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Blessed with a golden voice, he yearns to be a star but ended up in jail. A poignant interview with...


On a freezing evening, the figure of a young man shuffles along the hard shoulder of a busy highway in a nondescript American suburb, his head bowed against the biting cold.
It is only as he gets close enough for you to make out his facial features that he starts to appear eerily familiar.
Jon Berkery may never have met his father, Sir Tom Jones, but he carries the same brooding looks and high cheekbones like a calling card.
 
Singer Tom Jones' love child Jonathan Berkery Jones
Sir Tom Jones
 
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He dreams, improbably, of emulating Jones, who had a brief affair with his mother, by launching a glittering singing career.
But, as the Mail revealed earlier this week, the pitiful reality is that 24-year-old Jon is a recovering drug addict who until recently was sleeping in his car and now relies on the charity of family members to get by.
Not only this, but as well as taking drugs, he confesses to dealing them, too.
‘Until very recently I just wanted to live the street life, to be a gangster if you like,’ he says. ‘But I have had a few wake-up calls,’
 

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His predicament is brutally at odds with the life of the Welsh-born singer’s only other son, Mark, by Jones’s long-term wife, Linda.
Mark, who was born a month after the couple married 56 years ago, now runs his father’s business affairs and manages his £140 million fortune.
Jones calls him his ‘best friend’. Meanwhile, Jon and 72-year-old Sir Tom, who is back on our screens as a judge on the Saturday night BBC1 singing contest The Voice, have yet to even meet.
He was born after his American mother Katherine Berkery had a four-day fling that took place mainly in the bed of the singer’s suite at the New York Ritz-Carlton hotel in 1987.
Singer Tom Jones' love child Jonathan Berkery JonesTroubled: Young Jon with his mother Katherine
After the then 24-year-old wannabe model became pregnant, she contacted the office of the notoriously priapic singer to be told bluntly: ‘That’s showbiz, darling. Do what you have to do.’
After all, she was just one of up to 250 women a year Jones admits to sleeping with at the height of his fame, while cheating on his long-suffering wife.
But Miss Berkery refused to go away without a fight.
She demanded DNA tests and took Jones to court.
Finally, after years of denying he was the child’s father, Jones paid her off with a £50,000 lump sum and agreed to stump up £1,700-a-month in child support until Jon was 18.
He still refused to acknowledge the boy’s existence publicly, until eventually coming clean in a radio interview two years ago.
Even then, Jones has never made an attempt to contact his son.
No wonder Jon is troubled and deeply angry. He told the Mail this week how his mother once tried to persuade him to join the army in the hope that it would help him find the discipline to stay away from drink and drugs.
‘She thought that would straighten me out,’ says Jon. ‘And in a way I wanted that, too, but for different reasons. I was one angry kid — I wanted to legitimately kill people.’
That burning anger has shown little sign of dissipating in the intervening years. Instead Jon, who has 15 tattoos, has foolishly, and weakly, looked to the bottom of a bottle or bag of drugs in a bid to dull his feelings of resentment and rejection.
He began smoking cannabis at school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the age of 16. Indeed, he says almost proudly that ever since his teens he has been known by the nickname ‘Piff’, which is street slang for marijuana.
‘I was always high on good weed,’ he smiles. Even today, one of his accounts on the social networking site Twitter is in the name Piffington Jones.
He explains: ‘In Harlem, everyone adds ‘ington’ to the end of their names. So Piffington worked for me. I wanted to be known as Young Sir Piffington Jones.’
Unfortunately, smoking marijuana was only the beginning of his deeply destructive relationship with drugs.
Jonathan Berkery, 24, said he became a gun-carrying drug dealer who slept rough because he was abandoned by Sir Tom, who has always refused to acknowledge his existenceStrangers: Jon Berkery, 24, has never even met his father Sir Tom. The pop star and his mother had a brief affair in 1987
Soon, he had moved on to prescription pills, such as the painkiller OxyContin and the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. Next came Ecstasy and cocaine.
For a time, he enjoyed the way his connection to his famous father, however tenuous, opened doors.
‘When I was little I hated anyone making the connection between me and my dad. I didn’t want to be known as his son,’ says Jon.
‘But as I got older, my friends would use my name to get into clubs for free. They’d push me forward and tell the bouncers who I was.
‘If someone said they didn’t believe it, my friends would dig old magazine articles out of their pockets to show them stories about my father and me.
‘Quite often we’d get into the VIP areas and be given drinks. I always felt uncomfortable, but went along with it because of my friends.’
He dropped out of college, where he was studying audio engineering and soon, by his own admission, he had moved on to dealing drugs as well as taking them.
He describes buying two guns for protection, which he called ‘The Brothers’ and wore in-shoulder holsters. But as he speaks, you wonder how much of this gangster posturing is just misguided attention-seeking.
 
 
TV star: Sir Tom Jones, pictured with Danny O'Donoghue, Jessie J, singer and Will.i.am returns to our screens as a judge on BBC show The VoiceTV star: Sir Tom Jones, pictured with Danny O'Donoghue, Jessie J, singer and Will.i.am returns to our screens as a judge on BBC show The Voice
What is clearly the case is that after years of putting up with trouble and late-night visits from the police, his mother, who is part-Korean, had finally had enough and kicked him out.  But as has so often been the case in Jon’s life, Miss Berkery’s rich white parents — who adopted her when she was eight and who live in New Jersey — were on hand to bail him out.
They helped him move into a rented flat in Miami three years ago where Jon, who enjoys singing in karaoke bars, planned to find a studio to record his own songs.
Within six months, however, the money had run out and he had racked up a massive satellite TV bill.
‘I pawned the guns for money eventually,’ he says. ‘It was probably for the best. And for a while, all I owned was my eight-year-old Dodge car and a few possessions in a black trash bag.
‘I’ve slept on park benches, but most of the time I lived out of my car. I was pretty dirty — I didn’t really bother to wash.’
Around the same time, he was pulled over by police in Miami while driving his car with a friend. They found prescription drugs and cannabis. ‘My friend and I were actually quite lucky,’ John admits today.
Heartthrob: Sir Tom in his heyday in 1967. Son Jon wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and forge a showbiz careerHeartthrob: Sir Tom in his heyday in 1967. Son Jon wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and forge a showbiz career
‘The car was full of drugs, ecstasy, cocaine, OxyContin and Xanax, but the cops didn’t find that stash. I spent two nights in jail. At first, I was so high I didn’t care, but as I sobered up, I was very scared. There were some crazy guys in that jail.
‘I was charged with possession — if the police had found the real drugs I would have gone to prison for a long time.’
Eventually, the charges were dropped, but he was instructed, as a condition of court-ordered drug counselling, to move into in a rehabilitation shelter for criminals.
Once again, he was his own worst enemy. ‘There are curfews and rules — and I don’t obey orders well — and you have to get a job.’
‘I worked in telemarketing, cold calling people to try to sell them cruises. Each job lasted two or three months. It was mind-numbing and I often argued back with people who were rude to me on the phone.’
Ironically, as he idled away his time at one of his short-term jobs, singing and tapping on the desk, his colleagues, told him he should consider a career as a singer, not knowing that his father is the man known simply as ‘The Voice’.
‘One boss, who fired me when they were downsizing the company, said he expected to see me on television or hear me on the radio because of my voice,’ smiles Jon.
‘I love karaoke — I sing rap and R&B, but never my father’s songs. Every time I leave the stage, people tell me I have an amazing voice.’
Trouble has never been far away, however. In February, he was banned from driving after he was pulled over yet again by police.
‘The police caught up with me for not paying traffic fines,’ he shrugs.
‘They also told me I was driving on a suspended licence. There were so many traffic tickets that they took my licence away for five years. That was the moment I hit rock bottom. I couldn’t even live in my car.’
 
Together: Tom Jones and his wife Linda who has stuck with the singer despite affairs, pictured in 1965Together: Tom Jones and his wife Linda who has stuck with the singer despite affairs, pictured in 1965
With nowhere else to turn, he sought help again from his wealthy adoptive grandparents. They bailed him out, sending him a plane ticket to visit them, then gave him a one-way ticket to return to his mother in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she now lives.
Despite everything, she has agreed to him moving back in as he talks once again about trying to make a name for himself as a singer.
Home for the past few weeks has been her smart flat in a small complex of townhouses and apartments on the outskirts of town.
As Jon can no longer drive, he is reliant on his mother to ferry him around or else use patchy public transport.
More often than not, however, he has to make do by walking — not something that is a common sight in car-obsessed America.
National treasure: Sir Tom performs at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations last yearNational treasure: Sir Tom performs at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations last year
So it is that the hard-up son of one of the world’s richest and most famous singing stars can be seen walking forlornly in the road near his mother’s apartment.
Though close, theirs is hardly a frictionless relationship. Certainly, Jon, who is desperately immature for a 24-year-old, has not been helped by his mother’s habit of constantly moving home, especially when he was young and had endless changes of school.
She claims her nomadic existence was to escape attention over their notoriety in the States, which had been caused by her court battle to get Jones to pay up for the son he has shown no interest in.
Perhaps in a subconscious attempt to make up for their rootless lifestyle, and for the lack of a father figure, she still lavishes presents on Jon at Christmas and birthdays. Rightly or wrongly there is no doubt where Jon points the blame for his ongoing troubles — his absent father.
A few years ago, he spotted a billboard in Miami advertising a Tom Jones concert in the city that night. He says he seriously considered turning up and disrupting the show in the mixed-up hope of finally getting his father’s attention.
He claims that after years of hoping that Jones would make an appearance in his life, he now has no desire to meet him.
Yet, in the next breath he says he dreams of becoming a famous singer so his father will finally acknowledge him.
And despite the barely concealed animosity he feels for him, he plans to adopt Sir Tom’s famous surname to boost his chances of launching a singing career. But like so many of the wannabes who attempt to impress the music legend on talent show The Voice, you suspect his dreams are likely to be dashed.
Just like his hope that Jones will one day do the right thing and be father to the troubled son he’d rather forget.

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