American Desperado: My Life--From Mafia Soldier To Cocaine Cowboy To Secret Government Asset (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
If you've ever seen the movie Cocaine Cowboys, you already know.This guy Jon Roberts was one of the main people in Cocaine Cowboys. As it turns out, there's way more to his story than that. He was the son or the nephew or some shit of a famous mob guy in NY and he did his share of crime there in the '60s and '70s after returning from 'Nam all fucked the fuck up.But that's just the beginning. After relocating to Miami, after somehow committing too much crime in NY, he got into cocaine trafficking and probably had a hand in importing most of the coke people sniffed in the '70s and '80s. It's pretty amazing, both the amount of shit he was able to get away with and the level of ingenuity that made that possible.His story is ridonkulous to the point that at least some it seems unbelievable. Co-author Evan Wright, dude from Generation Kill, verifies what he can, and the footnotes end up being as interesting as the text itself. I read them all, though I usually skip over footnotes -- it's one of the ways I keep up a fairly prodigious reading regimen.One of the footnotes was eventually expanded into How to Get Away with Murder in America, or whatever it's called, a Kindle single -- maybe the best Kindle single there ever was. I like it even more than this book, for sheer entertainment value. I reviewed it here a couple of years ago. An unbelievable tale of evil, murder, drugs, money, sex and some hilarious moments in between. There were times reading it when I was like "holy shit, there are people like this out there?" But after a while I got used to the brutality in almost a cartoonish way. Jon Roberts' life story is the evil 'cocaine cowboy' version of "Unbroken" or maybe Forrest Gump. Here's a quick rundown of where this book takes you - NYC Mafia heyday, the disco/drug craze, the Vietnam War, the 'Miami Vice' cocaine running days, the Medellin drug cartel, and everywhere in between. If you can take some violence and a storyteller who's an admitted sociopath and totally evil, read this book.
What do You think about American Desperado: My Life--From Mafia Soldier To Cocaine Cowboy To Secret Government Asset (2011)?
Fascinating insight into the cocaine business in the 80s
—gchelle
Interesting story, this guy lived the life...
—Sally1222
The best true crime memoir I've read so far
—emmabear
really enjoyed this book; highly recommend
—udaymdesai
