by Mark Bowden
A short while later, Conlin called back to explain, apologetically, that his wife had, in his absence, made an agreement with another buyer. There was nothing he could do.
Larry was angry. He said he had called a lawyer, which wasn’t true, but then Larry had learned a thing or two about playing real estate hardball from his involvement in the Barclay Building fiasco, and he told Conlin that he was prepared to go to court: if necessary. It was nearly midnight.
“Look, we’ll give you anything you want for the house,” Larry said. “My wife is crying. She had just assumed that would be her house.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Conlin.
“Do they have a mortgage contingency clause in their offer?” asked Larry.
They did.
“Then you can back out of it,” Larry said. “Because I am making you an offer with no contingency.”
When Conlin continued to hedge, Larry turned threatening.
“If you don’t agree, then I’m going to put a lien on the house nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said. “I believe I had an oral agreement with you. I’ll tell my lawyer to prepare the papers right now.”
Larry knew that the Conlins were planning to move soon.
“The lien will be there for at least ninety days,” Larry said. “Even if my claim is turned down, it will drag on past your moving day. You won’t have the money to buy your new home.”
The next day the Conlins agreed to scuttle the earlier agreement and sell the house to Larry and Marcia for $219,000. Larry had them over a barrel.
At the settlement a few weeks later, Larry was warm and personable, as if nothing had happened. The sellers and their agent, who had lost half of the commission when the rival buyers’ offer was turned down, despised him. Who was this twenty-five-year-old dental student, anyway? Larry had topped off their impression of him when, a week before settlement, he had offered to pay Conlin $40,000 in cash and write a check for the remainder. It was, in effect, an invitation to cheat the government out of almost 20 percent of the closing cost fees. And where in the hell does a dental student come up with $40,000 in cash?
Larry seemed more bewildered than disturbed when the older man responded with the look of someone who has just been served fresh shit on fine china.
In March, David chartered a jet and flew Suzanne and Christine and Gina with him to Saint Thomas. All three women were infatuated with him. Suzanne was his former lover. Gina was his live-in girlfriend. Christine had begun confiding a secret longing for David to her diary.
Soon after they got back, David began sleeping with Suzanne. He told her he wanted to keep their personal relationship secret, not just because of Gina, but because he didn’t want everyone in the business to know that their relationship was more than professional. Of course, Suzanne told Christine about it right away.
* * *
By early summer, Larry owned a hit record. Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus” was number one on Billboard’s soul charts. Larry thought it sounded dreadful, but first the record went gold, with one million sales, and started closing in on platinum. The magazine came to Philadelphia to do a big photo spread on Frankie Smith and Mark Stewart and WMOT, calling it the hottest small independent recording company in the country.
Of course, behind the scenes was a different story. At Mark’s urgings, Larry had begun shelling out promotional fees to agents all over the country six months before. In Philadelphia, Mark acted as WMOT-TEC’s agent, courting Butterball, the lead disc jockey for Philadelphia’s leading soul station, WDAS, a bellwether for the industry. The stations had an A shift and a B shift. Tunes on the A shift got played every hour. For the right amount of money, the regional promoters would guarantee the A shift for your record, although no one ever discussed exactly how that was done. For Larry it was proof that one more supposedly legit industry was just a scam.
There was an art to pushing a record up the charts, provided you had plenty of money to spend. When a record jumped three spots on the chart, Billboard put a bullet next to it. It attracted more attention that way. That was how particular singles got a reputation for being hot. WMOT’s promoters would strike deals with key stations to withhold airtime for the record for two weeks and then play it heavily in the third to boost sales for that week’s surveys. The record would suddenly spurt up five notches or more, earning another bullet and building its own momentum. At one point Larry and Mark were able to orchestrate three records into the top fifteen. Larry was spending close to fifty thousand a month. CBS was reporting minimal net profits.
Nevertheless, WMOT-TEC looked like it was starting to fly. Mark wanted Frankie Smith to cut an album to cash in on the success of his single. That was another forty thousand. And Frankie and his band had to tour, which meant money for transportation, incredible hotel costs, clothes—a star has to look the part. The L.A. office was starting to run up bigger and bigger bills, and Mark had opened a West Coast branch of Celebrity Limousines. In all, there were now more than a dozen employees in California, some of whom, Larry learned, were making seventy-five-thousand-dollar annual salaries. By the end of the year, the total payroll for all of Mark’s ventures topped seven hundred thousand. Larry found out indirectly that Mark had recently given his wife a Porsche. When he confronted his financial advisor with this, Mark said, “I’ve got money of my own, Larry.”
But Larry had no idea how to get to the bottom of that.
Truth was, Larry was making so much money in 1981 that without Mark he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Mark knew a vice president at Bank Leumi who would take his periodic deliveries of sacks full of cash and spread it among almost a dozen separate accounts, so that no one deposit was greater than the ten thousand-dollar limit (beyond ten thousand the bank must report the deposit to Uncle Sam). There was a WMOT-TEC account, a Larmark account, an L’s Inc. account, a Wellington account, a Mark Stewart escrow account, a King Arena account. . . .
“Double Dutch Bus” went platinum. Larry had twenty gold records printed and mounted on plaques, at about seventy bucks apiece. They served a useful purpose. Larry found that people were as ignorant about show biz as they were fascinated by it. All Larry had to do was show people the gold record, and immediately they thought they understood how he had made his money.
His friends were convinced that Larry was making a bundle. David and Kenny and even Willie Harcourt were eager to sink money into the record company. It looked like a sure thing.
But in all of the excitement and confusion, somebody at the Wellington Building neglected to pay Frankie Smith a large portion of his royalties. When the singer initially inquired, he was reassured that the difference would be forthcoming. He waited and waited.
But by late 1981, the singer’s patience was wearing thin.
At the time Larry was buying his house in the suburbs, David was handling thirty kilos of cocaine per month. Larry and David were not only the primary sources of cocaine for metropolitan Philadelphia, the tentacles of their organization reached nationwide and even into Canada.
Billy Motto was doing a huge business in South Philly, selling to a diverse group of people far removed from the yuppie crowd familiar to Larry and David. Billy was by far the business’s biggest customer, buying about fifty kilos total in 1981. He was just a month or two away from making his first million. As a “privileged customer,” Billy was no longer paying the marked up price for cocaine. He was throwing his money in with Larry’s and David’s to buy wholesale. Larry had asked David not only to give Billy the first pick of each shipment, but to spend time teaching him all the ins and outs of testing coke, cutting it, making rocks, and packaging it. Billy took his lessons from David sitting by the stove in the kitchen of Suzanne’s place. They met three or four times over about four weeks.
At one such tutorial, Billy remarked in his cheerful, matter-of-fact way, “You know, don’t you, that at some point in the future we’ll all be doing time for this activity?”
As a joke, it
fell flat. Billy was the only one of them who seemed to regard that as a likely outcome.
Despite these sessions, perhaps because of them, David got on Billy’s nerves. Billy had become a well-respected man in South Philly, and was used to being treated with deference. It was a different world from the one Larry and David knew. Billy, who also dabbled in loan-sharking, had men working for him who would attack people with baseball bats or knives if they crossed him. After Billy first met Suzanne, and learned that she was handling a lot of meetings with buyers at her apartment, he brought over a pistol and gave it to David.
“Suzanne doesn’t want a gun,” David said.
“Tell her just to leave it out somewhere around the apartment where people can see it,” Billy said. “That way people will know that even though she’s a girl, she’s protected.”
David treated Billy like a customer, like someone lower than him on the organizational scale. David would set up meetings with Billy and then not show up, something the South Philly dealer regarded as a slap in the face. Instead of laughing, as Larry always had, at how rumpled and disorganized was the paper money Billy brought along in brown grocery bags (it always added up to the exact amount promised), David bitched about it constantly and even tried issuing Billy ultimatums. Billy didn’t like that, but for the time being he had no other reliable source for good cocaine.
In addition to Billy, David and Kenny and Willie Harcourt were all selling to their own circle of friends throughout Center City. David and Ken also had customers in New York City and in California. A buyer named Kevin had a steady business going in Bucks County, northeast of Philadelphia. A large portion of each Miami shipment was going to a woman in New England named Priscilla, who had customers throughout that region who were, on average, about ten years older then Larry. Brian Cassidy, a college student from Paoli, was selling to well-to-do younger residents on the Main Line, and also had a large customer in Pittsburgh. Paul Mikuta was selling to friends in Delaware, on the Main Line, in the Rochester area, and elsewhere. Steve Rasner, a dental school classmate who graduated a year before Larry, was selling to customers in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. There was a trio of Penn State students out in State College, in central Pennsylvania. Stu Thomas was selling to friends on the Jersey shore and another friend in Virginia. In New England, in addition to Priscilla, Ricky Baratt was still struggling to recover ground by selling in the Boston area, and Larry’s brother Rusty and sister Jill were dealing substantial amounts. Reckless Glen Fuller, despite his pending charges in New Jersey, was still selling cocaine in Vermont and in Colorado. Larry had a customer in Tampa, Florida, who was selling two or three pounds at a time, and another promising customer in Phoenix, Arizona, named Wayne Heinauer, whom Larry had met through a friend at State College back in the days when he was selling pot. Heinauer had one customer in Canada. There was a grade school principal in central Pennsylvania whom Larry had met as an undergraduate. There were dozens of smaller customers scattered around Philadelphia and the region, friends of friends of friends. Their names filled pages in the neat ledger kept in the safe at Suzanne’s. And each of these customers was a significant dealer on a smaller level, breaking their own purchases into dozens of smaller amounts for their own users, multiplying exponentially the total number of lives touched by Larry Lavin’s enterprise. Virtually all of the customers were between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all had enough money to spend upwards of seventy-five dollars for a gram of white powder to shovel up their nose. For many, the harmless drug they had tried for the first time at a party a year or two ago was now something they carried with them at all times, for a quick pop in the car before work, in an office lavatory several times a day, or in the corner of a bar after work. . . .
Managing this traffic in cash and white powder was a full-time job for nearly a dozen workers, most of them drawn from David’s acquaintances at local bars and restaurants. David and Willie were much more cautious than Larry had ever been. They always kept the cocaine and the money in separate places, and met with customers away from both. Willie had recruited three other young men, Gary Levin, Daniel Schneps, and Roger Parsons, to help transport the kilos from Florida to Philadelphia, and they took turns making runs. Two would drive down, meet with Paco and Pepe, and purchase ten or more kilos right at Paco’s house. It was a big change from the old seat-of-the-pants days. Willie would be met at the airport and driven out to Paco’s neighborhood. He learned that Paco’s relatives and associates owned all the houses on his block, so that there was no worry about neighbors growing suspicious. There were armed guards to provide escort, and lookouts posted at either end of the block with walkie-talkies to sound the alarm if anything unusual was happening outside. Willie got along famously with Paco and Pepe. His Spanish improved. Paco called Willie a “friend for life,” confessing that selling drugs was not a desirable business for them but that it was the only opportunity life had given them. Paco said he had drifted through the Gulf of Mexico on a raft on his flight from Cuba to Texas. Paco looked forward to getting out of the business and retiring as a wealthy man. “Your children will come to my house and play with my children,” he told Willie, “and we’ll drink a toast to the old days when we had to do this to provide for our families’ futures.” Paco confessed that one of his dreams was to pay to have his father released from prison in Cuba and bring the rest of his family to the United States. Pepe wanted to build hotels in Mexico.
It got so that trips to Florida, once such a frightening chore, were a pleasure. On the drive home, the two runners would take turns behind the wheel. Willie bought two big cars so that there was enough room to stretch out and sleep on the backseat.
In Philadelphia, David would select the break house, or “factory,” usually a vacant apartment rented by one of the workers using an assumed name. David moved the factory location constantly. In addition to staffing the whole organization with his own people, David shifted the operation from Larry’s old West Philly neighborhood around Penn, to Old City. The money was stored in a safe at Christine’s. The books were at Suzanne’s, and coke was stored elsewhere—the location was kept vague. Customers met with Suzanne or David, and the cocaine would be delivered there once the money was counted. Larry still handled a lot of the negotiations by phone, taking orders from his friends and relaying the information to David or Suzanne, but he was spending at most only a few hours every day on the business. He was busy finishing dental school and preparing for the big move out to Devon, but he always had time for a friend with money to spend.
As business continued to grow, David decided it was time to negotiate a price break. He was curious to meet Paco and Pepe anyway. So he asked Willie to arrange a meeting in Miami.
“Let’s get together for a bottle of Taittinger and blow a few grand and maybe I can get the price down,” he said.
The trip was more like a vacation than business. David took Gina, and Willie took his girlfriend. They stayed at the Fontainebleau. Paco threw an extravagant party in the Presidential Suite of the luxury hotel, a huge two-story suite with a grand piano and bar, and filled it with friends. They spent four days, mostly just enjoying themselves, their money, their women, their success. But for several hours every day they would retreat back to Paco’s house to talk business. Sitting around the wood-paneled study before the stylized island sunset scene, Willie and Paco, both big easygoing men, and David and Pepe, small and excitable, sipped scotch together and paused occasionally to snort a line of cocaine.
All along, ever since Larry had started buying kilos of cocaine in Florida more than two years earlier, they had been paying a fixed price of fifty-six grand per kilo. Paco and Pepe had been the main suppliers for almost everyone they had been buying from all that time. David’s argument was that during that time their business had grown from only two kilos per month to more than thirty, and yet they had never been offered cocaine for a penny less. He emphasized that their business was cash only; they had never bought on credit and therefo
re had never been in debt. Implicit in David’s pitch was that they were restless. They were good customers willing to pay up front. If Paco wouldn’t offer a discount, they might be able to get a better deal elsewhere.
Paco was firm. He said his hands were tied by his brother, who ran his family’s business. Besides, said Paco, to him, thirty kilos per month did not make Larry and David a big customer.
“A big customer buys a hundred kilos at a time,” he said. He explained that the biggest customers put up one to two million at a time, investing and participating in the risky trips to Colombia to smuggle large quantities north. Unless they were ready for that, to become partners with him, then they were regular customers and the price would stay the same.
David wouldn’t give up. When he realized he could not lower the price, he tried a different tack.
“If the price is fixed, what is it I can do to get some sort of a break?” David asked. “If thirty kilos isn’t enough business for a month, then what is?”
“Fifty kilos,” Paco said.
“If I can do fifty kilos in one month, what kind of break can you give me?”
It was evident to Willie that Paco didn’t believe they could do it. It was a jump way out of proportion to the growth levels they had seen from Philadelphia. In 1980, for instance, thirty kilos represented an approximate total of all the cocaine Willie had transported. But, as if to humor David, whose eagerness amused Paco, the Cuban said, “Listen, if you do fifty kilos in one month, I’ll give you a hundred grand in cash, or two free kilos.”
