Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  Presiding over the first hearing, Larry’s sentencing on drug charges, was the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, a slight, pale man with bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. Beneath the outward calm of the courtroom that morning was real drama. Judge Pollak had the power to lock Larry Lavin away for the rest of his life.

  Larry sat behind one table with his lawyer, Tom Bergstrom. Seated at a table alongside were assistant U.S. Attorneys Ron Noble and Tina Williams Gabbrielli, who had prosecuted cases related to the “Yuppie Cocaine Conspiracy.” Seated with them were Chuck Reed and Sid Perry.

  In Larry’s defense, Tom Bergstrom presented expert testimony that attempted to explain the psychological roots of his client’s greed. Then, one by one, he elicited warm tributes from Larry’s Virginia Beach friends, who had traveled north to do what they could for the fun-loving, generous man they knew as Brian O’Neil. Tom concluded with a stirring, emotional plea for lenience.

  But these were fragile impediments to the onrushing momentum of justice. In the year and a half since Larry had first been arrested, public attitudes toward cocaine use had gone through a dramatic transformation. The harmless party drug, the glamorous aphrodisiac and success symbol was now perceived as the new killer on city streets. With the advent of crack, with the recent shocking death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, cocaine had shifted in public perception from the category of illegal but culturally approved drugs like marijuana to the dark category of addictive killer drugs like heroin.

  This was no merely technical distinction. In 1969, in the enormously popular movie Easy Rider, the soundtrack sang of the difference between a dealer and a pusher:

  The dealer, the dealer is the man with the

  love grass in his hand.

  For a nickle or a dime he’ll sell you lots of sweet dreams,

  But the pusher is a monster, Good God! He’s not a natural man.

  God damn the pusherman!

  Larry had always seen himself as a “dealer.” Now, at the height of a national mania over crack (a word Larry had learned only months before) and a new recognition of how addictive and insidious were the long-term effects of cocaine, Larry was being portrayed as a “pusher.” And not just any pusher, but “Dr. Snow,” as Philadelphia magazine had dubbed him, the biggest pusher in the city’s history.

  Speaking for the government was Gabbrielli, a sober young woman with glasses and long light brown hair:

  “Dr. Lavin headed up the largest, the most sophisticated cocaine enterprise ever prosecuted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. So far in this morning’s proceedings not much has been said to remind us of the extent of his criminal involvement. . . . I think it’s important to dwell for a moment on how much cocaine we’re talking about. We’ve seized, through the assistance of a cooperating witness, David Ackerman, records of the Lavin organization for 1981 and part of 1982. In 1981, it shows that the organization purchased approximately two hundred fifty kilograms of pure, uncut cocaine. This cocaine was then processed, cut, and resold throughout the United States. Based on available information, the government believes it could easily show the organization distributed approximately a thousand kilograms of cocaine. A thousand kilograms of cocaine. That’s a million grams. Once the cocaine is sold, it’s usually cut at least one more time before it’s redistributed on the streets. Even if it was cut only once to a fifty percent purity level, which is still very high quality, that’s two million grams of cocaine. An eighth of a gram is considered an individual’s dosage amount. That would be sixteen million individual dosage amounts. That’s enough cocaine to turn on every man, woman, and child in . . . Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; and San Francisco, California. The government submits we have not caught a small fish, . . . but rather a kingfish.

  “. . . Lavin is thirty-one years old. He’s led an exceptional life, one full of excitement, power, thrills. He’s been a multimillionaire. He estimates, himself, he made five million. Perhaps it was more. He had money to throw extravagant parties, live in the best neighborhoods. He had money to be generous with, to loan to friends. He was able to help others in Virginia Beach. After all, it was easy. The money came easy. Now, however, it’s time for Lavin to pay that price.”

  Gabbrielli concluded that Larry ought to be sentenced to “at least” thirty years.

  Judge Pollak listened as Larry stood to defend himself, arguing that his business had been based on “friendship,” not violence, and that he had never been fully aware of the harm caused by cocaine.

  When Larry sat down there was a long silence in the courtroom. All eyes fell on the slight, black-robed figure on the dais. The silence lasted a full minute before Judge Pollak looked up from the papers before him and began to speak.

  “Why do we have such a full courtroom today?” the judge asked, scanning the crowded benches and standing spectators in the far corners of the chamber. Among the crowd were the press, Marcia Lavin and friends, observers from the courthouse, assistants on the U.S. attorney’s staff, and even the judge’s daughter, who knew how long and hard her father had considered the matter.

  “People are sentenced in the United States in courtrooms like this . . . every day,” said the judge. “By the weekly hundreds we send people off, sometimes to incarceration, sometimes to probation. Mostly the process does not demand this much attentive interest. Is Dr. Lavin’s case different from most?

  “. . . Our psychologist witness characterized Dr. Lavin’s case as an American tragedy. He saw close analogies to the terrifying Dreiser story. . . . I think we have a tragedy here, and perhaps it’s an American one, . . . but I don’t think that it’s quite the one that Dreiser had in mind.

  “We saw Dreiser’s hero come up, and then we saw him go down. He didn’t join us. Why do I say ’us’? Because this courtroom, which is so well attended today, . . . is a middle-, upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile, largely professional courtroom, mostly white, making it, and we are, are we not, concerned and even fascinated by Dr. Lavin because he is what? Very close to being one of us? . . . I’m suggesting that we focus on Dr. Lavin’s case because we identify with him and are frightened by what he did, and by what others might easily have done. We are worried and we are terrified about what is about to happen to him when he is cast out of our society. That’s part of what is so frightening.

  “. . . The distribution of masses of cocaine throughout our society is the distribution of a terrible poison. It seems reasonable to suppose, even though we cannot document each of the sad, sad cases, that people by the hundreds or by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, have been victimized by Dr. Lavin’s and his colleagues’ conspiracy. . . . And the victimization does not necessarily end with the breakup of this conspiracy. It seems reasonable to suppose that people by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, were introduced into a self-destructive way of life from which they may take years and years to extricate themselves, or may never, and are likely to do their time in prisons or die sick and alone. These are dreadful crimes.

  “Do I agree with the government that Dr. Lavin should be sent away for thirty years, at least? I do not. Do I agree with Dr. Lavin’s lawyer, Mr. Bergstrom, that the minimum called for . . . is an adequate disposition? I do not.”

  Judge Pollak sentenced Larry to fifteen years under count five, the Section 848 “continuing-criminal-enterprise” charge, and fined him a hundred thousand dollars. On the other counts, he imposed a total sentence of seven additional years in prison. Twenty-two years. The courtroom received the news with silence. Larry sat motionless in his chair, his back to the crowd.

  “I repeat,” said the judge, “that we do have here today a form of American tragedy: the fall, from extraordinary grace, of someone who on the record is clearly capable of doing very good things, has done very good things, for friends and family. It is not
at all surprising that many are deeply devoted to this person, and that must be borne in mind at the same time that we bear in mind that Dr. Lavin, witting or unwitting, has done terrible things to our society. . . . They deserve no sentimental glossing over. They deserve punishment.”

  That afternoon there was a second hearing before Judge Louis C. Bechtle, whose task it was to sentence Larry on five counts of failing to pay income taxes on his illicit earnings. Each of the five convictions—Larry had pleaded guilty—carried a possible five-year prison term and ten-thousand-dollar fine. There was hope that after the morning session, Judge Bechtle would not make his punishment “consecutive” to the drug term—add more prison time to the twenty-two years imposed by Judge Pollak. Since the tax crimes could be seen as a mere corollary to the central crime of drug dealing, Judge Bechtle had the defensible option of making his punishment “concurrent”—allowing Larry to serve time for his tax crimes at the same time that he served time for the drug charges.

  It was immediately apparent, however, that Judge Bechtle, a jurist of short temper and few words, was not disposed to treat the case before him as a shadow of the drug conspiracy case.

  Judge Bechtle gave no speech. He noted with distaste, “Our nation is awash in these drugs.” Then he sentenced Larry to the full five years’ imprisonment on each of the first four tax charges, and five years’ probation on the fifth. He imposed a ten-thousand-dollar fine on four of the charges, and a hundred thousand dollars on the fifth.

  Summing up, the judge announced that the twenty years’ imprisonment and five years of probation he was imposing would be served consecutive to the twenty-two years Larry had received that morning.

  Marcia sobbed. Larry looked as if someone had just slapped him in the face.

  Afterword

  I was originally drawn to Larry Lavin’s story by the suspicion that, had I made a few decisions differently in my life, I might have gone down the same road. Larry started his drug business by peddling small bags of marijuana from his frat house at the University of Pennsylvania. He made money and friends . . . and one thing led to another.

  Just a few years before he got started, I was a student on a college campus in Baltimore. A friend from Penn (as it happens) delivered to me one afternoon, unsolicited, the largest bag of pot I had ever seen. He dropped it on the floor of my bedroom and suggested that I break it down into small bags, mark up the price slightly, and sell it off. We could split the profits. I could see myself becoming the most popular man on campus overnight. I remember sitting and staring at the bag for a few minutes, and then deciding I wasn’t going to do it. My friend left disappointed and bewildered by my lack of ambition. I had figured it was one thing to be an occasional user, quite another to be a dealer. It wasn’t exactly a moral decision, because one who buys and uses dope occupies no significantly higher ground than the seller. For me it was a question of risk, of how serious I was willing to be about breaking the law. To stray across the line from time to time to get high was different than seeking profit in illegality.

  When stories about Larry first broke in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, I was a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I remembered back to that moment in college. What if I had decided to sell? Might I have gotten tempted by the ballooning profits, too? And when the market shifted so smoothly from pot to cocaine, with its exponentially higher profit margins and larger earnings, would I have been able to resist the opportunity to make millions?

  Larry and I were contemporaries. I knew the world he had come from, and, like him, I was now married and embarked on a career with small children at home. Attitudes toward illicit drug use had changed dramatically in a few short years. My own generation had experimented liberally and then moved on. For many, the brief cocaine craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s had been a kind of last fling before settling fully into the responsibilities of adulthood, career, and parenting. Cocaine, for that brief period, was seen in the same light as marijuana, a harmless recreational drug banned by ill-informed, uncool, and uptight elders. Then, seemingly overnight, cocaine the party drug became cocaine the killer. Len Bias’s death, the rising toll of addiction, and the violent rise of the Andean cocaine cartels exposed a dark underside to all the fun. By the mid-eighties, the crack epidemic was beginning. Addicts combed my neighborhood in Philadelphia nightly, stealing anything they could carry off. Dealers like Larry Lavin became major public enemies. I could easily imagine myself as him, onetime life of the party, dentist, husband, father, sitting in a courtroom charged as an organized crime kingpin, facing a potential life sentence, wondering what the hell had happened. When Larry and Marcia and the kids vanished . . . well, I understood that, too.

  I didn’t work on the story initially for the newspaper, but when Esquire magazine approached me about it in 1985, I welcomed the assignment. Larry was still a fugitive. This audacious yuppie cocaine kingpin who had seemingly gotten away with millions, while everyone else in his nationwide organization had been busted and sent to jail, had intrigued then-editor Lee Eisenberg. With the help of FBI agents Sid Perry and Chuck Reed, I researched and wrote the story, but Larry got caught before it ran. With the daring fugitive in custody, Esquire dropped the piece. But in the process of researching the story about him, I had grown even more intrigued. I wanted to meet this man I had spent months trying to understand.

  It turned out that Larry wanted to meet me, too. He had stayed in touch with his family and old friends—which had been his undoing—and they had told him that a writer was poking around for information about him for a piece in Esquire. He had been dreading its publication, knowing that photographs of him in a national magazine might blow his cover in Virginia Beach (which is why Perry and Reed were being so helpful). But, knowing Larry as I do now, he was also curious and even a little eager to see what the magazine would say. At that point he still took a little pride in the illicit enterprise he had built, and his infamy. So one afternoon not long after he was arrested and returned to Pennsylvania, I got a collect phone call from the Chester County Prison. I drove down and met him for the first of what would be many long interviews.

  I found him to be a charming, intelligent, and candid to a fault. Indeed, in time I think Larry began to realize that in his efforts to explain himself to me, he was painting an unflattering portrait of himself. His wife, Marcia, had been against his talking to me at the beginning, but as time went by and as Larry’s misgivings grew, Marcia warmed to the project. It hit home in particular with stories (related cheerfully to me by Larry) of romps with whores in Atlantic City. Marcia had not known about these things when she ran away with him. Marcia might not have known about all of Larry’s activities, but she was not blind to his failings. She told me, “Maybe this is exactly what he needs. Maybe this book will finally force Larry to see himself as he really is.”

  Larry didn’t react strongly one way or the other to the book, at least not to me. There were parts of it he didn’t like. He hadn’t anticipated my telling all the lurid details of his philandering (But, Larry, why did you think I spent all those hours sitting with you in prison asking questions and taking notes?), and his memory differed from others I had interviewed about certain incidents—for instance, the scene with Paula Van Horn, Glen Fuller, and the gun in chapter five (Larry denied that Paula had ever been threatened with a gun). By the time it came out in 1987, Larry’s primary response was chagrin. The twenty-five years tacked on to his prison sentence by Judge Louis C. Bechtle had taught him a harsh lesson about the price of notoriety. Larry had lost all interest in being a legend.

  He has been in jail now for fifteen years. His thick black hair has turned gray. Marcia divorced him, but they remain friendly, and he still visits with his children and talks to them on the phone. His oldest, Chris, is in college. His girls are in high school. He works out a lot, practicing yoga and running long distances around the exercise yard at the federal penitentiary in Rochester, Minnesota.

  Everyone who was convicted of selling
cocaine with Larry has long been out of jail. Most served fewer than five years. In 1999, Larry filed a legal challenge to his prison sentence, arguing that his lawyer, Tom Bergstrom, had improperly advised him about a potential plea bargain. Bergstrom did one final favor to his old client by testifying, in effect, against himself. The judge has yet to rule on the question, and neither Larry nor his current lawyer, Peter Scuderi, hold out much hope to prevail. Sid Perry, who now works in the FBI’s Baltimore office and is nearing retirement, and former assistant U.S. attorney Ron Noble, who now lives in Paris and heads Interpol, were among those who came back to Philadelphia to testify in the case. They were startled when they saw Larry in court. All that running in prison had turned his tall, slender frame gaunt. That, along with the gray hair, had drastically aged the former yuppie kingpin.

  “He looked so frail,” said Perry. “I could hardly believe my eyes. The minute Ron and I saw him, we looked at each other and said, ’Let him out.’”

  Perry said that he had been shocked on Larry’s sentencing day when Judge Bechtle more than doubled the carefully rendered twenty-two-year sentence imposed by Larry’s trial judge, Louis H. Pollak.

  Chuck Reed—Perry’s partner and Larry’s old nemesis—was not there to testify. He had been killed in 1995. Working undercover on another drug case in Philadelphia, he was negotiating a buy with a suspect when the conversation took a bad turn. The target of the probe shot him. Reed shot and killed the man before expiring himself.

  “It was a tragedy,” Perry said. Reed had been wearing a wire, but his old partner has never been able to bring himself to listen to the recording. “Chuck was a talent, a true talent. Apart from the Lavin case, he did some things as an agent that were just unbelievable.”

  Today, freedom for Larry Lavin is still most likely eight years away. Knowing how eager his customers and accomplices were during his heyday as a drug dealer, Larry still doesn’t see himself as someone who preyed on society, or who overtly harmed anyone. He once insisted to me that no one he knew or sold to was addicted to cocaine. Judging just by the characters I got to know researching this book, he was wrong. Nearly all of the people around Larry were struggling with addiction to some degree. But unlike most crimes, all of Larry’s “victims” were eager ones, and would likely have sought out the drug elsewhere if he wasn’t in business. His crime was in part generational. Larry was less a predator than an enabler. While millions partied with cocaine, he profited. To my way of thinking, there is only a small moral difference, and more than twenty years in prison seems an excessive price to pay for it.