Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  Soon, said Loya, in an indication that the relationship between the DTOs and the Yemenis was becoming stronger than ever, the Yemenis began traveling to see their Mexican partners in the Mexicans’ backyard: Las Vegas.

  “They’d have these big dinners,” said another former DEA official who ran wiretaps on the dinner meetings. “Lots of wine—very lovey-dovey. Then we’d get the tapes back from our wiretaps, and the Mexicans would call their friends back in California and say, ‘If it weren’t for the money, I’d kill these heathen Moor sons of bitches.’ And the Yemenis are in their hotel rooms on the phone with Toronto saying, ‘If it weren’t for the money, I’d kill those stinking Catholic infidel sons of bitches.’ ”

  The wiretaps also revealed that the Yemenis were funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to the terrorist organization Hamas. It was just luck, said Tony, that he was able to put together the clues.

  In the end, any moves against the DTOs were just a minor irritation, for the real connection between drugs and terror is seen in Barnett’s concept of “disconnected” states and Naím’s “invisible border.” The DTOs simply reassorted themselves, moving production from the isolated farmlands of California’s Central Valley to the Mexican state of Michoacán, for the reason that, as another former DEA agent described it, “the further you get from the limited bandwidth of control surrounding the seat of government, the more autonomous and lawless things get.” Michoacán is several states removed from Mexico City, the country’s capital. The former DEA agent went on, “We won’t even send agents to Michoacán—they’d be killed immediately. Even Mexican federal people can’t get in there. It’s like its own nation within Mexico, in the same way that all major trafficking points—Juárez, Nogales, et cetera—are like city-states. There’s no way to control them centrally.” That lack of control extends north of the border, all throughout the poor, disconnected parts of the United States. In Ottumwa, Tom McAndrew is trying to figure out how to keep his men from having their families killed.

  Two weeks before meeting Rudy, I’d been in Georgia and Alabama in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I’d gone there because, according to Tony Loya, record amounts of meth had been flowing into the area from the East Texas border during the past few months. There had been an increase in drug cartel violence around the sibling towns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo that had made every major American newspaper’s front page off and on for weeks. The Mexican government, in reaction, had sent in the army. The drug lords, in counter-suit, had redoubled their attacks on one another. To that end, they had begun employing a gang known as the Zetas, former American-trained members of the Mexican special forces.

  One morning, I’d spoken with Sherri Strange, then the DEA special agent in charge of the Atlanta office. According to her, the meth market in her seven-state area was so good that many of the Zetas had gone into business for themselves, armed with their expertise in surveillance, weaponry, and counterintelligence.

  “The DTOs hold Atlanta,” said Strange. “And they’re here in a way that, to me, after twenty-five years being on the street and in charge in various locations, is frightening. We used to have Mexicans—and excuse the term, I’m only talking about a few but, I’m sorry, all the big players are Mexican—that were pretty minor league. They were just guys trying to make enough money in a year to go back home and retire. Now, in the last eight months, there’s a sea change. We’re getting traffickers who are as highly trained as we are in intelligence gathering, evasion techniques, weapons. They’re scary. I can literally walk down the street—and this happened here a while back—and just know what’s going on. You see them, if you know what to look for, and you just think, ‘Oh my God.’ ”

  Later in 2005, I went to meet Alex Gonzalez, an officer with the Hoover Police Department, in Alabama’s poultry-rich northern tier. An interdiction specialist, meaning that he pulls cars and trucks over and searches them, Gonzalez and his partner are also part of the vast web of people who keep Tony Loya apprised of what’s happening on the fringes of the narcotics world. Describing the relationship he has with the traffickers, Gonzalez said, “We’ll get a load one day, a big one, maybe a hundred pounds of crystal headed to Atlanta. Or maybe $1.2 million in cash headed back to Mexico. And that night the traffickers call you on your cell phone and say, ‘Nice job, man! That was a big bust!’ It’s like we’re friendly, almost—joking with each other. Then they ask about your wife, and it gets very creepy; they want you to know how much they’ve got on you. They say, ‘Too bad while you were taking the five hours to deal with that hundred pounds, we got another thousand pounds past you.’ The hundred pounds were just a decoy.”

  He went on: “They watch us watching them. Their ‘counterintelligence’ is so superior to our ‘intelligence’—and I can’t stress enough what a bullshit word that is—that it’s just no contest. You taunt each other, like it’s a game, but it’s a game they always win.

  “What’s not a game is that, if drug organizations can not only get major shipments past us every day, but can know how much they got past and can laugh at it—if they’re watching that close—what’re the terrorists doing? I’ll tell you what they’re not doing is advertising. It’s not a game to them, I wouldn’t think. And what if they go into business together? They’ve done it before. Then what?”

  CHAPTER 14

  KANT’S REDEMPTION

  My last trip to Oelwein was in mid-December 2007. As the plane flew west from New York, an ice storm worked its way east. I met the weather at O’Hare Airport, which closed for most of a day; that was where I spent the night. By late the following afternoon, the glare off the frozen fields along Highway 150 was dizzying, and the sleet turned to snow and back to sleet again. It snowed the whole week I was in Oelwein; the high temperature was eighteen degrees. This was only the beginning of a long winter. By April, Fayette County would get nearly eight feet of snow. Drifts at the Leins’ farm would be forty feet high where the wind, with nothing to stop it for what seemed like a thousand featureless miles, had piled it up to the roof of the house.

  On the first morning of that last trip, Nathan and I got in his white diesel Jetta (it now had 222,000 miles on it, 45,000 more than when I’d first met him) and headed to court in West Union. Nathan was dressed in his customary gray suit and white shirt. His hair was carefully gelled, and he had on his class ring from Luther College. Jamie had once again gotten a job contracting with DHS, and was no longer bartending in Strawberry Point. Things around the house were much better for it. Better still, most of Jamie’s cases were down in In dependence. This meant she didn’t run into clients’ families, or even the clients themselves, while out and about in Oelwein. And she and Nathan didn’t have to worry about influencing each other’s views of people whom, for instance, Nathan might be prosecuting, even as Jamie was attempting to persuade the court not to take their children away.

  It’s a thirty-minute drive from Oelwein to West Union. When it’s three degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of twenty-seven below, it takes half that time for the Jetta’s heat to kick in. As we drove, Nathan and I looked for pheasants along the side of the road, coming out of the draws and creek bottoms to peck at waste grain fallen off the farm trucks. When we saw them—in pairs and threes, their green and red heads iridescent in the harsh, slanting light—Nathan made a note of whose field they were on. That way, we could come back in the afternoon and ask the farmer for permission to hunt on his property. At one fence crossing, we saw an entire covey of birds, prompting me to whistle and slap the dashboard with excitement.

  “Uh-uh,” said Nathan. “Amish.”

  The Amish didn’t let non-Amish hunt on their land, and vice versa. Not that there was any real antipathy between the two groups in and around Oelwein. Rather, there were rules of engagement, which served to highlight the differences between the Mennonites and the rest of the community. Even when the Amish came to town and participated in the wider world, they invariably managed to set themselves completely apart. Th
e night before, I was at the Kum and Go gas station when an enormous blue van pulled in. No fewer than fifteen Amishmen, none of whom were technically allowed to operate gas or electric machinery, poured out of the van, which had five rows of seats. The first day of deer season had—in accordance with the semi-religious aspect of the sport in northern Iowa—ended at sundown. The Amishmen had hired the van and driver to take them to a piece of state land called the Volga River Wildlife Management Area to hunt that day; attached to the back fender of the van was a heavy, grated cage that could be used for hauling equipment, but in this case was stacked with four gutted whitetail bucks. All fifteen Amishmen, including elderly men and boys in their teens, each with a beard and no mustache—or in the case of the boys, a dusting of peach fuzz along their jaw—walked single file into the Kum and Go to eat microwaved burritos and drink steaming black coffee from Styrofoam cups. Despite the violent cold, they wore collared white shirts, navy blue suits of thick wool, and rubber knee-high boots. In order to comply with state hunting regulations they each had pulled a hunter-orange stocking cap over the crown of their straw hat and fastened it with safety pins. When the Amish left the gas station, everyone in line watched them. Then someone said they were Yoders.

  “No they ain’t, either,” said the cashier. “Them are Bontragers, no question.”

  Covey of pheasants or not, asking the Amish for permission to hunt wasn’t going to happen. Not that it was of any consequence, for the principal motivation behind going hunting was less to hunt and more to spend time with Nathan, whom, as had happened with Clay Hallberg, I’d long before come to think of as a friend. On the drive to West Union that morning, Nathan and I, prompted by the fact that I’d gotten married two months before, talked about his relationship with Jamie. Nathan said it was hard to imagine himself getting married. Thinking about it was a little bit like imagining death, or eternity: when he closed his eyes and looked into it, the darkness closed in all around. It was better to keep his eyes open.

  “I don’t know if I can trust anyone like that,” he said. “Or, frankly, if I can be trusted with someone’s heart.”

  Nathan said his father still asked about Jamie, despite the fact Nathan had not brought her to the farm in nearly a year. His mother, though, said Nathan, never breathed a word about Jamie. While his father’s good-natured inquiries felt to Nathan like the faintest kindling of familial warmth and acceptance, his mother’s silence was like a bucket of cold water, Nathan said. Eventually, Nathan began ignoring his father’s questions altogether, leaving them to smolder and die beneath the weight of his mother’s coolness. It was not hard to imagine the three of them in the tiny farm kitchen, bundled in wool, taking a quick, standing dinner on a brutal winter night before going back into the barn to help the ewes lamb out. Briefly, they would all look at the green, peeling linoleum floor to which his father’s questions had silently fallen. Nor was it hard to see how, eventually, Nathan’s father would surely stop asking about Jamie.

  As far as Nathan was concerned, this was fine—at least until he figured out some other way to deal with it. When I wondered aloud what that way might be, there was a long silence while we both pretended to look across the frozen plain for pheasants. Finally Nathan said, “Jamie doesn’t complain, but I know it’s hard for her.”

  Nathan was fully aware that he was crippled, as he put it, by an irrational fear of conflict. He knew Jamie was not going to wait around forever. She had turned thirty-one in 2007. She wanted to get married and have children, and she wanted to do those things with Nathan Lein and no one else. They’d been living together close to eighteen months. Jamie wanted to be included in his plans about the farm. Yet, still she ate dinner alone in Nathan’s house on the nights he was at his parents’ place, or else she tried to work late herself so they’d get home at the same time. Sometimes she didn’t know what she was doing, coming home to a house that wasn’t hers, sitting there alone waiting while the man she wanted to have a family with ate dinner with his family. Then again, she didn’t know what else she could do. To say that it was hard for Jamie—and for Nathan—doesn’t quite give the situation its due.

  “I’m sure that eventually,” said Nathan, “something will give. Till then, here we are.”

  With that, we pulled into the courthouse parking lot, the Jetta’s tires making a sound like crinkling paper on the frozen crust of the snow. It was eight A.M. sharp. With no overcoat on, Nathan stood behind his car for a few long moments, with his briefcase on the ice-slicked trunk, going through his papers as though the cold were of no concern.

  The Fayette County Courthouse, in West Union, was built in 1905. Inside, there is a marble atrium, and three stories above it, an enormous round skylight of green stained glass. Everything is clean and polished, including the granite drinking fountains, which are the size of a tollbooth. The staircase is marble, and Nathan and I walked up to the third floor, past mothers and fathers in work pants and parkas sitting with their children on comfortable benches in the high-ceilinged hallway outside the juvenile courtroom. Beyond this was an old oak door with a plaque that said law library. On a bench beside that door sat two young men in orange jump-suits, their hands manacled to chains on their waists, and from there, to cuffs on their ankles.

  “Howdy,” said one man.

  “Back again,” said Nathan, as though he were talking to someone who’d just left a store and then returned, having forgotten something on his shopping list.

  The Law Library is where the three Fayette County assistant prosecutors and the various private and state defense attorneys have their coffee and go over the day’s cases with one another. The Law Library, with its twelve-foot-high bookshelves of polished cedar, hardly has a tense atmosphere, in part because very few cases are actually tried in Fayette County. Much of what happens is confined to the workmanlike procedurals of plea bargains, parole renewals, and county-jail incarcerations. Add to this that many of the attorneys have been coming here five mornings a week for one or two decades—and will continue to do so until they retire—and the result is a measure of familiarity that would be unattainable in, say, Miami-Dade County. Streamlining one’s strategy with an opponent not only gets everyone out of court sooner; it is also simply a matter of course, and a benefit of the attorneys’ personal fluency.

  From the window in the courtroom, three stories high in a building that sits on a slight rise in the prairie, one can see the First National Bank and Steege’s drugstore across the street, and beyond them, over the tops of the surrounding houses, the thirty or so rolling miles stretching east between West Union and Mississippi Lock and Dam Number 10, near the confluence of the Wisconsin River. Along the way, there are Elgin and Gunder, St. Olaf and Farmers-burg, Froelich and McGregor. Halfway to the river, the land bucks and jumps, the river valleys tighten as the grade increases, and there is a proliferation of timber and coal. Twelve thousand years ago, an iceberg the size of Wisconsin flattened most of Iowa, and as it receded, deposited scree and lime along what would one day be called the Mississippi. For a time, this tiny area of Iowa was called Little Switzerland, so lush and fertile did the hills appear to the Prussians and Austrians who settled those valleys in the 1850s and ’60s.

  First on the docket that morning was the man in shackles who’d said hello in the hallway. Though he looked twenty-five, he was in fact thirty-eight. He had blond hair, a blond beard, blue eyes, and a nose like a falcon’s beak. He entered his plea of guilty with a good-humored tinge of a Minnesotan accent.

  He was a familiar sight in the Fayette County Court, and he’d been, like Roland Jarvis, in the clink off and on for years. Several months before, he’d been put on probation for driving under the influence of an illegal substance, in this case meth. A week ago, he’d been picked up after driving erratically up in Winneshiek County, northeast of Fayette. Now he claimed not to know that both driving and leaving the county violated the terms of his probation. Nathan had grown weary of him. Sipping his coffee half an hour before, Nath
an had said to the judge, who sat just a few feet away from the attorneys in the Law Library, filling out papers: “I can’t stand it when someone patronizes me.”

  “Me neither,” the judge had said without looking up. Then Nathan said he wanted the maximum sentence of three years. The judge and the defense attorney agreed. What they all knew was that because of overcrowding in the Iowa prison system, the man would be out in six months.

  In the courtroom, it was a matter of going through the formalities of reading to the man the charges, the meaning of his plea, the basis for sentencing, and the philosophical tenets on which rest the power to incarcerate a human being in the state of Iowa. From the bench, the judge started by reading all of this. Then he recited the rest from memory while filling out paperwork, only occasionally glancing up at his charge. The judge had a white beard and white hair, and he’d recently retired. He and his wife were planning to drive their camper to Florida, but the county had asked the judge to come back to work until his replacement could be hired. He’d agreed, but his patience was short. He’d just turned seventy, and he was tired of the cold.

  When he was done with the sentencing, the judge looked up and said to the defendant, “You can’t expect me to believe that you, as something of a professional in the goofing-up department, didn’t know what probation means. Can you?”

  “No, sir,” said the man. “I can’t.”

  The judge shrugged and shook his head lightly. Looking back down at his mountain of paperwork, he said, “Well, good luck.”