Doctor Dealer (16 page)

Through his sophomore year of dental school, while he was still primarily a pot dealer, Larry dabbled with cocaine, mostly by investing his money in deals arranged by his friends.

He visited the head shops around Penn looking for books about cocaine. Unlike marijuana, which you could just smoke to determine its quality, cocaine was harder to evaluate. And with the amounts of money involved—a kilo (2.2 pounds), a bag small enough to slip inside a valise, cost fifty-six thousand dollars!—the incentive to deceive was extreme. This presented Larry with the kind of challenge he loved.

His years of lab work as an undergrad and now as a dental student had given him a good grounding in basic science. From the books Larry bought, he learned that cocaine was an alkaloid, one of a group of nitrogen-containing compounds derived from plants. Alkaloids have a distinctively complex molecular structure and exhibit a wide range
of powerful pharmacological effects. Morphine, codeine, emetine (a potent emetic), quinine (used in treating malaria), ephedrine (used for treating asthma), colchicine (used in treating gout), synephrine (shrinks swollen nasal passages) are all alkaloids. Cocaine was originally isolated and produced for use as a local anesthetic, for which it is quite effective, but it produces side effects that medical science considers undesirable—the very effects that were turning it into the recreational drug of choice in America. Cocaine stimulates the central nervous system, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature and inducing a temporary euphoria—followed, one might add, by a strong craving for more.

It was that strong craving for more that distinguished cocaine from marijuana as merchandise. Larry began dealing coke by throwing in a few gram bottles with the purchase of a certain amount of pot. With pot sales slowly falling off, Larry found he could use cocaine as an incentive, not to the pot users at the end of his supply stream, but to his own customers, each of whom was a substantial pot dealer in his own right. Cocaine was considered too expensive for the average pot smoker, but as a special gift to dealers buying ten thousand dollars of pot or more at a time, it worked as a discount mechanism.

But quickly the dealers came back asking for more. They, in turn, had shared cocaine with their customers, which further multiplied the demand. Larry’s coke business increased exponentially.

Larry put himself through a crash course in dealing cocaine. From a head shop on Pine Street, Larry bought a nifty melt box enclosed in a wood case that was a foot and a half long, four inches wide, and three inches high. Before buying a few ounces or a quarter pound, Larry would press a pinch of the powder between two glass slides and put it in the box. Most of the substances used to cut cocaine by wholesalers (in 1979 they were primarily using a baby sugar called Nanitol) melt at far lower temperatures than cocaine. Then Larry would fire up the box. Coke wouldn’t liquify until 150 degrees (F), while cut would begin to blacken and smoke at between 75 degrees and 100 degrees. Compared to his later methods, the melt box was clumsy and crude, but it worked—and Larry loved gadgets.

In time, Larry’s runners would learn from Cuban suppliers in Florida how to quickly test for quality by simply rubbing the cocaine on the web of skin between the thumb and index finger—good stuff would readily melt and be absorbed by the skin. For more accurate measures, they learned other techniques. There were tiny prepackaged capsules into which a trace amount of cocaine was placed and then mixed with chemicals when the bond at the capsule’s center was broken. The cocaine would turn either blue or pink. A light blue like an azure sky meant the cocaine was pure. A bright pink indicated
there was mostly cut. Later, Larry employed the Clorox test, where a trace of cocaine was dropped in a small glass of bleach. Cocaine would drift slowly to the bottom of the glass, leaving in the bleach a trail that looked like an icicle. Cut would just drop quickly to the bottom, leaving no trace in the bleach. Clorox was also excellent at revealing the presence of a cheap iodine-base cutting agent that was mildly poisonous. The iodine would leave a dark brown smear on top of the bleach. Eventually, Larry abandoned all these methods for a simple methanol test: Cocaine would dissolve in a spoonful of methanol, while most of the cutting agents employed at that time would not. It was enough to ensure that Larry got what he paid for.

From the scientific supply house where Larry had been buying cartons of glass vials for years, now he purchased an expensive electronic scale that could weigh items down to fractions of a centigram.

Larry’s first significant cocaine deal was in partnership with L.A., whose friends in Florida had gotten in on the ground floor. He put up some of his cash to help buy a half kilo. L. A. drove the shipment back, and Larry went to work on it.

From Tom Finchley, Larry had learned something about the successful marketing of cocaine. The average coke user on the street had neither the time, training, or inclination to adequately test what he was buying. So the first step was to “step” on the product, to mix in some cut of your own. Larry invested in some Manitol. Eventually, he perfected the cut mixture, abandoning the baby sugar, which added too much sweetness to the cocaine, for inositol, a sugar alcohol sold in health food stores as a vitamin. Inositol was whiter than Manitol. Blending this substance with lidocaine, a mild local anesthetic, covered the sweetness of the inositol and replaced the numbing effect lost by blending the cocaine with cut. This mix went into a blender to fluff it up to a whiteness and consistency similar to the cocaine’s. That got mixed in. Then it was time to make rocks.

It wasn’t that pure cocaine came in rocklike chunks; rocks were an illusion in the coke business from start to finish. Customers tended to believe that a rocklike chunk of cocaine was pure cocaine, which it wasn’t, though it did tend to possess a higher percentage of pure cocaine than shake because shake was so much easier to cut. Larry’s first step in packaging a shipment of cocaine was to sift: it, separating the rocks from the loose powder, or shake. The rocks were left alone.
The shake was then mixed with the Manitol. Larry’s standard formula was 9.7 grams of cut per 20.3 grams of cocaine. Then Larry would try to press the shake into what he called “man-made” rocks—although all the rocks were, in fact, man-made, the “real” ones having just been made earlier in the supply chain.

His first efforts at making rocks were crude. Larry tried pressing the shake under a pile of heavy books, which didn’t work. Eventually, from dealers in Florida and his books, Larry learned that by using acetone or ether to moisten the cocaine and pressing it tightly together with his hands, then pressing even harder with the lump between his knees, he could form tight, hard lumps. He would then break that apart with a butter knife, put the chunks on a pie pan, and place them under a heat lamp. Acetone left the rocks slightly yellower than the rocks in the initial purchase, so Larry experimented with ether, and finally began regularly using methanol. Using a gardening spritzer, he would squeeze a gentle spray of methanol on the powder until it was moist enough to mold.

His first buys of cocaine were half kilos, which Larry purchased in partnership with friends. But the return on the investment was incredible. A half kilo costing $28,500 could be stretched into twenty-seven ounces by cutting it with inositol and lidocaine. At the time, Larry could sell a single ounce for $1,500, which meant a $12,000 profit. Even with the overhead and the constant trouble with bad debts, Larry could be sure of clearing $10,000 or more on the deal. The profit on a single kilo was more than $20,000, on two kilos (he got a price break of $1000 per kilo for buying two) nearly $40,200! The numbers multiplied in Larry’s head like the certain clicks of a winning combination on a one-armed bandit. After only two or three buys, Larry contacted Miguel, the dealer Finchley had wanted him to use in 1977, and began buying two kilos of cocaine at a time. It was an extraordinary risk—$112,000! The money represented the joint investment of several of Larry’s longtime friends, but it included just about every penny he had ever made.

He was ready for another shipment of the same amount within two weeks. Larry had never seen anything like it.

In a matter of months, over the winter of 1978-79, Larry’s prodigious six-year-old pot business got shouldered aside like a crippled pensioner in the stampede for more cocaine. The net-worth total on Larry’s private accounting sheet climbed so quickly past his goal of a hundred thousand dollars that it seemed stupid to consider that milestone a place to stop. Larry was filled with precisely the kind of rush he had felt four years earlier when he had started selling large amounts of marijuana. Stop now? Why, Larry was just getting started!

His new goal, which he announced to Ken Weidler, was
One Million Dollars.

Early in 1979, Hank Katz, Billy South Philly’s contact at the hoagie shop, got shot in the stomach in an argument with some Greek dealers in Center City over an unpaid loan. Billy was sick. He had lost his pot connection. He had no way of getting in touch with Larry.
Although they had met several times over the past two years, Billy didn’t even know Larry’s last name. He had no idea where Larry lived.

So he went to the Katz hoagie shop in West Philly and began asking employees, customers and employees behind the counter, if they knew Hank’s friend Larry, tall, thick black hair, liked to talk a lot, a dental student. It didn’t take long—almost everyone seemed not only to know Larry, but to know exactly where he lived.

Billy buzzed at Larry’s door and got no answer, so he tacked a note on the door: “Larry, this is Billy. I would like to have an opportunity to speak with you. Let’s have lunch.” He wrote his phone number on the note and left.

Larry called back that same day. He said he was too busy for lunch, but that he would like to see Billy. So the next afternoon, Billy met Larry at the Osage Avenue apartment. Larry was wearing a white lab coat. He led Billy back to his study. They talked about Hank, who was making slow progress at a local hospital.

“He’s crazy to get mixed up with those Greeks,” said Billy, who was actually relieved to have him out of the way. Billy had been wanting to deal directly with Larry for a long time. He liked Larry more, and it would lower his costs up front. He saw new levels of profit for his pot business. But Larry had other plans.

“I’ve got a business proposition for you,” said Larry. Larry sat down in front of his broad wood desk and from one of its many small drawers he withdrew a glass jar containing one ounce of white powder.

Billy just shook his head. “Hank was after me to start buying that. He wanted, like, sixteen to eighteen hundred dollars for a little jar like that.”

“I’ll sell it to you for fifteen hundred,” said Larry.

“My people don’t use cocaine,” Billy said.

“Just try. See what happens.” Larry reached over his open dental textbooks to hand Billy the jar. He explained that Billy could mark the stuff up and make an easy couple hundred dollars.

“Who are you trying to kid?” said Billy. “I don’t know who your customers are, but mine are scraping to come up with forty bucks for an ounce of pot.”

Billy said he could see no reason to start dealing something new anyway. Larry, who could hear echoes of his own old arguments in everything Billy said, was convincing. He offered to front the coke, and to discount a hundred dollars off each ounce bottle if Billy would take four.

“Why carry an elephant around when you can put a mouse in your pocket?” he said.

Billy took the four bottles. He didn’t want to sour his relationship
with Larry, because he had hopes of being introduced to Larry’s pot connections in Florida. He wrung from Larry a tentative commitment to be allowed to make a Florida run. He took the cocaine home reluctantly. It took months and months to sell. Billy saw Larry several times during that period, but Larry never bugged him about the money. Slowly, Billy peddled the last of the powder, pushing it on his people, discounting it, anything to get rid of it.

Then something unexpected happened. All of the people who bought it came back asking for more.

Miguel, Larry’s new connection in Florida, was so delighted to have a new buyer in Philadelphia that he flew north to discuss matters with Larry personally. Larry met him in a hotel room near the airport. Miguel was a cadaverously skinny Cuban with a sallow complexion and the dreamy-eyed look of a man who overused Quaaludes. He was about ten years older than Larry and dressed in high southern Florida fashion—designer jeans neatly laundered and pressed, brightly colored shirts worn open to midabdomen, and lots of gold, including a Rolex nearly as big as his fist. The eager dental student explained that if his two-kilo, or “two-key,” gamble went well, he wanted to continue buying at that amount for a while. Miguel was eager to oblige.

Larry offered Miguel a ride back to the airport, and he walked the Cuban dealer to the gate for his flight. On the way to the gate, Miguel was waved down by an acquaintance, who happened also to be a friend of Tom Finchley’s.

That night Tom phoned Larry. They chatted for a few minutes about unrelated things. Larry had not told Tom that he was dealing with Miguel directly, so Tom’s question was angry and abrupt.

“What the hell are you doing with Miguel, Larry?”

“Look, Tom, it just happened.”

“You son-of-a-bitch!”

“What can I say?”

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Tom drew the words out slowly.

“Come on, Tom. Miguel has been trying to use me for the last two years. It would be foolish for me to deal with him through a middleman.”

Finchley was furious. He knew Larry would be dealing in much larger volume than he was. This move meant not only that he would not be getting a cut of Larry’s business for introducing him to Miguel, but that he would have to start buying from Larry if he wanted to get the best price. It was humiliating. And Larry wasn’t making it any better.

“It’s not my fault, Tom. Miguel was tired of dealing with you. He says you’re Quaaluded out all the time and you’re too busy with
your legitimate business. He can never get ahold of you when he wants.”