Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  So he felt more insulated than ever from danger precisely when profits had begun to multiply magically. Mark Stewart had plans enough for ten million dollars. Larry was looking at a lifetime of financial security. Options for his own life, where and how he wanted to live, were suddenly thrown wide open. Yet, try as he might, Larry couldn’t imagine any life he would want without Marcia.

  He restarted the car and drove down the hill to the church.

  SIX

  Batten Down the Hatches

  On their honeymoon, Larry and Marcia toured the Hawaiian Islands, staying two days each at a series of resorts, starting with the least populous islands and gradually working their way up to a final blast in Honolulu. On the main island they had a suite at the Mauna Kea, a spectacular hotel with an open plaza surrounded by interior balconies. Enclosed palm trees reached up to the full height of the structure from gardens with cascading fountains and pools that were illuminated at night so guests could watch the manta rays come in to feed on plankton. The giant blue-black rays moved with sweeping glides in a natural underwater ballet. Much to Marcia’s delight, fantastic tropical birds populated the hotel interior. There were no TVs, just the spectacular island scenery, fine restaurants with cornucopian spreads of fish and fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There were expensive shops for clothing and curios. When they returned to their room at night they found the bed strewn with a bounty of fresh blossoms.

  During these weeks Larry hunted up adventures, sometimes dragging Marcia along. They took a helicopter tour of the islands, swooping down alongside the verdant slopes of volcanoes and out over clear aqua bays, and then climbing up at a sharp angle over the rugged green landscape that jutted so suddenly from midocean. Larry was thrilled. Marcia couldn’t wait for the flight to end. On Hilo they drove up Mauna Loa through the clouds until the road was just a mud path through a barren pockmarked landscape of lava and stone. They went on a tour of the macadamia nut factory and a pineapple-canning factory—Larry was always fascinated by the manufacturing process. Larry learned to scuba dive. He begged Marcia to join him, the water below was so clear and the sights so extraordinary, but she was content to go out on the boats and relax in the sun on deck.

  After a week of his urgings, Marcia agreed to give diving a try. Larry assured her that it was much easier than it looked. She went along reluctantly, and it turned into a disaster. All of Larry’s other diving groups had been relaxed and fun. This group was led by a drill sergeant of a diving instructor who seemed more intent on scaring his students than teaching them. To reach the beach where they were to dive, the class had to make a long, hard hike across sand. Marcia slogged along uncomfortably in her diving suit and heavy tank. When they reached water, the instructor offered some last-minute instructions on how to equalize pressure within the mask, offering, as an aside, “If you fail to blow hard enough at that point the pressure can pop the eyeballs right out of your head.”

  Without a word, Marcia removed her mask, turned, and marched back toward the beach. Larry and the others stood knee deep in ocean water and watched her go.

  That night, to make matters worse, Larry got an urgent phone call from Mark Stewart and David Ackerman.

  “Couldn’t this wait?” pleaded Larry.

  Mark said it could not. He wanted to buy the Arena, a dilapidated indoor, six- to seven-thousand-seat sports stadium at Forty-fifth and Market streets, a poor, predominantly black West Philly neighborhood. The place was a wreck.

  “Are you crazy?” said Larry.

  Opened in 1920 as the Philadelphia Auditorium, it had hosted college ice hockey games, basketball games, and cultural events and eventually became one of the premier boxing and wrestling arenas in the country. During the 1950s it was called the Ice Palace, home to the Shipstad and Johnson Ice Follies, the Ice Capades, and an ill-fated professional hockey franchise called the Arrows. But the Arena had long since been supplanted as the city’s premier indoor stadium by the Civic Center, and in more recent years by the large, ultramodern Spectrum. The old Arena in recent years had been home to WHYY, Philadelphia’s public television station. When the TV station built new quarters in the early seventies, it sold the aging structure to a Camden lumber merchant who planned to level it and use the 1.4-acre lot as a storage yard.

  But Mark Stewart had more dramatic plans. They could pick it up for a mere ten thousand dollars down, a 10 percent deposit on a hundred-thousand-dollar down payment. Then they could spend a minor amount on essential renovations and start booking rock concerts and boxing and wrestling matches. Mark said he knew someone who could, perhaps, bring a Continental Basketball Association team to Philadelphia—the CBA being a second-string professional basketball league with teams in small cities. Larry’s investment wizard could scarcely contain his excitement. He had another idea. To make instant friends in the community around the Arena, out of which would come fans for the second-rate sporting events, he had made contacts with the Coretta King Foundation, seeking authorization to rechristen the aging edifice the Martin Luther King, Jr., Arena.

  Larry listened while David chirped his enthusiasm on the other line. David had followed Larry to Mark Stewart and was now, perhaps, even more in Mark’s thrall than Larry. But in the six months Larry had known Mark, he had learned how much air his advisor could blow into a small balloon. He understood how much Mark admired the owners and promoters of Philadelphia’s most successful and glamorous sporting franchises, and who ran the Spectrum and Veterans Stadium. This was exactly the field Mark wanted to break into. The Arena was his chance to play, on a somewhat more modest scale, a sports-world power broker. So Larry knew that much of Mark’s enthusiasm might have to do with his fantasies. After all, Larry had lived in Philly for seven years. He had seen the Arena. It was hard to picture it making money. But with Mark right there on the line, he could hardly explain all that to David.

  “Look, Larry, the guy who owns it will agree to accept a hundred thousand for it up front, and will carry all the paper,” said Mark. “It’s perfect for you.”

  David said that if Larry wasn’t interested, he was going to back the project himself.

  “Can’t we talk about this when I get back?”

  “Got to move on it fast,” said Mark.

  Larry gave in.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “But here’s the thing. I’ll agree to put fifty thousand into it, and if it doesn’t work after that we’re walking away from it.”

  Everyone agreed. After all, fifty thousand was like two weeks’ earnings in the coke business.

  Willie Harcourt met David Ackerman and Ken Weidler because his roommate owed them ten thousand dollars.

  Willie was a big man, easily four inches over six feet tall, with broad, thick shoulders and hips and not a lot of excess weight. He wore his blond hair down over his ears. Willie was from Naperville, Illinois, and although he had spent much of his childhood in southern California, he retained a Corn Belt common sense and conviviality that was especially disarming in someone of his size. He wanted to be a writer, and had always been a serious reader, so even though at age twenty-four he had never managed to stick with college long enough to graduate, he mixed comfortably with the affluent, educated crowds that drank at The Latest Dish, the club where he tended bar. The club was on Fourth Street between South and Bainbridge, in the heart of Philadelphia’s trendiest nighttown district.

  He had arrived in Philadelphia in late 1978 on a motorcycle he rode all the way from Pasadena. He had decided to leave the University of California and seek his fame and fortune in the real world. Without friend or acquaintance in a new city, Willie started in working fifty- to sixty-hour weeks and lived alone in a small apartment near the club.

  After the first year, Willie pooled funds with Michael Linley, a regular customer at The Latest Dish, and leased a much nicer apartment on Third and Fitzwater streets, just down the street from the house rented by David Ackerman. Michael met David, and started getting cocaine from him in 1979, at a time when t
he drug was in short supply and tall demand among denizens of the sexy singles South Street disco scene. There were no sinister, dangerous connotations to cocaine use; it was considered glamorous, exciting, fun, stimulating, and only unlawful in an uptight, technical way. Michael proved to be better at distributing cocaine than collecting for it, and within two months he had accumulated a ten-thousand-dollar debt to David and Ken.

  Willie felt bad for his roommate. He could see that Michael had a problem with cocaine, and that he had gotten himself in over his head. So the big, friendly bartender offered to help Michael collect some of his debts, police his future sales, and ease him back out of the hole. After a few weeks they had begun to make small progress.

  But not enough. One night, despairing of ever seeing Michael’s money, David and Kenny stopped by The Latest Dish and confronted Willie with the problem directly.

  “You owe us ten grand,” said David. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Hold on,” said Willie. “Michael owes you that money, not me.”

  “Michael said you’re his partner.”

  “Did he now?”

  Willie was not really surprised or even alarmed. He had come to enjoy working at the nightclub and had ambitions of eventually opening one himself, but the owners of The Latest Dish had recently been considering splitting up. He knew the place wasn’t going to survive much longer. Willie was a long way away from having the kind of money he would need to open a club of his own. He had gone looking for a job behind the bar at Elan, without success, and was feeling frustrated. His vision of the future had gone blank.

  So Willie was not distressed when these obviously successful cocaine-dealing dental students tapped him for Michael’s debt. He knew that despite the ten grand, David and Ken (whether they meant to or not) were dangling temptation. Willie knew enough about cocaine to know that the product they were selling, and of which they had such an apparently endless supply, was superior to most coke on the streets. For more than a year he had been steering customers to Michael and other dealers from behind the bar. The demand wasn’t just steady, it was clamorous. Judging by Michael’s experience, David and Kenny were not averse to fronting considerable amounts of product. They were not a couple of hoods; they were precisely the opposite: two attractive, popular, exciting young men. Willie liked them both immediately. He could see his own nightclub opening much sooner than he had dreamed.

  So Willie promptly offered to assume Michael’s total debt if they would front him enough cocaine to start earning the money back.

  During the last months of 1979, working from his very visible platform behind the bar, Willie began to even the accounts of his roommate. David and Kenny were impressed. When they offered Willie a chance to pay off the debt more quickly by delivering cocaine to customers in Chicago and Los Angeles, Willie quit his bartending job. By Christmas 1979 he was a full-time runner.

  He was into the business with both feet when he saw his first whole kilo of cocaine. Within a matter of days after starting, he was moving heavy bags of product and tens of thousands of dollars in cash through airports. It happened so fast that he hardly had time to reflect on the extent of the business’s illegality. It was daunting. This was no group of college kids distributing contraband among themselves; this was wholesale criminal enterprise. The profits were magical. Very rapidly, Willie’s dream of owning his own club seemed like a small thing, something he kept in mind to put a brake on his ambitions instead of a distant, only vaguely realistic goal.

  In late January of 1980, after a few successful runs back and forth across the country, Kenny offered Willie a chance to do something even bigger. Ken said that Larry, whom Willie had still not met, had agreed to let him and David begin making their own buys in Florida. In the past, whenever a shipment came up from Florida, Larry selected the kilos he wanted and David and Kenny got whatever was left. Larry’s recruits were eager to branch out on their own, and that meant making their own purchases in Florida. So they needed someone willing to take a large bundle of cash to Miami Beach.

  “How much?” Willie asked.

  “One hundred and sixty-five.”

  Willie agreed. First, though, he had to meet with Larry, who was putting up a substantial portion of the cash. Ken gave Willie the address on Osage A venue.

  Willie was excited and a little nervous about meeting Larry. He knew David and Kenny had the same kind of awe for Larry as he initially had had for them. What kind of a twenty-four-year-old man had the savvy and know-how to set up a million-dollar illegal business while attending college and dental school? Willie had found the challenge of college alone frustrating. He pictured Larry as someone like David, only more so, someone commanding, very caught up in the moment, very intense.

  Instead he found himself seated across the room from this very ordinary, easygoing fellow his own age, dressed in a Lacoste sportshirt and blue jeans and white Adidas track shoes with green stripes—the boy next door! Larry was not at all like David. Where David liked people to know immediately that he was the boss, Larry was laid-back, joking, unassuming. He treated Willie as an equal. Sensing that the big bartender was nervous about the trip, Larry joked about it and tried to put him at ease. He explained exactly whom Willie would be meeting, and where, and outlined step by step what would be expected of him in Miami.

  “When you get to Florida, walk out of the airport and there will be a gray Cadillac with a guy sitting in it who has a beard, with dark hair,” said Larry. “His name is Lester. Just get in the car and he’ll take it from there.”

  Willie would be taking the money down, meeting Lester and another runner, Larry’s friend Dick Muldair, a tall, skinny Penn student who had met Larry a few years earlier and had begun making runs for him. Muldair would be bringing back Larry’s two kilos. Willie would be bringing one kilo—David and Kenny’s—home on the plane.

  Back at his apartment on South Street, Willie waited for the rest of the cash. Kenny brought it in a Glad trash bag. Willie had never seen so much money before.

  “Now, what do I do with this?” he asked.

  “Just stick it in a bag, throw it through the X-ray machine, and get on the plane,” said Kenny. “No sweat.”

  “Great,” said Willie. “Nothing like a professional setup.”

  Ken said it would be wise to mix the cash bundles in with clothes and things in a bag so that it wouldn’t be too obvious when it went through security. When Ken left, Willie got out a handbag he could carry on the plane and mixed the bundles in with socks and balled-up shirts and underwear, trying to blend them in as well as he could. At the airport, watching the screen of the X-ray machine as the bag went through, he felt a tug of nausea. The cash blocks were plainly visible. But the bag passed through without notice, and he boarded the plane. When they were airborne he ordered a double vodka. His hands were shaking.

  In Miami, as he exited the airport, his heart sank. There was not one Cadillac waiting, but about eighteen! There was a row of Caddies, Mercedeses, and BMWs. To Willie it looked like Drug Central. He managed to find Lester, even though he had shaved his beard. Willie just went down the line of cars, stopping at Cadillacs to peer down and ask, “Are you Lester?” until one said yes and let him in. He prayed he had the right Lester.

  Lester sat in the back seat with a bodyguard. Willie sat in the passenger seat in front, and the driver took them to Coconut Grove, to an apartment building right on the bay. Lester had a clothing business on the side, making jeans for the Dominican Republic, so he told Willie about his business on their way up to the apartment and asked for his size. Muldair was already there. He and Lester set Willie up in the bedroom with a drink in front of the TV and asked him to wait. A short while later, Muldair came back in and handed Willie a plastic bag of off-white cocaine.

  “Here’s your kilo,” he said. Muldair described some of the cocaine’s characteristics to Willie, pointing out that its rock content was over 50 percent and taking out a melt box to demonstrate how to test fo
r cut. He showed Willie how to wrap the cocaine in baking soda to cloak its faint odor in case police dogs came sniffing. Lester came in and gave Willie several pairs of jeans, which would do a better job of shielding the contents in the X-ray machine than his shirts and underwear. Then Lester rode back to the airport with Willie and watched him through the security checkpoint.

  Willie was back in Philadelphia that night. He delivered the kilo to David’s apartment. Then they drove to another apartment where they broke down the contents into rocks and shake, pressed rocks, and packaged the amounts for David’s customers. Willie was paid five hundred dollars for his efforts. David was clearly delighted with how smoothly things had gone.

  “We want you to go again next week,” he said.

  By summer, Willie was making three trips to Florida every month, bringing back four to six kilos at a time. He got used to walking into motel rooms alone with a quarter of a million dollars in cash in his suitcase to meet total strangers, typically Cubans, who sometimes did things like point automatic weapons at him. It occurred to Willie fairly early on that he was the one taking all the risks. David and Kenny and Larry were the ones getting rich.

  But then, by this time he was being paid a lot more. Where else was he going to earn almost ten grand, tax free, every month?