by Dan Slater
31
No Angels
Operation Prophecy was a career case. It would be a shame for the work to go unknown to the public. Robert got his wish when a minor Wolf Boy on the Operation Prophecy indictment contested his association with the Company. There would be a trial after all, which would entail putting snitches on the stand to testify about their time in the Company.
For Angel Moreno, sitting a jury for these cases was not easy. Many prospective jurors were disqualified, either because they thought the government was the cause of Laredo’s violence, and believed legalizing drugs was the solution; or because they were related to a detective who would testify in the case; or because they believed media sensationalized the cartels, since it was such a made-for-TV thing, and that much of what was reported wasn’t true; or because a friend or brother or son or stepson or father or father-in-law or uncle or nephew had been imprisoned, and they couldn’t be impartial; or because, as Juror 69 put it: “Drugs have been here for many years. It’s only in the past five, ten, because of the trouble across, that we started speaking so much of it. But we were being ostriches. So what’s the point? Where are we getting? Nowhere.”
Richard Jasso agreed to cooperate with Moreno in order to get a deal for his wife: He’d serve time in state prison, for the Resendez double homicide, then join his father in the federal system for the double homicide of the American teens. Richard would be out in his fifties. In exchange for this deal, Richard agreed to testify against the obscure Wolf Boy on trial, a boy known as Cachetes, or “Cheeks.”
Richard Jasso met his dad, briefly, in the Laredo prison where he stayed during the Prophecy trial. It was their first time meeting since his dad’s 1999 incarceration on smuggling and murder charges. The conversation was awkward. His father, a member of the Mexican Mafia, didn’t understand why Richard started killing people if he was doing well with smuggling. But Richard’s main regret was the day he asked his wife to pick up Gabriel and Bart after they cooked Moises Garcia. Her imprisonment meant three years their kids went without parents. Otherwise, Richard expressed no remorse. He wondered whether, if he’d stayed at a certain level and lived comfortably with what he had, his life would’ve turned out differently. He’d never know. If he had the chance to do it over, he would, just better.
Richard barely knew the boy on trial; they worked together on the Resendez homicide. But this was a case about an enormous conspiracy, concerning low-level criminals who all worked, ultimately, for the same few criminals. And therefore it wasn’t necessary that all witnesses knew the defendant, only necessary that they knew about the conspiracy alleged. Richard could also testify to his work with Gabriel. And Moreno could easily link Gabriel, through wiretaps, to the cartel leaders in Mexico.
Gabriel, even though he refused to testify, was brought down to Laredo from his state prison in North Texas and housed in the cell facing Richard for the several weeks the trial lasted. They didn’t speak. Gabriel shut Richard out because Richard had cooperated with Moreno.
But in Richard’s mind, everyone “threw mud at each other.” Everyone ratted out everyone, because that’s how the underworld works. Richard also believed the media attention blew up Gabriel’s head. In addition to articles about him in the New York Times, Esquire, and Details, his case was all over South Texas media. Richard thought the attention locked Gabriel further into the image he’d always coveted: the stoic gangsta who accepted all responsibility and took what came. But Richard didn’t believe it: Gabriel blamed everyone but himself for his situation. From childhood, Gabriel prided himself on his independence; in reality, he could never see a life for himself beyond affiliation. To Richard, this central contradiction defined much about his old hoodie, employee, and boss.
Sitting across the prison corridor from Richard, Gabriel thought, Let him take the stand if he wants. Good luck surviving as a snitch. Gabriel noticed Richard’s new muscles. Richard knew he was going to the federal pen eventually. There was no “administrative segregation” over there. All prison families roam free, and what awaits . . .
Richard took the stand and performed well as a government witness. He spoke candidly, and believably. He described the March 2006 afternoon on which he, Gabriel, and another Wolf Boy went to the house of Laredo teen Poncho Aviles to find out who Poncho was recruiting for the Sinaloans.
“Did you see [Poncho] again?” Moreno asked Richard.
Yes, Richard said. One week later in Nuevo Laredo, Richard and two other Wolf Boys (not Gabriel) saw Poncho at Eclipse, the nightclub. Richard said that he and the other Wolf Boys spotted Poncho and followed him around the club. One of the Wolf Boys pulled out his pistol and hit Poncho over the head with the butt, then packed Poncho in the car. Richard said he called Gabriel, who was in Laredo at the time, and mentioned that they’d picked up Poncho. “Take him to the house,” Gabriel allegedly said. At the Nuevo Laredo house, before Gabriel arrived, the Wolf Boys undressed Poncho and began to interrogate and beat him. They asked Poncho who he worked with, what he knew about the contras, and what he was doing in Nuevo Laredo. Poncho confessed that he was at the Eclipse nightclub with another boy, Inez Villareal. So Richard returned to Eclipse and kidnapped fourteen-year-old Inez. When Richard returned to the house with Inez, Gabriel had arrived and was on the phone with Meme Flores. At that point, Richard testified, Gabriel took the detainees to another house, and Richard returned to Eclipse to party.
“Do you know what happened to Poncho and Inez?” Moreno asked Richard.
“They were killed,” Richard said.
“How did you find out they were killed?”
“The following day Gabriel told me.”
“Did he tell you what they did with the bodies?”
“Just that they were dead at dawn, and that they had thrown them into el guiso.”
“What’s el guiso?”
“When they’re thrown into barrels. They pour gasoline on them and burn them until they’re powder.”
Angel Moreno convinced several other Wolf Boys to cooperate and testify as well—including Bart and Wences. None of them seemed to have much information about the obscure Wolf Boy on trial, but they all had plenty of stories about being in the Company.
When cross-examining these witnesses, the defense attorney argued that this trial was about nothing more than a bunch of murderers taking the stand and saying whatever the government wanted them to say. In his cross-examinations, the defense attorney—as the defense does in such cases—focused on denigrating the character of the cooperating witnesses in an attempt to erode their credibility with the jury.
The defense attorney asked Bart, “You told Detective [Robert] Garcia that you thought you were ‘Superman and shit,’ right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you would commit murders whether somebody paid you or not?”
“That was toward the end,” Bart clarified.
“Is it true that you have participated in over thirty murders?”
“I can’t really explain that,” Bart said.
“And isn’t it true that you told Detective Garcia about chasing people down and ‘blowing the bitch’s top off’?”
Wences followed Bart on the witness stand.
After fleeing to Mexico following the June 2005 murder of Bruno Orozco, Wences never returned to the States. His cartel career ended, however, a few days after Gabriel’s. In April 2006, after Operation Prophecy raided the safe house on Orange Blossom Loop, Wences was driving drunk in Mexico, trying to roll a joint while steering with his knees, when he flipped his Avalanche and severed his spinal cord. Miguel drove to the accident, pulled Wences from the wreck, brought him to the Company hospital, remained at his bedside for three days, and then sent him to Cuba to be treated by specialists. Wences regained use of his upper body, and his sexual function, but he would be in a wheelchair forever. When he returned to Mexico, Miguel gave him a Dodge Charger and $10,000, told him that he didn’t have to work anymore, and paid him $1,000 every two weeks. H
e stayed in Mexico for four years, managing pain with tequila and pot, until the American legal system tracked him through cell phone communications.
When it was the defense attorney’s turn to cross-examine Wences, the attorney asked him, “Why did you decide to cooperate with the government?”
“I think it’s the right thing for my country,” Wences said.
“And you’re hoping to get something less than thirty years, correct?
“Yes.”
“And you want that because being in a wheelchair in prison isn’t easy?”
“No. No it’s not easy.”
It wasn’t easy. At the medical unit in Butner, North Carolina, the same federal prison complex that houses Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, Wences was surrounded by the dying—men who were too fat or too old or too diseased for the regular pen. He fell asleep at night to the sounds of moaning. His kids visited, but Wences didn’t like that. “Why are you here, Daddy?” they asked. “Because I played with guns,” he said. “Don’t play with guns.” In prison, Wences became hooked on opioids, the cheapest way to maintain a cripple. Still, he was thankful “to have a date.” Wences got a few years off his sentence for the murder of Bruno Orozco, a charge that turned federal (and more serious) because he and Gabriel crossed the border to commit a violent crime—Interstate Travel in Aid of Racketeering (ITAR)—and because Wences used a silencer on an assault weapon. He’d be out of prison when he was fifty.
Only Gabriel declined to testify, which made it easier for the government to position him as the crucial link between the Wolf Boys and Zeta brass. When asked, every snitch—Bart, Wences, Richard, and others—confirmed that Gabriel was their leader in Laredo.
When Rocky, the DEA informant, took the stand, the defense attorney tallied the DEA’s payments to him, which, by 2008, came to $212,000—less than Robert Garcia’s total Laredo PD salary for the same three-year period. The defense attorney asked Rocky, “Would you agree that in December of 2005 you were arrested for assaulting your wife? And that in March of 2006 your wife brought to the attention of DEA the fact that you had gone on a cocaine binge for three days and were again extremely violent to her?”
“Yes, sir,” Rocky said.
“And you would agree that violence toward your wife could be a criminal act that would violate your agreement with DEA?”
“True, sir. Yes, sir.”
Accustomed to this defense strategy, Angel Moreno addressed it in his closing argument. The defense, Moreno told the jury, was correct. You didn’t want to trust these witnesses with your kids. You didn’t want to trust them to sell you a car. You certainly didn’t want to trust them to give you surgery. But that’s not why they were testifying. They were there to explain how the Company works, how drug trafficking works, how assassinations work—and, in those operations, they were experts. “I’m sure the defendant wishes this would’ve happened in the Vatican,” Moreno concluded, “and that every witness was a priest or a nun. Folks, you can’t have angels as witnesses for crimes committed in hell.”
The minor Wolf Boy’s first trial resulted in a hung jury. He lost the retrial and got life in prison.
32
Hypocritical Bastards
In prison, lots of reporters visited Bart: the History Channel, Investigation Discovery, Fox, the New York Times.
His story suited a smorgasbord of prerogatives. The Fox correspondent, the sole female to interview Bart, became emotional. Another journalist compared Bart to child soldiers in Africa, and referenced Ishmael Beah, who, as a teenager, slaughtered villagers during Sierra Leone’s civil war. After living in a rehabilitation camp, Beah flew to New York, addressed the United Nations, attended college in the States, and became a bestselling memoirist. Bart wondered if he could produce a similar literary work—something that fell between Beah’s A Long Way Gone and A House in the Sky, the harrowing memoir by Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout about her captivity in Somalia. He even had a title picked out: Memoirs of a Teenage Assassin.
Bart had an uncanny way of intuiting what his questioners wanted. In some interviews, he acted callous and proud. Even though the Zetas wanted to kill him for taking his case to trial, he remained in awe of Miguel, the general who led by example. In moments of cold bravado (“Too bad for them,” referring to his victims), Bart’s voice remained soft and melodic even when his words were menacing, noted the Times. The Times reporter observed how Bart’s “countenance shifted back and forth, from the deadpan of a street tough with emotionless eyes to the oddly innocent laugh and smile of a boy for whom everything is a lark.” In other interviews, Bart described atrocities with an air of reluctance, haltingly, as if wrestling with trauma and trying to make sense of repressed memories. In this mode—which, he learned, was a hit with his public—he expressed glassy-eyed regret and portrayed himself as a victim of “that world.”
In 2011, Bart found new inspiration. He began exchanging letters with a mother of two in Massachusetts. Ten years Bart’s senior, Eryca cried after watching the documentaries about him. She liked the devilish flames he tattooed around his eyes. She wanted some kind of relationship.
It seemed to Bart that her intentions were pure, but how could he be sure? He had a lot of time to do. He didn’t want to start something that wouldn’t be finished. He asked Eryca never to lie to him. A friendship, he wrote to her, should be based on trust, and earned, not just summoned upon request. He opened up. He explained that he was more of a lovey-dovey type. He said he never got tired of listening to R&B, but he also liked “instrumental music” such as Mozart. In school, which he attended till sixth grade, he was good in biology and biochemistry. He had always wanted to be a medical examiner who performed postmortem examinations. But shit, he wrote, he didn’t want her to think he was a sicko. He certainly wasn’t the monster they portrayed him as; in his circle, it was important to remember, it was either kill or be killed. But Bart never killed an innocent person, he said. It was a job. They were all just price tags with different prices on them. But yes, it was true. Where he was from, “Bart” was a feared name. When Eryca had problems with her ex, Bart told her she needed to buy herself a gun and blow his brains out. They fell in love and agreed to get married.
Eryca told Bart that she obtained something called “a proxy marriage,” in which her sister stood in for Bart at the ceremony. But she never produced documentation when Bart asked for it. She wrote that she was looking at options for in vitro fertilization, and researched whether Bart could send his semen through the mail.
In one of Bart’s TV segments, with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Eryca told the camera, “He became close with Miguel Treviño, he became real close with the big boss. He gave Rosalio the big jobs. . . . Miguel Treviño, he was a monster. The stuff he forced Rosalio to do should never have been forced on anybody.” On Twitter, Eryca reveled in her new status as a “cartel wife.” But when the Center for Investigative Reporting aired her videotaped interview without concealing her identity, she sued for $500,000 in damages. Since the 2013 broadcast, her complaint stated, “Ms. Almeciga has endured public humiliation . . . as well as the overwhelming fear that Los Zetas cartel at any moment may take retribution against her. . . . She has developed paranoia and has been treated for depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (‘PTSD’), specifically, symptoms which contributed to extreme anxiety, lack of sleep, constant nightmares, and so forth.” A federal judge said Eryca “is not a remotely credible witness” and dismissed the case.
More reporters came, and Bart grew irritated with them. They were only interested in his past. No one asked about his future, his plans to appeal and move out of the Texas prison system to a state where the Mexican Mafia wouldn’t bother him. (He’d been stabbed in prison as retaliation for the Moises Garcia hit.) But the journalists did give Bart an idea. What if he used an interview to make people see how he’d changed? That could help get his case reopened. He needed “a world-wide publicity.” He wondered if a major media outlet might ev
en pay for the interview. Then, to demonstrate his benevolence, he could donate the money to the families of his victims.
He connected with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, who made time for Bart in 2013, after Miguel Treviño’s capture in Mexico. Bart prepared extensively. But when the CNN piece aired on Anderson Cooper 360, he wasn’t happy. Describing what he claimed was his first hit for Miguel, Bart told Lavandera: “I had to do it. What other options do I have? If I don’t do it, I know what’s gonna happen to me.” He continued: “The first day I had to take someone’s life—that’s a day I’m never gonna forget. ’Cause after that I didn’t have no life.”
“But you kept on killing after that first time,” Lavandera pointed out.
“I had to,” Bart replied. “That’s what a lot of people don’t understand.”
In voice-over, Lavandera said: “That’s what Reta says now. But in this police interrogation video [with Robert Garcia] the young killer relished the deadly power he wielded. . . .”
The editing trick that Lavandera pulled, Bart felt, was “a bitch move.” Why, after Bart talked about being coerced into executing a helpless man, did Lavandera have to play the interview of the Superman bullshit, then mention the “facial markings” even after Bart told “that hypocritical bastard” that the tattoos had nothing to do with the cartel lifestyle?
By contrast, Gabriel’s frankness with Lavandera—“I guess I was trying to put an image out there”—didn’t help Bart’s cause.
As Bart’s options closed, and media interest faded, advice arrived from the female Fox reporter who interviewed him.
She didn’t pretend to understand how lonely and depressed Bart felt, and wished there was something she could say or do to make it better. No one was worthless, she wrote. Everyone possessed the ability to contribute to society. If Bart looked a bit harder, she had no doubt that he, too, would find a way. The sooner he moved away from the old world he lived in, the more freedom he’d have. That world gave him a false sense of power and belonging. Now he was going through withdrawal. But he’d rebuild his life, of that she was sure. It might take time, but he’d get there.