by Mark Bowden
When Willie got back to Philadelphia he called Larry and said, “I will never work with this guy again. He’s going to get himself and the rest of us busted.”
Larry explained that he had to keep using Glen. Glen owed him money. “If you won’t work with him, you’re cutting yourself out of thousands of extra dollars every month,” Larry said.
“It’s not worth it,” said Willie. “Count me out.”
Willie was not the only one who wanted nothing to do with Glen. Kenny and David and most of Larry’s friends thought Fuller had some kind of death wish.
Oh, he was the life of the party when Larry and his friends all went out drinking or snorting together. Like when Larry threw a bachelor party for one of his friends at the Sheraton, the same room where Larry’s bachelor party had been staged. Larry wanted Glen there, so Glen chartered a plane from Boston with Larry’s brother Rusty. There was an especially attractive young blond hooker with green eyes and a rose tattoo over her left breast who stripped to her high heels and, loaded on bourbon and Quaaludes, orchestrated a group of the boys in a circle-jerk. Rusty kicked off the festivities by inserting cherries up the woman’s vagina and eating them out, accompanied by cheers and laughter. Later on, she jumped up to dance on a glass coffee table, which shattered, depositing her naked rump on the heap of broken glass. She didn’t feel a thing, just jumped up and kept on dancing. Larry and L.A. steered her, despite her protests, into the bathroom, and working with a first-aid kit they had summoned from the front desk, patched her up as best they could . . . Glen fit right in on those occasions.
But not always. One night after flying thirteen and a half kilos to Philadelphia in his carry-on luggage, Glen checked into the Bellevue Stratford Hotel and got dressed up for dinner. Larry and Marcia and Andy Mainardi and his wife were having dinner in one of the fine restaurants downstairs, so Glen assumed they had come to dine with him. He joined them at the table, and everyone was very pleasant until Andy asked Glen to speak with him privately. They walked away from the table and Andy whispered, “You’re not invited. This is a private party.”
Despite affronts like this, Glen had hopes of eventually taking over the business from Larry, or at least the New England branch. He knew that Marcia was pressuring Larry to get out, and that Larry had a lot of “legitimate” investments going. He had talked to Larry about taking over most of the business and just continuing to pay him a straight percentage for a few years. He knew he had competition. David Ackerman coveted Larry’s longtime, big customers—Larry’s did ten times the volume of anyone else, and he was the only one who had made millions. But Glen figured his year and a half of hard, risky work and his long friendship with Larry gave him an edge.
That was where things stood on Thursday, November 13, 1980, when Glen arrived in Philadelphia from Florida with ten kilos and checked into an apartment he had begun renting on the eighteenth floor of a building at Thirtieth and Chestnut streets. Glen got home early in the afternoon, after driving straight through twenty-four hours from Florida. Larry came over to help with the break.
They used two big aluminum bowls, first separating out the rocks from the shake, then blending inositol and lidocaine, spraying the mix with methanol and pressing that into rocks, then drying the rocks and packaging all the separate orders. It was hard work, lasting until well past midnight. By the time it was done Larry and Glen were coated with white powder from head to toe, numbing their eyes and lips and noses, dizzying them. A fine dust of cocaine lay over the walls and floor and furniture. While they worked that evening, Larry and Glen talked about going fifty-fifty on the business, and Glen said he was ready to start whenever Larry wanted. Larry had promised Marcia to stop by Christmas, he said, so they would talk about it again before then.
It was past two in the morning on Friday when they finished the break. Larry wanted Glen to get a good night’s sleep and head up to Haverhill in the morning to deliver cocaine and cash to his customers there. But Glen was too wired to sleep. He and his friend Doug, who had come by to help, decided to leave right away. Glen filled a blue Samsonite suitcase that had belonged to Marcia with money. He preferred not to carry cocaine in anything unlocked because an open container could more easily be searched without a warrant, so he asked to use Larry’s briefcase to carry the cocaine north. Larry needed the case to carry his cash.
“If you have to go now, just use a cardboard box,” said Larry. “We’ll tape it up real tight.”
“No way,” said Glen. “I’m not taking a box home.”
But Larry was the boss, and he insisted. They packed two and a half kilos in the box and Glen carried it reluctantly down to the trunk of his car.
Glen was weary of driving. He took two Quaaludes and, stretching out on the backseat of the Cutlass Larry had recently bought for these long drives, told his friend to set the cruise control on 63 MPH. There had been a lot of busts along the New Jersey Turnpike lately. Once underway, Glen dozed.
He was awakened by the sound of a police siren. He opened his eyes and saw flashing red lights.
“Fuck!” he said.
Two New Jersey state troopers approached the car, asked to see the auto registration, and after looking it over asked Doug and Glen to step out of the car.
“I’m in my bare feet,” said Glen. “Can I put my shoes on?”
They stood alongside the car as the troopers looked inside. One of the troopers found the remains of a joint on the floor under the front seat.
He approached Glen with a clipboard.
“We’ve got a consent form here for searching the trunk, but whether you sign it or not, we’re going to search it.”
He took the keys and opened the trunk. The other trooper stepped back to watch.
Glen saw his chance.
“Douggie, let’s hit it!” The two jumped back in the car. Glen had a spare key in his hand. He jammed it into the ignition, but before he could start the motor, one of the troopers grabbed Doug and pulled him out the passenger door. Doug and the trooper tumbled together down the embankment. The other trooper lunged at Glen from the driver’s side, pushing him over and poking a revolver in his ear.
“Don’t you fuckin’ move!” he screamed.
Larry got a call before dawn from his brother Rusty.
He said, “Glen got busted.”
And Larry felt again the sinking feeling he had experienced on getting the news about L.A., about Andy, and about Dick Muldair. This was the worst yet. Rusty told him that Glen and his friend Doug had struggled with the state troopers, and that one of the troopers had broken his wrist. So there would be assault charges, resisting arrest . . . the works.
No one associated with Larry had gotten into such serious trouble. Andy had gotten off, L.A. and Muldair had gotten only ninety days. But this was bad. Larry knew the ten pounds of cocaine was enough to send Glen away to prison for years. That was a lot of pressure—what if Glen decided to cooperate?
No. Larry knew that of all his friends, Glen would be least likely to do that.
“I’ll get him a lawyer,” Larry said. “If you talk to him, tell him to hang on. I’ll take care of him. We’ll have him out as soon as we can.”
Over the next two days, Larry put up $200,000 in bail for Glen and Doug. Then there was $50,000 to retain the services of one of the top drug lawyers in the country, a Washington, D.C., attorney allied with NORML (National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws). The ten pounds of cocaine Glen had been carrying represented a lost $224,000 in profits. The car, which had been seized, ran another $10,000. It pained Larry to see those figures lopped off his running profits column on his books. In his gut, it didn’t matter that he was two million or more ahead of where he had started. Once a certain level was reached, Larry experienced any new setback as pure loss. Glen’s bust was the largest single loss of Larry’s dealing career.
Heat seemed to be coming from all sides. It had been a terrible year, one trauma after another—the robbery, Paula Van Horn, Ralph, the r
iot at the Arena, the police raid . . . now this!
Marcia was right. It was definitely time to cool it. But first he would have to recover that half million dollars.
In early 1980, Larry’s childhood friend from Haverhill, his old drinking and doping buddy, Ricky Baratt, was back living at home in Plaistow, New Hampshire. Still nervous and chubby and insecure, Ricky had done a lot of drifting in the years since he and Larry had spent aimless summer evenings roaming the back roads of Haverhill getting high and drinking beer. He had gotten thrown out of Lawrenceville School for stealing a keg of beer from the back porch of The Rusty Scupper, a bar and restaurant in Princeton. He had tried to study music seriously, playing the saxophone at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but instead of studying and going to class he got stoned or drunk every day and just sat around jamming with friends. Marijuana made Ricky lazy and apathetic, but he craved it.
After dropping out of Berklee and hanging around home awhile, he had made another big effort to straighten out, enrolling at the University of New Hampshire and signing up for a rigorous regimen of advanced math and science courses. Ricky felt that the sheer size of the challenge might force him to rise to the occasion. Instead, he fell behind so quickly that he spent months just sitting in class listening blankly, having done no reading, taking no notes, just going through the motions, listening to lectures he didn’t understand. Finally he flunked out. He was an embarrassment to his successful family, although his father the doctor was ever-patient and encouraging.
To escape his failures and start fresh, Ricky loaded up his belongings in the old family Volvo his father had given him and, towing an old Volkswagen he meant to repair and sell, drove to New Orleans, where he worked fixing cars and playing his saxophone in a band. That lasted until the band broke up. Through a series of part-time jobs, Ricky drank so much he began to scare himself. Back to Plaistow he drove, still towing the Volkswagen, the black Volvo a few years more battered, and moved back in with his parents. His father found him work as a bookkeeper for his uncle, and Ricky applied for a job at the Western Electric plant in North Andover. A friend of his parents’ helped find Ricky a job at the huge plant, which had just been taken over by AT&T. He ran a giant copy machine for six months, earning ten thousand dollars a year, and took an in-house electronics course. In the fall of 1980 he passed a test and qualified for an upgrade. By late spring, Ricky was a quality control inspector, testing electronic components and making eighteen thousand a year. He bought himself a Harley motorcycle and began, for the first time in years, to feel self-sufficient and whole.
That was when he ran into Larry again. His old friend was visiting his parents in Haverhill, and Larry stopped over to say hello, driving a brand-new black Volvo. It was the same kind of car Ricky drove, only five years and some sixty thousand miles newer. Ricky’s parents had heard stories about Larry from the Lavins. Justin and Pauline were so proud of their youngest son. He was doing well in dental school and had somehow managed to make money playing the stock market. He had bought into a record company and a sports arena in Philadelphia . . . he was into so many different things, just exactly the way he had been as a boy! Only, who would have ever thought he would amount to so much, so fast!
It was the same old story for Ricky, only more severe. He was the weak, undisciplined, troubled one; Larry was the dynamic achiever, so outgoing, so pleasant, so successful. Only, just as he had as a teen, Ricky knew things about Larry that the adults didn’t know.
On that trip, Larry sold Ricky three grams of cocaine for $225.
“I could have bought another new Volvo with what I made selling this just last night,” Larry said.
They got to talking, and Ricky said he knew someone, a friend who owned a bar, who would probably be willing to buy up to an ounce at a time.
“No problem,” said Larry.
Before Larry left for Philadelphia, he agreed to send Ricky an ounce of cocaine, to get him started.
A Federal Express truck pulled up in front of the house two days later. Inside the package were several cassette tape cases, each filled with tiny, one-gram vials of cocaine—twenty-eight of them. Ricky took the vials to a friend who he thought might be interested, but his friend did not know how to test the drug and distrusted the quality of coke from an unknown source packaged in such an unorthodox way. So Ricky was stuck with trying to sell the grams one by one, which made him nervous because that meant he had to deal with twenty-eight different people. Soon that number was reduced because Ricky had started snorting the supply, which meant there was even more pressure to make the sales. Now he owed Larry more than sixteen hundred dollars. He sold some of the grams, snorted most of them, and ended up sending Larry several hundred dollars from his own meager savings.
He confessed his loss to Larry, and told him it would have worked out better if the coke had arrived in one bag.
“No problem,” said Larry.
The next day another Federal Express truck pulled up in front of the house. This time the delivery man brought a box to the door. Inside were not one, but eight one-ounce glass vials of cocaine! Ricky did some quick figuring. It was worth $16,800! Ricky was dumbfounded, and excited. Along with the shipment came instructions on how to demonstrate the product’s quality.
He took one of the ounces over to his friend at the bar and immediately made a sale—earning back the several hundred he had lost. But over the next few weeks, Ricky snorted much of the remaining shipment and had trouble collecting money from friends to whom he had fronted the stuff. No problem, Larry just shipped him more. Larry joked that he liked his people to be in debt; it forced them to keep coming back. Following Larry’s lead, Ricky fronted more ounces to friends and kept a running record of what he was owed. Soon larger shipments were arriving via Larry’s own couriers, first Glen Fuller, later a mutual local acquaintance named Brian Riley, who was working for Larry’s sister—Larry was also sending regular shipments to his brother Rusty and to Jill. Ricky would arrange his schedule at AT&T to make sure he was home when a delivery was due. Within a matter of months, Ricky was carrying thousands of dollars in his pockets, great wads of tens and twenties that he would spend time exchanging at banks for neat stacks of hundreds. With that much money in his pocket, he couldn’t resist buying drinks for his friends, eating out . . . pissing it away. He paid off his Harley and replaced the old Volvo with a sleek new Mazda Rx-7. He moved out of his parents’ house into an expensive apartment in Boston where he had his own garage that opened when he inserted a plastic card in a slot out front.
But it was all an illusion. Right from the beginning, Ricky lacked whatever facility Larry possessed for coming out ahead. His debit column started larger than his assets column and just grew continually. Between bad debts and his own growing cocaine habit, he kept falling farther and farther behind, $5,000 . . . $10,000 . . . $15,000 . . . $20,000. . . . Ricky would lie awake nights worrying how he was ever going to recover all that he owed, imagining that Philadelphia hoods were going to show up at his door and break his legs. Unable to sleep, he would snort more cocaine, which would elevate his spirits temporarily but leave him still deeper in debt and even more frightened. He clung to his job at AT&T as the one real positive thing in his life. He just banked that paycheck every week. That was his money, which he kept separate from the cocaine dealings. He worried most that eventually Larry would want that.
These fears were all in Ricky’s head, because Larry never even seemed concerned. The most he would do, over the phone, was get Ricky to run down his list of customers and check to make sure that the deliveries were being distributed and followed up on regularly. Larry seemed mostly concerned that Ricky wasn’t making any money for himself, not that he was late in making payments. After talking to Larry, Ricky would feel better for a few days. He would follow up on Larry’s suggestions; he would move the next shipment of cocaine, collect some money, and send it to Philly. But then a week would go by and the fears would sprout up again. The debt kept mounting
. . . $25,000 . . . $30,000.
Larry would say, “No problem.” He was just trying to do an old friend a favor, cut him in.
Ricky kept doing more and more cocaine. His debt kept mounting. His nightmares grew worse.
Back in Philadelphia, Ricky’s plight was nothing more than a few petty entries on a long balance sheet. Business continued to grow unabated after Glen Fuller’s bust in New Jersey.
No one was less surprised than big Willie Harcourt when Glen got busted. Willie felt vindicated. He had taken a substantial cut in earnings by refusing to have anything to do with Glen. Now Larry needed him again, adding more weight to the bags he was regularly delivering north for David and Ken. It had been nearly a year since he started making runs to Florida, and he knew what was going on down there better than Larry, Ken, David, or anyone else in Philadelphia.
So it bugged him to take orders from these dental students. Larry or Ken would get a long-distance call from someone like Miguel, who would say that he had a large quantity for sale if they could get someone down to Fort Lauderdale quickly. So they would call Willie and ask him to drop everything.
Once, earlier in the year, he had just come back from California after a week on the road. He had been at his girlfriend’s apartment only a half hour when Larry called.
“I need you to head to Miami. Miguel’s got something.”
“Larry. It’s nine-thirty at night in Miami. Can’t it wait until morning? I’ll fly down first thing.”
“No. Miguel has to see you tonight or the kilos are going to be sold. And he says he’s got one that’s really spectacular.”
“Larry, he’s full of shit. He’s lying to you.”
Larry, in that maddeningly cheerful way of his, just said, “Willie, get on your traveling shoes.”
So Willie had to say goodbye to his girlfriend and hustle out to Larry’s house in Willings Alley. There wasn’t enough time to pack the money, so they just stuffed bundles in Willie’s jacket and cowboy boots and pants pockets. Larry had called and asked the airline to hold the plane, and Willie arrived on the concourse at a dead run. As he was getting off the plane in Miami, the bundles of money were evident in all his pockets. As he stood in the aisle, waiting for the passengers to file off the plane, a voice behind him said, “I don’t know about all you, but I’m following the big guy!”