Joe Bruno on the Mob – Jon Roberts (Riccobono) Has No Remorse For His Gruesome Crimes

I never thought Jon Roberts (Riccobono) was a boy scout, but some of the revelations in his new book “My Life — From Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset,” makes me want to puke.

The book, co-written by Evan Wright, has some startling passages, so much so New York Post’s writer Susan Cahalan asked in a recent interview asked Roberts, “So would you call yourself a psychopath?”

“Well, that depends on how you define psychopath,” Roberts said.

“A lack of empathy or remorse.”

“Well, then, yes I am,” Roberts said. “I enjoyed my life. How many other people lived the life I did? Maybe that Bernie guy, but who else?”

That Bernie guy must mean Bernie Madoff. But even Madoff, a different kind of psychopath, didn’t do the things Roberts said he did. Roberts claims in the book that he unemotionally carved up dead bodies of guys he just killed.

Roberts explained the process as such: “Smash the teeth in with a hammer, and sprinkle these in the water. Then take a sharp knife — like a fillet for fish — and cut the body from a–hole up to the solar plexus. The guts will pop out like Jiffy Pop.”

There’s one thing in the Post article below I just don’t agree with. Cahalan claims, “To be fair, Roberts didn’t have much of a shot at normalcy.”

Then she cites the fact that Roberts witnessed his father kill a man when Roberts was only seven-years-old. Plus, Roberts claims he was brought up by an abusive step-father.

Both are hardly reasons for anyone to embark on a life of crime, where chopping up dead bodies is the norm. Roberts had free will, just like we all do. I just don’t buy Cahalan’s reasoning. If she were right, we’d have a heck of a lot more homicidal maniacs on our hands then we presently do.

A scary thought indeed.

You can view at article below at

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/confessions_of_psychopath_64mzAOWF9moWdnM6mhiAEM

Confessions of a psychopath

By SUSANNAH CAHALAN

Posted: 13 Nov 2011 08:34 AM PST

– Roberts claims that he drugged Ed Sullivan and tried to blackmail him with a prostitute. –

Unapologetic to the end, a career killer tells of his crimes

American Desperado

My Life — From Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset

by Jon Roberts and Evan Wright

Jon Roberts was a made man, a drug smuggler, a killer. He hobnobbed with OJ Simpson and Ed Sullivan, rubbed shoulders with Pablo Escobar and Carlo Gambino, and made enemies out of John Gotti and Ronald Reagan.

He tortured college students for fun, helped snuff-out “mob accountant” Meyer Lansky’s stepson and admits to brutalizing his ex-girlfriend with a belt when she tried to leave him. He flooded the country with cocaine in the 1980s.

Regrets? He has none.

“So would you call yourself a psychopath?” The Post asked him on Friday.

“Well, that depends on how you define psychopath,” Roberts said.

“A lack of empathy or remorse.”

“Well, then, yes I am,” he said. “I enjoyed my life. How many other people lived the life I did? Maybe that Bernie guy, but who else?”

A new disturbing but intensely enthralling as-told-to memoir, “American Desperado,” co-written and vetted by “Generation Kill” author Evan Wright, gets deep inside the head of a lifelong criminal.

While the book is littered with famous names — a testament to what Wright refers to as his place as the “Forrest Gump of crime and depravity” — there are also passages so dark and violent that you wonder how a man this sinister can sleep at night.

One example is his blithe advice about how to dispose of a body: “Smash the teeth in with a hammer, and sprinkle these in the water. Then take a sharp knife — like a fillet for fish — and cut the body from a–hole up to the solar plexus. The guts will pop out like Jiffy Pop.”

“In a lot of other books, they take these monstrous people and they edit down and shave off the rough edges,” Wright said. “I tried to render him as accurately as possible, as the frightening, monstrous person he is.”

To be fair, Roberts didn’t have much of a shot at normalcy.

In 1955, when Roberts (who was born John Riccobono in The Bronx) was 7 years old, his father, a made man in the Gambino crime family, took him to New Jersey. A car blocked their passageway on a bridge.

“I’ll take care of this,” his father said, pulling out a gun.

“I saw him take it out of his waistband and say something to the man in the car. Then he pushed his gun into the window.”

Bam, bam, bam.

The scene instilled in him his father’s philosophy: “The evil path is the strong path because evil is stronger than good.”

He lived a large portion of his life upholding his father’s credo.

Two years later, his illegal-alien father was deported to Italy, leaving him with an abused mother and an abusive stepfather.

Source: nypost.com

http://www.josephbrunowriter.com/index.html

 

Joe Bruno on the Mob – Jon Roberts (Riccobono) – A Rat Selling Some Limburger Cheese

It really annoys me when a guy lives a really despicable life. Selling drugs. Cracking heads and who know what else. And when he finally gets caught, he folds like a cheap suitcase and becomes a rat for the government.

Then he has the nerve to write a book that we are supposed to buy.

No, I’m not talking about Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, but some other slug called Jon Roberts, real name Riccobono.

Roberts has just co-wrote a book with Evan Wright called “American Desperado – My Life—From Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset.” The list price is $28, and it’s also available on Amazon Kindle for a whopping $13.99. (That’s more than Steven King charges for his Kindle books, and mine sell for 99 cents.)

Supposedly, Roberts saw his father kill a man, when Roberts was seven years old. Then he saw his two friends shot to death in Viet Nam, one by a 30-year-old woman, and other by a 10-year-old Viet Cong.

Then when he was discharged from the armed forces, Roberts said he was involved with the Gambino Crime family in the night club business. A man was killed. A rat said Roberts was involved in the killing.

So Roberts took it on the lam and went to Miami, where in a few years he became a major drug dealer with connections to the Medellin cartel. He also says he became tight with Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not true. Who knows?

Mob guys who co-write books don’t always tell the truth. They tell maybe their version of the truth, or downright fibs, because after all, they are mob guys, not alter boys.

I’ve made it a policy not to buy any book written by a mob rat. I read Sam Gravano’s book when it first came out, and now I know it was mostly fiction.

If I want to read fiction, I’ll read Steven King, whom I said earlier, sells his Kindle books for under 10 bucks.

At least I’ll get some bang for my buck. Not some crap from a slug.

The following article can be read at:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/30/141696333/from-mafia-soldier-to-cocaine-cowboy

From Mafia Soldier To Cocaine Cowboy

by NPR Staff

October 30, 2011

Jon Roberts was born into the Mafia.

His father, Nat Riccobono, and his uncles came to New York City from Sicily and made money by running shady businesses throughout New York in the late 1940s. After his father was deported and his mother died, Roberts moved from home to home until he was 16 and joined his uncles in the Mafia.

By the time Roberts was 26, in 1978, he was a practiced criminal — committing robberies and dealing cocaine in New York City; but he was getting bored. That’s when he moved to Miami and started working with the Colombians, importing cocaine.

American Desperado – My Life—from Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset

by Jon Roberts and Evan Wright

“It was organized, it wasn’t a slap affair like you saw on the TV with bombs going off,” Roberts tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Roberts, who was featured in the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys, just released a book he co-wrote with journalist Evan Wright called American Desperado: My Life — from Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset.

When Roberts was 7 years old, he witnessed his father commit murder.

“There were mornings when my father would take me to school … and some mornings he chose not to take me.”

On one of those mornings, when Roberts’ father decided he was too busy to drop his son off at school, they were in the car heading toward a single-lane bridge when another car began to cross.

“[My father] decided to make the other guy back up, and the other guy must have refused,” Roberts recalls. “The next thing I saw was a flash, and he had shot the guy in the head. He told the bodyguard to get in the car, they backed the other car off the bridge, and we just drove on and went about our day.”

Roberts says that moment changed him, but it wasn’t until he was a soldier in Vietnam that killing became a norm.

“When you see your best friend get stuck in the back with a knife from some lady that’s like 30 years old, and you see a little boy like 10 years old shoot your friend, your values change a little bit,” he says.

“Nobody really controlled us. And eventually after you do this for a while, you decide you’re pretty much your own boss,” he says. “And to me it was an education in how to do things.”

While in New York, Jon Roberts had close ties with the Gambino crime family. He attended his last wiseguy party — a New York wedding — before fleeing to Miami in 1973.

Roberts returned from Vietnam to New York with screws and a metal plate in his head — the aftermath of an explosion. By the time he was 20, he was one of New York’s biggest nightclub impresarios, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon.

But after a business partner turned up dead and an informant told the police Roberts was involved, he hightailed it to sunny Miami. The year was 1975.

“When I first came to Miami, I wasn’t smuggling: I was like all the other dealers on the street just trying to make a living, and it got to a point where I had so much business that these people just couldn’t supply me,” he says.

That’s when Roberts shifted from being a drug dealer to a drug importer for the Colombian Medellin cartel.

Importing paid well: By the end of 1976, Roberts says he was moving 50 kilos of cocaine worth $500,000 or more a month. Roberts was living it up: He had half a dozen servants, a Porsche, multiple houses, dozens of race horses and friends in high places, including the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The U.S. government labeled Roberts the “American Representative” of the Medellin cartel; he became known as “the bearded gringo” on Miami’s streets.

Roberts and a few American partners created a highly advanced drug-smuggling system that included secret airfields, listening posts to eavesdrop on Coast Guard communications, and homing beacons for tracking cocaine shipped by sea.

“We ended up getting, up by Tampa, a 450-acre farm and it was all surrounded by trees and we put two runways in there and we put hangars in for the planes to go in,” Roberts says.

Their drug-smuggling schemes stymied the U.S. government for nearly a decade.

In 1986, Jon Roberts was arrested as part a cocaine bust that ultimately unraveled his empire.

In the late 1980s, one of Roberts’ associates ratted him and several other people out to the government. Roberts immediately went into hiding.

For five years, he evaded the police, but they caught up with him in 1992 and charged him with overseeing the importation of billions of dollars of cocaine. Roberts was able to avoid a lengthy prison sentence by becoming a cooperating witness and informant for the federal government.

When he was released from prison in 2000, he says he had no plans. He worked at the old Beachcomber Hotel on Miami Beach and went looking for the money he had hidden in various locations around the city. It was all gone.

That same year, Roberts became a father. Today, he tells NPR’s Raz that he wants his son to take away an important lesson from his memoir.

“I want him to realize that I went about doing things the wrong way,” he says. “That’s not to say to you that if I had my life to live over again that I would have changed it, but that what I did was wrong.”

http://www.josephbrunowriter.com/index.html