Authors: Mark Bowden
“Double Dutch Bus” went platinum. Larry had twenty gold records printed and mounted on plaques, at about seventy bucks apiece. They served a useful purpose. Larry found that people were as ignorant about show biz as they were fascinated by it. All Larry had to do was show people the gold record, and immediately they thought they understood how he had made his money.
His friends were convinced that Larry was making a bundle. David and Kenny and even Willie Harcourt were eager to sink money into the record company. It looked like a sure thing.
But in all of the excitement and confusion, somebody at the Wellington Building neglected to pay Frankie Smith a large portion of his royalties. When the singer initially inquired, he was reassured that the difference would be forthcoming. He waited and waited.
But by late 1981, the singer’s patience was wearing thin.
At the time Larry was buying his house in the suburbs, David was handling thirty kilos of cocaine per month. Larry and David were not only the primary sources of cocaine for metropolitan Philadelphia, the tentacles of their organization reached nationwide and even into Canada.
Billy Motto was doing a huge business in South Philly, selling to a diverse group of people far removed from the yuppie crowd familiar to Larry and David. Billy was by far the business’s biggest customer, buying about fifty kilos total in 1981. He was just a month or two away from making his first million. As a “privileged customer,” Billy was no longer paying the marked up price for cocaine. He was throwing his money in with Larry’s and David’s to buy wholesale. Larry had asked David not only to give Billy the first pick of each shipment, but to spend time teaching him all the ins and outs of testing coke, cutting it, making rocks, and packaging it. Billy took his lessons from David sitting by the stove in the kitchen of Suzanne’s place. They met three or four times over about four weeks.
At one such tutorial, Billy remarked in his cheerful, matter-of-fact way, “You know, don’t you, that at some point in the future we’ll all be doing time for this activity?”
As a joke, it fell flat. Billy was the only one of them who seemed to regard that as a likely outcome.
Despite these sessions, perhaps because of them, David got on Billy’s nerves. Billy had become a well-respected man in South Philly, and was used to being treated with deference. It was a different world from the one Larry and David knew. Billy, who also dabbled in loan-sharking, had men working for him who would attack people with baseball bats or knives if they crossed him. After Billy first met Suzanne, and learned that she was handling a lot of meetings with buyers at her apartment, he brought over a pistol and gave it to David.
“Suzanne doesn’t want a gun,” David said.
“Tell her just to leave it out somewhere around the apartment where people can see it,” Billy said. “That way people will know that even though she’s a girl, she’s protected.”
David treated Billy like a customer, like someone lower than him on the organizational scale. David would set up meetings with Billy and then not show up, something the South Philly dealer regarded as a slap in the face. Instead of laughing, as Larry always had, at how rumpled and disorganized was the paper money Billy brought along in brown grocery bags (it always added up to the exact amount promised), David bitched about it constantly and even tried issuing Billy ultimatums. Billy didn’t like that, but for the time being he had no other reliable source for good cocaine.
In addition to Billy, David and Kenny and Willie Harcourt were all selling to their own circle of friends throughout Center City. David and Ken also had customers in New York City and in California. A buyer named Kevin had a steady business going in Bucks County, northeast of Philadelphia. A large portion of each Miami shipment was going to a woman in New England named Priscilla, who had customers throughout that region who were, on average, about ten years older then Larry. Brian Cassidy, a college student from Paoli, was selling to well-to-do younger residents on the Main Line, and also had a large customer in Pittsburgh. Paul Mikuta was selling to friends in Delaware, on the Main Line, in the Rochester area, and elsewhere. Steve Rasner, a dental school classmate who graduated a year before Larry, was selling to customers in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. There was a trio of Penn State students out in State College, in central Pennsylvania. Stu Thomas was selling to friends on the Jersey shore and another friend in Virginia. In New England, in addition to Priscilla, Ricky Baratt was still struggling to recover ground by selling in the Boston area, and Larry’s brother Rusty and sister Jill were dealing substantial amounts. Reckless Glen Fuller, despite his pending charges in New Jersey, was still selling cocaine in Vermont and in Colorado. Larry had a customer in Tampa, Florida,
who was selling two or three pounds at a time, and another promising customer in Phoenix, Arizona, named Wayne Heinauer, whom Larry had met through a friend at State College back in the days when he was selling pot. Heinauer had one customer in Canada. There was a grade school principal in central Pennsylvania whom Larry had met as an undergraduate. There were dozens of smaller customers scattered around Philadelphia and the region, friends of friends of friends. Their names filled pages in the neat ledger kept in the safe at Suzanne’s. And each of these customers was a significant dealer on a smaller level, breaking their own purchases into dozens of smaller amounts for their own users, multiplying exponentially the total number of lives touched by Larry Lavin’s enterprise. Virtually all of the customers were between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all had enough money to spend upwards of seventy-five dollars for a gram of white powder to shovel up their nose. For many, the harmless drug they had tried for the first time at a party a year or two ago was now something they carried with them at all times, for a quick pop in the car before work, in an office lavatory several times a day, or in the corner of a bar after work. . . .
Managing this traffic in cash and white powder was a full-time job for nearly a dozen workers, most of them drawn from David’s acquaintances at local bars and restaurants. David and Willie were much more cautious than Larry had ever been. They always kept the cocaine and the money in separate places, and met with customers away from both. Willie had recruited three other young men, Gary Levin, Daniel Schneps, and Roger Parsons, to help transport the kilos from Florida to Philadelphia, and they took turns making runs. Two would drive down, meet with Paco and Pepe, and purchase ten or more kilos right at Paco’s house. It was a big change from the old seat-of-the-pants days. Willie would be met at the airport and driven out to Paco’s neighborhood. He learned that Paco’s relatives and associates owned all the houses on his block, so that there was no worry about neighbors growing suspicious. There were armed guards to provide escort, and lookouts posted at either end of the block with walkie-talkies to sound the alarm if anything unusual was happening outside. Willie got along famously with Paco and Pepe. His Spanish improved. Paco called Willie a “friend for life,” confessing that selling drugs was not a desirable business for them but that it was the only opportunity life had given them. Paco said he had drifted through the Gulf of Mexico on a raft on his flight from Cuba to Texas. Paco looked forward to getting out of the business and retiring as a wealthy man. “Your children will come to my house and play with my children,” he told Willie, “and we’ll drink a toast to the old days when we had to do this to provide for our families’ futures.” Paco confessed that
one of his dreams was to pay to have his father released from prison in Cuba and bring the rest of his family to the United States. Pepe wanted to build hotels in Mexico.
It got so that trips to Florida, once such a frightening chore, were a pleasure. On the drive home, the two runners would take turns behind the wheel. Willie bought two big cars so that there was enough room to stretch out and sleep on the backseat.
In Philadelphia, David would select the break house, or “factory,” usually a vacant apartment rented by one of the workers using an assumed name. David moved the factory location constantly. In addition to staffing the whole organization with his own people, David shifted the operation from Larry’s old West Philly neighborhood around Penn, to Old City. The money was stored in a safe at Christine’s. The books were at Suzanne’s, and coke was stored elsewhere—the location was kept vague. Customers met with Suzanne or David, and the cocaine would be delivered there once the money was counted. Larry still handled a lot of the negotiations by phone, taking orders from his friends and relaying the information to David or Suzanne, but he was spending at most only a few hours every day on the business. He was busy finishing dental school and preparing for the big move out to Devon, but he always had time for a friend with money to spend.
As business continued to grow, David decided it was time to negotiate a price break. He was curious to meet Paco and Pepe anyway. So he asked Willie to arrange a meeting in Miami.
“Let’s get together for a bottle of Taittinger and blow a few grand and maybe I can get the price down,” he said.
The trip was more like a vacation than business. David took Gina, and Willie took his girlfriend. They stayed at the Fontainebleau. Paco threw an extravagant party in the Presidential Suite of the luxury hotel, a huge two-story suite with a grand piano and bar, and filled it with friends. They spent four days, mostly just enjoying themselves, their money, their women, their success. But for several hours every day they would retreat back to Paco’s house to talk business. Sitting around the wood-paneled study before the stylized island sunset scene, Willie and Paco, both big easygoing men, and David and Pepe, small and excitable, sipped scotch together and paused occasionally to snort a line of cocaine.
All along, ever since Larry had started buying kilos of cocaine in Florida more than two years earlier, they had been paying a fixed price of fifty-six grand per kilo. Paco and Pepe had been the main suppliers for almost everyone they had been buying from all that time. David’s argument was that during that time their business had grown
from only two kilos per month to more than thirty, and yet they had never been offered cocaine for a penny less. He emphasized that their business was cash only; they had never bought on credit and therefore had never been in debt. Implicit in David’s pitch was that they were restless. They were good customers willing to pay up front. If Paco wouldn’t offer a discount, they might be able to get a better deal elsewhere.
Paco was firm. He said his hands were tied by his brother, who ran his family’s business. Besides, said Paco, to him, thirty kilos per month did not make Larry and David a big customer.
“A big customer buys a hundred kilos at a time,” he said. He explained that the biggest customers put up one to two million at a time, investing and participating in the risky trips to Colombia to smuggle large quantities north. Unless they were ready for that, to become partners with him, then they were regular customers and the price would stay the same.
David wouldn’t give up. When he realized he could not lower the price, he tried a different tack.
“If the price is fixed, what is it I can do to get some sort of a break?” David asked. “If thirty kilos isn’t enough business for a month, then what is?”
“Fifty kilos,” Paco said.
“If I can do fifty kilos in one month, what kind of break can you give me?”
It was evident to Willie that Paco didn’t believe they could do it. It was a jump way out of proportion to the growth levels they had seen from Philadelphia. In 1980, for instance, thirty kilos represented an approximate total of
all
the cocaine Willie had transported. But, as if to humor David, whose eagerness amused Paco, the Cuban said, “Listen, if you do fifty kilos in one month, I’ll give you a hundred grand in cash, or two free kilos.”
That was the break David was looking for. He accepted the challenge excitedly. Before they returned home, Paco gave them three high-powered walkie-talkies, like the ones his men used to coordinate their escort and lookout assignments.
Back in Philadelphia, David geared up to meet the goal. For the last two weeks of April they artificially inflated demand, holding out on customers, making the rare claim that they were suffering a shortage. Then, during May, Willie and his runners made three trips to Florida. On the first two they brought back sixteen, then seventeen kilos. They pushed double orders of cocaine off on their customers, telling them that they anticipated another shortage in June. Pulling together cash from everywhere they could find it, Willie made the last run on the
last day of the month, carrying close to one million dollars in cash down to pick up a final eighteen kilos—one more than the amount David had promised to buy.
The final break of the month was a marathon session over Memorial Day weekend, involving the largest single shipment of cocaine the business had ever brought north. It took place at Paul Mikuta’s ranch-style house in Gladwyn, on the Main Line.
This was Christine’s first break. She was excited when David asked her to help out, and not just because he offered her a hundred dollars per hour. Christine had been kept on the periphery of the business, which was like being kept on the outside of a tight-knit secret social circle that included her best friend, Suzanne, and the man she secretly admired, David. His invitation was a chance to become more fully a part of their group, which Christine considered glamorous and fun. She had heard about breaks, and now she was going to actually take part!
It had all the right elements of danger and suspense. As Willie’s car approached Center City on 1-95, he called in on one of the new walkie-talkies Paco had given them. David and Paul were in the lead car. Suzanne and Christine were in another. The idea was for David to guide Willie’s car out to Paul’s, but somewhere out near City Avenue, about fifteen minutes northwest on the Schuylkill Expressway, Willie lost contact with the lead car. He had never been to Paul’s, so he turned around and drove back into Old City. When David and Mark realized things had gotten screwed up, they, too, doubled back.