Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  At the China ranch, Miguel ordered the white tiger.

  The cage arrived.

  Bodyguards emerged from a chicken coop carrying the naked, lifeless bodies of the three men murdered that afternoon, the scalp of one torn away. The starving tiger, released from its cage while a bodyguard controlled it with a leash, devoured the arms and legs while Miguel laughed. He told the woman—a friend of Elsa’s, apparently—that they’d stolen the tiger from a circus. He vowed to do the same to Elsa, if he ever found her.

  They departed the ranch.

  Near the border, Miguel and Wences turned the woman over to a man they called El Licenciado, a lawyer for Miguel who would take her to the bridge and see she made it back to Texas.I El Licenciado told Miguel that the family of the men killed that afternoon requested the bodies for a proper burial. Miguel laughed and asked for the phone. His brother, he told the family, had no proper burial, and neither would they. He said the bodies had been thrown on the side of the road. He didn’t remember where. Maybe they were eaten.

  * * *

  I. The moniker “Licenciado”—a graduate or licensed person—suggests a kind of fake respect for lawyers and politicians in Mexico’s corrupt elite, those educated people who do business with criminals. Their power, writes journalist Alfredo Corchado, is a symptom of impunity that has “roots in power structures dating back to the days of the Aztecs, which were molded to the modern age by the PRI.”

  25

  Heroes and Liars

  In late January 2006, two young DEA agents contacted Angel Moreno to say they had an informant who claimed to be connected to Miguel Treviño. The informant—“Rocky”—was a former Zeta employee who’d come out of a long hospital stay after being beaten nearly to death by Omar Treviño. The DEA agents were confident they could use Rocky to make big cases against high-level guys in the Company.

  It was one of the greatest aspects of the system, and one of the worst: the incredible discretion given to someone like Angel Moreno. For agents looking to make a case, Moreno was the guy they had to come to, go through, for a simple reason: In court, before the actual judge, the federal prosecutor was the face of the American government. Arguably, Moreno had more influence over a criminal’s future than any judge. Who got charged; when; how many times and for how much; and whether a mandatory minimum sentence got tossed in—these decisions were all up to Moreno. He liked to say he did more for defendants’ rights before they got charged than any defense attorney did afterward.

  Prosecutors at the border entertained two kinds of drug cases: “reactive” and “proactive.” The reactive ones were simple. Border Patrol busted a guy coming across the border with a load of dope, and called DEA or ICE—agencies with arresting powers. An agent drove to the bridge, or the checkpoint, made the arrest, and interviewed the smuggler about his network. Could the guy lead to bigger fish? Was he willing to cooperate in exchange for a sentence reduction? Then the prosecutor opened a case, and the negotiations began.

  The proactive cases were the ones where agents pitched the prosecutor: Joe Blow doesn’t have a job but he owns lots of trucks. We have good information that he’s moving coke. We want a search warrant. The agents submitted an affidavit, and the prosecutor opened a case.

  Moreno handled pitches for a subset of proactive cases: Agents who wanted to submit a case for OCDETF designation and funding came to him. Each agent had his or her own pitching style. Some agents, often the newer ones, wanted to come in and tell Moreno the whole story with a PowerPoint presentation, and Moreno would sit there thinking, Thanks, but I can read. But he always tried to listen and act interested. As a boss, stifling enthusiasm got you nowhere.

  J. J. Gomez and Chris Diaz had everything short of a PowerPoint presentation when they came into Moreno’s conference room talking about the promise of Rocky—their new informant, or confidential source. J. J. Gomez was a twenty-six-year-old local boy who went to Martin High seven years ahead of Gabriel Cardona. He played the drums in school and liked to study. He thought the barrio gangs were childish. He was more scared of his mother. On summer weekends, his father took him and his brother to a construction site, where temperatures reached 115 degrees in July and August. The lesson: Do everything you can to avoid this fate. At Martin, J.J. remembered, there were the good people and the bad people and you knew the screwups. They walked tough in the hallways and talked shit to teachers. They hung out across the border, had cars and chicks. Many students in J.J.’s class were the Gabriel Cardona type, and now they were dead.

  The second DEA agent, Chris Diaz, was a twenty-nine-year-old former cop from Virginia who spoke gringo Spanish. Chris knew the streets. His father was a Mexican who grew up in East Los Angeles. Chris was tall, lumbering, and wore a long goatee—an undercover look. His devotion to DEA was evident by his very presence in the Laredo office, a hardship post to all but the most ambitious outsider.

  In federal circles, particularly in the U.S. attorney’s office, newer agents like Chris Diaz and J. J. Gomez were known as “FNGs,” Fucking New Guys. FNGs, Moreno believed, rarely had a clue what they were doing. He didn’t know that Diaz and Gomez had eight years of DEA experience between them, nor that they’d been investigating cartel activity in Laredo since 2003. As for this “Rocky,” any new informant was risky. But after Rocky helped the FNGs set up two successive Zeta drug busts by the river, Moreno reconsidered his assessment of Diaz and Gomez and took a closer look at the case—and so did the DEA boss.

  A couple of months earlier, the agencies had been set on La Barbie, the size of La Barbie’s public profile correlating to the value of his hide. But in December 2005, the DEA’s La Barbie informant walked away. It turned out he’d been playing both sides all along. Now, in retrospect—as was often the case with informants—what had come before made sense. When the informant first appeared, back in June, he gave the “Barbie Execution Video” to Robert Garcia, who held it for a while and then shared it with agents at DEA and FBI. La Barbie never sent the video to the Dallas Morning News, as was reported. A FBI agent leaked it. La Barbie’s face wasn’t even in the video. La Barbie’s purpose hadn’t been to build his reputation but to have independent news organizations broadcast the other side’s depravity.

  Tell us about the guiso, and burning people with different fuels.

  Tell us about that journalist you killed.

  With voluntary informants (and even with involuntary informants, the ones you had a charge against), it was impossible to tell if they were genuine. Often, the supposed informant had nothing, and simply wanted to get paid by the government. Or he was there on the orders of a capo to extract (or deliver) intelligence (or misinformation) and then disappear. Even if you got a case out of it—even if you got a guilty plea or a conviction—you never knew whether you had been played. Cops and criminals called the war on drugs “the game,” but that was a misnomer. In games, opponents were delineated and a winner emerged.

  Informants were a consequence of an escalating war. As each new interdiction strategy was countered systematically by a new evasion technique, the war relied increasingly on paid snitches. In Mexico, criminals paid cops. In the States, cops paid criminals. In Laredo, aspiring informants networked with drug agents, called the office, and stopped by all day long, pitching business like hopped-up entrepreneurs:

  AGENT: How can I help you?

  SNITCH: I want to start school again and do Job Corps. I need to report to my probation officer. I owe about four hundred dollars.

  AGENT: What’s the fine for?

  SNITCH: I was caught at school with clonazepam for my anxiety. I’m eighteen but I’ve lived a forty-year life. Do I have regrets? No, because it made me the man I am today.

  AGENT: Okay. How can you help me?

  SNITCH: I can help you take down heroin and coke. Can you talk to my PO?

  AGENT: The faster you work the faster you get paid. Tell me the addresses of the houses. I hope it’s not ones we already have.

  SNITCH: You don�
��t have these, trust me. They’re not addresses. They’re deliveries.

  AGENT: Delivery guys?

  SNITCH: Yeah. I used to be a heroin addict, so they trust me.

  AGENT: Who are they?

  SNITCH: Family friends. Cousins. The biggest heroin dealers in Laredo. They were the ones who hooked me, so fuck them. I constructed their house.

  AGENT: Like you actually built it?

  SNITCH: I painted it. Look, the only reason I’m doing this is for my girl and my child. I’ve seen friends die of overdoses. I love my city too much to see it go down this fast.

  AGENT: Do you have the delivery numbers?

  SNITCH: No, they’re in my phone and I broke my phone.

  AGENT: [Looking at snitch’s phone] What phone is that?

  SNITCH: My girl’s.

  AGENT: And you mentioned some bad cops earlier?

  SNITCH: I’ve sold to them. I’m not gonna mention names.

  AGENT: Why not? You’re already here.

  SNITCH: [phone rings] Hello? . . . yes . . . Ma’am, can I call you back? [to agent] Sorry, I’m trying to get meds for my ADHD. But let me see how this works first. It’s all about trust. You can’t find trust nowadays. That’s why I wish I was born in the seventies and eighties. . . .

  To use snitches, and not get used by them, you had to understand their motivations. First, there was the “regular informant” who just wanted to get paid. This informant was a person who perhaps sold real estate or banking services, and who’d never been arrested. Regular informants stood at a distance from crime, were generally trustworthy, but provided the least information. Second, there was the “political informant”—a foreign official who had to be approved at the highest level of DEA. They were a black box; you could only guess at their true allegiances.

  Third was the “restricted informant,” the most common type of snitch. This informant was a criminal who wanted money or revenge, or who wanted to move out his competitor. Or it was someone who had soured on the underworld and felt as though he should’ve been law enforcement all along. It could be a drug-addled liar who woke up one morning and decided it would be fun to play cop, wear the badge, fantasize. Restricted informants could make huge cases, and were always difficult partners. They went back on their word, and played both sides. When you finally made a plan and went undercover, the informant invariably changed the plan at the last minute and blew the operation if you didn’t get him out of the way fast enough. One of every twenty was a decent informant, but it could take multiple meetings to assess. To employ them, you had to provide endless paperwork on their criminal pasts.

  History of coke?

  Heroin?

  Domestic abuse?

  Assault?

  Well, we’ll have to massage that for the paperwork.

  If the case went to trial, and the informant got called to testify, the defense attorney would try to use the informant’s criminal history to impeach his testimony. It rarely mattered, however. Jurors assumed informants were liars.

  The economics of the border complicated the spy game. The best informants could earn six figures over a snitching career, but the majority were lucky to make a few thousand dollars. So, without a personal vendetta driving an informant, or some black-market prerogative, the meager snitching salary often proved insufficient against the lure of criminal paydays and the risk of community banishment, or worse.

  Rocky, however, was ready to work. He wanted revenge for the time he was mistaken for a traitor and beaten by Omar Treviño. Rocky maintained a healthy coke habit, chattered incessantly, was highly manipulative, and beat his wife from time to time. But at least he had no murder raps, at least not on this side. If he delivered as promised, he’d earn his snitching salary.

  After he proved himself by helping DEA set up two drug busts at the river, Zeta leadership asked Rocky to service a new hit squad in Laredo. On the wire that Rocky now wore, the DEA agents, Diaz and Gomez, learned that Miguel had dispatched two hit men to make the loudest statement yet: a Scarface-style massacre at Agave Azul, the hot Laredo nightclub owned by La Barbie.

  THE BLACK HAND, THE LEADER of the Mexican Mafia in Laredo, was supposed to use Miguel’s $10,000 to rent a safe house in Laredo for one of Miguel’s hit squads. But the Black Hand spent the money, which was why he asked Rene Garcia, still looking to avenge his brother Moises’s death, to check Miguel’s hit men into Laredo’s El Cortez Motel, then serve as their concierge and chauffeur.

  “We need to kill a lot of people so we can make our point here,” one hit man said in the presence of Rocky, who was working with Rene to service the hit men. “So they can know who the Zetas are!” They snorted lavadita at the motel, and vowed to use grenades if the cops showed up.

  Rene, working as co-concierge with Rocky, took the hit men to the mall and to bars. He helped procure guns, drugs, and prostitutes. One hit man told Rene that he looked like Moises Garcia, and asked if they were brothers. “No,” Rene said. He had to play it cool long enough to meet Bart Reta, then cook the fool where he stood.

  But Rene would never get his chance.

  When Rocky was sent out on another errand, Diaz and Gomez ordered local police, led by Robert, to raid the motel and make “wall-off arrests” in order to conceal federal participation.I

  In just two months, Rene went from witnessing his brother’s murder, to seeking revenge, to being arrested for aiding the organization responsible. It was a bizarre path whose logic somehow made perfect sense in Laredo.

  FOR MORENO, THE BIGGER CASE was saddling up nicely. Rocky was legit. The DEA pledged support for Moreno’s OCDETF case.

  A trial unfolded in his mind. He’d use info obtained from Zeta minions to indict the leadership. At trial, when the defense attorney pointed out that the only witnesses were killers, Moreno would pull out a line he hadn’t used in years. He’d tell the jury that you can’t have angels as witnesses for crimes committed in hell.

  He smiled at the thought of it, and recalled his favorite Christopher Walken movie, The Prophecy, in which one character says: “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what that creature must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood? Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

  Moreno submitted the OCDETF proposal under “Operation Prophecy,” and signed the request for a federal war chest.

  COPS FILE CHARGES. PROSECUTORS REVIEW warrants for probable cause. And judges decide bail. But in Laredo, drug dealers drive luxury cars with ads on the windows supporting their favorite judge. A Mercedes says, “Elect Ricardo Rangel for Justice of the Peace.” Rangel was convicted of federal bribery charges. A Jaguar says, “Elect Manuel Flores for District Judge.” One of Flores’s sons provided the weapon in a triple homicide; another was indicted for shooting someone with a gun given to him by his mother.

  In Texas, the prosecutor could ask the court to deny bail in cases of multiple homicides, or cases of murder-for-hire. But that never happened in Gabriel’s situation. Instead, a justice of the peace reduced his bail on the “engaging in organized crime” charge to $50,000, and his bail on the murder charge for Noe Flores to $150,000. When Gabriel went before Judge Manuel Flores (no relation) on the Orozco murder, Flores set bail at $2 million, putting Gabriel’s total bail at $2.2 million, 10 percent of which—the amount it would cost to “bond out”—was $220,000.

  The Zetas wouldn’t pay that.

  When David Almaraz, one of Laredo’s prosecutors-turned-cartel-lawyers, convinced Judge Flores to call a bail-reduction hearing, no one at Laredo PD was notified. A different state prosecutor appeared than had appeared at the first hearing. Almaraz said he and the new prosecutor agreed to $200,000 for the Orozco charges, putting Gabriel’s total bail at $600,000, meaning it would cost only $60,000 to bond out.

  Texas had become a stock market for killers. Miguel Treviño d
idn’t like Gabriel at $220,000, but loved him at $60,000. So on March 20, 2006, a jail guard at Webb County screamed “Cardona! Con todo y chivas!”—an old saying meaning “Grab all your stuff,” literally: “Everything including the goats.”

  A nineteen-year-old Zeta killer tied to multiple murders on this side, and more in Mexico, walked out of jail for the third time in six months.

  CHRIS DIAZ, J. J. GOMEZ, and Robert Garcia met for lunch at Danny’s, a popular chain of Laredo diners specializing in classic Mexican fare. They traded information about the cartels—but didn’t share everything.

  For instance, Diaz and Gomez didn’t tell Robert that Chuy Resendez was a former Zeta; nor that Chuy, now a Sinaloa-allied smuggler in Laredo who worked with La Barbie, was a “source of information” for DEA. Back in the 1990s, before the Zetas moved in, the old gunslingers—independent smugglers—were well known around Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. People feared and respected Chuy Resendez—including Miguel and Omar Treviño, who grew up with Chuy in Nuevo Laredo, stealing cars and trafficking drugs together. When Miguel assumed control of the Nuevo Laredo plaza for the Zetas, he tried to charge his old friend Chuy a smuggling tax. “Come on, güey,” Chuy said. “We grew up together. We’re buddies.” But Miguel insisted: Chuy could pay the tax or get borrado del mapa. Chuy refused to fold. In 2003, when Miguel sent Zeta hit men to Chuy’s Nuevo Laredo house, Chuy was ready with grenades and AK-47s. He killed all of Miguel’s men, then “jumped the river,” partnered with La Barbie and the Sinaloa Cartel, set up a new smuggling operation near Laredo, and began passing intelligence about the Zetas to two young DEA agents: Chris Diaz and J. J. Gomez.

  While his relationship with DEA appeared to benefit Chuy’s bottom line, it didn’t always protect him. The Zetas hunted Chuy, and nearly killed him, recently, at the Laredo Wal-Mart. They had Chuy on the run. In murdering Bruno Orozco, another Zeta traitor, in June 2005, Wences Tovar and Gabriel Cardona removed one of Chuy’s best sources for Zeta intelligence, thereby diminishing Chuy’s value to DEA.