Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  He asked question after question, and tried to size up from Suzanne exactly what was Bruce’s state of mind.

  “Do you think that he might get scared?” Larry asked.

  “Bruce is tough,” said Suzanne.

  Larry thought about that for a few minutes. “I guess Bruce has been around,” he said.

  He left them with twenty-five thousand dollars. When he was gone, Suzanne found her car keys. She wanted to make sure nothing would keep her from the courthouse in the morning, so Suzanne put on a mink coat and a mink hat. She and Kim drove into Philadelphia and checked into the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, got stoned, ordered room service, and watched TV through the night.

  Bruce was released promptly after nine o’clock. He strode out of the marshal’s office on the second floor with a happy grin and was embraced by the giggling sisters. They left in search of cocaine.

  Several months after Bruce’s bust, Chuck Reed stopped by the house on Timber Lane. Marcia’s mother had just come over for dinner. She pulled her car in the driveway and entered the house through the garage into the kitchen.

  “Who are those people sitting in the car outside?” she asked Marcia.

  “What people?”

  Marcia walked to the foyer and peeked out the window by the front door. There were two men in a car parked up on the lane. Marcia guessed right away that they were agents.

  About fifteen minutes after that, the men got out of the car and came down the front walk to the door. Marcia was waiting for them. Chuck and the other agent showed their badges and introduced themselves.

  “We would like to come in and ask you a few questions,” Chuck said.

  “Our lawyer has advised me not to answer any questions,” Marcia said. “If you want to arrange a meeting, you can contact him. His name is Donald Goldberg.” The other agent turned and started back. Chuck stood his ground.

  “You know that your husband is in big trouble,” he said.

  “Good luck,” said Marcia. “I’m going to close the door now. I don’t mean to be impolite.”

  She shut the door as Chuck was saying, “Larry thinks he’s got a hotshot lawyer and that he’s gonna get off, but he’s going away to jail for many years, if not life.”

  Chuck Reed had everyone in this case spooked. Nobody seemed to think that Sid Perry or Tom Neff or Steve Gallon or any of the other federal agents involved were anything other than decent guys doing their job. Larry had heard a lot of nice things about Sid Perry’s quiet manners and friendliness. He often told people, when warning them what to expect before a visit by the FBI men, “From what I hear, Sid Perry is a nice guy. Chuck Reed is just an asshole.” Everybody thought Sid was nice, but Chuck Reed stayed in their minds. Stories circulated about Chuck. People remembered exactly what the big, bearded agent had said, the look in his eyes, the set of his jaw. Reed-bashing became a favorite inside sport. Encounters with Chuck Reed became the grist for countless stories. Embellished and distorted, these minor incidents portrayed the lead FBI agent as an oaf on a frustrated vendetta, outsmarted at every turn.

  So the visit to Larry’s house ended with the image of a red-faced Chuck Reed bellowing threats through the front window after Marcia coolly closed the door. The visit to David Ackerman ended with David refusing to look up the name of his lawyer in the phone book while Chuck fussed and stormed around his apartment. Suzanne’s story about “black hats” and “white hats” prompted gales of laughter. People claimed that Chuck Reed told them lies, made up stories about Larry owning clandestine airports in southern Florida and secret Caribbean estates, or about how Larry wouldn’t hesitate to have anyone killed who got in his way.

  To Larry, Chuck Reed was a CPA who had blundered into the biggest case of his career. He pictured the big FBI agent as having spent years huddled over ledgers in the dusty back halls of old courthouses, trying to catch the petty mistakes of corporate accountants. Now his probe of Mark Stewart’s books had unexpectedly thrust him into the real world, complete with his comic-book vision of himself as the good guy, like “Nick Danger, Private Eye” from the old Firesign Theater albums, and Larry as some modern-day suburban version of Al Capone. With deep-seated memories of his father’s old diatribes against government incompetence—what kind of person works for salaries like those anyway?—it was comforting and even easy for Larry to see the FBI as a group of clumsy but determined plodders, and none more representative than Chuck. These were years when cocaine was still considered a harmless, glamorous recreational drug, a status symbol. No one had yet heard of crack or of famous athletes keeling over dead from a few snorts. Laws against cocaine stemmed from the same bullet-headed ignorance evidenced by the old propaganda-film-turned-campus-classic Reefer Madness. Larry couldn’t understand why the government would be so determinerd to catch him. He attributed the relentless nature of the now two-year-old investigation to Chuck Reed’s private demons. He half expected that at some point a higher-up in the federal courthouse was going to find out how Reed had been spending his time and jerk him off the case.

  And if they didn’t, well, Larry was sure he would end up one step ahead of Chuck Reed in the end. Larry’s attitude had shaped the theme of all the stories told about Chuck. His friends and associates looked for the traits in Chuck that supported this view. It was reassuring to see things Larry’s way. They were all so much more together than Chuck Reed, so much more poised and intelligent, so much more cool. Surely guys like Chuck Reed never won in the end . . . but, then . . .

  After the raid at Bruce and Suzanne’s, Larry’s old, optimistic scenario of paying a fine or going away on tax charges was shattered. If they had been watching Bruce for that long, and they had the tape of his conversation with Wayne, then they had a good chance of building a cocaine case against him.

  It was time to develop a new option. If it all came down too hard, Larry realized, he would have to be ready to flee.

  How exactly does a person disappear? In the back pages of High Times magazine there were sometimes ads for strange books published by an outfit called Loompanics Unlimited, based in Port Townsend, Washington. There were books and pamphlets on techniques of electronic surveillance, private-detective manuals, how-to books on everything from writing novels to lip reading to surviving nuclear war to exacting revenge on a former spouse to growing marijuana in your basement. An ad for a book entitled New I.D. in America caught Larry’s eye in the spring of 1984—“With New I.D. in America, you can ’get lost’ permanently,” the ad promised. Larry sent away.

  The little paperback was filled with step-by-step advice on how to obtain new birth certificates, drivers licenses, social security cards, credit cards, how to create bogus business entities, bank accounts, and how to use mail drops—sequential mailing organizations that forwarded letters from place to place for several weeks before sending them to their ultimate destination, obscuring the letter’s origin. Along with the booklet came a catalog of other offerings that interested Larry. He investigated books dealing with wiretapping, and read up on how long it took the government to trace a phone call. He figured that if he and Marcia ran, he could occasionally call family and friends without fear of revealing his location.

  As for where to run, Larry had not yet given it much thought. He had considered Ireland, being his ancestral home, but in talking it over with his friends he feared that the Irish Republican Army would find out about him and come after his money. Larry made telephone inquiries at embassies and found out that most countries would extradite him back to the United States for drug crimes. He knew from his conversations with Billy Honeywell that officials in Jamaica could be bought off fairly readily, and there were banks in the Caribbean that made a practice of asking no questions about large cash deposits. In March, Larry and Marcia and Christopher spent a week in Aruba. Lounging on the beach or at poolside in a luxury hotel, watching the gentle sway of palm branches in sweet tropical breezes, it was easy and inviting to imagine escaping the enclosing web of circumstance. How alluring it
was to just be someone else! It would give Larry the last laugh on everyone—especially Chuck Reed. He would just pop out of the system—poof! Ever since his childhood on the lake in Haverhill, spending time with the Baratt family, Larry had fantasized about owning a boat. . . . Maybe it was time to pursue that dream.

  At first casually, and then with increasing determination as the inevitable day of his arrest and indictment approached, Larry went to work.

  One of the first things he needed was a printer. Larry called Billy Motto and asked if he knew someone, and the next day one of Billy’s men phoned to set up the meeting.

  Larry drove down to a health spa in South Philly that Billy secretly owned and where he often hung out. They met out front, and when they walked back to the manager’s office in back, the people using it cleared out hurriedly. Billy sat behind the desk and Larry sat down across from him. The printer arrived right on time.

  “This is Glen,” said Billy. “Glen, this is John.”

  With that, Billy got up and left the room. Larry had to admire the way his longtime customer and friend did business.

  Larry explained what he needed. He wanted copies made of his birth certificate from Massachusetts and of his own and Marcia’s baptismal certificates with all the spaces left blank. Within a week he had a stack of blanks about a foot high. Next, Larry sent away to book collectors’ clubs for personalized embossers that had an official-looking scales-of-justice design at the center. One embosser read, “From the Personal Library of Larry Lavin.” He ordered other embossers labeled “Library of the Sacred Heart Church” or “Le Haverhill Company”—he used the “Le” because the number of letters left “Haverhill” centered perfectly over the top. When he got the embossers, he altered them with his dental drills, filing away what he didn’t want. Then, by combining the altered embossers, he could stamp his birth certificate with an official-looking seal that had “Haverhill” on top and the justice scales in the center. He performed similar effects with stamps on the baptismal certificates.

  With these tools he was able to forge dozens of fake documents under names he picked from the phone book or made up or concocted by combining names of friends from his past. One of his false characters was named Sidoli, after his old friend from Exeter, whom Larry hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. Another incorporated the name Rault, another Exeter friend. One of the names he made up, just because he liked the sound of it, was Brian O’Neil. Using techniques he picked up from New I.D. in America, Larry obtained social security cards for many of these identities.

  He also began accumulating cash. He knew that the government was watching his bank accounts and investments, so he didn’t dare withdraw large amounts from them, but Larry had many customers who owed him money. He made strenuous efforts to collect, with some success, and added to that growing sum occasional six-figure payments from Frannie Burns.

  Larry had not made up his mind to flee, but he wanted to be prepared to move quickly if all hell broke loose. Down deep, Larry still hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Running would mean giving up his dental practice and his beloved house on Timber Lane, and it would mean losing three-quarters of his hard-earned fortune. He figured the most cash he would be able to accumulate over the next few months was about two million. He would have to walk away from almost twice that much.

  Despite the setbacks in early 1984, Larry still had reason to hope. Bruce hadn’t told the government anything, as far as he could tell. Larry Uhr had not cooperated with the FBI as he originally said he would. Efforts to use Joe Powell and Mark Strong, a former Arena employee, against Larry had backfired—both had warned him privately. Everyone else contacted by Chuck Reed and Sid Perry and the Treasury agents had refused to talk. Larry knew they all had the best incentive in the world—protecting their own hides. And although he had learned, from Wayne Heinauer, that the FBI had recorded their August conversation, to his way of thinking, the whole thing had more to do with Frannie Burns than with him. It was consistent with the story he had given his lawyer, that he had been in the business but had gotten out.

  So as spring approached, his biggest fear was that one of the minor players on the periphery, a small customer, say, or someone like Kim Norimatsu, for instance, might panic and offer to bare their soul (and his hide) in return for total immunity. So in addition to days that were already more than filled with dentistry, his multifarious investments, collecting money, and conferring with Frannie, Larry became more and more preoccupied with damage control.

  One of the minor characters who worried Larry during this period was Michael Schade, a Drexel undergraduate who had met Bruce and gotten involved in the business during 1983. Larry had never met the kid. His apartment had been raided and he had been arrested on the same day Bruce had been taken in.

  Early in April, soon after returning from the trip to Aruba, Larry made plans to meet with the red-haired, fair-skinned, nervous undergraduate. He just wanted to feel the kid out, find out how scared he was, reassure him and encourage him to hang tough.

  Larry believed that the worst things they had on Schade were a few phone numbers and conversations he had had with Steve and June Rasner. Steve was a dentist in Cherry Hill who had graduated the year before Larry from Penn Dental School. He and his wife, June, had been dealing marijuana and cocaine and had used Michael for pickups and deliveries. Larry’s idea was to get Michael together with the Rasners so that they could establish a consistent alibi to explain their relationship.

  What Larry didn’t know was that Michael Schade had already seen where his best interests lay. What Chuck Reed and Sid Perry had to say made a lot of sense. For a college sophomore, Michael was in a lot of trouble. It might not have been the kind of trouble Larry Lavin faced, but it was enough to daunt a nineteen-year-old kid. On the other hand, the FBI at that moment placed a very high premium on cooperation in the case they were preparing against the Lavin cocaine empire. They were offering him nothing less than what looked like a second chance on his whole life.

  So there was a tap on Michael’s phone April 12 when Larry called to arrange the meeting with the Rasners. Michael had never gotten a call from Larry before.

  “Hello?” said Michael.

  “How you doing?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “What a web we weave,” said Larry.

  “Oh, man, I know.”

  “Anyways, obviously I want to put you and Steve together.”

  Michael was intimidated by Larry. He knew of him only as “the big boss.” Bruce and Suzanne and others he had dealt with all liked Larry and held him almost in awe. Now to have Larry suddenly so interested in him was a little daunting. They discussed setting up a time for the meeting with the Rasners. Larry offered to come down and pick Michael up and drive him over to Cherry Hill.

  “. . . Steve wanted to get together in case they bring you people in,” Larry explained. “If they ever give you immunity, you guys can say exactly the same story.”

  “Right.”

  “You know? Something about these numbers were mentioned.”

  “Right.”

  “And he wants to try and remember exactly what, what you both think was said.”

  “Right.”

  “And he can relate it all to, um, repayment of debt or something.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Um, yeah, I guess so,” said Michael. He was so nervous, knowing the conversation was being recorded, that he was trying to say as little as possible.

  “My biggest worry is whether they had you on other tapes that same month,” said Larry.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll talk to you more about that. But I think they had his phone tapped for the month of January.”

  Larry speculated about other conversations that might have been recorded between Michael and others. They agreed to meet the next morning.

  Larry arrived promptly. Reed and Perry had considered putting a wire on Michael, but knowing of Larry�
�s penchant for electronic gadgets, they feared he might have his car wired to detect it. They settled on a plan to just debrief Michael in detail after the meeting. They watched as Larry picked up the kid, and then followed from a discreet distance as they drove across Philadelphia to the Ben Franklin Bridge and into New Jersey.

  In the car, Larry explained that they were going to meet the Rasners at a Cherry Hill restaurant named Olga’s.

  “I’m spending a lot of time lately driving around and meeting people, helping them to keep their stories straight,” said Larry. He told Michael all about Glen Fuller, who was still out on bail awaiting disposition of the charges against him from 1980. Larry liked to use Glen as an example of what good legal talent could do for his friends in trouble. Here was a guy who got nabbed with multi-kilos in the trunk of his car, fought with the state cops at the arrest, and was still, more than three years later, a free man. The implication was that Michael had little to worry about.

  “I can’t believe Chuck Reed searched Bruce’s house when he did,” said Larry. “If they had been watching him for a year, why wouldn’t he have gone in when he had just gotten a shipment? Bruce gets, like, ten to fourteen keys at a time, and Reed hits him when the place is empty. I don’t get it.” Larry laughed—one more anecdote for the growing legend of Chuck Reed.

  Michael told Larry that he had enrolled in a drug clinic to kick his cocaine habit.

  “I’m trying to get my head on straight,” he said.

  “My biggest worry is that Reed is going to get to Kim,” said Larry. “She knows everything and everybody. . . . Did they ask you about Brian Riley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They knew about his getting stopped at the airport in Boston with all that money. They asked me if I knew anything about that.”

  “Jeez. Bruce didn’t tell me that. When I talked to Brian I told him I thought they didn’t know anything about him. I’ll have to get ahold of him again. He calls his mother, like, every week. So I can get a message to him through her.”