The cop says, “You’re going to have to step out. We’re going to search this car.” It’s over with. The only thing I had going for me was that I gave them a fake name. My name came back clean. But they search the car. They find the Uzi. They find the .45. They throw us on the ground. They cuff us up. And they take us to the county jail. By this time, I was already on the ladder. My reputation had grown while I was in Mexico and after I came back and went back to prison. So when we land in county, I was considered a Big Homie. A senior shot caller.
After they put me in a cell, I got hold of some staples and started cutting up my fingertips so the prints would get screwed up. When they called me out to have my prints taken on the scanner, the cop asked me, “Why are your fingers so tore up?” I told him I was an electrician and that’s what happens when you’re working with wires all day. Your fingers get chopped up.
The amazing thing is that they set bail at $7,000. Here I was with my history, getting caught with a full-auto Uzi and a .45, and they let me post $700, the ten percent for the bail, and they let me out.
By the time I got out of that one, Bat Marquez had gotten out of prison and he was with David in Tijuana. Bat was a made EME brother and he was also David’s compadre. Bat talks to David and asks him about me. “What do you want to do about the homie?” David tells him, “Look. Have him stay in San Diego and wait for word until we can have him cross over.” They phone Myrna, Roy’s wife, with that message and she’s the one that relayed it to me.
My wife and I end up going to Roach’s house in Chula Vista and they put us up in a garage apartment. After a while, David asked me to come down. So I crossed over and stayed with my wife’s mother in Tijuana. Her mom had six small kids in the house and they were barely making ends meet. While we’re staying there, one night the local cops bang on the door and want to search the house. They all look at me because earlier in the day, David and Pato had come by looking for me to see that I was all right and dropped off some money for me and some for them. They knew who I was involved with. They’re all thinking it’s the Arellano thing. But it wasn’t. It turned out that somebody had reported a man with a gun earlier and they were doing a door-to-door search. I’d never seen that side of it, of how seriously they took something like that.
The cops leave and everything was cool again.
The next day, David called me and asked if I was ready to start working again. I said I was. He told me to pack up my stuff because I’d go back to living in the house. Pato picked me up, I kissed my wife good-bye and told her everything would be all right. She was worried and I could see it in her face. Like I said, she was the love of my life. She was beautiful, ten years younger than me. It’s hard for me to open up like that.
So I leave with Pato and we go to Rosarito to the Tres Torres Oceana, a high-end complex right on the beach. I meet up with David again and he gives me a big hug and says that he’s glad to have me back again. Then he says, “I have somebody for you to meet.” And out of the back of the condo comes Bat Marquez. I met Bat a couple of times, but I never really had any interaction with the guy. I know about him and he knows about me and he comes up and says, “What happened the night you got arrested with Robert Perez?” After some dancing around, I finally found out what he was talking about.
The night we got arrested for the Uzi and the .45, I had a Costco credit card on me that a little homeboy gave me. He’d done a burglary or something and he was showing me what he got. I saw the card and I asked him to give it to me. At the time, I was doing crystal meth and I was using the card to cut up the meth. When the cop asked me about the card, I told him exactly why I had it. I told the cop it was to cut up crystal meth. The cop told me that they found meth residue on the card. That was the extent of my conversation with the cop about the card, or anything else.
After I bailed out and left, Perez sent his arrest record, and mine, out to the street. You have to do that so the carnals know what you said or did during any arrest to make sure you weren’t talking. And if you did talk or didn’t carry yourself the right way, they used the paperwork as proof that you needed correcting or some more serious kind of retribution. Bat took that small credit card conversation I had with the cop as proof that I was talking about the drug business to law enforcement. Which is total bullshit. He was trying to make an issue of it when there was no issue. He was an idiot. He was trying to make himself look good or look big or like he had all this secret information about people.
But David was sharp. He told Bat, “Hey, cut it out. The homie is good. He already showed me his colors.” David already knew where my heart was at. David shut him down and told him that my conversation with the cop amounted to nothing. There was a little tension in the air after that, but I let it go.
Right after that, David asked me to do him a favor. He knew I was good with firearms and all that military stuff. He says he wants me to get rid of something for him. He goes to the refrigerator and pulls down a big basket of artificial flowers from it. He sets it on the table and takes the flower arrangement off it and there’s like six hand grenades underneath. He says, “Dog, these hand grenades have been buried for a couple of years. I don’t know how good they are but, man, I got to get rid of them. My family is getting ready to come over for Christmas and I don’t want them around. You want to go get rid of them?” I told him, “Yeah, I’ll get rid of them for you.”
So we jump in a big truck and drive south into the hills above the beach. Then we take a dirt road that goes right to the cliffs above the ocean. And we just start letting them loose, pulling the pins and throwing them. After we blew them all up, we jumped back in the truck and drove back. After we got back to the condo, Bat asks, “Hey, dude, you want to smoke a joint with me?” The dude doesn’t fascinate or impress me but I said, “Okay, I’ll smoke a joint with you.” So we go out on the balcony and start smoking. I guess he’s just trying to be sociable. But the truth is I never had much respect for Bat and neither did any of the other people on the crew. Bat was living in the shadow of the respect people had for David.
After I came back we started getting organized again after laying low for over a year after the Ocampo assassination. The story was that Benjamin Arellano had personally tried to visit the president of Mexico at the time and ultimately a deal was made involving ten million US dollars and future promises to take the heat off us. The other part of the deal was to offer a sacrificial lamb for the benefit of the press and to show the world that the Mexican government was serious about shutting down the cartels. Ramon threw a guy named Spooky and another soldier to the Mexican cops and they basically admitted to shooting the cardinal. Spooky wasn’t completely right in the head so it wasn’t hard for the cops to get a complete confession from him. Eventually, the cops beat him to death in prison. The other guy was to serve nine months in a Mexican prison for possession of firearms, but I hear he is still in prison.
After all this went down, we started getting new police uniforms, radios, and documents. And we started training again with the federales and the Mexican military. We needed to get back on our feet because the other cartels were going to take every opportunity to take over our business.
Instead of moving right back into the office, though, we were staying in the condo in Rosarito. Each floor of these buildings had two condos on it. I was living there with Pato and Bat in one condo. Across the hall was a guy named Gino Brunetti, his wife, and his cousin, a guy named Blanco. He was a Colombian. He was the middle man for the transactions with the Colombians. He’d go down to Cali, Colombia, to set up the deals, getting the shipments made from Cali to Tijuana, and then from Tijuana we’d send it to the United States. These were big dudes.
Gino Brunetti eventually got arrested in Cancun, Mexico, and was extradited to the US. He eventually received two life sentences to be served concurrently, plus 120 months to be served concurrently and a $25,000 fine.
Gino kind of takes a liking to th
e way I carry myself. By this time I was basically David’s bodyguard, and Gino liked the way I protected David. Everywhere we go, I’m strapped and I’m maintaining the position of a bodyguard. I always check first when we walk into a place. I go in first, make sure everything is safe before David goes in, and keep people away from him. Pato’s a coward, he’s not going to step up. And Bat is too cool for school. He’s on that whole “I’m in the EME. I’m that guy, I’m a carnal” attitude. Bat thinks he’s the shit.
David also asks me if I know anybody from California who wants to come down and be part of the crew. I knew that Big John had just gotten out of jail. Big John and I go way back to when we were youngsters. He’s six feet five inches, he’s got a lot of heart, he’s a gangster, he’s a thug, and I know he’d be perfect for the job. So I asked him if he wanted to come down to make some money. And he says, “Hell, yeah.” I told him he’d have to live down there and he couldn’t be running back and forth from Mexico to the US. He said that was good with him.
By the end of the year, just before Christmas, I had my wife set up in her own apartment and I’m seeing her on a daily basis. Everything was going well between me and my wife and she’s living off the spoils. My wife grew up so poor that I had thirty or forty thousand in the house and she wouldn’t touch it, even to go grocery shopping, without asking me if it was okay to spend some money on food. On my end, I was spoiling her rotten. I’m buying her dresses, I’m buying her jewelry, I’m buying her everything she ever dreamed of. And I was helping her mom too by giving them money. Because of what I was contributing, her and her whole family were living a great life.
As it turns out, Big John’s girlfriend is a friend of my wife. So when he comes south, they go to my house. I drive down to pick him up and bring him to the condo in Rosarito.
One day, Brunetti borrows me from David for security. I told him that I wanted to take Big John along as part of the security detail. Brunetti was cool with that.
Big John and I were as professional as we could be when Gino and his wife went out to dinner the first time. Anybody that tried to approach the table got stopped. When his wife went to the bathroom, we escorted her there and stood outside the door. And Gino liked that flashy, pomp kind of thing. Gino totally got off on it. The next day, he gave me $5,000 just for that one night. And he gave Big John the same thing. He thanked us for the job we did and then he said that if I ever wanted to buy some coke, I should come to him and he’d give me a good price. He said, “I got you. I like your style.”
When Christmas comes, all of David’s family arrives. I meet his mom and dad. I’m sitting up with his sisters, who are beautiful. We’re staying up late at night playing Scrabble and they’re treating me like part of the family and I’m feeling like part of the family. Of course, they all know what David’s business is and one day his father turns to me and says, “I’m going to ask you one thing. Please, please protect my son. Take care of him. Don’t let anything happen to him.” So I give him my word. I said, “I promise you, señor, I give you my word that as long as I’m with David, nothing will ever happen to him.” His dad then said, “David told me that you’re one of his strongest soldiers he’s got.” Then he shook my hand and we went on a store run.
• • •
There’s a place called the Rock & Roll Taco in Rosarito. And they were looking to have a famous band come in. It’s a big club in the Hilton Hotel. They knew the guy that owned that club. So David makes arrangements to get a table near the stage and he wants a long table set up. They also made arrangements to have the whole table cordoned off. And he was going to have his own security going. So when we go there that night, it’s Gino Brunetti and his wife, Barron and his wife. Then it was me, Big John, Blanco, and Pato. Bat had gone to San Diego to be with his family.
It was a real trip. I was told to go to the bar and tell them we only wanted one waiter serving, the same waiter serving us all night. I was given certain codes like if I touched my nose, this was from Gino. They also gave me a bag of coke to hang on to. Gino told me, “If I touch my nose, bring me the coke because I want to do a line.” David, on the other hand, is opposed to all drugs. He doesn’t like that shit. But Gino, he uses dope. And his wife does dope. So whenever he touched his nose, I’d go over to the table, give him the bag, and they’d do some lines.
David’s code to me was “If I touch my shoulder twice, that means there’s somebody here that we don’t like being around. And it’s time for us to leave.” But the night went smoothly. We do a couple of escorts for the women when they want to go to the bathroom. And the girls are getting pissy. David’s old lady and Gino’s old lady are both getting drunk. And they start talking to each other about me right in front of me. Gino’s old lady says, “We should set him up with a girl.” And the other one says to me, “You need to have a girlfriend. We can set you up with a good girl.”
I told them that I was cool and that I already had a girlfriend. But they keep insisting that I needed a girl. I told them I appreciated their concern. Whenever they went to the bathroom, Big John and I would open a path through the crowd for them. And the people in the club were tripping out. This was the holidays and there were a lot of Americans down there. One guy even yells out, “Damn, girl, who are you?”
The next day, once again, here comes Gino and he pays me and Pato and Big John five grand for maintaining security for them.
25
Bad Karma
After the New Year, things started popping again. Since we went underground, Chapo and Amado Carrillo were moving dope through our plaza and we had to stop that. One of the first missions after we came out from hiding was a woman in Imperial Beach.
A story hit the San Diego papers that the cops had found a van with one thousand pounds of cocaine parked at the curb in front of this woman’s house. Although the cops were sure she was using her house as a drop pad for the dope, they couldn’t prove it. Although she was living in Imperial Beach, this woman owned a couple of beauty parlors in Tijuana and she’d drive back and forth across the border every day to run her business. If she was smart, she would have just run her business and be quiet about it. But she wasn’t smart.
She liked to do a lot of partying and one of the guys she liked to party with was a real mama’s boy named Bon Bon. This Bon Bon guy was one of those well-off Tijuana civilians who was fascinated with the cartels and had been hanging around the same places we did. This woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut and one night she bragged to Bon Bon that she was working for Amado Carrillo, the guy that eventually died from complications while he was getting his face-lift.
From Bon Bon, word reached Ramon that she was working for Carrillo. Ramon decided that she had to go. My crew was assigned to take care of her where she lived. We got Bon Bon to agree to take us to her house, where we’d do some surveillance and put together a plan to get rid of her. Since Bon Bon was a complete idiot, we tried on three separate nights to find her place but Bon Bon kept getting lost. Finally, Ramon told us to bring Bon Bon to him. After they had a conversation, Bon Bon finally remembered exactly where she lived.
Drak, Pato, Panther, Bon Bon, and me were driving in Panther’s brand-new black Cadillac. We normally wouldn’t use one of our own cars, but Panther was getting another new one so he didn’t care if we had to burn this one afterward. Once we found the house and memorized how to get there and get out, we drove Bon Bon back to Tijuana to drop him off. We didn’t want that guy anywhere near us.
After we dropped him off at around three in the afternoon, we came back to San Diego and went to collect our guns. There was a junkyard in Chicano Park in Logan Heights called Sunshine Auto Body that we used as a drop place for dope and guns. There were empty junked buses and cars full of dope, guns, and anything else we might need while doing missions in California. One of the buses was like a complete arsenal. We could have picked a lot of heavy firepower like machine guns and shotguns, but we only had a
single target that night and by that time we were sure the target didn’t have anything like security for herself. So instead of big guns, we got three .38-caliber revolvers—two were blued and the other one was chrome plated.
We got to Imperial Beach around 7:00 P.M., but since it was January, it was already dark out. We had a plan worked out. I dressed up the cleanest of them. I was wearing Guess jeans, a nice jacket, J. Crew button-down shirt, a nerdy pair of glasses, and a hat. I was going to knock on the door while the rest of the crew would hide by the side of the garage. As soon as the door opened, we’d bum-rush the door and take care of business. We also talked about going through the house real quick because we were sure there was probably dope, money, jewelry, or some other valuable stuff in there.
I walked up to the door and knocked. I heard a young female voice from the inside asking who it was. We knew the woman had a daughter so it was the daughter that answered the door. I told her, “My mom asked me to come by to talk to your mother.”
The girl asked, “Who’s your mother?” I told her, “Gloria.” Then she asked which salon did my mother work at.
Since I already knew what stores she owned, I said, “The one in Plaza de Oro.”
A legit answer. She opened the door with the chain still attached to get a look at me. What she saw was a clean-cut nerdy guy, so she took the chain off.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 22