There are many things in life that are uncertain: Are we in the last wave of the pandemic, or will the variants lap the alphabet? Will all of your hard work pay off with a big promotion or are you busting your butt in vain? Does he love me or does he not?
But one life condition that one would think holds no uncertainty whatsoever is whether or not you have been the victim of a kidnapping. It’s an unfortunate, often tragic situation that most of us thankfully have no experience with. But even without having endured a kidnapping, it seems like a pretty simple concept: someone takes you from somewhere against your will and refuses to allow you to exercise your freedom of movement.
It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t know it was happening. That is, unless you were Jimi Hendrix.
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As the story goes, in the fall of 1969, the famous musician was kidnapped and held hostage for two days during what become known as his “lost weekend.” Even after he was rescued, Hendrix was completely unaware that he had been abducted in the first place.
It’s a crazy story, one that requires a few caveats before we start.
This episode in the legendary rockstar’s life didn’t enter his mainstream biography until 2011, when Jon Roberts, a former mafioso affiliated with the Gambino family and a cocaine cowboy who worked in Miami for the Medellín cartel, first revealed his involvement in freeing the musician. At first, he might seem like a somewhat sketchy source due to his own colorful background, which included more than a few episodes worthy of the Hollywood treatment, jail time, and a transition to government informant.
That’s also what Evan Wright, journalist and co-author of Roberts’ biography American Desperado, thought after he began the project. In the opening chapter of the book, Wright writes that some of Roberts’ stories “stretched my credulity” when they first began to work together. It’s why he ultimately decided to include other interviews in the book “to corroborate or at times challenge Jon’s version of events” rather than write it as a traditional “as told to” autobiography.
The Jimi Hendrix kidnapping episode falls into the former category.
“The tale seemed patently absurd until I began to look into the twisted history of the New York club scene in the late 1960s,” Wright wrote in Rolling Stone in 2011. “Based on research and interviews I conducted, it turns out that not only does Roberts’ story appear to be true, he solves a mystery that has intrigued Hendrix biographers for more than three decades.”
And so the story begins in that turbulent time in 1969. The phrase “sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll” wouldn’t be coined until nearly a decade later, but it appropriately could have been applied to the New York nightclub world at the end of the Swinging Sixties. The clubs may have been populated by A-list celebrities and members of American royalty, but behind the scenes, the city’s leading mob families were pulling the strings.
During this time, Roberts and his business partner teamed up with an experienced nightclub owner, Bradley Pierce, to re-launch a hotspot called Salvation. (It wasn’t until several months into the partnership that Pierce realized his two partners were “connected.”)
The grand reopening took place just a few weeks after Woodstock left its indelible mark on the history of American music. Hendrix was riding that high—both metaphorically and literally, he was deep into drug use at the time—when he played at the club’s opening night.
“At the reopening we had movie stars, models, and one of the Kennedys all waiting to get in,” Roberts remembers. “[My business partner] Andy was always a funny guy. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Jon, let’s spike the punch. Let them all freak out at our party.’ We put handfuls of Quaaludes in the punch. People used to call Quaaludes ‘leg-openers’ because of the effects they had on women. Our party was unbelievable. People that had probably never been high on a drug in their life were taking their clothes off.”
Roberts says that, during the course of the night, “Jimi Hendrix tried to get me to shoot speed with him, but I wasn’t into needles.”
Roberts is very clear that he was not close friends with Hendrix; he only knew the singer through Pierce. But they did run in the same circle for a bit during that time. Once when Hendrix needed an escape from the madness surrounding him, Roberts invited him out to his house on Fire Island. (“I had some good times with Jimi, but he was a disaster on water skis.”)
Hendrix’s lost weekend began at Salvation. Roberts says Hendrix was on a quest to score when he ran into two young Italians whom Roberts describes as “not Mafia but wiseguy wannabes.” They recognized the famous 26-year-old, saw an opportunity, and lured him to an apartment under the premise of selling him cocaine.
Charles R. Cross, a music journalist and author of Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, writes that Hendrix was at the club for a jam session when he decided to take the young men up on their offer to hook him up. According to Cross, the kidnappers demanded not money, but Hendrix’s contract from his manager Michael Jeffrey in return for his release.
Whatever the motives of the kidnapping wannabes, Roberts says that he was instrumental in securing the release of the musician. It only took a few calls after he found out what had happened at his club for him to come up with the names of the perpetrators. He immediately called them “and made it clear, ‘You let Jimi go, or you are dead. Do not harm a hair of his Afro.’”
Hendrix was presumably out of his mind on drugs during this ordeal, which is why he was clueless as to the precarious situation he was in. Later, there was some insinuation that the perpetrators had forcibly injected him with heroin. Roberts thought this was preposterous. “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.”
In the end, Hendrix was released unharmed and with his contract still secure in Jeffrey’s hands. The culprits weren’t so lucky. Roberts says, “We gave them a beating they would never forget.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story. To this day, there are many questions swirling around this lost weekend, particularly around whether it was really as straightforward as two budding criminals who seized an opportunity.
Roberts says some people later accused him of being involved, but he staunchly denies any connection. He wasn’t at the club at the time and immediately got to work trying to rescue Hendrix as soon as he received the call. Not only did he not receive any reward for his work as a “Good Samaritan,” but it also hurt him in the long run. Roberts says soon after this incident, the FBI started calling around about him. The Hendrix kidnapping put him on their radar and was the first entry in what would become a very large FBI file.
Others believed that Hendrix’s manager might have been behind the whole thing. This theory goes that Jeffrey wanted his client to believe he saved the day, so that Hendrix, now full of gratitude, wouldn’t even think about switching management. It wouldn’t be the last time Jeffrey was accused of nefarious behavior towards his famous client. (A former roadie would later claim that Jeffrey confessed to him that he was behind Hendrix’s death.)
Whatever the case, it is widely believed that Hendrix was unaware of what was going on that weekend, at least while it was happening. Which makes Hendrix’s “lost weekend” both one of the most intriguing episodes to come to light about the singer’s life, and possibly one of the most entertaining abductions in the history of famous kidnappings.
