Doctor Dealer (17 page)

“You wouldn’t even know fucking Miguel if it weren’t for me, Larry. Don’t give me this shit.”

“Don’t take it personally, Tom. It’s just business.”

“You’re fucking crazy it’s just business, Larry. Are we going to have to go to war over this?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Tom hung up the phone. Larry didn’t hear from him for a day or two. When Tom called again he had calmed down. He knew there was no margin in cutting off his dealings with Larry, especially now. Larry tried to be conciliatory.

“Look, Tom. You know I’ve always treated you right, fronting you things, getting you things at cost.” Larry had paid some of Tom’s legal fees the year before when he was arrested—Philadelphia police had searched the trunk of his MG and found cocaine, but the charges were later dismissed because they didn’t have a warrant for the search. Larry reminded Tom of every good turn he had done him in the last few years.

“And you know you’re a preferred customer, you’ll be buying from me at cost,” said Larry.

After the first three two-kilo shipments, Larry had accumulated enough cash to make the buys himself. Making the flights to Florida were Matt Weder, a tall, fat member of Phi Delta Theta who had graduated a year behind Larry and had been living with Andy Mainardi, and Ken. Ken couldn’t believe that Larry just kept sending the piles of cash he made back down to Florida.

“You might lose it all!” he would say.

Larry was so used to shocking people with his dealings that he considered it a form of tribute.

“You gotta have balls, Kenny. You gotta have balls.”

Dealing cocaine reversed the usual transportation problems. With pot, one had to cope with the smell and bulk coming home from Florida. With cocaine, the bigger challenge was moving so much money south. Even in 1979, when cocaine use was just beginning to join the mainstream, airport security guards would stop and ask questions when large bundles of hundred-dollar bills showed up on their X-ray machines.

At a secondhand shop as an undergraduate, Larry had bought for seventy-five cents an old gray-brown tweed overcoat that was much too big for him. Marcia had tried to throw it away once or twice, but Larry always spotted it out in the trash and saved it. It had big deep pockets on the inside and outside and hung down to his knees. It was
perfect for carrying money through airports. He and Ken would accompany Matt to Philadelphia International Airport. Matt would pass his luggage through the X-ray machine and walk through the metal detector. Then Larry and Ken would go through. They then went to one of the men’s rooms on the concourse, and with Larry and Ken taking stalls on either side of Matt, they would pass bundles of hundreds under the partitions to him. Matt would then stuff the cash into his carry-on bag.

“Come on . . . come on,” Larry urged Matt on one of dozens of these trips. Larry was always in a hurry.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” said Matt. “It won’t fit.”

“Just stuff it in,” said Larry.

Ken started to laugh. On his way out of the men’s room he said, “Can you imagine what that sounded like to someone overhearing us in there?”

When the weather turned warm, overcoats were out. On one trip Matt taped five-grand packets of hundreds three-deep all over his chest and legs. He wore an oversized shirt and baggy pants and just walked through the airport by himself. When he got to Florida, the bottom layers of money were soaked completely through with sweat. After that he doubled-wrapped the bundles in plastic and dripped all the way to Miami.

Through freshman and the first half of sophomore year in dental school, Ken Weidler was selling small amounts of the pot and Quaaludes he bought from Larry to a classmate named David Ackerman.

David was a short, slender New Yorker with thick, very fair brown hair and big green eyes. The son of divorced wealthy parents who for years had used money to vie for his affection, David was used to having and spending money. He had been a regular at expensive Center City restaurants all through his undergraduate years at Penn, and he liked to dress well at a time when most of his classmates’ wardrobes were a heap of unwashed denim and flannel on the floor next to their beds. Women loved David. With his pronounced long thin nose and sensitive eyes, he was strikingly handsome in a delicate, almost pretty way. David had the personality of a pampered little boy, combining self-assurance that was at times overbearing with an underlying sweet helplessness. He was shy about his jejune appearance, and tried to counter it with a succession of sparse moustaches and beards—a different combination almost every month. David was a brilliant student, with a crisp clear intelligence that announced itself in everything he did. He was animated to the verge of being hyperkinetic. In conversation he could be captivating, with eyes that flashed with enthusiasm or delight or anger. David had won a prestigious
competitive examination after his junior year at Penn that permitted him to skip his senior year and start in at Penn’s dental school immediately. His father was a successful dentist, so David’s passage from college through dental school and into a ready-made, lucrative practice seemed effortless and assured.

As Ken Weidler began to make money dealing the pot Larry sold him and eventually making the runs south for cocaine, he was able to keep up with David’s tastes for wine, fine restaurants, and women. David had a membership at Elan, a fashionable disco club in the Warwick Hotel that was easily the best place in town to mingle with beautiful single women. Through their sophomore year in dental school, Ken and David began taking cocaine along with them on their frequent nights on the town. The cocaine was like a magnet. At Elan, David and Ken were minor celebrities. They spent a lot of money, drank a lot, shared cocaine, and often went home with women.

Larry and David knew each other from dental school, but David had no idea that Larry was the source of his friend’s steady drug supply. Larry had never found time to become a part of the dental school’s low-key social life. He was too busy, for one thing, and his home life with Marcia had removed most of the old incentive to go out and mingle with his classmates. Marcia herself was a confirmed homebody. Her idea of fun on a Friday night was to sip wine and knit in front of the TV with Larry. So David’s impression of Larry was that he was a dull, studious fellow. When Ken finally relented to David’s insistent demands to meet his supplier, Ackerman was flabbergasted—“That guy who sits next to you in the lab?”

Overnight, David’s ambivalence toward Larry turned to hero worship. Larry thought it was comical. His impression of David was of an unbearably egotistical runt who made up for his youth and stature with bluster and strut, the kind of person who will just interrupt someone else in midsentence, as if to say, “What I have to say is more important.” David sometimes argued with his teachers, as if he believed he already knew more dentistry than they did. It was either that or he was busy sucking up to them. Larry didn’t like the guy. Ackerman was, thought Larry, “a typical New York Jew.” Then, suddenly, this David Ackerman was all over him, as if they had been best friends for years.

David made it clear right away that he wanted in on Larry’s business. Larry was always in the market for a runner, even one he didn’t particularly like, so on the first occasion that Ken could not make the trip to Florida, Larry asked David to go. Ackerman jumped. He handled himself so well dealing with Miguel in Florida, and his whole attitude was so eager and bright, that Larry couldn’t help but be impressed. He started employing David for a lot of different chores.
In addition to making runs, Larry soon had David changing money for him at local banks (a time-consuming chore with the growing amounts of cash on hand), making up orders, purchasing cutting agents, and so on. David had a quicker mind than Ken; intricacies that Larry grew frustrated explaining to Ken, David understood instantly. Because David understood more, his admiration for what Larry had accomplished was deeper and more rewarding to Larry than Ken’s simple amazement. Larry began to entertain notions of handing some of the business over to David eventually—it would reduce the demands on his time, reduce the risk, and reduce the mounting pressure he was getting from Marcia.

They had been living together for three years and been engaged for two. Marcia’s father had died in 1978, and one of the effects it had on her was to make more urgent her desire for a family of her own. In May of 1979, Marcia and Larry began looking for a Catholic church to be married in—they wanted one close to Penn because most of their friends lived there. Marcia wanted a traditional ceremony in June 1980. She wanted Larry completely out of the business before they were married, and he promised.

But for the time being, Larry had a new edge in his differences with Marcia over dealing. Before, with his constant losses and bad debts chipping away at his earnings, Larry arguably had been spending too much time and effort for the return—maybe thirty to forty thousand dollars to show for more than four years of work. But once the cocaine business took off, there was no question but that the business was making him rich—richer than he had ever dreamed of becoming. As the totals mounted, and the stakes grew higher and higher with each deal, Larry’s excitement grew with it. Marcia might warn him about getting caught, but so far that threat remained very distant. Larry assured Marcia that he had it arranged so that other people took the risks. He had never come close to getting caught. And those of his friends who did—L.A., Andy, and Tom—got off so lightly that even to a cautious person like Marcia the rewards appeared to heavily outweigh the risks.

Moral objections to drug dealing never entered Marcia’s mind, or Larry’s or any of his friends’. Dealing cocaine was nothing like dealing heroin. Coke was a party drug, a harmless, quick stimulant in great demand, not by derelicts and street people intent on destroying their lives, but by some of the brightest, most promising, most successful people they knew. People didn’t turn their noses up at cocaine dealing; they turned their noses toward it! Whatever social rewards Larry had gotten at Penn for dealing marijuana were multiplied tenfold by dealing cocaine. And it was making him rich!

Marcia’s objections were purely personal. She knew the risk wasn’t
worth it, she resented the time Larry spent engrossed in the business, and she was angered by his overgrown adolescent need for time “out with the boys.” But Larry was in another one of his phases where it was no use arguing with him about it. He had definite goals, a definite timetable . . . he had it all figured out.

Larry, David, Ken, and Paul Mikuta flew out to Colorado in March of 1979 to visit Larry’s old friend Glen Fuller. The trip introduced a new element to Larry’s life that was to become his specialty—the outrageous, expensive, decadent party.

Fuller had packed up his van in Haverhill in 1973 and headed west. He had heard about the great skiing in Aspen, and he was eager to strike out on his own. In Aspen, Glen kicked around from job to job, working as a short-order cook until a particularly good day for skiing came along, then he would walk out the door and head for the hills. Jobs were plentiful those days in Aspen, and Glen could always hustle a few more bucks on the slopes by stealing students out of the lines waiting to take lessons with the official ski instructors.

Glen eventually got into the produce business and sold marijuana and small amounts of cocaine on the side. In 1977, he took the money he had saved selling pot and opened a little seafood store in Vermont. There he met a pretty, dark-haired young woman named Rita Long and for the first time in his life considered settling down. By late 1978, Glen had a refrigerated delivery truck and a delivery route with more than a hundred restaurants as customers. He was doing well enough to lease a house in Aspen while he was living in Vermont, just so that he would have a nice place to stay whenever he felt like skiing. Through the years, Glen had kept in touch with Larry’s brother Rusty, and it was Rusty who told him about Larry’s sudden incredible success in Philadelphia with cocaine.

So Glen had visited Larry and expressed an interest in starting up a New England branch of the operation. His stocky, well-muscled frame filled Larry’s Osage Avenue apartment with the hell-raising enthusiasm of old. Old animosities over the Ski-Doo incident were forgotten; Glen was thrilled to discover that his preppie partner in teenage crime had made good—“Let’s get it on!” said Glen—reintroducing some of that old joy in deviltry that Marcia had been trying to mature out of Larry’s system. Larry prepared Glen’s first order himself, whipping up the cut in a blender on the living room floor at Osage A venue while Marcia was away at work, and packing up a cardboard box with about six ounces. Within months, Glen was chartering a small plane down to Philadelphia on a regular basis to pick up orders of a kilo or more.

Larry was resisting his old friend’s efforts to be let in on the business. He enjoyed Glen’s company, but he considered him too wild and unpredictable to be trusted with serious matters—i.e., Larry’s money. Glen didn’t get the message. The more Larry tried to keep him at arm’s length, the more determined Glen seemed to be. He wanted badly to be a part of Larry’s inner circle.

A year earlier, when Larry had flown out for a week of skiing in Aspen with his brother Rusty, Paul Mikuta, Andy Mainardi, and Ken Weidler, Larry had avoided Glen. Rusty knew that Glen had a house nearby, but Larry knew that his old friend had a way of commandeering events and steering them out of control. This year, though, he was obviously going to be impossible to avoid. Glen was making plans for Larry’s trip before Larry was. They would stay at his place and party like madmen for a week.

Larry and his friends flew out in March, over Easter break. When they arrived, after a long drive through the spectacular snowy scenery of the Rockies in winter, Glen introduced the Philadelphia boys to their companions for the week—Rita’s two sisters, one for Ken and one for David, a girl named Lisa for Larry, and a girl named Stacy for Paul. There was ample cocaine, marijuana, and a supply of Quaaludes on hand, plenty of expensive wine, brandy, and hard liquor, ski lift tickets, and a whole week to enjoy it. Any reservations Larry had about partying for a week with Glen fell away with his clothes when he got into bed with Lisa. This was going to be more fun than he had imagined.