BY ALL ACCOUNTS THE RAID HAD BEEN A SUCCESS. JOSÉ AND THE OTHER suspects had been arrested without a shot fired. Even the FBI’s surveillance plane with the damaged landing gear had been able to finally touch down in Oklahoma City without any injuries, just a few dings on the fuselage and a shaken crew.
But any triumph that Lawson and Perez felt was dulled by the realization that Miguel and Omar were still beyond their reach in Mexico. At least, Pennington said, they could take pride in the knowledge that they had ended the brothers’ plans north of the Rio Grande.
José, who had pleaded not guilty, was placed in solitary confinement at a county lockup near Austin. Federal judge Sam Sparks had denied bail since José was considered a flight risk. Sparks, a former trial attorney, had served the Western District of Texas for more than two decades. The seventy-three-year-old judge was considered conservative but not ideological, and deliberative when it came time for sentencing. He had already released José’s wife, Zulema, and eldest daughter, Alexandra, on bond.
Besides Miguel and Omar, Sergio “Saltillo” Guerrero, Luis Aguirre, and Victor Lopez were also still at large in Mexico. Not long after the raid they would learn of Victor Lopez’s suspicious death in Nuevo Laredo and cross him off their fugitives’ list. As they had hoped, Francisco Colorado turned himself in to the FBI in Houston three days after the raid. He had little choice since he couldn’t go back to Mexico. He was a marked man in the eyes of Miguel, just like Carlos Nayen.
In yet another entanglement with the DEA, the agency had indicted Nayen in Texas’s Eastern District on charges of drug smuggling and arms trafficking, a month before the FBI and IRS could file theirs in the Western District, which would now complicate the proceedings in Austin. Nayen had pleaded guilty to the charges and refused to testify at trial.
The two young horse trainers Felipe Quintero and Adan Farias, along with Raul Ramirez, one of the young bidders at the auctions, had struck plea agreements. And the two horse trainers had agreed to testify for the prosecution.
The rest of the defendants—Francisco Colorado, Eusevio Huitron, and Fernando Garcia—would go on trial with José Treviño.
Judge Sparks set the trial for October 2012 at the federal courthouse in Austin, which gave the team just four months to prepare. The case was the biggest the U.S. attorney’s office in Austin had worked in more than a decade. Gardner knew he’d need the help of another federal prosecutor in his office, so he enlisted Michelle Fernald. The two had worked together on several trials over the last two decades, and their very different personalities complemented one another in the courtroom. Fernald had a flair for dramatic delivery that contrasted well with Gardner’s deliberate, no-nonsense style.
For the team, the task before them of condensing, in less than four months, a nearly three-year investigation into a coherent presentation before a jury was cause for panic. They had at least four hundred boxes of evidence seized during the raid crammed into the conference room at the U.S. attorney’s office. The stacks were so high they obscured the windows and the view of the Capitol and downtown Austin. The outside world largely went unnoticed anyway, with the venetian blinds always closed, so that the agents could scrutinize one document after another on an overhead projector to help build their body of evidence.
They’d been working overtime since before the raid in June, and were now feeling the pressure of the looming trial date. Every morning before the sun came up, Schutt and Kim Williams would hit the trail at Lady Bird Lake for a run to try to decompress. Pennington had no such outlet, after blowing out his knee while running a half-marathon with the two in the spring. He blamed his injury on a dream he’d had. The night before the marathon, he’d dreamed he was at the race watching Schutt, Junker, and Kim Williams run, but he was high above them looking down. As they ran farther away from him, he realized he was dead. When he’d woken up, the dream had stayed with him, even spooked him a little. He wasn’t that old, he told himself, and he wasn’t retired yet.
That morning, when he arrived at the marathon starting line, he was determined to outrun anyone who got in front of him. But as he’d charged downhill something in the back of his knee had popped, and he’d felt a surge of white-hot pain shoot up his leg. After the race, the pain had settled into a nagging discomfort, which he’d ignored for months until his wife had forced him to see a doctor. The prognosis was not good: he’d torn cartilage in his knee and would need surgery. It couldn’t have come at a worse moment, he thought. He’d be hobbling around on crutches with Miguel and Omar still at large.
For Perez, it was becoming increasingly difficult to leave her kids every Monday morning and not see them again until the weekend. One morning as she was getting ready to leave for Austin, her eldest son, who was seven, asked why she was never home.
“Don’t you love us?” he asked. He’d recently watched a TV show about the police and had a vague awareness that his mom did something similar. Perez tried to explain to him that she was a federal agent, but he was disappointed she didn’t even wear a uniform like on television.
“I’m a policewoman, I just don’t dress like one,” she said. “And sometimes I have to put bad people in jail. And there are bad people everywhere, and sometimes I have to go far away to arrest them.”
He looked up at her blinking, trying to make sense of it. “Well, can’t you just get another job?” he said.
“But I love what I do,” Perez told him.
“Oh,” he said, looking disappointed. “Okay.”
Afterward, when she and Lawson pulled away from the curb for the drive to Austin, guilt washed over her. At least her husband understood what the job meant to her. He knew her well enough to know that any ultimatum to make her quit would only backfire. When Lydia decided she’d had enough of taking care of their kids, Perez might have to give up the violent crimes squad. Then she didn’t know what she’d do. The guilt subsided as they hit Interstate 35 and she and Lawson began to discuss their next task for the trial, but it always lived in the back of her mind. Still, she knew she had to see the case through. She was doing her small part to help her parents’ homeland. She sometimes wondered if it was already too late.
Lawson’s girlfriend, Elena, had finally broken up with him when he’d gone back to Laredo after the Oklahoma raid. He had seen the rupture coming for months, and now that they were finally done, he admitted to Perez that he felt nothing but relief.
In preparing for the trial, their primary job was keeping an eye on their sources and lining up cooperating witnesses to testify. Graham’s cool demeanor was finally starting to crack under the stress of living a double life for so long. He kept asking Lawson when it would be over. But all Lawson could promise him was that they were getting closer to trial. Once again, he was impressed by Graham’s nerve when he agreed to take the stand as a witness. He knew that the FBI would have to keep a close security detail around him since his life could be in danger. Many others in the horse industry had been too scared to even consider testifying. One well-known horse trainer at Los Alamitos who had worked with José hired bodyguards after he found out who José’s brothers were. He was so terrified at the thought of testifying that Gardner had determined he’d never hold up on the witness stand.
TWO WEEKS AFTER LAWSON spoke on the phone with del Rayo, the wealthy real estate developer arrived at the San Antonio airport from Mexico City with his wife and two children. Perez and Lawson met the family in the baggage claim area. The agents wore business suits, their gold FBI badges and their pistols hidden under their coats.
“¿Cómo están?” Perez greeted them, trying to put the family at ease. “¿Cómo les fue de viaje?”
The family had brought a mountain of luggage. It was clear that del Rayo knew they wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. His wife looked wary and the children grabbed at their father’s arm instinctively.
“Not bad,” del Rayo answered in English. He raised the suitcase he was carrying. “All of my medical records, financial documents are in here,” he said as they walked through the terminal toward the exit. “I want to clear my name.”
As Lawson had promised, he didn’t put handcuffs on del Rayo in front of his family, even though the businessman was still under indictment. They walked to the curb outside the airport terminal, and del Rayo with his suitcase of evidence got into the back of their unmarked car. Del Rayo tried to smile and wave so his children wouldn’t be scared at seeing their father being taken away by two strangers. But they were already near tears as the car pulled away from the curb.
They drove directly to the federal courthouse in Austin, where del Rayo was arraigned before a judge, then bonded out. After that, they met with Doug Gardner in his office for a debriefing so that del Rayo could make his case for innocence.