Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man

by Martin Corona

  So while we went back to the surveillance, David called me and told me to come down to San Diego. “I need you to meet some people.” So me and Puma went down there because David wanted me to have an extra body with me. When we got down there, I got a call from David and he told me, “Somebody’s going to call you and I want you to do something for him.” I told him that was cool and I waited for the call.

  So we get a call and they tell us to meet up in Horton Plaza. When Puma and I get down there, they scoop us up in a van and it was Kity Paez and Chi Chi. And Kity told us, “Look, man, we’re going to go down here and find this guy. And when we find him, we want you to go ahead and put in some work.”

  Kity is a really cool dude. He looked like a big kid. Normally, I would have been suspicious. But this was something that David put me onto and I was positive that David wouldn’t throw me to the wolves. If he was backing this guy’s play, it had to be part of David’s business. As it turned out, Paez struck me as a good dude that I could trust. He was open-minded. He would listen to us when we had a suggestion. He wasn’t the kind of guy that just issued commands and expected you to follow them blindly or without some feedback from you.

  Years later, after I was arrested, I found out that Paez had asked David for me personally. They all knew about the Boyle Heights mission and they liked the way I handled myself and ran my crew. So when Paez wanted to have somebody taken care of, I was the guy he wanted. I never really found out why this guy in San Diego had gotten on the wrong side of Paez or David Barron. Most of the time, I never got those kinds of details. Sometimes, though, out of respect, David would give me details like that after the job was over.

  Paez, Chi Chi, Puma, and me were sitting in a white minivan and Paez started shooting questions at me. Paez was in the front passenger seat and turned around in the minivan and asks, “Look. Let me ask you something. If we were to pull up next to a car right now, and I tell you that’s the guy and you had an AK-47, what would you do?”

  I told him, “I’d stick the gun right out the window and spray the guy while we were driving.” Then he said, “Show me how you’d do it.” So I walked him through how I’d do it and he said, “Good. Good. If we do this, we want it done right.” So I said, “Cool.”

  So he takes us down to the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego. This area is full of nightclubs, restaurants, and shops. It’s the sort of place that tourists flock to like the Third Street Promenade is in LA or Greenwich Village in New York. The guy we were looking for owned a nightclub in the area. We pull up to the place and Chi Chi gets out and goes in there. After about twenty minutes, he comes out and tells us that he talked to a couple of people in there and that the guy wasn’t there. The target had to take care of some kind of business in Mexico and that’s where he was. So Kity says he knew where this guy lived in Chula Vista and we drove there next.

  We looked at the cars in the driveway and the car he normally drove, a black Mercedes, wasn’t there. So we missed our chance. Kity called David and told him that we couldn’t find the guy. David got on the phone and told me to chill out overnight in San Diego and go out the next day looking for him.

  Then he said, “If things don’t work out, don’t worry about it. Go back to LA and take care of the thing I sent you on.” We spent a couple more days looking for the guy but he never showed up, so I went back to LA and took up surveillance on Huero Palmas.

  They ended up killing this guy sometime later. When they got him, they used the same white Jetta that I had used in the Boyle Heights mission. After they got him, they took that Jetta behind a supermarket and set fire to it. They poured gasoline all over the interior, and Tarzan, one of the guys on my crew, threw a match in there not realizing that the fumes are more flammable than the liquid. When the match hit the fumes, the whole car flashed out in a huge fireball, and Tarzan ended up getting some second-degree burns and had his hair and eyebrows completely singed off.

  I found out later that Tarzan and Zigzag had killed him in his Mercedes and they found something like $170,000 in a briefcase in the backseat that they took off with.

  After I get back to LA, I got a call from Marta, who was my girlfriend at the time. She called to tell me that she wanted to go out with her best girlfriend to a nightclub in Tijuana. She asked me if that was okay if she did that. I said, “Yeah, go ahead and have a good time. I’m up here in LA and I’ll see you when I get back.”

  Then around 2:00 A.M. she calls me back. I was dead asleep at the time. I could tell she’d been drinking but she wasn’t drunk. She asked me, “Baby what are you doing up there?”

  I told her I was asleep but I was in LA taking care of business. She kept insisting, “But what are you doing?” I told her, “Look, I told you never to ask me about my business.” She was living off me at the time. I was renting her apartment for her, I was taking care of her, and she had at least $25,000 that she was holding on to for me. I had told her that she could take out what she needed, but I wanted to know what she was taking out. She knew that I was in the drug business because I was bringing home dope and I had her brother selling it for me. So she was aware of all that. But she thought it was strictly drugs.

  Then she told me that when they were in the nightclub, one of the Logan boys, a guy named Cracks, was hitting on her. She told him to leave her alone because she was already living with me.

  Cracks said to her, “Fuck Nite Owl. It’s all Logan boys. He’s the only one from Posole.”

  Some of the other guys from my crew were there as well and they’re telling Cracks to shut his mouth. They told him that I was one of their crew and I was all right with everybody down there. But Cracks was one of those bad drunks that gets belligerent and he continues to try to hit on her. He finally decides to go up to her and says, “I bet you don’t even know what your old man’s doing.” She told Cracks that I was up there slinging dope. He says to her, “You don’t know. He kills people for money.” She told him it was bullshit. He kept telling her that I killed people for money.

  She asked me, “Baby, is it true?”

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s not going to hit on you anymore.”

  I was pissed at this. And it’s not just because he was hitting on my girlfriend. He was shooting his mouth off in a crowded bar about my business and the cartel’s business. This was something that could put us all in jeopardy. And not just from the cops but from the Sinaloa Cartel as well. The next morning, I jump in the car and drive down to Tijuana. As soon as I get there, I see David, and David is surprised to see me. He’s also pissed off that I left my assignment in LA unfinished and came back without his approval or even alerting him. I explained to him the situation with Cracks and Marta. He said he’d let it go for the moment, but Amado Carrillo was coming to town for a face-to-face meeting with Ramon. David told me to go suit up and get my stuff. They needed me for the escort mission. So I got my bulletproof vest and my guns and loaded up in David’s truck.

  Amado Carrillo Fuentes was the head of the Juarez Cartel, which had sided with the Sinaloa Cartel against the AFO, and he was known as el Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies. Among his other assets, he owned a large fleet of airplanes that he used in his drug business. He was supposed to be the richest criminal in history with something like $25 billion in assets. Carrillo got into the drug trade through his uncle Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, who was known as the legendary Don Neto, who was the head of the Guadalajara Cartel. We’d been warring with Carrillo for a decade and even though there was supposed to be a temporary truce during the time of the meeting, neither of them trusted each other to keep the peace. The war was basically over who would control the plazas, the ports of entry for drugs into the US. The cartel that controls the plaza controls the drug trade. You either have to pay a tribute to the owner of the plaza to get the drugs across or you have to declare war to control the plaza yourself. This meeting was supposed to iron out some problems and see if Ramon and Car
rillo could come to some arrangement.

  Carrillo brought twenty security guys with him, all armed to the teeth. Our mission was to go pick up Carrillo at the Tijuana airport and escort him and his team to Benjamin Arellano’s fortress just one block from the bullring in Tijuana. Benjamin’s house had a wall twenty-five feet high with guard towers. It was a fortress.

  This convoy duty was a demonstration to the world of how much power Ramon had over the entire Tijuana government and judicial system. We had about twenty SUVs at the airport, all of them filled with our security people. After we picked up Carrillo and his people, we headed to Benjamin’s house in a big convoy. The local Tijuana cops worked traffic control for us. They blocked intersections and ran interference the entire way from the airport all the way to our destination. It’s the same kind of traffic control and security that any president would get. We blasted the whole way with nothing to stop us. Except for an old man.

  Somehow, this old guy in a pickup truck gets himself in the middle of the convoy. As luck would have it, he was stuck just in front of our SUV. David was riding in the front passenger seat and Puma and I were in the back seat. The old guy is poking along slowing everybody down. David tells the driver to ram the old guy to get his attention. After we bump him, the old guy gets pissed and slows down even more.

  David was on the radio with Benjamin, and Benjamin was telling him to be cool and not do anything that could draw some heat. David tells us to open the doors and show the old guy our guns. The old guy apparently wasn’t impressed and just kept driving slow. So David bumps him off the road and pulls over. He radios the convoy to keep driving. David gets out of the SUV, pulls open the old guy’s door, and throws what must have been $2,000 at the old guy. He gets back in the SUV and we take off again. This was crazy shit, especially when you realize that he was doing this in front of the local cops.

  When we got to Benjamin’s place, the giant steel gates slide open and we all drive in. There must have been another seventy-five of our security people inside the walls, all armed with full-automatic weapons.

  Ramon and Carrillo had their meeting and we escorted them back to the airport. On the way back, Ramon asked us if we were afraid of heights. We said we weren’t. He had a plan to get us all into a couple of helicopters and get to Carrillo’s landing strip before his plane touched down and kill him on his own turf.

  He asked if I was ready to go out to Sinaloa in the choppers and kill Amado for him.

  I said, “Yeah. Sure I’ll go.”

  By that time, I was down for anything. I was already anticipating my life ending down there. My thinking was if I’m going to go out, I’m going to go out. I never refused to take an assignment. This kept me on good terms. It may have been the only thing that kept me alive. I was very sure that with all the politics the way they are with the cartel, the first time I refused anything, I would have been taken out. I was expendable. Regardless of how good you are, you’re always expendable.

  For some reason, Ramon couldn’t pull off this stunt and they canceled the helicopter assault.

  As it turned out, the helicopter intercept and any other plot to kill him was all for nothing. Carrillo eventually died from complications from having plastic surgery performed on his face. He died on the operating table. The two surgeons that operated on him were tortured and then put in fifty-five-gallon barrels and then they poured concrete into the barrels. It turns out that Ramon had his own people in the hospital and somehow got the doctors to kill him or caused the equipment to fail. A year later, the Mexican cops along with US law enforcement seized $10 billion from Carrillo’s various bank accounts.

  After David realized the helicopter intercept wasn’t happening, David said, “Listen, I need you to go back to LA. I promise you. I give you my word right here right now, that when you get back, I’ll have Cracks tied up for you and you can kill him any way you want to.” You got to remember that Cracks is his homeboy from Logan. So I figured, all right, the guy gave me his word and I accepted it. So I went back to LA.

  We went back to our surveillance the next day and spent another couple of weeks just watching. Palmas never showed his face.

  When I came back to Tijuana, I found out that they already took care of Cracks. They caught him in an alley and shot him seven times. But Cracks survived. He’s all messed up but he’s alive to this day.

  I was angry at David for breaking his word to me about Cracks. Soon after I found out about Cracks, I walked away from David and the Arellano brothers. I got in my car and came back to San Diego. In my mind, I was through with them.

  Not long after I landed back in San Diego, I was picked up by the local cops for a parole violation. After leaving Calipatria State Prison, I never reported to my parole officer and they’d had a warrant for my arrest ever since. At first they put me in Donovan but after pulling a few strings, I eventually worked my way back to Calipatria. Bugsy and I were cellies again, just as we were before I went to work for David and Ramon. I’d be in Calipatria for at least a year.

  I heard through Bugsy that David was angry with me for leaving the way I did. Bugsy was on my side and told David that the whole episode with Cracks wasn’t done right and David should have waited until I got back to let me take care of my own business.

  While I was in Calipatria waiting for my one-year sentence to end, Ramon, David, and the crew sparked off a battle that made headlines around the world and almost crippled the AFO.

  The event I’m talking about happened on May 24, 1993, at the Guadalajara airport. David’s crew, made up mainly from Logan Heights boys, assassinated Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. Hundreds of rounds were fired and the cardinal was hit with fourteen gunshots. Six other people died in the shoot-out. The fallout from the Ocampo assassination drove Ramon and the whole organization underground.

  There are a lot of theories on what actually happened that day. The first reports were that Ocampo was just caught in the cross fire between David’s crew and Chapo Guzman’s crew, who were protecting Chapo Guzman. The other theory is that Chapo was at the airport and driving away in the same kind of car that Ocampo happened to be driving in—a white Mercury Grand Marquis. And they thought it was Guzman in the Grand Marquis. The last theory is that this was an assassination plot that started in the Mexican government to silence the cardinal. The rumor was that the cardinal was going to name names of corrupt Mexican politicians who were working with the cartels. And it was those politicians that ordered Ramon to kill the cardinal.

  What’s not in doubt is that most of the shooters that day were David’s crew and most of them were Logan Heights homies.

  Like I said, the aftermath almost put a complete stop to Ramon and the cartel. Everybody went underground and they were told not to do anything. They had heat on them everywhere. Interpol. The Vatican. The United States. All the Catholic nations in South and Central America. They’re mad at Ramon. So for the whole time that I was in Calipatria, nothing was going on in Tijuana, and David had bigger things to think about than me walking out on him.

  24

  Wasn’t for Her

  After I got out, I was running around the neighborhood like usual. But this was the time I met my second wife. She’s the mother of my daughter. And I got to say that she is the love of my life. To this day she’s the only woman I ever really opened up to. I’ve never been able to open myself up to anybody else the way I opened up to her. I married her and we had a child. She was everything I ever wanted.

  And the life I lived just wasn’t for her.

  When we first got together, we ended up living at my cousin Roy Boy’s house. Roy Boy Rivas was an EME member. At the time, he was in county waiting for his trial on a murder beef. (He lost that case and he’s serving life.) He was married to Myrna.

  He had asked me, “I need you to do me some favors.”

  I asked what kind of favor and he said, “I need you to take a dude out.
”

  I said okay. I’d do it.

  He asked me to meet up with my ex-wife, Tutu. “I’m going to have you meet up with Tutu because she knows where this guy lives.” He was going to have Bobby Perez come down from San Diego to help. He asked me to meet up with her in Tijuana and if I had any guns.

  “Yeah, I got some guns.” At the time, I had a full-auto Uzi, a .45, a 9 mm, and a few guns I accumulated while I was in TJ.

  “When Bobby gets there, you meet up with Tutu and she’s going to take you where the dude’s at and you take care of him.”

  So Bobby and I meet up with Tutu and I told her that I had to go to Oceanside because that’s where my guns were at. So I get my guns and as we’re coming back, the cops pull us over. I grew up on the East Side and I know how the East Side is. They see more than one homeboy in a car or even one homeboy late at night and they’re going to pull you over. It’s just their thing. They see me and Bobby in the car and they get on our tail.

  Bobby asks me, “What do you want to do?” I told him we can either bail out and make a run for it or we can spray the cops with the Uzi and take off. “What do you want to do? It’s up to you.” You got to keep in mind that Bobby had just got out after doing seventeen years in the state penitentiary. And I can see now, after doing all that time, him not wanting to go back.

  Bobby says, “Maybe they’re just going to give us a ticket.” I know better. We got guns in the car, we both have records. There’s no way they’re going to just give us a ticket.

  Bobby is in total denial. He said, “Nah, nah, dog. Just pull over. They’ll just give us a ticket.” I asked him if he was sure he wanted to do that and not run for it. He was convinced we were going to walk on this one. So we pull over and the cops ask for license and registration. I had neither so I gave them a fake name. The cop goes back and runs it and then he comes back to our car and asks Bobby his name. The dude gives him his real name—Robert Perez. As soon as they run his name, they come back with the Fourth waiver. That’s the California law that says when you’re on parole, you waive your Fourth Amendment right and they have the right to search you, your property, or any place you happen to be without a warrant. That includes any car you ride in.