Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  And Larry Lavin’s business, which had come a long way from a few big sacks of pot, was about to enter the big leagues.

  SEVEN

  Maybe You’ll See Smoke

  Suzanne Norimatsu had fallen for David Ackerman the first time she saw him, four years ago, in the spring of 1976. She and her friend Christine Pietrucha were working as waitresses at La Crepe, one of the finer of Philadelphia’s new, trendy Center City restaurants. Suzanne was tall and willowy, with straight brown hair and big brown eyes. She was twenty years old. Her father was Japanese and her mother was of European ancestry, and in Suzanne the mix had produced just a whisper of Asian influence, enough to give her features an exotic cast. Christine was pretty and blond and possessed of a cheerful wit and sweet naiveté.

  This small, well-dressed, strikingly handsome young man came and sat at one of Suzanne’s tables. After dinner, he left a tip and a note on a cocktail napkin.

  “Suzanne: If you would like to do something with me next week, please call me at this number,” the note said, and then David had written out his phone number. Beneath, in what appeared to be an afterthought, “If you are one who prefers to be called, please write and give me your phone number.” Underneath that he had written his name and address.

  Suzanne showed the note to her friend.

  “He’s cute,” said Christine. “If you don’t write to him, I will.”

  So Suzanne wrote. Within days, David called. They went out together to see the movie All the President’s Men. By the end of June they were living together on Forty-first Street near Penn’s campus. David was in his second year of premed. Originally he told Suzanne he was a math major. When she discovered, through one of David’s friends, that he was in premed, she was more curious than angry.

  “Why would you lie about a thing like that?” she asked.

  He told her, “There are a lot of women at Penn who like to hit on premed students.”

  The first time David ever used cocaine—Suzanne would later have reason to remember it—was on the Fourth of July that year. Soon after Suzanne moved in with him they had a discussion about their drug histories. David said that he had smoked a lot of pot in high school but that he had quit. Suzanne said she occasionally liked to smoke a joint, but that she didn’t think it was that great. “But I like cocaine,” she said.

  “I never had that,” said David.

  “You’ve never had cocaine?” said Suzanne, surprised.

  “No. Never.”

  “I’ve had it at parties once or twice. It’s fun.”

  On the Fourth of July, David showed up with some. It had cost him a hundred dollars for a gram. They snorted it.

  “What am I supposed to feel?” asked David.

  “Like a rush,” said Suzanne. “A rush of energy.”

  “Do you feel something? Is it any good?”

  “I feel it.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” David said, disappointed.

  “I’ve heard that sometimes people don’t feel anything the first time,” said Suzanne.

  David was skeptical. The next time was on Suzanne’s birthday, January 21, 1977. David took her out to dinner and on the way home he produced a small vial.

  “Look what I got for you!” he said.

  That time they both liked it.

  It was too expensive to be a regular thing. Cocaine was like a special treat between them over the next two years. They broke up in the summer of 1978, the summer after David’s first year of dental school. David decided that he wanted to see other girls. It hit Suzanne hard. She lived at home for a few months and then went to Europe.

  More than two years later, Suzanne was back working as a wait-ress, living in a house on Pine Street that Christine shared with her boyfriend. David called one day and said that he owed Suzanne three hundred dollars.

  “If you owed me three hundred dollars, I’d remember,” she said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Don’t you remember? We went to Paradise Island and I put it on my American Express card. And later, I couldn’t pay it on time so I borrowed the money from you.”

  Suzanne remembered. “Well, it’s been so long,” she said. “I appreciate your calling, but don’t worry about it.”

  “No,” said David. “You don’t understand. I’ve got the money.”

  “You do?”

  “And I’d really like to pay you because I don’t like to owe anybody.”

  David gave Suzanne his address on Fitzwater Street, and she stopped by. He was living with Gina, the girl he had met on the trip to Glen Fuller’s house in Aspen in March of 1979. David asked Suzanne if she would befriend Gina, who was from Vermont and knew no one in Philadelphia. Suzanne felt awkward about it, but said that she would try. Then David told her that he was selling coke, and making a lot of money. He remembered that Suzanne had always liked cocaine and asked if she would consider working for him.

  Suzanne said she would think about it. Over Christmastime at the end of 1980, Suzanne and Christine took Gina on shopping trips, and they all went out together for dinner with David. Then one night just before New Year’s, David took Suzanne out to dinner alone. He told Suzanne about Larry, the guy who had started the business and made millions. Now Larry was hot, he said. The cops were watching him all the time and his phone was probably tapped. He wanted to turn the business over to David and his friend Ken Weidler, but the volume was ten times what David and Kenny were used to handling on their own.

  “What do you want me to do?” Suzanne asked.

  “Keep the books. Meet with people. I’ll set you up in a nice apartment.”

  “Who will I be dealing with?”

  “Mostly my friends. Everyone is very nice. You’ll like them. If you don’t like them, you won’t have to deal with them. Just give it a chance.”

  Suzanne pondered this silently.

  “We need someone we can trust,” David said. He was ready to pay her fifteen hundred a week.

  Suzanne almost fainted. She was earning, on a good week, less than two hundred dollars, and paying Christine sixty per month to rent a room. Besides that, she still had a yearning for David, who, if anything, had gotten better looking in the last two years, she thought. When they had broken up, it was because David was paying no attention to her. He seemed more interested in other women. Now the situation had reversed. David was living with Gina and lavishing attention on Suzanne! Right now it was ostensibly because he needed her to come to work for him, but Suzanne sensed that there was more to it than that. Throw into the bargain the attraction of making a lot of money and having access to a lot of cocaine, and it didn’t take long for Suzanne to make up her mind.

  David moved Suzanne into a beautiful loft apartment in Saint Charles Court, across the street from the old Hoop Skirt Factory at Third and Arch streets, in Old City, a newly fashionable neighborhood just blocks north of Philadelphia’s historic shrines, where old warehouses and factories were being rehabbed into loft apartments and condos. It was early in January 1981.

  For Suzanne, it was total immersion. Right away there was traffic in and out of her apartment at all hours of the day and night. David brought in a safe, and more money and cocaine than Suzanne had ever seen. Suzanne’s place became the headquarters for the business, and it seemed that David was there twenty-four hours a day. When he wasn’t there he was on the phone, calling to find out whether so-and-so had stopped by, whether the money was ready, whether a shipment had come in. . . . Suzanne was challenged and flattered by her job: to be trusted with more than a million dollars—and with so much cocaine! She had never finished college and was used to being considered pretty, but dumb. David made her feel smart and capable. She prided herself on keeping accurate books, and on making things work smoothly. It was the most interesting job she had ever had. Cocaine admitted her to a heady, exciting life. She used a lot of it, until her daily schedule stood on its head—she was up all night and slept every day until midafternoon. It was alternately exhilarating and ex
hausting. And, much to Suzanne’s surprise, she did like everyone. The young men who stopped by to exchange money for cocaine were well dressed, educated, well mannered; they had interesting jobs; they were successful, attractive young men, the kind of young men she and Christine used to admire from a distance at La Crepe.

  It didn’t take long for Christine to realize what Suzanne was up to, and within weeks David had hired her to help out as well. He got Christine an apartment in the Hoop Skirt Factory Building across the street from Suzanne and installed a safe there. That way, the money and the cocaine were never stored in the same place. Christine’s job was to run errands for David and Suzanne, to take out laundry, buy groceries, clean house, make sure the rents were paid on all the apartments (David rented three in the Hoop Skirt Factory Building and two in Saint Charles Court; the empty ones were for the breaks). Christine was paid five hundred dollars a week.

  Suzanne was making almost four times that much. She was making so much money she felt guilty. David paid her a commission on every kilo that was sold. She had no living expenses apart from clothing; her rent and food were paid. She was too busy to do much of anything else. So her money just kept mounting on a running tab David kept in one column in the books alongside his own profit column. Because Suzanne was notoriously bad at handling her own money, David called the column “Suzanne’s Enforced Savings Program.” She told David she wanted to use some of it to start a free breakfast program for bums on the street. He laughed.

  So Suzanne found impulsive ways to spend. She filled the apartment with fresh flowers every week. She bought herself expensive clothes. On a weekend in New York City in 1980, before she was contacted by David, she had passed on the street an art gallery that had an oversized, framed poster of Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol, one of a series of nine signed by both Warhol and Jagger. It was about three feet wide and four feet tall. Suzanne had this thing about the Rolling Stones. She had coveted that poster ever since. So when David sent her to New York to deliver some cocaine in late January, Suzanne made the delivery, collected thirty thousand in cash, and then steered across Manhattan in the big blue Cutlass with California plates that belonged to the business, heading straight for the gallery.

  Making her way across town in heavy traffic, Suzanne was startled at one intersection by a big cop waving at her insistently. She trembled with panic as she rolled down the window.

  “How’s the surfing?” the cop asked cheerfully.

  At first Suzanne blanked on the question. It was winter. What was he talking about?

  “I said, how’s the surfing?” asked the cop.

  Then she remembered that the car had California plates. She grinned.

  “Oh, fine, just fine! I love to surf!” she said.

  At the gallery, Suzanne did not see the poster displayed, so she went inside and asked to see it. The salesman frowned, but led her to a room in the gallery where they had six of the series on display. She pointed to the one she had seen in the window.

  “Can I have it?” Suzanne said.

  “How are you going to pay for it?” asked the salesman, in a way that Suzanne interpreted as scorn, as if he were saying, “This isn’t a poster shop, little girl.”

  “With cash,” she said.

  “Oh! I’ll get the manager,” he said.

  It cost fifteen hundred dollars. They wrapped it and waited for her to bring the car around to the front of the gallery. Then they carried it out and angled it into the back seat.

  When she got back to Philadelphia, she lugged the big brown package into the apartment house and up the steps. David was in the apartment with Mark Taplar and Danny Schneps, two young men David had recently recruited to help in different phases of the business.

  “Come here, guys,” Suzanne said excitedly. “Look what I got!”

  They crowded around, and oohed appreciatively when she unwrapped it.

  “I’m proud of you,” said David. “You took your money and made a wise investment.”

  “You should lock it up someplace,” suggested Taplar. “You’ll be able to sell it for three times what you paid for it in a few years.”

  “But I didn’t buy it to sell it again,” she protested. “I bought it because I like it!”

  It went up in her bedroom.

  To Suzanne, Larry Lavin was a mysterious figure in the background, a voice on the phone, a person whom David obviously admired, respected, and even feared—in the sense that if he didn’t please Larry he might lose control of the business. David wanted Larry to stay away for two good reasons. The first was that everyone considered Larry to be hot. After the raid on his house and Glen Fuller’s bust in November (Glen was now free on bail and his lawyers were preparing such a blizzard of motions that he would not be convicted and sentenced in New Jersey until 1984), David and Kenny were certain that Larry was being watched. Second, David saw his opportunity to move in. After Glen Fuller’s bust in November, Larry had agreed to turn over half of his business to David and Ken. They would be responsible for all of the actual details of running the business, while Larry would continue to collect half of the profits on sales to his own customers—who represented a far, far bigger monthly purchase than Ken and David’s previous business.

  After only a month of working with this arrangement, Ken had begun to back off. His classwork at dental school was suffering so badly that a concerned faculty member had pulled him aside to warn that if his work didn’t dramatically improve, he wouldn’t be graduating with the rest of the class in spring. He was having serious problems with his longtime girlfriend as a result of his habitual cocaine use and enjoyment of its sexual spoils—Ken and David were irresistibly attractive to the pretty girls of Philadelphia’s nightworld who loved cocaine. For Ken, the deciding factor came in December. He had shipped two ounces of cocaine to a friend in California via Federal Express, and somewhere along the way the package got opened. As a joke, Ken had put on the package the return address of a dental school classmate who lived in his apartment building. About a week after the package was mailed, DEA agents kicked in his classmate’s door. As it happened, the classmate was out of town, in Florida for Christmas vacation. So David and Kenny had to set up a vigil outside the apartment building, taking turns on the lookout in a car parked up the street, in hopes of intercepting their classmate before he returned to his apartment. They were certain that agents were waiting inside for the guy to come home, and they were afraid that the classmate, who knew about their dealing, would turn them in to the DEA if the agents got to him first.

  They waited five or six nights, rotating, staying up all night. Finally they spotted him as he drove up at the end of the week. They intercepted him, explained what happened, and begged him to keep his mouth shut. The classmate agreed, but in coming weeks he began having terrifying nightmares about being implicated in Ken and David’s drug dealing. He complained to Ken that he couldn’t sleep without having visions of armed men breaking down his door in the middle of the night and opening fire. Partly to reassure the guy, and partly to reassure himself, Ken moved out. The incident sobered him. It brought him face-to-face with the risks he was taking, with how he was wasting his years in dental school, with the relationship he was throwing away. So he abruptly stepped back from the business, leaving David with all the work and, ultimately, with the lion’s share of the profits.

  On the other hand, David was like one possessed. When his lack of effort and interest in dental school began to affect his progress, he simply left school. All of his considerable charm, hard intellectual gifts, and inexhaustible energy were focused on one thing: making his million. The way David saw it, he could take his maximum risks and make his million in one year, then turn the business over to Willie Harcourt and become, like Larry, a rich, silent partner, removed enough from the business to be safe. That was the plan.

  All Larry had to do was stay out of the way.

  But Larry couldn’t stay out of the way. He enjoyed being in charge, and he was smart enough to see that
David, left alone, was rapidly making the cocaine business his own.

  Larry’s initial worries after Glen’s bust had abated. After talking to Glen and to Glen’s lawyers, he now knew that the New Jersey case, no matter how threatening to Glen, was unlikely to ever touch him. Larry regarded—(incorrectly)—the search of his home in Society Hill to have been an isolated event, stemming only from the arrest of the Vietnam veteran in New Jersey. And when nothing further came of it, he no longer felt particularly worried, especially now that David was building such an elaborate system to isolate him from cash and cocaine. Larry felt like chairman of the board. Marcia had stopped bugging him because, by all appearances, he had gotten out of the business. He no longer had to personally recruit runners, keep the books, count and launder cash, break down and package cocaine. In other words, by early 1981 Larry was comparatively free to devote himself to Marcia and to completing dental school, and he was still reaping huge profits from the sale of cocaine.

  His two- to four-kilo-per-month operation of 1979 was now regularly shipping twenty kilos per month from Florida to Philly. The business was generating nearly four hundred thousand in profits every month! Since they were now dealing exclusively with Paco and Pepe in Miami, they were assured of a constant, safe supply of 95 to 98 percent pure Colombian cocaine.

  Suzanne was not privy at first to all of these subtleties. All she could see was that Larry, whom she had never met, was the architect of this incredible moneymaking system, and that he held David in a kind of thrall. Larry was at once David’s hero and someone whom he feared. David was forever worrying that Larry was going to object to the way things were being handled and just step in and take it all back.

  Since Suzanne considered David to be the most brilliant, most commanding personality she had ever met, she could only assume that this fellow Larry Lavin was like David, only more so—if that was possible. She pictured Larry as a kind of superman, a fearless, dynamic, authoritative criminal genius.