Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  LIKE BART, GABRIEL WAS CLASSIFIED as a security threat and a high-profile inmate, and housed in a segregated unit where he saw other inmates infrequently. His days began at six o’clock, when an officer knocked on his cell and screamed, “Get your ass up!”

  At eleven, he went outside for an hour of recreation in one of six fenced-in boxes. In his first state prison, he was housed on the same segregated tier as his old rap idol, South Park Mexican. They played a form of basketball, tipping the ball back and forth over the fence. SPM reinforced what Gabriel always believed—that the star was fooled by female fans who dressed up to appear older than they were. In fact, SPM got forty-five years for sneaking into his daughter’s bedroom and performing oral sex on her nine-year-old friend.

  Gabriel was caught between the image for which he had sacrificed everything and the better person he believed existed beneath it. To embrace the latter, he needed to disown the former. He could start by enrolling in a prison course called GRAD, Gang Renunciation and Disassociation. But it wasn’t so easy. He was in a prison gang called HPL. Zetas were not well received in prison, and Gabriel was loath to relinquish the protection HPL provided. Besides, the old image was useful.

  Since he didn’t talk much, people often mistook him as weak. Others were tattooed from head to toe and rarely got disrespected. Aside from four tattoos of Santa Muerte on his back, arm, and legs, he didn’t have many visible tattoos, except for “Christina” on his wrist and a second pair of eyes on his eyelids. People often tried to “throw game” on him. The worst were the Latinos from up north; they’d rather associate with the blacks than with “straight-up Mexicans” from South Texas, never minding that their parents all came from the same places: El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico. When Gabriel got moved to a new unit, he looked for the “gossip guy, the girl” and talked with him about “the cartel stuff.” Then Gabriel sent articles, and the gossip spread.

  That fool a killa for real!

  That fool square bidness!

  In his cell he did push-ups and sit-ups. He read magazines and legal texts. Random people wrote to him, mainly women and journalists. But they tended to disappear after a letter or two. One correspondent kept at it.

  33

  Another Media Guy

  It would be a stretch to say I was lured into a Mexican drug cartel by a poor economy and the decline of my legitimate business. But there is a connection. At thirty-one, I’d cycled through two careers, first abandoning law for journalism, then landing at the Wall Street Journal, where I covered legal stories. Following the paper’s acquisition by Rupert Murdoch, I, along with two dozen other reporters and editors, lost my job—laid off, we were told, for non-performance-related reasons. I filed for unemployment insurance and stopped my Journal subscription. Which is why I was at home on a June morning in 2009 to fetch the New York Times from the stoop of my apartment building.

  The paper’s national section contained an article, by James C. McKinley Jr., headlined MEXICAN CARTELS LURE AMERICAN TEENS AS KILLERS. It was a story about two teenage thugs from Laredo, Texas, childhood friends who worked as assassins for the Zetas—a vicious drug cartel shaped by a man who, I would later be convinced, was among the most brutal warlords in modern history.

  I read the article several times, absorbing its details as my imagination filled in the gaps. I was fascinated and horrified. I understood that children—Mexican children—regularly died fighting each other for the right to supply the American drug habit. I’d traveled to Sinaloa, and visited the “cartel cemetery,” Jardines del Humaya, where many of the bodies entombed are boys, their hammy mausoleums decorated with cartoons and imagery from the movies they enjoyed as kids. But when it came to child soldiers, didn’t the river divide the godforsaken land of cartels and corruption from the law and order of a drug-free America?

  I read every book I could find on the history of drugs and Latin American cartels, starting with earlier books such as Desperados (1988), Drug Lord (1990), and Killing Pablo (2001).

  Many of these books focused on the exploits of notorious smugglers and cartel leaders, those psychotic billionaires, like Chapo Guzmán, who landed on the pages of Forbes. Their exotic images made them obvious media curios, the new Pablo Escobars of Latin America; and, just like Escobar, who also made Forbes and whose grave site is one of Colombia’s top tourist attractions, their glamour, audacity, and wealth sugarcoated their legacies and the atrocities that elevated them. They dug air-conditioned tunnels beneath the border and evaded capture via plastic surgery. They were rarely seen, yet their myths outlived them. America fetishized cartel mayhem but ignored its roots and consequences.

  What about the young foot soldiers who pass unnoticed through American malls, I wondered. Who were they?

  I set the Times article aside, along with several boxes of secondary research, and wrote a different book, about the online-dating business and how it affected modern romance. I would spend the next two years writing about love, not war.

  But the cartel refused to leave me alone. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabriel and Bart.

  In 2013, the young men popped up in the news again when Miguel was apprehended. I chose this time to reach out to the lobos, hoping their former boss’s incarceration would make them willing to open up about their pasts. I introduced myself as a journalist who wanted to write a book about them. I apologized for not being more specific. I wasn’t sure what direction the project would take.

  I WASN’T INTERESTED IN CHRONICLING the history of cartels. The Zetas, with their roots in one of Mexico’s elite combat units, stood for something new about the escalating drug war. But no particular cartel seemed to matter all that much more than another. I didn’t care about the sociology of crime, the manhunts, or the toxic tangle of geopolitics that nourishes drug war violence on both sides of the border. Outrage over Mexico’s endemic corruption, and the hypocrisy and willful ignorance of U.S. lawmakers—these, too, were well lodged in the literature.

  The object of my inquiry was narrower: What is it like to be an employee of a global drug-trafficking organization? How do you apply for the job? What passes for entry-level training? How do you climb the ladder? What is the psychology of a young operative who kills daily? Are they all psychopaths? (Would that make sense, statistically?) How is he paid? How does he spend it? What kinds of women date him? How does he relate to friends? How does he know who his friends are? Why is the cartel life sending teenage boys and young men to their deaths at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world?

  I wondered if Gabriel and Bart could lead me through this territory, to places I could never go, and bring the war home, contextualizing it not in shifting gangs and warring drug lords but in the unglamorous human terms of delinquency and delusion. If Gabriel and Bart were harbingers of the drug war’s looming threat, I wanted to know what culture shaped these teenage serial killers, and what happened when the American justice system confronted the homegrown cartel operative. I suspected their stories contained some clue about where our country is heading, the evolving nature of the border, and how things got this bad.

  I BEGAN EXCHANGING LETTERS WITH the two young men, who by then were in their mid-twenties. Bart initially declined my overture. “My life story is priceless to me,” he wrote. “People will only taint it by telling it their own way, not the way things actually transpired. People use people, Mr. Slater. I have been used by medias only to fulfill their own personal needs.” I visited Bart in prison. We spoke for eight hours. He told me stories. He said Miguel Treviño never did drugs and lived mostly on water and yogurt. Bart was thoughtful, inquisitive, and manipulative. He asked what I would do if Treviño were standing next to me. We laughed at my answer. He warmed to the idea of telling me about his past. I went home. We wrote for three months, until Bart transferred to Laredo for another debriefing by the U.S. attorneys. When he returned to the state prison system, he was alternately unwilling and unable to recall his life with any clarity. Our correspondence fizzled out.
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br />   My experience with Gabriel was different. After I visited him in prison, he wrote: “I do not mind sharing my life story, Dan. See, I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. But some media people have approached me with lies.” He didn’t like how reporters told him one thing and wrote another. They’d say, for example, that they were going to send a message to kids about the consequences of the cartel lifestyle, then write only about the sensational aspects. Nor did he appreciate how TV stations baited him with offers to tell his side of the story, then portrayed him only as a monster. “You come across as honest and are a likable guy. We’ll see where it leads on your project.”

  Over the next two and a half years we covered every phase of his life from childhood through incarceration. The doomed narrative of his crew, corroborated by others, traversed a vast landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes. This wasn’t Jeffrey Dahmer. Nor was it some marginal Brooklyn underworld of goodfellas and wiseguys. This was life in a narco-state, the underworld enveloping the overworld in Mexico and America. It was the normalization of murder and mayhem as business as usual, and it was chilling.

  Gabriel and I exchanged more than eight hundred pages of writing. It was clear, from the first sentences, that his ninth-grade education belied a natural intelligence burnished by prison reading. His writing style was a high-low blend: From riffing on scripture, history, and current events, he’d transition to a detailed description of how to hold down a plaza, raid a house, knife an opponent to death, or incinerate a body with maximum efficiency. His letters drew me in.

  Eight years in a cell, with life to go, had brought the young man perspective. He wrote about the “irrational pride” of men from his community, about the “devouring ego” that disguises low self-esteem, and about how the need to be the Man drives an entire region of men to such destructive ends. In one letter expressing remorse over the pain he inflicted on his mother, who sometimes wishes Gabriel were dead, he signed off, “da’ self-forsaken disowned G-man!”

  There was a limit to his insight. He was a killer; and, for whatever authentic remorse he felt, his correspondence contained its share of dissembling. He insisted the Zetas had a rule about sparing the families of their victims. The details of his own crimes revealed this claim as delusion. “I know I’ll get hammered for this, but MT is a good man,” he wrote, referring to Miguel. “Serious. Stoic. Never degrades anyone. Looks out for the people. Loyal and trustworthy to friends. Enemy to enemies.”

  Absurd as his misplaced respect could be, it was, in a way, what I had sought out: the allure of cartel logic. In Gabriel’s willingness to correspond—in his candor and wry perspective, as well as his evasions and lies—lay an opportunity, finally, to learn what I’d always wanted to know: What is the life as lived?

  For the first year, a cordial but intimate tone marked our letters. Inside jokes developed between us. Christina, whom he referred to, ironically, as “the love of my life,” was known as “LOML.” Bart, who angered the Zetas by taking his case to trial, was “persona non grada,” or “the PNG,” or sometimes just “the Midget.” Of the books I sent him, his favorite was Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark expedition, and The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. My favorite book of 2014—The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace—bored him. He spent his life around blacks in the prison system, and knew their struggle well. What was the big deal about a black guy from poverty who went to Yale and died selling drugs?

  Like any long-distance relationship, the temperature of our back-and-forth fluctuated. We persevered through misunderstandings, spats, and reconciliations. As I tried to reconstruct the elaborate criminal existence he led in just nineteen years, and understand how his life intersected the war raging around him, many inevitable inquiries provoked tension between us. After a string of letters posing questions about what he’d told law enforcement, about why he said this or that, or implicated associates, and about details of indicted crimes, he grew suspicious of my motivations and wondered if I wasn’t just “another media guy” with an agenda, another writer looking to profit off the sensational narrative generated by “your colleagues.”

  Our relationship got worse before it got better. When I stumbled on evidence of a murder uncharged, we were at odds again. “I was not involved in any way and have no knowledge of that incident,” he wrote. “Questions within that context are irrelevant to me.” A curt and unproductive correspondence swallowed several months.

  “Respect my gangsta” was a phrase he sprinkled throughout one letter. His real concern, it turned out, was his adherence to the code. When he was arrested for the final time, he refused to testify, or do “the pigs’ homework.” He walked out of meetings with U.S. attorneys who could’ve lessened his sentence while his crew curried favor by helping the government make its case. There were federal trials going on, and other snitches testifying, including several of his superiors in the Company. When Zeta leaders were extradited and given sweet deals in exchange for intelligence on fellow capos and drug lords, Gabriel remained mum. He was a man of principle, a son of God. He was no snitch. “Respect my gangsta.”

  Our work resumed. But by then my research had expanded far beyond him.

  MAYBE IT WAS A GNAWING sense of the writing life having yielded little more than a better understanding of my native communities—Wall Street, the courts, their associated provinces. Maybe it was the acute discomfort with my comfort: newly married and settled in rural New England, with farmers’ markets, fuel-efficient vehicles, and a flexible freelance schedule. Or maybe it was something more specific, such as my own past as a casual pot smoker since the age of seventeen, someone whose serious mistakes rarely earned serious consequence. I felt a pull. I heard a voice telling me to go before caution set in for good.

  I began traveling back and forth to Laredo. I interviewed Gabriel’s family, friends, and girlfriends. I visited and corresponded with several of his childhood friends who became his Zeta associates and are also in prison—including Richard Jasso, Wences Tovar, and other Wolf Boys who do not appear in Wolf Boys. (I excluded a significant Wolf Boy, Jesse Gonzales, from the narrative, because Jesse couldn’t be interviewed; he was killed in a Nuevo Laredo jail in 2009.) I spoke with one of Gabriel’s rivals. I exchanged a year of letters with one of Miguel Treviño’s bodyguards. Most of them, like Gabriel, were engaging guys; smart, funny, and genuinely dangerous.

  I drew on interrogations; wiretaps; more than fifteen thousand pages of court testimony across ten trials; and stacks of informant interviews and confidential reports detailing Company operations, personalities, and the conflict with the Sinaloa Cartel—the battle that started the war, set the stomach-churning standard for violence, and defined the lives of Gabriel Cardona and Robert Garcia.

  I spent much time with Robert, his family, and his law enforcement colleagues. From illegal immigrant to migrant worker to military engineer to one of the border’s top investigators, Robert was a fascinating counterpoint to the Wolf Boys. The Mexican immigrant who became the American cop busted the natural-born Americans who became the cartel crooks. Robert’s arc of lost innocence, from fervent drug warrior to disillusioned critic, seemed to contain the entire story of American drug prohibition.

  When Robert returned to the street, as a sergeant, in 2014, I rode along on patrol, usually during the night shift. We monitored crime reports and went where we wanted. A woman totaled her Mercedes coming around a corner drunk, then walked home before passing out. A disturbance at a rent-by-the-week motel revealed strange happenings between a man, wife, and their adult son. A gang kidnapped a rival gang member. When a lime truck was taken to Customs and dismantled, it turned out to be a legit conveyor of produce. Every night was different. No car insurance. Drug possession. An infant rolled off the couch and dislocated her shoulder. At a junior high party of cigarette smokers and curfew violators, one underage drinker looked at my jeans and T-shirt and asked, “Are you CIA?”

  At 4:30 a.m., after a brea
kfast of chilaquiles and coffee with the other sergeants at Danny’s, I would fade into the bucket seat, the city moving by in slow motion like a dream. Up and down Clark, Calton, and Del Mar, round and round the Bob Bullock Loop. Spindly signs sparking neon lights flashed by like wildfire, Whataburger W’s stacked orange streaks. Predawn peace.

  I traveled to Matamoros, Mexico City, and Veracruz with a retired DEA agent; for two days, we sat in the old Veracruz café, La Parroquia, drinking lechero and interviewing reporters about how media corruption works along the Gulf Coast. Back in Laredo, I tagged along with officers who patrolled specific ghettos. In the Heights—north and east of Lazteca—where TAMIU president Ray Keck once lived as a boy, during the 1950s, when the neighborhood was middle-class suburban, we patrolled what is now a refuge of heroin addicts and prostitutes. We pulled over ladies of the night. We called in female cops to conduct cavity searches on women like the white trick from Mississippi whose powdered face failed to conceal the effects of a bad heroin batch. I rode with detectives from other divisions, such as Chuckie Adan, Robert’s old homicide partner, who now ran Laredo PD’s undercover drug unit. I interviewed potential informants, raided a stash house in Saint Baby, searched for drugs in statues of Santa Muerte, and watched shirtless boys carted off. I went to Laredo nightclubs with Gabriel’s brothers. I shadowed Robert’s son, Eric, while he worked his second job as a bouncer at one of those clubs. I attended barbecues at the homes of agents from DEA and Border Patrol. I would hang out with hoodrats one night, drink with prosecutors the next. Angel Moreno often asked, incredulous, “How are you vetting what these guys in prison are telling you?” I bought beer from Mami Chula’s Drive-Thru, and spoke with the underage girls serving six-packs in French maid outfits. I attended a Sunday cruise, hung out at Martin High, and watched a football game on Friday night.