Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Page A

assortment of different-sized boxes of Ziploc plastic bags. While dealers like Chance and Mott had avoided selling in quantities smaller than pounds, and handed over the stuff carelessly wrapped in newspaper or whatever else it had come in, Larry would sell to anyone and package to specifications. If Andy Mainardi wanted ten pounds, which he would be selling by the ounce, Larry would break down the ten pounds into ounces himself, delivering a box filled with neat baggies—just like an order from the Converse plant! With Larry it was almost a fetish. When a messy order of hash oil came in, he put on a lab coat and visited a scientific supply house off campus to order boxes of tiny glass vials. His customers were delighted. Larry even started delivering. Across campus and through the surrounding West Philly neighborhoods, Larry would carry green plastic sacks filled with Ziploc bags of grass and fling the orders up to dorm windows into the waiting arms of his customers, like a newsboy on his rounds.
    The business operated on one simple principle: Whatever Larry could buy, he could sell.
    Where in the past campus dealers had adhered to a kind of unspoken hippie tradition that it was unseemly to make too much money dealing marijuana, Larry was guided by something more basic, that emerging yuppie precept: greed. He was on the phone constantly, taking orders, scouting out new sources, comparing prices to keep his own competitive. His net worth was plotted carefully after each deal, and detailed records of purchases, sales, and debts were kept in tiny handwriting on sheets of paper hidden inside selected album covers—Larry’s collection of albums had grown considerably since the ones he had stolen from classmates at Exeter. Unlike traditional campusdope dealers, who sold only when they happened to have a large supply, Larry maintained a constant supply so that customers would know they could always buy from him. He even varied his inventory, dealing the basic user’s Mexican pot he got from Ed Mott or Bob Chance or Tom Finchley, typically in 100-pound bundles packed in boxes he bought for $90 to $100 per pound and sold for $165 per pound, while for more expensive tastes Larry stocked Colombian or Jamaican pot from Ralph in Virginia or from new sources at Penn State from whom he bought shipments of anywhere from 5 pounds to 220 pounds at about $320 per pound and sold at $425 per pound. For those who preferred a quick, powerful high, Larry sold blond hash that he could get from L.A.’s sources in Florida for $800 per pound and sell for $1,200 per pound; for those exploring more exotic highs Larry had rare black opiated hash that he bought for $1,600 per pound and sold at $2,000 per pound; and for those who liked their dope to hit them over the head hard he had messy hash oil, which Larry bottled to order, gently warming the tarlike stuff by the potful until he could pour it into his tiny glass vials. The hash oil, supplied by a student at Swarthmore College who delivered the sticky black drug in jars for $75 an ounce, Larry sold sometimes for as much as $150 per ounce. For retail sales he kept his pricing in line with the current prices listed in
High Times
magazine—that way he could point to proof that he was not gouging his customers. But perhaps the single most important feature of Larry’s booming trade was his almost kamikaze willingness to front the drugs and wait for payment. You didn’t even have to have money to buy dope from Larry.
    He had good business instincts. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he and L.A. and two other partners pooled funds to buy 100,000 Black Beauties, black capsules of amphetamine. It was a sure thing—Larry was really excited about it. Each capsule cost only two cents wholesale. Larry knew they could sell them at Penn for fifty cents each—a $48,000 profit! Before buying the capsules, Larry and L.A. found a couple of students willing to try them.
    “If the deal goes through, we’ll