Sometime in the nineties
Two men sat at a small, white, wrought-iron table next to the pool of a house about forty kilometers south of Cancún, near the city of Puerto Morelos. The larger of the pair clutched an ice-cold Modelo, his third, in his catcher’s mitt of a hand. The other, much smaller man sipped from a glass of Perrier.
They were quietly celebrating the success of the partnership they had entered a year earlier, as well as the horrific reputation it had earned among the federales and their criminal counterparts all along the Yucatán Peninsula. They were professional kidnappers and extortionists who now focused exclusively on rich norteamericanos.
Although they always worked as a two-man team, the authorities didn’t know that. They were referred to on the street by the singular moniker “El Choppo.”
The name came from their modus operandi. From day one, their strategy had been to put the fear of God into their victim’s significant other by including a severed fingertip along with their demands for ransom. They would also convincingly tell the victim they had implanted a heat-fusing chip at the top of his or her spine that could be ignited remotely if either of them was reported to the police.
Despite the frequency of abductions and the demands of outrageously large sums of money, their grisly intimidation techniques were so successful that the pair never came close to actual apprehension. But the whispered legend of El Choppo, and the gut-wrenching fear it inspired, was starting to draw the attention of Mexican authorities as well as others north of the border.
…
Arturo Flores was born and raised in Mérida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, where both his mother and father were tenured professors at the Universidad del Mayab Escuela de Medicina.
Growing up as the only child in an academic, upper-class family, Arturo learned early on the benefits of education and exposure to the arts and science. In addition to his native Spanish, he spoke fluent English and acceptable French.
Arturo was exceptionally bright. When tested during his first year of secondary school, his IQ registered in the 150 to 160 range. Naturally, his parents expected him to follow in their footsteps and attend medical school. However, Arturo wasn’t the least bit interested in comforting the sick. As he entered his teens, with their inevitable testosterone-induced changes, he discovered what began as a curiosity and then blossomed into a raging, all-consuming passion: he liked to hurt things.
At first, it was relatively harmless: pulling the wings off the ubiquitous June bugs that swarmed the tomato plants in his parent’s garden or squirting lighter fluid on a hapless green snake, then watching it writhe in agony when he set it on fire.
As he got older, he started trapping agoutis, the small Mexican rodents that looked like an overgrown squirrel. They would make amazingly loud screaming sounds when he nailed their feet to a board, sliced them with a razor, then used pliers to pull strips of skin from their living bodies. It was after graduating to stray dogs and cats that he decided he wanted to become a veterinarian.
Masking their disappointment at his decision not to attend medical school, Arturo’s parents agreed to pay his tuition with the stipulation that he study at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, UADY, which was less than twenty kilometers from their home. UADY was just fine with Arturo. He could live at home and not have to worry about cleaning an apartment or cooking or buying his own clothes.
Physically, Arturo wasn’t unattractive. In fact, he was incredibly nondescript. A little above average height with a slim, teetering-on-muscular build, Arturo was eerily easy to forget. He was not the party type and really wasn’t into girls, or boys, for that matter. At eighteen, Arturo had never tasted alcohol, didn’t smoke, and was still a virgin with no desire to change that status. He was the polar opposite of the image of a male college freshman.
He enjoyed his chemistry and pharmacology classes and absolutely loved anatomy, especially the dissection labs. But it was during his fourth year, when he and his fellow students were able to practice what they had learned on living, breathing pets and farm animals, that he realized he had made the right career choice.
During their internships, each student was required to assist staff veterinarians in the school’s free clinic. Following the “see one, do one, teach one,” practice long associated with veterinary and medical schools, Arturo was soon allowed to perform procedures on his own, without supervision.
It didn’t take him long to begin diluting or totally withholding anesthesia when he clipped dog ears and tails. Or his favorite procedure, neutering. Their screams of pain brought the same sensation that rock-and-roll or heavy-metal music gave an average person: a quickening of the pulse and waves of pure, albeit fleeting, pleasure.
It was during one of the commencement speeches, shortly before being confirmed as “Doctor Flores,” that he heard a comment he would take to heart and that would set him on a course that would change his life forever. Before sending the graduating class out into the real world, one of UADY’s professors challenged them to “apply their education and academic calling to fulfill their lives by realizing their individual passion.”
Arturo had only one passion, one burning desire, and he decided at once to begin his quest for a profession that would allow him to apply his training and live out that passion.
He would stumble across his calling much sooner than he expected.
Arturo and Hector were introduced to one another virtually, while each was visiting the fiercely secure chatroom Wet Work Wanted—WWW—deep inside what was referred to as the “darknet.” As was common among those who frequented WWW and most other darknet sites, Arturo and Hector danced around getting to know one another for weeks before finally connecting.
Hector lived in Cancún, the famous resort city, roughly 270 kilometers south of Mérida, where he worked as a part-time tour guide.
“Part-time” was something of a misnomer. He trolled just outside the Cancún airport’s arrival-passenger customs and baggage-claim area throughout the day, timing his rounds to coincide with international flights. When he wasn’t at the airport trying to hustle tourists into signing up for tours to Chichen Itza or Tulum, he was working the lobby of the big hotels doing the same. It was a living, but only barely so.
His physical appearance didn’t help much, not in the tourist trade. He was a tall, brutish-looking man whose ill-fitting clothes highlighted thick, construction-work-hardened muscles. The scarred knuckles on his callused hands suggested a lifetime of bar fights and beatings. Hector was well aware of his intimidating appearance and had recently decided to try his hand at the dangerous but lucrative kidnapping-and-extortion trade.
Following Arturo and Hector’s darknet tête-à-tête, they met face-to-face at Cenote Dzitnup, a picturesque but touristy natural-spring-water-filled cavern about ten kilometers south of Valladolid, the halfway point between Mérida and Cancun. They hit it off immediately; a Laurel and Hardy–looking but far-from-comedic pair.
Hector reiterated what they had been discussing for weeks. He needed a partner to help break into the tourist-abduction-and-extortion business. He elaborated on the business model they had gingerly discussed in the WWW chatroom. They would stalk the airport, bars, and upscale hotels for Brits, Europeans, or gringos who had that filthy-rich look about them. Once they identified a suitable couple, they would stake out their movements. Then, once they identified a pattern to the couple’s actions and a location, he and Arturo, working as a team, would grab the female, throw her into a black-market van, and start the ransom process.
After hearing the details of Hector’s partnership proposal, Arturo responded, “I like your strategy, mi amigo, but if you don’t mind, I have just a couple of suggestions. First, we need to demand payment in bitcoins. A bitcoin account is completely untraceable, and so is everything associated with it: purchases, transfers, withdrawals, everything. And ten or eleven thousand dollars is peanuts. We need to hit these rich fuckers up for at least a hundred grand, maybe more. We can demand a deposit up front, and thanks to being able to hide behind bitcoin security, we can give them a little longer, un poco, to scrounge up enough to make it worth our while.
“Unbelievably, even obscenely wealthy people, especially Americans, don’t have money that is just lying around. They have it invested in stocks or mutual funds or stashed away in annuities. That means we need to give them a little extra time to scratch it up if we want to make el dinero grande. But not too much time. We don’t want them getting over the shock of what they are going through and bringing in the federales.
“That brings me to another change I want to make in our future modus operandi, what I call the ‘horror factor.’ Since our initial discussion, I’ve studied the accounts of hundreds of kidnapping cases. Most of the successful ones, at least from the banditos’ perspective, were for small potatoes, or they ended up with a body in a ditch with nothing to show for the effort or with the nappers getting caught and thrown way the fuck back in prison—or here in Mexico, executed. The reason in ninety percent of the unsuccessful cases is that the nappers were too soft or gave the family too much time to collect the ransom. If they snatched a drug lord’s kid, zap, no more napper.
“We’re going to do things differently from the get-go. We’re going to instill absolute terror in their hearts, unimaginable shock and pure, unadulterated horror, before they realize what is happening. I’ve given this concept a lot of thought, and I’ve come up with a plan that will make your worst nightmare look like a bedtime story.
“Rather than just snatching the woman and then trying to contact the hombre, we grab ’em both at the same time. You’re a fucking gorilla, so unless we stumble upon the ghost of Bruce Lee, you shouldn’t have any problem putting the guy in a bear hug and throwing his ass in the van. I’ll do the same with the chica.
“Now here is where we put the fear of God in our guests.”