by Mark Bowden
Larry believed that Marcia and his friends were too timid. Dating back to the days when he and Glen Fuller had ripped off the ski-mobiles, Larry fancied himself as someone who could cross class barriers more readily than most of his sheltered, suburban-bred peers.
During the summer, while Marcia was away in Boston, Paul Mikuta had invited Larry to a bachelor party out at his parents’ house in Frazer for a friend who was getting married the next day. Larry had called Tyrone, who had given him the names and addresses of two women willing to entertain at the affair. So Larry had driven his white Impala down to the housing projects in Southwest Philly and picked them up. He drove them out to the party on the Main Line. When he arrived at the party with these two blunt, impatient black women, eager to finish their business and get going, the houseful of white college students seemed intimidated, as if Larry had thrown them a challenge. The groom was pressured into having sex with the women, and Larry indulged himself, but nobody else wanted anything to do with them. It became awkward. So Larry left early and took the women home. Later, Paul called to say that he had taken the sheets off the bed they had used and burned them.
The episode just confirmed Larry’s suspicion that he was more ballsy than most guys. They might get together at a bachelor party and watch stag movies and boast about going out to poke a few whores, but they faded away fast when Larry delivered the hookers to their beds. Tyrone might be considered a tough “street nigger,” and Billy might be considered a member of the South Philly mob, but Larry could handle it. All it took was a little more nerve and a little more smarts. Actually, his dealings with Billy Motto were a pleasure—Billy was charming and honorable and he looked up to Larry as an older brother. Larry knew that rumors about Billy’s Mafia ties were just that, rumors—useful rumors, in fact, because he noticed Billy had none of the bad-debt problems Larry faced continually. And Tyrone? Tyrone was a businessman just like him. Larry knew Tyrone was making money off their relationship. Why would he want to do anything to interfere with that?
Andy Mainardi had more reason than most to doubt Larry’s assurances in these matters. He was a full partner in the pot business, so he had a lot to lose if Larry did lose control of the situation. And ever since his arrest in Savannah, Andy was wary of the risks Larry took—wary because Larry’s risks had a way of becoming Andy’s risks. For instance, in May of 1978, in the spring of Larry’s freshman year at dental school, he had been sending Andy out to deliver bales of pot to a new customer at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. After some months of dealing with this character, his debt began to accumulate unreasonably. So Larry, on his own, for once decided to try and get heavy. He phoned the guy and told him that he was sending out someone to collect the money. If the debt wasn’t paid now there would be trouble. Then he sent Andy to collect. Andy drove to Lancaster unaware of the threats Larry had made on the phone. He thought it was just a routine trip to collect some money from a customer. When he pulled up in the guy’s driveway, four big men strode out of the house to meet him. Andy muttered hasty apologies when he realized what was going on and quickly drove home. He and Larry had lost about ten thousand dollars, but Andy was grateful to have escaped unharmed. Back in Philadelphia, Larry laughed as if it were nothing and insisted that he thought he had worked things out beforehand with the guy on the phone.
This business with Tyrone was exactly like that. Andy wanted nothing to do with it.
“These people carry guns and knives, Larry!” he would say.
“I know what I’m doing,” Larry would say. “I can handle these people.”
And, in fact, Larry did manage to keep on collecting from these guys, and the numbers on Larry’s tally sheets kept growing—which meant money in Andy’s pocket. So Andy put up with it. He put up with it until May of 1979.
Just before a weekend when Larry and Marcia had planned to visit her parents in northern Jersey, Larry was called by a friend of Tyrone’s who wanted to buy a few pounds of pot right away. Larry said fine, anything for a friend of my man Tyrone, but said, since he was going to be out, that they would have to meet with his partner Andy. Then Larry phoned Andy.
“These people are going to show up at your door in about a half hour,” Larry told Andy.
“You gave them my name and address!” Andy shouted. He had never been so angry at Larry. Andy said he didn’t want anything to do with these people.
“Come on, Andy. You’re the one who gives me shit about having these people over to my place with Marcia here,” Larry said. “I’d do it myself, but I promised Marcia. . . .”
Andy knew how much trouble Marcia had been giving Larry about dealing, so he gave in. Before the half hour was up, Larry’s contact was at the door. He made his buy, and then told Andy that he had a friend who wanted to buy more—a lot more. He asked if Andy could sell this guy forty pounds.
“But not at my house,” said Andy. “You tell them to meet me at the Roy Rogers at Forty-first and Walnut.”
Andy ordered a burger at the Roy Rogers but was too nervous to eat it. At the appointed time, three young men walked in and approached his table. They frightened Andy. They were younger than him, with black skin and fearless eyes. The one who spoke to him had a gold front tooth.
“You Andv?”
“Yes. Do you have the money?”
“Yeah. Let’s go,” said Andy. “Follow me.” He walked out to his car, started it, and drove to a dark parking lot behind a fraternity house on Penn’s campus. The car with the three black guys pulled up alongside.
Andy got out and walked back to the trunk. The three men got out and opened the trunk of their car. Andy hesitated just before opening his.
“Let me just see the cash,” he said.
The one who had spoken to him walked up close. “Okay,” he said. “Over here.” He led Andy over to their open trunk. As Andy turned to look inside, the man reached in his pocket and pulled out a gun.
“Here’s the cash,” he said.
“Take the pot,” said Andy. “Leave. Please don’t hurt me.”
The other men grabbed him, handcuffed him behind his back, and pushed him to the pavement. They kicked him and kicked him. Andy kept shouting, “Take the pot! Take the pot!”
When the man with the gun had thrown the contents from Andy’s trunk into his own, the other two ran back to the car, got in, and drove away.
Andy got up slowly. There was nothing for him to do but walk the few blocks back to his house with his hands cuffed behind his back. One of his roommates located a bolt cutter to remove the handcuffs.
When Larry and Marcia returned Sunday afternoon, Andy was waiting. He had cooled down, but when he explained what had happened, Larry was furious. Andy had lost not only the forty pounds, but additional dope that he had been carrying around in his trunk. They were out nearly fifteen thousand dollars.
“How could you be so stupid!” Larry said. He blamed Andy for setting up a second deal with someone they had never met.
“You don’t go out and do business like that with somebody you don’t even know!” said Larry. “You could get killed! And you don’t take more product with you than you’re gonna sell!”
Andy was upset that Larry put all the blame on him—to say nothing about the fact that he seemed more disturbed about losing the money than about Andy’s close call. For his part, Andy suspected the only reason Larry had involved him in the first place was because he wanted to avoid taking the risk himself.
They parted angrily. Mulling it over the next day, Larry concluded that it was time to end his partnership with Andy. He felt he was working night and day while Andy treated the business as a hobby, staying stoned all the time and taking frequent trips out of town—Andy had recently booked himself on the Concorde and flown away to Paris for a few days. On his own, and for different reasons, Andy was reaching much the same conclusion. He felt that Larry was expanding the business off campus, which was foolhardy, as evidenced by the fifteen-thousand-dollar loss they had just sustai
ned (not to mention the beating).
When Larry marched across the street the next day to confront Andy with his decision, he was suprised to encounter no resistance at all.
“Andy, I think I’m doing too much work here. This is, like, the final straw.”
“You’re right,” said Andy.
And they agreed immediately, without rancor, to part ways.
There was another reason for Andy’s decision to get out. In the early months of 1979, Larry had been pushing the business more and more away from pot, and more and more into cocaine. Two years after his discussion with Tom Finchley at Sears, Larry bowed to the inevitable. Cocaine was fast becoming the major drug of choice even in Larry’s own crowd. Pot use was still strong, but waning. It was getting harder to buy in Florida and it was taking longer and longer to move.
Cocaine had been just a novelty at Penn when Larry was an undergrad. Larry sometimes bought a few grams to use himself or share with his dealer friends. It was too expensive for most students and it was not the kind of high most students wanted. Marijuana is a passive drug. It offers the illusion of escape. It eases boredom and insecurity by making the commonplace seem less so and by temporarily suspending the pressures of daily life. Most college undergraduates manage to succeed with minimal effort, so they have a lot of free time and they are often bored. Couple boredom with the usual trials of adolescence—sexual anxiety, worries about choosing and starting a career, doubts about self-worth, etc.—and you have a large potential market for marijuana. Cocaine is an active drug. It offers the illusion of power. It is the preferred drug of a person in a hurry. Cocaine replaces insecurity with a feeling of omnipotence, imparting a fleeting visceral courage and sense of competence.
By 1979, Larry was finishing his second year of dental school, and his friends were pursuing other professional degrees, majoring in business administration or already holding down good jobs. Getting high had been fine for a boring lecture in cultural anthropology, or for cutting classes to goof off for an afternoon, but it was unthinkable for someone trying to maintain that competitive edge in the white-collar workplace or master a profession. How much more appropriate was a drug that imparted a feeling described as a “rush,” that made you feel smarter, stronger, sexier, and more successful, and that could be turned on or off within a matter of minutes? Cocaine helped you stay awake when you had more work to do. It picked you back up when you had a few drinks too many. It intensified everything that you did. Even the expense of cocaine had begun to work in its favor. If you could afford to lay out a few lines for friends on the coffee table after dinner, it was just another way of advertising success.
Through his sophomore year of dental school, while he was still primarily a pot dealer, Larry dabbled with cocaine, mostly by investing his money in deals arranged by his friends.
He visited the head shops around Penn looking for books about cocaine. Unlike marijuana, which you could just smoke to determine its quality, cocaine was harder to evaluate. And with the amounts of money involved—a kilo (2.2 pounds), a bag small enough to slip inside a valise, cost fifty-six thousand dollars!—the incentive to deceive was extreme. This presented Larry with the kind of challenge he loved.
His years of lab work as an undergrad and now as a dental student had given him a good grounding in basic science. From the books Larry bought, he learned that cocaine was an alkaloid, one of a group of nitrogen-containing compounds derived from plants. Alkaloids have a distinctively complex molecular structure and exhibit a wide range of powerful pharmacological effects. Morphine, codeine, emetine (a potent emetic), quinine (used in treating malaria), ephedrine (used for treating asthma), colchicine (used in treating gout), synephrine (shrinks swollen nasal passages) are all alkaloids. Cocaine was originally isolated and produced for use as a local anesthetic, for which it is quite effective, but it produces side effects that medical science considers undesirable—the very effects that were turning it into the recreational drug of choice in America. Cocaine stimulates the central nervous system, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature and inducing a temporary euphoria—followed, one might add, by a strong craving for more.
It was that strong craving for more that distinguished cocaine from marijuana as merchandise. Larry began dealing coke by throwing in a few gram bottles with the purchase of a certain amount of pot. With pot sales slowly falling off, Larry found he could use cocaine as an incentive, not to the pot users at the end of his supply stream, but to his own customers, each of whom was a substantial pot dealer in his own right. Cocaine was considered too expensive for the average pot smoker, but as a special gift to dealers buying ten thousand dollars of pot or more at a time, it worked as a discount mechanism.
But quickly the dealers came back asking for more. They, in turn, had shared cocaine with their customers, which further multiplied the demand. Larry’s coke business increased exponentially.
Larry put himself through a crash course in dealing cocaine. From a head shop on Pine Street, Larry bought a nifty melt box enclosed in a wood case that was a foot and a half long, four inches wide, and three inches high. Before buying a few ounces or a quarter pound, Larry would press a pinch of the powder between two glass slides and put it in the box. Most of the substances used to cut cocaine by wholesalers (in 1979 they were primarily using a baby sugar called Nanitol) melt at far lower temperatures than cocaine. Then Larry would fire up the box. Coke wouldn’t liquify until 150 degrees (F), while cut would begin to blacken and smoke at between 75 degrees and 100 degrees. Compared to his later methods, the melt box was clumsy and crude, but it worked—and Larry loved gadgets.
In time, Larry’s runners would learn from Cuban suppliers in Florida how to quickly test for quality by simply rubbing the cocaine on the web of skin between the thumb and index finger—good stuff would readily melt and be absorbed by the skin. For more accurate measures, they learned other techniques. There were tiny prepackaged capsules into which a trace amount of cocaine was placed and then mixed with chemicals when the bond at the capsule’s center was broken. The cocaine would turn either blue or pink. A light blue like an azure sky meant the cocaine was pure. A bright pink indicated there was mostly cut. Later, Larry employed the Clorox test, where a trace of cocaine was dropped in a small glass of bleach. Cocaine would drift slowly to the bottom of the glass, leaving in the bleach a trail that looked like an icicle. Cut would just drop quickly to the bottom, leaving no trace in the bleach. Clorox was also excellent at revealing the presence of a cheap iodine-base cutting agent that was mildly poisonous. The iodine would leave a dark brown smear on top of the bleach. Eventually, Larry abandoned all these methods for a simple methanol test: Cocaine would dissolve in a spoonful of methanol, while most of the cutting agents employed at that time would not. It was enough to ensure that Larry got what he paid for.
From the scientific supply house where Larry had been buying cartons of glass vials for years, now he purchased an expensive electronic scale that could weigh items down to fractions of a centigram.
Larry’s first significant cocaine deal was in partnership with L.A., whose friends in Florida had gotten in on the ground floor. He put up some of his cash to help buy a half kilo. L. A. drove the shipment back, and Larry went to work on it.
From Tom Finchley, Larry had learned something about the successful marketing of cocaine. The average coke user on the street had neither the time, training, or inclination to adequately test what he was buying. So the first step was to “step” on the product, to mix in some cut of your own. Larry invested in some Manitol. Eventually, he perfected the cut mixture, abandoning the baby sugar, which added too much sweetness to the cocaine, for inositol, a sugar alcohol sold in health food stores as a vitamin. Inositol was whiter than Manitol. Blending this substance with lidocaine, a mild local anesthetic, covered the sweetness of the inositol and replaced the numbing effect lost by blending the cocaine with cut. This mix went into a blender to fluff it up to a whiteness and consistency
similar to the cocaine’s. That got mixed in. Then it was time to make rocks.
It wasn’t that pure cocaine came in rocklike chunks; rocks were an illusion in the coke business from start to finish. Customers tended to believe that a rocklike chunk of cocaine was pure cocaine, which it wasn’t, though it did tend to possess a higher percentage of pure cocaine than shake because shake was so much easier to cut. Larry’s first step in packaging a shipment of cocaine was to sift: it, separating the rocks from the loose powder, or shake. The rocks were left alone. The shake was then mixed with the Manitol. Larry’s standard formula was 9.7 grams of cut per 20.3 grams of cocaine. Then Larry would try to press the shake into what he called “man-made” rocks—although all the rocks were, in fact, man-made, the “real” ones having just been made earlier in the supply chain.
His first efforts at making rocks were crude. Larry tried pressing the shake under a pile of heavy books, which didn’t work. Eventually, from dealers in Florida and his books, Larry learned that by using acetone or ether to moisten the cocaine and pressing it tightly together with his hands, then pressing even harder with the lump between his knees, he could form tight, hard lumps. He would then break that apart with a butter knife, put the chunks on a pie pan, and place them under a heat lamp. Acetone left the rocks slightly yellower than the rocks in the initial purchase, so Larry experimented with ether, and finally began regularly using methanol. Using a gardening spritzer, he would squeeze a gentle spray of methanol on the powder until it was moist enough to mold.
His first buys of cocaine were half kilos, which Larry purchased in partnership with friends. But the return on the investment was incredible. A half kilo costing $28,500 could be stretched into twenty-seven ounces by cutting it with inositol and lidocaine. At the time, Larry could sell a single ounce for $1,500, which meant a $12,000 profit. Even with the overhead and the constant trouble with bad debts, Larry could be sure of clearing $10,000 or more on the deal. The profit on a single kilo was more than $20,000, on two kilos (he got a price break of $1000 per kilo for buying two) nearly $40,200! The numbers multiplied in Larry’s head like the certain clicks of a winning combination on a one-armed bandit. After only two or three buys, Larry contacted Miguel, the dealer Finchley had wanted him to use in 1977, and began buying two kilos of cocaine at a time. It was an extraordinary risk—$112,000! The money represented the joint investment of several of Larry’s longtime friends, but it included just about every penny he had ever made.