Blow (22 page)

Mr. T placed a smidgen of George's coke on his hot plate and began applying the heat. It got hotter and hotter, and hotter still as the mercury in the glass climbed past 165, past 170, past 175. Jesus! Past 180. Past 185. When the cocaine finally began to dribble off the hot plate and melt away, the thermometer had hit a temperature of 187 degrees.

George got the callback in about fifteen minutes. Mr. T seemed to have difficulty holding on to his cool. “His voice was higher than usual and he said: ‘Holy shit, where'd you get this stuff?'”

“That was when I knew we really had something.”

After Betsy and Winny returned with the rest of the coke, George started fronting his share of the kilos to Mr. T, a kilo at a time. Mr. T put on a little cut, not too much, since they both wanted to market a premium-grade product, then packaged it into one-ounce bags, which he sold to smaller dealers up and down the Cape. As Mr. T got paid, he paid George, at the rate of $47,000 a kilo, more than George had hoped for. George also unloaded a couple of kilos to a dealer in Cambridge named Louis, an Italian leather-goods importer he'd met at Danbury who had customers throughout the Northeast. One way or another, the five kilos vanished in a week, and George found himself in possession of $235,000 in cash.

While it was a pretty respectable return on a single run, the $235,000 rated as pin money compared to the proceeds that were heading his way in the not-distant future, when so much green would be pouring in that he had to store it in the hot-air ducts in Betsy's basement, cutting off the heat to parts of the house so as not to singe his liquid assets. Later on the cash would be lining the very walls of his house, dug into the floor of his basement, stuffed into hollowed-out air-conditioning units. Condensed into denominations of fifties and one hundreds, however, the quarter million dollars fit nicely into a compartment at the back of the top dresser drawer in Betsy's bedroom. It was easier for him to get at that way; he didn't have to keep people waiting for their money while he excused himself suddenly to go down to check out the boiler. This was also when he fell into a habit that lasted the rest of his cocaine days, of slipping ten grand into the left inside pocket of his jacket whenever he had to leave the house. To buy things, sure, but not only for that. George had found little else that had ever given him a greater sense of comfort or made the world seem more secure and welcoming than just feeling the presence of that packet of bills pressing up next to his heart.

A few days later Jemel and Cesar called from Boston to arrange for delivery of the other ten kilos. George met them for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel. He told them to tell Carlos to keep it coming. It looked as if he could move a lot of the product just on the Cape alone, without even tapping his man in L.A. yet. Then would come the real money storm. They told him Carlos would be in touch, gave him a key to the trunk of their car, and said good-bye. In the parking lot he took two suitcases containing the kilos out of his trunk, put it in theirs, and drove back to Weymouth.

Betsy and Winny received fifteen thousand dollars each for their work. He'd never discussed any money with Frank, but on his return to the States he offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for his part in the transaction. Frank wasn't very happy with that. Twenty-five seemed pretty mean, he said, considering the remuneration he could just imagine George was allowing himself. George insisted that it was good money for the limited work Frank had done, which amounted to not much more than transmitting a couple of messages, and having a good time in the bargain, all paid for. Frank grumbled more loudly and kept it up, until one day in the car, driving along with George, Winny, Betsy, and Betsy's Lhasa apso, Toby, Shea began whacking the little dog on the head when it got into a yapping fit. George suddenly blew up. He threatened to beat the shit out of Frank if he touched the goddamn dog once more, then stopped the car and told him to get the fuck out anyway, he was tired of all the bitching about the money. Frank glared at him before he got out and stormed off. The two never saw each other again, which was how George saved twenty-five thousand dollars. But with Frank out of the picture, he felt the urgent need to find a pilot, to stop this penny-ante suitcase stuff and start shifting the enterprise into a higher gear.

*   *   *

On July Fourth weekend, 1976, the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations were in full throttle, from atop Mars Hill in Maine, the point where the dawn's early light first graces the American coast, to the town of George, in Washington State, where the locals had baked a sixty-square-foot cherry pie. During the week-long celebration, New York and Boston each played host to the Tall Ships, the fleet of square-riggers that came from around the world to honor the occasion, among them the steel-hulled
Christian Radich
from Norway, with its figurehead of a woman in a full-length blue dress, and the
Sangres II
from Portugal, whose sails were emblazoned with the Maltese Cross. Traveling from port to port, the ships cut through the Cape Cod Canal rather than going around the tip at Provincetown, and to watch them sail by, so many yachts and powerboats had jammed into Buzzards Bay that you could have practically walked across the bay going from deck to deck.

One of these pleasure boats was a thirty-three-foot Egg Harbor sportfisherman belonging to a real estate developer who specialized in constructing inexpensive houses known as half-Capes (they had only a sleeping loft upstairs instead of the two bedrooms found in the traditional Cape). A partner of his, Teddy Fields, was also on board that day. So were George and Betsy. Teddy Fields had grown up across the street from George on the Circle in Weymouth. Teddy's family had money. The sons were sent off to private colleges, and it was in their garage that George first laid eyes on the Porsche. Fields was also one of the few boyhood friends George had kept up with after leaving Weymouth, and he had stayed at Teddy's house in Cotuit, a little west of Hyannis, on occasions when George was down on the Cape on marijuana business. Flush with proceeds from the recent suitcase trip, George had volunteered to bring along a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon, some iced caviar, and lobsters. Besides helping to honor the country's birthday, George was there to ask his friend Teddy—since he knew everyone on the Cape—where he might locate a trustworthy pilot.

This was how George came to meet Barry Kane. Kane, a lawyer, was the Chatham town counsel. Prematurely gray, suave-looking, and smooth-mannered, he was sometimes referred to as the Silver Fox. He'd grown up in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston under modest circumstances and had had to borrow money to attend Boston College Law School, from which he graduated in 1958. When he arrived on the Cape three years later with his wife and their first baby, he was fourteen thousand dollars in debt and at night drove a cab in Boston to make ends meet. The next fifteen years saw him prosper from his law practice and from buying and selling real estate during a time of rapid growth in the area. Along with property in Hyannis, West Harwich, and South Yarmouth on the Cape, Kane owned a ski place in Mount Snow, Vermont, a condominium in Nassau in the Bahamas, a Porsche, a Cadillac, and a commodious sailboat. He lived in a rambling white-clapboard Victorian house, circa 1845, on Queen Anne Road, one of the oldest and most exclusive parts of Chatham. Chatham itself was one of the oldest and most exclusive towns on the Cape, its main street lined with sedate shops and outdoor cafés. The men of the town sported blue blazers and yellow trousers, the women wore pastel skirts, clutching tony straw baskets handcrafted on Nantucket at six hundred dollars a pop. Kane's wife, the daughter of William Moloney, M.D., a professor at the Harvard Medical School, died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1972. Her death, which left Barry with five children to raise, was ruled as accidental by the coroner, but it created a bitter dispute in the family over who was ultimately to blame. At her funeral, according to a real estate developer friend at the time, the two sides of the family glared at each other over the coffin. Dr. Moloney blamed Barry. He said his daughter had died of a broken heart because of Kane's more or less constant philandering.

In the late 1960s Kane had taken up flying at the little Chatham airport, where he kept a twin-engine Cessna 310. In 1975 he'd upgraded his rating to commercial status, allowing him to carry passengers and cargo, and he regularly ferried his friends and girlfriends down to the Bahamas. The developer friend says Kane spent a lot of time in the Bahamas and would boast about the influential contacts he'd made in the islands. He also talked about the fortunes people there were making in the humming drug trade, whose operators used the islands as a stopping-off point for marijuana and cocaine headed for the United States. “Barry loved money,” the friend says, “and I think he thought there was a lot of money to be made there, if only he could figure a way to break into it.” Kane never told him in so many words that he wanted to run drugs, but there were certain things he'd say. “One time we were on our way down there, flying over Cape Hatteras off North Carolina. He was looking at the air charts, the radar vectors and all, and he said, ‘You know, there's a gap between the radar rings right here. You could slip in between them, never be detected, and get into the country illegally.' The other thing, he asked me once was did I know that of all the drugs smuggled into the country and the drug runners operating that only 5 percent of them ever got arrested?”

Barry also appeared to be in a bit of trouble. The very month he met George he was due up before the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, the group that watches over lawyers' ethics, on a complaint by one of his clients that Kane had fleeced him out of property he'd put up as collateral for a loan. A year later Kane would be publicly censored for the incident. But prior to that, in his testimony before the board in July of 1976, he said his real estate investments were in a precarious state and that his law business had actually lost money in the two preceding years. He could use a piece of change.

Two days after their discussion on the boat, Fields accompanied George to Barry Kane's law office, located in a shingled cottage on a quiet street on the outskirts of Chatham. “I admit I felt a little uptight about walking into a very prominent lawyer's office and asking if he wanted to smuggle cocaine,” George says. After the introductions, however, George came directly to the point. “I told him there was an opportunity for him to make several million dollars tax-free. It would involve the use of his airplane. ‘If you're not interested,' I said, ‘I'll stop right here and walk out and not mention it again. We'll both forget this conversation ever took place.'”

“Don't leave, I'm interested,” Barry said, hardly waiting for George to finish. “It's smuggling drugs we're talking about, right?”

“He then went on to tell me he had a place in the Bahamas, that he knew certain people down there, Nigel Bowe, a prominent lawyer who would be helpful, and we could do it like this and he had a plane.…”

Kane jumped on the deal so fast it took George aback. He felt compelled to give him some kind of warning. “I said, ‘Look, you're a lawyer, this is against the law, all the penalties. If you say no, I'll walk out of here right now and forget the whole thing, we never met each other. It'll be over.' But he started quoting me the range between Medellín and the Bahamas as the crow flies, saying he'd have to get back to me on the precise mileage, ‘But we can stop overnight at Nassau. I can use the Bahamas as a base, fly the stuff into the States from there.' He mentioned somewhere in the Carolinas. I was obviously talking to a guy who, if he hadn't actually done this before, had given it an awful lot of thought.”

They agreed that Kane would do the runs. That summer he would have to work out a way to extend the range of his aircraft and check into getting some additional navigational aids. George busied himself with increasing his financial security with more small-scale trips, picking up the loads in Queens, New York, from Jemel, now a regular courier—not quite the mountain of money he was planning on, but averaging about fifty thousand dollars a month, enough for starters. To deliver the goods to Mr. T, he'd buy thirty-two-ounce jars of Coffee-mate, steam off the paper seal underneath the cap, and fill them up with cocaine, just a little short of a kilo, then glue the seal back on. He'd stick the jar into a bag of groceries, along with Wheaties, Dipsy Doodles, eggs, and a can of Dinty Moore's. A friend of Betsy's, Courtney, a welder by trade with a wife and several children who earned extra money from George doing drug errands, would meet George at a bar in Weymouth. George would hand over the bag of groceries, which Courtney took out and put in the trunk of a car in the parking lot that had been left there by Mr. T, who would come by later and drive it off. On one occasion, after a spate of car thefts, two plainclothes police officers were staking out the parking lot and saw this guy doing something funny with a bag of groceries, putting them in the trunk of one car, getting into another one and driving away. When they stopped him, Courtney stumbled a little at first, but recovered enough to say that this buddy of his couldn't get off work and had asked him to pick up some things at the market, put the stuff in his trunk. Here, see? Wheaties, eggs, Coffee-mate. Okay, the policemen said, have a good day. Drive carefully.

By now George felt he'd lived the monk's life long enough and could begin slowly unlimbering his talent for spending money. All for cash, since he didn't want any records kept, he bought a snow-white Porsche 924 to replace the one he'd had in California in his marijuana days. For the trips to New York he picked up a Ford Thunderbird, something more spacious. He liked the Thunderbirds because they were built on a Lincoln chassis, making for an easy ride, and had a powerful engine, which he fuel-injected by having blowers installed in the carburetor. He also bored and stroked the cylinders to boost the compression ratio. To catch George now, a police officer would have to push his usual wreck of a cruiser up to somewhere over 140 miles an hour.