by Dan Slater
One night, I drove into the Heights with Luis, Gabriel’s older brother, purchased an eight-ball, went back to my hotel, and tried cocaine for the second time in my life.
Luis served most of his twenties in prison for two marijuana smuggling cases. Out of prison for a year when I met him for the first time, in the fall of 2014, he was living with La Gaby’s extended family in San Antonio, and frying chicken at Popeye’s while finishing an associate’s degree in information technology. In the hotel, Luis and I mingled lines of coke with bottles of Heineken.
We talked about the cycle of domestic violence; about La Gaby’s good intentions and how she was overwhelmed raising four boys. We talked about Laredo politicians, and how easy it was to steal from uneducated people. We talked about the intoxicating effect of power on a poor kid; and about how Gabriel mistook fear for respect. On the third beer, Luis became emotional, enumerating the steps he thinks he could’ve taken to rescue his volatile brother from fate. Such as that time La Gaby kicked Gabriel out of the house after finding his Mini-14 in the closet and Gabriel responded by taking a baseball bat to the Malibu she bought to repair and flip. “I should’ve done something,” Luis said. “My mom favored me because I was the oldest. For my fifteenth birthday, she gave me a gold necklace and a hundred bucks. When Gabriel turned fifteen, he didn’t get anything. He said, ‘Hey, so you’re not going to give me anything?’ And then . . .” Luis broke down before he could finish the story.
BOOKS BEGIN WITH AN IMPULSE, then take off, like firecrackers, in unpredictable ways. I set out to investigate the cartel experience and observe the effects of the drug war on American life, but found other notions, too. As the 2016 election approached, and a raucous presidential hopeful made his own theater on Laredo’s political stage, the struggles of Laredo seemed to resonate with a growing segment of this nation—an America that existed beyond the op-ed pages’ daily concerns of college admissions and corporate scandals. An America of fatherless families and unintegrated families and sprawling immigrant families all trying to survive, in this case, on the sinking edge of an empire that’s built and maintained off their backs yet wants to keep them out.
What, I wondered, were their attitudes toward this country? Here, in one of the largest commercial ports in the world, with thousands of trucks zipping by each day like so much lost opportunity, what did people hold on to as they watched their dreams slip away? What did they believe had happened to their America? Or had it always been a mirage?
If I found answers to these questions, it wasn’t because Laredo was a border town, but because it was an American one. In the end, I wasn’t drawn to Gabriel and the Wolf Boys because they were accomplished criminals (they weren’t), or because they worked for one cartel or drug lord versus another. They were attractive subjects, rather, because they could’ve been any kids living at the juncture of American opulence and the dismal poverty required to preserve it.
If the Wolf Boys weren’t unique, what were they? The ungoverned boys who turn on one another in Lord of the Flies? In the abstract, yes. The cartel virus indicated troubling things about evil as a natural product of human consciousness. But it also underlined our own capacity as Americans to sustain obliviousness, to ignore the disease even as it spread.
Back in 2009, when Gabriel was being sentenced on his federal charges, his lawyer, arguing for something less than a life sentence, told the judge, “I don’t know what’s in my client’s mind. I’m not Freud. I’m sure Freud would have a field day. I don’t know what the motivation was. We don’t know what makes him tick. No one seems to really care.”
EPILOGUE
Early on a Saturday in 2015, the main international bridge connecting Laredo and Nuevo Laredo is shut down and cleared for a couple of hours as it is every year. February is a month of celebration in Laredo, with carnivals, parades, beauty pageants, car shows, cocktail hours, and fireworks—all in honor of George Washington’s birthday. No one seems to know why one of the most marginalized cities in America puts on the biggest George Washington celebration in the country, only that it’s long been a tradition.
The month of partying concludes on this morning with the Abrazo Ceremony. Two American children from Laredo, dressed in colonial-era costumes, walk across the international bridge beneath a military-style canopy of salutes, swords, and flags; halfway across, they embrace two children from Nuevo Laredo who wear the Mexican equivalent of period dress. Dignitaries, patrons, and politicians from both countries align on their respective ends of the bridge, like a cross-border showdown of love.
A highly ranked U.S. federal official is in attendance. Gil Kerlikowske walks toward the makeshift stage in the middle of the bridge. Ruddy-nosed and square-jawed, with narrow eyes and thin lips that turn down at the corners, Kerlikowske looks like a caricature of officialdom, a Fred Willard–type comedian playing a serious bureaucrat. After a policing career in Florida, New York, and Washington State, he accepted Barack Obama’s request, in 2009, to become the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. As drug czar, Kerlikowske fought the legalization movement, argued that marijuana was dangerous, and that Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was one of the great successes of the war on drugs. In 2014, the U.S. Senate confirmed Kerlikowske as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the second-highest revenue-earning agency in the country behind the IRS.
Kerlikowske hasn’t been to the Abrazo Ceremony since 2000, when air force jets blessed the event with a flyover. Walking toward the stage, he laments that the jets have been replaced with buzzing drones that will film this year’s hug from on high. In his keynote address, he says the goodwill exchanged between the sister cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo reinforces a strong bond, rich with patriotism. He calls the two-thousand-mile border between Mexico and America the greatest international neighborhood in the world.
The children hug.
As they retreat, a volley of gunfire in Nuevo Laredo’s middle distance shatters the ceremonial silence. On the bridge, the disturbance is largely ignored. The reverence of spectators tightens. Robert Garcia, one of several hundred law enforcement employees making overtime to cover the event, smothers a smile.
These days, Robert drives around in a red Chevy Avalanche, a blue Suburban, a silver BMW—“seizure cars,” originally acquired by drug dealers. Not discreet. But they send the right message.
It’s been a decade since Operation Prophecy, and Robert has parted with the photos of Gabriel Cardona that long adorned his office. His own boys turned out all right. Trey is an army gunner who defuses bombs in the Middle East. Eric is one of the top Harley-Davidson mechanics in the Rio Grande Valley.
Robert speaks at conferences around the country, explaining to law enforcement colleagues what he’s gotten from his intelligence gathering and what’s being done at the border to combat the cartels. For years he believed that the information gleaned from watching the kids in the safe house mattered. “We got to see how these guys operate in their environment,” he would say ambiguously, but then at some point he stopped believing it. He hopes the Treviño brothers will be extradited so they can make deals with Angel Moreno, or someone like him. They’ll give up information about long-established smuggling routes, and variations on familiar corruption.
“We must like the cartels,” he now says. “We must in some way want them, or need them. It’s crazy. It’s like we need the evil to determine the good. The yin and the yang.”
In Robert’s world, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. In 2007, his former boss, Laredo police chief Agustin Dovalina, pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges related to the kickbacks he took from the Mexican Mafia in return for looking the other way on the gang’s money-laundering activities at its slot casinos. Indicted with Dovalina were the cops who brought him the kickback scheme: the lieutenant from the stolen-property division; and the sergeant from narcotics—a cop who lived on Lincoln Street, a block away from the Cardonas.
In 2008, Robert
attended the National Forensic Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, known as the Body Farm. For ten weeks he studied chemicals, photography, bombs, and the art of restoring serial numbers. When he returned to Laredo he taught his own crime-scene processing curriculum at the police academy, but discovered he hated teaching. He didn’t have the patience to sit back and let students make their own mistakes. In 2012, after eight years in homicide, he requested a transfer. The cartel had returned to its old ways, hiring more seasoned gangsters in Laredo to carry out executions. But overall, there was a lull in murders, and Robert got bored with the mom-and-pop killings, where wife kills husband and there’s no investigation to put together. When he started using the phrase “good murders” to describe desirable cases, he figured it was time to quit.
Now, after twenty-five years, he feels done with Laredo. Too hot, not green enough. All he knows is cops, crooks, and lawyers. He has $25,000 left to pay off on the house, plus payments on the new SUV for his parents, and the college funds for three grandchildren. On the side, he makes $800 per day for speaking appearances, and $40 an hour handling nighttime security at construction sites. On Saturday nights, from midnight to six, he sits in a car, reads books about astronomy, and does homework for online classes in criminology.
He rides the circuit as often as he can, driving 140 miles northwest along the border to see his parents in Eagle Pass, then north to Ronnie’s parents, who moved from Arizona to Kerrville, Texas, where they bought eleven acres on rolling green hills. Despite considerable wealth accumulated in the bar business, they live modestly in a three-bedroom mobile. From the moment he steps out of the car in Kerrville to the moment he leaves, Robert fixes things, mows, and clears land for the retirement home he wants to build for him and Ronnie. Watching Robert absorb himself in labor, his father-in-law thinks that whatever he does for a living must be boring, or involve too much desk work. Where else would that energy come from?
As head of PD’s intelligence unit, he pursues Laredo’s largest drug-dealing family, the Melendez clan. They own a square block of houses in South Laredo—Saint Baby. Robert’s break comes when the Melendez patriarch stiffs the carpenter who built custom fireplaces, outdoor bars, and stash compartments. Bereft, the carpenter decides to collect an informant’s fee from Laredo PD instead. It isn’t Operation Prophecy, but the Melendez case will put more hides on the wall for Angel Moreno. What does the case mean for Robert?
A Melendez son recently purchased a yellow Corvette.
“MY TWENTIES HAVE COME AND gone,” Gabriel writes. “I pray every day for the people I’ve hurt and the lives I can never repair or return. I’ve had a lot of time to wonder about where my violent streak came from. Dr. Freud would surely identify some trauma in childhood from which I built up coraje that begged for release. But I feel no anger toward my parents, not even my father. I believe my parents are good people and I believe I am a good person. I speak as honestly as I can. I share with others and respect their opinions.”
In Laredo, Christina works as a receptionist at a medical office and raises her girl, the daughter she had with an old boyfriend who is also now in prison. Gabriel makes a Valentine’s Day card for Christina’s daughter: “Be good little princess and always listen to your mother.” Christina’s brother urges her to throw away Gabriel’s letters. Since Gabriel prayed to Santa Muerte, her brother says, demons lurk in the drawer where she keeps the letters. The letters, he says, are why her life isn’t going so great.
Life in Lazteca remains unchanged. La Gaby is caught bringing $25,000 in illegal proceeds to Mexico. Her third husband is sentenced to a year in prison for smuggling a ton of marijuana. Her brother, Uncle Raul, succumbs to fate; when his nephew’s name no longer ensures impunity, Raul is killed by the Zetas during a barroom spat in Boystown.
Luis, nearing the end of that associate’s degree, says he plans to apply for college in San Antonio, until he breaks parole by crossing into Mexico to see a young woman for whom he’s fallen. He pays for her to be smuggled across, but by the time she arrives in Laredo, pregnant with Luis’s third child, Luis is back inside for six months on the parole violation and looking at a possible charge for conspiracy to distribute meth. If Luis gets career-offender status, he could be looking at heavy time.
Gabriel’s younger brother narrowly avoids a felony murder charge after driving to a home invasion that ends with his own guy dead. Police expect him to go missing eventually. At twenty-four he’ll leave six children born to three women.
That all of this is standard for the hood doesn’t make it easier for Gabriel to watch: the disintegration of the family for whom he took so much pride in providing.
But the most painful piece is perhaps also the most predictable: Uncle Raul’s only child, Raulito, the sweet-faced boy whom Gabriel knew only as an infant. Raulito is now ten and lives with his grandmother in San Antonio. She wants him to be successful. But he talks about bazookas, guns, killing people. He doesn’t get straightened in school. He kicks the teachers. He kicked a little girl. School administrators placed him in a room alone until his grandmother came to get him. But he wouldn’t go with her. So the police handcuffed him and took him home. Gabriel wonders: What will become of Raulito?
They take the boy to see a shrink. Well, gee. How do you think Raulito’s mind is functioning right now? The boy knows his dad is gone. Knows his mom left. He writes his mom letters. They go unanswered. He talks to the whore only when she calls to ask for money from the grandmother. Do you think Raulito feels rejected?
In prison, Gabriel reads history, mythology, psychology. His knowledge of the world expands. Study sharpens his mind while isolation dulls his senses. In some ways he grows. The arrogant boy becomes self-aware, pokes fun at his own pretensions, jokes about having been used by Miguel and the Company. He translates entire Mexican books into English, sending them off chapter by chapter to the Jewish journalist—“Slaterooni,” or “Slaquiao”—who wants to know everything, whom Gabriel addresses as “Daniel” when he has a serious point to make, scolds for having “bad habits” when the journalist does airhead things like send letters without confirming receipt of Gabriel’s previous letter.
He also studies law, and mails filings to government offices. He works hard at it. But there are gaps in his understanding. “There wasn’t even a restraint,” he argues regarding the aggravated kidnapping of Bruno Orozco. “The acts occurred in broad daylight. A struggle took place. The victim refused to get restrained. His death was his restraint.”
Gabriel’s prison sentences are unfair, he believes. If, as the judge said, the G-man has no remorse, then why, knowing he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison—a place full of envy, anger, frustration, oppression, and selfishness—would he take Bible study classes? The Bible gives peace, makes you a better man. The Bible changes people. It teaches you to love others. It teaches you the history of how the world was before, and how it was after. It’s a wisdom book. He don’t need to bow down to no bitch-ass judge to get forgiveness from God.
But if you don’t believe he’s changed, just ask Mr. Tenorio, the counselor in the Laredo federal prison that housed Gabriel in the aftermath of Orange Blossom. Tenorio walked by their tank every day, took Gabriel to his office. They had great conversations. Tenorio said he didn’t believe Gabriel deserved life. Gabriel is reminded of Tenorio when he reads The Lucifer Effect . . . circumstances, conformity, blind obedience to authority. A boy became his environment. He got placed in Lara Academy, which was full of shit. No options. No means to get money. Slang and bang. Put any kid in that environment. Give him a couple nicks and dimes to sell. He loves the easy money. Give him a gun to protect himself. He wants to feel the rush of firing it. Get him shot. He retaliates. And when he’s immersed in that world, where he’s done it once, he wants to advance in responsibility and power.
“Out there I wore the clown gown of poverty,” Gabriel writes, “wasting $2,000 a week on fashion alone. I was the aggressive guy who’d get the job done a todo a
costa. Only retrospectively do I see the insecure kid. Back then I thought of myself as a businessman. I could justify any act considered normal within that business. It’s a culture of men who lack self-restraint, and who let little things that affect their pride get in the way of a calm life.”
One thing he does not want is glorification—to give youngsters the sense that what happened with the Wolf Boys is cool. He hears about these school shootings. The copycat shit that happens when the criminal world gets sensationalized. If anything, he wants youngsters to see how stupid it is to try to fit in, to try to be someone you’re not. A fucking follower. A gangster wannabe. It’s not a good life. It’s not worth it. You let a lot of people down, people who look up to you. He personally let a lot of people down. His football team. His classmates. His beloved grandfather, who, on his deathbed, told Gabriel and Luis to tuck in their shirts, keep going straight, and always listen to their mother. In the months after their grandfather passed, Luis did straighten out. He made it to senior year and only needed two credits to graduate when Gabriel and the Lazteca homies pulled him back in and he dropped out.
Of all things, Gabriel is broken because of his little cousin Raulito. Their grandmother takes Raulito to see Gabriel. Raulito asks why Gabriel is in prison. Gabriel says he misbehaved at school. Raulito smiles. “I already know about everything from the Internet.”
Dinner comes at three. He listens to the radio. ESPN. Fox. Dateline. Marshal Law: Texas.
The showers don’t come on until nine, which is late for him. So he hangs his white jumper over the door and turns on the sink. He puts a plastic pen tube under the faucet, kneels next to the sink, and redirects water to the side. He scrubs down, then lets his body air-dry as he pushes the water toward the drain. He stays kneeling—frozen in time but hoping to evolve beyond what he’s been—and begs for forgiveness.