Doctor Dealer (33 page)

With his business dealings with Mark Stewart and the cocaine business mostly out of his hands, there was little for Larry to do. He made some preliminary inquiries into opening a dental practice on the Main Line, but found that there were elaborate politics involved. There were seventeen dentists in Devon and sixteen in Wayne. The region was oversaturated. To buy in you had to be willing to go to work for one of the established practices, where you worked under the thumb of a longtime practitioner. Most newly graduated dentists have no choice. They have debts to repay and a career to get started. But Larry, who at this point was making more than a hundred thousand per month selling cocaine, was in a position to pick and choose, and he chose not to go the usual route. In fact, the politics of getting started scared him. Who needed it? Maybe he wouldn’t even pursue dentistry.

He had other things to keep him busy. Just before graduation, Larry bought the First National Game Room, a video arcade in a shopping center way out in Chester County, west of Philadelphia. Drawn to an interest in video games by Kenny, Larry had grown addicted to Donkey Kong in his senior year. He used to slip across busy Spruce Street from the dental school to play games at University Pinball. After many odd hours hanging around the arcade, Larry realized that it was an excellent cash business, just the thing he could use to help legitimize his illicit dollars.

After shopping around, Larry purchased the arcade in Eagleville shortly before graduation for fifty thousand dollars. He spent a lot of time over the next few months playing video games, attacking each of the newest games and playing until he was sick of it. When his own interest waned, the investment didn’t look so keen. Kids in Eagleville didn’t have that much money to drop into video games. The half-life of video games dropped off precipitously after the success of Pac-Man. Pac-Man had been profitable at arcades for three years. Donkey Kong, its biggest successor, lasted only six months. The next generation of games was only hot for about three months. And the practical details of running a small business got to Larry. When the man he hired to run the place had a day off, Larry would have to go and mind the store himself. No longer excited by the games, he got bored. On weekends, he and Marcia had to drive out to the place and
count tokens for hours. Larry tried to make improvements. Using an Apple computer he had repossessed from a customer who owed him money, Larry used a standard business program to make printouts showing the productivity of each machine, so he could maximize the return on floor space by moving out games as soon as their play time began to fall off. But despite all his efforts, the arcade never made more than $125 per day and stayed on a stubborn downhill trend. Video games were a fad, and he had gotten into it after the fad had crested. He finally sold the place for fifty thousand and counted himself wiser for the experience.

Toward the end of summer his pool was complete, the greenhouse was done, the basement renovations were finished, and Larry was at a loss. He had invested in three expensive condos in a Mays Landing development called the Sandpiper, so Larry spent a week going down to look at them and attending settlements. But then that was over. He was disgusted with the Arena, which was losing more and more money. Every day Dick Muldair would phone to relate new outrages about Mark’s management of the place. The Barclay Building project was still tied up in bankruptcy court, and in the hands of lawyers. And the record business continued to lurch along on its own, costing more and more money.

So Larry decided that since he spent so many hours a day worrying about his money, he might as well play with it full-time. He thought the best way to do that was to go to work at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. His old pot-dealing partners L.A. and Andy Mainardi had gone to work for the exchange and were doing quite well. Larry had plenty of money to work with. So, with his friends coaching him, Larry went to the Securities and Exchange Commission office in Washington and applied and qualified for the exchange in one day. He bought himself a seat for sixty thousand dollars.

L.A. tried to warn him. No one succeeded at the stock exchange without putting in years of apprenticeship. One went to work for someone who owned a seat and gradually got a feel for the place, for its internal politics as well as the tricks of smart investing. When you owned a seat, you had certain responsibilities that required you to trade relatively large amounts. Without experience, you could lose your shirt—if not your whole fortune.

But Larry was nothing if not confident. He obtained the necessary recommendations, put up the money, and plunged in headfirst. As a “market maker,” Larry was obliged to make markets in five stocks that he was assigned. He worked hard for a few months, but most of the time he was bewildered. People around him were making and losing millions, and Larry usually wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Some days he lost big and some days he won. Most days he lost.
He spent hours viewing videotaped lessons on investing, poring over dry newsletters, trying to absorb in weeks the savvy his friends had developed over years. After the newness of the work wore off, and the losses began to mount, Larry was bored. Every morning he would drive his BMW in, arriving just before ten o’clock wearing his conservative business suit. All around him men would sit reading the
Wall Street Journal.
Larry would don the green jacket that signified the stocks he was trading in. When things heated up, there was a lot of shouting and pushing and people were rude. He learned that when someone was friendly toward him, they were usually just trying to find out something, or mislead him, or take advantage of him in ways he couldn’t always decipher. So the work boiled down to a great big dry numbers game. Larry could see that the only ones really making a lot of money were the inside traders.

One day, as he was looking over that morning’s
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Larry saw an ad for a dental practice. A dentist in northeast Philadelphia was looking to sell his practice for $175,000. Larry took off his green jacket and drove out to see the man immediately.

The practice charmed Larry. It was in a small, one-story stucco house on the busy corner of Frankford Avenue and Ashburner Street, at the end of a residential block of row homes in solidly working-class northeast Philadelphia. Directly across from the front door was a gas station that had been converted into a small muffler repair shop, and beyond that a small shopping center. Across the street to the west was Pennypack Park, and behind a block of residential homes to the south was Holmesburg State Prison. The offices were well furnished and the dental equipment was modern. The place was wired with stereo speakers and multiple telephone lines and an intercom system. The dentist was opening a new practice southwest of Philadelphia, a step up, so it wasn’t that he was fleeing a losing operation. He told Larry that he had grossed more than two hundred thousand in the last year.

“Obviously, you’re not going to be able to open the door and walk in here and do that,” he said, “but you will be able to make a go of it.”

He said he was surprised to see Larry because, as it turned out, the ad in the
Inquirer
had misprinted the selling price. The practice was being sold for only $75,000, not $175,000. The dentist certainly hadn’t expected to attract many buyers for the latter price.

Larry bought the practice two weeks later, handing the dentist two cashier’s checks for the entire amount.

To manage his seat on the stock exchange, Larry hired the young son of another “market maker” to stand for him. That lasted only a
month or two. Larry’s stand-in managed to lose another $55,000. He came to Larry with a plan to salvage his investment at the exchange. The price of a seat had gone way up since Larry had purchased his two months before, and the kid had located a buyer willing to spend $125,000. Larry quickly sold, recovering much of what he had lost during his ill-fated venture into the world of high finance.

With the house remodeling completed, Larry threw himself into setting up his new dental practice. He knocked on the admiral’s door to tell him the good news, and the two dentists chatted about new techniques and the economics of setting up a practice. Larry knew the practice was too big for one dentist, so he offered a one-third interest to Ken, who already had half interest in a practice in South Philly. Within weeks, they were drilling teeth. Larry hired a secretary and an assistant and brought his Apple computer into the office to organize scheduling and billing. Right away he spent thousands of dollars to upgrade the equipment in the two operatories, buying modern devices and materials that few beginning dentists could afford.

By fall of 1981, Larry could honestly say that he had never felt happier in his life. He was still earning roughly a hundred thousand a month from the cocaine business, and doing little more than chatting on the telephone for an hour every evening and meeting twice a month with David to go over the books. The transition had gone smoothly in the dental practice. Larry got along well with his patients and found the work more exciting than he had imagined it would be. Hardly a day went by without some emergency disrupting the schedule. Because he wasn’t in it for the money, Larry brought a special enthusiasm to his dentistry. He did a lot of work for free, and frequently undercharged patients when he knew the bills would hurt. He worked three days a week, putting in long hours, and spent one day a week on the golf course with Ken. On his commute to and from the practice, Larry would cruise down the Schuylkill Expressway and out Roosevelt Boulevard with the sunroof of his BMW open and the radio playing loud and feel like the luckiest man alive. His long drives back and forth to the dental office were welcome periods of solitude, times when he could mentally step back and survey the world he had created for himself. He was twenty-six years old, and he already had his fortune and his profession—everything was in place.

Only one thing was missing, and even that was on its way. Marcia learned in late August that she was pregnant.

Larry was finally wising up in his dealings with Mark Stewart. Over the last eighteen months there had been a lot of talk about “negative lending,” whereby an investor, by pumping still more money into a losing venture, manages to turn the project around. It had taken
Larry a while to learn, but the traditional expression for “negative lending” was “throwing good money after bad.”

“I want you to close the Arena,” Larry announced at a meeting in Mark’s office with David and Ken, who had both invested enormous amounts in the place.

Of all Larry’s projects with Mark Stewart, he knew that the Arena was the closest to Mark’s heart. The flashy wheeler-dealer had dreams of owning a major sports franchise, of being a well-known boxing promoter like Bob Arum and Don King. But the Arena was a joke. The Philadelphia Kings might as well have been playing in a high school auditorium for the audiences they were getting. The Roller Derby and the evangelists and the trumped-up boxing matches were an embarrassment. No one had been able to fix the place’s heating and air-conditioning problems, so even when they were able to attract a crowd to the place, usually for a closed circuit fight, the smokey hot air turned the inside unbearable. Larry had heard from Dick Muldair, who had quit the place claiming that Mark had ripped off $250,000 he had invested shortly before going to prison. Muldair had horror stories to tell about the way Stewart’s employees were stealing him blind. Larry had been the one most skeptical of the project from the beginning. After eighteen straight months of losses, he had no trouble turning a deaf ear to Mark’s carefully reasoned protests.

“We’re not going to fund any more money for payroll, we aren’t going to give any more money for anything, period, unless you close the Arena,” he said. “I don’t care what you say, we’re not giving any more money. It’s stupid; we’re just losing money. We’re never going to recoup it. Let’s just take the loss and try to sell it.”

“Just give me two more weeks,” Mark pleaded.

“What do you mean, two weeks?” said Larry. “What are you going to be able to do in two more weeks? There’s not going to be one more event that’s going to change anything, let’s just get it over with.”

Mark fell silent. Larry, Ken, and David knew that it was a blow to his ego. Here he was with the three students whose money he was supposed to be managing, and now they were confronting him with the conspicuous failure of his pet project.

As they would later recall, Mark repeated, “Give me two more weeks,” and then quietly added, “I’m going to burn it.”

Larry remembers receiving a call from Mark the next day. He said he had found some guys to torch the place. He was going to give them five grand up front and another ten after the insurance settlement. He asked Larry if he had a key to the place.

“No, I don’t,” said Larry. “Why do you need a key?”

“I have to give these guys one. I’ll get it from Slim.”

On Saturday, October 3, Larry remembered taking a call from Mark on his portable phone, out by the pool. It was one of the last warm nights of the year.

“Listen to your radio tomorrow,” Mark said.

“Why?”

“There’s going to be something on there interesting.”

Larry didn’t immediately understand, and didn’t bother to ask for an explanation. After the meeting the week before at Mark’s office, Larry knew he had taken the first step toward dissolving their relationship. He wanted nothing more to do with the man. So he just said, “Okay,” and ended the conversation.

Later, listening to the Phillies game, it occurred to him. The Arena! Mark really was planning to have the place torched!

David Ackerman also remembered a call from Mark that night.

“Watch the sky to the west tomorrow morning,” Mark said. “Maybe you’ll see smoke.”

Mark’s handiwork was on the front page of the
Inquirer
metro page Sunday morning:

King Arena Damaged By Blaze
Homes evacuated near W. Phila. site