Johnny Romero PR Parisian

In 1985 Johnny Romero owned les Nuages, a St. Germain nightclub frequented by James Baldwin and James Jones. I was living with his daughter, Candida. She was 17 and I was was 32. He said nothing about our age difference, but after hearing that I lived on the Lower East Side, Johnny asked, "Are there still Puerto Ricans in New York?"

"Plenty, but the Dominicans are taking over?"

"Everyone gets their time in the sun, even chocha Dominicans."

Johnny had a temper, but was tough.

He had survived a fall from an airplane.

His parachute had failed to open.

He hit the ground from 2500 feet.

One night he told me, "Landing felt like I got hit by King Kong."

Johnny had run a New York club on Minetta Lane catering to white women hanging out with colored men. He left the city because of the Mafia.

"They were tougher than a fall from an airplane."

Johnny was rough around the edges of cool, mais 'un vrai mec' and they don't make them like that anymore.

Or Candida

Libre Puerto Rico

On September 12th of 1983 Víctor Manuel Gerena dropped off his girl at Hartford City Hall to get a marriage license after which the minimum-wage guard finished the day's work at Wells Fargo armored car facility by drugging his two white co-workers and robbing the depot of $7,000,000 in cash. His girlfriend was stranded at the altar and the FBI accused the fugitive of belonging to a pro-Puerto Rican Liberation gang called the Los Macheteros.

Víctor Manuel Gerena and the money was transported to Puerto Rico, where members of Los Macheteros distributed the loot to the island's poor.

The FBI confiscated approximately $80,000 in the years after the White Eagle Robbery and federal authorities prosecuted several gang members, however Víctor Manuel Gerena remains at large to this day, Puerto Rico Day and every day the fugitive sets another record for being on the FBI's Most Wanted List longer than any other man or woman.

Felicitations and a clenched fist salute to the FALN.

Libre Puerto Rico.

ps The FBI are dumber than a bucket of doorknobs.