Blow (40 page)

They were gone for two months, and when Billy met them at Logan Airport in mid-October, they had some people with them he'd never seen before. There was a cousin of Mirtha's, along with her boyfriend. There was also a short guy with a receding hairline and a beard, whom George introduced as his “ex-partner from Los Angeles,” name of Richard Barile. George said Richard had flown up in a private plane after seeing his father in Connecticut and would fly on down to the Cape, while Billy drove everyone in the car. They'd collect Richard at the Hyannis airport and continue out to Eastham for a celebration that night. The trip to Colombia had been very successful, and George told Billy he'd brought along a little blow for the party—not much, about two-thirds of a pound. Hearing this, Billy felt his eyes widen and joy leap into his heart. “In this area, the biggest amount of cocaine we'd been seeing had been maybe a pound here and a pound there. There had recently been a massacre in Boston, people shot, over just a pound and a half of coke and thirty-five thousand dollars in cash. So this was no small amount.”

As for how to proceed from here, the state police, like most police agencies, had a strict policy of “buy-or-bust.” This meant that if you came upon someone in possession of drugs, the only way you could overlook the offense was to try to use the person to worm further into the organization, and to buy up the load right then, with money from the department budget. If you couldn't do that, then you had to make an arrest on the spot—it was one or the other. “We had to do something,” Billy says. “The amount of cocaine here, we're talking then about twenty-two thousand dollars on the street, and there's no way we had that kind of money. Even the DEA wasn't coming up with that much at the time. So it was obvious the bust had to go down that night.”

After excusing himself to visit the bathroom—to call his department and alert them to get things ready—Billy drove George, Mirtha, and her cousin down to the Cape, stopping off at the Hyannis airport to pick up Barile. Billy went into the lounge to get him, and when they greeted each other again, Richard shook his hand, and somehow his arm brushed against the gun Billy had stuck in his pants underneath his shirt. Richard stiffened at the discovery but said nothing. Out at the car, however, Billy saw him whispering frantically to George. And he heard George tell him: “Of course he's got a gun! He's my bodyguard.”

By now, Billy was no longer alone. He'd been accompanied on the drive to the Cape by at least ten state troopers driving in unmarked cars ahead of and behind them. They picked up another ten or so cops in Eastham, which meant that when the party got into full swing out on Bayberry Lane, upward of twenty police officers were crouching in the bushes, hunkered down by the beach, or plastered up against the walls of neighboring houses, their pistols and shotguns drawn and ready, waiting for Billy to give the word to charge in. “But I hadn't actually seen the cocaine yet, and we couldn't do anything until I knew exactly where it was.” Billy had brought along two bottles of champagne to contribute to the party, which he'd put in the trunk of the car. The signal for the bust to commence was when Billy went out to get the bottles, hoisted one over each shoulder, and headed back into the house. From that moment, the guys would wait five minutes, to give McGreal time to locate all the people inside and prevent anyone from slipping out unnoticed, and then they'd pile in. The only thing that made Billy nervous was Barile. George's assurance aside, Richard had seemed jumpy ever since discovering that Billy had a gun. And on the drive out to Eastham, Richard had mentioned pointedly to Billy that he'd handle whatever security problems there were himself, with this machine gun he'd brought along in his suitcase.

At last George produced the coke. It had been in a package in his flight bag, and he set the whole amount, eleven ounces, right out on the table. After huffing up a huge sample for himself, he invited everyone to jump in. “When I saw that, I said, ‘Well, George, I've got a surprise for you, too,' and I went out to get the champagne from the trunk.” By the time he returned with the bottles, people were already getting pretty speedy, but for Billy the next five minutes seemed fairly to crawl. Finally, the time was up. But no guys. Then seven minutes, eight minutes went by. “George and the others are all coked out, Barile is getting more and more fidgety. He starts saying, ‘I'm getting my machine gun out and spray the beach out there. I don't like the sound of things.' And he was right. I could hear the guys rustling around myself. What the
fuck
were they waiting for?” Finally, McGreal could stand it no longer, and at what he later noted down as precisely 2:10
A.M
. on October 14, the trooper pulled out his gun and pointed it at Barile. “I yelled,
‘Freeze, state police. Don't anybody move. You're all under arrest.'
But nothing happened! Mirtha comes over to me and pushes the gun away and says, ‘Oh, come on, Billy, cut the shit.' They didn't believe me! George is just snorting away, having a great old time, not paying any attention at all. Just then, thank God, ‘Wild Bill' Shaughnessy, I think it was, comes crashing right through the screen, guys are suddenly running up from the basement, people charging in from the deck, everyone's shouting and yelling, pointing their guns, putting people down on their faces. That basically cemented in their minds who we were.”

George, too, remembers that night in some detail, but not quite as distinctly as McGreal. “I was pretty fried at the time, and it took a while for it to dawn on me what was happening. I was thinking it was such a little bit of coke, how could you possibly get arrested for that? They didn't know it, but there was fifty kilos in the chimney and three hundred thousand in cash behind the medicine cabinet. Except then I saw the cops lifting Kristina out of the crib. That's when it finally got to me, when I started to get upset. I mean, at two years old. The baby's first bust.”

TEN

Fort Lauderdale

1985

Whether you're the bad guys or the good guys, you both have the same goal in any cocaine deal, and that is to get through it alive.

—D
ETECTIVE
S
ERGEANT
G
REG
K
RIDOS
, O
RGANIZED
C
RIME
D
IVISION
, N
ARCOTICS
I
NTELLIGENCE
, F
ORT
L
AUDERDALE
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT

H
AD THE AMOUNT OF COCAINE THEY CAUGHT HIM WITH
in Eastham weighed just four ounces less, George might have been right in thinking nothing terribly serious would happen to him. Unfortunately, it exceeded the eight ounces specified in a strict new minimum-sentencing statute signed into law only months earlier by Governor Michael Dukakis, and suddenly George was staring straight at a mandatory prison sentence of ten years, with no possibility of parole. Once he was apprised of the situation, very little doubt remained in George's mind as to his next move. As soon as a lawyer from Boston bailed him, Mirtha, and the baby out of the Barnstable County House of Corrections, George signed an affidavit assuming the entire blame for bringing in the coke that night, which effectively exonerated everyone else caught in the raid. He said the others didn't know about the coke. This gesture extended even to Richard Barile, whom George had befriended again several months earlier. Barile, too, had been aced out by Carlos, who had gone behind his back as well as George's to sell loads directly to Richard's main dealer, Nick Hunter, the one who had given the party for Carlos on his first trip to L.A. The second thing George did was to have Clara Luz clear out the Pompano Beach house and come up and take baby Kristina back down with her and little Clarie to a rented house in Miami.

Lastly, he made a cash withdrawal from all the hidey-holes in the Eastham house. He winched up the oil burner in the basement, cleaned out the wall behind the Andrew Wyeth and the studs in back of the trick bathroom medicine cabinet. Other than a small travel bag for the money, they didn't pack any clothes or other things for fear of alerting anyone who might be monitoring the house, and on the morning he was scheduled to be re-arraigned before superior court on his indictment, George and Mirtha drove up to Weymouth in his Thunderbird to tell his parents he'd be going away for a little while.

For Fred and Ermine, who were now in their mid-to-late sixties, the recent events in George's life had given them a wearying sense of déjà vu, intruding in their own lives in a way that was difficult to endure. Once again it had been all over the TV; friends and neighbors had watched their son being led off to court in handcuffs. Stories on the bust had run in the papers, telling how the police had stormed this “posh North Eastham beach house” that had turned out to be a drug den. There was no mention of Billy's role in any of this, but Wynn Deschamps was being extensively quoted, making sure the world knew the bust “was the result of an investigation started by Eastham police.”

The visit to Abigail Adams Circle didn't last long. George told his parents he wasn't going to show up for his hearing that day; he feared that the court, knowing about his skipping out in Chicago, might refuse him bail altogether, and then he'd be seriously stuck. The only choice that lay open to him, he said, was to run away again. “Fred looked at me, and he said, ‘I'm sorry, but this is the end. Your mother and I just don't want you to come back. We just can't take it anymore. We're too old. We love you. Good luck, and good-bye.' There was really nothing left to say. What could I say? And so I just said, ‘Okay then. Good-bye.' And we left.” George never saw his parents again.

The last time George had lived as a wanted man, he'd been young, free of ties, highly mobile—not approaching forty and encumbered by a wife and two children, one of whom had to be put in school. And as she shortly brought home to him, Mirtha didn't take very naturally to life on the lam. The first thing they did upon arriving in Miami was to alter their looks and identity. Mirtha dyed her jet-black hair deep red and told the people she met that her name was Francesca. George took scissors to his own shaggy hair and dyed it black. He took on the name of David Mahan, giving new life to a long-dead guy whose name he'd gotten out of the obit files up in Hingham. Clarie was put into a school near Clara Luz's house, under her mother's maiden name. Through contacts among the Colombians they found a safe apartment to rent in a mostly Haitian neighborhood, not a great location to Mirtha's way of thinking, considering that the ghetto neighborhood of Liberty City, which lay just a few blocks to the west, had exploded in a deadly antiwhite riot just six months earlier, its commercial strips still largely burned out. “The place was a real dump, and we were totally isolated,” she recalls. “We could see my mother because the police didn't know where she lived. But it was horrible—the fact that you're not even able to use your own name, knowing you couldn't talk to a lot of people because you're hot. When you're hot, no one wants to deal with you. Nobody wants anything to do with you, because they think you'll bring the heat down on them. We had to leave absolutely everything behind—my bamboo living room set, my bedroom set, my plants. I'd loved my plants, and the fish tank, my tropical fish, the Black Lace angels, the Angelicas. Eastham was our home. I loved it there.”

Mirtha tried to ease her distress by seeking out the counsel of a priest practiced in the healing arts of
Santería,
the mystical religion prevalent among several immigrant groups from the Caribbean. “He said the reason all this had happened to us is we'd neglected the saints; that was why there were these, like, repercussions with the law,” she says. “So he was going to work some kind of a ritual, the way he said it, ‘to put the man to the side.'” Despite his considerable misgivings about it all, George went along with Mirtha for the first session, more or less to humor her. “We arrived at this guy's house. He's dressed in a flowing white robe, and he has these pigeons in a cage. He takes out three of them and circles them one at a time around our heads. He said it was supposed to collect all the bad shit that had been happening to us and fly out the door with it. Well, he let loose the first one, and it took right off into the sky. The same thing happened with the second one. But the third one dive-bombed right into the side of my car and knocked itself out. We all kind of looked at each other and I'm thinking, Uh-oh.”

After that one Mirtha tried something with a pumpkin, but it didn't work out much better. It was late one afternoon while George was out taking Kristina for a walk and after Mirtha had gotten a long way into a bottle of Jamaican rum, from which she was seeking comfort pretty regularly these days. “We had the top floor of this apartment along a hallway on the outside of the building with a little table out there, and that's where the priest told me to set it up,” she recalls. The pumpkin was about twelve inches in diameter. Following the priest's instructions, she'd scraped out all the seeds and stuff from inside and filled it with about a pound of honey mixed with water and different types of oil she'd gotten at a neighborhood
botánica,
where they sold curative herbs and sex potions. “I wasn't really into this kind of thing, but I knew that the forces were against us and that I wasn't in tune with my spiritual being during this period we're talking about here. And also I was pretty drunk.”

As she'd been instructed, Mirtha put on a white gown and set up a candle on the table, and then she knelt down and prayed to the pumpkin. “I said a lot of different prayers, for helping us, for protecting us, hoping this situation would be solved, to guard us against the evil forces of the law. But that night I got really mad at the pumpkin. We went out to a Latin nightclub called Harlow's and George got into a big fight with some people, there was shooting outside, I don't remember any of it too well, but it was a mess. I was really outraged after the prayers and things, so afterwards when I got home and there's the pumpkin sitting there looking at me, I take it and just smash it down the stairs, all in pieces. But later I felt that that was a mistake. I feel now it did something to hurt the spell, because things started getting worse.”