MIGUEL TREVIÑO WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS, BUT THE RAID AT LOS ALAMITOS fueled his paranoia of betrayal. After the raid, Carlos Nayen received a text instructing him to return to Mexico immediately. Nayen knew that since he’d been detained and questioned by the DEA, Miguel would now consider him a liability. He took the battery out of his BlackBerry phone and stashed it in a drawer at his condo in California. There was no way he was going back.
With Nayen off the grid and hiding out, Felipe Quintero, the California horse trainer who had been detained along with Nayen, began receiving a barrage of emails in Spanish asking about “El Chamaco,” the Kid, which was how Miguel and his brothers sometimes referred to Nayen. “What’s going on? Why aren’t you all answering? People in Mexico are concerned.”
Fernando Garcia, who had not been at Los Alamitos when the raid happened, returned to the stables. He received a text from Yo Yo instructing him to drop his phones and close his Facebook and other social media accounts, which he obeyed. He continued training José’s horses for the upcoming Ed Burke Million Futurity in June, the same race that Tremor Enterprises had won the year before with its million-dollar purse. A couple of weeks after the raid, he received a phone call from José asking him to go to Mexico to meet his brother. “He wants to talk to you,” José said.
Garcia had met Miguel once before, the previous year, when he’d driven down to Mexico with Nayen. They’d discussed the future of his racing business and how the horses were doing in the States. Garcia had always wanted to stay on the cartel’s perimeter. He knew that getting too close to Miguel or Omar was dangerous, and what would happen to people who knew too much. But Nayen had convinced him to go against his better judgment.
José had always made it known to Miguel that he preferred working with Garcia over Nayen, who was always scheming, always looking for ways to feed his ambition. Garcia knew his place. Now José was doing his best to try to convince him to meet with Miguel about a promotion. With some reluctance, Garcia agreed to go.
Shortly after his talk with José, he drove to Laredo, then walked over the bridge into Mexico to meet Yo Yo. They drove around Nuevo Laredo for hours in Yo Yo’s car waiting for a call from Miguel. No call came, so they went to a restaurant to wait. After a few minutes, Yo Yo excused himself and went outside. He didn’t come back. Garcia got spooked. What if gunmen were on their way? What if this was all just a ruse to get him to Nuevo Laredo so Miguel could kill him, as he had so many others? Garcia bolted for the door and hailed a taxi outside to take him to the bridge, where he quickly walked back to Laredo.
Moments after he arrived, he received a text on his BlackBerry. “I’m the guy you met in Zacatecas. Just come back again. Everything’s good. We’re just going to talk.” Garcia knew it was Miguel, because they had met the last time in Zacatecas. What should he do now? He hadn’t even turned thirty and he was training some of the most coveted racehorses in the business. He was already making a name for himself as a trainer. If he didn’t meet Miguel the horses would be taken away from him. He decided he’d take the chance.
Garcia met up with Yo Yo again in Nuevo Laredo, and this time they went to his apartment, where Garcia left his cell phone—anyone whom Miguel and Omar summoned would be checked for electronic devices to make sure they weren’t being tracked. Then he and Yo Yo drove around Nuevo Laredo waiting for the call. After a few hours, Yo Yo got a call from a driver who would come and pick them up. When the man arrived, Garcia and Yo Yo got into the backseat of the truck. By now it was two in the morning and pitch black outside when they reached the edge of Nuevo Laredo. They took a dirt road and kept driving until Garcia saw trucks parked up ahead and dozens of armed men illuminated in the truck’s headlights. Something very bad was going to happen, he thought.
The truck stopped. One of Miguel’s sicarios opened the passenger-side door. He asked the driver for a carton of cigarettes. Garcia was trying to remain calm. The driver handed over the cigarettes while Garcia and Yo Yo waited in the backseat for whatever might happen next. The gunman turned to them. “My compadre will be right over to talk to you,” he said, then disappeared. They waited.
Miguel appeared out of the darkness and slipped into the passenger seat, closing the door. “I want you to take Carlos’s place,” he said to Garcia. “I’ve talked to my brother and we’ve decided that Carlos is no longer going to be helping us.”
Garcia nodded. At this point it would be difficult to say no. Nobody said no to Miguel. From now on Garcia would be working with José and Yo Yo would help him with the payments like he had helped Nayen, Miguel said. He would also double Garcia’s salary to $10,000 a month. Garcia agreed to the deal. Just as quickly as he had arrived, Miguel was gone. The driver backed out of the field and they bumped and rattled down the dirt road to the highway. His feeling of dread was turning into relief. He was alive. And now he would be helping manage Miguel’s entire horse-racing operation in the States. He never could have imagined that he’d be in control of the most coveted bloodlines in racing, millions of dollars’ worth of horses. It was more than he ever could have hoped for. He was living his dream. But the dream didn’t come without a price.
When Garcia met Francisco Colorado later in Ruidoso, they talked about the horses that Garcia was training for him. Colorado had flown in on his private jet and Garcia had picked him up at the airport, then they’d gone to a restaurant to talk about the business. Garcia had helped a friend of Colorado’s get a horse ownership license and open a bank account for Bonanza Racing Stables, one of the front companies they’d created. Colorado didn’t want any more of the horses in his name at the auctions. In Mexico, his contracts with Pemex were under scrutiny, and so was his business; he didn’t want to be arrested for money laundering. He seemed unusually contemplative as they sat down to eat. His wife and youngest son were in Houston now, because it wasn’t safe anymore for them in Veracruz. He knew that Nayen was hiding from Miguel in California. He had raised him like his own son. “If you take over,” he warned Garcia, “be careful.”
JOSÉ HAD GROWN INCREASINGLY suspicious since the traffic stop in Oklahoma City. He blamed Victor Lopez. He called Miguel and let him know about the incident near the airport and that his courier, Lopez, was bringing heat on them. “Something needs to be done about Victor,” he told his brother.
In Nuevo Laredo, Lopez had become worried. The police had stopped him at the Dallas airport after his brief meeting with José in Oklahoma City and asked him several questions about where he was going and what he did for a living. The last thing he wanted was Miguel thinking he was a snitch. And he had decided the best move was to tell Miguel about what had happened in Dallas.
What Lopez didn’t know was that he was already a dead man. Miguel had ordered his execution as soon as he hung up the phone with his brother. Yo Yo, Lopez’s own cousin, was put in charge of the hit. A team of sicarios was ordered to find Lopez in Nuevo Laredo and make it look like he’d died in a botched carjacking, to throw off U.S. law enforcement. Yo Yo felt he had no choice but to follow orders. He wanted to warn Lopez to run, but it was too risky. Miguel would only learn of his betrayal, and then he’d be next.