By the mid-1980s, even as Laren Sims Jordan was beginning her downward spiral into a career of petty crime more than two thousand miles away, Larry was learning the truth of the old adage that being rich isn’t the same thing as being happy.

Later, even Larry’s closest friends would marvel at his penchant for doing himself harm with chemical substances. “It was like he thought he was invisible,” one of his oldest friends remembered. “That’s the way it is with drunks—they think they’re invisible, that nobody notices that they’ve been drinking. They think they’re acting perfectly normally, even when they’re blotto.”

Friends would recall that when people would tell Larry that he was drinking too much, he often acted insulted—as if he were too accomplished, too perfect to have such a flaw. “You couldn’t tell him anything when he got like that,” a friend remembered. “You’d say, ‘Hey, Larry, it’s me—remember me? I’ve known you all your life, you can’t fool me.’” But Larry wasn’t capable of taking personal advice from people—especially his closest friends. And it wasn’t just alcohol—by the 1980s, Larry was regularly using cocaine, and, according to some contemporaries, also heroin.

There seemed to be at least two subtle factors at work here: one was Larry’s psychological condition, still fragile years after the suicides of his father and brother. To some, Larry seemed armored, as if he were holding himself prisoner deep inside, avoiding all the pain. The drinking and drugging numbed all this, made it so he didn’t have to think about it. Unconsciously, perhaps, the abuse of drugs and alcohol was a form of suicide, albeit one that was more socially acceptable than blowing one’s brains out with a gun. Perhaps because of his upbringing, Larry was at heart an extremely lonely person. The drink and drugs had the effect of seeming to lift Larry out of this loneliness, to make him the life of the party, or at least help convince him that he was an entertaining, enjoyable person to be around. The desire to make contact with other people made drink and drugs ever more necessary to Larry’s mental equilibrium.

The second factor was likely the times and the culture. Larry had grown up and come of age at a time when drinking and drugging were seen as part of the persona of the rebel, something that boiled out of the 1960s’ cultural revolution extolling drugs, sex and rock-and-roll; doing booze and drugs to excess was hip, it was cool. As one of Larry’s lawyer contemporaries put it, it wasn’t as much of a challenge to cope with life straight, so sometimes a person put himself out on the edge by getting a bit crazy with drinking and drugs to make it more interesting. Therefore there seems to be a streak of Hunter Thompson’s caricature of the drug-crazed Samoan lawyer in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas suffusing Larry’s image in those years; it was part of his persona, at least as Larry presented himself to others.

And as a criminal defense lawyer, Larry often found himself hanging out with defendants who were similarly walking the edge, sometimes in shady bars and honkytonks, where the temptation to drink too much and lapse into harder chemicals abounded. There were plenty of times that Larry drank to excess, then hired someone at the bar to drive him home—he knew enough about the law to want to avoid being nabbed for driving under the influence.

Getting picked up and thrown into the drunk tank for a night simply didn’t fit with Larry’s self-image. He was the sort of person, in his own mind, who could handle his drink and drugs, no matter what, even if that wasn’t really true. Larry’s friends and supporters tried to cover for him as best they could, because they loved Larry. When Larry was sober, he was a delight to be around, even if he himself didn’t believe it. But when he got drunk or stoned, he could be a first-class pain.

As the 1980s unfolded, Larry continued to get “ink,” as he had put it, even if some of it wasn’t the most positive. For one thing, by 1984, Jack Mazzan, the hairdresser convicted of the murder of Judge Minor’s son, had appealed his conviction. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld Mazzan’s guilt, but said that Larry’s excoriation of the jury for their verdict was so prejudicial to Mazzan’s rights that he deserved a new sentencing hearing. The Nevada Supreme Court’s language made Larry look bad. Larry didn’t care all that much, however, and indeed, in light of later events-including what he later claimed he actually knew about the murder of Minor and also of April Barber—it seems possible that there was a method to Larry’s madness: that, realizing there was no way to save his client from the death penalty, Larry had actually insulted the jury as part of a subtle plan to give Mazzan a viable appellate issue. If that was the plan, it didn’t work, however; after a new hearing, Mazzan was again sentenced to death for Minor’s murder. It wouldn’t be the last of Mazzan’s case, however, as we shall further see.

Nor was Larry yet done with the Harveys bomb plot. Believing that the federal sentences for the bombers were much too light, the Nevada district attorney for Douglas County, which included the Lake Tahoe area, decided to prosecute the same defendants on state charges.

This time, the bomb-maker, John Birges, advanced a rather novel defense. He claimed that Harvey Gross, despairing of ever getting government permission to build his new hotel-casino, had hired Birges to destroy the facility, which carried the added bonus of allowing Harvey to collect the insurance money. Because he owed a loan shark a lot of money, Birges said, he felt compelled to go through with it. [This defense was eventually rejected by the jury when prosecutors pointed out that the government had already approved the casino renovation by the time of the bombing, and that the insurance was far less than what it actually cost to rebuild the facility.] As the new trial neared in 1985, Larry and his fellow lawyer Fred Atcheson struck a bargain with the Douglas County D.A., according to Atcheson: they agreed to turn their entire file on the bomb plot over to the authorities in return for an agreement not to prosecute Terry Lee Hall, their client. The D.A. took the deal and the file, Atcheson said later. That saved Hall a possible new prison term.

Meanwhile, Larry’s mother Marie got married again, to a man named John Murphy. It appears that Larry and Murphy were not on the most cordial of terms. Some of Larry’s Reno friends recall that he saw his mother’s new husband as some sort of “drugstore cowboy,” out to clip Marie’s substantial wealth. After the marriage, Marie executed a will, Larry would later say, granting Murphy a life interest in the income from Marie’s assets, but without access to any of the principal. A few years later, though, Marie told Larry that she wanted her new husband to have access to all the money, saying that she had to do this in order to keep the marriage together, that Murphy had insisted that she allow him access to her funds to prove her love and trust for him. Otherwise, Larry said Marie told him, Murphy would leave her. According to Larry, Murphy assured him that this change was only for convenience, and that he still didn’t expect to receive anything other than a life interest in the money if Marie died before he did.

By early 1986, Larry’s own marriage, to Gail, was in trouble, even as the last of the Papoose Palace cases—Larry and his associates were suing the county for their failure to properly supervise the day-care center—were on trial. Whether it was the stress of the trial or simply his nature, Larry’s drinking was out of hand again. On January 23, 1986, he filed for divorce from his third wife; the next day; Gail filed an application for a temporary restraining order against Larry, contending that he had verbally threatened her both at home and at work, including making “insulting and harassing telephone calls” that had caused her embarrassment. Gail wanted a court order to prevent Larry from making any more such calls.

This was but the opening gauntlet in a divorce case that would eventually go all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court, and result in a new law being passed by the state legislature, the so-called “McNabney Rule.”

The major bone of contention in the divorce was Larry’s annuity from the Papoose Palace cases. Gail claimed that since the annuity had been purchased from Larry’s fee from the settlement of the child molestation cases while she and Larry were married, she was entitled to half the money.

Not so fast, said Larry, through his lawyer, Reno attorney Fred Pinkerton. Since both parties had entered the 1983 marriage from prior marriages, and both had separate property, there had been an understanding that each side would “retain their separate autonomous estates … they did not pool or co-mingle their respective earnings.” Larry used his money to pay the mortgage, taxes and other common expenses, while Gail paid for the groceries. She had no right to half of the million-dollar annuity, Pinkerton said, any more than Larry had any right to anything that Gail had earned during the marriage.

Following a trial in Washoe County District Court, a judge ruled that Larry was entitled to most of the annuity as his separate property—80 percent of it, in fact. Gail got the other 20 percent. Unhappy with this decision, Gail appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, contending that the state’s divorce law required an equal division of the money. It would be a year before the case got to the high court, and when it ruled, it voted 3–2 to uphold the 80–20 split, with the majority contending that “equitable” didn’t necessarily mean “equal.” The following year, the legislature passed a law to require the 50–50 split of such marital community assets in all future such cases, a law that became known as “the McNabney Rule” in Nevada.

But by the time that happened, Larry had been married again, for the fourth time, and in fact, was well on his way toward yet another divorce.

This fourth marriage took place on November 27, 1986, in a custom “log cabin” which had cost a fortune to build, that Larry had hired contractors to erect in the hills south of Reno. The bride was another Reno lawyer, Linda Gardner. Larry’s oldest friends gathered, as well as his mother, Marie. After the ceremony was concluded, Marie turned to one of Larry’s long-time friends, who had known him since Mt. Rose Elementary School.

“We’ve been through a lot together, haven’t we?” Marie asked.

“Yes, we have, Marie,” the friend responded, and he knew Marie was thinking of all the other marriages—Donna, JoDee, and Gail—as well as all the emotional tumult each of the sunderings had brought.

“Well, this is the last time,” Marie said, and the friend realized that Marie meant it—she would never attend another marriage for her only surviving son.

Within the next year, Marie sold her condominium in Reno and moved with Murphy to Ashland, Oregon, where, as it turned out, he would become involved in raising American quarter horses.

In time, Larry would follow his mother north, at least for a while. But there would be one more trial to come, the biggest one of all, and one that would come close to costing Larry his life.