Blow (19 page)

Carlos also spent time with Dan Moore, the former president of the Surety Bank and Trust Company of Wakefield, Massachusetts, who had scarpered with $8.1 million of his institution's assets, and regaled inmates and guards alike with the travel brochures on places he planned to visit after getting out. Carlos taught him Spanish in return for lectures on how the banking system worked, what transactions had to be reported to the government, how to set up accounts in offshore institutions and move money around in ways no one could follow, which banks had the numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Netherlands Antilles. Banks with home offices in Canada were good ones, Carlos was told, especially ones with branches in Freeport and Panama City. “Carlos was mesmerized by people who knew about things, and Danbury was a regular mind factory,” says George. “He never got past the seventh grade, but if he'd gone on to college, he was the kind who'd go right for his doctorate.” Everything he was told he wrote down on pads of paper, which he filed away. What he learned about planes and boats and real estate and money laundering all went into separate pockets of one of those expandable cardboard files you can tie up in a string. “He was obsessive about details that I'd get bored with after a while. All I wanted to know was that a twin-engine Cessna had a fifteen-hundred-mile range and you could put tip tanks or saddle tanks on it and it could go so much farther, and you went from point A to point B. That was enough for me. Carlos wanted to know the kind of engine it had, the dimensions of the cargo space, the different radio frequencies, the climb ratios, everything.”

Carlos talked a lot with a doctor who had owned a string of nursing homes in New York State and had been convicted of defrauding the government by charging Medicare for the treatment of patients who didn't exist except on his phony rosters. After being indicted, he fled the United States for Belize, formerly British Honduras, a tiny country in Central America just east of Guatemala in the Caribbean. He had spent a couple of years down there, but finally grew homesick for his family and agreed to a deal with the U.S. attorney involving a couple of years in Danbury. Belize was what Carlos wanted to hear about. The doctor told him the country had no army and no extradition treaties with the United States; government officials were easy to bribe, the police rode around on bicycles, for God's sake. One use for the place, Carlos thought, was as a way station to that California desert George was always talking about. “But soon, Carlos was having these ideas about not just using the place, but taking it over,” George says, “doing it big-time, overthrowing the government. He wanted to set up gambling casinos, build condos, a yacht club, build an empire. He talked of making it a safe place for fugitives. It would be a haven for criminals to come to, where you couldn't get extradited to the country that was after you. ‘You're on the run, you can stay here, you pay us $2 million.' Once he got on to that idea, it was all he talked about; he wouldn't stop.”

Carlos modeled his dress and bearing after the tough ex-marine G. Gordon Liddy. Unlike Carlos, Liddy wasn't very solicitous toward fellow inmates; when he talked to people, it was to bark out opinions, not invite a lot of discussion on the matter. He also stood out at Danbury for the way he carried himself about the yard, with his shoulders erect, immaculately dressed, even in prison-issue. His khakis were pressed with a crease that could slice meat, his black shoes were spit-shined, his chest was always out. Carlos watched Liddy and began imitating him—keeping carefully groomed, his clothes crisp, strutting around the yard with his file of information under his arm. “Put Carlos and Liddy together, they looked like they were about to graduate from Annapolis,” says George.

Carlos also pumped George for what he'd read and the things he knew. He was particularly interested in listening to what George had to say about the philosophy of existentialism and about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. George had read them during a philosophy course at Long Beach City College and, with modifications here and there, had adopted existentialism as his own life view. “I didn't know about existentialism before Jack Leahy would come home from college and talk about it back in Weymouth, but then I studied it and found out it was simple. It's free will, I told Carlos. Nobody has the right to tell you what to do or how to do it, and you do what you want and you set your own moral standards, something within reason, and you take full responsibility for your acts.” George had also studied Machiavelli's
The Prince,
and was impressed by what he had written about acquiring power and manipulating people to achieve your ends. The prison library didn't have a copy, so he ordered Carlos one from a bookstore in Danbury.

George and Carlos would talk as they walked around the yard after supper—they had to be back in their rooms for the evening count at nine—and increasingly, it seemed, as the months went by, Carlos would raise the topic of revolution. He spoke of starting with Belize and eventually taking over Colombia. His hero was Ché Guevara, who with a shave would be a pretty close lookalike for Carlos, with his longish locks and penetrating eyes. Cocaine would be the vehicle to fund this enterprise, Carlos said. It was the Achilles' heel of America. The gringos were too morally weak to resist it. They were going to go for it in a big way, especially now that the rock stars and entertainment people were into it. The Americans would do anything they heard the movie stars did. Carlos also had admiring words to say about Adolf Hitler, how he'd worked out a specific plan for achieving power, laid it all out in
Mein Kampf,
and possessed the strength of will to carry it through.

“I'd listen, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about his political aspirations and all,” says George. “Plus what he was saying about Belize, it would only be a matter of time until the world became aware of the arrangement there and brought an end to it. We didn't need Belize, I told him; Mexico would be enough. I was only interested in moving a product people wanted for cash, not running a country. I wanted to make as much money as I could in a couple of years and then get out of it. Get the motor sailer, go to Ibiza or maybe Australia, the Great Barrier Reef. I told him that in my opinion there were already enough dictators fucking up the world. Ché had come to a bad end, dying in the mountains of Bolivia a broken man. I told Carlos he should read Ché's life story again. All revolutionaries come to a bad end in one form or another. I'd read history; revolutions never work out. One man's freedom fighter was always another man's dictator. I told him he should concentrate on our future smuggling enterprise. But it was like talking to a deaf person. He'd start going on about Hitler again. I decided it was best not to pursue the subject any further.”

For all his tendency toward the grandiose, at 135 pounds Carlos was still a relative pipsqueak when it came to his general effect. “When you first met him, he looked like just a kid,” says Arthur. “He may have been twenty-five, but he looked sixteen, like a teenager. He had protection in prison, because George stuck with him, and no one was going to screw around with George. Otherwise the black guys would have loved to make a little girl out of him.” George tried to beef Carlos up by taking him out to the weight rack, to put some bulk into his upper body. George was pressing 240 pounds then, with ten repetitions. Carlos was struggling to get up to 150. And one day at the rack a dispute arose over one of the weights, and an inmate came up and struck Carlos hard in the face with his open hand. “And Carlos didn't do anything!” recalls George. “Now, in prison, you never do
nothing,
even if the guy's Mike Tyson and you know you're going to get the shit kicked out of you, you have to go after him. If anybody ever slapped me in the face, I don't care who it was, they'd know they'd have to kill me. Otherwise your life is down the toilet. So I told that fucking guy, ‘I'm going to hit you in the fucking face with this fucking barbell, I'm going to fuck you up bad, you ever touch him again.' He backed off after that. Yet I couldn't believe that here was this big Mafioso Colombian guerrilla fighter, always talking about Ché Guevara and taking over countries—and didn't throw a punch!

“But then, I don't know, you look back at it, and in Danbury Carlos knew just what he was doing. He might have backed down from the fight, but he got exactly what he wanted out of every single person in that place. I mean, I thought I was slick, and here he was about to take me on the biggest roller-coaster ride I'd been on in my life.”

*   *   *

It was February 1975, and according to the math of the criminal justice system, George's parole hearing was due up shortly; he hoped it would be the prelude to his release from prison. He'd entered Danbury the previous April, having been sentenced to four years. He was eligible for parole after serving a third of that, or sixteen months. He'd already done more than four months in jails in Boston and Chicago before arriving at Danbury. So with a favorable ruling by the parole board, early April was when he'd be set free. He'd performed exceptionally as a schoolteacher, getting all his classes through the GED exam successfully. And during coffee breaks he'd been assuring his caseworker, that he had a plan and the desire to go straight when he got out. He wanted to buy a boat, he said, and go into the fishing business on the Cape, like Arthur. There was a little money saved up, and his parents would help him. He'd already screwed his life up enough, and he wanted to start off new. He was only thirty-two. It wasn't too late, even to go back and finish up school, maybe at the community college on the Cape. A degree in business administration wouldn't hurt when it came to marketing his fish. Don't worry, his caseworker told him. “He said he was behind me one thousand percent.”

On the appointed day, George shaved carefully, dressed himself in a new set of khakis, and walked down to the little hearing room near the warden's office, where he was ushered in by his caseworker. At the head of the table sat the two hearing officers. One was a kindly looking, middle-aged white man with glasses, dressed in a cheap-looking light-colored suit. The other one was a thin, balding black man, a sharp dresser who struck George as a lot more savvy than the white guy. During the thirty minutes or so that George was in there, the black guy never said a word, never smiled. He was the one George worried about.

“The white guy starts off, asking me all these questions. How I felt about my crime and the things I did, and I said I realized it was wrong and I had screwed up my life and I didn't want anything to do with drugs anymore. He asked me what I was planning to do now, and I told him about the fishing boat and the plans I had to get it. He liked that I was going to stay with my family, not just go off. They wanted to be sure you weren't going to fall into any bad company. And I told about the college classes. And on and on with all the bullshit, and still the black guy hadn't said a word. I was getting real uptight about him. He's just looking at me. I'm thinking to myself, He knows what I'm all about. He's going to get me, I know.”

“Then the white guy said, ‘Okay, George, go on outside and we'll call you back in a little bit and let you know.' It was a little torment they do to you. I mean, why can't they just let you know, right away? So I sat on a bench outside the hearing room, while my caseworker was in there talking to them. And I sat there for twenty minutes or so, worrying about my case. Then they called me back in. And the white guy is smiling. ‘Congratulations, George, you're going home! We hope you'll use this opportunity to get your life in order, and that we won't be seeing you back in a place like this.'

“‘Oh, thank you, thank you, I won't let you down, believe me. Thank you for everything.' And I shook both their hands and turned around and started walking to the door when the black guy opens his mouth.

“‘Hey George,' he said. I turn around and he gives me this big wink. ‘Keep that fishing boat out of South American waters.'”

SIX

Cape Cod

1975–1976

Cocaine is for horses, not for men;

They say it'll kill you, but they don't say when.

—T
RADITIONAL BLUES

O
N THE DAY HE WAS TO BE RELEASED FROM
D
ANBURY
, George overslept. Fat Harry came banging on his door after breakfast shouting that they'd been calling his name over the loudspeaker and to get down to Receiving & Discharge; his father was there to take him home.

George could in fact have gotten out two months earlier if he'd gone to a halfway house in Boston where parolees worked regular jobs during the day and returned at night, thus acclimating themselves to the free world without dying of the shock. But after his parole hearing George's enthusiasm for leaving was somewhat diminished. In prison he was picking up a lot of useful information, gathering names and numbers, which he noted down in a black phone book packed away with his gear. Carlos wouldn't be getting out for another six months anyway, and then faced spending additional time in custody while the Immigration and Naturalization Service, convinced he was someone America could get on nicely without, arranged to deport him to Colombia.

But what most eroded George's enthusiasm for being released was that as a condition of his parole he had to live at home with his parents, at least for the next year. He'd be back at 30 Abigail Adams Circle, back in his old room upstairs with his Little League trophy still sitting on the dresser. No more the Big Bad Bandito, the neighbors would no doubt think; nothing like a taste of prison to take Mr. Smart-ass down a peg or two. He was also looking at thirty months on parole, during which any infraction could send him back to finish his sentence. A federal parole officer out of Boston would be stopping by the house every week or so for a talk with his mom about whether George was behaving himself. It was a teeth-grinding prospect.