Blow (2 page)

“I felt sorry for them, which is almost always the case,” Trout recalls. “They were nice people. The parents are always the ones who pay for it in the long run. It's in the newspapers, the neighbors all know, a terrible embarrassment.”

Actually, as Trout thinks back, it was George's mother who was the gabby one. Fred didn't have much to say, at least to Trout. In truth, the visits rankled Fred, and he even called a lawyer at one point to see about preventing the agent from coming around, but then dropped the matter. Arguing about their son was an old routine for Mr. and Mrs. Jung. The question of exactly how much they should be helping the police to catch him had opened up another unpleasant chapter. Fred also grumbled to George about the FBI visits during one of the rare phone calls his son made from the West Coast. That's how George learned that Trout had been upstairs looking around his old room at the front of the house, where he used to lift weights and tend his fish tank, and where clippings from the Quincy
Patriot Ledger
about his feats as a halfback for the Weymouth High School Maroons hung on the wall. Also there for Trout to inspect was a photograph of George down in Mexico, with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat pulled down to shade his eyes, a long cigar clenched in his mouth, cartridge belts criss-crossed over his chest, a large revolver stuck in his belt, and a bottle of tequila in his fist. He looked like one bad
hombre,
for sure.

As it happened, in November of 1973, a little over a year after the Playboy Club bust, George flew to Boston to meet with a contact he'd developed in Amherst to firm up a deal that would effect a major increase in the volume of his business. The man had approached him the previous summer and said he knew people with two twin-engine Cessnas who wanted someone to hook them up with a connection in Mexico, to guarantee them an uninterrupted supply of marijuana. They would handle the details of transporting the stuff into the United States and distributing it thereafter. All George would have to do is take care of the Mexican end and load up the flights, a proposition that seemed almost too good to be true. And with the volume this guy was talking about, it looked like the operation could net him something on the order of a million a year, ten times what he was doing at the time. Euphoric over the new possibilities, and realizing it meant he'd be out of the country for a long time, George had decided to drive down to Weymouth and pay a short visit to his parents.

He knew what risk the venture entailed, which was why he'd told no one where he was going. He hadn't even told his parents that he was coming by. It was dark on a Saturday night right after Thanksgiving, about eight o'clock, when he pulled his rented car into the wooded area by the Weymouth Community Church, down the hill from his parents' house. He cut up through a thick stand of spruce that Mr. Stennes, the local clock maker, had planted in the late 1950s as a way to earn extra money by selling Christmas trees. (The scheme died abruptly a few years after George graduated from high school when old man Stennes shot and killed his wife after mistaking her for an intruder.)

Aided by the dim light of a new moon, George made his way through the trees, approaching the house via the backyard, and knocked on the kitchen door that opened onto a breezeway leading to the garage. It was cold. The door was opened by his father, a short, balding man, dressed in the khakis and plaid shirt he always wore—typical “dad clothes,” as George called them. Ever since his stroke fifteen years earlier Fred cried easily over the things that disappointed him in life—mainly George. The tears came now when he saw his son standing there. Then Ermine showed up at the door, more shocked to see him than glad, it seemed to George, acting nervous through the whole visit. His father brought him into the living room, and the two began making headway into a bottle of Scotch. Fred asked him how things were going. George talked about California, how easy it was living out there. Ermine kept getting up and disappearing into the couple's downstairs bedroom.

Special Agent Trout remembers the call coming in just before ten o'clock. A voice said: “He's in the house right now in Weymouth.” Hurriedly corralling two other agents to help out, Trout drove the half hour it took to get there and pulled up across the street. One agent went around to watch the back door. Trout and his partner went up the front walk and looked through the window into the living room. They spotted George sitting on the couch. Trout began banging on the glass-paned storm door, announcing loudly that he was with the FBI and demanding that they open the door. He saw George bolt off the couch and disappear from view. He yelled louder and banged harder, so hard the glass shattered just as Fred was opening up the inner door. “I ended up cutting myself fairly badly on the hand,” says Trout. “And when we got inside, before we even started searching the house, the mother insisted on stopping the bleeding and bandaging me up.”

George knew what was up at the first banging and instinctively raced upstairs to his room, thinking that maybe he could do a Huckleberry Finn out the window to the garage roof, drop to the ground as he'd done as a kid, and take off. He thought fleetingly too of his old double-barreled 12-gauge still stuck in the rafters; he used to bang away with it at the ducks flying over the marsh down back of the house. The shells were probably still in his dresser drawer. Suddenly his father called up the stairs: “George, this is your mother's and my house, and if you're doing what I think you're doing, you'd better stop right now.” In the end, George just crawled into the back of his clothes closet, worming through an opening in the eaves into a cubbyhole where he'd played as a little boy. Soon he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Trout poked his head into the room and called for George to come out. There's no need for anyone to get hurt, he said.

Because no one knew of his plans that night, because he came into the house through the backyard where the neighbors couldn't have seen him, because of her edginess and her suspicious movements while he was there, George has always believed that it was his mother who turned him in. Either she phoned Trout directly or she gave a prearranged signal for someone else to make the call. If the latter were true, George suspected the someone else would have been his father's brother, Uncle George Jung of Melrose. A retired U.S. Navy commander and George's namesake, Uncle George was the family patriarch and benefactor; for a number of reasons he had little use for his nephew and had treated George from his late teenage years with an ill-masked dislike. George never wanted to confront his mother on the matter. Trout says the voice he heard that night was male. “It was not the mother,” he says. “Not directly, no.”

*   *   *

George had been processed through Receiving & Discharge and sitting alone in a holding cell for about an hour, chewing on a dried-up baloney sandwich, no mayo, when Wong, a trustee from New York's Chinatown who was doing several years on a heroin charge, ushered him into a shower stall, hosed him down, then poofed him all over with delousing powder. From the supply room he issued George a plastic razor, a toothbrush, and a towel, and a set of regulation prison duds, consisting of khaki hand-me-downs from the U.S. Navy. The shoes were two sizes too big—a far cry from the comfort and suppleness of his five-hundred-dollar Bruno Maglis, and at the first opportunity George replaced them at the commissary with a pair of tennis shoes.

The next day, carrying his bedroll and personal gear in a plastic bucket, George was taken down to Massachusetts House, a large open dormitory lined with double-decker bunks. Here new inmates spent two weeks getting filled in on what to expect from prison life. George dumped his stuff on an available lower bunk and sat down to consider his surroundings. The room contained about a hundred men, some sleeping on their beds, others playing cards, reading, or talking in groups, or watching TV in a glassed-off television room. The Latinos were off by themselves, as usual, engaged in a game of dominoes. That pastime exceedingly irritated the Anglos in the room, for they kept it up nonstop all day and up to bedtime, slamming the pieces down with a great
whack,
accompanying the play with continuous shouts and whoops.

About an hour later another new inmate walked in. He had arrived the same day but on another bus and had spent the night in a holding cell on a different floor. He was short, about five feet six inches tall, and looked to be in his mid-twenties. A Latino of some kind, he was clean-shaven and very handsome in a sultry way. George was struck by two other things about him. First, when he came over to the cot next to George and asked if it was free, he spoke quite formally and politely, as if he were introducing himself at a dinner party. “How do you do?” he said in only slightly accented English. “My name is Carlos Lehder.” He said he lived in New York City but that his real home was in Colombia. Carlos also seemed unusually open and talkative, exuding none of the wariness prisoners instinctively feel when encountering an unfamiliar environment. “Usually you're a little careful about who you talk to in the beginning,” says George. “You don't know who's who or what's going on. In prison you want to hang back a little, take your time about what you say.”

Carlos's friendly manner invited quick intimacy. Right away George found himself explaining why he'd been sent to Danbury, all about the farmers in the hills of Mexico, the California desert, Amherst and the college kids. Carlos responded that he also was in prison for possession of marijuana—nothing, to be sure, on the scale of George's operation. In addition, he'd been charged with trying to smuggle a stolen automobile over the border from Detroit into Windsor, Ontario, whence he'd planned to ship it back to Colombia.

The two spent the next hour, until the public-address system called them to line up for supper, talking animatedly about their experiences in the marijuana trade, even forming some vague plans for when they got out. George had arrived at Danbury with a single thought in mind—to return to the smuggling business just as bloody fast as he could get free. In his mind, the smuggling itself had begun to transcend the material rewards of his trade—the money and the drugs and the Porsches and the women. Confronting physical danger, often of a high order, confounding the system, defying the straight world, staring down the terror he felt well up each time he landed in the desert or risked getting caught—these were the accomplishments on which his self-esteem had come to be pegged. Smuggling itself was the drug now, the therapeutic activity that got him through the day. Lacking a load to run or routes or schedules to devise, he felt as down and desperate as an alcoholic separated from his booze. Drug smugglers, George liked to say, shouldn't be sent to prison, they should be carted off to debriefing centers, to get their brains altered, their obsessions modified. Using prison as a chance to pay his debt to society and going straight thereafter had never entered his mind. He was looking to Danbury to further in some way the criminal enterprise that had become his life. “I wanted very badly to make something out of being there, to bring something back,” he says. “I was looking for an opportunity, and I didn't want to spend all that time and come away empty-handed.”

It was then, standing in line early that evening, waiting to get into the cafeteria at Danbury, that Carlos looked up at him. “George,” he said, “do you know anything about cocaine?”

*   *   *

In the middle of the 1970s there was no such thing as the Medellín cocaine cartel. At that time, it would have seemed a farfetched notion that a handful of small-time thieves and hustlers from a city few Americans had ever heard of high in the Andes could create an enterprise that would blossom into the most lucrative, ruthless, and deadly criminal empire in the world, responsible for the murder in Colombia alone of fifty judges, including eleven Supreme Court justices, twelve journalists, including the editor of Bogotá's
El Espectador,
the attorney general, the daughter of the country's president, the head of the national police drug squad, hundreds of police officers, and uncounted thousands of civilians. In the United States in the seventies the “drug war” was a political coinage for the effort to eradicate the use of heroin, whose ravages, while serious enough, confined themselves largely to ghetto neighborhoods of big cities rather than permeating the society. There was no such thing as crack. Where cocaine was concerned, the 1975 Report to the President from the U.S. Domestic Council's Drug Abuse Task Force rated the substance “low” for the “size of the core problem.” It said further that “as it is currently used [cocaine] does not result in serious social consequences such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions, or death.” The demand for the drug, dormant since its previous heyday back at the turn of the century and in the Roaring Twenties, emanated from a thin, rarefied slice of the population—rock-and-roll stars, the Pop Art crowd, Hollywood luminaries, members of Café Society on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It dribbled into the country in small quantities, often less than a kilo at a time, inserted into the anal cavity of a “mule” flying into Miami International Airport or secreted in a seaman's bag aboard a merchant ship bound from Barranquilla, Colombia, to New Orleans or Houston. In all of 1974, the U.S. Customs Service seized only 907 pounds of the drug, a little over 400 kilos.

No one was predicting that cocaine would begin arriving in quantities so large it would have to be lugged around in duffel bags and moved from one place to another in trucks: 125 tons of it a year by 1985, according to a calculation made by Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau. Or that the money generated by street sales of the drug—all cash-and-carry, no layaway plans, checks, credit cards, charge accounts, or promissory notes—would make of the cocaine business one of the industrial colossuses of the world. Selling at $100 a gram, for instance—one twenty-eighth of an ounce, fifteen to twenty lines' worth, sufficient to induce a heightened sense of well-being for an evening in a party of four—that 125 tons, cut two, three, four times by successive dealers, would generate retail revenue somewhere in the amount of $40 to $50
billion
a year. By 1985, close to the peak year for cocaine use in the U.S., these earnings would have ranked the cocaine business as the sixth-largest private enterprise in the
Fortune
500. General Motors, Exxon, and IBM grossed more money than the cocaine dealers did, but not AT&T, General Electric, Chevron, Sears, Roebuck, Chrysler, Boeing, R. J. R. Reynolds, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, U.S. Steel, or the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Company.