Doctor Dealer (45 page)

As for where to run, Larry had not yet given it much thought. He had considered Ireland, being his ancestral home, but in talking it over with his friends he feared that the Irish Republican Army would find out about him and come after his money. Larry made telephone inquiries at embassies and found out that most countries would extradite him back to the United States for drug crimes. He knew from his conversations with Billy Honeywell that officials in Jamaica could be bought off fairly readily, and there were banks in the Caribbean that made a practice of asking no questions about large cash deposits. In March, Larry and Marcia and Christopher spent a week in Aruba. Lounging on the beach or at poolside in a luxury hotel, watching the gentle sway of palm branches in sweet tropical breezes, it was easy and inviting to imagine escaping the enclosing web of circumstance. How alluring it was to just
be someone else!
It would give Larry the last laugh on everyone—especially Chuck Reed. He would just pop out of the system—
poof!
Ever since his childhood on the lake in Haverhill, spending time with the Baratt family, Larry had fantasized about owning a boat. . . . Maybe it was time to pursue that dream.

At first casually, and then with increasing determination as the inevitable day of his arrest and indictment approached, Larry went to work.

One of the first things he needed was a printer. Larry called Billy Motto and asked if he knew someone, and the next day one of Billy’s men phoned to set up the meeting.

Larry drove down to a health spa in South Philly that Billy secretly owned and where he often hung out. They met out front, and when they walked back to the manager’s office in back, the people using it cleared out hurriedly. Billy sat behind the desk and Larry sat down across from him. The printer arrived right on time.

“This is Glen,” said Billy. “Glen, this is John.”

With that, Billy got up and left the room. Larry had to admire the way his longtime customer and friend did business.

Larry explained what he needed. He wanted copies made of his birth certificate from Massachusetts and of his own and Marcia’s baptismal certificates with all the spaces left blank. Within a week he had a stack of blanks about a foot high. Next, Larry sent away to book collectors’ clubs for personalized embossers that had an official-looking scales-of-justice design at the center. One embosser read, “From the
Personal Library of Larry Lavin.” He ordered other embossers labeled “Library of the Sacred Heart Church” or “Le Haverhill Company”—he used the “Le” because the number of letters left “Haverhill” centered perfectly over the top. When he got the embossers, he altered them with his dental drills, filing away what he didn’t want. Then, by combining the altered embossers, he could stamp his birth certificate with an official-looking seal that had “Haverhill” on top and the justice scales in the center. He performed similar effects with stamps on the baptismal certificates.

With these tools he was able to forge dozens of fake documents under names he picked from the phone book or made up or concocted by combining names of friends from his past. One of his false characters was named Sidoli, after his old friend from Exeter, whom Larry hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. Another incorporated the name Rault, another Exeter friend. One of the names he made up, just because he liked the sound of it, was Brian O’Neil. Using techniques he picked up from
New I.D. in America,
Larry obtained social security cards for many of these identities.

He also began accumulating cash. He knew that the government was watching his bank accounts and investments, so he didn’t dare withdraw large amounts from them, but Larry had many customers who owed him money. He made strenuous efforts to collect, with some success, and added to that growing sum occasional six-figure payments from Frannie Burns.

Larry had not made up his mind to flee, but he wanted to be prepared to move quickly if all hell broke loose. Down deep, Larry still hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Running would mean giving up his dental practice and his beloved house on Timber Lane, and it would mean losing three-quarters of his hard-earned fortune. He figured the most cash he would be able to accumulate over the next few months was about two million. He would have to walk away from almost twice that much.

Despite the setbacks in early 1984, Larry still had reason to hope. Bruce hadn’t told the government anything, as far as he could tell. Larry Uhr had not cooperated with the FBI as he originally said he would. Efforts to use Joe Powell and Mark Strong, a former Arena employee, against Larry had backfired—both had warned him privately. Everyone else contacted by Chuck Reed and Sid Perry and the Treasury agents had refused to talk. Larry knew they all had the best incentive in the world—protecting their own hides. And although he had learned, from Wayne Heinauer, that the FBI had recorded their August conversation, to his way of thinking, the whole thing had more to do with Frannie Burns than with him. It was consistent
with the story he had given his lawyer, that he had been in the business but had gotten out.

So as spring approached, his biggest fear was that one of the minor players on the periphery, a small customer, say, or someone like Kim Norimatsu, for instance, might panic and offer to bare their soul (and his hide) in return for total immunity. So in addition to days that were already more than filled with dentistry, his multifarious investments, collecting money, and conferring with Frannie, Larry became more and more preoccupied with damage control.

One of the minor characters who worried Larry during this period was Michael Schade, a Drexel undergraduate who had met Bruce and gotten involved in the business during 1983. Larry had never met the kid. His apartment had been raided and he had been arrested on the same day Bruce had been taken in.

Early in April, soon after returning from the trip to Aruba, Larry made plans to meet with the red-haired, fair-skinned, nervous undergraduate. He just wanted to feel the kid out, find out how scared he was, reassure him and encourage him to hang tough.

Larry believed that the worst things they had on Schade were a few phone numbers and conversations he had had with Steve and June Rasner. Steve was a dentist in Cherry Hill who had graduated the year before Larry from Penn Dental School. He and his wife, June, had been dealing marijuana and cocaine and had used Michael for pickups and deliveries. Larry’s idea was to get Michael together with the Rasners so that they could establish a consistent alibi to explain their relationship.

What Larry didn’t know was that Michael Schade had already seen where his best interests lay. What Chuck Reed and Sid Perry had to say made a lot of sense. For a college sophomore, Michael was in a lot of trouble. It might not have been the kind of trouble Larry Lavin faced, but it was enough to daunt a nineteen-year-old kid. On the other hand, the FBI at that moment placed a very high premium on cooperation in the case they were preparing against the Lavin cocaine empire. They were offering him nothing less than what looked like a second chance on his whole life.

So there was a tap on Michael’s phone April 12 when Larry called to arrange the meeting with the Rasners. Michael had never gotten a call from Larry before.

“Hello?” said Michael.

“How you doing?”

“Pretty good.”

“What a web we weave,” said Larry.

“Oh, man, I know.”

“Anyways, obviously I want to put you and Steve together.”

Michael was intimidated by Larry. He knew of him only as “the big boss.” Bruce and Suzanne and others he had dealt with all liked Larry and held him almost in awe. Now to have Larry suddenly so interested in him was a little daunting. They discussed setting up a time for the meeting with the Rasners. Larry offered to come down and pick Michael up and drive him over to Cherry Hill.

“. . . Steve wanted to get together in case they bring you people in,” Larry explained. “If they ever give you immunity, you guys can say exactly the same story.”

“Right.”

“You know? Something about these numbers were mentioned.”

“Right.”

“And he wants to try and remember exactly what, what you both think was said.”

“Right.”

“And he can relate it all to, um, repayment of debt or something.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what do you think?”

“Um, yeah, I guess so,” said Michael. He was so nervous, knowing the conversation was being recorded, that he was trying to say as little as possible.

“My biggest worry is whether they had you on other tapes that same month,” said Larry.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll talk to you more about that. But I think they had his phone tapped for the month of January.”

Larry speculated about other conversations that might have been recorded between Michael and others. They agreed to meet the next morning.

Larry arrived promptly. Reed and Perry had considered putting a wire on Michael, but knowing of Larry’s penchant for electronic gadgets, they feared he might have his car wired to detect it. They settled on a plan to just debrief Michael in detail after the meeting. They watched as Larry picked up the kid, and then followed from a discreet distance as they drove across Philadelphia to the Ben Franklin Bridge and into New Jersey.

In the car, Larry explained that they were going to meet the Rasners at a Cherry Hill restaurant named Olga’s.

“I’m spending a lot of time lately driving around and meeting people, helping them to keep their stories straight,” said Larry. He told Michael all about Glen Fuller, who was still out on bail awaiting disposition of the charges against him from 1980. Larry liked to use Glen as an example of what good legal talent could do for his friends
in trouble. Here was a guy who got nabbed with multi-kilos in the trunk of his car, fought with the state cops at the arrest, and was still, more than three years later, a free man. The implication was that Michael had little to worry about.

“I can’t believe Chuck Reed searched Bruce’s house when he did,” said Larry. “If they had been watching him for a year, why wouldn’t he have gone in when he had just gotten a shipment? Bruce gets, like, ten to fourteen keys at a time, and Reed hits him when the place is empty. I don’t get it.” Larry laughed—one more anecdote for the growing legend of Chuck Reed.

Michael told Larry that he had enrolled in a drug clinic to kick his cocaine habit.

“I’m trying to get my head on straight,” he said.

“My biggest worry is that Reed is going to get to Kim,” said Larry. “She knows everything and everybody. . . . Did they ask you about Brian Riley?”

“Yeah.”

“What did they say?”

“They knew about his getting stopped at the airport in Boston with all that money. They asked me if I knew anything about that.”

“Jeez. Bruce didn’t tell me that. When I talked to Brian I told him I thought they didn’t know anything about him. I’ll have to get ahold of him again. He calls his mother, like, every week. So I can get a message to him through her.”

Then Larry entertained Michael with stories about how he had gotten involved in dealing drugs. Larry wanted Michael to like him, so he was trying to pour on the charm. His way of being charming was to talk someone’s head off. He told him all about his old pot-dealing days at Penn, college man to college man, and trotted out all his favorite old stories. Just as Larry’s father had a habit of telling and retelling his war stories, Larry had his well-polished anecdotes from college days. He had told the stories so often, always portraying himself as the reckless, fun-loving hero who got away in the end, that he frequently lapsed comically into the third person, as if he were talking about someone else. If you were in the right mood, Larry’s storytelling was charming and funny. To Michael, who was just eager to get this all over with, Larry sounded like an awful braggart.

Then Larry told Michael about the arson of the King Arena. He explained that he had had nothing to do with it, that it had been Mark Stewart’s idea.

“That’s how this all started,” he said. “I should have gotten out of all this then. But, hindsight is twenty-twenty! For some reason, I’m the one Chuck Reed really wants to get.”

They talked about Bruce Taylor. Michael said that it was a shame that he was dying of leukemia, and was startled when Larry laughed.

“That’s bullshit,” Larry explained. “Did you fall for that? It’s so stupid. Bruce tells people that because he figures if he ever splits with money from the business, nobody will come looking for him.” Larry just shook his head.

Michael was shocked. He told Larry he felt foolish for believing Bruce all this time.

Larry told Michael all about the taped conversation between him and Wayne Heinauer.

“It’s a very incriminating call,” said Larry. “That’s the worst thing they have on me.”

He advised Michael not to cooperate with the FBI.

“Take the Fifth, because once a person starts talking, they have to keep on talking,” he said. “If you take the Fifth, then they have to prove everything against you. In your case, they don’t have very much. Make sure the lawyer your father is getting you is a criminal lawyer. If he’s not, call me and I’ll hook you up with Donald Goldberg. He’s my lawyer. He could help you find somone who really knows what to do.”

When they got to Olga’s, Steve and June Rasner weren’t there. Larry waited for a while, then called Steve’s dental office and left a message for him to call back. He and Michael played video games while they waited for the call.

Rasner explained to Larry that he and his wife had seen someone with a zoom lens on a camera parked across the street when they got to Olga’s, so they left.

Larry was irritated. “You’re hallucinating now,” he told Rasner. Steve said he didn’t want to talk on the phone at Olga’s, and asked Larry to go to a pay phone across the street. “You guys are paranoid,” said Larry.

He hung up and they headed across the street to the pay phone. “Both of them are a bundle of nerves,” Larry told Michael. “I hope they can keep their heads, or else we’ll all be in a lot of trouble.”

An FBI photographer captured the frown on Larry’s face as he spoke that line.