The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Fortunately, after a full week in Arlington, all nine of the tapes were proven to be the real deal, corroborated by other intelligence sources as being the authentic voices of Amado and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

  • • •

  With the veracity of our tapes vindicated, we could begin to close the legal snare. In the American judicial system, there are four forms of charging offenses: a complaint, an indictment, a grand jury indictment, and information from the US Attorney’s Office leading to prosecution.

  Things were proceeding at breakneck pace: I’d obtained a complaint against Amado Carrillo Fuentes in conjunction with the US Attorney’s Office in the Fifth District.

  We were entering uncharted waters: on the verge of charging, and ultimately getting an extradition against, both Amado and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. There would be considerable legal hurdles ahead, but we were finally beginning the process of trying the untouchable Lord of the Skies himself in a US federal court.

  Of course, Amado Carrillo Fuentes didn’t rise to his position of power without having a wide network of spies and informants, both on the streets and within the Mexican government. Knowing how close we were to getting an indictment that could lead to his extradition, Amado began to take dramatic evasive measures—much like Pablo Escobar and other Colombian drug lords had done a decade earlier when under threat of extradition to the United States.

  Through our excellent intel sources in both the United States and Mexico, we knew that he had started on a secretive tour to find a place he could stash his ill-gotten billions.

  We knew he had traveled to Cuba, then down to Bolivia, then on to Buenos Aires and Santiago. The pressure within Mexico was getting too intense. Amado would only move around Ciudad Juárez in ambulances: The insides were kitted out in opulence like a limousine, but the exteriors resembled functional ambulances to thwart law enforcement surveillance.

  • • •

  In those frantic days we were pursuing the indictment against Amado, I found myself speeding down a slick black strip of highway. I had a new motorcycle that my stepfather had purchased for me—a Harley-Davidson Softail. I’d decided to do a marathon ride from the eastern border of Texas to El Paso—about 883 miles all told.

  I would ride for three or four hours, pull over for fifteen minutes to drink some water and gas up, but I wasn’t lingering anyplace for too long; I wanted to make it across the state of Texas in one day.

  As I was riding along like a madman, somewhere near Odessa, I pulled over. I’d received an urgent message from one of my supervisors in El Paso, Dennis Clark.

  By now the Texas heat had given way to a sudden thunderstorm; I stopped the Harley under a little bridge where I could escape the violently pelting rain.

  I noticed a rusted-out, dilapidated, and abandoned Pontiac parked under the bridge. I put my Softail on its kickstand, slid into the driver’s seat of the dilapidated car, and called Dennis on my cell.

  “What’s up, Dennis?”

  “Amado’s fuckin’ dead.”

  “I know. We’re about to bring the hammer down on his ass—”

  “No, Eddie. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I repeated it twice—not a question, just stunned, disbelieving. “Amado Carrillo Fuentes is dead . . .”

  “Dead.”

  I looked over, and there was a thin emerald-green-and-black snake slithering around the backseat.

  “Murdered?” I said, finally.

  “He died after surgery. Don’t know all the details yet. Too much anesthesia.”

  I was so frustrated, so pissed off. I glanced back and saw that emerald-green snake squirming up the backseat and actually thought—for an instant—about pulling out my piece and blasting the snake’s head clean off.

  “Fuck!”

  The entire chassis of that beat-up Pontiac reverberated from my shout.

  • • •

  When I got back to the El Paso task force office, the pieces of the story began to fall into place. On the verge of fleeing Mexico to escape our indictment, Amado Carrillo Fuentes had arranged for massive liposuction and facial reconstruction.

  Four Mexican doctors performed the surgery, which lasted hours. Amado came out of surgery and grabbed the anesthesiologist at his side. Slowly regaining consciousness, moaning in pain, Amado complained: Look, I need more.

  The anesthesiologist was reluctant—this physician was no quack; he was a veteran of countless plastic surgeries for Latin America’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. But he nonetheless administered more oral painkillers.

  Amado, still in great pain, demanded even more painkillers.

  Amado died of respiratory arrest on July 4. The surgeons had completely reconstructed his facial features and removed thirty pounds of fat from his midsection.

  I kept mulling over the information in my mind. Dead on a coroner’s table, his body bloated and distorted from the surgery: the richest drug trafficker on the planet—gone.

  • • •

  After Amado’s death, for thirty days there was an unholy bloodletting in Juárez. Anyone who owed Amado any money, or was in some way indentured to him, went out and butchered all the Carrillo Fuentes people he could find: street soldiers, lieutenants, even high-ranking officers in the cartel organizational structure.

  Better to kill now, in the interregnum, while there was no boss.

  In those thirty days there were ninety-four murders, an average of more than three murders a day.

  • • •

  The Mexican cocaine cartels maintain a complex, incestuous structure unlike any other drug empires on the planet. Sometimes they come together to behave like a criminal cooperative—as in the case of the original Federation.

  Other times, especially in a power vacuum, they wage vicious war among themselves, on a scale that dwarfs the Capone-era gangland wars of Prohibition. Just since 2006, more than 66,000 have been killed in the Mexican drug wars, a figure far exceeding the total number of US servicemen killed in the entire Vietnam War.

  And unlike the American Mafia—as we’d seen with the attempted contract killing of Steve Whipple—the Mexican cartels observe no boundaries about killing lawmen, judges, politicians, or one another’s closest family members.

  There’s a famous story, told throughout the Mexican drug world.

  When El Chapo Guzmán’s son, twenty-two-year-old Édgar Guzmán López, was publicly murdered in a shopping center parking lot by at least fifteen gunmen using assault rifles and grenade launchers, El Chapo made a chilling vow:

  “If my son can’t have a life, then neither can yours.”

  Though it’s never been proven, it’s widely believed that Guzmán ordered the hit on one of the sons of the rival drug lord who Chapo blamed for the death.

  It’s still often heard in barrios of Ciudad Juárez:

  “Chapo wanted his pound of flesh and, yes, he got it.”

  • • •

  I drove down into Ciudad undercover one day during the thirty-day bloodletting in the wake of the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. As you drive south through El Paso on Interstate 10 and look to your right, you see the sprawling barrios of Mexico’s most violent city: Ciudad Juárez.

  In the wintertime, you smell the burning tires throughout the barrios. I looked over, picturing the stark contrast between the abject poverty of those Juárez slums and the opulence in which Amado and Vicente had lived—untouchable lords—in their secure Campestre section of the city.

  Amado may have been dead, but one of my primary targets, named in the charging document, was Javier Herrera, the operations officer and chief enforcer for Amado and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

  Immediately after Amado’s death, Herrera was publicly executed outside of the Juárez bullfighting stadium.

  Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Mexican drug cartels have a particular w
eapon of choice: the AK-47 assault rifle, gas-powered, firing 7.62×39mm rounds from a curving magazine they refer to as the cuerno de chivo—the goat’s horn.

  Outside the bullfighting arena, in front of dozens of witnesses, Javier Herrera was shot more than thirty times in the face. They unloaded the entire cuerno de chivo magazine at point-blank range. Even among the cartel, that’s a particularly sadistic brand of execution.

  When you tear up a man’s face with thirty rounds, the flesh and features are destroyed. It’s an act of sheer sadism, preventing the mother or widow from having an open-casket funeral.

  • • •

  As for Amado himself, we knew we could not trust any of the information we were getting out of Mexico. We had to be certain that the Lord of the Skies had not cleverly staged his own death—used a bit of Hollywood-style trickery, in an eerie replication of what we’d done with Steve Whipple out in the desert.

  Immediately after Independence Day weekend, we went down to Mexico to get eyeballs on his corpse. Amazingly, the family did have an open-casket funeral. It was enough to shock even a hardened lawman.

  Amado’s face was grotesquely distorted, almost charred-looking: a bluish-gray ghoul. I had to match his fingerprints to an existing print we had—we had one on file because Amado had once applied for a visa to enter the United States.

  Sure enough, the prints were a match. Steve Whipple and I had lost our quarry; the richest gangster of all time was dead.

  • • •

  And the plastic surgeons? They paid the ultimate price for their dance with the Juárez devil.

  The retribution was swift. One vanished without a trace. Rumors continue to swirl about him—he somehow escaped, or perhaps became a cooperating witness.

  The other three doctors are known to have been murdered by the Juárez Cartel in the most grisly manner. Just like poor Tammy Morrison, the stripper we’d tried desperately to rescue, the doctors were torture-murdered. All three corpses were dismembered, the body parts placed into those fifty-five-gallon metal drums and drenched in acid. No remains were ever found.

  • • •

  The fate of Amado’s brother Vicente, meanwhile, remains baffling to this day. Perhaps murdered, perhaps hiding under another identity—Vicente has simply vanished from the face of the earth.

  No one in the DEA believes he’s dead, but he has successfully disappeared; from 1997, all the way to 2014, there has not been a single verifiable piece of intelligence that Vicente is still alive. And despite all our advancements in surveillance techniques, we haven’t got a single voiceprint of Vicente in decades.

  Perhaps he made it to Cuba, Bolivia, Chile, or Argentina—we just don’t know.

  According to some sources, Vicente is still handling about a fifth of Mexico’s $40-billion-a-year narcotics trade as the Juárez Cartel’s godfather in absentia. Right now, the Carrillo Fuentes drug-trafficking organization, using fleets of tractor trailers, is still regularly moving multihundred kilograms of cocaine, as well as multiton amounts of marijuana, through the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso corridor for distribution to cells in Texas, California, and Illinois.

  The US Department of State is currently offering an award of $5 million (US) for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

  • • •

  On February 22, 2014, Mexican authorities finally captured Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, now fifty-six years old—ranked on the DEA’s Wanted List as the world’s most powerful cocaine kingpin—in the resort city of Mazatlán. Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s one-time lowly lieutenant—who I’d followed through the streets of El Paso as he bought stainless steel kitchen appliances—had risen to billionaire status and the Forbes list of the “World’s Most Powerful People.” He was ignominiously nabbed by the Mexican marines at 6:40 a.m. in a high-rise condominium fronting the Pacific in Mazatlán.

  US officials announced that the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, had been instrumental in providing the intelligence that led to the capture of El Chapo. US Attorney General Eric Holder called the capture a “victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 7

  THE GREAT GAME

  Now I shall go far and far into the North playing the Great Game.

  RUDYARD KIPLING, KIM

  Since our takedown of Khun Sa and the Shan United Army in the 1990s, worldwide heroin production had shifted its axis, from Southeast Asia to Southwest Asia. With the downfall of the SUA, the traffickers of the Golden Triangle switched almost exclusively to manufacturing methamphetamine.

  Today, Afghanistan has a virtual monopoly on the world’s heroin trade: Approximately 92 percent of the illegal heroin sold globally is Afghan in origin.

  But how did the shift from east to west happen? Few Americans—few Westerners—understand the full story of how Afghanistan, under the Taliban, cornered the global market in opium production.

  A landmark report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) details the massive and profoundly negative impact of the Afghan poppy trade:

  The world’s deadliest drug has created a market worth $65 billion, catering to 15 million addicts, causing up to 100,000 deaths per year, spreading HIV at an unprecedented rate and, not least, funding criminal groups, insurgents and terrorists.*

  In 1999 Afghanistan saw a bumper opium crop of 4,500 metric tons. But in July 2000, Mullah Omar issued a surprising judicial ruling under Sharia law.

  Mullah Omar was the spiritual head of the Taliban, but also Afghanistan’s de facto head of state from 1996 to late 2001, under the official title Head of the Supreme Council. His word was law. He announced that, according to the Holy Koran, the use of any kind of psychotropic substance was strictly forbidden.

  Taliban signs began to appear around the country reading: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan not only engenders [sic] illegal things forbidden but launches effective struggles against illicit drugs as these drugs are a great threat to personality, wisdom, life, health, economy, and morality.”

  The ban was so effective that, officially at least, Helmand Province recorded no poppy cultivation during next season.

  Early in 2001, the Bush administration made a $43 million “eradication” reward payment to the Taliban regime. At the time this was billed as one of the most successful antidrug campaigns in history.

  • • •

  But was it? Prior to the September 11 attacks, Mullah Omar called a historic meeting of dignitaries in the Pakistani city of Quetta. The conference has come to be known as the Quetta Shura. All accounts indicate that those in attendance at this first sit-down included Haji Bashir Noorzai, Haji Bagcho Sherzai, Haji Baz Mohammad, and Haji Juma Khan (or HJK, as I would later come to call him).

  “Haji” is the honorific title given to any Muslim man who has made the pilgrimage, or hajj, to the holy city of Mecca. But every one of these “Hajis” at the conference in Quetta was known to us as a major opium and heroin trafficker in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was reportedly Noorzai and Juma Khan who masterminded the meeting.

  Time magazine reporting would later suggest that the Taliban’s ban on the cultivation of poppies and production of opium was the idea of Al Qaeda’s financial experts working with HJK and other top Afghan drug traffickers. According to Time, the ban “meant huge profits for the Taliban and their trafficker friends who were sitting on large stockpiles when prices soared.”

  Mullah Omar had reportedly told them: Yes, we’ve issued the fatwa that drug dealing is forbidden under Koranic law, but privately, we’ll keep stockpiling opium base.

  There are four stages in the production of heroin: poppy flowers, which are refined into opium paste, which is refined into morphine base, which is refined into heroin. While morphine base and heroin will deteriorate rather quickly, the brown
ish-black jellylike opium paste, unlike most agricultural products, can easily be stored for many years without refrigeration. Secreted away in warehouses, mass quantities of opium paste have a shelf life of at least ten years.

  Right after our Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, the Taliban reversed its religious position. Mullah Omar issued a second fatwa saying, in effect, that the cultivation of poppies and heroin production—though not consumption—were not only approved but encouraged, because now opium traffickers were funding and facilitating the campaign against the foreign invaders and infidels.

  In warehouses all over the country, men like Noorzai, Bagcho, and HJK had stockpiled tons of opium paste. The Taliban was now able to virtually corner the worldwide market; for several years, we now know, the Taliban had set aside half of their annual opium harvest. By lifting the ban, Mullah Omar sent their profits shooting up nearly tenfold: A kilogram of opium had sold for $44 wholesale before the ban, but one year later the price had risen to $400.

  Drug lords like Haji Juma Khan became overnight billionaires. Worst of all, from an American perspective, these opium billions were funneled into the insurgency and Al Qaeda cells. The DEA came to believe HJK alone was providing more than $100 million a year to jihadist terror groups.

  Those of us in the counter-narcotics business saw Mullah Omar’s first fatwa for what it was: a shell game, a clever con—a piece of dogma-cloaked PR for foreign consumption. Really, it was just a traditional price-fixing scam. Mullah Omar had announced a religious ban on opium production, but had his intimate consort of traffickers secretly stockpile a decade’s worth of product. It was a classic case of market manipulation carried out by a small cabal of Afghan drug lords.

  The stark reality is that the heroin production crisis in Southwest Asia is getting even worse as the US military completes its final drawdown from Afghanistan in 2016. Due to the widespread collusion between the Afghan government, police and intelligence operatives, and tribal drug kingpins, the heroin-terror connection is certain to increase—with disturbing repercussions for Americans both abroad and at home.