Doctor Dealer (24 page)

Lester sat in the back seat with a bodyguard. Willie sat in the passenger seat in front, and the driver took them to Coconut Grove, to an apartment building right on the bay. Lester had a clothing business on the side, making jeans for the Dominican Republic, so he told Willie about his business on their way up to the apartment and asked for his size. Muldair was already there. He and Lester set Willie up in the bedroom with a drink in front of the TV and asked him to wait. A short while later, Muldair came back in and handed Willie a plastic bag of off-white cocaine.

“Here’s your kilo,” he said. Muldair described some of the cocaine’s characteristics to Willie, pointing out that its rock content was over 50 percent and taking out a melt box to demonstrate how to test for cut. He showed Willie how to wrap the cocaine in baking soda to cloak its faint odor in case police dogs came sniffing. Lester came in and gave Willie several pairs of jeans, which would do a better job of shielding the contents in the X-ray machine than his shirts and underwear. Then Lester rode back to the airport with Willie and watched him through the security checkpoint.

Willie was back in Philadelphia that night. He delivered the kilo to David’s apartment. Then they drove to another apartment where they broke down the contents into rocks and shake, pressed rocks, and packaged the amounts for David’s customers. Willie was paid five hundred dollars for his efforts. David was clearly delighted with how smoothly things had gone.

“We want you to go again next week,” he said.

By summer, Willie was making three trips to Florida every month, bringing back four to six kilos at a time. He got used to walking into motel rooms alone with a quarter of a million dollars in cash in his suitcase to meet total strangers, typically Cubans, who sometimes did things like point automatic weapons at him. It occurred to Willie fairly early on that he was the one taking all the risks. David and Kenny and Larry were the ones getting rich.

But then, by this time he was being paid a lot more. Where else was he going to earn almost ten grand, tax free, every month?

*  *  *

One of the first things Larry did on returning from the honeymoon was drive out to meet Mark and David at his newest acquisition.

It was worse than he had pictured it. One look inside and Larry knew the project was never going to work.

In one of the offices off an upper hallway that looked down into the cavernous interior, Mark laid out his financial statements and plans, detailing the cost for new plumbing, new toilets and sinks, new electrical engineering, new refrigerators for beer and food concessions, an eccentric plan to convert the giant old ice-making machine (for the hockey and ice show rinks) into an air-conditioning system. Out of curiosity, Larry said he wanted to take a look at the device. Mark took him downstairs and pointed it out.

Larry stood in front of the thing for a long time.

“Mark, there’s no chance in the world that this machine will ever make ice again,” he said.

Mark insisted his plan was doable. He had already begun booking fight cards, and was planning to install a screen so he could open the place on June 20 with a closed-circuit screening of the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran championship bout. The Spectrum, the Civic Center, even the arenas in Atlantic City were completely sold out. Promoters had come to Mark begging to use the Arena.

“This place must be in violation of every fire and building code on the books!” said Larry.

But Stewart seemed unconcerned. To make Larry feel better, Mark told him that they already earned a five thousand dollar return on his initial investment. They had already begun selling tickets for the televised bout, and the place was sure to be sold out. It was the first return Larry had ever gotten on one of Mark’s investments, and it did a lot to placate his doubts about the arena—he couldn’t complain too hard about hazarding only forty-five thousand. And Mark did have his heart in it.

On the night of the scheduled opening there was a line of ticket holders wrapped all the way down Market Street to Forty-sixth, and down Forty-sixth to Chestnut. The gates were supposed to have opened by 8:00 p.m., but they were still closed when Larry drove up at 9:00. When he stopped his black Volvo to wait for guards to open the gate to the VIP parking area, his car was surrounded by an angry mob. Several of the security guards Mark had hired, off-duty Philadelphia cops, waded out through the crowd and cleared the way for Larry to pull in.

Inside, Mark was frantic. The satellite dish he had just installed didn’t work.

Outside, the mob was shattering windows and prying hinges off the giant doors.

Larry would remember Mark protesting, “It’s not my fault.”

Their grand opening made the newspapers the next morning, but not as they intended. It was reported as the scene of a small riot. Ticket holders eventually got refunds.

Larry’s house. A man’s voice on the phone.

“Batten down the hatches. There’s a storm coming.”

“Who is this?” asked Larry.

“This is a warning from a friend,” said the voice.

“Wait!”

But the caller had already hung up.

Larry and Marcia had been home from their honeymoon less than one week.

Larry could only assume that some kind of trouble was coming, but what? Dick Muldair had gotten busted making a deal at a shopping center on the Main Line with a guy who turned out to be a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, but that was something Dick had done on his own, so even if he talked about Larry (which Larry was sure Dick wouldn’t), they couldn’t get enough to come after him. The amount involved had been fairly small, and Dick was facing only about six months. But if not Dick, then what?

There was nothing to do but clean house. Larry and Marcia spent the night combing all four levels of their house for every trace of drugs. Larry filled a small brown bag with all they had collected, a small bag of marijuana, his pipes, and a vial of Quaaludes. He walked over to Mark Stewart’s office that night and locked it in the safe.

Nothing happened.

When the same voice came on the phone with a similar message two nights later, Larry begged for an explanation.

“Can’t you give me a little bit more of a feeling for what’s going on?” he pleaded.

The caller relented. He gave Larry a number and told him to call back from a pay phone in twenty minutes. Larry thanked him and left the house in search of a pay phone.

A woman answered. She was the wife of a Vietnam veteran with a contracting business in New Jersey who had been buying indirectly from Larry off and on for several years. Larry had met with them once, a year ago, when the vet had gotten into serious debt, and Larry had agreed to give them more time to pay him back. Anyway, she explained, her husband had gotten busted. She was grateful for the
way Larry had handled their indebtedness, so she had gotten her brother to phone with a warning. She wanted Larry to know that under questioning her husband had given his name to the state police.

Not long afterward, at dental school, one of Larry’s classmates drew him aside in the hall. His classmate’s wife was a lawyer working as an assistant in the office of District Attorney Ed Rendell of Philadelphia. One of her co-workers had come up to her in the office and asked if her husband was at Penn dental school. She said yes. So the man asked if he knew someone named Larry Lavin.

She said yes.

“Well, tell him to stay away from the guy. He’s on Ed’s list of suspected major drug dealers in the city.”

That afternoon, Larry had talks with David and with Ken. He wasn’t worried about his house being searched; there was nothing there. But he was going to have to keep the coke business at arm’s length for a while. He might be under surveillance. Larry figured his phones were tapped.

Unaware that city police had, in fact, been watching him for more than a year, Larry assumed that the New Jersey state police had given his name to city prosecutors. He was hot. But—it was funny—Larry didn’t feel the least bit threatened. To him, the fact that the information about official suspicions had twice leaked to him confirmed his feeling that there was a generational conspiracy at work to protect him from the law. It was the same kind of subcultural context in which he had dealt marijuana as an undergrad. Young people used harmless recreational drugs; the authorities tried to enforce pointless laws. It was “us” against “them.” Larry was too smart and had too many friends to get nailed by a force of square-headed high school graduates in cheap suits with badges.

Still, it was a good idea to lay low.

A more pressing problem continued to be bad debts. Ralph, Larry’s old pot connection from Virginia Tech, had bought cocaine from Larry and worked himself fifty thousand dollars into debt.

It was an unusually large debt, even for Larry’s books. He had been doing business with Ralph ever since he was a sophomore undergrad. His friend had a legitimate business now, so Larry had reason to assume his mounting debt would eventually be paid. So he had let Ralph get in deeper and deeper.

But in the summer after his wedding, when Larry had not heard from Ralph for several weeks, he tried calling. The number he phoned had been disconnected. So Larry looked up Ralph’s father’s number
outside Philadelphia, and began telephoning and leaving messages there every day.

After a week of this, Larry got a phone call. The caller identified himself as a friend of Ralph’s.

“Larry, how you doin’?” he said. “Ralph just asked me to call and convey congratulations on your marriage and your beautiful wife. And, oh yeah, he wanted me to tell you that if you ever call his house again he’ll have her cut up into little pieces no bigger than an inch.”

“Let me talk to Ralph, would you?” asked Larry.

“No bigger than an inch.”

Larry slammed down the receiver.

On a cold Friday night in the fall, after Larry and Marcia came home from dining out, Marcia showered and put on a blue terry cloth robe and stretched out on the living room couch in time to watch
Dallas.
Marcia was an avid
Dallas
fan.

Then the doorbell rang.

Larry crossed the room and pushed the intercom button.

“Who is it?”

“Police. We had a report of a burglary in progress and we’re searching the neighborhood. We want to look around.”

Larry pressed the button that unlocked the door to the outside gate. The door opened on a courtyard common to all the houses on the alley, but with one glance out the window Larry could tell by the number and urgency of the men moving through the gate that they had come for him. There were uniformed and plainclothes police, most carrying flashlights.

He turned to Marcia with an apologetic look and said, “This is it.”

Larry opened the door and said, “Let’s get this over with.”

Two of the men with flashlights grabbed him, wheeled him back into the living room, and threw him to the floor. One thrust a sheet of paper right up to his face.

“This gives me the right to search your place,” he said.

“We’re happy to let you search,” said Larry, standing. “Let’s go. If you’re going to search my house, I want to be present.”

Larry was worried they might plant something.

As they entered the living room, the dog Rusty ran across the room happily and jumped on them, barking. Marcia started downstairs to get the leash, and one of the cops shouted, “You can’t leave!”

“Where do you think I’m going?” Marcia said. “I’m just getting a leash for the dog.”

He motioned for her to sit back down and she did. One of the uniformed men went downstairs for the leash.

As the house was searched, room by room, Marcia was joined on the couch by the cop who had gotten the leash. She gave him some background information about that night’s
Dallas
episode.

Larry was feeling especially cocky. He followed the team of searchers through the house. They pulled out drawers, shined their flashlights up and under tables and chairs, pulled Larry and Marcia’s nice new Scandinavian teak cabinets away from the wall and inspected the shelves front and back, bottom and top. In the bedroom they were intrigued by Marcia’s hope chest, which was locked at the foot of the bed. She was summoned upstairs and readily produced a key and opened it. It was filled with neatly folded linen. Up on the third floor, where Larry had his prized new pool table, the men were about to give up when Larry announced—he couldn’t help himself—“You guys, you don’t know what you’re doing. You missed the best place in here.”

Then he stooped over to show them how panels on the pool table legs opened to hollow spaces inside.

Back downstairs, Larry and Marcia were directed to sit at the round kitchen table. There they were confronted with the evidence: two Quaaludes that had fallen behind a drawer in Larry’s dresser, a tiny silver coke-snorting straw, and five thousand in cash.

“We’re going to take you downtown,” said one of the men.

Larry held out his hands and said, “Let’s go. What can they do to you for two Quaaludes?”

“It’s pretty unusual for a senior in dental school to have five grand in his house,” said one of the detectives.

“I’d like to tell you something off the record,” said Larry.

“You can tell it to us on the record or off the record,” said one of the detectives, indicating that whatever Larry had to say they wanted to hear and would use against him. Larry went ahead anyway.

“You guys are late,” he said. “I’m just a dental student now. Those days are long gone.”

“Well, I think what we’re going to start doing is to take this house apart brick by brick,” a detective answered.

“Okay,” said Larry, wearily. “If that’s your job, go ahead.”

“No, not now,” the detective said. “Now we’re going to go over to 1228 Spruce Street.”

That was the address of TEC Records. In an apartment on the third floor of that building, Larry had a large stash of cocaine and the papers outlining his agreement with Mark Stewart. Often there was cash stored in that apartment. For the first time that night he felt a touch of panic.

“You’re going to take us down there and show us around the offices,” the detective said.