by Eldon Asp
The reason they were so pissed is they couldn’t believe how fast everything had gotten fucked up. One minute they’re part of the dominant gang, they’re on top of the world, and the next minute they’re running around with targets on their backs, freaking out because they’re gonna get killed now. That’s what their thinking was, anyway, and I don’t think they were wrong. And they blamed it all on Gordo because he had ruined everything for the price of a few bucks.
So anyway, these guys were yelling at Gordo and he was trying to back away from them, but they got him cornered and then he tried begging, which is just not something you do, so that pissed them off even worse. They each had one of those rebar canes that everybody favored, three feet of iron rebar bent up at one end like a walking cane and wrapped around and around with melted plastic from pop bottles, like Bubble-Up bottles or whatever. They would wrap that hot plastic around the rebar and then let it cool to make a covering on it. They’d make patterns with the different colors; some of them were really elaborate. I’m not sure if the plastic was for grip, or just to look cool, or maybe just so it wasn’t quite so obvious that you were walking around with a metal rod to smack people with. But these guys had them and they started hitting Gordo with them, hard. Gordo went down and they just keep whaling on him with the rebar. And the thing I’ll never forget is the sound that fucking guy made. Here was this great big fat guy, first of all, and then when they started really going to work on him he began literally squealing like a pig. It was horrible to listen to him. I mean, you could say he deserved it, but it was horrible. It was horrible to hear it.
That bloodcurdling squeal is probably what saved his life, though, because a guard came running, and he started firing his gun into the ground until the guys hitting him just broke and ran, leaving Gordo writhing in the dirt, still making that sound. It took him a few seconds to realize they weren’t whipping him anymore. Then he picked himself up, slowly because they’d got him real good, and he started limping back to the corral, back to wherever he slept. He wasn’t squealing anymore, but he was still sort of crying, like softly weeping, which in some ways was even worse.
That was a weird scene, a sad scene. That one’s stuck with me.
Diablo
Heladio Meets the Devil
AFTER THE KID ALEJANDRO SHOT Estrella down, then shot him again, the guards dragged him off and we all thought—or at least I did, anyway—that he was a goner. I thought they’d take him away and kill him, chop up his body and throw it in the dump. (That’s what the rumor always was whenever there was an unexplained disappearance; we thought whoever it was was put in the dump.) But that wasn’t the case this time. After about two weeks, Alejandro came back, looking like a million bucks.
Before he left, he was this mangy, scrawny, dirty little junky-looking guy with his raggedy, bloody clothes and his shitty homemade crutch. Now he was all cleaned up and fed, with a good haircut and real nice clothes. He had brand new everything: expensive boots, a nice leather jacket, the whole bit. He was still limping from when he had been shot in the leg before, but now instead of his rickety crutch he had a new shiny cane with a silver tip on it. He looked like a total big shot, and you knew right away that Heladio had hooked him up. He was part of that crew now, and he carried himself like a made man. Which I guess he was.
Heladio was fully in charge again by this point, holding court on his balcony overlooking the square. He was selling more chiva than ever, and still getting his cut of everything that went on. Johnny Brother was right—it was just a matter of waiting for all the craziness to blow over. Heladio was even back to sponsoring fiestas. Overall, it was a nice, calm, stable time for everybody. No one seemed to miss Estrella, who had always been a dick anyway, and no one seemed interested in making a move against Heladio. So we all breathed easy.
In La Mesa, any time things seemed good, it wouldn’t last for long. Prison will punish your optimism every time. So we should have known something bad was coming down. Even if we’d expected it, though, we couldn’t have known what form it would take.
In general, the way killings and other attacks worked is they were pretty much always business. Occasionally there’d be a crime of passion like that crazy situation with Mundo and the other guy’s sister, but those were rare. For the most part there had to be money in it. After Estrella was murdered, there was no incentive for anyone to go after Heladio, because no one was paying them to do it. No one wanted it that bad. In my experience, killings over revenge or honor don’t happen that often; it’s just not worth it.
But the thing that no one anticipated was how bad Estrella’s family on the outside missed him. I can’t imagine why, but they must have really loved that guy, because they came up with the money to put a hit on Heladio for no reason but straight-up vengeance. And killing a guy like Heladio doesn’t come cheap. Even though there were a lot of desperate people around, a lot of desperate murderers, this is still probably at least a thousand dollars we’re talking about.
The guy they hired for the job was Diablo, Estrella’s second capo. He was older, over thirty I would guess, but he looked older than that. He wore a red bandana, he had long hair, he was just a real treacherous guy, as you might expect from the name. After Estrella’s death, in that brief period before Heladio came back to reclaim the throne or whatever, Diablo had gone around with Estrella’s little black ledger book and tried to collect on all the debts that people owed Estrella. When Heladio came back, he pretty much laid low.
Anyway, in the old days Heladio would usually be surrounded by bodyguards whenever he walked through the yard. Not always, but he had a security presence around him fairly regularly. After they stabbed him, though, he stepped it up; you never saw him without his bodyguards after the stabbing—except on this one particular day when he went out by himself. They let him leave the prison for some reason or other, to see his lawyer or visit a woman or something like that. And he must have come back at a different time than he’d planned to, because when he came back his guys weren’t there to meet him; he had to cross the prison by himself back to his carraca.
I think now, in hindsight, that Diablo must have had something to do with the change in Heladio’s schedule. How else to explain it? Diablo was pretty treacherous, as I said, so I think he could have engineered it. Maybe he called whoever Heladio was supposed to see and cancelled the meeting or something. Either way, by luck or by design, he was camped out waiting when Heladio came back by himself. When he saw that Heladio was alone, he set up in this sort of corridor area between a couple of tanks, knowing he’d have to pass by there. He was leaning on the wall when Heladio walked by. I happened to be there too, not in the corridor, but out in the corral. I was pretty far away but I had a clear view.
I saw them sort of nod at each other, like they were saying hello. Not friendly, just a show of respect. As Heladio passed, Diablo pulled a gun out from the back of his pants, from his waistband back there under his shirt. He shot Heladio right in the middle of the back, and the bullet went clear through him; you could see daylight out the other side. Heladio just toppled forward and was dead before he hit the ground. Just like that.
This time, the guards were all over it. I don’t know if they’d seen it or what, but somehow they and the federales just came swooping in from everywhere all at once. They herded everyone out of there with bursts from their big-ass machine guns, the way they did when it was really serious. The death of Heladio Diaz was about as serious as you could get in that place; it would be the same thing as someone assassinating the president. So they chased all of us off the yard and back to our carracas for lockdown—they locked the whole prison down—and just before I went around the corner and lost sight of Heladio lying there, I saw something that I will never forget. One of the guards was kneeling down next to Heladio’s body, and he rolled him over, like he wanted to make sure he was really dead. Now Heladio was lying there on his back with this hole in his chest—blood everywhere, he was covered with it—and this guard
took his pointer finger, one finger, and he just, like, poked it into the hole in Heladio’s chest. Just poked it in there all the way to the hilt. Then he pulled it back out slowly and looked at it, staring at the blood on his finger as it ran down his hand.
Then they pushed me and the other guys and we had to move on, but that image has stuck with me to this day, and I’m sure it’ll stick with me forever, because why would you do that? Why would anybody want to stick their finger in a guy’s chest like that? I can’t figure it out. Was he trying to feel his heart? Did he just want to be able to say, I felt Heladio’s heart? What would make you do something like that?
Anyway, in the chaos that immediately followed, Diablo got dragged out just like Alejandro had after he killed Estrella. They took him to La Ocho, I think, to keep him safe from Heladio’s guys. And after a while Diablo came back, just like Alejandro, but he wasn’t all slicked-up like the kid had been. He wasn’t a big shot now. If anything he seemed smaller. No one made a move to get back at him—I think everyone just wanted it to be over with.
With Heladio out of the picture, there was a real brief freakout, but only because guys were afraid that the taste, the chiva, would be cut off. Sure, it was unsettling to think that even someone as powerful as Heladio could be taken out, but that was minor in the big scheme of things; it’s not like any of us really felt safe before that, so we weren’t that much more afraid afterwards. And you might expect there to be some kind of emotional response after such a major player is suddenly out of the picture, but that just wasn’t the case. Maybe there was a big funeral out on the street, with everybody crying and laying flowers on his grave and all that, but inside it was just another day. That’s the truth of it.
The guy they put in charge—and by “they” I mean The Brothers and another big criminal family who I’d rather not name—was a lower-ranking capo in Heladio’s organization. He would have been maybe about the number-four or number-five guy on the totem pole, not real impressive, but someone they could trust to take orders and not get any big ideas. As for Ramón, who I would have figured to be the obvious choice to take over, he pretty much kept right on doing what he’d always done: he’d sell his heroin and lay low in his carraca with his girlfriend Irma until his wife and kids came to visit. Then he’d kick Irma out until the coast was clear and then she’d be back. He didn’t really play much of a political role in La Mesa after Heladio was gone. I think he preferred it that way. Heladio’s other girl, Elsa, left the prison and didn’t come back, and as for the boy Bobby, he was already long gone by this point. He wasn’t a prisoner, so he had left earlier, I think around the time of Heladio’s stabbing, when things turned really tense inside. But this all went down fairly soon before I got out, so I can’t say for certain if there were any longer-term ripples that resulted from the killing of Heladio. From where I was sitting, it sure seemed like it was just business as usual from one day to the next, as unlikely as it sounds now.
Dragón
The Lady and the Dragon
I’VE NEVER BEEN A RELIGIOUS person by any stretch of the imagination, not even superstitious, but something happened shortly before my release that made me wonder whether things are maybe a little bit more connected than they seem at first glance.
In those days, at the time I was there, La Mesa didn’t have a big missionary presence. You didn’t see as many nuns or Catholic relief workers as you did in later years. I’m not sure why exactly, but that’s the way it was. There was just one main lady who used to come in and talk to us, try to save our souls or whatever. She was very nice, and easy to talk to, but I let her know right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in the whole Jesus thing she was pushing. She didn’t care, she still liked to talk to me, so we would talk for a while whenever she came in to visit.
One day she said she wanted to see where I lived, to check out the conditions. I took her into the tank and we climbed up to my carraca. To her credit, she didn’t seem scared at all even though the inside of the tanks was always a pretty freaky scene. So we were in my carraca, making small talk, when she noticed this print I had on my wall. I had an artist buddy back home who was pretty big in the underground rock scene, doing concert posters and stuff like that, and he had given me this framed print of one of his pictures. He was a good friend of mine but he was a really trippy dude, very much into freaky, mystical, far-out stuff, and that came out in his art. This picture was pretty wild: it had a big bare-breasted warrior woman as its main thing—I think she had a sword or an axe or something; huge tits, definitely—and she was sort of rubbing up on this big dragon. It was a really cool picture, and I would conservatively estimate that I had jerked off to it probably over five hundred times, so I felt like a creep standing there with this nice religious lady looking at it.
She told me I had to get rid of the dragon-lady picture, that I was putting my soul in danger just by having it in my place. She said that until I took that picture down and burned it I would never get out of La Mesa. Whatever. I said I’d think about it, and she went on her way. A couple weeks later she came back and I saw her out in the yard. She asked me if I’d dealt with the evil picture yet. I told her I hadn’t, but in the couple weeks that had passed since she talked to me about it, I’d begun to get a bad feeling from it. It was like she’d gotten into my head and ruined it for me. So I told her she could have it. We went back up to my place and I took it off the wall and gave it to her. She covered it with a cloth right away, as if it was dangerous to leave it exposed. She told me I was doing the right thing.
A short while later she sent word that she’d had a little ceremony where she said some prayers and burned the picture. It was done, she said; good things would happen for me now. And right after that, I found out I was being released. So trip out on that.
Llave
Going Home
THE MEXICAN LEGAL SYSTEM IS notoriously corrupt, and in those days, I believe, it was even worse than it is now. Everything was disorganized and informal and handled under the table or behind closed doors. In the vast majority of cases, your chances to beat the charges or to get off with a light sentence had very little to do with your guilt or innocence, or the seriousness of the crime, but by your ability to buy your way out of it.
In a smuggling case like mine, the first step was to try to get the sentence reduced to under five years. (Obviously, the real first step would be to try to beat the rap entirely, but that wasn’t an option for me because in signing the declaration that let Roger and Barbara go, I’d basically pleaded guilty.) If you were sentenced to five years or more, you had to do the time; there was no getting around it. If, on the other hand, you somehow managed to keep your sentence to under five years, suddenly a whole new set of options opened up to you. Under five years, there was hope.
What put me in a good position with respect to finding a lawyer was the fact that I’d kept my mouth shut. At no point did I even hint that I might be willing to roll over on my connection. Understand, I definitely could have. I could have given up Mexico Joe who’d supplied us the pot as well as everyone else a step or two up the ladder from him. But I would never do that because I think it’s wrong and, besides, it’s stupid. Keeping your mouth shut goes a long way towards earning respect in any prison. Nobody likes a snitch, and people will treat you nicer if they know you have a sense of honor and you take that seriously. So in my case, powerful people were happy to hook me up with a first-rate attorney because they liked that I kept my mouth shut.
Everyone told me the same thing: that the man to see was Rudolfo Lopez. He was the biggest lawyer in Tijuana at the time, and he was always helping guys in the drug business win their cases or reduce their sentences. He had a great track record, so when word came back that he was willing to talk to me, I was beyond happy. We finally met up when he came to La Mesa to see another client. After their meeting, he hung around for a few minutes to listen to the details of my case. I met him out near the gate. He was an imposing guy, probably in his mid-forties I w
ould guess, and dressed real sharp in a nice suit and expensive-looking shoes. He looked like what he was—a successful lawyer.
I explained to him what I knew about my case, which wasn’t much, frankly. I knew I’d been picked up by the city cops, who’d then turned me over to the federales who were the ones that eventually charged me. I hadn’t been sentenced as far as I knew, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea where my case stood now. Not a lot of information there. He didn’t seem too worried; he said he knew everyone there was to know in the whole court system and that he’d get to the bottom of it and let me know what he learned. In the meantime, he told me, my job was to start raising money: for expenses, for bribes, and—most importantly—for his fee.
I scraped up what little I had, then put the word out to basically everyone I’d ever met that I needed cash in a hurry to get myself out of prison. I think I was able to come up with several hundred dollars, which I handed over to Lopez the next time he came to La Mesa. He explained to me that my case was in the hands of the local judge, whose job it was to determine my sentence. If he gave me five years or more, I was screwed, but if he kept it under five years then I’d likely be eligible for fianza, or bail. If I could get out on bail while appealing my case, that could make all the difference in the world to my health and sanity (not that that was the plan, exactly, but more on that in a minute). He said he thought he could keep my sentence under five years for a few hundred bucks. I gave him all I had. He told me to keep scrounging money; we were nowhere near finished yet.