Suspect Became Known as a ‘High Roller’

Brian Bennett grew up in a three-bedroom house with seven brothers and sisters on a fading stretch of West Florence Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. By the time he was 22, he was paying his rent in a fashionable apartment complex off Wilshire Boulevard with $100 bills and doing business from Detroit to Denmark, where, according to federal investigators, he once ran up an $11,000 hotel bill in four days.

He moved through the world with what the manager of his apartment called “an untouchable attitude.” Cloaked in jogging suits and tennis shoes, he drove an array of expensive cars, received couriers at all hours of the night and, on occasion, brought shopping bags full of cash upstairs to his fourth-floor apartment, according to the manager.

When police surveillance into his alleged cocaine empire grew too severe late last summer, he pulled up stakes and moved to Tempe, Ariz., purchasing a half-million-dollar home in a swank housing tract and spending another $95,000 to build tennis and basketball courts and a swimming pool in the back yard.

The crews were still at work Tuesday, but Bennett, now 24, wasn’t there to appreciate it. He was in federal custody, contemplating the apparent end of what investigators characterize as a remarkably fast ascension into the highest reaches of cocaine trafficking.

Pudgy (5-foot-11, 260 pounds) with a nearly shaven head, Bennett symbolized the kind of drug dealer that people in South Los Angeles call a “high roller.” He did not appear to be rooted in neighborhood street gangs. Federal investigators said they did not consider him a street gang member, merely an ambitious young man who grew up around gang members and, on occasion, may have employed the ones he trusted as couriers. He had been arrested only twice, both on apparently minor charges.

Mysterious Connection

It remained unclear in the wake of Bennett’s arrest how someone with as modest a criminal background became a partner of Mario Ernesto Villabona-Alvarado, a Colombian cocaine kingpin who was arrested earlier this month and allegedly supplied Bennett with millions of dollars of cocaine each week.

By all accounts, Bennett--who was variously nicknamed “Waterhead Bo,” “The Fat One” and “The Pig,” according to federal investigators--was not even the roughest child in his family of eight children and stepchildren.

An older brother, Tony, 25, and a younger brother, Darron, 22, have each been arrested at least seven times on various drug, robbery and firearms charges. Darron served time in state prison for selling PCP.

Neither brother was charged in the federal complaint against Brian Bennett, but undercover officers said both were involved as couriers in Brian’s drug operation--along with their mother, Minny Finley, who last year moved from the Florence Avenue home where the family had lived since the mid-1960s to a spacious, fortress-like home in Northridge. Finley has not been charged with any crimes.

Brian, by contrast, had been arrested on a PCP charge three or four years ago and last year for driving with a suspended license.

“He doesn’t have a reputation for violence,” said a Los Angeles Police Department official familiar with Bennett’s operation.

Bennett’s mother moved to Los Angeles with several children from Michigan, remarried and had several more, according to a neighbor on Florence Avenue. She worked as a dental receptionist and for an aerospace company. Most of her children went to Washington High School, but Brian was sent to live and attend school in the West San Fernando Valley, the neighbor said.

The neighbor, who spoke on the condition she not be identified, said Minny Finley’s family seemed normal, except for a few noisy occasions in which police came to the house and arrested Darron Bennett. In recent years, Brian would come home occasionally, driving an expensive car.

The idea that Minny Finley could wind up carrying bags of drug money to various destinations on behalf of her son--an allegation made frequently by undercover federal investigators in their criminal complaint against Brian--was a surprise to her former neighbor.

“She was a hard-working woman,” the neighbor said. “She’s a very quiet woman. Minny was very, very strict about certain things.”

The family’s life began to change drastically two years ago when, according to investigators, Brian Bennett began buying and selling the cocaine that Villabona rovided.

An older businessman from Pasadena, Jimmy Washington, 42, was recruited by Bennett and Villabona to keep tabs on the money, investigators said. In October, 1987, Washington allegedly bought four check-cashing stores, regarded as ideal devices for laundering drug profits because they are not tightly regulated by the state or federal government, like banks, and because it is not unusual for operators of the stores to make large deposits of cash to banks.

Washington did much of his banking at Founders Savings & Loan in the Crenshaw district, near a mortgage company he had established, according to federal agents, who now say they will impound Washington’s bank accounts.

Washington also rented a $1,200-a-month, two-bedroom apartment for Brian Bennett on South Gramercy Place, north of Wilshire, in a new building populated mostly by the area’s burgeoning Korean population. About the same time, Minny Finley told her friends that she was moving to the San Fernando Valley for the safety of one of her daughters, who she said had been attacked at a local bus stop.

By mid-1987, LAPD drug investigators had begun to keep tabs on Brian Bennett. Bennett’s new neighbors--and those of his mother--were also beginning to pay attention.

The sight of six to eight young black men being buzzed in and out of the security apartment complex on South Gramercy was disconcerting to the Korean tenants, according to the manager of the apartment building. So, too, was the continual flow of expensive Mercedes, Porches and Cadillacs outside.

But there were no hassles. Brian, Tony and Darron Bennett “were very nice guys,” said the manager of the apartment building, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified and who had known for most of this year that police were conducting surveillance. “We called them the skinheads, guys with real short hair, nice sweat outfits. They’d come and go and take off in different directions, as if they thought they might be being followed.

“I think they were using the apartment as a place to keep cash. Sometimes late at night my wife or I would see them carrying big brown paper bags stuffed with cash. It was like they didn’t care. It was like the kinds of scenes you hear about but don’t imagine goes on.”

At Finley’s Northridge home, on the corner of Calahan Street and Yolanda Avenue, across from an elementary school, the new occupants stood out in part because they were the only blacks on a mostly white block.

The previous occupant of Finley’s home had added elaborate security: a wrought iron fence, a locked gate blocking access to the front walk, an electronic gate sealing off the garage and what appears to be a television camera.

Neighbors noticed luxury cars arriving after Finley moved in. The cars would stop for a short time while somebody went into the house and came out again, then move on. The neighbors noticed that action peaked late at night, or early in the morning, when they would see the cars during their daily constitutionals.

“I’ve always had my suspicions about them,” said the mailman, Pascal Nelson. “I thought maybe they had hookers in that house. And I thought about drugs too.”

As 1988 progressed, Bennett and the other suspects appeared to become more aware that law enforcement officers were watching them. In addition to their beepers, car phones and secret jargon, they employed countersurveillance techniques when they drove.

“They can follow me all they want,” Tony Bennett said over a pay phone in front of a fast-food restaurant, according to one undercover officer who said he listened to Tony’s end of the conversation. “ ‘Cause I’m not moving the (cocaine) load, Bo is. I’ll just take them all over town.”

Times staff writers Judy Pasternak and Stephen Braun contributed to this story.