by Johann Hari
Marcia needed protection. The only people she met who offered it were the Hell’s Angels—the drug-dealing motorbike gang who couriered coke across the highways of America. Richard thought they used her to transport drugs because a pretty young white girl doesn’t attract much attention. So she became a “house mouse”—one of the women who travels with them and skivvies for them, cleaning their bikes and their homes. A female friend of Richard’s who came along to the interview, said that in that life, “you’re a slave. You’re nothing . . . when you’re a biker chick . . . and once you get in, it’s kind of a Mafia deal. Once you get in, you may as well leave the country and hide because they will kill you. They will kill you because you know too much.”
So what was in it for Marcia to be a house mouse? Richard says: “A safe place to sleep. And food. And drugs. Place to shower. Ain’t got to worry about people kicking in the door because there’s a guy with a gun at the door.” Marcia’s man in the Angels was a much older guy called Conrad Kurz, who “was kind of strict to her. He was a Nazi . . . a full-fledged Nazi.” His home was filled with swastikas and Hitlerian flags. He “kept a pretty good leash on her,” Richard says, until they had a baby girl, Eureka, and the baby was taken away by the authorities in Arizona, presumably because Marcia had developed a drug addiction. Conrad couldn’t take the loss of his child. One day, he shot himself in the head in the shower.
Richard met her when he pulled up on his motorcycle at a truck stop when they were both in their early thirties. He, too, is an Angel. “That’s why she stopped me—because I had the fastest bike in town . . . She liked to go fast,” he says. He immediately liked her: she cooked him pork chops, and he loved the way she even made a fully cooked breakfast—egg and sausages—for his dog. They went gold panning—they rode up to the lakes to look for chunks of gold. “We’d do that for weekends at a time,” he says. Marcia loved being outside, in the water. It was where she was happiest.
They decided to settle down in Missouri. “I worked the railroad for a year. We had a house, I had a car,” he says. He managed to get Marcia to give up all drugs except weed. She started to do normal things. She mowed the lawn. She watched TV. She planted flowers. She started to draw flowers, too. “She was so happy to be stable,” he says. “I always got her stable.” But she decided she wanted to go back to Arizona for her daughter, Eureka: she couldn’t just leave her out there, without her mother.
When Marcia got back to Arizona, she discovered she had an outstanding warrant for having 1.5 grams of marijuana—two joints. The police busted her and she received her first conviction and was sentenced to a year under house arrest. When he looks back over her life, Richard believes this was the turning point, when her stability was pulled down again. She had been okay for a year, but now, after her arrest, Marcia’s paranoia returned with a vengeance. One day, when it was extremely hot out, she flew into a terror and ran off down the street barefoot, and she got third-degree burns on her soles. They had to take skin from her back to graft in its place.
As he said this, I found myself thinking of the last time Billie Holiday got clean—and George White came to stalk her, because of her past.
Marcia and Richard had a son together, Ritchie. She relapsed after the arrest and kept getting arrested now. Richard says it should have been clear to the authorities that “she was an addict . . . Addiction can be overcome with proper help. It ain’t a jail thing.” He believes the solution was to get her into “a mental hospital—that’s probably what would have helped her. Get her whatever she needs—Xanax, morphine, to get her chemical imbalance right . . . Get her on the right meds. Show her some respect. Give her some working skills. Get her a GED so when she comes out she has a place, like a woman’s shelter, [can] get a job . . . Give her respect, that’s how it’s supposed to be.” He believes “if you’re calm and cool and know you’ve got a life ahead of you that’s going up the steps . . . if you know you’re going up in the world, you’re going to stay going up in the world.” Instead, she kept being kicked down the steps by the criminal justice system. One day, she disappeared into a police car, and he never saw her again.
Richard eventually got together with another woman, and took Ritchie back to live with her and her kids in Missouri, where the boy would often ask about his mother. Then one day, ten years later, Richard came home to find the house on fire. He only found out later what happened: his stepson had raped and murdered Ritchie and his entire family and burned down their home. He tells me about this in broken fragments, as if it is too painful to explain clearly. He pushes in front of me newspaper reports of the deaths,36 which have the same baffled tone. He says the kid just went crazy one day, and murdered them all.
Richard doesn’t know whether Marcia ever found out that her son had died. She had another year to live. He hopes she didn’t.
In the arrest reports for Marcia Powell, you can hear her voice. In 1996, she gave a blowjob to a man in an alleyway in Phoenix and a passing thirteen-year-old boy happened to get a glimpse of it. The police charged her with sexual indecency to a minor—a charge normally leveled against pedophiles. The police wrote down her babble, in a tone that sounds mocking. She said she had been asked to give a blowjob to a man but “life would not permit it. We couldn’t do it because of a jolt which is a life we conquered.” She then offered to have sex with the officers arresting her because “there was a nationwide emergency!37 John’s in trouble! Visa! Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Special Forces, National Guard!” But then, suddenly, she was sane again, and sad. The report says she argued “she is not really a bad person, did not ‘hurt the kid or anything,’ and is not a menace to society because she ‘loves people,’ is teaching love while in jail, and is ‘not a total waste of time.’ ”
Richard looks at these reports when I hand them to him and reads for a moment. Then he says simply: “I miss her.”
In prison, looking out across the desert, Marcia would talk dreamily about nature. “She was a pagan in her beliefs—she believed that the trees had the same DNA that we did,” one of her former cellmates, Juliana Philips, tells me. Marcia would say “that everything out there has a soul and is our brother. We contaminate the water, people can’t drink the water. We can drink bottled water but our squirrels and cows and dogs and cats and buffalo can’t drink that—they still have to be poisoned.”
Later, Rich tells me: “If Arizona hadn’t stuck her in jail for 1.5 grams of usable marijuana, we’d be in Illinois living high [that is, well]. I’d be twenty years with the railroad. We had a nice house there, a huge yard. She’d be a mom. Kids raised. Ritchie would have been eighteen now. My kids might still be alive. Just because of a little bullshit.” Perhaps this is only a comforting myth he uses to deal with his pain, since Marcia had such deep-seated problems; but perhaps it is true. Perhaps that conviction did kick her out of the only trough of stability she ever found.
For Richard it seems to hurt most that as she lay dying, “they’re making fun of her. For being ill.” Richard hands me a photograph of Ritchie, and asks if I can arrange for it to be put with Marcia’s grave. “So she knows she wasn’t a criminal.” Because, he says, “she made angels.”
Many of the prison guards who put Marcia Powell in an exposed cage in the desert and ignored her screams are still at work today.
Chapter 9
Bart Simpson and the Angel of Juárez
An eight-foot-tall angel stood on the sidewalk in Ciudad Juárez with his vast feathery wings bristling in the breeze and his silver skin glistening in the light, as he stared down at yet another corpse. It is—it was—a twenty-year-old man. He had been walking on the street next to his house in this city, the most dangerous in the world, when the gunmen arrived. The angel could see the bullet wounds, and the puddle of blood, and the weeping when two of his relatives arrived. The angel was carrying a sign. It was addressed to the murderers—the people who had massacred more than sixty thousand1 people like this in Mexico in just five years. It addressed them by
name. Chapo Guzman, the drug lord. The Zetas, the craziest of his rivals. The police. The army.
TIME IS SHORT2, the sign said. SEEK FORGIVENESS.
Juan Manuel Olguín grew up in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city that sits across the border from the Texan city of El Paso, as the drug war was turning it into the deadliest place on the planet. I met him some time after3 he had stood over that corpse, on a Thursday night in 2012, in Juárez, when he was wearing his wings.
I had been reading the figures on Mexico’s drug war for years, but they didn’t make much sense to me. I knew the best estimate was—I’ll repeat the number—that sixty thousand people had been killed in five years. That 90 percent of the cocaine4 used in the United States passed through here every year. That Mexican drug cartels make between $19 and $29 billion5 every year from U.S. drug sales alone. But the human stories I heard were so extreme I couldn’t make any connection with them. They seemed to all focus on such unimaginable sadism—beheadings posted on YouTube, or pregnant women carved up with bottles—that it seemed unreal.
That is why, one morning in July, I walked into Ciudad Juárez from the United States over the thin brown trickle of the Rio Grande. The bridge was backed up with cars and squeegee merchants. Women sat on the ground, begging in two languages. The Mexican border agents didn’t check anything I brought in. They waved me through with an unsmiling nod.
One of the first things I saw was a sign. HISTORIC DOWNTOWN TOUR OF JUÁREZ, it said, directing me to the sites to that were famous when this was one of the great party towns of North America. This is where Billie Holiday came6 to get hitched and get wasted, and she was only one of millions of Americans who wanted the same Juárez buzz. But that route has, I saw, now been papered over with posters. HAVE YOU SEEN HER? the plastered signs say, above images of one young woman or another, smiling at a party, in the time before. One of them, in red lipstick and a multicolored scarf, caught my eye. This is all there is to see now in Juárez—the absences. The tourist attractions have all been shuttered or burned down.
My fixer, Julián Cardona—the Reuters correspondent for Juárez—drove me around the city as I tried to get a feel for where I was. It soon became clear that if Rothstein’s Manhattan was a vertical city reaching for the skies, this is a horizontal city scrambling for the desert. Its city center looks like any North American nowhere town, where a twenty-four-hour Wendy’s squats next to a mall where the theme from Titanic plays in a pan-pipes version as people buy enormous flatscreen televisions. But as you follow the fat eight-lane highways for miles out of town, the city thins, and the malls turn into burned-out husks of stores and rusty shantytowns. Just when you think you have hit the edge of Juárez, you find another rash of homes and stores, before finally the sand dunes win.
But before Juárez petered out, I had arranged to meet the angels.
When he was eleven, Juan started to watch his friends vanish into the Juárez drug trade. This is the most important smuggling route into the United States, and the gangs were at war to control it. The cartels prefer kids: they don’t understand death, so they are less afraid. Juan’s best friend joined for the cash and the sense that, finally, he was part of something. Juan, in a fog of hormones, considered joining a cartel himself. He would have money, at last. He would be able to support his family, which was sunk in alcoholism and drug addiction. But with people being slaughtered all around him, with houses being burned and shops being abandoned on every corner, he made a different choice. He told me that at the age of sixteen, “I decided to become an angel.”
At first, when the murders began, people would run in panic from the death scenes. Then it changed. They started to stop and stare. Then it changed again. They would just walk on by. As if it was normal. As if it was nothing. Because in Juárez, it was. People were training themselves not to see, to dismember the part of them that sees the dismembering.
But Juan and his teenage friends refused to live in a city where murder was ignored. Even though every adult who spoke out against the cartels, the army, or the police had been killed, he and a group who met at his church decided to go to the murder scenes to protest. They built angel costumes with great two-meter wings made from plastic and feathers. They covered themselves with sparkling silver paint and stood on a tall stool. The long shining robes hang down over both their body and the stool, so the angel looks like a giant, as though he has just descended from heaven. It is hard to describe what this looks like: it is almost unreal, like a hallucination. These kids make signs directly challenging the most brutal murderers on earth, and they hold them aloft at the very spot where these men have just done their killing.
On the night I met Juan, after a summer storm, he was about to go to stand by another roadside at midnight to hold up his signs. He invited me to come along. Two young girls perched behind him, holding on to his wings so the wind wouldn’t blow him backward. People in the cars that hurried past looked astonished, and bewildered, and frightened.
“I am not afraid. If I get killed, or whatever happens to me, it’s because I’m doing something good for the city,” Juan tells me. “I tell my mother to be proud of me if something happens.” He and his friends have been betrayed by the generation leading the drug war, he believes: “We want to show them, by example, that we want a better society.”7
Most people in Juárez are amazed the angels have not been shot. They will tell you, wearily, that it is only a matter of time.
Arnold Rothstein dreamed of a New York City where the rule of law had been hollowed out and the only true rulers were criminals like him. He wanted to establish power by force, and buy the remaining broken slivers of the state piece by piece until he could use them, too, as weapons. He never got to realize his dream. His bullet hit too soon. But his dream did come to pass.
I wanted to know what this meant, for real people, in their real lives. This is the part of the drug war most remote from my world, back in the stability of London. Yet I was beginning to feel we were all enmeshed together—the subjects of the drug war, and its logic—in a long, densely connected global chain. The impulse to repress, I suspected, had given birth to all this, but I wanted to see how.
I met many people in northern Mexico who shared their stories with me, but in the end, I came to understand what has happened there best through the tale of three teenagers. They were an angel, a killer, and a girl in love.
Just as Chino had explained to me what life is like inside a street gang, I wanted to understand what life is like inside a cartel, but I kept being told this was impossible. The cartels kill anyone who talks to outsiders. These are the most paranoid and secretive people in the world. And then, one day, I learned about one person—the only one to ever make it out and keep talking.
I wrote to the Texas Prison Service. After a long wait, I was told I had half an hour. Once I arrived in the middle of Tyler County in rural Texas—a huge mess of concrete and barbed wire—a guard smiled at me. I like your accent, she said, in deep Texan—you can have as much time as you want. I was guided through the prison by another guard until I was in a wide gray room and there was only glass in front of me. On the other side of the glass were tiny white cells.
The guard said: “I’m going to be around here in the area, because I can’t leave you by yourself,” and then she left.8
At the back of one of the cells, a door opened, and he walked in, small and lithe. He looked like a nerd who should be presenting his science project to me. The only thing undermining this look was his eye tattoo—a bright-colored flame, dominating his face.
“So what’s going on?” he said, looking me up and down. Before I could say anything, he said: “First of all—what do you know about me? . . . That’s what I want to know.”
He had a low voice. I said—I know you are here because, from the age of thirteen, you were a member of the Zetas. He nodded.
I asked Rosalio if I could put a little recorder between us. There was a hole in the glass, and the recorder sat there, with its r
ed light on. He began to talk. After each piece of information he gave me, he asked nervously what I thought of him, and whether I would make him sound good. He was almost pleading. He had been alone for a very long time, in solitary confinement. We talked for over four hours. This is his story as I can patch it together from what he told me and from the other evidence of his crimes in the public record.
In 2005, Rosalio Reta was at summer camp,9 like all the other American teenagers his age—a short Texan fifteen-year-old with spiky hair, nicknamed “Bart” because he looked like a less yellow Bart Simpson and loved to skateboard. He was also into the Power Rangers, alternative pop, and Nintendo 64, especially The Mask of Zelda and Donkey Kong. At camp in that particular year, he was learning useful skills, ones he would remember for the rest of his life. Except at this camp, you don’t learn how to canoe, or sing in a chorus, or make a log fire.
He remembered the techniques10 he learned there well. Take beheading, for example. “There’s times I’ve seen it they’ve done it with a saw,” he told me through the prison glass. “Blood everywhere. When they start going they hit the jugular and—” he snaps his fingers—“[it’s] everywhere . . . They put the head right there. The head still moves, makes faces and everything. I think the nerves, you can see inside, the bone, everything’s moving. It’s like they’ve got worms. I’ve seen it move, when it’s on the ground. If he’s making a screaming face, it stays like that sometimes. Sometimes it slacks off.”
This camp was deep in the mountains of Mexico, and Rosalio was there for six months, slowly being turned into a human weapon. “They just teach you everything. Everything you learn at a military camp,” he says. “How to shoot, how to coordinate . . . All kinds of explosives, handguns, rifles, hand-to-hand combat.” The camp’s slogan is “If I retreat,11 kill me.” He used these skills to murder more people than he can count. He committed industrial killings,12 threw hand grenades into crowded nightclubs, and shot a man in front of his toddler son and pregnant wife.