HORSE RACING IN MEXICO HAD ALWAYS HAD ITS UNDERWORLD PLAYERS, but in the spring of 2011 gun battles and vendetta killings threatened to destroy the industry, as the Zetas pushed deeper west into the Golden Triangle, the cradle of opium and marijuana production and a stronghold of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In the state of Durango, the Zetas extorted race organizers and kidnapped owners of racetracks or their family members, demanding enormous ransoms and control over their businesses. At one racetrack the owner died, some said from fear, after his two sons were kidnapped and never returned. Corpses swung from bridges—a message to anyone who dared defy the cartel. The stucco walls of police stations were sprayed with bullets from AK-47s, and others were burned to the ground. At night, families slept on the floor to avoid stray bullets from the gun battles between the Sinaloa and Zeta gunmen. Durango had not seen such violence in nearly a century, not since the Mexican Revolution.
Miguel and Omar held races in the Zetas’ new territory at ranches commandeered by the cartel. They also took over public racetracks for special occasions like Miguel’s birthday. Top cartel leaders and their associates attended a race in his honor at the La Cañada racetrack in Saltillo, Coahuila. Miguel sat near the finish line surrounded by his bodyguards bristling with AK-47s and AR-15s. Bets ran into the millions.
One rancher from Monterrey was foolish enough to let his horse win against Miguel’s. Afterward, Miguel offered to buy his horse, but the man refused. A few days later his stables were attacked, the man killed, and his horses seized by Miguel’s gunmen. When the unfortunate rancher’s family gathered for his funeral a few days later, the gunmen returned, killing everyone at the man’s grave. After that, Miguel never lost another race.
Jockeys and others who had legal residency in the United States or could get a tourist visa fled to el norte to wait out the bloodshed. Others without papers, in desperation, paid a human smuggler to get them across the border to safety.
Mexico’s misfortune benefited the struggling U.S. quarter horse racing industry as talented trainers, jockeys, and horse owners fled, looking for a fairer, less deadly playing field. But now the Zetas were making their presence known in the United States too. It was already an open secret that they kept horses at racetracks throughout the American Southwest. The Zetas were so feared that the Mexican jockeys, grooms, and hot walkers, who cooled off the horses after their runs, would only refer to them as la ultima letra, the last letter.
So it was a lucky break when Lawson got word that a Mexican man who’d recently started working for José’s racing operation wanted to talk. The man had phoned a sheriff’s office in New Mexico, saying he had information about some shady cartel business going on at the racetracks. At first the sheriff had been unsure about what to do with the caller’s tip, but then he’d checked the deconfliction database and, to his relief, saw that the FBI in Texas had already opened an investigation.
The sheriff passed on the man’s contact information to Lawson. Since the potential source was a Spanish speaker, Perez set up the meeting. By now Lawson and Perez had fallen into a familiar routine. Lawson worked with Graham and other Anglos in the business, while Perez gathered information from their Spanish-speaking sources.
About twenty minutes into their meeting, Perez could already tell that the man’s information was legitimate. Everything he told her checked out with what they already knew about José’s network. But the man was a bundle of nerves, sweating and sometimes speaking in a whisper. He was sure the Zetas would find out about his meeting with the FBI. He was from Mexico, he told her, and he knew what the Zetas were capable of. With its billions, the cartel could buy total impunity. They could kill anyone, torch houses and businesses, and the authorities would do nothing.
She tried to assure him that in the United States it was different. The cartel did not enjoy the same freedom it did in Mexico. “They could kill you too,” the man said, wringing his hands. Still, he said, he felt compelled to do something. That was why he had called the sheriff. Perez asked if he would agree to have his phone calls recorded by the FBI. They could also speak by phone regularly and he could keep her apprised of José’s plans. After some hesitation, the man finally agreed.
Perez gave her new source the code name “Parlay.” From inside José’s operation he’d be able to provide her with invaluable information that not even Tyler Graham was privy to. There would be very little he wouldn’t hear or see at the racetrack on the backside, where the horses were kept in long rows of stalls called shed rows and trained to race.
From talking to others in the industry, she’d learned that men like Parlay lived difficult, cloistered lives, sleeping in drafty tack rooms in the horse barns or crumbling dormitory buildings on the backside. The grooms, hot walkers, and exercise riders were crucial to the racing industry, but they often lived on poverty wages, sometimes working seven days a week. Isolated and their bodies crippled from bone-shattering kicks and spills on the track, they relied on the bottle, drugs, and whatever faith they had to keep working.
Most of the denizens of the backside were men, and, like her new source, immigrants from Mexico who closely followed the news from home. Quarter horse racing in Mexico was a small world, just like in the United States, where rumors traveled quickly. Everyone knew the stables were owned by the men with too much money, flashy women and cars, and no honest explanation for their wealth.
Perez would have to work diligently to keep Parlay from losing his nerve, which she knew would be difficult. For someone with relatives still in Mexico, speaking against the Zetas could be a death sentence not only for her source but for his family as well. As they spoke, Perez could see real fear in the man’s eyes, and couldn’t help but share some of it for herself and her own family.