And then there was the issue of what would happen if the cops showed up. The Hollenbeck Police Station is only a few blocks away and cops are driving in and out of the station all day. They could get to us in half a minute once the bullets start flying.
We decided on where to meet up in case something went wrong and we had to scatter. The military calls this a “rally point.” We had two rally points in case everything went completely sideways at the first rally point and we needed that secondary fallback position.
Then we started getting deeper into the mechanics of the kill.
You need to do all this groundwork ahead of time if you’re in any way serious about committing an assassination and getting away with it. Little gangbangers and hotheads get caught because the only thing they’re thinking about is pulling the trigger. An assassin who’s worthy of the title knows that pulling the trigger is only about ten percent of the job. The real work is the setup, planning for the “Oh, shit” moment when the plan falls apart, getting in, and getting away with it.
Once we had our scenarios down, I took the crew to a swap meet for our clothes.
We were operating in what the press likes to call a “gang-infested” neighborhood. To us, it’s just the neighborhood. None of us grew up in neighborhoods that were not “gang-infested.” We know how gangs operate.
What the average guy on the street doesn’t know is that when you enter a gang neighborhood, you’re being watched. We profile the hell out of everybody that walks through our varrio.
What does your hair say about you? What about those tattoos? We can tell the difference between a tattoo made in prison with sewing needles and shoe polish and the professional ones. We can look at a tattoo and make an accurate guess as to what neighborhood you’re from, your status in the gang, if you’re a camarada, a shot caller, or a soldado.
I picked out clothes for me and my crew that would send the local gangsters the message that we were “casual,” not gang affiliated.
I picked out a jacket with a hoodie in a different color for each of the team—weird colors like brown, yellow, black, and green. To a gangster, those colors mean nothing. Casuals. The only color that counts to a Sureno is blue. Blue is the color of the Mexican Mafia–affiliated gangs in all of California. Don’t get caught in Norteno territory wearing a blue jersey or a blue LA Dodgers ball cap. It could get you killed.
Then sweatpants, shorts to wear under the sweatpants, and T-shirts to wear under the hoodies. This was for the benefit of the cops. The idea was that, right after we did the hit, we strip off the jackets and sweatpants and dump them. After the shooting, the radio call would go out looking for three Hispanics in hoodies and sweatpants. By the time the units got that information, we’d be in T-shirts and shorts, looking like every other Hispanic on the street.
Then I got everyone different-colored bandanas and gloves. The plan was to dump the guns. They were expendable tools. But we couldn’t dump them with our prints all over them and we didn’t want GSR—gunshot residue—on our hands in case we got stopped and they got curious enough to give us a GSR test. So we got gloves that were thin enough to work a slide, press the mag release button, and anything else we needed to do to keep a gun working in the middle of a firefight but thick enough not to leave GSR on our skin.
We were committed to not getting stopped by the cops. We didn’t want to kill them. We thought, they’re just working guys like us. But they belonged to a government that wasn’t our government. And if it came to it, it was their tough luck that they can’t shoot first. We could.
I briefed my guys that after we did the hit and got back in the car, we would reload with topped-up magazines and lock and load for battle with the cops if we had to. I told Roach, the driver, not to drive away fast from the scene. Drive like every other guy on the road so we wouldn’t attract attention.
If we did get a cop on our tail, we wanted to be ready to light them up. If a cop car just got behind us, we’d be cool. But if the lights came on, that was our signal to bail out of our car, fire everything we had at the windshield of the cop car, and take off on foot.
We had one more day of surveillance and planning ahead of us. We showed up early in the morning and set up our monitoring of the three dealers.
We had everything we needed in terms of weapons and gear. We had the plan. We were spooled up and ready. All we needed was the opportunity to get these three guys out in the street at the same time.
And then. There it was.
We hadn’t planned on doing it that day or at that moment, but it looked like the patron saint of sicarios, Jesus Malverde, had heard the assassin’s prayer and gave us the perfect opportunity.
All three of our targets were out in the street serving cars that had pulled up. It was right around 9:00 A.M. on a Monday morning and business was great.
I didn’t have to say much to the crew other than “We’re doing it now.”
Roach drove the car and parked it to within a foot of where we agreed to park it. It was in front of a closed machine shop.
We tied off the bandanas, pulled up our hoodies, grabbed our guns, and started walking the half block to where the three were serving.
I don’t know what it’s like being in an organized war in an army. But when I stepped out of the car with a full-auto weapon in hand, dressed up in my battle gear and focused on my enemy, I felt an enormous calm. Even though we were moving fast, everything seemed to slow down and I got a sort of tunnel vision. At the same time, I became aware of everything around me in sharp detail.
They were busy selling and we got to about ten feet of them before one of them yells out, “Agua! Agua!” That’s the distress call. What he saw were three guys in hoodies and bandanas walking toward them with their weapons raised and fingers on the trigger.
The first guy closest to me wasn’t the fat dealer. He looked me in the eye and froze for less than a second. It’s all it took.
I already had the muzzle of the TEC .22 centered on his chest. I pulled the trigger and four mercury-tipped bullets hit him center mass. I found out later that he was dead before he hit the ground.
The second dealer took off on foot and Chuy followed him down a side street.
Puma, as he was ordered to do, immediately straddled the guy I had just shot and was about to put one in his brain to make sure he was dead. I yelled at him not to bother. I could tell the guy was already dead. I yelled at Puma to go help Chuy find the runner.
All this took a handful of seconds. But it felt like forever.
Next was the fat dealer who was on the passenger side of his customer’s car. The car was between me and the fat guy. I yelled at the driver to get the hell out of there. But the guy froze up. He wouldn’t move.
I fired two rounds into his car and he finally pulled away. Slowly. So slowly that by the time he was clear, the fat dealer was about twenty feet away and running toward his front door.
I took my time, aimed, squeezed the trigger, and eight rounds blasted out the barrel like a garden hose. The fat dealer rolled onto the ground. It looked like his legs just got chopped out from under him. But I could see he was still moving and crawling to his front door. I took a quick look to see if anyone was hiding behind the door with a weapon, but didn’t see anything.
I walked up to him and I could see that I’d only hit him in the ass and the legs. The fat dealer rolled onto his back and said, “Non me mata. Por favor. Non me mata.” (Don’t kill me. Please. Don’t kill me.)
It was way too late in the game for mercy. This guy was a sicario. Just like me. He was one of the forty people who walked into Christine’s discotheque and sprayed lead all over the place, not caring how many innocent people he killed. If the situation were reversed, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. I didn’t hesitate either. It’s an ugly business. But it is a business.
I said to him, “Si, puto. Por Ramon.”
&nb
sp; I leaned over him and emptied the rest of the forty-round magazine into his body.
When bullets hit a body, what the body feels first is something like an electrical shock. The nervous system is basically overloaded by the impact of each bullet and the body reacts with muscular spasms. This guy was twitching like somebody had plugged a generator to his feet. That somebody was me.
I looked up and down the street and it was completely empty. This was a Monday morning around the time that people were on their way to work or school and there wasn’t a single person in sight. We’d just committed what we believed to be a triple homicide on a street in one of the biggest cities in the country, and for a long moment, I was the only living thing visible on the landscape.
Where were my guys?
I started off for the car and Roach was already behind the wheel and he and Puma were stripping off their bandanas and hoodies. But where was Chuy? I told Roach to wait and give me a few seconds.
I jumped out of the car with my weapon still in hand just in case I needed it. I ran up the street and there was Chuy, bent over at the waist, his gun still in his hand and both his hands on his knees. He was gasping for air. He’d chased the guy for a long time and finally hit him.
Chuy saw me. He smiled. He said something like he thought we left him behind. Then he told me he hit his man.
Time to go.
We ran back to the car, jumped in, and took off the bandanas.
I told Roach to go slow. Don’t make it look like we’re escaping the scene. And the good soldier that he was, he drove down the street right past the bodies as cool and slow as Joe Citizen.
Our first turn out of there was Whittier Boulevard. It was three blocks away. If we could make it to Whittier, we’d blend in with the traffic and we’d be gone.
But then we had to stop for a traffic light. And, as things like this happen, a Hollenbeck black-and-white cruiser stopped behind us.
“Be cool,” I told the guys in the car. I also told them to check their weapons and make sure they were loaded with fresh mags.
It was a female cop driving without a partner. My stomach tightened because she might be a mother or a wife or both and the thought of killing a woman, even if she was a cop, made me sick. But not sick enough to give her a pass.
I reminded my guys again. “If she puts her light on, we bail out. We light her up with everything we got and meet up at the first rally point.”
We sat frozen waiting for the red light to change. And then. Her light goes on. We went on full alert. We had our hands on the door handles, ready to swing out and kill her.
Then she cranked her wheel hard. She made a high-speed U-turn behind us, and disappeared going in the opposite direction. She must have just gotten the shots-fired call. She’d come about three seconds from being executed.
We looked at each other. This was some crazy shit.
We pulled over at the place we had arranged to dump our weapons and clothes and finished stripping. We threw the weapons and the clothes into a plastic bag and handed the bag to one of the Border Brothers who was waiting for us.
As he took the bag to dump it, we started hearing sirens coming our way. A lot of them. We pulled out into traffic and drove down Whittier Boulevard to get to the freeway. A couple of cop cars actually drove past us to respond to the scene of our crime. It was beautiful.
We were back across the border and at the office that same afternoon.
The next day, David Barron came in with a suitcase and told us that the killings had started a shit storm in LA. He opened the suitcase and gave us each $25,000 in cash. He didn’t ask for the $15,000 he’d given me as getaway money.
The body count turned out to be only two out of three. The first guy I shot died on the spot. The fat dealer took two days to die from the bullets and the mercury. The third guy that Puma shot eventually survived.
I was a hero to David Barron and Ramon Arellano. I led a team on a successful assassination and not only got away with it, but it kept the LAPD and the entire California justice system in the dark about those homicides for over a decade. Those murders remained unsolved until I eventually became a prosecution witness and told them how and why they happened.
Getting it done right that time does not make me proud now, but it did then.
23
Respect
I came back from that mission in Boyle Heights, East LA, with the hit under my belt. In that world, there can be respect and that was what I was craving. The morality was completely turned on its head. Right was wrong and wrong was rewarded.
But it wasn’t just the fact that I could assault and kill people on demand that raised my status with David Barron. It was also the fact that I could follow orders even in the small things. David was a fancy dresser and he liked things around the office to be clean and straightened up. Most of the other guys in the crew lived like frat boys. They left their clothes laying around and they never cleaned up the place unless they knew that David was on his way. I was the opposite. I guess it came from being raised by a Marine but I always had my shit squared away. My bed was made, my clothes were clean, and I kept my guns and equipment in good shape. David noticed and gave me props for it.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t the only guy like that. There was another guy, named Chi Chi. He was a sharp dresser, like David, and he worked out a lot. He owned a couple of gyms in Tijuana that I sometimes used to work out in. So Chi Chi looked good and he owned a Porsche and a Mercedes. Naturally, he had a lot of girls always hanging around him. He was also a little older than most of the guys in the office and I guess that was part of the reason for his discipline as well.
The other thing is that I like to cook my own food. Whenever I cooked, everybody would start asking me to make some for them. So before you know it, I was the unofficial cook of the office, and David had respect for that too.
About a month after we came back from the mission in Boyle Heights in LA, David assigned me to do another mission in California. He made me the lead guy on it and told me to pick my own crew for it.
The target was a guy named Guero Palmas of the Sinaloa Cartel and therefore an enemy. He was Chapo Guzman’s right-hand man. He was just an enemy. Palmas lived in a small town called Maywood. When I say small town, it wasn’t something out in the woods or anything. Maywood is its own town in the greater LA area that has its own city government. At the time, Maywood also had its own sixty-man police department. Maywood and a neighboring town named Cudahy are only two square miles big. Sixty cops for that small a town is a lot, but they needed that many.
Maywood and Cudahy didn’t have the kinds of budgets to hire top people. And that included the police force. The Maywood police force was in large part made up of cops who were fired from their previous cop job for everything from corruption, prisoner abuse, sexual crimes, and bribery. It was known as the town where all the bad cops landed. The town itself had a high proportion of fully mobbed-up gangsters. One of the most popular nightclubs in Cudahy, for instance, had pictures on the wall of Al Pacino in Scarface, and pictures of Chapo Guzman, Pablo Escobar, Al Capone, and a bunch of other notorious criminals. They also played a lot of narcocorridos over the PA system. It was that kind of place.
I decided to take my reliable crew with me for this one—Chuy, Puma, Roach, and Trigger. We got across the border into California with no problems. We hooked up with our local guys who gave us guns, ammo, hand grenades, and showed us where Palmas lived.
We checked into the Maywood Inn and started doing our recon. Palmas lived across the street from a big swap meet that isn’t there anymore. He had one of the apartments in a small, four-unit building. Once we started doing the recon, we realized that this guy almost never came out of his house. People would come and go to see him to do their business, but he never stepped out of his pad.
Palmas had two Thunderbirds, a blue one and a maroon one. So we
sat in a park across from the apartments and waited day and night for him to show his face. It was long and boring, and naturally, when you sit in cars all day using binoculars and talking on radios, you draw the attention of the local gang. In this area it was Los Compadres. At first they thought we were cops. After a week of hanging around and getting to know these guys, we finally dropped David “Popeye” Barron’s name and they stopped being suspicious. In fact, we bought some dope from them to pass the time at night when we weren’t working.
One night we caught a break. We watched Palmas and his crew come out of the complex and pile into the two Thunderbirds. It was him and seven other people with him. We were already in the custom van Ramon had given us in TJ so we followed him until he pulled into the parking lot of a club called La Aquilla in South Central LA.
We were all ready to go. We had our rifles, pistols, and a couple of hand grenades and we were just about to make the move on him, when a couple of LAPD police cars pulled into the parking lot. We waited but the cops didn’t leave. So we scrubbed the mission and I decided to call David.
I told him the trouble we were having with Palmas not coming out of his house, so I told him I had a plan. We knew his apartment was on the second floor, so I wanted to have my guys with AK-47s set up downstairs and I’d throw a hand grenade into his apartment. Once the grenade went off, he’d either be dead or he’d run out of there. If he ran down the stairs, we’d get him with the AKs. David asked me if there were any kids living in the complex. I told him there were kids’ toys like Big Wheels in the yard so there probably were kids in the building. David didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t want to stir up a shit storm by accidentally killing kids. He wanted us to do it as stealthily as possible. You can imagine what would have happened. The publicity it would have brought down would have been dramatic. This was 1993. A hand grenade and full-automatic weapons? Not stealthy.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 20