by Mark Bowden
Larry’s first choice to take over the business was Billy Motto. Billy South Philly had matured from a hustling street vendor with pot customers to a multimillionaire cocaine dealer. He had started off admiring and imitating Larry, but over the years Larry had come to admire and imitate Billy. Dressed in his pastel sweat suits, driving his black Volvo with retractable panels for hiding money and cocaine, surrounded by his retinue of respectful, silent thugs, Billy was a force to be reckoned with in South Philly. During years when the traditional Italian-dominated organized-crime families were killing each other off, Billy had managed to quietly carve his independent illegal niche. People tended to like Billy so long as they weren’t on his bad side. He had an effusively friendly style, lavishing gifts on family and friends, always asking people if he could do anything for them, and seeming disappointed if they could think of nothing. Any promise was promptly kept. Billy was comically and unselfconsciously vain. He stopped out to Larry’s dental office every couple of months to have his teeth cleaned—Billy was especially proud of his perfect teeth. After the cleaning, he would inspect the work carefully in the mirror and complain to the hygienist that they weren’t quite white enough—and then laugh.
Billy was perfectly trustworthy and reliable in money matters, always paying up front, in total. Larry had gotten the idea for the beeper system from Billy. He admired the way Billy handled himself. Larry had never gotten the kind of respect from his workers that Billy got from his. And Billy was an excellent businessman. Of all his customers, Larry was convinced that Billy had profited most. Billy had purchased a home in Boca Raton, Florida, with a swimming pool in the backyard, just like Larry’s, and even bought himself a golden Lab, just like Larry’s. He had a pretty girlfriend named Angela and was thinking about starting a family. Recently, Billy had obtained the contract to supply fresh produce to all the Super Fresh supermarkets in the Philadelphia area, and he had purchased a flower shop in Center City, so in addition to his drug dealing and loan-sharking, Billy was managing profitable, legitimate businesses.
Larry and Billy met at a Steak ’n Brew on Route 202 in Devon.
“I know an indictment is coming,” Larry explained. “I want to get out, but it’s not that easy. There are lots of people, like Bruce, who would like to buy it, but they don’t have the money. Besides, you know what a fuck-up Bruce is.”
Billy said, “I’d like to help you, Larry. But the timing is bad.”
Billy understood that Larry had a lot of money tied up in the business. And he knew better than most people could how difficult it was to just walk away. He explained that he had decided to get out of the business himself. He had gotten over the initial thrill of having money, and had learned that people who were once grateful for the loans and gifts he gave had come to expect them. The attention and respect that had been lavished on Billy in his South Philly neighborhood, and that he had enjoyed so much at first, had now become cloying and insistent. And there was another, more sinister problem. Some of the bigger organized-crime figures in Atlantic City and Philadelphia were paying more attention to Billy. He felt like a mouse caged with a lion. Billy wanted to get out while he could. He found himself spending more and more time in Florida, and his heart was more in the flower and produce business than in cocaine.
He explained these things to Larry.
“Even if I did want to get even more into it right now, I don’t think it’s worth the heat,” he said. “You’re hot, Larry. I think all of these people are going to be hot. It’s all going to go down.”
Larry was disappointed, but hardly surprised.
“I’m in the same boat you are,” said Billy. “I’m looking for someone who can take over things for me. But it’s hard to find someone you can trust who can do the job.”
On June 29, a group of FBI and IRS agents raided the Norristown offices of Joe Powell, Larry’s silver connection. They seized Powell’s business records and interviewed the somewhat shocked and intimidated Powell.
Powell told them that Larry had invested about $487,000 with him during the first six months of the year. Most of the money had been delivered in shopping bags full of cash. These investments, he said, were considered loans. Powell had agreed to repay Larry at a 30 percent per annum interest rate, and not to report the interest payments to the IRS.
Word got back to Larry right away. It was just one more piece of evidence for the building tax case, and a reminder that the investigation was not just going to go away.
Larry was desperate. He considered Bruce reckless and inept. If the feds didn’t catch on to him, Bruce was going to drive away all his customers. It was no longer a question of finding someone he could trust; Larry needed someone with the resources to buy him out who was capable of carrying on the business without creating further legal problems for him and for his friends.
The one person Larry knew of who fit those two criteria was Frannie Burns.
Larry had finally met Frannie about six months earlier, after hearing about him for nearly a year. In late 1982, Larry lost Brian Cassidy, one of his best customers, to Frannie, who seemed to have a source for cocaine that was considerably cheaper than Larry’s. Larry was angry. To get back at this new rival, Larry told Brian he might be interested in buying from Frannie himself. Soon after that, through someone who knew Paul Mikuta, Frannie delivered two sample kilos. Larry cut the kilos, Paul cut them again, and then they returned them to Frannie saying the quality wasn’t up to their standards. It was Larry’s way of thumbing his nose at the guy.
But word kept getting back to Larry about the incredibly low prices Frannie got in Florida, so eventually business instinct had won out over pride. He called Paul Mikuta, who knew someone who knew Frannie, and said he wanted to meet with his rival.
Their first meeting was in Frannie’s beat-up blue Toyota, in the shopping center parking lot across the street from Larry’s dental office. Frannie, who was Larry’s age and married, was with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Sandy Freas. Larry was surprised by Frannie. He had expected someone more like himself, but Frannie was a short, chubby character with long straggly hair and a thick brown moustache. He talked with a pronounced lisp. Instead of being angry about the returned kilos, Frannie actually apologized to Larry.
“I know you didn’t like the ones I sent,” he said. “But I still think we can do business.”
They had spent about a half hour talking, chatting about mutual friends in Florida and Philly, and about prices. Despite their obvious surface differences, Frannie and Larry had a lot in common. Frannie had built his business up on the Main Line, and owned a Dairy Queen outlet in a small shopping center off Route 202. They were both serious businessmen who were alternately amused and alarmed by the drug-abusing foibles of the people around them. There was an immediate rapport between serious dealers because they were the rare ones who treated the drugs strictly as merchandise. Larry knew how difficult and risky the business was, and he sensed that Frannie did too.
Frannie had an immediate problem. He normally employed his father-in-law, Harvey Perry, Sr., as his runner. But Perry was dying of cancer and was in the hospital for treatments. Frannie needed someone to make a run for him right away.
So Larry offered to let Frannie use Stan Nelson, and Fran accepted. It put things on a cooperative footing right away.
For most of 1983, Larry and Frannie had been loosely cooperating, playing Florida dealers off one another to lower the price per kilo down to just twenty-two thousand. After Billy turned down Larry’s offer to buy the business, Larry met with Frannie at the McDonald’s in Devon. Larry was familiar with the place because he and Marcia often took fourteen-month-old Christopher there.
Frannie immediately liked the idea of buying Larry’s business. Larry wanted half a million dollars to just walk away. But Frannie proposed easing the transition. He wanted to gradually take over Larry’s customers, paying off the half million in installments, and using Larry to help him establish a rapport with the customers. What Franni
e actually had in mind, as Larry soon realized, was to take over the business and use its own profits to pay Larry off. They concluded the agreement in that one brief session.
“Frannie, you’re the only person I’ve ever met whose greed exceeds my own,” said Larry.
Larry urged Frannie to keep Bruce Taylor, who by then was the only one besides Larry who knew how to break, cut, and package the cocaine for Larry’s customers. Frannie had never gone to such trouble. He just turned over to his customers the kilos as he got them from Florida.
“I don’t need all that shit,” Frannie said. “I’ll just give it to them and they can do whatever they want to it.”
“No, look, Fran. You can make more money my way.” Larry scribbled some figures on a napkin, showing Frannie how much he could multiply his profits by cutting the coke and making rocks.
Frannie was amazed. “You make that much off a kilo?”
Larry basked in Frannie’s admiration. It was rare to find someone who could understand and appreciate his formulas.
Frannie agreed to keep Bruce for a while, and Larry agreed to help smooth the transition by introducing Frannie to each of his customers and encouraging them to continue doing business with him.
Larry left the meeting that afternoon in late July feeling wistful but relieved. He knew almost nothing about Frannie, except that he had managed to create and build a cocaine business competitive with his own. Self-interest would dictate the rest. Frannie could make a lot of money selling to Billy Motto and to Priscilla in New England, even apart from the smaller customers. It was a propitious moment in the cocaine business. Wholesale prices in Florida had fallen in little more than a year from fifty-six thousand per kilo to twenty-two, yet customers in Philadelphia and elsewhere were still willing to pay the old prices. Wayne Heinauer in Phoenix was still buying kilos for seventy-six thousand! A person could get rich fast in a market like that.
A great weight had been lifted from Larry’s shoulders, but, oh! the missed opportunity. To think he could have doubled his six million dollars by the end of the year!
Willowy Suzanne Norimatsu had gone to Europe in early 1983 after being approached by Chuck Reed and Tom Neff. While she was away her sister had gotten engaged to Bruce Taylor.
It was a strange twist. For years, Suzanne had been first girlfriend and then fiancée to the manager of the cocaine business, and Kim had been on the fringes of the organization, fascinated by it, by David, and by the cocaine. Now the situation had reversed. Kim was living with Bruce, who was running the business for Larry, and it was Suzanne on the fringes. She was still drawn to the cocaine and the excitement of the business, and she tasted a little of what her sister had felt during the last few years. She was attracted to Bruce.
Living at home with her parents, Suzanne spent much of her free time at the house in Newtown Square with Bruce and Kim. She and Bruce often sat up late playing poker and gin rummy. Bruce was attracted to both sisters, which began causing friction right away, and which came to a head in early August when, over one confused weekend, Kim and Bruce broke their engagement and Suzanne and Bruce wound up in bed—although not necessarily in that order. One week later, they impulsively chartered a plane to Las Vegas and got married.
When he lost track of Bruce Taylor in July, Chuck Reed was confident the would-be biker/cocaine dealer would turn up again soon. Phoenix DEA agents had been noting his comings and goings for several months.
Connecting with the Phoenix probe was a genuine breakthrough for the Philadelphia FBI man. Ever since Reed had become suspicious of Larry Lavin in late 1982, he had been painstakingly acquiring and compiling scraps of evidence to apply for permission to tap the telephones of Larry Lavin and his known associates. But it was time consuming, and the information was scarce. The best Chuck hoped to get was authorization, perhaps by late 1983, for a “pen register,” a limited phone tap that does not permit agents to record conversations but that registers what numbers are calling to and are being called from a targeted phone. Employing this arm’s-length surveillance was necessary to lay the groundwork for a real wiretap.
But the Phoenix agents were already way ahead of that procedure. They had enough solid evidence linking Heinauer to cocaine dealing that they were able to obtain a court order for a wiretap on his phone for one month, beginning August 12.
Suzanne and Bruce were married in Las Vegas on Saturday, August 13. By the following Sunday afternoon, Bruce was coming off the high that had sent him winging west. He hadn’t taken along a sufficient supply of cocaine. So he called Wayne, and the DEA’s tape recorders switched on.
Bruce told Wayne that he was in Las Vegas, and that he had just married Suzanne, Kim’s sister.
“I was gonna give you a call this evening,” said Wayne, laughing. “I wouldn’t have caught you at home, would I?”
Wayne said he had met Suzanne once, a long time ago. Bruce asked Wayne if he had any “product” for a “wedding present.” Wayne said that he did, so Bruce said he and his bride would be flying his way.
Bruce called again less than two hours later.
“You have a wedding present, right?” he asked Wayne.
“Yeah, oh yeah. I just went and got it to make sure that it was there,” said Wayne.
“Oh, beautiful! I’ve been totally sleepish.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been totally sleepish,” said Bruce. “A withdrawal symptom. And this is a hell of a time to fall asleep, on your honeymoon!”
Phoenix agents watched Bruce and Suzanne come and go on August 14.
Four days later, the tap on Wayne’s phone began recording a series of calls between Wayne and Bruce as the Philadelphia dealer flew out to Phoenix with Harvey Perry, Sr., Frannie Burns’s father-in-law—described by Bruce as “our new mule”—carrying two kilos. This was Wayne’s first experience dealing with someone associated with Frannie. In one of their phone calls, Bruce referred to “the transition,” which intrigued the listening agents. Evidently a significant change was under way in Larry Lavin’s business.
They didn’t have to wait long for an explanation.
* * *
On an unseasonably cool midday for late August, Tuesday the twenty-third, after the morning sun had burned the dew from the lawns in Devon and rush hour traffic had thinned on Route 202 and the Schuylkill Expressway, the boss pulled his big silver BMW up to a pay phone at the corner of Welsh Road and Roosevelt Boulevard in the Northeast. The booth was shattered and covered with graffiti, but by now Larry was suspicious of all the pay phones near his home and near his office. Since selling the business to Frannie, he had been playing things super safe. So he deliberately selected this booth for his call to Wayne Heinauer. He felt it was far enough away from both his home and the office to be safe.
Wayne had just gotten a two-kilo delivery from Bruce and Frannie’s father-in-law, who had arrived in Phoenix the day before. Wayne had seemed a bit leery of dealing with Perry, so Frannie had called Larry the night before and asked him to call and explain things to Wayne.
Larry took from his briefcase on the car seat the hand-held computer in which he kept all his telephone numbers stored. He opened the trunk and fetched his heavy orange bowl of quarters. Then he punched the phone number on his computer, inserted several coins, and placed his call to Wayne . . . and the DEA.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Wayne?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Larry. How ya doin’?”
“Good, how are you doing?”
“Good,” said Larry.
“Hey, what’s been going on, dude?”
“I just thought I’d call up and shoot the breeze with you.”
“Oh, very good. I’ve been wanting to give you a call and I thought I’d wait and see how things are going back there for everybody. So what have you been doing?”
“Well, I’m at a pay phone. I’m about to go to work. I’m just trying to see if I can get a bachelor party together for Bill Honeywell.”
“Oh, really?”
“He’s getting married next month.”
Heinauer had grown up in the same western Pennsylvania town as Honeywell. He and Larry reminisced about mutual acquaintances from the days when Larry had dealt pot as an undergraduate. Then the phone clicked, demanding more quarters, and Larry got down to business.
“Anyway, I know Bruce explained to you what’s going on, right?”
“Yes, uh-huh.”
“So, that’s good. It’s a little hard on pay phones, but what I’m basically trying to do is have Frannie take over the job that I do, which isn’t that much. But when there’s a problem, you know, I’m always here so someone can be reached.”
“Right, uh-huh.”
“Bruce is an excellent guy and everything is working out well with him. But he can’t always be reached, is one problem. Frannie can be reached really quick. He answers his beeper in like five minutes.”
“Right.”
“And he’s going to put up money for buying things down there, which is nice,” said Larry. “Can you believe Bruce got married?”