Jon Roberts recounts his criminal life -- from his early NYC days as a Gambino nightlife operator to his later Miami days as a Medellin cocaine trafficker -- with noted journalist Evan Wright in the newly published American Desperado as reported by NPR:
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.
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.
Of course, it all came to an end. The feds busted him in 1986, and then after a five-year run as a fugitive he became a "cooperating witness and informant for the federal government" in order to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.
During his NYC days Jon Roberts was known as John Riccobono who during the late 1960s and early 1970s muscled in on the burgeoning disco scene for the Gambino crime family. Roberts saw that the discos were an untapped market which could be as big for the Mafia as the gay bars in which every crime family was involved. Indeed, the idea came to Roberts after witnessing how profitable the gay bars were for reputed Bonanno mobster Anthony "Fat Anthony" Rabito, and he writes in American Desperado:
I saw that Fat Anthony had a very nice business going. Fat Anthony controlled a bunch of *** bars in New York. In the late 1960s, the *** joints were changing. They weren't just for ***s anymore. They were turning into discos. The ***s still went, but so did all the normal people. Discos were a big business. They were growing up and down Manhattan so fast, a lot of them didn't have any Mafia control.
