Blow (45 page)

Instead, it was decided to fly the load into a regular landing strip, a reasonably out-of-the-way field they had found up in Vero Beach, about a hundred miles north of Fort Lauderdale. This decision to abandon the cornfield, however, made Harbuck and his son-in-law unhappy, because it seemed as if they were getting nudged out of the deal. “Harbuck had always wanted to be the controller of the operation, right under George,” says Tom. “But once George started living on the boat, his loyalty changed from Harbuck to us. Leon thought he was going to get cut out completely. He'd also given us fifteen thousand dollars for expenses, and now he wanted at least to get his money back.” While Harbuck was contemplating the best way to accomplish this, there were a couple of developments involving the boat that almost blew up the whole deal. While luxurious, the quarters aboard were also tight, which meant that tempers could easily flare up. At one point George and Ahmed, who was snorting coke pretty consistently—another infraction Tom and Greg regularly had to overlook—got into such a violent fight with each other that people on the neighboring yachts called the Fort Lauderdale police. The cops showed up, not knowing they'd barged in on an undercover operation, and a lot of diplomacy had to be used to settle the dispute without having George and Joseph hauled down to the police station, where it would have been discovered that, my God, here was an escapee from a state prison.

Then, in a piece of coincidence worthy of Charles Dickens, Cliff Guttersrud one night met at a singles bar the ex-wife of the dirty cop whose boat they were living on. Cliff brought her back to the yacht, whereupon in the presence of George she remarked on the fact that this vessel looked very familiar. In fact, this was her husband's boat! “I remember I was on my honeymoon in Napa Valley, California,” says Tom, “when I got this call from George. He said, ‘Hey, I found out that the boat we're staying on is a cop's boat.' But he didn't think, ‘Hey, you guys must be cops.' It was, ‘What are we going to do? She told us we were being set up. The police seized it. She could show us the newspaper articles.'” Tom told George to relax. It was his father's boat, all right. He'd bought it at the auction where the police sell all the stuff they've confiscated. Hadn't he told him that before?

Nevertheless, they felt they'd already pressed their luck too far with the boat, so they moved George and Joseph back into a hotel, to a Holiday Inn out in Davie, thinking they'd cause less trouble farther from civilization. And that worked okay for a few days, until May 12, when George opened his door to a knock and found Harbuck standing there with his son-in-law, Steve Fuller, and Fuller was pointing at George with a .38-caliber revolver. Harbuck announced that he had nothing particularly against George, but he'd decided the only way to get back the money he'd invested was to commit a kidnapping, and George and Joseph were going to be his victims. George asked Harbuck who the fuck he thought he was kidding. And if he wanted to shoot him, go ahead. Where would that get him? Joseph, however, took the situation a little more to heart, especially as he saw Fuller pick up one of the pillows on the couch to use, supposedly, to muffle a gunshot, and he raced past them out the door screaming down the hallway that they were being kidnapped and somebody call the police. “Now we're all in trouble,” recalls George. “So I tell Harbuck, ‘Look, Leon, we better get the fuck out of here before the cops come, because I'm a goddamn fugitive, and we'll all get arrested, you stupid son of a bitch.' So in effect, you could say I facilitated my own kidnapping.” The next day Harbuck called up Tom and Greg to tell them what he'd done and what he wanted. And after George got on the phone to say he was okay, they drove out to meet Harbuck, gave him back his money, and secured the return of George.

By now the operation was into its third month, and patience on all sides was wearing thin. “We had been at these guys' beck and call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day,” says Greg. “Drive us here, drive us there, get us this, get us that, take them to Miami, take them out to the airplane. It was getting pretty tiring.” Greg pulled an eight-hour wait at the Miami passport office getting Joseph his papers so he could fly down to Medellín. Just about the last straw came the day when George said that, despite everything they'd done for him, he needed to find out more about them. After all, the only thing he knew was what they'd told him. “He told us, ‘I've got to know where at least one of you lives,'” says Greg. “And he was adamant about it. ‘We just can't do this deal unless you show me. If anything goes wrong, it shows your good faith.'

“Well, we had a real estate friend who was selling a house about forty-five minutes north of Lauderdale. It was a nice place, going for $400,000, the furnishings were still there, even a little dog, a miniature poodle, running around. We decided to show him that house and tell him it belonged to Tom.” Before they took him out there, Tom stuck some family snaps up on the wall to personalize the place. “When we arrived with George, I told him my wife was out at the store, but to look around, take his time. The poodle was yapping at us the whole time we were there. I told him, ‘Don't mind the dog, George, it does that to everyone.' And anyway, he bought it.”

Finally, after some three and a half months of on-again, off-again preparation, the plane was set to go down early on the morning of Saturday, May 25, and return sometime after midnight, right in the middle of Memorial Day weekend. George had brought down two gofers he knew from Massachusetts to act as a security detail, to help watch out for the police. Joseph had gone down to Medellín earlier to get the coordinates of the field they'd be using. The way George set it up with Humberto, Joseph would fly down in the Queen Air with Cliff and B.D. to supervise the actual loading. Coming back, they'd stop off in the Cayman Islands to take on fuel. Cliff had said the plane would be too heavy to make it to the States in one jump. In Florida, they'd land up in Vero Beach. The three hundred kilos, packed in duffel bags, would be off-loaded into a truck and a station wagon and driven down to this safe house that Tom and Greg had rented in Lauderdale. On the drive down, the two guys from Massachusetts would follow behind in another car, and if they saw any police on their tail, their job was to take off down the highway, to draw the cops away from the load.

Once it was safely in the stash house, negotiations would begin to transfer the coke to the Colombians in Miami. George had negotiated with Humberto to be paid $4,000 a kilo for the trip, a good price, considering the drop in the wholesale rates. This meant a total of $1.2 million. Of this, $300,000 was going to Tom and Greg for their part, and another $300,000 to Harbuck and his people. George was keeping $600,000 for himself, enough to get him to Panama, where he would check out things with the bank. With a little left over if he needed it.

*   *   *

Tom, Greg, and Mike McManus had a plan of their own for Memorial Day weekend. And if the one George was counting on didn't work out in exactly the way he'd hoped, neither quite did theirs. Adding in the two new guys from Massachusetts, and also two Colombians who had surfaced in Miami as representatives of the people for whom the shipment was intended, they now had ten cocaine conspirators they could lay their hands on, and hoped to haul in more. To make sure things went off without a hitch, they had prepared for the plane trip down and back with military precision. The stop in the Caymans on the way back wasn't really so Cliff could refuel. It was so he could make contact with a DEA agent at the airport there, to tell him exactly how much dope was on board and also whether anyone else besides Joseph had come along for the ride from Colombia. Tom and Greg didn't want any surprises popping out of the cockpit when the plane landed. In the Caymans a DEA chase plane would also pick them up and follow the Queen Air into Florida to keep the ground people advised on the progress of the flight.

On Saturday morning, May 25, the flight took off from the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airfield. On board were Cliff, B.D., and Joseph, and right away came plan deviation number one. Cliff hadn't confessed this to McManus, but he'd been harboring a lot of fear over the possibility of being recognized as a DEA pilot by someone down at the airstrip. So he had never really intended to fly to Medellín in the first place. He was loath to tell this to the DEA, however, because if he didn't make the trip, he wouldn't get paid, which meant he'd lose out on twenty-five thousand dollars. The solution he thought of was to have the plane stop off in the Caymans, not only on the way back, but on the way down as well. Which is what indeed occurred, and in the Caymans Cliff got off and had B.D. fly down to Colombia by himself; he would pick Cliff up on the return trip.

In Fort Lauderdale that day it was mostly sit and wait. George and his security detail from Massachusetts, Dennis and Ray, stayed with Tom at a place called the Berkeley Inn, while Greg supposedly went up to check the field in Vero Beach. Greg called in at about 6:30
P.M
. to say it had rained a lot up there and the strip was too muddy; they'd have to bring the load directly into Fort Lauderdale Executive Airfield. The truth was that Greg never went up to Vero Beach, and they had always planned on bringing it into Fort Lauderdale, because the load would be easier to keep under surveillance that way. They knew, however, that George would object to the airport as too risky, and would only agree to it if it was broached as an emergency. A little over three hours later, at 9:50
P.M
., the call came in from the agent in the Caymans that the plane had landed. It was carrying 300 kilos, or 660 pounds, packed in thirteen duffel bags. Cliff, B.D., and Joseph were the only ones on board. It would take off shortly, and the ETA in Fort Lauderdale would be between 1:30 and 2:30
A.M
. Sunday. Oh, by the way, the agent asked. How come Cliff had gotten off there and hadn't gone down to Colombia?

Because they were using the airport in town, George's two security guys wouldn't be needed right away. Tom suggested they go over to the Holiday Inn, rent a couple of rooms, and stay there until he or George called them. They'd be needed tomorrow to help with the load. Tom, Greg, and George then drove out to the airport to wait for the plane. They had a camper truck and a station wagon, with plenty of room for the thirteen bags. George told Greg he was nervous about using such an open landing site. Greg said he agreed, but there was nothing they could do about the weather. He and George were waiting outside the hangar. Tom was inside talking to the plane on a radio set. At 12:30
A.M
., an hour early, Tom banged on the hangar door to have Greg open it, and he said the plane was just about to touch down. Pretty soon they could see its landing lights approaching in the distance, and then the roar of the Queen Air as it taxied on by them into the hangar, with Cliff waving triumphantly from the cockpit. He offed its lights as soon as it pulled to a stop. The cargo door swung open, and out stepped Joseph Ahmed. He was dirty and greasy from loading the cocaine in Colombia and helping with the refueling, but he wore a big smile. “Let's go,” he said, and started lowering the bags to the three of them, who transferred them quickly to the waiting vehicles.

As Cliff and B.D. drove off in their own car, George got into the truck with Tom, and Joseph and Greg took the wagon. They headed to the stash house in the southwest part of Fort Lauderdale. Joseph couldn't contain his excitement. He clapped his hands several times and wrung Greg's in congratulations. He said his stepfather had wanted them to bring up fifty more kilos, but they couldn't fit them on the plane. There was also another load all ready to go, and Humberto wanted them to come back in three or four days and pick up three to five hundred more keys. Joseph was jigging around in the seat, babbling on about how they were all going to be rich. From what he'd seen at the landing strip, the amount of cocaine being shipped out just this weekend was fairly staggering. He was told their plane had been the fifth to land that morning, each plane taking off with what he thought were between two and five hundred kilos. In an underground shed next to the strip, he saw forty more duffel bags waiting to be picked up by planes coming in after them. All in all, counting the coke they'd brought in on this flight, the coke they'd get in a few days, as well as what he saw down there, it came to more than seven thousand pounds, or three and a half tons! Greg made a mental note to get hold of McManus as soon as he was clear of Joseph to have him alert the DEA down there, to see if they couldn't get the Colombian police to pull off a quick raid.

Several minutes later the two vehicles pulled up at the stash house, a low, sprawling Florida ranch located on a dead-end street off Riverland Road in the ritzy Riverland Isles section of Fort Lauderdale. The houses in this neighborhood—some of them with million-dollar price tags—were built along fingerlike canals that led into the south fork of the New River. Residents could hop aboard their boats in the backyard and follow the river right down to Port Everglades and out to sea. It was dark, so George couldn't see that the stash house stood out in the neighborhood for the way it had been neglected. Whereas the other lawns on the street had hardly a blade of grass out of place, the lawn here was badly overgrown, the bushes untrimmed. In the swimming pool out back the water was coated over with a scum of algae. The house actually belonged to the state of Florida, another piece of property confiscated from the rogue marijuana policeman at the same time they took his boat. After driving the vehicles into the two-car garage and closing the door, they all went into the house to begin dealing with the transfer to the Colombians.

What Tom, Greg, and Mike had hoped was not only to seize the three hundred kilos, but also get their hands on the $1.2 million the Colombians in Miami were forking over for the transportation. That would pay for quite a few sting operations in the future. They also wanted to reach further into the distribution network and take off a few more people. While Tom and Joseph went off to begin negotiations over a pay phone at a convenience store nearby called the Majik Market, Greg stayed in the house with George, who sought to elevate his already high level of ecstasy by snorting some coke. “He was so elated,” recalls Greg. “All this cocaine was sitting in the garage, and he knew the money he was going to make from it. Plus, when Joseph said there was another five hundred kilos sitting down there that Humberto wanted brought up, and forty more duffel bags, this put him in seventh heaven. This was what he'd spent time in prison for. He talked about doing future deals. We had a great relationship, he said. He said this deal had been hard because it was the first time we'd all been together, but from now on they'd go a lot easier.”