Doctor Dealer (18 page)

The group hit a fine restaurant in Aspen every night, and then returned to party with the drugs and each other until late. They bedded down separately, and woke for a late breakfast, a day of skiing, time to unwind, and then back out to another fine restaurant for dinner, where they would drop fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars. They reserved private rooms for the dinners, and brought out cocaine and marijuana to share with the help. Larry filled a sugar bowl with cocaine and rolled strawberries in it and fed them to the waitresses. Glen scared the wits out of David Ackerman, whom he instantly disliked, by taking him for a “hell ride” in his four-wheel-drive Bronco, at one point speeding so recklessly through an underground garage that David screamed for him to let him out. On one of the nights, Glen hosted an extravagant dinner party at his own house, inviting his friends in Aspen to meet his Philadelphia friends, serving expensive steaks and wines. Women at that party were urged, with only partial success, to perform sexual acts together, for the amusement of the men. When Larry decided things were a little too crowded at Glen’s, he rented an expensive apartment nearby with a
heated swimming pool, so toward the end of the week the party bounced back and forth between the house and the apartment.

There was a triumphant exhilaration to that week, the gorgeous snowy peaks, blue sky, the blinding whiteness of the snow, the fine foods and wines, the drugs, the sex. They were young and healthy and beautiful and rich . . . and this was just the beginning!

Soon after the Aspen trip, Larry gave in to Glen’s persistence. Glen said he had a contact in Dayton who could sell him two kilos for $110,000, but he had to meet them at a hotel there that night.

“Okay, let’s do it,” said Larry.

Glen was delighted. They drove in Larry’s white Impala over to David’s house on Fitzwater Street to pick up more money, and while Larry barreled down Baltimore Avenue toward the Schuylkill Expressway on his way to the airport, bouncing over the beat-up pavement and trolley tracks, Glen tried to count and bundle a great heap of hundred-dollar bills on his lap. Money had spilled all over the front seat and floor. In his haste, Larry was paying little attention to a succession of traffic signals at the end of each short block, and somewhere near Forty-third Street the law caught up to him.

A cop tooted his siren and flashed his red lights. Larry pulled over, swore, and then grabbed his overcoat, which was in the back seat, and threw it over Glen’s lap and the front seat, trying to cover the money. He gave the cop his license and registration, his heart pounding and his mouth dry, and explained that they were just in a hurry to catch a flight at the airport. Larry listened to the officer’s lecture and thanked him for not giving him a ticket. Both he and Glen burst out laughing when the police car pulled away.

“I don’t know,” said Larry. “This kind of shit used to be fun, but it’s not so much fun anymore.”

Larry walked the money through the metal detector, and they passed the bundles into Glen’s bag in the men’s room.

That night, after Glen checked into the appointed hotel in Dayton, he was met in his room by two Puerto Ricans—Glen called Hispanics “Funny-talkers.” They ordered a drink from room service, and Glen showed them the money. But before leaving the hotel to exchange the money for cocaine, the men convinced Glen to step downstairs for a bite to eat. Glen hadn’t eaten since morning. He slid the leather case full of money under one of the beds in his hotel room, and the three went downstairs to eat. Before he finished eating, the Puerto Ricans excused themselves. They said they would make a phone call, pick up the coke, and give him a call at his hotel room to arrange for a swap.

So Glen finished eating. When he returned to his room, the money was gone.

He went berserk. Slamming the door open, Glen strode down the hotel hall screaming. When a housemaid stepped out of a room in front of him, he grabbed her, wrapping one arm around her waist from behind and grabbing the back of her neck with the other hand. The maid protested in Spanish as Glen dragged her down the hall, accusing her of taking the money from his room. He stopped before the laundry chute—they were on the sixth floor—opened it, and leaned the woman’s head into the chute.

“You tell me where you put that money or you’re going down,” Glen shouted.

The frightened woman was screaming that she didn’t know what he was talking about, she knew of no money. The two men who were with Glen earlier had come back. They had forgotten their key and asked her to let them in the room.

Hotel security guards came running down the hall, and within minutes Glen was giving a report to the Dayton police.

When the confusion died down, he phoned Larry with the bad news.

Larry was too depressed to be angry. So much for letting Glen make deals. He made it clear that he held Glen responsible, that he owed Larry the full amount. The only thing to do when Glen got back to Philly was to put him to work.

“Get yourself some nice luggage,” said Larry.

Glen’s life for the foreseeable future was going to be spent shuttling from Philadelphia to Florida, back to Philadelphia, to Vermont, back to Philadelphia, to Florida, etc. In addition to continuing his dealing in New England, Glen Fuller had become Larry’s mule.

Tuesday, January 22, 1980, was a rare balmy winter day in Philadelphia. Marcia had opened the windows of the Osage Avenue apartment to air things out. With his dental clinic hours scheduled for afternoon, Larry was enjoying a quiet morning at home. David Ackerman was over. In addition to making more frequent trips to Florida for Larry, David had begun keeping the books. He and Larry were going over some of his figures when Paula Van Horn rang the bell.

Paula was older than Larry and David, who were in their mid-twenties. She was an articulate, cheerful woman of thirty-three with short brown hair and brown eyes. Paula had been married and divorced before entering dental school. She shared custody of her children. In between school hours and homework, Paula had been recruited by David to take piles of cash in small bills and drive around the city to various banks, where she would, through a series of relatively small deposits and withdrawals, gradually change the money into neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Larry paid her fifty dollars for every thousand she changed.

It was unusual for Paula to stop by Larry’s place. She usually dealt with Ackerman, who lived in the same house with her on Fitzwater Street in Center City. In fact, just that morning he had given her fifty thousand in small bills to change. When Paula asked Larry for more, David said, “What happened to the money I gave you this morning?”

Paula said that she had left it at her apartment, because she had not expected to have the afternoon free. Now she had the time, but didn’t feel like going back to her place to get the cash. Larry gave her another fifty thousand to change.

The following afternoon, as he was preparing to work on a patient
in the student dental clinic, Larry was distracted by a commotion on the sidewalk out the window. Peering down, he saw Paula surrounded by a small crowd on the front steps. Larry excused himself from his patient and ran downstairs. He pushed his way through the crowd and found Paula sitting on the front steps in tears. She said she had been robbed. Between sobs, Paula described her assailant. He was a black man, six feet tall, thinly built, in his mid-twenties, wearing a green knit cap, black pants, and a black leather jacket. A man in the crowd stepped forward to verify Paula’s account. He had seen it all happen and had chased the mugger but couldn’t catch him. The man accompanied her and David Ackerman to police headquarters, where Paula repeated the same sad story.

“How much did you have in the purse?” she was asked.

The policeman looked astonished when Paula said “ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand dollars!”
said the cop. The figure that amazed him came, of course, as tremendous relief to David.

Paula explained that she had been on her way to pay her boyfriend’s dental school tuition. She said her boyfriend was named David Ackerman.

When Larry had a chance to question Paula alone later, he learned the truth was a lot worse. She had been carrying the full hundred thousand. She had broken it all down and had planned on delivering the hundreds to David that afternoon.

That night Paula’s story was on the television news, and the next day an item ran in
The Philadelphia Daily News
under a headline that played on the American Express commercial slogan, “Never Carry Cash.”

“It was an awful thing,” she told the newspaper. “I was stunned. I want to forget the whole thing.”

Larry was out another hundred thousand, and he was worried about what the police really believed. Who pays their dental school tuition in cash?

But David, whose name Paula had given to the police and the press as her boyfriend, had a different worry. He was convinced that Paula was lying.

Larry would hear none of it.

“No way. Paula hurt her head and arm when she fell. How can she fake that? And why would she lie to me? I’m paying her better than she could ever make anywhere else. It doesn’t make sense.”

David and Ken thought Larry was too naive for belief. David offered a deal. If he could recover the missing hundred thousand from Paula, could he keep half?

Larry, who really did believe Paula, figured he couldn’t lose on
that deal, so he agreed. He would hear more about this promise in a few months.

One morning shortly afterward, as she prepared to leave the apartment for work, Marcia was startled by the bell. It was only 7:30 a.m. At the door was a short, slender man with dark curly hair and oversized rose-tinted glasses. He had a light beard and was finely dressed, wearing his camel’s hair overcoat open over a three-piece dark wool suit that fit him too well to be off-the-rack. Marcia glimpsed gold on several of his smaller fingers. He said his name was Mark Stewart, and that he had an appointment to see “Dr.” Lawrence Lavin. Larry was not yet a doctor, so it was unusual for someone to refer to him as one, which Stewart had done. He seemed especially eager to come in. Marcia stepped to one side, and he brushed by in a pungent aura of after-shave. She shouted for Larry, and, having taken an instant dislike to the person she had just let in, exited directly without explanation. Marcia was used to expressing her displeasure with Larry’s business by being stubbornly, quietly rude to his associates. Now they were coming by before breakfast. Marching down the steep front steps, buttoning her coat against the morning chill, she saw Stewart’s long, shiny black Cadillac parked below, looking especially out of place among all the beat-up student-owned heaps along Forty-third Street. It gave her a sinking feeling. Something about that man, that briefcase, the rings, the after-shave, that car, and being here at 7:30 a.m. . . . it spelled trouble.

She thought,
What has Larry gotten us into now?

In fact, Marcia was one of the reasons Mark Stewart was there that morning. With their wedding only six months away, Marcia’s deadline for Larry to stop dealing was growing close. She knew little of the particulars, but Larry had made his million. Although much of it was still tied up in the next deal, or in uncollected debts, Larry had accumulated quite a stash in safe-deposit boxes and in the drawers of the old dressers in the basement. While he and Marcia were students, they really had had little to spend money on, so Larry had kept rolling his back into the business and making more. But now things were going to change. In a few months they would be married. In a little more than a year he would be finished with dental school. Larry knew Marcia wanted children. So did he. They would want a nice house in the suburbs, and a car . . . no, two cars, one for him and one for her. Larry had fallen in love with the Main Line on trips out to Paul Mikuta’s house and during the summer when he drove a taxi. That was definitely where he wanted to move after leaving dental school. But how could he consider spending this way without showing
a sudden, inexplicable jump in income? For years he had been filling out financial aid forms at Penn that showed his earnings to be just a few thousand a year.

Larry’s most recent plan was to make a million, then turn the business over to David and Ken and find a way, somehow, to legitimize his cash. He wanted to be able to spend his money without running afoul of the IRS, and he wanted to invest his cash in something that would protect it from galloping inflation.

Larry had a phobia about inflation. He was afraid his million would shrink to mere thousands if he just buried it. Other people had nightmares about falling or drowning or about losing a loved one; Larry had nightmares about double-digit inflation. He wanted the money working for him, not growing mold in the earth. What he needed was to translate his illegal wealth into sturdy, legal capital.

For help, Larry turned to a classmate named Jonathon Lax, who in addition to carrying a full course load in dental school owned a thriving appliance business. Larry admired Lax, and felt they had a lot in common. Both were managing successful businesses on the side while they attended dental school. The only difference was, Lax’s appliances were legal.

Lax was hardly astonished to learn that Larry was a dealer. Nearly everyone at Penn knew that. But he was shocked to learn how much money Larry had made at it.

“I kind of want to live the lifestyle I can afford, but I don’t want to show any of it,” said Larry.

So Lax introduced Larry to a lawyer, who referred the rich young dealer to a managing partner of a prominent Philadelphia law firm. They had met in Center City on Tuesday, the day before Paula Van Horn’s mugging. Seated on leather chairs in a stately paneled conference room, Larry had shaken hands with the lawyer, a middle-aged man in a well-cut wool suit, and begun to explain his problem. At first he had planned to keep the source of his millions out of the conversation, but it was awkward talking about it without explaining. Finally, he just admitted the money had come from dealing. How else to describe his predicament?