Blow (24 page)

Now that he didn't have to live with his mother, George even tried to smooth things over with Ermine. While his parents were away for a week visiting Marie and Otis in Indiana, he hired Courtney and his son to gut the family kitchen and replace all the cabinets and appliances. They installed walnut paneling, olive carpeting to match the new cabinets, a stainless-steel sink, a self-cleaning electric oven, and a frost-free refrigerator. When his mother returned, she told George she loved it, waxing very enthusiastic even over the color scheme. His father didn't say much directly, but George learned that he'd resented the intrusion. If Ermine really wanted one, it was his prerogative to provide her a new kitchen, which everyone knew he couldn't afford. All his father said to George was that the kitchen was nice, but he liked the old refrigerator better.

It was at about this time that Carlos's behavior started becoming somewhat aberrant; he started screwing up in annoying ways that threatened their impending enterprise. Although it was all George's contacts they were now exploiting in their common effort to transport the product into the States and to sell it, George couldn't help getting the feeling he was regarded ever so slightly as the junior partner in the arrangement. He still regarded Carlos as a “brother,” but Carlos wasn't consulting him on every single matter these days, and he'd begun to lurch about a little recklessly. First, the $50,000 check he'd so blithely written out to Barry Kane bounced. Kane was someone they should avoid irritating at all costs. “Barry called me up and said, ‘Your friend Carlos's credibility on a scale of one to ten just went down to minus one.'” George apologized and told him to meet him at the Hilltop Steakhouse in Braintree, where he gave him an envelope containing $25,000. Kane grudgingly accepted the lesser amount, since it just about covered the loran and the gas tanks. After that Carlos got himself arrested down in Colombia in a car-smuggling incident. This came in the middle of another suitcase trip they were running through Caracas, Venezuela, which had to be aborted, losing them $400,000 in potential sales and costing George another $20,000 or so in expenses. All over a car! George was really pissed at that one.

Then came the little episode with the police dogs, with Carlos running for his life through the snowbound woods of northern Vermont.

It began in February of 1977; Carlos had gotten out of jail on the car-smuggling charge and had called George to meet him at the Holiday Inn in Toronto—he had news that might cheer George up. There were fifty kilos waiting at a house in Miami. He wanted George to go down and pick it up and bring it up north. Carlos would slip over the border into the States and be waiting for him at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge. They didn't discuss what exactly would happen next, but George assumed he'd be paid with at least five of the kilos to sell through Mr. T and Louis, the leather importer, and install an extra quarter-million in the heating ducts in Betsy's basement. The new money had a mollifying effect, and George and Carlos spent a couple of days in Toronto talking over plans. In George's presence, Carlos made several calls down to Colombia, conversing with someone in obviously deferential tones, the conversation always being a little one-sided.
“Sí, padrone. Sí, sí, padrone,”
Carlos would say. He never said who was on the line, but George assumed it was the Big Man, the source of the voluminous amount of product they'd shortly begin winging in.

Life with Carlos proved to be not much fun. He'd come down from his hotel room to eat his meals, but he didn't drink and most of the time stayed up there poring obsessively over the piles of magazines and brochures he'd collect on airplanes and cars and trucks. Or he'd wander around the airport talking to airplane dealers, stop at Chevrolet lots to look over those infernal Chevy Blazers he couldn't get enough of. “Carlos began driving me nuts up there with the airplanes and Blazers, talking about the same thing over and over: ‘It's got this range to it and this much cargo space and we can get this one here, and I've got all the statistics.' ‘Look, Carlos,' I'd say. ‘In America you do business and then you take time out, you live your life.' He had a real German mentality.” At night George had to go out to the bars by himself, not that this posed a great hardship. “Canadian women seemed very loose to me. It was, you talked to them, you had money and dressed well, you got laid.”

One night, about one or two in the morning, Carlos called George to his room. “He was sitting on the bed, and he said, ‘I think I'm going to marry Jemel. What do you think about it?' I said I thought it was a wonderful idea. She was a beautiful young woman, a very nice girl. ‘I think you would be a wonderful couple.'” Carlos meant right away. He immediately called Jemel in New York, she flew up the next day, and, after getting the blood tests and the papers signed, the three drove to the outskirts of Toronto to a justice of the peace, an elderly man who had a chapel rigged up in a paneled room in his basement. He put out the bouquet of flowers George had brought on the makeshift altar, cranked up Mendelssohn's “Wedding March” on a record player, and with George and the justice's wife witnessing the event, Carlos and Jemel tied the knot. Two hours later the happy couple drove to Montreal for their honeymoon, and George flew off to see about picking up the cocaine.

Always a little edgy about his phony passport—George, now briefly Brian Whittaker—took the precaution of flying home from Canada aboard Bar Harbor Airlines, clearing customs at Bangor, Maine, where travelers weren't burdened by too much scrutiny. “They had a little guy in a red-and-black checked hunting cap who'd come out and say, ‘Everybody here American? Got anything to declare? No? Okay. Good-bye.'” For the trip to Florida, however, George thought it best to travel as a family man. Betsy would come along as his wife, her daughter, Lisa, as his little girl, and Betsy's friend, Kathy, a student at Northeastern, to provide additional domestic ambience. Actually, relations in George's little family had been slightly strained recently, it having come out that his suspicions about Betsy and Carlos's friend Cesar Toban had been correct—she
had
slept with him on that trip to Antigua. George hardly qualified as Mr. Constancy himself, of course, having slept with Betsy's friend, Kathy, as well as Lorraine, his courier on the aborted Caracas run, two other women friends he saw in Boston when business took him there, and, in a moment of real weakness, Courtney's fifteen-year-old daughter, who confided the matter to Betsy's daughter, who informed Betsy that George was a child molester. George had arrived home that day to find two large garbage bags lying out in the middle of the driveway; they contained all his clothes, cut up into thin strips. That was the same day Betsy chose to tell him about her liaison with Cesar, and George elected not to make a very big issue of it, considering. As it was he spent a few days at Teddy Fields's place before an uneasy peace descended on his household.

In Miami Beach he put everybody up at the Fontainebleau Hotel, and while the females hung out at the pool, George took a cab to a complex of garden apartments about fifteen minutes south of Miami, where Carlos had said a guy was waiting with the fifty kilos. He represented himself to the cabbie as a seashell collector from the Cape and told him the duffel bags he was about to collect were filled with rare shells from the Caribbean, very fragile. At the given address, George knocked at the door of a ground-floor apartment and told the man who answered that Carlos had sent him. It's about time, the guy said in a Spanish accent; he was very angry, George sensed. He'd been holding this stuff for three weeks now. Where the hell had Carlos been? They got the duffel bags from the bedroom, and as they lugged them outside the man asked where George's car was. He didn't have a car, he said, he'd come by the cab over there, at the curb. “He said, ‘A cab? Are you fucking crazy?' But I figured it was in broad daylight, who'd think you were doing anything wrong? My philosophy was always if you did stuff in the open, right in front of people, and you looked like whoever you were supposed to be, you didn't have to worry about anything.” The cabbie opened his trunk and helped George load in the bags carefully. They're very expensive, George told him, don't slam the lid.

George and his “family” decided to stay on a few days to catch more of the Florida sun before heading back to the snow and slush of Massachusetts in March. For the flight north, he transferred the kilos to four suitcases, which he stashed in Betsy's basement, unbeknownst to her, not bothering with drainage pipes this time since he'd be turning them over so quickly to Carlos. Four days later Carlos called from Canada. Jemel had gone back to New York, he said, and he wanted to come down to pick up the load. George said he would send up Courtney and his daughter in Betsy's Oldsmobile to drive Carlos from Montreal across the border. A teenage girl and her dad and her dad's friend—George thought they'd have no trouble with customs.

Then two days later, on the night of Saint Patrick's Day, Courtney's wife pounded at Betsy's door in a state close to hysteria. Courtney had just called. There was big trouble at the border. They'd searched the car and found Carlos's passport and his Colombian money. They were holding Courtney in custody. Carlos was gone. He'd run into the woods. Courtney said the police were chasing him with dogs.

Jesus, Carlos again! George first told her to calm down. Courtney would be all right, he assured her. They wouldn't find anything in the car. George promised to cover any legal expenses if there was trouble. “What I'm really thinking is the police now have Betsy's car with her address on the registration. They had the passport of a missing Colombian national who'd been kicked out of the country for drugs. They're starting to put two and two together, and here I am sitting with my thumb up my ass and fifty kilos of cocaine down in the basement.” George told Betsy to take care of Courtney's wife, that he'd be in touch, that he had to go, don't ask where. Within five minutes he had the suitcases packed into the trunk of his Thunderbird, tore out of the driveway, and headed for the Southeast Expressway toward the Cape. Keeping the needle glued to the speed limit, he arrived at Teddy Fields's house in Cotuit, on Nantucket Sound, in less than an hour. He asked Teddy if he could stay a few days and store his suitcases in the attic. The only person he told where he was was his mother, in case Jo-Anne, the parole officer, chose this moment to spring a visit.

As it turned out, the customs people released Courtney later that very day. After calling his house constantly, George finally reached him to get a little more of the story. They'd driven down from Montreal, Courtney said, and had planned on crossing the border into Vermont, just to the east of Lake Champlain, north of St. Albans. Several hundred yards before the checkpoint, Carlos had suddenly panicked and changed the plan. He told Courtney to stop the car, he didn't feel confident of making it through customs. The roadway there ran through a dense patch of forest, and Carlos said he'd rather cut through the woods and meet Courtney on the highway about a mile on the other side of the border. But it was snowing out, and cold, Courtney said, all Carlos had on were street shoes. It wasn't all that far, Carlos said. Don't worry. Promising he'd see him in a bit, he walked off into the woods.

For reasons Courtney couldn't figure out, maybe just his nerves showing through, the inspectors on the U.S. side ordered them out of the car and proceeded to do a full-scale search. It didn't take long before they'd run across a number of discoveries striking them as exceedingly odd. Courtney's and his daughter's suitcases seemed in order, but there was this other suitcase, filled with a man's clothes. There was a Colombian passport in the name of a Carlos Lehder, and about twenty thousand dollars in Colombian currency. What the hell was this all about? Courtney answered that about ten miles back he'd picked up this hitchhiker, who just before they reached the border asked to be let out of the car and took off into the woods. Courtney didn't know who the guy was or what he was doing, didn't care to get involved, either. Maybe the guy just forgot his suitcase, or didn't want it, Courtney said. Didn't want his passport? Forgot his twenty thousand dollars? About now the teletype came through with the information that this Lehder character was a convicted felon and had been deported the previous year for a drug offense. Illegal alien? Drugs? This was when the customs agents put in a call for the dogs, Courtney said, and organized a search party to go into the woods. He and his daughter were released after about an hour, and he drove home. That's all he knew.

George waited a couple of days more at Teddy Fields's, checking in with Betsy to see if any message had come in from Carlos. When nothing happened, he sat down and did some serious thinking. Forget the running around in the woods like an asshole, Carlos also seemed to be in some kind of deep shit with this kilo deal. If that Colombian down in Florida was pissed off at having to hold the goods for three extra weeks while Carlos went tripping off on a honeymoon, there had to be other people now also waiting around even more pissed off, other Colombians in Boston or maybe New York, the people the kilos were being delivered to. Carlos was the transporter. These guys were the owners. Certainly they'd be just a tad anxious to know where over $2 million worth of cocaine, wholesale price, had gone to.

“I suddenly saw how this could be great for me, really help me get my foot in the door,” George says. “I mean, here I had more than $2 million worth of cocaine. I could have just disappeared with it, especially if Carlos was arrested, because right now he was the only one who knew I had it. Just take off and go to Australia, down to Mexico. How would they ever find me? But if I was honest about it when I didn't have to be honest, then the Colombians would start seeing me as trustworthy. So, I said, ‘You're not just looking at $2 million here. What you're looking at is $200 million!'” Thus it happened that George resolved to unload the fifty kilos himself, collect the money, turn it over to the Colombians, and save the day.