by Don Winslow
It’s a win-win deal.
And that’s in Mexico alone.
There are also U.S. Customs agents to pay to look the other way when cars full of coke or grass or heroin come through their stations—$30,000 a carload, no matter what’s in it. And still, there’s no way to guarantee that your car is going to go through a “clean” checkpoint, even though you’ve bought condo buildings whose top floors overlook the crossing stations and you have lookouts up there who are in radio contact with your drivers and try to steer them toward the “right” lanes. But the Customs agents are switched often and arbitrarily, and other agents are monitoring radio bands, so if you send a dozen cars at a time through the border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, you expect nine or ten of them to get through.
There are bribes to city cops in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, you name it. And to state police, and sheriff’s departments. And secretaries and typists in the DEA who can slip you info on what investigations are going on, with what technology. Or even to that rare, rare, DEA agent you could get on the arm, but they are few and far between, because between the DEA and the Mexican cartels there is a blood feud, still, from the killing of Ernie Hidalgo.
Art Keller sees to that.
And thank God for that, Adán thinks, because while Keller’s revenge obsession might cost me money in the short run, in the long run it makes me money. And that is what the Americans simply cannot seem to understand—that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich. Without them, any bobo with an old truck or a leaky boat with an outboard motor could run drugs into El Norte. And then the price would not be worth the effort. But as it is, it takes millions of dollars to move the drugs, and the prices are accordingly sky-high. The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.
And the truly funny irony is that Keller is himself another product because I make millions selling protection against him, charging the independent contractors who want to move their product through La Plaza thousands of dollars for the use of our cops, soldiers, Customs agents, Coast Guard, surveillance equipment, communications . . . This is what Mexican cops appreciate that American cops don’t. We are partners, mi hermano Arturo, in the same enterprise.
Comrades in the War on Drugs.
We could not exist without each other.
Adán watches as two Nordic-looking young women stand under the waterfall, letting the spray soak their thin T-shirts to display their breasts to any and all admirers, of which there are quite a few. The disco music is pounding, the dancing frenetic, the drinking hard, fast and constant. It’s El Día de los Muertos, and most of the people in the crowd here tonight are old friends from Culiacán or Badiraguato, and if you’re a narco from Sinaloa you have a lot of dead to remember.
There are a lot of ghosts at this party.
It’s been a bloody war.
But, Adán thinks, hopefully it is almost over, and we will get back to pure business.
Because Adán Barrera has reinvented the drug business.
The traditional shape of any of the Mexican pasadores was the pyramid. Similar to the Sicilian Mafia families, there was a godfather, a boss, then captains, then soldiers, and every level “kicked up” to the next. The lower levels made very little money unless they could build levels beneath them, who would in turn kick up, but make very little. Anybody but a fool could figure out the problem with the pyramid—if you get in early, you’re gold; if you get in late, you’re fucked. All it did, in Adán’s analysis, was create motivation to go out and start a new pyramid.
The pyramid was also too vulnerable to aggressive law enforcement. All you had to do, Adán thought, was look at what had happened to the American Mafia to see that. All you needed was one dedo, one snitch, one dissatisfied soldier at the lower levels, and he could take the cops up and down the integrated pyramid structure. Every single one of the heads of New York’s Five Families was now in prison, with their families going into serious and inevitable decline.
So Adán tore down the pyramid and replaced it with a horizontal structure. Well, almost horizontal. His new organization had only two levels: the Barrera brothers on top, everyone else underneath them.
But on the same level.
“We want entrepreneurs, not employees,” Adán told Raúl. “Employees cost money, entrepreneurs make money.”
The new structure created a growing pool of highly motivated, richly rewarded independent businessmen who paid 12 percent of their gross to the Barreras and were happy to do it. There was now only one level to kick up to, and you ran your own business, took your own risks, reaped your own rewards.
And Adán saw to it that the potential rewards were greater for the emerging entrepreneurs. He rebuilt his Baja cartel on that principal, allowing—no, encouraging—his people to go into business for themselves: lowering their “taxes” to 12 percent, giving low-interest loans for start-up capital, providing them with access to financial services—i.e., money-laundering—all in exchange for simple loyalty to the cartel.
“Twelve percent from many,” Adán had explained to Raúl when first proposing the drastic tax reduction, “will be more than thirty percent from a few.” He had observed the lessons of the Reagan Revolution. They could make more money by lowering taxes than by raising them because the lower taxes allowed more entrepreneurs to come into the business and make more money and pay more taxes.
Raúl is of the opinion that lead, not a new business model, is winning the war against Méndez, and in a narrow sense he’s right. But Adán is convinced that the more powerful factor was the pure force of economics—the Barreras simply undersold Güero Méndez. You can sell Coke with a 30 percent overhead, or Pepsi with a 20 percent overhead—you choose. An easy choice to make—you can sell Pepsi and make a lot of money, or Coke and make less money until Raúl kills you. Suddenly, there were a lot of Pepsi distributorships. You would have to be a fool to choose the lead Coke over the silver Pepsi.
Silver or lead.
The yin and yang of the new Baja cartel.
Deal with Adán and get the silver, or deal with Raúl and get the lead. A structure that tipped the scales in Baja against Güero Méndez. He was simply too slow catching up, and by the time he did, he couldn’t afford to lower his prices because he couldn’t get enough cocaine through La Plaza and had to pay out thirty points to move it through Sonora or the Gulf.
No, Raúl later had to admit, the 12 percent deal had been an act of sheer genius.
It’s perfect for guys like Fabián Martínez and the rest of the Juniors.
The rules were simple.
You would tell the Barreras when you were bringing the product through, what it was (cocaine, marijuana or heroin), how much weight, and what your pre-arranged sale price was—usually somewhere between $14,000 and $16,000 per kilo—and what date you were planning on delivering it to the retailer in the States. You then had forty-eight hours after that date to pay the Barreras 12 percent of the pre-arranged sale price. (The pre-arranged price was simply a guarantee on a bottom—if you sold it for less, you still owed the percentage on the quoted price; if you sold it for more, you owed the percentage on the higher price.) If you couldn’t deliver the money within the two days, you had better sit down with Adán and arrange a payment plan, or sit down with Raúl and . . .
Silver or lead.
The 12 percent was just for bringing the drugs through La Plaza. If you wanted to make your own arrangement with the local police, federales or army comandante to guarantee the safety of your shipment, fine, but if it got busted, you still owed the twelve points. If you wanted the Barreras to make those security arrangements, that was also fine, but it would cost you—the price of the mordida plus a handling fee. But in that case, the Barreras guaranteed the safety of your shipment on the Mexic
an side of the border. If it was seized, they would reimburse you for the wholesale cost of the shipment. That is, if it was cocaine, for instance, the Barreras would pay you the purchase price you had negotiated with the Orejuela cartel in Cali, not the retail price you expected to get in the States. If you bought the Barrera security package, the safety of your shipment was absolutely guaranteed from the time it reached Baja until the time it hit the border. No other dealer would try to rip it off, no bandits would try to hijack it. Raúl and his sicarios saw to that—you would have to be seriously insane to try to steal a shipment the safety of which was spoken for by Raúl Barrera.
The Barreras also offered financial services. Adán wanted to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to get into the business, so the 12 percent never had to be fronted. You didn’t have to pay it until after you had sold it. It was always done on the come. But the Barreras went the extra step—they would help you launder the money once you had sold your shipment, and this was an increasingly profitable product for the Barreras. The going rate for money cleansing was 6.5 percent, but bribed bankers would give the Barreras a volume price of 5 percent, so Adán was making an additional 1.5 percent on every customer’s dollar. Again, you didn’t have to launder your cash through the Barreras—you were an independent businessman, you could do whatever you wanted. But if you went somewhere else and got ripped off or cheated, or if your money got seized at U.S. Customs on the way back through the border, it was your own tough luck, whereas the Barreras guaranteed your money. Whatever you put in dirty, you got back clean—within three working days—minus the 6.5 percent.
And this has been Adán’s “Baja Revolution”—catching the drug business up with times.
“Miguel Ángel Barrera dragged the drug business into the twentieth century,” is how one narcotraficante put it. “Adán is leading it into the twenty-first.”
And beating Güero Méndez while we’re at it, Adán thinks. If he cannot move his cocaine, he cannot pay mordida. If he cannot pay mordida, he cannot move cocaine. In the meantime, we are building a network that is fast, efficient and entrepreneurial, using the newest and best technology and financial mechanisms.
Life is good, Adán thinks, on this Day of the Dead.
Day of the Dead, Callan thinks.
Big deal.
Like, ain’t they all days of the dead?
He’s knocking a few back at the bar of La Sirena. You want a challenge, try getting a straight-up whiskey at a Mexican beach bar. Tell the guy you want a drink without a goddamn umbrella in it, he looks at you like you ruined his fuckin’ day.
Callan does it anyway. “Yo, viejo, is it raining in here?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t need this, do I?”
And if I wanted fruit juice, amigó, I’d order fruit juice. Only juice I want is the juice of the barley.
Irish Vitamin C.
The old waters of life.
Which is kind of funny, Callan thinks, when you consider what I do for a living, what I’ve always done, basically.
Cancel people’s reservations.
Sorry, sir, you’re checking out early.
Yeah, but—
Yeah, but nothin'. Out of the pool.
It ain’t for the Cimino Family anymore, but Sal Scachi is still calling the shots, in a manner of speaking. Callan was chilling out down in Costa Rica, waiting for the shit storm in New York to blow itself out, when Scachi came to see him.
“How would you feel about going down to Colombia?” he’d asked Callan.
“To do what?”
To hook up with something called “MAS” was the answer.
Muerte a Secuestradores—Death to Kidnappers. Scachi explained that it started back in ’81 when the left-wing insurgent group M-19 kidnapped the sister of Colombian drug lord Fabián Ochoa and held her for ransom.
Yeah, that was a good business plan, Callan thought, kidnapping a boss’s sister.
Like Ochoa was going to pay, right?
What the cocaine magnate did instead, Scachi said, was he convened a meeting of 223 associates and made them each cough up $20,000 in cash and ten of their best gunmen. Do the math—that’s a war chest of four and a half million bucks and an army of over two thousand button men.
“Dig this,” Scachi said. “These guys actually flew over a soccer stadium in a helicopter and dropped leaflets announcing what they were going to do.”
Which was basically rip through Cali and Medellín like rabid dogs on crack. Busted into homes, dragged college kids right out of their classrooms, shot some of them on the spot and took others away to safe houses for “questioning.”
Ochoa’s sister was released unharmed.
“What’s all this to me?” Callan asked.
Scachi tells him. In ’85 the Colombian government struck a truce with the various leftist groups that formed an above-ground alliance called the Unión Patriótica, which won fourteen seats in parliament in the ’86 elections.
“Okay,” Callan said.
“Not okay,” Scachi answered. “These people are Communists, Sean.”
Scachi launched into a fucking tirade, the gist of which was that we fought the Communists so the people could have democracy, then the ungrateful motherfuckers turn around and vote for Communists. So what Sal was saying, Callan guessed, is that the people should have democracy, just not that much democracy.
They got the absolute freedom to choose what we want them to.
“MAS is going to do something about it,” Scachi was saying. “They could use a man with your talents.”
Maybe they could, Callan thought, but they ain’t gettin’ a man with my talents. I don’t know what Sal’s connection is to this MAS, but it ain’t nothin’ to me.
“I think I’ll just go back to New York,” Callan said. After all, Johnny Boy was firmly in charge of the family, and Johnny Boy had no reason to give Callan anything but love and safe harbor.
“Yeah, you can do that,” Scachi said. “Except for there are about three thousand federal indictments waiting for you.”
“For what?!”
“For what?” Scachi said. “Cocaine dealing, extortion, racketeering. The word I get is they also like you for the Big Paulie thing.”
“They like you for the Big Paulie thing, Sal?” Callan asks.
“What are you saying?”
“I mean, you put me there.”
“Listen, kid, I can probably get this straightened out for you,” Scachi says, “but it wouldn’t hurt if you would, you know, help us out on this thing.”
Callan didn’t ask how Sal Scachi could straighten out a federal beef by getting him to go down to Colombia to hook up with a bunch of anti-Communist cocaine vigilantes, because there are some things you don’t want to know. He just took the plane ticket and the fresh passport, flew to Medellín and reported for work with MAS.
Death to Kidnappers turned out to be Death to Winning Unión Patriótica Candidates. Six of them took bullets to the head instead of the oath of office. (Days of the Dead, Callan thinks now, working on his drink. Days of the Dead.)
After that, it was just on, he remembers. M-19 retaliated by seizing the Palace of Justice, and over a hundred people, including several Supreme Court judges, got killed in the fucked-up rescue attempt. Which is what you get, Callan thinks, for using the cops and the army instead of professionals.
They used professionals, though, to hit the leader of the Unión Patriótica. Callan didn’t pull the trigger, but he rode shotgun when they whacked Jaime Pardo Leal. It was a good hit—clean, efficient, professional.
Turned out, though, that was just the warm-up.
The real killing started in ’88.
The money behind a lot of it came from the Man himself, Medellín cocaine lord Pablo Escobar.
At first Callan couldn’t figure why Escobar and the other coke lords gave a rat’s ass about the politics. But then he tripped to the fact that the cartel boys had put a lot of their coke mo
ney into real estate, large cattle ranches that they didn’t want to see broken up by some leftist land-distribution scheme.
Callan got to know one of these ranches real well.
In the spring of ’87, MAS moved him out to Las Tangas, a large finca owned by a couple of brothers, Carlos and Fidel Cardona. When they were still teenagers their father had been kidnapped and murdered by Communist guerrillas. So as much as you want to talk about politics and all that shit, Callan thought when he met them at their ranch, it’s personal. It’s always personal.
Las Tangas wasn’t as much a ranch as it was a fucking fort. Callan saw some cattle out there, but what he saw mostly were other killers like himself.
There were a lot of Colombians, cartel soldiers on loan, but there were also South Africans and Rhodesians who had lost their own war and were looking to win this one. Then there were Israelis, Lebanese, Russians, Irish and Cubans. It was a fucking Olympic Village for button men.