Blow (44 page)

The meeting lasted an hour and twenty minutes, after which Harbuck and his son-in-law headed out westbound in separate cars; Tom, Greg, and Cliff drove back toward the city, leaving George alone in the hotel. So far the detectives had been able to identify everyone involved in the operation, either because they gave their names voluntarily or through the license plates on their cars. But George had no car. He hadn't given his last name. And the room was registered to a Delbert Lapham, a name they assumed, correctly, was an alias.

But when they were alone together driving off in the car, Cliff told the detectives, Jesus, he
knew
that guy. From the late 1960s, in Manhattan Beach. He'd flown loads for him, kilos of marijuana out of Mexico, into the dry lake beds of Southern California. The last he heard he'd gotten busted bringing three hundred kilos of marijuana into the Playboy Club in Chicago back in 1972. That guy is Boston George! Cliff said. That guy is George Jung!

*   *   *

In undercover work something new happens every day, and there was plenty of action. These were two reasons why Detective Kridos considers the five years he worked as a narcotics detective for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department as “the best years I'd spent as a police officer. The standard TV image you have of what police work is like is what we were actually doing—dealing with people who were dangerous, thousands of pounds of drugs. In undercover work, the most important thing was to establish your believability. You've got to blend your personality with what you know to be the narcotics traffickers' personality.” He learned early on to avoid the flashy attire associated with drug dealers in the movies. “I'd wear a watch, a single gold chain, and a wedding band, and that was it. Dopers get nervous when you wear a lot of jewelry because you're too high-profile. I mean, I'm standing to make a million dollars here. Why would I draw attention to myself? I'd want to look just like everybody else.”

Then there's “walking the walk and talking the talk”—knowing the price structures, falling in with the lingo. “If you're not very comfortable with the vernacular, a guy may throw something at you that you should know and don't. Like in a marijuana deal, ‘How much am I getting on the wrappings?' Which means, how much is he going to take off the price of a bale of marijuana so I'm paying for net-weight marijuana, not for two and a half pounds of plastic wrap? You could be stuck and not know what he's talking about, and they're immediately going to think something's funny. You also don't jump through hoops for them. Only cops jump through hoops for people. You call a guy and he says meet him at three o'clock at the Rainbow Restaurant in Lauderdale, you show up, wait fifteen minutes, and he doesn't show, you leave. He calls up and says something came up, he's down in Miami, why don't you meet him down there? You say, ‘Screw you! You want to do this deal, meet me here, or meet me halfway.' If you jump to get the deal done, they're going to suspect something, so you make it a little hard for them.”

One of the most crucial things Greg had to learn was the art of the “flash,” the money flash or the drug flash, usually employed to get a deal that's become bogged down in a Mexican stand-off moving again. “Say you're selling the cocaine. They might want to see the dope before they bring out the money. But that goes against your principles. You tell them, ‘No, you show me the money. You can't get arrested for just showing money. But if I show you the fifty keys, first I'm heating up where the keys are. I've gotta have somebody go to the stash house, bring them out on the street.' But if it's ‘No, I'm still not showing the money until I see the coke,' then you've got to do a flash. You make a phone call and have someone drive in and flash some stuff. And when you're flashing it, particularly if you're the buyer and you're flashing money, the first and foremost, the cardinal rule is when you show it, you show it when this guy has no clue he's going to see it. You may say, ‘Hey, take a ride with me.' He hasn't any idea where he's going or why, and you show him the money, like, fast. You open up the bag or the suitcase, let him riffle it but not count it, then you leave right away. You can't give him time to set something up, have some of his people around to get a countersurveillance going.”

Whether he was playing the seller, the buyer, or the transporter—the three standard roles in a drug sting—the most nerve-racking part for Greg was always the moment the deal went down, when the goods and the money actually changed hands. “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. And here the most crucial thing is that you're never going to put the money and the dope together. You're going to keep them separate. If you put them together, the potential for being ripped off and shot and killed goes up immensely. The various ways the exchange happens are, ‘Give me the dope, I'll sell it and bring you the money back'—that's probably the worst way. Another is, ‘Give me half the dope, I'll pay for half and sell it and come back and get the rest later.' Third is, ‘Give me half and I'll pay you after I sell it, but you hold the other half as collateral.' The way the transfer works is each side sends a representative to a neutral place, and they sit down and work out how it's going to happen. It's usually, ‘I'll send two of my guys with the money to meet two of your guys. I'll send two other guys to another location to meet two other of your guys who have the dope. So then I talk to my guys on the phone who are looking at the dope, and you talk to your guys who are looking at the money. We exchange everything and we walk away.' Of course, even doing it this way you can get ripped off, and if you're going to get ripped off, remember, they don't know you're cops, they just think you're drug dealers, so you're probably going to get killed. They don't want any witnesses, and they don't want anyone coming after them.”

*   *   *

From the beginning Tom and Greg could hardly believe the bonanza they'd stumbled upon—a three- to four-hundred-kilo cocaine deal involving a large network of traffickers. George's nephew, Joseph Ahmed, had appeared on the scene, so counting noses, they had six conspirators so far—McWilliams, their initial contact with Harbuck; Harbuck and his son-in-law, Steven Fuller; another gofer who popped up named Walsh; and George. And this was just on the American side. If they could use the cocaine they'd be flying in to pry into the Colombian organization in Miami, there was no telling how many they'd land. They were also going to discover, though they would not be the first ones, that in dealing with George they had a tiger by the tail.

The first surprise came when they ran George's name through the FBI's computer and found out that here was someone who'd just escaped from a state prison. So right away came a major problem. The Fort Lauderdale police had no proscriptions against dealing with fugitives. But Mike McManus of the DEA was operating under a strict policy that said anytime he ran across someone wanted by another jurisdiction he couldn't fool around, he had to arrest him right away—unless he could get the jurisdiction to sign off on keeping the fugitive for the duration of the trip. McManus found the state police in Massachusetts were willing to go along with the operation, but the Department of Corrections up there wasn't too keen on letting this guy, the “master of illusion” smart-ass, stay free any longer. “We were pleading with them that we were into a really big thing here,” says McManus, who handled all the back-up work. “This was the Medellín cartel! George was a documented heavy player, and all the names we're coming up with are major, major players in the cartel. We had such a good handle on this guy. He was eating out of our hand.” Still, Corrections wasn't satisfied. Hey, come on, putting George up at a hotel? He could walk away from the operation any minute. To get Corrections to cooperate, Fort Lauderdale at least had to put him on a tighter leash.

That was when they thought of housing George and his nephew on the boat, along with Cliff, who could help keep tabs on them. It was this fifty-eight-foot Hatteras, which the Fort Lauderdale PD had confiscated from a dirty cop who, under everyone's noses, had been running a huge marijuana-smuggling ring, with mother ships offshore and go-fast boats ferrying the goods in at night. The Hatteras was a $750,000 lushly appointed yacht moored at a slip in the New River alongside other luxury craft. It had plenty of room below deck for five or six people. It was wired for sound, with microphones all over the boat, under the carpet. There was a video camera in one of the stereo speakers. The story they told George was that it belonged to Tom's father in Detroit and was just sitting there unused, so they might as well stay there. “George loved the idea, he thought it was great,” says Greg. “The big yacht owner. It fit the profile he had of himself to a tee.”

As plans moved along, it became apparent that the delivery wasn't going to happen as quickly as everyone had assumed. It was the rainy season down in Colombia, so difficulties arose with transporting the bales through the jungle. And the gravel airstrips weren't in good shape. The longer the delay, the higher expenses mounted. Until they moved to the boat, George, Cliff, and Joseph Ahmed had been put up at hotels, and even afterward there were meals to pay for; covering George and Cliff's bar bills alone was enough to support a family of four over quite a stretch. Joseph had to be flown down to Colombia to check on how things were going. Colombians would come up to Fort Lauderdale to look things over, check on Cliff's plane. On that occasion, Tom and Greg took them out to eat at the Marriott Hotel, and although the Marriott boasted the most expensive restaurant in town, they still had difficulty explaining to the stingy accountants at the police department how they managed to spend five hundred dollars on lunch. Thus Tom and Greg were encouraged by the department to get as much money back as possible from the Colombians. Ideally they would make them pay for their own bust.

So they started putting pressure on George and Joseph to get the people in Medellín to produce forty thousand dollars up front. They said they needed it to pay Cliff, to purchase equipment for the airplane, get vehicles ready for the trucking end of it. Cliff had to hire a copilot to help him, a friend named B. D. Good, from Arizona. But they also started demanding money because it made them believable. “We were supposed to be transporters,” says Greg, “and that's the way the typical transportation deal was done: You give us money up front. If we had agreed to go down and get it before getting paid, we wouldn't be legitimate. So with George it was always, ‘Hey, where's the money? You said you can do this, you say you're part of a large organization. We're not seeing squat here. You guys for real, or are we wasting our time here, spinning our wheels? You stroking us? We're seeing nothing here.'”

As George busied himself getting the cash, solving other problems, Tom and Greg had the opportunity to get a peek into the organization to see how things worked. When Joseph was getting cash from the Colombians, for instance, Tom and Greg would drive him down to Miami, note all the people he talked to, the addresses, the car registrations. They'd furnish George or Joseph cellular phones for the calls down to Medellín, then reclaim them quickly and press the redial button to find out what number they'd called.

At one point the Colombians in Medellín wanted to meet the pilot George had found to make sure he wasn't working for the police, that he hadn't flown previous missions resulting inexplicably in a bust. Cliff didn't want to fly down, because he'd done other flights for the DEA, and so B.D. went in his place. Unlike Cliff, B.D. was a regular commercial pilot, had never flown drugs or been to Medellín, so sending him down seemed safe enough—except from B.D.'s point of view. For him, the experience proved fairly unnerving. “He said he was taken to a room on the top floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in Medellín,” Greg recalls, “and he's waiting in there when the door opens and these twelve Colombians come in. Nothing is said to him. Each one comes over and looks him up and down and then leaves. At that point he said he was thinking it could go either way. ‘You're thinking the worst thoughts at that point. They think I'm someone, but I'm really not.' He held his breath through the whole thing, until they all had left and he got the nod. If not, no two ways about it, he would have been killed right away. Afterward he said he went into the bathroom and threw up.”

It was hardly surprising, operating as they were in the midst of a ring of individuals whose business was breaking the law, that Tom, Greg, and Mike occasionally found themselves cutting a few corners of their own. Aside from harboring an escaped fugitive, not to mention feeding him a steady diet of steaks, lobsters, and Glenlivet Scotch, they had to contend with Joseph Ahmed's lack of control where women were concerned. One night, before everyone was moved to the boat, George called up Tom frantic from their hotel saying that Joseph had just attacked some young girl. “I mean, I'm a police officer, and he's telling me Joseph had just assaulted a girl, and wants me to come over and get them out of the hotel before the police come and they get arrested.” As it turned out, the girl had some of her clothes torn, but she suffered no physical harm and was persuaded eventually not to file a complaint.

Then came the kidnapping. Essentially, it came about because Leon Harbuck had gotten his feelings hurt when the two Colombians who'd come up to look at the plane also went out to inspect his field and immediately nixed the idea of throwing out their cocaine into a bunch of cornstalks. It might burst open, they felt; Harbuck's guys might not find it all right away. The idea seemed just too flaky. Harbuck told them he'd plow the corn under and they could put the plane down on the ground. As for that big drainage ditch that ran right through the middle of the field, he'd bridge it over with plywood. The Colombians looked at each other, and then at George, as if to say, Where'd you'd get this guy?