Chapter 22
It had been several weeks since ICE shipped Diego back one-way to Honduras, when an agent assigned to Operation Devil Horns poked his head into Santini’s office.
“Diego just called me from Honduras,” he said.
“Yeah?” Santini said. “What’d he want?”
The agent was still pissed at his wayward informant, who had flaked out on him after such a promising start to his career as a snitch.
“He said he wants to come back and work,” his partner said. “He says he’s sorry.”
Sorry, Santini thought. Yeah, he’s sorry alright.
But the prospect of getting Diego back into the investigation’s mix was too enticing to ignore, even though Casper had worked out great as an informant—more effective than Diego, in many ways. He was better known to the 20th Street clique and had higher-level connections with the Big Homies. But Casper’s days as an informant on the street were nearly done. Too much suspicion about him had developed within the clique.
Diego had been a major asset when he was actively providing intel about the clique, as well as facilitating the seizure of guns. He was also purposely detached from clique leadership, to avoid any legal entrapment issues as he provided eyes and ears on the gang’s street activities. The streets were where Peloncito and Cyco and their new booties lived, where they killed and maimed, and then frequently bragged about their exploits. If Diego returned to working the street, it could help the operation build a more airtight case against the gang.
The agent went to Nelson Wong at the US Attorney’s Office and described the situation, how Diego had called and expressed repentance and was promising to be a reliable informant again, if they let him come back to the States. As one who ultimately would have to try the case in court, Wong understood the obvious value of allowing Diego to return to work. It would likely help obtain additional evidence and make Diego available as a key witness at trial as well.
However, the prosecutor opposed providing any aid to Diego whatsoever in reentering the country. If the informant ever committed a serious crime in the States and it became publicly known that the federal government was responsible for him being intentionally allowed onto American soil, the political fallout could be extreme.
“We could tell him if he shows back up on this side of the border, we’ll defer action on his illegal entry,” Santini suggested to Wong.
Wong nodded.
“If he makes it across the border,” Santini said, “he can call us, and we’ll put him back to work. If not, then he’s on his own and we just move ahead without him, the way we are now.”
The plan was approved by Santini’s supervisors, and his partner passed the word to Diego that he had been granted a reprieve—but only if he could get back into the States on his own accord.
It was all Diego needed to hear, and he was on his way north, moving along the shadowy migration corridors from Honduras, through the Guatemalan jungle, and hitching free rides atop the freight trains that rumbled through Mexico to the US border at Tecate. Within a matter of days, Diego snuck back into California and placed a call to Santini’s partner.
“It’s Diego,” he said. “I am in San Francisco.”
Now, to keep his handlers happy and remain in the United States, Diego knew he would have to start digging around hard again for useful intelligence. Santini was so furious the last time the two men were together. Diego knew he was skating on thin ice with the agent now.
Prior to the highly publicized case of Brenda Paz, an MS-13 gang member who turned rat and was eventually killed while in protective custody in Virginia, it was not unusual for females to join MS-13 through a group-sex ritual involving multiple homies. (The gang ruled out membership for females altogether after Paz ratted out several members.) Getting gangbanged was an alternative for females to being jumped in through a severe beating with fists and feet, which male initiates were required to endure.
Peloncito’s juvenile girlfriend in MS-13, whose gang name was Flaca (Skinny), liked to shave her eyebrows and draw pencil-thin mascara lines in their place. Like a lot of teenagers, she wore tight-fitting jeans. A dark hoodie was her trademark top. She was a disturbed young woman, a lost soul full of confusion and hate. Beyond that, she was dangerously violent. Flaca, sixteen years old, enjoyed the thrill of slashing and stabbing unsuspecting, random victims. She was a perfect partner for Peloncito. Their bait-and-switch attacks on unsuspecting young men played on Flaca’s sex appeal and treachery. She’d lure them in, and Peloncito would make them pay.
A typical example of their attack profile: At 24th and Shotwell in the Mission, Jesus Jimenez was grabbing some tacos at Tagueria Guadalajara restaurant when Flaca approached him and asked him for his phone number. He was surprised. She was a little weird-looking, but definitely cute enough for a date. He followed her around the corner into an alley, where a blue Honda stopped abruptly next to them. Peloncito exited the vehicle and walked up to Jimenez.
“Mara Salvatrucha!” Peloncito yelled, and slashed Jimenez in the face with a knife.
Peloncito and Flaca hopped back into the car and drove off, as Jimenez rushed back into the restaurant, bleeding profusely and pleading for someone to call 911. He sat at a table near the window, attempting to control the blood gushing from a four-inch slice on his left cheek, which extended from his left ear to the base of his nose, clear down to the cheekbone.
In another seemingly spontaneous act of random violence, Peloncito and Flaca disembarked from a city bus at Mission and Silver Streets. It was the day after Christmas.
“Hey, cutie!” a young man said to Flaca, flirting, as she stepped onto the sidewalk. The would-be Romeo then noticed an older dude with a mustache and a scar on his face, Peloncito, wearing a black hoodie and a menacing look, step off the bus behind Flaca.
“Whoops!” the young man said, avoiding eye contact with Peloncito, who turned and walked away down the street with Flaca.
A few moments later, Peloncito and Flaca returned and confronted the flirtatious youth and two friends who were with him.
“MS, putos!” the bloodthirsty pair yelled in unison.
Peloncito grabbed one of the male youths and began stabbing him in the neck and back. While the victim struggled to escape, Flaca lunged at the young woman and stabbed her once in the chest. The two attackers then ran away from the scene.
Grievously wounded, the male victim stumbled and screamed, “Help me!” He ran toward Joe’s Cable Car Diner across the street and collapsed in the parking lot.
The female victim was taken to the hospital by her boyfriend, while emergency medical first responders tended to the injured male. He was in critical condition from several stab wounds to his neck and chest, requiring several hours of surgery to repair major internal injuries, and he nearly died on the operating table.
Back at work on the streets, a few days after the bus-stop attack, Diego visited Mission Playground, where Peloncito was schooling a young gang member about the finer points of MS-13’s reglos. Nearby, Cyco chatted up a young girl at the Valencia Street entrance to the park. Diego judged the girl couldn’t be more than fourteen years old—Cyco had a well-known fetish for underage females.
Peloncito told Diego los puercos (the pigs, or the police), had just taken a walk through the playground, so it would be smart for the homies to take a ride together to a park up the hill.
“Puchica, putos,” Peloncito said. (Let’s get the fuck out of here.)
Diego and the homies drove several blocks up State Street to a park in Corona Heights, situated at high elevation with great views of the city. Cyco said he enjoyed coming here to watch a herd of wild goats browsing the hillside.1 The 20th Street crew climbed out of the car and hiked up the hill to some public barbeque pits, where they passed around a fat joint.
In between effusive tokes, Peloncito laughed and bragged about recently stabbing three chapetes on Mission and Silver Streets the day after Christmas. He said that Papa Noel hadn’t given him any presents that year, but the opportunity to cut up the chapos was the greatest gift of all.
Eager to report Peloncito’s description of the attacks to Santini right away, Diego told the gangsters he needed to phone his wife. He strolled away to make the call in private.
Santini’s cell rang as he walked with Gibson through the parking lot of San Francisco General Hospital. The two cops had just finished interviewing a seventeen-year-old female who was stabbed in the chest by a Sureño gangbanger while waiting at a bus stop.
“Michael,” said Diego. “I have new information about an attack that Peloncito is bragging about.”
“Really, homito?” Santini said. “Junto! Pronto!”
“He is telling about a stabbing he and his girl Flaca did at Silver and Mission.”
The hair on the back of Santini’s neck stood up. The female victim that he and Gibson just interviewed was attacked at the same intersection. After the attack, SFPD Gang Task Force officers were called to investigate, since the assailants had referred to MS-13 during the assault. A city detective canvassed the area and met with a nearby store’s security guard, who provided video footage of the two perpetrators running through a parking lot, making their escape.
Following up the tip from Diego, Gibson showed Jimenez photo spreads of Peloncito and Flaca. The victim affirmatively picked them both out as his attackers. SFPD detectives also showed photo spreads of Peloncito and Flaca to victims and witnesses of the attack at the bus stop. Both were positively identified as the assailants.
Gibson served a search warrant at the residence of Peloncito. The cops knocked on his door late at night and he answered. They searched his bedroom, where they found a black hoodie, a blue hoodie, two knives, two cell phones, numerous pieces of gang indicia including hats, clothing, and jail letters. He was booked for attempted homicide.
Removing Peloncito from the street would change the clique’s power dynamics in unpredictable ways. It brought new leaders to the forefront, forcing Santini to track and contain the morphing group as best he could, pulling strings from the outside through his informants.
Flaca was arrested soon after and booked as a juvenile, her identity and case disposition kept confidential. Police later seized about a dozen pages of poems and lists of persons that Flaca wanted dead for one reason or another. The information was forwarded to state prosecutors pursuing attempted murder charges against her.
Mi Vida Loca
by Flaca
Esta vida that I live
Is slowly driving me insane
Extreme paranoia
Always keeping trucha
Living off that dirty feria
Cant trust no one
Not even your own barrio
Sleepin con one ojo open
Stead steppin
Head to toe Sur’ed up
Walkin enemy tierra
Solo on every creep
I’m a one person army
It’s me all alone against tu barrio
So fuck the world
Looking every chapa in the eye
Murder is my high
Checkin every Nor puto in sight
Behind bars mi wicked fantasies arise
Wicked in a cell
I know I’m going to hell
Esta vida that I live
I call my vida loca
With probably the single-most homicidal gang member, Peloncito, in custody, Santini turned his attention now to cutting off the other part of 20th Street’s two-headed hydra. Cyco was still free on bail pending an illegal firearm charge. His current legal situation was also complicated by a judge’s recent deportation order. For the time being, Santini believed Cyco would remain in the States long enough to bust him—hopefully soon—on a more serious federal racketeering charge.
Meanwhile, Casper continued to defy fate by functioning as an informant on the street. Soon after Peloncito’s arrest, he was paying a visit to the homies at the little park in the Mission when Patas drove up and asked him to take a ride. The Miceros boss wanted to discuss a volatile situation in the hood. Casper obliged and hopped into Patas’s four-door Cutlass.
Casper had always respected Patas. Like Tigre, he preferred working relationships on the street based on mutual respect between the neighborhood’s various gangs. Patas avoided unnecessary aggression, as opposed to the preferred style of 20th Street’s newest leaders, who tended to spread fear through wanton violence.
Although the Miceros’ primary area of operations was Mission Street, between 11th and 24th, Patas had several groups of rovers who intermittently worked different parts of the city. These roving peddlers funneled fake-document customers back to Patas, who controlled the entire counterfeit operation in the Mission, from photo labs to printing and lamination machines.
Patas told Casper that Cyco was demanding a new tax from the Miceros to meet the demand for special funds by the Big Homies in El Salvador. Cyco demanded Patas pay the tax within the next week, or he warned somebody was going to die. Patas told Casper he was not going to bend over for the threat. He also said he knew Cyco was planning to leave the States for El Salvador within the next several days.
After their conversation, Casper walked back to the park and gave Santini a call on his cell phone.
“He’s leaving,” Casper said.
“Who’s leaving, bro?” Santini said. “What are you talking about?”
“Our leader,” Casper said. “Cyco is headed south to El Salvador.”
“Fuck!” Santini said. “That’s bad news, homie.”
This revelation that Cyco planned to exit the States shocked Santini and put the wheels in motion for a quick plan to stop him, somehow. The agent couldn’t allow one of his investigation’s main targets and the current leader of 20th Street to leave the country and avoid prosecution. Santini assigned one of his team’s agents the task of ensuring Cyco was put on a leash before he escaped to Central America. While continuing to monitor the airline passenger record system, a ticket reservation for Marvin Carcamo, aka Cyco, popped up for a red-eye flight from San Francisco to El Salvador with Taca Airlines, departing in three days.
A tip from Santini’s partner to Bad Boy Bail Bonds about Cyco’s plan to flee the country sent the bondsmen into action. Bad Boy had posted Cyco’s original $80,000 bond for his pending gun charge. They arrested Cyco at the Taca Airlines ticket counter at San Francisco International Airport in front of his father and brother, Indio.
The San Francisco sheriff’s department was adamant they would reset Cyco’s bond at only the original amount of $80,000—even though it was clear he intended to flee the United States. Gibson worked through the night, drafting a series of detailed documents for a judge to get Cyco’s bail increased to $500,000. The following day, Santini learned that Cyco’s family planned on procuring the increased bail amount to get him released. This prompted the HSI agents to contact the local DA’s office, which worked with a judge to reset Cyco’s bail at $10 million.
Cyco’s attorney attempted to argue he was leaving the country and skipping on his bond in a good faith attempt to adhere to the immigration judge’s prior order that he leave the country within two weeks. The appeal was dismissed, to Santini’s relief. Cyco remained in custody for the gun violation.
Primary target number two for Santini was locked down for the time being, and for that he was grateful. Still, the federal grand jury needed to finish its agonizingly slow and deliberate process before it could deliver any RICO indictments, while violence on the street continued seemingly without relief.
Santini’s cell phone rang—it was Casper calling.
“Michael, I have a problem,” he said.
“What’s up?” Santini said.
“I am under arrest,” Casper said.
“For what?!” Santini said.
“They say the car I am driving is stolen,” Casper said. “I don’t know anything about it. I borrowed the car. I don’t know about it.”
Santini considered the situation. What did this mean for his investigation, if Casper got locked up for auto theft? Of course, the agent would be losing one of his two main informants, which wasn’t good. On the other hand, Casper had been running up against his expiration date for a while. The dumbass might have done himself a favor by getting busted, Santini thought.
“Okay, dog,” Santini said. “There’s nothing I can do for you right now.”
“But I didn’t know the car was hot!” Casper said.
“Sorry, man,” Santini said. “I can’t do anything about it right now. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Just be cool.”
He heard Casper let out a deep sigh on the other end of the line, then the voice of a CHP officer barking an order in the background. He heard Casper’s phone rubbing against the fabric of his clothes, and his muffled voice responding to the cop.
He came back on the line. “I have to go,” Casper said.
“Okay,” Santini said. “I’ll be in contact. Good luck, dog.”2