by Bruce Porter
George had just the person in mind. Several weeks before, in the Riverside Bar in Weymouth, he’d taken up with a very lively, good-looking woman named Betsy. She was twenty-eight and had jet-black hair, electric-blue eyes, and a light complexion—unmistakably Irish. She was also free, not tied down to a job. Her parents had died the year before in a head-on collision at the rotary in Orleans. She’d collected on both insurance policies, coming out with $300,000, a lot of cash then, along with their house in Weymouth, which was located, as it happened, on Whitmans Pond, the old spawning ground for the famous Weymouth herring. And, more to the point, along with her all-American appearance, Betsy was a kleptomaniac, possessed of rock-steady nerves and a brazen self-confidence. “I’ve seen her walk into a jewelry store and just mesmerize them,” George says. “She’d put on a ring or try on a necklace, looking right at the clerk, and then say, ‘Well, I’ll think it over,’ and walk out.”
George broached the subject of the Antigua trip with her the same day he talked to Carlos. Betsy was sitting on a blanket watching her ten-year-old daughter, Lisa, playing softball at school. With her was a friend of Betsy’s named Winny Polly, who by coincidence was also Frank Shea’s girlfriend. George said he had a surprise for them. How would they like to have an all-expenses-paid week’s vacation in Antigua? They could go down, swim, eat, stay in a fancy hotel, have a blast—all on him. All they had to do was bring something back for him, a few suitcases. What was in the suitcases? Betsy wanted to know. “Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing,” George said. “Just drugs.”
As it worked out, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. George drove them to Logan Airport and helped them check the bags through, joking with the clerk about how women could possibly fill up so many suitcases for just a little vacation. Betsy and Winny flew down to Antigua, checked into the hotel, and met Frank and Carlos and his friend Cesar who came from a wealthy Colombian family in the coffee business. A couple of days later they called George to say Antigua was a tropical paradise and they were having a terrific time. They’d been renting catamarans, doing the samba every night. Betsy especially liked Carlos’s friend, Cesar, who was slim, bronzed, so gracious, and a great dancer—Was something going on there? George wondered, but let it pass. Five days later he got a call telling him they were on their way home, and several hours later they showed up at Betsy’s house having taken a bus down from Logan. What about the bags? George asked. Oh, don’t worry, they’re safe, Betsy said. They didn’t want to bring eight pieces of luggage down on the bus, so they’d checked the suitcases into several lockers in the bus terminal in Boston.
The bus terminal in Boston? George nearly hit the roof. “I told them that was an insane fucking thing to do. One thing you never do in the drug business, you never, ever want to lose control. As long as you’re in possession of it, you always know what’s going on. But once you lose sight of it, you don’t know what’s happening. Three or four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine that belongs to someone else, that I could get killed for if it’s lost, and they’ve left it sitting in the fucking bus terminal?! People were always breaking into those things, stealing shit, the police making random checks.”
George took a now-contrite Betsy with him and drove rapidly into Boston to pick up the bags, which were unmolested, it turned out, and brought them back to Betsy’s bedroom. George took out their vacation clothes, and with a screwdriver pried off the rivets and lifted out the liners to see what they’d brought. The cocaine lay in the bottom underneath a layer of shelf paper and stuck down with aluminum duct tape to keep it from shifting position. It was glistening white and flaky, sprinkled with clusters of crystals, or rocks, which signaled a high level of purity. After opening up all the suitcases, George repacked the coke into one-pound packages, wrapped them with duct tape, then slipped them into heavy, waterproof Mylar bags. After dark he took them outside to a vacant lot belonging to the house next door and stashed them inside one of several drainage pipes that lay in the weeds, abandoned there after some construction work. One of the things he’d learned from the jailhouse lawyers at Danbury was to never stash drugs on your own property. That way, if the load is seized, the police will have a hard time proving the stuff belongs to you. The following day, the women flew down to Antigua to pick up the rest.
For his part in arranging the transportation, George was to keep five kilos for himself, to sell for whatever he could get. He would deliver the remaining ten kilos in Boston to Cesar Toban, who would fly up from Colombia, picking up Carlos’s girlfriend on the way, a young Cuban-American from New York City named Jemel Nacel, a student at the College of the City of New York. They would call George to arrange the meeting.
While the girls were still down in Antigua, George put a quarter of an ounce of the cocaine into a plastic bag and drove it to where The Sad-Eyed Lady’s speed dealer, Mr. T, lived in Hyannis. No one was home, so he slipped the bag under the rubber mat by the back door and drove back to Betsy’s house, a place he was now beginning to call home, at last out from under the collective thumb of his parents. That night George phoned him up. “I told him to look under the mat, that he’d find a little present there. See if he liked it and call me back.”
Mr. T had been dealing dope since 1970, after he got out of the U.S. Navy, demobilized with some 500,000 other servicemen into a job market, on the Cape, at least, that was in a state of collapse. “I spent six months on unemployment,” Mr. T recalls, “waiting for jobs in lines two blocks long in the snow and slush in Hyannis, freezing my fucking ass off. So I started dealing dope. I borrowed two hundred dollars from my mother and bought a pound of pot, and made four hundred dollars’ profit and had two ounces to smoke myself. I said, ‘Fuck off, Jack, this is it,’ and that’s how I began.” As a general-assignment drug dealer, never knowing what might come along, Mr. T had all the paraphernalia—the scales, the plastic bags, and also a “hot box,” which was used by the police and dealers alike for testing out the quality of cocaine, along with certain other drugs. By putting a small amount of the cocaine onto a two-inch-square hot plate, then gradually turning up the heat as measured by a thermometer attached to the top of the box, one can find out what the temperature is precisely at the moment the crystal substance on the hot plate begins to melt. Lab-pure cocaine hydrochloride, without a trace of imperfection—something almost impossible to achieve under the conditions in the processing plants in the Colombian jungle—melts at 195 degrees centigrade. The stuff it’s cut with—mannite, quinine, lactose, or Methedrine—all melt at much lower temperatures, from 105 degrees for quinine, for instance, to 166 degrees for mannite. Street coke that’s heavily cut, or stepped-on, in the parlance of the trade, might start melting at temperatures in the low 100s. The high-grade powder registers in the 160s and upper-170s.
Mr. T placed a smidgen of George’s coke on his hot plate and began applying the heat. It got hotter and hotter, and hotter still as the mercury in the glass climbed past 165, past 170, past 175. Jesus! Past 180. Past 185. When the cocaine finally began to dribble off the hot plate and melt away, the thermometer had hit a temperature of 187 degrees.
George got the callback in about fifteen minutes. Mr. T seemed to have difficulty holding on to his cool. “His voice was higher than usual and he said: ‘Holy shit, where’d you get this stuff?’”
“That was when I knew we really had something.”
After Betsy and Winny returned with the rest of the coke, George started fronting his share of the kilos to Mr. T, a kilo at a time. Mr. T put on a little cut, not too much, since they both wanted to market a premium-grade product, then packaged it into one-ounce bags, which he sold to smaller dealers up and down the Cape. As Mr. T got paid, he paid George, at the rate of $47,000 a kilo, more than George had hoped for. George also unloaded a couple of kilos to a dealer in Cambridge named Louis, an Italian leather-goods importer he’d met at Danbury who had customers throughout the Northeast. One way or another, the five kilos vanished in a week, and George
found himself in possession of $235,000 in cash.
While it was a pretty respectable return on a single run, the $235,000 rated as pin money compared to the proceeds that were heading his way in the not-distant future, when so much green would be pouring in that he had to store it in the hot-air ducts in Betsy’s basement, cutting off the heat to parts of the house so as not to singe his liquid assets. Later on the cash would be lining the very walls of his house, dug into the floor of his basement, stuffed into hollowed-out air-conditioning units. Condensed into denominations of fifties and one hundreds, however, the quarter million dollars fit nicely into a compartment at the back of the top dresser drawer in Betsy’s bedroom. It was easier for him to get at that way; he didn’t have to keep people waiting for their money while he excused himself suddenly to go down to check out the boiler. This was also when he fell into a habit that lasted the rest of his cocaine days, of slipping ten grand into the left inside pocket of his jacket whenever he had to leave the house. To buy things, sure, but not only for that. George had found little else that had ever given him a greater sense of comfort or made the world seem more secure and welcoming than just feeling the presence of that packet of bills pressing up next to his heart.
A few days later Jemel and Cesar called from Boston to arrange for delivery of the other ten kilos. George met them for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel. He told them to tell Carlos to keep it coming. It looked as if he could move a lot of the product just on the Cape alone, without even tapping his man in L.A. yet. Then would come the real money storm. They told him Carlos would be in touch, gave him a key to the trunk of their car, and said good-bye. In the parking lot he took two suitcases containing the kilos out of his trunk, put it in theirs, and drove back to Weymouth.
Betsy and Winny received fifteen thousand dollars each for their work. He’d never discussed any money with Frank, but on his return to the States he offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for his part in the transaction. Frank wasn’t very happy with that. Twenty-five seemed pretty mean, he said, considering the remuneration he could just imagine George was allowing himself. George insisted that it was good money for the limited work Frank had done, which amounted to not much more than transmitting a couple of messages, and having a good time in the bargain, all paid for. Frank grumbled more loudly and kept it up, until one day in the car, driving along with George, Winny, Betsy, and Betsy’s Lhasa apso, Toby, Shea began whacking the little dog on the head when it got into a yapping fit. George suddenly blew up. He threatened to beat the shit out of Frank if he touched the goddamn dog once more, then stopped the car and told him to get the fuck out anyway, he was tired of all the bitching about the money. Frank glared at him before he got out and stormed off. The two never saw each other again, which was how George saved twenty-five thousand dollars. But with Frank out of the picture, he felt the urgent need to find a pilot, to stop this penny-ante suitcase stuff and start shifting the enterprise into a higher gear.
* * *
On July Fourth weekend, 1976, the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations were in full throttle, from atop Mars Hill in Maine, the point where the dawn’s early light first graces the American coast, to the town of George, in Washington State, where the locals had baked a sixty-square-foot cherry pie. During the week-long celebration, New York and Boston each played host to the Tall Ships, the fleet of square-riggers that came from around the world to honor the occasion, among them the steel-hulled Christian Radich from Norway, with its figurehead of a woman in a full-length blue dress, and the Sangres II from Portugal, whose sails were emblazoned with the Maltese Cross. Traveling from port to port, the ships cut through the Cape Cod Canal rather than going around the tip at Provincetown, and to watch them sail by, so many yachts and powerboats had jammed into Buzzards Bay that you could have practically walked across the bay going from deck to deck.
One of these pleasure boats was a thirty-three-foot Egg Harbor sportfisherman belonging to a real estate developer who specialized in constructing inexpensive houses known as half-Capes (they had only a sleeping loft upstairs instead of the two bedrooms found in the traditional Cape). A partner of his, Teddy Fields, was also on board that day. So were George and Betsy. Teddy Fields had grown up across the street from George on the Circle in Weymouth. Teddy’s family had money. The sons were sent off to private colleges, and it was in their garage that George first laid eyes on the Porsche. Fields was also one of the few boyhood friends George had kept up with after leaving Weymouth, and he had stayed at Teddy’s house in Cotuit, a little west of Hyannis, on occasions when George was down on the Cape on marijuana business. Flush with proceeds from the recent suitcase trip, George had volunteered to bring along a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon, some iced caviar, and lobsters. Besides helping to honor the country’s birthday, George was there to ask his friend Teddy—since he knew everyone on the Cape—where he might locate a trustworthy pilot.
This was how George came to meet Barry Kane. Kane, a lawyer, was the Chatham town counsel. Prematurely gray, suave-looking, and smooth-mannered, he was sometimes referred to as the Silver Fox. He’d grown up in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston under modest circumstances and had had to borrow money to attend Boston College Law School, from which he graduated in 1958. When he arrived on the Cape three years later with his wife and their first baby, he was fourteen thousand dollars in debt and at night drove a cab in Boston to make ends meet. The next fifteen years saw him prosper from his law practice and from buying and selling real estate during a time of rapid growth in the area. Along with property in Hyannis, West Harwich, and South Yarmouth on the Cape, Kane owned a ski place in Mount Snow, Vermont, a condominium in Nassau in the Bahamas, a Porsche, a Cadillac, and a commodious sailboat. He lived in a rambling white-clapboard Victorian house, circa 1845, on Queen Anne Road, one of the oldest and most exclusive parts of Chatham. Chatham itself was one of the oldest and most exclusive towns on the Cape, its main street lined with sedate shops and outdoor cafés. The men of the town sported blue blazers and yellow trousers, the women wore pastel skirts, clutching tony straw baskets handcrafted on Nantucket at six hundred dollars a pop. Kane’s wife, the daughter of William Moloney, M.D., a professor at the Harvard Medical School, died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1972. Her death, which left Barry with five children to raise, was ruled as accidental by the coroner, but it created a bitter dispute in the family over who was ultimately to blame. At her funeral, according to a real estate developer friend at the time, the two sides of the family glared at each other over the coffin. Dr. Moloney blamed Barry. He said his daughter had died of a broken heart because of Kane’s more or less constant philandering.
In the late 1960s Kane had taken up flying at the little Chatham airport, where he kept a twin-engine Cessna 310. In 1975 he’d upgraded his rating to commercial status, allowing him to carry passengers and cargo, and he regularly ferried his friends and girlfriends down to the Bahamas. The developer friend says Kane spent a lot of time in the Bahamas and would boast about the influential contacts he’d made in the islands. He also talked about the fortunes people there were making in the humming drug trade, whose operators used the islands as a stopping-off point for marijuana and cocaine headed for the United States. “Barry loved money,” the friend says, “and I think he thought there was a lot of money to be made there, if only he could figure a way to break into it.” Kane never told him in so many words that he wanted to run drugs, but there were certain things he’d say. “One time we were on our way down there, flying over Cape Hatteras off North Carolina. He was looking at the air charts, the radar vectors and all, and he said, ‘You know, there’s a gap between the radar rings right here. You could slip in between them, never be detected, and get into the country illegally.’ The other thing, he asked me once was did I know that of all the drugs smuggled into the country and the drug runners operating that only 5 percent of them ever got arrested?”
Barry also appeared to be in a bit of trouble. The very month he met George he was
due up before the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the group that watches over lawyers’ ethics, on a complaint by one of his clients that Kane had fleeced him out of property he’d put up as collateral for a loan. A year later Kane would be publicly censored for the incident. But prior to that, in his testimony before the board in July of 1976, he said his real estate investments were in a precarious state and that his law business had actually lost money in the two preceding years. He could use a piece of change.
Two days after their discussion on the boat, Fields accompanied George to Barry Kane’s law office, located in a shingled cottage on a quiet street on the outskirts of Chatham. “I admit I felt a little uptight about walking into a very prominent lawyer’s office and asking if he wanted to smuggle cocaine,” George says. After the introductions, however, George came directly to the point. “I told him there was an opportunity for him to make several million dollars tax-free. It would involve the use of his airplane. ‘If you’re not interested,’ I said, ‘I’ll stop right here and walk out and not mention it again. We’ll both forget this conversation ever took place.’”
“Don’t leave, I’m interested,” Barry said, hardly waiting for George to finish. “It’s smuggling drugs we’re talking about, right?”