Blow (31 page)

Vesco owned his own island, Cistern Cay, about ten miles south of Norman. Carlos had run into him while looking for an island to buy, and after they'd talked a bit, Vesco had said straight out that he wanted to invest in the cocaine business and help bankroll Carlos's plans for Norman. He said he knew just about everyone in the Bahamas who could help you or hurt you, depending on whether they were sufficiently paid off. “Carlos was really enthralled with the guy, how he'd stolen all this money and gotten away with it,” George says. “The thing he liked best was that the United States government couldn't touch him. He'd fucked the U.S.A. and gotten away with it.” The three repaired to the bar in the little yacht club, a rounded structure with glass façade resembling an airport lounge, and ordered Bloody Marys. They were the only ones in the place. Vesco grilled George a little, asking how he'd operated in the marijuana business, what the demand for coke was like on the West Coast. He expressed interest in hearing about prison life at Danbury and the inmates there, especially the bank embezzler from Wakefield, Massachusetts, and the Medicaid doctor who'd fled to Belize. “At one point Vesco went into the men's room, and Carlos leaned over and sort of whispered, ‘This guy is getting us the prime minister of the Bahamas.'”

The island has but one road, which runs from the airport down the shank of the fishhook and around to the tip of its barb, alongside the lagoon filled with sharks. The rest of the day they drove around the island in a jeep, Vesco still looking all over through his glasses. Carlos showed George a house known as the Volcano for its cone-shaped roof. He was negotiating to buy it from a man named Beckwith, a part owner of Ocean World in Fort Lauderdale. There were just three of four other private houses constructed in little copses of pine trees to preserve their privacy. “He talked about buying up all the houses and getting rid of the people. ‘If they don't want to leave, they'll be sorry they didn't,' he'd say. ‘We'll get rid of them one way or another, maybe permanently if necessary.' Here was this passive little guy in Danbury who could get pushed around at the weight rack, and all of a sudden he's talking about exterminating people. He suddenly seemed to have all this newfound power, believing he could pay off the prime minister and do any goddamn thing he wanted. I said okay, not knowing what to say. It was obvious to me I was dealing with a very changed man.”

After about four hours, the two said good-bye to Vesco—he'd come over in his own eighty-foot cruiser—and ran on back to Nassau. That night at the Holiday Inn lounge, sitting in peacock chairs having drinks amid the bamboo, George described to Carlos how Richard had been getting pretty cocky lately, acting very much as if he was getting his supply of cocaine from someone else, as much as telling George he could go fuck himself with his kilos. Don't worry about Richard, Carlos said. The runs to the West Coast were going to be penny-ante stuff anyway pretty soon. Norman Cay was the future, he said, and don't worry about that either. George was going to be in the command structure here; he could count on it. But Carlos had to leave Miami for a while now, he said. He needed to be out here to get things organized, make some trips back to Medellín. Until then, George should deal as best as he could with Humberto, get the kilos from him, and see what Richard would be willing to take. It may be a little dry for a while, but big things lay ahead. George recalls there being a silence in the conversation after that. And then, “I said, ‘Carlos, I hope you never betray me.' He said he never would. And he almost started to cry. He said he would never do that. ‘I hope you never do that, because we're brothers. I don't believe you would ever hurt me.' And he said he never would. But I knew at the time that it was over. He couldn't lie to me, and that's why he nearly cried. I think he was hurt, too, because I think he did love me.”

*   *   *

Her name was Mirtha Calderón. She was Cuban, twenty-four years old in the summer of 1977, with penetrating brown eyes, black hair, and a soft, seductive voice, until she got angry, and then it could shatter a display case filled with crystal, the case included. She had fair skin, an inheritance from her Castilian ancestors. Her mother, Clara Luz (Clear Light), had been married several times; her father had served as an officer in the army of General Fulgencio Batista. After Castro came to power, Clara Luz brought her two daughters, Mirtha and Martha, to the United States, to Chicago, where she met an Italian named DiNicola who had been connected to the mob and could regale his family with tales of Al Capone. In 1968, when Mirtha was fifteen, she married a soldier returning from Vietnam, and she had a child named Clarie. A divorce soon followed, and Mirtha moved to New York City, where she found office work in the firm of a jewelry broker and resided in a modest basement apartment. She liked to shop for trendy clothes, and at night she hit the Manhattan discos then catching on, where she danced to Donna Summer records and the soundtrack for
Saturday Night Fever.
Her office salary provided her basic needs, but she didn't have to worry much about money because her family possessed important connections. The previous spring a cousin on her mother's side, Jemel Nacel, had married Carlos Lehder. Her sister, Martha, was married to Humberto Hoyos, a close associate of Pablo Escobar. Mirtha herself was also engaged to remarry, very advantageously, to an acquaintance of Carlos Lehder named Cesar Toban, the scion of a wealthy Colombian coffee family, the same Cesar Toban of the suitcase trips to Antigua. Mirtha's stepfather, the former mobster, had expressed great enthusiasm over the alliance, and a big wedding was being planned, but he never got to see it. He died in May of 1977, and shortly thereafter the engagement was called off when Mirtha fell in love with another man.

Humberto and Martha maintained a large apartment off Central Park West in Manhattan, right next to the Dakota, where John Lennon would be assassinated in 1980. Along with moving kilos to the West Coast, Humberto controlled a certain portion of the lucrative market for the product on the Upper East Side. One day that summer of 1977 he was expecting a certain visitor from Miami, who was going to drop off a small amount of money, about $100,000, for three kilos Humberto had sent out on consignment to L.A. The man was on his way to Cape Cod with some kilos of his own to unload and needed to be picked up at the Airway Motor Lodge at La Guardia Airport and brought to the West Side apartment. Humberto couldn't make it and asked Martha to go instead, and she asked her sister to come along for company.

“You had heard rumors about this man they referred to as ‘the Gringo' or ‘the Americano,'” she recalls. “At that time all the Latins were very tight and nobody else was allowed in, he was the only one. My sister said they knew this man from Miami. So we went up to the hotel room and he was there with another woman, named Lorraine, who was carrying stuff for him. She opened the door. He was standing back in the living room, and he just had this look. He had on a tan suit, with these hazel eyes, shaggy blond hair. Very good-looking. Very well dressed. He could do this thing with his eyes. All of a sudden they were like stars—this twinkle there, this spark. I still remember that look. ‘What is this?' I said to myself. ‘What
is
this?'”

What George recalls of the meeting was giving Mirtha his patented once-over and being impressed. “I was talking to Martha during the ride to the apartment but looking at Mirtha,” he says. “She had a good body, her breasts weren't too big, but she was wearing a mini-skirt and you could see she had good legs. Legs were what I liked.” At the Hoyoses' apartment they had drinks and dinner, talked a lot, and George asked Lorraine if she wouldn't mind taking the kilos the rest of the way on her own and dropping them off at Mr. T's. He wanted to stay in New York and get better acquainted.

Mirtha and George talked all night. During the 1960s she had painted flowers on her face, demonstrated in Chicago against the war and in support of the Chicago Seven. George detailed his experiences with LSD, his trips to Jefferson Airplane concerts at the Fillmore. She particularly wanted to hear what it was like the decade before in Haight-Ashbury. He also ran down some of his own political philosophy, threw in his Bob Dylan set piece, although he was a little rusty on that since switching into the cocaine business—Mr. Tambourine Man didn't figure too highly in the Colombians' view of things. “We talked until late and everyone had gone to bed,” he recalls. “She wanted to take me to show me her apartment. On the way we ran out of gas. We finally got gas, but it was late and I was tired so I said, ‘Let's check into this hotel. I'm not going to sleep with you, we'll get two beds, you sleep in one and I'll sleep in the other.' So we did that, and I'm lying there for about fifteen minutes trying to sleep, when she said, ‘Well, would you like to come over here?' ‘No, I'm tired,' I said. That kind of freaked her out. I always thought reverse psychology worked the best in these situations.”

Humberto was furious at first. What business did she have going out with this American, given her engagement to Cesar? He was yelling at her in the bedroom and George thought he heard a slap. “Humberto could throw pretty good temper tantrums. They were over pretty quickly, but he'd break up some furniture first, but, shit, they all did, the whole family, and all the women—Martha, Mirtha, and their mother—they drove him truly nuts. When Martha got angry, whoooh, you didn't want to be anywhere near the place. One day she got mad at him and faked that she'd drowned herself in the East River. She left a suicide note and Humberto was hysterical, crying, he had all these people looking for her, even called the police out. All the time she was hiding out. She'd just wanted to torture him. He used to tell me, ‘Georgie, don't ever get married, you'll never stop regretting it. They're all witch-bitches, believe me. You don't know it now, but you'll find out.'”

The flap about Mirtha's night out blew over quickly enough, but she canceled her marriage to Cesar shortly afterward, a payback that provided secret satisfaction for George, considering Betsy's fling with the guy in Antigua. And the new romance blossomed apace. “What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners—your all-American gringo. The Latin women loved American men, because they're not with the machismo. They're very mellow. They help the wives do the dishes, take care of the kids. The Latin men, all they think about is, okay, they have a wife, but she's a slave. Not George.”

By the end of the summer Mirtha had been up to Weymouth to meet George's parents, gotten the tour of his old room, been told how he'd crawl out the window at night when he was a little boy. She peered into the cubbyhole under the eaves, heard what he felt like when Agent Trout came to catch him. In Miami Beach they put up at the Castaways. He was relieved for an excuse to get away from Carlos and Jemel, and at night they'd have romantic dinners brought up to the room, served under candlelight. “He taught me how to drink the best wines, like Château Rothschild, Dom Pérignon champagne, eat lobster,” she says. “When we were alone, he'd tell me about the other women he'd loved, but he would say, ‘I love
you
now.' And then he would stand up in front of me and start singing, ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,' and do it, I mean start dancing. And singing. He was very romantic. He made me feel so young.”

And George liked Mirtha, too, at least well enough. To be sure, her limited education and her narrow upbringing in Chicago had produced gaps in her knowledge about the world that occasionally proved fairly stunning. When later that year they rented a beach house on the Cape, for instance, George announced over lunch one day that he was going to perform a little trick involving the ocean. He was going to command it to move back from the beach. Later that day, he told her, by the time Mirtha had come back from a shopping trip to Hyannis, the water level would be thirty feet short of where it was now. He went down and stuck a stick in the sand so she could see the difference. Mirtha just laughed—another of George's jokes. But when she returned five hours later and checked where the stick was, just to make sure, she saw that, My God, he'd done it! No, no, George explained, it's the tide. It went out while you were gone.

The tide? said Mirtha.

He did, however, enjoy her companionship in the evenings and the fact that she loved and admired him. She also provided an audience to whom he could unburden himself, a human refuge at the end of a day or a trip. Besides all that, Mirtha brought a distinct asset to the relationship, one that appreciated considerably in George's mind the more he saw himself being isolated by Carlos from the enterprise now picking up speed in the Bahamas. It was one thing for George to make runs to the West Coast and bring back a lot of money and make the Colombians rich. For this they appreciated and trusted him. But he was still a gringo, still not one of them, not someone they would bring into their inner circle and let him listen to the important discussions. George could never change his country or ethnic background. The only thing that could alter George in the perception of the Colombians was his becoming a member of the family, especially a family that had important connections down in Medellín. So here it was, staring him right in the face. Carlos or no Carlos, Humberto Hoyos in his own right was a powerful player in the cocaine game. George and Humberto got along fine and liked each other well, which was good for George and got him a lot of kilos to sell. Clara Luz, Mirtha's mother, was also stuck on George, liked to tell him about the family history in Cuba and Chicago and to tip him off to things she heard were going on in the business. Still, friendship was one thing; it would be so much better to have firm family ties, to be a son-in-law, a brother-in-law. Clearly, the right thing to do here where Mirtha was concerned was to make her an honest woman. He was going to marry the girl.