Blow (38 page)

That New Year's Eve George was determined to emerge from his room and take his family down to the hotel's Crystal Ballroom to celebrate. His current difficulties aside, it had been a banner year in the cocaine business, and he felt confident that a lot more good fortune lay ahead. A twenty-piece orchestra had been brought on for the occasion, and an elaborate champagne breakfast was planned for sometime after midnight. Mirtha and Clara Luz got dressed up in special gowns for the occasion, and George invited Hubert and his girlfriend to join the party. They all went down at about ten o'clock, just as the festivities were heating up. The band played mostly Latin jazz rhythms, George doing his turn out on the floor with Mirtha, trying bravely to keep up with Hubert's moves. The champagne flowed, and shortly after midnight, when the band had slowed the tempo a little and was playing “Moon River” or something like that, Hubert stood up from his chair, walked around the table, and asked Clara Luz if he might have this dance. “I thought she would shit her pants, the expression on her face,” George says. “But she did it. Clara Luz danced with Hubert.” And a few days later Humberto called, and the storm with Victor blew out to sea.

Humberto said he wanted to meet with George at the house in Pompano Beach, alone; he asked him to leave Hubert and his boys back at the hotel. He had something to tell him. “I got there first, and Humberto arrived with Martha, in his Cadillac—he had a yellow Eldorado with a sunroof. Martha hugged me, and she came into the house with us to be an interpreter, since Humberto's English wasn't that great. I gave him a drink, and pretty soon he said, ‘Georgie, I have to tell you this. Those kilos you took from Victor. They weren't Victor's kilos. They were my kilos. But keep them, Georgie. It's all over. My kilos, not Victor's. But it's all right.'” It was then that George understood why Victor had felt safe grabbing the $750,000 he owed for the airplane trip: The twenty-five kilos George was holding weren't Victor's to lose. And tricky Humberto, trying to conceal the fact that they really belonged to him, had finally outsmarted himself here. “So I laughed, and Humberto laughed. ‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha.' We had a couple more drinks, and then we never talked about it again. Except that six months later Humberto told me Victor had got himself shot. ‘Victor, no more,' he said. He'd apparently tried to pull the same kind of shit with someone else that he'd tried with me, only this time he was dead.”

*   *   *

Nineteen-seventy-nine was the year that Margaret Thatcher first became the prime minister of the United Kingdom, that the Sandinistas deposed General Anastasio Somoza Debayle and took over in Nicaragua, and that the adherents of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, ten months after the shah of Iran announced he was leaving on a “vacation,” made hostages of the United States Embassy staff in Teheran. On the home front, Hollywood came out with
Apocalypse Now,
and Americans had their first encounter with the possibility of nuclear disaster when a leak developed in the electrical generating plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The year also marked the last time Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts would attempt to capture the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

For George, the hurt, anger, and humiliation left over from his last encounter with Carlos in the Holiday Inn lounge in Nassau had still refused to go away. Clara Luz had been right. Forget the loads he was bringing in and the money he was making, the “Carlos thing,” as it became known among George's friends and associates, had become psychological baggage he couldn't seem to jettison. He and Mirtha had moved into an even nicer house in Pompano Beach, this one on the Intracoastal Waterway. It had a little dock out back, and George bought himself a cigarette boat, which he'd bomb off in with Mirtha to eat dinner at one of the canalside restaurants along the waterway. But at the parties with the Colombians he still couldn't escape hearing what a success Carlos was and how indispensable his transportation business had become to Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas. George would remind them that he'd just been down to Medellín himself to see Pablo; that showed he wasn't afraid of Carlos. But after several go-rounds, the trip lost its power to impress. “Carlos was on my mind every day. Even if I wanted to get him off, everywhere we went, I'd still be introduced as the guy who started him out. It began to drive me out of my mind, everyone talking about how much money he was making at Norman Cay.”

By now the word had gotten out to the yachting community in the Bahamas that something nefarious was going on at the cay and to give it a lot of sea room. As George heard about it at the parties, Carlos had turned the place into something out of Ian Fleming, like the sinister island hideout of Dr. No. A boat had been found drifting off its shore with blood splattered all over the cabin but no one on board. Yachtsmen would tell of being swooped down upon by a helicopter as they neared the island, and having someone yell at them over its loudspeaker to clear out fast. Carlos had bought a thirty-seven-foot red racing Scarab capable of doing upward of sixty knots, which his German bodyguards would take out on patrol, waving their guns at sportfishermen that came in too close. A houseboat had been hauled up atop the highest knoll on the island so lookouts could search the horizon for intruders. In one notable incident, the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, an accomplished blue-water sailor, put into the little harbor at Norman Cay to top off his water tanks and was told unceremoniously to beat it. Although he'd failed to buy up every house on the island, Carlos had made good his boast to George and frightened the few private homeowners left into staying away from the place, putting their plans for vacations in the Bahamas on hold for a while. Flights were landing and taking off almost around the clock, and the airstrip was guarded by some twenty Dobermans, which were kept in pens along its fringe, the bodyguards regularly patrolling up and down the lone road in their jeeps. George also heard stories about wild sex parties going on in Carlos's house, the Volcano. Hookers were imported from Nassau and Freeport to entertain the resident staff, running naked all over, Carlos himself having taken recently to smoking
basuco,
getting stoned a lot, zoning out on John Lennon's “Imagine” and “Helter Skelter” by the Beatles. A lot of automatic weapon fire was reported at night, the result of an undisciplined guard force shooting at shadows in the trees.

Carlos's success had unhinged George to the degree that he now imagined people were talking about it even if they weren't, thinking they, too, were about to stab him in the back. So at the parties he'd raise the subject himself; blitzed on coke, he'd grab hold of people to rail on about his old buddy, routinely threatening to kill him, to put out a hit on him and blow the fucker away, the ungrateful little cocksucker. People would try to edge out of the room when he'd get going on this. Among the gatherings ruined by his tirades was a dinner party Mirtha threw in Pompano Beach for their little circle of friends. Martha and Humberto came. The Mejias were there, Arturo and his girlfriend, also a woman in the trade, powerful in her own right, known as the Woman of the Alhajas, or Jewels, for the way she dripped with emeralds and diamonds and gold. And there was Hernando, nicknamed the Old Man, for his seniority in the business. Hernando lived in Hialeah and was known for stashing guns in every room in his house. They'd be stuffed under cushions on the couch, hidden behind the curtains. In his sauna out back he kept a gun in the pocket of his bathrobe, hanging on a hook. The sauna was famous in the Colombian community for the fact that, like roaches in a Roach Motel, certain people had checked into the place but never checked out. “When somebody did anything to Hernando, all he did was invite them over to go into the sauna, and that would be the end of it,” recalls Mirtha. “Give them some coke, turn on the dry heat, and, ‘Boom.' They'd be done.”

For her dinner party, Mirtha had her mother get up a big shrimp dish, put fresh roses and white snowballs on the piano. George brought out the Chivas Regal and the Rémy Martin, and Frank Sinatra alternated with Colombian music on the stereo. “We were having cocktails and entertaining like normal human beings, when George says, ‘I think what this party needs is a little livening up. I'm going to bring out the coke.'” Soon the dinner was sitting cold and forgotten on the table, arguments were bursting out. Martha began weeping. Humberto, who couldn't do much coke without it making him sick, threw up in the Florida room. It was now after midnight, and the men were wondering how they could ditch their wives and go out on the town. “George is now completely out of his mind and starts getting nasty, telling everybody off. ‘When you people want something, it's Mr. Georgie this, and Mr. Georgie that. You're all sons of bitches, you know that? You've all taken from me,' and on and on. Pretty soon everyone left, and George left with them. And that was the party.”

Whether it came from George's threats getting back to Carlos or from something else he'd done, pretty soon it was obvious that someone wanted to shut George up permanently. First there was the business with the nursemaid Mirtha had hired to stay up in Eastham with the children. One day when he was down in Pompano Beach George got a phone call from the woman saying three Latin-looking guys had shown up at the house looking for him, and she saw they all had guns. He'd have to get a new nursemaid; she quit. After that, there was the warning from Humberto, who said he'd heard that Carlos had become sick of all the mouthing off and that there was talk of a hit having been put out. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but George should watch himself. Which proved to be good advice about a week later, on a day George had driven down to see Humberto in a condo he had in Kendall, south of Miami, and parked his car against a curb outside. When he came out, he found he'd been hemmed in on three sides. At first he thought this was possibly a ploy, to keep him standing there long enough to furnish someone with an easy target. A little VW blocked him in the rear, which he resolved to just push out of the way and get the hell out of there. He got in his car and started the motor, then changed his mind. On second thought, he'd just better run for it. “I don't know why it was, but this feeling came over me and something said,
‘Get out of this fucking car!'
I leaped out and ran as fast as I could, and about fifty feet away the goddamn thing exploded. I looked back and it was all on fire. People were running over to see what happened.” After he got back to Pompano Beach and collected himself, George figured the device must have been tripped by a timer set to go off a certain number of seconds after he'd opened the door and gotten into the front seat. But however it worked, the explosion finally did it for George. No more talk. Now he definitely had to do something about Carlos.

Because it would enhance his rep with the Colombians, George determined to do the hit right on Norman Cay. “I wanted to get him where he lived,” he says. “That was the only way to do it, because it would show everybody that, well, Carlos had his bodyguards and everything, but I went right there and took him out in his own backyard.” One day that spring he flew out to the Bahamas to do some research. He learned from contacts in Nassau that the Germans were in the habit of flying in often in the evening to gamble and partake of the nightlife, leaving Carlos out on the island alone, with just a few Colombians to maintain security. Then he chartered a sportfisherman and went out to Norman Cay himself, anchoring about a half mile off the island pretending to fish, watching the routine of the place for a day and into the night. From what he'd seen, George thought the best way was to approach the island in a Zodiac pontoon boat with an outboard motor, land it on the rocky shore near the Volcano, and do it.

Not alone, of course. As he'd threatened Carlos in their last meeting, George knew there were people in Boston who could help with this kind of operation. To find some, he put in a call to his old pal from Danbury, Fat Harry of the Winter Hill Gang. Harry said he'd bring him up to the auto-body shop in Somerville that served as the gang's headquarters and introduce him around, let George explain his needs.

“They had an office in the back of the shop, and I brought along a chart of the island, all the information,” says George. “They told me they'd make the arrangements, that it wouldn't really be a problem. There were some ex-Vietnam guys, two were Rangers, that'd been in the mob and came back to Boston after the war.” But it wouldn't be cheap, getting down to the island and all, and also because some of the materiél they needed was expensive. They'd like, for instance, to find some percussion grenades, to throw a little confusion into the island population. It would be handy also if they could get their hands on a bazooka, what with the guards running around in the jeep. The price would be $250,000, with $125,000 up front, nonreturnable no matter what happened, and the rest afterward, plus expenses, which might run another $50,000 or $100,000. Fine, George said, and a couple of days later he delivered the down payment. “I also said that if this worked, I'd cut them in on some of the transportation stuff. They seemed to like this. They said they had control of the Norwood airport, and we could land loads there, no problem. Big things could happen. Actually, I wasn't really going to cut them in on that because I knew they were all fucking cutthroats and I didn't want to be around them, always watching your back. This mob lawyer friend of mine had told me, ‘George, you're playing with some really sick, dangerous people here. You can't trust these kinds of people, ever.'”

As it turned out, the affair cost him heavily, in other ways as well as financially. Somehow Humberto got wind of the plans for the hit, and George soon received a fairly frantic call to come to his New York apartment to talk. More like listen, really, while Humberto got hysterical. “Everyone was there, including Martha, Mirtha, and Clara Luz, and it went on for hours,” George says. “‘You can't do this, Georgie. You can't do this.' He was pacing up and down the living room, throwing his hands in the air. ‘It's going to cause big wars in the families. Please don't! You can have anything you want, all the kilos. I'll get more people for you.'” Others disagreed. “‘Kill him!'” he recalls one of the women shouting. “‘If you don't kill him now, it will be too late, and you will be
nothing.
'