Blow (46 page)

The more George snorted, however, the more his elation gave way to paranoia, and at about 3:00
A.M
. he started telling Greg he thought he heard something rustling around out on the lawn. This was one of the few coke deals where he hadn't been armed with his favorite .357 Magnum, and he was growing anxious over the security of the load. He'd asked Tom and Greg numerous times to find him a gun, and they'd debated over whether to supply him one that had a defective firing pin. In the end they promised to get one from a guy they knew but kept putting it off, and at the last moment they said the guy never showed up. So now George was looking around for a stick, anything. Finally he found a two-by-four piece of lumber. Brandishing that as a weapon, he sallied forth to check the grounds. George had been right in thinking there were people out there—nearly fifty of them, in fact, members of a special strike force put together by the DEA and the Fort Lauderdale PD. They were armed with pistols, rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns, all waiting for Greg or Tom to call it down, so they could rush in and bring this baby home. But everyone was hiding a good way back from the house, crouching down behind cover of one kind or another and not making any noise. What George had heard was coming out of his own head. After a couple of circuits around the yard he came back indoors, lay down on the floor, and using his sports jacket as a blanket, fell fast asleep.

Meanwhile, the negotiations Tom and Joseph were having with the Colombians in Miami weren't going too well. The Colombians told them they'd been sending all their cash down to Medellín, which meant they were cocaine-rich but money-poor. There was no way they could come up with the whole $1.2 million without first getting some of the kilos to sell. During these conversations, Tom found out that most of the load had been contracted for by a woman, but he didn't get a name. At one point, the Colombians proposed that he put a hundred kilos in the trunk of a car and drive it down to a parking lot in Kendall, south of Miami, where it would be picked up by agents for this woman. Twenty-four hours later the Colombians would deliver the $1.2 million, in return for the two hundred remaining kilos. Tom and Greg wanted to go for this, maybe set up surveillance around the parking lot and follow the Colombians as they tried to unload the coke. Mike McManus, however, said his superiors at the DEA were afraid to take the chance of losing the trail and allowing the cocaine to disappear onto the street.

Tom and Greg next proposed that they stonewall the Colombians, force them to come up to Lauderdale with the money or they just wouldn't get the coke. The DEA nixed this too. “Everybody thinks the DEA is very conservative, but the only time they got conservative on us was at the very end,” says Greg. “We wanted them to be a little more liberal. The way we wanted to do it—and Mike and I and Tom felt we had a feel for it—was push the Colombians to the point where, ‘You don't get your cocaine, or at least half of it, until you come up with some good-faith money. We did our part. We took our chances. We flew our people down to Colombia. We landed at Executive Airport. We're stashing the cocaine. Now you're telling us you're not giving us any money?'” But the DEA didn't want to take the chance of making the Colombians angry enough so that they'd try to come and take their coke by force. After all, the Colombians didn't know it was a police trap. “We felt, Hey, we had forty, fifty guys in the bushes, we could have at least tried it,” says Greg. “That was the frustrating point for me.”

So, the decision was made at 9:00 Sunday morning to go in and collect what they had. “There are just two of us in the house now, because they took Joseph off by the phone booth,” says Greg. “George had fallen dead asleep. Everybody came through the front door without making any noise. They were extremely quiet. They came over and pointed their guns at George and woke him up, and said, ‘George, you're under arrest.' He was very groggy, his mouth was gaping open. Wide eyes. He was flabbergasted. Devastated. He was in utter shock. He had been so ecstatic just before, and now it was all over.”

George doesn't remember the bust being quite so gentle. “I woke up and I see all these guys pointing at me with guns, there's about twenty of them coming in from all sides of the house, and they're looking like they can hardly control themselves. One thing I've noticed about the police is they get very hyper at times like these. Some of them were shaking like a leaf, they were so excited. ‘Don't you move, you cocksucker, dirtbag, you piece of shit, I've got kids you're selling drugs to, motherfucker.' One of them starts yelling, ‘Watch out! He could have a gun under that sports coat! You move, you rotten son of a bitch, and I'll blow your brains out!'”

Seeing George there on the floor surrounded by the cops jabbing at him with their shotguns and pistols, then watching him being hauled out through a cluster of gawking neighbors, arms handcuffed behind his back, Greg couldn't help experience just a twinge, a vague discomfort that tempered, albeit ever so slightly, the elation he derived from bringing off what to this day ranks as the biggest cocaine seizure in the department's history. “I don't care who you are, if you're an undercover officer, there are times you can become involved with the people you work with. You figure you're with him three and a half months, and George is a personable guy. A funny guy. A nice guy. I've seen where he could get mean, but I never saw him become violent. You don't feel bad he's going to jail because he deserves to go to jail. You don't have regrets, obviously, but you think to yourself, ‘You know, it's too bad. Under a different situation, you might develop a friendly relationship. Under normal conditions he probably would have been a good guy to know.'”

ELEVEN

Jacksonville

1987

Dylan said, “Ain't no use in calling out my name, babe, I'm on the dark side of the road.” Well, I'm there! And it's rock bottom, believe me

—
LETTER TO
M
IRTHA FROM
G
EORGE
J
UNG AT THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
P
ENITENTIARY
, L
EWISBURG
, P
ENNSYLVANIA

A
S DISCONCERTING AS THE BUST WAS TO
G
EORGE, THE
conduct of the arresting officers also caused no small uproar among the well-to-do residents of Fort Lauderdale's Riverland Isles neighborhood. And their complaints received more than passing attention in a story bannered across the top of the front page in Monday morning's
News and Sun-Sentinel,
overshadowing even the story about the arrest. “Those cars—sixteen to twenty of them—came roaring in here at 50 mph. Machine guns. Regular guns. Cops with hats that read ‘Miami Vice.' It was like a war zone. They couldn't even put anything like that in the
movies,
” said one woman, whom the reporter described as “visibly shaken” by the event. “You want the bad guys caught, but you don't want to put yourself and your family in jeopardy,” another homeowner was quoted as saying. “This type of thing really puts the neighborhood in danger.”

For George, of course, the arrest procedures and their aftermath had become a depressingly familiar scenario in recent years. After prying him away from their hyperventilating colleagues, Tom, Greg, and Mike inveighed upon George to make a couple of phone calls to the Colombians in Miami; if they couldn't nab the principals involved in the deal, they'd at least bag the two guys who'd been acting as the go-betweens. George readily agreed to help out, thinking that playing the hard-ass was hardly going to do his case any good. He was then taken to be booked and transported to the North Dade Detention Center, a county facility that rented out cell space for housing federal prisoners.

Along the way, someone had logged in his personal effects the police had found back in his room at the Holiday Inn, which comprised pretty much all he owned these days, besides the clothes on his back—and not to mention the $68 million he hoped was down in Panama. Going through his bag, they found George had already supplied himself with the documents he'd need for traveling to a foreign clime—birth certificates for two deceased males born in the early 1940s in Dedham and Melrose, Massachusetts, along with a couple of applications for U.S. passports. There was a
Time
magazine appointment book for the year 1983, with the telephone number of his parents scrawled in the back along with that of Leon Harbuck. There were picture postcards Mirtha had sent him from trips to Big Sur, of the cliffs overlooking the beach up at Mendocino. “The coast is beautiful,” she wrote on one of them, and expressed the wish that they could see it together someday. The police also found a three-inch-square snapshot of Kristina taken on her sixth birthday the year before. She's smiling into the camera, her paper hat affixed to her head with a rubber band, a Coke in one hand and an ice-cream cone in the other.

Sitting in jail, George had plenty of time to think ruefully, self-disgustedly, over how he could possibly have fallen for all the deception and the games played on him during the past three and a half months. His pain at having been so thoroughly fooled reached its zenith one night about a month after he got there, when a segment of ABC-TV's “World News Tonight,” came on the tube, scoring high in the jailhouse Nielsens for the fact that it featured an interview with a former drug smuggler who earned his living working as a confidential informant helping the DEA conduct stings on old associates. The son of a bitch was dressed up for the camera in a phony beard and had on dark glasses and a watch cap pulled down over his forehead. But to anyone who'd known him as long as George had, no amount of disguise could hide the fact that staring out at him from the TV monitor was his old pal and good buddy, Cliff Guttersrud.

The next ritual in the process consisted of visits by the lawyers. Following up on the large play George's arrest had gotten in the Fort Lauderdale press, a half dozen or so attorneys specializing in drug cases made appointments to see him at North Dade to try to get his business. “They came in, one after the other,” he recalls. “‘We can do this,' and ‘We can do that.' ‘Help you make some kind of a deal.' I'd been through it fifty times before. ‘George, if they taped you on the telephone, did they have proper warrants from the judge? Did they go through proper procedures? Protect your constitutional rights? Otherwise we can get it thrown out.' I mean, you're caught red-handed, and they try actually to make you believe you have a chance to fight it. In my mind, you're already stupid enough to get arrested, but if you're stupid enough to believe that bullshit, which a lot of people are, then you deserve to spend the rest of your life in jail. After they get done with their spiel, they talk about the money they think you've got stashed away. ‘We can work any kind of a deal you want on the money. If you've got money hidden, I can send someone, or if you've got gold buried, or diamonds, whatever you have, tell us where it is, whatever country it's in, and we'll go get it and protect you.' They're like barracudas. The people they really take are the Colombians—usually some poor bastard they've got dead to rights, and the lawyers will take a quarter of a million dollars from him, and then after they lose the case, they tell him, ‘Give me another quarter of a million, and we'll win an appeal.' They aren't going to win any appeal! The conviction rate in federal courts is something like 96 percent. The federal government has unlimited resources, and when they come after your ass, they're fucking ready.”

The lawyer he eventually chose was a British transplant to Florida named Maurice Graham, who'd followed a younger brother to the States for better employment opportunities after college and had first hung out his shingle in Lauderdale in the 1970s. “You start off with whoever comes in the door, shoplifters, home closings,” Graham says. Gradually, he began specializing in marijuana defendants and had a couple of airplane cases that got some attention in the media, spreading the word that even if your case looked hopeless, here was a fellow who could get you off. One of them involved a plane loaded up with marijuana that lost its way in bad weather and made an emergency landing on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, on the grounds of an Indian reservation. The tribal police chief impounded the plane, the county sheriff arrived, and a squabble ensued about who had jurisdiction. With the issue somewhat up in the air, Graham was able to negotiate with the prosecutor a deal where the pilot would get five years' probation and a fine of ten thousand dollars. “Then I looked the fellow right in the eye, I'm ashamed to admit, and I told him, ‘Look, there's no way this guy can raise ten thousand dollars in that time. Why not give him a twenty-thousand-dollar fine and indefinite probation until he comes up with the money?' The prosecutor is thinking that this way he'll have the poor guy on probation, have a hold on him for the rest of his natural life. And so he agreed. The very next day, the pilot walked into his office with a paper bag containing twenty thousand dollars, paid his fine, and flew off into the sunset, having been on probation for twenty-four hours. We got quite a lot of cases after that.”

Since then, Graham had graduated to representing cocaine defendants, whose business was considerably more lucrative; but by the time George came around he was losing his stomach for it, especially when it meant going into federal court. For one thing, there was a new ruling that allowed prosecutors to go after a defense lawyer's fee if he could show it was paid from illegally gotten gains. Considering the money involved, this was offering an increasingly tempting gambit where cocaine cases were concerned. Federal judges in the Reagan years also seemed to be growing more conservative, allowing prosecutors wider latitude, from Graham's point of view, on the admissibility of evidence. And unlike the state judiciaries, the federal courts had guidelines preventing the use of before-trial depositions taken from the police to impeach their testimony or cause them confusion when they appeared on the stand. If he could depose the officers first, then grill them during the trial, Graham could often come up with significant inconsistencies. “It's not easy for people to tell the exact same story about a situation if they have to tell it twice,” he says.