Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  Salazar’s testimony set the stage for the other informants who followed. Witnesses continually noted the ease by which narcotic drugs could be purchased in Mexico and hence in the United States.80 In one exchange, Daniel asked Perry Milton Turner of Austin, Texas, to describe how he found drugs in Mexico. That set the tone throughout the hearings. Turner, clean for years, replied: “A person can go down there, as long as he’s got dollars, that’s all it takes.”81 Turner explained that he began to use morphine after being hospitalized for an injury. Later, he continued to use it because he enjoyed it. He challenged concepts of reefer madness, an addict’s inability to work, and “ballyhoo” and “propaganda” in the newspapers, and he told Daniel that he held jobs while using moderate amounts of the drug. However, as morphine became more difficult to obtain through legal and illegal means, he turned to heroin. Once he became a heroin junkie, he lost his job and resorted to stealing to maintain his addiction.

  Daniel established that Turner had been arrested 52 times on narcotics charges, his wife of twelve years had been arrested on similar charges 122 times, and her sister 140 times. Their addictions forced Turner to frequently cross the border into Nuevo Laredo to buy twenty-dollar papelitos, each of which contained twelve to sixteen grams of heroin. To obtain that amount in San Antonio, Turner said that he paid thirty dollars (2012: $256.00) and that this heroin was more likely to be cut to increase profits for a dealer. By going to Nuevo Laredo, he received purer heroin at a lower price. In response to questioning, he confirmed that someone could purchase heroin in Nuevo Laredo and actually have it delivered to the United States for a small fee. The Mexican dealer determined the location of the drop-off and guaranteed delivery upon payment.

  The Daniel hearings confirmed that Mexico supplied 90 percent of the heroin in Texas. The abundant supply along the border led to questions about the hierarchy of heroin purity and origin. Members of the committee asked addicts whether they preferred brown Mexican heroin or white Asian heroin. However, W. E. Naylor, chief of the Narcotics Division of the Department of Public Safety, argued that white Mexican heroin was actually available in Houston or anywhere else in Texas.82 He suggested that the processing led to the differentiation between brown and white heroin, and he insisted that Mexican heroin was not some bastardized variety of Asian opium. Naylor argued that Mexican heroin was far purer than Asian; as Turner had established, it was less likely to be cut so it was far more concentrated for its price.83 Mexican heroin was not less potent, it was simply not as highly refined. Despite Naylor’s arguments, the commissioners continued to ask addicts their preference, which helped create a hierarchy of heroin whereby Asian heroin, trafficked predominantly by Europeans into the United States, was presumed to be purer and more desirable. When questioned, addicts confirmed this distinction.

  The questions about the supply and distribution from Mexico rippled through the hearings and disclosed the names of other women on both sides of the border who were active in the drug trade. The hearings revealed the complex roles of women in the drug trade of the 1950s, whether as users, mules, suppliers, or distributors. Women were not simply victims of the trade but actual participants. This included women of different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. More startling for the commissioners, several women who testified did not seem to be repentant but rather were antagonistic and confrontational. To the commissioners who questioned these women, who were without legal representation, the drugs undermined their ability to understand their proper place in society.

  On September 22, 1955, Alvin Scharff, customs agent in charge of Houston, outlined the activities of numerous women smuggling heroin across the border. He mentioned Ester Herrera, who worked with her extended family members to smuggle, on one occasion, sixty-three pounds of marijuana. He also recounted the case of Alma Mouton, Terrell Eva Lee Carradine, and Henrietta McCarty, three African American women who worked for Houston drug dealer Earl Voice. This group of women had gone to Mexico with $4,000 (2012: $34,250) to purchase heroin, smuggle it across the border, and deliver it to Voice, allegedly the major dealer among Houston’s black community.84 Scharff recruited McCarty to be an informant, and she would call Scharff and tell him about Voice’s plans. Her tips led to the arrest of the other two women as well as the arrest of another prominent drug peddler who had $405,000 (2012: $3,468,000) worth of heroin in his possession. All were connected to Voice.85

  Purificación Rodríguez Pérez (also know as Pura) appeared before the committee on September 22, 1955. From the beginning of her testimony, Senator Daniel and C. Aubrey Gasque, the general counsel, treated her as a hostile witness, and she was threatened with imprisonment because of her evasive answers. Her connections to heroin revealed a complex social network of family on a local peddling level. She argued that she had never sold heroin or marijuana but rather ran a legitimate establishment called the Pérez Lounge; she presented this testimony in spite of the fact that she was at the hearing while under a federal bond of ten thousand dollars and a state bond of two thousand dollars. Daniel and Gasque pressed her to confess. She denied that she sold heroin herself, but in the latter part of her testimony she did state that she was present when Johnny López sold heroin to an FBN agent. Daniel asked about her family. In her testimony, Rodríguez acknowledged that her husband had served a two-year sentence for heroin, and her niece Cora Luna had also served a sentence at the federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. Her brother-in-law Raphael Sánchez was still in prison on a heroin charge, as were her two brothers, Pete and Alberto. Daniel finished his interview:

  Senator Daniel: Are you the only one left in the family that has not been in prison for heroin?

  Mrs. Rodríguez: Yes.

  Daniel: And now you have been convicted and given a 4-year sentence, and you are out on bond on a state charge.

  Rodríguez: Yes, sir.

  Daniel: I want to say this to you, that you would not have been called here today had not witnesses told us that they had bought heroin from you while you had been out on bond and that you were still selling heroin. And in my view of your testimony I am going to direct counsel to turn over this testimony to the Department of Justice, with the recommendation that they take such procedure as they may deem advisable.86

  Like la Nacha, Rodríguez sold from her house but also at her business. By selling from her home, Rodríguez maintained a smaller operation than that of la Nacha. In her testimony, she revealed an extensive family business that was multigenerational. Houston served as a key destination for heroin that was trafficked through Brownsville, Matamoros, Reynosa, Laredo, and Eagle Pass. Rodríguez and women like her appear to have been equal partners in these family businesses. Like la Nacha, she maintained a legitimate business that helped cover up her illicit business, although she eventually lost her legal establishment. At the hearings, Rodríguez’s assertions of her innocence throughout the questioning reflected a certain amount of feminine bravado. She, like many other women who appeared, testified without legal representation. She also demanded not to be photographed.

  As discussed, women who owned businesses used them to legitimize the illegal work of their husbands, other family members, and themselves. The 1950s Tijuana dealer Big Mike Barragán Bautista and his wife Ismelda Galindo Barragán (also known as Puchi) provide another example of a fully successful partnership. The Barragáns remained shadowy figures in the testimony provided to the Daniel hearings in California. They never testified, but addicts and narcotics officers did testify in November 1955 about their empire, which extended from Tijuana to Los Angeles and as far east as Texas. Combined with the Jasso network, there appeared to be an overlapping system operating out of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez that supplied the southwestern United States.

  Big Mike’s name initially appeared in the joint testimony of Los Angeles sheriff E. W. Biscailuz, undersheriff Peter J. Pitchess, and LAPD narcotics chief K. E. Irving. Also present for the meeting was the Mexican consul general in Los Angeles, Adolfo Domíngu
ez, and his attorney, Bruno Newman.87 Domínguez was one of a few Mexican officials who attended the hearings. He provided a couple of questions to Daniel to ask the police officers in order to ascertain the quantity of heroin that came from Mexico. Big Mike’s name emerged as a prime source for the southern California drug trade, and he was as well known among police as he was among dealers and users.

  Bebe Phoenix and Mickey Wallace, two sisters, provided more information about Big Mike in their testimony to the Daniel Commission. Both were prostitutes and grifters and had bought heroin in Tijuana. Phoenix, in her testimony, explained that Big Mike might be Italian and that he had something to do with taxis. The two sisters established a network involving a transnational flow of drugs and sex from Tijuana to Hollywood. The women had found that their work as waitresses in Los Angeles could not support their heroin habit, so they went directly to the drug’s source in Mexico. From Wallace, the commission learned that most female addicts in Tijuana were Anglo American women, not Mexican or African American, and they opted to work as prostitutes in the city to be closer to their drug source.88

  Wallace demonstrated that she was quite entrepreneurial in bankrolling her addiction. As a cocktail waitress in the early 1940s, she had averaged from eighty to one hundred dollars a night (2012: about nine hundred dollars) through tips and by shortchanging her clients. It was while working as a cocktail waitress that she began to mainline heroin with her lover rather than simply smoking opium. Daniel asked Wallace: “Did you break any other laws other than living with this man and knocking down on the customers?”89 She confessed to prostitution, so that she could buy heroin in Tijuana and sell it in Los Angeles. She would secretly carry seven to eight ounces each time she crossed the border.90 Wallace had thus served as a low-scale trafficker and dealer in the Los Angeles area in the late 1940s and 1950s. She bought from Big Mike in Tijuana, slipped across the border, and then sold in Los Angeles.

  Small-time dealers like Wallace relied on people like Big Mike for a regular drug supply. Wallace’s testimony painted Big Mike as a boss and a sophisticated supplier. Oscar Palm, an addict, and Rae V. Vader, the customs agent in charge based in San Diego, developed a fuller picture of Big Mike beyond that of supplier to small-time dealers.91 As did la Nacha, Big Mike engaged in multiple entrepreneurial activities that were licit, if perhaps not entirely respectable to some.

  Figure 20. Women with contraband. H. J. Anslinger Papers, box 14, folder 5, image 227, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. This is most likely a staged photo.

  A native of El Paso, Palm was a dealer in Los Angeles and perhaps a distributor for Big Mike because he continually pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his own involvement, although he did admit to purchasing an ounce of uncut heroin at $400 (2012: $3,415) in Mexico. He brought it back to Los Angeles, where he sold it. He also admitted to having business contacts in Mexicali-Calexico and Ciudad Juárez–El Paso. Under pressure from the commission, Palm revealed that Big Mike had interests (perhaps his own poppy fields) in Sinaloa and that he also maintained laboratories in Tijuana. Palm also reported that Big Mike worked closely in his drug business with his brother-in-law Al Galindo.92

  Agent Vader filled in the rest. Big Mike was reputed to be Mike Barragán Bautista, who owned one of the largest taxi companies in Tijuana as well as the dog-racing track. As some addicts indicated, his taxi drivers sought clients as well as delivered heroin to different locations on both sides of the border.93 Addicts described crossing into Tijuana and getting a ride in one of the taxis to another destination to purchase drugs. Despite the efforts of U.S. customs and Mexican agents, they were never able to purchase heroin directly from Big Mike, only from his runners. Thus, Big Mike maintained distance between himself and the actual sale of drugs. From undercover informants, Vader had learned that Big Mike supplied dealers as far away as Dallas. In addition, he and his wife, Ismelda Galindo Barragán, owned a large and successful “house of ill repute” in Tijuana. In that bordello, Ismelda also sold heroin. (Consul General Domínguez interrupted Vader’s testimony and asked him for specific information regarding the Barragáns; Vader replied as best he could.) Like her husband’s taxi company, Ismelda’s business gave her an opportunity to exchange pesos and dollars and to mask the sale of narcotics.94

  All the women mentioned in the testimony had lives unlike those portrayed in the popular literature on drug trafficking that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Don Henry Ford’s Contrabando, a picaresque escapade about a gringo trafficker. Don Ford told anthropologist Howard Campbell: “When I operated, few women were involved. . . . It was a more male-dominated [activity] because of their culture, in rural areas women didn’t participate in business . . . very much.”95 Ford argued that with the introduction of cocaine, more women entered the trade as traffickers.

  Ford’s reading of drug trafficking, like many of the biographies and pseudo-memoirs of the narcos, reinforces the sense of masculine bravado surrounding the narcotics trade, which is then repeated by scholars who disregard the involvement of women. The introduction of cocaine brought greater numbers of women into the trade because more profit was available. Women worked as mules to pay off the debts of the men in their lives, or they may have been forced into smuggling because of their impoverishment. Campbell’s astute contemporary analysis, however, demonstrates the multifaceted experience of women in drug trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border. It wasn’t only poor women who got involved; upper-class women were drawn to the excitement of illicit activity, as in the case of one of Campbell’s informants, whose comfortable and educated background allowed her to rise in the business to become a drug lord. She used her privilege to her advantage.96

  In the 1950s, the Price Daniel hearings offered compelling evidence that men like Ford had misread the role of women. Their perceptions were informed by their own gendered constructs of masculinity rather than by the realities of the feminine experience within the trade. La Nacha was a crime boss who created a drug empire. Although she was a widow, her sons served as her collaborators and carried on the business as she aged, demonstrating the integral role of her family. Like la Nacha and Lola la Chata, other women in the drug trade such as Pura Rodríguez, Ismelda Galindo Barragán, Bebe Phoenix, and Mickey Wallace demonstrated that women were not necessarily anomalies in the business, and in fact were involved in all aspects of it. Women and men engaged in drug trafficking as part of multiple business interests that they held, whether they were creating multidimensional crime families or using drugs as a tool to supplement their income. Rather than being simply a complement to the men, women had and still have parallel roles, whether as mules, small-time peddlers, or bosses.

  CONCLUSION: THE EXTENDED FAMILY BUSINESS

  In 1962, FBN agent Thomas W. Andrew recognized Jasso as a source of heroin being smuggled into New Mexico. He wrote to Harry Anslinger that most peddlers in Albuquerque bought directly from her, and her sons and grandsons assisted the purchaser by meeting them on the U.S. side of the border and then accompanying them to the Mexican side. After concluding the purchase, mules crossed the border with the drugs.97 From Albuquerque, she supplied other parts of the state. More than seven years after the Daniel hearings, la Nacha continued to play a significant role in drug trafficking. Even in the mid-1960s, her age did not inhibit her business, because her children—and her grandchildren and grandnephews—had joined her. Like la Chata, she had created an extended multigenerational peddling and trafficking family.98

  In 1964, Jasso remained the most recognized supplier for the state of New Mexico. Once again, her name came up in government hearings on organized crime and illicit traffic in narcotics.99 While various reports argued that Mexico had returned to transshipping European opiates and had emerged as a site of operations for Corsican drug smuggling organizations, two Mexican dealers were listed as prominent in drug trafficking and organized crime: Jasso and Enrique (Henry) Sanchez of Nogales were lab
eled as international smugglers who trafficked in Mexican opiates.100

  In 1965, one of Jasso’s grandsons, Eduardo Amador González, was arrested for transporting heroin into the United States. He confessed that he helped the Tartaglias brothers of Albuquerque smuggle heroin bought from la Nacha in Ciudad Juárez into Texas.101 Detectives reported that in 1965 and as late as 1968, Jasso still served as a heroin supplier in the Southwest, and allegedly in this case her grandson served as a mule but against her wishes. His plea reflected his desperation to reach a favorable verdict, but it remains highly unusual considering that his uncles and one of his cousins achieved tremendous success in the trade. Having a grandmother such as Ignacia Jasso gave veracity to such a plea.

  Jasso’s daughter Pabla was the mother of Héctor González, also known as El Arabe, an infamous heroin dealer in the 1960s and 1970s. González built upon the foundations of his grandparents. He ran the Juárez heroin trade in the late 1960s and early 1970s until he died in an automobile accident on November 25, 1973. The El Paso Times reported:

  The victim, known to police as “El Arabe” (the Arab) [was the] grandson of the celebrated and reputed queen of the Juarez “underworld,” Mrs. Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso Vda. de Gonzalez. “La Nacha” is also being sought by federal narcotic police on a fugitive warrant.

  Police said Rui [sic] Gonzalez was killed instantly when the pickup truck he was driving overturned near Casas Grandes. His wife, Angela, and their two children, also riding in the truck, escaped with minor injuries.102

  By the time of his death, Jasso was only peripherally involved in the trade due to her age. His death ended her dynasty and created an opportunity for a new boss, Carlos Carrillo Fuentes, to emerge.