by Dan Slater
In Lazteca, if someone owned a flashy car, such as a Tahoe or Escalade, customized with nice rims, a stereo, and tinted windows, people considered the guy to be se mueve, pushing, and he was respected. But if he had multiple such vehicles he was considered to be se mueve pesado, moving heavy, and that label came with a different level of respect. In the eyes of the community, Richard was a model young man, a young pesado who was “about his business.” In Lazteca, to be about one’s business was about the best thing you could be. Gabriel envied him.
In Richard’s employ, Gabriel’s awareness of success expanded from trappings—Versace, Mercedes—to behavior. How did power act? How was it established and how was it maintained? Richard had a business frame of mind. He was social, always on the lookout for upstate buyers, piojos who could bulk up his bottom line. Richard made his aptitude for violence known, but left it to others whenever possible. Gabriel saw how carefully Richard formed trust, and how quickly it could be broken. Richard even accused his own wife of “ripping loads,” stealing drugs from him. Loyalty was fleeting in a world with such large amounts of money at stake.
Richard, now managing operations at the San Antonio warehouse, made $15,000 a week, sometimes twice that. And yet he seemed to think that paying Gabriel $300 a week and covering the clubs was adequate. What about the loads Gabriel ran to Austin? Did Richard think Gabriel was too dumb to know he deserved commission? Well, maybe the next shipment would have to go missing, and maybe the shipment after that as well.
In a traditional, arm’s-length smuggling deal between professionals—in which the Laredo drug supplier hires a transporter to carry a drug load to a northern buyer—it’s quite hard for one party to rip the other off. Both supplier and transporter protect themselves with something called a “letter.” The supplier wants to protect himself against the transporter selling the drugs to another buyer, pocketing the entire sale price, then claiming that the vehicle crashed or that the load was seized by law enforcement. The transporter wants to protect himself against the supplier—who might be an informant—“dropping a dime” on him, reporting the details of the transporter’s vehicle to the cops. In the “letter,” the transporter writes the details of the vehicle he’s going to use to transport the load, seals the letter in an envelope, and gives it to the supplier. The supplier can open the letter, later, only if something goes wrong with the deal. If the transporter returns with a story about a vehicle crash or a seized load, the supplier can confirm the story by opening the letter and comparing the vehicle details to, say, police paperwork or a report in the news. But if the deal goes as planned, the supplier must return the letter to the transporter unopened.
Normally, Richard used a letter with his transporters, but not with Gabriel because Gabriel was an old friend and he only moved small loads.
And so, with his childhood friend Wences “Tucan” Tovar, Gabriel jacked fifty pounds of weed from Richard and pushed it north, all the way to a connection in Springfield, Illinois. He jacked another load—two hundred pounds—and drove it to San Antonio. This time, however, the dope was concealed in a steel box inside the gas tank. They bought an electric saw, and parked in a nice neighborhood. Sparks flew as they tried to cut the tank in half. People gathered in their yards to watch. When the sparks ignited the fuel, the truck caught fire. Gabriel scrambled for a pail and a hose while spectators ushered their children inside, but the flames engulfed the truck too quickly so Gabriel and Wences ran away. Gabriel told Wences not to come around the hood for a couple of weeks. He told Richard that Wences had been arrested.
Tucan in the pen? It was plausible.
Born in Texas and raised in Lazteca until the age of ten, Wences moved across the border to Mexico when his dad “caught” a smuggling charge and had to flee. Wences moved back to Laredo at fifteen. Following his own early stints in Lara Academy and JJAEP, Wences applied to return to Martin High. The principal gave him one last chance not to fuck up. But when a sophomore challenged him to a fight over a girl, Wences cut open the guy’s cheek with a punch. The guy said Wences hit him with brass knuckles, which wasn’t true, but Wences landed in county jail for a few months, then pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and got probation. Word spread: Wences took a “felony two” charge—a second-degree felony—and walked away with only probation!
“Get a job!” his mother screamed. Wences labored at Expediters Inc., a warehouse on the west side, but didn’t like working for minimum wage. He cared about having enough money to own a decent ride, smoke pot, entertain preppy girls from the north side, and buy some flashy jewelry, the thick chains, esclavas, that were prized in the hood.
Having lived on both sides of the border, Wences, like Gabriel, had a wide network, and they would need it, because their association with Richard would not last much longer.
MOST OF GABRIEL’S SOCIAL LIFE now took place across the border. In the Nuevo Laredo nightclubs, where teenagers from Mexico and the States hung out, the hoodrats beckoned, their sweat-soaked tanks clinging to their breasts as they thumb-hooked booty shorts and hula-hooped their hips to Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina.” They guzzled Budweiser and grinded against whichever baller’s pocket showed the “gangster bulge” of a good week. The long-braided fresas congregated in the corner and sipped Boone’s Farm, the bottom-shelf wine, while the rat waited for DJ Kuri to announce the next lap dance. Purple strobes flashed electric on rolling asses; eyes pulsed, teeth glowed.
There was a cap culture among border youngsters. On occasion Gabriel wore an L.A. Dodgers hat for “La Amalia,” the Nuevo Laredo neighborhood controlled by Meme. Americans with a little money, especially those connected to prominent gangsters like Meme, had power in the Nuevo Laredo club scene. Most Americans went to Señor Frog’s, which was stricter on security, more of a hookup scene. Clubs like 57th Street had less security, so they attracted a more thuggish crowd.
But as long as Gabriel didn’t piss off the wrong people, his work for Meme Flores, which had continued while he worked for Richard, made the clubs a veritable zone of impunity. One night, roched out and feeling untouchable, Gabriel approached an enemy at the 57th Street nightclub and said, “What’s up, fucker?” This enemy was a former friend. But following a disagreement over a gun swap, the friend had become hostile, at one point sucker-punching Gabriel, then threatening his younger brother. Gabriel had trusted the fool. And now this. Nah.
The roches having severed any last thread of restraint, he called the enemy outside and pummeled the larger boy to the edge of consciousness. It was the worst beating Gabriel’s crew had ever seen. The boy was driven back to Laredo and airlifted to San Antonio that evening. Gabriel now had the reputation of someone who nearly killed someone with his hands.
On the American side of the border, back in Lazteca, Gabriel’s business relationships frayed. Richard Jasso, suspicious over the missing loads, stopped giving Gabriel work. Smuggling, Gabriel learned, was a tough game. The moving parts, the responsibilities.
His separation from Richard was a setback. But he still had Meme—the cars, the guns—and who knew where that might lead?
* * *
I. Literally an ox or a beast, güey—pronounced “way”—is border slang for “dude,” or “idiot,” depending on how it’s used.
PART II
The Company
The ladder of promotion was marked out in a straightforward, arithmetical way: the taking of captives—in single combat, and scored as to quality—for presentation for death on the killing stone.
—AZTECS, INGA CLENDINNEN
7
Original Vice Lord
In the beginning, on a brutal morning in June, when the South Texas heat congealed in the sky and baked the floodplains, there were only the stirrings of a city, an inkling of identity. Were they American or Mexican? Should they settle on this side or that? Did it matter which Laredo they lived in?
It was 1853, after America won the Mexican-American War. In the mid-1840s, James Polk had turned his political career
around, and won the White House, when he perceived public sentiment in favor of bringing Texas into the Union. He continued the westward expansion—“manifest destiny”—by attacking Mexico, and winning California and New Mexico in 1847. Now, six years later, after Laredo residents had been given the choice to stay north of the Rio Grande, on what was now American territory, or move across the river to Mexico, a reporter for a new newspaper, the New York Times, came to Laredo and observed an American surgeon shoot two men in a bar.
The surgeon fled across the border, where his captors put him in leg irons and shipped him back across. In Laredo, he was placed on a box and hanged. The Times reporter saw cattle raids and military encampments, violence and rough commerce. What was the effect of this demoralized frontier life on character? he asked. “People grow used to it—reckless of life, ragged, and saucy. The attention is called to getting whereof to clothe and to eat. The practice of carrying weapons, imposed by a few upon all, makes them suspicious and hasty.”
Since the end of the Mexican-American War, both countries had been expanding their legions of customs inspectors and border patrols, which turned Laredo and Nuevo Laredo into corrupt tariff-collecting towns. The mouth of the Rio Grande—where the great river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, two hundred miles southeast of Laredo—was becoming one of the busiest ports in the world. But Laredo and Nuevo Laredo remained trading posts, which meant that every new regulation presented a new smuggling opportunity: coffee, sugar, bacon, and even cotton. When the Civil War began, European ships waited in the Gulf to exchange their cargo for the outgoing Confederate cotton that helped finance the war for the south. When Union warships attempted to blockade the cotton trade and cut off Confederate financing, cotton smugglers traveled through Laredo instead.
Smuggling went both ways. Mexico’s prohibition of tobacco, following its independence from Spain in 1821, translated into enormous premiums for American tobacco merchants. During the hostilities that followed the end of the Mexican-American War, Mexican authorities seized 565 bales from Samuel Belden, a New Orleans tobacconist. Belden petitioned U.S. president Millard Fillmore, demanding that Washington intervene on his behalf. Others filed similar grievances. Although better than what today’s Mexican drug lords could hope for when their dope is seized, Belden’s outcome was less than satisfactory. Decades later, in 1885, the U.S. government awarded Belden $128,000 on a $500,000 loss.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Laredo developed new industries—oil, ore, and onions—the industrial revolution turned the city into a place of some significance. Bridges connected the countries. Railroads brought immigrants. French and Lebanese merchants. Swiss saddle makers. Polish grocers. Czech tanners. Italian hoteliers. In 1880, Anheuser-Busch established one of its first distributorships in Laredo. But the city remained a trading post. War and policy would always be hatched elsewhere; Laredo was the border frontier’s petri dish of implication. No trade would affect the city as narcotics would.
IN THE 1870S AND 1880S, Civil War veterans hankered for the morphine they got on the battlefield, and doctors discovered cocaine’s value as an anesthetic. The pharmaceutical business, led by companies such as Parke-Davis, built consumer interest in dope and coke, and the drugs became health problems.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, states experimented with regulation while support grew for federal prohibition. In 1912, the United States and a dozen other nations, including Germany, France, Italy, China, Japan, Russia, Persia, and Siam, signed the International Opium Convention at The Hague. The first international drug treaty, the convention committed its participants to suppress opiates and rid society of “hop heads.” Two years later, the United States restricted access with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.
The first U.S. narcotics agents had low-paying, low-status jobs deep in the “miscellaneous division” of the Treasury Department, which was charged with other distinguished duties like ensuring the quality of margarine. When early Supreme Court decisions held that the Harrison Act prohibited doctors from prescribing even “maintenance doses” of opium or coke, narcotics agents arrested thousands of physicians and closed clinics—driving addicts to shady suppliers, and creating a lucrative black market.
U.S. drug policy was rooted in morality and panic about public health. But Mexico’s antidrug law, adopted in 1916, grew partly from security concerns—or at least xenophobia. For decades, Chinese immigrants had been arriving in Mexico’s Pacific Coast cities. Some paid fifty dollars to be smuggled into California. Others remained in Mexico, and some headed into the interior, settling in Sinaloa and Sonora. There, in the Sierra Madre mountains, they found a climate to ply the trade they knew well from home: poppy cultivation.
Post-1916, the growers and traffickers of the opium that was in such demand in the States lacked a black-market regulator to supervise the illegal market for narcotics. Colonel Esteban Cantú filled that void. A cavalry officer who campaigned against the Yaqui Indians during the Mexican Revolution, Colonel Cantú took control of the Mexicali Valley. Part of the northern Baja Peninsula, Mexicali was a popular destination for American tourists. Cantú trained a private army of 1,800 men, and projected a sense of order to Americans who had reservations about their safety while visiting Mexicali’s red-light district.
Cantú’s primary revenue came from taxing vice—sex, drugs, and gaming. The Tecolote Gambling Hall paid him $15,000 a month. A syndicate of Chinese opium dealers paid $45,000 to get started, and another $10,000 a month. These “taxes,” Cantú argued, “moralized” vice by keeping the forbidden trades safe; financing public works and education; and liberating vice tourism from reliance on a corrupt and feckless central government in Mexico City.
A utilitarian outlaw, Colonel Cantú didn’t plunder or pillage; didn’t steal or menace. As Mexico’s first vice lord, he innovated a centuries-old role in Mexico.
PRIOR TO THE SPANISH CONQUEST of Mexico, in 1519, merchants paid “tribute” to the dominant warrior elites, such as the Olmecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs. The Aztecs, a wandering tribe that claimed to come from Aztlán, a mythical region in the northwest of Mexico, began as mercenary warriors for whichever tribe ruled the prosperous lake region around what is now Mexico City. Eventually, the Aztecs established their own city-state. Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Aztec empire stretched across much of Mexico. Under Aztec rule, sophisticated cities hosted vibrant merchant economies. Governors regulated the trading markets, and adjudicated business disputes.
In 1519, when Hernán Cortés docked at Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Spanish removed the Aztec warrior elites and leveled the empire. The natives who survived the Spanish conquest, and the disease that came with it, awoke to a new world. The encomienda system assigned zones of natives to serve individual Spanish colonists, “local nobles” known as encomenderos, who reported to the Spanish Crown.
Under Spanish rule, the natives upped their intake of pulque, a high-octane drink fermented from cactus. Imbibers blacked out, lost control, and became violent. Pulque, it was said, cast “the spell of Four Hundred Rabbits.” The Spanish Crown, worried that lazy natives produced only enough crops to pay the royal tribute, granted encomenderos the power of reparto de efectos: a monopoly to sell imported luxury items, such as horses and chocolate, to natives at inflated prices. The reparto de efectos coerced natives into accelerating production of valuable exports, such as wheat. In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the industrial potential of a zone was regulated by what became known as caciquismo, local-boss rule. A warlord with strongmen, the cacique morphed, during the nineteenth century, into a military man like Colonel Esteban Cantú.
As Cantú organized Mexicali into Mexico’s first zone of vice, the United States made serious changes to its trade policies—changes that would mold men with Cantú’s inclinations into very different criminals.
During the early twentieth century, trade protectionists and liberal-trade advocates in America debated betw
een a closed economy and an open one. Ever since the Civil War, tariffs, the hallmark of a closed economy, provided half of U.S. government revenue. But in 1913, the “opens” won: Congress approved the Sixteenth Amendment, instituting a national income tax. This tax reversed the way America financed itself. By 1920, falling tariffs composed a mere 5 percent of national revenue, while income tax supplied more than half the country’s budget. This policy transformation prompted changes at the border.
On the enforcement side, this change in economic policy meant that the U.S. Customs Service acted less like a department of economic security, collecting tariffs, and more like a security force with a mandate to stop smuggling. Between 1925 and 1930, Customs personnel grew by a multiple of six. On the criminal side, smuggling shifted from evading tariffs to evading prohibition. Increased enforcement pushed up prices for prohibited goods. Mexican border towns expanded to facilitate illegal trade. In 1930, Congress created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, or FBN, as an agency of the Department of the Treasury. The FBN fought opium and heroin, and successfully pushed for cannabis criminalization with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. By then Colonel Cantú had retired to California. The golden era of vice traffic was just beginning.
WHEN AMERICAN PROHIBITION PUSHED ALCOHOL underground, a youngster from the Gulf Coast began smuggling whiskey and sotol (cactus moonshine) up to Texas. In the 1940s, Juan Nepomuceno Guerra graduated to gambling, prostitution, and opium. World War II renewed the U.S. demand for morphine. Nepomuceno Guerra joined a coterie of contrabandistas such as the heroin king, Jaime Herrera Nevarez; Pedro Avilés Pérez, one of the first Mexican smugglers to expand into cocaine; and Domingo Aranda, who moved mule trains of tires, sugar, coffee, and anything else rationed in America during the war years.