by Mark Bowden
Andy had profited by his dealings with Larry. During his freshman year he had bought two or three pounds twice a month from Larry. By sophomore year he was buying up to ten pounds every two weeks. And some of Larry’s magnetism rubbed off. When Andy threw parties at his house off campus on Forty-first Street, sometimes two to three hundred people showed up. Andy always footed the bill and paid the lion’s share of expenses for renting the house. Dealing Larry’s pot had given Andy a lot of good times—and he even had a few thousand dollars of his own in the bank! So when Larry asked him to start running to Florida, Andy found it hard to say no. He figured he was smarter than L.A. No one was going to bust Andy Mainardi.
Andy liked the idea of running to Florida. He disliked living in the city so much that he had planned on leaving Penn that year anyway. Larry had talked him into staying, so now he was making money and looking forward to spending his winter in a warm place. He drove down by himself in a rented car for his first trip, but it was such a long drive that he resolved to take the train thereafter. Planes were too risky for all but the recklessly ballsy—guys like Mikuta. So on the second trip Andy rented a sleeper car. He passed the time getting high, reading, and listening to music. When he got to his hotel room in Florida, it seemed as if Larry was on the phone every couple of hours, fussing over his money and pot like a mother hen.
He took his second train trip south in November, and made his connections without incident in Fort Lauderdale. On the morning after making the buy he boarded a train north with about sixty-five pounds of pot stuffed in two large suitcases. He worried a little about the suitcases—after three loads the luggage smelled strong enough to give someone a contact high. Andy had taken the precaution of reserving a sleeping berth on the train and getting his ticket in advance so that he wouldn’t have to go to the ticket counter, but at the station Amtrak’s computers were down and everyone had to reconfirm their tickets at the counter. He felt conspicuous, a college kid with two huge, reeking suitcases, but everything had gone smoothly. Andy tended to be jumpy. In Jacksonville it made him nervous when, early in the afternoon, a man in a suit and tie got on and took the sleeper directly across the aisle. Out on the platform he had heard a barking dog. Now, why would someone be taking a dog on the train? Andy told himself to calm down and lit a joint. It was probably just a blind person with a seeing-eye dog.
It was almost two hours to Savannah. Shortly before they were due to arrive there, the door to his compartment crashed open, a gun was pointed at his face.
A voice screamed, “Freeze!”
Andy was allowed one phone call at the Chatham County Jail in Savannah. Marcia answered the phone. It was November 11, 1976, Marcia’s twenty-first birthday. She had some people over for a party in the apartment, so she had a hard time hearing Andy at first. He asked to speak to Larry.
Larry’s voice came on with its usual cheer: “Andy, what’s up?”
“Larry, I’m in jail. In Savannah. I was arrested.”
“Oh, my gosh.”
There was silence on the Philadelphia end.
Then Larry asked, “Does that mean they got it all?”
L.A. was sentenced in early 1977. After all that worrying, it turned out that Larry had been right. The judge gave L.A. ninety days at a work-release center. Too inexperienced to realize he had just been cut a huge break, L.A. shot his lawyer a look of shock and panic.
“I thought I was supposed to get probation!” he said.
“I told you there was exposure in this case,” said L.A.’s lawyer.
So that’s what he had meant by exposure! It meant jail time!
“Appeal it,” said L.A.
Over the next few hours the lawyer was able to convince L.A. of his good fortune—an appellate judge could always remand the case with instructions for a sterner sentence. Larry’s former partner was given a job at a bait-and-tackle shop outside of Fort Lauderdale. It turned out his co-workers there were small-time pot dealers themselves, so L.A. spent his ninety days fishing and getting high. On the phone he was able to help Larry steer Andy to his old connections in Florida.
In legal battles over the next few months, Andy’s Savannah lawyer managed to get the charges against him dropped. It was a big story in High Times magazine. Police in Florida and Georgia were cracking down on marijuana smuggling by train, bringing specially trained dogs on board to sniff out contraband. On the same train with Andy they had busted two other college students, en route to other campuses. At first the police had thought the three were working together, but it turned out that each came from a different school. So there were deficiencies in the search warrants that led to the charges being dropped.
Andy had learned his lesson. He told Larry that he had been convicted of the charge and placed on probation. He remained partners with Larry, but he had a good excuse for not taking road trips anymore.
Larry recovered more quickly from the losses and legal expenses of Andy’s bust. He recruited Paul Mikuta and two other younger students to make runs for him, and from then on the trips were made strictly by car. His business was spread throughout the area around Penn’s campus, in South and in Southwest Philly. Limited only by how much marijuana, hash, and Quaaludes he could find to buy, Larry’s net-worth sheet soon passed the thirty-thousand-dollar mark again and kept on climbing.
He did most of his banking at two Girard Bank branches, one on Thirty-sixth Street and the other at the corner of Thirty-ninth and Market streets. It wasn’t sophisticated. Larry just walked in regularly with his pockets stuffed with cash. He would bring in as much as twenty-five hundred dollars at a time, changing fives, tens, and twenties into hundreds. On one visit, a bank executive told Larry that it was generally known that there was a large drain on hundreds in the Penn area. So Larry began to use busier bank branches in Center City to make his exchanges.
At home one afternoon, Larry got a call from one of the banks.
“We just wanted to know if everything went all right with your transaction earlier today,” the man said.
Larry felt sweat forming on his palms.
“What do you mean?”
“We think you might have been shortchanged.”
“Oh. Wait a minute. Let me check,” said Larry. He set the phone down. There was nothing for him to check; he had already sent the stacks of hundreds on their way back down to Florida with Paul. He stood confused in the center of the living room for a few moments, then returned to the phone.
“I think you’re right. There seems to be some missing.”
“Oh, we’re so relieved to hear that,” said the man from Girard. “We came up with five thousand extra today, and we thought it might be yours.”
Larry stopped by the branch the next morning to collect a neat stack of fifty one-hundred-dollar bills . . . no questions asked.
“Why do you want to go to dental school? Why not medical school?” asked the interviewer from Penn’s School of Dentistry.
Larry was ready for the question. He knew that dental schools were wary of applicants who had chosen dentistry because they couldn’t get into medical school. They preferred students with a singular interest in dentistry.
“That’s not a problem for me,” said Larry. And he told the interviewer how he had wanted to be a dentist ever since he was a kid, about the work that had been done on his own teeth and how the dentist had befriended him.
“And besides, there are doctors and there are dentists, and I want to be a dentist.”
“What do you see as the crucial difference?”
“Being a dentist is not the same as being a doctor,” Larry explained. “When you’re a doctor you’re dealing with life and death every day. As a dentist, the worst that can happen is, well . . . if you mess up, it’s only a tooth!”
“You could not be more wrong,” said the interviewer, who seemed offended by the remark. He proceeded to put Larry in his place.
“I’m an oral surgeon,” he said, “and I do deal with life and death every day. . . .�
�� As the doctor of dentistry lectured, Larry grew increasingly dismayed. But then the questions moved into an area where Larry felt more comfortable.
“How are you going to pay for it?” the interviewer asked.
“I have some money saved, and I plan on applying for financial aid,” said Larry.
The interviewer grinned. “Do you know how much it costs to set up an operatory when you graduate?”
“I think the investment is currently about seventy-five thousand,” said Larry.
“How are you going to get that much money?”
“I intend to work, and borrow if I have to,” said Larry.
The interviewer seemed impressed with Larry’s confidence. He said the school was tired of students who came expecting a free ride—and he could tell from Larry’s application (which revealed nothing of his substantial drug earnings) that he would need help. The interviewer looked over Larry’s grades; they had slipped somewhat as he approached graduation day, but he was still near the top of his class. He had done extremely well on his dental boards. Overall, Larry left the interview feeling that he had been impressive talking about finances, but he had probably blown it with his answer to the first question.
So when he got an acceptance letter from the dental school at Tufts, Larry assumed he would be moving at the end of the school year. Marcia agreed to go with him. She was secretly thrilled. At last Larry would be out of his drug-dealing circle at Penn! Tufts had other advantages. It offered a three-year dental program instead of four, it would take Larry back up near his home in Massachusetts, and Marcia’s first physical therapy clinical assignment was in Boston (she had to successfully complete six months of clinical work after graduation in order to be licensed). Late in the spring of 1977 they had traveled to Boston and looked for an apartment. Larry began thinking about turning over his whole business to Andy Mainardi and wondered what he ought to charge him for it.
But shortly before graduation, Larry got his letter of acceptance to Penn. He was surprised, and delighted.
“So what?” said Marcia. “I thought you had decided on Tufts already.”
Larry explained that Penn was his school. His older brother had gone through medical school at Penn. He didn’t mention the dealing, but there was a tug-of-war going on under the surface. Marcia knew that the chances of Larry’s getting out of dealing were slim if he stayed on the same campus. Larry agreed to keep his appointment in Boston at Tufts to discuss his application for financial aid.
But at the Tufts interview, Larry learned that he could expect no financial aid. Marcia thought they could still swing it in Boston, living on a tight budget with Larry finding a part-time job, but Larry had made up his mind. They were going to stay.
At the end of May 1977, Larry and Marcia got engaged. They were both graduating; they had been living together for more than a year; it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. There was no dramatic proposal; there wasn’t even one particular romantic moment when the decision was made. Marcia wanted a ring, so Larry bought her a diamond mounted on a gold band. Larry said he wanted to wait until he was finished with dental school before getting married, but that was just a way of postponing the day. Marcia knew that marriage and children were what she wanted, but Larry wasn’t that sure. He preferred to let things stay the way they were for a while longer. Besides, if they waited a few years he figured he’d be able to afford to help with a much nicer wedding and reception.
Shortly before graduation, they moved to an apartment at 4300 Osage Avenue that would be their home for the next three years. It was a great gray-and-tan battleship of a house, three stories high, that commanded a high hill overlooking a quiet intersection just five blocks west of Penn’s main campus and only three blocks from the dental school. Set one block north of busy Baltimore Avenue, the house was the most impressive structure in a neighborhood of ornate row homes that some forty years ago was a relatively affluent residential enclave. It had long since become home to hordes of transient student renters, against whom landlords fought unceasingly to maintain the bare essentials of legal habitability. Any little patch of yard was littered and untended. Trash cans, often overturned, lined the broad uneven sidewalks with contents half in and half out. Rising above it all was 4300 Osage, reached by ascending a concrete staircase forty feet through trees and sparse but stubborn ground cover to the wide front porch, which wrapped around the west and north corner of the house. There were eight windows across the front on the second floor. A simple concrete addition had recently been added to the south end of the house, just a gray cinderblock cube built without regard to the Victorian style of the rest of the house, but it added a sunny extra room to Larry and Marcia’s spacious first-floor apartment.
Larry liked the basement, which was not broken up into separate storage areas in the manner of many of the rental houses around Penn. A common basement meant it would be hard to hold him liable for anything seized down there. He put a few old dressers down there, the kind with lots of drawers that locked with skeleton keys. He stored merchandise and cash in the drawers.
On the day they moved in, Marcia opened the door to the apartment to discover that rugs were already down, furniture had been set up in the proper rooms, boxes had been unpacked and books were already on shelves, lamps were in place. . . . She turned to thank Larry, but found that he was also surprised. Larry and his friends had been moving furniture and boxes over for a week or two, but he had left it all piled in the center of the front room. He and Marcia had planned on spending most of the day unpacking boxes and arranging things. Now 80 percent of the work was already done! A note on a living room windowsill explained: Two of Larry’s co-investors, Stu Thomas and Paul Mikuta, had arrived with a bale of marijuana and needed Larry’s scale and baggies. Thinking Larry and Marcia had already moved into the new place, and there being no answer at the door, they had let themselves in a window to discover the furniture and boxes. To find the things they needed they had to open the boxes, so, to make amends, they had taken an hour or two to arrange the furniture and unpack everything. Marcia didn’t know whether to be furious or delighted.
She decorated the apartment cozily, painting the rooms with soothing colors, a pale blue for the living room, pale green for Larry’s office and study. There was a lot more room to work with in this apartment than there had been on Baltimore Avenue. Larry bought a much larger aquarium and filled it with tropical fish: nervous silver danios that hid in the rocks at the bottom, flat square tetras and brown-and-white clown loaches, half-inch-long rasporans of neon red and blue, and a sinister black knight fish that despite its size and martial name was soon eaten by its tank companions. Illuminated against the pale yellow kitchen wall, the blue tank water assumed a glowing aqua hue. Marcia bought a white-plumed cockatoo she named Max, and twin parrots she named Chip and Dale. The plush blue rug fit on the living room floor. They picked out and framed a piece of stretched cotton fabric that was dyed in such a way that it looked like clouds against a blue sky. That was hung behind the couch in the blue living room. On other walls she hung framed needlework of her own and art prints from art shops that she and Larry liked. To make a coffee table, Larry bought an oversized baccarat board with a glass top and set it on top of a heavy wood lobster trap he had picked up one summer in Boston for five dollars. He brought home a mirror overlaid with a reprint of an old Coca-Cola poster—from the days when Coke really had a touch of cocaine in it—that read “Relieves Fatigue, Most Refreshing Drink In The World!” Just beyond the living room was a small kitchen, and then off the kitchen a hallway led back to their bedroom and a sunny back room where Larry put a big wooden desk his older brother Paul had given him, and where Marcia put her sewing machine.
Larry thought graduation was really neat—he had never attended one before. His parents and the Osborns came down. Larry and Marcia wore gowns and walked in the seemingly endless processional in the Philadelphia Civic Center to get their diplomas. Hubert H. Humphrey, battling the cancer that would kill
him within the year, gave a moving oration. Afterward there was a polite party at Phi Delta Theta. Larry posed in the front door wearing his white-and-blue plaid pants and a white polo shirt with a blue collar.
* * *
While they were furnishing the new apartment, Larry and Marcia made weekly trips out to the Sears store in Upper Darby. Marcia would go off in search of a variety of things they needed—linens, silverware, furniture, shower curtains, whatever—and Larry would usually head for the tropical fish or the TVs and stereo equipment or the tools—he wasn’t particularly good at using them but he loved to buy them.
On one of their trips in May, shortly before graduation, Larry ran into Tom Finchley. Tom, the son of a wealthy Pennsylvania family, had been buying and selling dope on a somewhat smaller scale than Larry all through his undergraduate years. A slender, athletic young man with fair hair and a moustache, Tom dressed in expensive clothes and liked jewelry; he wore gold rings, a gold watch, and a gold necklace. Larry and his friends distrusted Tom; he was just as avaricious as Larry but lacked Larry’s boyish charm. Larry’s friends, Paul Mikuta, L.A., and Andy, tried to avoid Tom, but Larry respected his resources and connections. They had done some business together, but Tom had his own connections in Florida through a Cuban named Miguel. Whenever he and Larry met they compared notes about busts, prices, and dealers.
They stood off to one side of an aisle by the tropical fish displays and briefly talked business. Lately, every time Tom saw Larry he was pushing Penn’s biggest pot dealer to begin investing more in cocaine. They had been over this ground before. Tom would argue that the profit potential with coke was so much better than grass; you could mark it up more and cut it before reselling it.
“Why don’t you do more with Miguel?”
“Well, you know, my guys are doing pretty good, Tom.”
“Come on, Larry, you know the profits are there. What are you waiting for?”
Larry shrugged. He wasn’t buying it. He knew Tom was just trying to expand his business, grab a portion of Larry’s customers. If Larry agreed to start buying coke, with Tom as the middleman, Tom’s volume could double or triple overnight. Miguel would charge him less, so he could make more off his own sales and he could earn a commission by acting as a broker for Larry.