Doctor Dealer (49 page)

“Larry, I don’t know whether or not it’s true, but if it is I want you to know that I take a very dim view of any drug-related activity whatsoever,” he said. “It’s terrible to get children involved in this kind of thing. I have children of my own.”

Larry smiled sheepishly.

“That judge rounded me up by mistake,” he said. “I got lumped in with some people who I loaned money to. I didn’t know what they were doing with it. I just got some bad advice.”

“Well, I hope you are innocent,” the neighbor said. “But I take a very dim view of that sort of thing.”

Marcia was miserable. She felt everyone was looking at her, whispering behind her back. She thought she saw something in the way a clerk at the supermarket smiled when she bought her groceries, or the way a neighbor just stood and stared and did not wave to her as she drove past on Timber Lane, or the way a teller at the bank pronounced her name when she withdrew her weekly household funds, or the way the people at the nursery treated Christopher . . . it was all out of step with the quiet normalcy she craved.

Marcia was beyond feeling angry or betrayed by Larry. She felt sorry for him. She worried about how she and Chris and the new baby, due in April, would live. Marcia was adamantly against going back to work before her children were old enough to be in school. She worried about what would happen to Larry, but along with worry and sadness Marcia could not help but feel vindicated by Larry’s fall.

For years she had complained to Larry about the drug business, warned him that the risk wasn’t worth it, made him promise to get out. Larry would always agree, apologize, promise, and then break his promises. Marcia had enjoyed their vacations, the house, picking out the furniture and the wallpaper, the expensive dinners out, but she never asked Larry for money and she never stopped wanting her husband to quit selling drugs and concentrate on earning a decent living with his profession. She knew their wholesome home life and growing family were due almost entirely to her. She had fought hard to pull Larry out of the orbit of his friends. Even though Marcia knew nothing of Larry’s dalliances with whores, the business itself had caused serious strains in their relationship over the years. She had always stopped short of leaving him. Now he was to be taken away from her. Marcia had the spent feeling of someone who had done everything she could, and failed.

When Larry had started talking about fleeing that spring, Marcia hadn’t paid much attention. She thought the idea was crazy, and, in fact, Larry himself wasn’t yet serious about it. But right after his indictment and arrest, Larry started talking very seriously about running away. He mentioned places like Ireland or Paraguay or Colombia or Jamaica. What got Marcia was the way he just took it for granted that she and Chris would go with him.

So on a morning in early October, when Larry was getting ready to fly up to Massachusetts to obtain a driver’s license for himself under the name of Richard Timmerman, one of his brother Rusty’s friends, Marcia knew it was time to speak up.

“Maybe you should just go on your own,” she said. “That way you would have less chance of getting caught.”

Larry was amazed, and hurt.

“Why would I run then?” Larry asked. “What’s the point? If I’m not going to be with you and Chris, there’s no reason to go. That would be the worst thing about going to jail.”

Marcia told Larry she had been giving it a lot of thought. She could live with her mother, who was a nurse, and they could make it. She told her husband that she would not leave the country. She would not raise her son in some foreign country. In fact, Larry had already begun to back away from fleeing America, which had been his first instinct. Down deep, the thing that Larry Lavin wanted most was an affluent, suburban American lifestyle. That was where his obsession with making more and more money led, not to some tropical backwater adventure. It was the life that had slipped away from him as a boy, and that he had played at during his years at Exeter. Besides, he would stand out more in a foreign land, and from the inquiries he made through his drug connections, Larry knew that no matter where he went he would have to pay off public officials for the rest of his life to stay free. He wanted to make a clean break, to leave criminality behind. So staying in the United States had begun to look more appealing to him anyway. It had a deliciously risky appeal, like hiding in plain view. Granting Marcia that much was easy.

But she was still unwilling.

“You have done this to yourself, Larry,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me or with Christopher or the new baby. They shouldn’t have to suffer for what you’ve done. I am not going to do anything to risk my freedom. Do you realize what would happen if I ran away with you and they caught us, and I went to jail, too? Our children would be raised by strangers! I won’t allow that to happen.”

“What jury would convict you of a crime?” said Larry. “You’re an innocent spouse. You would be doing what you’re supposed to be doing as a wife. That’s like a supernatural law that comes before any man-made law. If your husband tells you to do something, you do it, even though you know you’re breaking the law.”

“I’m not so sure it’s like that, Larry,” said Marcia. She told him to check with the lawyers. She would not go away with him unless she could be certain that if they ran, and got caught, she would not be culpable.

Larry sought legal advice on that question and obtained enough reassurance to satisfy his wife. What mattered most was that Marcia
loved Larry. Questions posed by his legal problems were really no different from those she had faced in freshman year of college. She loved Larry in spite of his reckless ego, his obsession with making money, and his self-destructive ambition.

But Marcia never believed for a minute that all Larry’s careful plans to vanish would work. She didn’t argue with him about it, but deep down she saw all his running around, forging his false I.D.s, collecting cash, hatching schemes . . . all of it was pathetic. It was just a matter of time. They would drive off, move in someplace else, set up a life, and then, probably within months, there would be a knock on the door. She got a friend to put the question to several lawyers hypothetically: What would happen to the wife of a fugitive if she ran away with him and they got caught? All of the lawyers doubted that an innocent spouse would be prosecuted.

Marcia thought about little else through late October. She finally decided that she would go. She had stayed with Larry this long, she would stay with him until she could no longer. When she married Larry, that’s what she had promised. So she felt comfortable. It was the right thing to do. They would eventually be caught, of that she was certain, but in the meantime the new baby and Chris, who was now two and a half years old and still years away from an age when he would have memories that would remain for the rest of his life, might get the chance to know their father. If he ran, so would she.

Larry gradually thinned possessions from the house, leaving enough furniture and odds and ends in each room so that the removals would not be obvious. Early each morning he would leave with the car trunk loaded with one or two blue footlockers, each about three feet long and two feet tall. Being careful to note whether or not he was being followed, Larry drove out to Valley Forge, to a storage lot where, using a false name, he had rented a garage. Over the next six weeks the garage filled with neat rows of footlockers.

Still, even with all this, Larry had not made up his mind to flee. Becoming a fugitive, severing ties with all his family, friends, and past, was a formidable step. He knew how difficult it would be to live happily with his family as a fugitive. The idea depressed him. He
liked
being Larry Lavin. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his days as someone else.

“There are certain things I won’t be able to do anymore,” he told Ken Weidler on one of their last golf-course outings that October. “No more spending a lot of money, going to expensive French restaurants, and asking for the best wines. No more driving a hundred miles per hour. I’ll have to figure out a good story to explain why I can afford things without going to work.”

He told Ken that he was thinking about forging credentials and eventually practicing dentistry again.

“Larry, what do you want to do, put up a red flag?” said Ken. “It seems to me that would be the quickest way to get caught.”

“You’re probably right.”

Ken didn’t believe his friend and partner could pull it off. He joked that Larry was the only career criminal he knew: “Do you really think you can lead a normal, straight life?”

Larry took the question more seriously than Ken expected. “No, I don’t think I can,” said Larry. “I think I’ve got a little larceny in my soul. I have to do something, even if it’s something little, like running a stop sign or something, just to know that I broke the law and nobody caught me. That will be the hardest thing to stop.”

Later, Ken asked Marcia why she was willing to go with him.

“You may be successful for a year or so, but they’re bound to catch you eventually,” he said.

“Well, then we will have had that year or two,” said Marcia.

Larry and Frannie got together frequently after their arrest, meeting in cars or in open spaces where they felt they could be certain they weren’t being watched. Their lawyers managed to obtain on discovery stacks of FBI tape recordings, so they spent one long afternoon listening to the tapes on the cassette player in Frannie’s Toyota.

They laughed about a lot of things on the tapes, especially about Bruce, who was the voice most often recorded.

“Did that guy
ever
use a pay phone?” Larry complained.

In the conversation between Larry and Suzanne, on the day the FBI had raided Bruce’s house in Newtown Square, Frannie winced when he heard Larry press Suzanne to say whom she had refused to identify in the FBI photos. Larry had said, “Begin with an F?” Frannie just leaned forward in his seat and tapped his head against the top of the steering wheel.

“Larry, Larry, I can’t believe you could be so stupid.”

The FBI had been watching and listening a lot of times when Larry assumed they would not have been. There had been a meeting with Frannie in the parking lot behind the Casa Maria restaurant off Route 202 the previous fall. Frannie had needed to confer with Larry about some aspect of the transition, and Larry wanted to pick up a few pounds of cocaine for a friend. Frannie had pulled up next to Larry’s car and said, “I think there’s somebody watching us in that car up on the hill.”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” Larry had scoffed.

There were pictures to show that Frannie had been right.

Likewise with the aborted meeting between Michael Schade and the Rasners. There was a picture of Larry exiting the restaurant that
morning, snapped at the precise moment he was denouncing the Rasners for being “a bundle of nerves.”

Larry and Frannie called each other so often over the next few weeks from pay phones that they got to know the numbers by heart. Larry would stop in a shopping center in Paoli, deposit his quarter, and beep Frannie. He would stand there conspicuously for ten minutes or more until the phone rang. Frannie would say, “You’re at that row of phones in the shopping center in Paoli, aren’t you?”

They met almost every night, varying their locations. At a meeting behind a local high school, where Frannie sometimes jogged his short fat frame around the cinder track, Frannie told Larry that the FBI had a diary written by his teenage girlfriend that was loaded with incriminating references to him and to Larry. At a meeting at an industrial center, Larry handed over some cash he had collected from a friend who owed Frannie. Larry had taken a substantial portion of it for himself. At a gas station they phoned Wayne Heinauer to find out more about what the feds had on him.

All the while Larry was planning to flee, Frannie was playing his own game. He saw himself as a double agent. He agreed to assist the FBI in catching his Colombian supplier in Florida and to give testimony against Larry, but then he would feed information back to Larry and other friends about what the government knew.

It was a dangerous time. Larry had two agendas: first, to learn as much as possible about the government case against him; second, to be ready to run before the door slammed shut.

Larry even threw himself a “going-away” party. He hadn’t made up his mind to flee, but as his trial approached, it was becoming more and more likely. Bruce Taylor had agreed to cooperate with the government. Frannie Burns was cooperating—in a sense: No one was ever quite sure of what Frannie was doing, including the FBI.

So Larry invited Paul Mikuta and Ken, his old fraternity big brother Dan Dill, a longtime Allentown, PA. customer, his old pot-dealing partners from Penn days, stockbrokers Andy Mainardi and L.A., his good friend and customer, pilot Stu Thomas, and others to join him in Atlantic City for one last blast. He made plans to meet Billy Motto there, too. Larry had $125,000 in an account at a bank that he believed the government did not know about. He wanted to withdraw the money, then take a check down to one of the casinos and launder it. He had mastered this art over the years. The bank could not give him more than $10,000 in cash without reporting the transaction to the IRS, and the casino would not just cash the check without doing the same, so Larry had a system for getting around the
requirement. He would leave a large check at the cage and collect chips. Then he would play games at the card tables, pretending to lose, all the while pocketing his chips and later passing them off to his friends, who would then cash them. At the end of the night it would appear as though he had lost the entire amount gambling, and he could walk out with most of his $125,000 converted to cash.

Larry drove down early that day and went swimming in the ocean. Afterward he sat on the beach with Billy Motto. Billy sent one of his men to get them hoagies and sat on a blanket with Larry talking about old times.

“You should stay and get it over with,” said Billy. “How can you leave your mother and your father?”