Blow

by Bruce Porter

  By now the word had gotten out to the yachting community in the Bahamas that something nefarious was going on at the cay and to give it a lot of sea room. As George heard about it at the parties, Carlos had turned the place into something out of Ian Fleming, like the sinister island hideout of Dr. No. A boat had been found drifting off its shore with blood splattered all over the cabin but no one on board. Yachtsmen would tell of being swooped down upon by a helicopter as they neared the island, and having someone yell at them over its loudspeaker to clear out fast. Carlos had bought a thirty-seven-foot red racing Scarab capable of doing upward of sixty knots, which his German bodyguards would take out on patrol, waving their guns at sportfishermen that came in too close. A houseboat had been hauled up atop the highest knoll on the island so lookouts could search the horizon for intruders. In one notable incident, the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, an accomplished blue-water sailor, put into the little harbor at Norman Cay to top off his water tanks and was told unceremoniously to beat it. Although he’d failed to buy up every house on the island, Carlos had made good his boast to George and frightened the few private homeowners left into staying away from the place, putting their plans for vacations in the Bahamas on hold for a while. Flights were landing and taking off almost around the clock, and the airstrip was guarded by some twenty Dobermans, which were kept in pens along its fringe, the bodyguards regularly patrolling up and down the lone road in their jeeps. George also heard stories about wild sex parties going on in Carlos’s house, the Volcano. Hookers were imported from Nassau and Freeport to entertain the resident staff, running naked all over, Carlos himself having taken recently to smoking basuco, getting stoned a lot, zoning out on John Lennon’s “Imagine” and “Helter Skelter” by the Beatles. A lot of automatic weapon fire was reported at night, the result of an undisciplined guard force shooting at shadows in the trees.

  Carlos’s success had unhinged George to the degree that he now imagined people were talking about it even if they weren’t, thinking they, too, were about to stab him in the back. So at the parties he’d raise the subject himself; blitzed on coke, he’d grab hold of people to rail on about his old buddy, routinely threatening to kill him, to put out a hit on him and blow the fucker away, the ungrateful little cocksucker. People would try to edge out of the room when he’d get going on this. Among the gatherings ruined by his tirades was a dinner party Mirtha threw in Pompano Beach for their little circle of friends. Martha and Humberto came. The Mejias were there, Arturo and his girlfriend, also a woman in the trade, powerful in her own right, known as the Woman of the Alhajas, or Jewels, for the way she dripped with emeralds and diamonds and gold. And there was Hernando, nicknamed the Old Man, for his seniority in the business. Hernando lived in Hialeah and was known for stashing guns in every room in his house. They’d be stuffed under cushions on the couch, hidden behind the curtains. In his sauna out back he kept a gun in the pocket of his bathrobe, hanging on a hook. The sauna was famous in the Colombian community for the fact that, like roaches in a Roach Motel, certain people had checked into the place but never checked out. “When somebody did anything to Hernando, all he did was invite them over to go into the sauna, and that would be the end of it,” recalls Mirtha. “Give them some coke, turn on the dry heat, and, ‘Boom.’ They’d be done.”

  For her dinner party, Mirtha had her mother get up a big shrimp dish, put fresh roses and white snowballs on the piano. George brought out the Chivas Regal and the Rémy Martin, and Frank Sinatra alternated with Colombian music on the stereo. “We were having cocktails and entertaining like normal human beings, when George says, ‘I think what this party needs is a little livening up. I’m going to bring out the coke.’” Soon the dinner was sitting cold and forgotten on the table, arguments were bursting out. Martha began weeping. Humberto, who couldn’t do much coke without it making him sick, threw up in the Florida room. It was now after midnight, and the men were wondering how they could ditch their wives and go out on the town. “George is now completely out of his mind and starts getting nasty, telling everybody off. ‘When you people want something, it’s Mr. Georgie this, and Mr. Georgie that. You’re all sons of bitches, you know that? You’ve all taken from me,’ and on and on. Pretty soon everyone left, and George left with them. And that was the party.”

  Whether it came from George’s threats getting back to Carlos or from something else he’d done, pretty soon it was obvious that someone wanted to shut George up permanently. First there was the business with the nursemaid Mirtha had hired to stay up in Eastham with the children. One day when he was down in Pompano Beach George got a phone call from the woman saying three Latin-looking guys had shown up at the house looking for him, and she saw they all had guns. He’d have to get a new nursemaid; she quit. After that, there was the warning from Humberto, who said he’d heard that Carlos had become sick of all the mouthing off and that there was talk of a hit having been put out. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but George should watch himself. Which proved to be good advice about a week later, on a day George had driven down to see Humberto in a condo he had in Kendall, south of Miami, and parked his car against a curb outside. When he came out, he found he’d been hemmed in on three sides. At first he thought this was possibly a ploy, to keep him standing there long enough to furnish someone with an easy target. A little VW blocked him in the rear, which he resolved to just push out of the way and get the hell out of there. He got in his car and started the motor, then changed his mind. On second thought, he’d just better run for it. “I don’t know why it was, but this feeling came over me and something said, ‘Get out of this fucking car!’ I leaped out and ran as fast as I could, and about fifty feet away the goddamn thing exploded. I looked back and it was all on fire. People were running over to see what happened.” After he got back to Pompano Beach and collected himself, George figured the device must have been tripped by a timer set to go off a certain number of seconds after he’d opened the door and gotten into the front seat. But however it worked, the explosion finally did it for George. No more talk. Now he definitely had to do something about Carlos.

  Because it would enhance his rep with the Colombians, George determined to do the hit right on Norman Cay. “I wanted to get him where he lived,” he says. “That was the only way to do it, because it would show everybody that, well, Carlos had his bodyguards and everything, but I went right there and took him out in his own backyard.” One day that spring he flew out to the Bahamas to do some research. He learned from contacts in Nassau that the Germans were in the habit of flying in often in the evening to gamble and partake of the nightlife, leaving Carlos out on the island alone, with just a few Colombians to maintain security. Then he chartered a sportfisherman and went out to Norman Cay himself, anchoring about a half mile off the island pretending to fish, watching the routine of the place for a day and into the night. From what he’d seen, George thought the best way was to approach the island in a Zodiac pontoon boat with an outboard motor, land it on the rocky shore near the Volcano, and do it.

  Not alone, of course. As he’d threatened Carlos in their last meeting, George knew there were people in Boston who could help with this kind of operation. To find some, he put in a call to his old pal from Danbury, Fat Harry of the Winter Hill Gang. Harry said he’d bring him up to the auto-body shop in Somerville that served as the gang’s headquarters and introduce him around, let George explain his needs.

  “They had an office in the back of the shop, and I brought along a chart of the island, all the information,” says George. “They told me they’d make the arrangements, that it wouldn’t really be a problem. There were some ex-Vietnam guys, two were Rangers, that’d been in the mob and came back to Boston after the war.” But it wouldn’t be cheap, getting down to the island and all, and also because some of the materiél they needed was expensive. They’d like, for instance, to find some percussion grenades, to throw a little confusion into the island population. It would be handy also if they could get their h
ands on a bazooka, what with the guards running around in the jeep. The price would be $250,000, with $125,000 up front, nonreturnable no matter what happened, and the rest afterward, plus expenses, which might run another $50,000 or $100,000. Fine, George said, and a couple of days later he delivered the down payment. “I also said that if this worked, I’d cut them in on some of the transportation stuff. They seemed to like this. They said they had control of the Norwood airport, and we could land loads there, no problem. Big things could happen. Actually, I wasn’t really going to cut them in on that because I knew they were all fucking cutthroats and I didn’t want to be around them, always watching your back. This mob lawyer friend of mine had told me, ‘George, you’re playing with some really sick, dangerous people here. You can’t trust these kinds of people, ever.’”

  As it turned out, the affair cost him heavily, in other ways as well as financially. Somehow Humberto got wind of the plans for the hit, and George soon received a fairly frantic call to come to his New York apartment to talk. More like listen, really, while Humberto got hysterical. “Everyone was there, including Martha, Mirtha, and Clara Luz, and it went on for hours,” George says. “‘You can’t do this, Georgie. You can’t do this.’ He was pacing up and down the living room, throwing his hands in the air. ‘It’s going to cause big wars in the families. Please don’t! You can have anything you want, all the kilos. I’ll get more people for you.’” Others disagreed. “‘Kill him!’” he recalls one of the women shouting. “‘If you don’t kill him now, it will be too late, and you will be nothing.’

  “And she was right. I knew inside that if I gave in, I was fucked. He’d fucked me over, this Latin kid, and I didn’t do anything about it, like somebody in the school yard who hits you in the face or takes your lunch money and you don’t do anything about it. What are you considered to be? If one guy can do it to you and get away with it, they’ll all do it to you. Then you’re done in crime. So why didn’t I do it? Because Humberto begged me not to. He said they’d all be killed—him, Martha, Mirtha. There’d be great retribution. His family would be wiped out down in Colombia, we’d all get it up here. There would be endless war, and they’d all blame me for being responsible. They didn’t care how I felt. They cared about that Carlos was making money for all of them, and this would fuck up everything big-time.

  “So what could I do? I said, Okay. Fuck it. I’ve got more money than I know what to do with anyway. Why do I need all this? Why put everyone through it? But personally, I felt it would never be the same again.”

  * * *

  In late summer of 1980, nearly a year and a half after he aborted the hit on Carlos—and just as his lawyer friend from Boston had warned him concerning those big parties and his high style of living—George finally succeeded in attracting the attention of the police. Ironically, the situation arose after he’d turned over a new leaf in regard to the spending, toned things down an octave or two. For instance, Mirtha had found another house she liked—a $500,000 modernistic place with an elaborate Japanese garden, also overlooking the water—but George had said no, it was too ostentatious. He cut out the shopping sprees, closed down the candy store in the bureau drawer in the bedroom. The money coming in from the trips he was sending right down to his numbered bank account in Panama, leaving just enough around the house to keep them afloat. “I started making out that I was almost broke, on the edge all the time, so no one would know how much I really had,” he says.

  He also began securing money for the runs, the up-front cash needed for the cars and trucks and manpower, by hitting up outside investors on the Cape and in Boston, rather than raiding his own stash. Many of these individuals were high-living criminal defense attorneys who fed their big spending habits by bankrolling their clients. They’d often cover themselves by drawing up legitimate loan agreements, spelling out how they were lending this money to a client with the understanding it would be used for starting up a wholesale fish business or investing in a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise. How could they possibly know the funds would be spent on smuggling a controlled substance over the border? In addition to putting their own money into cocaine runs, the lawyers would serve as brokers for a deal, pooling together smaller sums from their friends and colleagues—the orthodontist who lived next door, say, who had fifty thousand dollars he could afford to drop on a high-risk venture in hopes of doubling his money overnight. And not just once. Often, George says, the lawyers would insist on bankrolling a series of trips so as to ensure themselves a long-term relationship. “They’d say, ‘I’ll loan you the money, but I want to be in on three trips, do it three times with you. You need me now, but if you’re successful, you won’t need me after the first time. So if I get you this money, I want to be in on two more.’ This was good for me, because having an investor was like insurance money. If something happens and the trip goes down, he knows he’s not going to get anything, because that’s the deal. If it’s successful, I don’t make quite so much, but if it gets busted, I don’t lose anything either.”

  It was a local who got on to George, an Eastham cop named Wynn Deschamps. His father did yard work for Miss Toomey, George’s old high school teacher, who had a summer place there. Deschamps had heard all the talk, starting back in 1979, about the big bashes and the fancy cars that clogged Bayberry Lane, the little dirt road that ran in back of George’s house. It made him wonder how George earned his living. And George himself, through his driving habits, had done little to mask his presence from the police all up and down the Cape—for the number of speeding tickets he’d gotten, the drift turns and the 180s he’d practice in the Porsche out there on Route 6. As with most small police departments, however, the Eastham force had little resources of its own for following up on Deschamps’s suspicions. What they customarily did in these instances was to call for assistance from the Massachusetts State Police, which was why on August 2, 1980, Trooper William G. McGreal latched on to the case of George Jung.

  At the time, the state police had just fifteen officers concentrating on narcotics, only five of whom, like Billy McGreal, worked as undercover specialists. Considering that his normally neat appearance—close-cropped hair, conservative clothes—made him look about two days out of the police academy, he’d taken pains to dress down for the job. He’d grown a scraggly beard, let his hair sprout into a minor Afro, had an ear pierced. He drove around in an old-model Lincoln Continental, maintained in cherry condition—not exactly your run-of-the-mill surveillance vehicle. To further cloud his image, he kept company with a large disheveled German shepherd named Paco. He’d inherited Paco from another undercover cop whose assignment had ended but who couldn’t bring the creature home with him because it struck terror into the heart of his wife’s Chihuahua.

  McGreal had planned to spend that weekend relaxing down on the Cape, at a summer cottage in West Dennis he shared with other guys on the state police force, when he got the call from his boss saying there was an Eastham cop who’d requested a little specialized help, and Billy was the one he wanted to send. His boss said he didn’t expect much to come of it, but he’d appreciate Billy doing this favor because it would help out relations with the locals. Normally the job would have gone to a senior undercover cop named Paul Gregory. But Gregory knew George Jung. He’d played football with him back at Central Junior High School in Weymouth, and he couldn’t be sure that George hadn’t heard he’d gone on to become a trooper. So he passed the case on to Billy. “The boss said Eastham had a guy they wanted us to take a peek at that they thought was up to no good, supposed to be a big drug smuggler from the West Coast,” Billy recalls. “He said, ‘You’re not going to actually meet the guy, just get a six-pack of beer and a newspaper and hang around his beach. Let the locals meet you, jerk them around for a couple of hours, then say until we get an informant on the guy there’s nothing we can do. It’s easy overtime.’”

  After checking in with Deschamps, McGreal drove over to Bayberry Lane, took a cooler of beer out of the car, and made his way
down to the beach, stretched out on a blanket to catch a few rays. It was about one in the afternoon. Two hours passed, during which he’d struck up a conversation with an attractive young woman who had come down to the beach from the house next to the Jungs. “She didn’t know much about this guy, but she was kind of cute, and I’m single, so I’m thinking if I don’t meet this big dope dealer, I’ll at least get a date out of it. While I’m thinking this, suddenly he comes out on his deck at the top of the stairs. I only had a description of him from Eastham. Blond hair, looks like a leftover hippie from California. And I hear this voice, ‘Hey, you! You down there!’ I figure he’s going to chase me off his beach. ‘Hey, do me a favor, will you? Would you pull in my catamaran there? The tide’s coming in, I don’t want it to drift away.’ ‘Hey, sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’”