Blow (42 page)

To rate being sent to the forestry camp at Plymouth required his first spending a year in the prison system, during which he filtered down through the upper security levels, like a piece of food moving along the alimentary canal. First there was time in a maximum-security joint, the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole; then there was “close” security, which meant the MCIs at Norfolk and Concord. He passed much of the time reading, and sending off literature samples to Mirtha: “The changing seasons are but a four-act play, leaving us to obey the applause and filling us with curtain calls and laughter, for you and I are the center of the universe,” went one epistle. “There's a book called the
I Ching.
It is a book of wisdom written by holy men. One sentence is enough to busy one's mind and penetrate deep into you. I wanted to teach you of the book but our life was filled with such turmoil that as you well know I lost touch with the inner truth.… P.S. If you send peanuts they must be in pressure sealed cans. Cheese and meats can be wrapped in original cellophane wrapper. Also discuss with attorney that I want to be moved to Plymouth MCI. Take picture with Polaroid with red background similar to passport photo. Will explain later.”

He also wrote to Kristina—his arms and legs might be paralyzed, but there was still life in his fingers.

Dear Sunshine,

I wish you a very happy birthday. You are the Sunshine of my life. I love you. Be happy always. Try to give joy and happiness to those around you. Be kind to others. Love and love life. Love is a precious sacred gift which I give to you.

Love,

Daddy

Underneath his signature George drew in a large smiling face of the sun.

Actually, “escape” doesn't seem quite the appropriate word for what George did about six months after he'd reached Plymouth, on the night of February 13, 1985, to be exact. “Walking away” describes it more accurately, since the place has no real fence around it, and the inmates were pretty loosely watched. For a payment of two thousand dollars, he'd arranged to have a confederate bring him a change of clothes and drive along a road close by the prison, slow down near a copse of trees where George would be waiting for him at precisely nine-thirty at night. George had chosen that time because it would be dark then, and also because the last count was done at 9:00
P.M
., by a guard who wandered around the place with a clipboard. An hour later, at ten, everyone had to be in their rooms, and the place was locked up. Shortly afterward, around ten-thirty, a guard would check again, to see that all the beds were occupied. George figured this gave him an hour's head start, from 9:30 to 10:30, before his absence would be noticed. So right after the count George sauntered over toward the outside of the floodlit area, and when the guard with the clipboard disappeared into the building, he slipped into the darkness. The car appeared on schedule, and less than an hour later he'd changed into a sports jacket and slacks and was ensconced in a chair at a revolving bar at the top of the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, sipping his Scotch and looking out over the city lights. Just for the style of it, he'd left a note on his bed for the prison administration to ponder. “Freedom is a realm of illusion,” it read. “And I am a master of illusion.”

While in prison, George had found the intellectual level of the Massachusetts inmates to be a good deal lower than that at Danbury. Nevertheless, he did manage to make several useful acquaintances, one of whom he was thinking about now as he sat slowly revolving above Cambridge. Dale Habel was a forty-five-year-old prisoner who had been serving time for helping to smuggle several tons of pot into the old whaling port of New Bedford. Having to do his time in the North imposed a special hardship on Dale, since he normally lived in Florida and had never managed to acclimate himself to the cold. Dale and George had in common the fact that they'd both lived in the Fort Lauderdale area; Dale had lived west of the city, in the farming community of Davie. In prison, he and George had talked a lot about smuggling. If George ever needed help getting planes or finding landing fields, Dale had told him, he had a good buddy down there who could be of service. He was a farmer, an old guy, but still a tough son of a bitch and reliable, who ran a farm labor camp, renting out migrant pickers during harvest time. The farmer had been a marijuana smuggler, had rigged it so the bales were dropped out of an airplane into a cornfield out near his place where he also raised horses, out near Davie in a town called Sunrise. But this old farmer would be just as interested, Dale thought, in working on the importation of some other product. And so it was that when George got back down to Florida, a fugitive now for the third and weariest time in his life, he did just as Dale had suggested and hooked himself up with Leon Harbuck.

*   *   *

George had missed a year and a half of action while being a guest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and when 1985 rolled around, a few new faces had come on to the scene. Madonna and Prince had caught on in the music business. In sports that year, Boris Becker, age seventeen, became the youngest player ever to win the tournament at Wimbledon. On the international scene, the Soviet premiers had been dying right and left, and now there was a new Russian name to learn, that of Mikhail Gorbachev, fifty-four, the youngest leader to take over since Stalin. In the cocaine business, too, circumstances had changed dramatically. With the sharp decrease in wholesale prices, George had to bargain hard now to get less than half his accustomed payment for transportation, down to between three and four thousand dollars a kilo these days.

Right after leaving Plymouth, George put in a call to Humberto down in Medellín to line up some kilos for their last trip, then he flew out to his old stomping grounds in Manhattan Beach, California, to see about acquiring a plane and a pilot. The news back from Colombia proved encouraging. His brother-in-law said that three to four hundred kilos, maybe more, would be ready to ship in early April. This time around, Humberto would appreciate George making some use of his stepson, and George's nephew-in-law, Joseph Ahmed. Joseph, who was Martha's son from a previous marriage, was twenty-five years old, and Humberto thought it was high time for him to earn his spurs in the business, to show the powers that be, Pablo and the others, that he was old enough now to be trusted with his own loads. The news from California turned out to be less welcoming. In Manhattan Beach George had looked up some of the marijuana pilots, including Here-We-Go Bob, whom he found through his motorcycle, a custom-built chrome job with high-rise handlebars and a stretch fork in the front, parked just off the beach, as if Bob hadn't budged an inch in fifteen years. Although he and the others seemed glad enough to see George again, they reacted with suspicion when he broached the subject of flying in cocaine. “They knew I'd been arrested, but they didn't know whether I'd really escaped or was working for Uncle Sam,” he says. “After all, how'd I keep escaping and getting away? You begin to wonder after a while. Either you're working for the government or you're a certified lunatic. ‘You're saying you just walked out of prison? No, this is too much, George, I don't want any part of it.'”

So it was early in March when he arrived in Florida, still looking for a means of transportation. Dale, his newfound friend from Massachusetts, had also been released from prison by now, and the two of them went out to see this guy Leon Harbuck at a trailer he lived in with his young wife in the middle of a horse pasture out in the boonies west of Fort Lauderdale. Harbuck turned out to be a leather-tough Florida cowboy, with jug ears, a bulbous nose, a lot of missing teeth, and thinning hair that stuck up in wispy tufts. He talked with a brittle cracker twang, and his face was set in a more or less permanent glare, not a guy well endowed with a sense of humor. During a break in the discussion over how to get an airplane, Harbuck asked George if he'd ever ridden a horse. Sure, George said, thinking of the well-broken beasts the beach boys had gotten him down in Puerto Vallarta. “I got up on the back of this horse, and all of a sudden the son of a bitch takes off like a rocket, nothing I could do to stop it. He's heading right for this fence, and I'm thinking either he's going to jump over it or stop short and throw
me
over it. Either way I had to get off, so the only thing I could think of was to hurl myself off backward, and I landed on the ground with a crash, flat on my back, thought I'd broken every goddamn bone in my body. This guy Harbuck comes running up to me yelling, ‘Holy shit! That was the greatest dismount I've seen in my life!'”

Within a couple of weeks, Harbuck called George to say he'd put out the word and had found a couple of guys in the transportation business. Their names were Tom and Greg, and they seemed to have what was needed—pilots, planes, manpower, anything George wanted. George said it sounded good, but that he'd agree to meet them only if they brought along their pilot. He was the crucial factor here, and George didn't want to spin his wheels on a deal that wasn't going to pan out. The meeting was set for the night of March 27 in George's room at the Days Inn, off I-95.

George doesn't recall much about Tom and Greg during that first meeting, because his attention was almost completely devoted to the guy they brought with them to fly in the load. Here staring at him, hardly changed since he'd last seen him, was his old pal and buddy from Mexico days, the
FLYBOY
himself, Cliff Guttersrud. During that first encounter, George kept the recognition to himself, as did Cliff, but seeing his old pilot here renewed his confidence. “I hadn't seen Cliff since Mexico, in ten or fifteen years, but I recognized him right away,” recalls George. “I mean, he had been with Ramón and Frank, and Annette, and the two Wendys. He'd stayed with all of us at the beach house in Puerto Vallarta. We'd done a whole bunch of things together, and he was a damn good pilot. Harbuck I wasn't terribly thrilled dealing with, and I didn't really know much about Tom and Greg. But seeing Cliff eased my mind a lot. It gave me a really good feeling about the trip.”

*   *   *

By about the same time, March of 1985, the police in Florida—and just about everywhere else in the country—had been in steady retreat when it came to waging President Reagan's war on drugs. For all the manpower, intelligence capability, and equipment provided by the much vaunted South Florida Task Force—and the big seizures it flaunted now and then before the TV cameras—the aggressive battle was by now proving itself a sad exercise in futility. At the time of its formation under the leadership of Vice President George Bush in January of 1982, the task force had been given an unprecedented amount of resources to interdict cocaine smugglers and track down money launderers. The DEA's Florida office was provided with 60 new agents, 10 supervisors, and 3 intelligence analysts; 43 agents were added to the FBI in Florida, 145 to the Customs Service, 45 to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 20 to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center of the Treasury Department, 11 to the U.S. Marshals Service, and an unspecified number of accountants to the Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. Attorney's Office was bolstered with prosecutors. Chief Justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court promised to provide more federal judges to try the cases. The Coast Guard got additional cutters with which to blockade the coast. Navy warships were authorized to stop suspected vessels on the high seas. The U.S. Army contributed Cobra helicopter gunships, famous for their fire support during the Vietnam War, which would now chase after suspected drug planes. The Cobras would get help from the navy's sophisticated EC-2 surveillance planes, capable of tracking drug flights emanating from the Bahamas and the Caribbean by radar. As commander-in-chief of the operation, the vice president came to Florida in February of 1982 and told a gathering of the Miami Citizens Against Crime: “To those who commit crime, who engage in violence, we say, the American people have great patience, but that patience has been sapped.”

If the object of it all was to reduce the supply of cocaine available to those who wanted it in the forty-eight contiguous American states plus Alaska, the task force in its first three years of operation had been a dismal failure. At the time of its inception, federal estimates put the amount of cocaine arriving in the United States at somewhere between 60 and 80 tons a year; the wholesale price for a kilo of 100 percent pure coke was fifty to sixty thousand dollars; and the police were finding the strength of the average gram they seized on the street to be 12.5 percent cocaine. By 1985, despite record seizures by agencies cooperating in the task-force effort, it was estimated that between 100 and 125 tons were being imported each year, the price of a kilo of pure cocaine had dropped to twenty thousand dollars—and would keep going down for another two years—and the strength of a street gram was moving on up toward 30 percent cocaine. There was more coke around than ever, it was better than ever, and it cost a lot less; in fact, it was becoming affordable for just about everyone. Poor and working-class Americans, black and white, could now get themselves a taste of what the privileged minority had been shouting about. And no one knew it yet, but the devastating crack epidemic lay just around the corner.

As a police problem, not only were the drug smugglers too numerous and absolutely relentless in their pursuit of the American market bonanza, but on balance they had proved much more clever than the cops. “It took us a while to learn how far ahead of us they were in terms of technology and sophistication,” says Michael McManus, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Fort Lauderdale. No matter what hardware the feds added to their arsenal, the smugglers always seemed to go them one better. In the bust of one smuggling operation, McManus says, the DEA confiscated an elaborate code book, which consisted of forty legal-size, typewritten pages of radio frequencies that had enabled the smugglers to pinpoint not only the location of interceptor boats operated by the police, but also the whereabouts of the Coast Guard, the army, the navy, even the Secret Service. They also had plenty of money to overwhelm the police with surveillance. At Port Everglades, for instance, the main entrance from the sea into the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, they'd have spies sitting on the jetties, monitoring the marine traffic, watching the U.S. Customs and local police boats move in and out of the port. “There are no more predictable people in the world than cops,” says McManus. “From 8:00 to 9:00
A.M
. they'd stop and have their coffee. At 12:00 noon they'd cruise over to the Coast Guard station to get a cheap lunch. So the boats loaded with drugs would just wait offshore until the guy watching the traffic radioed out to them, ‘Come on down. Bring the fish in to market.'”