Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (16 page)

Jessica envied Vada’s position, but Vada rarely came to the Bronx and their interactions were limited to the telephone. Vada would say, “Little Miss Wicked Witch of the East, put my husband on.” Jessica had to show Vada respect, but she managed to get her digs in. She’d hold out the receiver as though it were infected and coo, “Your
girl,
honey,” and delicately pass the phone to George. She denied Vada the honor of calling her his wife.

George finally proposed to Jessica that spring, in part to make up for taking another girl to Hawaii on Jessica’s birthday; he gave her money to buy a diamond ring and encouraged her to take a formal portrait, which she did. She wore a corsage, and the photographer superimposed her image inside an enlargement of the ring.

In late April, Boy George was making arrangements for another shipment of heroin. Rascal called; George was out; Rascal told Jessica to page George’s supplier to relay a new meeting place. Jessica took down the necessary information, but she was less focused on George’s business than his love life. The engagement had done little to allay her fears about the competition:

Jessica: “No girls are with you, right?”

Rascal: “Huh?”

Jessica: “He ain’t with no girl?”

Rascal: “What?”

Jessica: “You’se are not with no girls, right?”

Rascal (sarcastically): “Yeah, with four girls.”

But Jessica’s brief call to Fried Rice would make her a coconspirator in George’s business. Conspiracy law cast a wide net: technically, a coconspirator could be held liable for the cumulative amount of drugs that passed through a criminal enterprise. Harsh drug laws determined prison sentences by drug weight; unfortunately for Jessica, George was
about to make the biggest deal of his life. Five days after the phone call, George and another dealer went in on a deal for thirty-two bricks of premium China white heroin; they paid $1.1 million, cash. Each brick was worth at least $175,000 on the street. The exchange took place at the Whitestone Lanes in Queens. Jessica’s relaying of the message was tape-recorded on the wiretaps.

10-4 stored fifteen bricks of George’s seventeen-brick share at a stash house and brought two to the new mill at 740 243rd Street for processing. The workers had already assembled. George did the honors of the first cut; the potency of the dope made George and 10-4 ill. They’d just opened the mill, and there was no furniture besides the table and chairs. The two men retreated to a back bedroom and lay down on the carpeting, where they slept until 9:00 the next morning. George took food orders for the table and went to the store. While he was gone, Rascal and Danny arrived to make the day’s first batch of deliveries. They were supposed to feed the spots directly, but they’d secretly farmed out the task to Moby. Usually, Moby paged Rascal to confirm the drop-off, but that morning he didn’t. Rascal called Moby’s mother, suspecting something had gone wrong, and it had: Moby had been arrested. Rascal called 10-4, who instructed him to return to the mill.

By then, the next batch of work was ready. 10-4 told Rascal and Danny to deliver it while he delivered Moby’s bad news to George. Rascal and Danny took a cab. Rascal was so worried about George’s reaction that he didn’t immediately notice the DEA agents who’d just cut them off in a white BMW. There was no time to discard the heroin in the I ♥ NY bag at his feet.

10-4 remained unaware of the extent of the growing crisis until early the following morning, after he dropped his son off at school. Still in his pajamas, 10-4 called Rascal’s mother from a pay phone: Rascal and Danny had been arrested with over ten thousand Obsession glassines. None of the stores were open for business. 10-4 paged the managers, and none returned his calls. He paged them again. The managers had been arrested, and the pagers had been confiscated and were flashing his code on the desks of the detectives who’d worked the Obsession case for years.

At 8:36
A.M
., 10-4 dialed the Morris Avenue apartment. George was sleeping with Jessica in the bed that his mother had left behind. DEA agents posing as Con Edison repairmen waited in a parked Con Ed truck. Others waited in unmarked cars, eyeing the entrance of the
building through binoculars. All wore bullet-proof vests. The government agents monitoring the wiretap heard 10-4 tell George to meet him beneath a nearby streetlight, bring plenty of money, and be prepared to break out, to “do a Jimmy James Brown.” The two bricks of heroin that had been milled the night before had disappeared.

Boy George hurriedly dressed and told Jessica, “I gotta go.”

“Where you going?” she asked sleepily.

“Don’t worry. I gotta go, I’ll call you from where I am and maybe you can visit me.” He grabbed $7,500 and instructed Jessica to burn his photographs: the blown-up picture of him in Hawaii, his arms covered in parakeets; shots from the Christmas party; the picture of him posing like Rambo, strapped with guns. In one etching, Boy George stood shoulder to shoulder with his Mafia heroes—Fat Tony, John Gotti, and Carmine Persico. These precautions were unnecessary, however; the agents nabbed George as soon as he hit the street.

The feds drove Boy George through Central Park on their way to central booking. As he looked out the window of the white Lincoln Mark IV, one of the agents pointed to a seedling: “See that plant? It’s gonna be a tree when you get out.”

The police detained Jessica and Enrique while they searched the apartment, then arrested them. George assured the investigators that they weren’t involved. Jessica and Enrique were interrogated and eventually released. Jessica scribbled a notation in her pocket calendar: “Bad day (went to jail.)”

A
fter questioning George at DEA headquarters, agents brought him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in lower Manhattan, where he joined 10-4 and other members of the Obsession crew. 10-4 flipped in less than a week. Outside, agents confiscated money and property under the federal forfeiture laws. They’d already found one of George’s Porsches and a Mercedes that had just received $50,000 worth of custom bodywork. Meanwhile, as word of 10-4’s defection spread, the loyalist ranks continued to dwindle. Boy George would glare around the bullpen and say, “Who’s next?”

Vada was next, although she never snitched. It was rumored that she had run off with the man who’d tried to sell George shares in the fast-food chicken chain. By the time the DEA got to George’s house in Puerto Rico, nothing much was left to take: no cars, no cash, no jewelry. They found leftover food and a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume. Pair after pair of sneakers remained neatly lined up in a walk-in closet. The agents drained the built-in swimming pool so they could take snapshots of the incriminating tile work. George never heard from Vada or their son again.

It took prison to make George realize what Jessica had believed since they’d met—that she was the right one to be his wife. The morning of the Obsession roundup, when she called George’s mother to relay his instructions about destroying evidence, the wiretap recorded Jessica’s prescient concern: “You know what makes me laugh?” Jessica told her. “The same people that talk are telling him how he can’t trust me because I’m gonna squeal on him.” She collected her three daughters and moved to his mother’s. George doubted Jessica would betray him, but he still wanted Rita to keep a close watch on her. Jessica’s day calendar, however, showed a woman who took her duties seriously:

Went to court.

Serena’s birthday.

Went to see Honey.

Run Errands!

Go with Grandma to doctors.

Went to see George.

Go see George.

Jessica learned that it was smart to arrive at the Metropolitan Correctional Center no later than eleven-fifteen for the noontime visit, which sometimes didn’t start until one o’clock. Prison visiting—like going to the emergency room, or to welfare—subjected people to lengthy, arbitrary delays. Jessica had to wait for a guard to give her a form, longer for the guard to collect it. There was almost always a line. Veteran visitors brought their own pens and change for the locker and the vending machines. They knew to stay close to the door to hear their name called. Guards summoned women by the last name of the inmate they were visiting. To step up for the notorious George Rivera was for Jessica a point of pride.

It could take another hour to complete the processing: coats and bags lurched along the conveyor beneath the X ray. Jessica dropped her jewelry and beepers into a grungy plastic tray. Boy George had given her his favorite charm for safekeeping—two tiny gold boxing gloves, which symbolized the Golden Gloves boxing competition he still planned to win. She wore the delicate charm on a slender gold chain around her neck. “Because I’m his champ,” she said.

Once she cleared the metal detector, she had her hand stamped, was buzzed into the interior lobby, lined up again, and signed the visitors’ log. She exchanged her ID for a locker key. Visitors had to store most of their belongings in a locker. When George’s unit—5-South—was called, she was buzzed into yet another interior hallway. She placed her hand beneath an ultraviolet light. A guard checked her hand for the stamp, and another guard rode with her in the elevator to the fifth floor. There, in the hallway, she waited again. A guard unlocked a door that granted access to yet another short hall, where visitors could buy snacks. George refused junk food, though, so Jessica usually bought only a diet soda for herself. The hall ran between two oval visiting rooms, visible through thick glass. Smudged plastic chairs lined the walls of each room, facing inward, as if recently vacated by an encounter group. Jessica was assigned a chair. She sat. She waited. At some point, the inmate was “produced.” Visits usually lasted an hour, unless your inmate had pull with the guard. George did.

Jessica briefed George about what she’d heard on the street: who planned to plead guilty, who else might rat. At one point, rumors were circulating that his mother might cooperate with the police. Jessica’s
attempt to live with Rita didn’t work out: the two women argued over money and George’s left-behind things. Jessica complained to George that his mother had no patience with children; she claimed that Rita used George’s rottweiler to terrorize the girls. Rita charged Jessica with laziness and disrespect. By summertime, Jessica had brought the girls back to her mother’s house. Lourdes was still living with Que-Que and Cesar in the dismal apartment on Vyse.

Jessica didn’t make much time for her daughters, but she dressed them well and documented their good-looking life in photographs. She bought sailor suits, socks and panties, barrettes and bracelets, headbands and adorable hats. She surprised them with a Barbie playhouse and equipped a play kitchen with miniature dishes and pots and pans. She stuffed the play refrigerator with play food and stocked the miniature shelves. It felt good to provide her girls with the things that she’d wanted herself as a child. Cesar inherited several of Boy George’s name-brand sweat suits and pairs of his unused sneakers. Jessica added to her collection of leather coats. She had more than forty: full-length and waist-length, car coats and jackets, one lined in mink.

At first, Jessica visited George every day. In their long, undistracted hours together, Boy George opened up to Jessica. Despite the cool front he projected, his situation was extremely grim. If convicted under the conspiracy law, he faced a possible life sentence. Rascal and 10-4 were cell mates: by June, Rascal joined the government, followed by Danny. Throughout the betrayals, Jessica remained a stalwart friend. “He just came close to me, and this, while he was in jail. We shared a lot of things together,” she said.

Jessica mentioned the upcoming birthday of one of her girlfriends, and George told Jessica to take a thousand dollars and do the birthday right. He booked a Mercedes-Benz limousine to deliver her and her friends to Victor’s Café. They ate an enormous meal. He called Victor’s Café on the pay phone that night to send his good wishes. Placing direct calls to unauthorized numbers from prison required some maneuvering. Jessica and her friends got drunk on champagne. They snapped pictures of themselves eating cherries, slicing knives into steak. The
plátano
had candles. The handsome waiters sang.

The celebration was a vast improvement over Jessica’s own birthday, when George had been in Hawaii with that other girl. He’d bawled Jessica out when she’d tracked him down in the honeymoon suite to ask why he hadn’t called. Now George called several times a day. He dedicated a song to her—Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.” He marveled at her
apparent loyalty. Had Jessica been the one locked up, George said, “probably the same day I woulda been fucking somebody else.”

Publicly, George treated his detainment as a temporary setback, but the other drug dealers regarded the collapse of Obsession the same way he’d regarded the downfall of the Torres brothers’ operation years before. One person’s misfortune was another’s opportunity. There were always customers to satisfy. A crew revived the Blue Thunder brand name. Jessica’s street currency was also renewed. Dealers were interested in getting to know Boy George’s girl. And she was interested in getting to know them—maybe because she was George’s girl, or maybe just because she was Jessica.