Blow (29 page)

Riding in the jet was practically the only time George could sleep or have any peace and quiet. Once on the ground, he was subject to constant pressure to keep in motion, because only when George was on the move did people make any money. “It began to be an absolute nightmare—the money, the cocaine, everyone wanting more and more and more. The airports, the airplanes, all the sneaking around you had to do.” He needed the cocaine to keep up the pace, but it made him so edgy and paranoid that when he transported the money from Richard's condo to the Santa Monica airport, he imagined that he was being followed by the police or by people out to steal his camera cases. He'd check in and out of two or three hotels on the way, entering through the front and leaving from the garage, to satisfy himself he'd lost the phantoms he thought were on his trail.

The money itself, the staggering amount of it, also got everyone just a little unhinged. On each trip back he was now transporting more than $2 million, almost $5 million in a week. It had to be counted, recounted, stacked, wrapped, packaged, taken to Miami, unwrapped, recounted, packed up again. In the Redondo Beach condo George generally waited until the cash had all accumulated before doing the big count. He put it off for as long as he could, because it was serious work that went on for hours. He'd stack the hundreds and fifties into piles of $10,000 each, two to four inches high, writing the amount on the top bill with a yellow magic marker. The twenties he put in stacks of five thousand dollars so they'd fit into the camera cases. In the beginning he did it all meticulously, counting each stack once, then getting someone else to do it again. Richard would come over to the condo with his retinue to help. “He always had all these young girls around him, ‘little surfer hoodsies,' I'd call them. They'd be running around the condo half-naked in their bikini bottoms, drinking champagne, doing coke. When I brought out the coke, it was sex city, and the money counting got a little, what you would call casual. It reached a point where we'd count and count and then snort some coke and count some more, until finally I'd say, ‘Fuck it, that's enough! That's about right. Let's go.' I'd get in the Learjet with the suitcases and deliver the money to the Colombians who would come by the Ocean Pavilion. Sometimes it was, ‘Here. Here's two and a half million dollars, and maybe it's fifty thousand off the number, I don't know.' And nobody would care. It was just, ‘When can you leave and bring back some more?'”

George's personal assets were now accruing into such a large wad as to present a serious storage problem. When the deliveries hit one hundred kilos a week, the Colombians cut his commission back to $5,000 a kilo—they didn't want him making more than they did—but this still added up to half a million a week, which by the beginning of August gave him a total of nearly $6 million, in cash. Forget spending it, or washing it, he could barely figure out where to put it. For one thing, it was heavy. As people in the cocaine business soon discovered, $1 million dollars in hundreds weighs exactly 20.4 pounds, double that if it's in fifties. George's stash, half in fifties, half in hundreds, tipped the scales at about 180 pounds, which meant that George's liquid capital now outweighed him by 5 pounds, and he was tending a little to pork these days. And it had a lot of bulk to it. In fresh, crisp hundred-dollar bills, $6 million in a single stack runs 21.5 feet high, about as tall as a two-story house; in fifties it's over 43 feet high. In other words, it's not something that you shove under the mattress when you hear a knock at the door.

What George needed to hide his growing mound of money in was a house, and it had to be back on the Cape, away from the Colombians and the frazzling life in Miami. Betsy's house was no longer available, their romance having fallen victim to George's newfound reliance on the escort services. He'd dropped by to break it off with her during a trip north in early July. Finding her out, he'd left a note on the kitchen table along with twenty thousand dollars in cash and the keys to his Thunderbird, packed his clothes and left. As a location for his own stash house, he looked in the town of Wellfleet, toward the end of the Cape and not as crowded as Hyannis. He told the real estate lady he wanted something on the water, with hot-air heat, if possible; it helped his sinuses.

The place she found was a large three-story cottage with weathered shingles and a big screened-in porch overlooking Cape Cod Bay. He hired his man Courtney, the welder by trade, regularly to courier the cash up from Miami and to construct additional heating ducts to nowhere in the basement at Wellfleet as a repository for the cash. George came up once or twice to check on things and transfer some of his pile to the Rockland Trust Company in Weymouth, where he got his father to cosign for a couple of safe-deposit boxes—the big ones, with the large drawers. By now, Fred had decided not to ask any questions about his son's financial success.

With his money safe, at least temporarily, George threw himself back into the plane trips and the preparations for Barry Kane's first run. So preoccupied was he in these matters that when a letter arrived from Jo-Anne Carr, forwarded to him by his mother, it came as a small shock for him to realize that he was still, despite it all, on parole. In recent months, his obligation to report on his activities had been reduced to sending in a monthly form attesting to the fact that he still resided at Abigail Adams Circle and was still employed in the fishing business, earning an income George put down as three hundred dollars a week. No foreign travel, no associating with people who had criminal backgrounds, no taking drugs. In her letter, Jo-Anne praised him for his successful effort at staying out of trouble and his commendable progress toward rehabilitating himself, in consideration of which she had therefore recommended releasing him from his parole obligations ahead of schedule. All the best, she said, for a happy and prosperous future.

Somewhere around this time George suffered a serious lapse in judgment and decided to introduce Carlos to Richard after all. Carlos's insistence that the meeting take place had eventually worn George down. Carlos had argued that since he had introduced George to everyone
he
knew, he now had a right to meet this guy. And if George refused to tell him Richard's name, this must mean he didn't trust him, and if that was the case, how could Carlos continue to trust George? George liked to say they were brothers, didn't he? Was this acting brotherly? He badgered George constantly. In addition, George's coke intake had escalated to the point where it was seriously clouding his judgment. He was up to four and five grams a day during the trips to and from L.A., whereas the pharmacology textbooks commonly put the toxicity level for normal people at 1.4 grams. Finally, there was the money: There was just so much of it lying around, what possible difference could it make whether he introduced them or not? In two years, George figured, he'd have $50 million dollars and get out of the business for good, convert some of his fantasies into reality. “Even if it wasn't $50 million, if it was only $20 million cash, you can do anything you want the rest of your life, put it into securities, make 12 or 15 percent interest. When you've got that kind of cash, they'll give you that kind of interest. At that time Mexico was giving in bonds something like 18 percent. Or the Mediterranean. This was not a vague plan of mine. I was going to do this thing with Carlos for a year or two, and I was getting out, because I didn't want to go back to jail, because I knew if you played this game, there were only two results—jail or death. So it was the motor sailer and be happy and drink the best wines and eat cheese and gamble in Monte Carlo, go to Hong Kong. Not in my wildest dreams did I think he would stab me in the back.”

The occasion for the introduction was a party in late July in the upper-middle-class community of Palos Verdes, at a sprawling house rented by Nick Hunter, an electronics-store owner and one of Richard's major dealers. There was a pool out back. Guests included the usual mix of rock artists and movie people, a lot of Hunter's high-end customers. About a pound of cocaine was piled up on a mirror sitting on a coffee table in the living room, there for the taking. Topless women were serving the drinks and bands were spelling each other so no one would have to endure more than a minute or so free of rock and roll. George was staying at the Castle with Richard that weekend, and he had invited Carlos to fly out for the party. After all the build-up, the meeting itself proved anticlimactic. George went with Richard to pick Carlos up at the airport. The two shook hands, and that was about it. Indeed, they seemed a little awkward with each other. Richard offered Carlos a snort, and to George's surprise Carlos took it. But whereas it usually brought people out of themselves, the coke only made Carlos seem quieter and more withdrawn. At the party, George noticed that Carlos talked mostly to the host, Nick Hunter, while sipping his mineral water. A crowd gathered around this exotic foreigner, but Carlos seemed pained by the attention. A couple of hours later he went back to his hotel and the next day returned to Miami.

EIGHT

Norman Cay

1978

I said, “Carlos, I hope you never betray me.” He said he never would. And he almost started to cry.

—G
EORGE
J
UNG

I
N THE CRUISING GUIDE TO THE
B
AHAMAS, YACHTSMEN
desirous of putting into Norman Cay for the night are warned that during certain months of the year, if you anchor in the large protected lagoon at the northern end of the island, it's not a great idea to dive in for a swim before lunch because you might get seriously eaten by a hammerhead shark. The sharks are born in the lagoon and return there every year to fulfill their instinct to copulate and perpetuate the species. Whether drawn by a fondly recalled feature of the place or reacting to a compass in their brains that homes in on some magnetic force in the bedrock underneath the island, as scientists more commonly believe, they leave the lagoon as small fry and reappear when they're ten feet long and in such numbers as to blacken the waters with their presence. Hammerheads aside, in all the other categories Norman Cay rates as being as close to paradise as any of the other seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas. Shaped in the form of a giant fishhook, with the barbed end curving around the shark lagoon and the shank consisting of a blindingly white beach a little over four miles long, the island lies at the head of the Exuma chain, an easy day's sail southeast of Nassau. Sparsely populated, Norman Cay possesses a harbor famous throughout the Bahamas for providing a haven from sudden tropical storms. A virgin coral reef eleven miles long and filled with tropical fish and wondrous underwater vegetation is situated just offshore. Out beyond the reef is the Exuma Sound, a thousand-foot-deep trench in the ocean that produces some of the best big-game fishing in the Caribbean.

In the 1960s, hoping to exploit its commercial potential, a land developer from Ohio constructed a modest twelve-unit hotel and restaurant there, along with a three-thousand-foot airstrip and a marina with an L-shaped dock. The venture languished after the Bahamas gained its independence from Great Britain and investors became jittery over what sort of business climate would be fostered by the new, all-black government. The island was then sold to a group of New York and Canadian businessmen, who by the late 1970s were still looking for someone to sink big money into the place.

In addition to sharks, Norman Cay has provided a refuge over the years for marine denizens of another variety, namely smugglers and sea pirates. It was named for a minor English pirate, and in the seventeenth century, it served Blackbeard and Henry Morgan as a launching point for their plundering. In the 1920s it was used as a way station for bootleggers running rum from the West Indies to the Florida coast, which lies 210 miles away, barely an hour's trip by airplane. There's no customs post on the island, or police presence of any kind. At night and in bad weather, airplanes can find the landing strip at Norman by locking on to the powerful radio beacon at Nassau International Airport, just twenty minutes away. And during the period in question there was the powerful advantage of what was referred to euphemistically as “the Bahamian way of life.” Loosely translated, this meant that under the government of Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling just about anything you might conceivably want in the Bahamas was up for sale, be it the courtesy of ample warning should the national police, for form's sake, decide to conduct a raid on your premises, or protection from any interference in your privately constituted affairs by any representative of a foreign power, especially including agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

The hospitality of the Bahamian government in regard to the drug business had been widely known among smugglers since the late 1960s, which was why during the summer of 1977, while George was doing the red-eye runs to the West Coast, Carlos Lehder had gone out scouting the region to find the kind of island empire he'd dreamed about ever since Danbury. On Norman Cay he immediately began negotiations with its corporate owners to buy a large amount of acreage on the southern end, which included the hotel, the airstrip, and the marina, with the stated object of developing the property. Carlos told them how he'd like to extend the airstrip a thousand feet or so, dredge the harbor, and expand the hotel, maybe also build a gambling casino. All this appealed to the owners, since they intended to retain a few building lots, which couldn't help but appreciate should Norman become a resort.

What Carlos neglected to tell them, of course, was that attracting tourists wasn't what he had in mind. As he related to George, the deeper docking facilities could be used for landing freighters—vessels with real carrying capacity, their holds fairly bursting with duffel bags of cocaine. From the dock he'd move the coke to airplane hangars he intended to construct along the runway, and fly it out on cargo planes, up to the DC-3s he could bring in once the airstrip had been extended. The hotel would be outfitted to house the kind of staff you'd need to keep a place like this humming—people to unload the ships, load up the planes, and keep everyone fed, entertained, and stimulated.