Doctor Dealer (12 page)

He had grown up on the rough sidewalks and streets of Passyunk Avenue, at the industrial bottom of South Philly. He was smoking dope by the first years of grade school, and by the time he was in the sixth grade he was hooked on heroin.

Billy would joke sardonically about the hall monitor who banged on the closed bathroom stall door, shouting, “Open up, Motto, I know you’re smoking cigarettes in there!” as Billy had emptied a syringe into a vein of his forearm.

He was then thirteen years old and he was killing himself. His liver was shot and his skin was pocked and riddled by rampant acne. He weighed only ninety-eight pounds the night his friends drove up to Saint Agnes Hospital on Broad Street, opened a door, rolled him unconscious to the sidewalk, and sped away. Billy had overdosed, and they were afraid to be caught with him.

Billy recovered from the overdose, and was sent to The Bridge, a drug treatment center, where for the first time in his young life he faced down his self-destructive tendencies. He stayed for fourteen months, gaining weight, having tattoos and needle tracks removed
from his arms by plastic surgery, learning the joys of living drug free and forming, for the first time, a measure of self-respect.

He would later say, “It got me back in touch with life. I started living again and I rediscovered all the things that were beautiful in life, like a pretty girl, like a kiss.”

He spent the rest of his teenage years in a halfway house away from his old neighborhood. Billy never went back to school. He worked as an assistant in a funeral parlor, and in his off hours he discovered girls. He spent his money going to dances and discos, and discovered that without drugs he was considered handsome and charming. Billy was fastidious to excess about his appearance—he had his teeth cleaned regularly by a dental hygienist, his nails tended by a manicurist, his hair barbered weekly. He worked out at a South Philadelphia gym like a professional athlete, ate healthy foods, and ordered Perrier water at bars. Although drugs and alcohol were a big part of the social scene in South Philly during his teens, Billy never backed off his new, strict regimen.

Eventually, Billy’s father gave him a ’65 Chevy and made him a partner in the family’s small produce business, which sold wares from four milk crates on the corner of Juniper and Sansom streets in Center City. Billy’s self-assurance and charm came to life on the street corner. He would flirt with the pretty girls who walked by and entertain the customers with his cheerful salesmanship—“Three pounds for a dollar, a quarter will put you in order!” Billy loved being on the streets, and with the low overhead, he and his father made good money. When the cops came by and told them to get moving, Billy would see his Dad slip them a few bucks to let them be. On the side he collected numbers for the illegal lottery and began keeping book on sporting events—something that was common and accepted in his neighborhood.

Billy loved the produce business. On his own he began to build it into something more. He used his earnings from running numbers to expand, buying additional crates of lettuce and tomatoes and getting up at dawn to hustle them in hoagie shops and restaurants, pushing his business farther and farther west from Center City along Walnut Street. Restaurant owners would look at the cocky kid the first time he came in with a crate of lettuce and tell him to get lost.

“We have a regular supplier,” they would say.

“I’ll beat their price,” Billy would say.

They would tell him again to get lost.

But that afternoon Billy would come back in, nicely dressed, with a group of his friends. They would order a big meal and leave a big tip. He would keep coming back that way until people took him
seriously, and he picked up their business. By the fall of 1976 Billy’s produce route stretched from Center City all the way out to the popular student eateries around Penn.

It was through friends Billy made around the campus that he started selling pot. A dealer named Hank Katz, whose father owned a popular hoagie shop off campus, fronted Billy five pounds of pot, which Billy quickly sold to friends in South Philly and paid for with a brown bag full of rumpled bills. Then he took ten pounds and sold that. It was so easy! When Billy asked for twenty pounds, Katz said his supplier wouldn’t sell him that much without meeting him first.

So Billy was introduced to the supplier.

He met Larry at Andy Mainardi’s apartment on Forty-third Street. The South Philly produce vendor said he wanted to buy twenty pounds, and instead Larry laid out forty pounds of Colombian.

Larry was clearly the better person to be dealing with.

“I’m impressed, but I can’t afford that much,” said Billy.

“I’ll front you,” said Larry.

“How much?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five.” That would put Billy in debt to Larry for $14,600.

“I’ll give you three hundred,” said Billy. “And I only want twenty pounds.”

Larry grinned. They spoke each other’s language. They eventually compromised at $325 per pound. Billy took thirty pounds.

He was back within the week with messy bundles of small bills, ones, fives, tens, and twenties all thrown in together in a big brown grocery bag. No one ever paid up that fast.

“Couldn’t you bring me money a little neater than this?” Larry groaned, but Billy could see that he was impressed.

“Hey, don’t push your luck,” said Billy.

After that, Billy continued dealing through Hank at the hoagie shop, but he began selling larger and larger amounts. Larry would have liked to deal with Billy directly, but protocol demanded that the middleman, who had brought Billy into the business, continue to profit.

But there was instant rapport between the preppie Irish kid and the charming Italian street vendor. In time they dealt with each other directly, on an almost weekly basis. Billy found Larry’s Massachusetts accent as comical as Larry found his thick South Philly patois. Billy could see that this tall, black-haired college kid was as serious a businessman as he was—he had expected some longhair, stoned wifty-eyed. Larry found Billy’s style impressive and was amazed by his
trustworthiness and ability to sell. From that first meeting on, whenever Larry sold something directly to Billy, they would begin the same way: Larry would name a price, Billy would make a lower bid, and then they would haggle and laugh until they found a comfortable middle ground. Billy, who felt insecure about his lack of formal education, was flattered to be treated as an equal by a college kid. Larry, who like most suburban youths felt somewhat deprived of hard knocks, got a charge out of dealing with authentic street characters like Tyrone and Billy, but with Billy it was more than that. He liked Billy.

There were rumors that Billy Motto was “connected,” that he had ties with the city’s legendary organized-crime family. After all, he had an Italian surname, he was from South Philly, and he ran numbers on the street. Billy didn’t go out of his way to dispel this impression. It was good for business. He was feared as someone too dangerous to cross, which helps a business survive on city streets. Billy subtly cultivated this image by employing friends and relatives to accompany him wherever he went. There was menace implied by the quiet, dark, muscular men who stood in the background and took orders from Billy. If you were with Billy and he wanted to order out for pizza, one of his men would promptly run out and get pizza. This was a source of constant amusement to the Penn crowd. He never personally handled the pot. He believed that if he never touched it, it would be a lot harder to get caught dealing it. So Billy would deliver money, haggle over prices and purchase orders, and then he would shake hands and leave. He had this superstition about leaving. After making a deal with Larry, he would always turn back before he left and say, “Tell me it’s going to be okay, Larry.”

Larry would grin and say, “It’s going to be okay, Billy.”

Then one of Billy’s boys would come by an hour or two later and pick up the order.

In his business records, Larry penciled in “Billy South Philly,” which soon became just “B.S.P.” It was to be a fruitful collaboration.

With the added efforts of Tyrone and Billy South Philly, Larry was back on his feet shortly after his senior year began. He was soon swinging hundred-pound pot deals again on a regular basis. Tyrone had begun supplying Quaaludes—which were obtained by his neighborhood friends on Medicaid who knew physicians in Southwest Philly who sold them scripts—illegal prescriptions. Larry had one friend who could obtain jars of pharmaceutical cocaine, which was a sort of novelty item in late 1976; Larry began using it on occasion to help him stay awake during class. Sometimes when he was working a pot deal he would be offered an ounce or two of cocaine on the side,
which he accepted for his own use and as something to pass out to his friends—like a little bonus for paying up on time. It was fun, but too expensive for most students. Besides, his customers still wanted more pot than he could buy.

With many of his earlier suppliers now graduated from college, Larry found he was buying most of his pot from Florida. Having personally resolved never to make a Florida run again, Larry needed someone to step in for L.A. For this he offered Andy Mainardi a chance to become a full partner in the growing business.

It was risky, but Andy trusted and admired Larry. He liked associating with him. Most of the people involved in drug dealing were spacey holdovers from hippie days, but not Larry. Larry was smart and reliable. If he said he was going to meet you someplace, he was there on the dot. Larry was the first person Andy knew to attach an answering machine to his phone, which made it easy to get ahold of him night or day. And Larry was so personable and charming. Andy thought he was a natural salesman, someone whom people instantly liked and trusted. Once, when Andy was still a freshman, he had attended a party at Phi Delta Theta. There must have been a hundred people in the frat house. Larry was out somewhere, and didn’t show up until the party was in full swing. But as soon as Larry came in the door it was like . . .
the king had arrived!
People just mobbed him. Larry’s personal magnetism was stronger than that of anyone Andy had ever met.

Andy had profited by his dealings with Larry. During his freshman year he had bought two or three pounds twice a month from Larry. By sophomore year he was buying up to ten pounds every two weeks. And some of Larry’s magnetism rubbed off. When Andy threw parties at his house off campus on Forty-first Street, sometimes two to three hundred people showed up. Andy always footed the bill and paid the lion’s share of expenses for renting the house. Dealing Larry’s pot had given Andy a lot of good times—and he even had a few thousand dollars of his own in the bank! So when Larry asked him to start running to Florida, Andy found it hard to say no. He figured he was smarter than L.A. No one was going to bust Andy Mainardi.

Andy liked the idea of running to Florida. He disliked living in the city so much that he had planned on leaving Penn that year anyway. Larry had talked him into staying, so now he was making money and looking forward to spending his winter in a warm place. He drove down by himself in a rented car for his first trip, but it was such a long drive that he resolved to take the train thereafter. Planes were too risky for all but the recklessly ballsy—guys like Mikuta. So on the second trip Andy rented a sleeper car. He passed the time
getting high, reading, and listening to music. When he got to his hotel room in Florida, it seemed as if Larry was on the phone every couple of hours, fussing over his money and pot like a mother hen.

He took his second train trip south in November, and made his connections without incident in Fort Lauderdale. On the morning after making the buy he boarded a train north with about sixty-five pounds of pot stuffed in two large suitcases. He worried a little about the suitcases—after three loads the luggage smelled strong enough to give someone a contact high. Andy had taken the precaution of reserving a sleeping berth on the train and getting his ticket in advance so that he wouldn’t have to go to the ticket counter, but at the station Amtrak’s computers were down and everyone had to reconfirm their tickets at the counter. He felt conspicuous, a college kid with two huge, reeking suitcases, but everything had gone smoothly. Andy tended to be jumpy. In Jacksonville it made him nervous when, early in the afternoon, a man in a suit and tie got on and took the sleeper directly across the aisle. Out on the platform he had heard a barking dog.
Now, why would someone be taking a dog on the train?
Andy told himself to calm down and lit a joint. It was probably just a blind person with a seeing-eye dog.

It was almost two hours to Savannah. Shortly before they were due to arrive there, the door to his compartment crashed open, a gun was pointed at his face.

A voice screamed, “Freeze!”

Andy was allowed one phone call at the Chatham County Jail in Savannah. Marcia answered the phone. It was November 11, 1976, Marcia’s twenty-first birthday. She had some people over for a party in the apartment, so she had a hard time hearing Andy at first. He asked to speak to Larry.

Larry’s voice came on with its usual cheer: “Andy, what’s up?”

“Larry, I’m in jail. In Savannah. I was arrested.”

“Oh, my gosh.”

There was silence on the Philadelphia end.

Then Larry asked, “Does that mean they got it all?”

L.A. was sentenced in early 1977. After all that worrying, it turned out that Larry had been right. The judge gave L.A. ninety days at a work-release center. Too inexperienced to realize he had just been cut a huge break, L.A. shot his lawyer a look of shock and panic.

“I thought I was supposed to get probation!” he said.

“I told you there was exposure in this case,” said L.A.’s lawyer.

So
that’s
what he had meant by exposure! It meant jail time!

“Appeal it,” said L.A.

Over the next few hours the lawyer was able to convince L.A. of his good fortune—an appellate judge could always remand the case with instructions for a
sterner
sentence. Larry’s former partner was given a job at a bait-and-tackle shop outside of Fort Lauderdale. It turned out his co-workers there were small-time pot dealers themselves, so L.A. spent his ninety days fishing and getting high. On the phone he was able to help Larry steer Andy to his old connections in Florida.