Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  Richard had a wife and children. He needed money. He needed a fresh start.

  Fortunes dwindling, he decided to approach his old associate, Gabriel. He heard Gabriel and some other boys from Lazteca, like Wences, had made inroads with the Company, handling enforcement work. Maybe Gabriel could bring Richard in on one of his killing crews. This kind of crossover was common in the border underworld: To survive, smugglers killed and killers smuggled.

  Richard walked to the safe house on Jefferson Street, in Lazteca, knocked on the door, and requested a meeting with Gabriel in one of the back bedrooms. At first, Gabriel just stared at Richard, amazed he was asking for work. To Richard, it was clear that Gabriel, seeing how life had soured for his old boss, was a little, well, glad.

  “We don’t get paid nearly as much as you’re used to,” Gabriel said.

  Richard nodded. He knew the Wolf Boys had no prospects for real financial gain. Gabriel lacked smuggling know-how; he couldn’t take full advantage of his Zeta connections. But maybe Gabriel could still serve a purpose. If Gabriel could introduce Richard to people in the Company, Richard could establish “a direct connect” to the most powerful cartel. When that happened, if it happened, Richard would have to hope that his previous relationship with Sinaloa-allied suppliers would not be a problem.

  Second chances were rare. But if Richard got one, his wife, who’d begun to show signs of betrayal, would believe in him again. The toys, the cars, the parties, the admiration and love—it would all rush back like a video game reset. And what would he have to do? Ride along on a few hits? Who cared. These people were going to die anyway. It was time to be about his business again.

  Gabriel, in considering a partnership with Richard, had his own designs. To rise in the Zetas and get his own plaza in Mexico, he needed a partner who could advance the business of the cartel—someone who knew smuggling. From Gabriel’s stint helping Richard on transport jobs, he’d learned how difficult that business was. Gabriel’s only reservation was Richard’s family. A good sicario was uncompromised. A man with wife and children was not a great candidate for an organization whose ethos boiled down to suicide missions. And still, this sense of a future, and this new respect from Richard—whom Gabriel felt had snubbed him when they were younger, when Richard was the big hustler and Gabriel an upstart—inspired Gabriel. He took Richard on.

  LA BARBIE, MEANWHILE, MADE HIS own moves against Company leadership. In September, he requested a meeting with a prominent pantera named Laura “Black Widow” Molano. Black Widow dated the Zeta commander Iván Velásquez-Caballero, known by the nickname “Talivan.” Talivan, who had started out as a personal cook and driver for Zeta chief Heriberto Lazcano, now co-ran the Nuevo Laredo plaza with Miguel. The Black Widow accompanied Talivan to meetings with municipal police in Nuevo Laredo, where Talivan made regular payments of $50,000. Whenever they slept, five armed men protected the perimeter. The Black Widow would often come out at night to fix them something to eat.

  Now, summoning Black Widow through a Zeta traitor in Nuevo Laredo, La Barbie met her at his Acapulco house and offered her $1 million to set up Talivan to be killed. La Barbie tried to be persuasive. “Son unos mata niños, mata familias, y unos secuestradores,” he argued. They’re child killers, family killers, and kidnappers. La Barbie said he wished to end the war and return Nuevo Laredo to peace. Black Widow nodded. She knew that if she said no, she’d be killed. So she said yes. Then she went home to Talivan and told him about La Barbie’s plot.

  GABRIEL SEARCHED A WEBSITE THAT contained pictures from Laredo clubs. His uncle Raul insisted that La Barbie was hiding in plain sight, spending weekends at his parents’ house in Laredo. Gabriel monitored the address. A Ford Expedition was parked in the driveway with its back to the garage. It looked bulletproof. There appeared to be a driver inside. Gabriel obsessed over the house, until Miguel called and said: “Get off that viaje!” La Barbie was unreachable, for the moment. There was other work to be done.

  The day before Thanksgiving, 2005, Gabriel wounded, but didn’t kill, a Sinaloan enemy in Laredo. The next day, Laredo police went looking for him because he pulled a gun on some citizens after a minor traffic accident in a Laredo intersection. They arrested him at the Lazteca safe house on Jefferson Street. In the morning, an old Lazteca homie who now worked for him bailed him out for $31,000 (it was so easy!) and Gabriel joined other Wolf Boys at the Hillside safe house, where Bart, newly returned from the training camp in Mexico, was staying.

  They began tracking the movements of a heavyweight smuggler in Laredo named Moises Garcia.

  19

  Brothers of the Black Hand

  Hey,” Gabriel was saying in a chauffeured SUV, speeding north toward the safe house on Hillside. “I can’t believe you shot him just like that. You went right up to the window and shot him in the head.”

  “Yeah, I think I also shot the girl,” Bart said. “I shot the guy right in the head. I don’t think he survived.”

  The chauffeur, Richard Jasso’s wife, snapped: “I don’t want to know anything!”

  She was eight years older than Richard, a decade older than Gabriel and Bart. She’d picked them up at a grocery store near Torta-Mex because none of the others were answering their calls. The boys laughed. She was an accomplice!

  At the house on Hillside, Bart jumped on the couch like an excited child while they waited for the evening news to confirm the death of Moises Garcia. The boys razzed Bart. “Your first job! You’re going to have nightmares!”

  “Nah!” Bart said. He knew some were weak in the mind and could not carry it in their conscience, but he’d “sleep as peacefully as a fish.”

  BEFORE THE AMBULANCE TRANSPORTED HER from the parking lot of Torta-Mex to the Laredo Medical Center, the new widow told Robert Garcia that she and her family hadn’t finished eating when her husband received a call asking him to return home. They were pulling out of the restaurant’s parking lot when a white Ford SUV blocked their white Lexus at the exit. She was in the passenger seat. Her brother-in-law sat in back, beside her three-year-old son. A young male, she told Robert, got down from the SUV. He was a light-skinned Hispanic; cropped hair; short and stocky. She thought he was walking over to say hello to her husband, until he reached inside his jacket and began firing.

  At the hospital, the widow, having absorbed two bullet fragments in her back and stomach, rated pain a nine. She was heavily sedated when Robert raced back in with suspect photos. A nurse advised him that now was not a good time.

  MOISES GARCIA’S MOTHER GRIEVED, HAVING days earlier sat in the church pews during her granddaughter’s baptism, processing the blessing of a new baby and the loss of a son. Now, on the shoulder of Zapata Highway, she sold five-dollar plates of chicken and rice to raise funds for the funeral.

  Rene Garcia, her eldest son, just felt rage. There used to be a code among gangsters, rules: “Leave family out of it” was a big one. Rene and Moises—twenty-six and twenty-four, respectively—grew up in South Laredo. Their hood was called Santo Niño—“Saint Baby.” Its criminal culture was more overt than most Laredo neighborhoods. Kids there often lived alone, running stash houses and tienditas, and fathering broods of their own. With two or three tienditas on every block, Laredo PD could set up on Saint Baby any night of the week and arrest a dozen personal-use buyers as they walked to their cars with fresh dime bags of marijuana ($10 worth) and $100 eight-balls of coke (3.5 grams).

  In elementary school, Rene and Moises started a local gang, and graduated to the junior ranks of the Mexican Mafia—known as “La Eme,” or the Black Hand—a Chicano gang that originated in California. “We are soldiers of Aztlán in the land of the Mexican,” stated La Eme’s constitution, referring to the mythical home of the Aztecs. “Our actions reflect the different forms of our struggle: economic, political, military, social, cultural. We are dedicated to any aspect of criminal interest. We will traffic in drugs, contracts for assassination, prostitution, robbery of high magnitude, and in anything else
we can imagine.” Ten percent of every member’s “business or personal interest” went to back to La Eme. The gang’s most fanatical members treated La Eme like a religion; they prayed to Aztec gods, spoke the ancient language of Nahuatl, and believed they were warriors.

  Rene was proud of his younger brother, Moises, the star hustler who made trips to Dallas and, in the lottery-like slang of the smuggling business, “hit big with pounds and keys.” As the years passed, they witnessed a civil war within La Eme’s leadership; under the banner of discipline, the organization culled its own ranks. Splinter groups bore splinter groups. In the early 2000s, Moises did two years in a Nuevo Laredo prison for executing a fellow Eme member on the orders of a leader. In prison, Moises met Meme Flores. Through Meme, Moises expanded, and began doing business with the Company.

  On December 8, 2005, when Moises was gunned down in the parking lot of Torta-Mex, his brother Rene, who was in the backseat, suspected that La Eme was behind it. There’d always been jealousy around Saint Baby, what with Moises coming up so fast in the business. And there was also a money problem: Moises had had successive drug deals go bad in Dallas, and his so-called carnales, his “brothers” in La Eme, refused to cover his debt to the Company.

  Well, Rene now thought—pacing Zapata Highway while his mother bagged food and soda—his brother’s fate was an organizational decision, up to the leadership of La Eme. But it was incumbent on the carnales to handle his bro’s demise internally, rather than let another organization, outsiders, do it for you. To Rene, the assassination of his brother didn’t feel like the work of La Eme. Not with Rene’s sister-in-law, pregnant, in the front seat, and his three-year-old nephew sitting next to him in back. The carnales would never endanger innocent family members.

  When the shooting happened, Rene hadn’t seen an Eme member approach the car. Only a short guy emerging from a white Ford Expedition. Before Rene realized the black item the guy was pulling out of his pocket was not a phone but a gun, it was too late. Child locks kept him trapped in the backseat. All he could do was cover his nephew and scream until the shooter stopped.

  Rene’s sister-in-law survived and gave birth, the next week, to a baby girl.

  Rumors came to Rene, including the name of the shooter: Bart Reta.

  Rene wanted to get his sister-in-law a new car. But he was unable to sell his brother’s bullet-riddled Lexus, associated as it now was with a notorious slaying. At the plate sale on Zapata Highway, an Eme leader—the Black Hand himself—showed up to make a contribution for Moises’s funeral. The Black Hand hugged Rene’s mom, then approached Rene and asked him what he needed.

  “A car,” Rene said.

  The Black Hand offered to exchange his Trailblazer for the shot-up Lexus. Rene agreed and handed over the title and keys to the Lexus. But he received only the keys to the Black Hand’s Trailblazer in return.

  “How about the title?” Rene said. “My sister-in-law needs that.”

  “Forget her,” said the Black Hand. “She’ll be with another carnal soon. He can worry about it.”

  Rene nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “Que?”

  “That his number came up,” Rene said, referring to his brother’s death.

  “It wasn’t our call, carnal. He owed a lot of money to the gente.”

  The Black Hand discouraged Rene from doing anything rash. “You won’t bring your brother back.” He assured Rene that he himself intended to kill Miguel Treviño, but first he wanted Rene to accompany another Eme carnal across the river to retrieve $10,000 from the Zetas, along with some coke. The money, the Black Hand told Rene, was earmarked for a new smuggling operation. It would be stupid to cook Miguel Treviño before the carnales capitalized on the opportunity Treviño was offering them.

  Rene—now locked in a fantasy of seeing Miguel Treviño and Bart Reta together, of gutting them clean and hanging their husks over International Bridge One with a narcomanta that read DON’T FUCK WITH THE FAMILY—was too dog-brained with fury to disbelieve the Black Hand’s nonsense. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  20

  Lesser Lords

  The band’s polka beats carried through the vaulted ceiling of the old ranch house in Valle Hermoso, a town just south of the border and fifty miles inland from the Gulf Coast, where a few hundred Company men gathered at property owned by Comandante Catorce to celebrate the holidays, and raffle off expensive gifts.

  The musicians of Los Tucanes were effusive on this fine December evening. One singer, then another, took a turn at the band’s biggest hits, or corridos, ballads that created a new iconography of the narco-world. Los Tucanes made the ballads convincing by acting them out, infusing each performance with a fierce, hard-edged humor. With his black mustache and piercing eyes, the leader of Los Tucanes married narco-chic to timeless Mexican machismo, to freedom fighters like Villa and Zapata. It was folk tradition kept alive in a world of cell phones, Italian sports cars, and huge tits spilling out of tight leather jackets.

  The corrido celebrated modern Mexico’s surreal juxtaposition: the extreme poverty and garish wealth, the elaborate courtesy and low-barbarian violence. The themes of the songs were smuggling, corruption, and betrayal. Another brave man killed. Another brother avenged. A spurned mistress caps her lover’s bride. Women are murderous and deceitful. Poor boys, surrounded by menacing landowners, leave school to sell drugs because they are tired of picking fruit in the hills.

  The print media, academics, and documentary filmmakers excoriated bands like Los Tucanes for endorsing mafiosi and pursuing opportunistic relationships with “armies of terror.” Cartels were known to finance the promotion of new corrido bands in order to use them, eventually, as money-laundering fronts. The genre’s defenders, however, claimed that the ballads were a chronicle of modern life, not an ad for it. “We are an effect of the drug traffic,” the leader of Los Tucanes once told the music journalist Elijah Wald, “not a cause.” There was a drug war going on; the violence and romance were what people were interested in. How were corridos any different than gangsta rap in the United States, or the old “murder ballads” of Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie?

  At the party, or posada, the Wolf Boys partied alongside comandantes. There were whole roasted chickens and goats; tamales; homemade tortillas; sprawling platters of salsas and jalapeño poppers; plus all the beer and whiskey and tequila one could drink. It was like the quinceañera parties that fresas threw in North Laredo, except that quinceañeras didn’t serve piles of lavadita—“wash”—a coveted form of cocaine from which impurities had been removed.

  Sixty new vehicles were being given away, compliments of the Company’s “rip-off” fund—monies gained from extortion. Winners of the raffles simply appeared at a designated car dealership and claimed their prize, which had already been “paid for” and assigned for pickup. Houses and Hummers; bags of cash; jewelry; bales of weed and bricks of coke; watches and designer purses—they were all raffled off, and the posada raged on.

  You could tell guests by their clothes. Comandantes paired Hugo Boss with ranchero accessories like fat belt buckles. Sicarios without rank dressed like niños poppies, Mexican preppies, in tight Lacoste shirts and faded jeans. American sicarios like Gabriel, Wences, Bart, and Richard opted for a more classic look: Versace shirts, khaki pants, burgundy or brown shoes, and a faded hairstyle. They had the look of confident, self-made young men. Their studied appearance also endowed them with that semblance common to upstarts in big organizations: eager sacrifices to a strange and powerful god. Boys going off to fight a war for someone else.

  Los Tucanes played for hours. Everyone danced to the bleating notes of the bajo sexto and the hard-driving accordion breaks. The sound of the corrido grated against the sexier refinements of Anglo pop. Crass and rurally rooted, the genre was disrespected by trendsetting intellectuals, but not by Company men like Catorce and Miguel Treviño.

  Even though Catorce hosted the party, Miguel financed the appearance o
f Los Tucanes, paying mid-six-figure rates for an evening of song. To have famous musicians singing of stories like his filled Miguel with emotion. For he could still feel pride; it was perhaps all he could feel—well, pride, and perhaps fear. The more power Miguel accrued: the more he worshipped respect: the more he feared losing it: the more he lost himself in work. Miguel didn’t sleep well on the days when he didn’t kill. He was no panochón, no pussy, but that didn’t mean there weren’t things that scared him.

  The past year, 2005, was a great one for the Company, and a turning point in Miguel’s life. It was the year he went from mere comandante—a soldier who oversaw enforcement, led raiding parties, and managed his own smuggling business on the side—to full-blown plaza boss, the Company’s controller of an important territory, in charge of all illicit traffic that came through Nuevo Laredo. Miguel’s string of successes changed him. Now in his mid-thirties, he shed some of his old modesty, ditching the jeans and T-shirts. On this night he wore orange ostrich boots, a shirt of white silk, black slacks, and a black trench coat—all Valentino. From a gold chain around his neck hung a gold grenade with “40”—his Zeta call sign—engraved on its pineapple shell. That necklace was standard issue for ranking Company men. But the gold-plated .38 Super—with a diamond-crusted “40” on the grip—was distinct. A bulletproof Porsche Cayenne was on order from the Company engineer.

  But like a man on the rise in any highly competitive environment, Miguel—like Osiel Cárdenas before him, the old Gulf Cartel leader who created the Zetas—was prone to paranoia, the justified concern that the potential for treachery surrounded him, in the form of fellow Company men who would’ve loved to take his place. If Miguel was drawn to his younger soldados, the Wolf Boys like Wences and Gabriel, it might’ve been because they were still naïve enough to believe that a value system did exist, that loyalty toward one’s boss was more than mere camouflage. Unlike his relationships with contemporaries, Miguel felt no jealousy coming from the boys, only reverence.