Was Jimi Hendrix kidnapped by the mafia after Woodstock festival?
Woodstock is branded as a festival of peace and love, something that everyone who was born too late or couldn’t get there at the time looks back on with unresolved envy. The truth is, while the festival made history and seems to have set the bar for good times, the reality was a nightmare, as weather disrupted proceedings, which meant that acts like Jimi Hendrix didn’t get to play their set until a couple of days after they were supposed to. It turns out that a delayed set was the least of the guitar legends issues, though.
Jon Roberts is a convicted cocaine trafficker who had ties with the Medellin Cartel’s rise in the ‘80s, worked with Pablo Escobar and was responsible for $15 billion worth of cocaine being brought into the US. Before all that, though, he worked in New York under the name John Riccobono, running a top Manhattan nightclub called Salvation for the mafia. He was familiar with Hendrix.
“Jimi and I were never great friends,” he said, “He was so far gone, I don’t think he was truly friends with anybody. Jimi was a bad junkie. Jimi had people around him all the time, too. He was suffocating from these hangers-on. After we met at Salvation, he came to our house on Fire Island so he could get away from it all. We’d make sure nobody would bother him except for his real friends.”
Shortly after his death, several stories circulated about Hendrix and his life, many of which were draped in fiction. Still, one that kept creeping up was how he had been kidnapped by the mafia after his performance at Woodstock. Naturally, as someone who had previously been in contact with Hendrix and knew him on a personal level, John was immediately a suspect in the alleged kidnapping.
“People accused me of being involved in kidnapping him,” Roberts said. “They said I was involved with kidnappers who tied Jimi to a chair and forced him to shoot heroin. Please. Nobody would have had to force Jimi to shoot anything. Just give him the heroin, and he’d inject it himself. It was Jimi going out searching for drugs that got him into trouble. Andy and I were the ones who helped get him out of it.”
Being as famous as he was, Hendrix had people who went out to buy drugs for him, but some nights, he would venture out into the street to try and find it himself. One evening, this took him to Salvation, where he was abducted by a couple of wannabe mobsters who decided to try their hand at getting something out of his kidnap.
“These guys were morons,” Roberts added. “They promised Jimi some dope and took him to a house out of the city. I don’t know if they wanted money or a piece of his record contract, but they called Jimi’s manager demanding something. Next thing I knew, the club manager called me and said Jimi had been taken from our club by some Italians.”
John and his business partner Andy were responsible for getting Hendrix back safely. They made a few phone calls and found out who the kidnappers were, so they got in touch and said he had to be returned without so much as a hair on his afro being harmed.
“They let Jimi go,” he said, “the whole thing lasted maybe two days. Jimi was so stoned that he probably didn’t even know he was ever kidnapped. Andy and I waited a week or so and went after these kids. We gave them a beating they would never forget.”
Hendrix continues to be a man of mystery. When you are famous for having a guitar-playing ability that is hard to believe, it is only natural that other hard-to-believe stories might surface around you. The tale of his post-Woodstock kidnap rings true, though, given so many people recall it, and Roberts has nothing to gain in telling the story now. The only inaccuracy was it wasn’t the Mafia who kidnapped him; quite the opposite, they’re the ones that rescued him.
