Word: boing
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...since a 1978-82 stint in TIME's Washington bureau; among other duties, he covered the Drug Enforcement Administration. He first contributed to a major TIME story on drugs in 1981, when we examined cocaine. This week he takes a look at the empire of Los Angeles superdealer Bo Bennett. Beaty covered Bennett's trial, but also spent months talking to drug traffickers. "At one point," he says, "I actually presided over a conference, with people at all levels of the business explaining to me how it works." Gaining their confidence was not easy. Beaty, who once went through...
...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...
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...
...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...