Blow (25 page)

Not only would he save the day, but he figured he'd end up making a lot more money on this deal than if Carlos were around. After all, he and Carlos had never discussed what would happen to the kilos once he handed them over. He'd get paid something for bringing them north, but he doubted it would be more than 10 percent, the five kilos' worth. As it stood now, he wasn't bound by any agreement. He could sell them for whatever he got, give the Colombians whatever he considered fair, set his own price structure. Carlos fucks up, George pulls it off, who's in a position to quibble?

The only person he knew who could possibly handle such a large load and do it fast, before people got really nervous, was Richard Barile out in Manhattan Beach. He had kept in touch with Richard, but vaguely, not really thinking about using him until they'd launched the Barry Kane trip. He now placed a call from Cotuit, and Richard told him things had picked up considerably since they'd last discussed the matter. “Things were happening very fast out there, he said. People really wanted it. He told me he was moving all he could get his hands on but he just didn't have enough supply. I said, ‘Look, Richard, don't ask questions. I've got what you want, and I've got a lot of it. I'm on my way out. I want you to meet the plane, and I want you to be driving a car that has a big trunk.”

When he landed at Los Angeles International Airport, it was very early in the morning, still dark. Richard was there to meet him in a Cadillac Eldorado. He remembers that Bob Seger was singing “Night Moves” on the radio. They drove directly to Richard's house in Redondo Beach and took the suitcases into one of the bedrooms. “He had a hot box in there to test it out. But when I undid a package, he forgot about it. The coke was all shiny and flaky, like fresh snow with the moonlight on it. It doesn't have that gleam anymore if it's cut. All he had to do was take a little snort, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, this stuff is high-test! Where'd you get it?' Don't worry, this is only the beginning, I told him. There was a lot more of it. I was going to get him thousands of kilos. I was going to fill the goddamn Coliseum with the stuff.”

It took Richard five days to unload the fifty kilos. He returned late every night with wads of fifties and one hundreds, which George counted methodically and stacked into piles of $10,000, each of which he wrapped with a rubber band. For security reasons, Richard didn't want George to leave the house. He'd get him his newspapers and some magazines, and George was free to soak in the hot tub out back, watch TV, look at the moon; Richard even offered to get him some women if he wanted, but he had to stay at the house. As long as he kept George's presence secret, Richard could maintain a lock on this veritable fountain of cocaine. Once the word got out, it would be hard to keep the vultures away. The days went by, the money came in. By the end of the week it lay all over the waterbed, all over the floor, piled up on the dresser, on the chairs, on the night stands, falling off the TV set—a total of $2.35 million. George had been literally sleeping and waking up with it for nearly a week now, but the sight of all that assembled cash still did something funny to his stomach.

Wasting no time, they packed it up as soon as the last hundred was counted, fitted it into a couple of aluminum camera cases, and headed for the airport. Richard came along on the plane to help with the bags, each of which contained more than a million dollars. During the X-ray session at the United Airlines check-in gate, the woman on the security detail took note of the baggage going by on her screen, told George only slightly under her breath: “Jeez, you guys have a
lot
of bread!”

“This about made Richard shit in his pants,” George says. “I told her don't be too loud about it. We were couriers for a bank and this was a transfer of liquid funds.”

Richard spent most of the six-hour return flight worrying about how many policemen would be waiting for them at Logan Airport. George gave that some thought himself, until he'd consumed about five little airplane bottles of Scotch, and the fear faded into the mist of alcohol. They met with no trouble back in Boston. Once the bags were packed into the Thunderbird, Richard shook George's hand, told him Don't be a stranger, now, and headed back to the West Coast. George drove down to Cotuit, to Teddy's house, where he went up the little ladder to the attic and put the camera cases in the same eaves where he'd kept the coke. When Teddy heard about the cases, he asked if he could go up and open one of them and take a look.
Look,
yes, George said.

There had been no word about Carlos. Two days later George's mother called. “She told me there was a nice young man and his very pretty wife who had come by the house to see me, said they were good friends of mine. Very polite, she said. It was, ‘Yes, Mrs. Jung. Thank you, Mrs. Jung.'” Which was the first George heard that his partner had made it safely through the woods.

SEVEN

Miami

1977

I was the one who had the cocaine. There was no getting it except from me. If I didn't like you, then I'd stop supplying you and I'd give it to the guy you were selling it to. Pretty soon he'd be selling to you
and
your customers. So all of a sudden, instead of being King Shit, you're a piece of shit. At one time I could make you and break you.

—R
ICHARD
B
ARILE
, L
OS
A
NGELES COCAINE DEALER

T
HE YEAR
1977
PROVED NOTABLE FOR SEVERAL REASONS
in addition to George's arrival as a key player in the cocaine business. Elvis Presley, age forty-two, died of heart failure while sitting on the toilet at Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tennessee. Gary Gilmore was executed in Salt Lake City, Utah, after urging the firing squad, “Let's do it.” The police tracked down David Berkowitz, the “Son-of-Sam” killer, at his home in Yonkers, New York. “Well, you've got me,” he told them.
Star Wars
and
Saturday Night Fever
rated as the big movies that year, with “Roots” breaking all viewing records on TV. And President Jimmy Carter, sworn into office in January, was urging Americans to cut down on their use of gasoline and pledged his administration to respond to the energy crisis with the “moral equivalent of war.”

Talking to Carlos over the telephone, George detected a clear note of relief in his voice after he heard that the load had been sold and the money was safe and sound. George told him he'd decided the split would be $37,000 per kilo for Carlos and the Colombians, which came out to $1.85 million, with George taking $500,000 for himself, for all the worrying and schlepping he'd done. Carlos seemed more than agreeable, and they arranged to meet at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, where Carlos and Jemel were staying, to transfer the proceeds. By the time George arrived at the hotel, Carlos had regained his old cockiness. Far from apologizing for the jeopardy he'd put everyone in, he tossed it off as a splendid adventure.

He told Geroge that after leaving Courtney and the car, Carlos had skirted the customs checkpoint and was waiting in the trees just off the road about a half mile south of the border to be picked up. When Courtney failed to show, and then when the noise of baying hounds reached his ears, Carlos guessed what had happened and ran back into the forest, trying to make his way south while staying parallel with the road so as not to become lost. By now the short northern day had given way to night, and it grew much colder, the snow falling heavily, which was bad enough for Carlos but which also hampered the search party and reduced the dogs' ability to follow his scent. Pretty soon the barking receded and then died out, and he was alone in the forest. For hours, it seemed to him, Carlos stumbled blindly through the snow, falling into bogs, the tree branches tearing at his pants and overcoat. He could no longer detect any feeling in his feet. Lacking shelter or any means of lighting a fire, he began seriously to wonder whether he'd survive the night. Suddenly he saw a distant light glimmering through the trees, which turned out to be a house alongside the road. Knocking at the door, he encountered an elderly woman. He told her his car had broken down a mile or so back, and asked if he could use her phone to call a cab to take him to the nearest motel. A cab in northern Vermont? At this hour? Not likely, she said. Such a nice young man, why didn't he stay at her house for the night? She had an extra room. He could dry out his clothes, she'd give him something to eat, and he could sort out things in the morning. Exhausted from his ordeal, Carlos hardly needed persuading. So at about the same time Courtney was being released from custody at the border, phoning his wife to pass on to George the alarming details of what had occurred, Carlos was already tucked into a safe, warm bed, with a bowl of hot soup under his belt and his clothes drying on a radiator. The next day he caught a bus and made his way down to New York City, where he stayed a few days with Jemel and called around to find out what might have happened with George—and, more importantly, the kilos. When no one at Betsy's house knew where he'd gone, Carlos set out for Weymouth, knowing that he could be in some serious trouble here if he didn't recover the load.

For the number of kilos involved, for the rapid turnaround, and for the amount of money he brought back, George's trip to the West Coast had opened up eyes wide indeed down in Medellín. With one trip he'd found them probably the most important contact they'd had to date, delivered the goods without a hitch, and along with the riches, returned with the message that this was only the beginning, that this friend in L.A. was able to handle all they could ship. And George had also found them Barry Kane, who at that very moment was readying his plane for the task of flying in greater loads. “It was obvious from the way Carlos was acting that suddenly I was the prize,” George says. “They had been dealing mostly with their own people, never with gringos before. They didn't know things like Hollywood even existed until I came along. Now they started treating me like the golden goose.”

The Colombians urged George to move down to Miami immediately and wanted to supply him with as much cocaine as they could—by boat, by mules, however they could smuggle it in—and have him transport the loads to his contact on the West Coast on a regular basis. They planned to start shipping in May. George would be paid five to ten thousand dollars for every kilo, and they hoped to be moving between fifty and a hundred kilos every week. Then, by the end of the summer, Kane's operation would be ready to go.

Late that April Carlos brought his whole family up to the Cape for a visit—Jemel, his brother Guillermo, and his mother, Señora Rivas, who now needed a cane to get around with. George put them up at Dunfey's Hotel, the famous Hyannis hostelry, and squired them around for a week to all the sights. They ate at Baxter's at the steamship landing, where the ferries left for Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, went out to the section of Hyannisport where you could peer over the fence and see some of the houses in the Kennedy compound. They drove to Provincetown, “P-town” to the locals, where George introduced them to the New England variety of lobster, with the claws, showing how to insert a fork into the tail and lever out the whole section in one deft movement. He took them out to Race Point, to look out over the Atlantic Ocean from atop the three-hundred-foot-high bluff he and Malcolm MacGregor used to ride down the face of in an aluminum canoe when they were teenagers. On the trip back he stopped off at Chatham to show them where Barry Kane lived. The Colombians had been a little uneasy about Kane in the beginning, as they were where any gringos were concerned; and here they were trusting someone they'd never dealt with before to take off with ninety-odd million dollars' worth, retail, of their cocaine and not disappear with it into the wild blue. George had eased their minds on this score by asking Kane to bring him over to his house, show him family photos, snapshots of the people near and dear to him. As they would soon demonstrate to the world, the Colombians had little compunction when it came to dealing harshly with the immediate relatives of those who betrayed them, no matter what the age or sex. Kane's wife had died, George knew, but he did have his five children, whose pictures George demanded to see; he also made a point of learning the names of the prep schools they attended. “Three hundred kilos was an awful lot of cocaine to trust to a stranger,” says George. “They wanted some kind of hook in him.”

Predictably, about a week was all Carlos could take of the tourist bit, after which he sent his family back to New York, while he stayed around planning things with George and making more of those damn visits to local airports. After leaving the one in Hyannis, Carlos asked George to drive into Trans-Atlantic Motors, the BMW dealership nearby. He wanted to look over the cars. “We walked in and the sales manager came over thinking we were your typical people just browsing, and asked if he could help us. Carlos pointed to a black one, a 318i, and said he wanted that one, how much was it? They guy said something like eleven thousand, and Carlos pulled this brown paper bag out of his pocket. ‘Here,' he said, and peeled off the money—he must have had fifty or sixty thousand in there—and put the rest back in his pocket. The guy's teeth almost fell out.” As the manager fell all over himself trying to get the car ready by that afternoon, Carlos asked if there was also a Datsun dealer in town. Jemel needed a 280Z to drive. George seized him by the arm and took him aside, told him to cool it, for Christ's sake. Didn't he ever learn? “I told him, ‘You're an illegal alien, they've got your passport sitting at the border. Don't you think that son of a bitch is going to remember this day the rest of his life? And remember you, too? I mean, even the Kennedys don't walk in and do something like that.'”

Managing to quash at least the Datsun purchase, George took Carlos the following day, their last on the Cape, to look at some summer property for his mother. They found nothing Carlos liked, and after supper they ended the day walking along the beach near the breakwater in Hyannisport, looking out into the blackness of Nantucket Sound. Carlos once again expressed his thanks to George for the way he'd handled the fifty kilos. It would have been his death warrant, for sure, if George had run off with the money, and he admitted now how worried he'd been. He said George had proven to be a true friend, someone Carlos felt he could always trust, and he hoped George felt the same way toward him. “I told him I'd given him my word and that I considered my handshake and my word as a sacred bond of honor,” George recalls. “I said that we were brothers, and would always be brothers and that I would never betray that friendship.”