Authors: Mark Bowden
“I’m sorry,” said the female agent, “but I have to put handcuffs on you.”
Marcia gave her a look of disbelief. “Do you really think that’s necessary?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s policy,” the agent said.
So Marcia held out her hands.
“You can drape your sweater over your hands if you don’t want people to see,” the woman said. Marcia nodded. The agent draped the sweater over her hands and led her out of the bedroom. Down the hall Marcia could see a crowd of agents huddled over the computer in Larry’s office.
As they moved across the front yard toward the car, Marcia felt the urge to check her mailbox. She had been busy in the house all day and had been meaning to get to it. Right away she realized what a ridiculous thought it was. It was strange, she thought. Like with the ham in the kitchen. Her mind clung stubbornly to household routine, as though she were determined not to acknowledge to herself at some level that this was actually happening. She looked down the handsome block of Royal Oaks Close and recalled that just an hour or so ago she had walked up with Tara in the stroller and Chris alongside, without a care in the world. And, just like that, it was gone. Marcia was confident that she would be released after at most a few days or so, but she knew her life would never be the same again.
Inside the car, the agent reached around Marcia for the seat belt, then hesitated.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Marcia. “Just two months.”
“Is it okay to put on the seat belt?”
“Yes. It’s okay.”
On the drive into Norfolk, Marcia thought about the children. The Millers were out of town that week. Marcia thought how lucky she was that Nancy Payne had been home. If not for Nancy, she would have had no place to send Chris and Tara. It would be a trauma for Tara to spend the night away from home, away from her mother, but at least it was with familiar people in a familiar place.
In Norfolk they drove past Waterside, the waterfront shops and restaurants where Marcia had dragged Larry on Easter. She was glad they had done that. It would probably be the last time they would go anywhere together again as a family.
The courthouse was nearby. They drove into a parking garage and then led Marcia upstairs. It was past dinnertime. Pregnancy always made Marcia voracious.
“Can I have something to eat?” she asked.
“We don’t have anything here,” the agent said.
“How about something to drink?”
One of the courthouse workers overheard Marcia’s requests and offered her his tray full of food.
“No, thanks,” she said.
One of the agents emerged from a room with a diet Coke.
Further down the long tile hallway, she heard Larry’s voice.
“Is he here?” she said.
“Yes,” said the agent alongside her. “He’s in the next room down.”
“Can I see him?”
“After you’re finished,” the agent said. “We have to get your picture and your fingerprints.”
They had trouble getting the camera to work when they took her mug shot. Marcia perched on a stool holding up a placard with her name and birthdate on it. They took her fingerprints.
After that they led her to an upstairs office. Larry was waiting alone for her there. It was sunset outside, a beautiful urban panorama under a glowing red orange sky.
Larry grimaced when he saw her. He looked disheveled and worn-out. Then there were tears in his eyes, and he was shaking, crying. He couldn’t get any words out. She took his hand as they sat down together on a couch under the window.
“I’m sorry” was all Larry could say. It came out as a gasp.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Marcia, trying to soothe him. “You gave me the best years of my life. I don’t regret a single day. I don’t blame you. I still love you.”
Larry just sobbed. Tears rolled down his face. He told Marcia he had signed over everything to get her released.
“Are you all right?” Marcia asked. She was always worried that he would get beaten up by arresting agents, even though the ones who had brought her in had been kind.
“I’m all right,” said Larry.
Then an agent came back in the office and led Larry out. Marcia asked if she could use a phone. From the phone on the office desk she called Nancy. The children were fine. They had eaten dinner and were watching TV.
“I don’t know when I’m going to get out,” said Marcia.
“As long as you need me to keep them for you, I will,” said Nancy.
“Thanks,” Marcia said. “Just don’t let them go to anybody! Don’t let them out of your sight.”
“I won’t,” said Nancy. “They’re mine.”
When she got off the phone, Marcia gave the agent escorting her the phone number for her mother and for her brother.
“Ask them to contact our lawyer, would you?” she said.
After waiting for another hour or so, Marcia was led down to a
car in the garage and set in the backseat alongside Larry. They were driven back to a Virginia Beach jail. Larry’s hands were cuffed behind his back, so he couldn’t sit comfortably. Marcia’s hands were cuffed in her lap.
“Just like Bonnie and Clyde,” said Larry, who had regained his composure completely. They both laughed.
It was a long ride and both Larry and Marcia felt goofy. Larry told her about how he had been arrested on the pier at Lynnhaven. Marcia listened to him and watched the stars against a night sky that darkened, as they drove, from deep violet to black. Marcia had a wistful feeling. These would be their last moments together for a long time, she thought. She rested her head on his shoulder for part of the ride.
At the jailhouse, Larry was led away by three guards.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too, Larry,” said Marcia. Women guards escorted her off in a different direction.
As she walked up the sidewalk to the front door of the jail, Marcia couldn’t see Larry, but she could still hear his voice.
Larry Lavin’s earthly day of reckoning took place September 4, 1986, in two sterile modern courtrooms, long, narrow, carpeted chambers without windows, noise, or odor, beneath ceilings that reach thirty to forty feet above the judicial dais.
Presiding over the first hearing, Larry’s sentencing on drug charges, was the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, a slight, pale man with bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. Beneath the outward calm of the courtroom that morning was real drama. Judge Pollak had the power to lock Larry Lavin away for the rest of his life.
Larry sat behind one table with his lawyer, Tom Bergstrom. Seated at a table alongside were assistant U.S. Attorneys Ron Noble and Tina Williams Gabbrielli, who had prosecuted cases related to the “Yuppie Cocaine Conspiracy.” Seated with them were Chuck Reed and Sid Perry.
In Larry’s defense, Tom Bergstrom presented expert testimony that attempted to explain the psychological roots of his client’s greed. Then, one by one, he elicited warm tributes from Larry’s Virginia Beach friends, who had traveled north to do what they could for the fun-loving, generous man they knew as Brian O’Neil. Tom concluded with a stirring, emotional plea for lenience.
But these were fragile impediments to the onrushing momentum of justice. In the year and a half since Larry had first been arrested, public attitudes toward cocaine use had gone through a dramatic transformation. The harmless party drug, the glamorous aphrodisiac and success symbol was now perceived as the new killer on city streets. With the advent of crack, with the recent shocking death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, cocaine had shifted in public perception from the category of illegal but culturally approved drugs like marijuana to the dark category of addictive killer drugs like heroin.
This was no merely technical distinction. In 1969, in the enormously popular movie
Easy Rider,
the soundtrack sang of the difference between a dealer and a pusher:
The dealer, the dealer is the man with the
love grass in his hand.
For a nickle or a dime he’ll sell you lots of sweet dreams,
But the pusher is a monster, Good God! He’s not a natural man.
God damn the pusherman!
Larry had always seen himself as a “dealer.” Now, at the height of a national mania over crack (a word Larry had learned only months before) and a new recognition of how addictive and insidious were the long-term effects of cocaine, Larry was being portrayed as a “pusher.” And not just any pusher, but “Dr. Snow,” as
Philadelphia
magazine had dubbed him, the biggest pusher in the city’s history.
Speaking for the government was Gabbrielli, a sober young woman with glasses and long light brown hair:
“Dr. Lavin headed up the largest, the most sophisticated cocaine enterprise ever prosecuted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. So far in this morning’s proceedings not much has been said to remind us of the extent of his criminal involvement. . . . I think it’s important to dwell for a moment on how much cocaine we’re talking about. We’ve seized, through the assistance of a cooperating witness, David Ackerman, records of the Lavin organization for 1981 and part of 1982. In 1981, it shows that the organization purchased approximately two hundred fifty kilograms of pure, uncut cocaine. This cocaine was then processed, cut, and resold throughout the United States. Based on available information, the government believes it could easily show the organization distributed approximately a thousand kilograms of cocaine.
A thousand kilograms of cocaine.
That’s a million grams. Once the cocaine is sold, it’s usually cut at least one more time before it’s redistributed on the streets. Even if it was cut only once to a fifty percent purity level, which is still very high quality, that’s two million grams of cocaine. An eighth of a gram is considered an individual’s dosage amount. That would be sixteen million individual dosage amounts. That’s enough cocaine to turn on every man, woman, and child in . . . Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; and San Francisco, California. The government submits we have not caught a small fish, . . . but rather a kingfish.
“. . . Lavin is thirty-one years old. He’s led an exceptional life, one full of excitement, power, thrills. He’s been a multimillionaire. He estimates, himself, he made five million. Perhaps it was more. He had money to throw extravagant parties, live in the best neighborhoods. He had money to be generous with, to loan to friends. He was able to help others in Virginia Beach. After all, it was easy. The money came easy. Now, however, it’s time for Lavin to pay that price.”
Gabbrielli concluded that Larry ought to be sentenced to “at least” thirty years.
Judge Pollak listened as Larry stood to defend himself, arguing that his business had been based on “friendship,” not violence, and that he had never been fully aware of the harm caused by cocaine.
When Larry sat down there was a long silence in the courtroom. All eyes fell on the slight, black-robed figure on the dais. The silence lasted a full minute before Judge Pollak looked up from the papers before him and began to speak.
“Why do we have such a full courtroom today?” the judge asked, scanning the crowded benches and standing spectators in the far corners of the chamber. Among the crowd were the press, Marcia Lavin and friends, observers from the courthouse, assistants on the U.S. attorney’s staff, and even the judge’s daughter, who knew how long and hard her father had considered the matter.
“People are sentenced in the United States in courtrooms like this . . . every day,” said the judge. “By the weekly hundreds we send people off, sometimes to incarceration, sometimes to probation. Mostly the process does not demand this much attentive interest. Is Dr. Lavin’s case different from most?
“. . . Our psychologist witness characterized Dr. Lavin’s case as an American tragedy. He saw close analogies to the terrifying Dreiser story. . . . I think we have a tragedy here, and perhaps it’s an American one, . . . but I don’t think that it’s quite the one that Dreiser had in mind.
“We saw Dreiser’s hero come up, and then we saw him go down. He didn’t join us. Why do I say ’us’? Because this courtroom, which is so well attended today, . . . is a middle-, upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile, largely professional courtroom, mostly white, making it, and we are, are we not, concerned and even fascinated by Dr. Lavin because he is what? Very close to being one of us? . . . I’m suggesting that we focus on Dr. Lavin’s case because we identify with him and are frightened by what he did, and by what others might easily have done. We are worried and we are terrified about what is about to happen to him when he is cast out of our society. That’s part of what is so frightening.
“. . . The distribution of masses of cocaine throughout our society is the distribution of a terrible poison. It seems reasonable to suppose, even though we cannot document each of the sad, sad cases, that people by the hundreds or by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, have been victimized by Dr. Lavin’s and his colleagues’ conspiracy. . . . And the victimization does not necessarily end with the breakup of this conspiracy. It seems reasonable to suppose that people by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, were introduced into a self-destructive way of life from which they may take years and years to extricate themselves, or may never, and are likely to do their time in prisons or die sick and alone. These are dreadful crimes.
“Do I agree with the government that Dr. Lavin should be sent away for thirty years, at least? I do not. Do I agree with Dr. Lavin’s lawyer, Mr. Bergstrom, that the minimum called for . . . is an adequate disposition? I do not.”
Judge Pollak sentenced Larry to fifteen years under count five, the Section 848 “continuing-criminal-enterprise” charge, and fined him a hundred thousand dollars. On the other counts, he imposed a total sentence of seven additional years in prison.
Twenty-two years.
The courtroom received the news with silence. Larry sat motionless in his chair, his back to the crowd.