrest was a close call for all of us. I was sure he would have talked, had he lived, because he was facing a lot of prison time. Getting rid of him was the right thing to do. But I felt bad for the kid.

The one guy it worked out for was James Caan. Joey Ippolito and I had introduced him to Steven Grabow and his wife, Linda, when they were visiting Miami. Caan had liked Linda from the moment he met her. After Steven got blown up, Caan gave her a shoulder to cry on, and they eventually married.
^*
Good for him.

By the early 1980s, my work life was so hectic, I needed something to take my mind away from it all. I found that escape in racehorses. This was a passion I shared with Toni in the life we built together. No matter how crazy my work got, I made time for our horses.

*
The Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston is one of the foremost veterinary hospitals in the world.

*
The Turnberry Towers form the heart of a luxury residential resort built by Soffer in Aventura in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2007 Soffer built a similar tower complex, also named the Turnberry, in Las Vegas.

*
Grabow was charged with trafficking seven hundred kilos of cocaine during a three-month period. He admitted to police that the source of his cocaine was in Miami, but he didn’t name his source. He was released on bond, pending trial.

*
Caan married Grabow’s widow, Linda Stokes, in 1996. They have two children.

†
While Jon has not provided proof of his or of Joey Ippolito’s alleged financial dealings with Soffer, Ippolito is reported to have lived in one of the Turnberry Towers and to have had a relationship with Soffer, who was no stranger to controversy. A close friend of boatbuilder Don Aronow, Soffer, like Aronow, was alleged to employ high-end party girls to entertain prospective customers, investors, and other friends. In 1987 leading presidential hopeful Gary Hart, a married man, saw his campaign implode when photographs were published of him on a yacht cavorting with party girl Donna Rice (now a prominent antipornography crusader). At the time of the scandal, Rice was reportedly a part-time employee of Soffer’s whom Hart had met at a party at the Turnberry.
Monkey Business
, the yacht on which the scandal took place, was owned by Soffer. Soffer was the subject of a fascinating profile written by Mark Muro for the
Boston Globe
, “Turnberry Isle: Where Stars Play and Also Fall,” May 31, 1987.

†
Grabow was blown up on December 8, 1985, by a powerful bomb placed in his car outside the Aspen Club, whose motto is “health, fitness, and pampering.” It was the first fatal car bombing in the history of Colorado. Reporting in the December 17, 1985,
Lewiston Journal
, Don Knox and Chance Conner quoted Grabow as having once said, “I’d rather be broke and washing dishes in Aspen, than be the king of France,” though their article noted that “Grabow had a penchant for fast sports cars, fancy suits, and good food. He drank from Waterford crystal glasses.” His murder was never officially solved, but when Miami investigators working on the 1991 racketeering case into Albert San Pedro discovered that he and Bobby Erra had been supplying Grabow with cocaine, they came to Aspen. They discovered, among other facts, that the bomb used to kill Grabow was similar to the type used in the attempted murder of Forge restaurant owner Al Malnik when his Rolls-Royce was blown up in 1982. Investigators planned to include Grabow’s murder as an additional predicate act in their racketeering case against San Pedro, but this avenue was closed to them following the discovery of his immunity deal.

‡
According to police reports I examined, Grabow was seated over the bomb when it detonated. His intestines were blown from his body. Nevertheless, he managed to run seventy-five feet while screaming for help before dying.

62

When Jon Roberts looks at horses he might buy, the ears have it.

“I love horses with big ears,” Roberts says. “The first time I laid eyes on Best Game, she was a yearling, standing in a field. She was a big, good-looking filly, very rough. She took off like a lightning bolt. I had to have her.”

In a little less than six weeks Best Game won a division of the Poinsettia. Best Game is the only filly in the world to have won two Hibiscus Stakes in 1983.

Roberts says, “If she runs good in New York there’s a $100,000 grass stake in California.”

Another claim Roberts made four years ago was equally fortuitous. He took Noholme’s Star for $30,000. The gelding has gone on to become a stakes winner with lifetime earnings of $170,369, winning 18 races.

“When he won the Florida Turf Cup, it was the biggest thrill I’ve had,” Roberts says. “He bowed in both legs and came back to run his heart out for me.”

Roberts was born in the Bronx 34 years ago and grew up in lower Manhattan. He moved to Miami in 1973 and sold cars. “I owned several car lots,” he says. “I met Danny Mones, who became my lawyer and my business partner. We bought a run-down building, very cheap, fixed it up and sold it. We made a real score and went on from there. We’ve done real well in real estate ever since.

“I’ve never married. I don’t have any children. The horses become like children to me. I love going to Ocala and buying horses. It’s one of the prettiest spots in Florida, and some day I’m going to have a farm up there. My girl, Toni Moon, loves horses as much as I do.”

Miss Moon, a very attractive lady, is a model and actress and appears in television commercials.

“I’ve been offered half a million for Best Game but I don’t want to sell. Think what her babies will be worth. Breeding is what I’m most interested in now. I’m going to start building up a broodmare band and go from there.”

Roberts’s first experience in breeding horses was sending his mare Winning Fate to Cerf Volant. “The foal came out with very crooked legs but I wouldn’t let them put her down. We raised her and I gave her to Toni for a riding horse.”

—Art Grace, “The Best Game in Town,” a profile of Jon Roberts
published in
Florida Horse
, June 1983

APRIL 2009—AVENTURA AND BAY POINT ESTATES

E
.
W
.:
The extent of Jon’s involvement in horse racing didn’t hit home for me until one night at Padrones, an upscale Cuban restaurant in Aventura. We were walking out with takeout food when a deep voice boomed, “Papa! Papa!”

The owner of the voice—a small, dapper man—came up the sidewalk with his arms open. Jon said, “That’s Angel Cordero. The little son of a bitch calls me Papa.”

Cordero, regarded as one of the greatest jockeys who ever lived, threw his arms around Jon. The two spent half an hour trading stories. When Jon owned Mephisto Stables, Cordero was one of his top jockeys. When they met again that evening in 2009, Cordero burst into tears while discussing the death of his wife, and Jon patted his shoulders to comfort him. As we left, Angel said to me, “Papa was one of the good guys.”

It was a surprise to witness Jon outside the context of his life of crime and see him regarded as a beloved figure. Up until that point in interviewing Jon, I’d assumed racehorses were mostly about laundering drug money.

After meeting Cordero, Jon arranged for me to meet Seymour “Sy” Cohen, who helped run Mephisto Stables. At the time he worked for Jon, Cohen was a columnist for the now-defunct
Miami News
who specialized in handicapping races. Cohen was also a fixture on the Miami social circuit. At Palm Bay Club, he was known as a fierce competitor on the tennis courts and played frequently with Oleg Cassini and Robert Duvall. Cohen helped advise the renowned painter and racehorse enthusiast Frank Stella in his purchases. As we drove to Cohen’s house, Jon explained, “The genius of Sy wasn’t just in looking at a horse. He knew where to run them so they’d win.”