Rohypnol, roofies, the date-rape drug: It used to be called Spanish fly. In Laredo, kids called the party pills “roches” because they were made by Hoffmann–La Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company. A powerful tranquilizer, roches were illegal in the United States but easily obtainable across the border, where one could buy a prescription for $5, and 100 pills for $50.
Gabriel had been hanging outside Martin High one afternoon when a slightly older girl named Ashley drove by with her friends and offered him a ride. The girls stopped at a gas station to buy cans of Sprite, and spread a bunch of pills on the hood of the car.
There were two kinds of girls in Laredo: hoodrats and fresas. A fresa—literally, strawberry—was a preppy, often light-skinned Latina from Laredo’s wealthier north side. The fresa wore lip gloss, while the hoodrat wore bright red lipstick. Where the fresa preferred sweaters and fur-lined boots, the hoodrat stomped around in Nikes and cutoff T-shirts. Where the fresa feigned reluctance, said no soy puta before pulling down her thong, the rat gave up the pepa without a hassle. Ashley was a hoodrat, del pueblo, pal pueblo: from the hood, for the hood—at her core, a sweet girl from one of Lazteca’s most shattered, CPS-worthy homes.
When one of her friends offered Gabriel a pill, Ashley said: “No! He’s not taking any.” But telling Gabriel not to do something only ensured that he did it. As they had, he crushed a pill, poured the powder into a soda, drank it down, and BOOM!
Thus began a routine: Cranking the stereo, Ashley and Gabriel drove around and talked for hours. One roche became two, then three: an instant good feeling, a cruising mood. Chatty. No worries. No shame. Ashley became Gabriel’s ruca, his girl. A steady date but something less than a girlfriend, she dedicated the song “Dilemma,” by Nelly and Kelly Rowland, to him.
The pills, which were used largely for recreation, not rape, worked differently on different people. Some became emotional and cried. Others went nuts, hallucinated, jumped off bridges. For Gabriel, the roches relaxed and desensitized him. On Sunday nights, everyone went to San Bernardo Avenue, a cruising street next to Martin High, one block west of I-35, where the owners of customized Chevy S10s and Dodge Rams showed off their butterfly doors and Forgiato rims that cost more than the cars themselves. Gabriel would note who owned which ride, making a mental catalog of Laredo’s biggest smugglers. His courage amplified by the roches, he walked down the middle of San Bernardo, against traffic. Swerving between the low riders as they roared by, the world seemed harmless.
Later during freshman year, Gabriel was walking in the hall when a member of a gang called Movida bumped into him on purpose. Many in Movida had played football with Gabriel in middle school. But Gabriel’s older brother, Luis, was in the rival gang, the Sieteros. When Movida saw Gabriel hanging out with the Sieteros, they begrudged him for it. Every few weeks he cut his hair at Nydia’s Salon—Movida turf. One day they saw him there and asked what he represented. “I’m not into little kids’ shit,” he said, mimicking what he’d once heard his uncle Raul say. “I represent my hood, Lazteca.” The boys of Movida said they had no problem with Gabriel. But now their opinion had apparently changed.
That same afternoon, Gabriel asked Luis for the keys to their mom’s Escort so he could leave school and escape a potential confrontation with Movida gang members. As he walked through the parking lot he heard people behind him cussing him out. When he turned around, he saw two dozen Movida members walking toward him, and prepared for a beating. As they approached, Luis—short, with a hulking physique—came outside and stepped in between Gabriel and the mob. The leader of Movida threw a punch at Luis, who ducked and came back with an uppercut that knocked the boy down. He stood up, pretended to walk away, then turned around and slashed Luis’s eyebrow with a sucker punch.
After the fight broke up, Gabriel felt humiliated. He knew you never let someone else fight your fights, and vowed to make sure it never happened again.
Gabriel started hanging out with the Sieteros, going to their parties, and looking for opportunities to be useful. The gang needed guns, such as .380s and 9-millimeters. A Laredo cop sold guns out of the trunk of his car. He had law enforcement catalogs for the kids to peruse, and would call them with news of special inventory. The cop—who lived on Lincoln Street, a block down from the Cardonas—even had grenade launchers and the flash grenades to test them.
FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, Laredo ran on the old patrón system of political favoritism. J. C. Martin, the namesake of Martin High, was Laredo’s mayor from 1954 to 1978. The original patrón, Martin maintained power by stewarding immigrant-friendly policies for the mostly Hispanic city. No ID cards. Abundant public housing. Loose limits on welfare. Martin could make millions of dollars disappear into a city-street department that paved only the road surrounding his mansion. He was corrupt as hell, but he brought out the vote.
The poorest areas of Laredo—the west side, home to Martin High; south-central, home to Lazteca; and the south side, home to the absolute worst ghetto, Santo Niño—were all bound by geography: the river and the border. After the city’s population doubled during the 1990s, to nearly 250,000, real estate, still controlled by the oldest and wealthiest Laredo families—the Martins, Brunis, Killams, Walkers, and Longorias—remained some of the highest priced in Texas, which helped keep the middle class lean and locked the poor out of land ownership.
In addition to the official ghettos in central and south Laredo—Lazteca, Siete Viejo, Cantaranas, the Heights, Santo Niño—Laredo was ringed by communities, or camps, called “colonias.” After World War II, developers began using agriculturally valueless land to create these unincorporated subdivisions without infrastructure or utilities, then sold the properties to immigrants who made low payments but didn’t receive title until they made the final payment.
There were no members-at-large on the city council, no one representing politically significant voting blocks. Each neighborhood, rather, was a ward with its own councilman. The councilman would build a community center, or maybe improve a playground, then get reelected again and again on a hundred votes. Not even the mayor could propose a city-wide ordinance.
“Almost everyone here’s Hispanic, and even the handful of gringos are assimilated,” said Ray Keck, the president of Texas A&M International University. The gringo son of European immigrants, Keck grew up just north of Laredo, went to Princeton University, married a Hispanic woman from Laredo, and then taught at the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut. “Since there’s little ethnic tension, there’s an easier, more natural system of subjugation, and the social classes tend to stagnate.”
Every school in Laredo has a colonia affiliated with it, and the colonia kids are bused in. Whenever crime becomes a political issue, local media blame the colonias, depicting them as havens of depravity and filth. Never mind that Laredo’s biggest criminal families often came from the upper classes on the fancy north side. La Gaby knew it, same as Robert and Ronnie Garcia knew it. When a kid from United North or Alexander High got in trouble, you never heard about it, because his parents were related to attorneys and judges. The wealthy walked away with a lecture while the average José sat in the county jail.
In the Laredo Independent School District—which contained Martin, Nixon, and Cigarroa high schools—97 percent of students were considered “economically disadvantaged,” and the other 3 percent just didn’t fill out the paperwork. At Martin, the principal acknowledged that he fostered two groups: those who would go into the drug business, and those who would chase them. Cops, agents, lawyers, judges, court workers, probation officers; not to mention diesel mechanics, truck yard owners, and warehouses that stored seized contraband for the government—the list of jobs created by drug prohibition was long.
But everyone, it seemed, was mixed up in something. Laredo’s council members lived on kickbacks. Judges favored dealers who supported their campaigns. The bail business was the biggest hustle of all. Bondsmen often split their money with prosecutors who helped recover seized vehicles and get their clients deals. For a fee, a corrections officer at the Webb County jail helped arrestees get their bail lowered. The corrections officer’s son was Laredo’s district attorney, though the DA was never implicated in the scheme.
On its high knoll—surrounded by coconut-less palm trees; adjacent to a huge port and a prized smuggling corridor—Lazteca, also known as the Devil’s Corner, was magnificently positioned for a jack of black-market trades. Immigrants. Narcotics. Cars. Weapons. Cash. Here, in Underworld University, a brave and resourceful boy was a useful thing.
ONE NIGHT, DURING THE SUMMER between Gabriel’s freshman and sophomore year, the Sieteros were throwing a party when the girlfriend of the gang’s leader screamed from a seated position on the ground. When people came to help her up, she said she’d been hit in the face by “a short kid” who was drunk.
Twelve years old and still under five feet, Rosalio Reta worried that his given name sounded girlish. A fan of The Simpsons, he’d recently changed it to Bartolomeo. Friends and family now called him Bart.
Bart’s large family was typical of Laredo’s poor. His father, a construction worker, and his mother, a beautician, both born in Mexico, earned a combined $400 a week and received $1,200 a month in food stamps. The second of eight children—four boys, four girls—Bart was born in Houston. He lived across the street from the Cardonas and attended J. C. Martin Elementary until second grade, when his family’s house burned down. The Reta family moved one neighborhood north, to Siete Viejo, where their dilapidated wood-frame mobile home lacked windows and doors. In the bedroom that Bart shared with his siblings, his favorite item was a Navy SEAL poster he stole from a local recruitment center. At night, when the family fell asleep together while watching TV, Bart would leave and walk to a nearby housing project where Sietero gang members gathered to smoke weed, drink beer, and play basketball beneath the twenty-four-hour safety lights.
Bart ventured out on these nights because he wanted to live his own life. He was tired of not having what he needed, of forgoing dinner on some nights so that his little sisters and brothers could have more food. To have something, he learned, you had to work for it. He was willing to work. He joined the Sieteros, and became a favorite of the gang’s leader.
But now, at the party, Bart chugged Presidente brandy in the backyard when that same leader approached him, pulled out a gun, and put the barrel to Bart’s head. Disrespecting a gang leader’s girlfriend was grounds for a beating; hitting her in the face could warrant something worse. Some of the Sieteros discussed taking Bart to a nearby field and shooting him. One gang member said killing Bart wouldn’t be smart because the girls at the party would tell on them.
Gabriel stood nearby, waiting for an opportunity to intervene on behalf of his childhood friend, the tough kid who always played football with the bigger boys and just wanted to fit in. Several gang members began to beat Bart, who tried to fight back but couldn’t. Gabriel eventually broke it up, and dragged Bart away.
After that evening, Gabriel and Bart began to distance themselves from the Sieteros and spend more time with each other. While they walked near Gabriel’s house in Lazteca one evening, Movida did a drive-by.
Gabriel had been shot at twice before; he would hear the bullets whistle past and imagine The Matrix, imagine that if he only raised his hand here, extended it there, he might just catch one. He would feel a chill, a tremble, and then battle mode entered. But this time he was hit on the back and head with shotgun fragments. Getting shot, he now discovered, was different than getting shot at. He didn’t feel the tiny fragments when they entered. Just burning and cold drips. Then humiliation, a tingle of rage on his lips, the unbearable feeling that someone had the upper hand.
TWO TEENS SHOT IN DRIVE-BY, wrote the Laredo Morning Times.
The cops recovered casings from the scene and said the investigation was ongoing. Investigation my ass, Gabriel thought after getting out of the hospital. When he retaliated, shooting one of his rivals in the leg, it was a big turning point for the fifteen-year-old. He became known as a vato de huevos, someone who had the balls to pull the trigger, a gatillero. Most important, he now fought his own fights. People felt safe in his presence. His friends wanted to be around him. When absent from a gathering, people asked after his whereabouts. The respect was intoxicating. He started to carry a gun.
His body changed. His bronzed, hairless chest was still concave, but his shoulders now popped. His lips grew plush; his nose straight and strong; his hands hard. He traded the Ricky Martin pompadour for the newer hairstyle, the Eminem fade.
Like any teenage boy developing a posture and attitude toward the world—a man’s personality—cultural models imparted to him life’s bitter realities and the noble ways of coping. In the shack next to his mother’s house at 207 Lincoln, Gabriel and Luis watched Blood In, Blood Out, a movie about teen relatives from East Los Angeles, repeatedly. After the movie’s characters get in a lethal fight with a rival gang, their paths diverge. Paco goes to the military and becomes a cop. Miklo goes to prison and becomes a gang leader. Gabriel understood the message of Paco: You can come from the hood and still make something of your life. But he identified most with Miklo. The heroic way the character stays true to his code and becomes the leader of his gang—“the baddest man in prison”—was an appealing fantasy.
On the wall of the shack, Gabriel scribbled lyrics and poetry by Tupac Shakur. He took off his shirt, smoked weed, and listened to “Hit ’Em Up,” “Still Ballin’,” and “Hail Mary”—songs about street life and getting revenge. Tupac wrote his best songs in prison, lived the life he rhapsodized, battled dirty cops, and survived assailants. Gabriel danced and shadowboxed with the music.
Five shots couldn’t drop me—I took it and smiled . . .
“Turn that Two-pack shit off!” La Gaby would yell from across the dirt driveway, but Gabriel ignored her. As he moved around spinning, punching the air—his jeans sagging below the waistband of his plaid Tommy Hilfiger boxers—ideas sprang into his mind; principles crystallized into code. It was about being en la punta del cañón, at the front of the barrel.
Be the guy who goes first!
Die for the homies!
Gabriel’s close friends frequented the shack. The boys—Gabriel, Bart, and another close friend named Wences Tovar, known as Tucan for his mighty nose—plus a cast of associated homies from Lazteca and Siete Viejo traded issues of Vibe magazine, and followed every twist of hip-hop’s East Coast–West Coast beef. Reading about the homicidal music mogul Suge Knight and the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, they saw their own habitat reflected in that celebrated ether. The music wasn’t just called gangsta rap. It was real.
Even more so when Carlos Coy—aka South Park Mexican, a Houston local—hit it big with songs like “Thug Girl” and “Illegal Amigos.” South Park Mexican, wrote the Houston Press, “was a hero to the shaven-headed brown kids in baggy print shirts and jeans, those sons of yard men, road builders, roofers and dishwashers, the youths caught between two cultures but not particularly valued by either.” SPM became a conduit for their rage and despair, but also for their dreams. He rapped for all the crazy muthafuckas. He let them know he’d been lost and needed help just like them. That’s why those who followed him were the sickest, most ill people in this world, because that’s who SPM wanted to help and change. He dropped outta high school cause he was tired of selling crack to your homeboy’s mom, and feeling like a worthless wetback. As a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old high school freshman, SPM also worried about going to jail for statutory rape.
Gabriel and Luis used the shack to entertain female friends. On the outside of the shack, facing Lincoln Street, they hung a poster of a curvy Chicana lusting over a bottle of Bud Light.
When sophomore year started, a truant officer found rolling papers and a bullet in Gabriel’s pocket. It would be the last day he set foot in Martin High.