by Dan Slater
He thought of Laredo. He wanted to go back there, where he was needed, to finish what he started and prove himself worthy of greater roles in the Company.
It had become known as “Forty’s list of forty”—the people in Laredo whom Miguel and the Company wanted dead; the final “sweeping” of enemies that, once completed, would secure the Laredo border crossing and the coveted I-35 smuggling corridor. Miguel spoke of his list like some grand project he planned to soon put in motion. He mentioned the list often to Gabriel, his most active sicario on the U.S. side of the border. “We’ll hold off a little longer, until the heat over there cools, and then we’ll go to work,” Miguel had told him, referencing Robert Garcia’s investigation of the boys following the murder of Noe Flores on Frost Street in early January.
When Gabriel joined the Company, Meme and Miguel told him he would enjoy perfect privileges in the warrior house, and he did. If he got caught or landed in jail they’d come for him, and they did. If he worked hard and handled business, they said, he’d come up in the Company, and now that was happening, too. Any Wolf Boy who made himself instrumental in this final sweep, Gabriel believed, was guaranteed a Mexican plaza of his own, and the title of a bona fide comandante.
He’d waited in Mexico long enough.
Now, as he drove north through Nuevo Laredo and back into his birth country, the sky snapping off into darkness, he resembled a fantastic insect stuck at the center of a huge vibrating web, or some rodeo bull pulling against opposing ropes while being rigged for a rider. What they didn’t tell him, what he couldn’t have known, was that the American legal system, for all its flaws, was a patient one. It waited.
* * *
I. In border slang, pedo—literally, fart—means “trouble,” or “problems.” To the question “Qué pedo?”—“What’s the matter?”—someone might respond, “No hay pedo. Ya está todo controlado,” meaning: “There’s no trouble. Everything is under control.”
PART IV
Prophecy
“Rivalry” is a densely textured relationship, building opposition out of similarity, and solidarity out of the intimacy of shared ambition and mutual envy.
—AZTECS, INGA CLENDINNEN
24
Last Meal
Do you need the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you calling?”
“My brother.”
Robert Garcia slid Gabriel’s cell across the table. “Tell him you’ll call him later.”
“Hey,” Gabriel said when Luis picked up. “I need you to call my brother Mike and tell him I’m arrested. Do you have his radio code?” Robert knew of Gabriel’s three brothers. There was no Mike. “They’re charging me with two murders, but I don’t know anything. They say there’s a witness. I think it’s all bullshit. Tell my brother Mike it will be a $2 million bond . . . yeah . . . tell him to send $200,000. He’ll pay it. You just keep collecting what’s mine, every Monday.”
On February 5, 2006, Gabriel had driven back to Laredo, but he hadn’t returned to Texas heedlessly. A few days earlier, he’d asked a friend to call a cousin who worked in the Webb County clerk’s office and inquire about warrants pending for each person in his crew. Gabriel had none, he was told, so he thought it would be fine to come across. Robert’s gambit worked and Gabriel was arrested at the border.
Eight months had passed since their last meeting. Gabriel had put on ten pounds of bulk, his back pushing against the seams of an untucked button-down, and he walked with a new swagger. His hair, which he wore shorter now, revealed the old scars of shotgun fragments. He behaved not as a young man facing heavy time on multiple murder charges but as one engaged in an elaborate game. The kid, looking at millions in bail, was concerned about getting his five hundred dollars per week in salary from the Company. The open mention of “brother Mike.” The confidence that the money would arrive. Robert decided to play to that ego.
“Last summer you told me about the murders you committed across,” Robert said. “Or was that bullshit?”
“No, they were true. I like to do them across because there is no problem across.”
“You said you had help from the police?”
“They set them up for you. Those guys have everything under control.”
“Were those deaths reported? Or did they disappear the bodies?”
“All the ones I’ve done they disappeared.”
“What do you use over there?”
“ARs,” Gabriel said, referring to AR-15 assault rifles. “They’re faster.”
“Why don’t you use ARs here?”
“Because over here it’s more difficult with the law,” Gabriel said, referring to America’s heightened penalties for using assault weapons in crimes.
Robert raised an eyebrow, leaned back, crossed his arms, and regarded Gabriel impassively. It was the posture of a nonjudgmental therapist acknowledging the gravity of his patient’s disclosure. Without changing tone, Robert transitioned: “So, the Torta-Mex murder, you said you didn’t participate. And this one, on Frost Street, tell me what happened.”
Gabriel denied any involvement with the murders of Moises Garcia at Torta-Mex, or Noe Flores on Frost Street. Robert said he had an eyewitness on the Flores murder, enough to get two more warrants on Gabriel—one for murder and one for “engaging in organized criminal activity.” An eyewitness was weak, Gabriel knew, but enough to hold him. He needed to provide a story. So he continued in a general way about Zeta operations on the U.S. side. Some hits had been done under the instruction of Miguel Treviño, he said, but he didn’t know which ones. There were other groups in Laredo working under other people.
Here it was, Robert thought: swirling nuggets of truth into his bowl of bullshit. Good, just keep him talking.
But then something happened that Robert didn’t expect. Once Gabriel got going on the story of the Noe Flores murder—the one he’d supposedly heard about through others—it was as if he couldn’t help himself. So authentic was his understanding of the case, the details so real, that his mixed-in lies tended to stand out against the truth, and vice versa.
A man named “El Señor,” he explained, had ordered the job. At first, Bart and his crew were confused about how to carry it out. But then girls who worked with El Señor ran into the target, Mike Lopez, while partying at a Laredo club called Cocktails. The girls called El Señor, then followed Mike Lopez home. Bart drove the hit squad across town in a gray Nissan. The girls’ job was to lure Lopez out of his house. But in the confusion on Frost Street, the shooter got mixed up and killed Noe Flores instead.
“Who was the shooter?” Robert asked.
Gabriel said that a guy named Joseph Allen shot Noe Flores with a .40-caliber handgun. It was the same guy, he said, who killed Moises Garcia with a 9 mm at Torta-Mex back in December.
Joseph Allen was a real person. He was wanted for another murder—and it just so happened that he looked like Gabriel, a coincidence Gabriel emphasized. It explained the eyewitness. Robert pondered his notes and nodded. Ah, Joseph Allen. It all makes perfect sense now.
“Who was the eyewitness?” Gabriel asked.
Robert steered him back toward Frost Street.
The hit squad, Gabriel continued, dumped the Nissan at a grocery store around the corner. Later, it came out on the news that it was not Mike Lopez they killed. That had seemed like a problem, at first, Gabriel said, but then El Señor said it was no problem. Mike Lopez was going to die anyway.
“There was a pack of cigarettes in the abandoned vehicle,” Robert said. “Who smoked?”
“They all smoke. But supposedly they belonged to Bart.”
“There was a cap left behind, too. What kind of cap was it?”
“A camouflage cap.”
“Whose?”
“Bart’s.”
“What’s the deal with Pablo, Polo, and David?” Robert asked, referring to other Wolf Boys in Laredo, those chukkies that Gabriel called “the B team.” The chukkies had been arrested fo
r a botched hit at a Laredo Wal-Mart a few days earlier, and had implicated Gabriel in the Noe Flores murder. “Were they also in charge of murders?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
“But they never did anything? What, they weren’t any good?”
“They were afraid.”
“How about Chapa?”
Gabriel’s driver, Chapa, had been brought in for questioning a few weeks earlier, caught coming back across in the white Expedition used in the Moises Garcia hit.
“We don’t tell him anything,” Gabriel said, then asked to use the phone again. With Robert sitting right there, he called “brother Mike.”
“No, brother, I was going to tell you, I am detained. . . . No, on the other side. They’re accusing me of a murder I had nothing to do with. . . . Yeah, I was with my girl when they got me. . . . No, the others remained on the other side. Yeah, they did listen. But you know how it is with my girl. . . . I’m just asking for some help if you can. If not, no problem.”
Over the past year Robert had interviewed more than a dozen cartel informants. This kid was deeper in the underworld than any of them. When Gabriel asked to make two more calls, Robert told him to go ahead, to take his time.
Gabriel called Luis again: “I just told Mike of my bond. He told me he warned me not to come across. He got angry and didn’t want to talk to me anymore. But he said he would pay. He’ll release the money. Just tell the midget to call Mike and confirm that everything’s cool. . . . Okay . . . And add some minutes to the Verizon phone so I can call you from county.” Then Gabriel called Christina back: “He’ll get me out. . . . Yeah, my brother Mike. It’ll be $2 million. Can you believe that? . . . Where are you going? Your house? . . . Okay, I’ll call later. . . . Love you too. Bye.”
Robert wanted to come across as friendly, fatherly, not antagonistic. He didn’t want that cartel lawyer, David Almaraz, interfering with his investigation. He said: “Okay, this is what’s going to happen. We obtained the warrant because the others accused you. And because you were ID’d. You are part of the group. That you can’t argue about. But I’m not going to screw you over with something you didn’t do, okay?”
Gabriel nodded. He was a son of God, a man of principle. He appreciated the fair treatment.
“But I need access to you,” Robert continued. “I know you’re going to speak with your attorney, which is your right. Tell him that you’re speaking with us. Maybe later I can show you a photo of that guy”—Joseph Allen—“to verify it’s him. If we can verify that you weren’t there, then maybe we can drop all the charges. I’ll continue to investigate. But tell me something: Where are these guys if I need to find them? Bart and these other assholes?”
“Across. But it would be very hard. They’ll shoot it out. They’re trained.”
“Bart is trained?” Robert asked. “But he was arrested and came out of TYC last summer, right?”
“Yes, but three or four years ago he was already with them. He came back here and was arrested with me. I was sent to county and released. He was sent to TYC.”
In early 2006, Bart was sixteen and a half years old. Joining the Zetas “three or four years” earlier would’ve made him twelve or thirteen on entry. At that point, by all accounts, he was still menacing middle schoolers, fantasizing about Navy SEALs, and pledging allegiance to the Sieteros. But Gabriel’s story about Bart already having become a Company man before going to TYC—a story invented from Gabriel’s guilt over having fingered Bart for the Flores murder—made an irresistible addition to border myth. The prepubescent cartel assassin! Even Robert’s bullshit sensor melted down.
But Robert had other reasons to believe, or to pretend to believe, whatever Gabriel said. As he continued the investigations, he hoped, eventually, to turn Gabriel into a cooperating witness—someone who would identify the others involved in the murders, and provide more information about Miguel Treviño, who, by February 2006, was now considered a “high-priority target” by Angel Moreno, DEA, FBI, and the rest of American law enforcement.
WHILE MIGUEL PLANNED HIS FINAL assault on Laredo enemies, the murder of his brother, Fito, sent him on a killing spree in search of his brother’s assailant.
Now a tattered couch sat in an open field. Miguel told Wences Tovar to walk the handcuffed men over to it. Miguel would be back in a moment.
An hour earlier, Wences had been taking franco in a Nuevo Laredo hotel when Miguel pulled up in a Ford F-150 and told him to come down. Wences crowded into the backseat of the extended cab, next to three bound men: two brothers and their father.
Omar, Miguel’s brother, was in the front seat. They drove to the Company ranch near China, a town in the neighboring state of Nuevo León. When Wences understood that one of the two bound brothers had confessed to killing Fito Treviño, he thought: I would not want to be you guys.
Now, Wences brought the three bound men to the couch in the middle of the field, and told them to scoot over so he could sit down. It would be a while until Miguel and Omar returned. Wences disappeared into the task of rolling a joint, until the familiar scream of a maiming interrupted him, and something wet slapped against his face.
A severed ear.
Miguel stood at the other end of the couch, next to the man who killed Fito. Miguel wore black jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. His knife was smeared with blood. Tucked between his torso and the knife-wielding arm was a container of potato salad, from which he speared bites with a plastic fork. “If I ever see you doing that shit around me again,” Miguel told Wences through a mouthful of potatoes, “you’ll be next.”
Wences tossed the joint aside and stood up. He didn’t want to look away. Miguel hated that. So he looked at the wound of the guy who had killed his boss’s brother. Every time an ear was cut, Wences was always surprised by how small the inside was. Just two tiny holes in the head.
The killer requested that his brother and father be spared. “They weren’t involved,” he said.
“Was my brother involved?” Miguel asked. “No, he wasn’t. So now you’re going to watch them die.”
Miguel radioed a doctor. He wanted this affair to be slow. Then he heated his cuchillo over a flame and soldered the ear wound shut hastily while his brother’s killer screamed, then vomited.
Omar looked impatient.
Of all Treviño siblings, Omar was closest to Fito, and most upset by his death. Going slowly didn’t work for Omar. He pulled the father, a huge man, off the couch and shot him in the face with an AR-15, emptying dozens of rounds into the nose, cheeks, chin, eyes, and forehead. Upon the gouge of each bullet, the man’s face sucked further backward until the head was flat on the ground like a rubber mask, pancake-thin. Wences forced himself to watch.
Miguel, his right hand on his .38, his left leg shaking, looked around. “Where’s that doctor?”
Spurred on by his brother Omar, Miguel let his impatience get the better of him as well. He shot the brother of his brother’s killer in the legs. This shooting went on for five magazines. He loaded a sixth magazine and shot the brother in the cranium at a glancing angle, revealing brain. He holstered his gun, walked to a nearby mesquite tree, and cut a spoonlike sliver of bark. He squatted by the head of the dead brother, scooped out a serving of gray matter, and handed the spoon to his brother’s killer.
Was Miguel messed up? Wences wondered, but then thought: Nah. How could Miguel be so intelligent if he was also messed up in the head? Sure, it was true that Miguel cut bodies open a lot, and seemed to enjoy it. But so did doctors and medical examiners.
“How does it taste?” Miguel asked, having fed his brother’s assassin several servings of brain.
“Like chicken,” he said.
This flourish of defiance elicited a smile from Miguel before he shot the young man in the head and walked away.
Wences, lingering in the shadows of early evening, stared at the father’s decimated head, a wet mush of holes into which flies now swarmed. The endless, anxious making of the self, the endless
striving, and then the reversal: the sudden, massive, physical assault for some possibly involuntary dereliction. The threat was always there, as was the evidence of its reality. When Wences closed his eyes, the flattened face remained like an afterimage, and he tripped, imagining his own family. What if someone told a lie about him to Miguel? he wondered. Was this everyone’s fate?
“Vámonos!” Miguel shouted, and the caravan departed to another ranch. Elsa Sepulveda, Miguel’s ex, had been found.
THE AGUILERA—LITERALLY, THE NEST—was a house of discipline, a place to store Company men who disobeyed orders, as well as immigrants, contras, and other collateral. Wences followed Miguel inside. They passed middle-aged women who asked for food and bathroom privileges, children who asked to go home. Miguel walked to a girl tied to a chair in the corner. He ripped the tape from her eyes and mouth.
When he saw her face he became furious.
He called over the soldier who brought her there, and threw pictures of Elsa Sepulveda on the floor. How was it possible that the soldier confused Elsa for this person? The soldier apologized and attempted to prostrate himself. Miguel laughed. The only thing he hated more than incompetence was a sorry-ass panochón. He shook his left leg, threw his head back, sighted down his nose, then pulled his .38, said “Ya mamastes”—“You’re gone”—and shot the soldier in the head. He told the woman on the floor, whoever it was, that she was coming with them. He told Wences to drive the Porsche Cayenne.
Outside, the woman tried to open the door of the Porsche, before Wences unlocked it, and received a shock from the armoring system. Wences deactivated the security and they all got in. It was night. As they returned to the China ranch, Miguel spoke to the woman in shockingly frank and emotional terms about his relationship with Elsa Sepulveda. He spoke of how humiliating it was when she left him, of how that humiliation deepened when he found out she was cheating on him. When she called to taunt him over the death of Fito, that was the last straw.