In with the Devil

by James Keene

  Never for a moment had Keene been tempted to use any of the merchandise he sold. He says, “I don’t think I ever understood what people meant when they talked about having addictions to dope or alcohol or gambling. But the money was something different for me. Once I saw all that cash coming in—rooms full of it—that became my addiction.”

  Nothing made Keene feel better about his newfound wealth than helping Big Jim. His father had retired around the time that Jimmy had left college. Big Jim had always fancied himself to be an entrepreneur and decided to devote himself full-time to his myriad business ventures. But it didn’t take long for all of his deals to crumble around him. Once impossibly boyish, he now wore a full beard that had gone completely gray. He had become like a hulking Hemingway in winter. One day in 1986, Jimmy stopped by the house his father owned on a hill overlooking the river. He found him hunched over some papers on the kitchen table, sobbing. It broke Jimmy’s heart. Superman wasn’t supposed to cry.

  Big Jim was on the verge of eviction. His treasured Corvette, Chevy 4 × 4, and Harley had already been repossessed. Worse yet, if all of his assets were liquidated, it could raise questions about the other notes he had signed. To add to the humiliation, his ex-lover was telling everyone in town that her new boyfriend was about to buy Big Jim’s things from the sheriff’s auction. The next morning, Keene arrived at his father’s door with a big bag. Inside was $350,000 in cash. First, they paid the entire mortgage on the house, then they reclaimed everything that had been repossessed. All Jimmy wanted in return was that his father not ask any questions.

  This was the first of many cash infusions into Big Jim’s affairs—a sort of reverse trust fund. Big Jim trusted that the source of money wasn’t too bad. The son trusted that his father could somehow leverage the ill-gotten gains into a legitimate moneymaking enterprise.

  Jimmy had tried on his own, investing in an adult-video company with a male childhood friend who had become a porn star. Along the way, as a fringe benefit, Keene had a brief fling with Samantha Strong, then the reigning XXX queen. They met when he happened to sit next to her at a party. “First,” Keene says, “she asked, ‘Um, what movies are you in?’ and then I told her, ‘Well, I haven’t been in any movies.’ We just hit it off from there and ended up having our own little private party later that night. For a while, we were seeing quite a bit of each other. She’d fly me out to Vegas while she did all her shows. She wanted me to be her travel companion, but I was just too busy for that kind of relationship between all my legitimate businesses and the crooked business.” Meanwhile, his partner proved too flaky to run the adult-video business. As Jimmy remembers, “All he wanted to do was party, party, party.” Keene ended up losing more than $300,000 before he shut the business down.

  If nothing else, Jimmy’s capital investment put the life back into Big Jim. He shaved off his beard of woe and was once again riding high with an attractive new lady on his arm. They had season tickets to Bears games and regular nights out at Chicago’s finest restaurants. Keene himself wasn’t living so large, but he never begrudged Big Jim his expensive tastes. “My dad was everything to me,” Jimmy explains. “I would have done whatever I had to do to make his life better and more enjoyable for him. It pushed me that much harder on the street.”

  Big Jim never intended to force his son into selling drugs, but every legitimate place where he sunk Jimmy’s money proved to be a dry hole, from trucking to real estate to—most improbably—a line of Italian frozen food. “He was spending it as fast as I could make it,” Keene says. “It was like I was on a treadmill.”

  If Big Jim had any illusions about the real source of his son’s wealth, they were surely dispelled in 1992 when both Jimmy, now almost thirty, and his younger brother, Tim, were busted as they drove two vans packed with 150 pounds of pot. The deal had been set up by Tim, who was making his own bones in the trade. Although it looked as if he had a reliable source, he had been snared by a sting instead. Jimmy helped engineer the deal and pushed to complete it when Tim became suspicious about his connection. The older brother even offered to help drive at the last minute. After the arrest, the Keenes were hauled to the county jail, but when directed to a pay phone to make his one call, Jimmy did not dial up his lawyer. Instead, he called his live-in girlfriend. As quietly as possible he said, “I’m not going to be coming home tonight.” When she asked what had happened, he replied, “It is what we’ve always worried about.” Then, just as calmly, he told her how to lift up the floorboard in the laundry room where he had stashed six kilos of cocaine and $150,000. “Put what you find in the laundry basket and cover it with a bunch of clothes,” he told her, “and get the hell out of there.”

  As the girlfriend pulled out of the driveway, she was convinced an undercover cop was already following her. Once she lost him in the little side streets of their neighborhood, she stopped the car and sprinkled the cocaine among the evergreens in someone’s backyard. She then drove over to Big Jim’s house. When he opened the door to greet her, she said, “Listen, Jimmy’s in a lot of trouble, and he told me to give you this.” She then shoved the laundry basket into his arms and left him standing there, dumbstruck. By the time she had returned home, the cops had already burst through the front door of their house.

  With the sons’ arrests, all the fissures that had cracked up the Keene family in the first place came to the surface again. Most of Lynn’s anger was directed at Jimmy for dragging his brother into drug dealing and using her van for part of the haul, although Tim protested that it was just as much his idea. She also lit into her ex-husband for the leniency he had shown the boys through the years. True to form, Big Jim couldn’t help but be concerned for Jimmy. As usual, he partly blamed himself for his son’s behavior. “I always had an idea of what was going on,” he told Jimmy, referring to the seemingly bottomless “trust” funds. “Now I know for sure. I shouldn’t have remained silent. But this is serious now. You need to get away from all this before they try to put you away forever.” Still, despite the lecture, Big Jim never did tell Jimmy what he did with all the money in the laundry basket.

  Ultimately, the brothers took a plea on possession of cannabis with intent to deliver. They served no more than probation because the local narcotics squad did not properly search and seize the vans. Still, despite the lucky break, Jimmy could not get off the dealing treadmill. His goals, he says, were modest by drug-dealer standards. “I wanted five million dollars that I could bury in a hole. Then I’d start a normal life. It’s not like I had dreams of big mansions, private jets, and stuff like that. I just wanted enough money to give me and my dad some peace of mind. Then we could have gone fishing or rode motorcycles together and done whatever we wanted to do with no pressure to get up and have to work a stupid nine-to-five job with menial pay. That’s what my poor dad struggled with his whole life. Suddenly I came of age and I tried to do it for both of us. And I came close. I really did.”

  To further that plan, Jimmy completed his college degree, but Big Jim’s wheeling and dealing—especially with the frozen food—was burning through the money faster than Jimmy could make it. “Looking back,” he says, “it’s amazing what I spent to come clean.”

  One day when Jimmy Keene’s drug dealing was at its height, he received a call from a man we will call Hector Gonzales—a narco trafficker in a northern-Mexican state who had become Jimmy’s major supplier of cocaine and marijuana. “Hello, Jimmy, my friend,” he said in English that had only the slightest accent.

  “What’s going on?” Keene asked. Hector was not the sort of connection who called just to chat.

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing much at all—except that I’ve got your friend here.”

  “My friend?”

  “Yes,” Hector answered. “Your little, skinny hippie party friend. The one we can’t trust. The one you and I need to get rid of.”

  Hector then clicked on the speakerphone and Keene heard the sobbing voice of Nick Richards, one of his oldest friends. “Jimmy, you got
to save me,” he cried. “These guys are going to kill me. They’re going to kill me for real, man.”

  By all rights, Keene should have let Nick die. A pretty boy, with the looks and flowing locks of rocker Rick Springfield, Richards liked cocaine as much as their most degenerate customers. “When Nick had the party goods and some girls to impress,” Keene says, “he was just a talking, snorting fool.” Jimmy let none of his other dealers get away with such conspicuous consumption, but he always cut some slack for Richards. Their relationship dated back to the days when they both played peewee hockey. Nick was the first close friend to help Jimmy sell drugs. But Keene paid dearly for his loyalty. Although Nick had led Keene to Hector, he had previously introduced Jimmy to another “supplier” in Phoenix who tried to kill Keene when he arrived with a cash payment. Keene barely escaped in a dash through the desert that summoned every ounce of his running-back prowess—all while he balanced a duffel bag on his shoulder with a million dollars inside. After that close call, Keene took the next plane home, went directly to Nick’s home, and punched him in the nose.

  Hector was not so forgiving. When he discovered that Richards had poached three kilos—worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—from a large shipment of cocaine, he snatched him from his condo in Phoenix and smuggled him down to Mexico to dispense a drug lord’s justice. Hector shouted over the speakerphone to Keene, “Let me blow the motherfucker’s head off right now and do us both a favor. He’ll get us all busted one of these days.”

  No matter how much Richards had screwed up through the years, Jimmy was not about to hear him whacked on the other end of a phone line. “You just can’t kill one of my guys,” Jimmy argued. “That’s not fair. Just put him on ice and I’ll come down there tomorrow so we can talk about it.” Of course, once inside Hector’s lair, Jimmy would be as much a prisoner as Nick, but he didn’t think of those consequences. He never thought of the consequences.

  The next day, Keene flew to Tucson and, as usual when he visited Hector, rented a sports car for the ninety-minute drive into Mexico. He remembered the first time he ever made that trip—to deliver a suitcase filled with a million dollars. Although Hector was as short and round as a bowling ball, he still looked every inch the Latin drug lord. His long black hair was slicked back and his mustache and goatee neatly trimmed. He wore diamond rings on his manicured fingers and thickly braided gold bracelets dangled from his wrist. He was always impeccably dressed in tailored suits or silk shirts and linen pants. But no matter how stylish his appearance, he could still be as ruthless and brutal as the most bone-chilling thug. When Jimmy put the suitcase on a table between them, Hector’s eyes flashed before Jimmy opened it. Hector asked, “Gringo, what’s to stop me from turning you around right now and blowing your head off?”

  “Nothing,” Keene replied. As he knew too well, Hector had paid off all of the local politicians and Feds. Meanwhile nobody even knew Jimmy was in Mexico. He could be dead and buried along some desert road and no one would ever be the wiser. “You can kill me, rip me off, do whatever you want,” Jimmy said as he snapped open the suitcase. “But then you’ll get just one of these from me. Do the deal like you promised and it won’t be long before I’m back here with another suitcase and then another one after that.”

  Hector closed his eyes into little slits, leaned right across the table, and then burst out in a big hearty laugh. “I like you, amigo. You’re smart and that’s why we’re going to get very rich together.”

  Hector’s home was a pink Moorish-style mansion that took up much of a mountaintop. Visitors approaching on the winding roads could be seen for miles by the guards. They wore sunglasses and wandered the grounds shirtless with cartridge belts and semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Jimmy drove up to the wrought-iron entry gates at the bottom of Hector’s mountain and announced his arrival through the intercom.

  Typically when Keene visited, he found the hacienda in full party mode. Naked strippers lounged by the pool, and laughing guests lapped up the cocaine or sumptuous spreads of food inside. But the day he came for Richards, he found a much more surreal atmosphere than usual. Only Hector’s steady girls were in attendance. Instead of greeting Keene, they turned their heads and skittered out of his way. The guards were so coked up, they twitched. Everyone cringed with each keening shriek that came from somewhere inside the house. Jimmy followed the sound to the kitchen—as big as any in a restaurant with stainless steel counters and appliances—where he found Nick tied to a chair. His face looked like a Kabuki fright mask, his hair wild and tangled and both eyes black. Rivulets of blood ran down from his nose and mouth against his powdery-white skin.

  Behind him, Hector paced the floor. Although he was neatly dressed in a shirt and tie, his forehead glistened and his eyes were feverish as though he, too, were high on something. His fury even unsettled the entourage of guards who hung around him. They, too, looked away from Keene as he approached.

  “I’ve been making your friend smoke dope for three days.” Hector laughed. He grabbed Richards by the hair. “Show your friend how you like to smoke dope,” he commanded. “That’s all you want to do, you partying piece of shit.” Turning to Keene, Hector said, “I say we do him right now, Jimmy. We’ll bury him here and nobody will ever know what happened.”

  At first, Jimmy didn’t know how to reply, but if he didn’t move quickly, he would soon see Nick’s brains splattered on the stainless steel counters. Somehow he had to find a way to save Richards without challenging the drug lord’s authority. As everyone watched, Jimmy strode right up to Nick and slapped him twice across the face. Richards yelped—as much in shock as pain—but then sobbed even louder. Hector and the guards were as stunned as Nick, but then erupted with laughter.

  “You stupid fuck,” Keene yelled at Richards. “You fuck up everything.” Jimmy turned to Hector. “I halfway don’t blame you for wanting to do this. He’s a complete fuckup.”

  Then Jimmy took a few breaths and got close enough to the drug lord to speak softly. “But you have to understand something, Hector. I’ve grown up with this kid. I don’t want him to get killed. Besides, no matter where you bury him, people in my organization will figure out what happened. That won’t make me look too good.”

  Hector dismissed the argument with a swat of his pudgy hand, but he started to soften. “Come on, Jimmy. You baby this fucking guy too much.”

  “You’re right. I totally agree with you, but let me handle it. I promise I’ll get him out of the organization, so you never have to deal with him again.”

  At last Hector relented with another dismissive swat. “If you don’t know who your real friends are, Jimmy, I’m not going to tell you.”

  As soon as the ropes were untied, Keene hustled Richards to the rental car. Other than his sniffles and his whimpers, Nick didn’t say a thing until they crossed the border. Only then did he break out in a huge smile and sob, this time for joy, “Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you. I owe you my life, man. I owe you everything.”

  Somehow that debt would not be great enough to keep Richards’s mouth shut just a few years later.

  Ever since he’d started dealing drugs in high school, Jimmy Keene had been in the sights of local narcotics agents. He had always frustrated surveillance and stings by speeding away from tails or using buffers to make his deals. But after the pot bust, he became the prime target of a regional task force that included investigators from every level of government and as far away as Chicago. It was only a matter of time—four years—before they found a way to infiltrate his organization, and no snitch would be more valuable to them than Nick Richards.

  One evening in November 1996, Jimmy grabbed something to eat in his kitchen and was walking with a tray to the living room when he noticed the knob on his front door start to jiggle. “At first I thought it was just my imagination,” he says, “and then boom—the whole door blew off the hinges.” Eleven agents stormed into the house, wearing black uniforms, crash helmets, and goggles. “One guy came lung
ing right at me, but I sidestepped and just lay flat on the ground so no one had an excuse to shoot me. Still, it seemed like they all had their guns pointed at my head and one said, ‘Just move, motherfucker, and we’ll blow your fucking head off.’ I kept asking for some kind of identification, and finally they pulled me up and put handcuffs on me. This guy fumbled around trying to get his wallet out and then stuck it in my face and said, ‘DEA, that’s who we are, fucker.’ ”

  For a while, the agents tore through the house as though it were the first time they had searched it. Then one, with his cell phone in hand, went directly to the master bathroom. Jimmy had personally built it with two of his closest friends when he added on to the house a few years before. By pushing a button behind the toilet, the wall would open. Behind it, he had a safe between the floorboards. The only person who had ever seen the setup was an old girlfriend whom he had paid to clean the house. The Feds had flipped her and, Keene suspected, probably snuck into the house before the raid to figure out how it worked. Inside the safe, the DEA agents found small bags of coke and weed along with an electronic scale. They also found two pistols in the nightstand by his bed and cash in an attic safe that could be tracked to another informant who had used marked bills to buy cocaine. It was all icing on the cake.