Doctor Dealer (36 page)

Then he drove to the Bellevue Stratford hotel, checked into a room, and called Larry.

“I’ve had enough,” he told Larry. “I’m out. David’s gone too far.”

“Just relax, Willie,” said Larry. “Just take a couple of days off. Order some champagne. I’ll pay for it. Just cool out, let me talk to David. If you want I’ll get you more money from David’s percentage.”

“No, Larry. I quit. This is it.”

Willie then called Paco and Pepe in Florida to tell them that he was out.

When that was done, he slept. Two days later Willie took a cab to the airport with a hundred thousand dollars in personal cash, downed two vodka and tonics at an airport bar, and then boarded a plane for California.

Larry didn’t fight hard to keep Willie. On reflection, he considered it a good thing. He was disappointed with Willie’s bookkeeping, and besides, Willie had been one of David’s people. Larry was in a mood to purge David’s influence from the business entirely. Willie’s departure made that job simpler.

The person Larry had in mind to run things was Brian Riley.

Brian was a twenty-nine-year-old native of Plaistow, New Hampshire, the northern neighbor of Haverhill. He was a big, gruff chainsmoking high school graduate with pale green eyes and thinning reddish brown hair and a red beard. His nickname was Bear. Brian had a muscular torso and a broad neck. His ruddy complexion and bad teeth and thick New England accent, combined with his size and his uneducated manner, made Brian more of a colorful character than most of the collegiate, suburban types in Larry’s circle. Larry liked him for that. Brian had been in the seafood business at home, and he looked, talked, and thought like a tough New England waterman. Brian had known Larry from a distance growing up in Plaistow. He mostly remembered him as the kid who got busted with Glen Fuller for stealing two Ski-Doos from area dealers.

Brian had gotten married just out of high school in 1972, and had two children before he and his wife divorced. He remained, for all his hardened exterior, a devoted father who insisted on keeping regular visits in New England with his children even when he was in the thick of Larry’s business in Philadelphia and Florida. He had gotten his start dealing through Larry’s sister in 1980, flying down to Philadelphia to deliver money in a shoe box and returning with cocaine stuffed down the back of his shirt. Brian had taken over the New England operation after Jill’s breakdown, and had turned it over to his largest customer, Priscilla, when Larry asked him to move to Philadelphia to become more centrally involved, in January 1982.

Larry explained that David Ackerman was letting himself get eaten up by cocaine, and that he had surrounded himself with all of his own people. Larry wanted Brian to learn the ropes and also act as his representative to the other workers.

“I want somebody on my side working in there,” Larry told him.

Eventually, once David was out, he wanted Brian to run the business for him.

It was, of course, an extremely lucrative opportunity, and Brian leapt at it. He admired Larry’s spirit, his cheerful, daredevil criminality. Brian didn’t have the kind of education to hit it rich in the world by any conventional means, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t as ambitious as the next guy. He believed that cocaine, unless abused, was essentially harmless, like alcohol. The fact that it was illegal was a hassle, but then, that was what made dealing cocaine so enormously profitable. He understood that Larry wanted him to take tremendous risks, but that there were also tremendous rewards. And, in truth, Brian enjoyed the excitement.

Right away there was plenty of that. On one of his first breaks, working with David at Brian’s house on South Street at 2:00 a.m., they ran out of inositol. Both Brian and David looked as if they had been working in a bakery. Brian’s black jeans were white. He felt numb, and was strung tight as piano wire.

These two ghostly figures emerged from the back door of the South Street townhouse and walked across the alley to David’s car. Before they had even started the car, a police cruiser zoomed up from behind and drew alongside. They shone a flashlight in at David and Brian. David flashed Brian a look of shock and despair.

“You guys see anybody come running up this alley within the last five minutes?” the cop asked.

They were looking for a burglar. Brian and David chatted with the police for a few minutes and then the cruiser pulled away.

In the months leading up to his confrontation with Larry, David’s cocaine addiction worsened. He took to locking himself in his apartment again, for days at a time, with his cocaine. Suzanne and Christine would go by and bang on the door and plead with him to open up, to come out, sometimes without success. After Willie left in May, David’s condition was a serious problem until Brian learned the necessary procedures and formulas for the breaks himself. David would insist upon everyone accommodating his own strange hours and work habits. He would rouse everyone at 2:00 a.m. and keep them working on through until late morning. To Brian, David and Larry during this period were like two old ladies arguing about their money.

Finally, in early June, Larry met with Brian and told him that he had accumulated enough to buy David out. Henceforward, Brian would be managing partner, earning six hundred per week and an additional thousand for every day he spent on the road. Larry told Brian to pull together a lump sum of cash from various safes and deliver it to David at the apartment on Conshohocken State Road in northwest Philadelphia.

Brian met David in the parking lot out in front of the apartment
house, outside TGI Friday’s restaurant. He handed David a suitcase filled with cash. At that point David was reconciled, and somewhat relieved to be putting the cocaine business behind him.

“Congratulations,” said David. “You’ve made it to the top.”

Then they went golfing. Brian could only play for nine holes. He had to catch a plane to Florida.

Paco and Pepe were very concerned about their lucrative Philadelphia connection with the departure of Willie Harcourt and then David Ackerman. They had never even met Larry Lavin.

They had reason to be worried. Brian Riley, unfamiliar with Willie’s beaten track to Paco’s house in Miami, had done some scouting around when he was in Florida. He discovered that the price of fifty-six thousand per kilo that Larry had been paying since early 1980 was way over the market in Florida. Brian found kilos of equal quality were selling for less than thirty-five! Checking with an old Penn State connection of Larry’s, he learned that Billy Honeywell, whom Larry had met dealing pot as an undergraduate, had become a full-scale smuggler, flying his own shipments from Colombia to Jamaica, where officials could be bribed to mark the packages as fruit, and then on into the U.S., landing at clandestine Florida airstrips in the middle of the night down grassy runways marked by flares. The same group had boats shuttling from Florida to Jamaica, and a seaplane that they landed on isolated lakes and then quickly off-loaded onto speedboats and took off in again. Honeywell’s price was only twenty-five thousand, and the purity level was the same!

Larry felt comfortable dealing with Honeywell because they had mutual friends in central Pennsylvania—Honeywell was engaged to the sister of Dan Dill, Larry’s brother in his fraternity, now a successful broker with Kidder Peabody (and a sizable cocaine dealer) in Pittsburgh. Larry had always been impressed by how straightforward and honest his State College connections had been.

So soon after Willie and David left the picture, Paco and Pepe’s Philadelphia business dried up. Since Paco had been behind all of the dealers Larry had done business with, dating all the way back to Miguel, Larry’s first cocaine supplier, Larry had been a steadily growing, reliable customer for four years. It was a remarkable track record in such a volatile industry.

Pepe contacted Willie in California and begged him to arrange a meeting with Larry.

They met in Atlantic City in June, at Resorts Casino Hotel. Larry drove down with David, Suzanne, Paul Mikuta, and Brian. On the way down he joked about having contracted gonorrhea from the party at his house after Christopher was born.

“That’s why I don’t go to those parties,” said David. “I knew that was going to happen.”

Larry laughed. He was in a particularly cheerful mood. As far as Larry was concerned, it was a good excuse to throw one of his bashes. He had already made up his mind about dealing with Paco and Pepe. It was crazy to continue paying fifty-six thousand for kilos that he could buy for less than half that price. But in deference to Willie and to the years of dealing with Paco and Pepe, he was willing to hear Pepe out. Willie had flown up the night before from Miami with Pepe. Larry had arranged for the Cuban to have ten grand in the cage for gambling.

Pepe arrived wearing a green leisure suit, with a lot of gold displayed under the wide, open collar. Larry thought he looked like a caricature of a Florida dealer. Pepe began by asking Larry why the business had fallen off.

“It’s simple,” Larry said. “We can buy things a lot cheaper from someone else. Either you lower your price to be competitive, or we take the business elsewhere.”

Pepe argued that they had a totally reliable supply of cocaine, that they were known to be trustworthy and capable because they had been doing business together smoothly for so long. He emphasized that the cocaine business in Miami was dangerous. If Larry went shopping around, he might be asking for trouble, either from the law or from unreliable dealers.

Larry acknowledged that. He said he was grateful for the business; they had made a lot of money together.

“But what about the price?” he said.

Pepe said that they were not just selling Larry cocaine, they were selling their elaborate security measures: the block of homes owned by family members, the walkie-talkies, the armed guards and escorts, the lookout systems. . . .

“But you can’t lower your price?” Larry asked.

Pepe said they could not. The price was set by Paco’s brother. They were powerless to change it.

“Okay, then we’re done,” said Larry. “It was good doing business with you. Thanks a lot.”

Pepe was upset. He continued arguing, even pleading. Willie felt sorry for him. He knew that Paco would hold Pepe responsible for the loss of this account. It was not Paco’s largest, but it was the largest Pepe had brought him. Pepe stressed that if Larry went somewhere else with his business in Miami, there would be a war in Miami. Paco’s people could not just let someone take their business away. Larry had no concern about the consequences in Miami. As for risk, Larry said that came with the territory.

“This is a business, Pepe,” said Larry. “I don’t understand why you can’t just see it. We’ve got to stay competitive. If we’re still selling things for seventy-six bucks a gram, we’re going to be out of business in a month.”

They shook hands, and their lucrative business relationship ended.

Behind steel-framed glasses Chuck Reed’s face is the face of a certified public accountant, round and bearded and sensitive, but everything else about him is big. He has sloping shoulders and long arms with thick forearms and big, strong hands. His straight brown hair is long and he has a close-cropped brown beard that covers a receding chin and broadens the wide oval of his face. Reed is a serious man, quiet and intense. He reveals little about himself in conversation, preferring to ask questions and listen dispassionately, leaving someone who has just talked to him with the feeling that they have just been turned inside out and politely discarded. He is used to knowing more than he is at liberty to reveal, and seems not just comfortable, but happy with that role. One rarely ends an encounter with Chuck Reed without wondering about what lay just beneath the surface of an answer or a question or about what caused the trace of amusement or anger in his eyes at something that was said . . . or wasn’t.

Chuck was thirty-two years old and had been an FBI agent for only three years in June of 1982 when he was assigned to begin investigating the curious doings of one Mark Stewart. From the surface details Chuck was given, Stewart looked like a one-man Flying Karamazov Brothers of finance. He owned more than thirty companies on paper, but all of them were headquartered in the same tall stone apartment building at 1228 Spruce Street, the Wellington. It looked like he was into real estate, tax shelters, a record company, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Arena (now an ashen ruin), a failing Continental League basketball team, a limousine service . . . other things. The sheer dizzying complexity of these dealings was enough to make the federal government curious, but two things in particular had piqued the FBI’s curiosity. Among Stewart’s other activities, he held the title of sports and special events consultant for the Playboy Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. On December 19, 1981, at a light-heavyweight championship boxing match between Matthew Saad Muhammad and Dwight Braxton, four coveted ringside seats had cradled the back ends of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the reputed boss of the Philadelphia-Atlantic City mob, Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, Lawrence “Yogi” Merlino, and Scarfo’s nephew. The seats, directly behind Howard Cosell, had been comped to the notorious mafiosi by Stewart. And early in 1982, a Philadelphia rap artist named Frankie Smith had reported that he was not getting royalties from his 1981
gold and platinum recording “Double Dutch Bus.” He had recorded the single with WMOT-TEC Records, which, curiously, had recently filed for bankruptcy. Why was a tiny recording studio with a big hit record broke?

Chuck Reed had worked as a certified public accountant in Vermont before joining the FBI. Bored by his job with a small auditing firm, he was intrigued by the stories told him by a retired FBI agent he met in 1979. When Chuck learned that the bureau was accepting applications from accountants, he applied and was accepted. After his training, he did general criminal investigation in Albany for a year, and was then assigned to a special white-collar crime unit in Philadelphia in 1980. One of the best things about the job was that there were no bureaucratic limits placed on his investigations. So a case that started out as an audit might lead off anywhere, and he was encouraged to continue following it. And if ever there was a case that might lead off anywhere, it was Mark Stewart’s. Here was a guy flirting with tax fraud, owner of an aged sports palace in West Philly that had been torched nine months ago, who gave away valuable ringside seats to notorious mobsters.