by Dan Slater
They did as many as ten raids a day. They’d take whatever they could carry after the contras were killed or captured. The loot—some combination of drugs, cash, guns, and jewelry—was piled on a table and split among the escolta. After a house was secured, Miguel would approach the most restless contra first and ask questions. Who do you work for? What do you do? Do you know so-and-so? How about so-and-so? He wanted addresses and names. He scribbled every piece of intelligence in a small notebook. He was always looking for the next house to raid. As conversation dwindled, Miguel would put his right hand on his .38 Special, tilt his head back, arch his neck, and shake his left leg, front to back, as if keeping time. The shaking leg: That was how Wences knew someone was about to die. Then Miguel would go to the second-most-restless contra, ask questions, and poom. Miguel’s eyes circling for the next and the next and . . . poom. If the contra gave him what he wanted, the contra died quickly. If the contra held out, ears and eyes and limbs flew.
Each day, Miguel and other Company men logged newly gathered information at the Company’s central intelligence office in Nuevo Laredo, known as La Central, where Miguel’s binder of names, faces, locations, and other intelligence was constantly updated. He also got locations from his panteras, the female spies and lookouts. These ladies slept with the enemy, snapped photos, and wrote down addresses. His panteras were so valuable that when the Mexican federal police attempted to extradite one to the States, he waged open battle in the plaza to prevent it.
He was a farmer’s son and a man of routine. Except for classic films with Mario Moreno, the Mexican comic actor better known as “Catinflas,” Miguel didn’t care for movies. He said they made people unrealistic about life. In Proceso, the weekly newsmagazine, he followed politics and cartel news, but he spoke of neither. At night, when they weren’t working, he wore white crewneck T-shirts; jeans or clam-digger-style shorts; and Nikes or Reeboks. Once a month he rented a hotel and told his men to invite their families for the weekend. He abstained from marijuana and coke, only sniffed a bundle or tasted a brick to confirm quality when loads moved through the plaza.
Where they worked, in the livestock-rich environs of northeast Mexico, Miguel treated his crew to cabrito, roast baby goat in tacos—sending out for two hundred tacos at a time—and cabeza de vaca en barbacoa: a whole smoked cow’s head from which the rich cheek meat was torn, shredded, wrapped in tortilla, and garnished with cilantro and onion. When near Monterrey, he sent bodyguards there to fetch massive quantities of cabrito from a famous restaurant called El Rey. Unlike other capos, Miguel didn’t try to intimidate underlings with wealth. If a soldier, or a soldier’s wife or child, or even a weekend girl, needed something, Miguel met the number without question, or sent a Company doctor immediately.
On franco they absconded to Tampico and the Playa Miramar. On that cobalt-watered coast north of Veracruz, under the shade of thatched palapas, it was always platters of mariscos, seafood, and beer. Once, when Wences, oblivious to tradition, asked for a cheeseburger, Miguel cracked up and said, “Si no estás en Boorger Keeng, güey!” and redubbed the boy “Hamburguesa.”
On some weekends Miguel hunted for deer on his brother Fito’s ranch and played basketball with his men. He visited his two preteen daughters from his first marriage; his son, Miguel, from his second; and his current wife, Maribel, and their son (also Miguel) and daughter. On other weekends, his bodyguards accompanied him to La Molienda, the racetrack where horses sprinted a quarter mile in seventeen seconds.
The quarter horses . . .
Miguel studied top bloodlines: Mr. Jess Perry, First Down Dash, Walk-Thru Fire. He learned how to buy into syndicates—shares in a top horse’s future offspring. These shares were marketable commodities, liquidity being one hallmark of a good investment. He learned about “equine embryo transfers,” in which breeders transfer embryos from an aging mare into a younger womb, harvesting foals from the impeccable genetics of a dying mother. Miguel tracked auctions and horses on a BlackBerry, calculating each horse’s value by comparing how much he paid at auction to how much each horse earned at races and in breeding fees. Before auctions, the ponies went on the Internet. He examined pictures. Did it have an imperfection in its gait? Did its knees work properly?
An agent who worked for Miguel found front men to buy horses on Miguel’s behalf—in Mexico and the States. Bucking industry practice, Miguel changed the names of his horses, once he owned them, to the names of cars: Rolls-Royce, Corvette, Bugatti, Jaguar, Porsche Turbo, Mercedes Roadster. Often, he raced a horse, then sold it back to the front man. When a front man, once contracted, refused to continue as a cog in Miguel’s scheme, he would be eaten raw—killed—and a new front man would take his place.
The horse-racing hobby was a decent way to launder money. For one thing, expenses were endless. Boarding and feed. Trainers. Entry fees and private racing facilities. Bribes to jockeys and gatekeepers. There were so many ways to disappear cash! On most money-laundering schemes, if you paid “twenty cents on the dollar”—that is, pay twenty cents to launder one dollar, receiving eighty cents back in clean money—you did well. But here was a scheme where you could actually make money. For big races, a typical winner’s purse was $400,000, and Miguel could fix races in Mexico in half a dozen ways. For instance, he could put a jolting device in his jockey’s hand. Or, if he had a weak pony racing, he could pay to have the track packed extra hard to favor slower horses. Or he could pay gatekeepers $10,000 each to hold their gate for a millisecond longer while his pony shot out first.
Miguel’s collection of quarter horses grew to several hundred. He bought a new ranch in Coahuila and called it La Ilusión. The trainers and breeders he employed knew not to raise the dangers of an overcrowded pasture—disease, injuries, fighting. Those trainers and breeders did whatever Miguel asked; after all, they made names for themselves in the industry by working for people who owned the best horses. El Comandante knew his business, and condescension was the gravest disrespect.
On Sundays Miguel went to church with his mother in Valle Hermoso.
15
The Clean Soul of Gabriel Cardona
Religion was for the ignorant, Gabriel believed, despite his religious upbringing. In his poor corner of America, he saw people submit to Catholicism, which, in his opinion, was “all about the religion and nothing about the people submitting to it.” They submitted out of weakness, he thought, and became weaker. Same thing with Islam. All those promises of eternal life in paradise? It was the brainwashing used to attract adherents, as far as he could tell.
Zeta comandantes laughed at Al Qaeda. Those fools fought for a fantasy, sacrificed everything in preparation for the next life. But what were they really angry about? Certainly not about women showing a little skin, which should’ve been a source of joy. And not about men fucking each other. Smoking someone with AIDS made business sense, but a clean fag brought good money in Boystown. Nor did the terrorists have any legit beef with Judaism, a righteous faith that revolved around money. Ah! Being poor is what pissed the terrorists off.
Well, Gabriel could understand that. If you took a despairing, idle person you could convince him anything was the source of his misfortune. Modernity. Greed. America. Disobedient pussy. The desperate were full of rage, devoid of purpose, and eager to belong. Zeta brass knew this phenomenon well.
Ever since emerging from the training camp, Gabriel believed that you lived and died, and maybe there was a point but who knew? Everyone was motivated by rage. He knew that much. And surely it was better to focus that rage on attaining something real, now, because there was no more spiritual meaning in death than there was pride in a fast-food job. What mattered was legacy, that one’s family and associates remembered a man with reverence as un vato de huevos, murió en la vaya, a man of courage who died on the go, not as a coward who flipped burgers but as a soldier who perished as bullets whizzed by on the battlefield.
Gabriel had his own religion—“the Law of Attraction,” he called it
. In sum, you got what you set your mind to attain. He set out to earn money and he earned it. He set his mind to working with Meme Flores, and the relationship turned into something more than he could’ve imagined. He set his mind on Christina, and got her, too. He thought of this faith in self-determination as his American trait, his birthright as a citizen, the United States, in his mind, being the epitome of fuck-the-world-let’s-live-and-see-what-happens.
He’d said fuck the world, set his mind to attaining Bruno Orozco, and now he was in jail. He wasn’t sure what this experience said about his Law of Attraction. But he knew the Orozco mission was a success, insofar as Orozco was dead; and jail, it seemed, was simply a by-product of that success.
Gabriel knew the county jail scene. In the fall of 2004, after getting caught on that drive-by, he spent a few days “on lock” in the Webb County jail, in downtown Laredo. But there he’d been housed in general population, “a mix of gangster day care and crime school,” where everyone watched telenovelas in the afternoon and fell in love with the Mexican actresses. There were several sixteen-bunk dorms with a communal toilet, a dayroom, tables, a TV, a telephone, and frequent visitors. The jail was civilized, not unpleasant. This Orozco arrest, however, was different. Instead of going to the local Webb County jail, the state shipped Gabriel a hundred miles north to the Frio County jail in Pearsall, Texas, and segregated him in a corner cell without phone or commissary privileges.
Across the floor, over in general population, known as “GP,” he watched the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the jail each day to proselytize. Every day, a self-proclaimed devil worshipper in GP would antagonize the Witnesses and spit hate: “Fuck God!” he screamed. “God sucks my dick!” Then, one day, Gabriel watched a smiling Witness extend his hand through the prison bars and say, loud enough for the whole floor to hear: “All is forgiven, my friend.” Stunned, the devil worshipper rushed over, gushing with gratitude, and clasped the Witness’s hand with both of his hands. This spontaneous reversal, the triumph of belief over atheism, affected Gabriel.
Bibles floated around the jail. He asked for one, read it, and found that he remembered much from those old Sunday school sessions where he scored perfect attendance.
Several weeks passed. He became flaco and barbón, skinny and unshaven, and grew his hair long for the first time since he was a kid. Through the slam of iron bars and the clatter of steel shutters, doubt crept in. Who were his friends? How could he save himself? What was he to make of this roche-free sleep, dreaming of slit throats, exploding heads, and burning bodies?
AS A HOMICIDE DETECTIVE IN Laredo, Robert and his partner, Chuckie Adan, had plenty of work even without cartel-related violence.
It was afternoon on a weekday in late June 2005. Earlier in the day, Robert and Chuckie had reported to the scene of a lifeless body half-concealed in the brush near Lake Casa Blanca, just off the Bob Bullock Loop, Highway 20, the road that rings the northern and western areas of the city. The dead girl wore a white T-shirt, and black sweatpants with a pink stripe down each side. The detectives observed a cluster of shallow contusions on her left cheek, and deeper cuts below her chin, above her eye, and at the base of her ear. The body—legs crossed at the ankle—looked as though it had been placed neatly in the brush, rather than thrown or dumped. It was almost as if someone had made a lame attempt to bury the child.
The young mother, who called in the missing-child report shortly before the body was discovered by a citizen looking at land near the lake, exhibited few signs of urgency when Robert and Chuckie visited the apartment. She said that she and her boyfriend last saw her six-year-old daughter the night before, around 11 p.m., when they went to bed and the girl stayed up to watch TV on the futon where she slept.
The boyfriend explained to Robert: “La niña es bien chiflada y nunca hace caso. Yo la busqué y no la encontré.” The child is very spoiled and doesn’t listen. I looked for her and didn’t find her.
The mother suggested somnambulism: speculating that her daughter sleepwalked out of the apartment.
Robert consulted his notes: The girl was discovered shoeless and sockless. In contrast to the dirt-smudged ankles and bruised arms, the bottoms of both feet were spotless.
Sleepwalked? Four miles? Robert and Chuckie betrayed confusion.
The mother attempted to make herself cry.
IN THE FRIO COUNTY JAIL, Gabriel read the Bible and obsessed over Matthew 12:43. When an evil spirit came out of a man, it went through arid places, seeking rest, and did not find it. If, when the evil spirit returned to the man, it found the house of his soul swept clean—but as yet unoccupied by something new and good—the evil spirit brought seven other evil spirits to live there. Without something righteous to replace evil, Gabriel understood Matthew 12:43 to mean, evil not only returned but multiplied.
He called Christina every day, insisting she be home at 5 p.m., stacking her mother’s phone bill with collect charges. Christina sent him a letter with a picture of the two of them, and sprayed her Lacoste perfume on the envelope. She was empelotada, in love, and he began to fall in love, too. If she wasn’t home at five to accept his calls, he left angry messages.
In the cell next to him, a new inmate, a twenty-year-old woman, cried nonstop and pleaded to see the chaplain. When the chaplain was slow in coming, the woman begged the guards to let her kill herself. She cried and cried and the sound became unbearable. Gabriel finally knocked on the wall and asked what upset her so much. She didn’t want to talk about it, she said. So he asked how much her bond was.
“Why does that matter?” she said.
“Just tell me.”
Her bond was $500,000, and that’s when Gabriel knew. Before she arrived, there was jail gossip about a Laredo woman named Yulianna Espinoza. She supposedly did nothing while her boyfriend beat her six-year-old daughter to death, then dumped the girl by a mesquite tree near Lake Casa Blanca. Begging death? Half-million-dollar bond? Who else could it be?
Normally, male and female prisoners didn’t sit in side-by-side cells. But it was a small county jail. Laredo PD sent Gabriel there for his own safety, so he could be housed in a segregated unit, and the police sent Yulianna there for the same reason. Prisoners didn’t like people who killed children.
“Look,” Gabriel said, “you can’t change anything. Mourn your loss but know life goes on.” He asked if she had other children. She had two sons.
“So live for them,” he said. He told her to turn her bible to Luke 2:19. It was about how the angel Gabriel taught Mary to have faith in what she couldn’t grasp. Yulianna told Gabriel he was crazy. But her crying slowed. They became friends. Her cell didn’t have a shower. So every other day the officers put Gabriel in her cell while she showered in his.
The boyfriend, also in the jail, sent Yulianna notes on sandwich paper. “I felt ugly when I would hit your kids,” he wrote in one. In another: “Don’t try to make it seem like I took away your girl. You know how she behaved and how she frustrated us both.” He asked Yulianna to take the rap for her daughter’s death.
“I still love him,” Yulianna told Gabriel, and began flushing the notes down the toilet.
“Get off that viaje,” Gabriel hissed: Quit that way of thinking. “The guy is full of shit!”
“But you don’t understand.”
“I do understand!” he said. “Your sons need you!”
They argued for several days until Yulianna relented. When she agreed to pass the remaining notes to her attorney, Gabriel gripped his Bible: All the ways of man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirits.
16
The Kingdom of Judgment
As a federal prosecutor, Angel—pronounced “AHN-hell”—Moreno believed in the righteousness of American law more than Robert Garcia ever could. Robert, for instance, didn’t care whether marijuana remained illegal or not; for all he cared, it could be punished with the equivalent of a traffic ticket rather than prison. But Angel Moreno wouldn’t hear of it. Moreno dismissed ar
guments about drug legalization as liberal crap. Yet Moreno, whom Robert respected for his courtroom tenacity and willingness to chase hard cases, was one of the most important people in Robert’s professional life. The two met for lunch, or after-work drinks, several times a year.
A career prosecutor with graying hair who looked like a Hispanic Donald Sutherland, Moreno emigrated with his family from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo when he was seven. He finished Marine Corps service in 1977—the same year Robert arrived in Eagle Pass, Texas, with his family. For Moreno, Martin High led to Laredo Junior College, which led to Texas A&M International University and then law school at University of Texas in Austin, during the mid-1980s, around the time Gabriel Cardona was born.
As a young prosecutor, Moreno did capital murder cases and corruption cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney on the federal side—an AUSA—he spent a year in Washington, D.C., training incoming prosecutors. Back in South Texas, he handled drug cases along the border. In 2000, over the objection of his wife, he volunteered to participate in the U.S. State Department’s plan to reform Colombia’s justice system in the wake of Pablo Escobar’s death. Moreno would, among other things, help Colombia establish programs for wiretapping, witness protection, and port security. His wife hadn’t liked the idea of uprooting their five-year-old son to go live in a war zone for two years.
One night, Moreno and his wife saw the film Proof of Life, in which Russell Crowe’s character goes to Latin America to rescue the kidnapped executive married to Meg Ryan’s character. Moreno enjoyed the movie; in fact, it inspired him a little. At home that evening, after receiving a follow-up phone call from the Department of Justice to ask if he was interested in the Colombia assignment, Moreno told his wife that he’d like to do it.