Then he hands the phone to David.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
I said, “Nothing. It’s all good. Have I ever turned on you?”
“No, you didn’t.”
I said to him, “I don’t want to raise my daughter over there. We’re not eye to eye anymore.”
“Are you against us?”
I said, “No, I’m not. I’ll still do my obligations to the carnals. We’re just trying to do some things over here. I’m leaving you guys alone for a while and working with Roy Boy, Black Dan, and Wimpie.”
What I meant by obligations is that I was kicking money upstairs to the Big Homies whenever I made a deal. I wasn’t a carnal yet and I was expected to show respect and let them know that I knew who still had the horsepower in prison and on the street.
David didn’t press the issue.
He said, “Give the brothers my regards. But Ramon still wants to see you and talk to you. Ramon wants to ask you himself.”
I told David, “Have Ramon call me. Tell him that if he needs something done, I’ll take care of it for him.”
We hung up and left it at that for a while.
But I could see that Chato was still acting strange. I told Chato, “I don’t like the way you’re coming at me. This business is my business and there’s no need to get you involved. If they call you next time asking about me, you tell them to call me direct. I got nothing to do with your phone.”
A few days later, the cell phone that I brought back from Tijuana rang. It was Ramon.
“Hey, carbon. Que esta pasando? I’m sitting here with my compadre Tiburon and we were talking about you.” I told him to say hi to Tiburon.
Then he asked me, “I know you’re working with the cousins up there. But are you with us or against us? Because you know how it is.”
I told him what I told David. “I don’t want to raise my daughter down there. You know I’ve always been loyal to you. I didn’t turn against you.”
Then he dangled a carrot in front of me. “Maybe we can set something up for you to work on that side.”
I told him, “That would be cool.”
“Come down and see me. I just bought a new yacht.”
I left it vague and said I’d do that once I got settled in. If I took a ride on that yacht, I’d never see the shore again.
28
Out of My Life
After the last conversation I would ever have with Ramon, I started dealing dope in a very big way. With my history, my reputation, my drug connections on both sides of the border, and with the backing of the brothers, I had crews organized all over San Diego.
I told everybody that was working with me that gangbanging was forbidden. From now on, it was going to be all business. If one neighborhood had a beef with another one, they had to come to me to straighten out. No more shootings, drive-bys, or dealers stealing drugs from each other. I set up territories and put people I could trust not to be stupid in charge. What I wanted to do was put away as much money as I could and then move the family someplace where nobody could find us.
Then one night, I was walking home to get a 9 mm pistol that I had stashed. A cop car was rolling in the opposite direction real slow. I think we probably saw each other at the same time, so they saw me duck into the bushes. They turned on their spotlight and they caught me in the beam. I decided not to run. I gave up without trouble because I wasn’t carrying the gun and I thought I could slide out of whatever they wanted the same way I slid out from the night they caught me with the Uzi and the pistol.
What I didn’t know was that my face was on posters as one of San Diego’s Ten Most Wanted for the murder of the woman in Imperial Beach. The other thing I didn’t know was that a cop named Steve Duncan was part of a special task force investigating the AFO. And I was on his radar. He’s the one that put me in those posters.
As a parolee, the cops had a right to search my house and they found the 9 mm. They arrested me and I got three years for the Uzi and pistol possession. That usually meant about eighteen months.
As hard as it is to believe, at that point in my criminal career, I didn’t have any violent felonies charged against me. All my previous charges were for drug possession and nonviolent burglaries and robberies. That’s the reason I only got three years. The case in Imperial Beach was just supposition based on information that Duncan got from an informer. They had nothing solid against me at the time.
So about a month after leaving Tijuana, I was back in state prison. This time it was Corcoran. After I was processed, the assistant warden brings me into his office and has a file in front of him. He looks at the file and asks me, “Is this true?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“It says here you were a hit man for the Arellano Félix Cartel and that you received paramilitary training from Mexican Army officers.”
I told him, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have me mixed up with somebody else. If that’s in my file, I want a copy of that.”
“But is it true?”
I told him it wasn’t.
Three days later I got a copy of the file and it spelled out my time with the AFO. The file mentioned Steve Duncan as the cop who put the report together. This was the first time I’d heard of him. I figured out real fast that the task force had snitches all over the AFO and they had a lot information on me. They didn’t have everything, but it looked like they had enough that sometime real soon, the feds would come to the prison and scoop me up.
After Corcoran, I was transferred to Tehachapi. Right after Thanksgiving 1997, my wife came to visit and told me, “Your tio is gone.” I knew she meant David.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“It’s all over the news and papers.”
“When did it happen?”
“On Thanksgiving Day in Tijuana. They said it was friendly fire but nobody knows for sure.”
I told her to send me every clipping and piece of news she could get. I needed to know what happened.
What happened was that David, Bat, Raton, and some other guys from the crew tried to kill Jesus Blancornelas. He was the editor for a newspaper in Tijuana called Zeta. Blancornelas ran a lot of stories about the AFO and even ran pictures of Ramon and Benjamin. So Ramon sent the crew to kill him right on the street as the guy was being driven to the airport. The cops counted 180 bullet holes in his car and they killed his driver. The editor was shot four times but managed to survive.
But during the shooting, David was hit in the eye by a ricochet off the car body and died instantly. There was a picture of David slumped against a wall with his rifle on the ground where he dropped it. Just like the cardinal killing, shooting the editor made headlines all over the world.
On one of her next visits, my wife told me that they had killed Big John because he was using too much and getting paranoid. They also killed Raton because they blamed him for shooting David. They convinced themselves that Raton had been paid off by one of the other cartels to kill David. The truth is that it was one of Bat’s bullets that killed David.
Right after that, most of the Logan Heights crew left Ramon and went back to San Diego. The reason was that Bat was next in line to get David’s job and nobody who knew Bat wanted to work for him. That’s when the whole organization started to fall apart. All the soldiers left.
The whole time I was in prison on the gun charges, the feds were putting their AFO case together. I knew they were doing that because Duncan tried to contact me to meet with him. But I refused. I told the COs that they had the wrong guy and I wasn’t involved with the AFO. They were looking at anybody with a connection to the AFO to see if they could get them to flip to build their case.
At the time I was released, they still didn’t have anything on me that they could use to prosecute. So I went back to San Diego and picked up where I left off moving dope. The on
e major event that happened in prison before I was released was that Darryl raised his hand for me and got a few other brothers to do the same. In their eyes, I was now a made man and a full-fledged brother. The day that I’d been looking forward to when I could call myself a carnal was also the day that I became completely disillusioned with the EME. The same moment Darryl told me I was a carnal, he asked me to kill somebody for him. The target was another brother that he had a personal beef with. It was crazy. I expected to be in an organization that was united and the brothers treated each other like family, but here was this fool asking me to kill another member. That wasn’t what I signed on for.
After I was on the street again, I completely lost interest in running my little dope empire and making sure that all the little egos in the EME were being satisfied with the money I was putting into their prison accounts. I started to let things slide. It was right at this time that my wife left. She couldn’t handle the stress anymore. She wanted out of my life and I couldn’t blame her.
One day, Freddie Gonzalez told me that he was having trouble with somebody on the street. He told me to go find somebody and to use my name and have him killed. I told him straight out, “I’m tired of all this, dog. I’m old and tired of going to jail and putting in work for somebody else. You don’t know what I’ve seen and been through.” This floored Freddie. He couldn’t believe it was me talking like that.
“I’m just being honest,” I said. “I don’t want to put somebody through the shit I been through.” Freddie shot a kite to Huero Sherm in prison about my change of heart and word got around fast that I was through. Sherm sent a letter to my new girlfriend that she should stay away from me. By that time, she was pregnant with my second child. And she didn’t want to raise the child by herself. We talked about the future and the both us tried to figure a way out of the mess.
My lawyer kept talking to me about meeting Steve Duncan and the US Attorney in San Diego, Laura Duffy. They weren’t offering a deal sight unseen, but they did want to talk to see if I was interested in cooperating. We had lots of meetings and it was during one of those meetings that one of the biggest weights of my criminal life was lifted from my shoulders.
I was talking to them about all the missions I’d done and how badly I felt after some of them. I mentioned the two cambio girls and how that episode still gave me nightmares. The room got real quiet and Laura Duffy looked at the other cops in the room and said, “He doesn’t know?”
They explained to me that neither of the cambio women had died. The bullet I fired at the first one’s neck just went under the skin, traveled to the other side, and came out. The other one survived three bullets to her head. It knocked her teeth out and gave her brain damage but she survived. They were both alive.
After I heard that, I wrote them a seven-page letter telling them what had happened and why and told them that I would happily spend the rest of my life in jail to make up for shooting them. I gave Duncan the letter to pass on to them. Sometime later, I got a letter back telling me that one of them forgave me and they didn’t blame me for what happened to them or to their brother. She saw me as much of a victim as they were.
I spent the next eighteen months in the Federal Building in San Diego telling Duncan and the task force everything I knew about the AFO. After I testified truthfully about everything I knew about, the federal judge sentenced me to 292 months in the federal prison system. My entire family was provided with funds to move out of the state.
During the time that I served in federal prison, the task force took the AFO apart one piece at a time. In 2002, Ramon was killed by a cop in Mazatlan. Ramon was there to kill one of his rivals. While driving, he violated some kind of minor traffic law. Not knowing that it was Ramon in the car, the cop pulled him over. Because of the kind of guy he was, Ramon pulled out a gun and shot the cop. The cop fired back as he was falling to the ground and killed Ramon in his car.
A couple of weeks after that, Benjamin was arrested and sent to jail for his part in the AFO business. In 2006, the youngest brother, Javier, was detained off the coast of Cabo San Lucas by the US Coast Guard. Because he was in international waters, he was taken directly to the US and prosecuted. The Arellano brother Eduardo was arrested by the Mexican Army in 2008. In 2014, the eldest brother, Francisco, was murdered at his own party in Cabo San Lucas by the Sinaloa Cartel. All five of the Arellano brothers involved in the drug business are either in jail in the United States or dead in Mexico.
After I finished my years in prison, I began to rebuild my life, trying however I can to make up in some small way for the violence I inflicted on people and the family that I should have been taking care of. This book is part of that atonement.
About the Author
Martin Corona, after serving as an enforcer in the Tijuana drug cartel, turned state’s evidence against the organization and made possible the federal prosecution that brought an end to it. He lives with his family. He speaks to law enforcement organizations on the subject of his crimes and to at-risk youth on the importance of avoiding his mistakes.
Tony Rafael was the author of The Mexican Mafia and a researcher and reporter on complex issues of gang crime in Southern California and Mexico. He passed away in the final stages of the production of this book.
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Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 25