As soon as she did that, I pulled out my gun and the rest of the crew rushed into the house. By this time the mom was with the daughter by the door and they both tried to take off screaming. We let the daughter go and three of us sort of tackled the mom. Pato shoots her in the head and Drak and I shoot as well. We were pretty certain she wouldn’t survive the five rounds she’d just taken.
We weren’t all that rattled or anything, but we completely skipped looking for anything else to take in the house. We later found out from the newspaper story that the cops found $500,000 in cash hidden in a closet.
We got in the Cadillac and took off. But as we’re driving, Pato starts yelling that he’s been shot. He looks at me and says, “Dog, you shot me. There’s a fucking hole in my hand.”
I knew there was a cluster when all three of us tackled the woman, but I know for a fact that I didn’t shoot Pato. He was bleeding and started to lose it and I kept telling him to chill and not trip out. It wasn’t going to kill him and it’s the kind of thing you got to expect in this line of work. I told him, “Even David got a bullet in his leg from a homie. Shit happens. Just chill.”
We decided to skip dropping the guns off at the body shop and shot straight across the border to Tijuana. I called my wife and told her to meet us in TJ. I was going to hand the guns off to her and she’d give them to me later on. We drove to the condo in Rosarito and told David about the mission and that Pato took a bullet in the hand.
David didn’t seem all that pissed. He was experienced enough to know that stuff like this can happen. He took Pato to the hospital and told us to chill out at the condo until he came back.
After Pato got fixed up, David and I went through the whole scenario move by move, and even David admitted that it looked like Drak had shot Pato in the hand. But convincing Pato that I didn’t shoot him was impossible. Just to keep things calm, I volunteered to pay $7,000 for the hospital costs, but Pato never got over it. He even wrote Bugsy in prison that I shot him in the hand and that he’d never be able to fully close his hand again.
Not too long after that, David shows up at the Tijuana office one day and tells me and Pato to get ready to roll. The first thing I asked him was how should I dress. Depending on the mission, we could go as uniformed cops, full-battle tactical, or casual. David says to just wear casual clothes so I put on jeans, a button-down shirt, and a cowboy hat. I asked about weapons and David said to just bring a handgun. “We just need to check something out.” He told us to hang tight and someone would pick us all up.
A little while later David’s sister Marta shows up and asks me, “What kind of knives do we have?” We went to the kitchen and picked out a few big chef’s knives that I rolled up in a towel and stuck in my pants. We get in one of David’s cars and we roll up the Via Rapida to Ensenada. The place David was looking for was a huge walled compound that must have been almost a block long.
When we get there, David and I go over the wall and see at least eight cars, a nice collection of vintage and new Porsches and SUVs. As soon as we land on the other side, a couple of little dogs come yapping at us. Apparently, the little dogs didn’t disturb anybody in the main house. David said, “We’re going in. Tie up everybody in the house. There’s a family living in the back house, so go in there and march them all in here.”
As we get to the secondary house, a guy comes out and we jump him. We take him, his wife, and two little girls around five years old back to the big house. David marches them all into the kitchen and tells me to tie them up. He then makes a call to Pato, who is outside with the car, and tells him to come in. The gate opens and Pato drives in and meets us in the house.
Usually when we go in casually dressed and with just handguns, it isn’t a big deal. But I could tell that Pato knew something and he was more nervous than I ever seen him. I asked him, “What’s up, dog?” Pato whispers to me and says, “David’s got something big going on, bro.” The people we had in the kitchen were the family of the brother that we were there to take care of.
David pulls me and Pato aside and tells us, “This guy’s brother burned Benjamin. He owed Benjamin millions of dollars, but when we went underground after the cardinal, the guy kept the money.” Then he said, “This guy treats his own brother like shit. He’s an asshole. He pays him minimum wage and forces him to live in a shack on the property.”
We went through the house and found the guy, his wife, a teenage boy, two young girls around ten and seven years old, and an infant. David told me to watch the family downstairs while he and Pato went upstairs to search. After about an hour, Pato comes down the stairs with a pillowcase full of stuff and a large suitcase that looks heavy.
David takes the homeowner upstairs and we hear a lot of noise. The guy is pleading for his life, begging not to be killed. After a while there’s no more pleading. Then the woman is taken upstairs and I heard the sounds of a struggle. David killed the two of them with a knife.
While this was going on, the homeowner’s brother asks me why we killed his brother. I told him, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Just be quiet.” Then he said that if we’re going to kill him he wants his whole family killed at the same time. He doesn’t want to live without them and they don’t want to live without him. All the while his wife is holding a crucifix in her hand and I could see she was in agony. Then her baby started crying and she looked at me and said the baby was hungry. Her hands were tied, so I untied her. But I told her that if David came back down, she should pretend that her hands were still tied. I told her to go ahead and feed it. She put the baby to her breast and began feeding him.
I was sickened by the thought that David would want to kill these people too. But he didn’t have anything against this family. They were victims of the homeowner, even though they were his family too, so I didn’t think David would kill them. It wasn’t unusual in cartel hits that they wiped out entire families, including little babies. I had a gun and I started thinking that if David made a move against these people if I had the heart to shoot him.
As David and Pato came downstairs again, there was a knock on the door. David went to the door and it turned out to be the guy that took care of the horses. There was a stable with horses on the property and this guy had no idea of what was going on in the house. David pulled him in and pistol-whipped him with a Desert Eagle. It’s a really big handgun and the guy was getting his head smashed in. He wasn’t killed but he was sure bloody and we all got hit with his blood spatter.
Then Marta called and that was David’s cue to get us out of there. We got in the cars and went back to the office. Once we got there, I tore off my clothes and gave them to Marta, who took all our clothes and went somewhere to burn them. I went into the shower and rubbed my skin raw trying to get the blood and the stench of that place off of me.
I went downstairs and saw that Pato and David were going through all the stuff they took from the house. David calls out to me and says, “Hey, fool. This is for you.” He tossed me a Rolex watch that was worth around $8,000. Pato had already grabbed another Rolex with diamonds around the dial that was worth $25,000.
Then David tells me, “Hey, there’s more.” He dumped a drawer full of jewelry on the table and said, “Take whatever you want. Give it to your old lady.” The truth is I was afraid not to take. I was already real quiet and not talking and if I started showing any kind of remorse or feeling, I know it would have started David wondering if I still had the heart for this business. He had already seen me freak out over some women he called the cambio girls in a job we did before the one in Imperial Beach, and he didn’t like it.
David called Benjamin and told him what we hauled out of the house. Then he told Benjamin, “We painted the house wall to wall.” Benjamin asked David who was with him and he said Pato and me. Benjamin told David to split the money with us but he wanted all the paperwork because he needed to study it and see exactly how much the guy had stolen from Ramon. “This
is what happens when you turn your back on Ramon,” Benjamin said.
David told me to go in the kitchen and help myself to the money. There were three stacks of money in there about three feet high and three feet wide, one stack each for me, Pato, and David. Our share was something around $35,000. But mixed in with the American currency, there was some Mexican pesos that Pato didn’t want to be bothered with. He just gave all his pesos to me. That came out to about $20,000 in value.
Later on, I gave my mother-in-law the pesos to hold for me.
Sometime after that, we were in the office as usual just hanging out and waiting for orders. David suddenly shows up without warning and tells us all to get ready and put on our Federal Police uniforms. We needed to take care of something right away and he needed everybody that was in the office at that time. We get dressed and strapped and we all pile into a van. It was me, David, Pato, Drak, Panther, Rafa Camacho, and Lino Quintana.
As we approach the target house, we see a car just starting to pull out. David yells out, “Stop him! Don’t let him leave.” The van blocks the car and we get out, grab the guy, and rush him back into his house.
Once we get in there, David and one of the other guys take the man, tie him up, and David says, “Put him in the bathtub.” I knew this was going to be ugly. There was an old woman and young girl around seven in the house as well. They told me to tie up the girl and her grandmother, take them to one of the other bathrooms, and watch them.
David and the rest of them are searching through the house, looking for anything valuable or anything that might be important paperwork. I was supposed to tie up the girl and the old lady but the little girl looked at me and asked, “You aren’t going to kill me, are you?” I said to her, “No, mija. I’m not going to kill you. And nobody else will.” I told her to pretend to be tied up and just hold on to the rope. “When we leave, you can let go of the rope and call for help.”
David told everybody that “We got to make this look like a dirty job. Throw weed all over the house and make this place look like a dope house.” They took handfuls of dope and threw them all over the place to make it look like this was a home-invasion drug robbery. David kept going through everything in the house looking for something in particular, but he never told us what it was or if he ever found it.
At one point I left the two I was watching and went into the bathroom where they were holding the man. He was in the tub with a sheet over him. I asked Lino how they were going to kill the guy. Before I even finished the sentence, I heard this disgusting, cracking, squishy noise from behind me. David had just smashed the guy in the head with a five-pound sledgehammer. Then David hit him a few more times with the hammer. David lifted up the sheet and made a disgusted-looking face. He called me over to look at the ugly mess he’d just made of a human being.
I don’t know if they ever found what they were looking for and I didn’t care. But right then I made up my mind that if any of them made a move against the little girl or her grandmother, I would kill them. Even if it was David. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was my last mission for Ramon. I was through. I was going home. I just had to find the right time and place to get out.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to shoot anybody on the crew that night. Once they killed the guy, we all got back in the van and went back to the office. The little girl and her grandmother were left unhurt.
That night I woke up in a cold sweat. I was having a nightmare. The cold sweats and the nightmares continued to happen for years after that last homicide. I wanted to commit suicide and I now know that the only reason I didn’t was because of my wife and soon-to-be-born child. I couldn’t imagine my child growing up without me in Tijuana. I had to stay alive for no other reason than to keep my child safe.
As I said, before we did the mission in Imperial Beach, David had put us on a surveillance mission of two women he called the cambio girls. They were sisters and both of them were beautiful and rich. They supposedly made their money from running a cambio, a money exchange office in San Diego. One of them even dated Ramon for a short time. After Ramon and the girl broke up, he started suspecting that she was talking to the cops. From what I heard, the sisters had a brother who worked for Ramon for a while but he did something that Ramon didn’t like. So Ramon had him killed. The girls were pretty sure that Ramon had killed their brother, and they took it hard.
I’d be with Pato or Drak or one of the other guys on the crew and we’d follow them for days. Most of the time they just went from their house to the exchange office and back. But one day we followed them all the way to Chula Vista in California. They drove to the sheriff’s office and we parked in the sheriff’s parking lot. They were there for a long time and when they left, we followed them back to their house.
It was obvious they were talking to the cops and Ramon decided to get rid of them. At first he said he wanted them tortured and then chopped up to send everyone a message that you don’t snitch on Ramon. But after a couple of times of trying to find them and then not being able to get the business handle for a bunch of problems that weren’t our fault, he said to forget the torture and the rest of it and just shoot them.
The job fell to me because by now I was the only one that Ramon and David could trust to get the job done without a mistake and do it as stealthily as possible.
Drak and I followed them for days in a couple of throwaway cars. These were used cars that we bought cheap but under false names. We bought them instead of stealing them because we didn’t want to be out driving around and take a chance on having a cop run the plates in case he didn’t like the way we looked. Whenever we drove those cars, we always wore some kind of gloves and we had the interiors steam-cleaned in case we left any kind of blood or forensic evidence behind. David and Ramon were smart about that and they always gave me money to legitimately buy a car we would use for a job. Guys like Bat were so stupid that they’d keep the money for the car for themselves and then go steal one to go on a mission. It screwed him up a few times, but David would always let it slide because he was his compadre.
Drak and I finally pinned the two women down in an alley behind one of their offices in San Diego. As they were pulling out, Drak blocked the alley with his car. I was wearing a big Afro wig, a long coat, and sunglasses even though it was ten thirty at night.
I had a Colt 1911 semiauto pistol loaded with hollow-points. I approached the car, leaned in, and shot the both of them. I hit one in the head and the other in the neck. In those last few seconds I realized the one I shot in the neck was pregnant. And then I heard the screaming from the backseat. It was a little girl around seven years old. She was naturally terrified. That’s when my life changed. I froze looking at her and felt devastated. I had killed her mom. I didn’t know which of the women was her mom, but I knew for sure they were both gone.
Drak and I got out of there and went straight back to Tijuana. We went to David’s place and told him it was done. David said we should wait for the news that night to confirm the kills. I wasn’t in control of myself anymore. I’d lost my shit and started getting paranoid, scared, and remorseful all at the same time. The thing was that my wife was pregnant and we were expecting our first child. I didn’t know if I could face her after what I’d just done.
I started walking around the apartment like a zombie, just saying, “It’s bad karma. It’s bad karma,” over and over again. I couldn’t watch the news because I didn’t think I could handle it, so I kept asking David, “Are they dead, bro? Are they dead? Did the baby die too?” David was getting pissed off at me. “Forget it. Just let it go.” But I couldn’t let it go. Bad karma, I said to myself over and over again.
Finally, when the news came on, David told me that the job was finished. Both women died and the baby couldn’t be saved. The news didn’t say anything about the little girl in the backseat.
Every time I’d go home and see my wife pregnant and happy with our child, I
started tripping in the worst possible way. I honestly considered suicide for the first time in my life. I started using heroin again just to blot out the memory and find a few hours of peace where I wasn’t tortured by the things I had seen in the car that night.
I started thinking about leaving Ramon and going back home, but I was worried about my wife and child. I knew that if I quit on the spot, I’d never leave Mexico alive and neither would they.
26
Neglected Business
Now that the AFO had come out from underground, there was a lot of catching up to do. The business had been neglected. That meant a lot more missions than before the cardinal was killed. We had two of them back-to-back.
We had a mission in Mexico City and the target was another commandante who was working for Chapo. I wasn’t the primary. Ramon pulled together a local crew and a few of us from the Tijuana office were there as backup in case this commandante had a security escort too.
Big John was one of the guys I picked to go down there with us. We spent a whole week in the Mexico City office waiting for the call. We were there long enough that Ramon decided to give me and Big John two days off, and he told Tiburon, his right-hand man, to take us to a mall for a shopping trip.
The three of us went to Colonia Sarange and I bought some clothes and a few CDs. We weren’t there very long, when Tiburon gets a call that they need us back at the office right away. By the time we got back, they were loading a motorcycle into a truck and everybody was getting strapped. Big John and I got our guns and bulletproof vests and made sure we had enough ammo and grenades.
Ramon was going on this mission with us. When Big John and I got there, he yelled out to us to ride in his minivan with him. Big John and I rode in the back and Ramon was up front. He’s on the radio and getting intel from whoever he has out there keeping an eye out for the commandante. I hear Ramon ask, “Is he there? Is he there?” He got his answer. The commandante was still there.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 23