Doctor Dealer (8 page)

But by far the most prized items in the scavenger hunt were trophies from other fraternities. In this, of course, Larry had experience. He set his sights first on one of the most unique and dramatic targets on campus: a moose head that hung in the hallway at rival ZBT, the predominately Jewish fraternity on campus. Larry recruited his friend Paul Mikuta to help—Paul was not pledging with a fraternity but enjoyed pranking as much as the next guy. In the middle of the night, Paul watched while Larry climbed up a rear wall of ZBT’s house, using window ledges and gutters for hand- and footholds. Easing out along a utility pipe three stories up, Larry worked himself over to a window. With a penknife, he chipped away at the putty around a small pane that had recently been replaced, and removed it. He reached inside and unlocked the window, and stepped inside.

Larry found himself standing in darkness in an empty bathtub. When’ his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he crept over to a pile of clothes draped over the back of a chair and rooted through the pockets. He found a bundle of keys. Then he climbed out the window and back down to Paul.

One of the keys opened the front door. They went directly to the moose head and lifted it off the wall. After carrying it across campus, thrilling in their daring and good fortune, they deposited it in Phi Delta Theta’s foyer. It had all gone so smoothly, Larry and Paul didn’t want to stop. They went back for more. This time they wrestled a heavy, prized poker table out the front door, delivering it to Phi Delta Theta shortly before dawn. More items were collected over the next few weeks, much to the surprise and delight of Larry’s prospective fraternity brothers. Eventually ZBT was summoned to recover its belongings amidst catcalls and jeers. Larry stole another
fraternity’s official flag, and when a group from that house tracked him down and came to retrieve it, Larry displayed a machete that he had bought at an army-surplus store in Boston—its blade was heavy and had a sinister bend. The group backed off. When a complaint was filed with the frat council about his machete, Larry was contrite. He agreed to return the flag. So he and Paul Mikuta climbed up in the Quad rafters and captured two pigeons. They wrapped them in the flag, put it in a box, and left it on ZBT’s front porch. The fraternity recovered a soiled flag and had a hell of a time catching the frightened pigeons.

Larry ran up more scavenging points than any pledge before or since. In the process he became one of the house’s most popular characters before he was officially even a brother.

By the end of freshman year, Larry’s relationship with Marcia Osborn had moved beyond friendship. Though Marcia was still writing to her high school boyfriend at Penn State, Larry’s persistence and charm had gradually worn away her resolve. They were in bed together often in her room at the Quad during spring semester, where Larry would often return with ridiculous stories about things he had taken, things he had done. Larry brought out maternal tendencies in Marcia; he was someone who needed to be loved in spite of himself. Larry was wild, but his drug use was really no more extreme than that of many freshmen in the Quad, and his grades were considerably better than most. Their personalities complemented each other, Larry affording Marcia a bit more joy and excitement than she had known, and Marcia offering Larry a reliable base of affection. Larry was reckless, loud, and impulsive, while Marcia was cautious, quiet, and analytical. Larry trusted and liked people instantly, while Marcia could spend months and years with a person before developing trust and affection. She committed her heart more cautiously than Larry did, but once committed, Marcia was like a rock. She figured that time would wear out Larry’s wildness, and that her own good sense would ultimately prevail.

Larry didn’t tell Marcia about the other girls. His relationship with her was to be the most important, but not the only one.

At the beginning of sophomore year Larry moved into Phi Delta Theta. He chose a room on the second floor of the thirty-room mansion, overlooking the front door, and began an ambitious paint job. Larry wanted to paint a fluorescent spectrum across his walls against a black backdrop in imitation of the cover of
Dark Side of the Moon,
an album by Pink Floyd, as though the colors were spilling on the wall from a giant prism. He got as far as painting his room pitch black and the ceiling white. Then things got busy.

Over the summer after freshman year, Larry had worked in the giant Converse factory in Haverhill. When he was not working at the factory, Larry had a second job as a lifeguard at the swimming pool of his parents’ townhouse complex. He had scholarships and a government loan to help pay his tuition and board at Penn, but he needed every dollar he could scrape up to pay the rest. He especially liked the Converse job. At the factory, workers had fashioned a cave out of the pallets in the warehouse. It couldn’t be seen from the floor, and was entered by climbing up and across the top layer of boxes and then climbing down inside. Out of sight, he and his coworkers, including his friend Ricky Baratt, spent many idle hours smoking dope.

But unlike many of his co-workers, Larry actually enjoyed his work at Converse and found himself growing more and more reluctant to spend so much time getting high. His job in the warehouse was to make up orders for shipments to shoe stores around the country. He would fill pallets with different-sized boxes and cartons of tennis shoes, a time-consuming but important procedure. Converse took pains to package each order exactly to the specifications of each customer, each of which had ordered different combinations of sneakers. Some of the orders were just for a few boxes, some for whole pallets. It fascinated Larry. He had dated the daughter of the man who supervised him, so his boss took a special interest in Larry, who, as a college kid attending an Ivy League school, was regarded as only temporarily suited for such labor. So Larry found himself infected with a new, managerial perspective. He watched his friends and co-workers sneaking off to get high—and continued to join them now and then—but it bugged him that they were working at only 50 percent of their potential. He could hear old echoes of his father’s lament:
Unions have spoiled American workers; it’s no wonder the fuckin’ Japs are kicking our ass!

Larry was surprised to feel such conservative instincts in himself. He had never thought of himself as ambitious, but those stirrings were there, too. Looking back over the way he had spent his first year at Penn, he realized that he couldn’t expect to continue pulling high grades if he lived that way. He resolved to work harder during sophomore year, and to find a way to make more money during the school year so he wouldn’t have to work fifty hours a week again next summer.

It was during this summer that Larry had the first seeds of a notion. He knew that Dan Dill, who was his big brother at Phi Delta Theta, had contacts who sold him two or three pounds of pot at a time, enough to supply the house with ounces and maintain a free supply for Dill’s bong. Dill didn’t see it as a business. But Larry did. It was a business! It worked on the same principle as the Converse
factory: The key to higher profits was higher volume, and the key to higher volume was having a steady supply of product on hand, neatly packaged to suit the customer. If Dill multiplied the number of buyers—nearly everyone Larry knew smoked dope—and maintained a larger supply, profits would quickly grow beyond what it took just to keep himself high.

Immediately on his return to Penn in the fall of 1974, Larry apprenticed himself to his big brother. Dill introduced Larry to the two main sources of marijuana at Penn, Bob Chance and Ed Mott, two upperclassmen who lived in off-campus apartments and drove cars and lived a life that, while not lavish, was far beyond the financial reach of most underclassmen. Chance was a studious personality who kept careful track of business dealings. Mott was a freewheeler who spent his money as fast as he made it. Larry noted that every time he stopped by Mott’s apartment there was a different girl with him—each of them a knockout. Chance and Mott had started dealing together as freshmen and after four years had connections that could deliver hundred-pound bales of pot, thirty-pound lumps of hashish, and large quantities of the other drugs—notably speed and Quaaludes—in demand on campus.

Dill was not as eager as Larry to expand the operation. But shortly after the semester began, he left on a week-long hunting trip to western Pennsylvania. In his absence, Larry paid a routine visit to Chance and Mott to replenish the house dope supply, handing over the standard two hundred dollars. Only this time Larry said he wanted to buy more. He asked them to front him ten pounds—or eleven hundred dollars’ worth of pot.

“Give me one week,” he said.

Chance and Mott agreed. Back in his black fraternity room, Larry used his machete and Dill’s scale to cut the dope into pieces. He sold it for ten dollars per ounce. Before the week was up he drove out to pay Chance and Mott their eleven hundred dollars—a whole brown bag full of bills, mostly tens and twenties. The sequence went Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson. It felt good to go to the branch bank and exchange the smaller bills for hundreds, crisp pale green Ben Franklins. After all, Franklin had founded Penn! When Dill returned from his trip that weekend, Larry handed him five bills. It was hard to believe something so slight as these five slips of green paper could be worth so much—five hundred dollars!

“That’s what I made off your connections this week,” Larry said.

After that, Dill conceded the pot business to his little brother.

L.A. was stuck. While he was away over an October weekend, Ed Mott had dropped off forty pounds of pot. Forty pounds! Who
was he trying to kid? The most L.A. had ever ordered at one time was ten pounds. And he had just moved that much over the last two weeks. All of his customers were well stocked. But there it was, filling a large blue American Tourister suitcase on the floor of his living room.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked Mott, who laughed on the other end of the phone.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Mott. “Take it on credit. Pay me when you move it. No hurry.”

“But you’re nuts,” said L.A. “I’m not going to be able to sell it.”

“Really?”

“Ed, it’s going to grow mold where it is.”

“Well, just hang on to it for a while, sell any of it you can.”

L.A. was annoyed. He knew Mott’s methods. By dropping off that amount he was urging L.A., daring him, to expand his business. There was nearly two thousand dollars in profits there if he could sell it. But he didn’t know where to begin. L.A. was a hulking junior with a broad face and big glasses perched on a wide, crooked nose. His thin, untended brown hair sprayed out like an aura. He was a bit of a loner, an awkward, extremely intelligent young man who liked to stay high—a habit he had started and perfected in high school in California. L.A. had connections in Florida dating back to high school days who were willing to sell him as much or more as Mott could deliver, but he had kept his dealing strictly to a small circle of friends, selling little more than it took to keep him in spending money and to maintain his own steady, free supply. The supply end was L.A.’s strength. How was he going to retail 640 ounces? Yet he knew that if he didn’t sell it, then Mott was just using him to store it, parceling out the risk to his minions. It troubled L.A., but not enough to do anything. His laid-back nickname had stuck for more than one reason. With the exception of a few minor sales, the suitcase was still nearly full when Mott checked back toward the end of November. L.A. told him it was hopeless, and he wasn’t thrilled with having the stuff lying around his apartment.

“Okay. I’m going to send over this guy named Larry.”

And within an hour this cheerful, skinny guy with black hair was at the door. L.A. smoked a joint with him. He thought Larry looked awfully clean-cut and wholesome to be dealing with Mott—most of the pot dealers he knew, including himself, were holdovers from the sixties, long-haired goofs who cultivated their own spacedout brand of cool. Larry wore his hair shorter and had actually combed it. He looked to L.A. more like some kind of ROTC freak. But there was something almost inspiring in the cheerful gleam that came to Larry’s eyes when L.A. showed him the forty-pound bundle.

“Thanks,” Larry said.

Larry took the whole suitcase. He sold the contents in three days.

When Mott came by L.A.’s apartment to collect the money from Larry, he said, “You and L.A. ought to start working together.”

People were still coming to Dan Dill at Phi Delta Theta to buy dope, and when word got out that there was always good and plenty to be had at the corner of Thirty-seventh and Spruce, the crowds grew. L.A. introduced Larry to friends in New York City who were willing to loan him money at 10 percent interest, and soon he was buying up to hundred-pound bales at a time. Larry would recruit one of his fraternity brothers to help him break down the bale with his trusty machete into smaller portions.

Word got out fast when a shipment was in. Soon after Larry started selling seriously he met Andy Mainardi, a freshman living in the Quad who had attended Lawrenceville School. Andy was short and chubby, with thin brown hair, a round face that made the lower part of his head seem larger than the upper, and glasses. He had been friends with Ricky Baratt at Lawrenceville and had done some dealing there, so Andy sought out Larry at Penn. He was a cheerful, energetic, and ambitious fellow, always ready with a story or a joke. He came from a well-to-do, prominent New Jersey family—his father was a judge—and planned eventually to go into business for himself. Andy, like L.A., loved pot. Larry viewed it primarily as merchandise. When Larry suggested cutting it with oregano to increase profits, L.A. and Andy reacted like outraged purists—it wasn’t just dishonest, it was
heresy!
Andy’s approach in particular was more that of a connoisseur than a retail merchant. If Larry was always looking for the most favorable profit margin, Andy was always looking for the best dope. One of the biggest attractions of dealing was that it gave him a chance to pick out for himself the choicest portions of each load as it came through. Andy preserved small samples of the best shipments the way a collector preserved bottles of rare vintage wine.