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BLOOD AND MONEY
BLOOD
AND
MONEYThe True Story of Ron Gonen:
Gangster Turned FBI Informant
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of
material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts have been
unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publishers
directly.
info@maverickhouse.com
http://www.maverickhouse.com
ISBN: 978-1-905379-44-6
54321
The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests.
For every tree felled, at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing
natural resources.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
‘Ron Gonen is a despicable person. Ron Gonen has
a record of crime that extends almost to the time
he reached maturity. . . . You don’t have to like Ron
Gonen. But you do have to listen to him.’
Author’s Note 11
Preface 13
Prologue 17
1 Portrait of a Gangster as a Young Hood 31
2 Sparkle Plenty 57
3 Addiction 75
4 ‘Til Death do us Part 91
5 Daily Deals 115
6 The Crazy 131
7 Murder by Numbers 143
8 Coke and Cancer 153
9 Aftermath 163
10 High Stakes Poker 173
11 Divisive Actions 185
12 How to Get Arrested 197
13 Agent Ron 215
14 Danny Fish 229
15 Hidden 249
Postscript 261
Acknowledgements 267
AUT H O R’S NOT E
11
reconstructed by interviewing all available participants
of a conversation and arriving at as close to a consensus
of what was as possible and taking into account the
limits of human memory.
12
P R E FAC E
13
holiday. After a week without hearing from them, I
assumed they had gone with a different writer.
In January 2005, I was living in Pittsburgh. It was
Saturday, 22 January, and I was hanging out at my
apartment, waiting for a snow storm to start and trap
me in for the weekend. The phone rang and on the
other end was a man with a thick accent. It was part
Russian, part Israeli, and I could’ve sworn I even
detected the faintest hint of New York in his voice. We
talked for two hours, and Gonen gave me the rough
overview of his life.
From the perspective of a journalist, his story
was perfect: A jewel and art thief in Europe and the
Middle East in the 1970s, Gonen had moved to New
York in the 1980s and started dealing cocaine. He fell
in with a group of Israeli criminals who were vicious
killers, and, just a few days before he was to have
been executed, Gonen was whisked into the Witness
Protection Programme. The story was dripping with
greed, sex, clever crimes, and colourful personalities.
I quickly re-evaluated my story: It wasn’t life in the
Witness Protection Programme—complete with
mundane jobs and minivans—that was interesting.
The interesting story was what you did to get yourself
there in the first place.
And Gonen did a lot, not least of which was help
federal authorities bring down what the New York
City tabloids and Israeli dailies called the ‘Israeli
Mafia.’ We spoke for several hours each day for the
next few weeks. The book you now hold is the product
of hundreds of hours of research and interviews and is
an accurate depiction of events as they happened.
14
Gonen understood from the outset that this was a
work of journalism and my goal would be to depict
the events of his life accurately, even if they did not
portray him in a good light.
15
on a drug as deadly as cocaine, people have to believe
that they are more important than whomever they
come in contact with. It makes a certain sense, but it
also strikes me as a tough way to go through life.
Beyond the attitude, however, are the day-to-
day complexities of being a gangster. Gonen worked
hard, and his wife, Honey Tesman, often told me if
he had worked as hard at a straight profession as he
had at being a felon, he could have been anything he
wanted to be. He kept long hours, and, at least during
the first few years he was in New York, he used the
drugs he was selling to fuel his frantic pace. A typical
day would take him to the far corners of New York
City to pick up and drop off drugs and money. When
most people mess up at their job, they get reprimanded
or, at worst, fired. When Gonen messed up, he went
to jail. And when he really messed up, he was nearly
killed. He sacrificed time with his daughter and had
strained relationships with his parents, his half-sister,
and his wife. In the end he had almost nothing to show
for three decades as a gangster. And based on what I
learned about his accomplices, they all worked just as
hard and in almost every case met fates similar to or
worse than Gonen’s.
The goal of this book is not to glorify Ron Gonen or
the criminal life. But given the hundreds of true crime
titles published and the dozens of movies produced
each year, the world has a strong fascination with the
gangster lifestyle. This is simply the story of one of
those gangsters.
- Dave Copeland, Boston, Massachusetts, August 2006.
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PRO LOG UE
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