LAWSON WAS ANXIOUS TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THE INVESTIGATION. BUT after their trip to Graham’s farm, Hodge said he’d have little time to be chasing after horses. He was wrapped up in a drug gang investigation involving a corrupt Laredo police sergeant. He’d been working on the investigation for two years but still didn’t have an indictment. And he was desperate to solve the case by the end of the year, so that he could leave Laredo without looking back.
So it was up to Lawson. He ran José Treviño’s name through the bureau’s deconfliction database, where federal and local law enforcement ran searches to see if another agency was investigating the same suspect. The DEA and Laredo PD were all over Miguel and Omar Treviño. But the database didn’t come back with a single hit on José. Lawson opened up a case file under the FBI and added Jason Hodge as lead agent, and then typed in his own name.
He’d never worked a money laundering case. He knew how to handle a drug investigation—he’d been doing nothing but that for the last five years in Tennessee, though he’d never worked anything on the scale of the Zetas. Whether drugs would surface in their investigation was still too early to tell. Both he and Hodge suspected that José was too careful. From the way he’d set up the bidding in Oklahoma, by using Tyler Graham as a straw buyer, he was laundering big money for his brothers and working hard to make the whole thing look legitimate. Bringing drugs into the mix would only draw the attention of law enforcement.
Not more than a week ago Lawson had toyed with the idea of quitting, but now he’d stumbled upon what had the potential to be a career-making case. They had a direct line to two of the FBI’s most wanted criminals through their elder brother, who wasn’t on any other agency’s radar as far as he could tell. And Lawson had the means through Tyler Graham to infiltrate José’s operation without the Treviños ever suspecting he was watching. Now all he had to do was keep Graham from losing his nerve.
Graham had told him he’d call as soon as he had something to report. Before they’d left his farm in Elgin, he’d gotten him to sign an agreement to become a source and make it official. Lawson had held the paper down on a desk while Graham reluctantly scrawled his signature across the bottom as if he were signing his life away. As the days ticked past slowly in Laredo with no word from Graham, Lawson wondered whether he really had a case. All he had was a piece of paper and a promise.
AS WINTER TURNED TO SPRING in 2010, the collateral damage from the war on the other side of the river began to hit the FBI’s Laredo office in waves. Kidnappings were reported daily, but family members didn’t notify the police in Nuevo Laredo because most of the police worked for the Zetas. So the calls rolled in about people who’d gone missing in Mexico. But the agents could only investigate kidnappings involving U.S. citizens. Lawson didn’t like seeing the families from Nuevo Laredo, just as desperate, be turned away. It didn’t feel right, but that was the bureau’s policy.
Among those missing were the Garcia brothers, U.S. citizens and successful businessmen from a large family that lived on both sides of the river. One afternoon they’d gone to Nuevo Laredo to ride their motocross bikes and never returned. Lawson was assigned the case, his first as a lead agent. Within days he’d gone from zero cases to two. He was finally starting to feel like a cop again.
But when it came to the FBI he was still a rookie. He’d been a deputy, so he knew how to work an investigation. But doing it the FBI way was different. For every hour of investigating it seemed like there were two hours of paperwork. He was still only halfway through the policy manual on his desk. He needed help from a streetwise and experienced agent. And there was only one agent on his squad he had in mind.
He knew that at first glance, he and Alma Perez seemed like an unlikely partnership. She was from the border and spoke fluent Spanish, and he was a gringo from Tennessee who was good at mangling it. But other than the home-cooked meals at Hodge’s house, Alma Perez was the only other reason he’d survived his first few weeks in Laredo. She’d arrived two weeks after he did, on a transfer from Miami.
Perez had spent the last five years working narcotics investigations, wiretapping Colombian traffickers and seizing multi-ton bricks of cocaine. She was also the only agent on their squad who’d requested Laredo and was happy to be there and knew the area. Married and with two small children, Perez wanted to be closer to her family. In her early thirties, with long wavy black hair and dark brown eyes, she also had an unflappable quality to her that he found appealing.
She didn’t turn off her work phone at 6 p.m. like some of the other agents. And she seemed just as anxious as he was to get back on the streets. One day, not long after she’d arrived, he’d invited her out to an early lunch, and ended up telling her all of his doubts and frustrations about the new job. The FBI felt like a vast bureaucracy, with so many agents from different backgrounds and so many different divisions. He couldn’t see where he’d fit in. Perez admitted she’d felt the same way her first year in Miami. “Just give it some time and you’ll find your place,” she’d promised him. “You won’t be disappointed.”
In the weeks following, he’d relied on her to keep up his spirits. He’d also called his dad, but it didn’t help when his dad would remind him that real police work didn’t happen from behind a computer. “You need to get back on the street, son,” his dad would counsel him. “Knock on some doors, start talking to some people.” Yeah, try doing it in another language, he felt like saying, but never did. He’d been using a computer program called Rosetta Stone to pick up more Spanish vocabulary, but the voice recognition software couldn’t interpret his southern accent. After a couple of days he’d given up. “I don’t think Rosetta Stone understands redneck,” he’d joked to Perez.
Within a day of Lawson’s being assigned the Garcia kidnapping case, Perez jumped in to help. She got to work phoning FBI sources in Mexico, while Lawson began contacting the Garcias’ relatives in Laredo. It didn’t take long to realize that they had a problem: all of the evidence they needed was on the other side of the river. But he was learning that getting any help from the police chief in Nuevo Laredo was complicated. If the chief got a message from Miguel Treviño that it was Zeta business, he wouldn’t touch it. The Zetas had their own code of justice. If someone committed a crime without authorization from Miguel, the Zetas would take care of the offender themselves. If it was another organization the FBI was investigating, like the Sinaloa Cartel—the Zetas’ sworn enemies—then the police chief could be more than accommodating.
It was too bad, said one of the Laredo cops on his squad, that he hadn’t been around in the old days. The Mexican cops would always make sure they got their fugitive. But in 2005, the Nuevo Laredo police chief had made the mistake his first day on the job of telling the media he wouldn’t be intimidated by the Zetas. Within six hours he was lying dead in the street surrounded by a halo of spent bullet casings. Several other policemen were also slaughtered. Miguel Treviño had made his message clear. After that, the Laredo cops were on their own.
Now Lawson didn’t need to drive to the edge of the river to try and comprehend the tragedy that was unfolding a few hundred yards away. He only had to look into the grief-stricken faces of the Garcia brothers’ wives and parents as they sat across from him at the FBI’s conference table. He tried to understand what it was like for families like the Garcias, who saw the border as nothing more than an imaginary line. The elderly parents still crossed into Nuevo Laredo regularly, even though their sons had just been kidnapped there. The two cities, which the locals called “Los Dos Laredos,” had coexisted since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was settled in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. They were inextricably linked by blood and by culture. Lawson asked the father, who was in his seventies, how he could risk traveling to Nuevo Laredo when he knew the city was controlled by the Zetas and there was a war going on. “It’s what we’ve always done,” he said. “My sister lives there, most of my family is there.” To stop going would be unthinkable.
After the meeting with the Garcias, Alma Perez couldn’t help but think of her own family on the other side. Like most border families, they’d spent their lives with one foot in Mexico, the other in the United States. But since she’d come back from Miami she hadn’t crossed the river into Nuevo Laredo. Her relatives had told her not to risk it. The Zetas were targeting the military, politicians, and the police in their campaign of domination and terror. Every day there were new and gruesome headlines about decapitations and mass graves.
Perez knew these were mostly statistics and names for Lawson and the other agents on her new squad. But the massacres, the shootings were in Mexican border towns she’d known since she was a girl. She thought of her happy childhood memories of her tías and tíos, quinceañeras and bodas. She’d been born on the U.S. side of the river, but part of her was still rooted in Mexico. Everything she had known in her parents’ homeland was slipping away, and it would never be the same again. It was like living with a phantom limb that still ached. No matter how hard she tried, she could not reconcile the destruction she read about every day in the bureau’s intel briefings with her own memories. So much had changed in five years. And she was still grappling with how to come to terms with it.
Perez was an FBI agent, but Mexico was not her assignment. Her new boss, David Villarreal, had made that clear to her already. Even before she’d arrived, she’d sensed that he was less than enthusiastic about her transfer to Laredo, even if she was an experienced agent. Of the more than 13,500 FBI agents, fewer than 20 percent of them were women. So Perez knew she was an outlier at the bureau. Most female agents with kids didn’t want to work violent crimes because it was a reactive squad, meaning they could be called out to a crime scene at any moment. This made the days often long and unpredictable. But Perez had liked working the drug squad in Miami, and was pleased she’d been assigned to the violent crimes squad in Laredo. And she was determined to make it work.
Maybe she’d partnered with Lawson because he was also an outlier in his own way. He’d never been to the border, could hardly speak Spanish. Some of the other agents and the task force officers said they’d heard he’d come from somewhere out in the backwoods of Tennessee. They thought he’d be begging for a transfer by the end of the year.