Free Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Page A

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 Conversefactory: 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