Prologue

 

 

 

 

Robert Torres had it all.

 

He had money. He had fancy cars. He had status. He had all the women he could ever want.

 

For a guy who started out in life as a welder, a cook and a gas station manager and once thought that the big time meant peddling dope on street corners in the Bronx, Torres came as close to living the American dream as anyone he was ever going to meet.

 

It started out as a family business. His cousins set him up in 1978. He was 22, a kid from small town Puerto Rico, a place called Guayama, who’d come north to New York to grow a chip on his shoulder because life had dealt him a rotten hand. The great melting pot was more like a cauldron where you could drown. So he told his cousins that he needed a job, that he wanted a shot at making it, and they supplied him with little plastic bags of product.

 

For a while, Torres thought he had life knocked. He had the cash that he earned and what cash he could steal. But the more he watched his cousins getting rich, buying cars and buying property and keeping pretty women in expensive clothes, the more he realized that dope was strictly nickel-and-dime stuff. He reminded himself that he had ambition, that he had plans. He persuaded himself that selling "shit" to kids and whores and getting beaten up by pimps was not the ticket. So he hit on his cousins for more of the action and they made him a manager. Now he ran other guys hawking stuff on street corners and had more cash in his pockets.

 

By 1985 he’d been on the streets for seven years. Closing in on 30, he got it into his head that he needed to branch out, to take a better shot at machine’ it. That meant going out on his own. And going out on his own meant heroin.

 

It took time. And because dealing heroin is a business in which one wrong step can mean a violent death, it also took cajones. But Torres managed to muscle his way in. He was smart enough to do it slowly, step by step. He was also lucky enough to stay alive while he worked his way up.

 

First he sold product himself. Then he put salesmen on the street to hustle it for him. Then he found ways to import it and he learned the tricks of wholesaling it. He even had his own brand names - Liberty, Blue Moon, Turbo Powder, Midnight Train, Sunshine, White Eagle, White Tiger, and Pink Diamond.

 

Within five years he had a hundred amigos working for him - he called them Los Brujos, the Warlocks - and commanded twenty distribution centers in Manhattan and the Bronx. To defend his network, he armed Los Brujos to the teeth. He loved guns and every now and then he’d go on a buying spree, such as the afternoon he bought nineteen semi-automatic pistols, thirteen .38 calibre pistols and a classic .45 that he wore in a shoulder holster because it made a macho bulge under his armpit.

 

He owned twenty properties in New York and forty more in Puerto Rico, including a tourist resort near San Juan. He owned a sand and gravel company, two beauty parlors, a restaurant, a garage, three heavy equipment rental companies, seventy pieces of heavy construction equipment, a wood working shop, a limousine service, a pile of blue chip securities, a 46-foot boat, a handful of professional race cars and a semi-pro basketball team in Puerto Rico that also called themselves Los Brujos.

 

By the beginning of 1993, Torres was moving close to half a million dollars worth of heroin every day.

 

That's when the Feds busted him.

 

They swooped down on him like a heavily armed commando force taking a beachhead, shackled him in chains, rounded up Los Brujos, and started unraveling his financial empire.

 

Once upon a time, Robert Torres had it all.

 

He had fancy cars. He had status. He had all the women he could ever want. At the age of 37, he was worth in excess of $60 million.

 

And all the time, lurking in the background was a man who showed Torres how to grab the American dream by the throat, a former senior officer at the Chase Manhattan Bank. His laundryman.

*****