Doctor Dealer (35 page)

The family was around the table when the phone rang. It was David Ackerman, calling for Larry. He took the phone in a back room of the apartment.

Larry was irritated to be bothered at his parents’ house, in the middle of his party. He thought none of his other friends would have been this rude.

David was slurring his words and speaking rapidly, obviously under the influence of cocaine or Quaaludes or both. He started off in a friendly way, but soon came to the point. He had an ultimatum.

“Larry, you have to give up five percent. Willie needs more to keep him going. We’ve got to give him more.”

“David, I can’t believe you’re calling me here at home. There’s no way I’m going to do that.”

“You have to give this up. You’re not doing any of the work now.”

Larry just hung up the phone. He was too angry to discuss it further. The way he saw things, he had staked about a million dollars of his money to get David started; David had thrown in maybe five thousand at the start. Larry had given this smartass New York Jewish kid a chance to make a million dollars, and this was all the gratitude he had?

He stewed over the phone call for the rest of the evening. He felt David had ruined his birthday party. He and Marcia had planned on staying up in Haverhill for a day or two, but instead they got a flight back to Philadelphia that night.

For Larry, the phone call was the last straw. Billy South Philly, Paul Mikuta, and Stu Thomas had all stopped doing business with David already. And Larry was tired of David’s finicky way of doing things. He was tired of having everything handled by David’s people—Willie, Suzanne, Christine, Gary, Danny, Roger, Mark Taplar. . . .
If it was a power struggle David wanted, then it was time to get it over with.

Larry drove home and dropped off Marcia, who was seven months pregnant, and then sped back down the Schuylkill Expressway to David and Suzanne’s apartment. He entered shouting. David, who had had time to cool off, tried to be conciliatory, but Larry’s mind was made up.

“I can’t believe you called me at my parents’ house to pull this,” he said. He pushed David against the apartment wall.

David argued that the present arrangement was unfair to him.

“No, David. Your best customers are still my people. Who are they going to listen to? If I tell them to stop doing business with you, they’ll stop.”

“Be reasonable,” said David.

“It’s all over,” Larry said. “You’re out. This is it.”

David quickly tried to back down, offering Larry a more attractive arrangement than his ultimatum on the phone.

“No, David. You’re out. That’s just it. I’m going to find a way to buy you out. I want you to sit down and figure out what you’re worth right now, and I’m going to find a way to buy you out.”

Together that night, with Suzanne trying to sleep in the back room, Larry tallied up $850,000 that David still had tied up in the business. He was going to get David that money, and from then on Larry was going to be back in charge.

Over the next few weeks, Larry had second thoughts. Maybe he should just let David have the business and settle for a smaller percentage. Ever since his meeting with Mark Stewart before the Arena was burned, Larry had been branching out on his own with legitimate investments. He and David had begun investing heavily in silver. Larry held certificates worth more than two hundred thousand, and checked the fluctuating rare metal’s prices daily, sometimes buying more, sometimes selling off small amounts. Through his insurance agent, Larry had met Joe Powell, a silver dealer who bought scrap circuitry, silverware, or anything else that contained the precious metal and then recovered the silver from it for resale. Larry soon was loaning the dealer huge sums of money at an incredible 30 percent annual interest rate. Through Powell, Larry met a group interested in starting up a gold-mining operation in Nevada. He put up almost two hundred thousand for them to purchase a unique strip-mining machine that used centrifugal force to separate gold from sand and dirt. And he had thrown in with his old dental school classmate/appliance dealer Jonathon Lax on projects to renovate
homes in South Philly and a housing project in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Despite his track record of poor investments, Mark Stewart had taught Larry a lot. Larry could put together an impressive financial statement with the best of them, and he had learned that bank presidents, as a group, had fools in exactly the same proportion as the population at large. So Larry felt that he was at last ready to begin acting as his own Mark Stewart. Those projects, along with the ones he was still mired in with Mark and his dental practice with Ken, took nearly all of his time. Now he would have to start supervising the cocaine business again. Marcia, if she found out, would be all over him—especially with the baby due in just two months. And Larry would be up to his neck again in risk.

But his pride was at stake. He couldn’t let David Ackerman push him around. Already three of his best friends had taken their business elsewhere. David was falling apart. Just a few weeks earlier Suzanne had telephoned in a panic after David took several Quaaludes and passed out. Suzanne said he had no pulse. Larry had gotten a friend to rush over just to make sure David was alive, and then to sit with Suzanne until David came out of it. It was dangerous leaving the business in the hands of someone so out of control.

Besides, down deep, Larry missed the dealing. He had always enjoyed being the man in charge.

So over the next few weeks he laundered a few checks through his various enterprises to pay off his partner. Ackerman retained some control over the business for the next few months, but by June he was strictly a silent partner. Larry called Billy and Paul and Stu to let them know that Larry was back. And he began meeting with Willie Harcourt regularly, reacquainting himself with what the hell was going on.

Christopher Lavin was born on May 6, 1982. It was a doubly special event, because Stu Thomas’s wife, Joanne, had her baby on the same day. Marcia and Joanne shared a room in the hospital, and Larry and Stu visited together, draped in blue gowns, taking turns cradling the pink newborns and posing for happy family snapshots.

That night, Larry and Stu celebrated in what had become Larry’s standard way. Larry Uhr, the man Mark Stewart had hired to manage the limousine service in Atlantic City, delivered a couple of expensive casino hookers out to Timber Lane. Larry invited over Ken Weidler and a few other friends, and the happy new fathers snorted cocaine, drank, dropped Quaaludes, splashed in the Jacuzzi, and fornicated happily through the night.

Marcia, of course, knew nothing about Larry’s acquired taste in whores. Ever since his bachelor party in 1980, Larry had been throwing
these bacchanals for all of his friends before they got married—and nearly all of them did marry from 1980 through 1983. The events were so notorious that Suzanne Norimatsu, one of the few women in their circle who knew all about these parties (and felt privileged to be let in on the boys’ lusty secrets), once accused one of the boys of getting married just so there would be an excuse for another one of Larry’s famous parties.

After the bash at the airport Marriott, the one when the hooker had fallen through the glass table and left bloodstains on the bathroom and the floors and walls, Larry was an unwelcome guest at the hotel—even though he happily paid for all the damages. When he had gone back to reserve the same suite for another party, the manager had refused.

“My rooms can’t take the wear and tear,” he said.

So Larry just got someone else to reserve the suites, and had his friends let him in through a back door. A highlight of that party was a food fight and a woman who shaved off her pubic hair in the bathtub to titillate the boys with naked genitalia.

The Atlantic City hookers were a more expensive, more attractive lot than the girls Larry had hired in Philadelphia. It got so that on his frequent trips to the New Jersey resort, Larry would routinely ask Larry Uhr to fix him up with one. After attending to business, Larry the millionaire dentist would deposit a large sum of money in the cage and spend the afternoon gambling, retire to a comped room upstairs for a romp with a whore, and eat a nice dinner before going home. It was a side of his life Marcia never saw and had no reason to suspect.

Larry’s Atlantic City bachelor parties outdid the earlier ones at the Marriott. Some went on simultaneously in two casino hotels. Because he usually put so much money in the cage downstairs, the hotels comped all the rooms and the limos and the food, including expensive candies, open bars, flowers . . . whatever his heart desired. Larry’s friends would fly in from New England and arrive in stretch limos, sometimes with a hooker on board to entertain them on the drive over from Philadelphia. Larry and Paul and Stu and Billy, veterans of these affairs, used to delight in inviting younger men who had never seen parties like these before, then urge them to put on shows with the hookers for everyone else. Glen Fuller, who was out on bail awaiting trial in New Jersey, always threw himself into these events with special gusto, as did stockbrokers Andy Mainardi and L.A. The women would do anything for money, so they were open to a far broader range of sexual play than most of the boys’ wives—everything from striptease to elaborate oral sex to props and lesbianism and other odd practices.

Atlantic City became Larry’s hedonistic playland. Larry would arrive with Paul at the casino, they would check into a room, and Paul would be on the phone immediately ordering up “two blonds with big tits” the way another hotel guest might call room service for a martini. In time, Larry developed a special relationship with a hooker named Janice, whom he would ask for regularly and sometimes put in charge of arranging to supply hookers for the next bash. For big parties there were a dozen or more girls and twenty or more of Larry’s friends. The girls would accompany the boys down to expensive dinners and on the gambling floor, and sometimes, if enough money was offered, would spend the night. Glen Fuller once paid a woman eight hundred dollars to sleep with him through the night. One party threatened to turn ugly when there weren’t enough hookers to go around. Larry had to set up a schedule, placing time limits on his friends’ sex play. He had to walk up and down the hall knocking on doors to enforce it, and would encounter all sorts of decadent scenes. One of his friends, pants down to his ankles displaying a pitiful half erection, pleaded with Larry on his knees for ten more minutes with a woman—the combination of drugs and alcohol intensified the urge but sometimes dimmed the performance.

Larry felt he was giving his friends experiences that they would never otherwise have, moments they would remember for the rest of their lives.

In the case of the hot-tub romp on the night after Christopher was born, it turned out to be an occasion all involved soon regretted. About two weeks after the party, one of the men present suspected he was seeing symptoms of venereal disease. That meant everyone involved had to take precautions.

Larry wrote himself a prescription for a powerful antibiotic which called for one large, painful injection to the buttock. In the upstairs bathroom, while Marcia fed the baby down the hall, Larry unpacked a syringe and uncapped the bottle. Unused to the procedure, he jammed the needle in wrong the first time, bending it. He contorted himself, rapping his fist on the sink quietly, and fought back the scream.

Then he unpacked a new syringe, and took aim again.

Willie Harcourt was rapidly discovering that the great financial structure he was buying into was built on sand. He had a 25 percent interest in a lucrative cocaine business, and more than $250,000 invested in a supposedly successful record company. To legitimize his earnings, he was being paid a $200 weekly paycheck from Celebrity Limousines. A month into this new arrangement, the checks began to bounce. When he inquired, Willie learned that Mark Stewart had been taking money out of the limo company, which was in fact profitable,
and was using it to make ends meet at WMOT-TEC Records, which, despite its hit records and surface prosperity, was in fact losing money. Willie, who was closer to Dick than were Larry, Ken, or David, felt he had to alert the investors to this travesty. But he was finding it impossible to get the two dentists together to confront Mark. Larry didn’t seem to care that much anymore. He had evidently already written off the record company. When Willie asked Larry about his $250,000 investment, Larry gave only a vague answer that Willie knew meant the money was gone. To Larry, a quarter million loss in his dealings with Mark Stewart was routine.

In May, when Willie was in Florida on a buying trip, David got a friend to open up Willie’s apartment and safe and inspected the books. When Willie came home, David was waiting in his apartment to accuse him of mismanagement. Then David sifted through the sixteen kilos Willie had just driven north, picked out a bagful of rocks, and left.

Willie sat there that night, outraged. It was obvious that he was not going to be given the autonomy that David had enjoyed with Larry.

He decided to quit. This and other things, added to Willie’s constant fear of getting caught and going to jail, had finally opened his eyes. Suddenly, all Willie wanted to do was get as far away from the cocaine business as possible. He saw David as a hopeless cokehead, and he believed that Larry and Ken and David had ripped him off for $250,000. At 3:00 a.m., Willie loaded up the kilos, the scales, the sifters and bowls and lamps and the safe and every other piece of cocaine paraphernalia in his apartment, drove it all over to one of the empty Chestnut Street “factory” apartments, and unloaded it there. He tried to sleep when he got back to his place, but couldn’t. So he filled a bucket with soapy water and, working with mops and a sponge, systematically scrubbed the floors, walls, and ceilings of every room in his five-story house in Center City.

Billy Motto stopped by at 11:00 a.m. looking for his four kilos.

“I’ve quit,” said Willie. “They’re not here. Get ahold of David.”

Willie called David’s apartment and left his announcement on the answering machine.