Meanwhile, back in Juárez, the manufacturing base of the city has been gutted. Into the breach have stepped drug lords and gangsters who shoot it out with one another, as well as with municipal police, federales, and the military, on a nightly basis.
“The city has been left to die,” says Sánchez. “There is no movement toward urban planning or commercial development. Is there any wonder that those who are left behind in the city turn to illegal activities? The illegal activities in Juárez are thriving, while legal commercial employment is going nowhere.”
Even more depressing than the hulking factories in the desert is the tract housing that has been constructed for the maquiladora employees. Squat, confining, monotonous by design, the desert projects are a crass form of human warehousing. In the city, colonias like Felipe Angeles are poverty-ridden and perilously unsanitary, but at least they feel like communities compared with the maquiladora industrial parks, where company buses pick workers up for their shift and take them to the factory and back in a soul-destroying cycle of cheap labor and subsistence.
Of the desert housing complexes, Sánchez says, “Many of these projects have become prime locations for recruitment by gangs like the Aztecas and Artistas Asesinos.”
We continue farther into the desert. It is Sánchez’s intention to show me the flimsy, near-comical border fence, which runs for a few miles and then abruptly ends in the middle of the desert. He points out surveillance posts and border patrol checkpoints, where vehicles are routinely stopped and searched for illegal contraband. As we drive along through fields of brown desert soil and sagebrush, I ask Sánchez about living with the fear and threat of violence that is so prevalent in the area.
He tells me a story: One night, his two teenage sons attended a birthday party outside the city, not far from where we are now driving. The party was held at a friend’s house. There were close to two dozen guests, all of them teenagers. Two of the attendees, friends of Sánchez’s sons, left the party early—around 9:00 p.m.—to return home. As they were driving back through the desert, they were forced off the road by another car. Gunmen got out of the car, pulled the two teenagers from their car, and executed them along the side of the road. Like many killings in Juárez, it made no sense: It is believed that the murders were a case of mistaken identity.
“It was horrifying,” says Sánchez. “My sons were in shock.”
As he remembers these events and relates them to me, Sánchez begins to cry. He is a grown man, driving through the desert with a recent acquaintance, and he is weeping uncontrollably. The sense of tragedy is overwhelming.
Sánchez gathers himself, wipes the wetness from his eyes and says, “I want you to know, I am not crying for myself or even for my children. I am crying for my city. I am crying for Mexico.”
After two weeks of investigations in Juárez, I am not satisfied. The Mexican authorities’ acceptance of Chávez’s explanation that Lesley Enriquez was murdered because she was corrupt is typical, part of a dubious pattern. In Mexico, when a prominent person is murdered, authorities often present to the public that the victim was in cahoots with the cartels and therefore his or her death was perhaps inevitable. I speak with Redelfs’s former partner, a corrections officer in El Paso named Mike Hernandez, who worked alongside Redelfs for five years. “He was a total professional,” Hernandez says of his murdered partner. “He was a good family man and great all around guy. What [authorities in Mexico] have said about him is bullshit.”
A memorial service for Redelfs and his wife is held at a Mormon church. Redelfs was active in the church (Enriquez was not a member) and the couple appeared squeaky clean according to those who knew them.
I am prepared to believe they are innocent victims who have been slandered in death, but then I hear from a source in the DEA who has agreed to pass along the results of an internal investigation. He is an active special agent currently on the job; I am not able to use his name because he is not authorized to communicate with me.
Of Enriquez and Redelfs, in three simple words the DEA source says, “They were dirty.” I ask for more details, which he declines to divulge, saying only that a federal law enforcement investigation in the United States confirms what the Mexican authorities have alleged: that Lesley Enriquez and her husband were on the take.
I speak with Phil Jordan, the retired DEA director who spent more than thirty years investigating drug trafficking. I tell him I am still having a hard time accepting Enriquez and Redelfs as having been in bed with narcotraficantes when, by all outward appearances, they were, as one source told me, “goody two-shoes” and churchgoers.
“Well,” Jordan says, “don’t you think that if you were involved in corrupt activities with narcos, to present yourself as upstanding citizens and religious people might be the best possible cover?”
By fall 2010, their murders are no longer a major news item. A story that had initially riled the righteous indignation of U.S. officials, including the president, a story of innocent U.S. citizens and federal employees gunned down for no good reason, has evolved into something far more complex and disillusioning. As is often the case in the war on drugs, it turns out that corruption was at the heart of the matter after all.
The shocking level of violence has accelerated. In late July, eight severed heads of murder victims are found neatly lined up along a highway in the state of Durango. No one knows how they got there. In that same month, it is reported that the warden of a prison in the state of Sinaloa allowed inmates to leave the prison, carry out murders for the local cartel and then return safely to their cells. This story is presented as a positive development, seeing as the warden was arrested for the crime. In late August, the bodies of seventy-two people who were attempting to enter the United States are found in a mass grave, one of numerous such sites discovered in the desert in the past year. This particular massacre is attributed to Los Zetas, a fearsome cartel composed of former members of the Mexican military who were originally trained by the U.S. military.
In late November, Mexican authorities arrest a man they claim is the leader of the Azteca Gang in Juárez. The suspect allegedly tells federal police that he is responsible for 80 percent of the city’s killings since August 2009. This is given major play in the press, including the New York Times, even though U.S. agents say this man’s name does not appear anywhere in their records of known Azteca leaders.
A victory for the forces of the law or a cheap PR stunt? It is hard to know. Meanwhile, the cycle of violence continues to escalate, partly because the governments of Mexico and the United States have committed themselves to a strategy of all-out war from which they say they will never back down. In the public domain, the fog of war hovers along with the pollution and dust that sometimes engulfs Ciudad Juárez. When atrocities occur, key details are omitted from news reports, public officials put forth version of events that are incomplete or outright lies, people are terrified and afraid to tell anyone what they have seen or what they know. There appears to be no end in sight.
Welcome to the narcosphere.
IV.
THE BULGER CHRONICLES
By the summer of 2011, I had good reason to believe that I would never again be writing about the Irish-American gangster. I had more or less exhausted the topic, having written two books on the subject and contributed to numerous cable television documentaries that profiled various Irish mobsters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I had chronicled the phasing out of the Irish Mob in New York and Boston, which, along with the decline of the Mafia, represented the end of what people in law enforcement refer to as “traditional organized crime,” meaning old-style racketeering with roots going back to the days of Prohibition. It seemed as though there was nothing left to say on the subject of the Irish Mob.
And then they captured Whitey Bulger.
I had written about Bulger before, in the book Paddy Whacked (2005), which was an attempt to lay bare the entire unholy universe of the Irish-American gangster, from the time of t
he Irish potato famine to the present day. I opened and closed that book with a meditation on Whitey, who had served as the Mob boss of Boston for more than twenty years, and who was still on the lam at the time.
[Bulger] was the last of the last, inheritor of a tradition that had once pretended to represent the rising of a people and inevitably degenerated over the generations into a bloody netherworld of treachery, deception, betrayal, wholesale murder, and dismemberment. To some, the story of the Irish-American gangster is the stuff of legend, a tribute to the rebellious, defiant, tough-as-nails side of the Irish temperament. To others, the saga is shameful, a best-forgotten example of antisocial behavior at its most homicidal and a desperate survival mentality personified in the diabolical, sociopathic tendencies of Whitey Bulger and his ilk.
Either way, the lives were lived, the bodies buried, and the history remains the same. Out there somewhere, Whitey exists as a living relic, or a ghostly reminder, that no criminal underworld in the history of the Unites States started as early or lasted as long as the Irish Mob.
By 2010, I’d come to the conclusion that Bulger was most likely deceased. There hadn’t been any recent sightings of the aging gangster, who first disappeared in 1995 along with his girlfriend, Catherine Greig. My guess was that after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, with the increased security around the globe, he’d gotten stranded somewhere. Eastern Europe, perhaps, where there had allegedly been a Bulger sighting in the late-1990s. He might have died there under an assumed name, a vaguely anonymous U.S. citizen with no known family contacts. There would have been no reason for foreign authorities to make any kind of announcement regarding such an undistinguished passing. As for Catherine Greig, I would not have been surprised if Bulger had resolved that problem. If she had showed signs of weakness, or had begun to crack under the pressure of life on the run, it was not inconceivable that Bulger might have strangled her to death and gotten rid of the body.
It did not cross my mind that America’s most wanted fugitive was living basically out in the open, in a popular section of Santa Monica, California, not far from the town’s famous bluff overlooking the beach and Pacific Ocean. Under the assumed names of Charles and Carol Gasko, Bulger and Greig strolled the beach and the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica like any number of mature couples who had left the urban hustle of their native cities behind to retire to the gentle climes of Southern California. Neighbors at their apartment building, the Princess Eugenia, were reportedly shocked that the sweet, slightly eccentric couple living on the third floor was, in fact, among the most wanted fugitives in the United States.
Vanity is what finally tripped up Bulger and Greig. After sixteen fruitless years of searching for Whitey, having exposed and detailed his criminal career on TV shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries, the FBI and U.S. marshals shifted their strategy to focus on Greig, who was a creature of habit. She liked to go to beauty salons on a regular basis. A media campaign with photos of Greig and information about her personal habits led to a tip from a woman who had seen Greig regularly at a Santa Monica salon. Based on that tip, the feds staked out the apartment of “Carol Gasko,” leading to the arrest of Greig and her notorious gangster paramour.
John Connolly, the former FBI agent who was Bulger’s benefactor back in Boston, later convicted on second-degree murder charges stemming from his relationship with Whitey, would later tell me from prison, “If it had been just Bulger on his own without Catherine, they never would have caught him.”
A few days after Bulger was returned to Boston and indicted on charges that included nineteen counts of murder, I received a communication from an editor at Newsweek magazine. Would I be interested in writing about the Bulger case in a series of articles leading up to and including his trial on charges of murder and racketeering?
I was hesitant. In the sixteen years that Bulger had been on the lam, close to twenty books had been written about Whitey from every conceivable angle. Bulger’s gangster history in South Boston; his relationship with brother William “Billy” Bulger, the powerful state senator; his role as an FBI informant and how he’d used that to further his criminal operations—all of these subjects had been investigated and presented in print. It seemed as though the Bulger story had been thoroughly worked over, sent to the morgue and further penetrated, probed, and dissected until the corpse no longer served any earthly purpose. And then it occurred to me: no, not exactly. There was one final chapter to the Bulger saga yet to be told: his prosecution.
Could Bulger be brought to justice, fairly and judiciously, even though his criminal activities were partly underwritten by the same criminal justice system that would now be putting him on trial? And what new or unanswered questions about Whitey might be raised or resolved by a full regurgitation of the Bulger saga in court? The possibilities were enticing. And so I packed a bag and hopped on an express train from New York City to Boston.
Beginning in early 2011, I became a semi-regular commuter, staying in Boston, usually at the Seaport Hotel on the harbor, not far from Bulger’s old stomping ground of Southie, and also walking distance from the federal courthouse.
For anyone entering the orbit of the Bulger story, a mood of creepiness and depression are the likely consequence. Bulger’s grip on Boston was unlike anything seen since the days of Al Capone in Chicago. Unlike Capone, whose reign was characterized by outrageous drive-by shootings and gang warfare in the streets, Bulger’s reign of power was more insidious, a subterranean culture of corruption that enveloped much of the city’s political and law enforcement structure and ate away at the fabric of justice from deep within the system.
While I was covering this story, some in Boston would tell me that they didn’t care about the Bulger story, that it didn’t really affect them or the city. They were in denial. The story of Bulger’s reign and his prosecution, as much as any other public event—for better or for worse—had come to define the city of Boston over the last quarter century.
Boston can sometimes seem like a small town, and covering the Bulger story meant getting to know a circumscribed cast of former gangsters, family members of murder victims, local crime journalists, former cops, and criminal defense lawyers who seemed trapped in an ongoing horror that never ended. There were Bulger’s years as Mob boss, his years on the lam, and now his prosecution, which promised to drag everyone back out into the limelight to regurgitate stories and events they thought had been put to bed decades earlier. As Pat Nee, a former criminal rival and then reluctant partner of Bulger’s put it to me, “It’s like being trapped in a nightmare. We just want it to all be over.”
How insular was the cast of characters in the Bulger story? One time, in the lobby of the Seaport Hotel, I was interviewing the relative of a man that Bulger and an accomplice were alleged to have murdered. My next interview, also scheduled to take place in the hotel’s lobby on the heels of this one, was with the person who was thought to have been Bulger’s accomplice during that murder. Though it was common knowledge to many—including the victim’s relative—that this man may have been an accomplice to the murder, the man had never been charged with the crime. It was nerve-wracking trying to quickly finish up the interview with the victim’s relative so that the two men, victim and killer, did not stumble upon each other. Covering the Bulger story offered many potentially explosive juxtapositions.
The various articles in this section represent a mishmash of assignments and styles. Three of the articles are full-fledged investigative pieces, one a book review, another a spot reporting assignment, and another a personalized obituary written for my Internet blog page. Most of the articles were written months apart from one another and were never intended to be read back to back. If read successively, the reader will find numerous informational repetitions in these articles, a consequence of having to remind the reader of salient details and factual matters relating to the Bulger story. Also, you may notice a repeat of certain adjectives or phrase
s that I use as shorthand over the course of these articles to describe Bulger and his criminals activities. I was tempted to go back and reedit these pieces to make them appear more seamless for this anthology but, ultimately, felt it was a more accurate representation of my work—extremis and on deadline—to let them appear exactly as originally intended in print and on the Web.
1.
WHITEY’S PAYBACK
Newsweek, September 19, 2011
Mob boss Whitey Bulger might be behind bars, but as his trial approaches, former associates, FBI agents, and victims’ families speak about why he might get away and how Boston has never recovered.
Of all the murders James “Whitey” Bulger is alleged to have committed in his twenty-year run as the Mob boss of Boston, the killing of Debra Davis stands alone. Whitey is alleged to have strangled the woman with his bare hands.
Davis, age twenty-six, was the girlfriend of Bulger’s gangster partner, Steve Flemmi. Bulger and Flemmi were concerned that Davis, a blond-haired beauty, had learned that they were both informants for the FBI. One night in September 1981, Flemmi, forty-six at the time, brought Davis to a house on Third Street in South Boston, or “Southie,” a tight-knit neighborhood that served as the base of Bulger and Flemmi’s criminal operations. Flemmi and Davis had been arguing. After nearly nine years together, Davis wanted out of the relationship. Flemmi wanted her out also, but not in the way Davis planned. Waiting in the house on Third Street was Whitey Bulger, fifty-two years old. Bulger suddenly emerged from the shadows and wrapped his hands around Davis’s throat. She struggled to break free. Squeezing tightly, never letting go of her neck, Bulger dragged Davis down to the basement, where he finished the job. Afterward, using a pair of pliers, Flemmi pulled the teeth from Davis’s head so that the body could not be identified by dental records. They later trussed and wrapped up the body and dumped it in a shallow grave near the Neponset River in Quincy, Massachusetts.
American Gangsters Page 18