Blow (32 page)

Well, not marry, exactly. As his various girlfriends knew too well, from junior high school days on up, George suffered from a constitutional incapacity to maintain a monogamous relationship. Put plainly, he was a hopelessly compulsive fornicator, to the degree that occasionally even he had to stand aside from himself and stare back in wonder. As for actual marriage, to tie himself
legally
to a person for the rest of his life flew directly in the face of all his dreams, of the Costa del Sol, of the cafés in Ibiza, of the women—especially the latter, the countless, unending supply of women. Actual marriage seemed too much to ask of himself, even under these opportune circumstances. But, despite his reservations, when Mirtha raised the subject, he told her he just might entertain the possibility. Someday, maybe. “I really can't remember exactly what I told her,” George says. “I promised her I'd think about it, or I said we'd get married eventually. I was doing a lot of cocaine in that period, and sometimes I'd say things that didn't stay with me very long. But I knew the Colombians were definitely big into families, into respecting the family, even though the guys screwed around a lot. They were also big into the Catholic church and christening children. So being married meant I would be solidified within the family. As far as I was concerned, it was a very advantageous thing to do.”

George eventually told Mirtha that if she really wanted to get married, they could act the part; they could pretend. So that fall he chartered a Learjet and took her on a vacation to Quebec City, where he got them a room in the venerable Château Frontenac, on the bluff overlooking the St. Lawrence River. And on their return Mirtha announced to her friends and family in New York and Miami that, yes, she and George had just done a wild, crazy thing. They'd eloped and gotten married up in Canada. He'd given her a ring, a coral-and-turquoise job she'd picked out herself. And she'd bought George one, too, a ruby set in gold, a stone the Colombians called
sangre de pichón,
or “blood of the pigeon.” For whatever difference it made, in Mirtha's social life and George's business, they henceforth presented themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Jung, husband and wife.

At first the liaison with the Hoyoses and the everyday demands of the cocaine business took George's mind off worrying about his prospects for the future. Through Humberto, he was given a new wholesaler to supply in Manhattan. Richard was still there on the West Coast, not as big as before and still getting uppity, but still willing to move kilos. George also had a good contact in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from his marijuana days, and he resurrected his relationship with Earl the Pearl, now a prime cocaine wholesaler throughout Marin County, a solid market area with good growth potential. And, of course, there was Mr. T back on the Cape, as well as his dealer in Cambridge.

George also had to begin giving some attention to all the millions in cash clogging the heating system in Wellfleet. At one point Barry Kane had talked to him about putting his money into gold certificates in Switzerland. Not only could this be done quietly, but gold was going crazy during that period, at one point getting up over six hundred dollars an ounce. The idea was to transport the money to the Bahamas, deposit it in one of the offshore banks, such as the Nassau branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia—an institution that had come a long way since its founding as a repository for the hard-earned savings of Scotch-Irish fishermen—and purchase the certificates through the bank by wire. Or wire the money from the Bahamas into a numbered account in Switzerland, or the Bank of Nova Scotia branch in Panama City. But Kane these days seemed to be drifting into Carlos's circles, and George felt a little uneasy about carting all his money down to Nassau.

What's more, with his “marriage” to Mirtha he seemed to have included a family that was developing considerable financial needs. There was Clarie, her daughter from her first marriage, and her stepbrother, Armando, who repaired cars in his backyard in Miami and seemed more adept at spending money—George's mostly—than making it. His mother-in-law, Clara Luz, lost no time in declaring dependent status for herself, exchanging her residence in the Hoyoses' apartment for one with George and Mirtha, in a house she got George to rent for them all near Barry Kane's condo north of Fort Lauderdale. And Mirtha herself was proving no slouch when it came to contributing to the profits of the shopping malls. All in all, George thought, he'd better hold off transferring the cash out of the country just yet. It looked like he'd find sufficient use for it close to home.

After a few months, though, it was obvious that his unhappiness over Carlos wasn't going to disappear. Getting his kilos from Humberto meant George had to work in the capacity of a dealer, selling them to small-timers around the country, somthing he disliked intensely. He now had to load up the door panels of a Jeep Cherokee with ten or fifteen kilos and schlep them out to his contact in Ann Arbor, a guy who sold hot tubs by day and at night attended the business school at the University of Michigan. Another customer was a would-be writer living in a shack lit by kerosene lamps in the woods near Buffalo, New York, who peddled kilos to finance his novel. There was also a black record-store owner in New York City, the only person of his race George ever encountered in the drug trade, who made George bring the goods to a drop-off point in an industrial area of Livingston, New Jersey. “To me, it was all degrading, like going from being Lee Iacocca to being a used-car salesman. I hated it,” says George. Not only was he making less than a tenth of his former income—barely a hundred thousand dollars a month—but the work put him at considerable risk. “It was a lot of exposure for not much money. You'd never know if the guy you were dealing with had gotten arrested and they'd let him out on bail so he could set you up.”

Transportation—that was George's baby, and the best way to stay clear of the law. But Carlos seemed to have a lock on that end right now. Carlos! He'd hear things from Humberto about what was happening on Norman Cay, and he didn't like any of it. In the last conversation he'd had with Carlos, the deal was that George would be called down when things got cooking. Well, they were obviously cooking up a storm, and George's phone hadn't rung at all. Carlos did indeed buy the house, the Volcano, paid $190,000 cash for it, the story being that he'd given the owner a suitcase full of money counted so casually that there was $8,000 too much. He'd also, as planned, picked up a 165-acre parcel, including the airstrip, hotel, and marina, from the investing company in New York, again for cash, $875,000, George later heard. A couple of dozen employees were now working on Norman Cay, building the hangars and some kennels near the runway for guard dogs. There were rumors that Carlos had hired a couple of high-tech bodyguards trained at a special security school in Stuttgart, Germany. He'd heard that Kane had made some more flights down to Medellín that George certainly hadn't been consulted on, even though he regarded Kane as his own recruit. He'd heard that even Frank Shea, his former boyhood pal, the one he'd gotten to help Carlos bring in the early loads, and his girlfriend Winny, were working on Norman Cay. And according to Humberto, the loads were certainly starting to come in and go out with considerably frequency. Carlos now had a fleet of three large boats, a fifty-one-foot powerboat, a cruiser ninety feet long, as well as all manner of airplanes.

In the middle of this, Richard Barile finally just shut George down, said he was getting about as much as he could handle from Carlos, with whom he now had a regular relationship, and that George would have to take his kilos elsewhere. “I blew up at him and said, ‘Listen, I set you up in this business, and then you fucked me over and went behind my back.' He said, ‘Well, that's business. George, I can't help it.' And I said, ‘Well, I'm telling you now that eventually some form of revenge is going to take place. I'm not going to stand for this.' ‘It's not my problem,' he said. ‘It's Carlos's problem. It's between you and Carlos.'”

George was now going to parties with the Colombians, where he'd be the only gringo, and the subject of Carlos invariably came up. The men would talk about it in their groups, the women in theirs—how well Carlos was doing, how big he was getting, how George had been screwed over, how he'd been responsible for Carlos's success, and now look at the way he was getting treated. “Then Mirtha would start talking about it around the house, so I couldn't get away from it. They wouldn't stop talking about it or let me forget it. I mean, I had this dream here, and Carlos had stolen my dream. Now no one would let me get on with my life.” This went on until early in 1978, at which point George called up Carlos at the Holiday Inn in Nassau, where he stayed when not on his island, and said he was coming down to settle the situation.

After landing at the airport and taking a cab to the hotel, George called Carlos in his room, and Carlos told him he'd meet him in the lounge. Carlos showed up in about five minutes, ordered a beer, and this time there was no obfuscating. George was out, as far as the Norman Cay operation went. “He said there was room for only one person to run the operation and that was going to be him. He said, ‘It's my world, my empire, and I have to run it.' He said it wasn't the end of the world for me, that I wasn't going to go broke with Humberto.” While Carlos was talking, George noticed two fairly large individuals enter the lounge and seat themselves at the next table. One was blond, wearing a polo shirt and khaki shorts, the other had dark hair and a bushy beard. Both were over six feet tall with thick necks and ballooning biceps; they looked like professional athletes in a sport with a lot of body contact. They sat there keeping George and Carlos under surveillance, until George started getting loud, causing some heads to turn in the bar, at which point they rose to their feet.

“Instead of being humble,” George recalls, “and humiliating myself like the last time, hoping he would come back to me, I suddenly realized that he was never coming back, and I just crossed over the line and had no fear, no insecurity. My anger just seemed to encompass my whole life. ‘So I'm fucked, is that it?' I told him. I said, ‘Well I'm fucking tired of getting fucked around like this. I'm in with some pretty heavy-weight people in Boston that you're going to find out about. You're going to pay for this, you and Barile and everyone.'” In the middle of his speech, George suddenly became aware that the two big guys were looming over the table, and Carlos interrupted him to say he wanted George to meet a couple of his employees, come all the way from Germany. This was Heinrich, he said, gesturing toward the one with the beard. The blonde was named Manfred. Why didn't George just lower his voice a little bit, not attract so much attention. This was a public place. They could talk about this like gentlemen. “By this time I was too pissed to talk about anything anymore and got up and said, ‘You're not going to get away with this. There are going to be reprisals for this. This is not the end of it.' And I walked out, got a cab to the airport, and flew home.”

It was right after this confrontation that George received the present. They were all having dinner at Humberto's apartment in Manhattan, and George was describing his meeting with Carlos, the German bodyguards, the threats he'd made. At this point, an elderly woman whom George understood to be an aunt of Humberto's, reached into her purse and took out something folded in a piece of linen cloth, which she placed on the table in front of everyone. Here, take this, she told George. When he unwrapped it, he saw it was an ice pick. “She told me, ‘My late husband said to always carry this for protection. The hole is so small a person doesn't bleed. If you don't get him now, everyone will look down on you.' I took the ice pick and said I'd think about what she said, and I put it in my briefcase. I didn't tell her, but I knew I wasn't going to kill anyone with a fucking ice pick. If I was going to get someone, I was going to shoot him.”

NINE

Eastham

1978–1980

We are finally alone this morning. He's having coffee on the deck and looking out at the bay. I love his blond hair. When he looks into my eyes I feel his love. He tells me he loves me and that he is happy for the first time in his life.

—
FROM
M
IRTHA'S DIARY
, S
UNDAY
, A
PRIL
24, 1978

S
INCE
G
EORGE WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS
, T
EDDY
F
IELDS
offered to take Mirtha around to the real estate dealers to look for a house they could live in on the Cape. She rented the place in Eastham on a gray day late in the fall of 1977. Built to a modern design, with sharp angles, an open deck, and weathered shingles and trim, it sat on a seventy-five-foot-high bluff offering a spectacular view out over Cape Cod Bay. A set of rickety stairs led down to a stretch of sand, which was known as First Encounter Beach. The encounter had occurred in 1620 after a party of Pilgrims stole a cache of corn from the Indians up in Truro and had to fight off a band of pissed-off Wampanoags who attacked them when the
Mayflower
put in to take on water. Eastham lies between the ocean and the bay just beyond the bend in the Cape, where it turns sharply north and heads up toward Provincetown. Besides its beach, the town is known to historians for its wind-driven grist mill, built in 1793 and still turning strong, and also for the three original
Mayflower
passengers buried in its cemetery. From George's house on the bluff you could make out the lighthouse on Race Point at the tip of the Cape. But the best show came from due west across the bay late in the day, when the sinking sun spread the entire horizon with a ruddy orange glow.

George wasn't much of a local-history buff, but he liked the view and listening to the gentle lapping of the waves. The house itself seemed perfectly designed and located for his line of business. Its shingle-covered chimney, built to disguise the flue for the basement oil burner, provided an ideal stash for the three hundred or so kilos he often needed to hide temporarily while the load was still in transit. The approach to the house was difficult to find, located several miles from Route 6, the main highway on the Cape, on a twisting series of back roads. A loft area over the kitchen, normally reserved for little Clarie's playroom, had a vertical dormer that gave George a commanding view over all the access roads. At his back was the sea. All in all, it was in a strong defensive position, not an easy place to approach without being seen. The situation of the place proved its value not many months hence when three Colombians with whom George had had a grave misunderstanding called down from Logan Airport and wanted him to come up and meet them—to discuss the problem, they said—at what he knew was a deserted stretch of waterfront just south of Boston. If they were that hot to see him, George suggested they drive down to Eastham. He'd set up a little reception committee in the window in Clarie's playroom, her dollhouse and the stuffed animals shoved over to one side so he could sit there in comfort while he leveled on the approaches to the house with a civilian version of the army M-16 that Mr. T had fixed up for him, its breech mechanism altered so as to fire on full automatic. Come on down, he told them. No one showed.