The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  But I had him under pressure now. Only took a few seconds before he buckled.

  “Yeah, she does.”

  Then he rattled off the names of a bunch of other strip clubs she could be dancing at that very night.

  • • •

  We had no time to lose. While the rest of the DEA team were loading the seized kilos of coke into trucks to be taken to the evidence locker, Ricky and I scoured the places we’d learned that Tammy would frequent in El Paso: restaurants, bars, other strip clubs like the Red Parrot, Nero’s, Jaguars Gold Club, Kayak, Ecstasy Palace, the Players Sports Bar and Grill.

  From spot to spot, I was speeding, muttering at Ricky, “Dude, we’ve got to find this chick.”

  “You’re right—we gotta find her before they find her.”

  “If we don’t find her, she’ll be in Juárez tonight.”

  We ran around all over El Paso that night till the sun came up, asking questions, scouring dozens of locations—to no avail.

  • • •

  The following day, through our intel sources and informants in Mexico, we learned that Tammy had indeed been taken across the border from El Paso into Juárez.

  She had suffered the grisly fate meted out by the cartels. They ruthlessly killed her, then dismembered her body. The cartel gangsters refer to it as making sopa.

  They place the dismembered corpse into a fifty-five-gallon metal drum and pour battery acid over it. Within hours, there is no corpse, just a grim sludge of former human remains. All that’s left to dispose of are a few vestiges of bone and teeth.

  • • •

  Tammy’s death haunted me through many sleepless, sweaty El Paso nights.

  It was a stark awakening to the twisted rules the cartels were playing by.

  The Juárez Cartel blamed her personally for the seizure. Didn’t matter that she hadn’t been an informant, didn’t matter that she hadn’t been flipped by us, didn’t matter that she hadn’t pocketed some of the cocaine for herself.

  She’d made only one mistake: being reckless or greedy enough to put the lease in her name—assuming responsibility for anything that happened to the product stashed inside. For that mistake she’d paid with her life.

  It was an execution committed out of revenge—but it was also a clear message to all the other exotic dancers willing to try to make some extra cash leasing houses for the cartel: Don’t fuck up with our product, or you’ll suffer the same fate as Tammy.

  • • •

  The next week another routine—and seemingly inconsequential—blip came across our radar. I’d been working my confidential sources in El Paso and managed to flip an informant: a twenty-four-year-old Mexican gangster named Palomo. Palomo told us about a young apprentice of Amado named Guzmán.

  He was arriving in El Paso to purchase sets of stainless steel kitchen sinks. Guzmán was supposedly some up-and-coming trafficker, known for his capacity for violence, but he was still only a low-scale lieutenant in the Amado organization.

  Nothing special. We had him under surveillance, tracked the movements of this young Guzmán. I tailed him into downtown El Paso, where I watched him visiting a bunch of Mexican hardware places and kitchen supply outlets.

  Turned out this trip had nothing to do with cocaine. Guzmán was simply buying stainless steel kitchen sets—he purchased close to fifty—putting them in a flatbed truck, then taking them back into Juárez, where he could sell them on the black market, untaxed, at a profit.

  As usual, I took note of the kid’s name—Guzmán. Even jotted down his nickname, El Chapo, slang for Shorty. But didn’t give him much more thought until about a decade later.

  By then he’d made a meteoric rise through the Mexican underworld. Unbelievably, El Chapo Guzmán—the same kid I’d tailed as he bought kitchen sinks—would be ranked by Forbes magazine as the eighty-sixth richest man on earth. Forbes also deemed the diminutive billionaire the forty-first “most powerful person” in the world. No other Mexican, not even the president, made the list. Considering his estimated net worth of more than a billion dollars, Forbes referred to El Chapo, perhaps with a dash of hyperbole, as the “biggest drug lord ever.”

  • • •

  Even before I arrived on the scene, Steve Whipple had achieved great success disrupting the cocaine smuggling of one of the Juárez Cartel’s more dangerous crews. There are five major ports of entry in El Paso, and the Juárez Cartel would pay off various officials, oftentimes Mexicans but also corrupt US border patrol, drive their truckloads across, and place the cocaine in stash houses, where it would be prepared for transshipment across the United States.

  The principal young border-crossers for the Juárez Cartel were the Espinozas, a tight-knit group of brothers and cousins based in El Paso but answering to their masters in Ciudad Juárez. They were moneymakers for Amado and his brother Vicente, but they’d recently run afoul of their bosses, largely due to the ingenious work of Steve Whipple and his wiretapping team.

  Before I came to Texas, Steve had made several significant stop and seizures, including one instance where he apprehended seven hundred kilograms of the Juárez Cartel’s purest cocaine. Steve came up with the idea of executing the first legal “staged carjacking”—formally called a delayed-notice search warrant—which would prove to be an outstanding investigative tool to generate confusion and chatter on our wiretaps.

  When the task force received reliable intel about a major land transshipment, a group of three or four agents would make a vehicle stop: hyperaggressive, shouting only in Spanish, identified by generic police markings, black balaclavas covering their faces.

  I went on a few of the missions with Steve. We’d do a thorough vehicle search—never arresting anyone or leaving a copy of a search warrant. These Mexican gangsters were so conditioned to dealing with dirty cops—or even rival crews of gangsters pretending to be cops—that most times they fell to their knees, certain we’d come to kill them.

  From a legal standpoint, we were operating under the Carroll Doctrine, a US Supreme Court decision from the Prohibition Era that upholds the validity of warrantless automobile searches—often called the “automobile exception.”*

  We’d make the drug seizures: Technically all the cocaine moving across the border is already the possession of the US government as a controlled substance under Title 21. Then we’d leave the transporters terrified, loosely bound in flex-cuffs, muttering prayers in Spanish, but always still holding on to their cell phones.

  The delayed-notice warrant tactic generated invaluable calls within the crew, as well as to the network of defense lawyers and up the chain of command to the bosses of the cartel. Among ourselves, we called it “tickling the wire.”

  • • •

  I knew we had to get inside the Juárez Cartel’s Espinoza crew before they ultimately got whacked by their mercurial bosses; losing a significant stash of cocaine—as we’d seen with Tammy—earned a summary death sentence. Something intuitively told me that they would be our entry into the inner circle of Amado, Vicente, and the other high-ranking Juárez Cartel gangsters.

  The key would be me going undercover to infiltrate this group of what we termed “narco-juniors”: young border-crossers of the Espinoza crew. As the frontline troops and lieutenants for the Juárez Cartel, these men were young and ruthless.

  This Espinoza gang always wore a distinctive—and deceptively innocuous—trademark: T-shirts and jackets emblazoned with the yellow cartoon image of Tweety Bird. Their cars were also adorned with Tweety Bird decals. Bodies inked with Tweety tattoos.

  Among the Mexican drug cartels, Tweety Bird has a coded and malign meaning, making him one of the pantheon of patron saints of the Mexican Mafia. Tweety is viewed by the Mexican gangsters as a young pollo—a baby chicken—which is also Mexican slang for an illegal border-crosser. Pollero is slang for a smuggler.

  Many Mexican narcotic
s traffickers worship dark “patron saints” such as Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde, a legendary bandit killed in Sinaloa in 1909. Malverde is viewed as a Latin-American version of Robin Hood, and smugglers bringing drugs across the border pray to him to deliver them safely across and often carry icons and images of Malverde with them.

  Although Santa Muerte is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, the name literally translates as “Saint of Death” and she is a deity or iconic figure worshipped at shrines throughout Mexico; drug traffickers pay homage to her and pray to her for the safe passage of their drug loads, as well as prior to executions.

  For years now, many Mexicans have been shot dead at her shrines or their decapitated heads left as a grisly offering to her.

  Several other traditionally recognized saints, such as Saint Jude, patron saint of hopeless cases, are also worshipped as deities by narcotics traffickers.

  As for the Looney Tunes cartoon image of the trickster canary, many drug traffickers place Tweety Bird stickers on their trucks or Tweety air fresheners on their rearview mirrors: The drug dealers and transporters like to see themselves as the invincible little bird that can never be caught.

  • • •

  The Juárez Cartel had learned through regular, often brutal interrogations—as well as via leaks from a corrupt defense attorney on their payroll in Texas—that Steve Whipple was the author of the wiretaps and the case agent on these various investigations. They acted swiftly and ruthlessly. They targeted Steve for a hit—knowing full well that he was a DEA special agent.

  Over weeks of careful cultivation, we convinced my informant Palomo to introduce me to members of the Espinoza crew who were operating a window-tinting and stereo-customizing business in El Paso.

  Two of the Espinoza cousins were managing the office, and I was introduced to them by my informant as a man called Fast Eddie who could take care of “difficult work.” I looked the part, had my ponytail down to the middle of my back, was wearing dress slacks, a button-down shirt, and simple black loafers. I was ostensibly a private eye from LA.

  Before I got there, we had an FBI break-and-enter team come down in the middle of the night; with surveillance cover from the DEA task force, the B&E team installed video and audio bugs in the auto-tinting shop prior to my first undercover meet.

  • • •

  On a blindingly bright February morning on the East Side of El Paso, Palomo took me to meet the Espinoza crew in their auto-tint and customizing shop.

  They were all kids in their early twenties, but they were speaking directly on behalf of older Juárez Cartel family members and associates who’d recently been arrested, convicted, and imprisoned based on Steve Whipple’s wiretap work.

  The leaders of the crew were Ivan Espinoza and his younger brother Julio Cesar Espinoza. In a prior meeting we’d secretly surveilled and recorded, Palomo had prepped them about my impending arrival.

  Palomo told them that I was a corrupt PI who now had a personal vendetta against Steve Whipple because he’d arrested some of my clients, costing me many thousands of dollars.

  “Great shop you’ve got—I hear you do nice work,” I said, turning to admire some of the luxury cars and SUVs they were kitting out.

  The Juárez Cartel bosses—who live in the secure Campestre section of Ciudad Juárez—all drove black Chevrolet Suburbans with fully tinted bulletproof glass, booming state-of-the-art sound systems, and Level 3 armor plating. They traveled around Mexico like invincible warlords in those tanklike vehicles whose interiors resembled the most opulent limousines.

  “Yeah,” Ivan Espinoza said, stroking his sparse goatee.

  “I also do nice work,” I said, offering a half-smile.

  “That’s what we hear.”

  Wasn’t the first time I’d played the role of a hit man. When you’re selling yourself as a killer for hire, you never start off saying anything too direct—“I can body that guy” or even “I can do him.” That’ll raise the bad guys up instantly.

  You speak in an understood criminal code: innocuous-sounding phrases, half-finished statements, and knowing glances.

  “I hear you have some issues here,” I said. “Heard you have an infestation.”

  They nodded, warily.

  I kept glancing around the tinting shop. “I’m the kind of guy— Well, I know how to eradicate disease.”

  “Yeah?”

  Now I leaned in close, lowering my voice to a half-whisper.

  “Look, I can do the job. But I’ll need ten large. I’m not using my own ride. I’ll need a clean car. And I’ll need something to scatter the disease to the winds.”

  They understood. Having gained their confidence, I showed them pictures of Steve Whipple taken on “surveillance” to confirm his identity.

  “Yeah, that’s the cop—that’s him,” Ivan Espinoza said.

  Cognizant of the risk of being accused of entrapment, I gave the Espinozas several clear opportunities to back out of the hit.

  To seal the deal, I took them outside the shop to show them my beat-up, rust-flecked gray Ford LTD. I opened the trunk, and they could see that it was entirely covered in sheets of heavy-duty transparent plastic—evidence that I knew what I was doing when it came to the disposal of “messy” work.

  “The car you get me should be— Well, I don’t care what kind of car it is, as long as it’s got a trunk at least this big.”

  They nodded, understanding. Steve Whipple’s a very hefty guy, so the size and depth of the trunk was important.

  We took a brief ride around El Paso in that Ford LTD.

  What they didn’t realize, of course, was that the car had been kitted out in its own way—wired up for audio and visual so that we captured all of our conversations.

  The Espinozas agreed to all the terms: to pay me ten large, and to provide me with a clean four-door car and a shotgun, preferably a Remington.

  After the first meet, back at the task force, we strategized and mulled it over:

  What would be our next move?

  Suddenly, Steve Whipple himself came up with an audacious plan to provide the Juárez gangsters with irrefutable “proof” that I’d completed the hit on him.

  • • •

  Working in tandem with the coroner’s office in El Paso, we went out into the desert to photograph the “murder” scene. Steve had recruited two El Paso Police Department homicide detectives, Max Zimmerly and Mickey Wilhite.

  We drove my big gray four-door Ford LTD out to the desert so that it was also visible in the background of the photos. Max Zimmerly combined fake blood—as professional as any Hollywood studio makeup man—with regular supermarket-bought Heinz ketchup to make the job look real. They duct-taped Steve’s hands and feet. They slipped a plastic bag over his head, then duct-taped the bag around his neck.

  Then they created the effect of a head shot as if he’d been blasted at close range by my 12 gauge. They dragged Steve around in the dirt, put dusty boot prints on his back and rear end, and made him look like he’d taken a righteous ass-whipping before my Remington had administered the coup de grâce.

  Then they took a dozen Polaroids of the “corpse.”

  The pictures were so disturbing that when I first saw them, I was pretty shaken up. It actually looked like Steve had been shot point-blank in the head. They were extremely graphic. Even today, I wouldn’t want Steve’s children to see those Polaroids, because it looked like I really did him.

  But the staged hit on Steve took an unexpected twist. Through a jailhouse snitch, the Espinoza crew got spooked. They became so worried about the wiretaps, and the possibility of a leak within their organization, that they wouldn’t agree to the last meet to pay me the $10,000 for the completed hit.

  But that didn’t make much difference to the federal prosecutors. We still had the entire Espinoza crew on conspiracy to commit murder, so we bagge
d every last one.

  • • •

  Two months after my arrival in El Paso, I’d furthered my rapport with my informant Palomo, who was able to cross over into Juárez for personal contact with the Carrillo Fuentes brothers; an introduction had been made through a trusted associate—a Chinese-Mexican restaurant owner—and we’d even been able to arrange face-to-face meetings at the Carrillo Fuentes homes.

  As with any confidential informant, you only trust what you can corroborate, but over the course of months, Palomo became my surrogate eyes and ears. I would send Palomo across the border many times to do work, because for me to go undercover in Ciudad Juárez and try to engage Amado or Vicente was unfeasible.

  In this respect, the Juárez Cartel gangsters weren’t like other major narcotics figures I’ve worked undercover during my career. This wasn’t like Mike Bansmer and me meeting face-to-face with Thai traffickers, or my solo interactions with a Nigerian like Sam Essell or a Lebanese like Kayed Berro. The rules are different south of the border. The Carrillo Fuentes brothers, like the other major Mexican cartel bosses, had a strict policy of meeting directly only with other Mexicans.

  Nonetheless, through my confidential informant Palomo, I managed to get nine audiotapes; eight were of the younger brother, Vicente, and one was solely with Amado. For the first time, we had two bosses of the Juárez Cartel implicating themselves on crystal clear tape recordings.

  Then, suddenly, things turned extremely tense back at DEA headquarters in Arlington; there were senior DEA officials who could not believe we’d actually got close enough to Amado to capture his voice, or even that we’d developed an informant who could gain such intimate access as we did.

  Days after we filed the twenty-nine-count complaint against Amado and Vicente, along with their chief operations officer, Javier Herrera, we learned of a power play among the competing brass within DEA, specifically the Special Operations Division. The internecine wrangling erupted into an internal investigation calling into question the origin and authenticity of the tapes.

  Steve Whipple and I had to fly to DEA headquarters to be grilled as to how we obtained the intelligence. At one point—much to my chagrin—the tapes were accused of being staged, complete with fabricated voices.