by Bruce Porter
George would drop off half the load at the house, wait until it was in turn unloaded to wholesalers, then demand his fee for the plane trip before delivering the rest—again, holding on to the second half as collateral against their disappearing without paying the freight. When the Colombians showed up with the money and George showed up with the coke, George would bring along a bodyguard. George employed several over the years, but easily the most formidable was Richard Starkland, alias “Bird,” from Natick, Massachusetts. A former air-force ground crewman who saw service in Vietnam, Bird was built like a piece of earth-moving equipment—six feet six inches tall, 260 pounds, with a broad, slightly pitted face and a big bushy beard. A fisherman by trade, Bird got his name several years earlier when he and a confederate were surprised by the game warden while tonging for clams in illegal waters. His pal was caught, but Starkland took off by land and succeeded in outrunning the marshal, even with three bushels of clams slung over his back. “Tell that big bird running over the marshes that he hasn’t seen the last of me,” the marshal told Starkland’s accomplice, and the name stuck. George met Bird in jail in Massachusetts following his early pot bust, and the two became pals. Bird had been arrested down near Yuma, Arizona, in connection with a purchase he’d made of thirty-five hundred pounds of marijuana from the mayor of San Luis, Mexico, right across the border. He carried the whole load on his back, two hundred pounds a trip, through the Colorado River to a location on the U.S. side in the Yuma Desert. He then returned east and paid two gofers from Framingham to go down in a jeep, pick up the pot, and bring it back. “I told them right where it was, that there were only two trees in the state of Arizona, and this was next to one of them, but they still couldn’t find it.” Bird went down and found it himself, unfortunately at the same time as did agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, and so the Bird was in the bag.
For his bodyguard duty he charged George $5,000 an appearance, plus the cost of his hardware, which consisted of a short-barreled .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson State Trooper, and also a Colt .45 automatic—not the erratic army model, but one of the Gold Cup competition series, capable of putting five slugs into a circle the size of a quarter at twenty paces. He’d arm the clip with mercury loads, which were hollow-point bullets bored out and filled with mercury and sealed over with wax. One hit anywhere in the upper body with this mother and half a man’s back would be oozing down the wallpaper. When the Colombians arrived, Bird would monitor their entrance into the apartment and then, while the coke was being inspected and the money counted, stand next to the door, his back to the wall, not say anything, and stare. “They’d feel you out with their eyes, so you’d never want to look down and you’d never want to blink,” he says. Bird made about eight appearances for George, supervising the orderly transference of somewhere in the vicinity of three tons of cocaine and $10 million to $15 million in cash—no problem.
After his last trip for George, Hank and his Dove hired out on another job and disappeared altogether. He gave no warning to George, left his wife and children, just vanished. George figured he either crashed his plane or made cocaine connections on his own and set up another life. With his string of Colombians to satisfy, however, George now needed another pilot, another plane, and another piece of luck. He had a chance meeting with the man who owned the house in Eastham, an Italian contractor named Dino Viprini. Dino dropped by one day because Mirtha had complained that their refrigerator, a brand-new Hotpoint, wasn’t getting cold enough. Dino had never met George before this, but he’d heard stories. “I started talking to this Italian guy,” recalls George. “And he says, ‘Ya know, I know what you’re doin’.’
“‘What are you talking about, What I’m doin’?’
“‘Come on,’ he says, ‘Come on. Guy comes in here, throws money and cash around, pays the rent in cash. You know, I got an airplane. I know some people in Florida, too.’
“I said, ‘Is that right, Dino?’
“And he says, ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ and I said, ‘Let’s talk some more.’”
It turned out that, like Hank, Dino had also been a pot smuggler, bringing tons of it in by boat from Jamaica to the Cordage Pier in Plymouth Harbor, just a few hundred yards from the crowds of tourists who stand around staring at what’s left of Plymouth Rock. Dino told George he knew a wealthy developer in Palm Beach and also a pilot who’d been flying pot into Texas and guns back into South America. Both of these guys were named Ralph—Big Ralph and Little Ralph. Dino said that Big Ralph, the developer, was looking to make a large investment of money and time and effort in the cocaine business. One thing led to another, and soon George was going down to Palm Beach for a visit. “At the time, he was married to a wealthy woman and living in this $5 million estate on the water,” George says. “I’d call his house and his wife would say, ‘Let me see, the Lamborghini’s here, so’s the Ferrari. Let me check with the maid whether he’s at the polo club’—he was a member of the Palm Beach Polo Club—or he’d be hanging out by his stables on the estate.”
Rather than chartering planes, Big Ralph suggested they go in together to buy one of their own and just hire the pilots. They chose a $1.2 million Cessna Conquest, a nine-passenger twin-engine turboprop. By taking out the seats they could fill the cargo area with just over a ton of cocaine. The Conquest had a speed of nearly 400 miles an hour and a range of 2,300 miles, meaning you could fly back from Colombia and go deep into the States without refueling. Because its turbo engines needed less oxygen than those on a straight prop job, the Conquest could fly in thinner atmosphere, up around 30,000 feet, almost beyond the view of groundlings, and its steep climb ratio enabled it to land and take off on the proverbial dime. The plane also had the advantage over a full jet in that its props allowed it to operate in heavy atmosphere as well as thin, so it could get right down on the deck, sneak underneath any radar surveillance, and come nipping into U.S. airspace fifty feet above the wave tops.
In the import company they formed, George was vice president in charge of sales, arranging the trips, ensuring the planes had a load to bring back, collecting payment for the job. The two Ralphs ran the operation itself, hired the pilots, made sure the flights got off the ground on schedule, came back in good order. Operating in such perfect symbiosis, they began flying regularly out of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airfield, and returning to tiny strips in the Everglades, North Florida, Alabama, and the Carolinas. From there they would truck the product back to Miami, where George turned it over to the Colombians. “All of a sudden I didn’t give a shit about Carlos Lehder anymore,” he says. “I was married to the Colombians, and I had the two Ralphs, with all the equipment and wherewithal. I was running with all these people, the flights going in and out. Barry Kane and his little shitbox of an airplane! Doing little piss-ant trips! I wouldn’t even talk about less than 1 million, 2 million, 3 million a run anymore. This was the dream I had had, right here. And it was all happening. What did I care about Carlos now? I was becoming as big a cocaine king as he was.”
* * *
George was acting pretty royally in the consumption category as well, with Mirtha keeping him company most of the way. He’d been using cocaine more or less regularly since late 1976, after the suitcase runs to Antigua, but these days his intake moved toward a level that, had the category existed, might have qualified him for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. When it comes to snorting coke, of course, establishing any level of use as “average” seems a fairly fruitless enterprise, considering how the drug tends to encourage the pursuit of extremes. Nevertheless, as calibrated in several academic studies of the subject, the standard hit for someone characterized as a regular but moderate user is usually figured at a couple of lines, one to a nostril, each line about an eighth of an inch wide by an inch long, containing fifty to a hundred milligrams of cocaine, done two or three times during an evening, maybe once or twice a week. This cocaine would most likely have been cut, so it’s far from pure, not like the stuff to which George had access.
Although snorting is the most socially acceptable form of intake, the nasal membranes offer one of the slower routes to the brain, since the coke must travel all through the secondary circulatory system to get there, arriving badly diluted in the bargain.
Much faster is what Sigmund Freud, Sherlock Holmes, and John Belushi enjoyed doing, which was to dissolve the cocaine in water and shoot up intravenously (Belushi’s fatal shot had a dash of heroin in it, making it what’s known as a speedball). “In my last severe depression I took coca again,” Freud wrote back in 1884, “and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.” Shot directly into a vein, the coke takes just two minutes to impress itself on the brain cells, and maintains its effect for ten or fifteen minutes. In solution form, the coke contains more wallop than when snorted, and can create sensations that, as Freud observed when he stayed up one night monitoring the habit of a friend, proved to be more than mildly disconcerting. The friend, whose name was von Fleischl, had been trying to cure his morphine habit with cocaine. One night he suffered a paranoid reaction and, with Freud at his side, began hallucinating that monsters were trying to get at him and insects were gnawing at his skin. More or less promptly after that, Freud decided he’d better knock it off.
The fastest route to a high, one that didn’t make its appearance in the United States until around 1986, and then mostly in cities on the East Coast, is to cook up the cocaine into crack and smoke it in a little pipe. The kernel of crack doesn’t stay lit very well, so you have to keep firing it up with a butane lighter, hence the telltale burn scar on the outer edge of a crack addict’s thumb. After a hit on the crack pipe, the rush comes on in only ten seconds and envelops the mind with the intensity of a fierce squall at sea. Three or four minutes later, it tails off, vanishing as rapidly as it appeared, to be replaced by a sharp psychological crash and an agonizing hunger for more.
When snorted, the only way George did it, coke takes a little longer to produce an effect, four to five minutes from nose to neuron. But the euphoria lasts longer, from fifteen minutes to half an hour, at which point the good feelings inevitably start turning sour and the high takes a downhill slide, reaching its half-life—the point when the half drug has been eliminated from the body—in forty-five minutes to an hour after the hit. That’s when you want to check into the coatroom or the john to do it again; and this goes on maybe five times a night, so that you can knock off a fifth of a gram, half a gram if you’re a fairly heavy user, or a whole gram if you’re near to going over the edge. When the crash would come for George, the feelings he missed most were the sense of possessing total control over his environment, of having a heightened sensitivity to things—“when you’re having a conversation with someone and you know what they’re going to say before they say it”—feeling magnificently superior to the other people in the room, of being a superman, a person whom no one can touch and no one can bring down.
By his own account, between 1978 and 1980, his years of heaviest use, George averaged about five grams a day, between 100 and 150 lines, five thousand milligrams. This was his maintenance dose. Some days he’d be up to ten, even twelve or fifteen grams, and he recalls on at least one occasion making a whole ounce—twenty-eight grams—disappear in a period of eighteen hours. “I just seemed to have this tremendous capacity for coke,” he says. “I never met anyone who could snort more coke at a sitting than I could. You put ten grams in front of me, and I could go through that stuff in ten minutes. One of the Colombians, Victor, would come up to Eastham and we’d do two or three grams and he’d have his head in the toilet. I’d do it with Mr. T, and after nine or ten lines he wouldn’t know where he was.”
After a while, snorting lines or doing little coke spoons got in the way of George’s travel schedule—he was always on airplanes or in cars, going or coming—so he took to filling up a Tylenol bottle with a few ounces, which he would pop into his shirt pocket. When he wanted a hit, he’d uncap it and insert a straw, not even taking the bottle out of his pocket, and a constant flow of coke would be vacuumed into his nose. Mirtha recalls that at parties in Miami with the Colombians, “the coke would be out on the table on a silver platter and the men would be doing these little lines, maybe taking just a hit with their spoons. George would measure out a line twelve inches long, run up the whole thing with his nose, and in one hit it would all be gone, like that.” The Colombians would say that George didn’t do your normal lines, he did boulevards. “Mr. I-95,” they called him, in reference to the endless string of white lines that mark the lanes on the interstate.
Averaging 5 grams a day, throwing in a few extra for the binges, this added up to somewhere around 6,000 grams, or 13.2 pounds of 100 percent pure cocaine that he visited on his brain cells from 1978 to the end of 1980. Cut and sold on the street, the amount would have cost close to $2 million. But the financial consequences of his habit paled alongside what it did to his personality and the general pace of his life.
The effect cocaine has on the brain is essentially to make the billions of neurons “talk” to each other, and in turn send out messages to the various parts of the body telling them how to act and feel. A brain cell, cell 1, say, normally communicates in an orderly fashion by firing off a neurotransmitter containing its message into the space between cell 1 and cell 2, known as the synapse. There the message from cell 1 is picked up by cell 2 through its receptor, whereupon cell 1 terminates the transmission by cleaning the remains of the neurotransmitter out of the synaptic space and getting off the line, as it were. It does this by employing a mechanism known as “reuptake.” The conversation having stopped, cell 2 can react to the message without getting confused by any static residue. One of the most important effects of cocaine is to cause the neurons to fire off their neurotransmitters into the synaptic space, willy-nilly, shooting out one impulse after the other and creating a lot of general chatter in the head. Another thing it does is to block the reuptake mechanism, which prevents cell 1 from clearing its former message out of the synaptic space before issuing a new one. This means that for the duration cocaine is present in the brain the cells never stop talking, the general effect of which is like a party telephone line with billions of customers, all blabbing at once, and no one will shut up, and you have to do what everyone says, and do it now.
Among the messages that come across loud and clear is the one that gears up the body to cope with an emergency—adrenaline shoots into the system, the pupils dilate, and the heart rate accelerates, pumping blood to the muscles. The senses go on high alert, the need for sleep and food gets suppressed, the energy level soars. For the same reason the Indians in the Andes could run twice as far when they chewed coca leaves, George Jung could stay up for four and five days at a time with no sleep, talking incessantly, making deals, doing business, fast-forwarding his life in general until it resembled the action in single-reel film from the 1920s. This was especially evident to anyone having the misfortune of being present when he was behind the wheel of a car. Once, when he was driving a Colombian visitor from the house at Eastham to the airport in Hyannis, George informed his alarmed passenger that he’d drop him off at the rotary by the air terminal, but that he was in too big a hurry to stop the car. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m really rushed, I haven’t got the time to stop, but I’ll slow down a little. You’ll just have to jump.’ It took two times going around that rotary, but he did it.” As a driver, George had been a public menace ever since his teenage days, but on coke he gave “speed demon” a new dimension of meaning. After midnight one night, trying to get to the Cape to supervise a money delivery, he drove his Thunderbird from the center of Boston to the Sagamore Bridge, fifty-four miles, in the space of twenty-five minutes, and this included negotiating two cloverleafs.
Coke also intruded into most aspects of George’s home life at Eastham, where Mirtha would try to keep up with George, at least part of the way; Clarie would sometimes wake u
p wondering why her mother was running the vacuum cleaner around at three or four in the morning. George liked to take Clarie off to her fourth-grade class at the Eastham elementary school, and on more than one occasion he ended up in some confrontation with a teacher or the principal, on whom George would unload the brunt of his own teaching philosophy from the pimp classes at Danbury. “Going to school in the car, I’d be having a little pick-me-up out of the Tylenol bottle, and Clarie would ask what I was doing. ‘It’s my medicine, Clarie. The doctors say I have to have this all the time.’” Arriving at the school at 8:00 A.M., he’d storm in with his sunglasses on, a silk scarf, leather jacket, his Porsche burbling to itself outside in a no-parking spot, whereupon he would discharge himself of some opinions to anyone in sight, then tear off. “I remember Clarie looking at me once and saying, ‘Why can’t you just be like the rest of the dads?’ I knew she was mortified a lot, but I couldn’t stop.”
That summer, however, he decided abruptly that maybe he’d been doing too much coke after all and resolved to tail off some on the grammage. The occasion came six days before his thirty-sixth birthday, on the same day his child was born, when George suffered a heart attack. He’d already experienced some physical consequences from the drug, one of them a subspecies of cocaine psychosis that had to do with what the medical books call “tactile hallucinations”—thinking things are crawling on your skin. This comes about because the same neurotransmitters that fool you into believing you’re physically invincible, sexually irresistible, and intellectually formidable, not to mention the life of the party, can also cause you to lose touch with reality in negative ways as well. You begin to suffer symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, thinking people are after you, that there’s stuff on you that shouldn’t be there. What George felt was an unbearable burning sensation in his feet. He thought his soles were peeling off, that he’d been walking on a bed of coals, like some Indian fakir, only not because he wanted to. A doctor he saw couldn’t figure it out, probably because George neglected to tell him about his coke habit. Walking being too painful, George stayed in bed, and he also stopped snorting coke, since getting high while lying on your back isn’t much fun. Abstinence, it turned out, was the cure, and eventually the sensation went away.