Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  Back in Philadelphia, Marcia bought a big brown scrapbook with a cutesy painting of a kitten on the front, a binder with sticky pages of thick cardboard and clear plastic sheets that lifted to cover and protect her photographs. Snapshots from their trip filled the first ten pages. Marcia lovingly labeled and dated the pictures of their first vacation together.

  When they returned home from their vacation, Marcia went to northern New Jersey to visit her folks.

  Larry talked Paul Mikuta, who was home from Rochester for the summer, into going down to Florida with him. It would be like another week-long vacation, only this one with the boys! Paul Mikuta was a big, brassy guy who swaggered through life, courting risk with bravado. Having Paul along had turned a nerve-wracking trip—with memories of L.A.’s bust so fresh in mind—into a joyride. Larry figured he could complete the trip and package and sell the shipment before Marcia returned in two weeks.

  So Larry and Paul flew to Miami together, and after a night on the town, they met with two of L.A.’s contacts and bought the marijuana. They had planned to just drive back to Philadelphia together, but at the last minute something came up in Paul’s family and he had to rush home. Paul carried some of the pot with him in his suitcase on the plane, but Larry refused to get on the airplane with such a large amount of contraband.

  He felt deflated when Paul left. He was left alone in a hotel room with nearly a hundred pounds of pot.

  First he bought three big suitcases, the kind with wheels at the bottom. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Philadelphia from Trailways, checked the bags, and settled in a seat far back in the bus for a long, long drive home.

  It seemed to take a whole day just to get out of Florida. July in the Sunshine State was sweltering. He couldn’t get comfortable on the bus. When he tried to read, it upset his stomach, so he watched the scenery for hour after hour.

  About five hours into the drive, somewhere in northern Florida, a tough-looking young woman got on the bus, walked down the aisle, smiled at Larry, and sat down next to him. She had pale blue eyes and straight blond hair and was wearing a faded pair of jeans over a pudgy figure. She said her name was Heidi. Considering that there were many empty seats in the back of the bus, and considering the way she kept smiling at him, Larry figured she had more in mind to pass the time than conversation. Somewhere near the border of North Carolina, Larry slipped his arm around her shoulder and she reached down to unzip his pants. And there, three rows behind the nearest passenger, in broad daylight, Heidi sucked and stroked him to orgasm, and then loudly—in case anyone on the bus hadn’t noticed what was going on back there already—spit his semen into the aisle.

  Larry began to consider that this had not been a good idea. He had always lectured L.A. about staying inconspicuous.

  Heidi then started talking about herself to him, loudly—too loudly. She said her parents had sent her to a mental hospital because she liked to have sex too much—it was hard to imagine that anyone on the bus was not listening to her—but that she had gotten back at them by having sex with everyone in the place, patients, orderlies, doctors . . . maybe they could get off at the next stop and go to a motel. . . . Toward late afternoon, a few hours away from Washington, D.C., she stood up and walked to the front of the bus, shouting for the driver to pull over. He did, and she bounded down the front steps and threw up by the side of the road. All eyes on the bus turned to Larry, who smiled sheepishly and looked away, willing himself someplace else. Then Heidi got back aboard, sat back down next to him, and fell asleep.

  At the next stop, Larry told Heidi that he had to take a leak. He phoned his friend Stu Thomas from the station and begged him to drive down and meet him in Washington.

  “It’s a nightmare,” said Larry. “You got to save me.”

  Several hours later, as the bus pulled into the terminal in Washington, Larry again told Heidi he was going to the men’s room. Outside the bus he grabbed the driver and explained that he wanted to get off the bus, now. So the driver removed Larry’s bags from the compartment underneath, and Larry pulled them into the men’s room with him, where he waited until well after the bus was scheduled to leave. Then he let another ten minutes go by just for good measure. He eased from the men’s room warily, and felt enormously relieved to find the bus, and Heidi, gone.

  But as he waited for Stu arrive, Larry noticed that his bags smelled funny, and that small pools formed under them when he left them sitting in the same spot for a few minutes. He opened one of the suitcases after loading them in the trunk of Stu’s car, and was nearly knocked over by the odor. Locked in the hot compartment under the bus for nearly two days, the pot had gone bad. It smelled as potent as ammonia.

  Back at Marcia’s apartment Larry dumped out the sodden, foul-smelling weed. Fistful by fistful, Larry attacked it with a hair dryer and packaged it. But the stuff never sold well. Larry was able to replenish the fraternity’s bank account, but he ended in debt to the friends who had put up money for the trip.

  He made the best of it, telling his friends at 3939 about the sex maniac who gave him blowjobs all the way from Orlando to Washington, and everyone agreed that things like that only happened to Larry Lavin. But inwardly it hurt. Larry felt that all his hard work over two years had been for naught.

  Word of Larry’s disaster spread unhappily through the small dealing community at Penn. He had become a cottage industry, and his fall was sure to swamp a few lesser entrepreneurs. Larry was performing service much valued by his fellow students. Use of marijuana and hashish was so prevalent on college campuses in 1976 that dealers were like precious resources—they were the ones taking criminal risks so that students could maintain their relatively “safe” one-or two-ounce stashes. At Penn, Larry was trading in such large amounts that he had become dealer to the dealers. He made the most money, but he also took the greatest share of risk.

  To repay his debts and get back on his feet in time to profit during his senior year, Larry knew he would have to take even more chances than before. Few student dealers dared branch their drug sales off campus; in addition to the greater risks involved in getting caught by municipal authorities instead of campus cops, there was a greater chance of getting ripped off, beaten up, or even killed. But Larry was in a hurry. It was through another dealer that Larry was introduced early in his senior year to Tyrone, an uneducated hustler from Southwest Philly who sold marijuana on the streets of his neighborhood. Tyrone was a slight, short, light-skinned heroin addict, who had a hulking bodyguard named Gene who accompanied him at all times. Larry’s new partner, Andy Mainardi, wanted nothing to do with Tyrone and his people. L.A., who was still waiting to face charges in Broward County, Florida, when school began again in September, told Larry he was crazy to risk dealing with Philly blacks. “Think about Marcia,” he said. But Larry felt he could trust Tyrone so long as he treated him honestly. Besides, Larry needed him. Tyrone was the only dealer who seemed able to sell Larry’s spoiled Florida pot. He bought it in small amounts, just five to ten pounds at a time, and always came back for more.

  It was also during this period of desperation that Larry was introduced to an ambitious young South Philly street vendor named Billy Motto.

  Billy was a few years younger than Larry. He was short and fit, a smart, cocky self-made kid from South Philly who always seemed as though he were ready to pounce on something. When he stood he stood straight, balanced like a fighter on the balls of his feet. When he was sitting he would sit straight, leaning slightly forward, with his hands poised to gesture freely while he talked. There were traces of old trouble with acne on Billy’s face, but it just made his good looks more rugged. Billy had dark blond hair and perfect white teeth and piercing green eyes. He liked to wear expensive jogging outfits and jewelry.

  Contrasted with Larry’s easy suburban, prep school, Ivy League background, Billy’s background was rough and remarkable.

  He had grown up on the rough sidewalks and streets of Passyunk Avenue, at the industrial bottom of South Ph
illy. He was smoking dope by the first years of grade school, and by the time he was in the sixth grade he was hooked on heroin.

  Billy would joke sardonically about the hall monitor who banged on the closed bathroom stall door, shouting, “Open up, Motto, I know you’re smoking cigarettes in there!” as Billy had emptied a syringe into a vein of his forearm.

  He was then thirteen years old and he was killing himself. His liver was shot and his skin was pocked and riddled by rampant acne. He weighed only ninety-eight pounds the night his friends drove up to Saint Agnes Hospital on Broad Street, opened a door, rolled him unconscious to the sidewalk, and sped away. Billy had overdosed, and they were afraid to be caught with him.

  Billy recovered from the overdose, and was sent to The Bridge, a drug treatment center, where for the first time in his young life he faced down his self-destructive tendencies. He stayed for fourteen months, gaining weight, having tattoos and needle tracks removed from his arms by plastic surgery, learning the joys of living drug free and forming, for the first time, a measure of self-respect.

  He would later say, “It got me back in touch with life. I started living again and I rediscovered all the things that were beautiful in life, like a pretty girl, like a kiss.”

  He spent the rest of his teenage years in a halfway house away from his old neighborhood. Billy never went back to school. He worked as an assistant in a funeral parlor, and in his off hours he discovered girls. He spent his money going to dances and discos, and discovered that without drugs he was considered handsome and charming. Billy was fastidious to excess about his appearance—he had his teeth cleaned regularly by a dental hygienist, his nails tended by a manicurist, his hair barbered weekly. He worked out at a South Philadelphia gym like a professional athlete, ate healthy foods, and ordered Perrier water at bars. Although drugs and alcohol were a big part of the social scene in South Philly during his teens, Billy never backed off his new, strict regimen.

  Eventually, Billy’s father gave him a ’65 Chevy and made him a partner in the family’s small produce business, which sold wares from four milk crates on the corner of Juniper and Sansom streets in Center City. Billy’s self-assurance and charm came to life on the street corner. He would flirt with the pretty girls who walked by and entertain the customers with his cheerful salesmanship—“Three pounds for a dollar, a quarter will put you in order!” Billy loved being on the streets, and with the low overhead, he and his father made good money. When the cops came by and told them to get moving, Billy would see his Dad slip them a few bucks to let them be. On the side he collected numbers for the illegal lottery and began keeping book on sporting events—something that was common and accepted in his neighborhood.

  Billy loved the produce business. On his own he began to build it into something more. He used his earnings from running numbers to expand, buying additional crates of lettuce and tomatoes and getting up at dawn to hustle them in hoagie shops and restaurants, pushing his business farther and farther west from Center City along Walnut Street. Restaurant owners would look at the cocky kid the first time he came in with a crate of lettuce and tell him to get lost.

  “We have a regular supplier,” they would say.

  “I’ll beat their price,” Billy would say.

  They would tell him again to get lost.

  But that afternoon Billy would come back in, nicely dressed, with a group of his friends. They would order a big meal and leave a big tip. He would keep coming back that way until people took him seriously, and he picked up their business. By the fall of 1976 Billy’s produce route stretched from Center City all the way out to the popular student eateries around Penn.

  It was through friends Billy made around the campus that he started selling pot. A dealer named Hank Katz, whose father owned a popular hoagie shop off campus, fronted Billy five pounds of pot, which Billy quickly sold to friends in South Philly and paid for with a brown bag full of rumpled bills. Then he took ten pounds and sold that. It was so easy! When Billy asked for twenty pounds, Katz said his supplier wouldn’t sell him that much without meeting him first.

  So Billy was introduced to the supplier.

  He met Larry at Andy Mainardi’s apartment on Forty-third Street. The South Philly produce vendor said he wanted to buy twenty pounds, and instead Larry laid out forty pounds of Colombian.

  Larry was clearly the better person to be dealing with.

  “I’m impressed, but I can’t afford that much,” said Billy.

  “I’ll front you,” said Larry.

  “How much?”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five.” That would put Billy in debt to Larry for $14,600.

  “I’ll give you three hundred,” said Billy. “And I only want twenty pounds.”

  Larry grinned. They spoke each other’s language. They eventually compromised at $325 per pound. Billy took thirty pounds.

  He was back within the week with messy bundles of small bills, ones, fives, tens, and twenties all thrown in together in a big brown grocery bag. No one ever paid up that fast.

  “Couldn’t you bring me money a little neater than this?” Larry groaned, but Billy could see that he was impressed.

  “Hey, don’t push your luck,” said Billy.

  After that, Billy continued dealing through Hank at the hoagie shop, but he began selling larger and larger amounts. Larry would have liked to deal with Billy directly, but protocol demanded that the middleman, who had brought Billy into the business, continue to profit.

  But there was instant rapport between the preppie Irish kid and the charming Italian street vendor. In time they dealt with each other directly, on an almost weekly basis. Billy found Larry’s Massachusetts accent as comical as Larry found his thick South Philly patois. Billy could see that this tall, black-haired college kid was as serious a businessman as he was—he had expected some longhair, stoned wifty-eyed. Larry found Billy’s style impressive and was amazed by his trustworthiness and ability to sell. From that first meeting on, whenever Larry sold something directly to Billy, they would begin the same way: Larry would name a price, Billy would make a lower bid, and then they would haggle and laugh until they found a comfortable middle ground. Billy, who felt insecure about his lack of formal education, was flattered to be treated as an equal by a college kid. Larry, who like most suburban youths felt somewhat deprived of hard knocks, got a charge out of dealing with authentic street characters like Tyrone and Billy, but with Billy it was more than that. He liked Billy.

  There were rumors that Billy Motto was “connected,” that he had ties with the city’s legendary organized-crime family. After all, he had an Italian surname, he was from South Philly, and he ran numbers on the street. Billy didn’t go out of his way to dispel this impression. It was good for business. He was feared as someone too dangerous to cross, which helps a business survive on city streets. Billy subtly cultivated this image by employing friends and relatives to accompany him wherever he went. There was menace implied by the quiet, dark, muscular men who stood in the background and took orders from Billy. If you were with Billy and he wanted to order out for pizza, one of his men would promptly run out and get pizza. This was a source of constant amusement to the Penn crowd. He never personally handled the pot. He believed that if he never touched it, it would be a lot harder to get caught dealing it. So Billy would deliver money, haggle over prices and purchase orders, and then he would shake hands and leave. He had this superstition about leaving. After making a deal with Larry, he would always turn back before he left and say, “Tell me it’s going to be okay, Larry.”

  Larry would grin and say, “It’s going to be okay, Billy.”

  Then one of Billy’s boys would come by an hour or two later and pick up the order.

  In his business records, Larry penciled in “Billy South Philly,” which soon became just “B.S.P.” It was to be a fruitful collaboration.

  With the added efforts of Tyrone and Billy South Philly, Larry was back on his feet shortly after his senior year began. He
was soon swinging hundred-pound pot deals again on a regular basis. Tyrone had begun supplying Quaaludes—which were obtained by his neighborhood friends on Medicaid who knew physicians in Southwest Philly who sold them scripts—illegal prescriptions. Larry had one friend who could obtain jars of pharmaceutical cocaine, which was a sort of novelty item in late 1976; Larry began using it on occasion to help him stay awake during class. Sometimes when he was working a pot deal he would be offered an ounce or two of cocaine on the side, which he accepted for his own use and as something to pass out to his friends—like a little bonus for paying up on time. It was fun, but too expensive for most students. Besides, his customers still wanted more pot than he could buy.

  With many of his earlier suppliers now graduated from college, Larry found he was buying most of his pot from Florida. Having personally resolved never to make a Florida run again, Larry needed someone to step in for L.A. For this he offered Andy Mainardi a chance to become a full partner in the growing business.

  It was risky, but Andy trusted and admired Larry. He liked associating with him. Most of the people involved in drug dealing were spacey holdovers from hippie days, but not Larry. Larry was smart and reliable. If he said he was going to meet you someplace, he was there on the dot. Larry was the first person Andy knew to attach an answering machine to his phone, which made it easy to get ahold of him night or day. And Larry was so personable and charming. Andy thought he was a natural salesman, someone whom people instantly liked and trusted. Once, when Andy was still a freshman, he had attended a party at Phi Delta Theta. There must have been a hundred people in the frat house. Larry was out somewhere, and didn’t show up until the party was in full swing. But as soon as Larry came in the door it was like . . . the king had arrived! People just mobbed him. Larry’s personal magnetism was stronger than that of anyone Andy had ever met.