When Jon Roberts looks at horses he might buy, the ears have it.
“I love horses with big ears,” Roberts says. “The first time I laid eyes on Best Game, she was a yearling, standing in a field. She was a big, good-looking filly, very rough. She took off like a lightning bolt. I had to have her.”
In a little less than six weeks Best Game won a division of the Poinsettia. Best Game is the only filly in the world to have won two Hibiscus Stakes in 1983.
Roberts says, “If she runs good in New York there’s a $100,000 grass stake in California.”
Another claim Roberts made four years ago was equally fortuitous. He took Noholme’s Star for $30,000. The gelding has gone on to become a stakes winner with lifetime earnings of $170,369, winning 18 races.
“When he won the Florida Turf Cup, it was the biggest thrill I’ve had,” Roberts says. “He bowed in both legs and came back to run his heart out for me.”
Roberts was born in the Bronx 34 years ago and grew up in lower Manhattan. He moved to Miami in 1973 and sold cars. “I owned several car lots,” he says. “I met Danny Mones, who became my lawyer and my business partner. We bought a run-down building, very cheap, fixed it up and sold it. We made a real score and went on from there. We’ve done real well in real estate ever since.
“I’ve never married. I don’t have any children. The horses become like children to me. I love going to Ocala and buying horses. It’s one of the prettiest spots in Florida, and some day I’m going to have a farm up there. My girl, Toni Moon, loves horses as much as I do.”
Miss Moon, a very attractive lady, is a model and actress and appears in television commercials.
“I’ve been offered half a million for Best Game but I don’t want to sell. Think what her babies will be worth. Breeding is what I’m most interested in now. I’m going to start building up a broodmare band and go from there.”
Roberts’s first experience in breeding horses was sending his mare Winning Fate to Cerf Volant. “The foal came out with very crooked legs but I wouldn’t let them put her down. We raised her and I gave her to Toni for a riding horse.”
—Art Grace, “The Best Game in Town,” a profile of Jon Roberts
published in Florida Horse, June 1983
APRIL 2009—AVENTURA AND BAY POINT ESTATES
E.W.: The extent of Jon’s involvement in horse racing didn’t hit home for me until one night at Padrones, an upscale Cuban restaurant in Aventura. We were walking out with takeout food when a deep voice boomed, “Papa! Papa!”
The owner of the voice—a small, dapper man—came up the sidewalk with his arms open. Jon said, “That’s Angel Cordero. The little son of a bitch calls me Papa.”
Cordero, regarded as one of the greatest jockeys who ever lived, threw his arms around Jon. The two spent half an hour trading stories. When Jon owned Mephisto Stables, Cordero was one of his top jockeys. When they met again that evening in 2009, Cordero burst into tears while discussing the death of his wife, and Jon patted his shoulders to comfort him. As we left, Angel said to me, “Papa was one of the good guys.”
It was a surprise to witness Jon outside the context of his life of crime and see him regarded as a beloved figure. Up until that point in interviewing Jon, I’d assumed racehorses were mostly about laundering drug money.
After meeting Cordero, Jon arranged for me to meet Seymour “Sy” Cohen, who helped run Mephisto Stables. At the time he worked for Jon, Cohen was a columnist for the now-defunct Miami News who specialized in handicapping races. Cohen was also a fixture on the Miami social circuit. At Palm Bay Club, he was known as a fierce competitor on the tennis courts and played frequently with Oleg Cassini and Robert Duvall. Cohen helped advise the renowned painter and racehorse enthusiast Frank Stella in his purchases. As we drove to Cohen’s house, Jon explained, “The genius of Sy wasn’t just in looking at a horse. He knew where to run them so they’d win.”
Cohen lives in Bay Point Estates, the same gated community where Gary Teriaca once stored cocaine in his home. After Jon and I are cleared for entry at the security gate, we drive past expansive homes set back from the road. Lawns are tended by small armies of gardeners whose gas-powered machines fill the air with buzzing. Cohen’s house has a brightly painted iron lawn jockey in front. When we enter, the housekeeper escorts us down a hallway where the paneled walls are covered by framed photographs of horses. Jon points to a picture of his younger self standing by a horse with Sy, a tall man with a confident grin. “That’s Sy,” Jon says. “See what a good-looking guy he was?”
“I still am, you motherfucker,” booms Sy’s voice from a room nearby.
We enter the back bedroom. Sy, seventy-six, lies propped up on pillows on his bed. Wires and tubes dangle from nearby medical machines. He’s recently undergone surgery. Though his face is ashen, he pushes himself up and greets Jon, “What’s happening, baby?”
Jon slips into banter with him that sounds like dialogue from a movie set in an old Miami Beach nightclub. It’s pure Rat Pack.
“God Almighty, you look good, kid,” Jon says.
“Sure, babe. I still have a cocktail in the evening.”
“Just one? Don’t lie to me, you cocksucker.”
They bring up good times at the old Palm Bay Club, which in the 1990s was converted into a residential community. Sy turns to me and says, “Kid, you should have been there. The Palm Bay was a real live joint.”
Jon sits by the bed and takes Sy’s arm. I notice several Frank Stella paintings—hanging off-kilter and covered in dust—on the walls. I ask, “Are these real?”
“Of course they’re real, kid. I help Frank buy his racehorses.”
“Jesus, I studied him in college.”
“College,” Jon says, amused and disdainful. He rolls his eyes to Sy, then turns back to me. “Frank was a madman. Frank liked to party. He gave me a bunch of those pictures he used to make, where he’d take squares and other shit and put all the shit together. Of all the famous people I ever was friendly with, Frank Stella was the only person who ever gave me anything. He was a good guy.”*
“I hope you still got those paintings, Jon,” Sy says.
Jon shrugs. “Those went away when I lost everything.”
I ask Sy what Jon was like when he met him.
Sy reflects a moment, then says, “When Jon asked me to help him with Mephisto Stables, he was serious. Jon wanted to learn. He made an intense effort. He listened explicitly and almost never second-guessed me. Later on, of course, he started to get his own opinions.”
“Fuck you,” Jon says, laughing.
“You want the truth, don’t you?”
“You’re right, Sy. I got my own opinions, and I should’ve stayed with you.”
Sy explains to me. “Jon got involved with that girl, Toni Moon. Jon thought she knew something about horses. It started to happen that I’d find a horse for Jon, and this girl would tell me that she didn’t like it. I wasn’t ready for that.”
“I was an idiot, Sy. I should never have let a girl get between us.”
“We ran some good races, kid. People still talk about Mephisto Stables in Ocala.”
“They really do, Sy?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, babe.”
As we get in the car to leave, Jon says, “I love that man to death because he gave me the most pleasure I had in my life through the horses.”
Jon drives past the Bay Point security gate, lost in thought. He says, “How can I explain a horse to you? Honestly, if you compare racing a horse to fucking the most beautiful woman, it might only last a few minutes with the woman. Even if you screw that beautiful woman for hours, and your horse wins a two-minute race, you’ll still have better memories from the horse. There’s nothing stronger than a winning horse.”
J.R.: Horses were the one good thing my father turned me on to. He loved the races. After I made my first big score selling coke to Bernie Levine in California, Danny Mones told me racehorses were a good way to launder money. Many horse sellers would take partial payment in cash. I’d claim the horse for a fake price that was low, and write a check for that amount. Then I’d give the owner cash to make up the difference. When I sold the horse later on, I’d sell it at its real price and pay taxes on the profit. Now my money was clean and legal.
Danny Mones and I started Mephisto Stables in 1977. Buying horses was different from buying condos. I liked to look at horses. I liked to watch them run. I liked to talk to the people in the stables. I liked to think about them.
Gary Teriaca introduced me to Sy Cohen at the Palm Bay Club. Sy gave such good advice about horses, I made him the president of my stables. He started taking me to Kentucky, Louisiana, California, and New York to buy horses. It got to where I was flying horses all over the country to run them in races. Obviously I met a lot of good pilots this way who I also got to help with my coke business.
Dealing cocaine had promoted me into high society. Owning racehorses took me into the stratosphere. The first time Sy took me to Lexington, we were picked up at the airport by his friend Judge Joe Johnson,* who hosted horse auctions. Judge Johnson drove us himself in a stretch Mercedes limousine. This judge was drunk off his ass. We blew through red lights and stop signs. Nobody stopped him. He owned the cops. It was nuts. I was in a limo with a shoebox of coke money being driven by a drunk judge.
We stayed at Judge Johnson’s house. He hosted buyers from all over the world. He had Japanese coming in, Arabs. We’d go to claiming races, which was where you’d bid on the horses. Judge Johnson took me under his wing and explained to me how to work cash payments in Kentucky. The judge didn’t know what I did for a living. He helped all his friends out this way. Even normal rich people need to launder cash now and then.
Judge Johnson was the good kind of judge. He was what was called a “Kentucky hard boot.” He spoke his mind. He was drunk when he went to bed at night. He was drunk at the breakfast table, and he was a hell of a guy. I stayed with him for years. It was through him that I got friendly with Cliff Perlman, who owned Caesar’s Palace. When I’d go to Caesar’s and get comped, everybody assumed it was because of my Mafia connections. No, I was connected to Caesar’s Palace by a Kentucky judge.
Horse-racing people were very genial. They made the rich doctors I used to do coke with look like garbage. No matter how high I rose in Miami, I was always “the coke guy.” In the horse world, I was just a man with a lot of money. One thing I truly learned about America is that once you have enough money to get in with the top, richest people, nobody asks where it came from. That’s one rule rich people live by as a courtesy to other rich people. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
IT TURNED out that Toni fit right in with these people. We ended up becoming friends with Al Tanenbaum and his girlfriend, Gloria. Al was a guy who’d made it big in stereos.* He and Gloria were an older couple we met at an auction in Ocala. Al and I were strangers standing next to each other at an auction, and out of the blue he asked if I wanted to go in on a horse with him. I said yes and bid on the horse. I ended up fronting Al $40,000 because he couldn’t write a check that high that day.
“Gentlemen’s agreement,” he said. “I’ll send you the check when I get back to New York.”
“No problem,” I said. Maybe he was a con artist, but I was curious to find out.
A few days later the check came in the mail. After that we all became great friends. Al and Gloria lived in a suite at the Regency Hotel in New York.† Toni and I started going up there, and Al would send his driver to pick us up. All of us would go to Toni’s favorite places—the Russian Tea Room and Elaine’s.‡ One night after Al had a few drinks, he said, “Jon, men should never ask this, but I feel I know you. What’s your game?”
It was very classy, the way he asked me. So I said, “All I’m going to tell you is this. I do real estate. I have my stables. But sometimes I also work in the importation business.”
Al laughed. “Bolivian marching powder?” Funny guy. That was the phrase he used.
“I guess you could say so.”
“Money is money, Jon. Once you have it, what does it matter?” He pointed to his girlfriend, Gloria, and said, “Did you know that she’s divorced from a man who has more money than you and I combined? She’s so wealthy that she has a car and chauffeur just to take her little fucking dog on a drive around the park so he can look at the trees out the window. All the starving people in the world, and that’s what she does with her money. Who are we to judge her?”
These people didn’t give a fuck about anything. They didn’t judge me. They didn’t want anything from me. They just wanted to have a good time.
We bought several horses together and started running them in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.* We’d stay at Al’s house up there, and he and Gloria would come down to Delray and stay with us. It was the best social relationship I’d had with anybody, and it lasted for years.
IT WAS through Al that I became friendly with another very interesting man, Judge Tom Rosenberg, who was a top guy in Cook County.† Judge Rosenberg was a houseguest at Al’s place in Saratoga Springs when we met him. He ended up coming down to Florida, and we went in on some horses together. He was a real gambler,* and I turned him on to Bobby Erra, who would take bets on anything. At the end of Judge Rosenberg’s first visit to Miami, I took the judge to Joe’s Stone Crab for dinner, and he said, “I insist you visit me in Chicago. Come to Sportsman’s Park.† There’s a race called the Color Me Blue that you’re going to love. Bring one of your horses.”
A few weeks later I had my stables send my horse Best Game up to Chicago. The afternooon Toni and I fly in, Judge Rosenberg has us picked up at the airport by a security detail of cops. They take us to a hotel by the Water Tower.‡ After we rest, the cops escort us to a restaurant. Inside, it is like the Roaring Twenties. Everybody is dressed to the nines. Judge Rosenberg is sitting like a prince at a table surrounded by ass-kissers and beautiful women. When he stands up to greet us, it is like the parting of the seas. Everybody in the room steps back and stares at him, then at me and Toni. Mostly at Toni, because she was always at her finest surrounded by money. After dinner the judge says, “I’m going to take you to a place I know you’ll like.”
The cops chauffeur us across town to a cabaret theater. One of the goons at the door says, “Good evening, Judge. Would you like your table by the bar, or are you going upstairs?”
“We’ll be going upstairs,” he says.
We went upstairs to big double doors. The bouncer standing there says, “How are you tonight, Your Honor?”
The bouncer opens the doors, and inside there are green tables with every game you’d see in Las Vegas, except this place is classier. There are guys in tuxedos, women in jewels. Everybody comes up to say, “Hi, Your Honor.”
Judge Rosenberg turns to me and says, “I’m going to get you some chips. The way it works is, nobody walks out of here with money. If you win, I’ll have somebody bring your cash tomorrow.”
I shot craps for hours. That’s my favorite game, but doing it with Toni and Judge Rosenberg and all these people who looked like they were in the movies—it was a trip and a half. At the end of the night, I was up $50,000. Next day, good to his word, Judge Rosenberg had one of his cops bring me my winnings.
A day later we went to Sportsman’s Park to run my horse Best Game. When the race started, he didn’t break right. My heart went to my stomach. Judge Rosenberg must have noticed the look on my face, and he leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about it, Jon. It’s just a horse race.”
Judge Rosenberg wasn’t just classy, he was a gracious man. I knew he’d bet on my horse, but he was trying to put me at ease. All my worrying was for nothing. Best Game pulled ahead and won.
We all had a terrific time in Chicago. At the time the judge was hosting me, my partner Ron Tobachnik and I were moving a couple hundred kilos every month in the city. Not that I’d ever mention this to the judge. I’d been some kind of gangster my whole life, but the first time I ever lived like one—like the way I pictured Al Capone living in his heyday—was during those nights in Chicago when Judge Rosenberg took me around town.
WHEN I first started buying horses, they were like pieces of meat to me. Whether they won or lost, I made money—because I was using them for laundering. But early on I became interested in winning. I had horses gushing cash. I bought a horse called Noholme’s Star for $30,000, and he earned $850,000 for me.
Sy taught me how to train horses so they’d run their hearts out. But I also learned how to fix races. There were many tricks. I hired what they called witch doctors—crooked vets—who could take a nothing horse and give him hops so he’d run his brains out. In the early days, hops meant heroin. They’d give it to injured horses so they’d run hard on injured legs. Of course, once a horse runs a race or two on hops, there’s no more horse left. By the late 1970s witch doctors were coming up with all sorts of exotic dope. There was the testosterone that Bryan used to shoot up. There was a drug called Sublimaze* that made horses fly like Superman. When they banned it in the United States, I found a guy in Colombia who could get it for me, and I’d fly it up with coke shipments.
The tracks got wise to doping, and they made a rule that winning horses had to get tested in a “spit barn,” where officials would test their piss. The guys overseeing the spit barns at Florida tracks were state employees. I could usually find one I could bribe into switching the piss cups. That way I could win with a doped horse, no problem.
If there was no way to pay off the guys at the spit barn, I found a mad-scientist doctor who, the morning before the race, would remove all the horse’s blood and replace it with oxygenated blood. I had another guy who employed a very simple trick. Before the race, he’d blow pure oxygen into the horse’s ass. The oxygen feeds all the veins up there, and the horse will run like a motherfucker, but he won’t test dirty.
There was always the old-fashioned way to fix a race: pay off the jockey. Some jockeys would sneak charging sticks up their sleeve. A charging stick is like a stun gun. When the horse gets shocked, he runs faster.
A really good jockey can hold a horse when he’s running him. He’ll whip him like crazy with his crop, but secretly he’s holding back the horse. If you do this with the same horse several races in a row, everybody thinks he’s a nothing horse. The odds go long, then you run him to win.
Albert San Pedro was into racehorses, and so was Bobby Erra. One time we put our heads together and decided, “Let’s fix a race at Calder by buying off every jockey.”†
We paid off every jockey and picked the trifecta.
It went perfect, at first. Everybody hit their marks. Bobby and Albert and I were all slapping hands. It’s one of the few times I ever saw Albert smile. Then, in the final stretch, bam, the lead horse steps in a tiny hole and breaks his leg. He goes down, and the whole pack crashes into him. Horses are falling everywhere, jockeys flying in the air. Disaster. You plan and you plan, and at the last minute your horse slips his foot in a little hole.
IN MY early days, I ran my horses like I ran my life. If there was an evil way, I’d find it. I got my rewards, and the good people got punished. At Calder I had a jockey named Nick Navarro who worked for me. He was one of the good guys. He wouldn’t hold horses or charge them or run them on dope. He was very skilled, and when I ran my horses clean, I used Nick.
One day in 1977 he ran a race for me at Calder. I walked up to him after he finished. He put his hand up to wave, and there was a powerful explosion. A bolt of lightning came out of the sky and hit him. It blew him to pieces. It split his helmet in half, threw him out of his boots.* He was one of the best guys. He had a wife, a couple of kids. And there’s me a few feet away. God sends a lightning bolt down. Instead of hitting me, He hits the good guy. Please. Don’t tell me the wicked are punished.
In the early days there were many things I did that I’m not proud of. Sometimes you’d dope a horse, and then when you used him up, you’d kill him for the insurance. There was a guy who was a hit man for horses. He’d come to your barn and give your horse lethal drugs that couldn’t be traced. It would look like the horse had a seizure. The last time I did this, I put the injection in the horse myself. I went out to eat, came back, and saw the horse legs up in the stall. This dead horse had a terrible look on his face. Even though he was dead, he was looking up at me. I could see in his eyes that in his last minute on earth, I gave him agony, and all he’d ever given me was pleasure.
I never killed a horse after that. Part of what changed my attitude about horses was Toni Moon. She loved horses. She liked riding them, and she had an eye for racehorses. When she came along, she and Sy got into a pissing match over how to run my stables, and she won. He still bad-mouths the horses she picked, but that’s sour grapes. Toni had good instincts, and she really cared for the animals.
When you care for your animals they can break your heart. This happened to me with a horse named Desperado. Toni and I found him in Kentucky. We were out at a farm early in the morning. The sun was barely up. There was a heavy mist. Out of it a horse came running. Desperado. He was gray with black dimples.
Toni and I looked at each other. We knew this was the horse. I’d always had the fantasy of winning the Kentucky Derby. I could dominate many tracks, but winning against all those blue-blood assholes at the Kentucky Derby? There’d be nothing greater. I felt Desperado was my winner.
He was still a baby when I got him. He hadn’t been trained how to run, but he could already fly on the grass, and he had good instincts. He didn’t like other horses. You don’t want a sociable horse. They stay in the pack. You want a horse who likes to run in front of all the other horses. Desperado was a killer.
I named him Desperado because I saw myself in his eyes. We took him down to Ocala, because Ocala is the best place in the world to raise baby horses. There’s no snow on the ground to slip and hurt themselves. Ocala’s built on limestone that leaches minerals into the water, and when the baby horses drink, it makes them strong.
The legs on a baby horse are tender. If you give the horse his head too soon and start running him early, he can buck his shins and injure himself. We found a trainer who was patient, Juan Sanchez. Juan had worked for Horatio Luro when he trained Northern Dancer, which many people believe was the best racehorse that ever lived.*
I raised Desperado the opposite of how my father raised me. That horse was my son, and I gave him the best. There were carrot farms near my house in Delray. You could pay farmers to walk on their land and pull carrots from the ground. I used to get up early and pull bunches of carrots and fly up to Ocala in my helicopter to feed Desperado.
After months and months Juan and I put a boy on Desperado and ran him. We had the boy hold him back, but Desperado moved like lightning. Juan turned to me and said, “He’s really full of himself. He knows how good he is.”
We decided to breeze him—give him an easy, full run—the next morning. Desperado decided to show off. He took all his head and ran full out. He broke the track record in the morning. We ran him again, and he broke the track record for the afternoon.
I looked at Toni and said, “We’re going to the Kentucky Derby.”
A few weeks later we were breezing Desperado out for his first race, and I guess he got cocky. He broke from the gate and twisted his leg. He went down. I ran to him. He tried again and again to get up, but his leg couldn’t hold him. He didn’t understand. I had to hold his head to stop him from fighting to get up. When I looked him in the eyes, that poor horse could see in my face it was over for him. To see this horse go from proud to broken, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
That horse killed me inside. But I was never mad at him. I tried to let him know he hadn’t disappointed me. I paid for an operation to try to remove a bone chip from his knee. I sent him to a rehabilitation farm where they swam him in tanks. But he was never the same. In the end I gave him to someone who let him live on a farm outside Ocala. I still brought him carrots.
Toni gave me the idea that I should retire from my business in Miami. She wanted to buy a farm up north. I’d become certified as a horse trainer. We had a vision of living up there and breeding horses.
I was thirty-four or thirty-five years old then. I had millions and millions of dollars. Since I’d come to Miami less than a decade before, I’d become, along with Max Mermelstein, one of the top two Americans in the Medellín Cartel. I’d helped them build their empire. I’d survived while a lot of people around me ended up in the dirt. A smart man might have walked away, but that wasn’t me. I believed I could have both worlds—my business life with the Colombians and my life with Toni—and this life would never stop.
But it don’t work that way, bro.
* Intrigued by Jon’s Frank Stella connection, in the summer of 2010 I phoned the artist at his studio to ask about his relationship with Jon. Stella recalled knowing Jon, but phoned me back a day later in a highly agitated state to say, “Please, don’t ever ask me about Jon Roberts again. He’s a very, very dangerous man. My wife is terrified that we are even speaking about him.”
* A Fayette County judge from 1968 to 1992, Joe Johnson was descended from local coal barons, and was known for eccentric statements he made from the bench, such as urging local police to shoot robbers on sight and threatening to arrest reporters he didn’t like. “He had this cowboy image, but he was a thoroughly honorable, forthright, trustworthy man,” a Lexington bloodstock consultant and longtime friend was quoted as saying in his obituary published April 3, 2008, by the Lexington Herald-Leader.
* As noted in his New York Times obituary published June 26, 1991, Alvin “Al” Tanenbaum was an industrialist who founded Yorx Electronics. “An innovator in the electronics business, Mr. Tanenbaum introduced the Space Saver, a compact stereo system, and other audio concepts.” The obituary makes no reference to his girlfriend, Gloria.
* Saratoga Springs is home to one of the oldest racetracks in the country.
* In his obituary published on August 21, 1999, in the Chicago Sun-Times, his son Tom says of his father, “He was a wild man. There was no minute that wasn’t filled with entertaining, politics or gambling.” Tom Rosenberg is the Oscar-winning producer of Million Dollar Baby, who was also named as an extortion victim in the 2008 trial of crooked Chicago financier Tony Rezko.
* Sublimaze is a narcotic painkiller that when blended with amphetamines and illegally injected into racehorses came to be known as “rocket fuel.”
* The incident made the national wires that day, December 28, 1977, in a UPI story, “Jockey Killed by Lightning.”
* Horatio Luro is regarded as one of the best trainers, in part because Northern Dancer, the horse he trained with Juan Sanchez, is one of the winningest horses in history.
† Now the Loew’s Regency at 540 Park Avenue.
† Judge Thomas Rosenberg served twelve years on the circuit court in Cook County, retiring in 1981. Before that he’d been an alderman for the 44th Ward, closely allied with Mayor Richard Daley.
† The racetrack outside of Chicago was demolished in 2003.
† Calder Race Course—which now is also home to a casino—is in Miami Gardens.
‡ The Russian Tea Room and Elaine’s epitomized New York sophistication and glamour in the 1980s.
‡ An actual water tower near Miracle Mile that has become a landmark.