Phil Cross: Gypsy Joker to a Hells Angel, page 14
I took a bunch of photos in those days, and I’d always give Willie a set. If I thought any of them were exceptionally good, I’d make blowups for him. I took a photo of the band, blew it up, and had it matted. Willie and the band members all signed the matting for me.
I was an avid jogger in those days and Willie was too. Whenever I was traveling with band, he and I would go jogging together. Everybody knows that Willie is a great musician. I’m lucky enough to personally know that he is also a great guy.
I was on a trip in Mexico with my friends John Hannegan and Chris Beason and about a dozen other peole when I got wind of an upcoming warrant for me back home. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Mexican police arrested me that same night.
One of the guys in our group came to my hotel room to ask me to come down to the bar because some guy was hassling one of the people in our group. I was on this trip with a group of citizens (some of them upstanding community members). I didn’t know some of these people very well, so I explained that I didn’t fool around. I would go, but the way I handled things was not by negotiating. Sure enough, when we got to the bar the first thing I saw was this asshole just fucking with everybody. I walked over, and as soon as he saw me, he started mouthing off. I say “started” because he never finished the sentence; I hit him so hard he flew backward over a railing.
Now seemed like a good time for me to leave, and I was on my way out the door when one of the guys, Jim, came up and started talking to me. I told him, “I’ve really got to leave, Jim.” He said, “Oh, sure, sure,” and then he kept talking, so I started walking. Jim walked with me. At this point, I needed to be moving fast, but I really couldn’t get it across to Jim that I was trying to avoid making any new friends, namely Mexican cops.
“Alto!” It’s harder to outrun Mexican cops than you would think. You don’t know the area and they have machine guns. After they caught me, they handcuffed me and put me in the back of a freaking Volkswagen.
My roommate on the trip was Bob Tobin. Bob is an attorney, so Jim went and got him. Bob speaks fluent Spanish, and when he got to the scene, I told him to do whatever was necessary to keep them from taking me to jail and running my name in a computer. The wheeling and dealing that Bob did was amazing; he talked to the cops, he talked to hotel management, he talked to the victim, and he talked to the victim’s loud-mouthed girlfriend (who it turned out was the root of the whole problem). After everybody was calmed down (and suitably compensated), Bob told the cops, “See, everybody is happy, now you can let him go.”
One of the cops told Bob, “Oh no, you have to talk to El Jefe first.” El Jefe had been across the street watching Bob in action the whole time. He was so amused by Bob and impressed with his performance that he agreed to let me go after another donation was made at the police station. Bob made the donation, and when he came back, El Jefe gave the high sign and I was free to go. That trip was the start of a lot of great friendships, Bob, of course, being one of them. Another was my friend Rich; he’s the guy who threw me a fiftieth birthday party nine years later.
While I was dealing with all of this shit in Mexico, my brother was dealing with the cops raiding my house. They treated Dave badly, and my house worse. My brother saw one cop actually close an open door just so that he could kick it in.
It seemed like a good time to leave Mexico, but I knew I couldn’t fly home because I had called and found out that a warrant had been issued, so I left my luggage behind, grabbed a flight to Tijuana, and walked across the border. Next I took a small plane from San Diego to Sacramento and a friend picked me up and took me back to a motel. But as it turned out, I wouldn’t be there for long.
Meg met me at the motel that night. We were watching TV and talking about the situation when the phone rang. The voice on the phone confirmed that I wasn’t just wanted; they wanted me on charges that could lead to twenty years in prison. After the call ended, I hung up and told Meg we had to go. Now! That late-night call put me on the run again.
Willie Nelson and me at the Country Music Awards.
I THREW SOME CLOTHES IN A BAG, Meg grabbed hers, and we were out the door in less than ten minutes. We took her car in case the cops were already looking for mine. I stopped at a pay phone so I could call my friend Vito. I needed a safe place to stay for the night, and I knew Vito would be just the guy. We met up with him at a restaurant in San Jose (“Meg, Vito, Vito, Meg”). Even when you’re running, you still have to eat, so we went inside and had a nice steak dinner, some wine, and made plans.
Jud was at a party at my house shortly before I went on the run.
My warrant was $1,000,000, and the guy wanted on suspicion of molesting six children and forcible rape had a warrant for one-tenth the amount. Does that seem like justice?
At the restaurant I made some more phone calls, three to be exact. First, I called my friend Rich. I needed a place to stay for at least a week, and it couldn’t be with a known associate. Rich was someone who the cops didn’t really think I associated with all that often. Rich came through like a champ. Next I called my old buddy Jud. I arranged to meet him the following day so he could take me back to Santa Cruz and drop me at Rich’s place. I also wanted Jud to arrange for a clean car so he could drive me out of state when the time came. The third call was to some friends out of state. I had managed to get a fake driver’s license from their state years before, for just such an occasion. It was the sort of thing a man doesn’t need until he needs it, and I renewed it faithfully. I didn’t want to risk losing it in a raid, so my out-of-state friends held on to it for me. It felt good to know that I had it, and that my preplanning was well founded.
I stayed with Rich for about a little over a week while I made arrangements to be gone for an extended amount of time. I also had to get enough cash together to last me for a while, and I had to wait for my ID to arrive.
When all the prep work was done, it was time for Jud to drive me to Texas where I would get a plane to New York. The one thing about Jud’s driving is that he has a lead foot; this is not a great thing when you are on the run, and so I had to keep telling him to slow down.
Just outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, we were going up a hill, and Jud was speeding of course. When we crested the hill, Jud was going about eighty miles per hour and he almost hit a highway patrol car that had been stopped and was pulling back onto the highway.
I think you can imagine how unhappy this cop was with Jud. He pulled us over and took Jud’s license but didn’t run it. He also told Jud that he wanted to look in the trunk. Jud opened the trunk, but luckily the cop didn’t thoroughly search it because Jud had two guns buried in there. He was probably looking for drugs. He gave Jud a ticket but never ran his license. After being told to slow down, we were free to go.
After that incident, I decided that Jud should be the passenger. I figured it was less of a risk for me to drive than having old lead foot at the wheel. Two hours after Jud got that ticket, we ran up on a roadblock, a serious roadblock that covered both sides of the road. Oh great. Now we had that to deal with. They were looking for a fugitive all right, just a different one, not the one who drove right into their hands. The cop who walked up to my window leaned down and looked at me, and then he looked at Jud. I expected him to ask for my license right off the bat, but he didn’t. He told us that would have to search our car; they were searching all vehicles before letting them pass. Jud leaned over and said, “Officer, our car was already searched. I got a ticket a ways back and the officer did a search.” With that, Jud handed him the ticket. The cop looked at it and said that we were free to go on. Good thing neither of us fit the description of their fugitive.
Looking back on it, it’s probably a good thing that Jud got that speeding ticket after all.
I stayed in New York through most of that entire winter. Let me make one thing really clear: I do not like the cold and I do not like snow, so I was not thrilled right about then. I had to make the best of things, though, and I had a pretty sweet deal going. I was staying in Greenwich Village with George, a friend of a friend, in his fifth floor walk-up. He needed help with the rent and traveled a lot, so it worked out fine. Most of the time I didn’t mind the walk-up part, unless I was tired or drunk. My dad came for a short visit while I was there, and I thought he was going to croak every time he went up those steps.
I had a pretty active social life there, but I wasn’t out every night. There were times when I didn’t feel like going out so I’d just stay at home, light a fire, and watch TV. I had to light the fire because that apartment was freezing. I always sat really close to the fire because the place was so cold. It was freezing outside and the heat barely worked. The windows in the bedroom were arched and one of them was broken. The landlord wouldn’t fix it because it cost a lot of money, and George and I weren’t about to foot the bill. So the window stayed broken and the snow came right on in.
I met George Jr. on one of those nights. It was really cold and he popped out of a crack between the fireplace and the brick wall and sat on the hearth by the fire to stay warm. He was a small mouse, and he wasn’t bothering me so I didn’t bother him. I saw him a lot that winter. Whenever I lit the fire, he would come out. I always had some peanuts on hand for him, and eventually it got so that he sat between my feet, in front of the fire, and I would drop the peanuts down to him. Better to hang with a mouse than a rat.
Meg and I would arrange to meet every couple of weeks. She would fly under an assumed name because you could do that easily before 9/11. Sometimes she would come to New York, and sometimes she would fly some other place and I would meet her there. She had a sister who lived on Long Island, so it wasn’t that odd for her to come to New York.
We talked roughly once a week by pay phone using a system I had put in place before I left. Before I left, I got the numbers of a bunch of different phone booths all over the south bay (this was in the days when there were still phone booths everywhere). I gave the number of the first phone booth to her, along with a date and time that I would call it. At the end of our talk, I would give her the location and number of a different booth, and we would set the date and time for the next call. We changed the call days and times; set patterns can get you in trouble. If I ran low on money, she would bring me some.
After I had been on the run for a year, Meg flew out to join me for good. The separation, plus the stress of trying to meet for visits was wearing thin, and I thought it was probable that the cops would watch her more closely as time went on. I knew she was always careful about looking for tails when we met for visits, but those were always at different locations. She was coming permanently and those kinds of preparations (like giving up your apartment and quitting your job) can send up red flags, so I had to make sure she was extra careful … no mistakes.
I had her make arrangements to meet up with her best friend Susie at a big shopping mall. They parked their cars at opposite ends of the mall, but arranged in advance to meet in the fitting room of a specific store three hours before her flight. Meg wandered around, trying things on, making it look like a regular shopping trip. When it was time to meet Susie, she went into the fitting room, changed her clothes and her hairstyle, and the two girls swapped car keys. Meg drove the borrowed car to the airport and flew out to meet me, again under an assumed name.
She flew into JFK and got a cab into the city. No meeting at the gate for us; too risky. We met at the Plaza Hotel. She arrived at the Plaza at about 8 p.m., went to the front desk, and asked if she could leave her luggage for a bit because she was waiting for her husband and he would check them in when he got there. “Happy to oblige, Mrs. Weston.” Then she went to the Oak Room for a drink and to meet me.
When Meg got to the apartment, the first thing she did was tape layers of newspaper over that broken window and then put a spare mattress in front of it. She doesn’t like being cold either. It helped a lot. Why didn’t George and I think of that? The next day she started cleaning and organizing. Did I mention that George was a slob? No way I was attempting to clean that place up, but she wouldn’t (or couldn’t) stay there, even temporarily, without fixing it up.
A night on the town before we left New York seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t go quite like we expected. Meg and I were going to see Liza Minnelli in a Broadway play. Charming Chuck, a New York Hells Angel and an old friend, knew Liza and had arranged for us to meet her backstage. We got dressed up, went to an early dinner, and decided to walk to the theater.
On the way, we passed a guy who was coming out of a bar. Right after we walked by him, he hit Meg in the back of the head, real hard. When I turned around and saw that guy standing there, with a satisfied smirk on his face, I lost it. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt with one hand and pulled him up to his toes. Already knowing the answer, I asked him why he did it. The guy mumbled, “Duh, uh, well um.” Wrong answer. I smacked him right in the ear. I hope he liked cauliflower, because he was getting it. I asked again. This time the dude claimed it was an accident. “Bullshit.” As I once heard Bill Cosby say on stage when talking about child rearing, “Let the beatings commence.” I pounded the guy; I beat him to the ground, and still holding him by the shirt, I started dragging him around. First I went left, and then I went right. I know Meg was thinking, “What the hell is he doing?” I was looking for an alley. Beating someone in public when you are a fugitive is not exactly wise. Every street in New York City has an alley, right? You see them on TV all the time, but not this street. As I was looking, I would throw a few more punches every so often, just to let this jerk know it wasn’t over.
The yard was trashed when we moved in. I spent countless hours in the hot Florida sun bringing it back to life. There wasn’t much else to do.
As I was involved in the hunt and punch, a couple walked up to Meg. The dude told her they had seen the whole thing and asked if she was all right. Then he said, “I hope your husband beats the dog shit out of that guy.” Meg said, “Oh, he will.” They started to walk off and a gay guy came up and said, “Oh, I wish he’d stop. I think he’s had enough.” The man turned back to the scene and said, “He should have thought about that before he decided to hit someone, the wrong someone.”
I actually did finish right about then. I couldn’t find the alley, so a couple of kicks would have to suffice. Time to go to the theater; don’t want to miss curtain call. We saw the play; we got to meet Liza, who was a terrific lady; and we spent some time with an old friend. Except for our little altercation and Meg’s headache, it was a nice evening.
We stayed on in New York for another six weeks while preparations for our final destination were underway. I had made the contacts I needed to establish a life for us, but a house had to be rented and furnished, and a car arranged for before we moved on to Florida.
Meg called home every couple of weeks to let friends and family know that we were OK and find out what the rumor mill was saying. Before she came out to join me, I had her give the number of one of the phone booths to Susie, along with a date and time that she would call it. They used the same system for their calls that Meg and I used for ours, and again there was no regular schedule. Those calls were a good for Meg too because they helped her to feel less cut off from the life she had known before she met me.
I have to give Susie (who had nothing whatsoever to do with the motorcycle world, or any type of outlaw stuff) a lot of credit for what she did. She helped Meg to help me, and she had never even met me. Even though she had been getting word from the cops that I was evil and that Meg was only with me under duress, she never wavered. She was smart and cautious, though, and she wanted to be sure she was doing the right thing, so during one of their talks she gave Meg a code word that she could say during any of her phone calls to signal if she needed help. But most of all, Susie trusted in Meg’s belief in me. Thanks, Susie!
While we were living on the run in Florida, we really had a pretty nice lifestyle. We lived in a nice little house two doors down from the Intracoastal Waterway, which everyone there pronounced: “Inner Coastal.” We drove a Mercedes; granted it was an old Mercedes, the green paint faded from the sun and the wood dash in sorry shape, but it ran. It was registered to a friend of mine from another state. We hung out with some of Palm Beach’s old money families (of course they had no idea who they were hanging with). We made friends with people who hung out in the same crowd as the Pulitzers through a mutual acquaintance, Barry, who was our next-door neighbor and an art dealer who had sold pieces to all of them. They were all nice enough people, and we had a lot of fun with them. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t quite what he seemed to be, though; Barry was a big scam artist and he ripped off a whole bunch of people.
We did all the regular things a couple does while we lived in Florida. We went to the movies, out to dinner, and took care of our yard (we had a really nice big yard). We even restored the paint and interior wood on the Mercedes. When we went to the county fair, we decided that we needed a pet (other than the palmetto bugs). We found the perfect one when we went into the 4H rabbit exhibit and saw the craziest-looking rabbit either of us had ever laid eyes on. He was an English Angora with long lop ears that rotated like antenna. We named him Spot (from the Cal Worthington commercials). He was paper trained and lived in the house but went out into the back yard every day to play with the two cats that came to visit. I think they thought he was another cat because he was bigger than either of them. That rabbit was huge.
“Palmetto bug” is the fancy name that the Floridians give to cockroaches. These aren’t regular little black cockroaches; these are gigantic brown cockroaches and everybody had them. These suckers got up to four inches long, and it didn’t matter if you made $500 or $500,000 a month, you had them. You had them unless you had your house and yard regularly sprayed. Meg wanted to get the service immediately. Well, I didn’t want all those chemicals in our house and yard, so I didn’t want to get our place sprayed at all. That turned out to be a bad decision. You see, when the neighbors on either side of you and behind you spray, those bugs got nowhere else to go. Oh, and they fly if they get startled, like when you go to swat them. After Meg found that out, she started walking around the house with a spray bottle of bug poison attached to her hip like a gun belt at all times. Any time she saw one, she’d whip out that bug-killing weapon of hers and start shooting. She panicked one day when one flew right up at her and started spraying it in mid-air. I don’t think she hit it, but I know she got me right in the face. I finally realized that she was probably dumping more chemicals in our house than a professional would, so I finally relented and got the bug service. I think she just sprayed that shit in my face to get her way.
