Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  Switching from DEA to the Laredo PD homicide division reinvigorated Robert. He’d put all he had into the objectives of DEA. It had taken a terrible toll on him, and he felt as if the drug busts amounted to nothing. The goal of drug interdiction was too uncertain. Without attacking demand in the United States, he couldn’t see the point of putting so many resources into stemming only a fraction of traffic. But violence spilling over was another matter.

  When Robert transferred to homicide, in the last days of 2003, there was no cartel-related violence in Laredo. But, just a few days into his new job, there was a double homicide; a month later, a guy was ambushed on his front lawn; and shortly after that a guy was killed in his white Cadillac. All of these victims were known Laredo gangsters. It was clear, from the PD investigations, that the victims were somehow connected to organizations across the border, but it was unclear how. The murders were professional, and no suspects were located. Once, in mid-2004, Laredo PD picked up a top Zeta, unknowingly, and then let the guy go. As 2004 turned to 2005, the murder rate spiked in Laredo. Even national news picked up on it. And yet Robert knew the real numbers were worse than reported. Through informants he heard of cartel hits that would never be solved or even known about. Bodies that dropped in Laredo were being disposed of in Mexico.

  Now it was June 2005, and just a week earlier, some guy had walked up to the front door of a local gangster’s house, rang the doorbell, and shot the gangster’s thirteen-year-old son by mistake. A security camera on a school across the street captured the shooting, but the video was grainy. Laredo PD knew that one of the two cartel groups in Nuevo Laredo—either the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, on one hand, or the Sinaloa Cartel on the other—was behind all of these execution-style murders, but they didn’t know which one. The name Miguel Treviño had been coming up in informant interviews; he was apparently now a leader for the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo. The names of other cartel leaders were also known. But Laredo PD had no leads on the cartel battle. As for the bodies turning up in Laredo, it was hard to investigate murders ordered by people in another country, particularly a country where few in law enforcement could be trusted to cooperate with U.S. authorities.

  On June 8, 2005, however, there was a small breakthrough. Robert arrested an eighteen-year-old named Gabriel Cardona at the scene of a broad-daylight murder on Killam Industrial Boulevard, off I-35 near the northern city limit.

  IT WASN’T THEIR FIRST MEETING. Eight months earlier, shortly after Gabriel’s eighteenth birthday, Robert interviewed Gabriel when Laredo PD picked him up for aggravated assault. Gabriel and another boy from Lazteca had done an unsuccessful drive-by shooting over some personal dispute that appeared unrelated to any gang conflict. The incident didn’t stand out much in Robert’s mind; drive-by shootings were daily occurrences. Gabriel had spent a couple of days in jail for it, if Robert remembered correctly, and then bonded out for $10,000 or $20,000.

  Now, here’s what Gabriel told Robert, and what Robert knew from his investigation at the scene of the murder on Killam Industrial Boulevard:

  With Gabriel at the wheel of one of three cars, the hit crew, pretending to be undercover police, pulled over a former Mexican cop named Bruno Orozco in the middle of a busy road. Realizing they were fake cops, Orozco yelled for help. That’s when another young man, named Wences Tovar, shot him nine times with an AR-15 equipped with a silencer. Leading the hit group was a man whom Gabriel said he knew as the Marine, or Z-47. The Marine left in one car and escaped cleanly. Wences left in the second car, which he abandoned near the border, along with the AR-15, ran into the woods, and got away. Gabriel peeled out, drove toward the border, and was stopped near downtown Laredo, after a small chase.

  It had been a violent week on both sides of the border. On the Mexican side, Nuevo Laredo’s new police chief was sworn in. “I’m not beholden to anyone,” said the police chief, a former print shop owner and Chamber of Commerce president. “I think those who should be afraid are those who have been compromised.” Three hours later, the new police chief was murdered in his car. On the U.S. side, the Sinaloans gunned down a Zeta at a Laredo Mercedes dealership. Then the thirteen-year-old boy, mistaken for his father, was murdered on his front lawn when he answered the door.

  Now, in the interrogation room, across from Gabriel, Robert prepared himself for the Mental Fuck.

  But he had little idea what to make of the kid, an American teenager who claimed to be connected to the Zetas. It wasn’t uncommon for drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico to hire an American in Laredo to carry out a hit. That happened from time to time. But usually the guys who took those jobs were seasoned gangsters in their thirties and forties, guys from big American gangs like Texas Syndicate, HPL, or the Mexican Mafia. Those Americans weren’t actually members of the Mexican cartel, they just ran with one of the gangs that took the murder contracts via some connection across the border. So at first, Robert had trouble believing it: Was an eighteen-year-old American kid really working as a killer for the Zetas? Or was Gabriel Cardona full of shit? Laredo thugs, especially youngsters, were always lying about their underworld accomplishments.

  Gabriel explained more about the murder on Killam. He told Robert that the day before he’d run into a friend in Laredo. No, he didn’t know the friend’s name, only his code—47. Gabriel’s claim of not knowing his own friend’s name wasn’t automatically bullshit; people in the underworld often knew each other by code only. This friend, Gabriel continued, had asked Gabriel if he had a car, and, if so, whether Gabriel could help him kidnap a person in Laredo and take the person across the border to Mexico. “Just pick him up and take him across,” Gabriel emphasized to Robert. Of the person to be kidnapped, Gabriel knew only that he was a policeman in Mexico, or a former policeman, and that he was wanted for killing Zetas on behalf of a major Sinaloa-allied distributor in Texas named Chuy Resendez.

  The Chuy Resendez connection: To Robert, this detail sounded too specific to be made up. Robert didn’t disbelieve that the original goal was to kidnap the guy rather than kill him. But the idea of Gabriel running into a friend, then tagging along on a mission of this magnitude—whether intended as a kidnapping or a murder—sounded like fiction.

  Well, Robert had a confessing suspect in Gabriel, even if he didn’t have the shooter, so he shifted the focus to Gabriel’s own background.

  “How much time do you have being a Zeta?” Robert asked.

  “Five months, more or less,” Gabriel said.

  Robert wondered if Gabriel would speak about crimes he committed in Mexico. “How many people have you killed across?”

  Gabriel said he had killed three people in Mexico.

  “Did you kill all three at the same time?”

  “No, two together, one separately.”

  “Policemen?”

  “Just guys.”

  “Who was the last one you killed across?”

  “They called him La Rata,” Gabriel said, invoking the term—ratas, rats—that the Company used for the Mexican military.

  “With a cuerno or a nine?”

  “A thirty-eight.”

  “Close range?”

  “As I’m closing in, if he turns I’ll fire. If he doesn’t turn, I’ll shoot him in the head. In other words—”

  “So you kill the guys and then what the fuck do you do?”

  “The cops pick them up and throw them away. I’ll be told, ‘These guys are going to the guiso.’ And it’s no problem.”

  “And the cops escort you?”

  “The cops set up an area, clear it out, and sound the sirens if there’s a problem. That’s the way it is across.” Gabriel spoke in a frank, shrugging way. What is one to do? It’s just how it is over there. “The military are the only people not on the payroll.”

  “So if the law over there stops you, if you’re cruising, what do you tell them?”

  “They knock on the window. I lower the window, but only this much”—pinching thumb and forefinger—“and ask what they want.
They say, ‘Get down.’ I say, ‘Why am I going to get down?’ They say, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ I say, ‘I am working. I am with La Compañía.’ ”

  “¿La Compañía?”

  “Yes. And they won’t report anything.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “When I am, I just tell them, ‘Don’t you see the gun?’ And the guy won’t ask more questions because he knows that if I’m carrying then I’m with them. He just asks for money. I give him ten or fifteen bucks.”

  “Tell me. From messing around on this side and doing drive-bys to killing people as if they were cockroaches—how the fuck do you jump from one thing to the other?”

  “They told me five hundred dollars a week, ten thousand dollars a job, and you’ll have all the power.”

  “But there’s a war between two groups. Aren’t you afraid the other group is going to pick you up?”

  “The other side doesn’t know who I am.”

  “Yes. But they’ll find out eventually.”

  “Yes, eventually, they will. But that’s why one knows what he gets into. So no problem. If they pick me up, well, too late. I’m already in it.”

  “Well, you know what you’re facing here, right?”

  “Yes, I guess I’m burned on this one,” Gabriel said, as if he’d been caught skipping school.

  Robert felt his aggravation getting the better of him, so he left the room and observed Gabriel on the video feed.

  “Are you listening to this?” Robert asked Chuckie Adan, his partner in the homicide division.

  Chuckie, also from Eagle Pass, was a few years younger than Robert, and had many children with a beautiful babe from Border Patrol. A former baseball prospect, Chuckie now carried the heft of a guy who poured two beers into a glass at once rather than waste time pouring each beer separately. Hardworking and irreverent, he paired well with Robert.

  “What do you think he is?” Chuckie asked. “HPL? Texas Syndicate?”

  “Says he’s a Zeta.”

  “He says that,” Chuckie said doubtfully. “But he’s probably Mexican Mafia or some shit like that.”

  “Nah. He used to run with the Sieteros, that little gang in Lazteca and Siete Viejo. But it sounds like now he’s part of a Zeta group working over here, taking orders from someone in Mexico maybe.”

  On the video feed, Robert and Chuckie watched Gabriel play with a pencil, a piece of paper. During Robert’s first eighteen months in homicide, he spoke to several killers. Most were older criminals who gave up what they thought they needed for favorable bail treatment. The cocky ones sometimes alluded to other criminal accomplishments, but never specifics, and nothing like this. Nothing about cops helping out on hits, or sending bodies to the guiso. Nothing about weekly salaries. La Compañía. This kid was definitely different than anything Robert had seen during his career.

  Gabriel stretched over the back of his chair, ran his hands through his hair, talked to himself. Robert knew that Gabriel knew that he couldn’t be touched for what he’d done on the other side, and was trying to get under Robert’s skin with it. You think you’re all-powerful, copper? You got me on this one, but you can’t touch me on the others! The kid wanted to stand up to the cops and be the Man, just like he was in Mexico. But he wasn’t in Mexico. He was in the United States, facing murder charges as an adult. Out of nowhere, Robert and Chuckie saw Gabriel nearly break out in tears: The potential weight of this murder charge hit him. Ah, Robert thought, a crier. A sensitive little hit man.

  Robert returned to the interrogation room and asked if Gabriel knew a guy named Catorce, referring to Z-14, Efraín Teodoro Torres, the original Zeta member who controlled Veracruz. Catorce’s name had been showing up in Laredo PD reports, along with Heriberto Lazcano and Miguel Treviño.

  “I don’t know who that guy is,” Gabriel said, looking surprised that Robert knew this name but also proud of himself for knowing someone of such importance.

  “How about Miguel Treviño?” Robert asked.

  “No, I don’t know him,” Gabriel said with a straight face.

  “But isn’t he in charge over there?” Robert asked, referring to Nuevo Laredo. “You have to know him.”

  “Nope.”

  Gabriel, it was clear, would now play dumb about everything except that which Robert could prove, and this pissed Robert off. Having intrigued Robert, initially, with some details of cartel life, Gabriel was now pulling back.

  Robert picked up Gabriel’s cell phone, checked the screen. “Both Forty-Seven and Forty keep calling you,” Robert said. This information would’ve helped Robert, had he known the Zeta codes, but that intelligence hadn’t yet come to him. He didn’t know that 40—Cuarenta—referred to Z-40, Miguel Treviño.

  “Forty-Seven is the Marine?” Robert asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So then who’s Forty?”

  “A friend of Forty-Seven’s.”

  Robert continued to scroll through Gabriel’s contacts. “Who’s A-One?”

  “That’s Ashley, a girl. I met her yesterday.”

  “How about C-One?”

  “That’s Christina, my girl.”

  “How about Guisos?” Robert asked. “Is that where they disappear the guys?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know his name.”

  “Who’s Oh-Two?” Robert asked, referring, unknowingly, to Cero Dos, the call sign for Meme Flores.

  “Juan,” Gabriel said.

  “Juan what?”

  “Juan Gomez.”

  Robert showed frustration. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “No.”

  “Who from Los Zetas gives you orders?”

  “The Commander.”

  “Which one?”

  “Eliseo,” Gabriel said, thinking of Efraín Teodoro Torres: Catorce.

  “Is that his name or what they call him?”

  “That’s how he calls himself.”

  Gabriel’s cell buzzed again: 40. “Who is this Forty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He keeps calling you, bro.”

  14

  Corporate Raiders

  Everyone in Miguel’s escolta—his raiding party; literally, his escort—wielded an AR-15 assault rifle with a grenade-launcher attachment, four fragmentation grenades, and nine double-sided magazines; plus a .45-caliber handgun with four clips and a level-four bulletproof vest with two metal plates. Whatever confidence their equipment failed to inspire, it was hard to question a comandante who went first in raids, who never asked you to do something he wouldn’t. Miguel was la mera paipa, the true shit. They followed him anywhere.

  At midday, when it rained, they found a place to rest. When the sun reemerged they resumed their chase and slaughter of the contras—Sinaloan soldiers and smugglers, in the state of Tamaulipas, who worked for men like La Barbie, the Beltrán-Leyva clan, and Chapo Guzmán himself. As the raiding party went from place to place, littering the earth with darkening bodies, Miguel took on the appearance of an automaton.

  In the guiso that followed raids, the sucking flames of the oil drums swallowed humans whole. The manager of the guiso cut out the bottoms of oil drums and set the drums in foot-deep holes in the ground. Both ash and oil seeped into the ground during the two or three hours it took a corpse to burn properly. Sometimes the scorched corpses, their faces twisted in a charred rictus of woe, were removed early and set upon the earth. Soldados kicked the black busts idly, like nudging a pebble, and the remains collapsed in soft explosions of ash. The guiso manager then shoveled heaping piles of ash onto pickup beds—a convenient way to dispose of the bodies, dust to dust as the truck motored down the highway.

  Wences Tovar, the triggerman on the Bruno Orozco murder, was now one of the newest additions to Miguel’s escolta. After Wences escaped the scene on Killam Industrial Boulevard, where Gabriel was caught and taken into custody, he fled across the border and lay up in a Nuevo Laredo hotel that later got raided by La Barbie’s men in retaliation for t
he Bruno Orozco hit. The murder of Orozco, a valuable Sinaloan employee, made Wences a target. But Wences fooled La Barbie’s people, left out a back entrance, and met Miguel at a gas station.

  “You killed Orozco?” Miguel asked as he unwrapped a tube of Rolo chocolates.

  “Yes, I did it.”

  “Have you been to the camp yet?”

  “No.”

  Miguel threw his head back and looked down his nose at Wences approvingly. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not a panochón”—a pussy.

  Wences nodded, proud.

  Miguel gave him ten thousand dollars. “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can have anything.”

  “What? Like food?”

  Miguel and his men laughed.

  Wences thought about it. “I don’t have a car,” he said.

  “What kind do you want?”

  “An Avalanche.”

  Miguel handed Wences a phone number and told him to take a few days of franco. “Call this number at nine every morning and nine every night. Don’t miss a call. You’ll be told when to reincorporate.” He gave Wences the name of a hotel where the Company had a block of rooms reserved.

  Later that evening, a pearl-white Avalanche appeared out front.

  A week later, Wences incorporated with Miguel’s escolta. Each day was a new raid, often many raids, busting down houses and killing Sinaloans. Rolling up to the house Wences would register the smallest noises, and steel himself against waves of adrenaline. Then stomping boots blew by like an ancient war cry. They went in through the back or the front, or sometimes they laid down cover fire while a soldado snuck up to the house and tossed a piña—a grenade; literally, a pineapple—through a window.