The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  “But the real money is in moving coke.”

  He goes to Raúl and says he’s ready to move up.

  “That’s cool, bro,” Raúl says. “We’re all about upward mobility.”

  He tells Fabián how it works and even sets him up with the Colombians. Sits with him while they make a pretty standard contract—Fabián will take delivery of fifty kilos of coke, dropped off a fishing boat at Rosarito. He’ll take it across the border at a thousand a key. A hundred of that g, though, goes to Raúl for protection.

  Bam.

  Forty g's, just like that.

  Fabián does two more contracts and buys himself a Mercedes.

  Like, you can keep the Miata, Dad. Park that Japanese lawn mower, and keep it parked. And while you’re at it, you can lay off busting my chops about grades because I’ve already aced Marketing 101. I am already a commodities broker, Dad. Don’t worry about whether you can bring me into the firm because the last thing in this world I want is a J-O-B.

  Couldn’t afford the pay cut.

  You think Fabián was pulling chicks before, you should see him now.

  Fabián has M-O-N-E-Y.

  He’s twenty-one years old and living large.

  The other guys see it, the other sons of doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers. They see it and they want it. Pretty soon, most of the guys who hang around Raúl’s little circle at El Arbol—doing karate and blowing yerba—are in the business. They’re driving the shit into the States, or they’re making their own contracts and kicking up to Raúl.

  They’re in it—the next generation of the Tijuana power structure—up to their necks.

  Pretty soon, the group gets a nickname.

  The Juniors.

  Fabián becomes, like, the Junior.

  He’s hanging loose down in Rosarito one night when he bumps into a boxer named Eric Casavales and his promoter, an older guy named José Miranda. Eric’s a pretty good boxer, but tonight he’s drunk and completely miscomprehends this soft yuppie pup he jostles in the street. Drinks are spilled, shirts are stained, words exchanged. Laughing, Casavales whips a pistol out of his waistband and waves it at Fabián before José can walk him away.

  So Casavales staggers off, laughing at the scared look on rich boy’s face when he saw the pistol barrel, and he’s still laughing as Fabián goes to his Mercedes, takes his own pistol out of the glove box, finds Casavales and Miranda standing out in front of the boxer’s car and shoots them both to death.

  Fabián throws the pistol into the ocean, gets back into his Mercedes and drives back to TJ.

  Feeling pretty good.

  Pretty good about himself.

  That’s one version of the story. The other—popular at Ted’s Big Boy—is that Martínez’s confrontation with the boxer wasn’t accidental at all, that Casavales’s promoter was holding up a fight that Cesar Felizardo needed in order to move up and just wouldn’t budge on it, even after Adán Barrera approached him personally with a very reasonable offer. Nobody knows what the real reason is, but Casavales and Miranda are dead, and later that year, Felizardo gets his fight for the lightweight championship and wins it.

  Fabián denies killing anyone for any reason, but the more he denies it, the more the stories gain credence.

  Raúl even gives him a nickname.

  El Tiburón.

  The Shark.

  Because he moves like a shark through the water.

  Adán doesn’t work the kids—he works the grown-ups.

  Lucía is an enormous help, with her pedigree and old-school style. She takes him to a good tailor, buys him conservative, expensive business suits and understated clothes. (Adán tries, but fails, to make Raúl undergo the same transformation. If anything, his brother becomes more flamboyant, adding to his Sinaloan narco-cowboy wardrobe, for instance, a full-length mink coat.) She takes him to the private power clubs, to the French restaurants in the Río district, to the private parties at the private homes in the Hipódromo, Chapultepec and Río neighborhoods.

  And they go to church, of course. They’re at Mass every Sunday morning. They leave large checks in the collection plate, make large contributions to the building fund, the orphans’ fund, the fund for aged priests. They have Father Rivera to the house for dinner, they host backyard barbecues, they serve as godparents for an increasing number of the young couples just starting their families. They’re like any other young upwardly mobile couple in Tijuana—he’s a quiet, serious businessman with first one restaurant, then two, then five; she’s a young businessman’s wife.

  Lucía goes to the gym, to lunch with the other young wives, to San Diego to shop at Fashion Valley and Horton Plaza. She understands this as her duty to her husband’s business, but limits it to her duty. The other wives understand—poor Lucía must spend time with the poor child, she wants to be home, she is devoted to the Church.

  She’s a godmother now to half a dozen babies. It hurts her—she feels that she’s doomed to stand with a stricken smile on her face, holding someone else’s healthy child by the baptismal font.

  Adán, when he’s not at home, can be found in his office or in the back of one of his restaurants, sipping coffee and doing the numbers on a yellow manuscript pad. If you didn’t know what business he was really in, you would never guess it. He looks like a young accountant, a numbers-cruncher. If you couldn’t see the actual figures scratched in pencil on the manuscript pad, you would never think that they are calculations of x kilos of cocaine times the delivery fee from the Colombians, minus the transport costs, the protection costs, the employee wages and other overhead, Güero’s 10 percent cut, Tío’s ten points. There are more prosaic calculations as to the cost of beef tenderloin, linen napkins, cleaning supplies and the like for the five restaurants he now owns, but most of his time is taken up with the more complicated accounting of moving tons of Colombian cocaine as well as Güero’s sinsemilla, and a small bit of heroin just to keep their hand in the market.

  He rarely, if ever, sees the actual drugs, the suppliers or the customers. Adán just handles the money—charging it, counting it, cleaning it. But not collecting it—that’s Raúl’s business.

  Raúl handles his business.

  Take the case of the two money mules who take $200K of Barrera cash, drive it across the border and keep driving toward Monterrey instead of Tijuana. But Mexican highways can be long, and sure enough, these two pendejos get picked up near Chihuahua by the MJFP, who hold them long enough for Raúl to get there.

  Raúl is not pleased.

  He has one mule’s hands stretched across a paper cutter, then asks him, “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to keep your hands to yourself?”

  “Yes!” the mule screams. His eyes are bulging out of his head.

  “You should have listened to her,” Raúl says. Then he leans all his weight on top of the blade, which crunches through the mule’s wrists. The cops rush the guy to the hospital because Raúl has been quite clear that he wants the handless man alive and walking around as a human message board.

  The other errant mule does make it to Monterrey, but he’s chained and gagged in the trunk of a car that Raúl drives to a vacant lot, douses with gasoline and sets on fire. Then Raúl drives the cash to Tijuana himself, has lunch with Adán and goes to a soccer match.

  No one tries to expropriate any Barrera cash for a long time.

  Adán doesn’t get involved with any of this messy stuff. He’s a businessman; it’s an export/import for him—export the drugs, import the cash. Then handle the cash, which is a problem. It’s the sort of problem a businessman wants to have, of course—What do I do with all this money?—but it’s still a problem. Adán can wash a certain amount of it through the restaurants, but five restaurants can’t handle millions of dollars, so he’s on a constant search for laundry facilities.

  But it’s all numbers to him.

  He hasn’t seen any drugs in years.

  And no blood.

  Adán Barrera has never killed anybody.
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  Never as much as thrown a fist in anger. No, all the tough-guy stuff, all the enforcement, goes Raúl’s way. He doesn’t seem to mind; quite the contrary. And this division of labor makes it easier for Adán to deny what really brings the money into the household.

  And that’s what he needs to get back to doing, bringing the money in.

  Chapter Seven

  Christmastime

  And the tuberculosis old men

  At the Nelson wheeze and cough

  And someone will head south

  Until this whole thing cools off . . .

  —Tom Waits, “Small Change”

  New York City, December 1985

  Callan planes a board.

  In one long, smooth motion, he runs the plane from one end of the wood to the other, then steps back to examine his work.

  It looks good.

  He takes a piece of fine sandpaper, wraps it around a block of scrap wood and starts to smooth the edge he just created.

  Things are good.

  Mostly, Callan reflects, they’re so good because they got so bad.

  Take Peaches’ big cocaine score: 0.

  Actually, minus zero.

  Callan got not one cent from that, seeing as how all the cocaine ended up in a Feebee storage locker before it could be put out on the street. The Feds must have had it up the whole time, because as soon as Peaches brought that coke into the jurisdiction of the Eastern District of New York, Giuliani’s trained Feebees were on it like flies on shit.

  And Peaches got indicted for possession with intent to distribute.

  Heavy weight.

  Peaches is looking at having his mid-life crisis in Ossining, if he lives that long, and he has to come up with Carl Sagan bail money, not to mention lawyer money, not to mention while all this is going on he isn’t earning, so Peaches is like, Ante up, boys, it’s tax time, so not only do Callan and O-Bop lose their coke investment, they got to kick in to the Big Peaches Defense Fund, which takes a chunk out of their kickback money, extortion money and loan-shark money.

  But the good news is that they didn’t get indicted on the coke. For all his faults, Peaches is a stand-up guy—so is Little Peaches—and although the Feds got Peaches on tape talking to and/or about every goombah in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area, they don’t have O-Bop or Callan.

  Which, Callan thinks, is a major fucking blessing.

  That weight of coke puts you in for thirty-to-life, closer to life.

  So, that’s good.

  That makes the air very sweet, just being able to smell it and know you’re going to keep smelling it.

  You’re already ahead on your day.

  But Peaches is up a pole, so is Little Peaches, and word is the Feds got Cozzo and Cozzo’s brother and a couple of others and they’re just waiting to try to flip Big Peaches to nail it down.

  Yeah, good luck on that, Callan thinks.

  Peaches is old-school.

  Old-school don’t roll over for nothing.

  But hard time is the least of Peaches’ problems, because the Feds have indicted Big Paulie Calabrese.

  Not for the coke, but on a boatload of other RICO predicates, and Big Paulie’s really sweating it because it’s only been a few months since that major hard-on Giuliani got four other bosses a century each in the penitentiary, and Big Paulie’s case is coming up next.

  That Giuliani is a funny fuck, well aware of the old Italian toast “Cent’ anni”—May you live a hundred years—except what he means is “May you live a hundred years in the hole.” And Giuliani wants to hit for the cycle—he wants to punch out all the heads of the old Five Families, and it looks like Paulie is going down. Understandably, Paulie don’t want to die in the joint, so he’s a little tense.

  He’s looking to take a little of his agita out on Big Peaches.

  You deal, you die.

  Peaches, he’s screaming that he’s innocent, that the Feds set him up, that he wouldn’t dream of defying his boss by dealing dope, but Calabrese keeps hearing rumors about tapes that have Peaches talking about the coke and saying a few inflammatory things about Paul Calabrese himself, but Peaches is like, Tapes? What tapes? And the Feds won’t turn the tapes over to Paulie, because they don’t intend to use them as evidence in Calabrese’s case—yet—but Calabrese knows that they’re sure as hell going to use them against Peaches in his case, so Peaches has them, and Paulie’s demanding that he bring them around to the house at Todt Hill.

  Which Peaches is desperate not to do, because he might as well just stick a grenade up his ass, reach around and pull the pin. Because he’s on them tapes saying shit like, Hey, you know that maid the Godmother is pronging? You ready for this? I hear he’s got this pump-up dick he uses . . .

  And other choice tidbits about the Godmother and what a cheap, mean, limp-dick asshole he is, not to mention a verbal rundown of the whole Cimino batting order, so Peaches does not want Paulie getting an earful of them tapes.

  What makes it even more tense is that the cancer is finally taking Neill Demonte, the old-school Cimino underboss and the only thing keeping the Cozzo wing of the family from open rebellion. So not only is that restraining influence gone, but the underboss position is going to be vacant, and the Cozzo wing has expectations.

  That Johnny Boy, and not Tommy Bellavia, better be made the new underboss.

  “I ain’t reporting to no fucking chauffeur,” Peaches grumbles like he isn’t already skating on skinny ice. Like he’s going to have a fucking chance to report to anybody other than the warden or Saint Peter.

  Callan gets all this gossip from O-Bop, who just refuses to believe that Callan’s getting out.

  “You can’t get out,” O-Bop says.

  “Why not?”

  “What, you think you just walk away?” O-Bop asks. “You think there’s an exit door?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Callan says. “Why, are you gonna stand in it?”

  “No,” O-Bop says quickly, “but there are people out there who have, you know, resentments. You don’t want to be out there alone.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  Well, not exactly.

  The truth is, Callan’s in love.

  He finishes planing the board and walks home, thinking about Siobhan.

  He met her at the Glocca Mora pub on Twenty-sixth and Third. He is sitting at the bar having a beer, listening to Joe Burke play his Irish flute, and he sees her with a group of friends at a table in the front. It’s her long black hair he notices first. Then she turns around and he sees her face and those gray eyes and he’s done for.

  He goes over to the table and sits down.

  Turns out her name is Siobhan and she’s just over from Belfast—grew up on Kashmir Road

  .

  “My dad was from Clonnard,” Callan says. “Kevin Callan.”

  “I heard of him,” she says, then turns away.

  “What?”

  “I came here to get away from all that.”

  “Then why are you in here?” he asks. Shit, every other song they sing in the place is about all that—about the Troubles, past, present or future. Even now, Joe Burke puts down the flute, picks up the banjo and the band launches into “The Men Behind the Wire”:

  “Armoured cars and tanks and guns

  Came to take away our sons

  But every man will stand behind

  The men behind the wire.”

  She says, “I don’t know—it’s where the Irish go, isn’t it?”

  “There are other places,” he says. “Have you had dinner?”

  “I’m here with friends.”

  “It'd be okay with them.”

  “But not with me.”

  Shot down in flames.

  Then she says, “Another time, though.”

  “Is that 'another time,’ like a polite blow-off?” Callan asks. “Or another time, we make a date?”

  “I’m off Thursday night.”

  He takes her to an expensive
place on Restaurant Row, just outside the Kitchen but well within his and O-Bop’s sphere of influence. Not a piece of clean linen arrives in this place without him and O-Bop give it the pass, the fire inspector don’t notice that the back door stays locked, a beat cop always finds it convenient to stroll past the place and show the colors, and sometimes a few cases of whiskey come straight off the truck without the hassle of an invoice, so Callan gets a prime table and attentive service.