Blow (28 page)

To George's great relief, two weeks later the word came that the trips to L.A. were set to recommence. Carlos was told by his contacts that sufficient loads were being smuggled into Miami—on boats and aboard Avianca, the Colombian national airline—to support regular flights, and the first load, twenty-five kilos, would be ready to go the following day. It arrived right on schedule, and for the next several weeks the routine rarely changed. Twice a week a Ford Econoline van carrying three Colombians pulled into the parking garage underneath the Pavilion. They opened up the sliding doors, lifted out two shopping carts containing grocery bags, and two of them pushed the carts into the elevator. The third followed behind, holding on to something under his coat. At George's floor they wheeled the carts down to the room. The kilos in the grocery bags would be wrapped in duct tape and marked with symbols representing their various owners—either people back in Medellín who'd arranged transportation for their loads or people in Miami who'd bought the kilos back in Colombia and were reselling them in the States. Some were marked “Willie” or
“Viejo,”
which meant “old man.” Some had
O
's on them, with
X
's through the middle. Others, many of them, were marked with a
P
or an
E.

In the bedroom George and Carlos wrapped the kilos again in double layers of shelving paper to reduce the chance that their scent could be picked up by drug dogs—not really a big worry then—and repacked them into four Samsonite suitcases, six or seven kilos in each. George, meanwhile, had called Lorraine, his courier on the Caracas trip, to come down to help, and the two of them carried the bags down to a cab out in front of the building, drove to the airport, and checked the bags on the 11:00
P.M
. United flight for Los Angeles. Lorraine was outfitted usually in a conservative dress or business suit and George in a camel-hair blazer and white turtleneck; they made a nice-looking young couple.

Richard would be waiting in L.A. and drive George and the bags—Lorraine would get the return flight back—to another underground garage, this one under Richard's stash house, at the time an eleven-story condo at 531 Ocean Plaza, on the Esplanade in Redondo Beach, just a few blocks away from the Castle. George hung out in a top-floor suite, exchanging his view of Biscayne Bay for a sweeping panorama of the Pacific Ocean, the beach, the Redondo pier, and the Portofino marina. In two or three days Richard would get rid of the kilos, replacing them with $1,175,000 in cash, which George packed into a carry-on camera case, small enough to fit into the overhead compartment on the plane, and returned to Miami. For the first few trips George earned $10,000 a kilo for his service, meaning half a million for the two 25-kilo trips he averaged each week. The rest went to Carlos and he didn't know who else, whoever had owned the coke, George didn't know this in the beginning. As for his own money piling up, at first he had no time to do anything with it other than stick it up on the closet shelf in his room at the Pavilion, telling Carlos to keep an eye on it. After the first couple of weeks he managed to get Courtney to come down to Miami and take it back up north. Put it in a safe-deposit box, he asked him, or bury it in a hole, take some out for his wife and five kids, just do something with it. When he got a minute, he'd come up and sort it all out.

As word of the trips pervaded the Colombian community, more and more drug dealers began scurrying to queue up—contracting for loads in Medellín, arranging to have them smuggled into Miami, putting them into the pipeline that George—they called him Jorge—this gringo friend of Carlos's, had running to the West Coast. George was now spending twenty-five hours a week in airplanes or waiting in airports. Adding on the two-day turn-around time in Redondo, this meant that back in Miami he hardly had time to sleep before being sent on another run. “I didn't know where I was half the time,” he says. “I'd fall asleep in the plane and wake up in my seat not knowing whether it was the money I had with me or the cocaine, or which airport I was landing at.” He soon compounded his confusion with his efforts to stay on top of things, which involved vacuuming a lot of the product he was delivering to Richard up his own nose—giving Carlos something to grouse to George about. Carlos called cocaine “poison” and had never even sampled it. He didn't indulge in anything of a mind-altering nature, at most taking a glass of beer if everyone around him had succumbed to getting stoned or plastered. He especially disapproved of mixing it with business. How could George possibly do coke while he was working? he remonstrated. But out on the West Coast, with Richard still keeping the lid on the operation, not letting George go out and blow off steam with his old buddies in Manhattan Beach, there was nothing to do. Nothing, that is, except for the other way he knew how to recreate, which was to have sex. Which he did more or less constantly.

In L.A. the escort services all had listings in the telephone directory, and as soon as Richard would leave the condo to begin unloading the kilos, George was on the horn dialing in his order. Managers of the services were a good deal more motherly toward their women than is generally supposed in the prostitution field, and would check with the main desk after George had called to see whether he was a legitimate guest. And they'd call again after the woman arrived, to make sure she wasn't being chased around the room by Bluebeard or Dracula. The rates ranged from $150 to $250 an hour, starting with your common blow job and moving up to acts requiring artifice and physical endurance. “But when they got here,” says George, “I'd have about $10,000 worth of coke piled high in a dish on the table, and once they saw all the blow, that was it. They'd call back the agency, tell them they were going off duty. I'd have them for as long as I wanted.”

Coming right off the plane, he usually put in an order for two women at a time, one black and one white, to come over and do friendly things to him simultaneously, nothing that he had to respond to very strenuously. After that he'd put in for the special-order stuff, requiring equipment and some technical skill. There were women of various nationalities—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Scandinavian, German, Mexican, Middle Eastern, East Indian. The “American” girls came in any of the fantasy styles current in the 1970s, from a Raquel Welch or Farah Fawcett down to a demure Audrey Hepburn. “Sometimes I'd say I'd want a girl who was into bondage and S and M. But nothing too heavy. I didn't want some maniac showing up. If you get handcuffed to the bed and you got a lunatic in your room, you're in for some trouble.” He knew that Richard, for instance, had a number of friends who liked to patronize some of the more serious sex emporiums in L.A., where there were medieval dungeons complete with implements of torture. George saw pictures of the places and thought he'd pass. “I wasn't really into big-time pain.”

About twenty minutes after he'd placed his order, the woman, in her late teens or early twenties, would appear at George's door, dressed in a skirt and top or blue jeans and a T-shirt, normal street clothes, carrying a large shoulder bag. She'd disappear into the bedroom and in a few minutes call to George that she was ready. When he peeked in, she'd be dressed in standard sex-shop sportif—stiletto heels, three or four inches high, net stockings attached to a garter belt suspended from a black leather corset. No top. Her breasts would be bare, thrust up and out by the corset, a spiked leather collar would be fastened around her neck, and her face would be set in a stern expression. George would take off his clothes and lie facedown on the bed, where she'd manacle him to the headboard using regulation police cuffs and secure his feet to the bottom of the bed with pieces of rope. With George thus laid out, she'd give his rump a good going over with her riding crop, or sometimes it was a cat-o'-nine-tails or a bullwhip, whatever the agency had in the supply closet. She'd give him a dozen or so good cracks with that, not enough to raise any welts, but enough so he knew he'd been a bad boy and had to be disciplined. He'd moan sometimes, to show her it was all having some effect. After that she'd untie him, then fit him out with a cock ring, which she would tighten up at the base with a couple of plastic clips so he couldn't ejaculate, at least not easily. Rigged out like that, maybe also a little fried on coke, George could sometimes deploy himself up to two hours at a time. “I don't think I can describe what it felt like,” he says. “Different, is all I can think of. One thing, though, is after all that I started looking at normal sex as pretty boring.”

Afterward he'd take the women out for dinner at the upper-deck restaurant in the Portofino marina nearby, looking out over the yachts and sportfishermen anchored in the slips. “Most of them were pretty normal people, doing it to earn money so they could do something else with their lives, like acting or going to college. Some were housewives who were bored. They'd have to get up and leave suddenly to pick up their kids at school.” There was only one he still remembers, a tall auburn-haired graduate student at UCLA whom he'd ordered back a few times, who said she was working toward her master's degree in abnormal psychology. “What she liked was to spank,” he says.

For all the cash he was funneling into their pockets back in Miami, George became a regular local hero among the Colombians. Everyone wanted Carlos to introduce them to this Jorge from Boston, wanted him to do loads for them. One night Jemel took George and Carlos to a party at the house of a cousin of hers, Martha Hoyos. It was a scene that George soon came to appreciate as typically Colombian. Martha's husband, Humberto, was formerly a bank president in Medellín, now involved in some way not immediately clear to George in the cocaine business. Handsome in the Gilbert Roland mold, he had standard Colombian features—pale white skin, a large supply of dark wavy hair, and a small mustache. He dressed immaculately, in a white guayabera shirt, black slacks, and one of a hundred pairs of soft Italian shoes he kept in his closet. He wore gold chains, a diamond ring on his little finger, and during parties, a wafer-thin Piaget watch, which he changed to a more masculine Rolex on workdays. Their house in Coral Gables was a large two-story Spanish job, stucco with a red tiled roof, formerly occupied by Esther Williams, the aquatic movie star. Out back, an Olympic-sized swimming pool served as the centerpiece of an elaborate patio. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Cadillac Eldorados were lined up out front. About a hundred guests were wandering about, including children, the little boys looking like nightclub emcees, dressed up in white jackets and black bow ties, their sisters in stiffly crinolined dresses. The wives fairly dripped with gold, emeralds, and diamonds, some almost bent low by their effort to dazzle. The men played poker at tables set out on the patio, or they competed in a gambling game that involved pitching quarters simultaneously into the swimming pool, two men playing at a time. The trick was to throw the coin so it hit flat and sank slowly in a sashaying fashion. The one whose quarter reached bottom first lost the game, meaning he had to turn over the keys to his car—his Maserati, Mercedes, whatever—to the winner. A lot of men were also snorting coke, discreetly, in a little anteroom off the dining room, but not their wives. As George would learn, that was one item on a long list of no-nos for Colombian women.

At one point Humberto, his brother, and some other Colombians got George alone in one of the bedrooms and started pumping him. They asked if he could help them line up airplanes for flights to Medellín. They asked if he could set them up with other outlets for cocaine besides the one in Los Angeles. “They were around me like flies—We can do this. We can do that. They all wanted to hook in. But I told them, Look, I was partners with Carlos, that he and I were together. They'd have to deal through him if they wanted to deal with me.” Carlos soon got wind of the bedroom session and came in to get George away from these guys. But the more George got to know this cousin-in-law of Jemel's, the more he liked him. Unlike many of the Colombians, who crowed about how big they were in the business, claiming to know important people, Humberto exhibited no braggadocio. “It was the opposite with Humberto,” George recalls. “He was a lot more than he ever appeared to be. He was a very smart man, so smart he didn't want anyone to really know how powerful and important he was. He would always send me other people who'd say the kilos belonged to them. ‘Georgie, I'm turning you on to my friend. He's got something for you.' Then I'd find out eventually it was really Humberto's load.” George didn't know it until later, but Humberto's kilos were the ones marked with the code names Willie and Viejo. Humberto had also arranged the import of other kilos on behalf of a good friend of his back in Medellín—the
P
and the
E
kilos. Carlos wasn't the only one who knew this Pablo Escobar.

In July, with the pressure mounting to sell more and more, the pace picked up, the loads doubled, and the stress level mounted. George was now transporting up to fifty kilos a trip, as many as one hundred kilos a week—too many suitcases to take aboard commercial flights, so he started chartering Learjets, for ten thousand dollars each way. Courtney had come down to help out Lorraine. The Lear landed them at the executive-airlines section of the small Santa Monica airport, where the pilot would phone ahead to have a limo waiting to take George and the load to Richard's condo. “I learned an important thing then, that when you fly around in a Learjet, nobody ever questions you. They don't know who you are, and they're afraid to ask. They just look in awe. You get out of the plane, you're wearing a cashmere jacket and an ascot, and there's a limo waiting for you—well, here's just one more multimillionaire. It's, ‘Yes, sir,' and ‘No, sir. Thank you, sir. Good-bye, sir.' You could be smuggling a nuclear warhead and they wouldn't dare stop you.”