When I saw the mug shot of Jon, I thought, Here’s the mysterious “bearded gringo.” I put in a request to interview him. By the time it was processed, it was too late. He was gone.
—Former Miami-Dade Detective Mike Fisten
J.R.: As bad as you’d think it would be having my partner Max snitching against me, it wasn’t that bad. The cops had nothing on any of my guys—Lee, Bryan, Roger, my redneck neighbors, or Albert. They’d searched the house in Delray and got nothing. Toni made sure there was no coke, no illegal guns. They couldn’t touch the house. We kept our horses.
I spent weeks jerking the FBI around about Mickey. I’d drive to pay phones and pretend to call Mickey and pass codes to him. I’d tell the FBI agents, “Mickey’s going to snorkel into the lake tomorrow to meet me. You better have your guys in scuba gear hiding under the water.”
I led them on chases all over the state. Meanwhile I got my affairs in order. Danny Mones had $20 million in properties of mine that he controlled. I had $150 million in Noriega’s banks. I had $30 million in cash buried all over the county, and a few million in bank safe-deposit boxes under fake names.
I took a couple million dollars in cash and had Roger fly me to Colombia.
NINETEEN-EIGHTY-SEVEN WAS a bad year to hide out in Colombia. Half the Ochoa family was in hiding. Pablo was trying to blow up the government. I went to go meet Rafa, and somebody shot his brains out. Compared to this, the days when they’d just chop a guy’s arm off at a stoplight to steal his watch were the good old days.
I caught a plane to Mexico after a few months there. My friend Rafael Quintero had been arrested in 1985 for kidnapping and torturing to death a DEA agent.*
But Quintero had friends who helped me find a place to live by Mazatlán, which is a beautiful city. I got a little house behind a gate. My face had gone up on FBI most-wanted posters, and these circulated in Mexico. I hooked up with two nineteen-year-old whores and moved them into my hideout. I reasoned that I’d be staying indoors a lot, and that two girls would be better than one. They were best friends in the whorehouse, but when we moved in together, they started to compete and get jealous. I liked them both, but they didn’t see that.
There was a show on TV that was like the Mexican version of America’s Most Wanted. One day they put my face on this show and warned viewers I might be in Mexico. The girls saw this on a day that one of them was feeling jealous, and she called the Mexican police.
I’d been on the run for almost two years and had burned through most of my cash. The Mexican police took the rest of it on my way to prison.
IN A Mexican prison, the warden is like the CEO of a business. His business is to get as much money from the inmates as he can. The good side to this was that, as a gringo, I was viewed by the warden as a good potential source of income. The prison officials didn’t report me to the U.S. embassy. The bad side was that during my first week they put me in a section of the prison that was probably about as comfortable as being aboard an old African slave ship. We were chained to the floors. Everybody was covered in their own filth. At night the guards pulled me out and shocked me with wires connected to a car battery. This was how they warmed me up for the shakedown.
After a week they hosed me off and brought me in to see the warden. He put his hand out, and I told him that if he let me use the phone, I could have somebody bring money.
I had no intention of paying this crook. If I did that, he’d hold me longer to squeeze more out. I called my sister with a plan.
JUDY: Jon told me he was in a Mexican prison and he needed me to come down there dressed like a nun so I could smuggle him clothes and documents to help him escape.
I did what any sister would do. I found a priest and told him I was making a humanitarian effort that required me to impersonate a nun. He gave me papers I’d need and sent me to a costume store in Manhattan to rent a habit.
I took some vacation days from work and flew to Mexico. I entered the prison as a nun. When I saw the filthy conditions they were holding my brother in, as if he were an animal, I was outraged. I wanted to pull my brother out of there with my hands. But all I could do was pass him the clothes and fake passport I’d smuggled in under my habit.
J.R.: I had everything I needed to escape. But an inmate turned me in. They sent me to the warden. This time I noticed he had a picture of a racehorse on the wall. The warden was into racehorses. We got more friendly, and he named a price for my release: two Kentucky-born sprinters.
I got Toni to drive them to the border in a trailer. She was met by some corrupt federales loyal to the warden, and they brought them to his farm. The warden released me, and we went to his farm. The man cried, looking at those horses I got him. I stayed a few days at his house to teach his guys how to feed the horses and take care of them. The warden wasn’t a bad guy. But that’s Mexicans. Once you’re a friend, they have a lot of heart.
THE WARDEN had some federales drive me to an illegal border crossing by San Diego. I walked into the United States with a few pesos in my pocket. It was just my luck that the year I came back President Bush invaded Panama and arrested his old friend and my banker, General Noriega. The U.S. government took over Noriega’s banks. I lost $150 million.*
I avoided my criminal friends like Joey Ippolito. When you’re a fugitive, you’re a get-out-of-jail-free card to anybody who’s got charges over his head. If they turn you in, they can get everything wiped clean.
The one guy I could trust in California was Larry Barrera. His father, Laz Barrera, had helped train some of my horses in Ocala. Laz was, of course, the greatest trainer who ever lived.† His son Larry was a great kid. I could depend on him, but he was a heroin addict.
Larry let me move in with him. He had a shack in the Hollywood Hills. Larry had an old lady who lived in a nearby house. He used to help her out—get her mail, bring her milk from the store. About a month before I showed up, the old lady had died. She was a shut-in with no visitors, so Larry left her mummifying on the couch, picked up her mail, and cashed her checks. He ran an extension cord from his shack to her place for free electricity. That’s how we lived.
You won’t believe this, but Larry was married to Joe DiMaggio’s niece. They were separated, but Larry was still friendly with her uncle, Joe DiMaggio. When Joe was in town, we’d go to a sporting goods store, steal a box of baseballs, and then visit him. He’d sign the balls, and when there was a Dodgers game, we’d sell them in the parking lot.
I didn’t call Judy or Toni when I got to California because the FBI had started watching them. I contacted my old friend Al Tanenbaum. When I asked him to loan me $20,000, he hung up on me. So much for rich assholes.
I phoned a girl who’d worked in my barn when she was seventeen. Her name was Eleanor Roosevelt, just like the president’s wife. Eleanor had always liked me. Now she was twenty-five and living in her parents’ house in Delaware. I asked her to send me $500.
Instead of sending it, she drove across the country and picked me up. She took me to her parents’ house in the suburbs. She introduced me to her parents but used a fake name. They were very friendly. I told them I was from Chicago and had come east to find a job as a stable hand.
The next morning I woke up alone in the house. I was curious about who her parents were, so I went in their bedroom to poke around. I noticed that in the closet her dad had a thick, black belt with a holster on it. Then I saw a big Smokey-the-Bear hat, a nightstick, a gun, and a badge. Her dad was the assistant warden of the county jail.
But her dad liked me. I got a job in the stables at Delaware Park Racetrack.* I liked coming home to dinners with the Roosevelts. I’d been on the run for so long, it was enjoyable having a family.
I looked exactly like my wanted poster, but these people didn’t see me as that guy. I was almost a son-in-law. Eleanor’s parents helped us get an apartment. Her father picked me up one day and drove me to the county jail. He wanted me to consider getting a job there. I told him I’d think about it.
I lived with Eleanor until March 1992, when I got recognized by a kid at the racetrack. He’d lived in Florida and was with that little group of kids who were smoking crack with Toni’s brother in my barn. He had a grudge because I’d fired all his friends. I got turned in by an angry crackhead.
A small army of FBI agents, backed by a local SWAT team, took me from the apartment I had with Eleanor.
I’d lasted five years as a fugitive. That’s not bad. Mickey beat me. Before his house arrest, he spent nearly seven years in Norfolk, Virginia. He opened a motorcycle-repair shop, moved in with a single mother, and helped raise her kid.
* Undercover DEA agent Enrique Camarena was kidnapped by Quintero, who tortured him during a three-day period during which Quintero employed a physician to prolong Camarena’s life. Quintero recorded the torture sessions on audiotape and sent copies to friends and enemies alike.
* The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was undertaken chiefly to seize banks that contained billions of narco-dollars and prevent the cartels from using the country as a finance hub.
* Now a track and casino called Delaware Park Racetrack and Slots on 777 Delaware Park Boulevard in Wilmington.
† Laz Barrera trained Affirmed, the last horse ever to win the Triple Crown, in 1978.