BOTH PENNINGTON AND PEREZ HAD COUNSELED LAWSON NOT TO WORRY about fallout from the traffic stop in Oklahoma—not until they saw José do something out of the ordinary. Graham said he hadn’t detected anything unusual in any of his dealings with José or the others. And José appeared to be increasingly consumed by the running of his new farm in Oklahoma.
But as they moved into the spring of 2012, their luck continued to sour. The DEA agent, who’d been taking notes in the back of the room during their debriefings with Poncho Cuellar and his crew, had taken an interest in Carlos Nayen—especially when he’d heard that Miguel had been paying Nayen with kilos of cocaine. The industrious twenty-six-year-old was selling it in Dallas for a fat profit. Now Lawson had been tipped that the DEA planned to go after Nayen with an indictment for drug smuggling and arms trafficking. He was now very much on the DEA’s radar. It wasn’t enough to have ICE following Victor Lopez; now the DEA wanted Carlos Nayen.
Perez was also having problems trying to keep her best source, Parlay, from cracking up. They talked nearly every day, and she spent much of her time consoling him. Parlay kept her informed on every move José’s crew made at the racetracks. He told her about Nayen and José making a big push into California, hiring veteran trainer Paul Jones and a handful of other noted trainers who worked at the Los Alamitos track near Los Angeles. News was already circulating among the insular world of the backside that the Zetas were at Los Alamitos, paying for horses with duffel bags of cash. The grooms, hot walkers, and other workers on the backside—some of whom had already fled the Zetas in Mexico—had thought they’d escaped the brutal cartel. Perez tried to keep Parlay calm and focused on their mutual goal of arresting the men. But her source had already convinced himself that he was a marked man.
One morning, he finally snapped. Disheveled and waving a gun around in front of a San Antonio police substation, he claimed the Zetas had commanded him to shoot up the station. After he was disarmed—miraculously he hadn’t been shot—he’d bragged to the cops that he worked for the FBI. Perez got a call from one of the policemen, skeptical and almost sorry to be asking whether it was true, since the man was clearly unstable. He was surprised to learn from Perez that it was.
Now the only way to get Parlay out of jail would be to deport him, since he was her informant. So Perez went to San Antonio and drove Parlay back to Laredo. She couldn’t hide her frustration during the two-hour drive back to the border. “I could have paid you for your work after the trial was done,” she told him. “But now I can’t. You really screwed up.” He was apologetic as they drove, saying he was sorry he’d caused her so much trouble. With a heavy heart, she watched him disappear across the bridge into Nuevo Laredo.
WHEN IT SEEMED LIKE things couldn’t get much worse, Lawson was hit with more bad news—this time in an email from Bill Johnston, a DEA agent who worked upstairs. On weekends, Johnston, who was originally from Philadelphia, sometimes went out to bars and clubs with Lawson and the other young agents in their building. Jeff Hathaway had been transferred to South America, and Johnston had been trying to repair some of the frayed relations between Lawson and his agency by offering to help out with the investigation where he could.
In his email, Johnston said he’d overheard that the DEA in California was going to raid the Los Alamitos racetrack that morning. They’d gotten a tip that Omar Treviño would be there. Lawson sat back in his chair, shocked. Then he read the email again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. But the email was brief and to the point. He pushed his chair back, then got up and quickly walked over to Perez’s desk. He could feel his panic quickly turning to anger.
“The DEA is raiding Los Alamitos. We’re fucking burnt,” he told Perez, pacing around her desk. He was too alarmed to sit down.
“What?” Perez said, incredulous, turning around in her chair. “When did you find out?”
“I just got an email from Bill upstairs. They’re looking for Omar.”
“Oh shit,” Perez said, letting it sink in. “What else did he say?”
“That’s it,” Lawson said, still pacing back and forth. “I’m going to call Pennington.” He strode back to his desk, looking like he might punch someone or something. When he gave Pennington the news, he had a similar response—shock, then anger. His task force had been working the case for more than a year, poring over thousands of documents, carefully constructing a trail of evidence linking the drug money with the horses. If José and the others fled to Mexico, they would be out of their reach. It would all be for nothing.
After he got off the phone with Pennington, Lawson phoned Bill Johnston. “What in the hell’s going on in California?”
Johnston said that all the information he had, he’d put in his email. The DEA was so big and so compartmentalized, he knew very little about what other offices were working on, or even other agents in his own office.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Lawson said. “See what else you can find out.” After hanging up the phone, he returned to Perez’s cubicle.
She was searching on her computer for any breaking news reports about the raid at the racetrack. “It won’t take long before it hits the news,” she said.
“This is bad,” Lawson said. “I’m going upstairs to find out what the hell is going on.”
“I’ll check with my sources at the track and see if they’ve got anything,” Perez said, picking up her cell phone.
By the time Lawson got to Johnston’s office on the sixth floor, Johnston had already called one of their agents in Mexico who was helping advise the agents on the ground in California, but he’d told Johnston he couldn’t talk until things had settled. The raid was still going down at Los Alamitos. As Lawson paced the floor around his desk, he watched Johnston dial the DEA’s Santa Ana office near the racetrack, where he seemed to have better luck. When he got off the phone, Johnston relayed the update to Lawson.
“They’ve detained some people,” he said. “They’re going to send me photos of them when it’s all over.”
Lawson sat down in a chair next to Johnston’s desk. What if they detained José? His head was beginning to throb. He could see their whole case unraveling before him.
Johnston gave him an apologetic look. “As soon as I know something, I’ll let you know.”
When Lawson exited the elevator to his office, he instinctively grabbed for his cell phone. He started to dial, then stopped suddenly. He looked at the call screen, which said “Dad,” and ended the call. It made him feel even more desolate. Since he’d returned to Laredo, the grief would wash over him like this—sometimes suddenly—catching him by surprise. He paused in the hallway and tried to collect himself.
In the office, he could tell that Perez had already informed Villarreal about the raid. Through the window Lawson could see him pacing around his office.
“You told him?” Lawson said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Not good. He wants an update as soon as we’ve got more.”
Perez had more bad news, she said. She’d found out that the U.S. Marshals had gotten the same tip that Omar Treviño had flown into Los Angeles on a private jet, along with his bodyguards, to inspect some horses at Los Alamitos. Both agencies were at the racetrack now, pulling people aside for questioning, and detaining anyone who looked suspicious for further questioning.
Omar and his brother Miguel each had a $5 million bounty. Lawson knew that neither agency could pass up the chance to arrest Omar on American soil if they thought they had a credible tip. But he was skeptical about the whole setup.
“Do you think Omar would ever risk coming here, with every law enforcement agency under the sun looking for him?”
“I hate to say it, but I think he’s smarter than that,” Perez said.
“What if they pick up José?” Lawson asked. There was nothing they could do but wait and see, which made it even worse.
“Then we’re done,” Perez said, frowning. “Ni modo.”
They went to Lawson’s favorite place for lunch, with the fried chicken and gravy, but neither of them had any appetite. They scarcely touched their plates of food, as they waited for Johnston’s email with the photos of the people the DEA had detained. Lawson kept checking his email on his phone.
“I got it,” Lawson said excitedly. It was Johnston’s email. He downloaded the attachment on his phone. He knew it would be better to wait until they got back to the office so he could download it on his computer, but they couldn’t wait that long.
Perez pulled her chair closer to Lawson so she could see the mug shots. “Oh no,” she said. The first photo was of Carlos Nayen. “I bet the DEA in Dallas won’t be happy about this either.”
“What a mess,” Lawson said, shaking his head.
“Who’s that other guy with the black hair?” Perez asked, pointing to the other mug shot.
“That’s Felipe Quintero,” Lawson said. “He’s a horse trainer they hired out in California.”
“Oh, right,” Perez said. “He was at the All American in Ruidoso.”
Lawson nodded in the affirmative. They were both cautiously relieved not to see José in the DEA’s lineup. The text of the email from Johnston said that Lawson should come to his office right away, because he had more details about the raid.
As soon as they got back, they went straight to Johnston’s office. The DEA agent briefed them on what he’d found out from the agents in California. As the raid had progressed, with the agents spreading out across the racetrack, people had started leaving in droves. So the DEA had set up a checkpoint in the parking lot. Everyone else leaving the stables was in jeans and T-shirts, but Nayen was wearing Ralph Lauren. He also seemed unusually withdrawn, not even glancing at the photo of Omar Treviño when a DEA agent asked if he recognized the fugitive they were searching for. Nayen also had a Mexican passport, so the agent had decided to detain him for further questioning, along with Felipe Quintero, who was driving. Once Nayen was in custody, the agents asked him repeatedly whether he knew Miguel or Omar Treviño. But Nayen had played ignorant, saying he’d never heard of them. After a couple of hours they’d let him go. Omar, of course, had never materialized.
Much to their relief, none of the agents had encountered José either. With so much law enforcement heat on the Treviños, Lawson knew they were incredibly lucky they had made it this far. They were running out of time. Too much had gone wrong: the DEA in Dallas hunting Carlos Nayen, ICE tailing Victor Lopez, and now the Los Alamitos raid. He’d also heard that Francisco Colorado’s ranch in Veracruz had been raided by the Mexican military.
They needed to move faster. The problem was that Doug Gardner didn’t feel the same urgency. We need to be organized and ready, he’d say whenever an anxious Lawson pushed him on the date they’d present the evidence before the grand jury to get the indictment. We need more time, Gardner would say.