by Mark Bowden
One afternoon at Saint Charles Court, Suzanne was awakened by the bell. She pressed the intercom button.
“Who is it?”
“Suzanne, it’s me.”
She recognized the voice from talking to Larry on the phone. She buzzed the lock opening the door downstairs, and then hurriedly called David.
“Larry’s at my door and he’s on his way up,” she told him.
“I’ll be right over,” said David.
Suzanne waited nervously to catch this first glimpse of the criminal mastermind. When she opened the door on this lanky, smiling dental student with the thick mop of black hair she was, well . . . she was disappointed. He seemed so ordinary. He was too much like everyone else. It was as if a myth had been shattered. She invited him in nervously, and Larry quickly put her at ease. David stopped by within minutes and they conducted their business, checking over the books. By the time they left, Suzanne found herself genuinely liking Larry. He seemed so sincere, so down-to-earth.
Still, it was hard to believe that he was the guy who had set this all in motion.
After a full year under Mark Stewart’s control, Larry’s money was spread all over town. There were regular boxing matches at the Arena, and Mark had purchased a Continental Basketball Association team, renamed them the Kings, and recruited former Philadelphia Sixers star Hal Greer to be general manager and coach. He was trying to promote professional wrestling matches, and even hustled Larry out to the airport one night for a meeting with Bruno Sammartino. TEC records had bought out another small recording company, named WMOT, and was promoting a whole new list of soul music singles and albums, mostly for groups that had been popular a decade earlier. Mark had invested Larry’s money heavily in an Atlantic City real estate deal. They were going to buy an old apartment building called the Barclay Building, extensively renovate it, and reopen it as the Atrium. And Mark had bought a limousine company that provided transportation for high rollers from Philadelphia to the big boardwalk casinos.
Despite the variety of these ventures, Larry realized by early 1981 that they all had something in common: They all soaked up his money without any appreciable return. With the exception of the limo company, which was relatively simple and seemed capable of thriving, the deeper Larry went into these amazingly complicated projects, the more questionable his investments became. To Larry, a pattern was emerging. Mark would come to Larry with a proposal that sounded exciting, a “can’t-miss” opportunity. Money would be invested. Then problems would crop up. Mark would come up with feasible solutions. More money would be invested. Then more problems would appear.
The Barclay Building represented precisely the sort of investment Larry had had in mind when he first sought expert advice in early 1980. Atlantic City was bursting with promise now that the state had legalized gambling and the first few casinos were in full swing. Real estate values were bound to soar.
Mark had come up with the Barclay Building project last summer. It was a U-shaped, six-story structure just two blocks from the boardwalk near the Resorts Casino, with a restaurant on the first level. The owner was in serious financial trouble and about to lose the building to his creditors. If Larry agreed to loan the guy $160,000 at a 6 percent interest rate per month, Mark explained, it would shore up the guy’s position. In addition to repaying the loan with interest, he would agree to pay a 20 percent loan fee. If he failed to repay the loan—and Larry and Mark never thought for a minute that he could—then Larmark, Inc., would get a second mortgage and the opportunity to apply for the legitimate financing they would need to purchase the property outright from the bank holding the original mortgage. The owner had a recent assessment that valued the building at far more than the $160,000 loan. Larry didn’t see how he could lose money on a deal like that.
Papers were signed in the impressive offices of Larry’s lawyer in a conference room where nearly a dozen attorneys worked on the deal around the long table. These trappings added, for Larry, a sense of surefire solidity to the project. Mark introduced Larry as his assistant and protégé, as someone who might eventually run his affairs. A few months passed, and, as expected, even with Larry’s loan the Barclay owner ran out of money and his bank began foreclosure procedures. Nearly all the building’s tenants were forced to vacate. Everything was proceeding as planned. Larmark succeeded in getting a letter of credit from an insurance company for an ambitious $3.5-million renovation project. An architect was hired to design the renovation, and he produced a handsome scale model. All of the open space in the center would be glassed over and the building would be renamed the Atrium. They worked out a deal with the first bank to assume the first mortgage and Larmark took over management of the building. All this cost Larry more money in fees and expenses, but it was exciting—he particularly liked the model. This was precisely the sort of thing he had in mind when he first met Mark Stewart. Then Resorts agreed to rent the top two floors. At last! They were getting somewhere!
But then, problems. The elevator wouldn’t work and Resorts wanted to back out. It turned out there was a nice restaurant on the first floor that had just remodeled and could not be evicted without violating the lease. Meanwhile, the company that insured the original owner slapped a two-million-dollar lien on the building because it claimed to have been defrauded by the original owner. Mark and the lawyers assured Larry that the case would never hold up in court, but while the matter was being litigated, the trendy renovation was on hold. In the meantime, in addition to more legal fees (with no end in sight), Larry was paying the mortgage and footing maintenance and utility bills for the building, which were expensive and ongoing. . . .
Then there was WMOT-TEC Records. Right away Larry learned that the key to success in the record business is distribution. WMOT had a contract with CBS Records, which made it worth buying, so Larry signed the check when Mark first proposed the deal. Next they needed money to pay the recording artists and to fly them around the country to perform, then to pay the regional distribution men who could guarantee airtime on radio stations around the country, then to wine and dine the local disc jockeys at the soul music stations to keep WMOT-TEC’s records playing at prime times, then to rent exorbitantly expensive time in modern recording studios to make the singles and albums. . . . Larry found himself shelling out money again and again. Mark then decided what they needed was to build their own sound studio in the basement of the Wellington Building. He had convincing reasons for wanting that, but when construction was done it turned out that the studio was not up to modern production standards and CBS refused to handle the records cut there. “It’s good enough for practice,” they said, “but not to record.” When one of WMOT-TEC’s singles, a punchy percussive rap number by Philadelphia artist Frankie Smith called “Double Dutch Bus,” started gaining ground on Billboard’s soul charts, Mark decided the company needed a promotional presence in Los Angeles, which he could show to be absolutely vital, so a western office was opened, a staff was hired, and Mark started shuttling back and forth from coast to coast. Months later, Larry found out that Mark had incurred fabulous expenses in L.A., mostly in rental costs . . . not the least of which was leasing himself a new Ferrari.
The kicker was that CBS, which was reporting substantial nationwide sales for some of WMOT-TEC’s soul music singles, was charging so much for pressings, promotion, and distribution that the net profit on sales, Larry’s one source of return on all these investments, was close to zero.
To make matters worse, the ex-owner of WMOT filed a lawsuit claiming that Mark Stewart had reneged on his original deal. Larry knew how the man felt.
Lastly there was the Martin Luther King Arena, Larry’s most conspicuous investment. After the riot in June, things had settled down. The Kings basketball team, which Larry had put up twenty-five thousand to help buy, was playing to crowds of a few hundred. The state boxing commission was probing charges that bouts at the Arena were strictly setups, opportunities for promising fighters to run up their KO totals by flooring palo
okas. Dick Muldair, Larry’s old friend and runner, who after serving his ninety-day prison sentence took a job at the Arena, was calling Larry to tell him that Mark’s employees at the Arena were stealing tools and, instead of working, were spending hours of unsupervised time each day getting stoned. There was only one truly promising fighter in their stable, Timmy Witherspoon, but nobody was willing to box him because Mark couldn’t put together the kind of backing needed to attract fighters of Witherspoon’s caliber. Mark brought in the Roller Derby, but nobody came to watch it because nobody in West Philly had ever even heard of Roller Derby. So he had taken to booking shyster preachers, including one who staged a show where he purported to raise a man from the dead. The resurrected soul stepped right out of a coffin on stage, and the gullible audience then filed past on stage enthusiastically to fill the empty coffin with cash.
By early 1981, Larry was catching on. Every time some new outrage would come to his attention he would rush to confront Mark, and every time the confident entrepreneur would manage to persuade the twenty-five-year-old dental student/cocaine magnate that the jackpot was just around the corner. Mark could be almost hypnotic he was so convincing. He knew so much more about business than Larry that he could, with a few charts and financial statements and a few deft sketches of what the future would hold, turn Larry’s anger into positive delight. There were times Larry stormed down to the Wellington intent on withdrawing his support for a project, only to leave having agreed to make an even more substantial investment.
And, of course, there were other reasons for maintaining his relationship with Mark. In the year since they signed their agreement, Larry had gone from living in low-rent student housing to living in a modern home in the city’s best neighborhood. He had gone from meeting with street hoods in his living room to conferring in boardrooms with some of the city’s highest-paid legal talent. He had gone from reporting almost no income to Penn every year, to multiple salaries—each of these projects enabled Larry to convert more of his illegal money into holdings that were legal, even if they were also unprofitable. Larry knew of no other way to readily access his wealth without inviting legal problems.
In four months he would be done with dental school. Already Marcia was talking about moving out of the city and starting a family.
It was April of 1981 when they decided to move. Larry and Marcia had just returned from a week in Saint Thomas, Larry’s last spring break before graduation. They had lived at 4 Willings Alley Mews for more than a year, but to Marcia the house would always be just the place where that Mark Stewart had put them up after the robbery. She hated it. Not one warm memory attached to it. During the huge parade celebrating the Phillies’ World Series victory in October, a woman neighbor had been pulled off the sidewalk by a group of drunken men who tried to rape her. And earlier this year Marcia had been knocked down by a man who tried to grab her purse. A year of living there had just confirmed her desire for more space, for a lawn, trees, a garden, birds, for a house that was not entirely vertical, for a place that, in some way, reflected what she wanted.
So the next weekend they went driving out on the Main Line, looking for a house.
Larry had called a real estate agent, Ilene McHenry, and looked at the paper. The first place they stopped to see, on Waterloo Road in Devon, was a sixty-room mansion. Its owners had plans to divide the huge house, worth two million dollars, into four condominiums, so that the estate would be jointly owned. Larry pulled in one end of a U-shaped driveway and drove up to the front entrance. Marcia refused to even get out of the car.
“Are you crazy, Larry? Look at this place!” she said. She couldn’t believe he was serious.
“I just want to look around,” said Larry.
He stormed off by himself to walk around the grounds.
Marcia was alarmed by something McHenry had said trying to make conversation as they drove around that day.
“You never know about people,” she said with a smile. “I sold a house to a nice young couple and it turns out they were running guns for the IRA.”
Later, Marcia said to Larry, “Now, why would she say something like that?”
“She was just making conversation; trying to be nice. It was something that happened that was interesting,” said Larry.
Marcia shook her head. “If you show a lot of wealth, Larry, people are going to be interested in where it came from. You’re still in school!”
On reflection, Larry realized that something more modest would not only make Marcia happy, it would also be far wiser for one in his special financial circumstances. Marcia thought something in the $75,000-to-$100,000 range would be fine. Larry was thinking more on the order of $200,000. He figured they could sell the Society Hill house for at least $150,000 to $180,000, so a $200,000 home would be an appropriate step up. They went looking with McHenry the next weekend, telling her that they were prepared to spend only $150,000. In the time-honored real estate tradition, the first house she showed them was well over that ceiling, a two-story white brick Colonial with gray shutters on Timber Lane.
They would see a dozen other houses over the next two days, but nothing else compared. For a young man in a hurry to turn his criminal fortune into legitimate wealth and social position, the choice was perfect.
Timber Lane is in Devon, just a fifty-minute ride out the Paoli Line from Center City Philadelphia, but a journey that for most people can take generations. The Paoli Line is the old Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line, from which the region takes its name. Its station stops—Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr . . . Paoli—are escalating rungs of Philadelphia’s upper class, the oldest and most formal establishment in America. Devon comes seven stops after Bryn Mawr, out where city streets are just a memory. George Washington once rode up the wooded hills and down the green slopes of this gently rolling landscape, just south of Valley Forge. Most of the old estates of Philadelphia’s homegrown aristocracy have been subdivided, but an equally rigid—if more pedestrian—hierarchy prevails. Next door to the white house with gray shutters lived the Eisenhowers, John and Barbara, parents of David Eisenhower and in-laws to Julie Nixon. On the other side lived a chemical company executive. Uphill, across the street, a retired admiral and head of the department of dental surgery at Temple University. Next to the admiral, a vice-president of the Mellon Bank.
Out here there was quiet: When a car moved down the gentle curve of Timber Lane, folks lean toward windows to watch. Out here there was order: landscaped lots on sylvan slopes, lawn services to keep the grass lush and trim, nurseries to sculpt the hickory, oaks, walnuts and white pines—and prep schools to prune the children. Timber Lane’s residents had earned the money and power to have things their way. Their way was one of country clubs and stables, the annual Devon Horse Show and County Fair, Colonial-style inns for a quiet dinner out, and a Bloomingdale’s in America’s largest shopping mall at King of Prussia, just a short drive away. Their days were scenic, their nights serene.
“The only time we get a little excitement around here is when the Secret Service moves in,” said owner Margy Conlin, who was out working in the front yard when Larry and Marcia stopped by with the real estate agent. “You see, Richard Nixon sometimes stops by to visit with the Eisenhowers next door, and before he arrives the Secret Service descends.”
The house itself was set back about forty feet on a slight downward slope from a narrow, winding suburban lane in a neighborhood dominated by trees. There were six windows across the second floor and four on the first, two on either side of a broad door with a rising sun pattern set in the brick overhead. There were Colonial lanterns on either side of the door. A driveway curved down from the lane on the west side of the property, leading to an attached two-car garage. What appealed to Marcia most was the backyard. It ran from the back porch in a long gentle green sweep that was nearly as long as a football field. At the far end of the property ran a stream over which a previous owner had built a small Japanese-style
bridge. A stand of maple and oak trees blocked the view of the next house, and on either side of the property there were bright yellow flowering forsythias, a white-blossomed little dogwood, and evergreens. Inside, the first floor was sectioned into four large, sunny rooms. To the left of the foyer was a living room, and behind that a dining room. Continuing clockwise was a kitchen and then, back at the front of the house on the right side of the foyer, a wood-paneled den. The staircase from the foyer led up to five bedrooms and two baths, one at either end. The basement needed work. A previous owner had intended to set up a medical office down there and had divided the space into a number of small rooms. Although it was not a new house, it had been especially well kept, and all of the plumbing and appliances were modern. For both Larry and Marcia, it was love at first sight.
The Conlins were asking $219,000.
“I love it, but it’s too expensive,” said Marcia.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be able to do it,” said Larry.
Larry got his camera out of the car and walked the grounds snapping pictures so that they would have something to show their friends. When she got home, Marcia excitedly called her mother to tell her about the house.
But that evening, McHenry called. She had bad news. Just after he and Marcia left, the agent who had originally listed the house had come up with another offer. If Larry wanted the house, he would have to move fast.
Larry hung up and immediately phoned Mrs. Conlin. She said that they appeared to have a buyer already. Larry said he would like to make a better offer. Mrs. Conlin said he would have to speak to her husband, who was out of town.
“Where?” asked Larry.
“He’s in New York,” she said.
“Where’s he staying?”
So Larry phoned the Yale Club in New York City and tracked down Dennis Conlin. After chatting amiably for a few minutes, Larry offered the full asking price for the house. Conlin was pleased. He said he had not expected to actually get the full asking price for the house. Larry hung up and told Marcia that Conlin had agreed; the house would be theirs. Larry then called his agent to tell her the good news, and she informed him that since her last call she learned that Mrs. Conlin had already signed an agreement with the other couple. Larry said she couldn’t do that; he had already reached an agreement in New York with her husband. So Larry called Conlin back. He said he would check with his wife and try to work things out.