Confidential Source Ninety-Six

by C. S. 96

  The door opened and I heard his feet ascending the steps into the cabin. He noticed me immediately. I made a show of stirring awake just as he pointed at Raul, though oddly unperturbed, saying, “I thought you said there was no one else in here except you, your wife, and kids.”

  “Sir, why are you pointing a gun at me?” I asked, feigning horror. “Raul, Maria what the hell is going on?”

  “Son, I need you to keep your hands where I can see them.” The deputy pulled his portable radio, calling for immediate backup, adding the exact highway marker we were at.

  The old cop looked at me and asked, “All right, son, what’s your name?”

  “Roman Caribe, sir,” I said with genuine concern, and that wasn’t a hard emotion to pull off.

  Deputy Barney then told me to slide off the platform, keeping my hands high in the air; I complied. I could hear the cavalry coming, sirens blaring in all directions. Before I knew it there were four police cars in a loose semicircle surrounding the RV. I could hear their doors swing open, and I imagined their guns were out at the ready.

  I wondered how good the lawyers were in Sevier County. No doubt they weren’t the Ivy League types, but I didn’t need them to be great—just good enough to negotiate a way for me to help the feds, a way out of my life under Tony.

  Deputy Barney ordered Raul and me to step outside the RV with our hands where he could see them and we complied. He allowed Maria to stay inside the RV with her children.

  To my surprise Deputy Barney did not cuff us. He gave us a cursory frisk to see if we were carrying any weapons; there were none, of course. He moved us to his cruiser, opened the door, and we filed in. “Y’all stay here while I make sure the woman is all right and there’s nothing hinky going on. Oh, and by the way, you see these boys in uniforms around us? They was raised up in these woods and they could shoot the tits clear off a bull at a thousand feet.”

  The request was crystal clear.

  Deputy Barney waked back to the RV and tilted his head at two cops to join him inside.

  I looked at Raul, who was sweating, petrified. He was about to talk, and I shook my head no. I made a circling sweep with my hand of the interior of the car then pointed to my ear. I moved in and whispered, “This car is recording everything we say. Don’t say a word that can implicate you. And by the way, what in the hell are we doing in Utah?”

  “Yo, primo, there was some crazy traffic on 70, lotsa police activity and shit, so I came down a little further south to, you know, bypass it. Believe me, I wouldn’t have if I didn’t think it was too dangerous rolling through 70 to get to 80 with all them cops.”

  I looked at him with murder in my eyes. He got it, and his head flopped against the side window of the cruiser like he’d just booted up a hot shot of black tar heroin.

  I explained the dire circumstances to him, telling him to be, above all else, respectful and to ask for a lawyer the moment they start asking questions. Though I was crossing my fingers that I’d get the chance to speak with someone at the DEA and get out from under Tony for good, I couldn’t let Raul know. I needed to act like everything was as it had always been.

  Raul nodded his head, but there wasn’t much life left behind his eyes. I jammed him hard with my shoulder and said, “Look at me and tell me you understand what I just said to you!”

  The damage Raul could do to all of us was insurmountable. I needed to keep him on point just long enough till we were lawyered up.

  Deputy Barney bounded out of the RV like a kid on Christmas morning. There was more bounce to his step, a smile even. It all seemed to be moving in slow motion, surreal, like a film, as if I’d been here before. The truth was I had been; I’d visualized this all happening the moment I agreed to go on this clusterfuck of a transport. The deputy moved to the back of the cruiser, popped open the trunk, and pulled out a large crowbar. When Raul saw this he dropped his head, resigned, shaking it back and forth. “That’s it. They found it. We fucked, Rome; we fucked.” His voice trailed off and back he went to the safe oblivion of nothingness.

  It took under two minutes for Deputy Phil Barney to emerge, now holding two sets of cuffs. The two other deputies also emerged with big toothy grins, and one of them gave a deputy standing sentry nearby a big thumbs-up.

  We were carted off in separate vehicles to the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office. It was an all-in-one complex—sheriff’s station, dispatch, corrections department, and courthouse. Deputy Barney separated Raul and me the moment we were cuffed. If these cops understood the bigger picture, who I was and what I was a part of, and they proved it to me, then I’d offer them nuggets of information that just might get me out of this life forever.

  The good news was the sheriff’s department could administer bail without having to see a judge, which they did upon my arrival—bail was set at $500,000. There are apparent guidelines that need to be adhered to. The weight of the controlled substance we were caught with was obviously an A-1 felony charge, meaning it is equal to a murder charge, but without heinous intent, key words enabling us to get such a reasonable bail. To most criminals living in this part of the country, $500,000 might have seemed the same as $500,000,000, but I was solvent, and using my home as collateral I’d only need to come up with 10 percent in cash, and I’d be out in a day. If I was to find a way out of this life, I was going to have to risk it all.

  The desk sergeant, a tall, fit, good-looking man with a pleasant face, escorted me to the fingerprint board to start processing my arrest. “Roman? What kind of name is that?” he asked.

  “My parents are from Puerto Rico so your guess is as good as mine.” We both laughed.

  He asked, “You think you’ll make bail?”

  “I believe so, but I’d like to speak to counsel if that’s possible?”

  “Phone’s over there. Once you’re printed you can make your calls.” He pointed to a large empty pen filled with about forty beds and a bank of phones along the wall. He reached into his pocket, fishing out a load of change. Smiling, he continued, “I’m sure they fleeced you at the desk so here’s some change.”

  I thanked him and the moment he finished printing me I stared at the phone bank and prepared for the worst call I would ever make. Before I moved to the phones, I asked him what they did with Maria. He told me she wasn’t being charged and that she was in a motel waiting for the next bus to take her and her two kids to San Diego. I could only hope that she would get off the bus and call a family member in Mexico to pick her up and get her as far away from Tony as humanly possible. Just the thought of her and those two innocent kids reminded me of all the lives I’d destroyed. This arrest brought up from the depth of my soul all of the shit that I’d tamped down for so many years. All that denial and false justification hit me square in the face like a slug from a .45. One thing was certain: if I ever got out from under this, somehow I was going to make it all worthwhile. I prayed that these cops had relationships with feds in the area.

  I asked the desk sergeant if he knew of any good lawyers in the area—what I needed a lawyer to help me pull off was like nothing I’d ever done before. Without hesitation he moved to his desk, wrote down the name of a local who was licensed in three adjoining states, then, handing it to me, he said, “He’s the best. Have someone call him now.”

  Inez picked up the phone on the second ring. I told her I’d been arrested. By her reaction you would have thought I’d told her I’d murdered someone. Her anguish crushed me, and I confess I began sobbing quietly into the phone. I worried the best thing I could do for her would be to disappear. That’s when I gathered my nerves and told her that I had a plan. It was going to be okay. In fact, crazy as it sounded, this arrest was the best thing that could’ve happened to us.

  After the sizable amount of paperwork was completed, Deputy Phil Barney brought me into a small eight-by-ten-square-foot interrogation room with one desk, two chairs, two-way smoked-glass window, a very visible camera mounted above a standard wall clock, and that was it, utilitarian
in manner and fashion. There were no tricks, no good cop–bad cop-type bullshit. The deputy reread me my Miranda rights and then he told me that the drugs we were caught with were coming back unreadable and he wanted to know if the substance was something other than cocaine, possibly methamphetamine. I knew the drugs weren’t coming back as cocaine because the rudimentary drug testing kits they used searched for additives amongst other chemicals when identifying drugs and this cocaine was 100 percent pure.

  I was stuck because I wanted to talk; I wanted to rip myself open and let it all pour out, everything I’d done up to that point. But if I broke so quickly to him, a local deputy, I feared I’d lose my leverage with the feds, and that I could not allow to happen.

  Fearful of ruining my one chance at escaping Tony’s deadly shadow, I kept my mouth shut and lawyered up as respectfully as I could. I needed someone to help broker the deal I had in mind.

  The Way Out

  I could only hope Raul had lawyered up, too. I wondered why the corrections officers and deputies were keeping me isolated from him as well as the rest of the prisoners in an otherwise empty forty-bed quad. It concerned the hell out of me. That and the fact that I’d been told that there was a federal bail hold on me, so I wouldn’t be allowed to leave any time soon.

  From what I had ascertained they considered me a high-profile prisoner, like a celebrity rolling through who had gotten caught in one of Sevier’s no-tell motels firing a twelve-gauge into the TV screen while in the throes of a four-day crack binge. I’d learn later why they kept me from the rest of the local population, and it had nothing to do with my charm or celebrity. Everything that happened up to that point was a carefully choreographed operation. From the separation of Raul, to the genteel, kid-gloves way I had been treated, it was all in preparation for the sales pitch that was coming. And what a pitch it was.

  A thousand miles away from my family, sleep was an impossible commodity. All I could do was fixate on the thought of twenty-plus years without them, and it started to wear me down. I was sitting on my bunk contemplating my life, how I’d gotten to this point. Through the Plexiglas window I could watch the inner workings of the whole facility, and when I did so I witnessed something that made my blood run cold. Raul, my partner in crime, was being escorted out of the building surrounded by cops! Cops whom I hadn’t seen up to that point, and worse still, they weren’t local cops or Utah State Troopers—their suits, blinding white oxford shirts, neutral blue-and-red-striped ties, soft-sole shoes, their fucking pocket squares, everything about them read wrong—read federal agents. He’d beaten me to the punch.

  It was bad enough having Tony, and his deceiving partner Hector, determine my fate and my every move, the money I earned, the air I breathed, but to have my freedom rescinded behind what this junkie said was too big a pill to swallow.

  I gently knocked on the Plexiglas. One of the young booking officers I became friendly with unlocked the slide on the window. “Who are those men,” I asked, “and where are they taking Raul?”

  He smiled and reaffirmed what I already knew and dreaded. The moment Raul was questioned he fell apart, giving up the entire transport and operation. And what a tale it must’ve been, because the feds were called in. But the worst part was that these feds somehow convinced Raul to take them to Detroit to sell the drugs to a group that he’d called his clients—not to the clients we planned to sell to, mind you, but to Italian gangster clients he’d once been in touch with as part of a deal I’d cut. Word traveled fast in this out-of-the way jailhouse facility; this young cop knew things about our organization that I didn’t think Raul even knew. Clearly I was wrong, and Raul was taking them on a very dangerous wild goose chase, I assumed to show his bona fides. These feds, whoever they were, would soon learn that Raul did not have the juice nor the knowledge to sell anything to anyone. Raul talking first was my biggest fear. How would they trust anything I said or offered them once they’d discovered how untrustworthy my partner was?

  I was face-to-face with this deputy who couldn’t be much older than twenty. I knew he was searching for my response and I gave it my all to remain calm in an effort not to betray the fear and anger surging through me.

  I’d dealt with Italians in Detroit several times in the past, and they weren’t the sort of men you would want to try and entrap or double-deal. But our contacts for this particular load were three separate groups of drug gangs: Dominicans, Jamaicans, and American blacks. Since he was going elsewhere, I knew Raul was punting, but he was going to end up dead and, quite possibly, get the feds he was with as dead. He was trying to sell the coke to a third party he barely knew, hoping to curry favor with the feds. He was smart enough to know he couldn’t go to my connections because they’d NEVER buy anything from him. They expected Pedro or me on this trip.

  That night in the quad I tried to sleep, wondering what lay ahead for my family. I was thinking of my son, just months old—would he grow up barely knowing me? My daughter suffering with cerebral palsy—how could Inez care for her, and all the children, and pay the bills? How would they recover from the embarrassment and dejection I laid at their feet? I knew what I had done for the past ten years was illegal—everything—and I deserved whatever they would throw at me, but they didn’t deserve this. I got so caught up in the life that I’d lost perspective of the “what if” moment—what if I get locked up? What happens to my family?

  I tried to calm myself. I thought about Raul with all those feds. Perhaps he was not the one they wanted but the bait to get me to flip. I needed one shot to prove myself to them.

  The first thing my lawyer told me was that they had cases against me, and of course I was blown away. Yes, we knew we were being watched. Hell, we were bringing in tons of weed, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin every week. But beyond that we’d seen the conspicuous tails on us all the time, which is why we were so buttoned up on security and street tradecraft when moving or delivering our material. They could follow us all they wanted, but we were never going to lead them to any tangible evidence to develop any real cases on us—or so I thought. But no security can stop your associates, once they have been arrested, from becoming informants and going after the biggest organizations they know. Usually, that was us.

  We were the Beltráns’ main supplier to the United States—and we could be sure our customers let their customers know about it. Selling dope is not only about executing sales—marketing and branding are equally important for sustaining an operation. Cocaine, weed, heroin, and meth directly from the source—the Beltráns—was considered the Ferrari of dope. The issue—what I had for so long led myself to believe would never be a problem—was that any cop or fed working in any narcotics detail knew the local purveyors of Beltrán’s gack, or drugs, were out there and they wanted to stem or stop its flow.

  I suddenly realized what a fool I’d been. Did I really think we were smarter than customs, the DEA, ATF, FBI, or any of the hundreds of local narcotics teams out there, all working 24/7 in a concerted effort to thwart the Beltráns and their U.S. connection?

  My options were limited and none of them were good. I knew I was caught, but for some reason, after the initial shock, I felt relief wash over me because I knew at that moment I’d be free from Tony.

  I finally turned to my lawyer, Tim, and very clearly announced, “I want out of here now.”

  Tim cut me off. “Of course you do, but first I need…”

  “No, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I want out, today, this instant, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to my wife and children, anything! Meaning I’m willing to talk.”

  Tim was caught off guard. He was a lawyer, after all, and it was his job to do one of two things: have the charges dropped on a technicality or get me the best possible deal. In a calm, practiced voice, he replied, “Listen, I understand your dilemma and frustration, I really do, but just hear me out. Deputy Phil Barney is an honest cop, and Lord knows he’s a good man.” He lowered his voice. “But he doesn’
t adhere to the rules of the law very well. I’ve been down this exact road with him more times than I can remember. He has excellent skills as a cop, and he knows when someone is…” He hesitated. “When someone is ‘dirty’ for lack of a better word. But nine out of ten times he reacts poorly, prejudicing the case, and nine out of ten I’ve easily beaten him in court. This fits the same pattern.”

  He furthered this by explaining that the town judge was a very law-sensitive man, and though it was a Friday, by Monday he’d get in front of the judge who, once presented with these facts, would have no choice but to throw the case out, meaning I would be home by Tuesday.

  I listened, but my mind was made up. I didn’t care if this was a tainted arrest and I was going free. I was done trying to beat the system. This was my chance to get out of the life, and hopefully redeem some of my past mistakes—I just needed to talk with someone who could guarantee that it was done safely. If I truly wanted out, it was going to have to start here and now. I was ready to start divulging a series of dangerous secrets, and I knew there were people out there who were going to listen, so I told Tim everything. He was pinned back in his chair listening. I told him about how I had been broke, nowhere to turn, making that fateful wrong decision to mule for the day, which of course turned into a ten-year odyssey of pyrrhic fantasies fulfilled, coupled with broken promises and dreams. The lie I was living, the pretense of being a good father while ruining other families’ lives; it felt good to let it all out. Every word amplified, crystal clear, and by this simple first act of contrition, finally speaking to another person without cherry-picking events or reciting a scripted response, it felt liberating. I ended by telling him I wanted to speak with Deputy Barney and the agents who had this case, or cases on me.

  The lawyer looked as shell-shocked as I must’ve looked when he dropped the bomb on me that the feds had “cases” on me. To his credit he didn’t try to debate me. He simply stood, knocked on the door, and was led out.