Doctor Dealer (48 page)

It was unsettling. Larry was impressed with what Goldberg had done for him that day. He was grateful. Now to be told that Goldberg was not going to represent him further was alarming.

“I thought you were done dealing,” the lawyer said pointedly.

Larry tried to explain that he really had stopped dealing, at least very soon after having consulted with Goldberg for the first time in late 1982. He had just been trying to collect money, to make back some of the millions he had lost in investments with Mark Stewart and Joe Powell.

“It was stupid,” said Larry. “You’re right. What can I say?”

“And I told you to stay off the phones,” Goldberg said.

They got home shortly after five. The air had gotten suddenly cooler.

Marcia’s mother asked, “Are you all right, son?”

“Yeah,” said Larry, trying to smile.

“Do you want me to stay or go?” Agnes asked her daughter.

“I think you better go,” said Marcia. “I’ll call you.”

Larry pulled down all the shades in the house, moving from room to room.

“I don’t want people looking in,” he said.

Marcia called the AAA to help her get the keys out of the car. While she was out in the driveway she saw the woman next door in her driveway. Neither woman said anything. When the keys were freed, she thanked the AAA man and walked back into the kitchen to start dinner.

Inside, Larry had on the Channel 6 news. The story of his arrest, complete with the mug shot taken earlier that day, was the lead news item.

“Larry, why in the world would you want to listen to that?” called Marcia from the kitchen.

He didn’t answer. Marcia walked in to watch for a moment.

“That’s the most important thing that happened in this city today?” asked Marcia.

Larry listened silently in his leather armchair, flipping channels to catch portions of the item on other stations. When the part dealing with his arrest was over, he turned off the TV and walked into the kitchen. He stood quietly for a moment, watching Marcia at work but with a distant look in his eyes.

“We may be leaving within six weeks,” he said.

Bruce and Suzanne Taylor were in a cabin in New England the day of Larry’s arrest. They learned of their indictment by phone. Bruce, who was out on bail, had left the cabin number with his lawyer’s office.

They were advised to hustle home. If they were arrested in New Hampshire, it might take a while before extradition was completed. They would spend days, if not longer, being shuttled from prison to prison on their way back to Philadelphia for arraignment.

So they gathered up their things, half expecting swarms of armed agents to come storming over the quiet autumn hills, and drove straight home as fast as they could. They turned themselves in the next day, and both were again released on bail.

Tom Bergstrom looked like the kind of man you would want on your side of a goal-line stand. He stood well over six feet and had the shoulders and back of an immovable object. Bergstrom played basketball in college, served in the U.S. Marines, and filled his office with posters, drawings, busts, and statuettes of John Wayne. There was a hint of the Duke’s manner in his muscular ease and lack of pretension. In his early forties, Bergstrom might have had flecks of gray in his hair, but it was cut too short to tell for sure.

Don Goldberg had called on the day of Larry’s arrest and briefed him on the case. Larry had agreed to pay Tom a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee up front. The big lawyer met Larry for the first time in Goldberg’s office the next day.

What Bergstrom saw surprised him. While he had not expected to meet a bum—Larry had made a lot of money, after all—he had expected someone a little more gold-trimmed and high-gloss. Larry looked as if he had stepped off the cover of an advertising brochure for an Ivy League school. He was wearing a gray crewneck sweater over a white shirt with a button-down collar, brown corduroy pants, and a pair of topsider shoes. He looked and comported himself like everyone’s idea of a perfect son: He was outgoing and friendly in a very pleasant way; he was candid, humorous, and self-deprecatory, obviously intelligent, clean-cut, and apparently genuine. Any reservations Tom had about defending the reputed cocaine king of Philadelphia eased. He liked Larry immediately. Tom’s first impression
coincided with Goldberg’s assessment: This was a basically nice kid who had made some big mistakes—Big Mistakes. Larry was in big-league trouble. He was about to be martyred to his generation’s lust for cocaine.

After chatting with Goldberg, who assured Larry and Tom that he would remain available for consultation, the lawyer and his new client strolled two blocks, past Claes Oldenburg’s giant clothespin-shaped statue
The Kiss
and across busy Market Street, to Tom’s office over Penn Center Plaza.

Tom went right to work. Larry answered questions seriously and candidly. He didn’t seem distraught or angry, just concerned and determined to fight. Tom was able to tell him very little good news. At first glance, the evidence against him seemed overwhelming. With the 848 charge, the very best Larry could hope for would be the minimum ten-year sentence. Tom guessed that, realistically, the worst he might expect was thirty to forty years. If he got ten years, then with good time and an early parole, he would have to do seven years in prison.

“That’s seven, period. You’ve got to do seven,” said Tom.

The key to avoiding that, the lawyer explained, would be to get the U.S. attorney to drop the charge under Section 848. That would allow Larry to plead guilty to drug-trafficking charges and give the judge more flexibility at sentencing. It might be possible to whittle actual time served down to something like four years. But it would require cooperation. Larry would have to agree to testify against others in the case.

Larry said he couldn’t imagine doing that. It would mean betraying virtually all of his friends and two members of his family. The only people close to Larry who
weren’t
involved in drug dealing were his parents, the workers in his dental office, his older brother Justin, Marcia, and Agnes. He knew that once he started talking, he would have to keep on talking or he would lose whatever initial advantage he gained.

There was another reason not to talk. Even though he had listened with disbelief to Chuck Reed’s description of Frannie, the more Larry thought about it, the more he realized elements of it might be true. Frannie was a reckless character. He had told Larry about pulling a gun on someone once, and had intimated that worse things than that had happened to people who crossed him, things that Larry would never have considered doing himself. And there was Billy Motto. Larry liked and respected Billy, but there was an aura of danger about his South Philly friend that was undeniable. Larry knew that Billy’s supposed connection with the local mob was overblown; if anything was true it was the exact opposite—Billy lived in fear of arousing the
attention of older, more powerful organized-crime figures. Philadelphia, after all, was in the midst of a wave of mob killings, sparked by the murder of longtime Mafia don Angelo Bruno. South Philly hoods were turning up dead nearly every week—
The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine
had recently outlined a tour of South Philly restaurants where notorious mobsters had eaten their last meals. Billy had often told Larry that if these more murderous criminal types started to muscle in on his drug business, it would be time to get out of town and concentrate on peddling produce. Still, Larry knew other things about Billy. Once, for instance, when someone had stolen a large amount of cash from him, Billy had sought help from local mobsters and, for a fee, got his money back. Larry didn’t know of anyone else who could have done that. Ever since he had known Billy, the South Philly dealer had been surrounded by armed, silent, loyal employees. On one occasion, one of Billy’s men had attacked and seriously injured a man who had threatened Billy in a bar. Bruce Taylor told a story about the time Billy gave him a knife as a gift after he first started working for Larry. Billy had handed him the knife handle-first, said Bruce, and had said, ominously, “There are other ways I could give this to you.” Maybe Billy had meant nothing by that, but Bruce had never forgotten it. Recently, one of Billy’s closest friends and associates, Gregory Cavalieri, was found murdered in a park outside of the city. The police considered Billy a suspect. Larry knew how upset Billy was about his friend’s murder—when Cavalieri was first missing, Billy had actually hired private detectives and taken out newspaper ads in an effort to find him. Larry was convinced Billy had nothing to do with it, but . . . it was just one more thing to consider.

No. Cooperating was out of the question.

The answer didn’t surprise Tom. He knew few defendants turned state’s witness readily, and he knew Larry’s resolve would be more seriously tested in the months to come. So he outlined a few good ideas for pretrial motions dealing with suppression of evidence. There was a chance he could successfully defend against the Section 848 charge; after all, the relationship between Larry and Frannie was not as clear-cut as the government maintained. The amounts of cocaine being sold, at least so far as Larry Lavin was concerned, were in fact less than half the amount quoted in Larry’s conversation with Wayne Heinauer. Evidence against Larry’s involvement was overwhelming, but within the fine gradations of culpability and evidence defined by law, there was some hope, some room to maneuver.

Before Larry left that day, Tom spent some time talking to him about things in general. Larry told him how he had gotten started in the business, about what it had been like at Penn during the mid-seventies,
when virtually everyone his age smoked pot, when the onus of criminality attached to dealing was little more than a joke. Larry talked about how the business had switched over to cocaine without missing a beat, and how fashionable the drug was, how popular its dealers, how profitable its sale. The one thing Tom couldn’t understand was why Larry had not just stopped at some point. Why hadn’t he stopped, say, after making a million dollars? Wasn’t that enough to satisfy anyone? Why continue to take such risks?

Larry acknowledged how foolish it had been not to stop, in retrospect. But he tried to explain, talking about himself (as he often did to humorous effect) in the third person. He tried to define the worm in his gut that had kept him going all those years, even after making millions.

“I definitely was on the verge of quitting,” he said. “If it wasn’t for these losses. The hard thing to understand is how important it is for Larry all these years, he’s got this sheet, and he always knows just exactly how much he’s worth. I always tried to have a fair estimate of what’s considered uncollectable debts and what’s a realistic figure on what I’m worth. But once you reach a figure, you never want to be less than that. And then we find out, boom! we just lost five hundred thousand and I’d say to myself, ’If I can just make that back then I’ll quit. Then I’ll have enough.’ “

“But where did this great need for money come from?” said Tom. “I don’t get it.”

“Tom, I saw my father work all of his life, work his ass off all of his life, and never have anything,” said Larry. “I made up my mind that I was gonna have money. It’s as simple as that.”

Patients kept coming! Larry had almost expected his life to stop after the indictment and arrest, but on Thursday morning he drove to work in a new, leased BMW, and there were patients waiting for him when he got there.

In the year and a half he had been practicing dentistry with Ken Weidler, Larry had come to enjoy the work more than he ever imagined he would. The mechanics of dentistry, the drilling and filling, the probing of people’s mouths, that didn’t excite him, but the steady stream of people and problems was engrossing, even exciting. Larry found that his days at the office never went as they were scheduled. There were frequently emergencies, or unforeseen problems, so there was an art to keeping things flowing smoothly in the office. Larry was good at it. Because he had more money than most beginning dentists, he could afford the very best tools and materials for his work. He brought to his purchases of dental wares the same childlike enthusiasm he had always brought to buying pot, or coke or electronic gadgets.
At night he read up on the newest techniques, often conferring with his old classmates about what he was trying. Former classmate Chris Furlan, who had opened a practice in West Philadelphia, used Larry as a kind of
Consumer Reports,
waiting to see what materials Larry preferred after sampling a variety of, say, the latest mixtures for filling cavities that Chris could not afford to put to the test himself. Larry enjoyed running the office, dealing with “the girls,” and, of course, keeping the books. He found pleasure in just doing something for people, easing their pain, fixing their bites, perfecting their smiles.

In the weeks after his indictment, Larry was grateful for the patients who kept coming, who still treated him with friendship and respect. His routine was a comfortable shelter from the storm that had engulfed his life.

Neighbors on Timber Lane kept their distance. Newspaper reporters had knocked on all the doors, even poor Mrs. Eisenhower’s, the day after Larry’s arrest. Most politely refused comment. Some spoke off the record, saying that they were not really surprised.

“When they moved in, they were so young,” said one of the anonymous voices quoted in a story five days after Larry’s arrest.

“People weren’t appalled,” said another.

Elicia Geisa stood in her backyard one day looking across as Marcia pushed little Christopher on the swing set in the Lavins’ backyard. She felt little sympathy for Larry, but she did feel sorry for Marcia and the little boy. What was going to happen to them? She wanted to walk across her yard and talk to Marcia, to perhaps console her or befriend her, but she didn’t know what to say. What did one say to the wife of the biggest drug dealer in the city on the occasion of her husband’s arrest?

The man who lived next door, a chemical company executive, who was closer to Larry and Marcia than most of his neighbors, felt angry and betrayed. Like most of the homeowners on Timber Lane, he had children who were closer in age to Larry and Marcia than he was. He confronted Larry on the property line one weekend afternoon about two weeks after the arrest. They were both working in their yards.