Doctor Dealer (26 page)

Marcia was right. It was definitely time to cool it. But first he would have to recover that half million dollars.

In early 1980, Larry’s childhood friend from Haverhill, his old drinking and doping buddy, Ricky Baratt, was back living at home in Plaistow, New Hampshire. Still nervous and chubby and insecure, Ricky had done a lot of drifting in the years since he and Larry had spent aimless summer evenings roaming the back roads of Haverhill getting high and drinking beer. He had gotten thrown out of Lawrenceville School for stealing a keg of beer from the back porch of The Rusty Scupper, a bar and restaurant in Princeton. He had tried to study music seriously, playing the saxophone at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but instead of studying and going to class he got stoned or drunk every day and just sat around jamming with friends. Marijuana made Ricky lazy and apathetic, but he craved it.

After dropping out of Berklee and hanging around home awhile, he had made another big effort to straighten out, enrolling at the University of New Hampshire and signing up for a rigorous regimen of advanced math and science courses. Ricky felt that the sheer size of the challenge might force him to rise to the occasion. Instead, he fell behind so quickly that he spent months just sitting in class listening blankly, having done no reading, taking no notes, just going through the motions, listening to lectures he didn’t understand. Finally he flunked out. He was an embarrassment to his successful family, although his father the doctor was ever-patient and encouraging.

To escape his failures and start fresh, Ricky loaded up his belongings in the old family Volvo his father had given him and, towing an old Volkswagen he meant to repair and sell, drove to New Orleans, where he worked fixing cars and playing his saxophone in a band. That lasted until the band broke up. Through a series of part-time jobs, Ricky drank so much he began to scare himself. Back to Plaistow he drove, still towing the Volkswagen, the black Volvo a few years more battered, and moved back in with his parents. His father found him work as a bookkeeper for his uncle, and Ricky applied for a job at the Western Electric plant in North Andover. A friend of his parents’ helped find Ricky a job at the huge plant, which had just been taken over by AT&T. He ran a giant copy machine for six months, earning ten thousand dollars a year, and took an in-house electronics course. In the fall of 1980 he passed a test and qualified for an upgrade. By late spring, Ricky was a quality control inspector, testing electronic components and making eighteen thousand a year. He bought himself a Harley motorcycle and began, for the first time in years, to feel self-sufficient and whole.

That was when he ran into Larry again. His old friend was visiting his parents in Haverhill, and Larry stopped over to say hello, driving a brand-new black Volvo. It was the same kind of car Ricky drove, only five years and some sixty thousand miles newer. Ricky’s parents had heard stories about Larry from the Lavins. Justin and Pauline were so proud of their youngest son. He was doing well in dental school and had somehow managed to make money playing the stock market. He had bought into a record company and a sports arena in Philadelphia . . . he was into so many different things, just exactly the way he had been as a boy! Only, who would have ever thought he would amount to so much, so fast!

It was the same old story for Ricky, only more severe. He was the weak, undisciplined, troubled one; Larry was the dynamic achiever, so outgoing, so pleasant, so successful. Only, just as he had as a teen, Ricky knew things about Larry that the adults didn’t know.

On that trip, Larry sold Ricky three grams of cocaine for $225.

“I could have bought another new Volvo with what I made selling this just last night,” Larry said.

They got to talking, and Ricky said he knew someone, a friend who owned a bar, who would probably be willing to buy up to an ounce at a time.

“No problem,” said Larry.

Before Larry left for Philadelphia, he agreed to send Ricky an ounce of cocaine, to get him started.

A Federal Express truck pulled up in front of the house two days later. Inside the package were several cassette tape cases, each filled with tiny, one-gram vials of cocaine—twenty-eight of them. Ricky took the vials to a friend who he thought might be interested, but his friend did not know how to test the drug and distrusted the quality of coke from an unknown source packaged in such an unorthodox way. So Ricky was stuck with trying to sell the grams one by one, which made him nervous because that meant he had to deal with twenty-eight different people. Soon that number was reduced because Ricky had started snorting the supply, which meant there was even more pressure to make the sales. Now he owed Larry more than sixteen hundred dollars. He sold some of the grams, snorted most of them, and ended up sending Larry several hundred dollars from his own meager savings.

He confessed his loss to Larry, and told him it would have worked out better if the coke had arrived in one bag.

“No problem,” said Larry.

The next day another Federal Express truck pulled up in front of the house. This time the delivery man brought a box to the door. Inside were not one, but
eight
one-ounce glass vials of cocaine! Ricky did some quick figuring. It was worth $16,800! Ricky was dumbfounded, and excited. Along with the shipment came instructions on how to demonstrate the product’s quality.

He took one of the ounces over to his friend at the bar and immediately made a sale—earning back the several hundred he had lost. But over the next few weeks, Ricky snorted much of the remaining shipment and had trouble collecting money from friends to whom he had fronted the stuff. No problem, Larry just shipped him more. Larry joked that he liked his people to be in debt; it forced them to keep coming back. Following Larry’s lead, Ricky fronted more ounces to friends and kept a running record of what he was owed. Soon larger shipments were arriving via Larry’s own couriers, first Glen Fuller, later a mutual local acquaintance named Brian Riley, who was working for Larry’s sister—Larry was also sending regular
shipments to his brother Rusty and to Jill. Ricky would arrange his schedule at AT&T to make sure he was home when a delivery was due. Within a matter of months, Ricky was carrying thousands of dollars in his pockets, great wads of tens and twenties that he would spend time exchanging at banks for neat stacks of hundreds. With that much money in his pocket, he couldn’t resist buying drinks for his friends, eating out . . . pissing it away. He paid off his Harley and replaced the old Volvo with a sleek new Mazda Rx-7. He moved out of his parents’ house into an expensive apartment in Boston where he had his own garage that opened when he inserted a plastic card in a slot out front.

But it was all an illusion. Right from the beginning, Ricky lacked whatever facility Larry possessed for coming out ahead. His debit column started larger than his assets column and just grew continually. Between bad debts and his own growing cocaine habit, he kept falling farther and farther behind, $5,000 . . . $10,000 . . . $15,000 . . . $20,000. . . . Ricky would lie awake nights worrying how he was ever going to recover all that he owed, imagining that Philadelphia hoods were going to show up at his door and break his legs. Unable to sleep, he would snort more cocaine, which would elevate his spirits temporarily but leave him still deeper in debt and even more frightened. He clung to his job at AT&T as the one real positive thing in his life. He just banked that paycheck every week. That was his money, which he kept separate from the cocaine dealings. He worried most that eventually Larry would want that.

These fears were all in Ricky’s head, because Larry never even seemed concerned. The most he would do, over the phone, was get Ricky to run down his list of customers and check to make sure that the deliveries were being distributed and followed up on regularly. Larry seemed mostly concerned that Ricky wasn’t making any money for himself, not that he was late in making payments. After talking to Larry, Ricky would feel better for a few days. He would follow up on Larry’s suggestions; he would move the next shipment of cocaine, collect some money, and send it to Philly. But then a week would go by and the fears would sprout up again. The debt kept mounting . . . $25,000 . . . $30,000.

Larry would say, “No problem.” He was just trying to do an old friend a favor, cut him in.

Ricky kept doing more and more cocaine. His debt kept mounting. His nightmares grew worse.

Back in Philadelphia, Ricky’s plight was nothing more than a few petty entries on a long balance sheet. Business continued to grow unabated after Glen Fuller’s bust in New Jersey.

No one was less surprised than big Willie Harcourt when Glen got busted. Willie felt vindicated. He had taken a substantial cut in earnings by refusing to have anything to do with Glen. Now Larry needed him again, adding more weight to the bags he was regularly delivering north for David and Ken. It had been nearly a year since he started making runs to Florida, and he knew what was going on down there better than Larry, Ken, David, or anyone else in Philadelphia.

So it bugged him to take orders from these dental students. Larry or Ken would get a long-distance call from someone like Miguel, who would say that he had a large quantity for sale if they could get someone down to Fort Lauderdale quickly. So they would call Willie and ask him to drop everything.

Once, earlier in the year, he had just come back from California after a week on the road. He had been at his girlfriend’s apartment only a half hour when Larry called.

“I need you to head to Miami. Miguel’s got something.”

“Larry. It’s nine-thirty at night in Miami. Can’t it wait until morning? I’ll fly down first thing.”

“No. Miguel has to see you tonight or the kilos are going to be sold. And he says he’s got one that’s really spectacular.”

“Larry, he’s full of shit. He’s lying to you.”

Larry, in that maddeningly cheerful way of his, just said, “Willie, get on your traveling shoes.”

So Willie had to say goodbye to his girlfriend and hustle out to Larry’s house in Willings Alley. There wasn’t enough time to pack the money, so they just stuffed bundles in Willie’s jacket and cowboy boots and pants pockets. Larry had called and asked the airline to hold the plane, and Willie arrived on the concourse at a dead run. As he was getting off the plane in Miami, the bundles of money were evident in all his pockets. As he stood in the aisle, waiting for the passengers to file off the plane, a voice behind him said, “I don’t know about all you, but I’m following the big guy!”

And there was laughter all the way to the last seat.

What made such matters worse was that Willie knew Miguel was a mess. The Cuban was wasted by Quaaludes and in over his head dealing. His phone calls to Philly were just desperate pleas for more cash. He would tell Larry he had something hot and Larry would jump. Willie would hustle down to Florida with mounds of money, only to discover that Miguel had no cocaine, or had stuff with too much cut to buy. There would be an ugly scene, with Miguel first threatening, then pleading. Willie would end up sitting on half a million dollars in cash in a hotel room for three days because he refused
to turn over the cash until Miguel came up with quality cocaine. But no matter how many times this happened, he could never get the boys in Philly to listen to him. David had developed a “Little Napoleon” complex, barking his orders, insisting that Willie stay up all night on a break after having been on the road for nearly thirty hours with the delivery.

All through 1980, primarily through Willie’s labors, the business had a constant supply of quality cocaine. His only break in the tiresome cycle of plane flights with money, long drives with cocaine, came when Larry’s house was searched and everyone decided to let things cool off. They all agreed to just lie low for a few weeks.

But before two days went by, David was on the phone.

“I want you to go down and just get one,” he said.

“No,” Willie said, perturbed. “Things are hot right now. I’ve been in and out of that airport a million times, and if they know anything about Larry they know about us. Let’s just stop for a week or two. What’s the problem?”

“Larry’s not going to be happy about this,” said David.

They argued, and finally Ackerman made it an order. If Willie wanted to keep his job, he had to go.

“There’s a million people who are dying to do what you’re doing,” David said.

Willie capitulated. His intuition told him that this was going to be it. He flew down and bought the kilo. Used to carrying up to six kilos at a time on airplanes, Willie had become a skilled packager. Working with a big satchel, he wrapped the kilo in baking soda and taped it, then wrapped a pair of jeans around it. He put towels on the bottom of the bag, put the jeans on top of the towels, and then laid a couple of layers of towels on top of that. He threw in more clothing on top of the towels, and then scattered items to distract the person monitoring the X-ray screen: cowboy boots, a hair dryer, a tennis racket, a big bottle of mouthwash, things that made a strong visible image so that the security guard spent the few seconds the bag was on the screen identifying very commonplace objects and ignoring the obscure mass in the middle. It was a tested technique.

What Willie hadn’t noticed was a newspaper article in the
Miami Herald
about a rash of hijacking attempts by terrorists who filled mouthwash bottles with gasoline, then, on the plane, threw the fuel on a seat and threatened to ignite it. At the airport he put the bag on the X-ray machine, passed through the metal detector, and watched the woman monitor the screen as his bag passed through. A state trooper stood behind her.

“Put the bag through again,” she said.

That had never happened before. Willie picked up the bag, walked
around, and set it on the moving surface again. The woman watched it pass through again, and said, “Bring me the bag.”

Willie felt like running. He picked up his bag and set it on a table beside the X-ray machine.

“I’m going to search your bag,” she said. “Do you have any objections?” The trooper hovered over her shoulder.