J.R.: 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.
But he decided to stiff us. He went behind our backs and opened a nightclub without our help. Obviously, we had to send in our guys to bust things up and shut it down, which we did. We went back to Shamsher and gave him a second chance to work with us. But he was a proud man and a stubborn man. He told us no.
At some point in the negotiations, we sent our friend Mikey Shits to talk some sense into Shamsher. Mikey Shits was the guy we had who carried a soup can that he used for beating on people, and when he was talking to Shamsher, one thing led to another, and Mikey beat him so bad, Shamsher had to go to the hospital. If that’s not bad enough, this idiot talks to the reporters, and they make a big story about it.*
WHY WAS this man such a problem? Andy and I had been running the clubs for nearly five years. On the street, five years is a lifetime. You meet very few criminals who do any one thing for more than five years. Any illegal operation is a finite thing. The bigger your numbers, and the more things you do, the bigger the chances that you’ll have a problem with the law. Smart people can usually get away with an illegal business for maybe two years before they run into a problem. If you make it to two years, you’ve done very well. The really smart guys go a couple years at one thing, wash their hands of it, and move on to something new. I wasn’t like that. I’ve always pushed things as far as I can.
By 1974 all the heat knew I was into wrong things. When the Gambino family put Andy and me on point to take over clubs, they knew we’d draw heat. If you are in the club scene, the police automatically know something is wrong with you. Nightclubs are not based on lawful people. Except on the weekends, lawful people are not in a club until three or four in the morning because they have to get up and go to work in the morning. During weeknights, any club is going to be filled with illegal people—gangsters, drug dealers, hustlers, pimps. The lifeblood of nightclubs is criminals. The police know this, and you can’t pay off every single cop. When you’re involved in nightclubs, eventually you will get heat.
I don’t know how I made it five years in the nightclubs. But after all the problems with Hendrix, Bobby Wood, Patsy Parks, Nunziata, and Shamsher, I didn’t see good times no more. I just saw heat coming and coming.
By then my old Outcast friends had started to fade. Petey got arrested on heroin charges for the millionth time, and he ended up going to prison for a couple years. Big Dominic Fiore kicked heroin by leaving the city. He moved to Connecticut and started a rendering business—which he still has today—where he drives a truck to all the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and picks up their grease. Rocco Ciofani became a very hardworking soldier in the Bonanno family and got promoted to capo. Jack Buccino started hanging out in Asbury Park following around Bruce Springsteen. He had learned the guitar and was finally going to do his own stage act. He married a beautiful blond girl from Teaneck, and after the wedding he was driving her across the George Washington Bridge when he hit a concrete stanchion at a hundred miles an hour. It squashed Jack, dead as a bug. His wife survived, but she was left a cripple and a vegetable who didn’t even know her own name.
Even Bradley Pierce was affected. After Patsy Parks got whacked, he went crazy and ran away to a monastery.
BRADLEY PIERCE: I’d started out in the 1960s believing I was spreading a new spiritualism. The murder of my friend Patsy Parks was an awakening. My spiritual interests changed. I was baptized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I entered a Trappist monastery. After I went to seminary, I became a priest.*
I have contemplated my time with Jon and have prayed about it. I have good memories. But I came to understand the evil in him. Everybody has a dignity given to them by God. Jesus Christ is in Jon. I know Jon struggles within himself. I pray for his soul. We have kept in touch over the years, and I share my love with him every time we speak. I believe Jesus can give anyone a second life. I was born again through Him. We all are given the chance to be born again, even Jon.
J.R.: My end in New York came when an informant told the cops that I was involved in the murder of Nunziata. He said that if they searched the apartment I kept with Andy, they’d find evidence.
When they raided the place, they found no evidence linking me to the murder of Nunziata, but they did get about a dozen illegal guns and some pills. In normal times, this would be a nothing arrest. But when I bonded out, my uncles sent a lawyer who told me, “Your family wants you gone. Get the fuck out of New York. They don’t want you to exist anymore.”
I believe the family made a deal with the New York police. I believe someone in the family told them I was involved in killing Nunziata. If I died, or disappeared off the face of New York, the family could go to the cops and say, “Okay, we got rid of your problem.” And the cops could say, “Okay, we did our best to catch the cop killer.”
That way everybody could save face and go back to doing business. I was the logical choice to go because there was so much heat on me. I saw this coming before I was popped on the weapons charges. When I bonded out of jail, I called Andy, and he said, “You’re my brother, Jon, but I can’t see you no more.”
For all I knew, Andy was supposed to whack me. I didn’t think this was the case, but I didn’t want to put him in that position. I hung up the phone, and I ran to Phyllis’s place to grab my dog, Brady. I kept an old Buick Le Sabre parked on the street for emergencies. It was a junk car. I jumped in with my dog and left. I didn’t take nothing. Not my boots, not the clothes in my closet. I was busted out. I had my dog, six hundred dollars in my pocket, and a Beretta .38 pistol. That was it, bro. I got on my horse and split.
I lost everything, but I wasn’t worried. Tomorrow was another day. At twenty-six, I was dead in New York. But I would live again.
I’d go to Miami to escape the heat.
* Jon is referring to the film The French Connection as well as to several Mafia rings smuggling heroin that were not actually the subject of the movie.
* Nunziata “died of gunshot wounds inflicted by his own revolver. The death was labeled a suicide, but that verdict was challenged by Nunziata’s widow … Mob sources have been saying that Nunziata’s death was a ‘hit,’ ordered by the Gambinos.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,” Time, January 1, 1973.
* The New York Times later ran a front-page, above-the-fold feature about Shamsher’s ordeal, “A Nightclub Owner Says He Has Woes—The Mafia,” by Nicholas Gage, New York Times, October 10, 1974.
* Father Pierce is now director of field education at the Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
† The Gambinos “set up the looting” of the evidence locker and “pushed 169 lbs. of the stolen drugs in Harlem … Thus far the only suspected police link that has surfaced is Narcotics Detective Joseph Nunziata, whose signature was on the form with which 24 lbs. were signed out.” From “Coffins and Corruptions,” Time, January 1, 1973.
† Nirvana is still located at 30 West 59th Street.
‡ In the Patsy Parks murder trial, Vincent Pacelli attempted unsuccessfully to introduce testimony from Nunziata that he was involved in a drug deal in a New York café at the time of Parks’s murder. See opinion of United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, United States v. Vincent Pacelli, July 24, 1975.
‡ Nirvana was a favorite hangout of John Lennon, who used to display his drawings there, using the restaurant as an informal gallery.