Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  As 2005 turned to 2006, the Moises Garcia murder case, in the parking lot of Torta-Mex, had been going cold when Robert reported to Frost Street, the scene of another execution-style killing. Piecing together information, it appeared as though Noe Flores, the half brother of a Laredo doper named Mike Lopez, was killed in a case of mistaken identity. Lopez, Robert learned, had been dating an ex-girlfriend of Miguel Treviño. At the scene, a female witness identified her old Martin High classmate Gabriel Cardona as the shooter.

  Gabriel Cardona: Robert hadn’t seen the kid since the previous summer, after he was arrested for the Bruno Orozco murder.

  Robert presumed there was a good chance that Gabriel fled across the border. So he gave U.S. Customs a photo of Gabriel with instructions to call if the kid tried to cross back into Texas via the bridge. He also kept Gabriel’s arrest warrants filed at Laredo PD only, and declined to file them at the Office of the Webb County Clerk, the record holder for the county courts, because Robert heard through a source that Gabriel had a contact working at the clerk’s office. Now, if Gabriel called the clerk’s office to check whether there were any outstanding warrants for him—whether it was safe to return to Laredo from Mexico—his record would come up clean.

  Robert also requested “tower dumps.” Laredo had about two hundred cell phone towers, divided largely among three service providers: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. He found each provider’s closest tower to Frost Street, and subpoenaed all the cell phone information that hit those towers around the time of the Noe Flores murder. A really smart criminal didn’t bring a cell phone to a crime, but most criminals weren’t really smart. Since cell providers purged their tower data every thirty days, it was better to request the data and not use it than need it and not have it.

  Robert and his partner, Chuckie, located the abandoned car used in the murder, a gray Nissan Sentra. They found a receipt for cell phone minutes, which led to a used-car dealer, which in turn led to the car dealer’s cell phone, which led to a Wolf Boy’s cell number. With that cell number, Robert subpoenaed phone records and “cell site” information. Cell site information told Robert which towers that particular phone “hit”—during calls—on the night of the murder, and at what times. The phone bill led to a Laredo tattoo artist.

  Robert’s visit shook the proprietor of Chester’s Tattoos. In his cell phone, the tattoo artist had a listing for “Bart”—a kid, he said, on which the tattoo artist had recently begun to render a large shoulder tattoo of a demon. Bart, the tattoo artist said nervously, had left halfway through the tattoo and planned to return soon to have it finished.

  “Why do you call him ‘Bart’?” Robert asked.

  “That’s what his friends call him, because he’s short and looks like Bart Simpson.”

  The tattoo artist said he had a family. He didn’t want any trouble. He didn’t know who the kids were. Robert gave the tattoo artist his Laredo PD card, hoping that news of his investigation would leak back to Cardona and whoever he was working with—and it did. When Bart came in the following day to have his tattoo finished, the tattoo artist passed on Robert’s card. A day later, Bart called Robert from Mexico.

  “This is Bart. Are you looking for me?”

  “Hey, Bart,” Robert said. “I have been looking for you. I need to—”

  “Look, you need to quit the investigations for these murders or I’m going to kill you and your family. You don’t know who you’re messing with. Understand?” Then Bart hung up.

  Robert slammed the phone down. How dare these kids! Then he thought: murders? He’d only been investigating them for the Noe Flores murder. What else had they done? He went back and looked at the case file from the Moises Garcia murder in the parking lot of Torta-Mex. Both Rene Garcia, the brother of Moises, and Diana Garcia, the wife, had ID’d the shooter as a short guy with buzzed hair and a mole above his lip.

  A few days later, the threat from the cartel began to feel more real. An Arizona cop contacted Robert and sent over a recording of an informant interview: “I got offered something real big in Laredo. I don’t know if he’s head of homicide? Head of narcotics? But his name is Robert Garcia. The Zetas want him gone. I guess he busted some guy named Cardona? Gabriel Cardona?” Miguel Treviño, the informant said, had pictures, a home address, and info about Robert’s schedule.

  Laredo Chief of Police Agustin Dovalina listened to the recording and mulled the threats. “Take your wife on vacation while we run this through Internal Affairs,” he told Robert.

  Now when Robert returned from South Padre Island, PD issued him an off-duty weapon and put around-the-clock surveillance on his home. He could no longer keep the threats secret from Ronnie.

  Ronnie had served her country, too. She accepted Robert’s career and its risks. But a little danger was one thing. Being held prisoner in her own home, and town, quite another. Eric was out of the house; he graduated in 2005 and enrolled in a school for motorcycle mechanics in Phoenix. But Trey, now a sixteen-year-old jock, was no longer allowed to play hockey because the arena was across town and practice was late at night. At first, Ronnie managed to hold it together. There was no use in heightening an already-elevated stress level. And there was stress.

  On some days, the Wolf Boys made Robert more tolerant of his own sons’ imperfections. He used to yell at Trey and Eric when they neglected the lawn, or played too many video games. His new perspective: Who gave a shit? But he could also go the other way. Coming home on some days, crazy with adrenaline and sleeplessness, snapping at everyone and everything, Robert would head straight to Trey’s bedroom, and, if any part was messy, flip his stuff like a SWAT team before heading back to work. Ronnie tolerated it for a while, then snapped one day and chased him out to the driveway: “You’re fuckin shittin’ me, right?!”

  For fifteen years Robert had served this city. And for what? A bullshit war. And for who? Absent fathers, women beaters. For the same immigrants who tried to break into the Garcias’ family home back in Eagle Pass until Robert’s father studded the walls with broken bottles. For delinquent American-born kids who claimed to be Mexican when they didn’t know the first thing about Mexico. For the Mexican Mafia gangsters, and the ignorant solidarity they claimed with Aztec culture. At stash-house busts in Santo Niño, when the pregnant teenagers filed out barefoot and bursting, Robert and his buddies shook their heads and called it “job security.” He felt shame because they were his people. He felt spite because he was a wetback, too.

  As a young cop he took pride in making drug arrests and busting criminals, but after a while the cycle of crime and dysfunction in the city had begun to make his struggle as a cop feel futile. And now here was something more than little drive-by shootings and robberies: a battle between two cartels, spilling into Texas.

  The spillover was real. Since 2004, the FBI had investigated nearly one hundred cases of U.S. citizens going missing in Nuevo Laredo—and those were just the reported disappearances. The most famous among them were Yvette Martinez and Brenda Cisneros. Supposedly they dated Miguel Treviño, or did errands for him, and then somehow crossed him by stealing drugs or dating an enemy. Yvette Martinez’s stepfather went big in the press. He started a website called Laredo Missing to chronicle all the disappearances of Americans. People magazine profiled him (“Who Is Stealing Laredo’s Young?”). In Laredo homes, cops and federal agents were finding assembly lines for building automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices. In law enforcement, the mood was both ecstatic and grave. Something’s happening! Bombs and shit! The cartels that Robert once lectured about at the Laredo police academy were now here. The reality of the spillover gave his path a heft it never had.

  And there was something else that motivated him, something that had always bothered him as a Mexican who loved his country and could no longer return to it: The cartels and their violence lay at the root of everything Robert hated. And not just because they ruined Mexico, but because they tarnished the entire image of the country. Was he really related to th
ese fratricidal people? The decapitations; ripping faces off. It was worse than any Middle East terror organization. Where did it come from?

  “This shit pisses me off,” Robert would tell Chuckie, his homicide partner. “I take it personal, dude. I really do.”

  Chuckie, also born in Mexico before immigrating to Eagle Pass, took the cartel violence personally as well. Unlike Robert, however, Chuckie never received any personal threats, and he declined PD’s offer to have squad cars watch his house. The cars, he believed, brought more bad attention than they were worth in actual security.

  Ronnie knew what angered her husband. The Garcia family, like most in Laredo, used to go across to Nuevo Laredo regularly to shop, eat dinner, and drink in the bars. They took the boys on trips to their father’s country. Whether for a wedding, birthday, funeral, or any other reason to see family, the Garcias returned to Piedras Negras several times a year. Now, because of the violence, they couldn’t go across, and that was a shame. But if Ronnie sympathized, she still couldn’t grasp the extent of Robert’s obsession with these investigations. In her opinion, he hadn’t been the same since that terrible murder case, the prior year, with the dead girl at Lake Casa Blanca, and that case had nothing to do with the cartels.

  It certainly wasn’t the money that drove him. Laredo PD was one of the most highly paid police departments in the state of Texas, but policing, even in Laredo, was still poorly compensated relative to the hours and the risk of the job. Overtime was decent. But busts or no busts, Robert made what he made: about $60,000 in base salary. In a few years—unless he became a chief, which would never happen because he wasn’t political enough, couldn’t sit in an office, and pissed too many people off—his PD salary would top out at $65,000. PD wasn’t like a federal agency, where the college boys got bonuses for big busts. In PD, there was no bonus for solved cases. Robert got awards that entitled him to some sideways promotion, more managerial responsibilities, more awards, and then the same pension as everyone else. “What do I need more money for?” Robert would joke. “I like mowing my own lawn.” His obsession wasn’t explainable in terms of money. Ronnie could live with that, but not with these threats. The distance Robert’s work put between them rended the relationship again, maybe this time for good.

  In his man cave, sipping whiskey and going over PD reports while squad cars watched his house, Robert shook his head. Those boys had done a pretty good Mental Fuck on him.

  But the threats only hardened his resolve.

  He felt an exhilarating combination of pride and fear. It was one thing to be threatened by the Wolf Boys, another to be in the crosshairs of the big man himself. It meant he was doing his job right, and, in his own sick way—he told no one at the time—he “got a boner out of it.”

  He kept the off-duty gun next to his bed. One night, in the wee hours, he nearly shot Trey’s best friend in the head when the kid woke up and used the wrong bathroom.

  22

  The Varieties of Power

  The cartel war meant different things to different people. For some it brought problems, for others opportunity.

  The American ambassador, Tony Garza, had no interest in criticizing the Mexican government, but he couldn’t shy away from speaking out when safety was at stake. The State Department warned Americans not to visit northern Mexico. “As friends and neighbors, we should be honest about the rapidly deteriorating situation along the border, and the near lawlessness in some parts,” Garza had said in a statement back in June 2005, after the Nuevo Laredo police chief was murdered on his first day in office.

  As for Laredo, the mayor’s mandate was clear: deny. She insisted the war was not spilling over into her charming Texas town. Like a restaurant that advertised “Clean Food,” Laredo’s beleaguered tourism board would plaster “Laredo Is Safe” across buildings and billboards.

  But not all bureaucrats and law enforcement officials in Laredo shared the same agenda. Laredo’s sheriff still warned that terrorists could arrive at any moment. The sheriff wasn’t stupid. Ever since 9/11, the word narco turned few heads in Washington. Narco-terrorism was a different matter. Local law enforcement used national security threats to argue for bigger budgets. Spillover violence, and the perception of chaos at the border, also gave political challengers an opportunity to criticize incumbents for their failure to maintain the peace. As for the journalistic community, reporters could always use a good story, and peacefulness didn’t create good stories.

  For its part, the U.S. government was eager to minimize the spillover narrative. Unlike the state of Texas, which defined spillover as any cartel-related violence, regardless of the victim, the federal definition excluded “trafficker-on-trafficker” violence. This approach conveniently ignored, or glossed over, the reality that many traffickers involved in the spillover, such as Gabriel Cardona, were Americans. But the federal definition meant that most cartel violence in the United States could be categorized, at least at the federal level, as non-spillover.

  At bottom, spillover violence, and how it was defined, came down to money. Which was why Laredo Chief of Police Agustin Dovalina was happy to expand his definition: it meant more money for his department. Between lieutenants, sergeants, patrol officers, investigators, and administrative people, Chief Dovalina had about five hundred employees spread among: drugs; crimes against property; auto theft; crimes against people (homicide, aggravated assault, armed robbery); sexual offenses (child abuse and child pornography; and adult crimes); and juvenile crimes.

  Dovalina’s police force represented about 10 percent of all Webb County law enforcement, and competition among agencies for federal funding was fierce. At the municipal, county, and state levels, Dovalina competed with the Sheriff’s Department, the constables, the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the Department of Public Safety, Food Stamps, and Child Protective Services. At the federal level, he had DEA, Border Patrol, Homeland Security, FBI, ATF, ICE, Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service.

  Every year, in the spring, Chief Dovalina went to Washington, D.C., for the big national police conference. Upon arrival, he always visited the stingy bastards over in the Department of Justice, the ones in charge of doling out COPS grants—federal money allotted for local PDs under Community Oriented Policing Services. In reality, COPS grants never amounted to much; if Dovalina was lucky, one year of every four he came home with a pittance. He often felt shorted by the federal government. And even now, with violence on the rise, he didn’t feel the federal government gave him what he deserved.

  So recently, when two of Dovalina’s PD underlings—a lieutenant in charge of the stolen-property division, and a sergeant assigned to the narcotics division—came to his office and said the Mexican Mafia wanted to launder money through its slot machine casinos, the maquinitas, by programming the slot machines to pay out above the legal limit of five dollars, Dovalina listened to the proposition. The Mexican Mafia would compensate the Laredo Police Department to look the other way, close down a competitor, and help keep the heat off.

  Dovalina considered it; he wanted a new set of golf clubs. He agreed to the kickback scheme.

  If Dovalina felt irreverent, it wasn’t only because he felt shorted on government funding. The cartel war gave Dovalina some power. His counterparts in Nuevo Laredo law enforcement came across the bridge seeking supplies such as body armor. “Of course,” Dovalina would say over lunch. And who knew? Maybe those supplies would reach crime-fighting cops in Nuevo Laredo. Probably not. But they would contribute to the war, a conflict about which Dovalina had few emotions, save that it was bad. One side or the other would win. His own battle would go on.

  MIGUEL TREVIÑO’S BATTLE CONTINUED.

  In church, he sat next to his mother and simmered. Mrs. Treviño knew her sons’ business and wept: Fito, her sweet boy who only loved to hunt, just twenty-six years old, had been sitting outside reading the newspaper when Sinaloan assassins shot him four times in the face, once in the chest, and once in each hand, then dumped his body b
y a swing in a park. The church in Valle Hermoso was sealed off for the closed-casket funeral.

  Miguel’s little brother had been murdered, and Miguel was infuriated that the incident had been reported on TV. It was the ultimate disrespect from the press, whose activities Miguel financed. Miguel had applied Catorce’s management model to Nuevo Laredo, and put local crime journalists, from El Mañana to El Diario, on a pay schedule. But these journalistic relationships, Miguel learned, were always in flux. The Company offered the publisher of El Mañana, for instance, a deal: His newspaper would become their mouthpiece, and the publisher would agree to no longer investigate drug trafficking. The El Mañana publisher worried about the arrangement. Agreeing to be the Company’s mouthpiece was the same as signing his death sentence. If the Company didn’t kill him, the other side would. But the publisher was not stupid, and he agreed to the second condition. From then on, a Company spokesman would communicate, through a crime reporter, which stories about crime could run in the paper. Arrangements such as these worked, most of the time, but reporters were untrustworthy. They took money from the Company. Then they took money from the other side. And soon they became orejas, ears, carrying information back and forth between criminal groups.

  In 2005, Miguel had had to make an example of Guadalupe “Lupita” Escamilla, a radio host who was supposed to make sure that certain news didn’t come out on the national level, which meant not reporting it at the local level. Lupita, it was rumored, had demanded a raise for her work as a Zeta mouthpiece, and tried to influence the Company by airing material contrary to its wishes. She was warned. She did it again. In January the Company put a few rounds of bullets in the side of her house. When that didn’t shut her up, the Company set her car on fire. In March, the final warning was given, and in April she was gone.