J.R.: Cocaine put me back in the good life. I got a beautiful new dog, a Doberman, to keep Brady company. I named him Chulo, which is Spanish for “pimp.” I got a nice wardrobe, but with a Miami flavor. Sneakers were in. The more sneakers you had, the better you were. Everybody wore white Adidas, with the stripes on the side. To me, Puma Bananas were the end-all of sneakers. I loved my Bananas. The Puma Banana was a yellow sneaker with black on the side. They lasted maybe a month, and then you had to throw them out and get a new pair. I went crazy with Bananas. Then it was saddle shoes. I couldn’t get enough saddle shoes.
People in Miami had a casual but classy look, Armani jackets and jeans. When Miami Vice came on TV, people said Don Johnson invented the Miami casual look. Not true, bro. He was copying us. Not me personally, but everybody I knew.
One thing I liked about Miami was the weed. I personally smoked weed all the time. In New York there was a prejudice against wiseguys smoking weed. People looked funny at Andy and me when we smoked out. In Miami nobody cared. I could be myself. I was lucky with pot. It never dulled my senses. I was never so high that I couldn’t shoot somebody or beat him when I needed to.
My friend Mouse, the pothead judge, turned me on to a nice little Spanish house up the street from him on North Bay Drive. I planted gardenias in the front and bougainvillea along the sunny side of the house. I love the explosion of red and purple in a bougainvillea, and to me the fragrance of the gardenia is un-fucking-real. In my backyard I had a little pool. Beyond that I had all of Biscayne Bay.
I put in a dock and a boatlift and got my first Cigarette racing boat—a beautiful maroon and gold 28, with twin engines. I got into diving for conch and for lobsters. Some mornings I’d wake up before the sun and drive my boat to the Bahamas. If the sea was flat, I could make it there in ninety minutes. In Bimini there was a bakery where they made bread that was out of this fucking world. Because of how the air is down there, you could taste the sea in the bread. It went perfect with lobster. That was my life. I’d drive to Bimini to pick up a loaf of bread.
The first club I got active in was the Palm Bay. It was built on pillars over the water, and you would dock your boat at the club by driving it through a tunnel underneath. All the celebrities visiting Florida played tennis at the Palm Bay. I went because it was the easiest place to get to by boat from my house, and they served a fantastic lunch.
Gary Teriaca was into Porsches, and he turned me on to the 911. I fell in love with that car. My first was champagne with a black interior and a turbocharger. We had a terrific Porsche-Audi dealer in town who never had a problem accepting a shopping bag of cash for payment. Over the years I probably bought a hundred Porsches. Many I gave away to different women.
Bobby Erra knew a lot about boats and boat engines, and he turned me on to a custom shop run by Butch Stokes, who’d been the racing-team mechanic for Porsche.* I told Butch, “I want my Porsche to be faster than any other Porsche on the road.”
Two weeks later I picked up my Porsche. Everything looked the same except Butch had put in a little dial on the dashboard. The dial had numbers on it, from one to fourteen. Butch explained the dial was to set the air boost in the turbo. A factory Porsche comes with a turbo boost of six.† Now I had boost that I could dial up to fourteen. My cylinders were bored out. I got special oil coolers. Butch said, “I’m going to have to teach you how to drive this car because, honest to God, this car is ridiculous.”
“Okay, bro.”
We drove it out to I-95, and I stopped it in the middle of the highway. We had all these cars honking and pulling over to the side. But fuck those assholes, I needed to see what my car could do. I turned my dial up to fourteen and punched the gas. The front tires rose off the fucking ground. I did a wheelie down the highway like my car was a motorcycle. Butch started yelling, because a car doing a wheelie you can’t control, so I let off the gas, and boom, the front wheels smacked the ground. We easily hit 160 or 180. Butch did not lie. That car was ridiculous.
I got thirty-six speeding tickets in the next four months. I had more legal trouble from tickets than I ever got from doing a murder. That’s a fact.
GARY TERIACA was becoming a high-flyer. He and his girlfriend Carol Belcher moved into a $400,000 house on Sabal Palm Drive, in Bay Point Estates.‡ Carol was close friends with a state attorney, Dick Gerstein,§ who lived nearby. When I first went to Gary’s house and he invited me to have drinks with his new best friend, the top crime fighter in the county, I was a little bent out of shape. Gary would have Dick Gerstein downstairs laughing at the bar, and upstairs in the study was where we kept the cocaine we got from Albert. Gary felt his house was a safe place to hold coke because Bay Point was a gated community. But it made me uptight. I remember sitting in the kitchen once holding five keys of coke in a gym bag while I chatted with State Attorney Gerstein. It was not a comfortable feeling. Gary always said Gerstein was a good guy. Later I found out Gerstein was a degenerate gambler who placed bets with Bobby Erra, so maybe he was right.*
NEXT TO cocaine and pussy, tennis was Gary’s favorite thing. He was always trying to get me to play. One time he insisted I bring my racket.
“Okay, okay.”
I show up and see some very attractive girls hopping around the court in their little tennis whites. Then this guy skips over with a sweater over his shoulders. He’s a pretty boy like Gary, an old friend from college. His name is Steven Grabow.
Gary says, “Why don’t you and Steven partner up?”
We knock the ball around for a couple hours, do some lines, have a few laughs. Later that day I bang one of the tennis girls in a little clubhouse by the court, which Gary’s friend Steven thinks is comical. He’s a total pussy hound. We’re all joking about this later, and Gary says, “My friend Steven has been living in Aspen, Colorado, the past couple years working as a ski instructor.”
“What’s it like out there in the mountains?”
“It’s like Miami, except nobody can get any coke.” That’s how Gary’s friend Steven put it.
Gary knew I was working with Bernie Levine to supply San Francisco. He wanted to run the same kind of setup with his friend Steven in Aspen. But the airport was small in Colorado, and there were rumors that the heat watched it. We decided the best way to move kilos to Aspen was to have guys drive it out. I helped Gary get started—got him cars to run the coke, and later hooked him up with a good customer out there. Gary would move a billion dollars of coke through that Grabow kid. It started with a tennis game. That’s how the business was sprouting up then.
FOR A couple of years, me and Gary and Bobby had good times in Miami. Bobby stayed away from the coke business and from Albert San Pedro for a couple years, but we all partied together. The old nightclubs around 79th Street were dying.* Cubans were moving into the neighborhood. It was one thing for them to park your car at a club. Nobody wanted to sit next to them in a club.
Everybody moved to new hot spots—the Jockey Club, the Coconut Grove, the Bombay, and later the Cricket Club, the disco in the Quayside Towers.† People called the Quayside Towers the “Quaalude Towers.” Quaaludes were the other great drug that people were taking along with coke. Quaaludes were more underground when Andy and I snuck them into the punch in our New York discos. In Miami you’d go out for drinks with a broad, and she’d bring her own Quaaludes. It wasn’t like today, where a guy will sneak roofies into some poor broad’s drinks so he can have his way with her. Back then broads would knock themselves out on purpose.
Me, Bobby, and Gary all had boats. We’d get six or seven girls, take them out on the ocean, tie our boats together, get the girls fucked up on Quaaludes and coke, and have a party. We had a girl get so wasted one time, she passed out, rolled off the deck, and fell into the water. Her girlfriends were so fucked up, they didn’t even notice that she’d fallen off the boat. Finally I saw this stupid girl floating facedown in the water. Me and Bobby panicked. With all the shit we were into, a girl drowning from our boat could be very bad.
Gary swam out and dragged the girl back onto the boat. She was gone. Gary started pumping her, and water shot out of her mouth. He pushed on her chest and blew air into her mouth, and finally she started puking and coughing. She was a mess, but thank God she lived. This could’ve been an absolute fucking disaster.
I saw the oddest thing in Gary that day—something that really showed me he was different. After this girl came back to life, he went down in the boat and started crying. His reaction was very strange.
BOBBY ERRA liked to drink and party with women, but he was not a showy person like Gary. Bobby was understated. In that way he reminded me of Carlo Gambino. With his rich wife, Marcia Ludwig, Bobby led a more quiet life than we did.
Bobby was such a weirdo, his idea of a wild time was running his dogs on the golf course at the La Gorce Country Club. Bobby and Marcia had Airedales, and at night when the club shut down, we’d take his dogs out with my dog and run them on the grass. Bobby had paid off the greenskeepers to give him keys to everything. He kept a special cart that was souped up to go thirty-five miles an hour, and we’d run our dogs off it while we talked about business.
If Bobby hadn’t been a gangster, he would probably have made a name for himself as a sportfisherman. He taught me more about fishing than anybody—flatfishing in the Keys, game fishing for humpback tuna in the Bahamas. Bobby had a Merritt boat,* and we’d go together for five-day tournaments. What makes the tuna a strong opponent is that not only is it a monster fish, but a tuna never stops swimming. If you want tuna, you wait until the water gets choppy, then throw out bait while you run your boat. A tuna will fight you for hours. I once caught a 426-pound fish, but Bobby routinely brought in fish over 700 pounds, which was incredible with that mutant hand of his. But every year we went to the contest, these same assholes in a beat-up yellow boat used to win. That’s life.
Bobby was a cheap bastard. His Merritt boat was no good for taking women out on. Instead of buying his own Cigarette, he’d borrow mine.
I kept my boat raised on a lift above the water. If you kept it in the water, there was always some asshole speeding past in his boat, which could damage your boat if it wasn’t on a lift. One day Bobby came over to borrow my boat and crashed it off the lift and sank it. He claimed the lift malfunctioned. I got the insurance company to pay for the boat, but this didn’t help how I felt inside.
I was crazy for that boat. It was my first nice boat in Miami. I ended up buying a new Cigarette 35 that I named Mistress. She was a great boat, and I owned several more afterward, but I never loved a boat as much as my first Miami Cigarette. I was heartbroken when Bobby sank her. Absolutely heartbroken.
* Abner “Butch” Stokes is better known as the racing boat engine mechanic who founded Stokes Porsche of Hollywood, Florida, in 1973 and is still in business today.
* Aside from Jon’s assertion, there is no evidence that Gerstein placed illegal bets through Robert Erra, but Miami-Dade police intelligence reports from the 1970s noted personal ties Gerstein had with organized crime figures like Meyer Lansky. Gerstein is best known for his role in exposing money laundering in the 1972 Nixon reelection campaign, which helped to break open the Watergate scandal. Ironically, Gerstein was ensnared in a financial scandal after he and defense attorney F. Lee Bailey became directors of CenTrust bank, which in 1990 was linked to a massive money-laundering scheme involving BCCI bank, General Noriega of Panama, the Medellín Cartel, and Middle Eastern arms dealers. Gerstein avoided criminal prosecution but was reprimanded for “ethical violations,” and his partner, F. Lee Bailey, was disbarred. Gerstein’s final public role was to serve as Pee Wee Herman actor Paul Ruben’s defense attorney after his arrest in a Florida adult movie theater for masturbating. Today, Dade County’s Miami county court complex bears his name in stately letters: The Richard E. Gerstein Justice Center.
* In 1981 the Dream Bar shut its doors and was turned into a punk rock club.
* Merritt is a manufacturer of premier sportfishing boats.
† Boost numbers refer to pounds per square inch of air pressure above normal atmospheric levels.
† Quayside Towers are premier condo high-rises in North Miami, built in the early 1980s, where units today go for several million dollars.
‡ Sabal Palm Drive was among the most exclusive addresses in Miami in the 1970s. Bay Point Estates was among the first gated communities on Biscayne Bay.
§ Richard Gerstein was Florida state prosecutor for Dade County and served six terms from 1956 to 1980.