Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  After chatting with Goldberg, who assured Larry and Tom that he would remain available for consultation, the lawyer and his new client strolled two blocks, past Claes Oldenburg’s giant clothespin-shaped statue The Kiss and across busy Market Street, to Tom’s office over Penn Center Plaza.

  Tom went right to work. Larry answered questions seriously and candidly. He didn’t seem distraught or angry, just concerned and determined to fight. Tom was able to tell him very little good news. At first glance, the evidence against him seemed overwhelming. With the 848 charge, the very best Larry could hope for would be the minimum ten-year sentence. Tom guessed that, realistically, the worst he might expect was thirty to forty years. If he got ten years, then with good time and an early parole, he would have to do seven years in prison.

  “That’s seven, period. You’ve got to do seven,” said Tom.

  The key to avoiding that, the lawyer explained, would be to get the U.S. attorney to drop the charge under Section 848. That would allow Larry to plead guilty to drug-trafficking charges and give the judge more flexibility at sentencing. It might be possible to whittle actual time served down to something like four years. But it would require cooperation. Larry would have to agree to testify against others in the case.

  Larry said he couldn’t imagine doing that. It would mean betraying virtually all of his friends and two members of his family. The only people close to Larry who weren’t involved in drug dealing were his parents, the workers in his dental office, his older brother Justin, Marcia, and Agnes. He knew that once he started talking, he would have to keep on talking or he would lose whatever initial advantage he gained.

  There was another reason not to talk. Even though he had listened with disbelief to Chuck Reed’s description of Frannie, the more Larry thought about it, the more he realized elements of it might be true. Frannie was a reckless character. He had told Larry about pulling a gun on someone once, and had intimated that worse things than that had happened to people who crossed him, things that Larry would never have considered doing himself. And there was Billy Motto. Larry liked and respected Billy, but there was an aura of danger about his South Philly friend that was undeniable. Larry knew that Billy’s supposed connection with the local mob was overblown; if anything was true it was the exact opposite—Billy lived in fear of arousing the attention of older, more powerful organized-crime figures. Philadelphia, after all, was in the midst of a wave of mob killings, sparked by the murder of longtime Mafia don Angelo Bruno. South Philly hoods were turning up dead nearly every week—The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine had recently outlined a tour of South Philly restaurants where notorious mobsters had eaten their last meals. Billy had often told Larry that if these more murderous criminal types started to muscle in on his drug business, it would be time to get out of town and concentrate on peddling produce. Still, Larry knew other things about Billy. Once, for instance, when someone had stolen a large amount of cash from him, Billy had sought help from local mobsters and, for a fee, got his money back. Larry didn’t know of anyone else who could have done that. Ever since he had known Billy, the South Philly dealer had been surrounded by armed, silent, loyal employees. On one occasion, one of Billy’s men had attacked and seriously injured a man who had threatened Billy in a bar. Bruce Taylor told a story about the time Billy gave him a knife as a gift after he first started working for Larry. Billy had handed him the knife handle-first, said Bruce, and had said, ominously, “There are other ways I could give this to you.” Maybe Billy had meant nothing by that, but Bruce had never forgotten it. Recently, one of Billy’s closest friends and associates, Gregory Cavalieri, was found murdered in a park outside of the city. The police considered Billy a suspect. Larry knew how upset Billy was about his friend’s murder—when Cavalieri was first missing, Billy had actually hired private detectives and taken out newspaper ads in an effort to find him. Larry was convinced Billy had nothing to do with it, but . . . it was just one more thing to consider.

  No. Cooperating was out of the question.

  The answer didn’t surprise Tom. He knew few defendants turned state’s witness readily, and he knew Larry’s resolve would be more seriously tested in the months to come. So he outlined a few good ideas for pretrial motions dealing with suppression of evidence. There was a chance he could successfully defend against the Section 848 charge; after all, the relationship between Larry and Frannie was not as clear-cut as the government maintained. The amounts of cocaine being sold, at least so far as Larry Lavin was concerned, were in fact less than half the amount quoted in Larry’s conversation with Wayne Heinauer. Evidence against Larry’s involvement was overwhelming, but within the fine gradations of culpability and evidence defined by law, there was some hope, some room to maneuver.

  Before Larry left that day, Tom spent some time talking to him about things in general. Larry told him how he had gotten started in the business, about what it had been like at Penn during the mid-seventies, when virtually everyone his age smoked pot, when the onus of criminality attached to dealing was little more than a joke. Larry talked about how the business had switched over to cocaine without missing a beat, and how fashionable the drug was, how popular its dealers, how profitable its sale. The one thing Tom couldn’t understand was why Larry had not just stopped at some point. Why hadn’t he stopped, say, after making a million dollars? Wasn’t that enough to satisfy anyone? Why continue to take such risks?

  Larry acknowledged how foolish it had been not to stop, in retrospect. But he tried to explain, talking about himself (as he often did to humorous effect) in the third person. He tried to define the worm in his gut that had kept him going all those years, even after making millions.

  “I definitely was on the verge of quitting,” he said. “If it wasn’t for these losses. The hard thing to understand is how important it is for Larry all these years, he’s got this sheet, and he always knows just exactly how much he’s worth. I always tried to have a fair estimate of what’s considered uncollectable debts and what’s a realistic figure on what I’m worth. But once you reach a figure, you never want to be less than that. And then we find out, boom! we just lost five hundred thousand and I’d say to myself, ’If I can just make that back then I’ll quit. Then I’ll have enough.’ “

  “But where did this great need for money come from?” said Tom. “I don’t get it.”

  “Tom, I saw my father work all of his life, work his ass off all of his life, and never have anything,” said Larry. “I made up my mind that I was gonna have money. It’s as simple as that.”

  Patients kept coming! Larry had almost expected his life to stop after the indictment and arrest, but on Thursday morning he drove to work in a new, leased BMW, and there were patients waiting for him when he got there.

  In the year and a half he had been practicing dentistry with Ken Weidler, Larry had come to enjoy the work more than he ever imagined he would. The mechanics of dentistry, the drilling and filling, the probing of people’s mouths, that didn’t excite him, but the steady stream of people and problems was engrossing, even exciting. Larry found that his days at the office never went as they were scheduled. There were frequently emergencies, or unforeseen problems, so there was an art to keeping things flowing smoothly in the office. Larry was good at it. Because he had more money than most beginning dentists, he could afford the very best tools and materials for his work. He brought to his purchases of dental wares the same childlike enthusiasm he had always brought to buying pot, or coke or electronic gadgets. At night he read up on the newest techniques, often conferring with his old classmates about what he was trying. Former classmate Chris Furlan, who had opened a practice in West Philadelphia, used Larry as a kind of Consumer Reports, waiting to see what materials Larry preferred after sampling a variety of, say, the latest mixtures for filling cavities that Chris could not afford to put to the test himself. Larry enjoyed running the office, dealing with “the girls,” and, of course, keeping the books. He found pleasure in just doing so
mething for people, easing their pain, fixing their bites, perfecting their smiles.

  In the weeks after his indictment, Larry was grateful for the patients who kept coming, who still treated him with friendship and respect. His routine was a comfortable shelter from the storm that had engulfed his life.

  Neighbors on Timber Lane kept their distance. Newspaper reporters had knocked on all the doors, even poor Mrs. Eisenhower’s, the day after Larry’s arrest. Most politely refused comment. Some spoke off the record, saying that they were not really surprised.

  “When they moved in, they were so young,” said one of the anonymous voices quoted in a story five days after Larry’s arrest.

  “People weren’t appalled,” said another.

  Elicia Geisa stood in her backyard one day looking across as Marcia pushed little Christopher on the swing set in the Lavins’ backyard. She felt little sympathy for Larry, but she did feel sorry for Marcia and the little boy. What was going to happen to them? She wanted to walk across her yard and talk to Marcia, to perhaps console her or befriend her, but she didn’t know what to say. What did one say to the wife of the biggest drug dealer in the city on the occasion of her husband’s arrest?

  The man who lived next door, a chemical company executive, who was closer to Larry and Marcia than most of his neighbors, felt angry and betrayed. Like most of the homeowners on Timber Lane, he had children who were closer in age to Larry and Marcia than he was. He confronted Larry on the property line one weekend afternoon about two weeks after the arrest. They were both working in their yards.

  “Larry, I don’t know whether or not it’s true, but if it is I want you to know that I take a very dim view of any drug-related activity whatsoever,” he said. “It’s terrible to get children involved in this kind of thing. I have children of my own.”

  Larry smiled sheepishly.

  “That judge rounded me up by mistake,” he said. “I got lumped in with some people who I loaned money to. I didn’t know what they were doing with it. I just got some bad advice.”

  “Well, I hope you are innocent,” the neighbor said. “But I take a very dim view of that sort of thing.”

  Marcia was miserable. She felt everyone was looking at her, whispering behind her back. She thought she saw something in the way a clerk at the supermarket smiled when she bought her groceries, or the way a neighbor just stood and stared and did not wave to her as she drove past on Timber Lane, or the way a teller at the bank pronounced her name when she withdrew her weekly household funds, or the way the people at the nursery treated Christopher . . . it was all out of step with the quiet normalcy she craved.

  Marcia was beyond feeling angry or betrayed by Larry. She felt sorry for him. She worried about how she and Chris and the new baby, due in April, would live. Marcia was adamantly against going back to work before her children were old enough to be in school. She worried about what would happen to Larry, but along with worry and sadness Marcia could not help but feel vindicated by Larry’s fall.

  For years she had complained to Larry about the drug business, warned him that the risk wasn’t worth it, made him promise to get out. Larry would always agree, apologize, promise, and then break his promises. Marcia had enjoyed their vacations, the house, picking out the furniture and the wallpaper, the expensive dinners out, but she never asked Larry for money and she never stopped wanting her husband to quit selling drugs and concentrate on earning a decent living with his profession. She knew their wholesome home life and growing family were due almost entirely to her. She had fought hard to pull Larry out of the orbit of his friends. Even though Marcia knew nothing of Larry’s dalliances with whores, the business itself had caused serious strains in their relationship over the years. She had always stopped short of leaving him. Now he was to be taken away from her. Marcia had the spent feeling of someone who had done everything she could, and failed.

  When Larry had started talking about fleeing that spring, Marcia hadn’t paid much attention. She thought the idea was crazy, and, in fact, Larry himself wasn’t yet serious about it. But right after his indictment and arrest, Larry started talking very seriously about running away. He mentioned places like Ireland or Paraguay or Colombia or Jamaica. What got Marcia was the way he just took it for granted that she and Chris would go with him.

  So on a morning in early October, when Larry was getting ready to fly up to Massachusetts to obtain a driver’s license for himself under the name of Richard Timmerman, one of his brother Rusty’s friends, Marcia knew it was time to speak up.

  “Maybe you should just go on your own,” she said. “That way you would have less chance of getting caught.”

  Larry was amazed, and hurt.

  “Why would I run then?” Larry asked. “What’s the point? If I’m not going to be with you and Chris, there’s no reason to go. That would be the worst thing about going to jail.”

  Marcia told Larry she had been giving it a lot of thought. She could live with her mother, who was a nurse, and they could make it. She told her husband that she would not leave the country. She would not raise her son in some foreign country. In fact, Larry had already begun to back away from fleeing America, which had been his first instinct. Down deep, the thing that Larry Lavin wanted most was an affluent, suburban American lifestyle. That was where his obsession with making more and more money led, not to some tropical backwater adventure. It was the life that had slipped away from him as a boy, and that he had played at during his years at Exeter. Besides, he would stand out more in a foreign land, and from the inquiries he made through his drug connections, Larry knew that no matter where he went he would have to pay off public officials for the rest of his life to stay free. He wanted to make a clean break, to leave criminality behind. So staying in the United States had begun to look more appealing to him anyway. It had a deliciously risky appeal, like hiding in plain view. Granting Marcia that much was easy.

  But she was still unwilling.

  “You have done this to yourself, Larry,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me or with Christopher or the new baby. They shouldn’t have to suffer for what you’ve done. I am not going to do anything to risk my freedom. Do you realize what would happen if I ran away with you and they caught us, and I went to jail, too? Our children would be raised by strangers! I won’t allow that to happen.”

  “What jury would convict you of a crime?” said Larry. “You’re an innocent spouse. You would be doing what you’re supposed to be doing as a wife. That’s like a supernatural law that comes before any man-made law. If your husband tells you to do something, you do it, even though you know you’re breaking the law.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s like that, Larry,” said Marcia. She told him to check with the lawyers. She would not go away with him unless she could be certain that if they ran, and got caught, she would not be culpable.

  Larry sought legal advice on that question and obtained enough reassurance to satisfy his wife. What mattered most was that Marcia loved Larry. Questions posed by his legal problems were really no different from those she had faced in freshman year of college. She loved Larry in spite of his reckless ego, his obsession with making money, and his self-destructive ambition.

  But Marcia never believed for a minute that all Larry’s careful plans to vanish would work. She didn’t argue with him about it, but deep down she saw all his running around, forging his false I.D.s, collecting cash, hatching schemes . . . all of it was pathetic. It was just a matter of time. They would drive off, move in someplace else, set up a life, and then, probably within months, there would be a knock on the door. She got a friend to put the question to several lawyers hypothetically: What would happen to the wife of a fugitive if she ran away with him and they got caught? All of the lawyers doubted that an innocent spouse would be prosecuted.

  Marcia thought about little else through late October. She finally decided that she would go. She had stayed with Larry this long, she would stay with him until she could no longer. Whe
n she married Larry, that’s what she had promised. So she felt comfortable. It was the right thing to do. They would eventually be caught, of that she was certain, but in the meantime the new baby and Chris, who was now two and a half years old and still years away from an age when he would have memories that would remain for the rest of his life, might get the chance to know their father. If he ran, so would she.

  Larry gradually thinned possessions from the house, leaving enough furniture and odds and ends in each room so that the removals would not be obvious. Early each morning he would leave with the car trunk loaded with one or two blue footlockers, each about three feet long and two feet tall. Being careful to note whether or not he was being followed, Larry drove out to Valley Forge, to a storage lot where, using a false name, he had rented a garage. Over the next six weeks the garage filled with neat rows of footlockers.

  Still, even with all this, Larry had not made up his mind to flee. Becoming a fugitive, severing ties with all his family, friends, and past, was a formidable step. He knew how difficult it would be to live happily with his family as a fugitive. The idea depressed him. He liked being Larry Lavin. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his days as someone else.

  “There are certain things I won’t be able to do anymore,” he told Ken Weidler on one of their last golf-course outings that October. “No more spending a lot of money, going to expensive French restaurants, and asking for the best wines. No more driving a hundred miles per hour. I’ll have to figure out a good story to explain why I can afford things without going to work.”