Blow (27 page)

To get the solid material back in, Richard would spray the mixture with a solvent—either acetone, which can be bought in any paint store, or ether, obtainable from a chemist's shop. The solvent would dissolve the cocaine crystals, making them bind. Then he'd bake the mixture in an oven. What emerged was a solid sheet, which when you crumbled it up and bagged it, contained a lot of rocks again and looked much more potent than the powder. As an alternative to the baking method, Richard used an iron press shaped like a hollowed-out brick, which he'd had fabricated at a local welding shop. After spraying a kilo with acetone, he'd double-wrap it into two plastic Baggies, lay it into the press, then fit an iron lid over it, which he could jack down on the Baggie, applying sixty thousand pounds of pressure to the inch. After forty-five minutes he opened the press, and what emerged was a crystalline brick, the real McCoy, as if straight from George.

As a big-time wholesaler, Richard had four dealers he supplied with up to five kilos each, sometimes unloading twenty kilos at a time. His mode of delivery varied, but one method was to buy grocery cans of various sizes from a supermarket supply house, put his cocaine inside, and seal them up with a canning machine he bought for $125. He'd then buy similar cans in the supermarket, for products like baby formula or powdered soft drinks, then steam off the labels and glue them on to his own cans of cocaine. Or he'd buy 2-pound cans of Maxwell House coffee, take off the top, insert a pound package of cocaine with the coffee, and seal it back up with his machine. The cans would be packed away at the stash house, and when orders came in, he'd have the runner deliver, say, three 16-ounce cans of Similac or raspberry Kool-Ade to wherever the dealer wanted. On some occasions the dealer might meet the runner inside the supermarket, throw a couple of cans of Richard's special blend of Maxwell House into his own shopping cart, and check them out through the cashier.

The price of the consumer product depended on many things, including the relationship between the buyer and seller, the quantity of goods involved, and, most important, the degree to which you exposed yourself to arrest. Ounce for ounce, on a unit-price basis, the richest rewards went to those lowest on the ladder, the street dealers, the guys most likely to sell a gram of coke mistakenly to the police. Considering the number of people involved and the fact that nothing ever got written down—not to mention that people routinely lied a lot—no one, the police included, has ever assembled the exact sales figures from any particular load, top to bottom. But using the fifty kilos George first delivered that March, and the prices generally obtaining during that period, it's possible at least to approach an appreciation of the kind of money that could be made.

George sold the 50 kilos of pure cocaine for $47,000 each and went back to the East Coast carrying $2.35 million. Richard's memory of that first deal has faded to a degree, but if he followed his standard procedure, he'd have cut the 50 kilos with 25 kilos of procaine or mannite, giving himself 75 kilos of product, which he would unload to his four dealers for $42,000 each. Net profit for him: $800,000. The dealers Richard sold to cut the load again by 50 percent, meaning that collectively, they now had 112.5 kilos of product to sell. These guys sold ounces, not kilos, to dealers lower down, and charged $1,200 each. So if they bought the 75 kilos in cut form from Richard for a total of $3.150 million, made it into 112.5 kilos or nearly 4,000 ounces, and retailed this for a total of $4.725 million, the profit split among the four of them came to $1.575 million.

Last came the gram dealers, the workhorses of the trade, who sold directly to the public. These guys were the most known on the street, the most caught, and the most likely to do time—and most of them had never heard of Richard Barile. Figuring that each of them bought an average of ten ounces at a time, this meant that it took some four hundred sales people to get rid of one load. The street dealers didn't cut the product any further because they didn't have to. They could make a profit with what they had, buying the ten ounces for $12,000 and gramming them out, 28 grams to the ounce, selling for $100 a gram, for a gross of $28,000 each. If all the gram dealers found customers for their goods, this meant that the fifty-kilo delivery, the one flown to California while Carlos was making his way down from the woods of northern Vermont, would have retailed for a total of $11.2 million. If each street customer bought just one gram each, about twenty lines' worth, went to a party and shared it with two friends—moderate users who would take a hit an hour and make it last through the night—this would mean that a total of 336,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area, a population group the size of Buffalo, Toledo, or Omaha, would have had their lives altered in some major or minor way, thanks to a single trip west by Boston George.

*   *   *

In early May 1977, when George flew down from the Cape to Florida to set up life with Carlos and Jemel, he discovered very quickly how far away this new scale of business would take him from his home turf. Demographically, in a city with a population that was 25 percent black and 56 percent Latino, the Anglos in Miami now qualified as the smallest minority. The first place they found to live in was a rundown motel Carlos knew about, located just off the Tamiami Trail in the heart of Little Havana, an area whose people, for all George comprehended of them, might just as well have come from Uranus. Not only had his meager facility in Spanish languished from lack of use since his Mexico days, but making sense of the world into which he'd been thrust, a volatile mix of Colombians and Cubans, was like picking one's way through an emotional minefield, comprised as it was of a tangle of subsurface alliances, long-smoldering feuds and resentments, and remembrances of love and fidelity betrayed, all of it overlaid by the politics of the cocaine business, which were about as honorable as a knife in the ribs. What's more, this motel Carlos had chosen for setting up the operation turned out to be a “regular shithole,” in George's opinion. “Prostitutes were coming and going at all hours, you could see drug deals obviously going down in the rooms. I was the only gringo living with all these Latinos. And he was going to bring loads of cocaine in and out of this place? It was like going down on your knees and begging to be arrested.” In short order, George demanded they get the hell out of Little Havana altogether, which was why the three of them, less than a week after he'd arrived, were tooling over the MacArthur Causeway in Carlos's little black BMW to check out places to stay in Miami Beach. If his whole business was dealing with the Colombians and the Cubans, he jolly well wasn't going to live with them, too.

You get no view of the beach in Miami Beach, at least not by driving down Collins Avenue, the main drag, since the sea is pretty thoroughly blocked off by high-rise hotels and apartment houses. The older resorts adhere to the Moroccan fantasy, constructed of stucco with Arabesque façades and painted in pinks and pale greens. The more modern ones—the Eden Roc, the Doral, the Castle, Las Villas in the Sky—are sheathed in glass, and a few are gussied up with fairly ridiculous-looking Victorian porches and balconies running thirty-odd stories up the front and back. Coming onto the Fountainebleau, still the Queen of the Beach, you're hit with a giant trompe l'oeil mural that introduces a view of the place through a Roman arch, decorated with a behemoth race of maidens balancing vases on their heads. In Miami, you don't get noticed by being subtle. I. Magnin, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus rule the mercantile roost.

After investigating a few possibilities, they settled on the Ocean Pavilion at Fifty-sixth Street. Eighteen stories high, sporting an orange and blue motif, the hotel/condominium was owned by a man named Harvey Weinberg from Rockaway Beach in New York City, who had followed his father into the hotel trade and had been doing business in Miami Beach since the days of Benny Siegel—“They call him Bugsy now, but no one called him Bugsy then,” he says. “At least we didn't.” That was before Senator Estes Kefauver shut down Miami's wide-open gambling operations in the early 1950s and the mob changed its venue to Las Vegas, and the big resort hotels started going up on former oceanfront estates owned by the Firestones and other upper-class families. By the time George and Carlos arrived at the Beach, Miami's heyday as a resort capital had come and gone. Jet airplanes had opened up the Caribbean and Hawaii to fun-seekers. Those who used to come down just for a holiday were moving to Miami to live, and the hotels were hastening to convert themselves into condo apartments so as not to go bankrupt. Latin and Canadian money was helping to keep the place solvent. “Every resort has built in its own downfall, because sooner or later it becomes so popular it's no longer chic,” says Weinberg, who sold off the Pavilion once but then had to take it back when its buyers couldn't make a go of it. “I mean, in Europe people don't go to St. Tropez anymore, or Nice or Cannes. They go to places like Rapallo, newer resorts. And that's what happened here.”

For what George and Carlos wanted, the Pavilion was just about perfect. It had an underground parking garage, which would allow them to drive the goods right into the building without having to unload out front. There was a service elevator connected to the garage, so they could bring the load from the car straight up to the floor without walking through the lobby. Visitors could drop by without announcing the fact to the world. They rented one apartment for the three of them. It had a big central living room, two bedrooms at opposite ends, and a kitchen, so they could cook and live up there and not have to mingle much with the guests. This was more like it, George remembers thinking as he stood out on their tenth-floor balcony having a Scotch. The apartment faced west, out across Biscayne Bay, where toward evening the office towers of Miami were brought into glowing relief by the setting sun. The view also took in Indian Creek, the inland waterway that ran alongside Collins Avenue, servicing the Spanish-style villas on the strip between the creek and the bay. Powerboats sat tied up at backyard docks. Here and there a cigarette boat was suspended on a set of davits, kept nice and waxed so it would move faster over the water. One didn't see too many of those babies back on the more sedate Cape. The faster ones got up to seventy knots, with a roar coming out of the manifold like a 707 taking off ten feet over your head. George was going to look into getting one for himself, just as soon as things got organized.

George soon found life with the happy couple even more vexing than with Carlos himself. For one thing, although they had a well-equipped kitchen, Jemel had no clear idea how to cook, try as she did. Unloading the bags from her first shopping trip, for instance, she put the eggs in the freezer, because that's where she thought they belonged. To celebrate their arrival that night, she prepared a candlelight dinner featuring three prime sirloin steaks, which she had neglected to take out of the broiler until they looked like the soles of burnt-up fishing boots, smelling about the same. George took everyone out for dinner to keep the peace. The usual period of adjustment for newlyweds was taking more than its usual toll. On one occasion George returned from an errand to find the place a wreck—several chairs and the standing lamps were all smashed, the couch overturned. He found Carlos out on the balcony looking heavily displeased, while Jemel whimpered in the bedroom. What he finally got out of Jemel, because Carlos refused to talk, was that in an ill-advised moment of honesty she'd confessed to him once having had a brief love affair with another woman, competition from a quarter that Mr. Latin Machismo had found difficult to accommodate.

After that incident, Jemel would go out to eat with George to complain that Carlos was becoming boring, that all he wanted to talk about, even to her, was the airplane thing. Not like George, she said. He talked about interesting things. “I didn't like that either,” says George, who was far from a natural in the role of marriage counselor. “The last thing I wanted was for her to come on to me, because with Carlos getting so crazy, that would have ended everything. I mean she was very pretty, very tempting. So I had to struggle pretty hard to keep up a wall between us.”

At first George attributed Carlos's insistence that the three of them stay together to his paranoia, to the scare thrown into him when he lost track of those fifty kilos. Later on, though, he suspected it had more to do with the question Carlos had raised walking on the beach back on the Cape, about George's “friend in L.A.” To his deepening annoyance, Carlos had raised the subject a couple of times since. If they were really partners, friends, brothers, whatever, he said, why couldn't he know who this guy was? Maybe he thought that by living with George he could get the name by osmosis, overhear a phone call or catch a number. But George was determined to play this one very close. Richard Barile was his lone ace in the hole, at least until he got well established with the Colombians. If they knew the contact he was selling to, why would they need him anymore? They'd sell it direct to Richard, save on the commission. As the loads increased, this could mean millions and millions. Why give this to George if they didn't have to?

And for that matter, George didn't trust Richard all that much either, which is why he'd given him Carlos's first name only. If Richard found out where George was getting the stuff, why wouldn't he deal direct, too? By cutting out the middleman, he could get the loads cheaper and make more money on his end. After all, this was no longer the marijuana business, with the God's herb and the brotherhood of the weed stuff. In the cocaine trade paranoia struck deep and permeated the atmosphere, all with good reason. So George made sure never to call Richard from the apartment, and he didn't tell Richard where he was getting the goods from, or even where he was living, other than south Florida somewhere. When he wanted to reach George, all Richard had was the phone number of an answering service in Miami. That was it. “Bob Dylan said, ‘If you live outside the law, you have to be honest.' But I found that with the people you dealt with in the cocaine business, it didn't really pay.”