J.R.: Andy and I kept an apartment on the Upper East Side as a party place. We sublet it from a friend of Bradley Pierce’s who had decorated it very weirdly. It looked like a spaceship inside, with plastic chairs shaped like eggs and blinking chrome lights. The walls had paintings of Chinese ladies in dresses. When we first took the place, Andy and me cut holes in the mouths of the ladies in the pictures and stuck cigarettes in them. I went there to recuperate.
For many years I’d carried a pimp cane—an oak stick with a handle shaped like a dog’s head with diamonds for eyes. Now I had to use the cane for real. Every step I took hurt. Going to the toilet was agony.
One day I’m lying on the couch snarfing up some Chinese takeout when there’s a knock on the door. I limp over, open the door, and see a beautiful girl standing there, Vera Lucille.* I had met Vera at Hippopotamus a few weeks before I was shot. I met her through Patsy Parks, who was in the group of party girls that followed Bradley Pierce to his different clubs. Patsy Parks was a half-assed model I never thought much of. She only stood out because she wore a cross on her neck like a Catholic schoolgirl. When I saw that cross, I’d usually walk in the opposite direction because she was never my cup of tea. But one night I saw her with a sensational girl, Vera. She was a French girl who was petite and dark haired like Phyllis, but with a personality that was the opposite. There was something warm about her, not hard and scheming like Phyllis. I felt it the first time I met her. But I met many cute girls, and this one fell out of my mind until the day she stood in my doorway with some crescent rolls she’d picked up at the Brasserie.*
“I heard you were hurt,” she said.
It floored me that this girl had been thinking about me. When I invited her in, there was nothing I could do but lie around. Vera came every day and sat with me for hours. I was in too much pain to sleep with her. She would sit, and we would talk. She was a smart girl. She had come to New York to study at Barnard College. But she wasn’t from a rich family. Her father sold fish from a cart by the road in a small town in France. She carried a picture of this man at his stand selling fish. Can you believe that? God, she was unbelievable. Vera had an innocent mind. She truly believed I was a good guy.
Even before I touched Vera’s body, I started to think about how I could get away from Phyllis. Even though Phyllis had thrown me out, in her mind this was temporary. To her, we were still married.
When I got my legs back, Vera and I kept a low profile going out. We spent a lot of time in the Village at little places like El Faro*—my favorite Spanish restaurant in New York—and out at a house in the Hamptons.
IN THE winter of 1971, Andy rented some cottages on the beach south of Acapulco, Mexico. He went with a girl of his, and Vera and I met them there. This was one of the best weeks I’d ever had. The thing to do there was ride horses. Vera loved to ride. I had ridden a couple times in Texas when I lived there with my sister. The horses in Mexico were easy because they knew the trails. We rode them along the surf. You’d see nobody for miles. The waves would roll up, and the horses had confidence in the water, so you could ride them in the ocean. When we got hungry, we’d take a boat out to an island with a shack where they cooked fresh, warm-water lobsters in hot sauce and butter.
Nobody had a care in the world down there. The other people in the cottages were all from Europe. The women walked around with no tops. But it wasn’t like being at a Playboy Club. They weren’t hustlers. Everybody was relaxed. Vera and I met another couple from France, and we became very friendly. We started this joke that I was going to go to France and work for her father in the fish business. It was a joke, but in my head it was a fantasy I could live in. Maybe I could get away from it all.
BUT WHEREVER I go, I meet people like me. Illegal people. One day Vera and I were at the pool, and a kid about my age came over and started talking to us. This guy looked American, but he spoke with a Spanish accent. “I’m Carlos Hill,” he said. “I have a club in town called Carlos’s. Please come tonight as my guests.”
Carlos’s was a Mexican version of a New York steak house. Next door there was an illegal casino. Vera and I went with Andy and his girl. Carlos Hill hosted us the entire night. Obviously, he was a sharp kid, and he was into the same things as Andy and me. Once he broke out the cocaine, we really bonded. Andy and I told him about our nightclub business in New York, and Carlos said, “You work with Gambino?”
“Why would you say that?” I said.
Carlos said, “My mom is from the United States. She came here to hide.”
“Who the hell is your mother?” Andy said.
“Virginia Hill.”*
Carlos claimed he was the illegitimate son of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill.† I never found out if his story was true, but he was obviously a connected guy, and I could see in his eyes he had a crazed blood in him, like me.
Vera had a great time at Carlos’s restaurant and clubs. She was naïve. She really didn’t understand what I was truly about. She didn’t understand that her friend Patsy who had introduced us was a half-a-whore party girl. Vera was a college girl from France. She was clueless.
As we got friendlier with Carlos Hill, I got a sinking feeling. One side of me wanted to know more about what he was into, and the other side didn’t want Vera involved. I wanted her to stay naïve.
Vera had classes starting at her college, so she decided to fly back to New York. Andy and his girl went with her. I stayed another week. Carlos wanted to introduce me to a friend.
The morning after Vera leaves, Carlos calls me. “Come out to the pool.”
I walk out and see a little Mexican guy sitting by the pool in cowboy boots. Carlos says, “This is my friend, the mayor of Guadalajara. He’s a maniac.”
Carlos points to six guys sitting with the mayor. “These guys are all his killers.”
Everybody smiles. The mayor doesn’t speak English, but Carlos is translating. The mayor points to a skinny kid with a fuzzy mustache in his group of killers. “This one is like my son,” the mayor says. “Rafa Carlo Quintero.”*
The universe has funny rules. I’m on vacation with the girl of my dreams, and the next thing I know I meet a guy claiming to be Bugsy Siegel’s son who introduces me to the biggest drug smuggler in Mexico. A few years later Rafa Quintero would become very important to me and Pablo Escobar.
But at that time I hung out with the mayor of Guadalajara. He was a character. He had all these young girls with him. He points to one and says, “I fucked her last night, and I found out she lied about her age. She’s sixteen. My limit is fourteen.”
The mayor wanted to take me to Guadalajara to show me what he promised would be the Greatest Thing in Mexico. He wanted to drive me in his car. In Mexico there were no convertibles that you could order from the factory. The mayor had taken a Ford 500 and sawed off the top. The seats were upholstered with furs from Mexican jaguars. We set off in the mayor’s convertible. Outside Acapulco we get pulled over at a roadblock run by the Mexican army.
The mayor points to the trunk and says, “Footballs, footballs”—using the English word. He opens the trunk and shows the soldiers ten “footballs” inside. These are packages in brown paper shaped like soccer balls. The mayor cuts one open to show the Mexican soldiers, and the “football” is made of coke. I look at these soldiers and think, Great. I’m going to a Mexican prison.
But the mayor is smiling. He hands the commander of the soldiers a “football.” The commander sticks his knife into the coke and snorts. He lights up and slaps the mayor on the back for having such good coke. This football is his payoff. Next thing I know, the soldiers are standing next to the mayor taking pictures. The mayor takes one soldier’s rifle and poses like he’s going to shoot him in the head. Mexico was truly nuts.
We finally get to the mayor’s house in Guadalajara. I had thought “mayor” was an honorary title. But my friend is the actual mayor—or at least the top political guy in town—who lives in a mansion, with police outside guarding it. They unload the footballs from his car. After we clean up and snort a bunch of lines, the mayor says, “Now. I’m going to show you the Greatest Thing in Mexico.”
It turns out the Greatest Thing in Mexico is located in a Guadalajara whorehouse called Del Noche El Dia. That’s where the mayor takes me. He has a special table at the bar on the first floor. The place is filled with fourteen-year-old girls in bikinis. They’re coming up to him and saying, “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”
Something about the mayor with these young girls turns my stomach. But the mayor is very happy. He stands up. “Now I will show you the Greatest Thing.”
“Greater than this?” I say, looking at the roomful of teenybopper whores.
The mayor is giggling as he pulls me into a theater. At the front is a stage with a band. There’s a singer in a blond wig, and a magician pretending to saw a girl in half.
The mayor points to the stage. “Here it comes,” he says.
A curtain opens. There’s a donkey with three whores standing around him. Have you ever seen a donkey cock? It’s not a small thing. These whores start touching it. They are dressed in French lace, but the whores must have come straight from the farm. They know exactly how to handle that donkey. He gets hard, and one of the whores slides under him on a table so he can fuck her.
I know I’m a freak for sex, but this is disgusting. Enough is enough. I really am not enjoying the Greatest Thing in Mexico. This poor donkey has enough problems pulling a plow, or whatever he does for a living, without these whores making a spectacle of him. I know I’m fucked up, but this sickens me.
The mayor opened my eyes to why I dislike politicians. People like me, people on the streets, we know we’re bad. Politicians do the same things we do, but they act like they’re such good people, giving speeches, handing out medals to crooked cops. Politicians are the worst scumbags I’ve dealt with.
I left Mexico with a bad feeling. Vera showed me the differences between our lives. Her life was riding horses on the ocean. Mine was sitting with a dirty mayor at a donkey show. For the only time in my life—until I had my son—I got the idea of trying to go to the other side. On the plane ride back to New York, I thought about trying to get more serious with Vera.
* Vera Lucille is a pseudonym to protect the identity of Jon’s former girlfriend.
* The informal yet chic French restaurant located at 100 East 53rd Street since 1959.
* A Spanish restaurant at 823 Greenwich Street, established in 1927 and still open today. It is better known for the kitschy murals of flamenco dancers on its walls than the quality of its food.
* Hill was the longtime girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who worked with Meyer Lansky and Jon’s uncle Joseph Riccobono in Murder Inc. and went on to develop Las Vegas. Siegel was murdered in 1947 when his Las Vegas investments on behalf of the Mafia failed to turn profits quickly enough.
* The Mexican drug lord arrested in 1985 for torturing to death an American DEA agent. He was convicted and remains in prison in Mexico.
† While Virginia Hill was known to have taken several trips to Mexico, there is no evidence she ever had a son there.