Blow by Bruce Porter Page B

always careful never to be around where the drugs were. They might have been his drugs, but he wasn’t the guy standing next to them if there was ever a bust.”
    George first walked into the Tonsorial Parlor for a haircut in August of 1967, and Barile remembers the occasion well. “He was friendly, looked like a Robert Redford dude, hair over the collar but not to the shoulder. ‘Hey, come on, let’s take some acid and go down the beach.’ That was George. He brought friends around, they’d sit on the bench outside, just hang out. He was very friendly because of course he knew I had the potential to help him out.”
    So it was that George started getting his pot supply directly from Barile—not directly, actually, because the way Barile set it up he did everything through other people. He had someone else rent different stash houses for him, and when he heard of a load coming in, twenty-five or fifty kilos, he would arrange to get it delivered to one of his houses. Then, if George wanted five or ten kilos out of that, Richard had someone pick it up from the stash house and meet with George to transfer the goods. With his supply assured, George now wanted to expand his market. He didn’t want to keep ouncing the stuff on the street. Not only was it bothersome getting together all those bags, but to maintain his profit level he needed to make a lot of little sales and deal with a lot of potheads—not the most discreet, levelheaded population group. Word of his operation could easily reach the ears of Sergeant McKewen. Wholesaling seemed to be the way to go.
    Early in the fall of 1967, fortune struck in the form of George’s old friend and classmate at Weymouth High School, Frank Shea. Shea and his girlfriend were on their way back to the University of Massachusetts from summer jobs waiting on tables. Visiting George overnight, he noticed a kilo of grass sitting out in a punch bowl on a sideboard in the living room. It was all broken up, with the junk sifted out so that you could just reach in and make a joint. And the quality struck Frank as better than anything he could get back East. “‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘where’d you get this stuff?’” George told him the price and described how easy it was to get good drugs out here. Shea said that back in Amherst, where the market consisted of students from the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, and Amherst—a group of schools known as the Five-College Consortium—pot was selling wholesale for more than three hundred dollars a kilo, six times what Richard Barile charged for it and nearly as much as George was turning it over for in retail. “When I heard that,” George says, “I told Frank, ‘Okay, this is it! We’re going into business. Big-time!’”
    Which was why it seemed an especially cruel turn that at this juncture George should receive notification from Uncle Sam that for all his country had done for him he now had to return the favor by joining the United States Army. The notice came as a rather abrupt shock, since George had heretofore been classified 4-F, thanks to the injury done to his right knee in a scrimmage just before the Brockton game, when he was creamed by John Hollander. Given the exigencies of the Vietnam War, however, the army had since widened its parameters of acceptance; so George might limp a little, but he was going to have to serve the nation in some capacity. Making the best of a bad situation, he called around and found out that Uncle Jack down in Baton Rouge knew a general in the National Guard who could secure George one of the hard-to-get slots in the California branch of the Guard. In George’s eyes, the Guard was punishment enough. “One day I’m stoned on LSD, selling dope, going to the Fillmore, having the time of my life. Then suddenly I’m getting off a bus at Fort Ord, California, and