Blow by Bruce Porter Page A

characters in Planet of the Apes. He talked rapidly in a clipped Connecticut accent and avoided eye contact, looking off a lot. Barile was the son of a contractor in Branford, outside New Haven. After leaving the Marine Corps, he’d gotten a job as a conductor on the old New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, which allowed him to take free train trips across the country during his vacations. On one such trip the train eventually stopped at Manhattan Beach, where Barile got off and began looking around for something to do that would keep him in California. Back home an aunt and a brother-in-law were in the beauty-parlor business, so he decided to use his benefits under the G.I. Bill and go to hairdressing school. After eighteen months of perming women’s hair at a local shop, he opened up a place of his own two blocks up the hill from the beach, the first unisex hair salon in town. He called it the Tonsorial Parlor.
    Trained in the art of layering and shaping women’s hair, Barile became a huge hit with the guys in Manhattan Beach, since long hair was fast becoming the style and just about the only way the old-time barbers knew to attack it was to shear it off. He also provided special services to special customers. For the airline pilots he fashioned straight-arrow wigs and tie-up jobs so they could keep their long hair for the beach parties but tuck it under their hats to pass the company’s grooming inspection. He did the same for guys in the marijuana trade, who needed to clean up their appearances before going on a business trip south of the border, where the sight of long hair and ponytails registered in the minds of the Federales the same as if they’d had a sign on them saying ARREST ME .
    For Barile, then, drug smuggling turned out to be a naturally coterminous extension of the hair game—like the old-time coal dealers who in summer got into selling ice—and he designed his shop in a way that seemed to nod approvingly at the outlaw’s way of life. Paneled in old barn wood and decorated in a western motif, the walls were hung with portraits of famous bandits—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse and Frank James, John Wesley Hardin. The two cutting rooms at the Tonsorial Parlor were closed off by swinging doors so people in the back could converse without being seen from the street. There was a pool table in the front waiting room and benches out on the sidewalk, both of which invited people to loiter, discuss ideas, make plans.
    Pretty soon the activities at the Tonsorial Parlor moved from the talking stage to something more concrete. “At first I’d just be doing people a favor, let them use the telephone, give them a place to hang out, or I’d know someone who wanted to buy some pot and I’d introduce them,” Barile recalls. “Soon friends would be dropping off a couple of kilos of pot, and I’d hold them for them, and they’d sell ounces out of the barbershop. Then if someone needed a pilot or a place to stash something, whatever anyone needed, I had the connections, because through the business I knew everyone and they trusted me. Before I knew it, I was putting all three things together. But I was just doing it to be a good Samaritan, I wasn’t making any money. So one day I said, the hell with this, man, I should really get in on the bandwagon here. And I did, and I became very successful at it.”
    Hearing the talk on the street, of course, Sergeant McKewen got wind that something was going on with Barile and the Tonsorial Parlor that didn’t have to do with hair. But never during that period, nor in the decade following, when Barile would routinely pull off cocaine sales in the millions of dollars, did McKewen get even close to making an arrest. “Everyone knew Richard was involved, but it was tough to make a case on him,” he says. “He was a very brazen guy, but he was clever. He never got caught because he was