Blow (33 page)

Mirtha knew he planned to stay for a while when, a week or so after settling in, he rented a jackhammer and cut a three-foot-square hole in the concrete floor under the 250-gallon oil-storage tank in the basement. George wanted it to be large enough to store $3 million in cash. He put a steel plate over the hole, then replaced the oil tank on top of the plate. To get at the money, he'd raise the tank off the plate with a come-along winch suspended from a pipe attached to the overhead beams. “Otherwise,” he says, “you looked in there you'd never dream you were staring at more money than most people earn in three or four lifetimes.”

The house had a lot of space—three bedrooms, plus a maid's quarters downstairs next to the garage, along with two sleeping lofts. But George's family had already begun to grow. Along with Mirtha's relatives, there was now Uncle Jack O'Neill, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, his mother's only sibling, who decided in his early seventies to give up the music stores he owned in Louisiana, divorce his wife of forty years, and come up north and join his nephew in the cocaine business. An old-fashioned Irish dandy, who in his younger years trimmed his mustache pencil-thin, wore a diamond pinky ring, and manicured his nails, Jack came from the musical side of the family. He'd studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and played piano in concerts and in nightclubs, at one point for Gordon and Sheila MacRae. A cousin, Don O'Neill, had a radio program out of Chicago. His mother, Ethel O'Neill, George's grandmother, was the one who had sung in music halls in Boston. George remembered visiting Uncle Jack's house in Baton Rouge as a boy. “I always loved him,” George says. “He was a big gambler, played cards and billiards, also a golfer. He'd bring me along out on the golf course, and when they reached the green they'd putt for a thousand dollars a shot. He'd say to me, ‘Georgie, this guy loves to lose money. Watch this.' And when the other guy was ready to shoot, Jack would unloosen his false teeth and have them fall out right on the green. The guy lost all his concentration.”

Jack was soon helping George regain his big-time status by coming up with new smuggling schemes. The two of them flew down to Bay Saint Louis on the Gulf of Mexico, just over the Mississippi line from New Orleans, where Jack knew the manager of a country club/condo complex, a whole community on the water, complete with its own stores, golf course—and landing strip. When Jack came north, he brought along some old friends, a newly retired couple in their late sixties. Wilmer had operated a rental-car agency in Baton Rouge, and he and his wife were looking for something to occupy their declining years. “‘Wilmer, he'll do anything,' Jack told me. So I soon had him and his wife running suitcase trips down to Caracas, staying in good hotels, flying first-class. They brought in two loads worth about one and a half million. They said they'd never had so much excitement in their life. Wilmer asked me if I knew anyone else they could do trips for.”

As Mirtha remembers them, the early days in Eastham provided her and George happy times, almost all the way through 1978. She spent a lot of money on a decorator to fix the place to her liking. She chose an orange shag carpet for the living room and orange drapes for the windows and across the sliding glass doors in front, a combination that made the place seem to burst into flame when exposed to the sunsets. She couldn't find any furniture to her taste on the Cape, so she ordered the living room and bedroom sets, a bamboo and rattan motif, from a store in Baton Rouge when they were down on a visit. “I was used to living in a house with all French provincial, like a museum, with chandeliers and marble tables, and silver. But it wasn't me. I was very down-to-earth.”

Life settled in. “In the evenings we'd sit out on the deck, looking out onto the bay. He would read and was relaxed. He felt good because he had accomplished what he'd wanted to do. He was doing what he knew best and was truly happy, especially after he found some new pilots. He'd always wear white, white and beige. A jacket with this little silk scarf. I'd buy him light blue shirts that looked so good with his hazel eyes. He'd have his cognac, the Rémy Martin. We talked about how we'd stay on the Cape, and I was going to play music, and he was going to write his book, about his life. This was the dream we were going to live.”

They also shared a few secrets in the safe house in Wellfleet. That place also looked out over the bay, had a wide, screened-in porch in front, and a large attic room on the third floor that George and Mirtha made over into their special fantasy place. Other than Courtney, who had brought the money there from Florida, no one knew about the Wellfleet house, not Mr. T or Teddy Fields, and not the Colombians. Even his brother-in-law Humberto had only the telephone number of Wellfleet, not the address. On the days he couldn't reach George in Eastham he'd try this other number, always getting Mirtha on the phone, who'd invariably tell him that George wasn't available just then; he was tied up. Not always tied up, actually. And some days he wasn't even George. He would transform himself into “Georgette,” someone Humberto would probably not have recognized very readily because of the makeup—lipstick, eye shadow, the blond wig, and because of the brassiere he wore, and the woman's panties. “I would more or less pick out what I thought would look good on him,” says Mirtha, who got the stuff at a department store in Hyannis. “It was very hard, because basically he was so
big,
I mean huge shoulders. He was a very hard person to shop for.”

Georgette's main assignment was to do the housework, performing the chores dressed in a scanty hostess apron and her economy-size ladies' underwear. Her lipstick was a neon pink, royal blue rimmed her eyes, and her wig was cut in a Dutch-boy style that hung down toward her shoulders. Georgette would run the vacuum cleaner busily around the room, bending over to jab it under the sofa, making sure not to miss those corners—surprising, how much sand gets into the hard-to-reach places with a house at the shore. She'd give the books a once-over with her dust cloth, climbing onto a stool and reaching up on her tippy toes to get the top of the china cabinet. The cleaning done, she'd set out places for dinner, forks on the left, knives on the right—had to get it right or “Mistress Mirth,” the stern one who ran the household, would get upset and do something to Georgette that might smart. Goodness knows, Mistress was hard to please. In short order Georgette would find herself told to go upstairs to the big bed in the attic, where she was made to lie down on her back with her hands and feet tied. Mistress Mirth got the hang of it as she went along. “At first I would tie him up with ropes, but he would say, ‘Look,' and I would walk back into the room thinking he was all tied up, and he'd be loose, standing there, saying, ‘I told you you didn't tie me right.' So then I began to get serious.” On a trip to visit her sister in New York City, Mirtha stopped in at the Pleasure Chest, a sex shop in Greenwich Village, and bought a variety of equipment—chains and handcuffs, leather straps, dog collars and leashes, a selection of whips. Back on the Cape she created a little outfit of her own, fashioned from a picture she'd cut out of a skin magazine and taken to a tailor in Provincetown she'd heard felt comfortable with such requests.

The Provincetown tailor made several versions for her, one white, one red, and one black, all consisting of a leather corset extending from her breasts to her crotch, held together by strings that laced up the front. She also ordered up leather bikinis to go with each set. Back in the attic, she'd put on her stuff and firmly affix Georgette to the bed, make her into the slave of Mistress Mirth. If Georgette wanted a snort of coke, she'd have to beg for it. The same for when she wanted a meal, and sometimes, if Georgette hadn't done a good job downstairs or had said something naughty, she might go a whole day without food, be left up there for hours and hours while Mistress Mirth stayed downstairs entering the day's events into her Kahlil Gibran diary, in which each week was headlined with some piece of wisdom from
The Prophet.

“George always wanted me to do more, saying I wasn't mean enough, so I'd constantly have to be thinking up things.” She kept Georgette fairly well shaved in the lower regions, lathering the Gillette Foamy all over the place, and using the occasion to carve her initials just above the pubic area with a razor blade. She'd allow him to come downstairs where she'd have a fire going in the fireplace and handcuff him to a rocking chair. Or she'd fasten on his dog collar and a leash and lead him around the house on all fours, once threatening to take him out on the street like that if he didn't behave. She also thought of putting clothespins on his nipples, making him endure that for four or five days. On one occasion when Mirtha returned to Eastham and he stayed on at Wellfleet, he called her up to leave a breathy message on the answering machine: “This is your slave Georgette calling to tell you I'm taking the clothespins off. They're painful. Perhaps when we meet again you can extend the time period. Good-bye.”

Early in 1978 the activities at Wellfleet had to be suspended shortly after Mr. and Mrs. Jung discovered they were going to have to accommodate a new member of the household, due to arrive the first week in August. Mirtha heard the news first from her doctor, and she rushed home to tell George. “I didn't want another child, really. I had Clarie. But he wanted one of his own. Oh, he definitely did. But I didn't know if he could handle it. When I told him, he hugged me and kissed me and said that's wonderful, he was really excited, and Jack was excited, too. They started to take care of me. ‘Sit down.' And, ‘You've got to eat this and that.' I remember how pleased he was. It was like a fresh start.”

Actually, before this moment George couldn't have given less thought to children, and especially to whether he might want one of his own. “The kind of life I'd led, raising a family, that stuff, the subject had never come up,” he says. “The way I thought, adventurers don't have time for children and dogs and cats. None of my girlfriends were interested in any of that. And the people I'd known in California, they might have had a dog, but that was it. I'd always assumed Mirtha was on the pill. But then I found out she wasn't.” Nevertheless, now that the event was at hand, he decided that maybe it wouldn't be so bad. The baby would be a boy—there was never a question in his mind about that—and he'd name him after his own father, Christian Frederick Jung. As the date got closer, he helped Mirtha shop for baby things and get the little room ready. “He'd go to the store with me, and everything we picked out was blue. Blue blankets, T-shirts with little blue borders on them. A little blue rattle. He bought the first stuffed toy the baby had. It was a teddy bear, really cute, with a little T-shirt that said ‘Hug me.'”

From Mirtha's diary entry for Thursday, May 4, 1978:

George has found another pilot and we're getting ready to leave for Norfolk in a few days. George buys me ice cream, our craving. We both eat it in the middle of the night. He likes coffee. I love chocolate. We were sharing this craving together. They say that men don't become pregnant. They do. I want this baby and he wants this baby, too. He placed his hands and felt the baby move today. He was in a trance after that. It's funny to see this mafioso man when it comes to expecting. We had a good day.

Whatever his feelings toward the blessed event, George's best day that spring was the one when he once again found a pilot and was back in the transportation business for the first time since the Kane flights nine months earlier. The source was a publication called
Trade-a-Plane,
a periodical that serious smugglers rarely missed. He'd answered an ad for a de Havilland Dove, the British version of the DC-3, which was for sale by a pilot named Hank, who operated out of the airport in Norfolk, Virginia. “I called the guy and said I was in the real estate development business and his plane sounded like what I wanted. He said to come on down, his wife would pick me up and bring me out to his hangar. I flew down and she showed up in a station wagon, three or four kids in the back. We drive over there, and here's this guy Hank, swigging from a bottle of tequila and sitting in the middle of all these airplanes. When we're alone he says, ‘Who're you shittin'? No real estate developer wants a goddamn plane this big. You're a smuggler.'

“‘You're goddamn right I am,' I said, ‘And so are you, you motherfucker.' And that's how we got started.”

For years Hank had augmented his salary as a Pan Am pilot by flying pot out of Colombia and Mexico, and at about the time George happened along he'd been considering moving into a more profitable product line. In the years between 1978 and 1980 things began cooking over a high flame in the cocaine business. Coca paste was flooding into the processing plants in Medellín and Cali, flown in from the three thousand-odd landing strips in the Alto Beni growing region of Bolivia, trucked up the Pan American Highway from Peru and Ecuador, landed from coastal freighters putting in at the Colombian port of Buenaventura and little coastal villages all along the Pacific, most of them reachable only by donkey trails. When Hank started making flights for George, he reported back that the airstrips he was directed to outside of Medellín and up near Barranquilla in the north were like miniature O'Hares in Chicago, with so many aircraft coming and going that the planes had to circle around for a while until they found a moment clear for a landing. At night the fields would be outlined by piles of burning automobile tires, which lit up the forest region like dozens of primitive encampments. Pilots would sometimes get confused and land at the wrong strip, then have to take off again and hopscotch to the next set of signal fires. In these go-go years of the trade, efforts to interdict the flights by federal and local police agencies in the United States were haphazard at best. Total seizures of cocaine by the DEA in 1980 amounted to only 2,590 pounds, equivalent to less than five of Barry Kane's planeloads. And it was not until 1982 that the Reagan administration declared its much vaunted war on drugs, with Vice President George Bush the general in charge.