by Dan Slater
Over dinner, Miguel elicited a sense of Gabriel’s work with Meme, and inquired about the boys’ legal problems in Texas. Wences, sober and still recovering emotionally from their near-death experience, didn’t speak much. But Gabriel sensed an opportunity. Perhaps his connection to Meme could be converted into something bigger. Gabriel spoke to Miguel confidently, as if they were equals. Despite the pills, his youthful mind remained a trap for details and dates. He unfurled a litany of transgressions, as if enumerating bullet points on a resume: drugs, weapons, assaults.
Miguel listened. Boys like these could be useful.
A YEAR EARLIER, IN 2003, the Gulf Cartel leader and Zeta founder, Osiel Cárdenas, had been apprehended in Mexico. The DEA-led manhunt for Osiel, which lasted several years, entailed tracking Osiel’s girlfriends and working with producers of the TV show America’s Most Wanted during what DEA reports referred to as the “media blitz” part of the operation. The Zetas tried to break Osiel out of prison with a squad of helicopters, but the attempt failed when the weather turned bad and a pilot backed out.
If Osiel thought it was going to be easy to escape, it might’ve been because his cross-country rival, Chapo Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, had escaped one of Mexico’s most secure prisons in 2001. Now, with Osiel in prison and Chapo roaming free again, the Company—the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas—faced its first real threat: Chapo wanted to expand his organization’s reach east, beyond Juárez, to the most lucrative border crossing of them all, Nuevo Laredo.
In early 2004, when Miguel Treviño met Gabriel Cardona and Wences Tovar, he would’ve been aware of Chapo’s ambitions. He also would’ve been aware of an American smuggler from Laredo who’d recently spurned the Zetas and sided with the Sinaloa Cartel instead.
In the 1980s, Edgar Valdez Villareal grew up on Laredo’s wealthy north side and played linebacker for United High. Known as “La Barbie” for his blond hair and blue eyes, a look Mexicans refer to as güero, he was in a dope-dealing gang of rich kids called the Mexican Connection. La Barbie passed up college and joined a group of smugglers, shipping marijuana, then cocaine to Georgia and beyond. Indicted for smuggling in 1997, La Barbie relocated to Nuevo Laredo. In 2002, when the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas came to Nuevo Laredo and killed La Barbie’s boss—the leader of the Chachos, the one who turned up dead wearing nothing but a thong—La Barbie staged a revolt.
From a DEA report:
Edgar Valdez Villareal was advanced (“adelantado” or “fronted”) 100 kilos of cocaine by the Gulf Cartel for which Valdez Villareal later paid. Valdez Villareal was then advanced 300 kilos of cocaine by the Gulf Cartel and later paid for those in full. Valdez Villareal was then advanced 500 kilos by the Gulf Cartel and only paid for 250. Valdez Villareal then convinced the Gulf Cartel to advance 1000 kilos. Valdez Villareal failed to make any payment for this shipment. The resulting debt, considered a theft, led to the initiation of hostilities. . . .
After killing a Zeta operative sent to kill him, La Barbie fled to Acapulco and joined a family of Sinaloa-affiliated smugglers—the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, who imported forty tons of coke per month through the southern Mexican port at Zihuatanejo. A Beltrán-Leyva underboss owned a marble business in San Antonio, Texas, which the organization used to smuggle coke to buyers in Atlanta and New York. La Barbie, together with Chapo and the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, decided to fight for Nuevo Laredo.
La Barbie, Miguel knew, was organizing soldiers, with the backing of the Beltrán-Leyvas and the Sinaloa Cartel, and a battle was coming.
Now, in the restaurant, Miguel asked who Gabriel knew in Laredo, and by his tone it was clear that he meant high-profile people in the underworld.
Gabriel thought back to those Sunday night cruises on San Bernardo Avenue, when he used to ask the older boys which ride belonged to which smuggler. He nodded and spit some names. Moises Garcia. Chuy Resendez. Richard Jasso.
Impressed, Miguel mentioned a training camp in southern Mexico. Gabriel appeared interested; Wences remained largely silent. Miguel said Meme would be in touch about coming to the camp.
Gabriel and Wences returned to Laredo, having met the deadly crew, la gente nueva, the Zetas, the ones who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
IN LATE 2003, ROBERT GARCIA had returned to Laredo PD after a stressful six years in DEA. He served his stint with the feds, and stuck with it longer than most. He was glad to be done, glad to be finished with the constant travel. He was thirty-five and looking forward to spending more time with Ronnie and the boys. Trey had just started high school and Eric was a senior.
But if Robert envisioned returning to the small-town pace of the city he patrolled in the 1990s, he was mistaken. Murders and drug crime were up. Laredo was becoming America’s car theft capital. Its juvenile crime was out of control.
Laredo’s new chief of police, Agustin Dovalina, called Robert into his well-appointed office. Flanked by his deputies, Chief Dovalina joked that they were going to put Robert in a more relaxing job.
“What?” Robert asked.
They said they needed another detective in the homicide division.
If they expected resistance, they didn’t get it. After drugs, the prospect of turning to murder came as a relief. Robert knew what homicide detectives did. There was a body. You helped the family with their loss, and tried to figure out what happened. He didn’t need the willful ignorance of a drug cop to believe in the job. Murder was apolitical. The pressure of homicide work also appealed to him, as did the win-lose nature of the job: You either caught the murderer and locked him up, or you didn’t.
“The cartel stuff,” as he would later call it, was not on his mind when he took the job. Laredo law enforcement knew about the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, and the Sinaloa Cartel. There had been intelligence floating around about cartel conflicts in Mexico. But there was no reason to think those conflicts would affect Laredo. To the extent Miguel Treviño was known at all among Laredo law enforcement, he was known as another “flunkie” in the Nuevo Laredo underworld, one of many local criminals who worked for whichever organization dominated the area.
Upon returning to Laredo PD, in the final days of 2003, Robert had no idea that a clash between two cartels would spill into Texas, turning his new job into something more than garden-variety homicide work, a fight for the city itself.
GABRIEL CARDONA, THE LAREDO YOUNGSTER whom Robert would soon meet, was also ignorant about the future. Since the ninth grade, Gabriel lived day to day. He had no idea where his association with Meme Flores, or his initial meeting with Miguel Treviño, would take him. At seventeen, he had stolen some cars, smuggled some guns, moved some drugs, and been in some fights. He was an intelligent thug, but a roche-addled high school dropout nonetheless, oblivious to the political twistings taking place above him and in far-off lands.
Gabriel’s cartel initiation would unfold over the coming year. His first meeting with Miguel had taught him only that his underworld mentor, Meme Flores, was “deeper in the game” than Gabriel realized.
Neither Gabriel nor Robert could’ve known that, through a series of escalating events, they’d both be plunged into the inaugural battle of one of the most brutal wars in modern history, a war that would bring a standard of violence back to the Americas not seen since pre-colonial times, or ever.
With Gabriel set to go global, as a cartel member, and Robert set to go local again, as a homicide detective, they appeared to be on separate tracks.
They were heading right for each other.
10
Raising Wolves
Every morning at eight thirty, print and TV reporters filed in to La Parroquia, a two-hundred-year-old coffeehouse in Veracruz, Mexico, that overlooked the Gulf Coast. La Parroquia’s concrete façade faced the busy port walkway in Veracruz, where carts and stalls sold ices, sodas, and tourist trinkets. Barges from all over the world offloaded electronics, furniture, and multi-ton shipments of South American cocaine.
From Veracruz, the coke traveled nor
th by plane to towns such as San Fernando, Reynosa, and Matamoros. Once a week, plaza bosses received the planes, each carrying 400 kilos, half a ton. They unpacked 25-kilo suitcases, repacked the merchandise as one-kilo bricks, and loaded the bricks into smuggling vehicles. Drivers then took the vehicles north to Texas border towns like Brownsville and Laredo, then on to distribution hubs in Houston and Dallas.
Here, in Veracruz, one of Mexico’s largest drug gateways—and therefore one of its most corrupt cities—the criminal elite controlled the media, and La Parroquia was where it happened. By 9 a.m., tables filled with politicians, businesspeople, and anyone else wishing to be heard by local journalists, many of whom accepted money from entities outside the news organizations that officially employed them. Shoeshine boys crouched on the terrazzo floor. Men wolfed down huevos rancheros while a nurse roamed the café and charged five pesos to check their blood pressure. White-jacketed waiters poured steamed milk into glasses of thick coffee for a buzzy drink called lechero. Over the next four hours the day’s news was gathered, invented, negotiated, and paid for.
The Zeta coleader, Z-14—Catorce—managed the Veracruz plaza. A smaller plaza like San Fernando—halfway between Veracruz and the border—might be worth $50 million a year as a gateway to border cities. Matamoros, a border city, might be worth twice that. But in Veracruz, a leading site of cocaine import, a competent plaza boss like Catorce could make several hundred million dollars a year. So Miguel Treviño traveled there in 2004 and learned everything he could about plaza management.
This is what Miguel apparently learned, and what he would apply when he returned to Nuevo Laredo:
SECURITY: Under Company protocol, the first task for any new plaza boss was to train and arm a security force. The cost of running a typical plaza ran about $1 million per month in peacetime, two or three times that during war. Expenses included bribes, payroll, houses, and equipment: .50-caliber weapons, thousands of magazines, grenades, bazookas, and bulletproof SUVs that cost $160,000 after customization.
Catorce insisted that a GAFE soldier train all recruits. Each trainee learned how to use firearms, walk in the brush, fight with a rival cartel, rescue a dead or injured partner, look after a boss, jump from moving cars, and speak in Company radio codes. Training lasted two or three months. Each trainee made $130 per week. With salary and equipment, it cost $8,000 to train one Zeta soldier. As graduates, each soldier made $250 per week plus commission.
EMPLOYEE PERKS: Catorce offered his men an employee-investment program called la polla. A group could pool their money and invest in a load at the Company’s border cost of $10,000 a kilo. If the kilo made it to Brownsville or Laredo, it sold for $12,500; $14,500 in Houston; $18,000 in Dallas; $24,000 in Atlanta; and $30,000 or more in New York. Like a futures contract, each polla was labeled with a city. One polla was for “Atlanta prices,” another for “Chicago prices.” Company men could make their own risk-reward calculations, allowing them to feel as though they owned a stake in the business.
PAYOFFS: The two most important law enforcement people—the boss of the federal preventive police and the boss of the federal highway police—made between $6,000 and $10,000 per month in bribes, while lieutenants made $3,000. Many journalists “reported to” a politician, and about 5 percent also “reported to” a cartel. At La Parroquia, politicians, many of whom took money from the cartels, paid off reporters who printed fawning coverage of their agenda and ghostwrote their guest columns. TV and print reporters made $1,300 to $3,300 per month—as much as eight times their salary.
In Veracruz, Miguel saw how a well-compensated media paid for itself. As punishment for tax evasion, two outlets of a popular sandwich chain might burn down in the same afternoon. The largest newspaper in Veracruz would run the next day’s editorial on winemaking. Several bars could be sprayed with machine-gun fire in broad daylight, and the following day’s front page would feature a thoughtful meditation on the city’s street dogs. There was no telling what a journalist might find newsworthy.
REVENUE: The main source of revenue was the cuota or piso, the smuggling tax. To come through the plaza, immigrants paid a tax of $250 if from Mexico; $500 if from Central America; and $1,500 if from Europe. Coyotes, their escorts, paid $100. Drug traffickers paid $50 per kilo of marijuana (about $50,000 per ton) and $500 per kilo of cocaine (about $500,000 per ton). Some paid their tax in kind, such as 5 kilos for every 100. After “stepping on” a kilo of coke, making two or three kilos out of the original by cutting it with things like baby laxative, the cartel could make $50,000 per kilo by selling small amounts—known as grampillas, staples—to Veracruz townies.
The plaza boss also extracted tax revenue from businesses. Grocers paid around $1,000 per month. Pharmacies paid $3,000 per month; bars, nightclubs, and brothels two or three times that. The piso purchased more than protection; it also bought a buffer from government oversight. Whereas failure to pay the cartel tax could bring violence or legal problems in the form of a city inspector concocting health violations, dutiful payment meant that the grocer could sell alcohol twenty-four hours a day, that the nightclub could serve the underage, and that the restaurant could cut corners on health protocol.
If a business had an electric bill of 20,000 pesos per month ($1,300), the person in charge of the federal electric commission saw that the business paid only one-third of the bill. In return, the business paid the utility manager 1,000 pesos for fixing the bill, and 3,000 pesos to Catorce for ensuring that the bill would be fixed. For some, the spoils of anarchy justified the piso.
SPIES: Panteras—female informants—were crucial to Catorce’s business. Tax revenue was reinvested in dancers and barmaids who could monitor subversive chatter and provide information about, and photographs of, the condemned. Hotel workers and taxi drivers also made great sources.
BANKING: In 2004, Catorce gave $12 million to Pancho Colorado, a respected magnate who owned an oil-services company in Veracruz called ADT Petros Servicios. Colorado bid on government contracts for work, such as remediation, that Pemex, the national oil company, outsourced. A generous man who also owned resorts and employed the mentally disabled because everyone deserves a job, Colorado was always smiling in La Parroquia. With the Company’s $12 million, he bought the Veracruz governorship, which influenced the granting of oil contracts. Once granted, ADT’s contracts required capital to be serviced. Catorce supplied the overhead, which returned in the form of clean government money.
Miguel returned to Nuevo Laredo, ready to tackle new opportunity. He would recruit soldiers, establish a culture of discipline, and dominate the territory.
BACK IN THE TRAINING CAMPS of Tamaulipas, in the summer of 2004, it was time to put the recruits in simulated raids and rid them of their bad habits. Hundreds of contras—Sinaloan enemies rounded up in raids—had been collected for the purpose.
“Bienvenidos, cabrones,” Meme Flores told the recruits upon arrival at the training camp. “Ésta es La Compañía, la mera paipa de Mexico.” Welcome, brothers. This is the Company, the true shit in Mexico. The approximately seventy young men, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty but dressed identically in jeans and T-shirts, sat on wooden benches and stared into his eyes. They listened. For the Mexican recruits, getting accepted into the Company, making good on promises to family, traveling in Mexico with respected men, returning home to parents and wives as a somebody: Whatever they fantasized about, it all seemed possible on this day.
Known as the adiestramiento, or the ’diestra, the training camp was staffed with Mexicans, Israelis, and Colombians. A week earlier, Gabriel—one of the only Americans at the camp—packed into a caravan of Suburbans heading south through Mexico to the training camp near Monterrey. A month had passed since the meeting with Miguel, when Meme asked Gabriel to come to the camp. Wences hadn’t been invited. In the caravan, Gabriel wore jeans and white T-shirts, as instructed, and left everything else behind, including his cell phone and wallet.
The reclutas, recruits, slept on
hard cots, twenty-five to a compound, and were given a loaf of bread and a banana every morning. They swam, and negotiated obstacles: mud, tunnels, ropes, and walls. Twice a week, in the middle of the night, camp leaders roused the recruits to pull weeds for new soccer fields. In the morning run, whoever came in last owed one hundred push-ups. In the afternoon they played soccer, and then everyone took turns boxing. There was no shame in not knowing how to fight. You were there to learn.
They learned about weapons: how to work the double grip of the MP5 submachine gun, made by Heckler & Koch; how to shoot the Glock, the thirty-eight, and the FN Herstal; and how to reload the magazine on an AR-15 assault rifle without losing ground to the enemy. The Colombian mercenaries taught combat skills. How to trap a car in an intersection. How to jump between moving cars. How to shoot through armored vehicles by unloading a clip beneath the door handle. How to walk and shoot accurately at the same time, minimizing your profile. How to shoot a running contra, like leading a wide receiver in a football game. On the basis of these early drills, more than half of the seventy recruits were separated and trained for noncombat jobs, as lookouts and patrols. About twenty recruits remained to be trained as sicarios, assassins.
Having excelled in the “dry drills,” Gabriel was chosen to demonstrate the first live exercise: take an AR-15 assault rifle, run into a house, and kill the contra inside. The other recruits who’d been designated as killers were invited into the house to observe from an adjoining room. Meme told the contra that if he survived, he’d be set free.
Gabriel, outside, breathed deeply, tightened his fists around the rifle, and charged in. When he came through the door, Meme jumped out and slapped the rifle out of his hands, then kicked the weapon toward the contra. Gabriel wrestled the contra for the rifle. Meme separated them and addressed the recruits.