American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Owen argues that a federal judge needs to appoint an independent commission to investigate Lucas’s career, why he was allowed to make cases and how those cases were facilitated by others.

  Nabors remembers when he took the stand and prosecutor Serrano demanded, “Why? Why on earth would a federal agent like Lee Lucas frame you on drug charges? What could possibly be his motive?” Nabors did not have a good answer, and he is still baffled by the question.

  What did Lucas have to gain by framing a bunch of innocent African Americans in the small industrial town of Mansfield? The answer is to be found in the inverted morality of the war on drugs.

  In the Northern District of Ohio, Lucas had an exalted reputation as an agent who delivered a high volume of cases; he made the world go around. With narcotics charges, you don’t need much of a case. Lucas was good at securing an indictment (his word and the word of a CI was usually enough), and severe mandatory sentencing ensured a wealth of plea bargains. Lucas wasn’t so good at producing evidence for trial—surveillance videos, corroboration, even believable photos to verify identities. There is a temptation to be sloppy with dope cases because one can be. Lucas and his team could easily have made a dozen legitimate arrests in Mansfield, but that wasn’t enough to justify the allocation of federal money and the formation of a federal task force.

  The day after the announcement that Lucas had been indicted, the new U.S. drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski, made the startling declaration that the DOJ would no longer use the phrase war on drugs. In the Wall Street Journal, Kerlikowski is quoted saying, “Regardless of how you try to explain to people that it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on product,’ people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

  Kerlikowski’s statement seemed to suggest a shift in how the DOJ views narcotics prosecutions. But in the following months, he appeared to backtrack by announcing, “We will continue to vigorously prosecute any violations of the drug statutes in this country.” When contacted to comment on drug police in general and, more specifically, the Lucas case, a spokesperson for the U.S. Office of National Drug Policy responded that Director Kerlikowski could not “fit it into his schedule.” Official spokespersons for the DOJ, DEA, and U.S. Attorney’s Office also declined to comment. Whether or not the drug war is over, or even in remission, remains to be seen. But if anyone wants a clear assessment of how narcotics prosecutions have skewed criminal justice and subverted the notion of due process, they don’t need to look far. Innumerable federal agents, cops, U.S. attorneys, prosecutors, and judges facilitated and benefited from the efforts of Lucas. Every case he supervised over the years is now tainted.

  In a courtroom in downtown Cleveland, it is DEA agent Lucas who will stand accused, but his co-conspirators are legion.

  POSTSCRIPT: On February 5, 2010, Lee Lucas was acquitted on eighteen criminal counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Many in Cleveland were shocked, with one local attorney familiar with the case referring to it as “our O. J. Simpson case.” However, the verdict had seemed inevitable once the judge in the case ruled that no evidence would be admissible that did not relate exclusively to the Mansfield drug cases. There was no mention of Lucas’s previous controversial cases in Miami and Bolivia, no evidence pertaining to his previous uses of confidential informants. Consequently, the entire case rested on the testimony of Jerrell Bray. After the verdict, a juror was quoted as saying that the jury simply did not believe that Bray was a credible witness.

  Jerrell Bray died in prison from natural causes on September 9, 2012. He was forty years old.

  2.

  NARCO AMERICANO

  Playboy, February 2011

  Juárez, the bloody ground zero for the Mexican drug war: Two American citizens—a U.S. embassy employee and her husband—are brutally assassinated in the middle of the day. The message from the cartels? More violence is coming, and no one is safe.

  The killings take place in a crowded area in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, mid-afternoon.

  A white Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates is chased by two vehicles one block from the U.S. border, near the Rio Grande. The driver of the Toyota is a man, age thirty-four. His wife, next to him in the passenger seat, is thirty-five; she is four months pregnant. In the back, a seven-month-old baby is strapped into a car seat.

  A black SUV and another vehicle occupied by armed gunmen pull alongside the Toyota. The man driving the Toyota tries to escape; he maneuvers desperately through traffic toward the Paso del Norte Bridge, the border crossing to El Paso, Texas. From the black SUV, gunmen open fire, strafing the side of the Toyota. The driver is hit; the car veers widely out of control, collides with other automobiles, and comes to a halt alongside the curb.

  The woman passenger screams in terror. Professional assassins step out of their car. Dressed commando-style in all black, they open fire on the woman and her husband, finishing the job.

  After the fusillade subsides, the assassins approach the vehicle. Some members of the hit team cordon off the area. Although they are less than a block from the border, where dozens of Mexican customs officials and armed military personnel are stationed, no cops approach the murder scene.

  The gunmen check to make sure the man and woman are dead. Ignoring the crying baby in the backseat, they gather up spent shell casings and other evidence, then leave the scene. No one chases after them.

  Once the killers are gone, military police descend. The couple in the front seat is history. In the backseat, the baby screams amid shattered glass and splattered blood but is miraculously okay. A policewoman reaches in and grabs the baby and clutches her to her chest.

  The killings should be shocking. Even in Juárez, called the deadliest city in the world, where the war against narco traffickers has given rise to a staggering body count, this terrible murder—which takes place in the middle of the day in front of dozens of onlookers—is outrageous.

  Even so, the flagrant brutality of the hit might have been absorbed into the body politic of Juárez, a city under siege, were it not for a simple fact: The victims are not only American citizens, but also government employees. The female victim, Lesley Enriquez, worked at the U.S. consulate in Juárez. Her husband, Arthur Redelfs, was a corrections officer at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, across the border in El Paso.

  The killings take place on March 13, 2010. At roughly the same time as the Enriquez-Redelfs hit, elsewhere in Juárez another assassination takes place. Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the husband of a U.S. consulate worker, leaving the same children’s birthday party attended by Enriquez and Redelfs, in a similar white SUV, is also gunned down by a professional hit squad.

  The killings have all the earmarks of drug cartels, which have been slaughtering people in Juárez, and all of Mexico, at an ungodly rate. The presidents of Mexico and the United States condemn the killings, with a spokesman for the National Security Council referring to them as “brutal murders.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expresses regret and denounces the cartels, saying, “There is no question that they are fighting against both our governments.”

  If there was doubt before, there is no longer. The killings represent a tipping point. What was viewed by some U.S. citizens and public officials as mostly a Mexican problem is now an American problem, with American victims. No one is immune. And no one is safe.

  “In all my years in law enforcement, I never imagined it would get this bad,” says Phil Jordan, a thirty-one-year veteran of the DEA who, in the mid-1990s, was promoted to director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency’s eyes and ears on the borderland and the international drug trade. Although he is now retired, Jordan maintains a network of law enforcement contacts, and he is frequently quoted on narco-related subjects in the press. His interests are professional but also personal. In 1995, his younger brother, Lionel Bruno, was shot dead in a Kmart parking lot in El Paso. A thirteen-year-old hood from Juárez was eventually arrested and prosecuted for the homicide;
the official story was that it was a carjacking gone wrong. But Jordan remains convinced the cartels targeted his brother because of his career in the DEA. A version of Jordan’s story is chronicled in the 2002 book Down by the River by Charles Bowden.

  “What you are seeing in Mexico now,” says Jordan, “is a new low. The cartels have become like Al Qaeda. They have learned from Al Qaeda.”

  Jordan is referring specifically to the cartels’ use of beheadings to deliver a message. Cartel rivals and other enemies are kidnapped and, on occasion, videotaped being beheaded or dismembered, with the savagery broadcast on YouTube and popular Internet sites such as El Blog del Narco.

  Then there are the remote-control car bombings that, throughout the summer of 2010, became increasingly commonplace. The entire country has morphed into a perverse version of the traditional Mexican celebration el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead).

  The numbers are shocking. Since December 2006, there have been nearly 30,000 narco-related murders in Mexico. The violence has taken place all around the country, from large municipalities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara to tourist enclaves such as Acapulco and the Yucatán Peninsula. Mass graves, severed heads and limbs, mutilated bodies left on display in the town plaza with threatening notes have become a near-daily occurrence.

  “These are the techniques of terrorists,” says Jordan.

  His observations are echoed by Secretary Clinton, who compared what is happening in Mexico to an “insurgency,” with the cartels attempting to take over sectors of government and whole regions of the country.

  Much of the mayhem is facilitated by corruption, with federales, municipal police and elected officials on the take. The temptations of narco dollars is seductive, and the threat of violence is persuasive. Public officials and average citizens are often coerced into the narco trade by the drug organizations, which make them an offer: plato o plomo, silver or lead. Either you take the cartels money and cooperate, or you will be shot dead.

  Corruption is sometimes a two-way street. Although the United States does not have the deeply entrenched institutional corruption that permeates Mexican society, the drug trade is sometimes facilitated by dirty U.S. border patrol agents, law enforcement personnel, and other government officials on the take.

  The killings of the consulate worker and her husband are a case in point. In July, Mexican authorities arrested a local Mexican member of the infamous Barrio Azteca Gang, which operates on both sides of the border (in Mexico it is known as Los Aztecas). According to the Mexican federal police, this gangster—Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo—claims that the target of the hit was Lesley Enriquez, the U.S. consulate employee. Chávez says he was the organizer of the assassination, which was ordered by the Juárez drug cartel because Enriquez was corrupt. She was helping to supply a rival gang with visas and had to die. The other victim, in the other white SUV, was murdered simply because the hit men weren’t sure which car belonged to their target, so they decided, just in case, to ambush both vehicles.

  The FBI office in El Paso publicly expresses doubt about the explanation for the killings, stating it has no evidence that Enriquez was corrupt. Over the following months, many theories about the killings appear in the press. This speculation takes place against a backdrop of further killings, bombings, kidnappings, and extortion that have turned the narco war into a killing field unlike anything else taking place on the planet.

  The narcosphere is a battlefield without borders. Politicians, businessmen, lawmen, bankers, drug lords, gangsters, and poor Mexicans and American citizens all have a role to play in an illicit business that generates, according to some estimates, up to $23 million annually from the United States alone. It is difficult to pinpoint the narcosphere’s central nervous system, but in terms of violence, the central war zone is Mexico’s northern borderland—encompassing the state of Chihuahua and its largest city, Juárez—which produces more victims of narco-terrorism than anywhere else in the country.

  Howard Campbell, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, refers to the phenomenon as “partly an accident of geography.” Campbell is author of the 2009 book Drug War Zone, a fascinating oral history that explores the Juárez–El Paso narco-economy from myriad perspectives.

  For nearly a century, going back to the days of Prohibition and before, America’s southwestern borderland has existed as a storied smuggling route. Some of this history, particularly as it relates to the narco trade, is glorified in narcocorridos—melodramatic musical ballads that celebrate drug smuggling, usually sung in the norteño style in a wavering falsetto accompanied by accordions and heavy brass. The narcocorridos have become the soundtrack to the current war. In 2008, when a drug lord from a rival cartel began a violent offensive to take over drug operations in Juárez, police radio frequencies were hacked to broadcast a narcocorrido that glorified his organization. To police in Juárez, it was a warning: We are everywhere. Join our cartel, or you will die.

  Says Campbell, “Juárez has become a drug war zone primarily because of its proximity to the world’s largest marketplace for narcotics—the United States.” The professor’s comments are an alternative phrasing of the famous observation of Porfirio Díaz, Mexican president in the late nineteenth century. Said Díaz, “Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.”

  Diaz was talking about the entire country, but his words resonate with the force of a shotgun blast in Juárez. Since 2008, when the U.S. government signed the Mérida Initiative—an agreement by which the U.S. Congress earmarked $1.3 billion in training, equipment, and intelligence to facilitate the Mexican narco war—there have been close to 7,000 murders in Juárez, a city of 1.3 million people. (By comparison, New York City, a city of more than 8 million, had fewer than 500 murders in 2009.) President Felipe Calderón and others in the Mexican government have claimed that these murders are mostly a consequence of cartel gangsters killing other gangsters. In fact, the victims comprise a broad swath of Mexican society—women, children, policemen, businessmen, public officials, and journalists—leading some observers to note that what is happening in Juárez as a result of a drug war is the full-scale disintegration of civil society.

  I arrive at the border crossing on the El Paso side on a hot August morning at 6:00 a.m. My guide is an hombre we shall call Christopher. Although Christopher is a gringo, he knows Juárez like the back of his hand. For seven years, from 1997 to 2004, Christopher lived as a heroin addict in one of Juárez’s toughest colonias, or slums, situated on the hillside overlooking downtown and across the Rio Grande into El Paso.

  My intention is to get a visual sense of the colonia known as Felipe Angeles, believed to be a home base of the Azteca Gang, which has been identified as the culprit behind the murders of Enriquez, Redelfs, and Salcido at the border. My guide tells me, “We must go early before most people are awake, like the Comanche used to do it.”

  We cross through the checkpoint on foot, passing over the brackish, bone-dry Rio Grande, then grab a bus in downtown Juárez. The bus rambles through the mostly deserted streets of downtown, along Avenida 16 de Septiembre toward Felipe Angeles. After ten minutes, we exit the bus and walk the rest of the way, up a steep hill into el barrio.

  We pass a police station, where half a dozen municipal cops are arriving for work. They look at us, two gringos walking alone through el barrio before the sun has risen, as if we must be escapees from a mental institution. Curiosity becomes hostility; we are outside the norm and therefore suspicious. A few minutes later, I notice a police jeep following us at a distance.

  “We are being clocked,” I tell Chris.

  “No big deal,” he says. “The way we’re going, they won’t be able to follow.”

  Chris leads me off the streets to narrow gravel pathways, up rocky cliffs, and down hills that no car or jeep could traverse, on our way to find an old friend of his by the name of Chavito. At this hour, the only inhabitants are goats, mangy dogs, and runawa
y chickens.

  We find Chavito, whose home is more like a garage than a house. In the yard is the shell of an abandoned ambulance. We rustle Chavito out of bed. He and Chris embrace.

  Chavito is around fifty years old, grizzled, with many missing teeth and a sweet disposition. His stomach is alarmingly distended, he says, from a recent surgery gone wrong. He occasionally winces in pain.

  Chris and Chavito talk about old times. Excitedly, Chavito tells a story that is both shocking and familiar.

  When Chavito and Chris were at the rehab clinic down the street, they became friendly with two recovering addicts named Carlos and Juan Pablo. Eventually, Carlos and Juan Pablo left and organized their own rehab clinic, a converted house in downtown Juárez that they named El Aliviane. Eventually, Carlos relapsed and again started using heroin; he also became a member of the Aztecas.

  The Aztecas have a rule about dope. You can sell it, but if you become a user yourself, oftentimes you are killed. Carlos was targeted for execution. According to Chavito, Juan Pablo met with leaders of the gang and said, “Please don’t kill Carlos. In fact, your policy of killing the addicts among you is wrong. It is inhumane. Please let me take in the Azteca dope addicts, and I will show you that they can be cured. They can be saved.”

  The Azteca leadership agreed. A number of gang members, including Carlos, were allowed to stay at El Aliviane, which supplied a mattress, a place to sleep, and a roof overhead.

  The problem was that a rival drug organization caught wind of the fact that a number of Aztecas were now residing at El Aliviane. One night in early September 2009, the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is engaged in a turf war with the Juárez cartel for control of drug distribution routes, sent a team of sicarios, or assassins, to the clinic. Wearing hoods and carrying submachine guns, they busted down doors and stormed the house. Although only five or six of the twenty people present were Azteca Gang members, the assassins did not discriminate. They rounded up the rehab patients—including Carlos—and made them line up against a wall, then slaughtered them with staccato blasts of machine-gun fire.