Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man

by Martin Corona

  With the AK to my shoulder I crouch low to make myself harder to see and approach from that angle and I use two- and three-round bursts to pin down the occupants. Once I get close enough, I swing around to the front to take out the driver and unload on the rest of the occupants in the car. I had a hundred rounds to play with, so I really let the car have it.

  When I was done I looked over at the cops and David and they were all smiling. David asked me, “Where did you learn to shoot like that?” I told him, “I watched a lot of TV when I was in jail.” They laughed some more but that was the truth. Then David said, “You keep this up and you’ll be putting in work real soon. Remember. No nuts. No glory.”

  21

  The Fat Guy

  To us, the mansion was just “The Office.” But it was a mansion with a huge atrium, a pool, waterfall, koi pond, and a staff. We had women that cleaned, cooked, and did our laundry and we had local old men who maintained the grounds and did maintenance.

  The office was located in one of Tijuana’s best neighborhoods. It would be the equivalent of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, or Sutton Place in New York. Our neighbors were the cream of Tijuana society. They were judges, politicians, millionaire businessmen, and old-money families that made their fortunes a hundred years ago in gold, oil, cattle, and crops.

  Of course, everyone in the neighborhood knew exactly what was going on behind the walls of the office. They couldn’t help but see the twenty-four-hour heavily armed security force that constantly patrolled the grounds. And how could they possibly not see the caravans of ten to fifteen SUVs, packed with armed men, coming and going in the middle of the night or in broad daylight? But the neighbors kept their mouths shut because we didn’t bother them or have any dealings with them. Our business was dope and murder and our enemies were other people whose business was dope and murder.

  Occasionally, the two worlds did collide and we had to handle these “legitimate” people who either got in our way or decided to play with fire. Oddly, some of the young people in these wealthy families were fascinated by the life of a narco-terrorist and did business with us. Some did well. Others ended their lives melting in a barrel of acid.

  Growing up as a street kid in San Diego, living the life of a millionaire was something I never thought I’d experience. At the time that I raised my hand to join the AFO as a sicario, I didn’t care if the price for the life of a king was killing people. The people that Ramon Arellano Félix targeted were no better or worse than we were. They were just adversaries, our opposite numbers in the drug business. Everybody on both sides knew that competition in the drug trade basically comes down to how many people on the other side can we kill before they give up. And that was the goal. Kill as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, until the attrition just wears them down.

  Of course, they were trying to do the same to us.

  A month after I’d left Calipatria State Prison in California and crossed the border to work for Ramon, David “Popeye” Barron gave me my first assignment.

  Like I said, David Barron was a Mexican Mafia brother, but years ago he traveled to Mexico and offered himself up for service to the Arellano Félix brothers, the AFO. Barron had personally killed something close to one hundred people for the AFO. He used everything from pistols, shotguns, rifles, machetes, knives, sledgehammers, chain saws, to plain old meat cleavers. He liked to think of himself as a specialist, a methodical killer with a deep knowledge of the human body. Later, on some of our missions, he’d show me how and where to plunge the knife into a bound man who was screaming for his life.

  David pulled me aside one morning and told me that Ramon had ordered two assassinations. I never knew their names. And I didn’t need to. All I was told was that these two guys lived in LA and they’d been part of the assassination team that tried to kill Ramon at Christine’s discotheque in Puerto Vallarta the year before.

  That was the incident that got Ramon Arellano Félix calling David Barron Charles Bronson. Chapo Guzman had sent forty assassins into Christine’s to kill Ramon and his brother Benjamin. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds had been fired from both sides during the gunfight between Ramon’s people and Guzman’s killers. Eight of Ramon’s bodyguards were killed, ten of Guzman’s assassins were killed, and something like a dozen innocent civilians were killed in Christine’s that night.

  It was a bloody massacre that should have made headlines all over the world. Or at the very least in the United States, the biggest consumer of the drugs we moved. The fact that it didn’t just indicates to me that American society is deluded in thinking that personal drug use is a victimless crime. Every ounce of pot or bindle of cocaine or eight ball of heroin that changes hands on the streets or in an executive suite or an Oscar after-party has blood on it. A lot of it is innocent blood, like the young “civilians” who were killed at Christine’s that night.

  Ramon needed to show Guzman that even though the assassination had failed, Ramon wasn’t about to let any of Chapo’s guys live to brag about the tale. And it didn’t matter that they were no longer in Mexico. Chapo needed to be sent a message that even his people living in the US would not be safe from the long arm of Ramon’s retribution. These two shooters had to die. And I was the one just tasked with killing them.

  This was the thing I’d sweated about since I was recruited the month before. This was going to be my first hit. And it was critical to Ramon Arellano Félix that it get done and done right. No fuckups. No arrows pointing back to him. No footprints that could implicate the cartel. It had to be clean and fast. And I was going to be in charge.

  One of the people on the target list, a fat, slow-moving shooter, was now living large in LA, dealing drugs for Chapo Guzman and probably feeling safe from any retaliation from the Arellano brothers. After all, he was in the US. And everybody knows that the cartels don’t commit murders in the US. It was to our advantage that people kept believing that. The reality is, more killings in the US are committed on orders that originate in Mexico than the cops and media let on. No one wants to talk about how little control they have over who comes in.

  Chapo and the Arellanos had been at war for a decade, since 1989, and nobody has any clear idea of the body count on both sides. Thousands.

  David gave me $15,000 in “desfanar” money—getaway cash in case something went wrong. If I needed to buy a car, bribe a hotel clerk to give me a room without checking in, or buy a gun on the street, I’d have enough for me and my crew to make it back to Tijuana.

  Besides actually killing one or more of my boss’s enemies, what I was worrying about was going back to the US. I was a parole violator. I never checked in with my PO after I left Calipatria State Prison. I could get violated just for that. Could I make it across the border into San Diego without a nosy border agent running me through the NCIC? Would some gang cop in LA spot me at a gas station and decide to see what was up?

  The truth is, I’d grown up on the streets and had developed ways of how to behave around cops. And I was good at profiling people and analyzing situations that could get too hot for me.

  There was no way we could bring our weapons across the border. So David gave me the names of two Border Brothers (Mexican nationals, also known as paisas) who lived in LA. These paisas also knew our targets and they’d be our local facilitators. These US-based locals were part of Ramon Arellano’s network of intelligence, communication, and enforcement. They’d set us up with the guns and show us who this fat dealer was and where he lived.

  The cartels would not be able to ship a billion dollars of dope into the US every year without a huge network on US soil. It could be anybody. A middle-aged mother handling money and phone calls for the AFO in Palmdale. A construction worker standing outside a Home Depot in LA. A couple of teenagers slinging dope in Compton and keeping an eye out for AFO competitors. A civilian employee of the LAPD. Someone on staff in a city council member’s office. A Border Patrol agent. A co
rrections officer in Pelican Bay State Prison. They can be anywhere and anyone.

  David asked me to handpick two guys to go with me. There was no question. I picked the only two of my San Diego homeboys who I could halfway trust to shoot straight and follow orders. They were both only seventeen at the time.

  I picked Roach and Puma. Roach was an awesome driver who didn’t lose his shit in a gunfight or a police pursuit. Puma was a solid soldier with a lot of heart. They were proven quantities.

  When you’re working for the Dark Side, you’ve got nobody to rely on except the guys standing next to you. Going deep into enemy territory, which, face it, is what we were doing, is nothing like gangbanging or hitting up an enemigo from the neighborhood across the boulevard.

  I wasn’t a gangbanger anymore. I wasn’t even just a Mexican Mafia camarada. I was now the sharp tip of the spear of an international criminal organization. And at that level of operation, you’re expected to perform like a professional. Excuses only make you dead.

  Guzman and the Arellanos were all billionaires. They did what they had to do to keep the other guy from eating into their business.

  So at 3:30 P.M. the next day, Puma, Roach, and I waited in line at the San Diego border crossing. Puma was driving a red Toyota pickup truck. Roach and I were in a brand-new white Jetta. Both vehicles had California plates that, if the cops ever ran them, would come back to legally registered owners in California. That’s what a billion-dollar organization can buy you—an enormous support system of safe houses, safe registrations, routes of entry and exit, intelligence networks, and all the guns and people required to keep the organization running smooth.

  We had people inside the Mexican government that fed us information on American cops working in Mexico. We had people inside the Mexican phone companies that tapped the phones of anybody we wanted. Including the US DEA agents that were working in Mexico. There was nothing we could not know or could not buy.

  It turned out I had no reason to sweat crossing into San Diego. The Border Patrol guys saw the plates and barely gave us a second look when we flashed our California-issued driver’s licenses. Actually, I didn’t even show a driver’s license because I didn’t have one. I flashed a California DMV-issued identity card.

  The border was so loosely enforced that the cartels could move anything they want through it. I had a warrant because I never showed up to my parole meetings. I was in the US law enforcement computer system as a parole jumper. A few keystrokes on a computer would have shown that.

  By 6:00 P.M. that afternoon we were in Los Angeles. We checked into a Ramada Inn and called the two Border Brothers at the phone number that David had given me.

  An hour later, Chino and Chuy, the two Mexican nationals living illegally in the US, showed up at the room. They were both in their twenties. They brought us our weapons and gave us the briefing on where our targets lived and how they operated.

  They brought us a fully automatic Uzi submachine gun equipped with a huge silencer. They also gave us an M1 carbine, a .357 revolver, and a couple of 9 mm semiautomatic pistols.

  The carbine is a semiauto weapon that the US military used in World War II. It’s a good, reliable weapon that was designed for hard use in combat situations. The Uzi was developed by the Israelis for close-quarter combat. It has a short little barrel that’s perfect for using from inside a car or in a room. The problem with the one they gave us was that it had a massive, eighteen-inch silencer on it. That made the handy gun less handy. I didn’t want a long barrel getting in the way in case we had to use it from a car or I had to carry it under a shirt.

  The way we worked was to use a light-caliber weapon for the initial engagement and then back that up with the heavier calibers. Basically, the Uzi sprays a lot of lead real fast but it’s not that accurate. The procedure is to hose off the opposition and get at least enough holes in them to get them down. Then we finish them off with head shots at close range with the heavy calibers like the .357 Magnum and the .30-caliber bullet of the carbine. Believe it or not, it’s hard to kill somebody with a single shot in a gunfight. The only absolute, instant kill shot is in the head. And you need to be close and the target has to be still to get that shot.

  It was a point of honor to use the least amount of ammo to kill a guy. The ideal hit was a single shot to the head at close range. When someone came back from a mission and had to use a lot of bullets to get the job done, we’d haze them for wasting ammo. Sometimes, like the guy who killed the police commander in Mexico City, a sicario would apologize for using more than a few rounds to kill his target.

  I told Chino to see what he could do about losing the silencer. But I realized the next day he had no idea what I was talking about.

  I gave Puma and Roach one hundred dollars to go get some food, and I started thinking how to run this mission based on the information the two Border Brothers had given us.

  A few hours later, Roach and Puma came back with a couple of girls they met on the street and they basically partied and screwed until three in the morning, when the girls left.

  They were young. And although they didn’t say it, they were probably thinking that this could be their last night on earth so why the hell not get loaded and laid. I was thirty at the time. I had already reconciled myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to live much longer. Getting drunk and laid wouldn’t make me feel any better than I was. Besides, getting loaded is a hazard. It makes you stupid and tired the next day and if I was going to survive, I needed to stay sharp and on my game.

  Maybe the best I could hope for was a cartel funeral with a big headstone and a statue of Santa Muerte planted in the dirt over my body. I didn’t care. I had nothing holding me to the world of the living. I’d cut myself off from my parents and my siblings. I didn’t have a relationship with my wife or children. I was a fugitive from the California justice system. I didn’t have a single thing to look forward to or live for. I was already dead.

  The next day the two Border Brothers came back and they took us to a canyon in the hills outside of Pomona, California. The guys in the crew that trained me were former Mexican Army or Mexican Federal Police members. They told me that when you prepare for a mission, you have to function-fire your weapons to make sure they work. Then clean them, load them, and make sure nobody else handles the weapon except the guy that’s going to use it. That’s what I drilled into Puma and Roach.

  Then Chuy threw me a curve. He wasn’t supposed to be part of the hit team. But he said he wanted in. I don’t know why but I figured he probably needed to earn some stripes with Ramon or his gang or the Mexican Mafia. Or all of them. I could see he was like me in a lot of ways. He wanted to prove himself. Even though it all worked out well in the end, I should not have let him be part of the hit team. It was unprofessional.

  I assigned Puma the M1 carbine. Chuy got the .357 revolver and Roach got one of the 9 mm semiautos. I was supposed to have the Uzi, but Chino the Border Brother had taken the Uzi to a guy who supposedly knew about guns. This idiot thought the silencer was a flash suppressor that wasn’t made right. So he drilled about one hundred holes in the silencer, thinking that was the way flash suppressors work. He basically destroyed the usefulness of the gun.

  When we got back to the Ramada, I called David about the Uzi and that I needed another weapon. A few hours later, a fully automatic TEC .22-caliber showed up. It had two forty-round magazines loaded with hollow-point bullets that had been dipped in mercury. The idea was that if the bullets didn’t kill the target right away, the mercury would eventually poison him. These rounds were reserved for the fat guy, who we knew for sure was one of the shooters at Christine’s discotheque. He was the primary, must-kill target. If we got anybody else connected to him, that was a bonus.

  Once we had our weapon situation figured out, we started the surveillance part of the mission.

  The street where we’d do our hit was in East LA, not too far
from the post office in the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division. That part of LA is about as deep in Sureno gangs and Border Brothers as any part of the city. It’s been a spawning ground for street gangs and Mexican Mafia shot callers since before World War II. Legendary EME brothers like Joe “Pegleg” Morgan, Mundo Mendoza, and Alfie Sosa all came from those streets.

  We parked where the dealers wouldn’t see us watching them. Roach and Puma were in the Toyota. Chuy and I were in the Jetta. We had Tijuana police radios and we were using those to talk to each other. It turned out there were three of Chapo’s people working that street. They had rented houses and apartments on both sides of the street. And the way they worked was that they’d hang around in the front yard, looking to the casual observer as just a couple of residents relaxing. But we could see that every few minutes, a car would pull up to the house and wait. One of the dealers would approach the car and serve the drugs.

  Then the car would pull off and the guy would go back to sitting in his yard. It was a drive-up franchise for dope—a Burger King for coke, meth, and pot. And this was just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of Chapo Guzman’s retail dope outlets all over California and the rest of the country.

  “That’s him. That’s the cabron,” Chuy said when the fat dealer first showed himself. I told my guys to memorize his face. He was the guy we needed to kill.

  22

  Getting It Done Right

  He was working with two other guys, both Mexican nationals working for Chapo Guzman. I decided right there to hit all of them. I wanted to go back to the office with a high body count. We watched them dealing most of the day. They were busy.

  Once we had the guys’ faces, their houses, and how they worked completely memorized, I started looking for ways to get in and out of the street fast. I sent our two Border Brothers away and drove all around the neighborhood with my shooters. We analyzed entry and escape routes. We went through a lot of “what if” scenarios. What if they spot us early and run? What if they have shooters in the houses? Dope houses are a prime target for home invasions from rival gangs, so a smart dealer will always have a security team in place right behind the entrance, with large-caliber weapons. So there was that to think about.