by Mark Bowden
* * *
One of the first things Larry did on returning from the honeymoon was drive out to meet Mark and David at his newest acquisition.
It was worse than he had pictured it. One look inside and Larry knew the project was never going to work.
In one of the offices off an upper hallway that looked down into the cavernous interior, Mark laid out his financial statements and plans, detailing the cost for new plumbing, new toilets and sinks, new electrical engineering, new refrigerators for beer and food concessions, an eccentric plan to convert the giant old ice-making machine (for the hockey and ice show rinks) into an air-conditioning system. Out of curiosity, Larry said he wanted to take a look at the device. Mark took him downstairs and pointed it out.
Larry stood in front of the thing for a long time.
“Mark, there’s no chance in the world that this machine will ever make ice again,” he said.
Mark insisted his plan was doable. He had already begun booking fight cards, and was planning to install a screen so he could open the place on June 20 with a closed-circuit screening of the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran championship bout. The Spectrum, the Civic Center, even the arenas in Atlantic City were completely sold out. Promoters had come to Mark begging to use the Arena.
“This place must be in violation of every fire and building code on the books!” said Larry.
But Stewart seemed unconcerned. To make Larry feel better, Mark told him that they already earned a five thousand dollar return on his initial investment. They had already begun selling tickets for the televised bout, and the place was sure to be sold out. It was the first return Larry had ever gotten on one of Mark’s investments, and it did a lot to placate his doubts about the arena—he couldn’t complain too hard about hazarding only forty-five thousand. And Mark did have his heart in it.
On the night of the scheduled opening there was a line of ticket holders wrapped all the way down Market Street to Forty-sixth, and down Forty-sixth to Chestnut. The gates were supposed to have opened by 8:00 p.m., but they were still closed when Larry drove up at 9:00. When he stopped his black Volvo to wait for guards to open the gate to the VIP parking area, his car was surrounded by an angry mob. Several of the security guards Mark had hired, off-duty Philadelphia cops, waded out through the crowd and cleared the way for Larry to pull in.
Inside, Mark was frantic. The satellite dish he had just installed didn’t work.
Outside, the mob was shattering windows and prying hinges off the giant doors.
Larry would remember Mark protesting, “It’s not my fault.”
Their grand opening made the newspapers the next morning, but not as they intended. It was reported as the scene of a small riot. Ticket holders eventually got refunds.
Larry’s house. A man’s voice on the phone.
“Batten down the hatches. There’s a storm coming.”
“Who is this?” asked Larry.
“This is a warning from a friend,” said the voice.
“Wait!”
But the caller had already hung up.
Larry and Marcia had been home from their honeymoon less than one week.
Larry could only assume that some kind of trouble was coming, but what? Dick Muldair had gotten busted making a deal at a shopping center on the Main Line with a guy who turned out to be a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, but that was something Dick had done on his own, so even if he talked about Larry (which Larry was sure Dick wouldn’t), they couldn’t get enough to come after him. The amount involved had been fairly small, and Dick was facing only about six months. But if not Dick, then what?
There was nothing to do but clean house. Larry and Marcia spent the night combing all four levels of their house for every trace of drugs. Larry filled a small brown bag with all they had collected, a small bag of marijuana, his pipes, and a vial of Quaaludes. He walked over to Mark Stewart’s office that night and locked it in the safe.
Nothing happened.
When the same voice came on the phone with a similar message two nights later, Larry begged for an explanation.
“Can’t you give me a little bit more of a feeling for what’s going on?” he pleaded.
The caller relented. He gave Larry a number and told him to call back from a pay phone in twenty minutes. Larry thanked him and left the house in search of a pay phone.
A woman answered. She was the wife of a Vietnam veteran with a contracting business in New Jersey who had been buying indirectly from Larry off and on for several years. Larry had met with them once, a year ago, when the vet had gotten into serious debt, and Larry had agreed to give them more time to pay him back. Anyway, she explained, her husband had gotten busted. She was grateful for the way Larry had handled their indebtedness, so she had gotten her brother to phone with a warning. She wanted Larry to know that under questioning her husband had given his name to the state police.
Not long afterward, at dental school, one of Larry’s classmates drew him aside in the hall. His classmate’s wife was a lawyer working as an assistant in the office of District Attorney Ed Rendell of Philadelphia. One of her co-workers had come up to her in the office and asked if her husband was at Penn dental school. She said yes. So the man asked if he knew someone named Larry Lavin.
She said yes.
“Well, tell him to stay away from the guy. He’s on Ed’s list of suspected major drug dealers in the city.”
That afternoon, Larry had talks with David and with Ken. He wasn’t worried about his house being searched; there was nothing there. But he was going to have to keep the coke business at arm’s length for a while. He might be under surveillance. Larry figured his phones were tapped.
Unaware that city police had, in fact, been watching him for more than a year, Larry assumed that the New Jersey state police had given his name to city prosecutors. He was hot. But—it was funny—Larry didn’t feel the least bit threatened. To him, the fact that the information about official suspicions had twice leaked to him confirmed his feeling that there was a generational conspiracy at work to protect him from the law. It was the same kind of subcultural context in which he had dealt marijuana as an undergrad. Young people used harmless recreational drugs; the authorities tried to enforce pointless laws. It was “us” against “them.” Larry was too smart and had too many friends to get nailed by a force of square-headed high school graduates in cheap suits with badges.
Still, it was a good idea to lay low.
A more pressing problem continued to be bad debts. Ralph, Larry’s old pot connection from Virginia Tech, had bought cocaine from Larry and worked himself fifty thousand dollars into debt.
It was an unusually large debt, even for Larry’s books. He had been doing business with Ralph ever since he was a sophomore undergrad. His friend had a legitimate business now, so Larry had reason to assume his mounting debt would eventually be paid. So he had let Ralph get in deeper and deeper.
But in the summer after his wedding, when Larry had not heard from Ralph for several weeks, he tried calling. The number he phoned had been disconnected. So Larry looked up Ralph’s father’s number outside Philadelphia, and began telephoning and leaving messages there every day.
After a week of this, Larry got a phone call. The caller identified himself as a friend of Ralph’s.
“Larry, how you doin’?” he said. “Ralph just asked me to call and convey congratulations on your marriage and your beautiful wife. And, oh yeah, he wanted me to tell you that if you ever call his house again he’ll have her cut up into little pieces no bigger than an inch.”
“Let me talk to Ralph, would you?” asked Larry.
“No bigger than an inch.”
Larry slammed down the receiver.
On a cold Friday night in the fall, after Larry and Marcia came home from dining out, Marcia showered and put on a blue terry cloth robe and stretched out on the living room couch in time to watch Dallas. Marcia was an avid Dallas fan.
Then the doorbell ran
g.
Larry crossed the room and pushed the intercom button.
“Who is it?”
“Police. We had a report of a burglary in progress and we’re searching the neighborhood. We want to look around.”
Larry pressed the button that unlocked the door to the outside gate. The door opened on a courtyard common to all the houses on the alley, but with one glance out the window Larry could tell by the number and urgency of the men moving through the gate that they had come for him. There were uniformed and plainclothes police, most carrying flashlights.
He turned to Marcia with an apologetic look and said, “This is it.”
Larry opened the door and said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Two of the men with flashlights grabbed him, wheeled him back into the living room, and threw him to the floor. One thrust a sheet of paper right up to his face.
“This gives me the right to search your place,” he said.
“We’re happy to let you search,” said Larry, standing. “Let’s go. If you’re going to search my house, I want to be present.”
Larry was worried they might plant something.
As they entered the living room, the dog Rusty ran across the room happily and jumped on them, barking. Marcia started downstairs to get the leash, and one of the cops shouted, “You can’t leave!”
“Where do you think I’m going?” Marcia said. “I’m just getting a leash for the dog.”
He motioned for her to sit back down and she did. One of the uniformed men went downstairs for the leash.
As the house was searched, room by room, Marcia was joined on the couch by the cop who had gotten the leash. She gave him some background information about that night’s Dallas episode.
Larry was feeling especially cocky. He followed the team of searchers through the house. They pulled out drawers, shined their flashlights up and under tables and chairs, pulled Larry and Marcia’s nice new Scandinavian teak cabinets away from the wall and inspected the shelves front and back, bottom and top. In the bedroom they were intrigued by Marcia’s hope chest, which was locked at the foot of the bed. She was summoned upstairs and readily produced a key and opened it. It was filled with neatly folded linen. Up on the third floor, where Larry had his prized new pool table, the men were about to give up when Larry announced—he couldn’t help himself—“You guys, you don’t know what you’re doing. You missed the best place in here.”
Then he stooped over to show them how panels on the pool table legs opened to hollow spaces inside.
Back downstairs, Larry and Marcia were directed to sit at the round kitchen table. There they were confronted with the evidence: two Quaaludes that had fallen behind a drawer in Larry’s dresser, a tiny silver coke-snorting straw, and five thousand in cash.
“We’re going to take you downtown,” said one of the men.
Larry held out his hands and said, “Let’s go. What can they do to you for two Quaaludes?”
“It’s pretty unusual for a senior in dental school to have five grand in his house,” said one of the detectives.
“I’d like to tell you something off the record,” said Larry.
“You can tell it to us on the record or off the record,” said one of the detectives, indicating that whatever Larry had to say they wanted to hear and would use against him. Larry went ahead anyway.
“You guys are late,” he said. “I’m just a dental student now. Those days are long gone.”
“Well, I think what we’re going to start doing is to take this house apart brick by brick,” a detective answered.
“Okay,” said Larry, wearily. “If that’s your job, go ahead.”
“No, not now,” the detective said. “Now we’re going to go over to 1228 Spruce Street.”
That was the address of TEC Records. In an apartment on the third floor of that building, Larry had a large stash of cocaine and the papers outlining his agreement with Mark Stewart. Often there was cash stored in that apartment. For the first time that night he felt a touch of panic.
“You’re going to take us down there and show us around the offices,” the detective said.
“No, I’m not,” said Larry. “That’s not my building, and I’m not taking you in there. If you want to search there, you’re going to have to go get the owner and serve him with a search warrant.”
Abruptly, the two detectives who had been questioning Larry walked up to the living room. Larry assumed they had gone to confer with the others. He and Marcia sat alone at the table. They both fully expected that Larry was going to be taken to police headquarters, so Larry whispered to Marcia to call his lawyer as soon as they left. But after a few minutes of sitting alone they realized that the house was silent. Larry got up and walked up to the living room. It was empty. The door was open wide and all of the men had gone.
“They left!” he called down to Marcia.
“Are they coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
Marcia looked out the window down at the street. There were cruisers and vans pulling away.
Larry closed the door.
Marcia was delighted at first. She busied herself picking up drawers and putting things away. She was filled with nervous energy.
But later on that night, when she couldn’t fall asleep, she got up to look out the window. There was still a blue police van parked down at the end of the alley. She got back in bed, turned her head away from Larry, and quietly cried.
Glen Fuller made thirty runs to Florida for Larry from the spring of 1979 until the fall of 1980. His deliveries had grown from the standard two-kilo orders to routine deliveries of ten or more at one time. He was a stocky, moustachioed dervish during that year and a half, living life on a circuit of flights and marathon drives from Philly to New England to Philly to Florida, back to Philly and back north. . . . There was always a rush, either sellers in Florida who would only have cocaine for sale that day, or customers in New England or Philadelphia who wanted a delivery before Friday in time for the big weekend sales. Glen was tireless and fearless. He did everything on impulse. At a time when most dealers wouldn’t dare carry cocaine through airports, Glen would wake up late in Miami from a drunk the night before, realize he had to be in Philadelphia that afternoon, snort a few long lines, pack up his bags, and board the plane. When he drove he would cruise upward of 90 MPH, snorting coke to stay awake and smoking dope to ease the boredom of the drive, steering up the road shoulders if the traffic in front of him was moving too slow. Larry knew Glen was reckless, but his old friend owed him more than a hundred thousand dollars and had no other way of paying the money back. Glen earned five thousand per week—which went toward the debt—and was paid one thousand per day in expenses when he was on the road, an amount Glen somehow managed to squander on whores (Glen liked to buy them two at a time), food, drugs, planes, cars, boats, you name it. Larry often said he didn’t care and didn’t even want to know about what happened in Florida or in airports. “I give you the money, you bring me the product,” Larry would say. “That’s all I need to know.” Glen enjoyed the freedom that gave him and was willing to accept the risks. And when Larry would sit still for it, Glen could entertain him with stories that raised the small hairs on the back of the preppie dental student’s neck.
Once a bag full of money had split open in the middle of a crowded concourse at the Philadelphia airport. He had swiftly stooped over, dropped the broken bag on top of the pile, and scooped up the pile between his arms. When he stood and looked down he saw he had gotten all but one fat bundle of hundreds—ten thousand dollars. So he kicked the bundle along in front of him until he made it to the men’s room door and into a stall, where he patched things together as best he could.
He had gotten arrested in Fort Lauderdale for reckless driving with $576,000 in the trunk. The police impounded the car and held Glen overnight in the drunk tank, where he slept on the concrete floor and contracted a skin rash that took him more than a year to lose. But the next morning a fr
iend posted bail and they recovered the car, trunk unopened, money safe and dry.
On a trip to Orlando, Glen picked up a blond named Marti and recruited her to help him move coke through the airport. He had twelve kilos on that trip. So they split it up in their bags and got in line to go through security. Marti went through the checkpoint with no problem, but just before Glen was to follow her, the X-ray machine broke down—which meant hand searches of luggage.
Glen just pivoted, grabbed his luggage off the counter, and said, “Oop! Forgot my ticket!”
He walked back up the concourse alone. Marti put her bag in a locker down the concourse and came back.
Meanwhile, Glen had ordered himself a scotch at a bar in the terminal and called Larry, who, as usual, was in a hurry. Glen wanted to forget this flight and leave the next day.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Larry said. “That’s your problem down there. We need that stuff up here tonight.”
“Look, Larry, they’re hand-searching everyone’s bags.”
“Go to a different terminal,” Larry suggested. “Glen, have a couple of drinks and be brave.”
“Fuck you,” said Glen, and he hung up. Marti fetched her bag and they chartered a flight back to Philadelphia.
From time to time it would dawn on Glen that he was being used by Larry and his friends, that they didn’t really consider him one of them. He was a wild man, a reckless lowlife they employed to take risks for them.
Willie Harcourt hooked up with Glen for one and only one deal in Florida. Unlike Glen, Willie was a quiet, cautious, introspective man who tried to stay constantly alert for subtle shifts in circumstance that might mean danger or the law. Willie’s idea of a good run to Florida was to get in and get out as uneventfully as possible. He met Glen at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale in September of 1980, and almost immediately wished that he hadn’t.
Instead of quickly making the deal for eight kilos, Glen wanted to take everyone out drinking and for dinner, then picked up two whores. On the way to the airport the next morning Glen drove over 90 MPH, passing slow-moving traffic by swerving over on the shoulder. Willie was terrified. Glen was enjoying himself.