Doctor Dealer (40 page)

Larry had what he considered three strong reasons not to just stop dealing. The first was greed. Owing to what Larry considered mismanagement during the year since he canned David Ackerman, he had sustained a lengthening series of losses. These were not actual losses, but the difference between what Larry felt he should have made on a given deal and what he actually made. Abandoning the business meant just accepting an amount considerably lower than the “Total” of his net-profits column, a setback of nearly a year. The second reason also had to do with greed. Larry had a total of $1.5 million tied up in the business, mostly in product and bad debts. He had been able to tolerate deadbeats in his business for so many years because the profits had continually grown so fast that each new deal more than recovered what was lost on the last one. To pull out suddenly was to lose the $1.5 million that Larry felt he had already earned. The third reason had to do with risk. Larry knew that all the people working for him and buying from him were not just going to stop buying and selling and using cocaine if he left the business. Larry believed that law enforcement had been kept at bay for nine years only because of his management ability. Larry trusted his business sense and his feel for the risks involved. If he let go of the controls, the machine was certain to break down, and the conspiracy would rapidly unravel. So when someone like Brian Riley or Ken Weidler cautioned him that he was “nuts” to keep on managing the business after he knew he was under investigation, Larry felt like screaming. Didn’t they see? Now would be the worst time to walk away! It was a matter of self-preservation.

So it pained Larry to have to rely on someone like Bruce Taylor. He was a prime example of how bad things could get. When Bruce was high, which was most of the time, he was as reckless as Glen Fuller. When he came down, Bruce would just vanish for days at a time. Nearly every week Larry’s phone would start ringing and his friends would complain that Bruce was supposed to do this or that and hadn’t shown up. Larry would call Bruce’s house and there would be no answer. Then he would go down and bang on the door for a half hour or more, just as Brian Riley had, until Bruce, looking wan and disheveled, would stagger out. Bruce had begun telling people he had leukemia, which was not true, but it helped explain his erratic behavior and frequent lapses. His plan was to someday just disappear
with a lot of money and cocaine. If people believed he was suffering a fatal illness, he reasoned, they would be less likely to spend a long time looking for him.

Truth was, the way Bruce was living, a fatal illness was a fair approximation of his future prospects. One night, when he was briefly back in Philadelphia after leaving Larry’s employ, Brian Riley was called by Kim Norimatsu, who was then living with Bruce (they had gotten engaged in April). Kim was distraught. Bruce was on the floor in the kitchen, flipping out. It was Bruce’s birthday, and the accumulated doses of cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, Quaaludes, and whatever else he had taken had overwhelmed him. Brian rushed over to the house and sat through the night on the kitchen floor with Bruce, who was convinced that someone was trying to break into the place and get him. Bruce was earning a thousand dollars per week by late spring, but his cocaine use was so heavy he was actually accumulating a debt to Larry.

In an effort to keep a handle on things, Larry laid down strict rules for Bruce to follow. Breaks were to be done at constantly varying locations. Money, books, and product were to be kept separate. For communication (the expensive scrambler phones never worked right), Larry instituted the beeper system and laid down the pay phone law. No business was to be conducted on home phones whatsoever. No one was supposed to even know the home telephones or even names of one another. A message service had been contracted, and beepers were handed out to all key employees and major customers. When they called each other they just dialed the message center and indicated by a number (not a telephone number) whom they were trying to reach. The service then beeped the person being called, and the number of the pay phone being used by the caller would be displayed on their beeper. Then they called back. It was a good system. So long as everybody followed the rules and varied the pay phones used frequently, there was virtually no way the FBI could listen in. Larry, personally, was diligent. He carried around an orange Tupperware bowl filled with a hundred dollars’ worth of quarters. If the feds ever tapped his phone, the most they were likely to hear would be Marcia calling the diaper service.

But none of Larry’s precautions seemed sufficient to keep Bruce out of trouble. On July 12, Bruce was stopped by the Philadelphia police for going the wrong way down a one-way street. He had two kilos of cocaine in a black safe in the trunk, an ounce of cocaine in a plastic bag in the glove compartment, and he was smoking a joint. At police headquarters, Bruce later told Larry, one of the cops had come up to him with the baggie of cocaine.

“This is good stuff,” the cop said.

“Why don’t you keep it,” said Bruce. “It’s nothing.”

“You’re right,” said the cop.

Another plainclothes officer asked Bruce to open the safe in his trunk. Bruce lied, saying he didn’t know the combination. After that, he was locked in a holding cell. A few hours later he was released. There were no charges. The safe in the trunk was undisturbed.

Bruce called Larry that night from a pay phone.

“Okay, get your stuff together,” said Larry. “You’re moving.”

Larry had been working on getting Bruce a house in Newtown Square, a suburb southwest of Devon. Bruce checked into a hotel with Kim that night, and several days later moved into his new house.

Bruce and Larry chalked up the mysterious lack of charges after the Philadelphia arrest to the ineptitude and corruption of the Philadelphia police. In fact, Bruce’s arrest and release that night had been carefully orchestrated.

Ten days earlier, on July 2, Canadian customs officials at the border of Eastport, Idaho, and Kingsgate, Alberta Province, had stopped a thirty-year-old blond Canadian woman named Virginia Ann Dayton and searched her car. On the seat of her car they found a tan suitcase containing a kilo of 80 percent pure cocaine.

In Dayton’s purse was a business card with the name Wayne Heinauer on it, and a number.

The Canadian border officials had been tipped off by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Phoenix, Arizona. Eight weeks before, DEA Agent James White had received a tip that Wayne Heinauer, a young Phoenix construction contractor, was dealing cocaine. He was buying the drugs, the informant said, from a dentist in Philadelphia named Larry and receiving monthly deliveries from someone named Bruce.

During April, White and other DEA agents, along with Phoenix narcotics detectives, had staked out Sky Harbor International Airport and watched Heinauer, a solidly built man of thirty with brown hair and a moustache, meet with a succession of travelers, who typically flew in, met with him briefly, exchanging bags, and then flew on somewhere else. One of the travelers was Virginia Dayton. Another was a wiry, dark-haired, moustachioed man who had taken out a room at the Granada Royale Hotel under the name Bruce Taylor, and who gave his home address as Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bruce was traveling with a woman (this was Kim Norimatsu). After the meeting with Heinauer, Bruce checked out of the Granada Royale and got a room with Kim at the Marriott Mountain Shadows Resort Hotel in Scottsdale. On Friday, April 22, agents watched Bruce and Kim as they bought tickets for Philadelphia at the airport under the name B. Winns. Agents in Philadelphia,
contacted by the Phoenix office, watched at the airport as Bruce and Kim got off the plane. Philly agents reported that Bruce and the young woman had moved through the airport quickly, looking around and over their shoulders frequently, as if aware they were being followed. Agents attempted to follow them by car, but Bruce drove too fast and crazily for them to keep up, and they lost him.

Again on Thursday, June 9, Phoenix DEA agents were watching Heinauer’s house when Bruce and Kim arrived, staying for ten minutes before leaving with Heinauer for the airport. This time they purchased tickets under the names Mr. and Mrs. B. Wayne and flew to Philadelphia.

At the airport, Bruce and Kim split up—to the DEA agents, it appeared as though they were trying to see if they were being followed. They got back together in a taxi, and the DEA agents, who had gone undetected, followed the cab back to Bruce’s house on Poplar Street.

Through the weeks that James White in Phoenix had been exploring information about Wayne Heinauer and his connections, he had run requests for information about a dentist named Larry in Philadelphia through federal law enforcement computers. There was little to be had, except that an FBI agent in Philadelphia named Chuck Reed had been searching for information about a dentist named Lawrence W. Lavin.

The DEA agent and the FBI agent talked in June. Chuck had not known about Bruce Taylor. It was his first strong lead into Larry’s cocaine dealing. Having the city police pick up Bruce had provided an opportunity for mug shots and fingerprints, without alerting Larry that the FBI was on to his courier. The idea was then to turn Taylor loose and keep watching him. Eventually he might lead them to Larry.

So the next morning, Reed and his partner, Sid Perry, staked out Bruce’s house on Poplar Street. It would be a few hours before they realized he had vanished.

Marcia and Larry vacationed in Bermuda in May. Christopher was a fat-cheeked toddler with ringlets of fair brown hair. The little family stayed in a condo overlooking a palmy bay and aqua waters that darkened to ultramarine on the horizon.

Back home on Timber Lane, Larry snapped closeup shots of the explosion of springtime color in his backyard, which had been enhanced by two years of professional gardening. There were orchids and tulips and irises and violets and roses and lilies, a bonanza of reds and oranges and purples and whites. Beside the pool on a sunny afternoon weekend, with Chris bobbing in his inflated green froggie life preserver and Marcia paddling after him in the cool water, it was easy to forget the approaching threat of arrest and prison. Larry was confident that whatever happened, his lawyer could make the case
drag on for years—Glen Fuller had yet to be convicted for his bust on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1980.

Larry was unaware of the new avenue agents had found into his dealing, but he was acutely aware that unless he retreated fast, Bruce Taylor was going to eventually be his undoing. Ever since Chuck Reed’s visit to his dental office in February, and Brian Riley’s departure a month later, Larry realized that the only safe thing to do would be to sell out. He could feel the federal investigation nipping away at the fringes of his illegal enterprise. Ken and David had been questioned about Mark Stewart. Andy Mainardi had been questioned. Suzanne and Kim Norimatsu had been approached by Chuck Reed. A former Arena employee named Rick Imondi had been questioned. Larry Uhr was apparently cooperating. One of Wayne Heinauer’s customers had just been suspiciously busted on the Canadian border. All of these events had just confirmed Larry’s belief that although the FBI suspected his cocaine dealing, they had no hard evidence. Still, it was wise to put as much distance between himself and the business as possible. Ideally, he would sell the business to someone who would manage it capably for him. That way he could retain a financial interest without having to be personally involved. He knew that he would have to accept even harder terms than those he had rejected when David Ackerman had tried to dictate a year earlier, but there was no alternative.

Larry’s first choice to take over the business was Billy Motto. Billy South Philly had matured from a hustling street vendor with pot customers to a multimillionaire cocaine dealer. He had started off admiring and imitating Larry, but over the years Larry had come to admire and imitate Billy. Dressed in his pastel sweat suits, driving his black Volvo with retractable panels for hiding money and cocaine, surrounded by his retinue of respectful, silent thugs, Billy was a force to be reckoned with in South Philly. During years when the traditional Italian-dominated organized-crime families were killing each other off, Billy had managed to quietly carve his independent illegal niche. People tended to like Billy so long as they weren’t on his bad side. He had an effusively friendly style, lavishing gifts on family and friends, always asking people if he could do anything for them, and seeming disappointed if they could think of nothing. Any promise was promptly kept. Billy was comically and unselfconsciously vain. He stopped out to Larry’s dental office every couple of months to have his teeth cleaned—Billy was especially proud of his perfect teeth. After the cleaning, he would inspect the work carefully in the mirror and complain to the hygienist that they weren’t quite white enough—and then laugh.

Billy was perfectly trustworthy and reliable in money matters, always paying up front, in total. Larry had gotten the idea for the beeper system from Billy. He admired the way Billy handled himself.
Larry had never gotten the kind of respect from his workers that Billy got from his. And Billy was an excellent businessman. Of all his customers, Larry was convinced that Billy had profited most. Billy had purchased a home in Boca Raton, Florida, with a swimming pool in the backyard, just like Larry’s, and even bought himself a golden Lab, just like Larry’s. He had a pretty girlfriend named Angela and was thinking about starting a family. Recently, Billy had obtained the contract to supply fresh produce to all the Super Fresh supermarkets in the Philadelphia area, and he had purchased a flower shop in Center City, so in addition to his drug dealing and loan-sharking, Billy was managing profitable, legitimate businesses.

Larry and Billy met at a Steak ’n Brew on Route 202 in Devon.

“I know an indictment is coming,” Larry explained. “I want to get out, but it’s not that easy. There are lots of people, like Bruce, who would like to buy it, but they don’t have the money. Besides, you know what a fuck-up Bruce is.”

Billy said, “I’d like to help you, Larry. But the timing is bad.”