Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  “That’s a Larry expression!” he shouted. “Nobody else says that anymore! What have you been talking to Larry about?”

  Willie knew the change had been caused by the cocaine. He had watched it happen. David had started “basing” in late summer. After formally breaking up with Gina and before he and Suzanne began living together again, David briefly took up with a woman who was addicted to this technique. Basing involved first mixing cocaine with ether and distilled water to turn it into a solution, and then drying it under a heat lamp or blow-dryer to, in effect, wash out the hydrochloride that makes cocaine soluble and capable of being absorbed through mucous membranes. The resulting dry paste is cocaine in its purest form, far more potent than the powder most users suck up their nose. When smoked, the paste is taken up through the lungs with greater efficiency than snorted cocaine is absorbed through nasal passages. Basing is a highly addictive form of cocaine abuse, and a dangerous technique—comedian Richard Pryor would set himself on fire doing it. Once he got started, David would lock himself in his apartment for days at a time, calling out for more cocaine when his supply diminished. There were days when David would call Willie and ask him to bring food and leave it in the hall outside his door. This period lasted for several months. When the woman left, David stopped basing. But the experience seemed to have left him with an insatiable lust for cocaine.

  But little of that was in evidence on New Year’s Eve, when toast after toast of vintage wine was hoisted to the honor of the host and his lovely fiancée. David presented Suzanne with an heirloom, a valuable diamond engagement ring that had been his grandmother’s.

  The total bill for the evening was thirty-five grand. Willie threw in five grand towards the tip.

  Willie was grateful for the meal that night, for the fine bottle of cognac and the opportunity to earn his own million, but mostly he was glad because at last he would be rid of David Ackerman.

  At least, that was the plan.

  But if the first two months of 1982 were any indication, David was incapable of backing off. He continued to badger Willie constantly. On the night before Kenny Weidler’s wedding, David sat through the night snorting cocaine and going over fine points of bookkeeping and packaging formulas with Willie. Every time Willie would make a motion to leave, David would insist that he stay. It got to be 3:00 a.m.

  “You’re supposed to be in Kenny’s wedding tomorrow, David. Don’t you think you ought to get some sleep?” Willie said. The wedding was in upstate New Jersey.

  “Don’t worry,” said David. “I’ve got a couple of ’ludes. I’ll be okay.”

  Willie left at 5:00 a.m. He slept for about an hour, dressed, and drove to the wedding, getting lost along the way. He arrived at the end of the ceremony. David wasn’t there. It had been a very traditional wedding, with six ushers and six bridesmaids. David was to have been an usher. His absence was glaring. When he arrived late for the reception, David stayed out in the car until Willie came out to coax him in. Ken was furious with David, and his wife, Barbara, wouldn’t even speak to him.

  Despite the festive New Year’s meal, David’s relationship with Suzanne was actually on its way downhill by the time of their engagement party, and it continued to worsen over the next few months. After the engagement, his jealous suspicions became psychotic. If Suzanne stayed out too long shopping with her sister, he accused her of having met with another man. If he found two coffee cups in the apartment, he accused her of having another man over while he was gone. And yet, on a trip to Atlantic City, when David decided he wanted to sleep with Kim, Suzanne’s sister, he talked Suzanne into sleeping with one of the drivers. Kim refused to sleep with David, but Suzanne and the driver hit it off so well that their relationship continued—fulfilling David’s worst fear. Living together in an apartment on Conshohocken State Road now, high on a hill in northwest Philadelphia, David and Suzanne would fight and fight until he would tell her to leave. She would throw some things together and head for the door, and then David would angrily refuse to let her leave.

  On one of these nights, in anger David phoned Kim and told her to come and get her sister out of his apartment.

  It was after midnight, but Kim was there in fifteen minutes. When she got to the door, David answered and told her to go away.

  “Suzanne’s not leaving,” he said.

  But on this night, Suzanne had decided that she really was going to go. She pushed David out of the way and started down the hall toward the elevator with Kim. As they waited for the elevator, David came running down the hall, pleading with Suzanne to return.

  “I’m not coming back,” said Suzanne.

  “Leave her alone,” said Kim.

  David got angry and started shouting threats.

  “Go away, David,” said Kim.

  “I’m leaving,” said Suzanne. “And I’m not coming back.”

  David made a move to grab Suzanne, and Kim, who was smaller than her sister, pushed David back. David then turned and pushed Kim, and Suzanne lunged at David to protect her sister. There was more pushing and kicking and screaming.

  Then from out of a side door next to the elevator stepped a security guard.

  “Would you please keep it down?” he said.

  “All I want to do is leave,” said Suzanne. “And he won’t let me leave.”

  “Look, I don’t want to get involved, but just please keep it down,” said the guard. And he left.

  No sooner had the guard left than the fighting resumed. When the elevator doors finally opened, David started pushing his way in with the sisters, so Suzanne pulled the diamond engagement ring off her finger and flung it past David down the hall. Instinctively, David turned and went after the ring, and the elevator doors closed.

  After hiding out from David at one place or another for a few weeks, Suzanne ended up at Willie’s. When David learned she was there, he accused Willie of sleeping with her, which was not true. Eventually, Suzanne met with David and they reconciled. She moved back into the apartment, and, within weeks, the fighting resumed.

  As David worsened, his relationship with Larry grew more and more strained. It bugged David that Larry was collecting twice as much in profits as he. After Larry split the business with David and Ken, his daily involvement had virtually ceased. David was the one working all hours of the day and night, managing a multimillion-dollar illicit business while Larry was golfing once a week, setting up his dental practice as a hobby, fixing up his beautiful home in the suburbs, whizzing around backcountry roads in his luxurious foreign car, finding ways of converting his hot cash into permanent wealth. David was willing to accept the arrangement because it gave him an opportunity to do likewise. But once he had made his million, it was his turn to step back from the business and begin enjoying the fruits. Only he couldn’t. David didn’t trust Willie to manage everything smoothly—he had no David Ackerman to take over for him. And, to make matters worse, David was collecting only about 35 percent of net profits—splitting new customers with Larry fifty-fifty, sharing his and Ken’s old customers with Ken, and taking only 25 percent from Larry’s old friends, the business’s biggest customers. David had expected Larry to make him an equal partner, so that they would equally bear the cost of giving Willie his percentage. But Larry wouldn’t go along with that.

  On March 14, Larry’s twenty-seventh birthday, Larry was at his parents’ apartment in Haverhill. Most of his family had gathered to celebrate with a cake and presents. By this time, both Larry’s older brother Rusty and his sister Jill had gotten heavily involved in dealing Larry’s cocaine in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Rusty was driving big expensive cars and embarking on large-scale development projects. Jill had been handling quite a few customers herself until, in 1981, her own abuse of the drug drove her to a nervous breakdown. Massachusetts state troopers found her raving in her car by the side of the turnpike in the fall of 1981 and took her to a hospital. Larry’s parents and oldest brother, Justin, the physician, were ignorant of the source of the yo
unger half of the family’s sudden affluence—and of Jill’s breakdown. They accepted Larry’s stories about the stock market and the record company at face value, and why not? Hadn’t Larry owned a seat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange? Didn’t he have a gold record to show for his investment in WMOT-TEC Records? Larry’s brother Justin, who was earning good money teaching and practicing medicine, had begun calling his younger brother for financial advice. Larry had gotten in the habit of presenting his parents with thousands of dollars in cash, and was making plans to buy them a condominium in West Palm Beach, Florida, right: on the golf course—both Justin and Pauline loved golf. So it was an especially happy gathering of an especially prosperous family honoring the youngest son, for whom every family member had reason for admiration and gratitude.

  The family was around the table when the phone rang. It was David Ackerman, calling for Larry. He took the phone in a back room of the apartment.

  Larry was irritated to be bothered at his parents’ house, in the middle of his party. He thought none of his other friends would have been this rude.

  David was slurring his words and speaking rapidly, obviously under the influence of cocaine or Quaaludes or both. He started off in a friendly way, but soon came to the point. He had an ultimatum.

  “Larry, you have to give up five percent. Willie needs more to keep him going. We’ve got to give him more.”

  “David, I can’t believe you’re calling me here at home. There’s no way I’m going to do that.”

  “You have to give this up. You’re not doing any of the work now.”

  Larry just hung up the phone. He was too angry to discuss it further. The way he saw things, he had staked about a million dollars of his money to get David started; David had thrown in maybe five thousand at the start. Larry had given this smartass New York Jewish kid a chance to make a million dollars, and this was all the gratitude he had?

  He stewed over the phone call for the rest of the evening. He felt David had ruined his birthday party. He and Marcia had planned on staying up in Haverhill for a day or two, but instead they got a flight back to Philadelphia that night.

  For Larry, the phone call was the last straw. Billy South Philly, Paul Mikuta, and Stu Thomas had all stopped doing business with David already. And Larry was tired of David’s finicky way of doing things. He was tired of having everything handled by David’s people—Willie, Suzanne, Christine, Gary, Danny, Roger, Mark Taplar. . . . If it was a power struggle David wanted, then it was time to get it over with.

  Larry drove home and dropped off Marcia, who was seven months pregnant, and then sped back down the Schuylkill Expressway to David and Suzanne’s apartment. He entered shouting. David, who had had time to cool off, tried to be conciliatory, but Larry’s mind was made up.

  “I can’t believe you called me at my parents’ house to pull this,” he said. He pushed David against the apartment wall.

  David argued that the present arrangement was unfair to him.

  “No, David. Your best customers are still my people. Who are they going to listen to? If I tell them to stop doing business with you, they’ll stop.”

  “Be reasonable,” said David.

  “It’s all over,” Larry said. “You’re out. This is it.”

  David quickly tried to back down, offering Larry a more attractive arrangement than his ultimatum on the phone.

  “No, David. You’re out. That’s just it. I’m going to find a way to buy you out. I want you to sit down and figure out what you’re worth right now, and I’m going to find a way to buy you out.”

  Together that night, with Suzanne trying to sleep in the back room, Larry tallied up $850,000 that David still had tied up in the business. He was going to get David that money, and from then on Larry was going to be back in charge.

  Over the next few weeks, Larry had second thoughts. Maybe he should just let David have the business and settle for a smaller percentage. Ever since his meeting with Mark Stewart before the Arena was burned, Larry had been branching out on his own with legitimate investments. He and David had begun investing heavily in silver. Larry held certificates worth more than two hundred thousand, and checked the fluctuating rare metal’s prices daily, sometimes buying more, sometimes selling off small amounts. Through his insurance agent, Larry had met Joe Powell, a silver dealer who bought scrap circuitry, silverware, or anything else that contained the precious metal and then recovered the silver from it for resale. Larry soon was loaning the dealer huge sums of money at an incredible 30 percent annual interest rate. Through Powell, Larry met a group interested in starting up a gold-mining operation in Nevada. He put up almost two hundred thousand for them to purchase a unique strip-mining machine that used centrifugal force to separate gold from sand and dirt. And he had thrown in with his old dental school classmate/appliance dealer Jonathon Lax on projects to renovate homes in South Philly and a housing project in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

  Despite his track record of poor investments, Mark Stewart had taught Larry a lot. Larry could put together an impressive financial statement with the best of them, and he had learned that bank presidents, as a group, had fools in exactly the same proportion as the population at large. So Larry felt that he was at last ready to begin acting as his own Mark Stewart. Those projects, along with the ones he was still mired in with Mark and his dental practice with Ken, took nearly all of his time. Now he would have to start supervising the cocaine business again. Marcia, if she found out, would be all over him—especially with the baby due in just two months. And Larry would be up to his neck again in risk.

  But his pride was at stake. He couldn’t let David Ackerman push him around. Already three of his best friends had taken their business elsewhere. David was falling apart. Just a few weeks earlier Suzanne had telephoned in a panic after David took several Quaaludes and passed out. Suzanne said he had no pulse. Larry had gotten a friend to rush over just to make sure David was alive, and then to sit with Suzanne until David came out of it. It was dangerous leaving the business in the hands of someone so out of control.

  Besides, down deep, Larry missed the dealing. He had always enjoyed being the man in charge.

  So over the next few weeks he laundered a few checks through his various enterprises to pay off his partner. Ackerman retained some control over the business for the next few months, but by June he was strictly a silent partner. Larry called Billy and Paul and Stu to let them know that Larry was back. And he began meeting with Willie Harcourt regularly, reacquainting himself with what the hell was going on.

  Christopher Lavin was born on May 6, 1982. It was a doubly special event, because Stu Thomas’s wife, Joanne, had her baby on the same day. Marcia and Joanne shared a room in the hospital, and Larry and Stu visited together, draped in blue gowns, taking turns cradling the pink newborns and posing for happy family snapshots.

  That night, Larry and Stu celebrated in what had become Larry’s standard way. Larry Uhr, the man Mark Stewart had hired to manage the limousine service in Atlantic City, delivered a couple of expensive casino hookers out to Timber Lane. Larry invited over Ken Weidler and a few other friends, and the happy new fathers snorted cocaine, drank, dropped Quaaludes, splashed in the Jacuzzi, and fornicated happily through the night.

  Marcia, of course, knew nothing about Larry’s acquired taste in whores. Ever since his bachelor party in 1980, Larry had been throwing these bacchanals for all of his friends before they got married—and nearly all of them did marry from 1980 through 1983. The events were so notorious that Suzanne Norimatsu, one of the few women in their circle who knew all about these parties (and felt privileged to be let in on the boys’ lusty secrets), once accused one of the boys of getting married just so there would be an excuse for another one of Larry’s famous parties.

  After the bash at the airport Marriott, the one when the hooker had fallen through the glass table and left bloodstains on the bathroom and the floors and walls, Larry was an unwelcome guest at the hotel—even though he happi
ly paid for all the damages. When he had gone back to reserve the same suite for another party, the manager had refused.

  “My rooms can’t take the wear and tear,” he said.

  So Larry just got someone else to reserve the suites, and had his friends let him in through a back door. A highlight of that party was a food fight and a woman who shaved off her pubic hair in the bathtub to titillate the boys with naked genitalia.

  The Atlantic City hookers were a more expensive, more attractive lot than the girls Larry had hired in Philadelphia. It got so that on his frequent trips to the New Jersey resort, Larry would routinely ask Larry Uhr to fix him up with one. After attending to business, Larry the millionaire dentist would deposit a large sum of money in the cage and spend the afternoon gambling, retire to a comped room upstairs for a romp with a whore, and eat a nice dinner before going home. It was a side of his life Marcia never saw and had no reason to suspect.

  Larry’s Atlantic City bachelor parties outdid the earlier ones at the Marriott. Some went on simultaneously in two casino hotels. Because he usually put so much money in the cage downstairs, the hotels comped all the rooms and the limos and the food, including expensive candies, open bars, flowers . . . whatever his heart desired. Larry’s friends would fly in from New England and arrive in stretch limos, sometimes with a hooker on board to entertain them on the drive over from Philadelphia. Larry and Paul and Stu and Billy, veterans of these affairs, used to delight in inviting younger men who had never seen parties like these before, then urge them to put on shows with the hookers for everyone else. Glen Fuller, who was out on bail awaiting trial in New Jersey, always threw himself into these events with special gusto, as did stockbrokers Andy Mainardi and L.A. The women would do anything for money, so they were open to a far broader range of sexual play than most of the boys’ wives—everything from striptease to elaborate oral sex to props and lesbianism and other odd practices.