by Mark Bowden
But Brian could feel his luck running out. His anxiety was partly eased in late 1982 when Stan Nelson took over most of the running. By early 1983, the portly Florida lawyer was spending most of his waking hours in a car, either driving money down to Florida or bringing coke back to Philadelphia. Larry had met Nelson shopping for New Jersey real estate in 1981 and had loaned him sixty-three thousand to start a fruit-beverage distribution company in Florida. When the beverage company failed to generate sufficient profits to repay the loan, Larry suggested that Nelson earn the money to repay him by driving cocaine north. Stan started in the summer of 1982, and six months later he was handling most of the transportation for Larry’s business. Larry liked turning over transportation to Stan because he was reliable, and because he did not fit the profile law enforcement agencies sought in airports and on highways—well-dressed young men with big suitcases or big cars. And Nelson was clever. He used the canning machine from the beverage company to seal kilos in odorless cans, and mixed the cocaine-bearing ones in with his regular truckloads of fruit-juice powder. It was the safest, most ingenious method Larry had seen.
So by January of 1983, Brian’s responsibilities were reduced to keeping the books and breaking, cutting, packaging, and distributing the cocaine.
When the FBI and IRS stopped out to see Larry at the dental office, it further upset Brian. He told Larry right then that he should take his money and run, sell out to someone else and stay as far away from drug dealing as he could for the rest of his natural life. Larry just laughed.
“They can’t prove anything connecting me with drugs,” he said.
To help keep things that way, Larry drove up to New York City with Brian and went on a shopping spree at electronics stores, buying himself thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, including six scrambler phones in briefcases that would enable him to talk on the phone without fear of a wiretap and devices that could detect the presence of a bug. Larry had a ball talking shop with the store owners.
On the drive home, Brian said, “You really think you can fool the FBI?”
Larry said they would probably get him on tax charges because of his connection with Mark Stewart, but that he didn’t think they knew the first thing about his drug dealing.
“I only sell to my friends, who won’t help them,” Larry said. “I never handle anything anymore, so they’re not going to observe me dealing anything. That leaves the telephone.”
Brian tried to explain that he sometimes got a feeling about these things, and the feeling was bad.
“Larry, things are too fucking hot. You’re crazy. If it was the Philadelphia police or even the state police, maybe you would have a chance. But the FBI? Man, they go to college to learn how to bust people like you.”
Still, Brian could understand how hard it was for Larry to stop. Brian himself found it hard to stop. He was making almost a thousand dollars a day, and had bought himself a condo in Florida and a boat and a house in New Hampshire up near where his kids lived with their mother. Larry, eager to avoid any suspicious activities himself, gave him almost complete autonomy. Brian liked the people he was working with. He played outfield for Billy Motto’s softball team. At home or on the road he lived a partying life, with a big-breasted teenage girlfriend named Nancy at home and a loose and exciting social circle that included Kim and Suzanne Norimatsu. On the road he had money for expensive hookers, fine meals, and luxury restaurants. His work for Larry had accustomed him to a style he was reluctant to abandon.
But when Brian woke up one afternoon in his house on Pennsylvania Avenue and saw a SWAT team with rifles running across the front yards and police cars and vans up and down the block, he figured, “This is it.” He pulled on his pants and waited for the door to crash in. He had too many kilos of cocaine in the closet to even think about flushing it down the toilet or hiding it.
But nothing happened.
Finally, Brian opened his front door and wandered out to see what was going on. He half expected to be grabbed and thrown to the ground. Instead, one of the cops explained that they had busted a cocaine dealer two houses down from Brian’s.
That did it.
Brian’s last ounce of luck was gone. He telephoned Larry and told him that he was clearing out.
“You’re too hot,” Brian said. “I got a bad feeling about it, Larry.”
Larry didn’t argue. Brian owed him fifty thousand dollars, but Larry agreed to settle for twenty-five. They met in the parking lot behind a restaurant near Larry’s house in Devon. Brian handed over the money owed, and took off that night for New Hampshire.
In the months that Brian had been running the business for Larry, he brought down from Exeter, New Hampshire, a strange, rough-hewn motorcyclist with long brown hair and thick moustache named Bruce Taylor. Bruce had a coiled snake tattooed to his left forearm and rode a Harley-Davidson. Brian, who had known Bruce from high school days, asked him to come to Philadelphia with him in October of 1982 to act as his bodyguard. Bruce was reputed to be a martial arts expert and had a reputation in the small towns of northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire as a roughneck. He had been one of Brian’s cocaine customers. So when Brian suggested bringing him down to Philadelphia, Larry went for it.
“He’s a bikey type, but he’ll do anything for us,” Brian said.
For six months, Bruce was Brian Riley’s shadow. At the first meeting where money and cocaine were exchanged and Bruce was left alone momentarily with $350,000 in a briefcase, he considered picking it up and running. But staying had its own advantages. By January of 1983, Bruce was injecting cocaine, two grams at a shot, three or four times a day. To explain the hypodermic needles and syringes in his apartment, he told Brian and Larry and others that he was a diabetic. He was making five hundred dollars a week and falling into debt, but there was no shortage of white powder.
Brian and Larry had taught Bruce the techniques of breaking down kilos, cutting them, making rocks, and packaging. He lived with Brian for his first months in Philly and moved to his own house around the corner on Twenty-ninth and Poplar in early 1983. But Brian quickly came to regret urging Bruce on Larry. His would-be bodyguard and assistant was clearly in over his head with cocaine. Bruce would fail to show up for meetings or deliveries, and Brian would have to bang on his door for up to a half hour to wake him up in the middle of the afternoon. Bruce was hopelessly inept at keeping the books. Larry would check weekly, and discover that deals that should have shown a tidy profit had somehow come out to be losses of fifty grand or more.
When Brian suddenly quit and left town, Larry had little choice but to hire Bruce to manage the business for him. Dropping the business altogether was something Larry never even considered, even with the FBI and IRS probes. Ever since he was a sophomore in college, now nine years ago, Larry had been tallying his net worth, recording its ups and downs in neat little columns of numbers. By the spring of 1983, Larry was worth nearly five million, but easily a third of that was tied up in the business, in debts, in product, or in cash being assembled for the next deal. Another third or more represented holdings of stocks, real estate, condos, silver certificates, and loans. By now this complex financial machinery had acquired a momentum of its own. Larry needed the cocaine business funds to keep the legitimate projects going—not one had proved significantly profitable. Only the limo company had promise, and Mark was raiding its budget to feed his many unhealthy projects.
Larry had what he considered three strong reasons not to just stop dealing. The first was greed. Owing to what Larry considered mismanagement during the year since he canned David Ackerman, he had sustained a lengthening series of losses. These were not actual losses, but the difference between what Larry felt he should have made on a given deal and what he actually made. Abandoning the business meant just accepting an amount considerably lower than the “Total” of his net-profits column, a setback of nearly a year. The second reason also had to do with greed. Larry had a total of $1.5 million tied up in the
business, mostly in product and bad debts. He had been able to tolerate deadbeats in his business for so many years because the profits had continually grown so fast that each new deal more than recovered what was lost on the last one. To pull out suddenly was to lose the $1.5 million that Larry felt he had already earned. The third reason had to do with risk. Larry knew that all the people working for him and buying from him were not just going to stop buying and selling and using cocaine if he left the business. Larry believed that law enforcement had been kept at bay for nine years only because of his management ability. Larry trusted his business sense and his feel for the risks involved. If he let go of the controls, the machine was certain to break down, and the conspiracy would rapidly unravel. So when someone like Brian Riley or Ken Weidler cautioned him that he was “nuts” to keep on managing the business after he knew he was under investigation, Larry felt like screaming. Didn’t they see? Now would be the worst time to walk away! It was a matter of self-preservation.
So it pained Larry to have to rely on someone like Bruce Taylor. He was a prime example of how bad things could get. When Bruce was high, which was most of the time, he was as reckless as Glen Fuller. When he came down, Bruce would just vanish for days at a time. Nearly every week Larry’s phone would start ringing and his friends would complain that Bruce was supposed to do this or that and hadn’t shown up. Larry would call Bruce’s house and there would be no answer. Then he would go down and bang on the door for a half hour or more, just as Brian Riley had, until Bruce, looking wan and disheveled, would stagger out. Bruce had begun telling people he had leukemia, which was not true, but it helped explain his erratic behavior and frequent lapses. His plan was to someday just disappear with a lot of money and cocaine. If people believed he was suffering a fatal illness, he reasoned, they would be less likely to spend a long time looking for him.
Truth was, the way Bruce was living, a fatal illness was a fair approximation of his future prospects. One night, when he was briefly back in Philadelphia after leaving Larry’s employ, Brian Riley was called by Kim Norimatsu, who was then living with Bruce (they had gotten engaged in April). Kim was distraught. Bruce was on the floor in the kitchen, flipping out. It was Bruce’s birthday, and the accumulated doses of cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, Quaaludes, and whatever else he had taken had overwhelmed him. Brian rushed over to the house and sat through the night on the kitchen floor with Bruce, who was convinced that someone was trying to break into the place and get him. Bruce was earning a thousand dollars per week by late spring, but his cocaine use was so heavy he was actually accumulating a debt to Larry.
In an effort to keep a handle on things, Larry laid down strict rules for Bruce to follow. Breaks were to be done at constantly varying locations. Money, books, and product were to be kept separate. For communication (the expensive scrambler phones never worked right), Larry instituted the beeper system and laid down the pay phone law. No business was to be conducted on home phones whatsoever. No one was supposed to even know the home telephones or even names of one another. A message service had been contracted, and beepers were handed out to all key employees and major customers. When they called each other they just dialed the message center and indicated by a number (not a telephone number) whom they were trying to reach. The service then beeped the person being called, and the number of the pay phone being used by the caller would be displayed on their beeper. Then they called back. It was a good system. So long as everybody followed the rules and varied the pay phones used frequently, there was virtually no way the FBI could listen in. Larry, personally, was diligent. He carried around an orange Tupperware bowl filled with a hundred dollars’ worth of quarters. If the feds ever tapped his phone, the most they were likely to hear would be Marcia calling the diaper service.
But none of Larry’s precautions seemed sufficient to keep Bruce out of trouble. On July 12, Bruce was stopped by the Philadelphia police for going the wrong way down a one-way street. He had two kilos of cocaine in a black safe in the trunk, an ounce of cocaine in a plastic bag in the glove compartment, and he was smoking a joint. At police headquarters, Bruce later told Larry, one of the cops had come up to him with the baggie of cocaine.
“This is good stuff,” the cop said.
“Why don’t you keep it,” said Bruce. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re right,” said the cop.
Another plainclothes officer asked Bruce to open the safe in his trunk. Bruce lied, saying he didn’t know the combination. After that, he was locked in a holding cell. A few hours later he was released. There were no charges. The safe in the trunk was undisturbed.
Bruce called Larry that night from a pay phone.
“Okay, get your stuff together,” said Larry. “You’re moving.”
Larry had been working on getting Bruce a house in Newtown Square, a suburb southwest of Devon. Bruce checked into a hotel with Kim that night, and several days later moved into his new house.
Bruce and Larry chalked up the mysterious lack of charges after the Philadelphia arrest to the ineptitude and corruption of the Philadelphia police. In fact, Bruce’s arrest and release that night had been carefully orchestrated.
Ten days earlier, on July 2, Canadian customs officials at the border of Eastport, Idaho, and Kingsgate, Alberta Province, had stopped a thirty-year-old blond Canadian woman named Virginia Ann Dayton and searched her car. On the seat of her car they found a tan suitcase containing a kilo of 80 percent pure cocaine.
In Dayton’s purse was a business card with the name Wayne Heinauer on it, and a number.
The Canadian border officials had been tipped off by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Phoenix, Arizona. Eight weeks before, DEA Agent James White had received a tip that Wayne Heinauer, a young Phoenix construction contractor, was dealing cocaine. He was buying the drugs, the informant said, from a dentist in Philadelphia named Larry and receiving monthly deliveries from someone named Bruce.
During April, White and other DEA agents, along with Phoenix narcotics detectives, had staked out Sky Harbor International Airport and watched Heinauer, a solidly built man of thirty with brown hair and a moustache, meet with a succession of travelers, who typically flew in, met with him briefly, exchanging bags, and then flew on somewhere else. One of the travelers was Virginia Dayton. Another was a wiry, dark-haired, moustachioed man who had taken out a room at the Granada Royale Hotel under the name Bruce Taylor, and who gave his home address as Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bruce was traveling with a woman (this was Kim Norimatsu). After the meeting with Heinauer, Bruce checked out of the Granada Royale and got a room with Kim at the Marriott Mountain Shadows Resort Hotel in Scottsdale. On Friday, April 22, agents watched Bruce and Kim as they bought tickets for Philadelphia at the airport under the name B. Winns. Agents in Philadelphia, contacted by the Phoenix office, watched at the airport as Bruce and Kim got off the plane. Philly agents reported that Bruce and the young woman had moved through the airport quickly, looking around and over their shoulders frequently, as if aware they were being followed. Agents attempted to follow them by car, but Bruce drove too fast and crazily for them to keep up, and they lost him.
Again on Thursday, June 9, Phoenix DEA agents were watching Heinauer’s house when Bruce and Kim arrived, staying for ten minutes before leaving with Heinauer for the airport. This time they purchased tickets under the names Mr. and Mrs. B. Wayne and flew to Philadelphia.
At the airport, Bruce and Kim split up—to the DEA agents, it appeared as though they were trying to see if they were being followed. They got back together in a taxi, and the DEA agents, who had gone undetected, followed the cab back to Bruce’s house on Poplar Street.
Through the weeks that James White in Phoenix had been exploring information about Wayne Heinauer and his connections, he had run requests for information about a dentist named Larry in Philadelphia through federal law enforcement computers. There was little to be had, except that an FBI agent in Philadelphia named Chuck Reed had been search
ing for information about a dentist named Lawrence W. Lavin.
The DEA agent and the FBI agent talked in June. Chuck had not known about Bruce Taylor. It was his first strong lead into Larry’s cocaine dealing. Having the city police pick up Bruce had provided an opportunity for mug shots and fingerprints, without alerting Larry that the FBI was on to his courier. The idea was then to turn Taylor loose and keep watching him. Eventually he might lead them to Larry.
So the next morning, Reed and his partner, Sid Perry, staked out Bruce’s house on Poplar Street. It would be a few hours before they realized he had vanished.
Marcia and Larry vacationed in Bermuda in May. Christopher was a fat-cheeked toddler with ringlets of fair brown hair. The little family stayed in a condo overlooking a palmy bay and aqua waters that darkened to ultramarine on the horizon.
Back home on Timber Lane, Larry snapped closeup shots of the explosion of springtime color in his backyard, which had been enhanced by two years of professional gardening. There were orchids and tulips and irises and violets and roses and lilies, a bonanza of reds and oranges and purples and whites. Beside the pool on a sunny afternoon weekend, with Chris bobbing in his inflated green froggie life preserver and Marcia paddling after him in the cool water, it was easy to forget the approaching threat of arrest and prison. Larry was confident that whatever happened, his lawyer could make the case drag on for years—Glen Fuller had yet to be convicted for his bust on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1980.
Larry was unaware of the new avenue agents had found into his dealing, but he was acutely aware that unless he retreated fast, Bruce Taylor was going to eventually be his undoing. Ever since Chuck Reed’s visit to his dental office in February, and Brian Riley’s departure a month later, Larry realized that the only safe thing to do would be to sell out. He could feel the federal investigation nipping away at the fringes of his illegal enterprise. Ken and David had been questioned about Mark Stewart. Andy Mainardi had been questioned. Suzanne and Kim Norimatsu had been approached by Chuck Reed. A former Arena employee named Rick Imondi had been questioned. Larry Uhr was apparently cooperating. One of Wayne Heinauer’s customers had just been suspiciously busted on the Canadian border. All of these events had just confirmed Larry’s belief that although the FBI suspected his cocaine dealing, they had no hard evidence. Still, it was wise to put as much distance between himself and the business as possible. Ideally, he would sell the business to someone who would manage it capably for him. That way he could retain a financial interest without having to be personally involved. He knew that he would have to accept even harder terms than those he had rejected when David Ackerman had tried to dictate a year earlier, but there was no alternative.