As a little boy, I was obsessed with the police. I envied their starched military-style uniforms and their speeding cruisers with their flashing lights and blaring sirens.
I dreamed of being a cop, of catching the bad guys, especially if they were taking advantage of innocent people. For me, police officers were superheroes. I knew law enforcement was my calling, even as a very young boy growing up in Tennessee.
I was born in Memphis, but by the time I was three, we—my parents, my older sister, and I—moved to Murfreesboro, a small municipality of wide lawns and fading antebellum plantations just south of Nashville in the deep, humid middle of the state. Nothing much had happened there since the Civil War. In school, we learned about the Battle of Stones River, which took place in Murfreesboro over three days at the end of 1862 and the beginning of 1863—one of the war’s bloodiest clashes, resulting in more than twenty-three thousand casualties on both the Confederate and Union sides.
When I was eleven years old, I had my own historic battle in a suburban backyard. Looking back, it wasn’t so much a battle as the defining moment of my young life. That’s when I found myself caught red-handed, squinting in the glare of police spotlights—my first encounter with the law.
In the summers, my friends and I would camp out in one another’s backyards, lying with our sleeping bags on freshly mown grass, gazing up at the stars, or huddled together in a pup tent, scaring one another other with our made-up stories of ghosts, zombies, and grisly murders, falling asleep to the sounds of crickets and bullfrogs. Summers in Tennessee were hot, and the evenings didn’t cool down much, so most nights, we’d take our sleeping bags outside the tents, waking up in the morning covered with dew.
One summer night, it was so hot and sticky none of us could sleep, which was why a group of us decided to sneak into one of our fellow camper’s house. I’m not sure why we did this, although I seem to recall that we wanted to retrieve something that we thought was important at the time. As we argued with one another in loud whispers, trying to pry open a bedroom window, we suddenly heard the wheels of a cruiser approaching us in the dark and knew we were in trouble. It was a police car. Someone must have called the cops when they heard us making a ruckus. We froze, too frightened to even turn around. I could barely make out the two officers who emerged from their squad car, as I was blinded by the headlights. They told us to stand still, although they needn’t have said anything at all because we were all too frightened to move. Beads of sweat poured down my cheeks as I held my hands up. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I could see that the cops were tall and muscled. They seemed to me larger than life in their neatly pressed black uniforms and polished black boots. When they asked us if we wanted to be taken to the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office and put in jail, or go to our parents, we all answered at the same time. We all knew what would happen if our parents got involved, so we unanimously opted to go to jail. That sent the officers into fits of laughter. We were mortified and all stood uncomfortably at attention as they wrote down our names and addresses and escorted us back to our homes, where they woke up our moms and dads. Somehow, we all survived that terrible night, but we lost our taste for camping. At least during that summer.
Over the years, I have often thought back to that first encounter with the law and how much I admired those officers for using common sense with a group of mischievous kids.
More than anything, I wanted to be a police officer, but it was years later that I discovered that my parents had different plans for me.
I grew up in a strict Baptist household, the youngest of three children. Or I should say, the youngest of two. An older brother died when he was just three, before I was born. My sister was eight years older than I was, and we spent much of our childhood locked in battle.
My father stood six foot four, and he was the strongest and smartest person I ever knew. My uncles liked to tell me that when my father was a young man, he loved to fight and he never lost a bout. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and he was once asked to try out for the Washington Redskins—an opportunity he politely turned down because he didn’t see professional football as a solid career path.
When my dad was old enough, he volunteered for the U.S. Army, although he had to cheat on his physical exam to get in. My dad had poor vision in his left eye. When he took the exam, the doctor told him to cover his left eye with his left hand and read the chart. No problem. When they asked him to do the reverse on his right eye, he simply used his right hand to cover the left eye and passed the vision test!
My dad started off in the infantry and was sent to Europe after the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II in 1941. Because of his size and strength, he worked with the medical corpsmen in France and Belgium, carrying wounded soldiers to safety and holding them down for medical procedures when needed.
When he returned from Europe, my father decided to enroll at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, to become a minister. He was the first in his family to attend college, and after he graduated, he moved with my mother and sister to his first church in Memphis, where I was born. Later, in Murfreesboro, he rotated through several small churches and worked odd jobs to make extra money. I remember him going door-to-door selling vacuum cleaners. He was very good at it and frequently said that God directed him, telling him where to go and what to say to do his job.
Eventually, God directed my father out of the ministry and into broadloom. After he got a job at a flooring store in Nashville, he urged his youngest brother, who had retired from the air force, to go into business with him. They did well with their fledgling carpet store in Nashville, but there was too much competition in that city to expand on a grand scale, and they decided to look elsewhere.
Two years after my encounter with the police, we left Tennessee and moved north to my parents’ home state of West Virginia, where my father and uncle were poised to create a broadloom empire. We settled in Princeton, a quiet railroad town of some six thousand people surrounded by coalfields and nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. We had solid family roots in the state, where my maternal grandparents had settled after they emigrated from England. My grandfather had worked in the coalfields his entire adult life.
I wasn’t happy with the move. As a teenager, I was upset about leaving my friends behind in a place where I was one of the popular kids. When school started in Princeton, I went to the local junior high school, but I don’t recall it as a very pleasant experience. Kids made fun of my Tennessee accent, which pegged me as being from the really Deep South. I tried every which way to blend in and eventually learned to stifle my accent to match the way the Princeton kids talked. Outside of sports and church, my new town seemed to have little to offer kids, although town leaders eventually did open up a youth center in an old bowling alley and installed Ping-Pong tables, a snack bar, and a dance floor, where I had my first dance with a girl.
In Princeton, my father and uncle set about turning their store into a successful family business, and we were all dispatched to help them. My mother was the bookkeeper and worked with walk-in customers, scheduled installation jobs, and ordered supplies for the store while my father and uncle hawked linoleum and carpeting to their clients. Truth be told, my mother was really the heart and soul of the business, which might have failed if not for her enthusiasm and hard work. My sister also worked part-time at the store. By the time I was fourteen, I began working there, too. It was my father’s hope that I would take over the business, and he believed that I needed to start at the bottom. My first duties included sweeping, mopping, cleaning the bathrooms, and taking out the trash. Eventually, I graduated to meeting customers and guiding them through hundreds of carpet and linoleum samples.
To this day, broadloom makes me claustrophobic.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, while other teenagers were growing their hair long, smoking weed, protesting the war in Vietnam, and mourning the breakup of the Beatles, I was leading a pretty sheltered life in a conservative Appalachian town. And even though he had long left the ministry, my father remained a strict disciplinarian. I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema until I was eighteen, and we weren’t allowed to play card games—not even Old Maid—in our home. My parents forbade my sister from wearing pants or shorts, and dresses had to be worn well below the knee. My father spanked us with a belt when we were caught doing something wrong. To some people, this probably sounds rather harsh, and in today’s permissive society, our parents would probably be accused of child abuse. But that’s how we grew up—with very strict boundaries. We knew what we could and could not do and what was expected of us.
As we did in Tennessee, our family attended the First Baptist Church in Princeton. I wasn’t interested in much of anything to do with religion or church socials at the time, not until I attended a performance of the church kids’ choir. The choir was called the Sounds of Conviction, known as the Sounds for short. And after that first performance, I was so impressed by the professional staging, the lighting, and the singing that I joined the group and didn’t leave until after my senior year of high school. I wasn’t the greatest singer, but I loved the mix of kids and being part of a team. We traveled throughout West Virginia and Virginia, appearing at schools and churches. The show was so popular that the choir grew from about forty kids when I joined them to more than four hundred by the time I left.
After high school, I left for West Virginia University in Morgantown, excited to be on my own and living in a dorm with other kids my age. At my parents’ direction, I majored in business administration, but I had no interest in learning about economics and finance. In hindsight, I feel like I spent my first semester at one long party. When my grades came out, my parents decided that they were not going to throw their money at a lost cause. Who could blame them? At Christmas break, I reluctantly packed my things, withdrew from WVU, and returned home.
Carpet samples became my future.
Still, eager to pursue law enforcement, I enrolled at Bluefield State College. I signed up for the school’s newly created criminal justice administration program without my parents’ knowledge. And, boy, did I love it! During the spring semester in 1975, I volunteered to be the first BSC student in a new summer internship program at the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office and the Bluefield Police Department (BPD). I met deputies and officers from both agencies who encouraged me to take the civil service exam to qualify to become a cop. I studied in secret and took the test without my parents ever finding out. When the results were announced, I got the highest score, and my name was placed at the top of a potential hiring list for both the sheriff’s office and police department.
The BPD was the first agency to call me and offer me a job interview. That’s when I had to confess to my parents about my college major and that I’d secretly taken the police entrance exam. My parents were much smarter than I’d given them credit for and had already figured out what I was up to. After I passed the physical exam and background investigation, I was sworn in as a patrolman with the BPD in November 1975. I was all of nineteen years old.
On the day I went to try on my new uniform, I was ecstatic, although I was told that I was too young to purchase a weapon. The minimum age to buy a gun in the state was twenty-one, which meant that I would have to persuade one of the older cops to go out and get me my first handgun—a blue-steel four-inch Colt Python .357-caliber revolver.
I didn’t expect my father to be pleased with my success, but on some level, he was proud of me, because he went out and bought the ammo.
As a rookie officer, I patrolled a section of the town and did my share of desk duty, but I was drawn to drug traffickers. It was 1976, and it seemed to me that illegal drugs were everywhere. Even back then, I saw how harmful drugs were to society and how dealing drugs and addiction were messing up young lives. In the mid-1970s, cocaine was going through a resurgence, becoming the recreational drug of choice of the glitterati at discos and swanky parties around the country, especially New York’s Studio 54. Elsewhere, freebasing, or inhaling the vapors of cocaine at its melting point, was giving junkies incredible highs. Underground chemists were experimenting with rock cocaine, mixing baking soda and other substances to produce crack, which would have devastating consequences in American inner cities by the 1980s. And with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, hundreds of soldiers were returning home impossibly hooked on heroin.
But marijuana was enough of a scourge for me as a young cop, and in my free time, I found myself pursuing drug pushers. In 1976, I got to know a snitch who told me about a trafficker who was selling multi-pound quantities of grass. At that time, a pound of marijuana fetched more than $1,300. I called Jack Walters, another rookie cop who was my closest friend on the force, and we set up a plan to bust the bad guy on our day off. Working with our informant, we asked him to call the target.
That evening, the snitch called the target to inquire about the price of one pound of weed. Less than twenty minutes later, we arranged to meet him at a local gas station to make the purchase. Jack and I hid in the back of the gas station while the snitch led the target through the transaction.
As soon as we spied the target removing a small bag from his car, we swooped in for the arrest. The culprit turned out to be a seventeen-year-old high school senior from an upper-middle-class home. He didn’t need the money, but had watched too many bad-guy movies and thought he could get away with this little criminal enterprise in a small town where he thought the cops knew nothing.
Jack and I handcuffed the frightened teenager and called for a detective to come to the scene. The detective was astonished that two rookie cops were involved in a successful drug bust on their day off.
The seventeen-year-old was charged and eventually released to his parents. Fortunately for him, an agreement was reached in the courts, and he was placed on probation. Because he was a juvenile, his criminal record was expunged when he became an adult and finished his probation.
Despite my success, I felt my dad wasn’t so happy about my chosen field, clearly disappointed that I hadn’t followed in his footsteps in the family business. After I had been in the police department for eighteen months, my guilt got the better of me, and in 1977, I took a ninety-day leave of absence to return to my father’s store to give flooring another try. But I lasted less than two months among the broadloom and linoleum samples. I was clearly miserable, and I returned to the police department before my leave was up.
It was only after I’d been a cop for five years that my dad finally told me how proud he was. That made all the difference, and it gave me the strength to go forward.
I never looked back.
I cried all the way on the five-hour drive from Hebbronville to Huntsville—what was supposed to be the first major step in my career in law enforcement.
I was a sociology major at Texas A&I in Kingsville and had scored a three-month internship with the state’s department of corrections. I would get college credit and a small salary for working at the prison where the state housed its most notorious prisoners, who were all on death row.
I was thrilled.
But my parents worried for my safety and tried to convince me not to go. To be sure, there were other things holding me back in my southern Texas town. My family was going through a rough time because my mother, Alicia, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a cruel fate for a God-fearing, clean-living woman who never had a drink or smoked a cigarette in her life. She went to church every Sunday and always managed to have a meal ready for my older brother, Jorge, my dad, and me. It was hard to make ends meet in Hebbronville. We owned a small family ranch that didn’t yield much money, and my brother and I helped my dad mending fences and working the cattle every summer. Through the leanest years, my mother remained a great optimist, even as she eventually lost both her breasts to the cancer. She loved going to bingo at the church on Friday nights. She always came back saying that she was one number away from hitting the jackpot, even though she never won a penny.
Choking back sobs, she begged me to stay. My father, whose name was Jesus but whom everyone called Chucho, warned that I was also making a mistake. He worried that my internship working among the most brutal prisoners in the state was simply not a good idea. It was too dangerous, he said. This from my father, who was a cowboy and had made his mark in the vaquero capital of Texas! He wasn’t afraid of anyone. But I wanted more than the family ranch, which had been passed down from my grandfather to my dad, and where my family barely eked out a living. I had to leave the confines of my small Texas railroad town. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to experience my first real criminal justice job.
I packed only a few clothes for the trip as if to prove to my parents that I would soon be back, that this wasn’t forever. I’d keep my promise to be by my mother’s side to help her through the chemotherapy treatments that she was about to undergo in Laredo. But my parents turned their backs and refused to speak to me.
That’s how I left my childhood home at eighteen, with a heavy heart and wondering if I would ever see my mother alive again. Looking back now, through the prism of so many years, I know they must have been just as sad as I was.
The tears came as soon as I put the key in the ignition and gripped the steering wheel of my 1974 Chevy Nova. I bought the two-door, sleek brown muscle car with the cash I had saved from picking watermelons during my summer breaks in Hebbronville, which is probably the world watermelon capital, surrounded by seemingly endless green fields of the fruit. I had been doing the grueling work since I was fifteen, squatting among the dusty vines every summer under a blistering one-hundred-degree sun. The workers’ truck would come by my house at 6:00 a.m. and would deposit me and our crew of mostly Mexican migrants at the nearby farms, returning home at 8:00 in the evening. The melons averaged about ten to fifteen pounds each, and by the end of the summer, I had arms like Popeye’s. Several times, I encountered rattlesnakes that liked to hide below the melons to cool themselves off from the sun. I never got bit, but I came close. One of them tried to strike at me, but I threw a watermelon on it and crushed it to death. To this day, I can’t eat watermelon, and I have a real phobia of snakes.
By the time I was seventeen, I became so good that I graduated from picker to cutter—part of an advance reconnaissance team usually made up of older workers who scour the fields for the ripest fruit. Later, I became a stacker, helping to load the melons on a trailer—an art form, as each stack had to be a perfect layer of melons lined up horizontally from the floor to about eight feet high. I earned $300 for each trailer I stacked and could complete two in a day, so my paychecks were huge. I gave a big part of my pay to my mom and saved up the rest to buy my car.
On that long drive out of the place I knew so well, I cried because on some level I must have known that I was leaving my youth behind, driving past the watermelon fields, the elementary and high schools where I’d played football and baseball, and the dive bar where I drank my first beer. Speeding north along U.S. 59, the tears rolled uncontrollably down my cheeks, clouding my vision. The miles of ranches dotted by dust-covered vaqueros on their horses and herds of cattle outside my window played like scenes on a film loop from some long-ago life.
I passed Houston and drove north to Huntsville, the seat of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which operates all the state’s correctional facilities for adults. Someone—I can’t remember who—once called it a recession-proof company town because the main economic activity is housing criminals.
Indeed, of the thirty-eight thousand residents who made up the city, about seven thousand worked in its prison system. Thousands more worked at the local university. There are seven prisons in Huntsville, housing more than thirteen thousand inmates. Locals like to joke that “half the population of Huntsville’s under key, and the other half gets paid for their time.” It’s all part of their gallows humor, but it also underlies a pride that comes from living and working in a place that has become a kind of national monument to criminal justice, despite what side of the death penalty debate you’re on. There is a Texas Prison Museum, where the pistol Bonnie Parker was holding when she was gunned down by a sheriff’s posse in Louisiana in 1934 is on display. But the main attraction is Old Sparky, the electric chair in which 361 prisoners were executed between 1924 and 1964. Before Old Sparky, prisoners marked for execution were simply hanged in different counties across the state of Texas.
I didn’t know what to expect when I set out for Huntsville, and I was still red-eyed and raw from my drive from Hebbronville when I drove down the city’s main streets. It was a nice enough Texas town, not unlike so many I had passed through as a kid—flat and sprawling, with rusty pickups parked outside the hardware store and the soda fountain. I stopped to stretch my legs and walked past what appeared to be the long-shuttered Old Town Theatre on Twelfth Street, near the Greyhound bus station, where later I would watch recently released inmates hesitantly waiting for buses, clutching beer cans wrapped in brown paper bags—their first taste of freedom after doing time.
On the Sunday afternoon that I arrived, a few diners were crowded with students from Sam Houston State University. Through the windows, I saw some of them lingering over pie and coffee, deep in homework assignments or animated conversations. But I knew I was in the most sinister place that I had ever been when I looked up at my new place of employment, an imposing redbrick building that dominated the city’s downtown. Built in 1849, the 225-cell Huntsville Unit has the distinction of being the state’s oldest prison. And since 1982, when Texas reinstated the death penalty, the prison, which is better known by its nickname—the Walls Unit—has housed the country’s most active execution chamber.
I had nowhere to stay and checked into the cheapest hotel room I could find. The next morning, I reported too early for my internship and was assigned to the Ellis Unit, a prison twelve miles north of Huntsville, which housed the toughest death row inmates. Walking back to my hotel after filling out the necessary paperwork, I found a small, dilapidated trailer parked about a block from the Walls Unit. It was barely twenty feet long and was falling apart. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. But I rented it on the spot from the old lady who owned it. Maybe she noticed my bloodshot eyes. Were my cheeks still stained by tears? I don’t know why she seemed to trust me on the spot, sheepishly asking for only a hundred dollars a month. On my days off, I could walk from the tiny trailer to the main prison and use my vouchers to get free lunch and dinner.
My first day of work, I drove to Ellis Unit and was assigned the death row roll call. I received no training or warnings about what this would entail, and as I took hesitant steps on the three-foot-wide metal catwalk that separated the inmates’ cells on either side, I’m not ashamed to admit that I was scared to death. My hands were clammy, and my heart was pumping too fast in my chest with every move down the catwalk, not daring to peer into any of the cells. I kept my gaze fixed on the list of names I had to call out on my clipboard. I was sure that the prisoners could smell my fear and hear the hesitancy in my voice as I began the roll call, careful to focus on the correct pronunciation of all the names. They must have known I was the new guy and totally in over my head, for when I called out the third name and heard nothing but deafening silence, someone suddenly yelled out a loud “Boo!”
That “Boo!” sent me over the edge, and I bolted. I whipped around and ran back across the catwalk as fast as I could.
When I came to my senses, everyone—the guards and the other prisoners—seemed to be falling over themselves laughing at my expense.
I breathed a sigh of relief, but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. After all, the brutality of the crimes that these inmates had committed was no laughing matter.
And there were dangers lurking everywhere in the prison. I arrived at Huntsville a few years after the July 1974 hostage taking—the longest siege in U.S. prison history—when Fred Gómez Carrasco, a notorious drug trafficker from San Antonio known as El Señor, took sixteen hostages at the Walls Unit library. Carrasco, then thirty-four, was one of the most notorious heroin kingpins, responsible for the deaths of as many as fifty-seven people throughout Texas and parts of Mexico. Carrasco and fellow inmates Rodolfo Dominguez and Ignacio Cuevas had bribed prison workers to smuggle three .357 Magnum pistols into the prison in a can of rotting ham. More than three hundred rounds of ammunition were smuggled in cans of peaches.
The kidnappers negotiated with prison officials for eleven days, threatening to kill hostages who ranged from other inmates and librarians to a prison chaplain. Carrasco requested that authorities provide him and his two accomplices with bulletproof vests, suits, and, bizarrely, Nunn Bush shoes for their daring escape. On August 3, they left the prison protected by a makeshift shield of two rolling blackboards, reinforced with fat legal books and cardboard taped to the outside for added protection. They christened their contraption “the Piñata” and “the Trojan Taco.” The convicts handcuffed themselves to three women—librarian Julia Standley and teachers Yvonne “Von” Beseda and Novella Pollard—and took them inside the chalkboard fortress along with the prison chaplain, Father O’Brien. Around the Piñata, they wound a rope and handcuffed four other hostages as a human buffer in case Texas authorities decided to shoot. The plan was to make it to the courtyard, where an armored car Carrasco had demanded was waiting.
But as the blackboard caravan descended a ramp from the third-floor library under cover of darkness, police turned on a high-pressure hose that dispersed the hostages on the outside. Immediately, shooting from inside the shield began as police demanded that the inmates surrender. For an intense fifteen minutes, the shooting continued. In the chaos that followed, Dominguez shot Standley four times in the back. She died instantly, before Dominguez himself was gunned down by authorities. Carrasco killed Beseda and then turned the gun on himself. Cuevas shot and wounded Father O’Brien before fainting and falling on top of Pollard. Cuevas, the illiterate son of a Mexican peasant who was serving a forty-five-year sentence for murder, was the only hostage-taker to survive the dramatic prison break. He was convicted three times of capital murder in the death of Standley, a forty-three-year-old mother of five. Although two of the convictions were overturned on appeal, Cuevas was tried for Standley’s murder under a Texas law that makes an accomplice liable for crimes committed in the same incident. On May 23, 1991, Cuevas was executed by lethal injection, only a few yards from where the dramatic prison break had taken place.
My internship also coincided with the incarceration of a fat white guy everyone on death row called the Candyman. I soon learned that the press had dubbed him “the man who killed Halloween” because he poisoned his own young son with cyanide-laced candy to collect a fat insurance payout.
His name was Ronald Clark O’Bryan, and he was an optician from the Houston suburb of Deer Park. After he was convicted of murder, parents across the country panicked, thinking twice about allowing their children to accept Halloween candy from anyone—strangers as well as family.
On a drizzly Halloween night in 1974, O’Bryan and another neighborhood dad took their children trick-or-treating in suburban Pasadena. O’Bryan, then thirty, lagged behind his friend and the children and came back holding several treats that he claimed had come from a home on their walk that had been dark and shuttered when they had tried to ring the doorbell. O’Bryan distributed the treats—Pixy Stix—to his own two children—eight-year-old Timothy and five-year-old Elizabeth—and the three others who accompanied them. When they got home, O’Bryan urged his son to try the poisoned Pixy-Stix. But after little Timothy gulped down a mouthful of the poisoned powder, he complained it tasted bitter and began vomiting. He died soon after.
O’Bryan told police that he got the candy from the darkened house on their trick-or-treat route. He claimed that after he rang the bell, he had just seen a hairy arm holding out the candy. The alibi was quickly proven to be false when the owner of the house produced time sheets from his job as an air traffic controller. He was working Halloween night and had several witnesses to prove it.
Police arrested O’Bryan days later, after they found that he had taken out tens of thousands in insurance policies on his children. He was $100,000 in debt and was about to lose his home and his car. He was also about to be fired from his job after his employers found him stealing. Timothy’s death alone was worth $31,000 in insurance cash.
I wasn’t around for O’Bryan’s execution. After winning two previous stays of execution, O’Bryan was condemned to death in 1984, several years after my internship at Huntsville. He maintained his innocence even as he was being strapped to the gurney, just before receiving the lethal injection. He was thirty-nine years old.
“We as human beings do make mistakes and errors,” he said in his final statement. “This execution is one of those wrongs. But it doesn’t mean the whole system of justice is wrong. Therefore, I forgive all—and I do mean all—those who have been involved in my death.”
As much as I deplored their crimes, I did come away from that experience thinking that O’Bryan was right on one thing: All the inmates—even the most brutal convicted criminals—are still human beings. This is one of the most valuable lessons I have taken away from law enforcement, and I learned it from a Huntsville prison trustee—a prisoner who was assigned to help the guards in exchange for special treats, such as telephone use or extra food. Be strict with them, yes, but be compassionate as well, he told me.
In the end, though, that same compassion didn’t filter down to me at Huntsville. Just before my three months were up and I was scheduled to return to college, I found myself on the receiving end of an ugly racial slur that almost ended my career before it had even started. It was so nasty and unexpected that it still haunts me all these years later.
Back home in Hebbronville, my only cousin was getting married, and her wedding fell on the last day of my shift. I summoned up the courage to ask the commander of the prison for a day off. The Captain, as he was known, was a heavyset white man with an intimidating presence. At Huntsville, he was an anomaly because most of the people I worked with were decent and caring, many of them criminal justice majors working on their degrees at Sam Houston University. As I sat in the prison’s executive office and stammered out the details of my family situation and asked him to allow me to make up the time by working extra hours—I proposed to work nine consecutive days instead of our usual seven-day shifts to make up for the day off—he flew off the handle. He started screaming at me, calling me “a lazy Mexican” among other things that I have blocked out of my memory. He ordered me out of his office, and he told me he was going to write me a negative recommendation, which could ruin my law enforcement opportunities in the future.
That was it! Three months of hard work, where I felt I had learned so much to advance my criminal justice career, and my fate appeared to be in the hands of a racist who couldn’t control his temper. I thought I was doing the right and proper thing by letting him know about my personal situation, but I left his office in a shambles. I worked the seven-day shift, and then without a word to anyone, I got in my Chevy and drove back to Hebbronville. I made it to my cousin’s wedding and then headed back to school.
I was barely nineteen and felt my career in policing was over. Later, when I applied for work with the sheriff’s office in Laredo and to become a special agent with the DEA, I was too afraid to include Huntsville on my résumé.
I saw the headlights of the oncoming car as it barreled into my lane. I was still a rookie cop with the Bluefield Police Department. That night, I was on patrol, driving through leafy, residential streets of the historic railroad town in the heart of the Appalachians, about twenty minutes outside of Princeton, where I still lived with my parents.
With a population of just over twenty thousand, Bluefield was the largest town in southern West Virginia and western Virginia. The primary industry was the Norfolk and Western Railway Company, which eventually became the Norfolk Southern Railway. The primary cargo coming through the town on the railroad was coal heading to Norfolk, Virginia, to be shipped to various places around the world. People from nearby villages and other towns would come to Bluefield for shopping and entertainment, and every Saturday night, there was dancing with a country and western band at the Bluefield City Auditorium.
There were usually three to five off-duty police officers working these events, and it wasn’t unusual for us to arrest quite a few people each week—most of them for picking fights or breaking into parked cars while they were drunk. That’s when things in Bluefield could turn ugly. A lot of the folks who descended on Bluefield were from areas that didn’t have much in the way of a police presence, if any at all. They were not accustomed to having to obey any rules or being told by a police officer what they could or could not do. Back then, most of these out-of-towners worked hard during the week and wanted to play hard on the weekends. And for many of them, fighting was part of life, so it wasn’t unusual for them to resist arrest when confronted by a police officer. The following morning, after they’d sobered up in the drunk tank at the precinct, they would either apologize for their behavior or they’d say something like, “Man, that was a great fight, wasn’t it? I can’t wait to come back next weekend for another try.”
When I wasn’t patrolling the parking lot of the auditorium, most of my duties consisted of driving through Bluefield’s main streets, looking for any crimes in progress and checking commercial doors and windows for signs of break-ins.
I loved my job and felt I was making an important contribution to the community. One cold, winter night, I was sure I had saved three small children from freezing to death in the back of a pickup truck. Their parents had left them in the car, which was busted-up and missing windows, so that they could catch a few dances in the auditorium. I was horrified by the sight of the trembling little children. After my partner and I put the children in the back of our heated police cruiser, I marched into the auditorium. I made my way up to the stage, grabbed the microphone from the singer in mid-song, and demanded that the parents of the children come forward or I would be forced to take the children to Child Protective Services. After a few tense moments, the parents came forward and were loudly booed by the crowd. They were dirt-poor and said they had just wanted to enjoy a few dances. I could tell that when they were reunited with their children that they were good parents who had just temporarily screwed up because they wanted to enjoy a few moments alone on the dance floor. So we let them off with a stern warning that if we ever caught them doing something like this again, we would make sure to call the proper authorities to have their children taken away from them.
On another blustery winter’s night, while a reporter who was following me on my rounds waited outside, Officer Dave Gaither and I charged into a burning house, frantically going from room to room until we saw a mother and her young daughter. Dave helped the child’s mother escape, and I picked up the child and ran like hell out of the burning home.
I truly believed then as I still do today that a police officer is a public servant, a title that I carry as a badge of honor. As a public servant, an officer is expected to serve and help the public. It’s not always about chasing bad guys, writing traffic tickets, and working accidents.
But when the good deeds were done, we returned to our routine and the often monotonous patrols on the midnight shift.
It was on a routine midnight shift that I saw the Cadillac that raced in my direction—a near accident that did a great deal to set my own views of small-town policing on its own collision course.
The crusty, seen-it-all senior officer who sat beside me in the passenger seat instinctively grabbed the steering wheel and cursed loudly as I swerved the police cruiser onto the sidewalk to avoid a head-on collision. The driver behind us wasn’t so lucky. From my rearview mirror, I could see the speeding Cadillac sideswipe the vehicle behind us before continuing at breakneck speed into the night.
I put on my siren, made a precipitous U-turn, and gave chase.
When the car finally stopped, I was surprised to find that the driver was a well-dressed, middle-aged woman. She was also falling-down drunk. We placed her in custody and had her car towed. In her high heels and fur jacket, she was wobbly and had trouble standing still. She had no idea why we’d stopped her and said she didn’t recall striking another car. She wasn’t combative or argumentative but displayed an air of affluence and importance that was about as subtle as the slightly sweet smell of alcohol mixed with her strong French perfume. When I told her she was being arrested for drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident, she seemed to stand straighter, looking down at my partner and me.
“Do you know who my husband is?” she asked, slurring her words.
On our way to the police station to test her on a breathalyzer, my partner told me that I would be alone handling this case to see how I did. I found this strange but didn’t realize the significance of his gesture until much later. And then, lowering his voice to a whisper, he informed me that the prisoner sitting in the back of our cruiser was extremely wealthy and married to a prominent attorney in town. She also had a family member who was a local judge. Then he started laughing to himself.
I was so naïve and inexperienced that I picked up on none of these clues. For me, no one was above the law.
When we arrived at the station, I began the booking process, just like we did with every other prisoner. But things were different—the shift commander, a lieutenant, arrived at the station to witness the process, and I noticed that the desk sergeant was also acting very differently with this prisoner. They watched in silence as I conducted the breathalyzer test. The results showed her blood alcohol level at 0.20, which was double the limit for driving under the influence in those days.
As I got ready to escort the prisoner to the lockup, the lieutenant and sergeant told me to wait with her in the booking area. At the same time, the chief of police arrived—an extremely rare occurrence. He was accompanied by a well-known attorney. After a brief huddle, the prisoner left with the lawyer. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Several days later, at the trial, I presented my case. Normally, because this was city court, the chief sat in on all hearings to observe how we handled ourselves in court. But this time, he wasn’t there and had designated one of the detectives to sit in for him. When I asked the detective what was going on, he just laughed and demanded to know if I was ready to learn what really happens in court. Not quite sure what to expect, I went to the table where our city prosecutor usually sat, but he wasn’t in the courtroom either. When I looked over to the defendant’s table, I saw the attorney I had seen the night of the arrest. But he sat alone, without the defendant.
When the judge arrived, the defendant still hadn’t arrived. The judge, another local attorney, called the case and then told me to present my evidence. I nervously described how the woman had driven into our lane of traffic, forcing me onto the sidewalk. Then she hit the car behind us and continued driving, leaving the scene of an accident until I turned around and pulled her over. I told the court about her demeanor and inability to pass a field sobriety test. I read out the breathalyzer results and told the judge that was all the information I had available.
I waited for the defense attorney to rebut the evidence or ask me questions, but nothing happened. The judge ruled that the evidence was not sufficient to support a charge of driving under the influence. He then reduced the charges to “public intoxication and reckless driving” and found the defendant guilty. The defense attorney closed his notebook with what seemed like a single congratulatory clap and smiled at the judge without saying a word. The case was adjourned.
The look on my face must have been one of pure disbelief because the judge came over to me and made a point of shaking my hand, telling me I had done a fine job and that I had a very bright future ahead of me. He introduced me to the defense attorney.
After everyone left the courtroom, I found myself alone with my partner, the seasoned cop who had sat in the passenger seat of my cruiser the night that I thought I was doing a noble and good thing—taking a dangerous driver off the streets of Bluefield.
Boy, did I feel like a boob.
“Welcome to the world of small-town politics,” said my partner as he walked out of the courtroom ahead of me.
We moved my mother from the ranch in Hebbronville to my grandmother’s house an hour away in Laredo after I got my first job at the sheriff’s office there. The cancer had returned with a vengeance, spreading from her breasts and consuming her entire body, and she needed to be close to the hospital where she was being treated.
I accompanied her to her oncologist’s appointments and chemo sessions as often as I could, taking turns with my grandmother to care for her.
But nothing helped. My mother died at just fifty. I was glad that she was able to make it to my college graduation and to see me get my first job in the Laredo sheriff’s office. She told me that she was very proud of everything I had accomplished.
Her death was the hardest thing I’d ever endured, partly because we were so close and because I had always looked to the women in my family as sources of incredible strength.
I was very close to both my mother and grandmother, who never missed any of my high school baseball or football games. My grandmother was the toughest woman I knew—the anchor of our family. She spoke only Spanish and knew only a few words of English, but she always managed to get by. Her name was Petra, but everyone called her Pete, including my grandfather. A chain-smoker, she stood five foot eight and was more than 180 pounds. I never saw her without a pack of Winstons, even when she developed respiratory problems and her doctor told her the smoking was killing her. She claimed she never inhaled, but we all knew that it wasn’t true. My entire family begged me not to buy her cigarettes, but she pleaded with me, and I always capitulated. I could never say no to my abuelita.
That’s what my brother and I called her—little grandmother! And when it came to us, she had the kindest and most understanding heart. We always got the best Christmas gifts from her. When I was seven, she bought me my first bicycle—a red Texas Ranger with two headlights.
We were also quite close to my grandfather, who had deep blue eyes and a weak constitution—the opposite of my fierce abuelita. My grandfather’s name was Francisco, but everyone called him Pancho. Unlike my grandmother, he was an intellectual, a title searcher, who worked for a local abstract company. He never smoked or drank, and he was a health nut before it was fashionable to be one. His dinner of choice was often a boiled apple in a bowl of milk with granola. I wondered how and why they had ever fallen in love because their personalities were so opposite. When their house in Laredo was robbed, my grandfather went to shut all the doors and windows in the house and then found a hiding place. My grandmother confronted the crooks with a hammer.
In Laredo, my deeply religious grandmother also opened up her home for church socials and became a confidante of the local Spanish parish priest. Every Sunday afternoon, he made a beeline to her home to sample her tamales—delicate meat- and pork-filled pillows of soft masa, steaming when you unwrapped them from their corn-husk jackets.
My grandmother was a brilliant cook, and she never used a cookbook. Every Sunday when I was a kid, we would make the one-hour drive from Hebbronville to Laredo to visit my grandparents and feast on her cooking. My mother especially cherished those visits, spending hours in the kitchen cooking with my grandmother. Their specialty was cabrito en su sangre (baby goat in blood). My mother, aunt, and grandmother would often cross the border into Nuevo Laredo and bring back a freshly killed goat. They insisted upon watching the animal being slaughtered to make sure that its blood was packed in a separate plastic bag so that it would not contaminate the goat’s meat, or be mixed from the blood of another goat which could also spoil the meat. Later, the blood was mixed into a fragrant sauce with ancho and green chilies, garlic, cumin, and oregano. The smell of the dish filled my grandmother’s kitchen, and after hours of slow cooking, the blackened stew was heaped on earthenware plates atop steaming Mexican rice. The meal was always accompanied by homemade corn tortillas.
I happily moved into my grandparents’ home when I got my first law enforcement job in Laredo at the Webb County Sheriff’s Office. They were so happy that I was moving in with them that they built me a separate extension onto their house, complete with my own bedroom and bathroom.
My grandmother proudly told everyone about my first job at the sheriff’s office, even though I didn’t spend much time going after bad guys in one of the country’s most porous and busiest border regions, where in those days, traffickers easily smuggled drugs from Mexico in the tractor trailers that clogged the bridges across the Rio Grande. In my first real job in law enforcement, my main duties were limited and mainly consisted of supervising prisoners at the local jail. They ranged from petty thieves to entitled drug traffickers and politicians who were used to getting what they wanted.
The Aranda brothers were the worst. Arturo Daniel Aranda and his brother Juan José were probably the first drug traffickers I ever met, and they always gave me a hard time. They were extremely violent, and they didn’t care about anything, probably because they were looking at spending the rest of their lives in jail. I have to admit that pretty much everyone who worked for the Webb County Sheriff’s Office hated them for gunning down a young cop from the Laredo Police Department. Pablo Albidrez Jr. answered a call just after midnight on July 31, 1976, from undercover narcotics officer Candelario Viera, who was following a station wagon with out-of-town license plates heading toward the banks of the Rio Grande, a well-known crossing point for drugs from Mexico. Viera had been assigned to help a DEA task force and saw the Aranda brothers loading burlap sacks into the trunk of the car. The sacks contained more than five hundred pounds of marijuana.
Driving in an unmarked car, Viera followed the station wagon and radioed for assistance. At a city intersection, Albidrez’s police cruiser came to a screeching stop in front of the station wagon. Viera pulled up from behind.
“Police officers! Get out of the vehicle! Step out of the car!” yelled Viera, clutching his 9 mm Browning pistol.
But there was no sound from the station wagon, and the two officers decided to approach cautiously. That’s when the Arandas began shooting wildly. Bullets pinged off every surface and in every direction.
When the shooting stopped and officers who had arrived on the scene arrested the brothers—Arturo had suffered wounds to his left shoulder and hand—Viera looked back where Albidrez was crouched in front of his police cruiser, clutching his heart. He had been shot straight through his police badge. Albidrez, twenty-eight, died on his way to Mercy Hospital. He left behind a young wife and two toddler daughters.
Another man incarcerated at the jail while I worked my first job at the sheriff’s office was the powerful Laredo political boss, J. C. “Pepe” Martin. Pepe Martin was a legend in Laredo. His father, J. C. Martin Sr., was a wealthy landowner who had been elected Webb County sheriff. J. C. Jr. followed his father into public life and became the ultimate “patron”—a Democratic political boss who promised jobs in exchange for votes and wielded almost absolute power in office. He won six four-year terms as mayor, ruling the city between 1954 and 1978, when he decided he’d had enough of politics and declined to run for another term. Pepe had numerous large-acre ranches and thought nothing of using city workers and machinery to take care of them. A month after the reform candidate, Aldo Tatangelo, was elected mayor, Martin was indicted by a federal grand jury on mail fraud. He pleaded guilty and paid a $1,000 fine in addition to $200,000 to the city. He also had to serve a “prison sentence,” where he spent thirty weekends hanging out at the jail.
But despite his conviction, Pepe Martin still wielded a great deal of power in southern Texas. My job was to let him into a downstairs jail cell every weekend after they dropped him off at 6:00 p.m. on Fridays. But I was under strict orders to let him stay in the cell by himself and never to lock him in. He was a nice, charismatic older gentleman, and he would come out and talk to us during the day. In fact, he had pretty much the run of the jail and would shoot the breeze with us and act like a regular guy. Every Sunday morning at 7:00 a.m., a black Suburban would idle outside the jail, and I would release him to his driver. It was politics at its best!
When I wasn’t working, I was crossing the Rio Grande into Nuevo Laredo, hitting the bars where there were no age limits on drinking and everything was much cheaper than on the American side. You didn’t need a passport to cross the border in the 1970s and 1980s, and the city was still relatively safe. A decade later, violence from the drug wars would result in the closure of a lot of the bars and restaurants in Nuevo Laredo. The violence was fueled by Los Zetas, a criminal gang originally made up of deserters from the Mexican Army’s special forces units. The group eventually became the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel in the 1990s, brutally murdering the group’s rivals in a bloody turf war and engaging in sex trafficking and kidnappings. Years later, they turned Nuevo Laredo into a virtual war zone as the group became increasingly powerful and fought for control of lucrative drug-trafficking routes. By the mid-1990s, the Zetas took control of a lot of the Mexican businesses. Many more closed down because of the “tax” imposed by the Zetas. After a series of massacres in the city, many Mexican businesses ended up relocating across the border to Laredo and San Antonio.
But when I was working at the sheriff’s office, most of us headed to the Mexican side for beer and fajitas, and I spent most of my time off hanging out at the bars and discos. There was the Lion’s Den, where the gold-colored swizzle sticks featured an imperial lion’s head. The disco catered to rich kids from South Texas. Nearby, the Cadillac Bar featured live music and a more upscale menu. Originally founded in New Orleans, the restaurant was moved by the owners to Nuevo Laredo during the early days of Prohibition in 1920. The moneyed drug traffickers and Laredo politicians who frequented the joint had a famous Super Bowl pool. Shares ran at a minimum $1,000 apiece. Even at this price, the pool always sold out quickly. The place was too rich for me, and most of the time, my buddies and I would head to Boy’s Town, the red-light district, where the nearby cantinas and brothels had the cheapest beer.
Years later, when a bad guy held a gun to my head, it was my knowledge of the brothels and bars in Boy’s Town that ended up saving my life.
When I was still working at the sheriff’s office, my best friend was Poncho Mendiola. He was older and retired from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Like me, he taught at Laredo Junior College, where he was chairman of the law enforcement department. We spent a lot of time together drinking beer and barbecuing. People in Laredo would complain that they had little money, but they always seemed to have a cooler full of beer and plenty of fajitas on the grill. In fact, beer and meat often became a currency on the border, where there was a real sense of community. When I dented my police cruiser a few times, Poncho helped me get it fixed without my supervisors ever finding out. Poncho and I headed to an old garage that was also a police hangout in Laredo. The owner, Nando, would fix police and government cars in exchange for beer and steak, which they would barbecue on the spot, even as they were fixing the car. Nando would also do deals with regular customers by overcharging their insurance companies for the work and then giving back some of the money to the customer. The body shop doesn’t exist anymore. It closed down after Nando’s death.
For a while at least, I felt I had it made in Laredo. I had my own place, rent-free. I came and went whenever I wanted, and my grandmother doted on me and cooked my favorite meals. She was also my gatekeeper, and when I broke up with a girlfriend, my abuelita proved a capable enforcer. I realize now it was a cowardly way to treat women, but in the macho, cowboy culture of South Texas, I never gave it a second thought.
Still, my grandmother couldn’t fix everything in my romantic life. And maybe if she had, I never would have ended up applying to the DEA.
In fact, it was all because of a woman that I ended up at the DEA. I was all set to do the right thing and marry my girlfriend in Laredo back in 1982 when she told me she was pregnant. But on the day before our wedding when she called me and told me she had gotten her period, I packed my shit and left Laredo as fast as I could!
I clambered into my Chevy and took off at the crack of dawn like a fugitive, terrified that her brothers would come after me. I waited until I was nearly four hours out of town before I called her to break the news.
“You’re going to leave me?” she said, incredulous.
“Well, actually, I already have,” I said.
She had manipulated me so well. She had even taken me to a clinic where a nurse told me she was pregnant.
After I left her waiting at the altar, I became persona non grata in Laredo, where her family was pretty well connected. My former fiancée’s friend was an administrator at Laredo Junior College, where I was still teaching in the criminal justice program. After the incident, he told me that I should resign and leave Laredo because I was no longer a good example for my students or the community as a whole.
I got the message and started to look for ways out.
Months later, I applied to the DEA.
I’d pretty much had it with small-town police work, and at the dawn of a new decade, I also found myself scrambling to support two young sons in a doomed marriage.
In November 1981, just months after my second son, Zach, was born and my marriage had come to a definitive end, I took a job as a special agent with the Norfolk and Western Railway and relocated to Norfolk, which was more than a five-hour drive from my home in Princeton.
The job paid double what I was earning as a cop in Bluefield. I had to remind myself of how much money I was finally making, because after a few months as a railroad cop, I was miserable.
For as long as I can remember, I had dreamed of doing hard-core police work, of going undercover to catch drug pushers and other bad guys. Now, I felt like a glorified security guard sitting outside the entrance to a multimillion-dollar pier where coal was loaded onto ships. I appreciated having the job with the railroad, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.
Adding to my misery was the fact that I had just met the woman of my dreams back in Bluefield—a nurse with a passion for motorcycles and muscle cars—and now I was unable to spend any time with her because I was so far away.
Just before I took the Norfolk job, I met Connie, who was introduced to me by a mutual friend. She arrived at the station house with a group of other women while I was on one of my last midnight shifts for the Bluefield Police Department. I was in the squad room for roll call when the desk sergeant called back to our lieutenant, “Murphy has a carload of ladies waiting for him on the ramp.”
I can no longer remember the wisecracks from the other officers in the room, but when I made my way to the ramp, I knew why they were all jealous. Checking my reflection in a glass door, I did my best tough-guy swagger to the car—a light blue Chevy SS with nice wheels, driven by the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Connie, a registered nurse, had very long hair and a dark tan. Like me, she was recently divorced and worked the night shift—in her case, the emergency room and trauma wards at the hospital in Myrtle Beach—and then spent most of her days at the beach to relax. Which was why she looked to me like a bronzed beauty.
After we started dating, I realized that she was incredibly handy around cars and motorcycles. I had a motorcycle at the time, and when I learned that she owned her own motorcycle, that was a big attraction. As a guy who loved adventure and excitement, how could I not fall in love with a woman who owned her own motorbike?
Her fascination with cars and bikes probably came from growing up with two older brothers, and her father was a mechanic. She always drove a very nice sports car—vehicles that most would consider a muscle car, like the Chevy SS or Chevy IROC. And she knew what to do with a wrench, which was incredibly empowering and sexy! One day, I returned home to find her installing new speakers in her car, a sleek Camaro Z/28. The very ambitious project involved removing the dashboard, an enterprise I would never even have dreamed of undertaking on my own.
I could tell from the outset that Connie loved her job, which was why she was able to recognize the same passion I had for my own work. Early on, I confided to her my dream of doing serious police work, cultivating informants, and going undercover to capture bad guys, especially those who were trafficking drugs. I dreamed of being a DEA special agent before I even knew that such a position existed.
Before starting my career, I’d read several books and articles about officers working undercover, infiltrating groups and organizations. To me, that sounded like a real challenge, and it certainly had to be exciting.
Also, I’d seen the danger and devastation caused by illegal narcotics—how drugs overwhelmed users’ lives and changed their personalities, how they could go from promising lives to ones of utter despair and agony. Equally important was how this negatively affected their families, friends, and others around them.
Illegal narcotics had long been a problem in the United States, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that federal authorities decided to get tough and create a law enforcement agency whose sole purpose was ending the menace by going after the traffickers.
Illicit drugs were nothing new in the United States. In the 1930s, heroin started to enter the country from the South of France. The raw material was opium poppies grown in Turkey and the Far East, which arrived on ships docking at Marseille, one of the busiest ports on the Mediterranean. The heroin was produced at underground labs in the city and trafficked by the Corsican gangsters and the Sicilian Mafia who made up the so-called French Connection. The heroin was shipped from Marseille to New York City in what seems today like quaintly modest quantities. The first major heroin bust took place in New York on February 5, 1947, when police seized seven pounds of the drug from a Corsican sailor.
Years later, a Republican congressman from Connecticut began to sound the alarm that heroin was becoming a scourge, leading to high addiction rates and crime in the United States. In April 1971, Representative Robert Steele began to investigate reports of rising addiction rates among U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. Reports suggested that 10–15 percent of U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin.
Those findings coupled with rampant marijuana use among counterculture hippies alarmed many in law enforcement, who predicted that these were but the early signs of a coming epidemic. Indeed, drug abuse was exploding in the country, as U.S. and South American traffickers began to follow their Corsican and Sicilian counterparts to feed the increasing U.S. demand for marijuana, cocaine, and heroin.
In this charged climate, President Richard Nixon declared “an all-out global war on the drug menace” and began the process of setting up an agency exclusively devoted to federal drug law enforcement. In the past, the federal government had relied on myriad different authorities that simply couldn’t wield the muscle to wage Nixon’s all-out war.
“Right now, the federal government is fighting the war on drug abuse under a distinct handicap, for its efforts are those of a loosely confederated alliance facing a resourceful, elusive, worldwide enemy,” Nixon declared. “Certainly, the cold-blooded underworld networks that funnel narcotics from suppliers all over the world are no respecters of the bureaucratic dividing lines that now complicate our antidrug efforts.”
Nixon called for a centralized command to deal with the scourge. To this end, the Drug Enforcement Administration, a federal agency devoted to cracking down on drug use and ending drug smuggling, was established by executive order on July 1, 1973. There were certainly ulterior motives attached to Nixon’s focus on drugs as he fought to take media attention away from the scandal that would eventually end his presidency. But at the time, the creation of a federal law enforcement group that would act as a powerful strike force seemed like a good idea.
When I wasn’t working, I was missing Connie. We started a long-distance relationship after I moved to Norfolk and only managed to see each other about once a month. Eventually, Connie took a nursing job at a hospital in nearby Virginia Beach so that we could be together. It was the first of many occasions that she would sacrifice her career for mine.
After about two years with the railroad police, I applied to return to my law enforcement roots and transferred back to Bluefield. Both Connie and I wanted to be closer to our families. But the change of venue didn’t do anything to make me any happier about my job, even as Connie managed to get a nursing job at nearby Princeton Hospital. Although I truly enjoyed working with the other railroad officers, who were very talented investigators, I was still working in what I considered a dead-end position.
I first heard the initials DEA at an all-night diner over eggs and bottomless cups of black coffee after I’d finished a midnight shift in Bluefield. Between mouthfuls of scrambled eggs doused in ketchup, Pete Ramey, a fellow railroad cop, told me about working undercover to bust drug dealers. Pete was a large, towering figure with an easygoing personality. A former Virginia state trooper, he had spent time working narcotics throughout Virginia and as a task force officer with the DEA in Roanoke. After Pete joined the railroad police, I took him under my wing, and when we shared the same late-night shifts, we headed after work to the local Hardee’s, where I peppered him with questions about his narcotics background. I must have asked him the same questions over and over, but he always took the time to answer them and fill in the blanks.
More than anyone, Pete knew that I wasn’t happy working as a railroad agent, and he started to encourage me to apply to the DEA. At first, I didn’t think that anything like that was possible for me. I’d applied for two other federal law enforcement agent positions in the past and was put off by the fact that the process was excruciatingly slow. It always left me discouraged. But Pete persisted, encouraging me to complete my college degree so that I could qualify for a spot with the DEA.
In the spring of 1984, things started to look up. Connie and I were married in a small ceremony surrounded by close family and friends. Shortly after the reception, we left for our honeymoon, a Caribbean cruise that departed from Miami. It was my first time flying on a plane with more than one engine.
When we returned from our honeymoon and I began to settle into my new duties of inspecting trainloads of freight in Bluefield, a life-and-death incident would suddenly put my whole career in sharp focus. It would force me off the safe path and into the perilous but also exciting unknown.
One Saturday night as I was patrolling Norfolk and Western property in downtown Bluefield, checking buildings and vehicles to ensure that none of them had been broken into, I heard what sounded like the pop of gunfire and faint screams in the distance. As I got closer to the shooting, I saw a Bluefield cop crouched behind a police cruiser. He had a gun in his hand aimed at the third floor of the building directly in front of him, where a gunman was firing shots that sounded like cannons going off. I recognized the thumps of a .44-caliber Magnum and saw the bullets ricocheting off the police cruiser, missing the young police officer by mere inches. The screams were closer now, and I saw that they were coming from a man lying on the sidewalk, a dark patch of blood spreading across the concrete where he lay.
I immediately ran to the cop and asked if backup was on the way, but he was so new to the force that he hadn’t thought to call in his position. I told him to radio the police department before I rushed to help the wounded man. I dragged him into a recessed doorway so that he was out of range of the gunman upstairs. Then we exchanged shots with the gunman on the third floor.
Once reinforcements arrived, the police officer was able to persuade the gunman to surrender with no further injury. Later, I assisted detectives at the crime scene, taking statements from witnesses. We soon learned that the gunman had returned to his apartment to find his wife with the man. The enraged husband had pulled out his Magnum and shot the other man in the butt as he fled the third-floor flat.
I returned to railroad police headquarters at about 6:30 in the morning, confident that I had done the right thing in helping a fellow officer in a potentially deadly situation. I was proud of what I had done and proceeded to inform the division chief about my involvement in the shooting.
“Just what did that shooting have to do with railroad business?” he asked, becoming increasingly hostile as I tried to explain that I considered it my duty to come to the aid of a fellow officer. It was an unwritten rule: Street cops always helped each other, especially if one of them was in mortal danger. Law enforcement is a closed society—a close-knit fraternity, quick to protect its own.
But the division chief was a bureaucrat who had never worked the street. Enraged, he was buying none of my explanation. He drove to our office and demanded that I turn over my weapon—a Smith & Wesson Model 15 .38/.357-caliber snub-nosed revolver. Before giving him my revolver, I removed the bullets from the cylinder, which is a common safety practice with any firearm.
The chief became apoplectic. He began yelling at me that I shouldn’t have emptied my weapon because now he wouldn’t be able to determine how many rounds I had fired. I asked him if he really thought I would not have reloaded my weapon after being involved in a gunfight. Then I handed him the empty casings from my pocket so he could see how many rounds I’d fired.
He berated me for an uncomfortable fifteen minutes. But I stood my ground and told him that given the same circumstances I would respond in exactly the same manner, that I would never leave a fellow police officer in danger. And the same can be said for almost every other railroad police officer working in Bluefield, as well as around the country.
That’s when he threatened to “get my job” over the incident.
I had already decided my time was up with the railroad. Later, I was interviewed by BPD detectives as well as the hierarchy of the Norfolk and Western police over my part in the shooting. Luckily, those higher-ups had been street cops prior to becoming railroad cops, and they understood. The Bluefield Police Department was so pleased with me that they awarded me a commendation for bravery and for coming to the aid of a fellow officer.
Of course, the division chief was not happy with the way things turned out.
Following the shooting, I decided I’d finally had enough of small-town policing—again. I continued with trying to finish my college degree, which had been interrupted during my first marriage and birth of my sons. When I finally graduated and got my diploma in May 1985, I immediately submitted an application to become a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
I waited and waited for a response. I had no idea it would take two years.
I whined, I complained. I called DEA headquarters countless times. And I also met with Pete. He listened and never wavered in his encouragement, remaining enthusiastic about the career that he knew to be just around the corner for me.
I learned that a former college classmate, Dave Williams, was working as a DEA agent in Miami. Dave and I had taken that first police test together in 1975. While I went to work for the city police, Dave opted to work at the sheriff’s department. After a few years there, Dave moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a highly decorated police officer there. I called Dave in Miami to see if he had any advice on what I should do. As an old friend, Dave was very supportive, but he wasn’t in a position that would help with the processing of my application.
I panicked. And after waiting more than eighteen months after I’d submitted my application, I decided to drive to the DEA division office in Washington, D.C., determined to speak to the DEA recruiter in person.
Special Agent Charlie West met me at the reception area wearing a slightly bemused expression.
“Do you have an appointment?” he asked.
I blurted out that I really wanted a job with the DEA and had taken the chance of catching him in the office because I hadn’t heard anything from the agency. Charlie was clearly shocked. He probably thought I was an idiot for driving that far—it was over five hours from Bluefield to Washington—on the chance that he might be there.
To his credit, Charlie checked on my status and returned to tell me that my application was still being processed. Charlie said he would see what he could do to push things along, and I left.
Within a few weeks, I received a call from Charlie, who told me to return to Washington for an interview. I was elated, but I think Pete was even happier for me. My interview went well, and Charlie initiated the investigative process, one of the first hurdles on the road to being accepted into the elite federal agency.
But after a few months, I received a shocking letter from the DEA stating that my application was turned down due to medical reasons.
Several years earlier, I had had problems with a stomach ulcer. Although I hadn’t had any issues for years, this was enough to disqualify me from becoming an agent. Needless to say, I was completely devastated, and it was Pete who came to my rescue yet again. I also thought about my father and his desire to get into the army—an urgency that caused him to cheat on his eye exam. For more than a split second, I considered doing the same, but in the end, I didn’t have to.
Pete told me that the DEA had a process that allowed me to challenge their findings. And after speaking with the DEA physician at the agency’s headquarters, I went to two other doctors and underwent the required screening and submitted my results to the agency, asking them to reconsider my application.
In May 1987, I transferred back to Norfolk from Bluefield with the railroad police. I’d only been there for a couple of weeks when in early June 1987, I finally received the phone call from the DEA recruitment office, congratulating me on being accepted as a candidate to attend special agent training and asking if I could report to the DEA office in Charleston, West Virginia. A week after that, I would report to the DEA Training Academy located on the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. I didn’t hesitate. When that call came in, I immediately accepted and agreed to report to Charleston the following week. After calling Connie, I handed in my resignation with the railroad, packed everything up in the temporary apartment I had rented in Norfolk, and drove back to Bluefield. Fortunately, I had three weeks of vacation time pending with the railroad and used that to give notice that I was resigning.
In the end, I was so sure I would be accepted into the DEA that I had refused to sign my lease.
I did my DEA training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Glynco—a 1,600-acre campus in southeast Georgia, located between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. It was the spring of 1984, and the crack epidemic was just beginning to sweep across the United States. Overnight, it seemed that drugs were everywhere.
I couldn’t help thinking about this as I started the intensive eighteen-week program that would turn me into an elite soldier in America’s war against drugs.
Those weeks at DEA training camp were the hardest I’d ever endured, much more difficult than the training I had undergone for certification for the Webb County Sheriff’s Office in Laredo. For one thing, the instructors at Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) were all veteran agents, drawn from the FBI and the DEA. They brooked no nonsense. If you failed two tests, they simply threw you out.
We lived in apartment-type housing with four men to an apartment. The four of us quickly became friends and looked out for one another. We helped each other study in the evenings, which became a real discipline after a day of grueling exercise and “practicals”—scenarios led by professional actors, which were supposed to teach us basic surveillance skills. The practicals started off easy but then advanced to complex cases. Each case practical was different, and each agent would be assigned as the lead agent preparing us for situations in the real world. There was always a lot of pressure because the instructors could suddenly send you home for messing them up.
One of our roommates—an attorney who grew up in a rich New York family—got off on the wrong foot with one of the agent instructors. The agent disliked him from the start and proceeded to make life miserable for him. We encouraged him not to drop out, and he eventually graduated from the program. But back in New York after a few months with the DEA, he realized the agency was not for him.
During the training, I never left the base. My stomach was in knots most of the time because of the numerous academic tests and practicals, which lasted until about 10:00 every night, after which you had to go back to your room and study for the next one. It was the first time in my life that I worried that I was simply not cut out for this kind of law enforcement work. In fact, in our class of forty-five cadets, only thirty made the cut. Many simply flunked out or left of their own accord when things got too difficult. I studied hard and tried to maintain a positive attitude because the instructors seemed to follow our every move and mood.
Every Sunday, I would call my father in Hebbronville and tell him about the week. Talking to him about the training and what was going on at the ranch calmed me down and gave me enough confidence to face yet another grueling week of tests and physical activity.
One of the things I did like was the communal mess hall that was open to cadets from various federal agencies. I had never seen so much food in my life—tables full of salads, steaming trays of mashed potatoes, vegetables, roast chicken, and beef. Still, with so much food, I managed to lose weight. I went into the academy weighing about 200 pounds and came out at 180.
The last week of the academy, I knew I had passed and remember my class coordinator telling me I had done well and would graduate in the upper third of my class.
No one came to my graduation. A lot of the guys had their families and wives at the ceremony, but I was single, and it was too complicated for my family to make the trip from Texas. Still, I was on top of the world when they gave me my new credentials and a gun, and I simply couldn’t wait to show off.
I flashed my shiny new DEA badge at the tiny airport in Brunswick, Georgia, as I checked in for my flight back to Texas. But I guess I wasn’t the first one to have that idea. Over the years, airport personnel must have dealt with hundreds of new DEA and FBI recruits heading home after their training.
In any event, I was deeply disappointed that as I held up my badge during check-in, no one bothered to look up.
After undergoing the bureaucratic formalities in Charleston, I headed to Quantico in a suit and tie. Or more accurately, my suit was in a garment bag in my car as I drove the three hundred miles to the DEA Training Academy. There is nothing I hate more than having to wear a suit and tie. The blazer reminds me of a straitjacket, making it difficult to move my arms. The starched shirt feels like cardboard cutting against my skin, and the tie is, in a word, suffocating.
But I was a newly minted basic agent trainee (BAT), and the training manual required that we show up in business attire. At the last exit before Quantico, I stopped at a McDonald’s to change into my suit, and then I drove the last few miles to the academy. When I arrived at the U.S. Marine Corps base that was to be my home for the next thirteen weeks, I noticed several other BATs in jeans and shorts. They were promptly told to leave and return in the proper attire.
I had stepped into the DEA firmament and was determined to follow every rule, even though I missed Connie terribly, and I didn’t get along with one of the three counselors that I was assigned to. After my second week at the academy, I received an urgent call from Connie that my father had suffered a heart attack and the prognosis was not good. The doctor suggested that family members who wanted to see my dad again should do so immediately. During the first five weeks of DEA training, BATs are not allowed to leave the academy, including on the weekends. To leave the academy, I needed to obtain permission from our counselors and the academy staff. The only counselor available that Friday evening was the one I tried to avoid because of his caustic personality. When I approached him about my family situation, he was predictably difficult.
“I’ve got a baby agent who can’t handle his own problems, so what do you expect me to do?” he asked me.
I was shocked because I thought I had entered the most elite police force on earth—the ultimate fraternity where officers were tough but kind and had each other’s backs.
Even after I explained the gravity of my father’s situation, the counselor remained unmoved, but in the end, he did provide me with the clearance for the drive to Princeton. The next day, just before I left for the hospital to visit my father, I received a phone call from my regular counselor asking how my father was doing and if there was anything he could do for my family and me. As I learned later, this was more in line with the fraternal DEA I had dreamed about. My father survived that heart attack and lived several more years before finally succumbing to another heart attack.
Our weeks in the classroom consisted of reviewing the U.S. federal code associated with narcotics violations, money-laundering statutes, writing reports and drug identification, and testing as well as dealing with informants. There were also courses in firearms and physical training—both of which were taken very seriously at the academy. We learned how to handle weapons and focused on marksmanship and how to engage multiple targets. We also practiced with using available objects to protect ourselves under fire and how to deal with malfunctioning weapons.
After nearly twelve years of police work, I was a good shot. I’d won recognition in various state and national competitions, and when I was at the academy, the instructors asked me to work with some of the other BATs who were struggling to meet the DEA standard in firearms.
Every Wednesday evening was Agent Enrichment Night, which required BATs to wear business attire to dinner and was always followed by a guest speaker in the auditorium. It was also steak-and-wine night, which made wearing a suit bearable. The only problem was that the dining hall was located above the firearms cleaning room and the sickeningly sweet alcoholic smell of Hoppe’s solvent permeated everything we ate.
Just before graduation, BATs are expected to attend a ceremony to announce their new assignments. The ceremony is held in a classroom where each BAT is called to the front of the room and asked where they would like to be stationed and where they think they will end up before being handed a sealed envelope by one of the instructors. The envelope is opened in front of the entire class. It’s also another occasion at which a suit is unfortunately required.
At the beginning of training, each recruit is asked to submit a wish list of five offices around the country where they would like to work. My list included Norfolk, Virginia; Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Miami, Florida. Recruits are required to sign a mobility agreement that says that you are willing to be stationed anywhere in the United States at the DEA’s discretion.
When it was my turn, I stood up and said I would love to be stationed in Norfolk but that I was likely to get Jacksonville.
Sweating, and with my heart pounding through my starched white shirt, I tore open the envelope and read, “Miami.”
Later that day, I called and told Connie about my assignment. I can’t say that either of us was all that excited. Not at first. We were both concerned about being so far from our families, but we didn’t have any other choices. Once again, Connie would leave her job to follow me. We had no idea then that it was a sacrifice that would go on for the next twenty-six years.
Moving across the country may sound routine for many people whose jobs require them to transfer frequently, but as I would quickly come to learn, being a DEA agent is not a job; it’s a lifestyle. It requires long hours at work and away from home, with days often stretching between twelve and twenty hours, or longer. Agents make many sacrifices to get the job done, which in turn sometimes requires even greater sacrifices from their families. It takes a strong spouse to tolerate the amount of time the agent is gone, to run a household, keep up with the kids and their activities, and hold down their own careers. I already knew that the marriages of many agents ended up in divorce because of the stress and strain on the families from the requirements of being a successful agent. The stress extended to the concern over an agent’s safety while working one of the toughest jobs in law enforcement. I knew I would be away from home for long periods, that Connie would probably be facing a lot of things on her own.
But as we spoke on the phone about the adventure that awaited both of us, neither of us could really get a grip on what we were in for. That single word—Miami—hit us gently like a warm ocean breeze. We would be moving to Miami, and we would just get on with it.
My dad was too sick to attend my graduation from the DEA Training Academy, but Connie came along with her parents. At the ceremony, after the speeches and the jokes, I pledged to support and defend the Constitution, enforce the drug laws, and protect the United States against foreign and domestic enemies.
In my woolen suit and starched white shirt, I noticed that I raised my right hand with a new sense of freedom and dexterity of movement. For after thirteen weeks of the hardest training I had ever known, I had lost twenty-five pounds, and my only suit was now far too big. But as I clutched my gleaming new badge, I have to say that I never felt more comfortable in my own skin.
I was headed to the DEA office in Austin, Texas, but first, I had to deal with some unfinished business in Laredo, where I returned after my DEA training.
I worked my first narcotics job on the international border I had come to know so well as a cop. But entering the murky undercover world of drug traffickers and cooperating informants left me confused. Sometimes, it was hard to know just who were the bad guys and who was on your side.
For instance, there was Guillermo González Calderoni, the head of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police—an agency roughly equivalent to the FBI. Calderoni was known as El Comandante and was probably the most powerful cop in Mexico. But part of his success in capturing some of the biggest Mexican drug cartel members lay in his profound relationships with the bad guys. El Comandante was particularly adept at playing both sides against each other for his own personal enrichment. He had grown up with José García Ábrego, the brother of Juan García Ábrego, who was the head of the Gulf Cartel, and considered him a friend. Of course, all of this came out much later when U.S. federal agents found that while he was going after some of the biggest dealers of the day and working as an informant for the DEA, he was also protecting others, going so far as to collect millions for setting up hits on rival drug lords.
I met Calderoni several times as a young cop and then as a DEA agent, and I never trusted him. By 1993, he was fired in Mexico over accusations that he was helping to ship drugs to the United States. Calderoni fled across the border, where he convinced a U.S. federal judge to deny Mexico’s extradition request on charges of torture, illegal enrichment, and abuse of power. Calderoni, who eventually settled in a gated community in the border city of McAllen, Texas, accused former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his brother, Raúl, of doing business with the country’s biggest drug traffickers. He also accused Salinas of ordering the killing of two rival politicians during the 1988 presidential campaign. The fifty-four-year-old former cop became a marked man, and in 2003, he was killed with a single bullet as he sat in the driver’s seat of his silver Mercedes-Benz outside his lawyer’s office in McAllen.
Like I said, I never trusted Calderoni, and my gut told me to stay far away from him even as he was the top cop in Mexico. But on my first undercover job, we couldn’t avoid him. At least my partners at the time needed to seek his cooperation to bust a heroin dealer in Nuevo Laredo. On that first assignment, Raúl Perez and Candelario Viera (we all called him Candy) were my partners. These were the same guys who had been involved in the shoot-out with the Aranda brothers when I had first joined the Webb County Sheriff’s Office. Candy and Perez were both strong-willed, no-nonsense cops who had gone on to work some of the biggest drug seizures on the border. Working with the DEA for more than a decade, they knew the identity of every drug trafficker who operated on the border, and they knew who was cooperating with the Mexican feds. They may have even known about Calderoni’s unsavory connections, but they weren’t about to rat him out, since they knew they needed his cooperation to do anything.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I was nervous as we crossed the border into Nuevo Laredo, where I was scheduled to meet the target. Even in the short time that I had been off the beat at the sheriff’s office, the Mexican border town that I had come to know so well was in dangerous flux. In a few years, the drug violence would reduce it to a virtual ghost town. Los Zetas were consolidating their control, and their cartel boss, Heriberto Lazcano, dealt harshly with his rivals. In one instance, he dispatched Miguel Treviño Morales, better known to us as Z-40, a federal informer and one of the most brutal members of the group, to wipe out his rivals in Guatemala. In Mexico, Z-40 was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people. In some cases, he forced his victims to fight each other to the death. He subjected others to the notorious guiso, or stew—which consisted of dumping them into vats of oil and then dousing them with gasoline before lighting them on fire.
In the shadowy world I now inhabited, there were few formalities and little respect for the rules. I was shocked that we seemed to be breaking the law by crossing into Mexico—another country!—without any of the proper authorizations! Candy, Perez, and I simply drove over the bridge to Nuevo Laredo without obtaining any of the requisite country clearances from federal authorities in Mexico City, which at that time entailed writing a teletype and waiting for their go-ahead—a process that usually took a few days. But Candy and Raúl had friends among the Mexican feds in the city and simply coordinated with them. And since I was new to the DEA and unknown to the drug traffickers on the Mexican side, I was the perfect agent to conduct the operation. As part of their sting, I was to pose as a heroin buyer. Their informant told the bad guy that I had the cash for the deal. Right before the sting, we met with the commander of the Mexican federal police to let him know about the operation. Then we drove to a grimy Church’s Chicken restaurant, where I waited for my target. Five minutes after I sat down in a booth, a handsome and very cordial gentleman in his sixties appeared at my table. He asked me if I was Juan—my undercover name—and when I said yes, he motioned for me to walk with him outside the restaurant, where he showed me a ball of what looked like black tar. I picked up the heroin and told him the money was in my car. At that moment, six Mexican federal police agents swarmed him and arrested him without incident. I felt sorry for the old man. What was such a dignified and seemingly well-educated man doing selling heroin at a fast-food restaurant on the Mexican border?
Back in Laredo, the Mexican federal agents called and said that the heroin that we seized was pure, and they complimented me on a job well done.
Of course, I was happy that everything had gone well, but if you want to know the truth, I was also pretty spooked.
As I drove to Austin and to my new life as a special agent with the DEA, I had the feeling that I had embarked on a dark journey to a strange new country, populated by UCs, CSs, and an alphabet soup of strange acronyms that I would come to learn along the way.
There was no map to guide me and no way to tell just whose side anyone was on.