Doctor Dealer (30 page)

In four months he would be done with dental school. Already Marcia was talking about moving out of the city and starting a family.

It was April of 1981 when they decided to move. Larry and Marcia had just returned from a week in Saint Thomas, Larry’s last spring break before graduation. They had lived at 4 Willings Alley Mews for more than a year, but to Marcia the house would always be just the place where that Mark Stewart had put them up after the robbery. She hated it. Not one warm memory attached to it. During the huge parade celebrating the Phillies’ World Series victory in October, a woman neighbor had been pulled off the sidewalk by a group of drunken men who tried to rape her. And earlier this year Marcia had been knocked down by a man who tried to grab her purse. A year of living there had just confirmed her desire for more space, for a lawn, trees, a garden, birds, for a house that was not entirely vertical, for a place that, in some way, reflected what she wanted.

So the next weekend they went driving out on the Main Line, looking for a house.

Larry had called a real estate agent, Ilene McHenry, and looked at the paper. The first place they stopped to see, on Waterloo Road in Devon, was a sixty-room mansion. Its owners had plans to divide the huge house, worth two million dollars, into four condominiums, so that the estate would be jointly owned. Larry pulled in one end
of a U-shaped driveway and drove up to the front entrance. Marcia refused to even get out of the car.

“Are you crazy, Larry? Look at this place!” she said. She couldn’t believe he was serious.

“I just want to look around,” said Larry.

He stormed off by himself to walk around the grounds.

Marcia was alarmed by something McHenry had said trying to make conversation as they drove around that day.

“You never know about people,” she said with a smile. “I sold a house to a nice young couple and it turns out they were running guns for the IRA.”

Later, Marcia said to Larry, “Now, why would she say something like that?”

“She was just making conversation; trying to be nice. It was something that happened that was interesting,” said Larry.

Marcia shook her head. “If you show a lot of wealth, Larry, people are going to be interested in where it came from. You’re still in school!”

On reflection, Larry realized that something more modest would not only make Marcia happy, it would also be far wiser for one in his special financial circumstances. Marcia thought something in the $75,000-to-$100,000 range would be fine. Larry was thinking more on the order of $200,000. He figured they could sell the Society Hill house for at least $150,000 to $180,000, so a $200,000 home would be an appropriate step up. They went looking with McHenry the next weekend, telling her that they were prepared to spend only $150,000. In the time-honored real estate tradition, the first house she showed them was well over that ceiling, a two-story white brick Colonial with gray shutters on Timber Lane.

They would see a dozen other houses over the next two days, but nothing else compared. For a young man in a hurry to turn his criminal fortune into legitimate wealth and social position, the choice was perfect.

Timber Lane is in Devon, just a fifty-minute ride out the Paoli Line from Center City Philadelphia, but a journey that for most people can take generations. The Paoli Line is the old Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line, from which the region takes its name. Its station stops—Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr . . . Paoli—are escalating rungs of Philadelphia’s upper class, the oldest and most formal establishment in America. Devon comes seven stops after Bryn Mawr, out where city streets are just a memory. George Washington once rode up the wooded hills and down the green slopes of this gently rolling landscape, just south of Valley Forge. Most of the old estates of Philadelphia’s homegrown aristocracy
have been subdivided, but an equally rigid—if more pedestrian—hierarchy prevails. Next door to the white house with gray shutters lived the Eisenhowers, John and Barbara, parents of David Eisenhower and in-laws to Julie Nixon. On the other side lived a chemical company executive. Uphill, across the street, a retired admiral and head of the department of dental surgery at Temple University. Next to the admiral, a vice-president of the Mellon Bank.

Out here there was quiet: When a car moved down the gentle curve of Timber Lane, folks lean toward windows to watch. Out here there was order: landscaped lots on sylvan slopes, lawn services to keep the grass lush and trim, nurseries to sculpt the hickory, oaks, walnuts and white pines—and prep schools to prune the children. Timber Lane’s residents had earned the money and power to have things their way. Their way was one of country clubs and stables, the annual Devon Horse Show and County Fair, Colonial-style inns for a quiet dinner out, and a Bloomingdale’s in America’s largest shopping mall at King of Prussia, just a short drive away. Their days were scenic, their nights serene.

“The only time we get a little excitement around here is when the Secret Service moves in,” said owner Margy Conlin, who was out working in the front yard when Larry and Marcia stopped by with the real estate agent. “You see, Richard Nixon sometimes stops by to visit with the Eisenhowers next door, and before he arrives the Secret Service descends.”

The house itself was set back about forty feet on a slight downward slope from a narrow, winding suburban lane in a neighborhood dominated by trees. There were six windows across the second floor and four on the first, two on either side of a broad door with a rising sun pattern set in the brick overhead. There were Colonial lanterns on either side of the door. A driveway curved down from the lane on the west side of the property, leading to an attached two-car garage. What appealed to Marcia most was the backyard. It ran from the back porch in a long gentle green sweep that was nearly as long as a football field. At the far end of the property ran a stream over which a previous owner had built a small Japanese-style bridge. A stand of maple and oak trees blocked the view of the next house, and on either side of the property there were bright yellow flowering forsythias, a white-blossomed little dogwood, and evergreens. Inside, the first floor was sectioned into four large, sunny rooms. To the left of the foyer was a living room, and behind that a dining room. Continuing clockwise was a kitchen and then, back at the front of the house on the right side of the foyer, a wood-paneled den. The staircase from the foyer led up to five bedrooms and two baths, one at either end. The basement needed work. A previous owner had intended to
set up a medical office down there and had divided the space into a number of small rooms. Although it was not a new house, it had been especially well kept, and all of the plumbing and appliances were modern. For both Larry and Marcia, it was love at first sight.

The Conlins were asking $219,000.

“I love it, but it’s too expensive,” said Marcia.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be able to do it,” said Larry.

Larry got his camera out of the car and walked the grounds snapping pictures so that they would have something to show their friends. When she got home, Marcia excitedly called her mother to tell her about the house.

But that evening, McHenry called. She had bad news. Just after he and Marcia left, the agent who had originally listed the house had come up with another offer. If Larry wanted the house, he would have to move fast.

Larry hung up and immediately phoned Mrs. Conlin. She said that they appeared to have a buyer already. Larry said he would like to make a better offer. Mrs. Conlin said he would have to speak to her husband, who was out of town.

“Where?” asked Larry.

“He’s in New York,” she said.

“Where’s he staying?”

So Larry phoned the Yale Club in New York City and tracked down Dennis Conlin. After chatting amiably for a few minutes, Larry offered the full asking price for the house. Conlin was pleased. He said he had not expected to actually get the full asking price for the house. Larry hung up and told Marcia that Conlin had agreed; the house would be theirs. Larry then called his agent to tell her the good news, and she informed him that since her last call she learned that Mrs. Conlin had already signed an agreement with the other couple. Larry said she couldn’t do that; he had already reached an agreement in New York with her husband. So Larry called Conlin back. He said he would check with his wife and try to work things out.

A short while later, Conlin called back to explain, apologetically, that his wife had, in his absence, made an agreement with another buyer. There was nothing he could do.

Larry was angry. He said he had called a lawyer, which wasn’t true, but then Larry had learned a thing or two about playing real estate hardball from his involvement in the Barclay Building fiasco, and he told Conlin that he was prepared to go to court: if necessary. It was nearly midnight.

“Look, we’ll give you anything you want for the house,” Larry
said. “My wife is crying. She had just assumed that would be her house.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Conlin.

“Do they have a mortgage contingency clause in their offer?” asked Larry.

They did.

“Then you can back out of it,” Larry said. “Because I am making you an offer with no contingency.”

When Conlin continued to hedge, Larry turned threatening.

“If you don’t agree, then I’m going to put a lien on the house nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said. “I believe I had an oral agreement with you. I’ll tell my lawyer to prepare the papers right now.”

Larry knew that the Conlins were planning to move soon.

“The lien will be there for at least ninety days,” Larry said. “Even if my claim is turned down, it will drag on past your moving day. You won’t have the money to buy your new home.”

The next day the Conlins agreed to scuttle the earlier agreement and sell the house to Larry and Marcia for $219,000. Larry had them over a barrel.

At the settlement a few weeks later, Larry was warm and personable, as if nothing had happened. The sellers and their agent, who had lost half of the commission when the rival buyers’ offer was turned down, despised him. Who was this twenty-five-year-old dental student, anyway? Larry had topped off their impression of him when, a week before settlement, he had offered to pay Conlin $40,000 in cash and write a check for the remainder. It was, in effect, an invitation to cheat the government out of almost 20 percent of the closing cost fees. And where in the hell does a dental student come up with $40,000 in cash?

Larry seemed more bewildered than disturbed when the older man responded with the look of someone who has just been served fresh shit on fine china.

In March, David chartered a jet and flew Suzanne and Christine and Gina with him to Saint Thomas. All three women were infatuated with him. Suzanne was his former lover. Gina was his live-in girlfriend. Christine had begun confiding a secret longing for David to her diary.

Soon after they got back, David began sleeping with Suzanne. He told her he wanted to keep their personal relationship secret, not just because of Gina, but because he didn’t want everyone in the business to know that their relationship was more than professional. Of course, Suzanne told Christine about it right away.

*  *  *

By early summer, Larry owned a hit record. Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus” was number one on
Billboard’s
soul charts. Larry thought it sounded dreadful, but first the record went gold, with one million sales, and started closing in on platinum. The magazine came to Philadelphia to do a big photo spread on Frankie Smith and Mark Stewart and WMOT, calling it the hottest small independent recording company in the country.

Of course, behind the scenes was a different story. At Mark’s urgings, Larry had begun shelling out promotional fees to agents all over the country six months before. In Philadelphia, Mark acted as WMOT-TEC’s agent, courting Butterball, the lead disc jockey for Philadelphia’s leading soul station, WDAS, a bellwether for the industry. The stations had an A shift and a B shift. Tunes on the A shift got played every hour. For the right amount of money, the regional promoters would guarantee the A shift for your record, although no one ever discussed exactly how that was done. For Larry it was proof that one more supposedly legit industry was just a scam.

There was an art to pushing a record up the charts, provided you had plenty of money to spend. When a record jumped three spots on the chart,
Billboard
put a bullet next to it. It attracted more attention that way. That was how particular singles got a reputation for being hot. WMOT’s promoters would strike deals with key stations to withhold airtime for the record for two weeks and then play it heavily in the third to boost sales for that week’s surveys. The record would suddenly spurt up five notches or more, earning another bullet and building its own momentum. At one point Larry and Mark were able to orchestrate three records into the top fifteen. Larry was spending close to fifty thousand a month. CBS was reporting minimal net profits.

Nevertheless, WMOT-TEC looked like it was starting to fly. Mark wanted Frankie Smith to cut an album to cash in on the success of his single. That was another forty thousand. And Frankie and his band had to tour, which meant money for transportation, incredible hotel costs, clothes—a star has to look the part. The L.A. office was starting to run up bigger and bigger bills, and Mark had opened a West Coast branch of Celebrity Limousines. In all, there were now more than a dozen employees in California, some of whom, Larry learned, were making seventy-five-thousand-dollar annual salaries. By the end of the year, the total payroll for all of Mark’s ventures topped seven hundred thousand. Larry found out indirectly that Mark had recently given his wife a Porsche. When he confronted his financial advisor with this, Mark said, “I’ve got money of my own, Larry.”

But Larry had no idea how to get to the bottom of that.

Truth was, Larry was making so much money in 1981 that without Mark he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Mark knew a vice president at Bank Leumi who would take his periodic deliveries of sacks full of cash and spread it among almost a dozen separate accounts, so that no one deposit was greater than the ten thousand-dollar limit (beyond ten thousand the bank must report the deposit to Uncle Sam). There was a WMOT-TEC account, a Larmark account, an L’s Inc. account, a Wellington account, a Mark Stewart escrow account, a King Arena account. . . .