by Bruce Porter
George would perk up, though, when talk turned to the subject of Nietzsche. “I’d talk for hours to him about Nietzsche,” says Beth, who last saw George in 1976 and has since moved her family from the Cape to Los Angeles. “Nietzsche argued that a person is a whole thing, consisting of light and dark images. If you try eliminating the dark ones, how do you know that you might not also be eliminating something that’s light, too? They’re intertwined. George was very enchanted with that part of it, about the Damons and Angels. It seemed to provide a perfect rationale for the things he did. ‘They’re both in there, inside me,’ he’d say. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. And they’re in you, too. I’ll show you.’ And he’d go right to where your devils were and command them to rise. If he said, ‘Rise,’ they lived. If you were the slightest bit greedy, he had you in the palm of his hand. That was George Jung. That was the secret of his success. I found that out very painfully.”
* * *
As George had foreseen only too well back in Danbury, it didn’t take long before life with his parents became unendurable. Over supper at night, his mother always maneuvered the talk to her favorite topic, how George had ruined his life, and theirs too, while he was at it. “You’re thirty-three years old and you’re a bum,” was her main theme. “You’re a common criminal. You’ve been in prison. You’ve disgraced us with the neighbors. We can’t lift up our heads. You’ve thrown your life away. You’ve never been any good. You can’t hold a decent job.” George couldn’t get away from it by moving out, because that would get him in trouble with the parole office. Malcolm MacGregor, Mike Grable, and Barry Damon were all married and most raising children—there was nothing in their lives he could identify with. He also gave a wide berth to the big colonial at the bottom of the hill, where his high school sweetheart, Gerry Lee, now lived with her husband, John Hollander, who’d played end on the football team. They had two kids now, and a big yard with nice woods in the back. George felt like an invisible man, thrust backward into a former life but lacking the ability to connect with anyone who lived there. He snuck around the town, not wanting to be seen. “Here I’d been up in the hills with Manuel and the Indians, running free for years, making more money than anyone I ever knew, leading my own life. Suddenly there I am with no car, living with my parents, going by their rules, sleeping in the bedroom where I was a little boy, and them yelling at me, even Fred started doing it. ‘I don’t want to catch you going down to the bottom of the hill and start making any trouble,’ he said.”
George busied himself reshingling his parents’ house and duly broached the fishing idea to his parole officer in Boston, a young woman named Jo-Anne Carr, who’d visit the house regularly to check on his progress. “My mother and Jo-Anne got along real well. It was, ‘Oh, Jo-Anne, darling, come on in and have some cake and coffee.’ She was a little lame for a parole officer, naïve to the whole thing, and young. Kind of cute face, but heavy in the legs. I used to play with her—give her a hug. ‘You’re not bad-looking, you know. Maybe we could go out sometime.’ I don’t think she got asked out on many dates. ‘Oh, George, we’re not supposed to do that,’ she’d say.”
At Danbury, George had hoped to do his temporary fishing stint with his friend Arthur Davey. Arthur had a magic touch when it came to putting his boat right where the fish were. One time out on the Georges Bank he landed such a huge catch that he ran out of space in the hold and ordered the crew out of their bunks so he could fill them up with haddock and cod. Arthur wanted George to come out with him, but their parole officers nixed the arrangement on the grounds that two ex-convicts couldn’t be going into business together.
George had more than enough money—$50,000 in hundreds stashed in a safe-deposit box in the Rockland Trust Company in Weymouth. It was all that remained of the quarter of a million or so from his smuggling days, most of which he’d blown in the last six months before the FBI caught him. He’d taken one of his girlfriends on a tour of first-class hotels in Santa Fe, Mammoth Lakes, and other parts of the West. What with the champagne-and-caviar breakfasts and the sprees at clothing stores, $200,000 of it disappeared with remarkable speed. He couldn’t touch the remaining money unless he could show he’d earned it from some honest endeavor. Clam digging at Wessagussett Beach wouldn’t quite fill the bill. As it was, his guilty plea left him owing the IRS $286,000 in special taxes the government imposed on large marijuana seizures. So as long as George continued in the pose of a law-abiding member of society, the fifty long ones wouldn’t do him much good.
In regard to his problem with the IRS, George sought the help of Fat Harry, who on his release from Danbury went back to running the book on the South Shore and living with his wife and mother-in-law in their neatly kept house near a cemetery just outside of Boston. Harry advised him to go down to the Federal Building in Boston and see a certain lady named Mrs. O’Toole. “She brought me up as a kid,” he said. “Get a dozen roses and I’ll call and tell her you’re coming down. She’ll take care of it.” George did, and Mrs. O’Toole proved to be an old fan of Harry’s. “He’s a bad boy sometimes, but I love him anyway,” she said. “He told me all about you, and we can just eliminate this because if you sign a pauper’s oath that you don’t have any money, I can take care of it.” So one minute George owed the federal government $286,000, and the next, with the stroke of a pen, he didn’t owe it anything at all.
He turned now to establishing himself in the fishing business. The Sad-Eyed Lady put up ten thousand in cash from her divorce settlement and signed a bank note for thirty thousand more, which was enough to purchase a slightly leaky forest-green thirty-eight-foot dragger out of Plymouth Harbor, which George christened the Hunter. The vessel was too small to make the seventy-mile trip out to the rich fishing grounds of the Georges Banks, where the seas could get pretty rough in sudden bad weather. On the other hand, it was shorter than the sixty-foot length that would have required George to hire a captain with a master’s license from the Coast Guard. To take out the Hunter he had only to know how to read a compass. But there were several catches. When Beth agreed to put up the money, it was with the understanding that George was going into the fishing business for real, to make money at it. To do that he had to work hard, meaning the boat had to put out to fish every day, weather permitting. He didn’t tell Beth, but George didn’t quite see the venture that way. He viewed the vessel as a sort of Potemkin village for Jo-Anne Carr to inspect. He was also silently hoping the boat would put her in mind to reduce the number of months he’d have to spend on parole.
To keep the boat going out every day, George hired a captain, a guy he knew named Gordon, whom George had found selling used cars on the Lincoln-Mercury lot in Quincy but who harbored great ambitions of making it in the fishing business. George took on another acquaintance, named Peter, as a deck hand. Peter was an airplane pilot who happened to be visiting from Los Angeles, having just jumped bond on a three-year sentence for marijuana smuggling in California. He knew all about the dry lake beds. George wanted him close at hand—not just for net hauling. Beth complained at first about why they needed to pay an extra hand—it meant less money all around, she said. But George’s persuasive charm had not been diminished at Danbury. “I don’t remember what reason he gave,” she says, “but one of the things about George was he could get anybody to do anything he wanted. I never saw so much power in a person, so much charisma. He had such great charm, perfect manners. He’d talk to the waitress or someone in a bookstore, anyone, and he could transform them, bring joy into their lives. They were beaming when he left.”
Whatever his talents might have won for George in some other field, they certainly availed him of very little in his fishing enterprise, where he was dogged by bad luck and inexperience. Not far into the venture, he and his crew snagged a sunken wreck of another fishing boat and tore their net all to hell, which cost them several days in port. They were hunting in largely depleted waters, netting only five hundred to a thousand pounds’ worth a day, which ad
ded up to only three hundred dollars a week apiece, even going out all the time. That winter of 1975–76 it stormed constantly, and got so cold that Plymouth Harbor froze over for the first time in local memory. Fishing in the freezing weather was about the least amount of fun George had ever experienced. After taking in the net on a big reel, the catch would be dumped on the deck, to be gutted and sorted in the howling wind, with sleet or snow icing up the deck. They wore insulated boots and gloves, but water seeped in and soon numbed up their fingers and toes. The boat would be pitching 20 or 30 degrees. Fall over the side now, and someone had to do quick work to save you from a watery death. It got so miserable that Peter finally made the decision to return to California, do his prison time, and get on with his life; at least he’d be warm. This meant George had to go out on every trip or leave the boat idle, which would bring both Beth and Jo-Anne down on his neck.
Then one foggy day the engine failed as the boat was coming through the Cape Cod Canal, and the current took them in toward the rocks. George radioed for help, but the Coast Guard rescue ship passed right by without seeing them. George became so apoplectic shouting into the transmitter—We’re over here, you fucking assholes!—that the commander in Hyannis later called him in to account for his breach of radio etiquette. Just before disaster struck, the engine somehow restarted, and they got the boat safely back to port. Subsequent breakdowns, however, so debilitated their fishing effort that, in the end, George let the repo people from the bank simply come and tow the Hunter away, to sell it for whatever they could recoup. Beth’s ten thousand dollars went down the drain, along with what remained of her faith in George as a business partner. Shortly after that, word also leaked back to her about some of the things going on between George and her daughter, Dulcinea, the little session with the art critique not having been the last of it. George wasn’t completely surprised, therefore, when one day in mid-February of 1976 the Sad-Eyed Lady ordered him to clear the hell out. When he arrived at her house, she was standing in the doorway. “She was shrieking, ‘You son of a bitch. I’ve put a curse on you that’s going to last the rest of your miserable life and destroy you.’”
All this sudden misfortune might have weighed heavier on George’s mind had a telegram he’d been waiting for not arrived at his parents’ house shortly after the rupture with Beth. It was from Colombia, the city of Medellín. WEATHER BEAUTIFUL. PLEASE COME DOWN, it read. There was a telephone number he was supposed to call. And it was signed: YOUR FRIEND, CARLOS.
* * *
For all his bravado back in Danbury, the bragging about his big contacts, George harbored some doubts as to how he was really going to move a load of coke. Who wanted it? Where were they? During a three-day furlough he’d taken toward the end of his prison term, George had called up Richard Barile at the Tonsorial Parlor in Manhattan Beach to discuss the potential of the cocaine market in Los Angeles. Richard said he’d like to hear more about what George had in mind but remained a little vague about the specifics. “He said it was going on big out there, but he couldn’t quote any prices, just that if I came out, it could happen. I was just a lousy marijuana smuggler. I don’t think he took me really seriously.”
On the Cape there seemed to be hardly any demand at all. What cocaine you could get was of such poor quality, cut so often, that the preferred drug for people in the euphoria market seemed to be methamphetamine, or speed—especially in the form that Beth’s son, Nick, was concocting in the basement. This was “crystal meth,” later known as “ice,” a smokable crystalline form of methamphetamine that produces a high of several hours’ duration; it is also highly addictive. One day the previous fall Beth had asked George to deliver a batch of Nick’s product to a guy who’d be waiting in a car down the street from the house in Dennis. The man turned out to be a gaunt, furtive-looking character in his late twenties, with deep-socketed, penetrating eyes, who seemed as jumpy as a blue jay. Obviously he was on the stuff himself, George thought. From the way he darted glances around the landscape, you could also spot him as a drug dealer from a few hundred yards off. George produced the crystal and the guy turned over a bag containing fifteen thousand dollars in cash. He went by the name of “Mr. T,” and he was the son of a fairly prosperous Portuguese fisherman. George noted down his phone number, thinking Mr. T might prove useful later on.
During his furlough, George had also called Manuel down in Mazatlán to talk about cocaine, but his former colleague proved far from encouraging. He said, “You’re getting into a dangerous game, Jorge, with some dangerous fucking people. Not like it is in the marijuana business, where we are all brothers. Why do we not continue the business we were doing? We’ll always be safe, and have our friendship and enough money. The road you want to head down leads to self-destruction and evil.” George dismissed the warning as exaggeration; Manuel always did tend to overdramatize things.
With limited phone lines available between the United States and Colombia, it took several frustrating hours for George to get through to Carlos. The number turned out to be that of Autos Lehder, the family car business located in downtown Medellín, and it was Guillermo, Carlos’s brother, who finally answered. Carlos had gone out, he said. George should call back the next day. “When Carlos and I finally connected, we talked in a very general way, no specifics. He said he wanted me to come to Medellín to talk about how things should proceed, that everything down there was just as we had discussed. I said give me some time to make arrangements and I’d let him know when I was coming.”
Only after hanging up did George think that it probably wouldn’t be smart to go down himself, at least not on this trip. He was still on probation and supposed to be staying at home. Getting a false passport was no problem, but what if something happened down there, some kind of delay, and Jo-Anne—her visits always came on short notice—chose that moment to drop by? It seemed safer to send down an emissary, he thought, a go-between. The person who came to mind was Frank Shea, his old childhood friend and contact at Amherst. He’d also done some flying for George out of Mazatlán. Frank was back in Weymouth now, working at the Fore River Shipyard. He’d never been arrested, wasn’t on any customs checklist. Frank seemed ideal for the mission. As a pilot, he had the knowledge to check out possible airfields and discuss arrangements for getting planes loaded up. “Frank was also the kind of guy who’d do something, but then go away from it,” George says. “And I didn’t want to involve any more people in this than I had to.”
It turned out Frank had just been laid off from work at the shipyard and quickly agreed to go. George gave him money for tickets, and in mid-March he was in Colombia, meeting with Carlos at a ranch the family owned a little way out of town. He called George the next day. “Frank was basically ecstatic over the phone. He liked Carlos very much, and he was looking at the coke, saying something to the effect that we’ve really hit the jackpot this time. I’d really put it together.”
Whereas George, however, had anticipated that the flights would start right away, the Colombians seemed to want to move a little more slowly. “I had sent Frank down there to start the airplane trips, only Carlos switched it all around. They had no concept of airplane flights or major drug loads.” Over the telephone the conversation had to be circumspect, but it boiled down to the fact that the Colombians also didn’t quite trust this gringo friend of Carlos’s yet. To front out a load of kilos, send them up to someone they’d never heard of, had no control over, maybe couldn’t even find if something went wrong, that was far too big a gamble. So the deal, Frank said, was to try a little bit at first, and see where that goes. Then maybe they’d talk about airplanes.
Frank told George to call Carlos back the next day and settle the details directly with him. This time George went to a pay phone. It cost eighty quarters to talk for three minutes to Carlos in Medellín. George was soon keeping a little Tupperware container under the seat of his car filled with $100 in coins—and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the successor to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics a
nd Dangerous Drugs, was soon pegging cocaine smugglers by how low their pants were riding, or the little pocketbooks or satchels they’d have sitting by the pay phone. Carlos said the plan was to smuggle in fifteen kilos. Although certainly not a planeload, fifteen kilos rated as a significant amount of cocaine back in 1976, $750,000 worth, if it could be moved for, say, $50,000 apiece. If, George was thinking.
Carlos told George to go out and buy fifteen hard-shell suitcases, Samsonites, seven blue and eight red, one for each kilo. Then find two people to act as couriers, to board a plane with half the suitcases and fly down to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, one of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, property of Great Britain. It was a popular resort, with flights going in and out all the time. The Colombians Carlos was dealing with had made several runs through Antigua and knew the lay of the land there. George was instructed to have the couriers check into the hotel, where Carlos and Frank and an associate of Carlos’s named Cesar Toban would also be staying. After the couriers arrived, Carlos would come to their room and replace the suitcases taken on the flight down with ones he’d brought from Medellín. The new suitcases would also be blue and red Samsonites, identical in every respect, except that the metal stripping around the edge that held in the plastic inner linings on each side would have been removed and the linings lifted out. Underneath would be laid out a thin layer of cocaine, a half kilo on each side, one per suitcase. Carlos wanted to hide only a small amount of cocaine in each, so that with the plastic liner fitted back in place and the metal stripping refastened with rivets, it would be difficult, even taking out all the clothes, to see or feel that there was anything secreted between the two layers. Of course, the false-bottom trick was not exactly a startlingly new ploy; it was well known to customs agents. The trip required a certain amount of performance art to attract the inspector’s attention away from the luggage. The couriers should be women, well-tanned, pretty, vacationing-schoolteacher types, with a lot of personality. Their luggage should be packed to reflect the great week they’d had, filled with resort clothes and souvenirs from the islands. Most important, the couriers should be people who in no way felt frightened or uneasy about what they were doing. Customs agents possessed deers’ noses when it came to sniffing out a guilty conscience.