SINCE JANUARY 2010, PENNINGTON AND HIS TASK FORCE HAD BEEN LIVING out of their suitcases in Austin, working late into the evening each day in a conference room at the U.S. attorney’s office they’d designated as their war room. There was nothing high-tech about the arrangement, just a long narrow room at the end of a hallway, with more than a hundred cardboard file boxes stacked inside, so that it looked like a dense forest.
Among the columns sat the team members at their makeshift desks with their laptops. In the middle were Brian Schutt and Kim Williams, who were trying to match the names of horses to the pedigree and registration documents that had been filed for each horse with the American Quarter Horse Association. They’d received dozens of boxes from the AQHA in Amarillo from a subpoena several months earlier, and they were working their way through the documents to identify which horses were being held under the various straw buyers for Miguel. Each horse was then entered into a long Excel spreadsheet on their computers.
Pennington and Billy Williams were still piecing together the bank documents for José and his various associates, including Nayen, Garcia, and Lopez. They’d discovered that thirty-five mares that had been transferred to Zule Farms in Oklahoma, including Dashin Follies, were now listed under the name Luis Aguirre. After the transfer of the horses, José’s wife, Zulema, had written Aguirre a $122,000 check for the breeding mares, but it had bounced. Pennington had seen the name before in other documents. It appeared that Aguirre often held horses under his name for José and his brothers.
Lawson and Perez worked with Graham and other sources to keep watch on the various members of José’s crew. After the raid at Los Alamitos and the traffic stop in Oklahoma, they were on heightened alert for anything unusual. Much to their relief, Garcia and José carried on at the Los Alamitos racetrack as if the raid had never happened. They were preparing several of their horses for the upcoming trials in early June for the Ed Burke Million Futurity. Only Carlos Nayen had changed his routine. He spent most of his time at his condo near Los Alamitos with his wife and their newborn baby, but never went to the racetrack anymore. Lawson couldn’t help but think of Ramiro Villarreal.
THREE WEEKS PASSED, and Lawson was starting to believe they’d dodged catastrophe, when he received a phone call from one of his sources at Los Alamitos that rekindled his anxiety. His source said an investigative reporter named Ginger Thompson from the New York Times was asking around about José Treviño and Tremor Enterprises.
Unbeknownst to Lawson and the team, Thompson had received a tip about Tremor Enterprises six months earlier, and by the time Lawson was alerted she was close to publishing. A couple of hours later, Lawson got a call from another source at the track contacted by Thompson. Lawson was perplexed. The Times reporter seemed to be calling all of the key sources in their investigation.
If her story broke in the Times, it would be the end of their investigation as José, Nayen, and the others would be on the first plane to Mexico. They were in deep trouble. And this time they were dealing with someone outside of law enforcement with a different agenda.
Lawson strode over to Perez’s cubicle. When she saw the look on his face she frowned.
“I don’t want any more bad news,” she said, shaking her head.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
Perez raised an eyebrow, an expression of dread coming over her face. “What is it?”
“There’s a reporter from the New York Times sniffing around Los Alamitos,” Lawson said. “She’s talking to everyone. She knows all about José and Tremor Enterprises.”
“When is she going to publish?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Lawson said, pacing. He was starting to take all of the bad luck personally.
“Chingao,” Perez said, sitting back in her chair. “She can’t publish that story. Not till we make the arrests.”
“I know,” Lawson said. “Maybe we should talk to her?”
“Agents can’t just talk to reporters,” Perez said.
“Well, someone needs to,” Lawson said. He glanced over at Villarreal’s office, and could see through the window that his boss was at his desk, fully engrossed in a telephone conversation.
Perez looked at him. “He likes you better than me,” she said.
Lawson sighed. “Let’s go,” he said, heading toward the closed door of Villarreal’s office.
The two agents made their case to Villarreal, who frowned as they laid out the devastating consequences that would occur if the Times reporter published her story. José would flee to Mexico, his crew would scatter, and sources could be killed. They needed to make some kind of deal with the reporter to hold off on publishing her story, Lawson urged, at least until they could make the arrests. Villarreal sat back in his chair, mulling over the facts that the two agents had just laid before him. “Let me talk to San Antonio,” he said finally.
As they left Villarreal’s office, Lawson was overcome by a sense of futility. It was a feeling he always got when he knew he was trapped in the slow-moving gears of bureaucracy and there was nothing he could do about it. Villarreal was going to pass the problem up the chain of command to San Antonio, and from there it would go to Washington where it would sit until it was too late.
“You had better tell Pennington,” Perez said.
Steve Pennington took the news more calmly than he had with the raid. There was nothing he could do but keep working, he told himself. He was going to keep out of it and let the brass above his pay grade work it out among themselves. He’d keep poring through the financial documents with the same dogged determinedness as he did on every case. If there was one thing he had learned, it was that persistence and patience were usually rewarded.
As Lawson had feared, Washington debated what to do, then decided not to do anything—until the Times reporter contacted the DEA’s press office in Washington for comment and told them she was going to run with the story. The DEA contacted the FBI about Thompson’s impending story, which touched off a panic. The FBI contacted the reporter to try to negotiate a deal.
After a tense month of back-and-forth negotiations, Thompson agreed to hold her story until the day of the raid. In return, the FBI would give her the redacted search warrant from the investigation—an exclusive—that laid out the intricacies of the money laundering operation. It was a win for the Times and a win for the FBI and IRS, which had just negotiated a few more precious weeks.