The Fling of a High Roller

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.