by Mark Bowden
Wayne laughed. “Yeah, God! You’re telling me! They came down, you know, after they went to Vegas. And I said, ’You gotta be kidding me. Man, I’ve only known you for a short while but, boy, you’re hard to keep up with!’ . . . I couldn’t believe it. I said, ’Oh, you and Kim couldn’t wait.’ And he says, ‘Uh-uh, it’s not Kim.’ ”
Wayne asked about Marcia and Chris. They chatted for a moment about other mutual friends again, then Larry addressed the recent arrest at the Canadian border of Wayne’s customer Virginia Dayton.
“I’m sorry to hear about that other thing that happened.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, hopefully we’re getting that straightened out,” said Wayne. “It’s just a stupid thing. People went against our plan, you know? And they went and got themselves popped.”
“Yep.”
“But we’re working that out. I’m kind of in the hole right now. That’s why, you know, I’d like to have everything sitting there waiting for you guys but I’m gonna be a little bit slow. I explained that all to Bruce.”
Larry told Wayne not to worry. Then he reassured him about doing business with Perry, and with Frannie.
“It will take a while for everything to work out . . . eventually. I just wanted you to understand that you can call Frannie. Just tell him what you want, and boom, you know?”
“I do have a hard time getting ahold of Bruce sometimes,” said Wayne.
“So, I tell you, Frannie is going to be real good,” Larry said. “He can work with you. He’ll do anything. If you need his father-in-law to deliver it anywhere . . . The neat thing is, that guy is dying of cancer, you know? He’s only going to be around for another year or two. If anything ever happens to him, you know, he’s not going to say anything, which is kind of neat.”
Lavin asked about the quality of the coke that had just been delivered, and Heinauer said it looked “very nice.” He said he might have some trouble selling it quickly. His competition was selling grams for sixty-five or sixty-six bucks.
“I just can’t compete with them,” Wayne complained. “I’ve lost like three or four customers.”
“If you talk to Frannie,” Larry said, “one thing is, you know, he does like about sixty or eighty [kilos] a month, between our business and his, and he gets it cheaper than I was getting it before. If you think it’s going to be worthwhile to increase your business, you know, he’ll give you a price break.”
“Oh, okay,” said Heinauer.
“So you should rap with him about that, you know. And he’ll do anything. He’ll send out every week. Whatever you want done, he’ll do for you.”
“Oh, that’s good to know, very good to know.”
“So I think it will be a little more organized now.”
Heinauer explained apologetically that he was behind in his payments, and asked Larry to explain to Burns and Taylor that this was not usually the case.
“I told them you hate to owe money, but we like to get people to owe money. . . . We know you’re good for it. You’re good people, so everything will work out okay.”
“So are your troubles working out?” Heinauer asked, referring to Larry’s IRS troubles.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I think I’m going to end up going to jail.”
“Yeah, that’s what Bruce told me the other day.”
“It looks like they’ve got this about seven-hundred-thousand-dollar tax case that, you know, there’s no way of explaining it. They’re gonna know, kind of, behind the scenes, what’s going on, but I don’t think they can prove that, but because of that I’ll probably get a sentence on the tax thing. I’m just kind of waiting it out and trying to do the smartest thing possible. . . . That’s one reason I made this move, you know. And I’ve just gotta sit back and wait and see what the hell develops. What I am telling everyone is to kind of learn from my mistakes. Always use pay phones. Never keep anything in your house.”
“Right,” said Wayne. “We try to do that program already.”
“If you ever buy anything, you know, use cashier’s checks. My biggest mistake was to put money through this record company, which was doing, like, five million dollars a year, so we didn’t think putting through some checks for, like, fifty thousand or so would matter that much.”
“But it caught up, huh?”
“But what happened was, one guy questioned his revenues. He didn’t get paid enough, and that brought on the FBI doing a whole audit, and they just pulled every big check. And there were two hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of checks to me, you know?”
“Oh, boy.”
“So, like, when I bought my house or something. Eventually they started looking at everything else I owned, and one thing uncovered another. But, that’s the way it goes. I’m still hoping. The one good thing is that I’ve never had any, I haven’t been in any trouble whatsoever, and I gotta think that’s gonna help somewhat.”
“Oh, yeah, hopefully, yes.”
“So we gotta see what happens. I’ll give you a call maybe every month or so just to see what’s going on.”
“Very good. Very good.”
“Obviously, if you ever hear of any problems with Frannie, I’m still here. All you’ve got to do is call me, and I’ll know to go out and call you.”
“Okay, good enough. Thanks a lot for calling. Good talking to you.”
“Yeah, good talking to you.”
“All right, bye.”
“I’ll see you.”
Larry had no way of knowing it, and wouldn’t find out for more than a year. But he had just handed his head to the FBI on a plate.
The DEA informed Chuck Reed the next day that his man had dropped unexpectedly into their web. What amazed the agents most was Larry’s estimate that his business, combined with Frannie’s, was doing sixty to eighty kilos of cocaine each month. A recent federal estimate of the total amount of cocaine being sold in the Philadelphia area each month was less than twelve kilos. They were doing more than that each week.
It upped the probe’s priority. An organization that size was by far the biggest in Philadelphia history, and one of the biggest that law enforcement officials had ever uncovered in America.
TEN
Let’s Get Out of Here
Christmas on Timber Lane was pretty as a greeting card. Marcia put one electric candle in each of the windows, which gave a twinkle of magic to the white house against the snow. She decorated the weeping fig tree in the dining room and the Christmas tree by the front window in the den. A full crèche was lovingly arranged on a shelf by the stereo. Wearing a handmade dress of red silk and a gold necklace, Marcia went to mass on Christmas Eve with her mother and the baby. On Christmas morning, Christopher plowed into mounds of brightly wrapped toys. Marcia preferred playthings for him that had educational value, little wooden puzzles or kiddie arts and crafts. For Larry there was a universal gym and a stationary bicycle.
Larry had heard almost nothing further about the FBI investigation in the more than ten months since Chuck Reed had stopped by his office. Maybe the FBI had given up. Larry figured that if they hadn’t caught him in all the years when he was in the business up to his neck, they certainly weren’t going to nail him now. His involvement with the cocaine business had virtually ceased. Other than occasional telephone calls to his old customers, smoothing over the transition to Frannie, and clandestine meetings with Frannie to pick up some of the money he was owed, Larry was doing nothing to incriminate himself further. As for the tax charges, just the passage of time seemed to ease his foreboding. What were they talking about anyway? With good legal protection he might get off with a big fine. At worst, Larry figured he might spend a year or so in a minimum-security prison for tax fraud. It was not an appealing prospect, but, when you weighed against it the more than five million dollars he had made, it wasn’t a bad bargain.
Larry was cheerful enough about his prospects that he continued his annual tradition of mailing Christmas cards to all of his customers. He always chose cards w
ith lots of snow falling on an urban setting, and personally inscribed them, “From Larry and the Gang!”
Marcia did not share Larry’s optimism. She was done trying to argue with Larry about it, but she was convinced the government would discover his cocaine dealing and arrest him. It was only a matter of time. She believed their comfortable days together were numbered. Part of her felt sorry for Larry, and part of her was angry. Why wouldn’t he listen to her? She had done nothing but warn him that this was coming since they were both sophomores in college. She was also angry with herself. How could she have stayed with him all this time? Now they had a baby. She had wanted this family and this life so badly that she had been willing to turn a blind eye to Larry’s dealings, and to the approaching disaster. Marcia loved Larry. She could not have just given up on him even if she had wanted to. So she tried to hope. Maybe Larry was right. Maybe the FBI wouldn’t be able to prove anything about his drug business. Maybe there would just be a fine and a short jail term. So, as she had for nearly ten years, Marcia played along.
They had prepared friends and family for the shock and embarrassment of his pending arrest and trial. Larry told everyone that he had gotten involved with some people who gave him bad advice. Now he was in tax trouble. He might have to go to jail, but he was going to defend himself as best he could. Poor Larry. Poor Marcia. Poor little Christopher. Everyone was sympathetic, and angry at the government for even threatening to disturb the picturesque harmony of this handsome, affluent young Main Line family.
How dare they!
One week before Christmas, the FBI placed a tap on Bruce Taylor’s phone and on a whole raft of pay phones around Larry’s home in Devon, his office, and even along the route back and forth. Chuck Reed had happened to spot Larry talking on a pay phone off of Route 202 one day as he drove past. So that one and the ones near it were also tapped. The conversation with Wayne Heinauer had provided more than enough just cause to authorize the taps.
From the first day the tap was placed the agents began recording evidence of Bruce Taylor’s dealing. Bruce used his home phone in frequent, flagrant violation of Larry’s beeper system/pay phone procedures. Larry had even encouraged Bruce never to use the same pay phone twice. But there weren’t many pay phones at all out in Newtown Square. It was winter and cold outside. Larry was just paranoid, thought Bruce. So on January 7, when his beeper went off indicating that Larry was waiting for him, and displaying the number of the pay phone where he could be called back, Bruce waited for a few minutes to make it seem as if he had gone out to a pay phone, and then returned the call from his living room.
“How you doin’?” asked Bruce.
“Oh, I could be better,” said Larry.
“Yeah, same here.”
“I was fuckin’ around with my hot tub, and you know those stupid stakes that people use to hold up tomatoes?”
“Yeah?”
“I turned the wrong way and caught one of those in my eyelid.”
“Oh, baby!”
“So I sliced my eyelid open a couple of hours ago and I look like someone punched me, I got this big black and blue mark. . . . What’s up?”
Bruce asked how long it had been since Larry talked to Brian Riley. Larry said that he called about every two weeks. Bruce still had some things that Brian had left behind when he skipped town. Larry punched up the numbers for Brian on his hand-held computer and read them to Bruce. They discussed a customer who was behind on payments, about whom Frannie had gone to Larry for help in collecting the debt.
“You’ll have to work it out with him,” said Larry, who was resisting pressure to get involved.
Larry said that he had hooked up Billy Honeywell, his source in Florida, with Frannie, but that Honeywell’s prices weren’t low enough to interest Burns.
“I think Frannie’s getting them for around twenty-five now, just for your own knowledge,” said Larry. Bruce was trying to go to work for himself with some of Larry’s old customers, so he was partly in competition with Frannie, even though he was still buying from him. So Larry was imparting a little inside information to help his old manager. Bruce told Larry about his fancy new hot tub. Larry gave him detailed advice on how to keep the tub running properly.
“You use it a lot at first, then you get tired of it,” said Larry. “Every once in a while I get back into it and use it for a while. It’s hard with the baby. . . . So I got this gym set with all these weights and shit, kind of like a universal. Marcia gave it to me for Christmas, so I’ve been working out every couple of days.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I’m trying to get in shape for when I go to jail.”
“You gotta be,” said Bruce, “otherwise you’ll fuckin’ be walking bowlegged. Just fuckin’ nail the first person you see. The first person that gets close to you, fuckin’ beat him.”
“I was reading the other day in the paper this guy, for a hundred-eighty-thousand tax evasion, they gave him two years., and then another judge let him off on appeal, and it turned out that the judge had married the guy’s lawyer, so the Inquirer did a whole page on it.”
“Oh. Jesus!”
“The original judge said, ‘I think people like this should go to jail; it’s not right that they can just come out and go for a boating trip or something.’ And these are Philadelphia judges. Just what I want to hear.”
They talked on, Larry supplying Bruce with more phone numbers, complaining about people who still owed him money, chatting about Frannie. It was obvious that Larry missed being more involved. He had few opportunities to get together with his old friends. He was a person whose enormous expertise was lying fallow. Bruce’s business was way down.
“With these prices you just got to try and make money by staying with the good people,” Larry advised. “Don’t take too much risk. . . . If you have a chance to make some money, make some money and put it away.”
As the agents listened to the long, rambling conversation, they noted all the names of customers Larry and Bruce mentioned, and they realized that the tape had completed another important link in the case. They had Larry’s conversation with Wayne Heinauer, and they had pictures of Bruce meeting with Wayne in Phoenix. Now they had directly established Larry’s link to Bruce.
It was time to start reeling in the big fish.
It had been snowing hard through Monday, January 16. As was their habit, Suzanne Norimatsu-Taylor and her husband, Bruce, had gotten to bed in their downstairs bedroom at about 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. Suzanne slept the sound sleep of one spent by a long weekend of partying with cocaine. Normally she would have slept until early afternoon, but this morning the tall, dark-haired woman was awakened suddenly at about eleven by the sound of heavy footsteps on the outside stairs. Through partially opened blinds she could see men hurrying, carrying guns.
“Bruce, wake up! FBI! Shotguns!” she shouted.
Even with the blinds partly open it was dark in the bedroom. Sitting up in bed, Suzanne could see the pool table in the next room where lights were still on. At the far side of that room were the stairs up to the living room at ground level. Just as Bruce roused himself from sleep she saw legs descending the stairs.
“FBI! Who’s in there!” shouted one of the lead men. “Get down on your hands and knees and crawl out here!”
Bruce rolled out of the bed on his hands and knees. He grabbed Suzanne by the hand.
“Get down on the floor!” he said.
Instead, Suzanne stood up, pulling on her robe, and defiantly walked into the next room. A female FBI agent stepped up and patted her down for weapons. There were about twenty agents moving around the house.
Suzanne and Bruce were escorted upstairs and told to sit together on the couch in the living room. As the agents methodically searched, Bruce and Suzanne dozed. One of the agents brought them a blanket. After about an hour, one of the agents escorted Suzanne downstairs to go to the bathroom and to let her get dressed. She pulled on a black jumpsuit in the bathroom. Bruce was then take
n downstairs.
While he was gone, Chuck Reed approached Suzanne.
“See, Suzanne? If you had spoken to me six months ago, none of this would have happened,” he said.
Suzanne pulled the blanket over her head and sank further down into the couch.
“I’m not fooling around, this is serious,” said Chuck angrily. “Sit up! Are you sober?” Chuck turned to one of the other agents and repeated, “Is she sober?”
The agent nodded. Chuck turned back to Suzanne. “Do you understand that this is serious?”
“Yes, I know you’re serious,” said Suzanne.
“Well, now’s your chance. You can help us get Larry.”
Suzanne looked away, avoiding the bearded agent’s steady gaze.
“Don’t be so stupid, Suzanne. You know Larry is sitting over there in his hot tub, and he doesn’t give a damn about you.”
Chuck stood up silently and left the room just before Bruce came back.
For three hours Bruce and Suzanne were on the couch.
Sid Perry, Chuck’s partner since the summer before, a smaller, easygoing agent with a soft Tennessee accent and a milder manner than his partner’s, approached the couch and said, “We’d like to talk to Bruce.”
Bruce followed Sid and Chuck into one of the back bedrooms. Suzanne waited, tucking the blanket more tightly around herself. A few minutes passed, and then Sid emerged from the back room.
“Bruce wants to talk to you,” he said.
Suzanne joined her husband in the bedroom. They sat together on the edge of the bed. Bruce explained in a whisper that the agents had shown him pictures of him meeting with Wayne Heinauer at the Phoenix airport. Chuck had told Bruce he was going to be sent away to jail for a long time, perhaps as long as fifteen years, unless he was willing to help them now. He would still go to jail, but perhaps not for so long.
“What did you say?” asked Suzanne.
“I told them no. I said I wasn’t going to make any deals.”
He said the agents had asked what he was afraid of. One of the agents had said, “Frannie and Larry don’t know where your family lives.” Bruce said he had just laughed. Suzanne indicated to Bruce that she was behind him whatever he decided.
