Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

“Okay. I’m going to send over this guy named Larry.”

  And within an hour this cheerful, skinny guy with black hair was at the door. L.A. smoked a joint with him. He thought Larry looked awfully clean-cut and wholesome to be dealing with Mott—most of the pot dealers he knew, including himself, were holdovers from the sixties, long-haired goofs who cultivated their own spacedout brand of cool. Larry wore his hair shorter and had actually combed it. He looked to L.A. more like some kind of ROTC freak. But there was something almost inspiring in the cheerful gleam that came to Larry’s eyes when L.A. showed him the forty-pound bundle.

  “Thanks,” Larry said.

  Larry took the whole suitcase. He sold the contents in three days.

  When Mott came by L.A.’s apartment to collect the money from Larry, he said, “You and L.A. ought to start working together.”

  People were still coming to Dan Dill at Phi Delta Theta to buy dope, and when word got out that there was always good and plenty to be had at the corner of Thirty-seventh and Spruce, the crowds grew. L.A. introduced Larry to friends in New York City who were willing to loan him money at 10 percent interest, and soon he was buying up to hundred-pound bales at a time. Larry would recruit one of his fraternity brothers to help him break down the bale with his trusty machete into smaller portions.

  Word got out fast when a shipment was in. Soon after Larry started selling seriously he met Andy Mainardi, a freshman living in the Quad who had attended Lawrenceville School. Andy was short and chubby, with thin brown hair, a round face that made the lower part of his head seem larger than the upper, and glasses. He had been friends with Ricky Baratt at Lawrenceville and had done some dealing there, so Andy sought out Larry at Penn. He was a cheerful, energetic, and ambitious fellow, always ready with a story or a joke. He came from a well-to-do, prominent New Jersey family—his father was a judge—and planned eventually to go into business for himself. Andy, like L.A., loved pot. Larry viewed it primarily as merchandise. When Larry suggested cutting it with oregano to increase profits, L.A. and Andy reacted like outraged purists—it wasn’t just dishonest, it was heresy! Andy’s approach in particular was more that of a connoisseur than a retail merchant. If Larry was always looking for the most favorable profit margin, Andy was always looking for the best dope. One of the biggest attractions of dealing was that it gave him a chance to pick out for himself the choicest portions of each load as it came through. Andy preserved small samples of the best shipments the way a collector preserved bottles of rare vintage wine.

  Dan Dill had connections throughout his senior class, L.A. had his buyers among the juniors, Larry seemed to know everyone in the sophomore class, and Andy, being nearly as gregarious as Larry, was plugged into the ongoing party in the Quad. Dill’s bong would be fired up downstairs on the second floor, where he entertained customers by getting them high and playing music and making them laugh, and then, one by one, customers would go upstairs and collect their orders—anything from a few ounces to ten-pound bags. Within two or three hours the hundred-pound bale would be gone. There would be as much as five thousand dollars’ profit on a deal, an untidy mound of small bills that Larry enjoyed separating and stacking into piles. L.A.’s instinct was to bank the money and lay low for a while, but Larry would hear none of it.

  “If you want to make money, you have to keep it rolling,” he said.

  So Larry would get right back on the phone to place another order with Chance or Mott or one of L.A.’s connections in Florida. Soon Larry had sources of his own. Through a fellow sophomore named Tom Finchley, Larry met a big dealer at Virginia Tech named Ralph, who worked with smugglers who flew the stuff in themselves. Larry spent a weekend in Blacksburg, Virginia, partying with Ralph, who took him out in the woods and showed him a barn that was a marijuana warehouse, with bales stacked and shelved awaiting delivery just like in the Converse factory in Haverhill. Larry opened another pipeline.

  Packaging was Larry’s specialty. When Larry and Marcia went on their weekly trip to the supermarket, Marcia would fill a cart with groceries while Larry filled one with an assortment of different-sized boxes of Ziploc plastic bags. While dealers like Chance and Mott had avoided selling in quantities smaller than pounds, and handed over the stuff carelessly wrapped in newspaper or whatever else it had come in, Larry would sell to anyone and package to specifications. If Andy Mainardi wanted ten pounds, which he would be selling by the ounce, Larry would break down the ten pounds into ounces himself, delivering a box filled with neat baggies—just like an order from the Converse plant! With Larry it was almost a fetish. When a messy order of hash oil came in, he put on a lab coat and visited a scientific supply house off campus to order boxes of tiny glass vials. His customers were delighted. Larry even started delivering. Across campus and through the surrounding West Philly neighborhoods, Larry would carry green plastic sacks filled with Ziploc bags of grass and fling the orders up to dorm windows into the waiting arms of his customers, like a newsboy on his rounds.

  The business operated on one simple principle: Whatever Larry could buy, he could sell.

  Where in the past campus dealers had adhered to a kind of unspoken hippie tradition that it was unseemly to make too much money dealing marijuana, Larry was guided by something more basic, that emerging yuppie precept: greed. He was on the phone constantly, taking orders, scouting out new sources, comparing prices to keep his own competitive. His net worth was plotted carefully after each deal, and detailed records of purchases, sales, and debts were kept in tiny handwriting on sheets of paper hidden inside selected album covers—Larry’s collection of albums had grown considerably since the ones he had stolen from classmates at Exeter. Unlike traditional campus dope dealers, who sold only when they happened to have a large supply, Larry maintained a constant supply so that customers would know they could always buy from him. He even varied his inventory, dealing the basic user’s Mexican pot he got from Ed Mott or Bob Chance or Tom Finchley, typically in 100-pound bundles packed in boxes he bought for $90 to $100 per pound and sold for $165 per pound, while for more expensive tastes Larry stocked Colombian or Jamaican pot from Ralph in Virginia or from new sources at Penn State from whom he bought shipments of anywhere from 5 pounds to 220 pounds at about $320 per pound and sold at $425 per pound. For those who preferred a quick, powerful high, Larry sold blond hash that he could get from L.A.’s sources in Florida for $800 per pound and sell for $1,200 per pound; for those exploring more exotic highs Larry had rare black opiated hash that he bought for $1,600 per pound and sold at $2,000 per pound; and for those who liked their dope to hit them over the head hard he had messy hash oil, which Larry bottled to order, gently warming the tarlike stuff by the potful until he could pour it into his tiny glass vials. The hash oil, supplied by a student at Swarthmore College who delivered the sticky black drug in jars for $75 an ounce, Larry sold sometimes for as much as $150 per ounce. For retail sales he kept his pricing in line with the current prices listed in High Times magazine—that way he could point to proof that he was not gouging his customers. But perhaps the single most important feature of Larry’s booming trade was his almost kamikaze willingness to front the drugs and wait for payment. You didn’t even have to have money to buy dope from Larry.

  He had good business instincts. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he and L.A. and two other partners pooled funds to buy 100,000 Black Beauties, black capsules of amphetamine. It was a sure thing—Larry was really excited about it. Each capsule cost only two cents wholesale. Larry knew they could sell them at Penn for fifty cents each—a $48,000 profit! Before buying the capsules, Larry and L.A. found a couple of students willing to try them.

  “If the deal goes through, we’ll give you each two hundred dollars,” said Larry.

  But the effects of drugs are sometimes tricky. So much depends on your state of mind. Evidently, Larry’s guinea pigs wanted the two hundred dollars so much that it warped their judgment, because despite their insistence that the capsules had given them a powerf
ul rush, it was evident within days after the purchase and delivery that the Black Beauties were duds—little better than placebos. Inside the frat house it was a joke. Larry faced facts quickly and slashed the price of his capsules to five cents. He sold off his portion of the buy within a few days, recovering his investment and turning a small profit. L.A. and the other investors hung tough—and graduated more than a year later with boxes of black capsules in their closets.

  Matched against the traditional campus dope dealer, who sold only when a shipment came in and even then only to keep himself well stocked, Larry had little trouble cornering Penn’s market. He learned (and liked) the feel of neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills, the preferred unit of currency for underground transactions, crisp pale green Ben Franklins about a half-inch thick. There was something indescribably macho about a bundle of hundreds. Larry got in the habit—which Marcia deplored—of carrying a thick wad of cash around with him at all times.

  Larry was always willing to front dope to people, even those he hardly knew. It just was not in him to distrust others. Larry worked on a principle that most of his friends considered painfully naive: He figured if he treated people well, they would treat him well in return. For most people that was true, but as the months went by the list of tardy debtors grew. In the first months there were only a handful who owed Larry a few hundred dollars total. But the list of names steadily grew. By the end of sophomore year there were more than thirty people on the list, and the total owed was in the thousands. Larry just didn’t worry about it. It bothered L.A. and Ed Mott and other dealers, but not Larry. The amounts he was making far outstripped such losses.

  It all happened so fast that Larry never even had time for second thoughts. By spring of 1975 the business had made him one of the most popular students on campus. He was making what seemed like a lot of money, even though, after paying off interest and splitting the profits with L.A., he was earning only a few thousand dollars on a hundred-pound deal. Toward the end of sophomore year he moved into more spacious quarters in the fraternity, a two-room suite that was painted a shade of green close to the color of money. He bought himself a ’66 Chevy Nova for three hundred dollars and also a leather coat. But most profits were poured back into the next deal.

  Dope dealing swept Larry up as surely as addiction sweeps up its victims. It played just the right chords in his personality. It allowed him to capitalize at once on his cynicism, his playfulness, his hypersociability, his ambition. It challenged his mind and satisfied his appetite for risk.

  The business went, as Larry would put it later, “from nothing to zoom!”

  THREE

  Less Risk, More Exposure

  Larry moved in with Marcia in the spring semester of his junior year, 1976. They had been sleeping together most nights for more than a year, and Larry had kept clothes in her closet and books in her place all that time. But Marcia knew they were really living together when Larry carried in his stereo. He set up the big Advent speakers he had bought back from Paul Mikuta in two corners of the bedroom.

  Marcia only recently had moved out of an apartment she had shared with two friends for more than a year. There had been trouble between her and her roommates for some time, mostly over Larry. Marcia had moved with them from the Quad into an apartment at 4002 Spruce Street during junior year. It was over a barbershop and two doors away from University Pinball, a favorite off-campus hangout. Her roommates had started off liking Larry, but as his dealing grew more and more notorious, they viewed him with a mixture of awe and revulsion. Having money in his pockets intensified his cockiness. They found him insufferable. Every time Larry came over they would ignore him, even though he had tried to make peace by helping to furnish their place. He had separate telephones installed for them in their rooms and purchased shelves, a couch, shower curtains, and wall hangings. When he stopped over he always stocked their refrigerator with goodies. But when he wasn’t around they told Marcia how surprised they were that she kept seeing him. They told her that he was running around with other girls behind her back. Marcia chalked their warnings up to spite. Marcia had fallen in love with Larry.

  As she saw it, complaints about Larry were indirect complaints about her. Both roommates led more active social lives than Marcia. They were Jewish, which had never mattered before, but now, along with their other differences, it made Marcia feel outnumbered. She noted that hers was the smallest of the apartment’s three bedrooms and began to keep score of a multitude of minor inequities. Finally, after a particularly bitter argument, Marcia moved out. She took the couch and other furnishings that Larry had given them, and before leaving she stalked angrily through the apartment removing all the gifts he had given her roommates—she took down the shower curtains, pulled the phones from the wall, etc.—and tossed them in a trash can on the sidewalk in front of the barbershop downstairs. She found a small apartment for herself at the corner of Fortieth Street and Baltimore A venue, in a building called Calvert Hall, which overlooked the big green-and-silver trolley cars that shuttled back and forth down the center of the old avenue all hours of the day and night.

  It wasn’t that Marcia disagreed with her old roommates about Larry’s drug dealing. While she had nothing against people getting high—Marcia was in a minority of nonusers—and it was generally known that you couldn’t get in much trouble for keeping a private stash of an ounce or so, selling was another matter. Marcia thought it was stupid—he was sure to get in trouble.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Larry would say. “The worst they’re going to do is make me take a semester off, or something like that. If I got caught by the city I might be in more trouble, but it would be pretty hard to get caught because I’m in a fraternity house. There are rules. I read about it in High Times. They can’t search the whole fraternity house. If they want to come into my room, they’ll never find anything because I’m paying people to hide things in their rooms. There are thirty rooms! They actually searched a whole frat house once, and the case got thrown out of court because . . .”

  Larry had it all figured out, as if High Times magazine were the last word. Marcia would just nod and grimace. She didn’t believe Larry’s reassurances, but what could she do? Who was she to give Larry advice? She was the one who struggled in science courses that Larry mastered with ease. Besides, as Marcia fell harder and harder for Larry, the balance of their relationship shifted. At first, when Marcia had another boyfriend, Larry had pursued her. Now things were the other way around; Marcia was the eager one. He was so wrapped up in the business, and was such a big hit with all his friends, that sometimes it seemed as though Larry had no time for Marcia. Even when he was with her in the apartment he was on the phone all the time. Larry thought he loved Marcia, but at times it was hard for him to be with her. She was so different from his other friends. She didn’t like to go out drinking and partying. She thought most of the fraternity brothers were juvenile slobs and their attitudes toward women were demeaning. But deep down she knew that if the issue were forced with Larry, he would leave before he would give up dealing. It was like some necessary extension of his personality. But it was crazy! He did not know the meaning of discretion. It seemed like everybody on campus knew Larry Lavin was selling marijuana.

  Even Phi Delta Theta was worried. The fraternity had held a meeting to try and rein Larry in. A panel of senior brothers told him that they were getting worried about the amounts of dope he was handling, about the steady stream of customers in and out of Thirty-seventh and Spruce.

  “People are stopping us as we walk across campus, asking us what Larry has this week,” said one.

  “It’s just gotten too obvious,” said another. “Larry, if they search the house they may not find your stash, but almost everybody in the house has some personal dope in their rooms. Any one of us could get in trouble. You’ve just gotten too big. You’re attracting too much attention.”

  At first Larry was wounded, but when he cooled down he could see their point. He compromised with
them. He would continue selling but he would no longer stash the product in the frat house. Still, there were grumblings. Even Dan Dill wished out loud that the dealing would go back to what it was before, more of an ongoing party than a business. Larry began looking for someplace else to live.

  Marcia kept waiting for something to happen, for Larry to get busted or beat up or suspended for a semester. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Maybe the premed courses, which were getting more demanding—even for Larry—would eventually crowd dealing out of the picture. He still wanted to get into dental school more than anything. And just when Marcia seemed ready to give up on him he would come around for a while, or say something really sweet.

  In the middle of spring semester, Larry leased an entire four-story row house at 3939 Chestnut Street for eight hundred dollars a month. He figured if he moved in L.A. and Andy Mainardi and other friends, he could carry on his dealing without worrying about people across the hall or upstairs getting suspicious, and besides, Larry liked living in a big house with all the boys. If Phi Delta Theta wouldn’t have him, then he would set up on his own. He slept in the house one night. There were so many cockroaches that to defend himself he kept a sneaker in his hand all night. The next day he called an exterminator and paid cash to have the whole house bombed with roach killer.

  That night he moved in with Marcia.

  * * *

  Even L.A. thought Larry was crazy. Every time the son-of-a-bitch made a few bucks he would pump it right back into the next deal.

  “Why don’t you just take fifty percent, or even twenty, and put it away somewhere, in a safe-deposit box or something?” L.A. would ask. He had been saving from his drug earnings for several years and had almost thirty thousand dollars. “It does add up,” said L.A.

  Larry would just laugh.

  “And let inflation eat me alive?” he said. Larry’s philosophy was: The only way to make money dealing is to keep increasing the margin—the bigger the buy, the lower the cost and the greater the profit. He said, “If you want to make progress you got to keep letting the money roll!”