Doctor Dealer (29 page)

They waited five or six nights, rotating, staying up all night. Finally they spotted him as he drove up at the end of the week. They intercepted him, explained what happened, and begged him to keep his mouth shut. The classmate agreed, but in coming weeks he began having terrifying nightmares about being implicated in Ken and David’s drug dealing. He complained to Ken that he couldn’t sleep without having visions of armed men breaking down his door in the middle of the night and opening fire. Partly to reassure the guy, and partly to reassure himself, Ken moved out. The incident sobered him. It brought him face-to-face with the risks he was taking, with how he was wasting his years in dental school, with the relationship he was throwing away. So he abruptly stepped back from the business, leaving David with all the work and, ultimately, with the lion’s share of the profits.

On the other hand, David was like one possessed. When his lack of effort and interest in dental school began to affect his progress, he simply left school. All of his considerable charm, hard intellectual gifts, and inexhaustible energy were focused on one thing: making his million. The way David saw it, he could take his maximum risks and make his million in one year, then turn the business over to Willie Harcourt and become, like Larry, a rich, silent partner, removed enough from the business to be safe. That was the plan.

All Larry had to do was stay out of the way.

But Larry couldn’t stay out of the way. He enjoyed being in charge, and he was smart enough to see that David, left alone, was rapidly making the cocaine business his own.

Larry’s initial worries after Glen’s bust had abated. After talking to Glen and to Glen’s lawyers, he now knew that the New Jersey case, no matter how threatening to Glen, was unlikely to ever touch him. Larry regarded—(incorrectly)—the search of his home in Society Hill to have been an isolated event, stemming only from the arrest of the Vietnam veteran in New Jersey. And when nothing further came of it, he no longer felt particularly worried, especially now that David was building such an elaborate system to isolate him from cash and cocaine. Larry felt like chairman of the board. Marcia had stopped bugging him because, by all appearances, he
had
gotten out of the business. He no longer had to personally recruit runners, keep the books, count and launder cash, break down and package cocaine. In other words, by early 1981 Larry was comparatively free to devote
himself to Marcia and to completing dental school, and he was still reaping huge profits from the sale of cocaine.

His two- to four-kilo-per-month operation of 1979 was now regularly shipping twenty kilos per month from Florida to Philly. The business was generating nearly four hundred thousand in profits
every month!
Since they were now dealing exclusively with Paco and Pepe in Miami, they were assured of a constant, safe supply of 95 to 98 percent pure Colombian cocaine.

Suzanne was not privy at first to all of these subtleties. All she could see was that Larry, whom she had never met, was the architect of this incredible moneymaking system, and that he held David in a kind of thrall. Larry was at once David’s hero and someone whom he feared. David was forever worrying that Larry was going to object to the way things were being handled and just step in and take it all back.

Since Suzanne considered David to be the most brilliant, most commanding personality she had ever met, she could only assume that this fellow Larry Lavin was like David, only more so—if that was possible. She pictured Larry as a kind of superman, a fearless, dynamic, authoritative criminal genius.

One afternoon at Saint Charles Court, Suzanne was awakened by the bell. She pressed the intercom button.

“Who is it?”

“Suzanne, it’s me.”

She recognized the voice from talking to Larry on the phone. She buzzed the lock opening the door downstairs, and then hurriedly called David.

“Larry’s at my door and he’s on his way up,” she told him.

“I’ll be right over,” said David.

Suzanne waited nervously to catch this first glimpse of the criminal mastermind. When she opened the door on this lanky, smiling dental student with the thick mop of black hair she was, well . . . she was disappointed. He seemed so ordinary. He was too much like everyone else. It was as if a myth had been shattered. She invited him in nervously, and Larry quickly put her at ease. David stopped by within minutes and they conducted their business, checking over the books. By the time they left, Suzanne found herself genuinely liking Larry. He seemed so sincere, so down-to-earth.

Still, it was hard to believe that he was the guy who had set this all in motion.

After a full year under Mark Stewart’s control, Larry’s money was spread all over town. There were regular boxing matches at the
Arena, and Mark had purchased a Continental Basketball Association team, renamed them the Kings, and recruited former Philadelphia Sixers star Hal Greer to be general manager and coach. He was trying to promote professional wrestling matches, and even hustled Larry out to the airport one night for a meeting with Bruno Sammartino. TEC records had bought out another small recording company, named WMOT, and was promoting a whole new list of soul music singles and albums, mostly for groups that had been popular a decade earlier. Mark had invested Larry’s money heavily in an Atlantic City real estate deal. They were going to buy an old apartment building called the Barclay Building, extensively renovate it, and reopen it as the Atrium. And Mark had bought a limousine company that provided transportation for high rollers from Philadelphia to the big boardwalk casinos.

Despite the variety of these ventures, Larry realized by early 1981 that they all had something in common: They all soaked up his money without any appreciable return. With the exception of the limo company, which was relatively simple and seemed capable of thriving, the deeper Larry went into these amazingly complicated projects, the more questionable his investments became. To Larry, a pattern was emerging. Mark would come to Larry with a proposal that sounded exciting, a “can’t-miss” opportunity. Money would be invested. Then problems would crop up. Mark would come up with feasible solutions. More money would be invested. Then more problems would appear.

The Barclay Building represented precisely the sort of investment Larry had had in mind when he first sought expert advice in early 1980. Atlantic City was bursting with promise now that the state had legalized gambling and the first few casinos were in full swing. Real estate values were bound to soar.

Mark had come up with the Barclay Building project last summer. It was a U-shaped, six-story structure just two blocks from the boardwalk near the Resorts Casino, with a restaurant on the first level. The owner was in serious financial trouble and about to lose the building to his creditors. If Larry agreed to loan the guy $160,000 at a 6 percent interest rate per month, Mark explained, it would shore up the guy’s position. In addition to repaying the loan with interest, he would agree to pay a 20 percent loan fee. If he failed to repay the loan—and Larry and Mark never thought for a minute that he could—then Larmark, Inc., would get a second mortgage and the opportunity to apply for the legitimate financing they would need to purchase the property outright from the bank holding the original mortgage. The owner had a recent assessment that valued the building at far more than the $160,000 loan. Larry didn’t see how he could lose money on a deal like that.

Papers were signed in the impressive offices of Larry’s lawyer in a conference room where nearly a dozen attorneys worked on the deal around the long table. These trappings added, for Larry, a sense of surefire solidity to the project. Mark introduced Larry as his assistant and protégé, as someone who might eventually run his affairs. A few months passed, and, as expected, even with Larry’s loan the Barclay owner ran out of money and his bank began foreclosure procedures. Nearly all the building’s tenants were forced to vacate. Everything was proceeding as planned. Larmark succeeded in getting a letter of credit from an insurance company for an ambitious $3.5-million renovation project. An architect was hired to design the renovation, and he produced a handsome scale model. All of the open space in the center would be glassed over and the building would be renamed the Atrium. They worked out a deal with the first bank to assume the first mortgage and Larmark took over management of the building. All this cost Larry more money in fees and expenses, but it was exciting—he particularly liked the model. This was precisely the sort of thing he had in mind when he first met Mark Stewart. Then Resorts agreed to rent the top two floors. At last! They were getting somewhere!

But then, problems. The elevator wouldn’t work and Resorts wanted to back out. It turned out there was a nice restaurant on the first floor that had just remodeled and could not be evicted without violating the lease. Meanwhile, the company that insured the original owner slapped a two-million-dollar lien on the building because it claimed to have been defrauded by the original owner. Mark and the lawyers assured Larry that the case would never hold up in court, but while the matter was being litigated, the trendy renovation was on hold. In the meantime, in addition to more legal fees (with no end in sight), Larry was paying the mortgage and footing maintenance and utility bills for the building, which were expensive and ongoing. . . .

Then there was WMOT-TEC Records. Right away Larry learned that the key to success in the record business is distribution. WMOT had a contract with CBS Records, which made it worth buying, so Larry signed the check when Mark first proposed the deal. Next they needed money to pay the recording artists and to fly them around the country to perform, then to pay the regional distribution men who could guarantee airtime on radio stations around the country, then to wine and dine the local disc jockeys at the soul music stations to keep WMOT-TEC’s records playing at prime times, then to rent exorbitantly expensive time in modern recording studios to make the singles and albums. . . . Larry found himself shelling out money again and again. Mark then decided what they needed was to build their own sound studio in the basement of the Wellington Building. He had
convincing reasons for wanting that, but when construction was done it turned out that the studio was not up to modern production standards and CBS refused to handle the records cut there. “It’s good enough for practice,” they said, “but not to record.” When one of WMOT-TEC’s singles, a punchy percussive rap number by Philadelphia artist Frankie Smith called “Double Dutch Bus,” started gaining ground on
Billboard’s
soul charts, Mark decided the company needed a promotional presence in Los Angeles, which he could show to be absolutely vital, so a western office was opened, a staff was hired, and Mark started shuttling back and forth from coast to coast. Months later, Larry found out that Mark had incurred fabulous expenses in L.A., mostly in rental costs . . . not the least of which was leasing himself a new Ferrari.

The kicker was that CBS, which was reporting substantial nationwide sales for some of WMOT-TEC’s soul music singles, was charging so much for pressings, promotion, and distribution that the net profit on sales, Larry’s one source of return on all these investments, was close to zero.

To make matters worse, the ex-owner of WMOT filed a lawsuit claiming that Mark Stewart had reneged on his original deal. Larry knew how the man felt.

Lastly there was the Martin Luther King Arena, Larry’s most conspicuous investment. After the riot in June, things had settled down. The Kings basketball team, which Larry had put up twenty-five thousand to help buy, was playing to crowds of a few hundred. The state boxing commission was probing charges that bouts at the Arena were strictly setups, opportunities for promising fighters to run up their KO totals by flooring palookas. Dick Muldair, Larry’s old friend and runner, who after serving his ninety-day prison sentence took a job at the Arena, was calling Larry to tell him that Mark’s employees at the Arena were stealing tools and, instead of working, were spending hours of unsupervised time each day getting stoned. There was only one truly promising fighter in their stable, Timmy Witherspoon, but nobody was willing to box him because Mark couldn’t put together the kind of backing needed to attract fighters of Witherspoon’s caliber. Mark brought in the Roller Derby, but nobody came to watch it because nobody in West Philly had ever even heard of Roller Derby. So he had taken to booking shyster preachers, including one who staged a show where he purported to raise a man from the dead. The resurrected soul stepped right out of a coffin on stage, and the gullible audience then filed past on stage enthusiastically to fill the empty coffin with cash.

By early 1981, Larry was catching on. Every time some new outrage would come to his attention he would rush to confront Mark,
and every time the confident entrepreneur would manage to persuade the twenty-five-year-old dental student/cocaine magnate that the jackpot was just around the corner. Mark could be almost hypnotic he was so convincing. He knew so much more about business than Larry that he could, with a few charts and financial statements and a few deft sketches of what the future would hold, turn Larry’s anger into positive delight. There were times Larry stormed down to the Wellington intent on withdrawing his support for a project, only to leave having agreed to make an even more substantial investment.

And, of course, there were other reasons for maintaining his relationship with Mark. In the year since they signed their agreement, Larry had gone from living in low-rent student housing to living in a modern home in the city’s best neighborhood. He had gone from meeting with street hoods in his living room to conferring in boardrooms with some of the city’s highest-paid legal talent. He had gone from reporting almost no income to Penn every year, to multiple salaries—each of these projects enabled Larry to convert more of his illegal money into holdings that were legal, even if they were also unprofitable. Larry knew of no other way to readily access his wealth without inviting legal problems.