Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  The cop and the agents ate and talked. From the parking lot, Gabriel watched them.

  “I’M HERE,” ROCKY TOLD THE comandante after walking across the bridge from the United States to Mexico.

  “Okay, I couldn’t come get you. But go around the block. There’s going to be a guy in a silver Jetta waiting for you.”

  Rocky was nervous he’d be killed, and for good reason: He’d been present at two drug busts at the river, and at the bust of the hit men at the Cortez Motel, and all three times he walked away without being arrested.

  There was a guy around the corner in a silver Jetta. The guy put a gun to Rocky’s head while he searched him. “Everything’s okay,” the guy told Rocky. He mentioned that the Company had a long list of targets in Laredo, then handed Rocky $5,500 and asked him to set up a new safe house in Laredo, a large house for a new group of assassins.

  Rocky returned to Laredo on foot with the money, and critical new intelligence: The Zetas had a long hit list of people in Laredo. Who was on the list? Rocky didn’t know. But there seemed to be dozens of targets.

  Robert Garcia, Chris Diaz, and J. J. Gomez met with Angel Moreno. If you wanted to kill one guy, or attack a nightclub, you ordered it done and your hit men fled back to Mexico. But several hit men and several targets? A safe house? They were planning on a slaughter.

  This new information altered Moreno’s thinking: Operation Prophecy was no longer just about an OCDETF investigation, and building a case against capos in Mexico. Moreno, the agents, and Robert needed to try to identify some or all of the targets on the hit list so they could foil the murders before they happened. Simply arresting hit men didn’t mean stopping the murders; if a cartel wanted someone dead, it would keep putting out a contract until the job was done.

  Moreno proposed a plan: wiring a safe house for sound and video, and then using Rocky to lure Zetas into the house, where the government would monitor their movements and record their phone calls with Zeta leadership in Mexico, trying to find out who was on the hit list and gathering as much evidence as possible against top Zeta leaders before kicking down the door. Moreno, the agents, and Robert mulled it. It could be insane, or it could be brilliant.

  Letting assassins roam Laredo while the government watched? It was definitely without precedent.

  What if people died while agents watched from the wire room? What if the assassins asked Rocky to get them guns? Could the government provide criminals with weapons? Absolutely not, ATF said. Well . . . maybe under certain circumstances. Maybe if the guns were nonfunctioning. Actually, they didn’t know. What if the assassins asked Rocky for drugs? Could the government provide drugs? Probably not, but DEA could watch the criminals consume their own drugs without shutting the operation down. More questions came up. What would air and ground support cost per day? What if there was a shoot-out around the safe house? Would there be an extraction plan for neighbors? Did they need to alert the neighbors? Just ignore those kids across the street . . . they’re assassins.

  Moreno called a meeting of every agency boss in Laredo and described the plan.

  “If it works, we’ll all be heroes,” he told the room. “If it doesn’t, I’ll get indicted.”

  The agency heads stared at Moreno with grudging respect. They were all federal bosses. But Moreno, as prosecutor, had the power to make charging decisions and authorize investigations. Every boss had his or her share of war stories about bitter face-offs with Moreno—usually over a wiretap or a subpoena that he wouldn’t submit to the court, usually because the affidavit wasn’t sound. The disgruntled DEA agent, for instance, would kick it up to his local boss. The local boss would call Moreno and say, “You need to push this forward. Our legal counsel says the affidavit has enough.” And Moreno would say, “Yeah, but your legal counsel doesn’t rely on it in court when the case goes to trial. I do.” And then the local boss would kick it up to the regional boss in Houston, and the regional boss would call Moreno: “You need to do this now. Time’s wasting.” And Moreno’d say, “Have you read the affidavit? No? Well read it, then call me.” And then instead of taking five minutes to read the affidavit, the DEA’s regional boss would call the Department of Justice’s regional office in Houston and demand to speak with the drug chief, only to be told that the drug chief was Moreno. Then the regional boss would call the head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, then Washington, and up and up and up.

  Prosecutors like Moreno tended to have a different relationship with the more esoteric federal agencies. Fish & Wildlife, for instance, would get pretty excited, and be extremely thankful, when a prosecutor took on a case that would land the agency in the headlines. But the bigger agencies, the ones Moreno dealt with every day—DEA, FBI, ATF, Homeland Security—they were the worst, and Moreno had no patience for their bullshit. If Operation Prophecy succeeded, the younger agents would get bumped up a pay grade, to GS-13 or journeyman status. But if it failed—or even if it succeeded while a minor part went wrong—they would not share in the ignominy. The weight would fall on Moreno alone. He knew a fellow AUSA who was prosecuted for advancing himself cash on his government ATM card. A dumb move, granted, but an infraction for which an agent might’ve caught, at most, a reprimand. If an agent pissed off a judge, or screwed up testimony, it was hardly mentioned. But if a judge bad-talked a prosecutor, that prosecutor had better self-report before it became news. When Moreno took a hard line, agents wondered why he was being an asshole, and he just thought: not compared with what they do to us. This arrangement was the prosecutor’s trade-off, and part of the reason why the American legal system largely worked. Complete power came with complete responsibility.

  Moreno amassed the resources of nine federal, state, and local agencies, including DEA, FBI, ICE, ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, Border Patrol, and Laredo PD. The DEA bosses were gung ho about the investigation and committed to seeing it through. Rocky, after all, was their informant. But the other agency heads clashed over a complex, high-stakes operation. They wanted the case but they didn’t. It was their case one day, when the outlook was good, then not, the next, when the investigation hit a bump. If it succeeded, every alpha dog wanted credit. If it didn’t, no one wanted liability. This, Moreno knew from experience, was the essence of a multiagency OCDETF investigation.

  Diaz and Gomez worked hard. It was their case, and they owned it. They reviewed Fourth Amendment law to find out what could and couldn’t be recorded in the safe house. Diaz wrote the Title III warrants for the wiretaps. Robert got guns from the Laredo PD evidence room, took them to the shooting range, and filed down the firing pins just enough so that the guns clicked when the trigger was tested but didn’t actually spit rounds. His drive and controlling approach to work pissed a lot of people off; those who hadn’t worked with him before came around to the same opinion as those who had: asshole. But Robert was used to this dynamic in team situations, and didn’t stop moving long enough to process the gossip. Far as he was concerned, the same rule applied. Lead, follow, or get out of my way.

  IN LATE MARCH 2006, THE Prophecy team was still getting the legal aspects of surveillance squared away when Zeta leadership called Rocky and asked if the safe house was ready. It was painful to put the criminals off, to risk losing the operation, but bureaucrats moved at a glacial pace. Diaz and Gomez told Rocky to ask for a couple more days.

  By April 1, when the wiretap warrants were signed by the judge and everything was set to go, Rocky’s phone had turned cold. Miguel Treviño had grown impatient. Zeta leadership turned to a different concierge. A new cell was setting up somewhere in Laredo, a massacre was coming, and the agents of Operation Prophecy were helpless to do anything about it.

  * * *

  I. When making an arrest, federal agents often use local cops to “wall it off.” Bigger fish are less likely to be scared away if they think their subordinates have been busted by local law enforcement. Signs of federal involvement can tank the larger investigation.

  26

  Career M
oments

  After finishing a midnight workout on the weight set he bought for the Hillside house, Gabriel sat on the balcony with an AR-15 across his lap and a corta, a handgun, in his belt. He smoked weed by converting an orange into a pipe, carving out a bowl on top and poking a hole through the middle.

  The marijuana opened and focused his mind.

  What is this game, he wondered, snapping people as if they were flies?

  And then he was outside his head. He watched himself pull out the corta, release the clip, roll a bullet between his fingers. He thought: I possess an AR. I possess a corta. I have a Versace shirt and a roll of cash in my pocket. Lines by Tupac Shakur ran through his head.

  He thought about the book he read in jail during February and March. It was an investigation of the murders of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G. Gabriel turned ten on the day Tupac, twenty-five, died in 1996. Tupac and his producer, Suge Knight, were in Vegas, driving from the Mike Tyson fight to a party, when a Cadillac screeched to a stop in front of Suge’s BMW. The rear window came down, and .40-caliber bullets tore open the “Thug Life” tattoo on Tupac’s torso as he tried to scramble for cover in the backseat. Six months later, a twenty-four-year-old Biggie Smalls—Tupac’s East Coast rival in the 1990s hip-hop scene—was also killed in a drive-by.

  Gabriel had always believed that Tupac and Biggie died in a gang war between West Coast and East Coast rappers, Bloods versus Crips.

  This book told a different story. In this account, Tupac was in the midst of a tricky comeback when he was murdered. The year before his death, Tupac sat in a New York prison, settling into a fifty-two-month sentence for the sexual assault of a groupie. By then, he’d put out two bestselling albums, and starred opposite Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice. He’d also been arrested eight times, escaped conviction in the shooting of two off-duty police officers, and cheated death when he was shot in the lobby of a Manhattan music studio. Plaintiffs tried to sue Tupac in civil court, blaming his lyrics for the shooting of a Texas trooper, and for the paralysis of a woman hit by a bullet during one of his concerts. Of Tupac’s many assault cases, one charged him for attacking the filmmakers of Menace II Society when he felt they were casting him as a sucker.

  Imprisoned, finally, for sexual assault, Tupac felt ready for a change.

  He’d helped build gangsta rap into a bazillion-dollar business with crossover appeal. All those white suburban kids living vicariously through his ghetto rhymes. Yet, financially, Tupac was ruined. Thug life ate his earnings in legal fees. If that life was real, he began thinking in prison, let someone else represent it.

  Suge Knight, the book said, visited Tupac in prison. Tupac’s problems made him more attractive to Suge. If Tupac agreed to join Suge’s music label, Death Row Records, Suge said, he could spring Tupac. One week later, Tupac was released from prison.

  If Tupac was the warrior-poet, Suge was the general, buying and intimidating his way to impunity. Within the hip-hop castle, however, they were competitors vying for the same subjects, a core ghetto audience that demanded crime and sex from their rap-industry stars, in art as in life. But they also did socially minded activities. Suge hosted Mother’s Day celebrations and sponsored Christmas toy giveaways, Gabriel read. And Tupac had his own milk-and-honey stuff, such as his ode to mothers in the song “Dear Mama.” In another song, “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” Tupac encouraged kids to ignore negativity and rise above the hood. But take away those assaults, the cop shootings, that prison time: Without all that crazy shit to woo the illest, Tupac, like South Park Mexican, would’ve had no stage, would’ve been no nigger for the times.

  The bad, Gabriel decided, made the good possible.

  When he came out of prison and joined Death Row, Tupac’s idea was to maintain a friendship with Suge but slowly separate his business from Death Row and start his own label, Makaveli Records, the name inspired by his prison reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Unwinding the business relationship with Suge was difficult. That prospect faded when Tupac’s first album on the Death Row label, All Eyez on Me, earned $10 million in its first week, second only—at the time—to The Beatles Anthology as the best commercial opening in history. But, Gabriel read, Tupac remained determined to cut loose. He relied more on his East Coast attorney, a Harvard professor, and fired Death Row’s lawyer.

  The Tyson fight in Vegas was ten days later.

  The book maintained that everything about Tupac’s murder was strange. In a typical drive-by, the shooter’s car pulled up alongside the victim’s car, such that both passenger and driver were in the line of fire. It also made the getaway easier. But the Cadillac pulled in front of Suge’s BMW. The shooter had a frontal shot at Tupac, and only Tupac. The murder appeared, at first, to be retaliation for an attack Tupac made on a Crips gang member earlier that night, as Tupac and Suge were leaving the Tyson fight. The book suggested that Suge staged the altercation to create the appearance of a motive.

  Blood in, blood out, Gabriel thought.

  Well, he didn’t admire Tupac any less. But Gabriel’s own code was different. If he used to think of himself as independent, he’d matured into a soldier, a Company man—more than a mere Wolf Boy—and now he lived by the principles of duty and loyalty. Por y sobre la verga. For and about the idea. Anything within the business was nothing more than business. Do the job and make yourself valuable, he had always told himself. And he did. Big brother Mike would be there, he had assured himself, and he was right.

  The law kept letting him out, the Company kept paying for it. What clearer validation could there be?

  His leadership skills were impeccable. With those Wolf Boys beneath him in the hierarchy, he was generous but stern. He respected authority. He listened first, then spoke. He knew the organization. He knew who controlled each plaza in Mexico. He knew, for instance, that Cancún was up for grabs, and that he was a contender to run it. Mexico would be easier. A beachside plaza of his own. He and Christina living like royalty among a crew of his closest homies.

  He slept.

  The next day, Richard and another Wolf Boy came by with news. Alfonso “Poncho” Aviles, a sixteen-year-old whom Gabriel remembered from school, had joined the Sinaloa Cartel and was recruiting other kids from Laredo.

  Gabriel called Meme, who said, “Find out who he works with and what he does.”

  Gabriel, Richard, and the third Wolf Boy, who knew Poncho, went to Poncho’s house and passed themselves off as fellow Sinaloans. Poncho mentioned the names of a few prospective recruits, then a suspicious relative came outside and the Wolf Boys left. A few minutes later, Poncho called. He said he knew that they were really working with Forty, and that if he ever saw them again, it wasn’t going to be nice.

  No, Gabriel agreed: It wasn’t.

  THE SIX WEEKS GABRIEL SPENT in jail during February and March were not a waste. They were a write-off. He met a young man named Pantera, who was in jail because his brother-in-law, Chuy Resendez, betrayed him. The Sinaloa-allied Chuy controlled the trafficking routes through Rio Bravo, the Texas border town just east of Laredo.

  Chuy would be a hard kill, a trophy for any rising Company man. Cooking Chuy would all but guarantee Gabriel’s promotion. So when Pantera made bail, a week after Gabriel made bail, Gabriel and Richard asked Pantera to get a picture of Chuy. Richard blew the picture up on a Xerox machine, and the three of them drove across to meet with Miguel.

  Surrounded by ten gunmen wearing bulletproof vests and armed with AR-15s, Miguel greeted Gabriel, Richard, and Pantera, and invited them into his Porsche Cayenne.

  “Okay,” Miguel said. “How much is it going to be?” He looked back at Gabriel and Richard, awaiting a number. When Gabriel didn’t speak, Richard said: “Fifty for us and forty for Pantera?”

  Miguel agreed: $50,000 would be split between Gabriel and Richard, and $40,000 would be paid to Pantera for setting up Chuy. Pantera would alert the Wolf Boys when Chuy was in town, tell them where he stayed, and who he was going to visit.
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  As Richard and Gabriel exited the Porsche, Miguel said, “Hey, Gaby. There’s another group over there trying to locate Chuy. Meet up with them, use them however you want. You run it, but stay back. Me entiendes?” Understand?

  “Sí, Comandante,” Gabriel said, and ran off.

  Later that day, they met the six other Zeta assassins in a park in Siete Viejo to coordinate their protocol. Then Gabriel, with Pantera, went out scouting for Chuy in the Dodge Ram while Richard and several Wolf Boys from “the B team,” the “chukkies,” waited at a safe house. Pantera and Gabriel relayed Chuy’s movements to Richard and the others: Chuy’s truck was on Highway 83. Richard and the Wolf Boys ran out to a green Chevrolet pickup and sped away from the safe house.

  Armed with a 9 mm, Richard lay down in the bed of the pickup, between two boys with AK-47s. The driver spotted Resendez’s truck on 83, pulled next to it, then pulled ahead. When the boy in the passenger seat of the pickup began to shoot, Richard and the two in back popped up like skeletons from a grave and shredded Chuy’s Suburban with more than ninety rounds. Chuy’s truck slowed, then coasted away, crossed lanes, and stopped when it hit a wrong-way sign.

  Later that day, Sunday night, Gabriel and Richard showered, picked up Richard’s wife, and went cruising on San Bernardo Avenue.

  On Monday, Miguel and Meme invited Gabriel and Richard to Nuevo Laredo for lunch. It was Gabriel’s biggest commission yet: $50,000 to be split between him and Richard. Gabriel would take $30,000 and Richard would get $20,000.