Blow (50 page)

“Hello, Fred,” the tape begins.

You know, I remember a lifetime ago I was about three and a half feet tall weighing all of sixty pounds with a determined look on my face. Some Saturday mornings you'd wake me up. It was still dark outside. The earth was covered with snow, and together we'd climb up into your big yellow truck. You know, I used to think that truck was the biggest truck in the world and how important the job was we had to do. If it weren't for us, people would run out of oil and freeze to death. We'd stop after driving it seemed forever in a world that was entirely alien to me, a place called South Boston, with huge brick buildings and strange-looking black people everywhere. I was in awe of these strange-looking people and somewhat afraid, but felt safe with you. Together, we'd get out of that big yellow truck and you'd let me pull the hose down the alleyway to the oil spout. I would struggle desperately through the snow, but the oil spout seemed forever away. I'd never make it more than halfway, and then you'd grab the whole of the hose, taking it the rest of the way with ease. I thought you were the strongest guy in the world, and the toughest. Everywhere we went it seemed you knew everyone. I remained under that impression for quite some time.

Remember when you bought the boat for me and the outboard motor? Christ, I couldn't even swim. Are you sure it wasn't a plot to get rid of me? You must have lived in fear, wondering what crazy idea I was about to conceive of next. I believe getting my driver's license was probably the most traumatic experience of your life. It was most definitely the point when you had to give up going to sleep on weekends until the blue-and-white Mercury was safe in the garage.

Football. Now that's an interesting subject. You were my most loyal fan, never missing a game. Remember when Jack Fisher turned against me? And I was going to quit the team? You stuck by me and talked me out of quitting. Every kid on the block loved you, Fred. Remember how they all would hang out at our house? They came to see you, not me. You were unique, and everyone and anybody was always welcome at our house. You were certainly the Pied Piper sitting there with cigar in hand and giving orders and free advice. You always managed to get the guys into some job, cutting the lawn, painting the house, putting up a fence. They never said, No, Fred. They all loved you. In essence, you had a dozen sons, not just one, making you the richest man in the world. What you had was priceless. In between all this activity, you kept me busy digging up the yard. For the longest time I lived under the impression you were in the septic-tank business. Even Marie would pick up a shovel before Otis would arrive for the Saturday-night date.

Track meets. Remember the old track meets? You were always there to watch me throw the discus. Remember the day I broke the record? Little League baseball. Remember how you encouraged me to become a pitcher? And the day I pitched the first no-hit game for the Federal League? I guess we were both proud of each other that day. We did have some crowning achievements, didn't we? Do you think we became legends in our own time, Fred? Well, maybe in Weymouth, anyway.

Then I kind of grew up, well, almost grew up, and went away to college. Two or three colleges, to be exact. Remember Waino, the Tuna? They broke the mold when they made Tuna. How about the day Tuna and I left for California, in that little black sports car. I often wonder what went through your mind that day as you watched Tuna and I drive away in that sports car, to travel three thousand miles to where we'd never been, California. After a few years in California, I returned home with the FBI chasing me. Of course, everyone comes home with the FBI chasing him, right? The day they caught me in the living room, remember, Fred? I was standing in there, handcuffed, and that FBI agent, Trout, the crazy one that was after me for two years, had to get on his knees to put my boots on. You looked down at him and said, ‘That's where you belong, putting on his boots.' That was one of your best lines, Fred. That was right out of a John Wayne movie. You even came to visit me in Danbury, remember that? How about the day you picked me up from Danbury, and the car broke down in Connecticut? We made it though, didn't we, buddy? What a team, able to overcome any obstacle.

Well, eventually I did reach the pinnacle of success, and I became a big-time smuggler. Money, Learjets, fast cars, wild women, houses with maids. Remember how you would say for me to give you half the money to save, otherwise I'd end up broke someday? You were right again, Fred. Well, old man, I'm forty-five years old right now, and I've finally learned what you tried to tell me all those years. As the gambler says, “You got to know when to hold, know when to fold, and know when to walk away when the dealing's done.” At least I've learned that much. I'm going to be all right, buddy. You know, I've written a book about all my adventures called
Grazing in the Grass Until the Snow Came.
And the book is dedicated to my father. “With love, from your son.”

“May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face, and the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.” Dutchmen never give up, do they, Fred? The book comes out in the fall. And I know you're going to be around to read it. I love you. George.

When Fred died three months later, on April 26, 1988, George got the news right away. What he didn't hear about until long afterward, when Auntie Gertrude finally told him, was that after the tape arrived in Greenwood, Fred would take it out to his car where he could be alone, away from everyone, and he'd sit there in the front seat with a little battery-operated tape recorder and play the tape over and over again, listening to his son try to tell his father good-bye.

Epilogue

O
F THE OLD CROWD FROM
W
EYMOUTH
, B
ARRY
D
AMON
, the “White Rabbit,” who played center for the Weymouth Maroons and waited for George to pick him up in the Mercury for their Saturday night dates, earned an associate degree in engineering and became a supervisor in the documents department of the nuclear generating plant at Plymouth. Mike Grable, team quarterback who handed off to George for his first touchdown run, married a junior high school girlfriend of George's, with whom he has three children, and works as a general manager for an electrical contractor in Boston. John Hollander, the end who smashed George during the scrimmage just before the Brockton game, married Gerry Lee, George's high school sweetheart; they have two children and live in an eighteenth-century white colonial house just below the Circle. Waino Tuominen—Tuna—lives in western Massachusetts, where he works as an assistant herdsman on a large dairy farm and is active in local environmental politics for the Green Party. Malcolm MacGregor, George's best boyhood friend, graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, earned a doctorate in theoretical chemistry at the University of Connecticut, and teaches physics at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy; he's married, with three sons. Clem Horrigan, the Weymouth High School English teacher who read to George and his friends from the pages of Jack London, died in the fall of 1986.

Otis and Marie Godfrey still live in Greenwood, Indiana, where Otis is a senior research scientist at Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis. One of their sons graduated from West Point, another from law school, and a daughter became an engineer via Purdue University. Ermine continues to live in the pre-fab not far away. Uncle George died in 1991, five years after Aunt Myrna. Auntie Gertrude, who moved into their house in Wakefield, gave George his uncle's clothes, including a sterling silver belt buckle, inscribed with the initials GJJ. Considering that they shared the same name, George might get some use out of it.

Most of the policemen who arrested George over the years have since moved up a notch professionally. Special Agent J. J. Trout advanced from the FBI's warrant squad to pursuing bank robbers, still working out of Boston. His first inkling of what happened to the young man he arrested in his bedroom that day back in 1973 came fifteen years later when he saw George on TV during the Lehder trial in Jacksonville, in an interview with Ron Gollobin, star crime reporter for Boston's Channel 5. “A guy like him, from a middle class family, I thought he would do a couple of years and get out and get on with his life,” says Trout. “It blows my mind that he went all the way to the top.”

Trooper Billy McGreal made sergeant and won the “Trooper of the Year” award after the Eastham bust and is working in the highway patrol division out of the barracks in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Detectives Greg Kridos and Tom Tiderington of the Fort Lauderdale PD were also promoted to sergeant and captain, respectively; Kridos began attending law school at night, hoping to open up a practice after he retires from the force. Tiderington uses George's bust as the basis for his drug lecture at Broward County Police Academy. Agent Mike McManus was moved up several grades in the Drug Enforcement Administration and relocated with his family to the Bahamas office. Special Agent Richard Garcia, the Stinger missile man, won the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award in 1988 for an undercover operation and was promoted to a supervisory position in Washington, where he used to think “conservatism was taking place.”

All the major drug smugglers with whom George associated have been arrested or, as in the case of his brother-in-law, Humberto, fled the country and went back to Colombia. The Yaqui Indian, Ramón, spent four years in prison in Chihuahua, Mexico, in the late 1980s, a year more than he had to for the fact that he retaliated against a bullying inmate by stabbing the fellow in the stomach. The man survived, “but now he can only eat mushy thing,” says Ramón, who's back in Puerto Vallarta with his wife, Emily, and their two sons. Barry Kane, in what was dubbed the “Son of Lehder trial,” was convicted in 1988 of the two drug flights he made for George and Carlos back in 1977 and sentenced to twelve years in prison and fined $500,000. Richard Barile pleaded guilty in 1989 to cocaine distribution charges stemming from his own activities with George and Carlos. He ended up serving only two and a half years, and is now living in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Carlos won a reprieve of sorts in 1992, after he provided key testimony helping to convict Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator, as a drug trafficker. In payment, he was moved out of his basement cell in the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, placed in the Witness Protection Program and relocated to cheerier prison quarters elsewhere in the country. The
Miami Herald
ranked him eighty-fourth out of the One Hundred Most Influential People in South Florida History. Pablo Escobar turned himself in to the Colombian government in June of 1991 in exhange for the promise that he would not be extradited to the United States and would do his time in comfortable prison quarters in his native province of Antioquía. A year later Pablo escaped after getting word that he was being moved to a harsher prison setting elsewhere. He avoided capture until December of 1993, when about 500 members of the government's elite Strike Bloc surrounded his safe house in Medellín and shot him dead as he tried to flee over the rooftop. American officials said Pablo's death would have a “negligible” effect on the drug trade. “If Lee Iacocca left, would Chrysler stop making automobiles?” said Tom Cash, former head of the DEA office in Miami.

Mirtha is still living on the West Coast. Frederica is now twenty-two years old and discovered finally that her father wasn't lying paralyzed in a hospital bed. Lucia is married and has a daughter of her own.

And George. In exchange for his testimony at the Lehder trial, he was free to walk out of prison in July of 1989, no parole, his debt to society marked
PAID IN FULL
. In all his life, he had never had a checking account, never had a Social Security card, never paid income taxes. He calculates he made around $100 million through his association with the Medellín cartel, but, penniless, he returned to the Cape after prison to a job delivering fish to seafood restaurants for Bird, his former bodyguard. Shortly, he reentered the drug business with his Yacqui Indian friend Ramón, and in 1994 was caught importing several hundred pounds of marijuana from Mexico and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Now fifty-eight years old, he works as head gardener at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, where he brightens the prison walkways with marigolds and chrysanthemums. Occasionally, overhead he can see the crows wheeling about and hear their cries, but otherwise the woods surrounding the place is empty and quiet. So life is for George, the motor sailer, all the dreams having receded so far into the distance as to no longer be in view.

Acknowledgments

First of all, thanks to George, for the hundreds of hours he spent and the thousands of miles he traveled in the effort to bring his past into focus, not always a pleasant journey, from California to Cape Cod, from Mexico to Miami, from the Valley of the Moon and the Dry Lake Beds to Norman Cay and the mostly vanished haunts of his teenage days in Weymouth.

This book was also made possible by the willingness of many people to share their memories of George and of Carlos and to describe their experiences in connection with the cocaine and marijuana trades, on both sides of the law, and thanks to them is hereby given. Their names appear throughout the chapters and the nature of their help is self-evident. In this regard, I wish particularly to note the assistance of Mirtha Jung and her mother, Clara Luz; of Ramón Moreno, Arthur Davey, Richard Barile, and Mr. T.; and of Agents James J. Trout and Richard Garcia of the FBI, Agent Michael McManus of the DEA, Sergeants Greg Kridos and Tom Tiderington of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, Sergeant William McGreal of the Massachusetts State Police, and Sergeant Fred McKewen of the Manhattan Beach Police Department, now retired.

Others contributed in ways not made apparent in the book, and I would like to use this space to express my gratitude. Among the many I talked to in Weymouth, I'd like especially to thank Benny Ells, retired member of the Weymouth Fire Department and devoted statistician to the Weymouth High School Maroons since 1946; Donald Cormack, lecturer at the Weymouth Historical Museum; and Eddie Beck, guidance counselor at Braintree High School, who encountered George as his football coach at Central Junior High School in Weymouth.