The time was right: I felt for my little .38 snub-nose in my waistband.
I glanced warily at Mike. Bansmer nodded, and like veteran partners, in unison, we pounced.
We each grabbed Phong by one of his thickly muscled arms.
“Phong, you’re under arrest,” Mike barked.
“We’re DEA, and those are police officers in the front seat,” I said in Thai.
A sudden look of fear shot across Phong’s face, and he immediately began to struggle. Mike and I were shocked at his strength. He knew he was facing the death penalty and fought like a wild beast. Mike and I grappled with him, but it was difficult getting a proper choke hold on him in the backseat. At least Phong could not reach his pistol, though he was struggling mightily to do so.
Phong was in a total panic, kicking the front seats, desperately trying to wrest his arms free to get to his gun. He fought quietly and with wild eyes. The three of us struggled violently before Mike had enough. Mike relinquished his grip and calmly pulled out his 9mm Beretta and stuck it hard into Phong’s ear.
“I don’t want to shoot you—but by God, I will!” he shouted.
Phong froze. The power drained from his arms, and he seemed to crumple in on himself. I used all my own strength to wrest him away from Mike’s gun—almost pulling his head into my lap. I knew Mike was ready to shoot if Phong didn’t stop kicking and struggling, and I didn’t want him to die there in my arms.
• • •
We handed Phong over to the Thai cops to make the arrest, and in short order they’d flipped him. Phong became our principal informant in the case we developed in northern Thailand—ultimately known as Operation Tiger Trap—that would lead to the demise of the Shan United Army.
Phong soon led us to a lychee farm three hours north of Chiang Mai, right on the border of Burma, near a stronghold village of the SUA. On that lychee farm the DEA bagged more than three hundred kilograms of pure number four heroin. Shortly thereafter, the DEA and Thai authorities seized an even bigger haul of Shan United Army heroin from a trawler in the Gulf of Thailand.
• • •
With those massive seizures we were able to bring down sweeping indictments in New York’s Eastern District against thirteen senior Shan United Army traffickers, all major figures who were known to be the linchpins of Khun Sa’s operation.
But now the Opium Warlord’s wrath was intense.
Catherine Palmer, assistant US attorney in the Eastern District, received multiple death threats—and an explosive device was sent to the prosecutor’s office.
• • •
Our case was rock solid. But Khun Sa had not risen to his position of power by chance; he was no fool, and realized that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a US penitentiary. He worked out an arrangement with corrupt Burmese officials to avoid extradition to the United States, even as I was preparing to testify against him in federal court.
In 1996 Khun Sa officially “surrendered” to the country’s military junta but, instead of being sent to prison, was allowed to live in seclusion in Yangon, reportedly still running an array of business ventures in secret. He ultimately died on October 25, 2007. The official cause remains unknown, but the formerly untouchable, chain-smoking Opium Warlord—the “Prince of Death”—had long suffered from diabetes, heart disease, partial paralysis, and high blood pressure.
CHAPTER 6
THE LORD OF THE SKIES
They called him the Lord of the Skies: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, godfather of the Juárez Cartel. A man so feared, so wily, and so wealthy that even today—long after his gruesome demise—he’s still ranked number one on many unofficial lists of the “richest gangsters of all time.”
He earned the name “Lord of the Skies” due to his private fleet of planes, including nearly two dozen private Boeing 727 jet aircraft, which he used to import cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, where it was later smuggled into the United States. As the de facto CEO of a sprawling cocaine empire, Carrillo Fuentes had an estimated net worth of $25 billion. In the mid-1990s, we in the Drug Enforcement Agency ranked him as the most powerful cocaine trafficker in the world.
Still in his thirties then, Amado was known as a criminal mastermind, one of those audacious—and utterly brilliant—businessmen who come around once in a generation.
Through the 1970s and ’80s, of course, it was Colombian kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers who dominated the cocaine trade. They used Mexico only as a transshipment point: perfectly situated, with its broad and pervious border to the US markets.
Amado had been there as a young narco-trafficker at the founding of the Federation, a cooperative conglomerate of previously competing local Mexican bosses, put together by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, known as El Padrino, the original Guadalajara-based godfather of the Mexican cartels.
But Amado Carrillo Fuentes, bright and enormously ambitious, wasn’t satisfied with the status quo. He determined that, for all the tens of millions coming into their coffers, the Mexicans were little more than glorified mules; they were being used by the Colombians to advance the trade but not receiving what Amado deemed due compensation.
Amado developed a new vision under the tutelage of Félix Gallardo, reshaping the transshipment of cocaine to American locations, mostly along the West Coast of the United States.
Previously, the Mexicans had been paid in cash per kilogram of pure cocaine. But with one stroke of genius, Amado Carrillo Fuentes changed the entire game. He said to the Colombians:
“Forget the cash—just pay me in product.”
He offered to fly his own 727 jets into Colombia, pick up the cocaine, and guarantee safe delivery to the vast wholesale and retail markets in the United States.
To the Colombian cartel bosses, it made little difference: After all, it was just processed coca. Rather than compensating their middlemen in cash—pesos or US dollars—they’d simply pay them in product.
Around this same time, the most powerful drug traffickers in Colombia were starting to come under indictment by US federal prosecutors. After decades of seeming impotence, the Colombian government had finally stepped up and begun to extradite cocaine traffickers to US jurisdictions. Many of the Colombian cartels’ coca loads were being seized and destroyed, and they were losing fortunes.
It was much safer for them to simply move the coca from Bolivia, process it into raw product in Colombia, then let the Mexicans take over the rest of the operation. True, this meant a smaller profit to the Colombians, but also much less risk. The Mexican mobsters already had an established network of soldiers, workers, and gang affiliates in California willing to assume the risk of transportation and distribution.
In retrospect, it was absolutely brilliant mercantilism. Now Amado Carrillo Fuentes could sell the exact same product—the same quality of pure cocaine—in California and across the United States at a much lower price point. After all, the cocaine had cost the Mexicans nothing—their only investment was risk.
Within a very short time, Amado and his confederates had completely undermined the Colombian cartels, selling the cocaine wholesale at a cheaper rate. Indeed, this became the business model that all the modern Mexican cartels follow today, set in motion by that dark visionary Amado Carrillo Fuentes—a complete shift in the financial paradigm.
Today, the only remaining Colombian cocaine trade is to Europe, transported via container ships to the coast of Africa, smuggled in with the collusion of corrupt African officials and then overland up to the waiting markets of Western Europe.
• • •
I first got involved in Mexican cartel investigations immediately after our successful takedown of Khun Sa and the Shan United Army. Don Ferrarone—the country attaché in Bangkok—was in the process of being transferred back to Houston, Texas.
Ferrarone called me into his Bangkok office and asked me if I’d relocate to Texas
with him. I respected Don immensely. He stood six-one, strong features, receding hairline, and he had decades already on the job: When I was still a kid in St. Louis, Don had worked the famous Nicky Barnes case, taking down Harlem’s “Mr. Untouchable.”
Don convinced me to apply for the job in Houston, but his real plan was to send me to El Paso, the hot spot in the Southwest for the Mexican cartel crisis. He wanted me in El Paso because it was, as he put it, “across the street” from Ciudad Juárez, which had earned an ugly reputation as the murder capital of the world.
Don arranged for me to be stationed in El Paso on what’s known as “temporary-duty basis.” The basis soon became quite permanent. I never even made it to Houston.
Honestly, it was a steep learning curve. I knew virtually nothing about cocaine. Mike Bansmer had given me a thorough education in Golden Triangle heroin, in the corruption, politics, and counter-narcotics policing of Southeast Asia—but the Mexican cocaine cartels were brand-new ground for me.
I was immediately assigned to working the Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Juárez Cartel investigation. Formally, we were designated the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, but we all referred to it simply as the Amado Task Force.
I spent hours reading intel reports, learning everything I could about Amado Carrillo Fuentes and his second-in-command, his brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes—also known as El Viceroy.
• • •
For decades, the Drug Enforcement Administration had been trying to infiltrate the increasingly powerful Mexican cocaine cartels. It was all too often a deadly proposition. In 1985, while on assignment in Mexico investigating drug trafficking, DEA Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was abducted. Shortly after leaving the US Consulate in Guadalajara, Kiki was kidnapped—went missing, without a trace. His corpse was found several weeks later, partially decomposed and wrapped in a plastic bag, buried in a shallow grave seventy miles north of the Mexican city.
His death had been particularly gruesome. Kiki had been tortured—sodomized with a broom handle—and kept alive, wide awake, through the vicious interrogations by a physician injecting him with amphetamines, before ultimately being buried while still alive and breathing.
Kiki Camarena’s disappearance became an international incident, briefly straining relations between the United States and Mexico. The case featured as Time magazine’s cover story, “Death of a Narc,” on November 7, 1988, and the Drug Enforcement Administration launched Operation Leyenda, the largest homicide investigation in DEA history.
Investigators soon identified the Federation’s boss, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, and his two closest associates, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero, as the primary suspects in the kidnapping. Fonseca Carrillo and Caro Quintero were quickly apprehended and imprisoned; Félix Gallardo initially remained free, but was later convicted of the murder.
The Mexican physician Humberto Álvarez Machain, who allegedly prolonged Camarena’s life so the interrogation and torture could continue, was brought to the United States to face justice. Álvarez was tried in US District Court in Los Angeles, but acquitted. Four other suspects—Javier Vásquez Velasco, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, Juan José Bernabé Ramirez, and Rubén Zuno Arce—were ultimately found guilty of the kidnapping.*
• • •
Nine years after Kiki Camarena’s murder, the task of trying to infiltrate and take down Amado Carrillo Fuentes and the Juárez Cartel seemed no less daunting than it had been in Kiki’s day, but within two months of my arrival in El Paso, I was fortunate enough to partner up with the foremost expert on drug-investigation wiretapping in the Southwest United States.
When I arrived in El Paso, Special Agent Steve Whipple—today he is the special agent in charge for all of Texas, based out of Houston—had been pursuing and wiretapping a group of Juárez Cartel gangsters engaged in overland transshipment.
Steve’s a born-and-bred Texan, six-two, imposing, always impeccably dressed in cowboy boots, crisp blue jeans, and snap-button cowboy shirts. He took me under his wing and gave me my education on wiretaps, cocaine, and the tremendous—often capricious—violence of the Mexican cartels.
Amado Carrillo Fuentes may have been the mastermind of his criminal empire, but he’d more than met his match in Steve Whipple. Everyone in law enforcement knew that if you were a drug trafficker anywhere near a phone—on either side of the border—you were never safe from Special Agent Steve Whipple.
• • •
I was only a week into my new posting when I saw the cartels’ ruthlessness firsthand. We got a tip from the Hotel-Motel Group of the DEA El Paso office. The Hotel-Motel Group was often a vital source of intel about the activities of cocaine traffickers crossing over from Ciudad Juárez to transact business in El Paso.
We quickly acted upon the intel: We found a suspected stash house that had been leased in the name of Caroline Morrison, and soon determined that she was a stripper whose dancing name was Tammy.
Tammy was part of a group of migratory exotic dancers who travel back and forth, in an arc—sticking to the I-10 Corridor. From Santa Monica to Jacksonville, from Southern California to North Florida, these young women bounce from club to club. Some of them—especially the young, attractive ones like Tammy, those billed as “featured dancers”—do very well financially, pulling in undeclared, untaxed cash working that I-10 Corridor.
• • •
Tammy had the look of a West Texas cheerleader, but in reality she was a blonde, blue-eyed California girl. She danced a few nights a week in El Paso, at a club called the Prince Machiavelli Lounge. The girls working there often danced for the Mexican cartel traffickers who’d crossed the border.
The lure would start off innocently enough: The Mexican gangsters would approach one of the strippers, pay for a few lap dances, buy a round of drinks or a bottle of champagne. After a few nights of that, the girls would be approached about making some “extra” money. The cartel was moving so much product, they were always in need of stash houses.
But a Mexican national taking out a lease would instantly bring heat from the El Paso cops. In our DEA office, the Hotel-Motel Group agents were experts at developing informants who knew the locations of stash houses.
The gangsters would routinely target these innocent-looking white girls like Tammy, throw them $1,000 cash per month just to lease a house. The girls wouldn’t even have to live there, just open the garage door, switch on the lights, and make the place look like someone was actually home—not storing hundreds of bricks of pure cocaine.
• • •
It was the middle of a cloudless Texas night, and I was rolling with a DEA agent named Ricky Farrell. We arrived at the stash house, made a warrantless entry: coming into Tammy’s place under exigent circumstances.
We found eight hundred kilograms of pure cocaine.
Stash house?
The cocaine wasn’t even stashed. All eight hundred kilos were stacked right out in the open. The house had no furniture. No appliances. No signs that anyone had ever lived there.
We seized all the cocaine and, from documentary evidence, established that the lease was in the name of Caroline “Tammy” Morrison—a featured dancer at Prince Machiavelli.
Ricky Farrell and I drove straight to the club, located at 533 Executive Center Boulevard, just off Interstate 10. The Prince Machiavelli Lounge looked like an upscale joint—one of those places that style themselves “gentlemen’s clubs” rather than “titty bars,” catering to visiting businessmen and professional ball players—but it had a long history of criminal activity.
A few years later, after I’d left El Paso, the club’s liquor license was revoked after a dancer allegedly sold cocaine to undercover state narcotics agents. In 2001, federal officials accused a University of Texas at El Paso research assistant and his wife of smuggling women from Russia—essentially “white slave trading”—and mak
ing them work as topless dancers at the club.
We pulled into the nearly full parking lot of Prince Machiavelli and assessed the security situation: There was one bouncer outside and another inside the corridor.
The first bouncer I ran into was towering: six-foot-six, heavy build, light-skinned, but with strong Aztec features. Even though he could see we were cops, at first he wanted to deny us entry. I reached into my pocket and badged him—showed him my DEA credentials. He took a step back. Then Ricky and I made our way inside.
The place had that unmistakable smell of strip clubs everywhere: too much body spray and inexpensive perfume barely masking the more tart odors of sweat and sex.
Two girls were writhing on poles, their lithe limbs reflecting bits of multicolor glitter sweat-glued to their thighs and hips and chests. Ricky Farrell and I started grilling the manager and some of the strippers.
“Where’s Tammy tonight?” I said.
“Who’s Tammy?”
“Don’t give me that shit. Tammy. Your dancer. Blonde, about twenty-four years old.”
The manager, a middle-aged Mexican-American, tried to play it tough, cold, steely-eyed. We were in plainclothes, so again I flashed my DEA credentials.
“Stop with the fucking games.”
“Oh, Tammy. That Tammy. She didn’t come in tonight.”
“Where you think she is?”
I pressed into the manager while Ricky went off talking to the other strippers.
“Look, honestly, I don’t want no problems. I really don’t know where’s she at.”
“Does she meet with any Mexican guys here?”
“I mean, she dances for everyone. White guys, black guys, Mexican dudes—”
“Not lap dances. Has she ever met with Mexican guys? Private conversations, I mean. Business conversations.”
The manager was clearly afraid. He didn’t want to answer.
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