In 1969, rock icon Jimi Hendrix left a Greenwich Village club called Salvation and reappeared two days later. He was thankfully unharmed and had no clear idea what happened to him.
Hendrix was accosted by either two or four men (depending on accounts) as he left the mafia-affiliated club and was forced into a car. “Before I realized what had happened,” he later told his friend, Curtis Knight, “I found myself forcibly abducted by four men. I was blindfolded and gagged and shoved in the back of a car.”
Rolling Stone’s excerpt from Jon Roberts’ 2011 memoir American Desperado claims the abductors contacted Jimi Hendrix’s camp and made a monetary demand. Roberts explained, “Two Italian kids at our club — not Mafia but wiseguy wannabes — saw Jimi in there looking for dope and decided, ‘Hey, that’s Jimi Hendrix. Let’s grab him and see what we can get.’”
The New Statesman theorizes that the guitarist was kidnapped by people associated with the mob who thought they could make money from taking the rock star off the streets.
In American Desperado, Hendrix’s captors were tracked down by convicted drug trafficker Jon Roberts, who ran the Mafia-tied club Salvation, and mob associate Andy Benfante. Roberts explained in his memoir that it took “two or three phone calls to get the names of the kids who were holding Jimi.”
We reached out to these kids and made it clear, ‘You let Jimi go, or you are dead. Do not harm a hair of his Afro,’” he wrote.
But Roberts claims that Hendrix was so inebriated he may have been unaware of the entire ordeal. “The whole thing lasted maybe two days. Jimi was so stoned, 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.”
Just one year later, Hendrix was dead and what really happened to him during this kidnapping has never been explained.
