by Elaine Carey
In 1940, prison guards arrested Manuela Rodríguez Sánchez, who had traveled from Veracruz to Santiago Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City to visit her husband, Pablo Campuzano Torres.76 Campuzano had committed homicide so his prison sentence was long. At the time of her arrest, Rodríguez said that she knew that her husband enjoyed fruit, but he was more partial to “Juanita.” So she had prepared a basket of tropical fruits and hid marijuana in her clothing. Guards arrested her for concealing and then transferring marijuana. She was aware that it was illegal to pass this plant to her imprisoned husband, given that she had taken the trouble to hide it.
Figure 8. Shoe with marijuana. Serie Mariguana, opio, y rogas, ca. 1935, 142927, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
In prison, men and women both sold and used drugs to gain power, to obtain privileges, and to make money. In both Mexico and the United States, family members of male inmates have played the role of sympathetic visitor but have also acted as fronts for the inmates’ internal drug businesses by smuggling in supplies. As in the early 1900s, women passed drugs to their imprisoned men not only to help them assuage the slow passage of time, but also to allow them greater access to power within prison that drug possession provided. Prisoners sometimes worked alongside prison guards and even wardens to profit from drug trading both within and beyond the prison.
Drug use and vending in prison became a growing problem in Mexico in the 1930s, causing tensions within communities that surrounded prisons and in relations with the United States. In April 1935, C. Zepeda Morantes, a concerned citizen, wrote to Juan de Dios Bojórquez of the Secretariat of the Interior about Alejandro Lazy, a prison director in Mexico City, who allowed alcoholic drinks as well as heroin and other drugs to be widely consumed. Zepeda wrote that a conspiracy of vice existed between Lazy, a lawyer named C. J. Guadalupe, and the commander of the guards, Rodolfo H. Vivanco.77 He argued that male and female prisoners used drugs and alcohol that they purchased from a small store maintained by the prison director’s lover, Soledad Rodríguez Prado, whom he routinely met at the house of a prison guard, Mercedes Moreno, who lived in the neighborhood. In turn, Lazy, Guadalupe, Vivanco, and Rodríguez conspired to sell drugs to the prison population. Rodríguez’s store served as a front for drug distribution. Conspiracies like this document that prisoners, prison directors, attorneys, and guards alike felt the lure of drugs as a means to make money.
Despite the overall lower addiction rates in Mexico compared to the United States, Mexican health authorities recognized that prisons presented a growing problem with regard to drug trafficking.78 In 1938, U.S. Treasury agent Alvin Scharff met with Mexico’s chief of alcohol and narcotics service of the Department of Health, Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, to discuss the problem. Salazar worked closely with addicts. He told Scharff that there were some four hundred addicts in the various jails and penitentiaries in the Federal District who had been securing supplies of drugs for their personal use from people who smuggled the drugs into the jails. Salazar argued that it had been impossible to prevent smuggling into the prisons because of lax conditions and strong demand.
Differing dramatically from policies favored by the United States, Salazar advocated a medical response that would provide addicts with morphine so that the heroin and opium traffickers’ fortunes would wane and they would lose influence in the prisons.79 Moreover, Salazar alluded to the fact that the drug trade flourished in part due to the corruption of government officials who too were involved in the trade.80
Outside prison walls, the relationship between women and drug peddling was also complex. Women peddled drugs in the street as they sold fruit, cigarettes, and other items. Cases from the 1930s demonstrate that women sold marijuana cigarettes on the street, sometimes hidden in fruit baskets, while other times, in certain neighborhoods, more prominently displayed but still hidden from inspectors. For example, María Dolorez Cruz Hernández, a forty-five-year-old woman, drew suspicion in the Plaza Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in Mexico City. Police reported that she appeared to be a lower-class street vendor who became nervous when they approached her. On inspection, the police discovered that she had a number of well-rolled marijuana cigarettes. In the interrogation, she told the police that she secured her supply from a dealer from the Tacubaya neighborhood and had just finished her day’s work.81 She had apparently sold a substantial number of marijuana cigarettes in the plaza.
Localized vending among women was common in many major cities around the world. In New York City in the 1910s, narcotics peddling among the nonelite demonstrates an emerging narconarrative of vice. In 1914, Lulu Hammond stood trial for violation of the Harrison Act. She had allegedly sold “a deck of cards [cocaine]” to a man posing as her client. Hammond, an African American widowed single mother, argued that she was a laundress who did not sell drugs, as alleged, from her apartment, where she lived with her daughter, a roommate, and a dog. In the court transcripts, Hammond is described as wearing an Asian kimono at the time of her arrest. Her kimono, her living circumstances, and the testimony of her own daughter, who told the court that her mother owned a gun, ensured that whether she had sold the cocaine or not, she was destined for jail. The attorneys and detectives were fascinated by the spectacle of a black woman wearing a kimono, which they believed signified that she was probably a prostitute. She argued that it had been a gift from a merchant marine boyfriend, which only fueled speculation that she worked as a prostitute. Stereotypes of the time suggest that an armed African American woman, wearing a kimono and selling cocaine to a white man, was a threat.82
Hammond may have been a small-time peddler, but other women involved in the drug trade developed sophisticated selling practices that continue today. In 1923, narcotics agent Walter C. Smith arrested Alice Hurley for selling cocaine in Philadelphia.83 In his interview, she told him that she worked a particular area of the city on commission for a male dealer. Smith documented that women like Hurley worked on commission or held franchises from other dealers. Hurley appears to have worked on commission for a man affiliated with organized crime.84 Cases such as these from the 1920s, although few, document that female street vendors had a multidimensional relationship with the selling of drugs.85 Women served as steerers, lookouts, runners, jobbers, and fronters for drug sales; as fronters, they purchased drugs for other people and perhaps smuggled them into prisons.86 Through maintaining franchises, selling on commission, or serving as steerers by bringing customers to dealers, women had a degree of autonomy from male authority because they sold independently on the street or from their homes. In those cases, they controlled the ebb and flow of their business.
Many women also sold for their husbands and lovers. Those familial connections to a prominent bandit or drug peddler ensured that certain women would continue to draw police attention. For instance, Ana María Barrera de Urquito was the wife a bandit. When she was arrested with her lover, Elpidio Miravete, a member of another family of imprisoned bandits, the Mexican press reported that the two became insulting and adopted a challenging and insolent attitude toward authorities. Ana María declared: “Since you were unable to bother my husband . . . you now endeavor to hurt me saying that I sell drugs. . . . That is not true!”87 Police often assumed—and probably rightfully so—that a woman’s connections indicated her likely involvement in drug selling.
The peddling of narcotics mimicked the vending of alcohol. Women began selling drugs to support their families, and they used family networks to sustain their work. Bingham Dai, in his work on opium addiction in Chicago during the 1930s, documented that of the 672 women addicts he studied, 14 percent were nonaddicted peddlers who had been arrested and sent to either the Women’s Reformatory at the Dwight Correctional Center or the Keeley Institute, both in Dwight, Illinois.88 These women made up the portion of those arrests who were in fact vendors who sought profit, not access to drugs. Among the other women, Dai also noted the high rate of vener
eal disease among women addicts compared to male addicts, a result of women’s additional work as prostitutes.
Drug use, however, caused concern that women were acting beyond their acceptable gendered roles in society. Smuggling and peddling, although a form of commerce, in many ways undermined expected gendered norms. Women who bought and sold drugs transgressed beliefs about the role of women within the illicit labor market. While prostitutes often used mind-altering substances to perform their work, other women may have used drug selling as a way to move beyond prostitution, or they simply opted to sell drugs rather than turn tricks. Both occupations were dangerous, subjecting women to police harassment, personal attacks, and physical deprivation. However, the transgressions of street vendors, contrabandistas, and smugglers ensured the scrutiny of policing agents on both sides of the border. Prostitution, on the other hand, was simply an internal Mexican problem that rarely led to the sharing of information with U.S. law enforcement officers.
In 1939, the Mexican newspaper Excélsior reported that a woman, Teresa Sánchez Velázquez, had gotten into a heated argument with Alejandro Aguilar Luna in a saloon. This incident caught the attention of Harry Anslinger at the FBN. Aguilar Luna, an addict, had apparently bumped into Sánchez, which triggered a dispute. Sánchez was described as having “hair on her chest and a revolver in her belt.” When Aguilar bumped into her, she “abused him” for his lack of gentility. He picked a fight with her, and she shot him in the foot.89
What remains striking is why the U.S. embassy in Mexico City would share such a minor news report with the FBN. Perhaps Sánchez’s use of force clearly showed how drug use, whether by an addict or by those who come into contact with one, works to undermine social hierarchies between the sexes.90 Sánchez frequented an establishment where addicts were present, and her perceived physical appearance as masculine further supported the threatening view that drug use altered the social order, even between men and women and masculinity and femininity. Sánchez’s act of self-defense also raised questions about what she was doing in a cantina, traditionally a male establishment. Incidents like this yielded considerable discussion among public health officials about drugs and women. These fears flowed across borders and contributed to transnational cooperation.
THE GLOBAL MULE: THE TRANSNATIONAL
CASE OF MARIA WENDT
Internal flows of drugs created domestic problems for Mexico. As the country tried to rebuild and modernize, drug selling and use undermined those efforts. However, internal drug use in Mexico was beginning to draw global attention; a growing number of international cases involving multiple actors reached far beyond the arms of Mexico’s policing and state agencies and created a huge dilemma for the country. In the 1930s, technological advancements wrought by modernization allowed men and women involved in criminal behavior to expand their activities by using air travel, telephones, and banking wires. In the wake of the collapse of the Mexican economy in 1929, many people found the means to make money through narcotics beyond localized smuggling along the border or simple peddling. The case of Maria Wendt (also referred to as Molly Maria Wendt) can serve as an example of women used as transnational mules by international criminal syndicates. Wendt was exceptional because her ties to one of the era’s most prominent drug trafficking rings helped create a partnership between the United States and Mexico. Her arrest led to the dismantling of one of the world’s most famous global opiate rings. More importantly, she and the men that she worked with provide keys to understanding the supply of Asian opium to Mexico.
In 1933, Harry Anslinger wrote to Francisco Vásquez Pérez at the Department of Health about a suspected trafficker, Jorge Halperin, aka Mechel Halperin, who was operating in Mexico City.91 In October and November 1934, Anslinger sent Vázquez Pérez three letters in which he argued that Halperin worked for Naftali Loeffelholz-Brandstatter (also referred to as Norbert), the head of a company called the Machinery and Engineering Corporation based in Shanghai.92 Anslinger alleged that this business served a front for a notorious transnational opium trafficking ring that operated from Shanghai, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Havana, and Berlin.93 Anslinger also claimed that Halperin had exchanged telegrams with George Dorande of Shanghai, an agent for Loeffelholz-Brandstatter; Dorande demanded money from Halperin and told him to use an agent, Albert Rosenbaum, at a particular Mexico City bank to wire the money to Shanghai.94 Anslinger’s cryptic messages to Vásquez Pérez never specifically outlined what the Mexican public health official should look for, but he asked Vásquez Pérez to put Halperin under surveillance. Anslinger was convinced that Halperin was involved in narcotics smuggling.
As discussed in chapter 1, Mexican officials had already shown great concern about the illegal activities of foreign nationals. This case had extraordinary repercussions. The early cooperation that emerged between Mexico and the United States was unprecedented. With Anslinger’s encouragement, Mexican officials gathered information about Halperin, who lived with his wife, Ethel, and two sons, Otto and Rodolfo. Halperin, of German origin but a naturalized “Central American citizen” (no country specified in the documents), worked as a businessman who sold decals (calcomanías) and as a real estate agent for properties owned by Americans in Mexico.
In a handwritten, unsigned letter to Anslinger, an agent for the Department of Health asked if the FBN knew whether the drugs would come by ship or by parcel to Mexico. Officials in Mexico believed that a large shipment was due to arrive soon. But neither Mexican nor U.S. officials knew when, where, or how that shipment would arrive.95
The surveillance of Halperin demonstrated cross-border cooperation in an attempt to stem drug trafficking. It also illustrates the impact of modernity on drug trafficking, and those who worked to stop it. Anslinger and his agents had observed Loeffelholz-Brandstatter, intercepted various telegrams, and sent that information to Mexican authorities, although it is unclear how the FBN secured telegrams sent from Mexico to China.
Halperin used telegrams to communicate with his contacts in Shanghai and received his instructions from Dorande the same way. Moreover, the ability to wire money to another country reflected an innovation in banking technology that enabled traffickers to often dispense with physical couriers. FBN agents, perhaps operating illegally in Mexico, intercepted communications and instructions and passed those on to Mexican authorities. The evidence suggests that Mexican authorities never questioned how Anslinger acquired the telegrams—which is rather suspicious, since all were sent from Mexico City directly to Shanghai, though they may have been routed via the United States. Instead, they followed his request to place Halperin under continuous surveillance, which revealed little except that his family life and daily activities did not seem that unusual or threatening.
In 1936, the investigation of Halperin and his ties to Loeffelholz-Brandstatter took an advantageous turn. On August 5, U.S. Customs agents detained Maria Wendt when she disembarked from the Japanese ship MV Heiyo Maru after it docked in San Pedro, California.96 Customs inspectors grew suspicious of her and searched her baggage. Initially, they thought she was a silk smuggler because her wardrobes were full of silk, but these only served as a front for her true cargo. Upon closer inspection, customs officers found secret compartments in her trunks that yielded fifty-four pounds (862.75 ounces) of pure heroin valued at $100,000 (2012: $1,652,000). Once cut, it had a value of over $1 million (2012: $16,518,000). Federal officials arrested her. At that time, it was one of the largest narcotics hauls ever apprehended from a mule.97
Once arrested, the twenty-three-year-old confessed that she was supposed to deliver the heroin to a man dressed in black on a certain day in a certain place in Los Angeles. During their investigation, agents found that the heroin originated in Shanghai. Daniel Bailey, the customs agent in charge, reported “that the deal for this shipment of narcotic was consummated in Mexico City between Anton Wurthmueller of Mexico City and Norbert Lefenholtz Branstatter of Shanghai, China and unknown parties from New York City.”98 He alluded
to the fact that Wendt may have been present at the meetings in Mexico City in which the group planned to move the heroin to its final destination in New York.99 Bailey’s communication confirmed that the organization had been under surveillance in Mexico City, most likely due to the earlier surveillance of the Halperin case. Loeffelholz-Brandstatter lived in exile in Shanghai and based his business there; Anton Wurthmueller lived in Mexico City, overseeing an operation that shipped agricultural and engineering equipment from Germany to Mexico and Central America. Hidden away in that equipment, he smuggled heroin. In 1935, he was believed to have smuggled four hundred pounds of heroin into the port of Veracruz in a single shipment.
When arrested in San Pedro, Wendt confessed that she had been asked to deliver the heroin to a man she had planned to meet. In her testimony, she stated that Mr. and Mrs. Francis Rossendahl (also appears as Rosendeal) hired her to accompany Mrs. Rossendahl from China to San Francisco.100 She had met Mr. Rossendahl, a stockbroker, at a café in Shanghai.101 Wendt was to accompany his wife as a nurse. After arriving in San Francisco, Wendt argued, Rossendahl asked her to travel to Los Angeles on her own to deliver some trunks. After that, she would travel to Mexico City.102
After Wendt was taken into custody, officials held her, hoping to nab her accomplice. They planned to hold her for a few days and allow her to make the drop so that they could arrest others. Trusting Wendt to work with them, they housed her at the Rosslyn Hotel in Los Angeles rather than the country jail; however, their plan failed because Wendt escaped from the hotel. Her escape led to a crisis in the Treasury Department; a woman who was the key to a two-year-long investigation had slipped through the fingers of agents. Officials proclaimed that “her own friends” must have kidnapped her. On August 12, 1936, Thomas Gorman of customs reported to Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury, that Wendt had fled from his officials in Los Angeles. However, he stated that they detained the fugitive that morning in New York City boarding the SS Deutschland to sail for Germany. Morgenthau became enraged over the incompetence of his LA agents, and he called for disciplinary action against the employee or employees responsible for Wendt’s escape.103