Blow (30 page)

In the eyes of people back in Medellín, Carlos had by now proved his worth. Thanks largely to George's series of runs to the West Coast, the processors had convinced themselves Carlos was the man with the right ideas and the right contacts, the one who could put the cocaine business on the track toward achieving its ultimate market potential. This was no piddling 100- or 200-kilo operation he envisioned anymore. Carlos was talking jumbo loads: 500 kilos at a time, 750 kilos, 1,000 kilos at a time now—more than a ton of 100 percent pure product going in and out on each trip, with a trip a week or more. He was planning to have a veritable blizzard of blow—billions and billions of dollars' worth—headed toward the United States. Look, he told George, they'd always talked about cranking this thing up, right? Well, now he was ready to launch their little operation into stellar orbit.

“He was totally obsessed with this island thing and owning it and having an empire,” says George. “It was all he could talk about, he wouldn't listen to anything else. And we started to have big fights about it. I basically thought it was ridiculous to do this. Even if he could buy off officials in the Bahamas, to entrench himself and fight the governments of the world, saying ‘Here I am, I've got my own little island. Fuck everybody, this is my drug-transport business, come and get me.' I told him, ‘Are you shittin' me? If the United States government finds out who you are and where you are and you're breaking the law, I mean, we took down Japan, Germany, and Italy. You don't think they can't take down Carlos Lehder on Norman Cay?'”

George tried to bring Carlos back to the original plan they'd talked about back at Danbury: bringing the loads across the border through different access points, some through Mexico into California, others into Louisiana, Florida, and other southern states. “The islands were fine, but my plan was to keep moving, keep changing, be secretive, be light on our feet. Nobody knows what you're doing or where you are or who you are, and as long as they don't know who you are, they can't get you.” In conversations about their business, George and Carlos had already begun referring to themselves as “the company,” which they thought of as also including Humberto, this Pablo Escobar down in Medellín, whom George hadn't met yet, Barry Kane, and a few others. “It wasn't called the ‘Cartel' then, it was
la compañía,
” says George. “My job was to get the pilots and the planes and arrange the landings and be like the vice-president of the American end of things. Carlos would handle the liaison in Colombia, arrange for the shipments. That was the original concept.”

Trying to rein in Carlos after he settled on Norman Cay, though, was like trying to keep a horse in check with a piece of string. In conversations with George, he was soon beyond Norman and into more expansive schemes, much grander designs of what he could do with the cocaine profits. “‘Money is power,' he said, and he was going to have an unlimited amount of money,” George recalls. “He wanted to use it to liberate the people of Colombia. He said that something like 87 percent of all the arable land was owned by 12 percent of the people. You had women sitting on church steps purposely crippling their own children to make them sympathetic beggars. He wanted to take over the country and give the people back their land. I asked him if he'd ever seen the movie
The Adventurers,
based on the Harold Robbins novel. Ernest Borgnine was in it. It's about a country in South America where this guy forms a revolution in the hills and finally he comes down and takes over the palace and he's holding a gun to the head of
el presidente,
who's a corrupt son of a bitch but tells him, ‘Go ahead, shoot me and take this chair, because you will become what I am.' I told Carlos that power corrupted people and he would eventually become the man he hated.”

But George had never stood up terribly well to an assault of Carlos's revolutionary rhetoric, and as he'd done back at Danbury, he simply gave up protesting after a while and let the little Colombian keep the floor. “When a twenty-eight-year-old kid tells you he's going to take over a country, what do you say to him? And I mean, what did I really care, anyway? I wanted one thing. I wanted the cocaine and I wanted the money. That's all. Carlos's scheme was forever, he was in for the whole show. I figured I wasn't going to stay around long enough to see the last act.”

It wasn't long after these conversations that George began getting the message, indistinct at first, that there were about to be some management shifts in the corporate structure of
la compañía.
It was nothing as dramatic as losing the corner office or executive dining-room privileges, yet he felt in all the transactions now going on between Miami and L.A. that in some way he was being left out of the loop. For one thing, by the end of the summer Carlos's attention was clearly shifting from Miami to the islands. He still had to be in Miami occasionally, if only to deal with his own cash supply (a problem he solved by secreting the money inside the body panels of Chevy Blazers and shipped them down to his contacts in Medellín). But his main time these days was taken up with plans and negotiations in the Bahamas that seemed to require almost no consultation with George. For another, the coke George now took West was turning out to be second-class stuff, cut with quinine, the clumsiest of adulterating agents. Richard could no longer move the loads for top dollar, which meant he greeted George less enthusiastically, and sent him back with less take-home pay. When confronted about the deteriorating quality of the product, Carlos would tell George to wait for the next batch. But then that wouldn't be much better. What was going on here? “I'd go out to L.A. with twenty-five or fifty kilos, and Richard would say it was cut and he didn't have to take this shit, and I'd have to almost beg him. Then he'd say, ‘All right, I'll take it,' but like it was a big favor. And here we had been the best of friends. It didn't take any genius to start thinking that he was getting stuff from some other source and that I'd better make a move here or I was done dealing.”

George's worries were put on hold for a few weeks when Barry Kane suddenly called to say he was finally ready to make the two runs, transporting 250 kilos each, back to back. He drove over to the Pavilion and picked up George and Carlos in his rangy four-door convertible Lincoln Continental, a vintage model from the early 1960s that had the doors opening out as on a cabinet and became a hit among oil sheikhs and Latin dictators. Carlos the car buff seemed very impressed. To discuss final plans, Barry drove them to the Castaways Motel in south Miami Beach, whose bar was constructed underneath a swimming pool to give an underwater view of all the women in their bikinis cavorting in the water like a school of guppies.

The delivery they were embarking on was a little more problematical than any they'd tried; before, George simply took the kilos out to someone he knew and handed the money over to the Colombians on his return. There was more cash involved here: The transportation fee for the two trips came to $5 million—$3 million for Kane and $1 million each for George and Carlos. More to the point, this was the first time they'd be dealing with Colombians they didn't know personally, and also the first time the money and the cocaine would be brought together in the same place, a notoriously precarious situation in the drug business. When the money came in close proximity to the kilos, it seemed to raise the greed level of the Colombians to such irresistible heights—here was a chance to put their hands on the coke
and
all the money, double the profit—that the guns would come out from underneath the jackets, a lot of bodies left around for the police to sort out. In this particular instance, the likelihood of such a thing happening seemed pretty remote. After all, the coke belonged to people in Medellín who were using George's group to fly it in to their own people in the States. The only thing they could recoup in a rip-off was the $5-million transportation cost. Since they needed Kane to keep flying, it was definitely not in their interest to take a short-term profit and lose the long-term asset. Still, you never knew. Some Colombian with a wild hair up his ass, a not-terribly-future-oriented guy, maybe hyped up on coke, might decide to make a play for the jackpot, just go ahead and grab it all, blow the people away and face the consequences later. Miami was still three years away from hitting its peak in the category of drug killings, which by 1980 were increasing at a fairly astounding rate. But there had been enough headlines in the newspaper to make George announce that he intended to bring along a gun, and he advised Kane to do the same.

George possessed a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver with walnut grips, which he kept in a holster clipped on to his belt on his right hip so he could reach across and whip it out with his left hand should the fateful moment arrive. He'd bought it from his friend Mr. T, the drug dealer up in Hyannis who moonlighted as an armorer and gunsmith. Whatever the requirement, Mr. T could thread a muzzle so as to fit on a silencer, file off serial numbers, convert a semiautomatic into a burp gun, and make other alterations required in the drug business, down to sawing off the barrels of a 12-gauge shotgun if what you needed was a room cleaner. The .357 was loaded with 158-grain super-high-velocity hollow points that achieved 1,500-foot seconds at the muzzle and slammed into the target with 700-foot pounds of energy, compared to a puny 179 pounds for the standard-issue .38 revolver carried at the time by most police departments. Many of the Colombians preferred one or another of the 9-millimeter machine pistols, the American-made Mach 10 or the Israeli Uzi, the latter having fewer working parts and regarded as more reliable. These could be concealed under one's coat, the clips were easy to get in and out, and they kicked off a lot of rounds in a hurry, 600 to 800 a minute. But what George prized about the .357 was that it was a regular canon, the force of the thing capable of driving a slug through an engine block and knocking a 200-pound man off his feet on the other side. He'd never actually shot it at anyone so far, and he'd been shot at himself only once, in that raid on the marijuana field above Mazatlán by the Federales, who banged away uselessly at Manuel and George as they scooted down through the jungle. To confirm just what the .357 could do, George drove out into the Everglades one afternoon and set up some watermelons in the woods, and with a single shot each he vaporized them, one after the other, into a mist of pink and green. That seemed about enough to handle the job.

Several days later Kane flew down as planned to the designated ranch outside Medellín. With him was a Colombian gofer supplied by Carlos to help him find the right place. Kane liked to keep the details of his flights to himself, so all George knew was that everything went as planned and Kane flew back from Colombia through the Bahamas, then to his secret landing place somewhere in North Carolina. There he put half the load, 125 kilos, into the trunks of two used cars he'd bought off a lot with phony papers and had them driven to the parking lot outside a little bachelor's-pad condominium he owned off Route 1 just north of Fort Lauderdale, a forty-five-minute drive north of Miami. At the appointed time, four Colombians showed up at Barry's apartment and he gave them the keys to one of the cars. The deal was that the Colombians would drive off with half the load one day and pay nothing. They would return the next day with full payment in order to get the other half. This way, if for some reason they took off with 125 of kilos, the remaining 125 would more than compensate for the loss.

When the four returned the next day, they carried two large suitcases, each containing $1.25 million. It took about an hour to count the whole amount. The Colombians sat around and drank beer and watched. Three of them wore guayabera shirts, and George could see bulges at their waistbands. A fourth had on a suit jacket, concealing something with more firepower, George assumed. George and Barry counted the money twice, riffing through the bundles of $10,000, all new bills. Everything being deemed in order, Kane took out the keys to the second car, and with George and Carlos very alert now, taking in every little move by the Colombians—right here was when it would happen—one of the Colombians took the keys in his hand, the four backed slowly out of the room, the door closed, was locked, and the deal was done.

“The whole thing was pretty heavy,” says George, “but when it was over, I walked out of there with a little click in my heels, a bright smile on my face.” The second such exchange occurred in the same manner one week later, George having done another run to L.A. in the interim. And Courtney came down to relieve him of the accumulated proceeds, advising George that with all this damn money he needed to fit in a couple more ducts back in the house at Wellfleet, where there was now upward of $10 million.

Not long after the Kane run, Carlos urged George to come down to the Bahamas and see for himself what the excitement was about at Norman Cay. George flew to Nassau, where Carlos picked him up at the airport, and the two chartered a sportfisherman and headed for the island. The boat run took less than two hours; it was a typically gorgeous Bahamas day, the sun penetrating the turquoise waters so one could see down to the coral reefs and the bright sandy bottom. As they approached the island, they could make out the hotel up by the airstrip, and also the little yacht club overlooking the marina. Standing on dock to greet them was a stocky man in his fifties, about George's height. He wore cut-offs and dark sunglasses and had a large belly, black bushy hair, and a beard. Suspended from his neck was a pair of binoculars, which he kept trained on the horizon of the surrounding ocean. They landed and tied up, and Carlos introduced George to Robert Vesco—“Call me Bobby,” he told George—the arch-swindler who had fled the United States during the Nixon years after defrauding investors of some $224 million (and also illegally donating $200,000 to the president's re-election campaign).