Infamous America - MIAMI DRUG WARS Ep. 2 | “Evil Is Stronger Than Good”

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Jon Roberts is born into the New York mafia. But when he runs afoul of the mob, he moves to Miami and transforms himself into a successful cocaine smuggler. Hotshot mechanic Mickey Munday becomes a key component of Jon’s operation. While they build their business, Griselda Blanco ushers in the Miami Drug Wars with brazen plans that earn national news headlines. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Roberts wanted grits for breakfast. He figured grits were what you ate when you came to a small southern town like Yeha Junction, Florida. John assumed that by the time he finished eating, the plane would have made its drop and the cocaine would be in the barn, ready for the driver to take back to Miami. John stepped out of his big Lincoln Continental and left his driver in the car. He stood in the parking lot of the diner, about to head in for breakfast, but he never made it to the restaurant. The sound of a King Air Turbo Prop plane flying overhead was deafening. That was a bad sign. Pilots making airdrops of cocaine knew to fly in quietly,

and the King Air wasn't the only thing making noise. John heard helicopters and a jet. He barked at his driver to move over, and he slid in behind the wheel of the car. Before John could hit the gas, he heard police sirens. As John prepared to deal with the cops on the ground, things were getting worse in the air. John's pilot had been intercepted by U.S. customs. The helicopters and the jet belonged to the government. John had to hope his pilot dumped the cargo before the government could get a hold of the plane.

Even if that happened, and even if John could deal with the police, he knew he'd have another problem. He'd have to convince the Colombian cartel that the Koch really had been to be in the police. Coke really had been sacrificed when a government plane showed up and that he hadn't stolen it. John knew if the cartel didn't believe him, they'd do far worse to him than local law enforcement or the feds ever could. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with,

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In this season, we're telling a six-part story about the Miami drug wars of the 1970s and 1980s. This is episode two. Evil is stronger than good. John Roberts sat in the backseat of his father's car. Even though John was only seven, his dad, Nat Rikobono, often took him along in the car when he was working. The car suddenly stopped on a bridge. Another car was facing them, preventing them from crossing. Nat's driver said he'd take care of it, but Nat stopped him. He wanted to handle it himself. John watched as his father walked across the bridge to the other car, had a quick conversation with the car's owner, and then shot him at point-blank range. Nat dumped the man's body onto the road, moved the car out of the way, and casually returned to his own car.

When Nat asked John what he'd seen, John said he hadn't seen anything. Later in life, John would admit that as he watched things unfold on the bridge, he started to realize. that he didn't react to violence like most people. He witnessed his father shoot another man, and he felt nothing. In American Desperado, the book he wrote with author Evan Wright, John said, I might be a sociopath. Most of the time I've been on this earth, I've had no regard for human life. That's been the key to my success.

In that moment, John also realized he'd been born into the mafia. It was never talked about at home. but there was no way around it. John's father and uncles had come from Sicily. They settled in the Little Italy section of the Bronx and worked with legendary mobsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Later, the brothers served under mafia boss Carlo Gambino. When John was about 11, his father was deported to Sicily after the cops cracked down on members of the mafia in the area. John had never been particularly close to his father. But one of Nat's saying stuck with him for the rest of his life.

From the time he was a little boy, his father would tell him, evil is stronger than good. With his father gone, John's mother tried to steer him away from a life of crime. But John already felt the pull of evil, as it were. Even before becoming a member of the Gambino crime family like his father before him, John got a rush of stealing from other kids and beating them up in the process if he had to. In 1965, John got caught up in a kidnapping case and was sent to the Manhattan Detention Center, known locally as the Tumes.

John faced serious time, but the United States government bailed him out. If John went to Vietnam, his criminal record would be wiped clean. He took them up on the deal. Even for a man with a self-proclaimed lack of regard for human life, Vietnam was intense. John admitted later that he suffered a mental break during the war. There were certain things he'd seen that he couldn't shake. Still, when he returned to America at the age of 20, he felt better than a lot of young men who were coming home.

At least he knew he had a job and a future. With his criminal record erased, John could have gone straight, but that was never his plan. Instead, he went to work for his uncles. He collected debts and shook down people. when they wouldn't pay. The family got into the nightclub business, and John helped run the operation. The job put him in close proximity with two of the things he loved most in life, women and drugs. He quickly went from smoking marijuana and dropping acid to taking PCP regularly.

The drugs fueled John's violent side. He said he got off on crime. He started robbing other mobsters. It wasn't about the money. He loved the risk, and he loved embarrassing the so-called powerful men. His actions came to a head when he had an affair with an older wise guy's wife. One day, the mobster came home to find his wife and John mostly naked and in bed together. As John tried to run out, the mobster shot him in the ass. As John lay bleeding from his backside on the floor, the mobster beat him mercilessly, and then dragged him out onto the sidewalk.

John woke up in the hospital and soon found out that his standing in the mob was on shaky ground. His time in New York was coming to an end. Bad blood kept building between John and other mobsters. He'd stolen from them for years, and now he'd slept with another man's wife. When John became the primary suspect for a murder he said he didn't commit, he knew people on the inside were trying to sell him out.

John gave up the money and the life he had in New York and headed south. He'd heard Miami, Florida was a paradise for guys like him. Miami in the 1970s and early 1980s has been referred to as a jumping off point. Miami was seen by cartels as their entree into the growing drug trade in the United States. Americans across the country were hungry for marijuana and cocaine. Once inside the border, the drugs seemed to sell themselves. But getting inside the border was the key. The cartels needed talented smugglers.

When John arrived in Miami at the age of 26, he called it a virgin city. It hadn't yet descended into the chaos of the cocaine wars, and a criminal like John could still operate pretty much under the radar. He'd long since changed his last name to Roberts, taking it from actor Pernell Roberts, who played one of his favorite TV cowboys on Bonanza. In Miami, people didn't automatically know who his dad and his uncles were, which gave him the freedom to start over. He got into the drug trade, primarily selling marijuana with just a little cocaine on the side, but he quickly realized Coke was where the real money was.

He shifted his focus and slowly grew his operation like any entrepreneur. He made contacts who led to other contacts, and soon he was dealing coke to wealthier clients who wanted to buy larger quantities. He called these people weekend warriors. They were doctors, lawyers, and other people with money who worked hard all week and then spent their weekends getting as high as possible. John hooked up with a stewardess friend, and soon she was helping him smuggle Coke to the West Coast.

He started pulling in thousands of dollars a week. Like so many others in the trade, he bought property and cars. He also had an affinity for racehorses. Miami was proving to be the paradise he'd heard about, and he was making a name for himself. Soon, he'd attract the type of company that could help him take his business to a whole new level. In 1976, the Medellin cartel was founded in Colombia and firmly established itself in the cocaine trade. Griselda Blanco, known as the Black Widow and the godmother, worked directly with the cartel, and quickly amassed power and wealth in Miami.

Griselda ran a vast drug operation that was only getting bigger. Still, she wasn't the only game in town. After meeting a young man named Fabito in 1978, John made his own high-level connection with the Colombians. Fibito was Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, the younger brother of the infamous Ochoa brothers, who helped found the Medellin cartel with Pablo Escobar. Fabito was in Miami helping his brothers expand their business. He was looking for talented smugglers, and he thought John was the right man for the job. As the operation in Medellin grew, John's business grew alongside it. There seemed to be an endless demand for Colombian co-cane.

in America, which enabled the Medellin cartel to continually increase its supply. The growing supply allowed them to undercut the prices of other groups who sold cocaine, which only increased the demand for the Colombian product. The Medellin cartel essentially cornered the market, and their client-based grew. John added celebrities and athletes to his stable of weekend warriors. One of his classic stories is about providing cocaine for several pit bulls, Steelers the night before they beat the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl 8. It was January of 1979, and John's business continued to skyrocket.

But tensions were rising in Miami. A number of Cuban gangs had been virtually cut out of the cocaine trade, and not all of the Colombian traffickers saw themselves as being on the same team. Griselda Blanco, who John Roberts would later call a beast of a woman, wanted to send a message to her rivals. In the summer of 1979, Griselda ignited the cocaine wars, drew the attention of the federal government, and forced smugglers like John to rethink how they brought drugs into the country.

Dade Land Mall was one of the biggest shopping centers in South Florida. Layed out on approximately 50 acres, it offered shops and restaurants of all kinds. It was a weekend destination for suburbanites who wanted to, to come into the city. On the afternoon of July 11th, 1979, a white delivery truck pulled into the parking lot of Dade Land Mall and stopped just outside Crown Liquors. The words, happy time-complete party supply were stenciled on the side of the truck. At the time, Grizelda Blanco was back in Columbia, but that didn't mean she couldn't conduct business in Miami, and she badly wanted to

kill a fellow drug boss. A little before 2.30 p.m., the drug boss, Hermann Jimenez-Penez-Penso, walked into Crown Liquors with his bodyguard. Jimenez supposedly asked the clerk where to find the Chivas Regal. Before the bodyguard could grab a bottle for his boss, two men stepped out of the white delivery truck and walked into the store. One man carried a 380 Beretta automatic handgun. The other had an Ingram Mac 10 machine pistol. The two men unloaded their weapons. Glass bottles exploded and liquor sprayed everywhere. Bullets peppered the walls and the floor and the ceiling.

Jimenez and his bodyguard died on the spot. The lone employee in the store was wounded. A police officer said later, the dead men looked like Swiss cheese. The gunmen kept firing even after the bodies hit the floor. When the shooters thought their work was done, they hurried back out into the parking lot and fired random shots so no one would try to follow them. They jumped into the white delivery truck and sped away from the mall. They ditched the truck a short distance down the road and continued their escape in a different vehicle. By the time the police arrived, Dade Land was in chaos.

This was by no means the first shooting connected to the drug trade in Miami. But up to now, there hadn't been anything. so brazen. It was the middle of the day in a public shopping center. Griselda Blanco showed her rivals that she could hit anyone, anywhere, and she didn't care if innocent victims got caught in the crossfire. The Dadeland shooting, or the Dadeland Mall massacre, as it was sometimes called, drew national attention. There was no longer any way to keep the Miami drug wars in the shadows. Pressure on local authorities grew, and the federal government started to take notice. The attention forced people like John Roberts to rethink how they could best bring their product into the country.

In the 1970s, a lot of the drug trade was conducted on boats coming out of the Bahamas, and on commercial flights like the ones Griselda Blanco used to bring Coke into New York. John believed with the added government attention, they needed to employ more private pilots who could haul cocaine directly from Columbia to Miami. John had worked with a handful of pilots in the past, namely Barry Seal, a guy who seemed to get off on crime as much as John did. But Barry wouldn't be enough. In 1980, John started dating a model and aspiring actress named Tony Moon. Tony spent quite a bit of time with pilots who would fly her from Miami to photo shoots in different exotic locations.

Through Tony, John met a British pilot whom he hated. But the man proved useful. The pilot made a life-changing connection. He introduced John to Max Murmolstein. John met Max for the first time in the restaurant of a Howard Johnson's hotel. John was unimpressed. Max spent the meeting shoveling clams into his mouth and talking about the shoe store he'd created to launder money.

But John soon found out why Max was important. Max Murmolstein was one of the highest-ranking Americans in the Medellin cartel. He worked directly with Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers. Max took a liking to John, and they combined forces. Together they brought on new pilots, scouted safe landing spots to bring in the cocaine, and expanded the entire operation. Almost everything they did was designed to outsize. smart the American government, and they were successful for a time. But John later admitted that

with their success, they got complacent and sloppy. And one of their biggest close calls in their early days working together happened in a town called Yeeha Junction. John couldn't believe there was actually a place called Yeha Junction. But it was real, and still is, though it's too small to be called a town. It's currently a census-designated place. with a couple dozen streets, a truck stop, a subway sandwich shop, a gas station, and a rundown motel. It's 165 miles north of Miami and about 30 miles inland from Vero Beach. But in the early 1980s, its two main attractions were the three highways that intersected in the tiny community and its remote location. Yeha Junction sits right in the middle of a giant circle of wildlife preserves, conservation areas, and state parks.

In short, it's virtually empty of human life and therefore ideal for cocaine drops. As John and his new partner Max revamped their smuggling operation, they took to heart the concerns of one of their pilots. He thought that landing his plane in Miami, dropping off the drugs and then taking off again, was getting too dangerous. He wanted to do airdrops. An airdrop is when a pilot flies in low over a specific place, and then someone called a kicker pushes bundles of cocaine out of the plane. A ground crew then races in to grab the packages, and Yeha Junction offered the perfect location for airdrops. There was a stretch of land that was hidden by trees where a pilot could fly in low. Close by, there was a barn where the ground crew would wait. When the packages of cocaine

tumbled out of the plane, the ground crew scooped them up and took them to the barn. There, the packages were loaded into a car and driven to Miami. Max had a guy customize a Lincoln Continental for just this kind of job. The custom Lincoln had a trunk big enough to carry huge supplies of cocaine. In addition to creating the oversized trunk, the mechanic added special air shocks to the back, so the car wouldn't bust an axle or ride low when carrying a large shipment. Driving down the street, nothing about the car would seem out of the ordinary. John drove the custom Lincoln the morning he went to eat grits in Yehaw Junction. His plan was to eat breakfast and then take the car to the barn, make sure everything got loaded,

from the airdrop and then have his driver take it back to Miami. But as he stepped out of the car to head inside for breakfast, he heard the drug smuggling plane, the helicopters, and the jet roar through the sky above him, and he knew his plan was falling apart. He jumped into the car, pushed his driver aside, and started to hit the gas. As his foot touched the pedal, he heard sirens.

The police followed John as he pulled out of the restaurant parking lot. They told him to pull over. He had no idea if they knew about the plane overhead, or if they knew he was involved with it. Most people who knew John Roberts talked about how charming he could be. His charm had helped him with work and women for years. Now he needed it to get him out of a jam with some small town cops. They asked him what an out-of-towner was doing in Yeha Junction. He told him he'd wanted some grits.

He joked with him about the name of their town. He told him his friend had souped up the Lincoln's engine, and he needed an open road to test drive it. Somehow the lie worked. By the end of the conversation, John was back in his car speeding down the highway, and the cops were escorting him and cheering him on to drive faster. As it turned out, they weren't connected to the airdrop at all. After John's brief run-in with the Yeha Junction Police, he tried to figure out what happened with the air drop. His pilot told him the government tried to intercept the plane.

The pilot and the kicker got rid of the packages far from the original drop point and then managed to get away. Government officials searched and found the packages. Max Murmolstein panicked when he heard about the close call. He'd have to deal with the cartel. If they thought he and John stole the shipment and were lying about it, there was no telling what kind of horror they might inflict. The bosses in Medellin asked if the cocaine had been dropped to avoid the government, why weren't they seeing anything about it in the news?

John called a friend who talked to some corrupt cops. The cops found an internal DEA report stating that an abandoned cocaine drop had, in fact, been found. The report proved that John and Max were still loyal. The cartel could handle lost goods. It was part of doing business. But now it was time to get back to work. John was disgusted with himself. He knew he'd gotten sloppy.

Worse, it was clear now that the government was on to them. He needed someone who could outsmart the DEA and American customs agents. He wanted to talk to the guy who'd customized the Lincoln Continental. Mickey Monday could build almost anything. Later in life, John would compare him to McGiver. Mickey loved to tinker, and he believed there was always a way to improve an existing piece of technology or equipment. Mickey would say, if it rolls, floats, or flies, I can make it go faster.

Mickey and John couldn't have been more different. Mickey was born in Miami in 1945 and spent most of his life in Florida. He didn't do drugs. He didn't like violence, and he prided himself on being a good son to his mother. John called him a Boy Scout and a hillbilly professor. For his part, Mickey thought John was too ostentatious. He thought it was easy to peg John as a Coke dealer from the second you laid eyes on him. But despite their differences, the two men liked each other, and each thought the other had something to offer the business. Max Murmolstein had basically sidelined Mickey in the organization. Mickey customized the Lincoln Continental and worked on some of Max's other vehicles, but that was about it. Max didn't want him to have any input in the business.

After only knowing Mickey for a short time, John came to believe Max was intimidated by Mickey's intelligence. Max didn't like to feel stupid, and Mickey could easily make people feel stupid. It didn't take long for John to realize that Mickey's genius was being wasted. Mickey had countless ideas on how to make smuggling more efficient and more effective. Maybe most importantly to John, Mickey believed there were ways to outsmart the United States government. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the government increased its commitment to the war on drugs. This led to a significant rise in incarcerations, especially in non-violent drug offenses. It helped usher in zero-tolerance policies for drug-related crimes, and it prompted the birth of

Nancy Reagan's Just Say No Anti-Drug Campaign, and the DARE Drug Education Program. Anti-drug messaging across the country grew throughout the 1980s. But it wasn't the messaging that concerned John Roberts and Mickey Monday. They were worried about what was going on behind the scenes. The government was spending more money and committing more time and manpower to keeping drugs from coming into the U.S. Smugglers could no longer just pay off some cops and fishermen to make their operation work. Mickey didn't do drugs. He didn't even really support.

the use of drugs. However, he believed the government had no right to tell people what they could and couldn't do with their personal lives. Mickey started to look at the government as competition, and he badly wanted to win. John convinced Max to bring Mickey on as more than just a guy who customized cars. Max always considered Mickey an employee, but John quickly saw him as a partner. They immediately examined the whole operation. How could they ensure planes would get past the government? How could they keep drug dogs off their backs? How could they continue to increase the amount of cocaine they brought in from Columbia without getting caught?

The answer was constant innovation. Soon, John and Mickey would help take the Medellin cartel and the Miami drug trade to a whole new level. They would revolutionize the way drugs were smuggled. into the country, and they would take on the United States government in the air, on the ground, and at sea. Next time on Infamous America, John Roberts and Mickey Monday stay a step ahead of the U.S. government and reshape the entire smuggling industry. Brazil de Blanco escalates her attacks on her rivals, and the three of them helped the Medellin cartel increase its hold on the cocaine trade.

Together, they push Miami to its breaking point. That's next week on Infamous America. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive early access and the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was co-executive produced by Stephen Walters in association with ritual productions. Research and Writing by Michael Federico,

original music by Rob Valier, audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Beryl Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.