by Mark Bowden
Those early-winter weeks on the beach were perfect therapy for all the excitement of the last year. One of the first things Marcia noticed, happily, was that the telephone never rang! Larry went for daily jogs along the beach with the dog, and took long walks with Marcia and Chris. They had never been to a resort community in the off-season and were delighted by the way it reverted to a small town, with friendly neighbors who would stop and say hello and introduce themselves, and merchants who got to know you by name. After a few days of the solitude and quiet, they began going to area malls just to get out of the house. They bought a new color TV to replace the older one in the apartment, a video tape recorder, a new camera, put a deposit on a tape club. Marcia bought a microwave oven. One weekend they drove to Williamsburg, where they had visited as college students, and spent the day taking in the sights. Larry and Marcia loved the Colonial flavor of the area. Without ever really sitting down to a formal decision, over the first few weeks they both decided that this was where they wanted to stay.
Their flight had gone as smoothly as they could have hoped. So far, Larry’s juggling of identities and Social Security cards and post office boxes was going well. No one knew where they were, so it was no more likely that somebody would be looking for them in Virginia Beach than anywhere else in America. The more Larry felt comfortable in the little beach apartment, the more he liked the idea of staying. It was so close to Philadelphia, and to FBI headquarters in Washington, that it might, in fact, be the best of all places to hide.
Besides, on his long walks and morning outings with the dog, he had begun to eye the fishing boats lined up along the piers and in dry storage racks at Lynnhaven and other marinas up and down the inlets and bays. Ever since he was a boy vacationing at the Baratts’ house on the lake outside Haverhill, he had fancied having his own boat.
So in early December, he started visiting realtors in the Williamsburg and Hampton Roads areas. After looking at a few locations, Larry found a house he wanted. It was set in a remote, wooded location outside Williamsburg, near the confluence of two rivers where the water was deep enough to float a big boat. The house was an old mansion, big enough to have a separate upper-floor living area with its own bedrooms, kitchen, and bath for live-in servants. Larry thought it was perfect. To Marcia, it was reminiscent of the mansion Larry had fancied when they first went shopping for a house on the Main Line.
Instead, they settled on a new suburban development called Middle Plantation, one of many affluent subdivisions going up on wooded marshlands in the rapidly growing area between Norfolk and Virginia Beach. They bought a new house set on a corner acre at the end of a block called Royal Oaks Close. It was a two-story redbrick house with a red front door, with a front and back yard almost identical in configuration to the house they had abandoned on Timber Lane. The backyard formed a long, gradually sloping rectangle back to a wooded lot. On the back, southern side of the house, the steeply sloping gray-tiled roof was broken by seven separate skylights, so nearly every room of the house was flooded with sunlight. It was a neighborhood identical to Timber Lane in almost every respect, big family dwellings set well back from a quiet street, with driveways that curved up along the side of the property to attached garages. Housed in these neo-Colonial homes were the families of bankers, businessmen, stockbrokers, and professionals, the youngest of them with teenage children.
Larry, as Brian O’Neil, offered the full asking price of $235,000 for the house in order to top a competing bid, and signed a contract with the builder, Les Williams, in the second week of December. Before closing on the deal, Larry took Les aside and offered him $35,000 of the sale price in cash. He told the builder that he had been a stockbroker in Philadelphia, and that he had suffered a mild heart attack that he had never told his wife about. His doctors had instructed him to take it easy for a few years, so, Larry explained, he had sold off his assets quickly and moved south. So he was stuck with a lot of money in cash and was looking for ways of investing it. Williams gladly agreed to take the $35,000 in cash. They recorded the sale price of the house at $200,000.
Converting that $200,000 from cash into cashier’s checks took a long time. Larry had to visit more than twenty banks, because any check in an amount greater than $10,000 required a report to the government. He had a list of all the banks in his vicinity and checked them off one by one to make sure he didn’t accidently put two identities in the same bank. To avoid suspicion, before obtaining a cashier’s check in a large amount, Larry opened accounts at each bank, depositing a seed amount of money, then gradually, over two or three trips, built up the account to almost $10,000. Then he would make a trip in to withdraw the cashier’s check. He tried to vary his appearance, sometimes going in wearing blue jeans and a sportshirt, other times dressing in a three-piece suit with an expensive topcoat.
Keeping track of all these accounts, post office boxes, and identities was a dizzying, full-time occupation. In all, Larry invested $920,000 in stocks under a total of twenty-two separate identities, each with its own private mailing address (usually a box that he rented at various U-Haul centers), bank accounts, Social Security numbers, etc. Larry bought himself a small Epson home computer and used it to help keep track of his twenty-two separate identities and addresses. Since the only way to obtain Social Security registration without answering a lot of questions was to apply before age eighteen, all of Larry’s false identities were for people under eighteen years old. By spring he started to get notification from Selective Service at many of his post office boxes, so he had to stop in the local draft office and register, pretending to be only eighteen years old. It was necessary to file tax forms for all of his identities. Larry kept looking for ways to simplify these dealings, but as time went by they seemed to just grow more and more complex.
They moved into the new house before Christmas, keeping the beach apartment for a few weeks until they had time to purchase rugs and furniture. Larry bought a black Plymouth Voyager with imitation wood paneling on the side for himself, and a maroon Nissan Maxima station wagon for Marcia. The house was still mostly barren, but Marcia was able to piece together enough furnishings and trappings to make Christmas cozy. The tree went in the bay window area of the living room, set on a bare wooden floor. Around it she placed potted poinsettias, and she hung cloth angels from the window latches. Across the room, before the fireplace, was a blue throw rug, a big red leather chair and foot rest, and a handsome mahogany coffee table Larry’s father had made and that they had carted in the U-Haul. There was a big Sony stereo TV in the corner on a footlocker and a new sofa against one wall. Marcia lined the mantelpiece with Christmas candles and hung the holiday stockings that she had knitted herself. On Christmas Eve, Marcia left out a rabbit cup half-filled with milk and pieces of butter cookie on a plate, with a note that read, “Dear Chris, Thank you for the milk and cookies. Rudolph liked his carrots. Have fun with your new toys. Merry Christmas, Santa.”
As spring approached, Larry went right to work re-creating his beloved backyard layout. He added a spacious back porch with a built-in Jacuzzi. He hired a swimming pool company to build a small backyard pool in the shape of a Mickey Mouse head. Larry helped design little cleaners for the pool bottom that popped up when switched on and then sank back down flush with the bottom when switched off. He selected a special kind of seashell finish to decorate the concrete edging and the pool deck. Alongside the pool Larry had a play area constructed with a slide, a fort, jungle gym, and swings. Landscape crews filled in low-lying areas of the property and planted beds of azaleas and tulips. A big wooden fence went up around the long perimeter of the backyard. It soon looked even nicer than the house they had left behind.
For Marcia, despite her fear that every knock on the door or strange car cruising up the block was the FBI, these were some of the happiest months in her marriage to Larry. They were together with Chris, and a second child was on the way. Larry was busy handling his money, opening bank accounts, and making investments in stocks and bond
s, but he was home most of the time. The phone almost never rang. Larry committed himself, for the first time since his son was born, to spending an hour of time with Chris after dinner every day, playing games, going for walks, wrestling on the floor, or just watching TV. It was odd the way things worked out, but it had been Larry’s arrest and indictment that had finally forced Marcia’s dream into reality. They were at last a normal family, eating dinners together, working on their own house, going shopping together, being parents. Larry spent hours over the holidays sitting in the big red chair reading a Robert Ludlum novel with one of Marcia’s yellow-and-orange handmade afghans thrown over his long legs. Marcia could gaze out of the kitchen on a scene that perfectly matched the ideal she had sought for so long. Larry’s downfall had humbled him. The threat of prison, and of losing Marcia and Chris, seemed to have finally awakened him to what was lasting and valuable in his life. He had new respect for Marcia, and showed new vulnerability in his dealings with her. They still argued over things and still occasionally got on each other’s nerves, but they made decisions mutually. They were in this together.
Meeting neighbors was a trauma. On one of their first days in the new house, a man who lived across the street rang the doorbell to invite the new family to a Christmas party. The neighbor introduced himself and talked for a moment about the party, and then said, “What’s your name again?”
“Larry,” said Larry, startling himself with the slip. “Er, it’s actually Brian,” he said, “but my wife calls me Larry. Larry is my middle name, and her brother’s name is Brian, so she never called me by her brother’s name.”
“Well, Larry is a perfectly good name because that’s my name!” the man said.
At the party Larry and Marcia introduced themselves to the neighborhood as Brian and Susan, but explained that they really called each other by their middle names, Larry and Marcia. People tended to call Marcia Marcia, but Larry easily became Brian. Their best friends quickly became Jess and Babette Miller, who lived directly across the street. The Millers had teenage children, but also a little boy about Christopher’s age.
Brian was a big hit on the block. He was frequently the only man in the neighborhood who was home during the day. So when a woman’s water pipe burst down the block, she came running for Brian. Larry crawled down through the flooded basement to turn off the water main, then spent the rest of the day hauling out furniture and rugs and mopping up. At one of the first meetings of the community association, the O’Neils won first place for having the prettiest yard in the neighborhood. The prize was a year’s worth of professional lawn care. “How ironic,” said one of the neighbors. “Brian and Marcia are the ones who need it least! Their house looks like they’ve lived there for twenty years already!” Most of the homeowners were growing lawns from seed. Larry had taken the quicker, more expensive route. He had covered his with a thick blanket of healthy sod early in spring.
Larry explained his affluence and ease by telling his neighbors that he was a computer whiz. He had founded his own small computer company in Philadelphia just after graduating from college, and had built it into a successful enterprise. Then he had sold out to a larger computer firm for a big price tag, and, as part of the deal, he had promised not to go back into the field for three years. Thus his early, youthful retirement.
Marcia worried as Larry became a more and more popular figure in the neighborhood. She figured the fewer people who knew them, the fewer questions they would have to answer, the fewer lies they would have to invent. But Larry seemed to enjoy being put on the spot and having to invent stories to explain himself. After a while, it was hard to keep track of all the stories Larry had told. Marcia felt like crawling under a rock with every false detail of her husband’s clever conversational concoctions. But it was like a game to him. He was incapable of turning down a party invitation, or of sitting in the house while people were out and about in the neighborhood, or of letting other people manage the new community association. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a good reason to back off. Why couldn’t he just become a little bit more reclusive? Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut?
Shortly after buying the house, Larry bought himself a twenty-six-foot boat, a Sea Ray Weekender. In January, Larry signed up to take scuba diving lessons at the Lynnhaven Dive Center, near the marina. After the lessons on their honeymoon in Hawaii he had longed to do it again. So he took a few weeks of lessons in the swimming pool at the dive center, and formed close friendships with the society of divers—many of them local policemen or fire fighters. He bought the most expensive diving gear, which endeared him to the store owner, and by March, when conditions were right for ocean diving, he was spending two or three hours every day at the shop. Within months, Larry and his companions were making deep dives thirty to fifty miles offshore, searching for old wrecks a hundred feet down.
Once he started diving, Larry had again established a separate life away from home, a life that satisfied his pleasure in taking risks and for being in the company of men. He frequently left early in the morning and came home late at night. His promise to spend just one hour each day after dinner with his son was forgotten just as swiftly as so many other promises before it had been.
During the first months of 1985 there were few reasons for Larry and Marcia to fear detection. Larry had even made a few calls home from pay phones, to Ken Weidler and to his brother Rusty. Through them he got word back to his family and to Marcia’s mother that they were settled and doing well. Larry wanted news about the drug case, but the group that had been indicted with him had not yet gone to trial. He learned that his wild old friend and former runner, Glen Fuller, had at last been sentenced to four years in prison by a New Jersey judge for his 1980 arrest driving cocaine north on the turnpike. But Glen had been released immediately, pending the outcome of his appeal, and was living in Aspen. Larry had to laugh about that. He learned that he and Mark Stewart had been sued, along with officials of Bank Leumi Le-Israel, for conspiring to loot WMOT-TEC Records of two million dollars, and then in January, his old mentor Mark Stewart’s problems worsened further when he was indicted on seventy-four counts of filing phony tax statements for clients of his tax shelter schemes, and indicted separately for laundering a half-million dollars of Larry’s drug money through his various enterprises. Larry wished the courts luck in getting to the bottom of that mess—he considered a half million a generous understatement. Frannie Burns had helped the FBI nail Diego Arbelaez, his Colombian supplier, with 170 pounds of uncut cocaine in his Hollywood, Florida, garage. Larry’s other friends and former associates had all retained lawyers and were waiting in fear for the other shoe to drop. His former cocaine-dealing partner David Ackerman had kicked his cocaine habit and gone back to dental school.
Whenever Larry hung up the phone and walked back to his car under sunny Virginia skies, braced with the musky smell of salt air, it was like returning through some warp in time and space. What was happening in Philadelphia was like some fast-receding nightmare. Larry was grateful to have escaped it all, and proud of himself for having had the presence of mind and cunning to give himself a second chance. Often he would resolve not to call again for a few years, just to play it perfectly safe. Marcia thought he was crazy to make these occasional calls. But then, a few weeks or a month later, as the appointed time for his next prearranged call approached, he would find himself pulling into a shopping center lot and hunting up a phone as if drawn by some force out of his control. Some part of Larry missed being at the center of the storm.
He had still not gotten driver’s licenses for Brian and Susan O’Neil. Larry was afraid to have his picture taken by the Virginia State Police. What if they checked photos against a list of fugitives?
So he put it off and put it off until one morning, pulling out of Middle Plantation on his way over to the dive center, his Maxima was flagged down by the local police. Larry was in a cold sweat. He had been going 35 MPH in a 25-MPH zone. As he handed over his Richard Timmerman Massac
husetts license, the one that listed him as thirty-nine years old and twenty pounds heavier than he was, Larry could see all his carefully laid plans wash away in a moment. Even if the cop didn’t question the license, wouldn’t the ticket go on the record of Richard Timmerman in Massachusetts?
The cop didn’t notice anything unusual about the license. He gave Larry a speeding ticket and drove off. That afternoon, Larry called the sheriff’s office and explained that a friend of his from out of state had been driving his car on a visit, and had gotten a speeding ticket. If the ticket was promptly paid, would it still go into the computer and go on his record in Massachusetts? The clerk at the sheriff’s office said yes, the ticket would go into the Virginia computer, but that no, it wouldn’t show up on his friend’s record in Massachusetts automatically. The information could be accessed in Massachusetts, but they would have to inquire about it first.
Larry was relieved, but the incident prompted him to see about getting new driver’s licenses for himself and Marcia. Posing as novelist Robert Ludlum, Larry called the state police and explained that he was looking for some general information as background research for his next book. The state police spokesman was eager to oblige.
“I’m a big fan of yours,” he said.
Larry asked if it was common practice to search through driver’s license photos for fugitives. The spokesman said no, it would just take too many man-hours for too few results, and it would be too difficult to do. It just wasn’t practical.