TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120390/1203103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.1 KB | 221 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 51

The Fling of a High Roller


Living a ghetto dream, Bo Bennett rode the coke trade from
poverty to riches -- and into prison

By JONATHAN BEATY and ED MAGNUSON


    On the day in 1988 when Caesars Palace sent a luxurious
Learjet to fly Brian ("Bo") Bennett to Las Vegas, he must have
marveled at how his lot in life had changed. Only three years
earlier the youth from the downtrodden ghetto of South Central
Los Angeles was stocking shelves in a supermarket. Now, at 23,
he was off on the kind of fling casinos reserve for the highest
rollers.

    In between bouts at the gaming tables, Bennett would be
treated to a free ringside seat at the championship fight
between Sugar Ray Leonard and Donny Lalonde. After Leonard won
by a knockout, Bennett would receive the champ's satin dressing
gown as a souvenir. He would golf with top hotel executives and
tip waitresses with $100 gambling chips. His lavish suite would
not cost him a dime.

    Why such hospitality for a man with no visible means of
support? Because Bennett was flush with cash. He won and lost
thousands at blackjack and craps. He also had a host of buddies
who enjoyed the high life as much as he did. They romped through
the hotel lobbies, slapping palms and spending freely. They
glittered with gold chains and had flashy women on their arms.
Like most businessmen, they enjoyed a rowdy national convention.
Their trade, however, was illegal. It was the import,
distribution and sale of cocaine.

    Bennett's rise to riches is an example of the cocaine
trade's devastating impact on the nation's impoverished urban
neighborhoods, which are breeding a new, sophisticated -- and
violent -- kind of criminal. By offering dreams of wealth, the
business has lured some of the best and brightest young minds in
the inner cities. To Bennett, an unsophisticated youth with a
talent for business, dealing cocaine was a path to success.

    In Bennett's view, forming a partnership with Colombia's
Cali cartel was a lucrative business opportunity. His main
supplier, a drug lord known to him only as "Oscar," was in
effect the chairman of the board of a multinational enterprise.
Bennett saw himself as chief executive officer of the California
subsidiary. He had an associate, Mario Villabona, who had moved
from Colombia to California in 1983. Villabona, a protege of
Oscar's, amounted to the California president.


    Bennett's good fortune began when Oscar instructed
Villabona to develop a market for crack in ghetto areas. It was
a bold but necessary business decision. By the mid-1980s, the
price of powdered cocaine had fallen, in part because sales to
affluent whites had peaked. Crack, the tiny smokable rock, could
be immensely profitable if it could be moved in huge quantities.
Blacks were a tempting new market.

    Villabona somehow selected Bennett to become the Cali
group's first connection with black street gangs in the U.S.
With Villabona, he swiftly built an empire that by 1988 was
moving one ton of cocaine a week and pulling in gross income of
up to $4 million a month.

     Bennett's illegal enterprise expanded so swiftly that the
crack trade soon dominated the economy of the South Central
area. With its many logistical needs, it lured otherwise
respectable businessmen into helping out and reaping profits.
Like other import firms, Bennett needed delivery vehicles (in
this case, fast cars), secure communications (cellular
telephones), warehouses (safe houses), banking facilities (money
launderers) and retailers (street dealers). As smaller
distributors and street sellers all collected commissions while
spreading the poison through the black neighborhoods, crack
became even more profitable to the area's underground economy
than it was to the foreign suppliers.

    Ironically, Bo had seemed an unlikely prospect for a
criminal career. While his two brothers, Tony and Darron, ran
with tough gangs and had arrest records, he avoided violence.
Overweight and suffering from asthma, Bo was a well-liked
teenager who took school seriously. He jumped at the chance to
ride buses to a predominantly white high school in Sepulveda. He
was given a room by a white family so he would be close to his
new school and able to take the grocery job nearby. Unlike most
of his friends, he managed to graduate from high school in 1982.
His diploma pleased his widowed mother Minnie Finley, who
cleaned motel rooms and had high hopes for Bo.

    But Bo never did escape. By 1987 Los Angeles detectives had
heard reports that a big black kid (Bennett is 5 ft. 11 in., 260
lbs.) was arriving at drug night spots in a Rolls-Royce driven
by a young Hispanic. This was a mistake Bennett repeated: he
made himself too visible. He even drove up to a South Central
car wash in his Mercedes-Benz to boast to bystanders, "I got
more keys [kilos of cocaine] in my trunk than you all got
clothes on your back."

    With his sudden affluence, Bo paid off the mortgage on his
mother's house on Florence Avenue and moved her to a rented home
in middle-class Northridge. He bought his sister Carmen a
manicure salon and a condominium in Tarzana. He set his brother
Darron up in a high-rise on Wilshire Avenue in Westwood, paying
the $3,000 monthly rent. Moving frequently to avoid being ripped
off by other drug dealers, Bo placed his common-law wife Linda
Payton and their son Brian Jr. in a San Fernando Valley
apartment. As a hideaway, he bought a $200,000 house in
Chatsworth with cash. Since he put many of his relatives to work
in his crack business, he had to provide them with cars. He kept
a fleet of 10 modest vehicles for business use, while he drove
a Mercedes or Corvette.

    The largesse added to Bennett's overhead, but he could
afford it. In 1987, when cocaine prices were at an all-time low,
Oscar in Cali was charging Villabona about $10,000 for a kilo.
Out of that, Oscar paid Colombian growers and refiners about
$3,000 and Mexican smugglers $2,000. He kept $5,000 for himself.
In the U.S., Villabona and Bennett charged $12,000 for a kilo
and split the profits. Some weeks Bo pocketed $1 million.

    Two of Bennett's best customers were David and Michael
Harris, flashy distributors who ran a string of crack houses in
South Central L.A. Michael's profits let him buy a red Ferrari
and gain access to a world of celebrities and politicians who
were unaware of how he could afford his leather suits and
diamond pendants. That may be because he also ran a trucking
firm, an auto-leasing outfit and a limousine company, which were
handy for his coke business. Recalls an admiring associate: "His
drivers wore tuxedoes and he always made sure there was
champagne in the cars."

    To supply lower-level dealers with pagers and cellular
telephones that were difficult for narcs to overhear, Michael
Harris set up a front company, Telesis Electrical Co. He even
became a patron of the arts. His money-laundering theatrical
production company invested $385,000 in the Broadway production
of Checkmates, which ran for five months in 1988.

    While Bennett's flamboyant life-style attracted attention,
the police had nothing solid on him. Villabona, however, became a
bit too bold. In 1987 he lent a house he owned in Westlake
Village to a cartel kingpin. When Drug Enforcement
Administration agents raided the house in pursuit of that
operator, they found records showing that Villabona and his
Danish wife Helle Nielsen had seven bank accounts in
Copenhagen. Later, the unsuspecting Villabona twice flew to
Denmark, where he made hundreds of telephone calls to conduct
his coke business. So, on one occasion, did Bennett.

    At the urging of the DEA, Danish police were listening.
They heard Villabona and Bennett order 2,000 lbs. of cocaine
and arrange its distribution. They also heard Cali bosses
complain that Villabona was $3.3 million behind in his
payments. Indignantly, he asked his handlers to prove that he
was short. One of them detailed his transactions -- and the
incriminating evidence was taped.

    Bennett, who had been robbed several times by other
druggies, got tired of running. He bought a furnished
five-bedroom house in Tempe, Ariz., for $450,000. When he
spotted another house nearby with an indoor swimming pool, he
told a realtor, "I've gotta have it." He bought it for his
brother and sister to occupy. In all, Bennett and his friends
and relatives grabbed five houses in Tempe.

    In the end, Bennett and his business pals were tripped up by
the high-tech gadgets they depended on to keep the cops in the
dark. On Nov. 6, 1988, two of Michael Harris' delivery men were
stopped by Missouri state troopers for driving a van at 68
m.p.h. in a 55 m.p.h. zone. The officers found 1,100 lbs. of
coke in the vehicle. They also seized a cellular telephone.
Tidily programmed into its memory were Bennett's telephone
number in Tempe and that of a Los Angeles company linked to
Villabona.

    That persuaded a California judge to let federal agents tap
the phone at Villabona's house in Malibu. They overheard him set
up his biggest deal yet: a 3,000 kilo-a-month supply line to
buyers in Detroit. Michigan police moved in when the would-be
buyers tried to deliver $5 million in cash to a motel outside
Detroit.

    In a swift roundup of the gang on Nov. 19, 1988, Bennett
was arrested in Tempe and Villabona in Malibu. Harris was
already serving a sentence for attempted murder. Last May they
and five associates were convicted on a federal charge of
conspiracy to import cocaine. This week they face sentencing.
Bennett and Villabona were expected to get life imprisonment
without parole. For Bennett, the thrilling ride on the fast
track is over. The millions he spent are merely memories. His
houses and fancy cars were seized by federal agents.

    The crack business in South Central L.A., however, is still
flourishing, but with one notable difference. The young black
businessmen who have taken Bennett's place drive Nissans instead
of Mercedes, and try to keep a low profile.