J.R.: The first thing I ever did with Max came at the direction of Fabito. In late 1980 I’d stopped using the cop’s stash house in North Bay Village. I’d started paying some of the drivers I used to rent their garages. I’d use guys with the most boring, normal suburban homes I could find. We’d just park the coke car in the garage until we needed to deliver it. I ran into a problem when one of my drivers worried that some cops were watching his house. We had a big shipment come in, and I had no place to hold it. Fabito told me that Max’s guy, Rafa, could let me use one of his stash houses.
Rafa lived around the corner from Max in Sunny Isles. Rafa was a wiry kid, and he was very hyper because he constantly smoked what the Colombians called “bazookas.” A bazooka was a normal cigarette, except half the tobacco was squeezed out and replaced with cocaine. Rafa had a bodyguard named Flaco whose main job was to follow him around and roll bazookas.
When I went to see Rafa, he’d heard already that I was coming. I’d met him a few times with Max, and he was very personable. He drove me out to his stash house in Kendall, a suburb built in the 1970s for white people fleeing Cubans in Miami. It was now being taken over by Colombians like Rafa.* It looked like the Colombians in Kendall had all used the same architect Albert had used to build his madhouse in Hialeah. In Kendall they’d buy a house on a normal suburban street, add a couple stories to it, cover the whole thing in burglar bars, and build a fifteen-foot wall around it. Rafa’s stash house was a fortress.
When he took me inside, he showed me something I’d never seen, except in a movie. We walked into a normal-looking den. Rafa picked up a garage door opener and clicked it, and the wall slid open. Inside there was a stack of at least a thousand coke bricks, and bundles of cash piled to the ceiling.
“Is this good?” he asked.
“Sure, Rafa.”
That’s where I had my driver deliver our coke.
Later I found a redneck neighbor of mine in Delray who was a master electrician and contractor and could build hiding places like Rafa’s. Unlike Rafa, I selected stash houses in anonymous neighborhoods all over Dade and Palm Beach counties. I picked houses belonging to people who worked regular jobs and didn’t have criminal records.
RAFA AND I were very tight from the start. He was easier to deal with than Max. I’m not saying he was a barrel of laughs. He was like Albert in that he’d sometimes kill a person for no fucking reason. He was almost like a little kid, though. A lot of the Colombian street guys were like that. They could shoot someone one minute and the next minute be laughing or crying. If Rafa saw a sad episode of Little House on the Prairie—which was his favorite American TV show—he’d bawl his eyes out. Rafa’s favorite fucking place on the planet was Disney World. To me, that place is like a fucking prison, with children and the guy in the rat suit.* But Rafa and his guys loved that shit. Even Pablo Escobar, when he was the most wanted man in the world, once snuck into Florida just to visit the Magic Kingdom.
The secret to handling Rafa was knowing how coked out he was at any given time. This was easy to determine based on watching how either he or Flaco, his bodyguard, rolled bazookas. When they rolled one, they’d pinch tobacco out of it, and they’d always pile the tobacco on the table. If the pile was small, Rafa was okay. If the pile was big, he might be out of his mind.
Rafa was married to a very petite Colombian girl, Odelia. We’d be out at dinner somewhere, and she’d look at him wrong, and he’d punch her. I’d never seen anything like it. One time he broke her face and put her in the hospital. She came out with wires on her jaw to hold it together. It looked like a birdcage on her head. A month after that, she and Rafa were at Disney World laughing like kids.
Rafa was the most unstable person you’d ever meet. But he always kept some reason in his brain. He knew he couldn’t touch Max because Max had Pablo Escobar on his side. Rafa understood the force that Pablo had. If someone didn’t have force backing him up, Rafa would cut that guy to pieces.
I never had any problems with Rafa, except once or twice. My main problem with Rafa was partying. Since Rafa smoked coke, when you partied with him, he wanted you to smoke it. He’d be after me, “Fume, fume, fume!”—smoke it.
I’d say, “Rafa, I don’t smoke cigarettes. It’ll choke me.”
“Fuck it! Smoke with me.”
There were times I’d sit in his house with him, and I’d be so fucked up, I couldn’t move. My arms and legs would be numb, and I’d be thinking, What have I done to myself?
Rafa would sit across from me covered in ashes. He’d smoke his bazookas down, not noticing as the ashes fell on his chest. I’d be paralyzed. I’d hear my heart beating, but I could barely move my eyeballs. Rafa would want to do more.
I’d tell him, “No more.”
“Oh, no, no, no! You don’t leave now,” he’d say. “You sit here until I’m done.”
“I’m leaving, Rafa.”
“What do you want? You want a girl? You want whores?”
I once spent two days trapped at his house. I’m not sure it’s medically possible, but I think the two of us smoked an entire kilo. Maybe Flaco helped. Other guys who worked for Rafa came in to ask a question, and he’d yell, “Get the fuck out,” and shoot at the walls and ceiling. We’d do target practice by shooting at the chandeliers. I saw myself in the mirror, and I was covered in bazooka ashes, too. I looked like a mummy. All I could do was laugh at this crazy fucker. Rafa was wacko, wacko, wacko. The party didn’t stop until Rafa passed out. Once he was out, I wouldn’t even check his pulse. I’d tell Flaco, “Get me the fuck home.”
Flaco and his guys would put me in a car and deliver me to Delray like a piece of beefalo meat. You wouldn’t see me again for two days. Rafa was unbelievable. I’ll be honest, 50 percent of my job when I started with Max was babysitting Rafa.