by Bill Mason
I found out from Bill Welling that my name and photograph had been circulated to every police precinct in Cleveland, so there was no hope of unloading the Blair House goods with Blute Tomba. I was lucky enough that I hadn’t been caught yet just going to twenty-four-hour grocery stores in the middle of the night. The second night I was in Cleveland, Welling picked up some pizza and a couple of six-packs and came by the apartment. I told him of my predicament and asked him to come with me to off-load the jewels.
“Where are you thinking?” he asked around a mouthful of pepperoni and cheese. I started ticking down some cities where I knew fences, and he stopped me when I hit Atlanta. “I got some business in Atlanta.”
I told him that was good, because I’d probably get the best deal there. Neither of us saw any reason to mention that it was close to Florida and my family.
“You’re probably not gonna get the same deal as you would from Blute,” he said, “but . . .”
But it was a lot safer.
Later that night we went down to the garage and removed a few panels from the van and stashed all the jewels. The next day it was back on the road again and off to Georgia.
When we arrived in Atlanta, we checked in to a motel, then I called my contact and left a phone number for him to get back to me. He’d call back when it was safe, and that could be that same afternoon or not for a few days. With nothing to do for at least a few hours, Welling suggested we go to dinner.
“Did you know Carl Coppola had a restaurant here?” I asked him.
“The smuggler from Fort Lauderdale? I didn’t know that!”
Carl had funneled much of his marijuana-smuggling profits into the She strip club and a string of Jilly’s rib restaurants, and spent a lot of time in one fancy Jilly’s northeast of the city on Roswell Road in Sandy Springs. We went out there and it was like old home week. You’d have thought we were all long-lost brothers or something, the way we carried on. A common affinity—we were all crooks—and a lot of alcohol will do that.
We were all crooks, yes, but some of us were much bigger crooks than others. It was probably just as well that at the time, I didn’t know much about who Carl really was, or I might have picked another joint to hang out in. It would only be a few years later that he would become the subject of a federal trial that blew the lid off a vast empire rivaling anything that another Coppola—Francis Ford—had put up on the screen in his two Godfather movies, except for the fact that it was a good deal less lovable.
Joey Cam was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and spent money lavishly on people he liked. Curly-headed and of medium weight and build, he was a gentle Italian whose only expression seemed to be a pleasant smile. Carl, on the other hand, was thin and wiry and mean as a snake, although he was always nice to Welling and me.
There were two others I hadn’t met before. One was Alex Biscuiti, a henchman of Carl’s, with a disposition that made Carl look like a choirboy. Biscuiti supposedly lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, but was always with Carl. The other was a guy named Gary Pierce.
I checked in with the motel periodically, but there were no calls, so we hung out with Carl and his friends. After a big dinner we gravitated toward the bar and started doing tequila shooters and bullshitting one another about what we’d been up to. Talk among this crowd inevitably turned to drug smuggling. Carl and Joey commanded a lot of respect in that circle; they’d been at it for years and had boatloads (almost literally) of money to show for it. Gary Pierce was an up-and-comer in the field. When he saw how affectionately Carl treated Welling and me, he must have thought it a good idea to be nice as well and invited us to his farm about twenty miles outside Atlanta. We went the next day. It was a huge spread and seemed an unnaturally bucolic place for a career criminal to be spending his time. He introduced us to his family, and the whole thing looked like something right out of The Waltons.
When we got back to the motel, there was a phone message waiting.
“You’re pulling my leg,” Welling said as he slowed the van at my direction and angled for the curb. A few feet away was one of the most prestigious jewelry stores in Atlanta. Welling had heard of the place even back in Ohio. “This is the fence?”
I don’t know why he should have been surprised; after all, Blute Tomba’s was a pretty upscale shop, too. But it was nothing like this. The store looked like one the queen of England would be comfortable in.
The jeweler greeted me warmly, although he called me by a different name. I introduced Welling, then the jeweler held out a hand toward an interior doorway and said, “Shall we?”
His eyes grew wide as I laid the stuff out on a felt-covered counter. You’d think a guy would withhold his admiration prior to negotiating, but we were all professionals and there was no sense trying to downplay the quality of what I’d brought. The jeweler had obviously been through similar scenes countless times and knew the cardinal rule: Don’t ask where anything came from.
“How come you didn’t break this one down?” he said as he picked up a diamond-encrusted bracelet and checked it out with his loupe.
“Didn’t look special,” I answered.
“Well, it is,” he said, then handed me another loupe. I examined the bracelet as he described what to look for.
“All those small diamonds,” he said, “they’re not just chips, the kind of stuff you sprinkle on for show.” He used a miniature screwdriver to point some of them out. “Each one is beautifully cut, and they’re all the same shape. Hell of a lot of labor went into this thing.” He paused as I verified what he was telling me, then said, “Damned shame, too.”
I knew right away what he meant. That kind of workmanship made this a dangerous piece to handle, because of its uniqueness. However, once those tiny diamonds were torn off the bracelet, their individual values wouldn’t begin to approach what the unified piece would have been worth. The value was in the matched set of stones, and once that was broken up, all that was left was the worth of the separate diamonds. But nothing was worth getting caught.
I nodded and handed the bracelet back. “Would it help if I told you it came from over a thousand miles away?”
“Love to help you out, but no.” He offered to let me hold it back from the rest of the stuff, but that would be more trouble than it was worth, and too risky. I told him to give me one price for the whole package. Apart from not having recognized the true value of that one piece—you never stop learning—my estimate was pretty close to the mark. The jeweler made an offer that was about 25 percent less than what I’d come up with, so I knew that after some bargaining I’d be very close. Since I hadn’t known the true value of the bracelet and couldn’t have gotten it anyway, I was pretty happy about that and was upbeat during the subsequent “hondling,” which was generously soaked with shots of schnapps provided by the jeweler. When it was all over, we agreed that he’d bring the cash to our hotel room at eleven o’clock the next morning.
“You want me to hold these now?” he asked.
It wasn’t as silly as it sounds. He was a well-established guy with a legitimate store of many years’ standing, so I knew he couldn’t easily run away. He was also a veteran fence with a thriving business and wasn’t about to wreck all of that just to rip off one customer. In any event, a fence’s cut is so big, there’s not much incentive to steal from customers.
But I told him I’d take the stuff with me anyway. That was mostly to make sure he didn’t get skittish and cause delays. It was also in case something happened on my end and I had to bolt before the meeting. He understood and took no offense.
Out in the car Welling said, “Just curious: What if he’d come in fifty G’s less? Would you’ve walked?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. We both knew I needed the cash and wasn’t in much of a negotiating position. “Yeah,” I finally said, and he nodded approvingly. You can’t show weakness or desperation to a fence. It takes years to build a reputation as someone who won’t be trifled with, but only minutes to wreck it
. Whatever straits I might have been in at the time, it wasn’t bad enough to compromise any future dealings.
We went to Jilly’s again that night. Buoyed by the thought that I’d soon be rid of the hot jewels I’d been carrying and would have liquid cash instead, I partied even harder than usual, and Welling followed suit. The next morning we awoke barely twenty minutes before the jeweler came by the hotel. There was so much stuff and so much cash and we were so bleary-eyed that it took us half an hour to go through it all and make sure we were squared away properly. As soon as the jeweler was gone, Welling blew out a long breath, leaned back on his chair and picked up the phone.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Why don’t we just order breakfast from room service?” he said, waving the phone around.
“We’re checking out,” I told him, and about fifteen minutes later we were out of that hotel and on our way to another one across town. No matter whom you were dealing with, you never knew where or when a double cross was coming.
That night we were back at Jilly’s. Now that we’d visited with Gary Pierce and his family, it was like we’d known one another for ten years. Carl seemed pleased, and sometime during the postdinner festivities at the bar, he took Welling and me off to a quiet table in the back.
“Not sure what you guys are doing down here,” he said, then put up his hands. “And I don’t really give a shit. But if you got some time on your hands, you interested in a little work?”
Carl knew about my flight from Florida and probably assumed I could use some money. Even though I had plenty after fencing the Blair House goods, I had no idea how long it was going to last and whether more would be available. If I started running low and things got too hot for me to dip into my various caches of loot, I could find myself in a serious bind. “What’d you have in mind?” I asked.
However subtly, I’d just crossed some kind of a line. When you asked a guy like Carl what the deal was—and it was undoubtedly going to involve drugs—it was very difficult to turn it down once he’d laid it out. Welling knew all of that but stayed quiet and went along with me.
“Not much,” Carl said. “I got a big load of weed coming into a little airport outside the city. I need help moving it to Birmingham. Got a buyer all ready.”
Carl wanted Welling and me to help off-load the bales from the plane into a truck, then run lookout vehicles as Carl and Alex drove the truck to Alabama. Welling would be in a rental car about two miles behind, looking for any police that came onto the road behind the truck. I’d be in the lead in my van, about two miles up ahead, looking for cops as well as for open weigh stations. All three vehicles would be in constant radio communication.
“You’d also be backup,” Carl threw in somewhat casually, “until I get my money from the buyer.” He would supply the weaponry, machine guns known as Mac-10s. They were capable of firing sixteen hundred rounds per minute, and he was especially proud to tell us that not only did he have silencers for them, but they were a two-stage type that had been outlawed and were near impossible to get anymore. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I knew the Mac-10 was a weapon that could take out a herd of elephants. These guys didn’t kid around.
“For a night’s work and a two-hundred-mile ride,” Carl concluded, “you each get fifty grand.”
The deal had every element I hated in a score: drugs, weapons, partners and somebody else calling the shots. “Sounds good to me,” I said, and looked at Welling.
“When do we do it?” he asked.
As I said, I hadn’t really been entirely aware of the extent of Carl Coppola’s dealings when I was hanging around with him in both Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta. I knew he was a pretty heavy-hitting and successful drug smuggler, but I didn’t know how heavy. Turned out he was one of the major distributors running cocaine from the southeast to New York. I learned that fact shortly after the Jilly’s restaurants in Marietta and Sandy Springs were confiscated by the federal government in 1986, along with $3.3 million of Carl’s money, all as part of his arrest and indictment on a variety of charges that included racketeering and murder.
The next morning I gave Welling thirty thousand dollars for his help and backup with the fence, and drove him to the airport for his flight back to Cleveland. When I was alone again, I wanted nothing more than to head south to be with my wife and kids. But I was still a fugitive on the run, still driving the Ford van a smuggler had left in our rental house in Lighthouse Point, its panels stuffed with cash, and I couldn’t go to Florida safely anymore. All that money didn’t take away the pain one bit.
The deal with Carl was that I would stay in Atlanta and that Welling would be on the first flight from Cleveland as soon as I called him and reported that the load was on its way in. It sounded easy, but staying in Atlanta was awful for me. All I really had to occupy me was lying low, and that’s not exactly the same as keeping busy. I moved into a motel after Welling left, spent half an hour getting familiar with the layout, then parked myself in front of the television. Everybody I knew was busy during the day. Whether what they were doing was important or not was beside the point, the point being that they were doing something and I wasn’t. I found myself more and more looking forward to going to Jilly’s at night, hanging with the boys and getting piss drunk, all the while ignoring the risk of that kind of exposure. New faces were constantly drifting in and out; one I’d have particular reason to recall was a fellow named Daniel Forgione, Joey Cam’s father-in-law. Later on I’d also meet Tommy Papanier, one of Carl’s bodyguards.
Meanwhile, after a few days Carl still had nothing definitive to say about the load coming in, and I was starting to get a little steamed. When you hang around all day with nothing to do, it’s easy to work yourself into a lather. Gary Pierce seemed to sense this and started confiding to me about some things he was trying to get going. At first I listened politely, but the more days that passed without anything happening with Carl’s deal, the more attention I paid. Pierce seemed to pick up on that and gradually shifted into trying to get me to take part. I was vulnerable to suggestion and he was very convincing.
After two weeks I’d had about enough of hanging around. I told Carl I was going back to Cleveland. “If it happens,” I said, “we can be here in ten hours.”
“Sure,” he said, as though he’d expected it.
I didn’t want to leave him any numbers, so I suggested an arrangement in which I’d call a pay phone in front of Jilly’s every night at a certain hour.
He nodded, then said, “But talk to Pierce before you go.”
“About what?”
“About he wants to talk to you. So do it.”
It was about two A.M. at Jilly’s. Pierce was three sheets to the wind but seemed to sober up a little when I asked him why Carl wanted me to speak to him. “I’m out of here in the morning,” I told him.
“The deal I been telling you about,” he said. “I need two hundred large to get it going. Carl and Joey are in for twenty-five each, and you and that other guy from Cleveland can come in for the same. Carl says it’s okay. Your back end is two hundred and fifty grand, you and your buddy each.”
Carl hadn’t said a word to me about this, and I realized he was letting Welling and me in as some kind of compensation for the other deal, which apparently had fallen through. But I was too ticked off and drunk to make a decision on the spot, and told Pierce I’d let him know.
“I’m doing you a favor, Mason,” he said. “Stuffing free money in your pockets. Let me know tomorrow.”
I went back to the motel, got a few hours’ sleep, then packed up and headed for Cleveland in the van. After I drove around there for a while to make sure I wasn’t being followed, I went to Welling’s place and told him about the deal.
“Never done a drug deal before,” he said. “Except that thing with Carl that didn’t happen.”
I could tell he was trying to get me to make the decision for both of us. I think he wanted me to talk him into it, since it wa
s pretty obvious that I wanted to go for it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have brought it up. That probably surprised him, but it shouldn’t have. As much as I didn’t like anything to do with drugs, the fact is that at that moment I was more of a hard-core criminal than I’d ever been. Before the troubles in Florida, I was just a neighborhood guy with a penchant for stealing jewelry once in a while. But now I was a fugitive from the law. My successful property business was a memory, as was my respectability. I was separated from my home and family, and I’d been hanging out with nothing but nasty crooks for weeks, listening to their endless bullshit and getting drawn deeper and deeper into the way they viewed the world. I was in no frame of mind to reject turning $25,000 into $250,000, nor was I about to help Welling see both sides of the proposition equally.
“Hardly anybody ever gets caught,” I told him, and it was true. For every mule, peddler or middleman who got busted, thousands didn’t. It wasn’t just the absurd amounts of money that attracted people to the trade; it was the surprisingly small probability of getting arrested. You couldn’t throw a rock in South Florida without hitting somebody who was somehow involved in drug trafficking.
If there was any single factor that triggered alarm bells in my head, it was that I would be working with partners, a violation of one of my most basic principles. But I was no longer operating from the cool distance of my former rationality. I was angry at the world, I was living in constant fear of discovery and I was bored. Offhand I can’t think of a more lethal combination.
Welling, ready to gamble nearly everything I’d paid him for helping me fence the Blair House goods, gave me $25,000 in cash, and I drove back to Atlanta. I got in late at night, went straight to Jilly’s and handed $50,000 to Pierce. After that, there really wasn’t anything for me to do but wait and stay in touch. Welling and I had no major operational responsibilities; we were simply “investors” who’d put up some front-end money, and all we would really need to do is help if there were any last-minute snafus, so we had to stay in Atlanta until the deal was done.