Blow (26 page)

After they'd pledged loyalty to each other, Carlos asked George, Oh, by the way, who
was
this friend in L.A., the one he delivered the coke to, the one they'd be dealing with now for a while? George looked at Carlos and told him no soap. He was sorry, but that was one piece of information, friendship aside, he intended to keep to himself. He hoped he understood. Carlos said yes, he did. He could respect that, he said. No problem.

*   *   *

Although the house at 523 North Lucia Street is only one story high, the people in Redondo Beach have always called it the Castle, because of the fact that it was constructed of stone instead of the usual stucco or wood, and because its peaks and arches make it look like something you'd be more likely to find in a Bavarian forest than in a beach town in Southern California. It was indeed built by a German in the late 1920s, a bootlegger, the story goes. He dug out a secret basement under half the house, accessible through a trap door located inside a closet, and used it for storing the illegal booze he ferried in from rumrunners anchored offshore. The house sits in what's known as the Tree section of town, a lush residential area on the lee side of the hill that overlooks the ocean. Richard Barile purchased the Castle in 1971 for fifty thousand dollars, putting three thousand down and financing the balance with a G.I. loan. Along with operating the Tonsorial Parlor in neighboring Manhattan Beach, Richard was half owner at the time of a popular restaurant just up the street called the Silo, notable for its interior paneling of old barn siding and its menu featuring expensive French food and wines.

Richard bought the Castle for the security it afforded him in his third, and most profitable, business, which was drug dealing. The backyard of the Castle, for instance, where George had sat in the hot tub waiting for his money on that first trip, was sealed from peering eyes by the thirty-foot wall of an adjacent apartment building. Across the front ran a wrought-iron fence, laden with blood-red bougainvillea, and at the gate there was a buzzer system. This prevented Detective Fred McKewen, the local narc who fruitlessly dogged Richard's trail for years, from walking right up to the front door and looking through the window to acquire probable cause to give the place a toss. Photoelectric sensors hidden in the shrubbery detected any movement on the lawn and announced it loudly, both in the house and out on the patio, with blinking lights and a screeching alarm. “No one had any reason to ever be in my yard, and if they were, I'd know about it right away,” says Richard, who at one point augmented the system with a German shepherd attack dog trained to leap out snarling from behind the house every time someone buzzed at the gate. The animal grew so vicious that it attacked Richard once, and he got rid of it.

Regarding the quality and volume of the product and the way the business ran, Richard divides the history of the Los Angeles cocaine scene into before and after the arrival of George Jung. In the early-to-middle 1970s, as he moved from marijuana into cocaine, Richard had dealt mainly in ounces, not by preference but because of the scarcity of the product. He bought from mules, a little at a time, a pound here and there, adding a pound more of cut to earn a profit. By the time it reached him, the cocaine had already been stepped on, so with Richard's cut, and subsequent ones added further down the chain, “the stuff hitting the street was pretty beaten up,” he says. It got so bad that on several occasions he recalls selling an ounce of “cocaine” that contained only a gram of pure coke, barely a trace. “In the beginning people out here didn't know good cocaine from bad anyway, so it wouldn't matter. They were doing it just as a social thing. Pure cocaine didn't come around until George and Carlos. And you could instantly tell the difference. This stuff came in a nice solid chunk, right from the factory, direct to you. It had an opalescent tinge to it. It glowed a little, like mother-of-pearl. That's when it really started to become big.”

As Detective McKewen can readily testify, Richard ran a nearly seamless enterprise. Each facet, from receiving to storage to cutting to delivery, was intricately thought out, nothing was left vulnerable to chance discovery or detection by the police, even if they found some excuse to pry into his affairs. Richard knew all about McKewen's trick involving motor-vehicle violations, for instance, and was determined not to give him an edge where that went. “Richard drove a little brown Porsche around town and always made sure his record was clean,” McKewen recalls. “I know that because I followed that car on a lot of nights. And for years and years, I can't tell you how many law-enforcement officers called me from other jurisdictions and from the feds, and said, ‘What do you know about Richard Barile? We're working him.' ‘Good luck,' I said.”

Richard's success as a cocaine dealer came partly from the lessons he learned as point man in a U.S. Marine platoon stationed in the Philippines during the early 1960s. His job had been to help train infantrymen in jungle warfare before they went over to Vietnam to advise the South Vietnamese army. “In the Marine Corps there were two main things—you had to have your own shit together, and you had to be able to count on the other guy. Otherwise you could easily get killed.” The two weeks at a shift he'd spend in the jungle trained him in the little things that could account for the difference between life and death—what all the different noises meant, the way shadows fell that could hide an enemy soldier. Much of his sensitivity to the environment came from watching a wizened old man in his late seventies, a former guerrilla with the HUK, who went out with the group to show them how to get sustenance off the jungle floor. He taught them how to locate snails and pop off the little trap door that hides the meat, how to find where the wild rice was growing and boil it up inside of bamboo shoots. “We'd be going along and suddenly the old man would hear something and stop in his tracks. He'd go, ‘Peep, peeep, peeeeeeeep,' then walk a little bit and, ‘Peeep, peeeeep,' then suddenly he'd start running like a son of a bitch and you'd hear a roaring of wings, and he'd grab that sucker with his bare hands—a wild hen—right before it took off.”

In his own organization Barile became known as “the Little General” for the order he imposed and how quickly he banished people who couldn't operate up to standard. He regularly swept the cars and houses used by his dealers with electronic debugging devices to make sure their movements weren't being monitored. He conducted surprise inspection visits to wherever they were cutting the coke before moving it out. “This way you'd find that some guys were real sloppy. The scales would have coke caked on them, the spoons they used they never washed. They'd save the plastic bags, if there was a little bit of coke in there, so if they ran short they could scrape it out to complete an order. ‘Either clean it up or dump it out, screw it,' I'd tell them. Cops come in and then you don't have time to wash the spoons or the scale. They find residue, they can make an ambient bust. It showed me that somebody wasn't being professional, and if they weren't professional, I wouldn't do business with them.”

When it came to the police, there were three ways to get arrested in the drug business—by accident, by selling to or buying from an undercover cop, or by getting ratted on from the inside—and Richard went to great lengths to obviate all three possibilities.

First, he made sure no loose threads hung out for the police to pull on. If workers showed up high or drunk, they were gone. Not only would that screw up their judgment, but in those days a drunk-driving arrest gave the police wide latitude in searching your car and making other intrusions into your life. An expired driver's license could subject a worker to a visit from Detective McKewen. “If they had parking tickets,” Barile explained, “I'd take them down to court and make sure they paid them.” The same for an expired registration. “Headlights? Taillights? I would tell them that before anyone uses their car for anything, they had to make sure everything was working, everything was legal. I found that these were the things that made all the difference.”

The real danger was getting caught red-handed, dealing unknowingly—buying or selling—with someone working for the police. On the buying part, he had no fear where George or Carlos were concerned, because if any bust came down on that end, it would most likely happen immediately, at the point the plane landed in the States from Colombia. As most large-scale dealers knew, the DEA maintained a strict bird-in-the-hand policy, one that proved a constant annoyance to the agents themselves. They could not allow a load of drugs, once it entered the country, from moving out on the street—by following a delivery, for instance, from Miami to Los Angeles to try to catch the West Coast members of the ring. The fear in the DEA was the agents could screw up along the way and lose track of the load. In that event, not only would the drugs be out in the population, but the agency would have lost the goods it needed to hang the case on, possibly jeopardizing the whole bust. So it was better to be safe than sorry. “When the cocaine reached L.A., I knew everything was secure up to that point, no cops following it,” Richard says. “My worry was the other end. Busts usually come from the bottom up, not the top down, so you're not looking at the guy who's selling it to you. You're looking at your customers.”

For this reason, Richard stayed as far away from the cocaine as he could. When it landed in L.A., he would have the load driven directly from the airport to one of several stash pads whose location he changed every three months. Except for recreational use, he never kept a serious amount of cocaine around the Castle, secret basement notwithstanding. “Most of your big dealers, if they had any brains, all had a stash pad and hired somebody to sit on it. When you're taking orders, coming in on a beeper, you meet the person to discuss it at a restaurant, then you'd tell a runner, someone else, to go pick it up here and drop it off there. You never go near it and you never touch it.”

This still left the problem of his own people: How could he make sure, if there was a bust somewhere down the line, that no one he'd dealt with could be persuaded to turn him in to save their skin? One precaution Richard took was to cut the cocaine right away, when it arrived from Miami, rather than let it go out to any dealer as 100 percent pure. “In those days, because a lot of the street stuff was so bad, if you got caught with pure cocaine, the police would think you were close to Mr. Big, you must be getting it right from the main source. They'd put a lot more pressure on you to give him over. So if one of your dealers got caught with pure coke, this would be a heavy bust. The cop would say, ‘Look, whoever you got this from you better give him up or we're going to lean pretty hard on you.' But if they busted them with coke that had already been cut, that comes back from the lab, say, only 30 or 50 percent pure, well, that meant whoever you got it from was pretty low down in the structure. Things went a lot easier for you. I had to pay a lot of legal bills, but none of my people ever turned me in.”

In addition, he impressed upon his troops never to take chances that might expose them unnecessarily, and to get rid of the evidence fast, even if it meant losing a lot of Richard's coke. “I'd try to give them a lot of confidence. I'd tell them, ‘Hey, look, here's three or four kilos, if you ever have a problem, flush it right down the toilet, you don't owe me a thing. Just don't get into trouble. You'll always make money with me. Just don't do anything stupid. You gotta be safe and cool.' I got that from the marine corps.” For screw-ups, for people slow to pay, for those who committed infractions of the work rules, Richard didn't hesitate to use the power he held over their ability to succeed or fail in the coke business. “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.”

Picking up kilos at the airport and distributing the tons of blow that disappeared up the collective nose of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and points all over metropolitan Los Angeles, Richard stood well toward the top of a coke empire that reached into the farthest corner of the community—and where everyone connected with the trade made a heretofore inconceivable amount of money. As with any product, the money you made in the cocaine business depended on the quality of the goods you sold and how great the supply and demand were. Cocaine rarely went on the retail market in its pure form, since everyone's profits were linked arithmetically to how much the product had been cut. The kind of cuts varied according to their availability.

The cutting agents Richard liked best, because of their similarity to cocaine, were procaine or lidocaine. These are synthetic derivatives of the drug, commonly obtainable at chemical shops and used medically as local anesthetics. Procaine, for instance, is the same as Novocain—it has the numbing effect of cocaine but with only a tenth the power to generate a high. Other cuts were neutral white powders such as lactose, which is milk sugar, or mannite, a sweet substance taken from plants and used as a mild diuretic. Quinine was the least desirable cut, for the burning sensation it created in the nose, something dealers often tried to neutralize with a little dose of procaine to numb up the nasal passages. He'd usually cut the cocaine one to two, putting seventeen ounces of cut into a Pyrex baking dish together with a kilo, or thirty-five ounces, of pure cocaine, ending up with a sales product that was 67 percent pure. He'd sift the mixture through a flour sifter, ending up with a fine white powder. Unfortunately, to any reasonably sophisticated customer, the fine powder was the tip-off that the product had been cut and mixed up again. Pure cocaine arrives as a crystal, not a powder, and the crystals bind with one another to form little “rocks.” The more rocks there are in evidence, the purer the product. So as a marketing ploy, after cutting the load, Richard had to “rock it back up,” as the expression goes. “When they're buying cocaine, what they're looking for is what's solid,” he says. “They see a lot of chips, or they see a solid brick, they're saying to themselves, ‘Man, this stuff's pretty good.'”