Nathan handed the plate to her. He said, “Well then, I guess I’ll just get out of your hair while you get the rest of this done.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Then he ducked as he went back out the door. Without saying much, he’d said all there was to say. Then he headed home to Oelwein.
CHAPTER 9
THE INLAND EMPIRE, PART TWO
While Lori Arnold was in prison in Alderson, West Virginia, from 1991 to 1999, Cargill consolidated more and more of the meatpacking industry—and the food industry in general, along with Tyson, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Swift, and ConAgra. Like the big pharmaceutical companies, the food industry grew both its lobbying power and its political leverage alongside its profits. Meatpacking companies began openly courting immigrant workers from Mexico—many of whom were illegal, had no identification, and whose movements were nearly impossible to monitor. (According to a New York Times article from 2001, a government study found that 40 percent of agricultural workers in the United States are here illegally, while Immigration and Naturalization Services estimated that one in four meatpacking workers in the Midwest is illegal.) As meatpacking plants employed illegals at abysmally low wages, the economies of places like Ottumwa suffered still more. Meantime, DEA had a continued lack of success fighting the meth industry, thanks to the powerful pharmaceutical lobby.
With each Mexican drug-trafficking organization controlling one segment of the U.S. and Mexico border, essentially splitting the 2,500 miles into 500-mile increments, these organizations could tap into the expanding immigration routes throughout the United States—routes blazed by the very illegals who were coming to work in the packing plants. In those illegals, the five major DTOs had a built-in retail and distribution system that, because it is so hard to track, is all but impenetrable by law enforcement. In 2001 a CBS news report on 60 Minutes Wednesday made the point clear when it found that 80 percent of the workers at a Cargill plant in Schuyler, Nebraska, were Hispanic and 40 percent were there illegally. For thirteen hundred dollars, two CBS correspondents were able to purchase stolen social security cards and birth certificates.
This was the environment in which Lori Arnold says she found herself when she got out of prison in 1999. Her husband, Floyd, was in Leavenworth, where he would soon die of a heart attack. Her son, Josh, was eighteen, had graduated from high school, and was working at a Foot Locker shoe store. In eight years, Ottumwa’s Mexican population had grown from zero to the highest per capita in the United States, thanks mostly to the Cargill-Excel plant, where, according to Lori, wages were pegged at five dollars an hour. She was living with her parents, and she took a job at the plant trimming hams. Wearing fifty pounds of protective steel mesh, Lori had ten seconds to sever the cone, or bottom, of a twenty-five-pound hog hind; remove the fat; heave the ham onto a conveyor belt above her head; and resharpen the knife before the next one reached her. The room temperature was maintained at just above freezing, and her feet would freeze inside steel boots. Lori was continually dumping hot water over her boots to try to regain feeling in her toes. Each eight-hour shift, she got two breaks: fifteen minutes in the morning, thirty minutes at lunch. The union had long been dissolved as a condition for keeping the plant open, and she had no insurance, and no access to worker’s compensation should she be hurt. To Lori, who’d been just spent seven years in prison, and had once hidden in her car with her newborn son while Floyd shot at them with a .44 Magnum, life had never felt so hard.
It wasn’t long after Lori took the job at Cargill-Excel that she also began taking stock of the schism in the local crank market. After Lori had gone to jail, the good crank stopped coming to Ottumwa from California—and from her superlab. In Lori’s absence, many of the blue-collar white addicts had come to rely on the local batchers who made their own Nazi dope, of which there was never enough to go around, as the cooks could only make a few grams or ounces at a time. Meantime, Mexican dealers out of Des Moines, Iowa, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota—in an attempt to take over relatively lawless Ottumwa as a lucrative distribution point—had begun flooding the market with Red-P methamphetamine. Red-P dope, or crystal meth, was made at Mexican-run labs in California’s Central Valley and in the state of Michoacán, in west central Mexico, and then driven through ports of entry like Nogales, Arizona, before being distributed throughout the West, the Great Plains, and increasingly, the Southeast.
Back in Lori’s drug-empire heyday, in the late 1980s, Mexican-run superlabs had produced anywhere from ten to twenty-five pounds of meth every two days. By 1999, thanks to the failed DEA legislation monitoring red phosphorus and pseudoephedrine, superlabs were capable of producing up to a hundred pounds a day of crystal meth, which is up to 95 percent pure and therefore offers a much cleaner, more powerful high than the P2P crank of Lori’s early days. Given its purity, the “tweak” associated with coming down off a crystal binge—the paranoia, the Parkinson’s-like shaking, and the schizophrenic hallucinations—was popularly considered to be far easier to handle than it had been with P2P. So, too, did crystal’s translucent quartz-like appearance help diminish meth’s reputation as a “dirty” drug and, as many people at DEA suppose, make meth attractive to a broader range of people. (Eventually “chrissy” would become the drug of choice among urban gays in New York and Los Angeles.) As Lori said, “Crystal was both a crank addict’s and a crank dealer’s dream.”
Still, it was difficult for the Mexican traffickers to take control of the retail meth market. Many whites in Ottumwa, meth habit or no meth habit, resented Mexicans for working at the packing plant for so little money; it was their fault, it was said, that the wages at Excel—and along with them, the hopes of Ottumwa—had plummeted. Mexicans were framed as interlopers, and mistrust or even outright racism was common. Then there was the language barrier. Mexican dealers had a hard time finding customers, despite the fact they employed a strategy of giving away small amounts of highly pure meth in order to create a base of addicts: the same strategy Lori had used on her first night selling crank back in 1984.
By 1999, according to both Lori and a former Mexican employee, Ottumwa’s Excel plant had become a clearinghouse for illegal immigrants. That same year, Cargill-Excel placed newspaper advertisements in the poor, industrial border towns of Juárez and Tijuana offering two free months’ rent to workers who could make it to Ottumwa from Mexico. For Cargill and the rest of the packing conglomerates, employing illegals would appear to have been the best of all possible situations, for the simple reason that these employees, lacking legal identification, didn’t technically exist, and therefore had no rights. Nor were they apt to argue with the harsh conditions of an industry that continues today to have the highest rate of employee injury in the United States. A failed 2001 federal criminal case brought against a Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, made clear that corporations would essentially not be held liable for employing or recruiting illegal immigrants to work in the plants. Despite the fact that two Shelbyville managers were caught on tape by federal investigators asking human traffickers for five hundred undocumented workers over four months, Tyson’s defense team successfully maintained that it’s too difficult for Tyson employees to determine who’s who among legal and illegal employees. The ruling institutionalized the notion that employers of immigrants are not beholden to offering the same rights to workers that other companies must, for the simple reason that they don’t know—and don’t need to know—who works for them. Alternatively, how can there be any hope of enforcing laws on people who are not who they say they are? According to two former employees of the Cargill-Excel plant in Ottumwa with whom I spoke (both of whom were in the United States illegally), the going rate on stolen social security cards at the plant in 2005 was one thousand dollars, though the most prolific vendor offered the equivalent of a package deal if you wanted more than one.
On the one hand, what Lori saw back in 1999 made her angry. Who did these Mexicans think they were, she thought, taking jobs from Americans and then selling them
dope? On the other hand, Lori could plainly see that the middle of the value chain, the most dynamic part of any economy, was totally undefined: it was wide open because the white addicts simply didn’t like the Mexican dealers. All that was needed was someone with the guts and the connections to approach the Mexican Mafia, as Lori calls them, and start helping them move all their good, cheap dope.
That someone, though, wouldn’t be Lori Kaye Arnold. Lori was on probation for what seemed to her the rest of her life. She had to urinate in a cup every couple of weeks so her parole officer could send the sample to the state lab in Iowa City for drug tests. She had a son to get to know after serving eight years in prison. Lori had amends to make, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings to attend, and a lot of sober time to get under her belt before anyone would start trusting her again. She had new friends to find, too—the people she used to hang around with were either in jail or still using meth, and she knew damn well she couldn’t be near them. She would need to work hard if ever she wanted to pay off her back taxes or move out of her parents’ home. If she could just get her own apartment, Lori thought, she might finally start making up for lost time—maybe her son could even move in with her. And so for a year and a half, Lori left Cargill-Excel most evenings and worked the night shift at Wendy’s, trying not to think about the business that had made her the most famous woman in Ottumwa ten years before.
And then one night, Lori went to a bar. It was a Friday, and Lori, fresh off her shift trimming hams, was damn square sure she deserved a cold one. In fact, she deserved about eight cold ones, which would be one for every year since she’d had the last beer. Then an old friend offered Lori a bit of crystal meth nicely arranged in the middle of a piece of aluminum foil. Lori lit a match, held it beneath the foil to liquefy and then vaporize the dope, and smoked it through a glass tube. For a woman like Lori, who eight years before used to snort an eighth of an ounce of meth a day, smoking one measly foil somehow didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
Nor did she think it was anything to worry about when, a few days later, she decided to make a quick fifty bucks selling a small amount of crystal that a friend needed to get rid of in the worst way. Lori had just that week started renting her own apartment; now she wanted, as a means of making things up to her son, to help him pay off some old debts. So Lori quit the night-shift job at Wendy’s and began selling small amounts of meth. Then, because she just couldn’t pass up such a peach of an opportunity, she approached a Mexican trafficker in Des Moines and made a deal with him. By 2001, two years after she got out of prison, Lori was moving so much Mexican-made crystal from so many different traffickers that she bought a nightclub—just as she’d done back in 1989—to help launder the money.
At the time, Lori was hitting the meth pretty hard herself. She does not, she says, remember sleeping more than one night a week, at most. Because she was still on parole and had to submit to urinary analyses every couple of weeks, she paid the four-year-old daughter of one of her employees five dollars apiece for cups of urine to sneak into her tests. She bought a house and paid her son’s debts. She bought another Jaguar. She got reacquainted with an old boyfriend and planned to marry him soon. Then, on October 25, 2001, she sold a quarter pound of meth to an undercover narcotics officer in the Ottumwa Police Department. Shortly thereafter, Lori was arrested, tried, convicted, and once again sentenced, this time to seven and a half years in the medium-security federal work camp for women in Greenville, Illinois.
The woman who founded the Midwest meth trade fifteen years before had now helped usher in the drug’s new era by teaming up with the DTOs, which had grown in part out of Lori’s original link to the Amezcua brothers. Once again, the tenth-grade dropout from Ottumwa was at the head of a trend sweeping across the nation. By 2001, all the pieces were in place. The newest era of the meth epidemic was in full swing.
The United States is broken into seven regions by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Operations in each region, all of which are secret, are coordinated by a special agent in charge (SAC), whose DEA experiences run the gamut from U.S. street assignments to operational tours of duty in foreign countries. SACs are invaluable in understanding the recent history of narcotics in the United States and in the world—for instance, the broad context in which Lori Arnold’s Stockdall Organization fit in with the DTOs. In 2006, the piece of the puzzle that was still missing for me was exactly how the DTOs had become so powerful so quickly. While the discovery of the industrial meth market had been an instrumental part of the process, that alone didn’t account for how five mega-organizations had evolved from the business put into place by the Amezcua brothers before their capture in 1996. Ironically, I was told by two former DEA SACs that it was a blow to the Colombian cocaine cartels in Cali and Medellín that provided the final, triumphant piece for the formation of the five Mexican DTOs.
Operation Snowcap was the code name for DEA’s 1987 multinational cocaine-control effort in Central and South America. The approach was twofold: to seize large amounts of cocaine and to cripple Colombian distribution routes that passed through Guatemala. By almost any measure, Snowcap—coupled with operations to limit distribution via the so-called Caribbean Corridor feeding the Miami port of entry—was a huge success, resulting in a dramatic decrease in the amount of Colombian cocaine entering the United States. But Snowcap also had an unforeseen consequence: it redirected the distribution of cocaine from the Colombian cartels to what were then small-time Mexican narco-operations.
Back in the 1980s, Guatemala was what was called a “trampoline” state. Planes coming from Colombia laden with cocaine would stop there to refuel before “bouncing” to locations in Texas, Arizona, and California. In that way, Guatemala played the same role the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the Bahamas did with marine delivery of cocaine via the Caribbean. As soon as Operation Snowcap limited the Cali and Medellín cartels’ two principal options for delivery into the United States, the Colombians approached the Mexican organizations that controlled access to the twenty-five hundred miles of essentially unprotected U.S. border. The Colombian cocaine and heroin empire, which had for years depended on cooperation with Guatemala and the Bahamas, was now dependent on Mexico. According to Tony Loya, the ex-SAC who ran Operation Snowcap from Guatemala City, “What happened was not the lesser of two evils; it was the greater. Our success with Medellín and Cali essentially set the Mexicans up in business, at a time when they were already cash-rich thanks to the budding meth trade in Southern California.”
In essence, the Mexican organizations based along the border—in Tijuana, Juárez, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros, each of which would become the base of operations for the five DTOs—were able to heavily influence the price of cocaine by controlling its entry into the United States. DEA’s success with Snowcap essentially awarded the Mexican organizations gate-keeping rights in the most valuable narcotic market on earth, at the same time as those organizations were building a separate but related business in the meth trade. What the Mexican organizations did subsequently, however, was far more significant. For the favor of allowing the Colombians to ship their cocaine into the U.S. marketplace, the DTOs demanded payment not in cash, but in product. For every kilo of cocaine the Mexicans let cross their border, they kept a kilo for themselves.
A senior American official assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City who also worked on Operation Snowcap explained the result this way: “By controlling the entry point for all of the cocaine into the U.S., the Mexicans controlled the price. How else will Colombia get its product to its customers? It depends on the DTOs. By taking payment in cocaine and distributing it themselves, the DTOs created fifty percent market share overnight. If you control the price, along with half the retail and distribution, you basically own the business.”
The shift in power from the Colombian cartels to the Mexican traffickers had two major consequences. First, the DTOs grew rich enough to buy larger amounts of precursors to make meth. Second, DEA was unabl
e to adjust to the new paradigm. The Medellín and Cali cartels had relied on Bahamians, Dominicans, and Americans to distribute and sell their cocaine. Those businesses were, according to the embassy official in Mexico City, highly centralized. Their movements were predictable, and decisions came from the top—most famously from Pablo Escobar. In contrast, the DTOs, said the official, are decentralized and protean. They rely only on Mexican nationals to distribute and sell their products, making it harder for DEA to infiltrate the organizations. Because individual distributors have more decision-making power, the movements of the organization as a whole are much less predictable.
Seen in one respect, the DTOs are an expression of the immigrant labor force as it was successfully portrayed by defense lawyers in the 2001 Tyson case—virtually invisible and nearly impossible to follow. Lori Arnold’s description of the reality of many illegal immigrants at the Excel plant—using fake identification, moving from town to town and packing plant to packing plant—sounded a lot like meth’s trajectory around the country as I tried to trace it back in 1999: there, but never quite visible.
According to a Pew Hispanic Center report in 2005, there are twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States. Eight hundred and fifty thousand more arrive every year, the report found, along with the fact that 25 percent of all agricultural jobs in the United States are done by illegal immigrants. The link between the agricultural business, meatpacking, and illegal immigration would appear to be self-evident. As University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan says, “Cracking down on illegal immigration would cripple the [food production] system.” What also appears to be true is that the DTOs employ a miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country. Ironically, that fractional number is harder still to police within an ever-expanding multitude of people that is overwhelmingly law-abiding.
Nick Reding Page 16