Authors: Mark Bowden
“They showed him a picture of him and Wayne a year ago?”
“Yeah. They did take him off into another room for a little bit. That’s when they said they wanted to make a deal.”
“And did anything happen?”
“No. He said that he didn’t know any of these people to make a deal with, or anything about them.”
“So they talked about me and David then, or do you think they were talking about other people?”
“Oh yeah, well, they talked to me about you guys.”
“But, as far as making a deal, is that who they were talking to him about, or do you think they were talking about some other people, too?”
“Yeah, there were some other people, too, since they called me in, too, for that part.”
“Well, did you recognize any of those other names besides David and I? Did you recognize anyone else they wanted to make a deal about?”
“Yeah.”
“Who else was it?”
“Well, your other friend. I don’t really know him,” said Suzanne in a pleading voice. She had just told the FBI she didn’t recognize the guy, so she was reluctant to name him now on a tapped phone.
“Right,” said Larry. “Did they say a name, or . . .?”
“Yeah. Uh-hmm.”
“Begin with an
F?”
“Yep.”
“Any other names that you knew?” asked Larry.
“No, that was it. Just them.”
“Unbelievable,” said Larry. He was amazed at the tenacity of the agents. They had been following them all around the country for more than a year!
“Okay, so you’re going to go down there at nine, right? I mean, there’s nothing else we can do, right? Is there?
“You can lend me some money.”
“Yeah, okay. Well, I will come and see you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know how great that is. Uuh,” Larry groaned. Just how much deeper he was implicated was gradually sinking in. “. . . It’s unbelievable that they would watch him for a year!”
“Well, you know what they said, they’ve been hanging around. I mean, they said that to me a year ago. That they would be around for another two years or something.”
“. . .I wonder what happened out there with . . . with Wayne,” said Larry. “So, they tried to get real intimidating then and told him he was going to go away for a long time, that type of stuff?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah? Great. Well, it will be interesting to see what Fitzpatrick says. Say the worst happens, what’s the worst they can do? If they definitely have a good search warrant then they have that, and I’ll be interested to see what—I’m just surprised that there weren’t a lot more names if they had pictures of him and Wayne.”
Larry knew that if they had been following Bruce for more than a year, they would have learned about a lot more people than Wayne. It didn’t occur to him that the breakthrough in the investigation had
started
with Wayne, with the DEA in Phoenix. He assumed it had grown out of the local probe of his own dealings. There was a gap
there that he found intriguing. He was worried about what more Bruce might say.
Larry agreed to drop money off for Suzanne. He said he wanted to talk to Bruce as soon as he was released.
Sweat was rolling from Larry’s armpits when he hung up the phone. For the first time since the meeting with Chuck Reed and the IRS agent almost a year ago, Larry realized his predicament had significantly worsened. They were on to the coke business. His mind raced.
Drilling teeth was the last thing on his mind, but he had a patient in the chair all numbed up and a root canal in progress. There were other patients in the waiting room. . . .
Bruce won’t talk,
thought Larry.
We’ll get him a good lawyer. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He got into this business on his own. He wanted it. If you get in voluntarily it means you accept the risks. He’s not going to pass it on to everyone else. Bruce wouldn’t do that. . . .
Larry took a couple of deep breaths, stood up, and put a smile on his face as he went to tend to his patient.
Bruce called Suzanne collect from the detention center that night.
“Oh God, Suzanne!”
“Did Fitzpatrick say how it looked or anything?” Suzanne asked.
“He said it didn’t look that bad, but he always says that.”
“No, no, no. Now, he’s pretty honest.”
“Okay. The law says I’m gonna get at least ten years,” Bruce said.
“Don’t listen to them.”
“I ain’t. Fuckin’ Chuck there, what an asshole.” “Isn’t he?”
“Yeah. He says to me, ’Your wife set you up with us.’ “
“Did he?”
“. . . I told him to fuck off.”
“Why didn’t they take me?” asked Suzanne.
“They said they were going to arrest you later.”
“Oh, really?”
“I think he’s talking through his asshole. Because you could be running.”
“Arrest me later, huh?”
“Yep. Oh God, I don’t want to hang up. I’m gonna have to get off pretty quick.”
“I love you,” said Suzanne.
“I love you, baby. See you in the morning?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Come on down to this area.”
“I will.”
“. . . Is there anything? Did they miss anything?” Bruce was feeling the hard effects of cocaine withdrawal.
Suzanne said they had gotten it all.
“Okay, down where I keep the tools? You know the shelf there, like, where you put the cans and stuff?”
“Downstairs there?”
“Yeah, and the Epsom salt?”
“Yeah.”
“See if that little package is in there. That little silver thing that the cartridge came in.”
“What cartridge?”
“Remember? The cartridge.”
“Oh.”
“In the storeroom that I was keeping the
Ds
in?”
“Oh yeah, yeah.”
“They get that?”
“I don’t know,” said Suzanne. “You want me to look? Hold on.”
Kim chatted with Bruce for a minute while Suzanne checked the hiding place. Bruce said to her, “You got to get me something off somebody for when I get out of here!”
Suzanne then returned to the phone. “I can’t find anything.”
“It isn’t there?”
“No.”
“They found it, then,” he said, disappointed.
Bruce asked Suzanne to check one other hiding place, and there was no cocaine there either.
“See if you can get me ahold of something tomorrow,” he said. “Fix me a blast in the morning. A big one.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“If you can’t, you can’t,” he said, dejected.
“I’ll try,” said Suzanne.
It was six o’clock. Bruce hung on the line a few minutes longer.
“Can you sleep there?” Suzanne asked. “What is it like?”
“It’s horrible. It’s, it’s all niggers.”
“Really?”
“Yep, same as last time. I got in a fight last time. Had to break the guy’s arm.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m in the same place.”
“Oh, no!”
“Naked,” he said.
“Naked!”
“Yep, Suzanne.”
“Why?”
“They took my clothes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s horrible.”
“I love you,” Suzanne said. She felt ready to cry.
“I love you,” said Bruce.
Larry came over later. Kim and Suzanne sat on the pool table and Larry sat in an armchair alongside as Suzanne went back over in detail the events of the day.
He asked question after question, and tried to size up from Suzanne exactly what was Bruce’s state of mind.
“Do you think that he might get scared?” Larry asked.
“Bruce is tough,” said Suzanne.
Larry thought about that for a few minutes. “I guess Bruce has been around,” he said.
He left them with twenty-five thousand dollars. When he was gone, Suzanne found her car keys. She wanted to make sure nothing would keep her from the courthouse in the morning, so Suzanne put on a mink coat and a mink hat. She and Kim drove into Philadelphia and checked into the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, got stoned, ordered room service, and watched TV through the night.
Bruce was released promptly after nine o’clock. He strode out of the marshal’s office on the second floor with a happy grin and was embraced by the giggling sisters. They left in search of cocaine.
Several months after Bruce’s bust, Chuck Reed stopped by the house on Timber Lane. Marcia’s mother had just come over for dinner. She pulled her car in the driveway and entered the house through the garage into the kitchen.
“Who are those people sitting in the car outside?” she asked Marcia.
“What people?”
Marcia walked to the foyer and peeked out the window by the front door. There were two men in a car parked up on the lane. Marcia guessed right away that they were agents.
About fifteen minutes after that, the men got out of the car and came down the front walk to the door. Marcia was waiting for them. Chuck and the other agent showed their badges and introduced themselves.
“We would like to come in and ask you a few questions,” Chuck said.
“Our lawyer has advised me not to answer any questions,” Marcia said. “If you want to arrange a meeting, you can contact him. His
name is Donald Goldberg.” The other agent turned and started back. Chuck stood his ground.
“You know that your husband is in big trouble,” he said.
“Good luck,” said Marcia. “I’m going to close the door now. I don’t mean to be impolite.”
She shut the door as Chuck was saying, “Larry thinks he’s got a hotshot lawyer and that he’s gonna get off, but he’s going away to jail for many years, if not life.”
Chuck Reed had everyone in this case spooked. Nobody seemed to think that Sid Perry or Tom Neff or Steve Gallon or any of the other federal agents involved were anything other than decent guys doing their job. Larry had heard a lot of nice things about Sid Perry’s quiet manners and friendliness. He often told people, when warning them what to expect before a visit by the FBI men, “From what I hear, Sid Perry is a nice guy. Chuck Reed is just an asshole.” Everybody thought Sid was nice, but Chuck Reed stayed in their minds. Stories circulated about Chuck. People remembered exactly what the big, bearded agent had said, the look in his eyes, the set of his jaw. Reed-bashing became a favorite inside sport. Encounters with Chuck Reed became the grist for countless stories. Embellished and distorted, these minor incidents portrayed the lead FBI agent as an oaf on a frustrated vendetta, outsmarted at every turn.
So the visit to Larry’s house ended with the image of a red-faced Chuck Reed bellowing threats through the front window after Marcia coolly closed the door. The visit to David Ackerman ended with David refusing to look up the name of his lawyer in the phone book while Chuck fussed and stormed around his apartment. Suzanne’s story about “black hats” and “white hats” prompted gales of laughter. People claimed that Chuck Reed told them lies, made up stories about Larry owning clandestine airports in southern Florida and secret Caribbean estates, or about how Larry wouldn’t hesitate to have anyone killed who got in his way.
To Larry, Chuck Reed was a CPA who had blundered into the biggest case of his career. He pictured the big FBI agent as having spent years huddled over ledgers in the dusty back halls of old courthouses, trying to catch the petty mistakes of corporate accountants. Now his probe of Mark Stewart’s books had unexpectedly thrust him into the real world, complete with his comic-book vision of himself as the good guy, like “Nick Danger, Private Eye” from the old Firesign Theater albums, and Larry as some modern-day suburban version of Al Capone. With deep-seated memories of his father’s old diatribes against government incompetence—what kind of person works for salaries like those anyway?—it was comforting and even easy for Larry
to see the FBI as a group of clumsy but determined plodders, and none more representative than Chuck. These were years when cocaine was still considered a harmless, glamorous recreational drug, a status symbol. No one had yet heard of crack or of famous athletes keeling over dead from a few snorts. Laws against cocaine stemmed from the same bullet-headed ignorance evidenced by the old propaganda-film-turned-campus-classic
Reefer Madness.
Larry couldn’t understand why the government would be so determinerd to catch him. He attributed the relentless nature of the now two-year-old investigation to Chuck Reed’s private demons. He half expected that at some point a higher-up in the federal courthouse was going to find out how Reed had been spending his time and jerk him off the case.
And if they didn’t, well, Larry was sure he would end up one step ahead of Chuck Reed in the end. Larry’s attitude had shaped the theme of all the stories told about Chuck. His friends and associates looked for the traits in Chuck that supported this view. It was reassuring to see things Larry’s way. They were all so much more together than Chuck Reed, so much more poised and intelligent, so much more
cool.
Surely guys like Chuck Reed never won in the end . . . but, then . . .
After the raid at Bruce and Suzanne’s, Larry’s old, optimistic scenario of paying a fine or going away on tax charges was shattered. If they had been watching Bruce for that long, and they had the tape of his conversation with Wayne, then they had a good chance of building a cocaine case against him.
It was time to develop a new option. If it all came down too hard, Larry realized, he would have to be ready to flee.
How exactly does a person disappear? In the back pages of
High Times
magazine there were sometimes ads for strange books published by an outfit called Loompanics Unlimited, based in Port Townsend, Washington. There were books and pamphlets on techniques of electronic surveillance, private-detective manuals, how-to books on everything from writing novels to lip reading to surviving nuclear war to exacting revenge on a former spouse to growing marijuana in your basement. An ad for a book entitled
New I.D. in America
caught Larry’s eye in the spring of 1984—“With
New I.D. in America,
you can ’get lost’ permanently,” the ad promised. Larry sent away.
The little paperback was filled with step-by-step advice on how to obtain new birth certificates, drivers licenses, social security cards, credit cards, how to create bogus business entities, bank accounts, and how to use mail drops—sequential mailing organizations that forwarded letters from place to place for several weeks before sending them to their ultimate destination, obscuring the letter’s origin. Along
with the booklet came a catalog of other offerings that interested Larry. He investigated books dealing with wiretapping, and read up on how long it took the government to trace a phone call. He figured that if he and Marcia ran, he could occasionally call family and friends without fear of revealing his location.