Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  That was the break David was looking for. He accepted the challenge excitedly. Before they returned home, Paco gave them three high-powered walkie-talkies, like the ones his men used to coordinate their escort and lookout assignments.

  Back in Philadelphia, David geared up to meet the goal. For the last two weeks of April they artificially inflated demand, holding out on customers, making the rare claim that they were suffering a shortage. Then, during May, Willie and his runners made three trips to Florida. On the first two they brought back sixteen, then seventeen kilos. They pushed double orders of cocaine off on their customers, telling them that they anticipated another shortage in June. Pulling together cash from everywhere they could find it, Willie made the last run on the last day of the month, carrying close to one million dollars in cash down to pick up a final eighteen kilos—one more than the amount David had promised to buy.

  The final break of the month was a marathon session over Memorial Day weekend, involving the largest single shipment of cocaine the business had ever brought north. It took place at Paul Mikuta’s ranch-style house in Gladwyn, on the Main Line.

  This was Christine’s first break. She was excited when David asked her to help out, and not just because he offered her a hundred dollars per hour. Christine had been kept on the periphery of the business, which was like being kept on the outside of a tight-knit secret social circle that included her best friend, Suzanne, and the man she secretly admired, David. His invitation was a chance to become more fully a part of their group, which Christine considered glamorous and fun. She had heard about breaks, and now she was going to actually take part!

  It had all the right elements of danger and suspense. As Willie’s car approached Center City on 1-95, he called in on one of the new walkie-talkies Paco had given them. David and Paul were in the lead car. Suzanne and Christine were in another. The idea was for David to guide Willie’s car out to Paul’s, but somewhere out near City Avenue, about fifteen minutes northwest on the Schuylkill Expressway, Willie lost contact with the lead car. He had never been to Paul’s, so he turned around and drove back into Old City. When David and Mark realized things had gotten screwed up, they, too, doubled back.

  To hell with the walkie-talkies. The three cars met outside Suzanne’s place and just drove in a caravan out to Paul’s.

  Christine was shocked when Willie brought eighteen kilos into the house. That was nearly forty pounds of pure cocaine, worth 1.3 million dollars to the business. Cocaine users were used to seeing a small pinch of white powder in a glass vial or plastic bag. Here was enough cocaine to fill a barrel, three large suitcases full. She had known David and Suzanne were managing a big business, but it wasn’t until she saw those stacks and stacks of white powder in kilo-sized plastic bags that she could picture just how big.

  David was in heat over the enormous profits represented by the product in this room. He had all the formulas written out on a tablet for each customer, he had his calculator, and he paced the room like a little dictator, instructing the workers as they broke down the shipment into individual orders and weighed the packages on an expensive yellow electronic scale. Billy Motto and Paul Mikuta got uncut cocaine. Everyone else got a predetermined mixture of real rocks, “man-made” rocks, and shake, which had been mixed with a healthy portion of inositol, which David called “I,” and lidocaine.

  David and Willie had a loud argument before things got started.

  Willie was seething. It had been a tough month, easily the most hectic since he had gotten involved more than a year earlier. He had been without sleep for nearly two days when he got back to Philadelphia. He had been snorting cocaine and drinking during a lot of that time, and he was exhausted. His plan had been to just drop off the cocaine and go to sleep for a day. But when he had phoned David on his way home, David had insisted that it was too dangerous to store that much cocaine in the city overnight. He proposed the walkie-talkie rendezvous instead.

  “Okay,” Willie had said. “I’ll drop it off out there if you want.”

  When Willie arrived at Paul’s, he had figured his night was over. But as he turned to leave, David said, “No, I want you to stay. We’re going to break this up now.”

  “All of it?” asked Willie.

  “Yes.”

  Willie knew it was an all-night task.

  “Look, David,” said Willie, peering down at his boss. “I just finished driving twenty-four hours from Miami. I was up the previous night buying all of this and putting it all together. Before that I had to drive down there. Forget it. I’m done.”

  They ended shouting at each other. Willie, who had a lot of money tied up in the business, and who had already invested close to $125,000 in WMOT-TEC, had much to lose by falling out of David’s favor. David had hinted that at the end of the year, Willie would be in line to take over the business. Then it would be Willie’s chance to make a million. But the big bartender was exhausted.

  “You are the only one strong enough to press rocks,” said David.

  “I’m going home,” said Willie.

  “If you don’t stay, you’re fired,” David said. “You lose your equity in the record company. You’re out.”

  Willie knew David would do it. He bit his bottom lip, strode across the room and snorted about a gram of coke, and went to work.

  Once they got started, there was cocaine over the entire room, over the rugs and walls, coating the drapes, the windows, the furniture. Everyone in the room was coated with the stuff. White powder choked the air, it stung and then numbed their eyes and ears, nose and mouth, and had the usual potent side effects. As if the contact high alone weren’t enough, there were lines laid out on a dresser at one end of the room with a hundred-dollar bill rolled up alongside them. Christine’s heart raced with excitement as she and the others, buoyed by bursts of exuberance, worked frantically. Someone had the Phillies game on in the corner, with the sound turned up loud. The men were sifting cocaine into big metal salad bowls using a series of strainers, each one smaller than the next. Rocks were separated from the powder and then broken down according to size. They ended with bowls filled with small, medium, and large rocks and a big pile of shake. The bowls were in a line on a big table in the middle of the room. Willie went to work spraying the shake and pressing it into rocks. He set the compressed material underneath a row of heat lamps set at another end of the room. David paced and calculated and gave orders. He was the only one in the room whose hands were not buried in white powder.

  Suzanne got sick. She was upset about David’s argument with Willie—she and Willie had become close friends. A few hours into the break she doubled over with severe stomach cramps. Christine took her into the next room and took her temperature, which was high. Every few minutes she would leave the break to sit with Suzanne, bathing her wrists with alcohol in an effort to keep her temperature down. Willie and Christine ended up doing most of the work themselves.

  The break lasted for twelve hours. They started at ten o’clock Friday night and finished at ten o’clock Saturday morning. When they were done, Suzanne was still sick. Willie was so tired he felt delirious. Christine felt faint. Paul went home to get some sleep. He and Ken and Stu were invited to a Memorial Day golf outing with Larry and a picnic back at his place in Devon.

  David collected his hundred-thousand-dollar rebate. In June, the business didn’t buy one kilo of cocaine.

  For the whole summer after moving in, there were work crews parked in the driveway of Larry and Marcia’s house on Timber Lane. Construction of a swimming pool began in the yard. An attractive wooden fence was constructed around the pool area. Landscape crews dug holes and planted trees and bushes and flowers. On the sharply angled front roof were installed flat black solar panels that were supposed to reduce the house’s gas bills sufficiently to eventually recover the $22,000-plus cost of installation. Monitoring and control equipment for the solar panels took up almost a fourth of Larry’s basement. Marcia mentioned that she wanted to hang a lot of pla
nts from rear windows, so Larry decided what she really needed was a greenhouse, and then decided what the greenhouse really needed was a Jacuzzi. He and Glen Fuller rented a front-end loader and excavated a big hole behind the southwest wall for a propane tank to supply energy to heat the tub. Contractors were hired for the more difficult task of excavating ground and knocking a hole in the south wall of the house so that there would be a direct entrance to the basement from the pool area. Larry had carpeting, snazzy diagonal wood paneling, and a bar installed to create the perfect setting for his heavy pool table, and rounded out the room with a TV screen and an Atari hookup with a boxful of games and extra joysticks and his big fish tank.

  Neighbors watched from a distance with wonder. Marcia felt as if she were hiding in the house. She didn’t want to meet the neighbors, for fear of having to make up elaborate stories to explain how they could afford all the work going on.

  But Larry, as usual, confronted the problem head-on. He strode across the lawn one day soon after moving in to introduce himself to the woman across the street. She was wheeling her garbage cans down her steep driveway to the street.

  When she remarked that the previous owners had not stayed in the neighborhood for long, Larry responded, “I’ll be here for a long time.” She thought that was odd, but she liked Larry nevertheless.

  Elicia Geisa and her husband owned the house down the hill and across the way from Larry and Marcia’s back porch. They had the best view of all the construction work that began immediately after the Lavins moved in. Elicia’s first glimpse of Larry was of this tall, skinny man, little older than a kid, pacing the backyard overseeing the work crews, always with a portable phone pressed to one ear. She walked over and invited Larry and Marcia to dinner.

  Larry made a bad first impression on the Geisas. He and Marcia showed up on time, and after initial pleasantries, Larry basically took over. He talked and talked, mostly about himself. He began by stressing that he was not Jewish. People often assumed he was Jewish because of his name, he said, and maybe because his thick black hair made him look a little Jewish. Anyway, he was really Irish Catholic. The Geisas found it strange that he would start right in with that information, as if it were something important for them to know—which it was not. Right away Larry shattered one easy assumption about his obvious affluence. Without being asked, he said he had not inherited a penny. He talked about attending Phillips Exeter Academy and Penn on scholarship, and volunteered that he had made a lot of money investing in the stock market, first little amounts, then bigger. He told the Geisas that he was part owner of a record company, and that he owned some land at the shore, other things. Larry said he got a kick out of living next door to the Eisenhowers. He thought that was really neat. Marcia sat through the meal being pleasant. Inside, she was mortified. Why did Larry feel it necessary to go on like this around strangers?

  When Larry and Marcia left late that evening, Elicia’s husband remarked, “He’s either into the Mafia, or drugs.” And they laughed about it.

  Directly across the street, uphill, lived Paul Farrell, a retired two-star admiral who had been head of the U.S. Navy Dental Corps. Farrell was head of the department of dental surgery at Temple University. Larry, again, strode directly across the street when he saw Farrell working in his yard. He introduced himself to the admiral and was delighted to learn that they were both dentists. Farrell had even attended Penn dental school almost four decades ago. The admiral later couldn’t help but remark to himself that he had worked all of his career as a dentist, with great success, before he could afford to live on that block of Timber Lane. Here was this kid across the street, with an even bigger, nicer house, making rapid and expensive improvements, and he had yet to see even his first patient!

  A few days after their initial meeting, Larry rang the bell and introduced Marcia and his mother-in-law. Mrs. Osborn, he said, had just sold her house in New Jersey and moved into the nearby Valley Forge Apartments. Farrell invited them in and he and his wife had a nice chat with their new neighbors. The Farrells liked the Lavins. They were a friendly, attractive young couple. In the military it is a custom to return such courtesy visits, so about a week later the Farrells rang Larry and Marcia’s bell. Larry gave the admiral a tour, showing him the work going on in the basement and yard. The inside of the house was already completely furnished. Upstairs, Larry showed the admiral his gold record on the wall and explained that he had made a lot of money investing in the record company as a student. There were big, beautiful Persian rugs on the downstairs floors, and the furniture was mostly Colonial style. And everything was brand-new.

  Graduation day was in late May. Larry’s folks came down from Haverhill, and Marcia’s mother and sister were there. Wearing his black gown with a purple sash, Larry took turns posing with his parents and with Marcia and then by himself in front of the dental school. His face had filled in since undergraduate days, giving him a stronger jaw and a more substantial, mature appearance. He was flush with pride. Larry considered the dental school diploma his finest accomplishment—and he had made nearly 3 million dollars along the way! His small fortune was already invested heavily in legitimate projects. He and Marcia had a beautiful home on the Main Line . . . what was left for him but years of enjoying himself, having a family, maybe setting up a dental practice? It was ironic that dentistry, the profession he had wanted all of his life and worked so hard to achieve, was now purely a matter of personal preference. There was certainly no hurry about getting started.

  Larry’s passage through dental school had helped to shape the experience for the entire class of ’81. More than a half dozen of its members, including two who had not made it to graduation day and several from the class that graduated in ’80, were involved in the business. Larry’s dealings were such common knowledge among his classmates that they poked fun at it in the yearbook. On page 47 there was a closeup photo of white powder on a small spoon poised under a nostril—“Sure don’t smell like Temrex [a temporary filling material]!” read the caption. On page 64, Larry was pictured talking on a pay phone—a standard sight in the hallways of the dental school—and the caption beneath the photo read, “Resorts buy, Exxon buy, Healthco buy, Codesco sell.” Codesco was the firm that had supplied dental equipment to Penn, and it was going out of business. Healthco was the firm taking over the contract. Exxon was just considered a blue chip investment, and Resorts, the casino, was a nod to Larry’s growing interest in Atlantic City. Originally the yearbook staff had written a caption with Larry selling off dental supply companies and buying drug companies. The editor, Christopher Furlan, thought that was a bit too blatant, so, for Larry’s sake, he changed it.

  Larry’s summer was spent acting as foreman for all the projects under way at his home. Marcia was concerned about how this looked, but she didn’t complain too much. Just as she had hoped other watershed events over the past seven years would force Larry to make the final break from dealing drugs, she hoped that starting a dental practice, coupled with his enthusiasm for projects around the house, would leave little time for it. There had been, in Marcia’s eyes, real progress. After their wedding a year ago, Larry’s involvement in the business had fallen off dramatically. He was still on the phone a few hours every night, but it had been a long time since she had to deal with any of the sleazy characters Larry called friends. Then, after Glen’s bust, Larry had stepped even further back, handing over the whole operation to David. She knew Larry was still making money. He was still poring over his assets every night with the same eagerness, and there were still hours of talking on the telephone, but Marcia still hoped it was just a matter of time.

  Away during the day, still working at the VA hospital, Marcia would come home in the evening and all of the dirty dishes from the night before, and from breakfast and Larry’s lunch, would be piled in the kitchen sink. The house would be a mess. Larry would want to go out to dinner with friends, and all Marcia would want to do was take a bath, eat dinner, and relax. Sometimes Larry would j
ust leave. He bought himself a big silver BMW 703, thirty grand, top of the line, and sometimes he would have fun just speeding along Waterloo Road, testing himself and the car against its dips and swerves and its sudden flat-out rural straightaways.

  With his business dealings with Mark Stewart and the cocaine business mostly out of his hands, there was little for Larry to do. He made some preliminary inquiries into opening a dental practice on the Main Line, but found that there were elaborate politics involved. There were seventeen dentists in Devon and sixteen in Wayne. The region was oversaturated. To buy in you had to be willing to go to work for one of the established practices, where you worked under the thumb of a longtime practitioner. Most newly graduated dentists have no choice. They have debts to repay and a career to get started. But Larry, who at this point was making more than a hundred thousand per month selling cocaine, was in a position to pick and choose, and he chose not to go the usual route. In fact, the politics of getting started scared him. Who needed it? Maybe he wouldn’t even pursue dentistry.

  He had other things to keep him busy. Just before graduation, Larry bought the First National Game Room, a video arcade in a shopping center way out in Chester County, west of Philadelphia. Drawn to an interest in video games by Kenny, Larry had grown addicted to Donkey Kong in his senior year. He used to slip across busy Spruce Street from the dental school to play games at University Pinball. After many odd hours hanging around the arcade, Larry realized that it was an excellent cash business, just the thing he could use to help legitimize his illicit dollars.

  After shopping around, Larry purchased the arcade in Eagleville shortly before graduation for fifty thousand dollars. He spent a lot of time over the next few months playing video games, attacking each of the newest games and playing until he was sick of it. When his own interest waned, the investment didn’t look so keen. Kids in Eagleville didn’t have that much money to drop into video games. The half-life of video games dropped off precipitously after the success of Pac-Man. Pac-Man had been profitable at arcades for three years. Donkey Kong, its biggest successor, lasted only six months. The next generation of games was only hot for about three months. And the practical details of running a small business got to Larry. When the man he hired to run the place had a day off, Larry would have to go and mind the store himself. No longer excited by the games, he got bored. On weekends, he and Marcia had to drive out to the place and count tokens for hours. Larry tried to make improvements. Using an Apple computer he had repossessed from a customer who owed him money, Larry used a standard business program to make printouts showing the productivity of each machine, so he could maximize the return on floor space by moving out games as soon as their play time began to fall off. But despite all his efforts, the arcade never made more than $125 per day and stayed on a stubborn downhill trend. Video games were a fad, and he had gotten into it after the fad had crested. He finally sold the place for fifty thousand and counted himself wiser for the experience.