Blow

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  A Note on Sources

  Prologue (1974)

  1. Weymouth (1946–1965)

  2. Manhattan Beach (1967–1968)

  3. Puerto Vallarta (1968–1970)

  4. Mazatlán (1970–1973)

  5. Danbury (1974–1975)

  6. Cape Cod (1975–1976)

  7. Miami (1977)

  8. Norman Cay (1978)

  9. Eastham (1978–1980)

  10. Fort Lauderdale (1985)

  11. Jacksonville (1987)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  It’s not at all so easy as you fellers think it might be.… You’d be satisfied with five grand. But I tell you, if you find something then, you couldn’t be dragged away; not even the threat of miserable death could stop you getting just ten thousand more. And if you reach fifty, you want to make it a hundred, to be safe for the rest of your life. When you finally have a hundred and fifty, you want two hundred, to make sure, absolutely sure, that you’ll be really on the safe side, come what may.

  —B. TRAVEN, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE

  A Note on Sources

  This story is true. I’ve reconstructed the events and conversations in it from interviews with witnesses and participants whose names appear in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. I also drew on the extensive evidence available from legal sources, including the police investigations, indictments, plea agreements, and/or trials of George Jung, Carlos Lehder, Barry Kane, and Richard Barile.

  In several instances, I changed the names of incidental characters whose involvement in one aspect or another of the drug trade has escaped the attention of the authorities and the media. In such cases, I refer to the characters solely by first name.

  Prologue

  1974

  If you are a new inmate only recently sentenced by the courts, this will probably be an entirely new experience for you.

  —FROM THE INMATE INFORMATION HANDBOOK AT THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, DANBURY, CONNECTICUT

  THE QUARTER-MILE-LONG ROAD INTO THE PRISON at Danbury seems more like a driveway into some fancy retreat for big thinkers than the entrance to a federal facility for convicted felons. Lofty spruce and elm trees throw shadows across the road as it winds up from the highway. Off in the distance a man on a tractor is mowing the meadow, bringing into relief the contours of the gently sloping hillside. Even when the water tower and the white concrete buildings loom into view, there’s little about the place that appears ominous. Designed in the Art Deco style of the late 1930s, with rounded corners and strong vertical lines in the center, the prison has no guard towers or search lights up on spires, no fences or razor wire surrounding the perimeter. Inside, the men don’t live in the steel cages piled high in cell blocks that you see in prison movies but in their own seven-by-nine-foot rooms, each situated off a dayroom or set back from a balcony on the second floor. They’ve got real doors instead of bars, and real privacy. Each room has a desk built in underneath the window so an inmate can write his letters while gazing out over the rolling Connecticut countryside. As a place to spend several years, the quarters might seem a bit confining, but not to a degree that would strike any freshman at a New England boarding school as particularly Spartan.

  George Jung was bused up to Danbury from New York City by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in April of 1974, together with a dozen other inmates from throughout the Northeast. Among other events that spring, Saigon lay under siege by the Viet Cong. Patty Hearst had joined forces with her kidnappers, members the Symbionese Liberation Army, and helped them hold up a bank. President Richard Nixon was refusing demands that he resign from office, because “that would lead to weak and unstable presidencies in the future.” When George arrived at Danbury, he was thirty-one years old. He had shaggy, honey-blond hair and was five feet ten inches tall, with broad, muscular shoulders and a massive chest. He’d been doing work on that physique ever since junior high, when he started lifting weights in his bedroom to get himself in shape for the football team by the time he got to high school. The “Jung” came not from any Chinese ancestors, as most people assumed before they saw him in person. It was Dutch, pronounced with a hard “J”. And, indeed, the way his hair was cut, about two inches longer than the style popularized by the Beatles, he looked a lot like the famous Dutch boy on the can of paint. His grandfather, Frederick Jung, a cigar maker, had migrated from Amsterdam in 1903 and worked as a cigar-roller for the J. A. Cigar Company in Boston. His father, also named Frederick, but called “Fritz” by his multitude of friends, ran an independent fuel-oil business for many years with contracts to serve apartment buildings in Boston. George had grown up in the coastal town of Weymouth, Massachusetts, about twenty miles south of Boston, in a house situated just around the corner and up a hill from the Abigail Adams Homestead, birthplace of the woman who became wife to the second president of the United States and mother to the sixth.

  The event propelling George toward Danbury had taken place a year and a half earlier, in late September of 1972, at the bar of the Playboy Club of Chicago. At the fateful moment, George was being mesmerized by a vibrantly blond Swedish hooker, a dead ringer, he thought, for the movie actress Britt Ekland. As he was applying the finishing touches to an arrangement that would get this luscious piece up to his room, two men in suits approached and asked if he’d mind stepping outside for a minute. They turned out to be agents for the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

  What they wanted to talk about was the fact that three days earlier George had arrived at Union Station from Los Angeles with two steamer trunks, each of them packed with 150 kilos of marijuana, a total of 660 pounds’ worth. George was delivering the goods to a well-to-do young man in Chicago eager to involve himself in something profitable other than his father’s extensive scrap-metal business. The man had agreed to pay George $150 a kilo for it, or a total of $45,000, not a small amount in those days, when a brand new Porsche, now costing as much as $100,000, was going for $8–10,000. From the baggage room in the train station George had arranged for the trunks to be transferred by two limousines to the basement of the Playboy Club, where the manager had been given to understand that they contained a large amount of camera equipment and that George was an important figure in the world of fashion photography. Two days later the intended customer had showed up with a van and a guy to help him, and the two of them had carted the pot away. George was now waiting in the bar to get his money.

  The thrust of George’s drug business involved purchasing three to four hundred kilos of grass every month or so from small farmers in the Sierra Madre in Mexico, flying it in to dry lake beds in the desert country of Southern California, then trucking the load east in a rented Winnebago, where he would sell it to wholesalers in Amherst, Massachusetts, the locus of four private colleges and a large state university, with an aggregate enrollment of some thirty thousand pot-hungry students. Since 1968 George had made a good living doing this, and he had become familiar with a large part of America in the process. He was now hoping to add Chicago’s hot spots to his market.

  The deal would have gone off fine, if only George’s prospective customer had not, three weeks earlier, tried to sell some heroin to an undercover policeman. Having unpleasant visions of himself behind bars, he had agreed to keep the authoriti
es apprised of his pot transaction with George, in exchange for consideration on his sentence. Thus the appearance of these two federal agents interrupting George on this, his night of nights. Actually, they apologized for arresting him. It was really heroin guys they wanted, not pot smugglers. Marijuana at the time was coming into such widespread use as to approach alcohol and tobacco as drugs of preference in the United States; and at least some people in the federal government were urging the authorities to be a little less hysterical about stamping it out. A report to the president from the Domestic Council’s Drug Abuse Task Force estimated that between 25 and 30 million Americans over the age of eleven—about 20 percent of the population—had smoked pot. And when it came to how law-enforcement agencies should be allocating their time, the drug was relegated to very low priority—fifth, below heroin, amphetamines, barbiturates, and cocaine. For that matter, cocaine wasn’t causing much of a ripple, either. Where the first three drugs were deemed high on their ability to induce physical or psychological dependence and in the “severity-of-adverse-consequences” category, pot and coke scored a low on both counts.

  The debate, of course, had little effect on George’s predicament; but one thing he had come to realize in his mere four years as a professional drug outlaw was that in the criminal justice system one’s situation rarely stays bleak for very long if one applies some of the basic rules of the game. Rule one: Be very skeptical in general toward any advice of your lawyer to the effect that you should fight the case and present yourself before the men and women of the jury. Lawyers earn fees that way, and you earn time, especially if you’ve been caught as red-handed as George was now. Not only will the jury, without a doubt or a qualm, saw off your nuts with a rusty blade and hand them up to you on a platter, but the exercise is bound to cost a lot of money fruitlessly spent. Rule two: Plead not guilty at the arraignment and get bailed out of jail. If necessary, you can change your plea later if your lawyer works out something with the prosecutor. The DA’s a busy person and will cut a deal that’s better than anything you’d get from a trial. But you won’t have to worry about any of that, because according to Rule three, promptly after the arraignment, you take off.

  Thus, two days after pleading not guilty to a charge of possession of 660 pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute, George got himself bonded out of the Cook County Jail, said good-bye forever to Chicago, boarded a flight to Los Angeles, and went back to work bringing more loads across the border. Temporarily, at least, he decided to forgo his dream of midwestern expansion in favor of sticking with old customers who were trustworthy and dependable.

  As a federal bond jumper, however, he now had the FBI on his trail, which meant that more effort would be exerted toward his capture than would be had he skipped out on a state charge, since states have little wherewithal to track people cross-country. But even the FBI had to follow budget priorities. Since bond defaulters were rated less of a threat than, say, escapees from federal prisons or people who were armed and dangerous, the effort to nab George was limited to sending his file to the FBI office nearest his hometown and a local agent advised to keep an eye out in case he showed up.

  “Usually with a fugitive you look for the girlfriend, what is it, ‘Cherchez la femme?’” says James J. Trout, then a young FBI agent working in the Fugitive Squad in Boston. Trout had been with the Bureau for only a year at the time and had a caseload of forty other fugitives to track down. “Find the girlfriend and most of the time she’ll lead you right to him.” George didn’t have a girlfriend; he did have a sister, Marie, four years older, but she had married a Ph.D. in chemistry named Otis Godfrey and moved away to Indiana, where Otis was a rising star in the research division of Eli Lilly & Co. The couple lived in the suburb of Greenwood, outside Indianapolis, in a neat little house with trees and a yard. It’s safe to say the last thing they wanted was a visit from George the jailbird; they’d be sure to invite the neighbors over for that one. This left Trout to forage for information from George’s parents, Ermine and Fred, who still lived on “the Circle,” as the area around Abigail Adams’s birthplace was known in Weymouth. So he’d stop by once in a while to see what they had to say, which usually wasn’t much. Whereas Marie liked to phone her mother nearly every day, George wasn’t too good in the keeping-in-touch department. Indeed, his parents hadn’t seen him face-to-face in nearly two years, since before his arrest in Chicago. So when Trout visited to chat on the topic of their son’s whereabouts, Fred and Ermine treated him pleasantly enough, talked with him and all, but said they couldn’t help much.

  “I felt sorry for them, which is almost always the case,” Trout recalls. “They were nice people. The parents are always the ones who pay for it in the long run. It’s in the newspapers, the neighbors all know, a terrible embarrassment.”

  Actually, as Trout thinks back, it was George’s mother who was the gabby one. Fred didn’t have much to say, at least to Trout. In truth, the visits rankled Fred, and he even called a lawyer at one point to see about preventing the agent from coming around, but then dropped the matter. Arguing about their son was an old routine for Mr. and Mrs. Jung. The question of exactly how much they should be helping the police to catch him had opened up another unpleasant chapter. Fred also grumbled to George about the FBI visits during one of the rare phone calls his son made from the West Coast. That’s how George learned that Trout had been upstairs looking around his old room at the front of the house, where he used to lift weights and tend his fish tank, and where clippings from the Quincy Patriot Ledger about his feats as a halfback for the Weymouth High School Maroons hung on the wall. Also there for Trout to inspect was a photograph of George down in Mexico, with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat pulled down to shade his eyes, a long cigar clenched in his mouth, cartridge belts criss-crossed over his chest, a large revolver stuck in his belt, and a bottle of tequila in his fist. He looked like one bad hombre, for sure.

  As it happened, in November of 1973, a little over a year after the Playboy Club bust, George flew to Boston to meet with a contact he’d developed in Amherst to firm up a deal that would effect a major increase in the volume of his business. The man had approached him the previous summer and said he knew people with two twin-engine Cessnas who wanted someone to hook them up with a connection in Mexico, to guarantee them an uninterrupted supply of marijuana. They would handle the details of transporting the stuff into the United States and distributing it thereafter. All George would have to do is take care of the Mexican end and load up the flights, a proposition that seemed almost too good to be true. And with the volume this guy was talking about, it looked like the operation could net him something on the order of a million a year, ten times what he was doing at the time. Euphoric over the new possibilities, and realizing it meant he’d be out of the country for a long time, George had decided to drive down to Weymouth and pay a short visit to his parents.

  He knew what risk the venture entailed, which was why he’d told no one where he was going. He hadn’t even told his parents that he was coming by. It was dark on a Saturday night right after Thanksgiving, about eight o’clock, when he pulled his rented car into the wooded area by the Weymouth Community Church, down the hill from his parents’ house. He cut up through a thick stand of spruce that Mr. Stennes, the local clock maker, had planted in the late 1950s as a way to earn extra money by selling Christmas trees. (The scheme died abruptly a few years after George graduated from high school when old man Stennes shot and killed his wife after mistaking her for an intruder.)

  Aided by the dim light of a new moon, George made his way through the trees, approaching the house via the backyard, and knocked on the kitchen door that opened onto a breezeway leading to the garage. It was cold. The door was opened by his father, a short, balding man, dressed in the khakis and plaid shirt he always wore—typical “dad clothes,” as George called them. Ever since his stroke fifteen years earlier Fred cried easily over the things that disappointed him in life—mainly George. The tears came now when
he saw his son standing there. Then Ermine showed up at the door, more shocked to see him than glad, it seemed to George, acting nervous through the whole visit. His father brought him into the living room, and the two began making headway into a bottle of Scotch. Fred asked him how things were going. George talked about California, how easy it was living out there. Ermine kept getting up and disappearing into the couple’s downstairs bedroom.

  Special Agent Trout remembers the call coming in just before ten o’clock. A voice said: “He’s in the house right now in Weymouth.” Hurriedly corralling two other agents to help out, Trout drove the half hour it took to get there and pulled up across the street. One agent went around to watch the back door. Trout and his partner went up the front walk and looked through the window into the living room. They spotted George sitting on the couch. Trout began banging on the glass-paned storm door, announcing loudly that he was with the FBI and demanding that they open the door. He saw George bolt off the couch and disappear from view. He yelled louder and banged harder, so hard the glass shattered just as Fred was opening up the inner door. “I ended up cutting myself fairly badly on the hand,” says Trout. “And when we got inside, before we even started searching the house, the mother insisted on stopping the bleeding and bandaging me up.”

  George knew what was up at the first banging and instinctively raced upstairs to his room, thinking that maybe he could do a Huckleberry Finn out the window to the garage roof, drop to the ground as he’d done as a kid, and take off. He thought fleetingly too of his old double-barreled 12-gauge still stuck in the rafters; he used to bang away with it at the ducks flying over the marsh down back of the house. The shells were probably still in his dresser drawer. Suddenly his father called up the stairs: “George, this is your mother’s and my house, and if you’re doing what I think you’re doing, you’d better stop right now.” In the end, George just crawled into the back of his clothes closet, worming through an opening in the eaves into a cubbyhole where he’d played as a little boy. Soon he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Trout poked his head into the room and called for George to come out. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt, he said.