Nick Reding
Page 20
Even as I’m capable of criticizing my father’s legacy, I’m incapable of feeling anything less than terrific pride in his accomplishments. His story defies sociology. It is an example of individual greatness of its own stubborn accord: the essential component of the American dream. Nonetheless, there are consequences. The best of intentions sometimes don’t turn out like they’re supposed to—just as methamphetamine, the miracle pharmaceutical of the 1930s, has today become a nightmare. Somewhere along the way companies grew to have no respect for the people whose lives their products perhaps intended to improve, refusing to provide workers with a decent wage or health insurance. Despite this, people fight to endure, just as they always have. And as they fight, some percentage of them will look to a drug that falsely promises help in that cause.
Walking along the tracks that day, I found it hard to believe that, just as my father had predicted, three rooster pheasants picked at waste grain in the frigid midday sun. Somewhere to the east, buried in the snow, was the ball field.
CHAPTER 12
EL PASO
By the beginning of 2007, the Combat Meth Act had been in effect for six months. As Phil Price, now a former special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, had predicted two years earlier, the laws making it harder to buy cold medicine had indeed reduced the number of Beavis and Butt-Head labs across the United States. The numbers of addicts, however, hadn’t changed. This meant that those who had relied on home-cooked dope—15 to 25 percent of users, according to 2005 DEA estimates—were now doing business with the DTOs, meaning that 95 to 100 percent of the meth consumed in the United States came from Mexican-run labs. The DTOs had quickly adjusted to the difficulty of importing large amounts of pseudoephedrine into Mexico by purchasing it from a growing number of middlemen—mostly in China but also, increasingly, in Africa. This, in turn, resulted in increased production of the drug.
Also as Phil Price had predicted, the U.S. media by mid-2007 had completed an autopsy of the drug epidemic that, according to drug czar John Walters, was now all but over. Excluding the work of Steve Suo and a few others, the media’s rabid coverage of meth in 2005 and 2006 had treated the drug as a small-lab phenomena. Now that small-lab numbers had dwindled from Arizona to New Jersey, state politicians, magazines, newspapers, and evening newscasters took this reduction as the sole indicator that the epidemic was under control or cured. Seen another way, meth just wasn’t as interesting to report on once it could no longer be cast as a fundamentally American morality play whose acts were once carried out ad nauseam in trailers, kitchen sinks, and bathtubs across the nation. In many cases, the postmortem became a witch hunt, as bloggers and newspaper columnists called into question whether the meth epidemic had ever existed in the first place. Nowhere was this suspicion more candidly stated than in a March 2006 article in Portland’s Willamette Week, the rival paper of the Oregonian. Titled “Meth Madness: How The Oregonian Manufactured an Epidemic, Politicians Bought It and You’re Paying,” the article functioned as a compendium of questions regarding Steve Suo’s and the Oregonian’s integrity. Furthermore, Willamette Week accused state and federal officials of using the meth story for their political gain.
The gist of the criticism, as summed up by the Willamette Week article, was that meth, as a media phenomenon, had been propped up by numbers and statistics that seemed questionable, if not specious. For instance, Willamette Week took to task a report entitled Multnomah County Meth Tax written by an economic research firm called ECONorthwest. The report, oft-cited by Suo and both Oregon and national politicians—and ultimately imitated by other firms in other communities like Benton County, Arkansas—claimed that every household in Multnomah County paid the equivalent of $350 annually to compensate for the community problems caused by meth. That’s to say that every household in the densely populated area, which includes Portland, was paying the rough equivalent of their yearly state taxes to cover the rising costs of increased foster care, overtime staffing of police precincts, property damage, and missed work time attributable to a surge in meth use.
The Willamette Week article contended that the statistics on which the report was based were a mix of fact and anecdote, and therefore the study itself was preposterous. For instance, a Portland police chief couldn’t explain how he’d come up with the statistic that 80 percent of arrests in his precinct were meth-related. Nor, said the article, could the idea of a “meth tax” be taken seriously when it includes the cost of “meth-fueled property damage” that cannot be conclusively linked to the drug. According to Willamette Week, the Oregonian’s reliance on “bad statistics and a rhetoric of crisis . . . has skewed the truth [and] rearranged governmental spending priorities, perhaps without justification.”
Newspaper columnists from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Miami Herald agreed. John Tierney of the Times lamented that, thanks to meth, politicans had “lost sight of their duties.” Glenn Garvin of the Herald called the Oregonian’s coverage “nonsensical.” Craig Reinarman, whose criticism of the Reagan administration’s response to the crack epidemic was put forth in the book Crack in America, worried that the exorbitant meth coverage by papers like the Oregonian had further directed money to law enforcement and prison, and “away from the underlying sources of people’s troubles,” as he told Willamette Week. No one was more critical of the nation’s meth coverage than Jack Shafer of Slate.com, whose weekly columns tried to disprove every study on which the concept of a meth epidemic had stood. Among Shafer’s favorite targets were the estimated hundred million dollars annually that meth supposedly cost the state of Indiana, and a National Association of Counties survey that found meth had sent more people to local emergency rooms in 2005 than any other drug.
It takes a considerable lack of irony for one newspaper to loudly and dramatically accuse another of histrionics. Nevertheless, Willamette Week made one extremely valid point: drug studies and statistics are inherently flawed, insofar as the supposedly quantitative data is based largely on hearsay, observation, and common sense—which, depending on where you stand, may or may not seem common, and may fail altogether to make sense. It’s unfortunate, though, that Willamette Week—along with most of the other critics, Jack Shafer of Slate.com included—relied on equally unstable ground for their metrical evidence. What the paper and Shafer pointed to were the NIDA and University of Michigan reports, which found, via a deeply faulted system of their own, that meth use had remained stable or dropped in the United States between 2004 and 2006. Basically, one quantitative analysis proved to be as invalid as the other.
Meantime, as Willamette Week tried to disprove ECONorthwest’s findings by referring to the University of Michigan report, it seemed to be important to understand the true effect of recent changes in the meth market fostered by the passage of the Combat Meth Act. What would the law—along with an absent media—mean in Lori Arnold’s hometown of Ottumwa? As an answer to that question, I was reminded of two trips I’d taken there the year before.
On Halloween night of 2005, I’d met a former Mexican drug trafficker, along with his handler, in a small conference room at the abandoned commuter airport outside Ottumwa. The trafficker asked to be called Rudy. Now twenty-four, he was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, then moved with his mother and brother across the border to the Juárez’s sister city of El Paso, Texas. There, Rudy and his brother joined a gang and began dealing cocaine at the ages of thirteen and fifteen, respectively. By sixteen, Rudy was traveling from Juárez to El Paso with up to fifteen kilos of cocaine in a backpack. The Rio Grande between the two cities is dry for much of the year, said Rudy, and largely unguarded away from the busy international bridges. Rudy and his brother would pick a promising spot, descend into the riverbed, and climb up the other side. When they were discovered, Rudy and his brother would return to Mexico, have a soda to pass the time, and then try to cross again from a different spot a few hundred yards or a couple of miles away; they were always successful, he said.
Eventually, Rudy and his brother began working for a comandante of the Mexican federal police, predominantly transporting marijuana. Then one day his brother was in a car accident in Mexico and lost a load of dope, leading to his murder. Rudy was able to identify the body only by a tattoo on his brother’s calf—his brother had been shot so many times that his face was gone. Afraid for his life, Rudy agreed to take a hundred-pound load of methamphetamine from the Mexican border up to the Ozark Mountains. This was in 1999. According to Rudy, he had no idea what meth was, or even what he had delivered to the white men with long beards who met him in the wooded hills outside Rogers, Arkansas. From there, Rudy took a series of meatpacking jobs, first in Missouri and then in Iowa. All the while, he dealt meth, which was either sent to him one to five pounds at a time in the mail or given to him in bulk by traffickers to distribute at the packing plant.
Rudy called the DTOs’ infiltration of meatpacking plants “the perfect system.” The first thing you do once you cross the border, he said, is to steal someone’s driver’s license. Or you buy a stolen license at the meatpacking plant. (When Rudy said this, his handler—a sergeant in the Ottumwa Police Department named Tom McAndrew—laughed, and added that at least once a month, a confused first-generation Mexican American in California, Texas, or Arizona will call the Ottumwa police wondering why there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Iowa, a state to which he has never been.) Moreover, said Rudy, traffickers work long hours in the packing plants, just like everyone else, in an attempt to go unnoticed. As he put it, U.S. law enforcement is used to drug dealers who are flashy and don’t work. Mexican traffickers used this strategy of blending into the general population of immigrant workers to very quickly develop markets as far north and east as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The DTO’s domination and expansion of the meth market was so streamlined, in fact, that when Rudy went back to El Paso two years after his first delivery to Arkansas, crack and coke were no longer the smugglers’ drug of choice; crank was.
Eventually, Rudy was compelled by a speeding ticket and resultant immigration investigation to work as an informant for what was formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), but since 2001 has been the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—a department of the Office of Homeland Security. ICE agents told Rudy that he would be rewarded with a green card if he could help them indict and convict enough “coyotes,” as the human traffickers who bring groups of illegals across the border are called. Rudy agreed, but he played both sides of the fence: many coyotes also smuggle drugs, so Rudy used his connections at ICE to lessen his competition for the El Paso meth market. When ICE agents balked at their promise to give Rudy a green card, he left Texas and headed once again for Iowa. He’d heard that the Cargill Excel plant in Ottumwa was hiring, and he assumed the police and sheriff’s department there would be highly unsophisticated compared with DEA in El Paso.
Rudy got to Ottumwa in 2002. How exactly he came to be an in formant there he won’t say, though it was through a deal for some violation, whether for dealing meth or lacking papers. What is clear is how desperately Rudy is needed in Iowa. Tom McAndrew is the director of the Southeast Iowa Inter-Agency Drug Task Force, an umbrella agency including state, local, and federal antinarcotic agents. It was McAndrew who, as an undercover cop, busted Lori Arnold in 2001. Today, McAndrew calls Rudy the most overused informant in Iowa, pointing to the fact that Rudy, in addition to working for DEA, gets “farmed out to every police and sheriff’s department in the state, not to mention a couple other states when the need arises.” It’s for good reason. According to people at DEA, a critical difference between the Colombian and the Mexican dealers is that the Colombians have to rely on Americans to distribute and sell their product. Not so with the DTOs, who rely on a vast network of Mexican traffickers and dealers who are hard to track. The language barrier alone—particularly in rural areas where there may be many immigrants but few English-speaking ones willing to work against their own people—makes it difficult for DEA agents to penetrate the drug organizations. And according to Rudy, even native Spanish speakers would still need to have the proper connections to Juárez or El Paso or Matamoros to gain access to information. Talking to Rudy made it easy to see how the DTOs’ insularity—enforced with the threat of violence against a distributor’s family members who remain in Mexico—made him so formidable.
According to McAndrew, Rudy was one of only three Spanish-speaking informants working in a state rife with Mexican DTO operatives. As we spoke that night, McAndrew kept going to the lone window in the little room at the commuter airport and peering out into the darkness from behind the curtain. The reason McAndrew had finally agreed to let me talk to Rudy, he said, was to underscore what McAndrew and his men—along with the rest of Iowa law enforcement, whether DEA agents in Des Moines, Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement agents in Cedar Falls, or cops in Oelwein—were dealing with, and what limited recourse they had with organizations that had a militaristic level of organization, efficiency, and increasingly, violence. In the end, Rudy was good enough that he could, as McAndrew said, “bring in as many five-pound deals as we [could] handle.” But he was never going to infiltrate high into the traffickers’ organizations. They were too closed. In a way, it made McAndrew long for the days when Lori Arnold ran things, before the DTOs took over. McAndrew had fit right into Lori’s milieu.
Pointing at Rudy, McAndrew said, “This is it, man. Not that I don’t love you, buddy. But you and me against them—that’s pretty funny.”
In a May 12, 2008, New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell observes that world-shifting ideas, far from occurring to just one person at a time, crop up in something more akin to clusters. Alexander Graham Bell, Gladwell points out, is credited with inventing the telephone, though Elisha Gray filed a patent for the same invention on the same day. Calculus was discovered independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at approximately the same time. For Gladwell, “the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.”
Lori Arnold had certainly had an enormous impact on Ottumwa in her day, as well as on a good deal of the greater Midwest. But who knows how many others had spearheaded drug routes in the rest of the country—with or without the help of a superlab hidden on a horse farm. Though he didn’t quite have Lori’s vision, Jeffrey William Hayes of Oelwein was essentially trying to do the same thing. Had a few things gone differently, he might well have been the Lori Arnold of his time. Oelwein and Ottumwa might have reversed roles as planet and satellite in the meth solar system. The story of multiples is surely the story of meth, both in the case of Lori Arnold in Iowa and the Amezcua brothers in California, along with an unknown number of contemporaries.
“Good ideas,” concludes Gladwell, “are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them.” Once found, good ideas reinforce one another. This is one way of describing Rudy’s presence in Ottumwa, along with however many others who have landed there with the idea of going into the crank business: Lori built it, and the rest came.
It says a lot about what Ottumwa has become that Tom McAndrew, despite fifteen years working there, has never moved his family to Ottumwa from Kahoka, Missouri, seventy miles away. He would fear, he said, for the welfare of his wife and daughters. The night we all met at the commuter airport, Rudy concurred, saying, “I used to think El Paso was the worst place in the world. Now I think this is.”
It’s cliché to suggest that the undercover cop and the drug dealer are but one chromosomal mutation from being the same person. And yet in McAndrew and Rudy—the country boy and the street thug, whom McAndrew describes as “just a big old softy”—there was every reason to see basis in this stereo type. Rudy loved the rush of bringing McAndrew and DEA small-time Mexican meth dealers. Rudy’s job was essentially, he said, to “go around Iowa, making connections.” Being in danger was like drug for him.
For McAndrew, the cat-and-mouse game he played with dealers was also like a drug; he just loved busting dealers, plain and simple.
The two men needed each other in ways that were readily apparent: McAndrew needed Rudy’s connections and Spanish skills; Rudy needed McAndrew’s supervision to work off his violation and stay out of jail. They both nodded knowingly and completed each other’s sentences during the two hours we talked that Halloween night. They were two of a very limited number of people in a vast, underpopulated area doing this one specific thing: infiltrating drug rings. So while they were wary, untrusting friends, they shared a curious kind of respect. McAndrew clearly didn’t like Mexicans, and Rudy clearly didn’t like whites. And yet, as with the cobra and the mongoose, where would they be without each other? The dynamic between them was most clear in something that McAndrew said that night while we drove back to town: he wondered if Rudy’s eventual career turn, once he’d turned in enough low-level dealers to McAndrew and DEA, would be to go back into the meth business. “That’s what I’d do,” McAndrew had said.
While we were at the airport, Rudy talked at length about the mistrust between native Ottumwans and the immigrants who came in ever larger numbers. McAndrew said he understood, but added drily that he didn’t feel welcome in town, either, given how many Mexicans there were. McAndrew and Rudy both laughed. Then McAndrew grew deadly serious. Recently, he said, Mexican meth traffickers had begun following his men around. Just a few weeks before, two off-duty agents with the Iowa Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement had gone into a pharmacy on Main Street and were followed by two young traffickers. The agents were told to stop investigating a particular meth case. If they didn’t, said the traffickers, the officers’ wives and children would be killed. To prove they meant business, the traffickers related the ins and outs of each family member’s daily routine: they’d been watching. (The violence did not include only Mexican drug traffickers. A few months before that, a meth addict had walked down Main Street with a shotgun, shooting at shop windows, lights, and bystanders for ten minutes before McAndrew’s men killed him. McAndrew himself had recently been run over by a car during a crank bust.)