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The three-mile chase ended a five-year-long pursuit by the police. Harry Feingold's arrest that March afternoon broke up what prosecutors said was the most extensive drug dealership ever uncovered in Suffolk County...
Within hours of Harry's capture, police arrested his wife, Joanne, and his brothers Marc, then 23, and Michael, then 28, all on charges that they had conspired to distribute cocaine. And in Florida, the Feingolds' father, Irving, a 57-year-old catering chef married to a Colombian woman, was accused of being his sons' supplier and was extradited to New York.
Before spring's end, they and 26 other people - including a chiropractor, a Long Island Rail Road engineer, a rock-band manager and the son of a local politician - would plead guilty to involvement in the operation. Harry, Irving and Marc Feingold would all be sentenced to terms in state prison...
"They're not bad people," said Evalynn Feingold, Harry's mother, who lives in West Islip with Michael, a minor figure in the case who pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and was the only one of her sons not sentenced to state prison. Standing over a stove preparing chicken cutlets on a recent night, she talked about Harry, now 30, and Marc. "Why does anyone sell drugs? Greed. They were taking an easy way of making a living."
What follows is an account of how Harry Feingold and some of his friends made a living....
Evalynn and Irving Feingold moved with their three sons from Brooklyn to Curtin Avenue, West Islip, in 1965...
Irving Feingold had been in the Navy and later drove a cab, but soon after marrying he entered the catering trade of his father-in-law...
Irving's work often took him and his wife to hotels in the Catskills, where he would cook and she would wait on tables. Sometimes the family traveled and worked together, in the Catskills and in Florida...
When his 15-year-old girlfriend moved with her family to California. Harry, 18, followed her and married her in Tijuana, and they returned to West Islip...Harry spent two years in the Navy, in California and the Far East. After leaving the service, he bought a delicatessen and employed his mother and two brothers. But like his marriage, which lasted only a few years, the deli didn't work out...
Marc graduated from West Islip in 1980 and attended Canton College in upstate New York, where he obtained a degree in business administration. It is also where he first used cocaine..
While Marc was at college, his oldest brother was establishing himself in the drug trade...
By this time, Harry had already been dealing both marijuana and cocaine from a New York source, according to detectives. The big boost in his business came after 1980, when Irving Feingold divorced his wife, moved permanently to Hialeah, Fla., and married a Colombian woman...
Harry, whose mother describes him with pride as "a natural businessman," developed a purchasing, production and marketing system no less efficient than that of a fast-food outlet. Police said it went like this:
Three times a month, Irving Feingold purchased 2 to 6 kilograms - 4.4 to 13.2 pounds - of pure cocaine from a Colombian importer he knew in South Florida. Harry would dispatch a courier, usually Raymond Ovetsky, an old friend who lived on Central Park South, on a night flight to Miami to pick up the shipment. Ovetsky, a rock-band manager known more commonly as Arlo (the acronym of his initials, RLO), would fly back the following morning with the cocaine.
At first, Harry kept the cocaine in a safe in his house on Wampum Lane. But after a burglary in 1982 - police believe that cocaine was taken - Harry decided to establish a warehouse. He talked to his oldest friend, Tommy Cahill, a New York City sanitation worker who lived with his wife and four children on Center Chicot Avenue. A deal was struck: Harry would keep his inventory in a locked attache case in a locked part of Cahill's basement, near his woodworking shop. He would also keep a triple-beam scale and a device to heat-seal bags. He would have unlimited access to the basement.
In return, Cahill, himself a cocaine user, would get $200 a month and free cocaine...
Feingold kept careful books...
There was Leigh McGunnigle, a young chiropractor from Brooklyn...He was sentenced to 60 days in jail and five years' probation.
There was Michael Lynch, 37, owner of a sporting-goods store who operated softball leagues... was sentenced to a 1-to-3-year term. There were Patrick Meade of Ocean Beach and James Marthen of Smithtown, both of whom worked in real estate. There was Frank Van Dyke, who lived in Manhattan, and Jay Jarboe of Oakdale, who was known as Jaybird. All pleaded guilty to attempted-conspiracy charges and were sentenced to brief terms in the Suffolk County jail...
Harry lived there with his second wife, Joanne, whom he had married in the summer of 1982. The house was on a cul de sac on Great South Bay, in a section called Magoun Landing..
Harry had a flamboyant lifestyle... He visited his circuit of bars, in West Islip and Manhattan, often arriving in a limousine. Sometimes, he played "celebrity bartender" at one of his hangouts, Grand Central Station in Bay Shore...
In Hialeah, meanwhile, Irving Feingold was apparently enjoying life as a drug middleman...
Marc Feingold's group, however, was more porous. And after police had spent four years on his brother's trail, their case began to move in the spring of 1984. They arrested someone who told narcotics detectives Coletto and McGovern that he had bought his cocaine from an auto-body worker named Brian Soltan, and that Soltan's source was Marc Feingold. The informant arranged a sale between Soltan and an undercover detective. When the three met, the detective said later, Soltan told him that he had to go get the cocaine. The informant prompted him: "You gotta go to Feingold's?"...
In August, 1984, Harry needed someone to make a pickup, and Billy Bagdanoff needed a manifold for his Dodge Charger. Bagdanoff, 18, was a local teenager who did landscaping at Harry's house. When Feingoldoffered him $500 to pick up a package in Miami, he accepted...