Blow (39 page)

“And she was right. I knew inside that if I gave in, I was fucked. He'd fucked me over, this Latin kid, and I didn't do anything about it, like somebody in the school yard who hits you in the face or takes your lunch money and you don't do anything about it. What are you considered to be? If one guy can do it to you and get away with it, they'll all do it to you. Then you're done in crime. So why didn't I do it? Because Humberto begged me not to. He said they'd all be killed—him, Martha, Mirtha. There'd be great retribution. His family would be wiped out down in Colombia, we'd all get it up here. There would be endless war, and they'd all blame me for being responsible. They didn't care how I felt. They cared about that Carlos was making money for all of them, and this would fuck up everything big-time.

“So what could I do? I said, Okay. Fuck it. I've got more money than I know what to do with anyway. Why do I need all this? Why put everyone through it? But personally, I felt it would never be the same again.”

*   *   *

In late summer of 1980, nearly a year and a half after he aborted the hit on Carlos—and just as his lawyer friend from Boston had warned him concerning those big parties and his high style of living—George finally succeeded in attracting the attention of the police. Ironically, the situation arose after he'd turned over a new leaf in regard to the spending, toned things down an octave or two. For instance, Mirtha had found another house she liked—a $500,000 modernistic place with an elaborate Japanese garden, also overlooking the water—but George had said no, it was too ostentatious. He cut out the shopping sprees, closed down the candy store in the bureau drawer in the bedroom. The money coming in from the trips he was sending right down to his numbered bank account in Panama, leaving just enough around the house to keep them afloat. “I started making out that I was almost broke, on the edge all the time, so no one would know how much I really had,” he says.

He also began securing money for the runs, the up-front cash needed for the cars and trucks and manpower, by hitting up outside investors on the Cape and in Boston, rather than raiding his own stash. Many of these individuals were high-living criminal defense attorneys who fed their big spending habits by bankrolling their clients. They'd often cover themselves by drawing up legitimate loan agreements, spelling out how they were lending this money to a client with the understanding it would be used for starting up a wholesale fish business or investing in a Dunkin' Donuts franchise. How could they possibly know the funds would be spent on smuggling a controlled substance over the border? In addition to putting their own money into cocaine runs, the lawyers would serve as brokers for a deal, pooling together smaller sums from their friends and colleagues—the orthodontist who lived next door, say, who had fifty thousand dollars he could afford to drop on a high-risk venture in hopes of doubling his money overnight. And not just once. Often, George says, the lawyers would insist on bankrolling a series of trips so as to ensure themselves a long-term relationship. “They'd say, ‘I'll loan you the money, but I want to be in on three trips, do it three times with you. You need me now, but if you're successful, you won't need me after the first time. So if I get you this money, I want to be in on two more.' This was good for me, because having an investor was like insurance money. If something happens and the trip goes down, he knows he's not going to get anything, because that's the deal. If it's successful, I don't make quite so much, but if it gets busted, I don't lose anything either.”

It was a local who got on to George, an Eastham cop named Wynn Deschamps. His father did yard work for Miss Toomey, George's old high school teacher, who had a summer place there. Deschamps had heard all the talk, starting back in 1979, about the big bashes and the fancy cars that clogged Bayberry Lane, the little dirt road that ran in back of George's house. It made him wonder how George earned his living. And George himself, through his driving habits, had done little to mask his presence from the police all up and down the Cape—for the number of speeding tickets he'd gotten, the drift turns and the 180s he'd practice in the Porsche out there on Route 6. As with most small police departments, however, the Eastham force had little resources of its own for following up on Deschamps's suspicions. What they customarily did in these instances was to call for assistance from the Massachusetts State Police, which was why on August 2, 1980, Trooper William G. McGreal latched on to the case of George Jung.

At the time, the state police had just fifteen officers concentrating on narcotics, only five of whom, like Billy McGreal, worked as undercover specialists. Considering that his normally neat appearance—close-cropped hair, conservative clothes—made him look about two days out of the police academy, he'd taken pains to dress down for the job. He'd grown a scraggly beard, let his hair sprout into a minor Afro, had an ear pierced. He drove around in an old-model Lincoln Continental, maintained in cherry condition—not exactly your run-of-the-mill surveillance vehicle. To further cloud his image, he kept company with a large disheveled German shepherd named Paco. He'd inherited Paco from another undercover cop whose assignment had ended but who couldn't bring the creature home with him because it struck terror into the heart of his wife's Chihuahua.

McGreal had planned to spend that weekend relaxing down on the Cape, at a summer cottage in West Dennis he shared with other guys on the state police force, when he got the call from his boss saying there was an Eastham cop who'd requested a little specialized help, and Billy was the one he wanted to send. His boss said he didn't expect much to come of it, but he'd appreciate Billy doing this favor because it would help out relations with the locals. Normally the job would have gone to a senior undercover cop named Paul Gregory. But Gregory knew George Jung. He'd played football with him back at Central Junior High School in Weymouth, and he couldn't be sure that George hadn't heard he'd gone on to become a trooper. So he passed the case on to Billy. “The boss said Eastham had a guy they wanted us to take a peek at that they thought was up to no good, supposed to be a big drug smuggler from the West Coast,” Billy recalls. “He said, ‘You're not going to actually meet the guy, just get a six-pack of beer and a newspaper and hang around his beach. Let the locals meet you, jerk them around for a couple of hours, then say until we get an informant on the guy there's nothing we can do. It's easy overtime.'”

After checking in with Deschamps, McGreal drove over to Bayberry Lane, took a cooler of beer out of the car, and made his way down to the beach, stretched out on a blanket to catch a few rays. It was about one in the afternoon. Two hours passed, during which he'd struck up a conversation with an attractive young woman who had come down to the beach from the house next to the Jungs. “She didn't know much about this guy, but she was kind of cute, and I'm single, so I'm thinking if I don't meet this big dope dealer, I'll at least get a date out of it. While I'm thinking this, suddenly he comes out on his deck at the top of the stairs. I only had a description of him from Eastham. Blond hair, looks like a leftover hippie from California. And I hear this voice, ‘Hey, you! You down there!' I figure he's going to chase me off his beach. ‘Hey, do me a favor, will you? Would you pull in my catamaran there? The tide's coming in, I don't want it to drift away.' ‘Hey, sure,' I said. ‘No problem.'”

McGreal stayed through a couple more beers, then made his way up the stairs to George's house to ask if he could use the bathroom. Be my guest, George told him. “He says his name is George Jung, and I say I'm Bill Sullivan. ‘What're you doing around here?' he asks. Now, I never expected even to meet him, so now I've got to think quick. I'd been undercover for two years, and I knew I had to come up with something logical, some reason why a young guy would want to come down to a private beach and sit by himself. ‘I just have to be alone,' I told him. And he asks me what happened, and I said, ‘You don't want to hear this, but my wife just got killed in a car accident.' And I started breaking down. ‘God! Bill, this is awful. Mirtha! Come quick!' He tells me to sit down and he goes to get me a drink. ‘Mirtha, this is our new friend, Bill Sullivan. His wife just got killed in a car accident.' And she asked me if I wanted to stay for dinner. I'm saying to myself, No, this is going much too quick. I mean, why would I want to stay for dinner at some stranger's house? Normally you'd wait a few days so as not to look like you're latching on to him too fast. So, I said, ‘Thanks, but, no, I've gotta go.' But I ask them if it would be okay if I parked my car out front tomorrow and came back to use their beach. ‘Anything you want,' they said.”

When McGreal returned the next day, George told him his car was being fixed; would Billy mind driving him up to the convenience store to get some groceries? On the way, McGreal told George he was staying down in West Dennis, that he'd moved in with some guys for the time being. “You try to keep your story as close to real as possible. Use your real first name, where you really live. If I tell him I live in Harwich, and after a few drinks I switch it to West Dennis, they're going to say, ‘Wait a minute.' After the errand, we're sitting out talking on the deck when suddenly George says to me, ‘You son of a bitch, I know what you're up to!' And of course I'm thinking he's on to me. Holy shit, here I am in a bathing suit, no gun, all alone. There's no backup. But then he's, ‘You're a fucking dope dealer, aren't you! And you know what? So am I!' I say, ‘No, no. I'm not a dope dealer. I mean, I do some credit cards, some small stuff, larceny, but, hey, no.' He told me, ‘Bullshit,' and then went on about how he'd gone through five or ten million dollars in the last year or so and how he'd snorted about a half million dollars' worth of cocaine himself. He told me he could make me a very wealthy man, and he goes on bragging about it all, and before I know it, I'm his goddamn aide-de-camp.”

Gofer was more like it. But if McGreal felt momentarily like turning cartwheels over his good fortune, bringing this bust in to home base was going to involve a considerable amount of work, and of a nature he hadn't figured on. George had Billy driving him all over the Cape, doing errands here and there, taking him ten times a day up to make calls to Miami and Colombia at the pay phone on the corner, running into the store to get him change. He chauffeured Mirtha to the malls, took her and the children to appointments, did chores around the house. Occasionally he would have to deal with the residue from one or another of George's escapades. On one excursion to a pharmacy in Orleans, George and Billy were standing by the car while Mirtha went in to get a prescription, when out of nowhere a couple of guys approach George and the one holding the baseball bat starts yelling curses at him and swinging away in what Billy interpreted as an unprovoked attack. As it turned out, during one of his cocaine and alcohol episodes a few days earlier, George had encountered the bat wielder and his wife at the counter of a local grocery store and elbowed them both aside so he could pay for his cigarettes and get on his way, threatening to beat the shit out of the guy and telling his wife she could go fuck herself, which she probably had to since she looked like a pig. The guy had gone out and gotten a friend and the two of them had been looking for George ever since. As Billy wrote it up later in his report:

This officer attempted to disarm the subject who was swinging the bat wildly. When this failed, this officer utilized the motor vehicle and chased the subject into a shop. Mirtha came out of the pharmacy at this time and the three of us left the area. A short time later while traveling on Route 6 in Eastham this officer was stopped by two officers of the Eastham P.D. Subsequently two officers from Orleans P.D. arrived. We explained the situation to them and this officer was arrested for assault by means of a deadly weapon, i.e. the car. This officer was transported to Orleans where he was printed, mugged, made use of the phone and placed in a cell. About fifteen minutes after being placed in a cell, the bondsman arrived and this officer was released on $5 personal recognizance. Upon release from custody I rejoined George and Mirtha in the parking lot.

Billy says George told him not to worry about it, that he'd get him one of the mob lawyers from Boston who'd continue the case into the next millennium, until it died of everyone's indifference.

As close as he got to George, however, McGreal still had nothing he could use as the basis for a bust. There was no sign of any cocaine in the house. Plenty of plans got discussed, for cocaine trips, for marijuana trips—including one being developed by a boat captain Billy was introduced to who planned to bring in twenty tons of pot aboard a scalloper and off-load it into a ten-wheel dump truck filled with gravel as a cover. But the only actual illegality he'd witnessed was the assault with the car, for which he himself had been arrested.

Then on August 12 George and Mirtha left for Miami, expecting to continue on for an extended visit to Colombia, to see this fellow George knew who had a big ranch. They told Billy to take care of the house while they were gone and gave him a written list of two dozen or so chores—be sure to water and prune the plants, let in the carpenter to fix the screens, rent a pair of Winnebagos for a transportation job George had in mind, call up Mirtha's mother in Pompano Beach every day to check on how the children were doing, get a hold of four handguns George had promised someone. They left a number in Medellín to call if he had to get in touch. “Ask whoever answers for ‘Mr. Georgie.'” He also should call up
AERO
magazine, a publication for flying enthusiasts, and get the details about this piece of property they were advertising: “Country escape, private mountain lake, 21 miles from Hancock, N.Y. Immaculate 2-story lodge, tastefully furnished, 200-foot lake front, 3 boats, 2600 ft. airstrip.” George wanted him to find out if the airstrip was dirt or paved.