J.R.: I was tired of being a ghost. After weeks of sweating my balls off in Miami, I contacted Phyllis in New York. Hearing from me was no big deal to her. She understood, when I disappeared, why I did it. She never thought I was dead. That was Phyllis’s good part. You never had to explain anything. She already understood.
Phyllis told me I was out of everybody’s minds in New York. I had some breathing room. It was time to put some feelers out in Miami. I wanted to start earning again.
If you want to do illegal things, you need other people. You rob a bank, you need a driver. You deal drugs, you need a supplier. There are very few criminal fields where one guy works by himself. Even a counterfeiter needs help getting special inks. When you need other guys to do something illegal, you got to trust each other.
Trust is in short supply on the street. Obviously street people got to be careful of each other. We’re all criminals. The other problem we got is snitches. How do I know the other guy is not setting me up? How do I know he’s not going to rat me out if we get heat? Does he got balls, or does he shit his pants when we got a problem? You need to know all these things before you start working with somebody.
To build trust takes time. You need to get high with a guy, joke with him, chase women with him, get into fights with him to see how he carries himself in different situations. It can take months and months to figure out who the other guy is.
The Mafia was many things. It was paying taxes and rules and old mustache guys telling you what you couldn’t do. The Mafia was also a trust organization. If someone in the Mafia you knew pointed to a complete stranger and said, “He’s a good guy,” you could take that to the bank and rob it. You didn’t need to spend months with the guy. You and he could immediately focus on making money together.
I’m sure the legitimate world works the same way. If you were in the stereo business starting off in a new city, it would probably help if you had a friend to introduce you to a big stereo seller in your new place and say, “This guy is okay. He knows a lot about stereos.”
That was me. But I didn’t sell no stereos.
Phyllis understood I wanted to reach out to wiseguys in Miami but I needed to keep it quiet. Phyllis had the idea I should talk to a friend of her father’s named Two Fingers. Two Fingers got his name because he had fired a gun one day to shoot somebody, and the gun blew up and burned his fingers off. He lived in New York, but he had worked in Miami with a man named Patsy Erra.* Patsy had run casinos in Cuba before Castro kicked everybody out. Now he ran some of the biggest hotels and clubs in Miami, including the Dream Bar, which was a famous gangster hangout.† Phyllis called Two Fingers and asked him if he knew any good guys I could meet in Miami who would keep quiet about me because of my trouble in New York. A few days later Two Fingers called me. He told me I should meet Patsy Erra’s son, Bobby. He said, “Bobby’s a crazy kid like you, and he’s a good guy.”
Bobby Erra was very friendly when I called him. He said, “I’ll meet you tonight. I’ll take you to a club, a restaurant, whatever you want to do. Meet me at the Dream Bar.”
Going to the main gangster bar made me a little uptight. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Dream Bar was in the heart of “79th Street”—a ten-block area in North Miami Beach where all the nightclubs were. It had been wiseguy paradise since the 1930s. Bobby assured me, if we met early enough, there’d be nobody in the bar.
I had to laugh when I walked into the Dream Bar. It was your classic guinea shithole. It was gaudy as shit. Golden chandeliers. A giant sphinx on one wall. The place was dead inside. I guess the old generation of mustache wiseguys were getting too old and infirm to go out. I’d barely reached the bar when three guys dressed like college kids walked over to me: Bobby Erra and the brothers Gary and Craig Teriaca. They were dressed in shorts, Izod shirts, and Gucci slip-ons. I could not believe these were wiseguys.
But the fact was the fact. Bobby was Patsy Erra’s son. His friend Gary was the son of Vincent Teriaca,* who worked for Patsy. Bobby and Gary were both wiseguys. The exception was Gary’s little brother, Craig. He partied as much as anybody, but he was not wise. Craig worked as a golf and tennis pro. He was a straight kid.
Me and Bobby and Gary were all about the same age. Once I got over the surprise of how these guys looked, we became very comfortable. We’d all grown up with fathers who were in the Mafia. They were “new Italians,” like Andy Benfante and I had been, but even more so. Bobby and Gary had gone to the University of Miami and had been in fraternities. Imagine that. College-educated wiseguys.
Both of them played golf and tennis. They hobnobbed with upper-crust people. They always dressed “country’d out.” That’s what Gary Teriaca called his look, like he was ready at any time to play tennis at a country club. They always wore sweaters over their backs, but without their arms in the sleeves. If it was warm or cold, it didn’t matter. The sweaters were on their backs. All they talked about was golf, tennis, boats, nice cars. Everything with them was “Relax. Don’t you worry about it.”
That first night they took me around 79th Street. Bobby’s father had a piece of another club down the street called Jilly’s Top Drawer, which was guinea heaven. Jilly was hooked up with Frank Sinatra,* and Jilly was very high on himself because of this. I went there a few times to see Frank Sinatra, but that was it.
One thing that stuck out about 79th Street was all the Cubans working the doors at Italian clubs. Cubans were bouncers. Cubans were car parkers. In New York Italians did not put anybody on the door but Italians. Andy and I used black guys at our clubs, but that was not normal. In Miami, Italians and Cubans were very close. Italians had run the nightclubs in Cuba, and when Castro kicked out the Mafia, the Italians brought the Cubans who’d worked for them in Cuba over to Miami. It worked out good because Cubans and Italians are good at doing wrong things together. It’s the same with Jews and Italians. By themselves, Jewish people are no more criminal than anybody else. But you put a Jew and an Italian together, a crime is going to happen.
The best place Bobby and Gary turned me on to was Sammy’s Eastside. Sammy’s was where younger wiseguys went. On the outside it looked like a pisshole. But they had a doorman out front, and if he didn’t know you, you did not come in.
The inside of Sammy’s was even worse than the outside. The front room was nothing but an old bar and a few tables. It was always packed. This place was madness. There were gangsters with machine guns on the tables. There were Miami Dolphins. Jimmy the Greek and Hank Goldberg hung out there.* In the back Sammy’s had a room where professional girls from the bar would fuck the customers. Sammy’s was the kind of place you’d walk into at ten at night, and you’d be stumbling out, blinking your eyes, at ten in the morning, wondering what happened. I loved Sammy’s.
That first night I went in there with Bobby and Gary, Gary pulled me aside and asked me, “Do you want to do a line?”
Now I knew Gary was my kind of people. When we did lines together—that night or any time—Gary hid it from Bobby. He and Bobby had grown up together, and Bobby was like his older brother. As close as they were, they were very different guys. Gary was a wiry, slick-looking Italian kid. He was a good athlete, but he was not a fighter. He was a pretty boy. Everything he did had extra class to it. He was a natural ladies’ man. When I met him, he was just starting to get involved with Carol Belcher. Her family owned the Belcher Oil Company† and islands in the Bahamas.‡ Not only was she rich, she was married to a wealthy man in Beverly Hills, California, when Gary first met her. Gary stole her from her husband.*
Gary was wacked out on coke from the day I met him. I don’t know why he hid it from Bobby. Bobby did not do coke, but he didn’t give a shit what Gary was into. I believed Gary had a complex about his father finding out. So he pretended he never did coke, which was ridiculous. His nose always ran. He sniffed constantly. Later, after he lost his mind on coke, he still pretended like he didn’t touch it. But sniff sniff sniff, that’s all you heard from him. Gary was a guy who was, as they say, not true to himself.
Bobby Erra was the opposite. He was who he was. Bobby carried himself like a man. He ran his father’s gambling business. He wasn’t just a bookie, he was a layoff guy—a banker for other bookies. Bobby was nationwide. He worked with bookies from New York to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. You could put $200,000 or $300,000 on a game with him, and he would not blink. He was the bookie to the rich and powerful. Bobby was in the top, Waspiest country clubs of Miami—the Palm Bay and La Gorce Country Club. Bobby also had a piece of the Jockey Club with a guy named Armand Surmani.† If you were a rich person, a celebrity, or a politician, and you gambled, the odds were good you knew Bobby Erra.
Bobby was not an outgoing person like Gary. But he was good at cards and backgammon and used to play all hours at the clubhouse at La Gorce. One of his good friends was Raymond Floyd, the PGA champion.* Bobby was not a ladies’ man like Gary, but he was hooked into rich women. He married Marcia Ludwig, a very wealthy girl who was friends with the governor of Florida.† He used to brag to me that he took bets from the governor.‡
Bobby dressed in nice clothes, but no matter what he wore, he had no style. For instance, he cut his hair in the shape of a football helmet. He had thick, bushy hair, and it looked like the barber just put a helmet on his head and clipped around it. Everything he did was off. We made a big score once, and I decided to buy Bobby an Audi 100, a top car in the 1970s. I sent him to a dealer to pick one out, and a week later Bobby rolls up in a bright orange Audi. It’s the most disgusting color I’ve ever seen on a car. That was Bobby. Even when he got the right car, he made it look weird.
Don’t get me wrong. Bobby was a tough, tough guy. He flipped a race boat when he was a teenager, and when the boat came down it cut off a bunch of fingers on his hand. Who knows, maybe that’s why Two Fingers liked him? They both had fucked-up hands. But Bobby didn’t let that stop him. He became a great golf player, and because of that mangled hand, he could hustle the fuck out of people. He’d say, “Look at my hand, you’ve got to give me a few shots here.” And he would beat them for big money. Afterward they’d be like, “Motherfucker.” Bobby was unbelievable that way. He used that stump to his advantage. He was not the type of guy who moaned about it.
Bobby had a brother who was blind. I don’t know what caused it. Bobby would always talk about his brother—how he had to pick him up or do this or that for him. But all the years I knew Bobby, I only met his brother one time. We had to take him to the bank to sign something because Bobby used to put property in his brother’s name to hide assets.* Bobby’s brother was like a shadow he didn’t let you see.
THE FIRST night I partied with Gary at Sammy’s Eastside, he tapped the mirror we were snorting lines off of, and said, “This is it. Coke is the thing, man.”
I’ll never forget that. Gary, wacked out as he was, he was intelligent. He saw the big picture. Everybody and his brother smuggled pot in Florida. Prices were dropping. Bales of weed lost by smugglers used to wash up on the beaches. They called them “square grouper fish.” Coke was a different story. There was a permanent shortage. People could not get enough. A kilo wholesaled for $50,000 and sold for two or three times that on the street. Coke was such a concentrated drug that $100,000 worth could fit in a shoebox. The same value of weed, you’d practically need a dump truck to carry it.
Gary also talked about another advantage coke had. It was classy. Heroin addicts were filthy pigs who walked around like zombies. It was a ghetto drug. The main customers for cocaine were upper-class society. Coke was the opposite of most Mafia businesses, which, like my father’s numbers game, were based on making money off of poor people. Coke was about supplying rich people with something they wanted.
Gary Teriaca had a vision of the future, but he was in a bind. Like other young wiseguys, his father would kill him if he caught him dealing coke. The other problem Gary had was, coke was not easy to get steadily. He was selling coke to his rich country club friends, but this was small-time. His main business was real estate scams, like selling shares in make-believe condos, but he was aching to grow the coke business.
As I hung out more with Gary and Bobby, I tried to think about things we could do together that would build a bond between us. The only thing I had to offer them was kicks. Neither of them had ever done a drug rip-off. When I told them stories about robberies I did in New York, their eyes lit up like kids at Christmas. I planted the idea in their minds that if they had real wiseguy balls, we should do a robbery together.
* Pasquale “Patsy” Erra was a top boss in the Bonanno family. He was also affiliated with Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Meyer Lansky.
* Vincent Teriaca was the longtime manager of the Dream Bar and reputed under-boss to Patsy Erra.
* Jilly Rizzo was a restaurateur who operated nightclubs in Manhattan and Miami. Through his friendship with Frank Sinatra, Jilly achieved minor celebrity status. He became a regular on the 1960s comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and made a cameo appearance in Frank Sinatra’s 1968 film Lady in Cement, which also features Jilly’s Miami nightclub. Jilly was convicted on federal fraud charges in 1990 and died two years later in a car crash outside Sinatra’s Rancho Mirage, California, home.
* James “Jimmy the Greek” Snyder was a sports commentator and oddsmaker who died in 1996. Hank Goldberg was a protégé of Jimmy the Greek and a Miami radio personality. He now works as a commentator for ESPN.
* According to statements she later made to federal investigators, Carol Belcher met Gary Teriaca in Miami when they were both in high school. She married a man named Kattleman and moved to Los Angeles. In 1974, while her marriage to Kattleman was already rocky, Gary Teriaca visited her in California. They began an intimate relationship, and Teriaca persuaded her to move back to Miami, where her father purchased a home for the two of them in the exclusive, gated community of Bay Point Estates.
* Floyd won the PGA Championship in 1969 and 1982, as well as the 1976 Masters Tournament and the U.S. Open in 1986. In a 1990 federal organized crime investigation into Erra’s activities, investigators found there was no evidence of impropriety stemming from Floyd’s friendship with Erra. In addition to his friendship with Floyd, investigators discovered that Erra had a business relationship with legendary race car driver Mario Andretti, with whom he attempted to open a chain of pizza restaurants.
* Erra’s financial dealings with his blind brother were exposed in a 1990 federal racketeering investigation into his activities, which resulted in his entering a plea of guilty. His brother avoided prosecution.
† Erra is alleged to have had an interest in Miami’s iconic Fontainebleau Hotel, as well as in numerous nightclubs in Miami Beach’s entertainment district. He was a significant figure in illegal gambling. He died in 1976. The Dream Bar, also called the Dream Lounge, occupied a few different locations in its time. It was a popular music spot where Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra frequently performed. Jazz great Buddy Rich cut an album there. A late-1950s cabaret guide described it: “Make with the jazz, and dance music, in this highly-modern, dark club. Gander the waitresses here (they wear sheer, sheer negligee-type gowns). Open from 9 pm to 5 am.” From Cabaret Quarterly, Special Resort Number, vol. 5, p. 74, 1956.
† A Florida oil transport and pipeline construction company that merged with a Texas firm in 1977.
† Erra and Ludwig were never legally married, though they maintained a residence together and Ludwig described herself as his “wife” in testimony she gave in 1991 to a federal grand jury regarding her relationship with Erra. A former Orange Bowl queen, Ludwig was from an old Miami family. She was a close friend of Adele Graham’s, wife of Bob Graham, a former governor of Florida and U.S. senator, and most recently President Obama’s handpicked co-chair of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
† The Palm Bay was a club and private hotel that catered to celebrities visiting Miami. Robert Duvall, James Caan, Peter Ustinov, Oleg Cassini, and painter Frank Stella were frequent guests. In John Platero’s profile of the club, “You Can’t Buy Your Way In at Palm Bay Club,” published by the AP on July 7, 1982, he wrote, “The late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis was once almost turned away. Spiro Agnew—when he was vice president of the United States—also was left cooling his heels outside. But for those who get past the guarded entrance to the Palm Bay Club, they’ll find the essence of old Florida.” Noting such amenities as boat slips that can accommodate 130-foot yachts, a floating heliport, and a pond stocked with $400-a-piece Japanese koi, Platero quoted the daughter of the club’s founder, Gayonne Dinkler: “People here are not nouveau riche. They have innate class and the majority of them have been that way for generations.” La Gorce was founded by real estate and railroad barons in the 1920s and has been a playground to Miami’s old-money elites, as well as several American presidents, ever since. The Jockey Club was a residential tower, with tennis courts and a complex of private bars, restaurants, and discos, at 11111 Biscayne Boulevard. It was a favored haunt of former vice president Hubert Humphrey, comedian Jackie Gleason, and actress Eva Gabor. Surmani was a manager of one of the Jockey Club’s bars. At the time Jon met Bobby Erra, he was facing charges for an assault in Las Vegas where he severely beat a man in his hotel room with a water pitcher. The man whom Erra assaulted was due to testify against Surmani in a tax-evasion case.
‡ The Belcher family owned the northern half of Great Stirrup Cay, a private island in the Bahamas. They sold it to the Norwegian Cruise Line in 1977 to be developed into a resort.
‡ In 1986 then-governor Graham endured the biggest political scandal of his career after state troopers discovered that his wife had taped a note to the mirror of his bathroom in the governor’s mansion urging him to pardon Albert San Pedro, a criminal associate of Erra’s. Graham did not issue the pardon. But according to Mike Fisten, a former Miami Dade Police Department detective who, while serving on a federal task force, investigated Erra’s gambling operations in the early 1990s, numerous calls were placed between a phone used by Erra’s organization to take illegal bets and a private line at the governor’s personal home in Miami. Fisten says his request for a subpoena to tap Erra’s phone line and record calls to the governor’s private phone line was denied by his superiors.