Blow

by Bruce Porter

  I was the one who had the cocaine. There was no getting it except from me. If I didn’t like you, then I’d stop supplying you and I’d give it to the guy you were selling it to. Pretty soon he’d be selling to you and your customers. So all of a sudden, instead of being King Shit, you’re a piece of shit. At one time I could make you and break you.

  —RICHARD BARILE, LOS ANGELES COCAINE DEALER

  THE YEAR 1977 PROVED NOTABLE FOR SEVERAL REASONS in addition to George’s arrival as a key player in the cocaine business. Elvis Presley, age forty-two, died of heart failure while sitting on the toilet at Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tennessee. Gary Gilmore was executed in Salt Lake City, Utah, after urging the firing squad, “Let’s do it.” The police tracked down David Berkowitz, the “Son-of-Sam” killer, at his home in Yonkers, New York. “Well, you’ve got me,” he told them. Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever rated as the big movies that year, with “Roots” breaking all viewing records on TV. And President Jimmy Carter, sworn into office in January, was urging Americans to cut down on their use of gasoline and pledged his administration to respond to the energy crisis with the “moral equivalent of war.”

  Talking to Carlos over the telephone, George detected a clear note of relief in his voice after he heard that the load had been sold and the money was safe and sound. George told him he’d decided the split would be $37,000 per kilo for Carlos and the Colombians, which came out to $1.85 million, with George taking $500,000 for himself, for all the worrying and schlepping he’d done. Carlos seemed more than agreeable, and they arranged to meet at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, where Carlos and Jemel were staying, to transfer the proceeds. By the time George arrived at the hotel, Carlos had regained his old cockiness. Far from apologizing for the jeopardy he’d put everyone in, he tossed it off as a splendid adventure.

  He told Geroge that after leaving Courtney and the car, Carlos had skirted the customs checkpoint and was waiting in the trees just off the road about a half mile south of the border to be picked up. When Courtney failed to show, and then when the noise of baying hounds reached his ears, Carlos guessed what had happened and ran back into the forest, trying to make his way south while staying parallel with the road so as not to become lost. By now the short northern day had given way to night, and it grew much colder, the snow falling heavily, which was bad enough for Carlos but which also hampered the search party and reduced the dogs’ ability to follow his scent. Pretty soon the barking receded and then died out, and he was alone in the forest. For hours, it seemed to him, Carlos stumbled blindly through the snow, falling into bogs, the tree branches tearing at his pants and overcoat. He could no longer detect any feeling in his feet. Lacking shelter or any means of lighting a fire, he began seriously to wonder whether he’d survive the night. Suddenly he saw a distant light glimmering through the trees, which turned out to be a house alongside the road. Knocking at the door, he encountered an elderly woman. He told her his car had broken down a mile or so back, and asked if he could use her phone to call a cab to take him to the nearest motel. A cab in northern Vermont? At this hour? Not likely, she said. Such a nice young man, why didn’t he stay at her house for the night? She had an extra room. He could dry out his clothes, she’d give him something to eat, and he could sort out things in the morning. Exhausted from his ordeal, Carlos hardly needed persuading. So at about the same time Courtney was being released from custody at the border, phoning his wife to pass on to George the alarming details of what had occurred, Carlos was already tucked into a safe, warm bed, with a bowl of hot soup under his belt and his clothes drying on a radiator. The next day he caught a bus and made his way down to New York City, where he stayed a few days with Jemel and called around to find out what might have happened with George—and, more importantly, the kilos. When no one at Betsy’s house knew where he’d gone, Carlos set out for Weymouth, knowing that he could be in some serious trouble here if he didn’t recover the load.

  For the number of kilos involved, for the rapid turnaround, and for the amount of money he brought back, George’s trip to the West Coast had opened up eyes wide indeed down in Medellín. With one trip he’d found them probably the most important contact they’d had to date, delivered the goods without a hitch, and along with the riches, returned with the message that this was only the beginning, that this friend in L.A. was able to handle all they could ship. And George had also found them Barry Kane, who at that very moment was readying his plane for the task of flying in greater loads. “It was obvious from the way Carlos was acting that suddenly I was the prize,” George says. “They had been dealing mostly with their own people, never with gringos before. They didn’t know things like Hollywood even existed until I came along. Now they started treating me like the golden goose.”

  The Colombians urged George to move down to Miami immediately and wanted to supply him with as much cocaine as they could—by boat, by mules, however they could smuggle it in—and have him transport the loads to his contact on the West Coast on a regular basis. They planned to start shipping in May. George would be paid five to ten thousand dollars for every kilo, and they hoped to be moving between fifty and a hundred kilos every week. Then, by the end of the summer, Kane’s operation would be ready to go.

  Late that April Carlos brought his whole family up to the Cape for a visit—Jemel, his brother Guillermo, and his mother, Señora Rivas, who now needed a cane to get around with. George put them up at Dunfey’s Hotel, the famous Hyannis hostelry, and squired them around for a week to all the sights. They ate at Baxter’s at the steamship landing, where the ferries left for Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, went out to the section of Hyannisport where you could peer over the fence and see some of the houses in the Kennedy compound. They drove to Provincetown, “P-town” to the locals, where George introduced them to the New England variety of lobster, with the claws, showing how to insert a fork into the tail and lever out the whole section in one deft movement. He took them out to Race Point, to look out over the Atlantic Ocean from atop the three-hundred-foot-high bluff he and Malcolm MacGregor used to ride down the face of in an aluminum canoe when they were teenagers. On the trip back he stopped off at Chatham to show them where Barry Kane lived. The Colombians had been a little uneasy about Kane in the beginning, as they were where any gringos were concerned; and here they were trusting someone they’d never dealt with before to take off with ninety-odd million dollars’ worth, retail, of their cocaine and not disappear with it into the wild blue. George had eased their minds on this score by asking Kane to bring him over to his house, show him family photos, snapshots of the people near and dear to him. As they would soon demonstrate to the world, the Colombians had little compunction when it came to dealing harshly with the immediate relatives of those who betrayed them, no matter what the age or sex. Kane’s wife had died, George knew, but he did have his five children, whose pictures George demanded to see; he also made a point of learning the names of the prep schools they attended. “Three hundred kilos was an awful lot of cocaine to trust to a stranger,” says George. “They wanted some kind of hook in him.”

  Predictably, about a week was all Carlos could take of the tourist bit, after which he sent his family back to New York, while he stayed around planning things with George and making more of those damn visits to local airports. After leaving the one in Hyannis, Carlos asked George to drive into Trans-Atlantic Motors, the BMW dealership nearby. He wanted to look over the cars. “We walked in and the sales manager came over thinking we were your typical people just browsing, and asked if he could help us. Carlos pointed to a black one, a 318i, and said he wanted that one, how much was it? They guy said something like eleven thousand, and Carlos pulled this brown paper bag out of his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, and peeled off the money—he must have had fifty or sixty thousand in there—and put the rest back in his pocket. The guy’s teeth almost fell out.” As the manager fell all over himself trying to get the car ready by that afternoon, Carlos asked if there was also a
Datsun dealer in town. Jemel needed a 280Z to drive. George seized him by the arm and took him aside, told him to cool it, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t he ever learn? “I told him, ‘You’re an illegal alien, they’ve got your passport sitting at the border. Don’t you think that son of a bitch is going to remember this day the rest of his life? And remember you, too? I mean, even the Kennedys don’t walk in and do something like that.’”

  Managing to quash at least the Datsun purchase, George took Carlos the following day, their last on the Cape, to look at some summer property for his mother. They found nothing Carlos liked, and after supper they ended the day walking along the beach near the breakwater in Hyannisport, looking out into the blackness of Nantucket Sound. Carlos once again expressed his thanks to George for the way he’d handled the fifty kilos. It would have been his death warrant, for sure, if George had run off with the money, and he admitted now how worried he’d been. He said George had proven to be a true friend, someone Carlos felt he could always trust, and he hoped George felt the same way toward him. “I told him I’d given him my word and that I considered my handshake and my word as a sacred bond of honor,” George recalls. “I said that we were brothers, and would always be brothers and that I would never betray that friendship.”

  After they’d pledged loyalty to each other, Carlos asked George, Oh, by the way, who was this friend in L.A., the one he delivered the coke to, the one they’d be dealing with now for a while? George looked at Carlos and told him no soap. He was sorry, but that was one piece of information, friendship aside, he intended to keep to himself. He hoped he understood. Carlos said yes, he did. He could respect that, he said. No problem.

  * * *

  Although the house at 523 North Lucia Street is only one story high, the people in Redondo Beach have always called it the Castle, because of the fact that it was constructed of stone instead of the usual stucco or wood, and because its peaks and arches make it look like something you’d be more likely to find in a Bavarian forest than in a beach town in Southern California. It was indeed built by a German in the late 1920s, a bootlegger, the story goes. He dug out a secret basement under half the house, accessible through a trap door located inside a closet, and used it for storing the illegal booze he ferried in from rumrunners anchored offshore. The house sits in what’s known as the Tree section of town, a lush residential area on the lee side of the hill that overlooks the ocean. Richard Barile purchased the Castle in 1971 for fifty thousand dollars, putting three thousand down and financing the balance with a G.I. loan. Along with operating the Tonsorial Parlor in neighboring Manhattan Beach, Richard was half owner at the time of a popular restaurant just up the street called the Silo, notable for its interior paneling of old barn siding and its menu featuring expensive French food and wines.

  Richard bought the Castle for the security it afforded him in his third, and most profitable, business, which was drug dealing. The backyard of the Castle, for instance, where George had sat in the hot tub waiting for his money on that first trip, was sealed from peering eyes by the thirty-foot wall of an adjacent apartment building. Across the front ran a wrought-iron fence, laden with blood-red bougainvillea, and at the gate there was a buzzer system. This prevented Detective Fred McKewen, the local narc who fruitlessly dogged Richard’s trail for years, from walking right up to the front door and looking through the window to acquire probable cause to give the place a toss. Photoelectric sensors hidden in the shrubbery detected any movement on the lawn and announced it loudly, both in the house and out on the patio, with blinking lights and a screeching alarm. “No one had any reason to ever be in my yard, and if they were, I’d know about it right away,” says Richard, who at one point augmented the system with a German shepherd attack dog trained to leap out snarling from behind the house every time someone buzzed at the gate. The animal grew so vicious that it attacked Richard once, and he got rid of it.

  Regarding the quality and volume of the product and the way the business ran, Richard divides the history of the Los Angeles cocaine scene into before and after the arrival of George Jung. In the early-to-middle 1970s, as he moved from marijuana into cocaine, Richard had dealt mainly in ounces, not by preference but because of the scarcity of the product. He bought from mules, a little at a time, a pound here and there, adding a pound more of cut to earn a profit. By the time it reached him, the cocaine had already been stepped on, so with Richard’s cut, and subsequent ones added further down the chain, “the stuff hitting the street was pretty beaten up,” he says. It got so bad that on several occasions he recalls selling an ounce of “cocaine” that contained only a gram of pure coke, barely a trace. “In the beginning people out here didn’t know good cocaine from bad anyway, so it wouldn’t matter. They were doing it just as a social thing. Pure cocaine didn’t come around until George and Carlos. And you could instantly tell the difference. This stuff came in a nice solid chunk, right from the factory, direct to you. It had an opalescent tinge to it. It glowed a little, like mother-of-pearl. That’s when it really started to become big.”

  As Detective McKewen can readily testify, Richard ran a nearly seamless enterprise. Each facet, from receiving to storage to cutting to delivery, was intricately thought out, nothing was left vulnerable to chance discovery or detection by the police, even if they found some excuse to pry into his affairs. Richard knew all about McKewen’s trick involving motor-vehicle violations, for instance, and was determined not to give him an edge where that went. “Richard drove a little brown Porsche around town and always made sure his record was clean,” McKewen recalls. “I know that because I followed that car on a lot of nights. And for years and years, I can’t tell you how many law-enforcement officers called me from other jurisdictions and from the feds, and said, ‘What do you know about Richard Barile? We’re working him.’ ‘Good luck,’ I said.”

  Richard’s success as a cocaine dealer came partly from the lessons he learned as point man in a U.S. Marine platoon stationed in the Philippines during the early 1960s. His job had been to help train infantrymen in jungle warfare before they went over to Vietnam to advise the South Vietnamese army. “In the Marine Corps there were two main things—you had to have your own shit together, and you had to be able to count on the other guy. Otherwise you could easily get killed.” The two weeks at a shift he’d spend in the jungle trained him in the little things that could account for the difference between life and death—what all the different noises meant, the way shadows fell that could hide an enemy soldier. Much of his sensitivity to the environment came from watching a wizened old man in his late seventies, a former guerrilla with the HUK, who went out with the group to show them how to get sustenance off the jungle floor. He taught them how to locate snails and pop off the little trap door that hides the meat, how to find where the wild rice was growing and boil it up inside of bamboo shoots. “We’d be going along and suddenly the old man would hear something and stop in his tracks. He’d go, ‘Peep, peeep, peeeeeeeep,’ then walk a little bit and, ‘Peeep, peeeeep,’ then suddenly he’d start running like a son of a bitch and you’d hear a roaring of wings, and he’d grab that sucker with his bare hands—a wild hen—right before it took off.”

  In his own organization Barile became known as “the Little General” for the order he imposed and how quickly he banished people who couldn’t operate up to standard. He regularly swept the cars and houses used by his dealers with electronic debugging devices to make sure their movements weren’t being monitored. He conducted surprise inspection visits to wherever they were cutting the coke before moving it out. “This way you’d find that some guys were real sloppy. The scales would have coke caked on them, the spoons they used they never washed. They’d save the plastic bags, if there was a little bit of coke in there, so if they ran short they could scrape it out to complete an order. ‘Either clean it up or dump it out, screw it,’ I’d tell them. Cops come in and then you don’t have time to wash the spoons or the scale. They find residue, they can make an amb
ient bust. It showed me that somebody wasn’t being professional, and if they weren’t professional, I wouldn’t do business with them.”

  When it came to the police, there were three ways to get arrested in the drug business—by accident, by selling to or buying from an undercover cop, or by getting ratted on from the inside—and Richard went to great lengths to obviate all three possibilities.

  First, he made sure no loose threads hung out for the police to pull on. If workers showed up high or drunk, they were gone. Not only would that screw up their judgment, but in those days a drunk-driving arrest gave the police wide latitude in searching your car and making other intrusions into your life. An expired driver’s license could subject a worker to a visit from Detective McKewen. “If they had parking tickets,” Barile explained, “I’d take them down to court and make sure they paid them.” The same for an expired registration. “Headlights? Taillights? I would tell them that before anyone uses their car for anything, they had to make sure everything was working, everything was legal. I found that these were the things that made all the difference.”

  The real danger was getting caught red-handed, dealing unknowingly—buying or selling—with someone working for the police. On the buying part, he had no fear where George or Carlos were concerned, because if any bust came down on that end, it would most likely happen immediately, at the point the plane landed in the States from Colombia. As most large-scale dealers knew, the DEA maintained a strict bird-in-the-hand policy, one that proved a constant annoyance to the agents themselves. They could not allow a load of drugs, once it entered the country, from moving out on the street—by following a delivery, for instance, from Miami to Los Angeles to try to catch the West Coast members of the ring. The fear in the DEA was the agents could screw up along the way and lose track of the load. In that event, not only would the drugs be out in the population, but the agency would have lost the goods it needed to hang the case on, possibly jeopardizing the whole bust. So it was better to be safe than sorry. “When the cocaine reached L.A., I knew everything was secure up to that point, no cops following it,” Richard says. “My worry was the other end. Busts usually come from the bottom up, not the top down, so you’re not looking at the guy who’s selling it to you. You’re looking at your customers.”