Blow (41 page)

That Christmas they moved down to a rented house in Homestead, bought Kristina a Husky puppy for a present, and tried to restore some order to their lives—an entirely fruitless endeavor, as it turned out. Tortured by the pain that snorting coke was causing his feet, George had some success these days in once again reducing his consumption. But whatever that might have done to bring peace and quiet to the household was overshadowed by Mirtha's increasing alcohol binges, and also a new habit she'd acquired from her Latin girlfriends: smoking crack. “It was a different rush, much faster, so much you almost think you're going to have a heart attack,” Mirtha recalls. “It only lasted a few minutes, which is why you'd smoke so much of it. But a lot of people got into it because they didn't want to wreck their noses.” Smoking crack and drinking rum didn't much improve Mirtha's capacity for running a tight ship. One night she fell asleep with a candle flickering next to her. It set the curtains on fire, and George woke up in a room filled with smoke and flames and barely got everyone out of the house alive. They lost their house and all their clothes in the fire, along with whatever other possessions they'd accumulated since abandoning Eastham.

What also went up in flames was that little box in which George had kept the receipts for his numbered bank account down in Panama City. Did he need to actually produce the receipts to withdraw his money? His experience had been that banks just wanted to know you were really who you said you were, and they'd give you a new bank book. Big Ralph had been handling all his bank business; he'd have to get a hold of him now to set his mind at rest that there wasn't going to be an unhappy ending. But alas, Big Ralph was busy at the moment, having gotten busted during a foul-up with one of the runs, in which the Cessna Conquest was confiscated by the federal government.

To tide himself over during this dry period, George found himself another plane and a pilot, and Humberto set him up to transport five hundred of Pablo's kilos from a mountain landing strip lying between Medellín and coastal Barranquilla. With a passport made out to the erstwhile David Mahan, George flew down on a commercial flight to inspect the landing field and was driven into the mountains by two of Pablo's Colombians, along with an interpreter for George and a young woman whom everyone was apparently supposed to share to ease the rigors of traveling on the mountain road. Whether it was because George, now middle-aged, had simply grown too old for this stuff or because he was just grumpy over the uncertainty of his present situation, that trip turned out to be more than a little unnerving. “We're eight thousand feet up in the mountains on some goddamn dirt road six feet wide and they're all smoking
basuco
and drinking rum, speeding down these roads that were twisting all over the place, and I'm looking down into these gorges. There were no guardrails. They're passing the pipe around and pawing at the girl, grabbing her tits and kissing her and laughing, the car's weaving all over. I'm thinking pretty soon I'm a dead man here. When we got to Barranquilla, I jumped out of the car at a stoplight and ran into the first bar I saw. ‘Please, Mr. Georgie, come with us,' and I'm telling them, ‘You motherfuckers get away from me, I'm staying right here and having a few drinks before we go any farther.'”

The ride to Barranquilla was quickly outclassed by what transpired next, another sample of how Pablo Escobar imposed order over his empire. “The interpreter who'd come with us from Medellín, he was paid by Pablo just to make the trip, but he took me aside and said he wanted me to meet some people who had some dope too. We went to this apartment building in Barranquilla, and there were these guys who said they also had kilos. ‘We want you to move them for us, too. Nothing is to be said to anybody about this, and we can make some real money.' I just listened and didn't say anything, but I was thinking to myself, ‘I'm not going for any of this bullshit. I'm not crossing Pablo or any other motherfucker down here.' I told them I'd think about it, but I had to get back to the hotel. The interpreter said to go ahead and that he'd be along shortly.

“When I got back to the hotel room, there were four of Pablo's people there, and I told them exactly what was going down, that I was just down here to do my job and didn't want to get mixed up in anything. They said, ‘Don't worry about it, Mr. Georgie, we'll take care of it.'” A few minutes later George sauntered out on the balcony, which was ten floors up and had a sweeping view of the city and out to the sea beyond. By happenstance he saw the interpreter down below park his car in the lot and saunter into the lobby. A few moments later he knocked at the door. “They opened the door and let him in, two guys on each side of him, and it happened so fast he didn't know what hit him. They grabbed him by the arms and ran him across the room without saying a word—I don't think his feet even touched the carpet—and they ushered him right off the fucking balcony. He was gone! The whole thing took about two seconds. He landed in the parking lot not far from his car. I looked over and a little crowd was gathering. I mean, I thought they might do something to him, but do it later, for Christ's sake, up in the mountains, not kill him right in the fucking hotel, while I'm right there doing a job, in broad daylight, in the middle of Barranquilla, a big beach resort town, just throw the fucker right off the balcony! I said, ‘Uh, well, I think I have to be getting back to the States now. I've got something really important I have to do. I'll get back to you fucking guys later.'”

And he would have, too, to complete the run, if an event hadn't interceded that abruptly changed George's plans for a long time to come. The event was a fight with Mirtha, one of a series of battles between them that during their days of being wanted in Miami evened out into continuous warfare. They had “horrendous fights,” George recalls. “We were arguing all the time, and because the houses next door in Homestead were only thirty feet away, the neighbors would always end up calling the police. We'd argue over money, over her smoking crack. She'd go on about why we had to leave the Cape, the beautiful house we'd lost. I mean, suddenly she loved the Cape. When she was there, it was too lonely, she always wanted to be in Miami or New York. And when Mirtha got drunk, she got hard to control, even for me. She threw things a lot, at me, or smashed them against the wall—ashtrays, vases, pitchers, anything, so long as it would break.”

One night after the fire—by now they'd moved to another house, in North Miami—they were driving home from a party at the house of some Colombians down in Kendall, south of Coral Gables. “Mirtha thought I was trying to get it on with this guy's girlfriend. She thought we were making eyes at each other, and she was probably right. But anyway, she suddenly flips out and grabs my hair and starts yanking on it and screaming at me. It's a little after midnight on Saturday, on I-95 going north through the center of Miami, which is like rush hour, only everyone's going eighty miles an hour, and I'm right in the center lane, with cars on both sides. My hair's long again now, and she's got it in both hands, yanking my head back and forth. I'm trying to hold on to the wheel, the car's weaving all over, I'm yelling at her that she's gonna fucking get us killed. The only thing I could do, I let her have it with my right hand, and I broke her nose.”

Blood now streaming down over her mouth and chin, Mirtha let go of George's hair to attend to her own problem, and the incident might have ended in a hospital emergency room had not the car right behind them contained two members of the Dade County Public Safety Department, now known as the Metro Police. “They'd seen us fighting and me hitting her, the car's going all over the road. When they pull us over, Mirtha's so pissed off she begins yelling, ‘He's a fucking cocaine smuggler! He's wanted by the police up in Massachusetts! Take that motherfucker away to jail!' So they put the cuffs on me, drive me down to the police station, and that was it. Two days later they came and asked if I'd waive my rights and sign the extradition papers. I said, sure. I had had it. I knew I was in trouble big-time here, what with running away and also the drug charge. But one thing about going to jail: I knew Mirtha wouldn't be in there with me.”

*   *   *

From the bust onward, that October of 1981, life took George on a fairly bumpy trip for a while. After being escorted back to Massachusetts, he languished for thirteen months in the Barnstable jail while his lawyer tried to work out some deal with the prosecutor. Mirtha had managed to remain free for a few weeks because the Miami police hadn't thought to check her record when they locked up George. But she, too, was arrested shortly afterward on a fugitive warrant and also sent back to Massachusetts, to the women's facility in Framingham. By early in 1983, George's lawyer, a criminal attorney from Quincy named Elliot R. Levine, a former teaching fellow at the Harvard Law School, had convinced the district attorney that the state's mandatory sentencing law was so constitutionally vague that, in exchange for Levine's not challenging the statute in the appellate courts, the prosecutor agreed to let George and Mirtha plead guilty and receive only the time they'd already served.

A few days after they got out George collected his family, and they all headed down to Florida. There he ran into Hank, the pilot from Norfolk, Virginia, who had suddenly disappeared a couple of years before. He was now living with a Colombian woman in Palm Beach, and he and George began flying in more loads. In the fall of 1983, however, as a favor to a down-and-out pilot in Massachusetts, who had begged George to get him some cocaine to sell so he could get back on his feet, George delivered a kilo to the man at a Howard Johnson's Motel outside of Plymouth, only to discover that the guy was working for the state police. Busted again!

For Mirtha, this was the last straw. Shortly afterward, she gathered the children and moved out to San Francisco to start anew, continuing the program she'd begun in prison to get off alcohol and drugs. Where the raising of five-year-old Kristina was concerned, Mirtha resolved to make the life she had shared with George Jung disappear altogether. “I told her that Daddy had gotten into a very bad boat accident, and that he was in the hospital and was being taken care of very well, but that he was paralyzed from the neck down. This was what my counselor and I agreed on, to tell her this, because it was better than telling a five-year-old, ‘You know, your daddy is a drug smuggler, and do you know how many keys he brought in with Carlos Lehder?' So, he was in a hospital back East and he couldn't move his arms and legs.”

By now the Massachusetts state legislature had repaired the defects in the mandatory sentencing law, which meant that George, having been busted with a whole kilo, was facing serious time. On top of the state charge, they'd also found a 9-millimeter pistol in the trunk of his car, so the feds had him for interstate transportation of a weapon in connection with the commission of a felony, that is, the sale of the kilo of cocaine. As dark as things appeared, however, George had always experienced considerable luck where the criminal justice system was concerned, and the gods didn't choose this moment to cast him adrift. Somehow the kilo of cocaine he'd been caught with miraculously disappeared from the locker at the Middleboro state police barracks, where it was being stored as evidence. All the state had left was the sample that had been sent to the police lab for testing. In negotiating with the prosecutor for a deal, George's lawyer threatened to call to the witness stand every trooper in the barracks to get to the bottom of what had happened. Figuring this would not only tie up the case endlessly but also bring down more embarrassment on the state cops, the prosecutor agreed to a compromise. George would serve forty months on the drug charge, instead of the twenty years he faced had they pressed the matter. As an added bonus, he could do two years of that in the minimum-security forestry camp in Plymouth, where inmates worked at the not-particularly onerous task of tidying up the grounds of Miles Standish State Park for the tourists. And so as not to inconvenience him terribly on the federal gun charge, they would let the eighteen additional months for that one run concurrently. Once he heard about that minimum-security forestry camp, George listened to all the other details with only half an ear. Because he'd already made up his mind that right after he'd done his federal time, he would pull off an escape.

One motive for the escape was simply that George was George. “I didn't have that much more time to do, really, but my mind didn't work like other people's,” he says. “Ninety-five percent of them would have stayed. But I would just go. Leave. I always ran away, every chance I got.” More important, though, something he was careful not to share with anyone, was the worry that had begun to seep into his mind about the money in Panama, the stash he'd been mounting up all these years, which the last time he'd added up his bank receipts had totaled just short of $68 million. Because of Mirtha and her goddamn crack habit, all the receipts were gone now. He'd memorized the account number, of course. But he'd completely lost touch with Big Ralph, who was out of prison by now but didn't stay in close touch with George. One thing George could do was send a lawyer down to Panama to look into it, to see if things were okay. But George had seen too much of lawyers in the cocaine trade to regard that as a smart idea. In his experience, the lawyers were like wolves stalking a herd of caribou—ravenously hungry but biding their time, watching for a weakened animal, then moving in to devour their prey. No, he really had to go himself. But the trip would require a lot of cash, and with his bad luck in the last year and a half, he was just about tapped out, especially when it came to the funds he would need to pull this off. His name might be on all kinds of international watch lists, and he could just imagine what sort of reception a paroled ex-convict cocaine smuggler would get asking the vice president of the bank to please give him his $68 million, or wire it to Switzerland, whatever. He'd need a lot of grease here, maybe have to pay people off, maybe get help from Pablo Escobar, who by now had become friendly with the man who ran Panama, Colonel Manuel Noriega. Whatever he devised, it would take money to get it done—to make that big withdrawal and retire finally from the smuggling business. Retire to the motor sailer, the Great Barrier Reef. Maybe he could even get back with Mirtha, give her 68 million reasons to remember the good old days. He could see the children. For all these reasons, George was determined to get out of captivity as soon as he fucking well could, get his ass down to Florida, and set himself up to do just one more run.