All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  “He’s busy right now,” she says, her eyes narrowing.

  “I can wait.”

  She says it’s not a good idea for him to talk to anyone “on account of what happened,” so I write my phone number on the back of my receipt and depart for the nearest taqueria to debrief with Greg. Our new waitress is so bubbly, I ask what she thinks of her town’s latest bust.

  “People try to make life easy, but it goes to trash fast,” she says. “They could have made it, real slow, but they could have made it, pero no, they wanted to do it the fast way.”

  I ask if she knows him personally, and she says of course. “They’re our customers! We have all the drug dealers in here.”

  From there, we move on to the police station, an orange brick building without a single window. I press the intercom and ask to speak with someone. A sergeant with a goatee retrieves us. He escorts us down some hallways and up some stairwells and delivers us to the chief of police. Seated behind a wood desk, he so meets your expectations of a small-town Texas sheriff—cowboy hat, caterpillar moustache, prominently displayed gun and badge—you half-expect him to laugh and say, “Gotcha!” His office features two computers, a flat-screen TV, a new iPhone just out of the box, and a hanging cross. Elevator jazz echoes through the speakers. A detective joins us for the interview.

  “They were good tacos,” the sheriff attests. “I’ve eaten there quite a bit. I liked the barbacoa. But you can’t run a business and do that off to the side.”

  They tell me how they launched a six-month investigation and, on the day of the sting, dressed a dozen officers in SWAT gear and equipped them with machine guns.

  “We sent in two officers to have some tacos, and they acted as the eyeballs for the team before they showed up,” the sergeant says. “We were able to get to him before he destroyed the evidence. We’d been told by an informant that he’d try to throw the coke in the grease.”

  “If they throw it anywhere else, we’ll go on after it, like the toilet, but we can’t go after it in the grease ’cause we’ll get burned,” the detective explains.

  They found eleven baggies of coke inside a Folger’s coffee can, along with some Altoids. Then they went to the dealer’s house and found an additional 11.2 grams. I ask if cocaine is the drug of choice out here.

  “What we have here is coke, heroin, and marijuana,” the sergeant says. “It’s unusual to find crack. We’ve only had two cases in the last three years.”

  “What about meth?” I ask. A Breaking Bad devotee, I thought I had recognized some telltale signs of meth labs while driving around.

  “Meth is a white man and white lady’s drug,” the detective says. “Over 90 percent of this town is Hispanic, so we deal with what Mexico brings in. If you drive four miles north, you’ll see meth, but Hispanics just won’t take it.”

  “Why do so many people here sell in the first place?” I ask. “What started all of this?”

  A steak knife has surfaced on the sheriff’s desk. Fiddling with its blade, he muses, “We used to never lock our house here. You could hang your guns on the gun rack in the back of your truck and no one would touch them. Then things started going downhill. People started breaking in, dealing drugs. If you don’t have a job, you got to do whatever it takes to get drugs. Men will steal; women will do prostitution. It is an ongoing battle, and I see nothing in the world changing to stop that. I have friends who got hooked on drugs. Even a police officer did. One used to work at our department, got out, and started selling. They lost their job, their career, their family.”

  After a sober moment, the sheriff perks up. “But Chinese investors are coming down!” Cracking open a DVD case, he pops a disk into the player to show us a promotional video. Smiling Chinese men in business suits emerge on the flat-screen TV. He presses every button, yet he cannot get the DVD to play. Sighing, he turns around and asks if there is anything else I need to know.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, a text pops up on my phone: “Wondering if journalizing my life from a humble straight arrow life to the complex life it became has strong footing for publishing? Text me back.”

  I do, and he agrees to an online chat a few nights later. Nervous about his upcoming court date, he consents to some background questions but nothing that could compromise his case. I learn that he was raised in a “close to 100% Mexican” neighborhood called La Casa Blanca, or The White House. When I ask if that irony was intended, he writes that the name probably derived from the fact that white was the cheapest house paint available, so that’s what everyone used. His parents were migrant workers who followed the seasons to Colorado and New Mexico, picking cotton, cucumbers, and onions. Though he escaped this grueling work himself, most of his six siblings did not. He graduated high school with honors and completed sixty hours of community college, then took some leftover financial aid and opened his taco stand in 1994. He awoke each morning at four to warm up the grill and sold about 200 a day.

  “Have had up and downs but proud to say I pay for my kids doctor visits and never food stamps, etc.,” he writes.

  I ask for a proper sit-down interview, but he says we must wait. So I do. A few months later, I return to his taco stand to check in. He still can’t talk, he says, and with reason: I soon learn from the newspaper that he has pled guilty to drug possession and gotten sentenced to eight years’ deferred probation and a $2,000 fine. I allow half a year to pass, then return. His taco stand has been replaced by another. I walk inside and introduce myself. The new owners want nothing to do with me.

  Next door is a barber shop. A client wearing tight black jeans and cowboy boots is on his way out, so I allow the barber a moment’s rest before entering. A duct-taped barber chair stands in the middle of the room, surrounded by couches, end tables, television sets, barbells, and posters of Bruce Lee and Selena. Emerging from the storage room that doubles as his bedroom, the barber stops in his tracks. In his forties, he has a neatly trimmed moustache, pretty blue eyes, and deeply engrained laugh lines. Every curl on his head appears to have been individually coifed.

  “What, are you going to hold me up?” he jokes, seeing me cowering in the doorway. “Do you want all my money? I’ll get it right here.”

  When I mention my research, he grows even more animated. “I don’t know much about him, but you could write about me! I’m full of stories. I once chopped off a guy’s head and hung it right here.” He points at a long, thin stain streaming down the cinder block wall beneath an old sickle. Then he pulls out a machete from behind a cabinet and waves it above his head. For a half second, there is a quarter-chance he could be serious. Then he bursts out laughing.

  “I been in four movies already!” he says, pointing to a promotional poster for a flick called Honor Sin Patria.

  Once, he was driving through the desert with a producer and a few other actors in Nuevo Leon, he says, scouting for backdrops, when two trucks pulled them over. Four Zetas stepped out holding automatic rifles. They made them lie in the dirt and asked what the hell they were doing.

  “I started to think, man, I would rather go down fighting than just get shot in the back of the head, so I was about to jump one of ’em, but then the producer started talking about how we were just making a film.”

  After helping themselves to a camera and a handful of DVDs, the Zetas sent the crew on their way.

  “They are like gremlins,” the barber says. “You do away with one and another pops up. Now what they are doing, they aren’t getting their own hands dirty, they are hiring people to do it for them. They don’t actually live around here, though. They are just passing through.”

  I ask about his former neighbor, and he says he wasn’t surprised to learn about his side business.

  “A lot of people have asked me if I want to deal right here too. I wouldn’t even have to buy it myself. They would front me the drugs and I would just keep the profit. But I always say no. I don’t even do that stuff, and that’s the truth. I have got a lot of future ahead of me. I’ve got a new girlf
riend.”

  He proceeds to tell me all about her—how in high school he walked her home one day, and how she moved to Fort Worth the next. How they never said good-bye. How twenty years passed, during which they married other lovers and raised families of their own, but how a few weeks ago, she returned to town for a funeral and they ran into each other at the cash register at Taqueria Guadalajara and learned they had both recently gotten divorced.

  “She said, ‘Let’s start saving a quarter a day so we can be together,’ and I said, ‘Baby no, I’m going to save a dollar a day. No, I’m going to save five dollars a day!’ Then I thought about it and said, ‘No, I’m going to save twenty dollars a day.’”

  “Doesn’t that make dealing kinda tempting?”

  He shakes his curls. “I’ve saved a thousand dollars already. I bought her a promise ring, too. Real pretty, with a heart on it.”

  AFTER MUCH INDECISION, I take a deep breath and drive to the dealer’s house. (His address was published in the newspaper.) It is a modest neighborhood of feral cats and dented cars. A man’s black belt is lying in the dealer’s yard. Trying to conjure Sophie’s chutzpa, I walk up to his door and ring the bell. The curtain rustles. I wait an unnervingly long time before ringing again. His partner opens the door. No need for introductions. She remembers me.

  “He’s asleep,” she says.

  “It’s 12:15.”

  “He works nights now.”

  Our eyes clasp in a staring contest. Just when I start thinking she’s not the kind of woman who’d take lightly to her man chai-latte-ing with another, she blinks and blurts some details. “He got locked up for ninety days, so I had to shut down the business. It was too much to take care of with our son. I couldn’t keep up with everything.”

  At that, an eight-year-old appears, cuddling a small dog.

  Feeling like a bully, I blink too. Handing her my business card, I ask her man to call me.

  He doesn’t.

  This is when I should have found myself a new dealer. I mean, really. If there are drugs on every dollar, how hard could it be? But, well, you know how when you find a bail bonder you like, you follow her around? Stories are like that, too. And so I continue checking in whenever I’m in town, every six months or so. He keeps promising he’ll meet me, even pinpointing a particular week, but when the date rolls around, he falls silent. After three years of back-and-forth, he stops responding to my e-mails and phone calls altogether, though he occasionally still “likes” my Facebook posts. Judging by the photos he uploads on social media,18 he appears to be working for an oil refinery now. That would be the first question I’d ask, should he ever grant me an interview: is there any intended irony in that? But I already know the answer. It was the next best-paying job in town.

  NOTES

  1. For a quarter of a century, Don Pedrito Jaramillo of Los Olmos Creek traveled between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, faith-healing Mexican families who otherwise had no access to health care. A typical prescription consisted of rubbing onions or mescal across one’s belly or drinking a certain amount of water for a nine-day period. According to Santa Barraza, Don Pedrito also helped alleviate hunger by requesting his patients bring in glass jars with lids. Into each, he plunked a blessed grain of rice that replenished the entire jar each morning. His shrine attracts thousands of visitors a year who say a prayer at his tomb and leave behind testimonios, photographs, crutches, and braids of hair as offerings.

  2. After two and a half years of business, Andre’s shuttered in the summer of 2010 because it became nearly impossible for customers to reach the restaurant due to the highway’s expansion and its dearth of exits. Sophie predicted the new expressway would ultimately “kill this town, and the only economy will be drugs and illegals.” Her husband, Larry, added, “Might as well put a cross at both ends and be done with it.”

  3. Sophie wasn’t the first to name something in honor of the Tejana superstar. In the first five months after the singer was shot and killed by the president of her fan club in Corpus in 1995, more than six hundred baby girls were christened Selena. A Corpus mother of twins even altered one daughter’s spelling like Sophie did so she could have a Selena and a Selina.

  4. Whose heads? Some drug dealers who dared cross the capos of La Familia, it seems. Kidnapped the day before from an auto mechanic’s shop, the dealers’ heads got sawed off with bowie knives while they were still alive.

  5. At first, the Mexican Army was considered less corruptible than local or federal police, but stories soon emerged of soldiers demanding bribes at checkpoints, tormenting neighborhood teenagers, raping village women, fighting officials for a share of drug profits, and murdering innocent civilians. See Cecilia Ballí’s January 2012 coverage in Harper’s for more about the terror the army incited in Juarez (and beyond).

  6. He has since made narco history as El Pozolero, or “The Stew Maker.” Authorities believe he dissolved some 300 bodies over a ten-year period for drug lord Teodoro Garcia Simental.

  7. That, at least, is the number most commonly cited by U.S. media and groups like Human Rights Watch. Statistics vary from 47,000 to more than 100,000. Given some cartels’ predilection for burying their victims in secret graves while bribing officials to look the other way, we will likely never know the true death toll.

  8. Depending on which organization you consult and the criteria it uses, the number of Mexican journalists who have been murdered because of their work ranges from 50 to more than 100. According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, 90 percent of these crimes go unpunished. The situation has grown so dire, Freedom House now designates Mexico a “Not Free” nation in its annual “Freedom of the Press” reports, along with countries like Russia, China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia.

  9. Arturo ran the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel along with his brothers until December 2009, when his luxury apartment in Cuernavaca got surrounded by hundreds of special forces from the Mexican Navy. After a ninety-minute siege, Arturo, six of his aides, and a navy sailor lay dead. Hours after the sailor’s funeral, gunmen burst into his family’s home and revenge-killed several of his mourners, including his mother.

  10. The champion of the dispossessed, Santa Muerte is revered not for her holiness but for her ruthlessness. While some scholars trace her prominence to the 1994 devaluation of the peso, others date her back to the Aztec goddesses Coatlicue and Micetecacihuatl. Santa Muerte demands total devotion from her followers and frequent offerings of candy, liquor, and cigars. When the Mexican government started destroying her public altars in 2009, due to her link to the cartels, her adherents took to the street in protest. Read more about her cult in Desirée Martín’s Borderlands Saints.

  11. One of the more outrageous cases of government corruption: in 2008, Calderón’s own drug czar was charged with accepting $450,000 in bribes from cartels. Per month.

  12. Corruption, of course, doesn’t halt at the borderline. In the past two decades, five sheriffs from the Texas Rio Grande Valley have been caught doing something nefarious, and there have been at least 140 convictions in corruption investigations involving U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2004. In December 2012, an anti-narcotics police squad from the Valley got busted for reselling the dope they confiscated. People have grown so shameless, the Justice Department recently created an FBI task force to further investigate practices of police units as well as hospitals, courthouses, and school boards in the Valley, according to National Public Radio.

  13. Under the reign of Nazario Moreno González (aka “El Más Loco”), La Familia obtained formidable power and cast a quasi-religious influence. After kicking out all but his most loyal henchmen, González rebranded the cartel the Knights Templar—which journalist Ioan Grillo once described as a bunch of “flesh-eating meth traffickers”—and wrote his own bible for his followers. He so brutalized his home state of Michoacan that citizens banded together in autodefensas, or self-defense squads, and fought back. Their saga is chronicled in Grillo’s 2016 book, Gangster W
arlords.

  14. Along with two aides, eight guns, and $2 million cash, Morales finally got captured in his pickup truck after visiting his newborn child in July 2013, with nary a bullet fired. As of August 2015, he was still in prison, but given the vanishing acts of other capos via laundry baskets and under-the-shower tunnels, he might not be there for long.

  15. That was the last year Juarez earned the dubious distinction of “murder capital of the world.” In 2011, its homicide rate dropped by more than 1,000 deaths. The Honduran city of San Pedro Sula then assumed the title.

  16. For a soulful memoir about the tragedy of covering Mexico’s drug war as the son of migrant workers, read Alfredo Corchado’s 2013 book, Midnight in Mexico.

  17. Boringly called “breakfast tacos” outside South Texas, taquitos are hot, fluffy tortillas stuffed with all manner of morning goodness (eggs, meats, potatoes, nopales, refried beans, cheese), slathered in salsa, rolled in aluminum foil, and rarely sold for more than $2.50. In high school, “taquito runs” were our teachers’ most effective form of bribery.

  18. Speaking of social media, according to Sophie, it’s a bail bonder’s best friend. Here’s her strategy for finding an errant client: “Say I look for John Shmuck. I see on Facebook he tells Susan, ‘We go to party at 7 P.M.’ So we go pick them up. We say, ‘You have a free taxi!’ It is better than GPS.”

  6

  The Agents

  THE CANOPY HOVERS ABOVE THE CHECKPOINT LIKE A MAMMOTH prehistoric bird, blocking the brutish sun but trapping in everything else. Like exhaust fumes. Like noise. Like pigeons. Every day, 13,000 vehicles barrel through this station on the outskirts of Falfurrias. That’s 13,000 injections of carbon monoxide, 13,000 growling engines, and 13,000 interrogations followed by 13,000 responses. And lethal amounts of pigeon shit.