Blow (10 page)

By late in 1967 George had given up the pile-driving business and gone into the pot trade in earnest. On the wholesale market in Manhattan Beach he'd pay sixty dollars for a kilo-size brick, or 2.2 pounds, break it into thirty-five 1-ounce bags, and move those on the street for ten dollars apiece. If he did 10 kilos a month, and performed all the chores himself, George could make a profit of nearly three thousand dollars, this in the days when fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year could support a family of four without too much scrimping. Through the stewardesses he knew and all the other California friends he'd made during the previous two and a half years, George soon found he could sell pot as fast as he could wrap it up and move it out. To expand the business, however, he now had to tie in with bigger suppliers. “The way I saw it,” he says, “being in the drug business was like being an executive in any business: If you wanted to climb the ladder, you sought out people and pursued those who were better and bigger than you were, and you tried to ingratiate yourself. Then you find they're not as big as you thought they were, and so you go beyond them, and before you know it they're working for you. Anyway, that's the way I wanted it to work.”

The person George needed to get friendly with was an ex-marine-turned-hairdresser by the name of Richard Barile, another refugee from the East and the lynchpin of the local drug culture. Only five feet two inches tall, with a receding hairline, Richard had dark eyebrows and a dense black beard that put one in mind of the characters in
Planet of the Apes.
He talked rapidly in a clipped Connecticut accent and avoided eye contact, looking off a lot. Barile was the son of a contractor in Branford, outside New Haven. After leaving the Marine Corps, he'd gotten a job as a conductor on the old New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, which allowed him to take free train trips across the country during his vacations. On one such trip the train eventually stopped at Manhattan Beach, where Barile got off and began looking around for something to do that would keep him in California. Back home an aunt and a brother-in-law were in the beauty-parlor business, so he decided to use his benefits under the G.I. Bill and go to hairdressing school. After eighteen months of perming women's hair at a local shop, he opened up a place of his own two blocks up the hill from the beach, the first unisex hair salon in town. He called it the Tonsorial Parlor.

Trained in the art of layering and shaping women's hair, Barile became a huge hit with the guys in Manhattan Beach, since long hair was fast becoming the style and just about the only way the old-time barbers knew to attack it was to shear it off. He also provided special services to special customers. For the airline pilots he fashioned straight-arrow wigs and tie-up jobs so they could keep their long hair for the beach parties but tuck it under their hats to pass the company's grooming inspection. He did the same for guys in the marijuana trade, who needed to clean up their appearances before going on a business trip south of the border, where the sight of long hair and ponytails registered in the minds of the Federales the same as if they'd had a sign on them saying
ARREST ME
.

For Barile, then, drug smuggling turned out to be a naturally coterminous extension of the hair game—like the old-time coal dealers who in summer got into selling ice—and he designed his shop in a way that seemed to nod approvingly at the outlaw's way of life. Paneled in old barn wood and decorated in a western motif, the walls were hung with portraits of famous bandits—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse and Frank James, John Wesley Hardin. The two cutting rooms at the Tonsorial Parlor were closed off by swinging doors so people in the back could converse without being seen from the street. There was a pool table in the front waiting room and benches out on the sidewalk, both of which invited people to loiter, discuss ideas, make plans.

Pretty soon the activities at the Tonsorial Parlor moved from the talking stage to something more concrete. “At first I'd just be doing people a favor, let them use the telephone, give them a place to hang out, or I'd know someone who wanted to buy some pot and I'd introduce them,” Barile recalls. “Soon friends would be dropping off a couple of kilos of pot, and I'd hold them for them, and they'd sell ounces out of the barbershop. Then if someone needed a pilot or a place to stash something, whatever anyone needed, I had the connections, because through the business I knew everyone and they trusted me. Before I knew it, I was putting all three things together. But I was just doing it to be a good Samaritan, I wasn't making any money. So one day I said, the hell with this, man, I should really get in on the bandwagon here. And I did, and I became very successful at it.”

Hearing the talk on the street, of course, Sergeant McKewen got wind that something was going on with Barile and the Tonsorial Parlor that didn't have to do with hair. But never during that period, nor in the decade following, when Barile would routinely pull off cocaine sales in the millions of dollars, did McKewen get even close to making an arrest. “Everyone knew Richard was involved, but it was tough to make a case on him,” he says. “He was a very brazen guy, but he was clever. He never got caught because he was always careful never to be around where the drugs were. They might have been his drugs, but he wasn't the guy standing next to them if there was ever a bust.”

George first walked into the Tonsorial Parlor for a haircut in August of 1967, and Barile remembers the occasion well. “He was friendly, looked like a Robert Redford dude, hair over the collar but not to the shoulder. ‘Hey, come on, let's take some acid and go down the beach.' That was George. He brought friends around, they'd sit on the bench outside, just hang out. He was very friendly because of course he knew I had the potential to help him out.”

So it was that George started getting his pot supply directly from Barile—not directly, actually, because the way Barile set it up he did everything through other people. He had someone else rent different stash houses for him, and when he heard of a load coming in, twenty-five or fifty kilos, he would arrange to get it delivered to one of his houses. Then, if George wanted five or ten kilos out of that, Richard had someone pick it up from the stash house and meet with George to transfer the goods. With his supply assured, George now wanted to expand his market. He didn't want to keep ouncing the stuff on the street. Not only was it bothersome getting together all those bags, but to maintain his profit level he needed to make a lot of little sales and deal with a lot of potheads—not the most discreet, levelheaded population group. Word of his operation could easily reach the ears of Sergeant McKewen. Wholesaling seemed to be the way to go.

Early in the fall of 1967, fortune struck in the form of George's old friend and classmate at Weymouth High School, Frank Shea. Shea and his girlfriend were on their way back to the University of Massachusetts from summer jobs waiting on tables. Visiting George overnight, he noticed a kilo of grass sitting out in a punch bowl on a sideboard in the living room. It was all broken up, with the junk sifted out so that you could just reach in and make a joint. And the quality struck Frank as better than anything he could get back East. “‘Jesus Christ,' he said, ‘where'd you get this stuff?'” George told him the price and described how easy it was to get good drugs out here. Shea said that back in Amherst, where the market consisted of students from the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, and Amherst—a group of schools known as the Five-College Consortium—pot was selling wholesale for more than three hundred dollars a kilo, six times what Richard Barile charged for it and nearly as much as George was turning it over for in retail. “When I heard that,” George says, “I told Frank, ‘Okay, this is it! We're going into business. Big-time!'”

Which was why it seemed an especially cruel turn that at this juncture George should receive notification from Uncle Sam that for all his country had done for him he now had to return the favor by joining the United States Army. The notice came as a rather abrupt shock, since George had heretofore been classified 4-F, thanks to the injury done to his right knee in a scrimmage just before the Brockton game, when he was creamed by John Hollander. Given the exigencies of the Vietnam War, however, the army had since widened its parameters of acceptance; so George might limp a little, but he was going to have to serve the nation in some capacity. Making the best of a bad situation, he called around and found out that Uncle Jack down in Baton Rouge knew a general in the National Guard who could secure George one of the hard-to-get slots in the California branch of the Guard. In George's eyes, the Guard was punishment enough. “One day I'm stoned on LSD, selling dope, going to the Fillmore, having the time of my life. Then suddenly I'm getting off a bus at Fort Ord, California, and these monkeys are yelling and screaming, ‘Get your fucking ass in line.' And you go inside this building and the next thing, there was no hair.”

George submitted to eight weeks of basic training, then eight more weeks of advanced infantry training, during which he became a squad leader, and was finally mustered out to report once a month to Guard meetings in Pasadena. That would have been the end of it, except that shortly afterward his unit got a call-up notice. Whether in the army or in the Guard, George was going to Vietnam. Clearly the situation now called for some drastic countermeasures. “When I heard we'd been called up, I knew I had to do something quick, so I went to see a friend of mine in San Francisco, a hippie lawyer. He said, ‘All right. Get five pounds of pot. Go to the Holiday Inn and call and tell me what the room is. The police will come over and bust you. I'll make a phone call and get you probation, and they'll kick you out of the army.'” And it all transpired precisely according to plan. Several days after his arrest, George was ordered to come in and see his commanding officer.

“He was sitting there at his desk with a big frown on his face and said, ‘I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm getting rid of you. Here's your papers. It's a general discharge. You've been arrested for drugs, turn your shit in, we don't want anything to do with you, you're a disgrace to the unit.'

“I said, ‘Gimme those papers. I don't have to turn my shit in. I already threw it all away. I'll see you later.' And I left.”

*   *   *

Around this period George had a fortuitous change in girlfriends. At Cisco's one night he met a remarkably beautiful and well-endowed young woman named Annette, who looked like Ali McGraw. She wore loose-fitting chamois vests with no bra, displaying nearly the whole story of her large-size breasts. Taking her to Mike the Greek's on Sunday afternoons, George had a time clearing a path through the gawking clientele to a table. “When I first saw George, he just mesmerized me,” Annette says of her first encounter with the incipient drug entrepreneur. “His sad green eyes, his eyes were very beautiful, and he had blond hair, not tall, but he had really well-developed shoulders. He wore those little hippie glasses, round green granny glasses, like John Lennon had. He was like no one I'd ever met.” George talked to her about Aldous Huxley and
Brave New World
(the drug part), and he gave her his Hermann Hesse and Bob Dylan lectures, and also her first acid trip. “And I eventually ended up an extension of him, lost my identity. And I think he screwed every girlfriend I had.”

Annette worked as a stewardess for Trans-World Airlines and could carry on and off the plane any amount of luggage she wanted to, without anyone batting an eye. Within a month George had put her to work. The first load consisted of twenty kilos packed into a couple of Samsonite suitcases that Annette agreed to fly for him to Logan Airport in Boston, where Frank Shea met the plane and transported the pot across the state to Amherst in the trunk of a rental car. Business grew in steady fashion; indeed it skyrocketed, and soon smaller wholesalers were putting in orders for ten and fifteen kilos at a time, taking it from the drop point in Amherst up to Stowe, Vermont, back to Cambridge and Boston proper, and out to the Cape. Before winter was over, the meager transportation capacity of the commercial airlines was causing a bottleneck in the supply line. Where's the stuff? people were shouting to George. When can you get more?

So George jacked up the scale a peg and began renting out Winnebagos for between $250 and $300 a week, using them to move greater quantities, up to 125 kilos, or 275 pounds, at once, on marathon cross-country drives. With a helper to keep the vehicle on the road twenty-four hours a day, George could make the trip in about sixty hours going flat out—no motels, no showers, eating in the cab. To avoid detection in case he got caught for some traffic violation, George paid a carpenter in Manhattan Beach—“the magic carpenter,” he dubbed him—to construct a removable plywood bulkhead across the bathtub section in the RV's bathroom compartment, making the space look as if it contained only a sink, shower stall, and toilet. George stored the pot in back of the bulkhead, which he faced with a full-length mirror. To find the pot, one would have to know it was there and take apart the Winnebago to prove it.

Depending on the quality of the marijuana and the prices he negotiated at both ends, George was taking in anywhere from $10,000 up to $30,000 or so each trip, which meant that, after paying Richard and his helpers and deducting expenses, he was netting on average $5,000 to $10,000 for himself. This was when a brand new Ford Thunderbird like the one George was soon squiring Annette around in cost only $4,600, when a year at an Ivy League college, including room, board, tuition, and books, cost under $5,000, and when for $50,000 you could pick up a five-story brownstone in Manhattan. In addition to raking in the money, George now was treated as some kind of visiting hero each time the Winnebago pulled up in Amherst. While they waited around for the shipment to get sold, George and Annette and sometimes a small retinue of friends would put up at the gracious Lord Jeffrey Inn, order a log fire lit in their room to take off the chill, and quaffed drinks down in the bar with the Amherst alumni. “There were movie stars, and there were rock stars, so now we were the pot stars,” George says. “And we were whacking out the whole campus.”