Blow (4 page)

Listening to Carlos explain some of this, sitting on his bunk in Danbury, George retained about as much as he had of the chem-lab lectures back in high school, which wasn't a lot. But when Carlos got to the economic end of the business, George started paying more attention. Adding up the cost of the coca leaves, the chemicals, and the cheap labor involved, it cost the processors less than a thousand dollars to produce a kilo of 100 percent pure cocaine, which they were selling then for six thousand dollars in Colombia. If they transported it to Miami, it would go wholesale for between fifty and sixty thousand dollars a kilo. In 1974 tenured college professors earned twenty thousand dollars a year and houses in the Hamptons went for a hundred grand. With a few trips to Florida, one could become a rich man.

Moving from wholesaling to retailing, the numbers climbed higher still as the quality of the product got worse. Cut a number of times by interim dealers, who would add inert substances to boost the weight and maintain their profit margin, the common street product in some cases would contain no more than 15 or 20 percent cocaine. Dealers found they often had to add Methedrine to give the mix a decent amount of drive. But for argument's sake, say it was cut only once or twice, keeping the product fairly high-grade. Selling for one hundred dollars a gram, a thousand grams to the kilo, with all the deals running smoothly, no glitches along the way, this meant the kilo purchased for six thousand in Colombia would generate street sales in America of between two and three hundred thousand dollars, and even more if you dealt in shoddier merchandise.

By now George's jaw was fairly sagging toward his navel at the prospect of the profits involved here. But what about the supply? he asked, applying a dose of skepticism to this otherwise heady scenario. He knew from his own early frustrations in the marijuana business, knocking around Puerto Vallarta in Mexico searching for a pot connection, that sales projections meant nothing unless you could lay your hands on the goods. Don't worry, my friend, Carlos told him; they could get all the cocaine they wanted. He had several important acquaintances. One of them, named Gustavo Gaviria, was, like Carlos, in the business of stealing and smuggling cars, but with a twist. Gustavo stole the cars and smuggled them into Ecuador and Peru, where he sold them to buy coca paste, which he brought back to Medellín and had refined into cocaine; it was a good business, with very low start-up costs. He was now also getting connections for paste in Bolivia, Carlos had heard, and making arrangements with a number of labs outside Medellín. This Gustavo was in partnership with his cousin, a former emerald smuggler whom people in Medellín were starting to talk about as a man on the rise. Carlos had met this guy himself. The name meant nothing to George, no more than it did to anyone else in the United States at the time. It was only later that George came to appreciate the value of Carlos's having even this tangential a connection to Pablo Escobar.

As for the demand side, cocaine seemed on the verge of really taking off in the United States. Although it was hardly a mass-market commodity, interest in it was building fast, particularly on the West Coast, where rock stars and movie actors were touting it like crazy, as if they owned stock in the company. Coded references cropped up in songs by Steppenwolf and the Jefferson Airplane. Record producer Phil Spector sent out Christmas cards that read: “A little snow at Xmas time never hurt anyone.” Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were proselytizing on its behalf, using it openly at Hollywood parties. In L.A. it had to be an out-of-it shindig indeed where guests didn't disappear into the bathroom, emerging with pupils dilated and a lot of sudden pep. It wouldn't be until 1977 that there existed enough national savvy about the drug to generate one of the major guffaws in Woody Allen's
Annie Hall,
when the Woody Allen character makes a hundred dollars' worth of cocaine disappear with a badly aimed sneeze. But by 1974, bedrock polling evidence had already suggested the balloon was about to go up: The National Household Survey announced that 5.4 million Americans over the age of eighteen had admitted to snorting cocaine at least once.

Alone, however, the Colombians didn't seem quite able to exploit the potential of this burgeoning market. Not many of them spoke English. They didn't feel comfortable in America, where their speech and manner of dress made them stand out; they were wary of foreigners. Their only experience in the U.S. had been in Miami and New York, both of which had fairly large communities of compatriots to provide them cover. They knew nothing about the West Coast.

Clearly the need now was for an American connection the Colombians could trust—a facilitator who not only knew how to get the stuff into the country safely and in much larger amounts than had been done so far, but who also had access to a distribution network of reliable individuals through which the product could be supplied to all the seemingly eager customers. Here was where George took over the conversation from Carlos, detailing his experience in the marijuana business. He told Carlos he could get airplanes, one, two, ten of them, if they wanted. He ran through his lecture on the dry lake beds. You could reach them just as easily from Colombia, in one or two jumps, stopping off in Mexico to refuel. He knew all about doing that. As he saw it, getting cocaine into the country posed no problem. As far as the marketing went, at about the time George was going off to prison he had noticed that many of the dealers who'd been taking his pot had begun to deal in cocaine as a sideline. And the word he'd been hearing was that they couldn't get anywhere near as much as they could sell, and what they got was sadly diluted. Nevertheless, the dealers were building up customers, developing the necessary market knowledge—what kind of people wanted it, where they could be found. George told Carlos he knew a guy, a hairdresser—never mind his name—who was plugged in to the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, who knew rock stars and movie starlets. This guy was crying for it, too. No doubt about it, George said; he could get the connections.

Once they had this thing cranked up, the money pouring in would make what George had been taking out of the marijuana trade look like a kid's allowance. Say they flew in three hundred kilos of 100 percent pure cocaine—an astronomical amount at the time, but if he'd flown in three hundred keys of pot, why couldn't he just as fucking well fly in the same amount of coke? That would cost them $180,000 in Colombia, and it would wholesale in the States for, what, $15 million? Eighteen million? And if they did that once a month? What are we talking a year, here? Pick me up off the floor! he thought, woozy over the prospect. Maybe once a strong market was developed, he'd back off it a little, just do the transportation part—pick it up at Point A and deliver it to Point B, without having to worry about selling the stuff. He'd make less money that way, but it would be a lot less risky. Ninety-five percent of how you got your ass caught in the dope business was by selling to someone you didn't happen to know was working for the police. George didn't need a lecture on that one. So for doing just the transportation, they'd charge the Colombians $10,000 a kilo, get some planes, provide constant service, run a regular airline. Flying in three hundred kilos a month, even half that amount—let's not be pigs about it—would come to $18 million dollars a year.

“Suddenly I knew I had the world by the balls and I just needed a little patience and I was going to get so fucking rich it was beyond belief,” George says. “Have you ever known something like that? I knew it and I didn't care what kind of hell I had to go through. It didn't matter anymore. It was mine, all of it, and I couldn't believe it myself. I couldn't believe it—that here I was, a kid from a fucking shithole town like Weymouth, smuggling some lousy marijuana—and I thought
that
was money!—and all of a sudden I knew I was going to have millions and millions of dollars. I didn't just get sent to jail. I got sent a gift! I was thankful they put me there. Really! ‘Thank you, federal government. Thank you, fucking FBI. You don't know what you did for me.'”

ONE

Weymouth

1946–1965

Cohasset for its Beauty

Hingham for its Pride

If it weren't for the Herring,

Poor Weymouth would have died.

—O
LD SAYING

I
N
1622
A SPLINTER GROUP OF
P
ILGRIMS
from the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts journeyed up the coast to Weymouth to try to set up a trading post, and if they'd only heard about the herring they might not have made such a mess of it. As it was, they turned out to be a pretty sorry crew, bickering among themselves and stealing corn and other foodstuffs from the local Wampanoag tribe. In return, the Indians found little reason to help out the following winter when the Pilgrims ran desperately short of food and ended up either dying of starvation or dragging themselves ignominiously back to Plymouth. A permanent settlement wasn't established in Weymouth until two years later, when people with farming skills, rather than traders, gave it a shot, and after no less a person than Miles Standish himself had come up to Weymouth to win over the hearts and minds of the Wampanoags, who had gotten pretty ornery by then. Standish accomplished the task in ready fashion by inviting two of the more influential sachems to be his guests for a nice sit-down lunch, and when the Indians began to feel a little under the weather—he'd taken the precaution of poisoning their food—his men dispatched them with knives and axes.

The famous herring that might have saved the settlers migrated in from the ocean early every summer and swam upstream to their traditional spawning ground in a body of fresh water known as Whitmans Pond. During the height of the trek, all but killed off in the early 1900s by industrial development, Whitmans Pond would virtually boil over with fish, providing townspeople a nearly effortless and bountiful harvest. As a little boy, George could see the pond from his bedroom window, and in winter he'd walk over from the house his parents had in a subdivision known as Lake Shore Park and go ice skating with his chums.

To the other blue-collar families in the neighborhood, the Jungs seemed to have it pretty good in those years right after World War II. Where most of the men and some of the women worked on the assembly line down at the Procter & Gamble plant or as welders and steamfitters at the Fore River Shipyard across the river in Quincy, George's father led a relatively independent life, servicing heating accounts throughout Boston from his own truck. The family certainly had money enough. Every other year Fred bought a brand new car, either a Ford or a Mercury, always the roomiest model; his wife wore the best of clothes, had a fur coat.

George was too young in those days to help his father on the truck, so a boy from the neighborhood, Russell Delorey, who was nine years older and would often baby-sit for the Jungs, went along with Fred on Saturdays and school holidays. “In the winter I'd walk over there at six in the morning in the dark,” recalls Russell, who grew up to become a masonry contractor on Cape Cod. “He'd start that big oil truck and I'd climb up and sit in it while it warmed up. When he finished his breakfast, he'd come out and we'd leave, and we wouldn't come home until ten o'clock at night.” Fred invariably drove the same route, from South Boston to the South End, from Beacon Hill to Washington Street, and for Russell the work often proved grueling. Hauling the heavy oil hose over back fences and sometimes a hundred feet up an alley covered with snow or ice or mud, the boy would often slip and fall. “Some of the settings were also a little frightening for a young person,” Russell says today. “There'd be drunks sleeping in the alley, and black people around, but I never felt threatened because of Fred's ability to manage everything, be a friendly person with everybody, no matter who you were. It seemed to me that he knew everybody in the city of Boston. Driving home, he would talk about the merits of a wholesome life, about working hard all day long. We'd always stop in Quincy on the way and get a large loaf of Syrian bread to take home. We did that every night.”

In 1948, when George was six, the Jungs moved up, both geographically and economically, to a house on Abigail Adams Circle. Laid out as a subdivision just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Circle featured larger, two-story colonial-style houses, some of which, like the Jungs', occupied the crown of a hill and looked down over the salt marsh to the Fore River as it flowed into the sea at Wessagussett Bay, site of the original settlement. In Weymouth terms, the Circle rated as one of the better parts of town. Here the women mostly stayed home all day, and the men wore ties and worked as managers at General Dynamics in Quincy, or commuted on the South Shore Railroad to office jobs in Boston. The father of George's best boyhood friend, Malcolm MacGregor, had a degree from MIT and a prominent job as a ship surveyor that took the family overseas for long stretches. Across the street and three doors down lived the Fieldses. Mr. Fields was the president of a button company in Boston; his son went off to Colby College. It was in the Fieldses' driveway that George saw his first Porsche.

Financially, the Jungs held their own well enough, but the new neighborhood was something of a challenge socially. Looking back, Malcolm MacGregor's mother, Gladys, cannot recall Mr. or Mrs. Jung ever taking part in the annual Christmas dances that would be held at the Community Hall, or showing up for the Fourth of July picnics in the neighborhood. “They never mixed much,” she says. Her memory of George's mother, Ermine, was of a “nice and quiet woman” who worked in the Ann Taylor shop in nearby Braintree. She was exceptionally pretty. In her looks and her flowing dress she resembled the actress Loretta Young; not by accident, it seemed, “The Loretta Young Show” was a program she never missed. Mrs. MacGregor recalls George's father as a heavy-set man, with a ruddy complexion and always a cigar sticking out the side of his mouth. “He was an ordinary man, a beer drinker,” she says. “He'd park his oil truck in the family's driveway.” And according to Russell Delorey, Fred got just about as much respect inside the household. “I don't believe that Mrs. Jung or the other family members really knew what Fred's day was like,” says Russell. “I saw it as full, rewarding, and successful. But I'm afraid that at home he was simply regarded as an oilman.”