Blow (34 page)

Meanwhile, with the word out about the huge profits being made in the American market, Colombians were pouring into the States with the avidity of miners on the scent of a gold strike. The processors from Medellín controlled sales in Florida and most other areas of the country, which accounted for about 70 percent of the business; the balance, which went largely to New York City, was given over to traffickers from the Cali region, in the south. The cocaine lords weren't widely known as the “Medellín cartel” until around 1985, the year they made the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek;
but by the turn of the decade they had already formed the manufacturing end into a smooth-running industrial enterprise.

On the board of directors, as it were, was Pablo Escobar, who ranked as first among equals and had charge over most of the production facilities. With him sat the Ochoa clan from up north in Barranquilla. Unlike most of the others in the trade, who came from uncertain backgrounds—Pablo was part Lebanese, for instance—the Ochoas were an old family, proud of their roots in northern Spain. The patriarch, Don Fabio Ochoa, was an obese man with courtly manners who often dressed completely in white, from shoes to hat, invested in Picasso paintings, and devoted much of his time to the family's bullfighting interests and raising walking horses. Don Fabio had three sons, all active in the business, foremost of whom was Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, or El Gordo, “the Fat Man.” Short and stocky, clean-shaven with a pudding face, Jorge worked in the sales end of the company, coordinating much of the distribution in the southern United States. In his spare time he collected classic Harley-Davidsons and helped run the family's Hacienda Veracruz, a vast holding outside Barranquilla that, like Pablo's place outside Medellín, contained a private zoo with animals brought over from Africa. Also on the board was José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, known as “the Mexican,” who owned large tracts of forestland and oversaw the transport of the coca paste from the farms to the factories, now and then helping Pablo on the enforcing end. And then Carlos, of course, figured in overseas transportation. Carlos had begun building his own hacienda, complete with zoo, down in Armenia, to the south of Medellín.

Hundreds of others worked at high levels of the trade, buying kilos in Colombia, combining them with other loads for shipment to the States, or arranging for transportation on their own, if they had the bulk to make it pay. Whatever arrangement they worked out in their native land, they had a frantic need these days for airplanes and pilots, and for people they could trust who could put the trips together. In this part of the enterprise the Colombians clothed every piece of the deal in a cloak of secrecy; they had nothing to learn from the Byzantines when it came to the arts of deception. Most of the Colombians who sought out George and his airplanes came through Humberto—or George thought they did. But he never knew if Humberto was sending the Colombians as a service to them, for which Humberto got paid, or if the kilos these people wanted George to fly into the country really belonged to them or to Humberto, who might have been masking the fact for some reason. Or was Humberto possibly agenting the whole operation on behalf of his friend Pablo Escobar, and this was Pablo's personal cocaine? George suspected all of the above held true at one time or another, but he didn't know which it was, and he didn't much care, as long as the Colombians came.

“Humberto was now calling up constantly,” George recalls, “saying he's got this guy and that guy, they want to move three hundred kilos, five hundred kilos. He'd call and say, ‘Can you get me two planes by tomorrow? This guy has a thousand kilos.' I'd say, ‘Hey, slow down here, will you?' But I'd get them. Because by then it was snowballing. Everyone had started to do it. I was meeting ten different Colombians a week. They all had kilos to bring in. They all needed airplanes.”

It soon became clear that George couldn't run the business out of Eastham, and so he had Clara Luz rent another house for the family on the inland waterway in Pompano Beach, just north of Fort Lauderdale. He liked Fort Lauderdale because it had two airports, a lot of good restaurants, the Bahia Mar Yacht Basin, the lushly decorated Pier Sixty Six Resort and Marina. Living there also distanced him from the Colombian stomping ground in Miami, giving him a little peace and quiet when he wanted it. Yet getting to a business meeting in Coconut Grove or Little Havana or Coral Gables involved just a short hop down I-95.

Hank did six trips for George in rapid succession, carrying three hundred kilos each time, for a total of nearly two tons. George charged the Colombians the usual $10,000 a kilo, split it down the middle with Hank, and in about four months they were each better off by some $9 million. The operation won no prizes for sophistication. Figuring that the police in Norfolk, Virginia, weren't exactly turning over every rock looking for cocaine smugglers, they simply flew the loads in at night, straight from Colombia to the Norfolk airport. Once on the ground, the plane would taxi to a dark end of the runway and pause there so the kilos could be thrown out to George's guys waiting in the bushes, then taxi over to check in at the U.S. Customs shed. The kilos would be trucked down to a stash apartment in Miami and negotiations would be initiated with the Colombians for transferring the goods in return for payment for the trip.

When George sent word that the load had arrived, he'd be provided with the address of a house in Miami where the cocaine should be delivered. Usually it was located in a quiet middle-class area of Little Havana and occupied by Colombians trying to blend in with the socioeconomic mien of the neighborhood. At one point a trafficker even went so far as to print up a set of instructions for how these operators should act, a sort of Emily Post guide for the cocaine trade. According to one of the pamphlets confiscated during a DEA bust in the 1980s, the house should have an attached two-car garage and the people living there be a couple, thirty-something, with children. The man should leave in the morning carrying an attaché case, dressed for going to the office. “Try to imitate an American in all his habits,” it said, “like mow the lawn, wash the car, etc.” The couples were warned “not to have any extravagant social events at the house, but [they] may have an occasional barbecue, inviting trusted relatives. It is recommended that every occupant have a well-maintained dog. Preferably a Great Dane.”

George would drop off half the load at the house, wait until it was in turn unloaded to wholesalers, then demand his fee for the plane trip before delivering the rest—again, holding on to the second half as collateral against their disappearing without paying the freight. When the Colombians showed up with the money and George showed up with the coke, George would bring along a bodyguard. George employed several over the years, but easily the most formidable was Richard Starkland, alias “Bird,” from Natick, Massachusetts. A former air-force ground crewman who saw service in Vietnam, Bird was built like a piece of earth-moving equipment—six feet six inches tall, 260 pounds, with a broad, slightly pitted face and a big bushy beard. A fisherman by trade, Bird got his name several years earlier when he and a confederate were surprised by the game warden while tonging for clams in illegal waters. His pal was caught, but Starkland took off by land and succeeded in outrunning the marshal, even with three bushels of clams slung over his back. “Tell that big bird running over the marshes that he hasn't seen the last of me,” the marshal told Starkland's accomplice, and the name stuck. George met Bird in jail in Massachusetts following his early pot bust, and the two became pals. Bird had been arrested down near Yuma, Arizona, in connection with a purchase he'd made of thirty-five hundred pounds of marijuana from the mayor of San Luis, Mexico, right across the border. He carried the whole load on his back, two hundred pounds a trip, through the Colorado River to a location on the U.S. side in the Yuma Desert. He then returned east and paid two gofers from Framingham to go down in a jeep, pick up the pot, and bring it back. “I told them right where it was, that there were only two trees in the state of Arizona, and this was next to one of them, but they still couldn't find it.” Bird went down and found it himself, unfortunately at the same time as did agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, and so the Bird was in the bag.

For his bodyguard duty he charged George $5,000 an appearance, plus the cost of his hardware, which consisted of a short-barreled .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson State Trooper, and also a Colt .45 automatic—not the erratic army model, but one of the Gold Cup competition series, capable of putting five slugs into a circle the size of a quarter at twenty paces. He'd arm the clip with mercury loads, which were hollow-point bullets bored out and filled with mercury and sealed over with wax. One hit anywhere in the upper body with this mother and half a man's back would be oozing down the wallpaper. When the Colombians arrived, Bird would monitor their entrance into the apartment and then, while the coke was being inspected and the money counted, stand next to the door, his back to the wall, not say anything, and stare. “They'd feel you out with their eyes, so you'd never want to look down and you'd never want to blink,” he says. Bird made about eight appearances for George, supervising the orderly transference of somewhere in the vicinity of three tons of cocaine and $10 million to $15 million in cash—no problem.

After his last trip for George, Hank and his Dove hired out on another job and disappeared altogether. He gave no warning to George, left his wife and children, just vanished. George figured he either crashed his plane or made cocaine connections on his own and set up another life. With his string of Colombians to satisfy, however, George now needed another pilot, another plane, and another piece of luck. He had a chance meeting with the man who owned the house in Eastham, an Italian contractor named Dino Viprini. Dino dropped by one day because Mirtha had complained that their refrigerator, a brand-new Hotpoint, wasn't getting cold enough. Dino had never met George before this, but he'd heard stories. “I started talking to this Italian guy,” recalls George. “And he says, ‘Ya know, I know what you're doin'.'

“‘What are you talking about, What I'm doin'?'

“‘Come on,' he says, ‘Come on. Guy comes in here, throws money and cash around, pays the rent in cash. You know, I got an airplane. I know some people in Florida, too.'

“I said, ‘Is that right, Dino?'

“And he says, ‘Yeah, that's right,' and I said, ‘Let's talk some more.'”

It turned out that, like Hank, Dino had also been a pot smuggler, bringing tons of it in by boat from Jamaica to the Cordage Pier in Plymouth Harbor, just a few hundred yards from the crowds of tourists who stand around staring at what's left of Plymouth Rock. Dino told George he knew a wealthy developer in Palm Beach and also a pilot who'd been flying pot into Texas and guns back into South America. Both of these guys were named Ralph—Big Ralph and Little Ralph. Dino said that Big Ralph, the developer, was looking to make a large investment of money and time and effort in the cocaine business. One thing led to another, and soon George was going down to Palm Beach for a visit. “At the time, he was married to a wealthy woman and living in this $5 million estate on the water,” George says. “I'd call his house and his wife would say, ‘Let me see, the Lamborghini's here, so's the Ferrari. Let me check with the maid whether he's at the polo club'—he was a member of the Palm Beach Polo Club—or he'd be hanging out by his stables on the estate.”

Rather than chartering planes, Big Ralph suggested they go in together to buy one of their own and just hire the pilots. They chose a $1.2 million Cessna Conquest, a nine-passenger twin-engine turboprop. By taking out the seats they could fill the cargo area with just over a ton of cocaine. The Conquest had a speed of nearly 400 miles an hour and a range of 2,300 miles, meaning you could fly back from Colombia and go deep into the States without refueling. Because its turbo engines needed less oxygen than those on a straight prop job, the Conquest could fly in thinner atmosphere, up around 30,000 feet, almost beyond the view of groundlings, and its steep climb ratio enabled it to land and take off on the proverbial dime. The plane also had the advantage over a full jet in that its props allowed it to operate in heavy atmosphere as well as thin, so it could get right down on the deck, sneak underneath any radar surveillance, and come nipping into U.S. airspace fifty feet above the wave tops.

In the import company they formed, George was vice president in charge of sales, arranging the trips, ensuring the planes had a load to bring back, collecting payment for the job. The two Ralphs ran the operation itself, hired the pilots, made sure the flights got off the ground on schedule, came back in good order. Operating in such perfect symbiosis, they began flying regularly out of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airfield, and returning to tiny strips in the Everglades, North Florida, Alabama, and the Carolinas. From there they would truck the product back to Miami, where George turned it over to the Colombians. “All of a sudden I didn't give a shit about Carlos Lehder anymore,” he says. “I was married to the Colombians, and I had the two Ralphs, with all the equipment and wherewithal. I was running with all these people, the flights going in and out. Barry Kane and his little shitbox of an airplane! Doing little piss-ant trips! I wouldn't even talk about less than 1 million, 2 million, 3 million a run anymore. This was the dream I had had, right here. And it was all happening. What did I care about Carlos now? I was becoming as big a cocaine king as he was.”

*   *   *

George was acting pretty royally in the consumption category as well, with Mirtha keeping him company most of the way. He'd been using cocaine more or less regularly since late 1976, after the suitcase runs to Antigua, but these days his intake moved toward a level that, had the category existed, might have qualified him for a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
When it comes to snorting coke, of course, establishing any level of use as “average” seems a fairly fruitless enterprise, considering how the drug tends to encourage the pursuit of extremes. Nevertheless, as calibrated in several academic studies of the subject, the standard hit for someone characterized as a regular but moderate user is usually figured at a couple of lines, one to a nostril, each line about an eighth of an inch wide by an inch long, containing fifty to a hundred milligrams of cocaine, done two or three times during an evening, maybe once or twice a week. This cocaine would most likely have been cut, so it's far from pure, not like the stuff to which George had access. Although snorting is the most socially acceptable form of intake, the nasal membranes offer one of the slower routes to the brain, since the coke must travel all through the secondary circulatory system to get there, arriving badly diluted in the bargain.