STEVE PENNINGTON AND BILLY WILLIAMS WERE BEGINNING TO REALIZE that they needed help with Francisco Colorado’s ADT Petroservicios and with tracing the funds that had flowed through José Treviño’s various U.S. bank accounts.
Through cooperating witnesses, they’d learned that Miguel treated ADT Petroservicios like his own personal bank, depositing money into the business and then using it to wire money to the United States. But their weakness was still the lack of documents to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. They’d both requested bank documents for ADT from Mexico but had never gotten a response. Gardner and Fernald would need to show the jury that the millions Colorado had spent on horses had come from Miguel’s cocaine trafficking. They also had to prove that people in the industry, like the horse trainer, Chevo Huitron, had taken money from José and Carlos Nayen knowing it was dirty. But this was turning out be an even tougher challenge than they had anticipated.
Michelle Fernald suggested her husband, Michael, might be able to help with the financial analysis. Thirty-eight years old, Michael Fernald, who still had the short military cut from his days in the army, where he had worked in intelligence, was a criminal investigator with the IRS based in Austin. Fernald had been hearing about the Treviño investigation for months, and he was intrigued by the scale and complexity of the money laundering conspiracy.
Fernald was an expert in wire fraud and a CPA, unlike Pennington or Billy Williams. His background was in white-collar crime. Pennington knew Fernald and respected his opinion. The younger agent had helped Pennington out in the past with search warrants but he’d never worked full-time on a drug cartel case. Pennington phoned Fernald and asked whether he’d be willing to join them. He assured Fernald that he wouldn’t need to worry about the drug trafficking side of it—that was his specialty—what he needed was an in-depth financial analysis on Colorado and José’s businesses, the kind Fernald would do in one of his white-collar investigations.
Fernald readily agreed to help. And when Pennington pitched him to the rest of the team, they were quickly in agreement that it was a good idea.
The next morning, Fernald arrived early and cleared a spot at one of the folding tables in the crowded conference room. Brian Schutt and Kim Williams were already there. There were now six investigators working through the evidence. Each cardboard box had been color-coded to denote the city or state where the evidence had been seized. There were receipts, veterinarian bills, even pieces of scratch paper with names and phone numbers and doodles drawn across them, because someone on the evidence team during the raid had thought the notes might be important. Now they had to sort through all of it and figure out if it was. Each scrap of paper would be made into an electronic document. The whiteboards on the walls around them were scrawled with various names, flow charts, and other notes in black marking pen that had struck someone as important.
Throughout the day, Pennington or another agent would shout out the names of horses to Kim Williams and Schutt seated at a table in the middle of the room with their laptops. They would check to see if the horse was already on their growing Excel spreadsheet, and dutifully add it to the list if not. By now Pennington and his task force had been working the investigation so long they had it down cold. But Fernald had less than four weeks to understand everything there was to know about the finances of Francisco Colorado and José Treviño. He opened up his laptop and started reading.
TWO WEEKS WENT BY quickly, and Michael Fernald was feeling the intense pressure of trying to come up with a financial analysis of a complex money laundering conspiracy in so little time. Every day he combed through stacks of documents until he was blurry-eyed from lack of sleep. He hoped to get some financial documents from ADT Petroservicios during reciprocal discovery. He’d also submitted another MLAT request for financial documents from Mexico—this time through the U.S. State Department. He’d made it a broad request and included the Pemex contracts with ADT Petroservicios. It was his first time working a case with a Mexican business. Typically he would send his court-ordered subpoenas to banks and corporations and they would provide him with the financial documents within a few weeks or face stiff penalties, even jail time. But he had no such authority in Mexico. He could only request the documents and wait. He knew that Billy Williams and Pennington had gotten nowhere with their first request. In any investigation, an agent waited for that lucky break, set his hopes on it, but Fernald knew his time was running out.
Five days before the October trial, and seeing that neither side was anywhere near ready, Judge Sparks made a decision. With more than thirty thousand pages of documents from the prosecution, competing trial schedules on the part of the defendants’ lawyers, and ongoing negotiations over the hundreds of horses in IRS custody, both sides had begged the court for more time. Judge Sparks relented and set a new trial date for April 15, 2013.
The judge’s ruling brought much-needed relief for the team. They now had six more months. This meant Michael Fernald had a more realistic chance of getting the information he needed to dig deeper. Lawson’s friend, DEA special agent Bill Johnston, had also joined them in a further effort to make amends between the two agencies. Doug Gardner had learned from another prosecutor about some wiretaps between Ramiro Villarreal and Miguel and Omar that the DEA office in Houston held. The recordings the DEA had would help them build their link between Miguel’s money and the horses. Johnston told Gardner he would do his best to get the wiretap recordings. Gardner also tasked the young DEA agent with doing email search warrants. Johnston would start with Fernando Garcia’s email and work from there.
The one downside to extending the trial date was figuring out what to do with the horses for several more months. Some of them were already getting sick and dying from illnesses due to overcrowding at José’s ranch. The IRS had seized 485 horses, many of them still in Lexington under a protective order. At least eleven had already died. José’s eldest son, José Jr., had been left in charge of them with a handful of workers. But Junior, who had been born and raised in Dallas, hated the ranching life. He couldn’t wait to get out from under the burden of the horses and back to the city. He had already asked the IRS whether he could sell sixty of the less valuable broodmares so there would be fewer animals for him to maintain.
The costs of caring for the horses were also mounting for the federal agency. The day of the raid, the IRS’s hired cowboys had hauled away forty-nine of José’s most valuable racehorses, and were now paying for their care at various stables. The agency had already spent close to a million dollars in just four months. And it didn’t help that the press had been tipped off to the sick and dying horses at the Lexington ranch, which generated more bad press for Pennington’s thin-skinned bosses in Washington. Horse-racing experts also warned Billy Williams and Pennington that the dozens of yearlings on José’s ranch would need to be saddlebroken and trained in the next couple of months if they had any hope for a racing career. They told their bosses that the horses would need to be auctioned off, and soon.
But José’s lawyer moved to block the sale of the horses, arguing before the judge that his client had a “sentimental attachment” to them. After close to a week of sparring in court, José finally agreed to the auction, but on one condition: that the government not sell his five most prized horses, which included Mr. Piloto; Separate Fire, which had won the Ed Burke Million Futurity at Los Alamitos; and Tempting Dash. Michelle Fernald and Doug Gardner agreed to the deal. It was also agreed that the proceeds from the auction be held in escrow by the IRS until after the trial. If José were found not guilty, the money would be his.