14

ABREGON: BROTHERS IN CRIME

Juan Carlos Abregon was a smart man. He always had cash and if he didn’t, then he could get his hands on some, if he wanted to. I don’t know how he did it, but he always managed somehow. Apparently, he had been busted for his part in a drug ring in the city of Santa Cruz, although they never got him with anything, so maybe he still had some funds stashed away somewhere. From what people told me, his fortune had gone up and down over the years. Even when it went down, like now, when he was in prison, he always came up with some new plan to get rich and, more often than not, he pulled it off.

Abregon was also a tough man, you could tell that much straight away. He wasn’t big, but even if you had never met him before, you could tell that he was tough by his eyes and his silence. Physically, he was no different from most of the men from Santa Cruz: he was of medium height with dark skin and a small pot belly from eating so well. He also had the obligatory moustache that all the men from those parts had at the time. No one was exactly afraid of him, but he was given a certain amount of respect for being dangerous, although I didn’t know what he had done to earn his reputation. Occasionally he got moody and would refuse to speak to anyone. But when that happened, you just knew to stay out of his way. Mostly, he was friendly enough; he shook hands and made small talk with people he passed in the corridors. So, tough and moody, yes. But dangerous, no.

It took a while for us to become friends, or even to meet each other, for that matter. He didn’t associate much with other prisoners, so no one really knew him too well, which may have been part of the reason why he had maintained his reputation for being dangerous. Abregon never had many visitors to his room except for one girl who came to see him a few times a week. She was quite a lot younger than he was, and apart from the fact that her name was Raquel and that she was from Santa Cruz, no one knew anything about her. Whenever she came to see him, the door would remain locked until it was time for visitors to leave, at which point he would walk her to the main gate and wait with her in the queue until she left.

Abregon later told me that Raquel was his wife, although it seemed to me, from the way they acted, that they hadn’t known each other for very long, maybe since just before he went to prison, or maybe even while he was inside. He never told me the full story, not even when we became brothers. Anyway, it seemed that Raquel was going to stick by him. Anyone whose wife or girlfriend stands by them and visits them all the time in prison is a lucky man.

When Abregon and I did finally meet, we established a kind of mutual respect immediately. He already knew who I was, because all the foreigners in the prison stood out a mile, and I knew about him by reputation. After a few months we became good friends, and eventually I was one of the very few people he allowed into his room. Even then, we never really discussed personal things too much. Abregon was fairly secretive about his past and we always spoke about things in a general, roundabout kind of way. I liked the way that he talked negocios, though; he talked about it a lot, but he never boasted about his direct involvement because he never needed to.

In fact, he never told me anything about himself even when, after several more months of friendship, we made a brotherhood pact: we swore that we would always do whatever we could to look after each other, and whichever one of us got out first couldn’t rest until the other one was free.

It was strange to have someone that I could count on as a brother, but who wouldn’t tell me anything important about his life. However, that was the way it was with us and the fact that he was so serious and disciplined about it made me even more confident that I could trust him in everything. I knew that he would never get me in trouble if something went wrong with any of our joint negocios, which is why I agreed to do that first prison deal.

Having my credit card and the money sent by my friends in Europe meant that I wasn’t forced to get a job in the prison or become involved in negocios. However, Abregon’s first proposal was too good to refuse – he would put up all the money and organise everything, while I simply had to find a reliable buyer in Europe who could be trusted to pay when the merchandise arrived. We would split the profit fifty-fifty. I could use the money to pay my lawyers, bribe the judges or save it for when I got out.

The deal came off. There were some small hitches and we had to pay a few people more than expected, but the deal went through and Abregon received our sixty thousand dollars. I asked for my share straight away. I paid five thousand dollars to my lawyers, and sent another ten thousand for the judge – making the total five thousand more than he had asked. My lawyers were now one hundred per cent confident I’d get off. It was only a matter of waiting a little while longer. But the trouble was where to keep the rest of the cash in the meantime. At any time the police could raid my room (particularly if anyone found out about the money) or I might be sent to Chon-chocoro, the maximum-security prison, before my trial began. Abregon had legal bank accounts outside where he could safeguard the money for me. So, that’s what I did with my remaining fifteen thousand. Abregon put some of his in the bank, but no one ever messed with him – not even the police – so he often kept a lot of money in his room for when he needed it on short notice.

Not long after that first deal, Abregon’s brother-in-law suggested another scam, which was also very easy money: bringing stolen cars across the border from Chile and rebirthing them. Bolivia was a far poorer country than Chile, so the price you could get for stolen cars was a lot lower, but it was far easier and safer to get rid of them because the controls on secondhand car sales were almost non-existent. With a little help from the police, you could be the legal owner holding all the right papers. And how would anyone from another country ever trace a stolen car in a place like Bolivia?

It sounded too good to be true and I wondered why other people weren’t doing it. The answer: capital. Abregon explained to me that lots of people knew about it, but not everyone could do it because you needed to put up a significant investment to buy the cars in the first place, which most people didn’t have. However, once you had that money, you could make a lot more and then, by reinvesting the profits and doing it on a bigger and bigger scale, even more money could be made. I was reluctant because it required me to hand over ten thousand dollars to Raquel’s brother, who I didn’t know. I would have only five thousand dollars remaining in the bank, but Abregon convinced me that after two or three times I would have enough money to bribe my way out of prison on the spot and then live like a king on the outside.