Blow (36 page)

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For a while, after the baby came home, George actually managed to cut back a little on his habit, and happy times resumed in the Jung household. George would get up in the middle of the night to feed Kristina her bottle or change her diaper. He'd sit by her high chair spooning in the baby food, play with her down on the beach, or take her on a walk with him in the stroller when he went to the convenience store a couple of miles away on Route 6 to use its pay phone to call down to Colombia. He was so attentive that, when Kristina started to talk, it was George she'd ask for if she woke up at night. “
La leche, poppi. La leche,
” she'd say. “It was all new for George, and I think that was one of the times he was very happy,” Mirtha says. “I would go to sleep and he would stay up and watch the baby, hour after hour. The baby was so fragile he didn't want Clarie to carry her, he thought that she'd drop her. Everybody was excited. And it was a good time, a happy time. It was really a happy time.”

With the money pouring in like a veritable deluge, George had to give serious thought these days to what to do with it all. He certainly couldn't start blowing millions of dollars, buying yachts and houses, without drawing attention from the IRS or any number of police agencies who would want to know where it had come from. Now that he was a full-fledged family man, with a wife, two children, and a mother-in-law, not to mention Mirtha's brother and Uncle Jack, along with a live-in nanny to take care of the children and two houses to keep up, it didn't seem quite the right moment to take off for the Great Barrier Reef or find a permanent seat at that café in Ibiza. There was now somewhere around $30 million stashed at Wellfleet, with a few more sitting underneath the oil burner at Eastham. He kept the presence of most of it a secret, even from Mirtha, or rather, especially from Mirtha, since everything that reached Mirtha's ears went directly to Martha, and pretty soon every Colombian in the business would be expressing interest in those heating ducts. For walking-around money, he maintained a general fund in a bureau drawer in the bedroom, replenishing it regularly. “Everybody could have money anytime they wanted, like a candy store,” he says. “Jack and his friend Wilmer, all they had to do was go to the bureau drawer, or Mirtha, when she wanted to go to the mall, just take out a handful.”

When Mirtha would be down in Florida, he'd also secrete money throughout the structure of the house. He had a carpenter come in to refit the medicine cabinet in the bathroom so it could be pulled out easily, if you knew the trick, and behind it mounds of cash could be stuffed in between the studs in the wall. He unfastened part of the living room paneling and put money in there, fitting the pieces back together with a hidden metal clamp. Over the clamp he hung up a framed print he'd always liked, Andrew Wyeth's
Christina's World.
And every month now he began hiring a Learjet to take several million from Wellfleet down to Big Ralph in Palm Beach, who was transporting cash to various accounts in banks with discreet branches in the Cayman Islands and Panama City. In return for their discretion when it came to accommodating people bringing in suitcases of cash, the offshore banks began exacting a 1 percent “counting fee” from the drug traffickers, which provided a good piece of change in addition to the usual profits from lending the money out at interest. Once it was in the offshore bank, the cash could then be transferred secretly by wire to anywhere in the world, even back into the United States, a factor that was contributing in no small way to the construction boom in Miami and elsewhere in Florida.

George thought vaguely about eventually moving his share to Switzerland, but right now he was content to let Big Ralph handle things. He seemed to have the right contacts, and George had little time to make any complicated decisions himself. After each trip Ralph simply gave him a receipt from the bank confirming the deposit, with a seven-digit number on it representing his growing account. He stored the receipts in the safe under the oil burner at Eastham. At night he liked to sit out on the deck, watching the moon reflecting off the water, drinking his Rémy Martin and thinking about his life and what he'd done and where he'd been, about his nest egg, all safe, sound, and secret. When he took it all out someday, wouldn't
that
be a kick?

Of course, George was blowing a lot of the money too, the hell with the IRS. He bought the Eastham house outright, paying Dino Viprini $185,000 in cash and closing the deal with a handshake, not bothering with any legal folderol such as getting a deed. Clara Luz wanted to go on a nice long trip to Europe, so George sent her. Were the commercial flights to Florida too much of a hassle for Mirtha? He would send her down on a Learjet. There were the cars, always three or four up at Eastham, plus a couple parked in Florida. George had a Porsche 924, now a burnt umber one, as well as his turbo-charged Carrera, the stand-by Thunderbirds, '75s and '76s, BMW's, a couple of Mercedes Benzes, and a Ferrari. He had to trade in the Ferrari after the Japanese came out with a lookalike model. “I didn't want to go around and have people think I was driving a fucking Datsun,” he says. For her casual trips around the Cape, when she didn't feel like ordering a limo, Mirtha had a bright silver Oldsmobile Toronado, which she'd tear off in up the dirt road in back of the house, leaving sand and rocks flying in her wake. “The Silver Bullet's on the move,” the neighbors would say. George also tried once more to give his parents a present, arriving at their house one day with a brand new Ford Country Squire station wagon. They never used it. After it sat in their garage for six months, he went up to Weymouth and took it back.

The normal household expenses ran about sixty thousand dollars a week, what with keeping the bureau drawer up to the mark and feeding Mirtha's addiction to the malls. Out in Provincetown, the general business confidence along the main drag rose appreciably whenever Mirtha and her girlfriends from New York and Miami hove into sight. George was never exactly a clotheshorse, but he did his part, buying dozens of expensive leather jackets, five-hundred-dollar silk shirts, and his favorite Bruno Magli loafers, now up to twelve hundred dollars a pair. “I didn't really like to shop for things, so I'd do it all at once,” he says. “I'd go into Neiman Marcus in Miami and tell them I wanted that and I wanted that and that, and I'd take off my clothes and say, ‘Here, throw these away,' and put on the new stuff and tell them to deliver all the rest and walk out.” On one occasion he had a tailor in Fort Lauderdale line his blue jeans with silk because they felt so good that way. And he ordered a half dozen pairs of cashmere pants. Cashmere pants, sir? “The guy said he'd never heard of anyone wearing cashmere pants, but when I started peeling off the hundreds, he started seeing what a good idea it was after all.”

George also gave money away, just dropped it on people. He would send people like Courtney on simple errands and pay them five or ten thousand dollars for a day's work. He invariably picked up checks for elaborate meals, spent fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars on a bottle of wine—Château Lafite-Rothschild—and put visitors up at resort hotels on the Cape. And he'd throw parties, usually down on the beach at Eastham, having grown less secretive these days about where he lived. He'd have parties in honor of the Colombians sometimes, and sometimes for his new batch of acquaintances in Boston—Mayor Kevin White and his wife Kathryn would show up, along with a lot of expensive lawyers. He ordered caterers to set up tents on the sand, and brought in four-piece combos to play Cole Porter, or rock bands for Mirtha. He'd have whole canoes sitting out on the beach filled with shrimp and lobster tails and Beluga caviar. There'd be twenty cases or so of Dom Pérignon champagne, limousines and expensive cars clogging the roads to the house. At one party, a noted mob lawyer from Boston pulled George aside and told him: “You know what all this is, George? It's a goddamn accident waiting to happen. You're the king in his castle here, with all the little serfs watching you and wondering who the fuck
is
this guy and what is he doing? Why don't you just put out a big neon sign, make it easier for cops? Because, sure as hell, you're gonna get busted in this house. Why don't you stay down in Fort Lauderdale, where you blend in better?”

That fall of 1978 was particularly memorable in George's life for two important events, one of them being a trip he took with his mother and father on a Sunday afternoon up to Wakefield, to pay a last visit to his ailing grandmother, Nana Jung, before she died. Uncle George was going to be there, too; it would be the first time George would see him since graduating from high school and getting offered the sweeper's job down at the Boston Edison plant in Quincy. George stopped off in Weymouth to pick up his parents and drove them up in a brand new Lincoln Continental he'd rented for the occasion. He was dressed in a sharp-looking blue blazer with brass buttons and his special cashmere pants, and had on a Rolex watch with clusters of diamonds in it, worth about eleven grand, which Humberto had given him as a birthday present. Also a Gucci tie, which Aunt Myrna commented on right away when she opened the door. Aunt Jenny and Uncle Ray Silva, the parents of George's cousin Bobby, the bank president, were there. Also Auntie Gertrude, who ran the beauty parlor in Filene's. And of course Uncle George, who strode across the carpet to give Ermine a kiss, shake Fred's hand, and notice that George was puffing on a little Dutch cigar, one of the Schimmelpfennigs that came in the tin.

“The first thing he said to me was, ‘There will be no smoking in this house.' And I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Is that right!' and I kept right on smoking. Aunt Myrna came rushing over and said, ‘Oh, Georgie, don't mind him, he's a senile old fool. I want you to sit down and tell me
all
about Danbury.'” So George got on the couch and told them stories about G. Gordon Liddy and the Wakefield bank president. Aunt Myrna asked him what he was doing with himself these days. And before George could come up with something—the precious-metals business or investment counseling, bring out one of his phony business cards—his mother piped up and told everyone that, Oh, George was doing very well. He was in real estate development now. Obviously miffed at the attention being awarded his good-for-nothing nephew, Uncle George grabbed Fred's arm. “‘Come on, Fred,' he said. ‘You and I'll go in and watch the game.' He never said another word the rest of the afternoon. That's how I could tell that I got him that day.”

The other thing that happened that fall was that George decided to check in at the home office, to fly down to Medellín and pay his respects to the man whom the Colombians, in their penchant for emulating the Italian Mafia, had begun referring to as El Padrino, or “the Godfather”—Señor Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

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That first time, George went alone to see Pablo. Mirtha had the new baby to take care of, of course, but besides that, the Colombians weren't too keen on having women around when business got discussed. There were a lot of things they didn't like the women doing with them. “At the parties you'd never see the men talking to the women, if there were any other men there,” says Mirtha. “Except for George, of course. He'd talk with the men, but he liked talking to the women, too. The women would stay over by themselves and talk about the things their men had bought them, their cars and jewelry. They'd talk about their men, their personalities and the things they did to them when they were mean.” With the Colombians, at least those in the cocaine culture, it was a common practice for many of the men to go off on weekends to see their mistresses and girlfriends, returning to their wives and children on Sunday, in time for mass, which they rarely missed. Humberto, much more the homebody, was particularly religious and would ask George and Mirtha to accompany him and his family to church sometimes. George would sit next to him, hearing him praying out loud for the success of the impending trip, beseeching God to let nothing go wrong with bringing in the next load.

“But even though the men were often gone, they'd hire guys to spy on us,” says Mirtha. “They'd watch the homes, watch their apartments. They'd report back to him everything she did that day, who she saw or who she was seen with in public. The women got very crazy—paranoid—especially the ones who were fooling around, because the men could be very cruel.” At the parties featuring coke, which could go on for days, the men snorted out in the open, but the women were expected to do it on the sly, slipping into the powder room for a couple of lines. And when the business discussions began, the women automatically left the room. “The women would be around, but they weren't actually allowed in on the planning of things, because the Colombians never really trusted women. They felt vulnerable. They always felt the women are the ones who are going to go squealing on them. And they resented me, because I would make sure to be there. I thought George and I were one, and I would stay and be quiet and listen to what was going on. George knew Spanish well enough to say what he wanted, but he didn't really know the language. He couldn't tell how they'd say things that meant something else because of the tone of voice they used. I wanted to protect him. There was no way I was going to allow them to, excuse my vocabulary, fuck him over. No way.”

As arranged by Humberto, the plan was for George to spend the night at the Intercontinental Hotel and be taken by Carlos's brother, Guillermo, out to Escobar's ranch the following day. Along with cementing his relationship with Pablo, George also had a political agenda in mind. “Escobar knew I'd been feuding with Carlos, after all, and there'd been threats. Now here I was coming down alone to Medellín, into his own backyard. I wanted to show that I wasn't afraid of Carlos. I felt like it was taking a hell of a chance, but that it would solidify my status. And I guess I wanted to get back my respect, too.”