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the country. El Oso had studied martial arts in Pasadena and became fascinated not just with fighting techniques but also with the Japanese warrior code, Bushido. He threw himself into training and became a locally renowned fighter. At six foot three and 230 pounds, he had crushing speed and agility. Ricky met him after El Oso opened his own dojoin 1973, and he asked El Oso to become his sensei . The two quickly bonded. When El Oso had a son, Ricky became his godparent in a church ceremony. “Ricky and I saw ourselves like ronin,” El Oso says, “samurai fighters with no master.” When El Oso’s dojo ran out of money, forcing him to take a job driving a beer truck, Ricky brought him on as a Transworld detective. “Albert paid us two hundred dollars a week,” El Oso says, “plus 10 percent of the collections we did for him.”
    Although Ricky obtained permission from the fire department to moonlight for Transworld, he never told anyone he was actually working for Albert. To further shield himself from the business he did for Albert, he adopted an alias, “Alex Padron,” a play on his middle name, Alejandro, and his last name. For years no one would connect Ricky the fireman, then CIA officer, with Alex the alleged drug courier, arsonist, extortioner, and hit man.
    Ricky also kept his wife in the dark. When she spoke to OCS investigators in 1991, she detailed a dismal married life. From the OCS report: 
    Maria Prado described her ex-husband as a very domineering man who expected her to stay at home and raise the child. She advised that he was an avid weightlifter, [who] enjoyed the martial arts, old cars, and weapons. He had a German Luger pistol which he was very fond of.
Maria did not know if Enrique worked for San Pedro. Maria recalled that often San Pedro would call and Enrique would leave the house. Upon his return, Maria would ask where did he go with San Pedro, and Enrique would reply that it was none of her business. 
     
    About once a month, Maria told investigators, Albert would take her and Ricky to dinner, usually at the Forge (where Gary Teriaca’s brother would be shot to death in 1977). The Forge’s owner, Al Malnik, was a close friend of Danny Mones’s, and another reputed protégé of Meyer Lansky’s. (Malnik is perhaps best known for his friendship with Michael Jackson in the 2000s, becoming godparent to his son, Prince Michael, a.k.a. “Blanket,” and later falsely claiming to be the executor of Jackson’s will.) Despite occasional outbursts of violence, the Forge was a fashionable and pricey Miami restaurant.
    Maria told investigators that she believed Albert, who began buying racehorses with his father in the 1970s, acquired his wealth from winning at the track. Purchasing racehorses was a common means of laundering money in 1970s Miami. Albert not only laundered money though horses; he also founded his own stables and used them as cover to explain his growing wealth. When OCS investigators interviewed Ricky in 1991, he too told them that he “believed that San Pedro made a lot of money off the horses.”

Life with the Godfather
     
     
    Albert’s shooting, not surprisingly, added new layers of paranoia to his violent personality. He acquired houses adjacent to his parents’ house and razed them. He walled off the enlarged lot, put in guard shacks, and expanded his childhood home until it rose above the blue-collar neighborhood like a fortress. He installed bullet-resistant windows, security cameras, and walls on the upper balconies shaped like gun parapets. Visitors were frisked by his Transworld bodyguards, who also started Albert’s cars to check for bombs. Guard dogs ran the grounds. According to Albert’s third wife, Lourdes, the dogs were so vicious that Albert was once attacked by his favorite and had to be hospitalized. Jon Roberts, a frequent visitor in the 1970s, said, “There was nothing to figure out about Albert. He was a psycho, and everybody knew he was a