by Don Winslow
Anyway, Tito played a big role in winning the wars for Sinaloa, and as a reward Nacho let him start his own organization in Jalisco, independent but still a satellite of Sinaloa.
Tito loved Nacho, and when he heard the Zetas had killed him down in Guatemala he grabbed five of them, tortured them to death over the course of weeks, then cut off their dicks and stuffed them in their mouths.
No, you don’t disrespect El Mastín.
Now the man’s shadow literally falls over both of them.
“Iván,” Tito says, “may I have a word?”
“I’ll catch you later,” Ric says, trying not to laugh. All he can think of is Luca Brazi from the wedding scene in The Godfather, which he’s had to watch with Iván about fifty-seven thousand times. Iván is obsessed with the movie to only a slighter lesser degree than he is with Scarface.
“No, stay,” Iván says, and when Tito looks dubious, adds, “Ric is going to be my number two. Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of him.”
He talks a little slow, like Tito is stupid.
Tito says, “I want to move my organization into heroin.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Iván asks.
“It’s profitable,” Tito says.
He’s got that right, Ric thinks. Sinaloa is making millions off smack while Jalisco is still slinging cocaine and meth.
“The two don’t always go together,” Iván says, trying to sound like his father. “For one thing, it would put you into competition with us.”
“The market’s big enough for both of us,” Tito says.
Iván frowns. “Tito. Why fix what isn’t broken? Jalisco makes plenty of money on meth, doesn’t it? And we don’t even charge you a piso to use our plazas.”
“That was the arrangement I had with your father,” Tito says.
“You paid your dues,” Iván says, “no question. You’ve been a good soldier, and you got your own organization as a reward for that. But I think it’s better to just leave things as they are, don’t you?”
Christ, Ric thinks, it’s almost as if he’s patting the man’s head.
Good dog, good dog.
Sit.
Stay.
But Tito says, “If that’s what you think is best.”
“It is,” Iván says.
Tito nods to Ric and walks away.
“Rubén got his brains from his mother,” Iván says. “His looks, too, thank God.”
“Rubén’s a good guy.”
“He’s a great guy,” Iván says.
Doesn’t Ric know it. Rubén is Tito’s solid number two, runs his security force in Jalisco and is heavily involved in the transport of their product. How many times has Ric heard his own father say, If only you were more like Rubén Ascensión. Serious. Mature.
He’s made it pretty clear, Ric thinks. Given a choice, he’d rather have Rubén for his son than me.
Tough luck for both of us, I guess.
“What?” Iván asks.
“What what?”
“You got a look on your face like someone just ass-fucked your puppy.”
“I don’t have a puppy,” Ric says.
“Maybe that’s it,” Iván says. “You want me to get you one? What kind of dog do you want, Ric? I’ll send someone out right now to get it for you. I want you to be happy, ’mano.”
That’s Iván, Ric thinks.
Ever since they were kids. You told him you were hungry, he went out and got food. Your bike got stolen, a new one appeared. You said you were horny, a girl showed up at the door.
“Love you, man.”
“Love you, too,” Iván says. Then he adds, “It’s our turn now, ’mano. Our time. You’ll see—it’s going to be good.”
“Yeah.”
Ric sees his father approaching.
But it’s not Ric he wants to see.
Núñez says, “Iván, we should talk.”
“We should,” Iván says.
Ric sees the look on his face, the smile, knows that this is the moment he’s been waiting for.
His coronation.
Núñez glances down at his son and says, “In private.”
“Sure.” Iván winks at Ric. “I’ll be back, bro.”
Ric nods.
Leans back in the chair and watches his best friend and his father walk away from him.
Then he does have a memory of Adán.
Standing on the side of a dirt road in rural Durango.
“Look around you,” Adán said. “What do you see?”
“Fields,” Ric said.
“Empty fields,” Adán said.
Ric couldn’t argue with that. On both sides of the road, as far as he could see, marijuana fields lay fallow.
“The US has, de facto, legalized marijuana,” Adán said. “If my American sources are right, two or more states will soon make it official. We simply can’t compete with the local American quality and transportation costs. Last year we were getting a hundred dollars for a kilo of marijuana. Now it’s twenty-five. It’s hardly worth our growing the stuff anymore. We’re losing tens of millions of dollars a year, and if California, for instance, legalizes, the loss will be in the hundreds of millions. But it’s hot out here. Let’s go get a beer.”
They drove another ten miles to a little town.
A lead car went in first, made sure it was all clear, and then went into a tavern and emptied it out. The nervous owner and a girl who looked to be his daughter brought in a pitcher of cold beer and glasses.
Adán said, “Our marijuana market, once a major profit center, is collapsing; meth sales are falling; cocaine sales have flattened. For the first time in over a decade, we’re looking at a fiscal year of negative growth.”
It’s not like they were losing money, Ric thought. Everyone there was making millions. But they made less millions than they had the year before, and it was human nature that, even if you’re rich, being less rich feels like being poor.
“The present situation is unsustainable,” Adán said. “The last time this occurred we were saved by the innovation of crystal meth. It became, and remains, a major profit center, but there is small potential for growth that would compensate for our marijuana losses. Similarly, the cocaine market seems to have reached its saturation point.”
“What we need,” Ric’s father said, “is a new product.”
“No,” Adán said. “What we need is an old product.”
Adán paused for dramatic effect and then said, “Heroin.”
Ric was shocked. Sure, they still sold heroin, but it was a side product compared to weed, meth and coke. All their business had started with heroin, with opium, back in the days of the old gomeros who grew the poppy and made their fortunes selling it to the Americans to make the morphine they needed during World War II. After the war, it was the American Mafia that provided the market and bought up as much opium as they could grow for heroin.
But in the 1970s, the American DEA joined forces with the Mexican military to burn and poison the poppy fields in Sinaloa and Durango. They sprayed pesticides from airplanes, burned villages, forced the campesinos from their homes and scattered the gomeros to the winds.
It was Adán’s uncle, the great Miguel Ángel Barrera—M-1—who gathered the gomeros at a meeting similar to this one and told them that they didn’t want to be farmers—farms could be poisoned and burned—they wanted to be traffickers. He introduced them to the Colombian cocaine market and they all became wealthy as middlemen, moving Cali and Medellín coke into the United States. It was also M-1 who introduced crack cocaine to the market, creating the greatest financial windfall the gomeros—now known as narcos—had ever known.
Millionaires became billionaires.
The loose confederation of narcos became the Federación.
And now Adán wants them to make opium again? Ric thought. He thinks heroin is the answer to their problem?
It was insane.
“We have an opportunity,” Adán said, “even great
er than crack. A ready-made market that’s just waiting for us to take advantage of. And the Americans have created it themselves.”
The giant American pharmaceutical companies, he explained, had addicted thousands of people to legal painkillers.
Pills.
Oxycodone, Vicodin and others, all opium derivatives, all the fruit of the poppy.
But the pills are expensive and can be hard to obtain, Adán explained. Addicts who can no longer get prescriptions from their doctors turn to the street, where the bootleg product can cost up to thirty dollars a dose. Some of these addicts need as many as ten doses a day.
“What I propose,” Adán said, “is to increase our production of heroin by seventy percent.”
Ric was skeptical. Mexican black tar heroin had never been able to compete with the quality of the purer product that comes in from South Asia or the Golden Triangle. More than doubling production would only lead to massive losses.
“Our black tar heroin is currently around forty percent pure,” Adán said. “I’ve met with the best heroin cookers in Colombia, who assure me that they can take our base product and create something called ‘cinnamon heroin.’”
He took a small glassine envelope from his jacket pocket and held it up. “Cinnamon heroin is seventy to eighty percent pure. And the beauty of it is, we can sell it for ten dollars a dose.”
“Why so cheap?” Núñez asked.
“We make up for it in volume,” Adán said. “We become Walmart. We undercut the American pharmaceutical companies in their own market. They can’t possibly compete. It will more than compensate for our marijuana losses. The yield could be in billions of new dollars. Heroin was our past. It will also be our future.”
Adán, as usual, had been prescient.
In the time since just three American states legalized weed, the cartel’s marijuana sales dropped by almost forty percent. It’s going to take time to complete, but Núñez started to convert the marijuana fields to poppies. Just over the past year, they’ve increased the heroin production by 30 percent. Soon it will be 50 and by the end of the year they’ll reach the 70 percent goal.
The Americans are buying. And why not? Ric thinks now. The new product is cheaper, more plentiful and more potent. It’s a win-win-win. Heroin is flowing north, dollars are flowing back. So maybe, he thinks, the Adanistas are right—Barrera lives on.
Heroin is his legacy.
So that’s a story you could tell.
3
Malevolent Clowns
I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends came to the funeral in the same car.
—Steven Wright
Their house is a brownstone on Hillyer Place east of Twenty-First in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. They chose it because Dupont is “walkable,” for Marisol; there are coffee shops, restaurants, and bookstores nearby; and Keller likes the historical resonance of the neighborhood. Teddy Roosevelt lived around here; so did Franklin and Eleanor.
And Marisol loved the crepe myrtle tree that grew up to the third-story window, its lavender blooms reminding her of the vivid colors back in Mexico.
She’s waiting up when Keller gets home, sitting in the big armchair by the living room window, reading a magazine.
“We’re a ‘power couple,’” she says when Keller comes through the door.
“We are?” He bends over and kisses her forehead.
“It says so right here,” she says, pointing to the copy of Washington Life in her lap. “‘Washington power couple Mr. and Mrs.’—actually, Doctor—‘Art Keller showed up at the Kennedy Center fund-raiser. The DEA director and his stylish Latina wife’—that’s me, I’m your ‘stylish Latina wife’ . . .”
Keller looks at the page, not thrilled that she’s been photographed. He doesn’t like her image being out there. But it’s almost inevitable—she is stylish and interesting, and the story of the DEA hero with the Mexican wife who was once gunned down by narcos is irresistible to both the media and the Washington society types. So they get invitations to the chic parties and events, which Keller would by inclination turn down, but Marisol says that whether they like it or not, the political and social connections are extremely useful to his work.
She’s right, Keller thinks. Mari’s charm has proved to be an effective antidote to what has been referred to as his “anticharm,” and she has opened doors (and kept them open) that would otherwise be closed to him.
When Keller needs to talk with a representative, a senator, a cabinet official, a lobbyist, an editor, an ambassador, a shaker-and-mover—even someone in the White House—the chances are that Mari just had lunch or breakfast or served on a committee with the spouse.
Or she does the talking herself. Marisol is fully aware that people who would say no to Keller find it much harder to refuse his charming, fashionable wife, and she’s not above picking up the phone when an appropriations vote is needed, a critical piece of information has to go out in the media, or a project needs to be funded.
She’s busy—already on the board of the Children’s National Medical Center and the Art Museum of the Americas and has worked on fund-raisers for the Children’s Inn, Doorways for Women and Families, and AIDS United.
Keller worries that she’s too busy for her health.
“I love those causes,” she said to him when he expressed his concern. “And anyway, you need to put political capital in the bank.”
“It’s not your job.”
“It is my job,” she said. “It’s exactly my job. You kept your promise to me.”
He had. When he first called O’Brien to accept the offer, he said he had one condition—a replacement for Mari at her clinic had to be found and funded. O’Brien called him back the same morning with the news that a Texas oil firm had stepped up with a qualified physician and a big check, and was there anything else he needed?
Marisol started her diplomatic campaign to help him. Joined the boards and the committees, went to the lunches and the fund-raisers. Over Keller’s objections she was profiled in the Post and the Washingtonian.
“The cartels already know what I look like,” she told him. “And you need me doing these things, Arturo. The Tea Party troglodytes are already out to hang you, and the liberals don’t love you, either.”
Keller knew that she was right. Marisol was “politically perspicacious,” as she once put it, her observations and analysis usually dead-on, and she was quick to discern the nuances of the increasingly polarized American scene. And he had to admit that his desperate desire to escape politics and “just do his job” was naive.
“All jobs are political,” Marisol said. “Yours more than most.”
True enough, Keller thought, because he was the top “drug warrior” at a time when the current administration was seriously questioning what the war on drugs should mean and what it should—and, more importantly, shouldn’t—be.
The attorney general, in fact, had ordered DEA to stop using the phrase war on drugs at all, stating (rightly, in Keller’s opinion) that we shouldn’t wage war on our own people. The Justice Department and the White House were reevaluating the draconian drug laws passed during the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s that legislated mandatory minimum sentences that put nonviolent offenders behind bars for thirty years to life.
The result of that legislation was that more than two million people—the majority of them African American and Hispanic—were in prison, and now the administration was reviewing a lot of those sentences, considering clemency for some of them, and exploring ending mandatory minimum sentences.
Keller agreed with these efforts but wanted to stay out of the controversies and focus on the mandate to end the heroin epidemic. In his opinion, he was the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while he was willing to put less emphasis on enforcing, say, marijuana laws, he preferred to defer policy statements to the drug czar.
Officially the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the “drug
czar”—as the position had been tagged—was the guy who spoke for the president on drug policy and was in charge of seeing the White House’s intentions implemented.
Well, sort of.
The current czar was a hard-liner who was somewhat resistant to the AG’s reforms that POTUS supported, so he was on his way out to become the boss of US Customs and Border Protection (so Keller would still have to work with him), and a new guy—more amenable to the reforms—was on his way in.
To Keller, it was just another strand of bureaucracy in an already tangled net. Technically, Keller’s immediate boss was the attorney general, but they both had to take the drug czar into account, as the AG served at the behest of the White House.
Then there was Congress. At various times, DEA had to consult with and report to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, Budget Committee, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
The House was even worse. It had its own Budget, Appropriations, and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees, but its Judiciary Committee also had subcommittees—Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, and Immigration Policy and Border Security.
So Keller had to confer and coordinate with the Justice Department, the White House, and the Senate and House committees, but there were also the other federal agencies whose missions coincided with his—Homeland Security; CIA; FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco; ICE; Bureau of Prisons; the Coast Guard and the Navy; the Department of Transportation; the State Department . . . the list went on and on.
And that was just federal.
Keller also had to deal with fifty state governments and state police forces, over three thousand county sheriff’s departments and more than twelve thousand city police departments. Not to mention state and local prosecutors and judges.
That was the United States, but Keller also had to communicate, confer and negotiate with government officials and police from foreign countries—Mexico, of course, but also Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and all the European Union countries where heroin was bought, sold and/or transshipped. And any of those dealings had to be run through the State Department and sometimes the White House.