Blow (21 page)

All this sudden misfortune might have weighed heavier on George's mind had a telegram he'd been waiting for not arrived at his parents' house shortly after the rupture with Beth. It was from Colombia, the city of Medellín.
WEATHER BEAUTIFUL. PLEASE COME DOWN
, it read. There was a telephone number he was supposed to call. And it was signed:
YOUR FRIEND, CARLOS
.

*   *   *

For all his bravado back in Danbury, the bragging about his big contacts, George harbored some doubts as to how he was really going to move a load of coke. Who wanted it? Where were they? During a three-day furlough he'd taken toward the end of his prison term, George had called up Richard Barile at the Tonsorial Parlor in Manhattan Beach to discuss the potential of the cocaine market in Los Angeles. Richard said he'd like to hear more about what George had in mind but remained a little vague about the specifics. “He said it was going on big out there, but he couldn't quote any prices, just that if I came out, it could happen. I was just a lousy marijuana smuggler. I don't think he took me really seriously.”

On the Cape there seemed to be hardly any demand at all. What cocaine you could get was of such poor quality, cut so often, that the preferred drug for people in the euphoria market seemed to be methamphetamine, or speed—especially in the form that Beth's son, Nick, was concocting in the basement. This was “crystal meth,” later known as “ice,” a smokable crystalline form of methamphetamine that produces a high of several hours' duration; it is also highly addictive. One day the previous fall Beth had asked George to deliver a batch of Nick's product to a guy who'd be waiting in a car down the street from the house in Dennis. The man turned out to be a gaunt, furtive-looking character in his late twenties, with deep-socketed, penetrating eyes, who seemed as jumpy as a blue jay. Obviously he was on the stuff himself, George thought. From the way he darted glances around the landscape, you could also spot him as a drug dealer from a few hundred yards off. George produced the crystal and the guy turned over a bag containing fifteen thousand dollars in cash. He went by the name of “Mr. T,” and he was the son of a fairly prosperous Portuguese fisherman. George noted down his phone number, thinking Mr. T might prove useful later on.

During his furlough, George had also called Manuel down in Mazatlán to talk about cocaine, but his former colleague proved far from encouraging. He said, “You're getting into a dangerous game, Jorge, with some dangerous fucking people. Not like it is in the marijuana business, where we are all brothers. Why do we not continue the business we were doing? We'll always be safe, and have our friendship and enough money. The road you want to head down leads to self-destruction and evil.” George dismissed the warning as exaggeration; Manuel always did tend to overdramatize things.

With limited phone lines available between the United States and Colombia, it took several frustrating hours for George to get through to Carlos. The number turned out to be that of Autos Lehder, the family car business located in downtown Medellín, and it was Guillermo, Carlos's brother, who finally answered. Carlos had gone out, he said. George should call back the next day. “When Carlos and I finally connected, we talked in a very general way, no specifics. He said he wanted me to come to Medellín to talk about how things should proceed, that everything down there was just as we had discussed. I said give me some time to make arrangements and I'd let him know when I was coming.”

Only after hanging up did George think that it probably wouldn't be smart to go down himself, at least not on this trip. He was still on probation and supposed to be staying at home. Getting a false passport was no problem, but what if something happened down there, some kind of delay, and Jo-Anne—her visits always came on short notice—chose that moment to drop by? It seemed safer to send down an emissary, he thought, a go-between. The person who came to mind was Frank Shea, his old childhood friend and contact at Amherst. He'd also done some flying for George out of Mazatlán. Frank was back in Weymouth now, working at the Fore River Shipyard. He'd never been arrested, wasn't on any customs checklist. Frank seemed ideal for the mission. As a pilot, he had the knowledge to check out possible airfields and discuss arrangements for getting planes loaded up. “Frank was also the kind of guy who'd do something, but then go away from it,” George says. “And I didn't want to involve any more people in this than I had to.”

It turned out Frank had just been laid off from work at the shipyard and quickly agreed to go. George gave him money for tickets, and in mid-March he was in Colombia, meeting with Carlos at a ranch the family owned a little way out of town. He called George the next day. “Frank was basically ecstatic over the phone. He liked Carlos very much, and he was looking at the coke, saying something to the effect that we've really hit the jackpot this time. I'd really put it together.”

Whereas George, however, had anticipated that the flights would start right away, the Colombians seemed to want to move a little more slowly. “I had sent Frank down there to start the airplane trips, only Carlos switched it all around. They had no concept of airplane flights or major drug loads.” Over the telephone the conversation had to be circumspect, but it boiled down to the fact that the Colombians also didn't quite trust this gringo friend of Carlos's yet. To front out a load of kilos, send them up to someone they'd never heard of, had no control over, maybe couldn't even find if something went wrong, that was far too big a gamble. So the deal, Frank said, was to try a little bit at first, and see where that goes. Then maybe they'd talk about airplanes.

Frank told George to call Carlos back the next day and settle the details directly with him. This time George went to a pay phone. It cost eighty quarters to talk for three minutes to Carlos in Medellín. George was soon keeping a little Tupperware container under the seat of his car filled with $100 in coins—and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the successor to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, was soon pegging cocaine smugglers by how low their pants were riding, or the little pocketbooks or satchels they'd have sitting by the pay phone. Carlos said the plan was to smuggle in fifteen kilos. Although certainly not a planeload, fifteen kilos rated as a significant amount of cocaine back in 1976, $750,000 worth, if it could be moved for, say, $50,000 apiece.
If,
George was thinking.

Carlos told George to go out and buy fifteen hard-shell suitcases, Samsonites, seven blue and eight red, one for each kilo. Then find two people to act as couriers, to board a plane with half the suitcases and fly down to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, one of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, property of Great Britain. It was a popular resort, with flights going in and out all the time. The Colombians Carlos was dealing with had made several runs through Antigua and knew the lay of the land there. George was instructed to have the couriers check into the hotel, where Carlos and Frank and an associate of Carlos's named Cesar Toban would also be staying. After the couriers arrived, Carlos would come to their room and replace the suitcases taken on the flight down with ones he'd brought from Medellín. The new suitcases would also be blue and red Samsonites, identical in every respect, except that the metal stripping around the edge that held in the plastic inner linings on each side would have been removed and the linings lifted out. Underneath would be laid out a thin layer of cocaine, a half kilo on each side, one per suitcase. Carlos wanted to hide only a small amount of cocaine in each, so that with the plastic liner fitted back in place and the metal stripping refastened with rivets, it would be difficult, even taking out all the clothes, to see or feel that there was anything secreted between the two layers. Of course, the false-bottom trick was not exactly a startlingly new ploy; it was well known to customs agents. The trip required a certain amount of performance art to attract the inspector's attention
away
from the luggage. The couriers should be women, well-tanned, pretty, vacationing-schoolteacher types, with a lot of personality. Their luggage should be packed to reflect the great week they'd had, filled with resort clothes and souvenirs from the islands. Most important, the couriers should be people who in no way felt frightened or uneasy about what they were doing. Customs agents possessed deers' noses when it came to sniffing out a guilty conscience.

George had just the person in mind. Several weeks before, in the Riverside Bar in Weymouth, he'd taken up with a very lively, good-looking woman named Betsy. She was twenty-eight and had jet-black hair, electric-blue eyes, and a light complexion—unmistakably Irish. She was also free, not tied down to a job. Her parents had died the year before in a head-on collision at the rotary in Orleans. She'd collected on both insurance policies, coming out with $300,000, a lot of cash then, along with their house in Weymouth, which was located, as it happened, on Whitmans Pond, the old spawning ground for the famous Weymouth herring. And, more to the point, along with her all-American appearance, Betsy was a kleptomaniac, possessed of rock-steady nerves and a brazen self-confidence. “I've seen her walk into a jewelry store and just mesmerize them,” George says. “She'd put on a ring or try on a necklace, looking right at the clerk, and then say, ‘Well, I'll think it over,' and walk out.”

George broached the subject of the Antigua trip with her the same day he talked to Carlos. Betsy was sitting on a blanket watching her ten-year-old daughter, Lisa, playing softball at school. With her was a friend of Betsy's named Winny Polly, who by coincidence was also Frank Shea's girlfriend. George said he had a surprise for them. How would they like to have an all-expenses-paid week's vacation in Antigua? They could go down, swim, eat, stay in a fancy hotel, have a blast—all on him. All they had to do was bring something back for him, a few suitcases. What was in the suitcases? Betsy wanted to know. “Don't worry about it, it's nothing,” George said. “Just drugs.”

As it worked out, things couldn't have gone more smoothly. George drove them to Logan Airport and helped them check the bags through, joking with the clerk about how women could possibly fill up so many suitcases for just a little vacation. Betsy and Winny flew down to Antigua, checked into the hotel, and met Frank and Carlos and his friend Cesar who came from a wealthy Colombian family in the coffee business. A couple of days later they called George to say Antigua was a tropical paradise and they were having a terrific time. They'd been renting catamarans, doing the samba every night. Betsy especially liked Carlos's friend, Cesar, who was slim, bronzed, so gracious, and a great dancer—Was something going on there? George wondered, but let it pass. Five days later he got a call telling him they were on their way home, and several hours later they showed up at Betsy's house having taken a bus down from Logan. What about the bags? George asked. Oh, don't worry, they're safe, Betsy said. They didn't want to bring eight pieces of luggage down on the bus, so they'd checked the suitcases into several lockers in the bus terminal in Boston.

The bus terminal in Boston?
George nearly hit the roof. “I told them that was an insane fucking thing to do. One thing you never do in the drug business, you never, ever want to lose control. As long as you're in possession of it, you always know what's going on. But once you lose sight of it, you don't know what's happening. Three or four hundred thousand dollars' worth of cocaine that belongs to someone else, that I could get killed for if it's lost, and they've left it sitting in the fucking bus terminal?! People were always breaking into those things, stealing shit, the police making random checks.”

George took a now-contrite Betsy with him and drove rapidly into Boston to pick up the bags, which were unmolested, it turned out, and brought them back to Betsy's bedroom. George took out their vacation clothes, and with a screwdriver pried off the rivets and lifted out the liners to see what they'd brought. The cocaine lay in the bottom underneath a layer of shelf paper and stuck down with aluminum duct tape to keep it from shifting position. It was glistening white and flaky, sprinkled with clusters of crystals, or rocks, which signaled a high level of purity. After opening up all the suitcases, George repacked the coke into one-pound packages, wrapped them with duct tape, then slipped them into heavy, waterproof Mylar bags. After dark he took them outside to a vacant lot belonging to the house next door and stashed them inside one of several drainage pipes that lay in the weeds, abandoned there after some construction work. One of the things he'd learned from the jailhouse lawyers at Danbury was to never stash drugs on your own property. That way, if the load is seized, the police will have a hard time proving the stuff belongs to you. The following day, the women flew down to Antigua to pick up the rest.

For his part in arranging the transportation, George was to keep five kilos for himself, to sell for whatever he could get. He would deliver the remaining ten kilos in Boston to Cesar Toban, who would fly up from Colombia, picking up Carlos's girlfriend on the way, a young Cuban-American from New York City named Jemel Nacel, a student at the College of the City of New York. They would call George to arrange the meeting.

While the girls were still down in Antigua, George put a quarter of an ounce of the cocaine into a plastic bag and drove it to where The Sad-Eyed Lady's speed dealer, Mr. T, lived in Hyannis. No one was home, so he slipped the bag under the rubber mat by the back door and drove back to Betsy's house, a place he was now beginning to call home, at last out from under the collective thumb of his parents. That night George phoned him up. “I told him to look under the mat, that he'd find a little present there. See if he liked it and call me back.”

Mr. T had been dealing dope since 1970, after he got out of the U.S. Navy, demobilized with some 500,000 other servicemen into a job market, on the Cape, at least, that was in a state of collapse. “I spent six months on unemployment,” Mr. T recalls, “waiting for jobs in lines two blocks long in the snow and slush in Hyannis, freezing my fucking ass off. So I started dealing dope. I borrowed two hundred dollars from my mother and bought a pound of pot, and made four hundred dollars' profit and had two ounces to smoke myself. I said, ‘Fuck
off,
Jack, this is
it,
' and that's how I began.” As a general-assignment drug dealer, never knowing what might come along, Mr. T had all the paraphernalia—the scales, the plastic bags, and also a “hot box,” which was used by the police and dealers alike for testing out the quality of cocaine, along with certain other drugs. By putting a small amount of the cocaine onto a two-inch-square hot plate, then gradually turning up the heat as measured by a thermometer attached to the top of the box, one can find out what the temperature is precisely at the moment the crystal substance on the hot plate begins to melt. Lab-pure cocaine hydrochloride, without a trace of imperfection—something almost impossible to achieve under the conditions in the processing plants in the Colombian jungle—melts at 195 degrees centigrade. The stuff it's cut with—mannite, quinine, lactose, or Methedrine—all melt at much lower temperatures, from 105 degrees for quinine, for instance, to 166 degrees for mannite. Street coke that's heavily cut, or stepped-on, in the parlance of the trade, might start melting at temperatures in the low 100s. The high-grade powder registers in the 160s and upper-170s.