David Barron finally shows up and asks me if I was all set up and squared away. I told him I was. He said we’re going out for a little ass tonight but I’d be on duty when we got back and that I’d have a few days off later in the week. He asked me about my clothes and I told him they were at my wife’s house but I had no idea who’d be there right now. He laughed and said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He said he’d give me more money for clothes and I could wait for my days off to buy them. He told everyone to leave their weapons behind and to get into the Suburban. Once we’re all loaded up, he yells out, “Agacharse!” So we all duck down with our heads between our knees and he goes roaring out of the garage into the street.
After driving for about five minutes, David said, “Okay. You can look up now.” When I did I saw that we were driving on Avenida Sanchez Taboada and heading toward downtown Tijuana. I recognized the area because my homeboys and I would go down there occasionally and hit the clubs on Revolution Avenue. So the area wasn’t at all foreign to me.
We pulled into a parking lot and the crew got out all excited and jabbering away. We followed David into a club called Mexico Lindo and as soon as we got in there, I could see there was nothing but an ocean of girls all wearing lingerie and prancing around. It was clear that this wasn’t David’s first visit or the first time this crew had been there. The crew was welcomed like visiting royalty. They took us to a large booth and we all turned to David for direction. He says, “Okay, cabrones. Two drinks each. Maximum.” The crew seemed happy with that. It was obvious that David was enforcing the no drinking or drugging rule. There was something about it that appealed to me. It was the kind of move professionals make. When they asked me for my drink order, I took a pass. David asked me, “Are you sure?” “Yeah,” I told him. “I’m sure.” When he ordered a Coke, I told the waitress that I’d have a Coke as well.
The place was crammed with beautiful women from all over the world. There were Mexican girls, for sure, but there were black and white girls from the US and Europe, girls from Central and South America, and some from places that I couldn’t pin down. No matter where they came from, though, they were stunning. A cute short-haired girl came and sat on my lap. Her most striking feature was a pair of almost unnatural-looking emerald-green eyes. They almost looked like they had a light shining from behind. The combination of those green eyes and thick black hair was amazingly exotic and beautiful. Her name was Desiree, or so she said, and she came from Colombia. She put her hands on my chest and felt the muscles and asked me if I worked out. I told her I did. Every day. One by one, the boys are peeling off with girls and heading upstairs. Although he wasn’t rushing us, I could tell that David didn’t want us hanging out there all night. He came over and asked if I was okay. I told him everything was just fine. I asked Desiree if she wanted to go upstairs to a room. She said she had a cousin who had just arrived from Colombia and she didn’t want to leave her alone her first night there, so would it be all right if her cousin came with us. That was probably a lie but I didn’t care. The more the merrier.
I looked at David and he shrugged and said, “Go ahead if you can handle it.” Desiree goes off to get her cousin and a minute later the three of us are upstairs in one of the rooms. It was a huge room with two enormous beds and a hot tub in the corner. Desiree starts filling the hot tub right away and when it was good to go, the three of us got naked and got in. The two of them were amazed to see my tattoos. This was 1993 and tattoos weren’t as popular as they are now. Not even with gangsters. In fact, David discouraged people from getting tattoos and he paid to have a few of my more visible ones removed. He was especially concerned about the tear tattoo near my eye. He didn’t want any easily visible physical descriptors that could help identify me in case someone saw me doing something that could get me and the crew in trouble. David ran a tight ship.
After messing around in the hot tub, the three of us got into bed and less than a half hour later, there was a knock on the door. I put on my shorts and see that it’s David holding a grocery bag. Fun time was over. He tells the girls he’s going to pay them in one-dollar bills. The girls looked puzzled but money was money. He asked them how much he owed them and Desiree said $300 apiece. David counted out $600 in singles, paid them, and we left.
Back at the office I found my weapons right where I left them by the couch. There was a blanket and pillow on the couch as well and I figured that would be my bed for the night. Big Smokie was still up; obviously he was working the night shift, ready to answer the phone or the radios if something popped up. I lay down. I had my pistol under the pillow and made sure I had the AK and the grenades within arm’s reach. This had been a long, long day. I’d woken up that morning in Calipatria State Prison as a released convict and now I was going to sleep in Tijuana as a hired gunman for one of the most notorious cartels in Mexico. Nobody I knew could claim the kind of day I’d just had. I fell asleep thinking, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Over the next few days, I started to familiarize myself with the routines at the office. Cottoro, Gorilla, and Big Popeye didn’t live at the office the way the rest of the crew did. They arrived in the morning and worked a day shift. The rest of the crew basically did nothing but lay around all day monitoring the radio and lounging around. There was always a lot of radio traffic, but it was all Tijuana police talk that had nothing to do with us. We’d only get interested if something happened that was of interest or concern to David or to the Arellano brothers. I found out that there were three offices. Ours, which was David’s office, and then two other ones for Ramon Arellano Félix and Benjamin Arellano Félix, his older brother. Ramon did the day-to-day work of keeping the drugs moving and the pipeline into the US filled. Benjamin was the money guy and the man who was sent out to pour oil on the waters in case there was any trouble with the cops or the local politicians. He was the smooth-talking public face of the Arellano Félix Cartel. The face that was acceptable to some degree to the Mexican public. He didn’t look or act like a killer and he always had the right touch of conciliation when he was called upon to make some public announcement.
Other offices dealt mostly with the business of the drug business. We knew practically nothing about them because we were the shooters and enforcers. David and the health and safety of the brothers was our concern.
Puma from Logan Heights in San Diego was one of the first guys on the crew that I got to be friendly with. Although he was only eighteen or nineteen at the time, he was a lot more mature than his age. He grew up in the same kind of circumstances I did and we had the same sort of criminal history—running around his varrio slinging dope and getting himself involved with the local neighborhood gangsters. But he had a very funny side to him. For instance, I worked out almost every day I could, and most mornings at the office, I was in the gym early. One morning I ran into him there. I was there to lift weights. He was there to get high. He asked me if I wanted to smoke weed and I was a little surprised and said no, it was against the rules. He said the rules didn’t really apply to weed. Ramon just wanted us to stay away from cocaine, heroin, and PCP, the really hard stuff. That may have been true but I still wasn’t about to get high on the job. Puma was skinny. There wasn’t much meat on him at all, so I offered to show him how to lift weights. He tried some light weights and gave up. Then he lay down on the bench, held his joint over his chest with fingertips of both hands, and started bench-pressing the joint—making all the noises of a guy trying to bench-press a couple of hundred pounds. “Arrgh. Yeah, this is really giving me a burn.” Like I said, he was funny.
When we had days off, Puma and I would try to take them at the same time. Early on in my stay, David came by and gave me and Puma a bunch of money and told us to use our day off to buy some clothes. He gave us each something like $1,000. We got a ride from Big Popeye to the border and we crossed into San Diego. We took the trolley into Logan Heights so he could show me around his neighborhood. Roach let us borrow his t
ruck and we hit all the clothing stores. Since we weren’t allowed to dress like gangsters, we went to places like Banana Republic, Old Navy, Fila, Miller’s Outpost, and Nike. We bought a bunch of clothes and then went over to Horton Plaza, where we met some girls from Imperial Beach. We took them to the movies and later to a hotel in Chula Vista just off the 5 Freeway.
That’s pretty much how we spent our days off. We actually didn’t need much in the way of personal items because we had everything taken care of for us. Even when we scored some big bonus money, we never spent much of it. We either put it away or reinvested it by buying some dope and reselling under David’s strict supervision and with his okay. Considering what Puma and I would turn into later on, the money wasn’t much of a reward for what it cost us in the destruction of our souls and the waste of years of our lives.
When we got back, David wanted to check out the clothes we bought to make sure they met his approval. He was a real micromanager that way. David was always a sharp dresser and made sure that none of us looked like gangsters or wore stuff that made us too noticeable. David had closets full of high-end Italian shoes and expensive suits even though most of the time when he was in the office he wore jeans and a sweatshirt. Occasionally he’d ask us if we wanted any of his “old” clothes. To him, if something had been in his closet too long and even if he’d never worn them, they were old clothes.
David Barron was always willing to help us learn something that made it safer for us to do our business and not get killed.
The next day, I got a real education from David and a look into the depths of corruption in Tijuana and probably the rest of Mexico. Big Popeye told us to get our weapons ready and load up in the van. We all got excited thinking this might be a mission but they didn’t tell us where we were going. I heard David talking on the radio and he mentioned something about Posole—my own neighborhood. I thought it might have something to do with me or something happening back there.
Big Popeye put me in the Suburban with Big Smokie and we rode off. By this time, they weren’t bothering us to get our heads down when we left. We knew where we were and they had to trust us at some point. The neighborhood we lived in was called El Hipodromo and it was located behind the Agua Caliente Racetrack. We drove around the track property and turned onto Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. We eventually pulled up to a building and parked. I noticed that the front of the building had a lot of double-parked cars all sort of jumbled together. But what caught my attention was the huge Mexican flag hanging off the building and the words POLICIA JUDICIAL FEDERAL. Holy shit. We were at the Federal Police station.
As soon as we park, two federal cops in uniform come up to the Suburban. One of them is carrying an Uzi submachine gun. The other is carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Technically, both weapons are machine pistols since they’re chambered for pistol ammunition, but most people just call them machine guns. A real machine gun fires a rifle-caliber bullet.
I was so nervous that I never caught their names. Pancho? Nacho? Who knows. All I’m thinking is just don’t bust me or kill me. They did neither. They got in the Suburban and Big Popeye drove. Big Smokie is on the police radio talking away. We hit the Via Rapida and catch the highway going to Rosarito. I never thought I’d ever find myself sitting in a car with automatic weapons on my lap and some cops sitting in the back, also armed to the teeth. And all of us not shooting at each other because we were on the same side.
After driving for twenty minutes, we stopped at a gate by the side of the highway. One of the cops got out and unlocked it. We drove through. I saw a sign that says RANCHO .357. We drove up the road for a couple miles and then I saw a bunch of what looked like buildings but with the sides missing. It’s just framed two-by-fours but with windows and doors framed out. Beyond the buildings were silhouette targets and the hulks of bullet-riddled cars. We were at some kind of shooting range. A range that the cops were using. What the hell? Smokie is on the radio and tells David that the gate is open and he should come on up.
We dismounted and a few minutes later, one of the cops pulled out his pistol and shot at one of the silhouette targets. The other cop did the same and they both then went forward to check their targets. The cops asked me if we brought any more targets and Smokie says that “CH” was bringing them. This was the first time I’d heard David Barron referred to as CH. Apparently, after a disco shoot-out, Ramon Arellano Félix started calling David Barron “Charles Bronson.” Partly because of the way he looked but mostly because of the way he got the two brothers out of the jaws of an assassination attempt by shooting and killing everything that the assassins could throw at them. CH eventually became David’s radio call sign and the designation for our “office.”
The cops tell Smokie to step up and shoot at a target with his pistol. He does and when he’s done, it’s my turn. I fire fairly rapidly but carefully and when we go forward, I can see that my grouping was a little wide but that seven out of the ten rounds I fired would have been fatal, or near fatal, center mass chest shots. Not too bad. It was a lot better than Smokie had done and he was impressed. He asked me if I’d fired guns a lot in the past. “A little bit,” I told him.
Actually, I grew up around guns. My father and I would often go to the range and shoot shotguns at clay pigeons. He also taught me to shoot .22-caliber pistols and rifles. One time, for my ninth birthday, my dad took me to the base for a war game event they had. He arranged it so that I got to fire an M60 tripod-mounted machine gun. This was a real machine gun that they refer to as a “crew-served” weapon since it has a gunner who does the firing and an assistant who carries the ammo and the tripod and loads the weapon. I didn’t want to brag or anything, though. For some reason, I didn’t want to expose my hand too much with these cops around.
After we got done shooting the pistols a few more times, Smokie told me to go get my AK. “You ever shoot one of these before?” he asked me. I hadn’t and told him so. He walks me through the operating system quickly, showing me how to insert the magazine, rack the slide to load the weapon, and then switch the lever on the receiver that was marked SEMI and AUTO. In SEMI mode, the weapon fires with each pull of the trigger. In AUTO mode, the weapon keeps firing as long as you keep your finger on the trigger—what they call full auto.
I put it on SEMI just to get a feel for the weapon and determine how bad the recoil was. There was definitely recoil but it was very controllable. I put the AK to my shoulder and fired a string of single rounds into a bush. Firing at a bush isn’t really marksmanship of the first order, but it does represent what I might come up against in the real world. And if you can keep your rounds hitting into an area that small, you’re basically overwhelming your opponent with firepower.
I got a couple of congratulatory noises from the cops and Smokie. “Try it on full auto,” Smokie says. “Do it Bronson-style from the hip.” This is not the most accurate way of firing an AK or any weapon, really, but it looks cool. So I flipped the lever to AUTO, braced the stock against me, and unleashed a long string of fire into the same hapless bush. They all hit where I’d want them to hit if this was a gunfight and some guy was taking cover behind the bush. No wild stray shots bouncing around all over the country. It was a rush.
It’s amazing how fast you can go through a 100-round magazine when you fire on full auto. Even though I was wearing earplugs, my ears were ringing and I had a huge smile plastered on my face. I ran out of ammo and watched the other guys shoot. I fell in love with the one cop’s MP5. Since it fires a smaller, 9 mm pistol-caliber bullet, there’s a lot less recoil than with the AK-47 so it’s easier to control and you can put a lot of lead on a small target. It’s a light weapon, shorter than an AK and a lot handier to use if you have to fire from a car or a confined space like a small room. The other thing about the MP5 is that it has three modes of fire. One is the SEMI mode that fires one round at a time. There’s another mode that fires three-round bursts. And then, of course, it has th
e full-auto mode that will basically empty a thirty magazine in about three seconds if you keep the trigger pressed. Of all the guns we had, that MP5 was my favorite.
A little while later, David and the rest of the crew showed up. David shakes hands with the cops and asks me if I had a chance to shoot yet. I told him I did. Then he asked one of the cops how I did. “Este carbon tira bravo,” he said. “This fucker shoots good.” Then David looks at me and says, “Let’s see what you got.” We walk over to the van to get some more ammo. There was maybe 20,000 rounds of AK ammo in two wooden crates. There were also thousands of rounds of 9 mm and .38 Super ammunition. David also brought out these blocky-looking machine pistols—MAC-10s that spew out something like 1,200 rounds a minute. They’re not really accurate but they’re basically bullet hoses that you can use to spray down a whole room full of people. Except for the .38 Super pistols, none of the guns we used that day were legal in Mexico or the US. They weren’t the kinds of guns you could buy at a gun show or, frankly, anyplace in the US.
After we all got reloaded, David said, “I want to see how you guys would approach that car and how you take out the occupants when you get there.” He had a couple of the crew guys line up and gave them the signal to attack. They basically rushed the car like a mob and spraying bullets all over the place.
When it was my turn, I approached it a little differently. I put myself in the place of the guys in the car and I thought to myself, what would be the hardest way for them to shoot me if I was approaching the car. So I angled my approach to the car using the C-pillar of the car as their blind spot. Everybody knows that the C-pillar of a car is a big blind spot when you’re driving, so it would be the same if someone was standing there shooting at you.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 18