Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Off the foursome drove in a white stretch limousine. The car even had a name—Excalibur. The white lights on the roof looked like crystals. The winter day was clear. Coco and Cesar sat beside each other in red leather seats. The leather reminded Coco of the jacket Cesar had worn when they’d first met. Jessica and Boy George sat across from them, but they seemed very far away.

  The chauffeur drove right over the potholes. Coco wished they could loop around her block so she could show the car off to her friends. The limousine joined traffic on the Major Deegan, then crossed over the majesty of the George Washington Bridge. They were now in another state.

  To celebrate Cesar’s return to school, Boy George opened the cooler and pulled out a bottle of Moët. He wanted everyone to drink. He himself wouldn’t, because alcohol disrupted his training regimen. Coco wouldn’t, because alcohol made her queasy. Jessica wouldn’t, because she wasn’t a drinker and wasn’t in a partying mood just yet.

  “Whoever doesn’t drink has to walk—I’m leaving you on the side of the road,” Boy George told them.

  “He means it,” Jessica whispered. “Listen to him cuz he say he’ll leave you and he will, he did it to me.” During one excursion to Atlantic City, he’d abandoned Jessica beside the highway. Another time, he’d left his spot managers at Great Adventure as a practical joke.

  Coco could tell from the funny face Cesar made that the champagne nauseated him, “so I drank mine and I drank his.” Jessica had to drink until the champagne ran out. George told the chauffeur to pull over to the breakdown lane. Jessica stuck her head out of the power window and vomited, clasping her hair at the nape of her chain-draped neck.

  Excalibur had its own VCR. They watched a videotape of Andrew Dice Clay, George’s favorite comedian. George had a big, echoing laugh. Cesar remembers thinking, “This is some rich shit going on.” He was surprised at how friendly George was. “I didn’t think he’d be talking to me, you know, cuz he was rich.” Coco thought that Boy George’s laughter sounded fake.

  The Mount Airy Lodge appeared ahead, a palace tucked in the snow. It was the largest resort in the Poconos. The limousine pulled up to the entrance and Coco stepped out onto a red carpet. Through the lobby’s smoky windows, she could see a chandelier. As George registered, Coco and Cesar and Jessica stood in the lobby and watched the guests pass. People chatted, skis balanced on their shoulders, and strolled nonchalantly in boots, as though the Mount Airy Lodge were something that happened every day. Boy George handed Cesar his own set of keys. Like the limo, the room had a name—the Crystal Palace Suite.

  Everything was color-coordinated in gold and powder blue. There was a TV, a stereo, a fireplace with a log that never stopped burning. The red Jacuzzi in the huge bathroom was shaped like a heart. The bed was round and there were mirrors on the ceiling and the walls. The living room opened onto a miniature swimming pool. The room was so interesting, Coco thought, that you’d never need the street. And even if they did go outside, no one was looking to fight.

  George equipped the group with skis, boots, and poles, and then he and Cesar deposited the girls on the bunny slope and took off. Coco was nervous with excitement; this was the first time she and Jessica had been able to hang out. Jessica was warm and open, and she didn’t mind looking dumb. A T-bar dragged them up through swarming crowds of little kids. Neither girl could ski more than three feet without falling down. Their legs split. Their knees caved in. They laughed so hard they could not stand up. Coco understood why Cesar was so attached to his sister.

  As the girls waited in line for the T-bar, they spotted George and Cesar swooping down an advanced trail. Cesar had never skied before, but he was athletically gifted. The girls screamed and waved frantically, but the boys didn’t even turn to look. Boy George admired Cesar’s guts; the kid was willing to try everything. And he was bold with Boy George as well: at one point, Cesar told George, “If you gonna be with my sister, you got to accept her kids.”

  “What’s between me and your sister is between me and your sister,” George answered, but he gave the kid credit for having heart. Jessica and Coco, soaked and cold, waited for the boys indoors.

  Coco would remember this afternoon as one of her happiest: the breeziness of the families in their bright jackets with matching hats and gloves; the confident little boy who actually hovered over them after they’d fallen and politely offered help; the trail of blue blotches that Jessica’s new jeans left in the snow.

  That night, the boys wandered off again. They said they were going to the casino, but Jessica knew they were cruising for girls. She didn’t mind. She and Coco were having their own good time, dipping their legs in the heated swimming pool. Suddenly, the lights went out, and the girls sat in near darkness. Only the underwater spotlights in the pool glowed. A croaky voice broke the silence. It was George pretending to be Jason from the movie Friday the 13th. “We were so scared,” Jessica remembers. “That was when there were things that could scare me.” Boy George tossed Jessica in the water, fully clothed.

  Back in their own Crystal Palace Suite, Coco and Cesar pretended they were on their honeymoon. They made love on the round bed and ordered food and watched TV and made love again in the heart-shaped Jacuzzi and laughed and playfought and never went to sleep. “We broke night,” Coco said. From their bed, they watched the morning brighten.

  Sometimes, in the Bronx, Coco broke night in her bedroom, watching the police conducting surveillance on the roof of the building across the way. Three Cuban brothers ran their drug operation from several of the apartments, and there was always activity. Countless times, Cesar and Rocco broke night on the street. But daybreak in the Poconos was different. They weren’t facing time to kill, or feeling left behind, or stuck. There was nobody out to hurt them, no sad mothers or brothers or sisters to worry about. The Poconos held promises beyond the reach of the usual; they could ski again, or play basketball, or go ice-skating, or ride a snowmobile.

  But the peace was what Cesar cherished most, the respite from acting tough. He later said, “That’s enough to hold a memory in.” That weekend in the Poconos was the only honeymoon Cesar and Coco would ever have, although they would remain in love for many years. They were both fourteen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the early spring of 1989, George installed Jessica in his mother’s old apartment on Morris Avenue. His brother, Enrique, lived there still. That George let Jessica join his family mattered a lot to her. Not long before, she had ordered Milagros to bring her the twins. Now she finally had a home; she even had a brother-in-law, if not quite a husband. She was ready to act like a mother and a wife.

  Milagros was distressed about losing the twins; she had taken care of Brittany and Stephanie for the last two years. The sudden nature of the separation was especially brutal: a friend of Jessica’s had greeted Milagros on the street with a machete, ushered the girls inside the building, and warned Milagros never to visit again. Jessica had refused to come out. Milagros worried that Brittany and Stephanie would feel bewildered and hurt, and that they might not be safe in George’s household, but she saw nowhere to turn for help. She didn’t want to risk angering George. Milagros comforted herself with the thought that the arrangement would never last. In the meantime, she inherited Kevin, the little boy she and her mother used to watch. Kevin’s own mother had been arrested, and BCW, the Bureau of Child Welfare, had come for him; he was headed for foster care unless Milagros took him in.

  George didn’t spend much time in the apartment at Morris, but Jessica and George’s brother hung out. Enrique was working at Fordham University as a security guard. On his way home, he’d call in to see what Jessica needed. She always needed—rice, Burger King for the girls, something to unclog the bathtub.

  “What am I? A home-delivery man?” he would joke.

  Enrique liked Jessica. They laughed over the stupidest things. He wasn’t much of a ladies’ man, so she introduced him to her friends. He also saw how hard she tried to please his brother. Georg
e would call and tell Jessica to prepare dinner, then not show up. He mocked the love notes that she sprayed with perfume and left on top of their satin sheets. He called her stupid and ugly and fat, fat cow, fat bitch, fat fucking dumbo bitch, and ho.

  When George was mean to Jessica, she would sometimes turn her rage and frustration on her little girls, calling them stupid and crackheads, then mocking their tears. “Stupid bitch, what the fuck is your problem,” she would snap. “Turn on the TV!” George berated her for being a rotten mother, but he had even less tolerance for children than she did. Even his jovial paternal moods were mixed with cruelty. He pitted the twins against one another to playfight, which was common—families routinely toughened up their kids this way—but George always crossed the line. He’d force the twins to fight even after they cried—not the early cries of hurt that everyone seemed to ignore, but deep sobs of distress. Once, he tossed Brittany into the bathtub; another time, he folded Stephanie up in the pullout couch.

  Playfights with Jessica soured just as inexplicably. One time, he hit her so hard during a mock wrestle that his hand swelled. “I ain’t gonna wreck myself over this,” he muttered, and swung at her with a stick instead. When Jessica laughed, George went berserk. “Ever since I was little, whenever somebody starts hitting me, I start laughing,” Jessica later said. “And if I laugh, he thinks I’m laughing on him, and he just keeps beating me.”

  George taunted Jessica: she had no place to go, her own family didn’t want her, people hung out with her only because of his money, her mother was a fiend, she’d abandoned her own kids. Jessica comforted herself by taking inventory of what she had: her old hooky partner, Lillian, for one, had been her friend long before Boy George. “I have Lillian,” Jessica repeated to herself like a mantra, as though the assertion of sisterhood defended her against what she feared was true.

  One weekend, unknown to Jessica, George took Lillian to Atlantic City. Then he asked Jessica why she had not spent time with her friend.

  “Lillian was away,” Jessica said.

  “Do you wonder where she was? Your friend?” George grinned. “I just fucked her. Call her up.”

  Lillian denied that she had been with George, until George got on the line and described what she had been wearing when he’d deposited her in front of her mother’s building, just an hour earlier. Lillian hung up. Jessica rushed to Lillian’s, but Lillian had fled. Jessica told Lillian’s boyfriend what had happened, then seduced him, after which she smugly reported her conquest back to George. Predictably, George beat her up, but that time, he did not kick her out. That month at the Morris Avenue apartment was her longest continuous stretch of living with George, which was to Jessica a significant accomplishment. She’d never made it that long with any man. Unfortunately, that April was the same month a federal judge approved a warrant for the FBI to install a wiretap.

  The wiretaps largely documented Jessica’s conversations; George was usually out and about while she spent the better part of her days on the phone, shifting between people on call-waiting. She paged beepers obsessively. She pined for Serena, whom she often didn’t see for weeks, even though she couldn’t handle Serena when she had her for any length of time. Jessica was bored and depressed. Only in those conversations about intrigues and plans, or during the terrified calls placed to girlfriends after George’s beatings, did she sound energized.

  She continued to harass Gladys, the bank teller, with crank calls. She moaned over a girl named Erica whom George had met in Hawaii, a Millie from Puerto Rico, and a local drug-dealing girl named Razor, who drove a Rolls-Royce. But being neglected had some advantages: Jessica kept up with a busy love life of her own. She continued to meet George’s associate Danny. She called Puma, sometimes to see him, but as often to complain about the neglect she suffered from George.

  “Trinket there?” she’d ask.

  “Yeah,” Puma would say. Once he pretended to arrange a drug deal as a cover for their next rendezvous.

  Jessica would pretend that she was sneaking out to see Serena, and Enrique would baby-sit Brittany and Stephanie, unknowingly covering one layer of Jessica’s double lies. Sometimes Jessica didn’t feel like going out, but Enrique insisted; he was extremely attached to the twins.

  Other prospects absorbed George. His heroin supply had returned and Obsession continued to sell well, which made laundering money a priority. He worked with a stockbroker who converted sneaker boxes full of tens and twenties into bonds. George had hired a financial consultant to diversify his business interests, and now he owned shares in a water filtration company and was considering building a strip mall and franchising a fast-food chicken chain. He backed several promising young boxers.

  While 10-4 managed most of the daily business, George attempted to launch several new heroin spots in Manhattan. He set up stores on Fifth Avenue and 105th Street, First Avenue at 115th, and 132nd Street between Madison and Park. None took off. He launched a second brand name, Sledgehammer, but needed another mill so as not to cut into Obsession’s production. “What are you trying to be,” 10-4 asked him, “McDonald’s and Burger King?” George bought cars and shipped some to Puerto Rico. He flew Rascal and Danny and 10-4 to San Juan with suitcases full of cash. He also kept in close touch with Vada, who was in the midst of renovating their country house.

  George had bought the place the year before, for $140,000 in cash. Landscapers dug and raked and planted. Laborers mixed tar for a basketball court. The brass bathroom fixtures were ripped out and replaced with gold plate. George installed a swimming pool with the tiles arranged in his initials above a replica of the Obsession crown. When Fried Rice visited, he was struck by the discrepancy between the opulence of the house and its dirt-poor surroundings: “The inside didn’t match the outside,” he said. “It was like wearing a twenty-dollar dress with a three-hundred-dollar bra.”

  Jessica envied Vada’s position, but Vada rarely came to the Bronx and their interactions were limited to the telephone. Vada would say, “Little Miss Wicked Witch of the East, put my husband on.” Jessica had to show Vada respect, but she managed to get her digs in. She’d hold out the receiver as though it were infected and coo, “Your girl, honey,” and delicately pass the phone to George. She denied Vada the honor of calling her his wife.

  George finally proposed to Jessica that spring, in part to make up for taking another girl to Hawaii on Jessica’s birthday; he gave her money to buy a diamond ring and encouraged her to take a formal portrait, which she did. She wore a corsage, and the photographer superimposed her image inside an enlargement of the ring.

  In late April, Boy George was making arrangements for another shipment of heroin. Rascal called; George was out; Rascal told Jessica to page George’s supplier to relay a new meeting place. Jessica took down the necessary information, but she was less focused on George’s business than his love life. The engagement had done little to allay her fears about the competition:

  Jessica: “No girls are with you, right?”

  Rascal: “Huh?”

  Jessica: “He ain’t with no girl?”

  Rascal: “What?”

  Jessica: “You’se are not with no girls, right?”

  Rascal (sarcastically): “Yeah, with four girls.”

  But Jessica’s brief call to Fried Rice would make her a coconspirator in George’s business. Conspiracy law cast a wide net: technically, a coconspirator could be held liable for the cumulative amount of drugs that passed through a criminal enterprise. Harsh drug laws determined prison sentences by drug weight; unfortunately for Jessica, George was about to make the biggest deal of his life. Five days after the phone call, George and another dealer went in on a deal for thirty-two bricks of premium China white heroin; they paid $1.1 million, cash. Each brick was worth at least $175,000 on the street. The exchange took place at the Whitestone Lanes in Queens. Jessica’s relaying of the message was tape-recorded on the wiretaps.

  10-4 stored fifteen bricks of George’s seventeen-brick share at a stas
h house and brought two to the new mill at 740 243rd Street for processing. The workers had already assembled. George did the honors of the first cut; the potency of the dope made George and 10-4 ill. They’d just opened the mill, and there was no furniture besides the table and chairs. The two men retreated to a back bedroom and lay down on the carpeting, where they slept until 9:00 the next morning. George took food orders for the table and went to the store. While he was gone, Rascal and Danny arrived to make the day’s first batch of deliveries. They were supposed to feed the spots directly, but they’d secretly farmed out the task to Moby. Usually, Moby paged Rascal to confirm the drop-off, but that morning he didn’t. Rascal called Moby’s mother, suspecting something had gone wrong, and it had: Moby had been arrested. Rascal called 10-4, who instructed him to return to the mill.

  By then, the next batch of work was ready. 10-4 told Rascal and Danny to deliver it while he delivered Moby’s bad news to George. Rascal and Danny took a cab. Rascal was so worried about George’s reaction that he didn’t immediately notice the DEA agents who’d just cut them off in a white BMW. There was no time to discard the heroin in the I ♥ NY bag at his feet.

  10-4 remained unaware of the extent of the growing crisis until early the following morning, after he dropped his son off at school. Still in his pajamas, 10-4 called Rascal’s mother from a pay phone: Rascal and Danny had been arrested with over ten thousand Obsession glassines. None of the stores were open for business. 10-4 paged the managers, and none returned his calls. He paged them again. The managers had been arrested, and the pagers had been confiscated and were flashing his code on the desks of the detectives who’d worked the Obsession case for years.