I begin my day at five a.m. as a dispatcher for a medical transportation service,” Gabriela Cardona explained to Judge Danny Valdez when summoned to juvenile court to answer for her second son’s truancy at reform school. “Judge, I don’t know what he does or who he sees. He goes to Nuevo Laredo and doesn’t return until four in the morning.”
Back in 1987, as a young judge, Danny Valdez created the first gang summit in the Martin High cafeteria. The gang leaders would come in, shake hands, share a pizza lunch, and then return to hostilities a week later. But the initial hopeful stir the gang summit always created meant terrific PR, and the summits became regular features of springtime at places like Martin High and United South. Judge Valdez knew other ways of reforming bad kids; a week in juvenile detention, for instance, could help straighten a kid out. But since Laredo’s juvenile detention center had only twenty-four beds, most offenders were released to their parents. Word on the street: All you need is a parent to show up and they let you go!
By the early 2000s, as street gangs with cross-border ties proliferated, Judge Valdez now dealt with one of the country’s highest rates of youth arrests for violent crimes. Gangs used to fight with their fists; now they fought with weapons. A youngster was arrested for a violent crime in the city, on average, every other day.
But what Judge Valdez saw in his court, largely, were single-parent families going to hell. Parental involvement, he knew, went a long way. He tried ordering parents to sit with their delinquent kids in school, say, for a morning or two per week. The strategy could be effective, unless it was unrealistic for a parent to follow her child to school, which in most cases it was—as it was for Gabriela Cardona.
For her son’s truancy, Judge Valdez fined La Gaby two hundred dollars and told her to accompany Gabriel to his reform school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He also ordered Gabriel to attend the Military Disciplinary Program, a weekend “boot camp” that enforced the consequences of delinquency and disrespect.
“Disrespect for what?” Gabriel asked his homies back in the shack on Lincoln Street.
The boys laughed. Laredo devoted every February to a monthlong celebration of George Washington’s birthday, but these kids from Lazteca had no reverence for it. The driving principles of America, they believed, were waging economic wars and plundering other societies. Veterans Day supposedly commemorated lives lost in the war for freedom. But what freedom? they asked. Oil had nothing to with freedom!
On Televisa, a Mexican TV network, they watched captured smugglers on both sides of the border paraded in front of the camera amid bales of marijuana and bricks of cocaine; money; and guns. Far from cautionary examples, they considered the handcuffed men to be pesados, heavyweights.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS PRIOR TO GABRIEL and La Gaby appearing before Judge Valdez, the rolling papers and the bullet had landed him in Lara Academy, the first layer of Laredo’s overburdened reform system. At Lara, a World War II veteran spoke about the horrors of war and the importance of an education. He described pulling limbs out of the South Pacific and confronting Japan’s kamikaze pilots, who believed that to die for the emperor was to live forever. It was a weird way of thinking, the veteran said, but the suicide bombings on 9/11 were similar to the kamikaze missions. He concluded by saying that environmental influences were no excuse for delinquency.
When Gabriel showed up to Lara Academy buzzed one Monday morning, after a weekend of drinking, he was transferred to the next layer of the reform system—the Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program. At JJAEP, known as “the Alternative,” mobile homes converted to classrooms formed a square around a basketball court. Students worked on learning modules at their own pace. For this stage in the system, somewhere between high school and prison, Judge Danny Valdez and the other juvenile judges who oversaw JJAEP struggled with just how prisonlike the Alternative should be. For instance, video cameras trained on the students were a source of controversy. Were the cameras advisable safety precautions, or too Big Brother? Did they negate the sense of confidence and self-worth that the staff tried to instill in students? It was hard to say. Mostly, the cameras captured sex during recess, and footage of the girl who gave out blowjobs after school.
But the teachers and supervisors made it clear: If you didn’t learn to behave, you would be sent to Texas Youth Commission, TYC, juvie—the junior prison that prepared you for the big house.
When Gabriel tried to reenroll at Martin High, as a sophomore, the principal advised him that it was better to catch up on credits in the Alternative, then return to Martin and graduate with his class. If Gabriel felt frustrated by the principal’s dismissal, he was also too busy with underworld pursuits to dwell on his school failures for long. Accompanied by Bart, or some other associate, Gabriel stole cars in Laredo and sold them across the border to a man named Mario Flores Soto, known as Meme Flores, whom he met through a Lazteca family.
Meme—pronounced “MEH-may”—headed one of Nuevo Laredo’s criminal organizations. Until then, Gabriel had only seen the money to be made from drugs going north. Meme showed him the other side: Mexico’s demand for smuggled cars and weapons. From the 9 mm he graduated to bigger guns like the Mini-14, an assault rifle.
Uninhibited, thanks to the roches, which he now took with increasing frequency, ingesting as many as five per day, Gabriel stole cars and trucks with a methodical efficiency that sometimes dissolved into quick frustration if he felt a partner wasn’t sharing an equal load of the risk. Having established a reputation as someone who was “always down to ride,” ready to tackle any criminal opportunity, Gabriel felt that others in his circle, like his older brother Luis, wanted the benefits without the risks. When Gabriel forced Luis to steal a truck from a gas station, his brother tried to pull himself together. Luis walked into the gas station, but then just kept walking, past the vehicle and into the night.
Bart was the only homie whose fearlessness and work ethic matched Gabriel’s. The day Gabriel “jacked,” or stole, a customized Ford F-150 pickup truck from Lazteca, Bart was in flip-flops but he still sprinted behind the truck and threw himself into the bed while people from the neighborhood looked and laughed.
NOW, SENTENCED TO THE MILITARY boot camp for skipping the Alternative, Gabriel, sleepless and still drunk from the night before, was determined to “win” the boot camp when La Gaby dropped him at the first weekend session. He forgot to bring his own water bottle—a boot camp rule—and almost passed out from dehydration during the marching, running, push-ups, and sit-ups. During the break a congressman addressed them: “Half of you are not going to finish high school. I’ve seen a lot of good people end up in bad places, and we don’t want that to happen to you.”
Gabriel partied again that Saturday evening and refused to return to boot camp the next morning, so his mother called the cops. A boot camp sergeant, seeing the police escort, went hard on Gabriel that day.
Get back, get back, you’re too slow!
I can’t hear you!
Faster, faster!
Fall in!
The motivational yelling was thought to be effective because these kids lacked an authority figure. But the sergeant didn’t want Gabriel there if he wasn’t going to obey orders. He made it clear to Gabriel that if Gabriel wanted, he could quit, then go through the same boot camp in TYC. “Okay,” Gabriel said, and walked outside, as if to wait for a ride to juvie. When the sergeant went back inside, Gabriel ran to Lazteca, and juvie waited. After getting caught for a drive-by with Bart, a month later, at the end of 2003, Gabriel finally landed in TYC. “We meet again,” said the sergeant. After a few weeks of juvie—where Gabriel saw Ashley, the one who introduced him to roches, now pushing a broom across the cafeteria floor—the probation officer cut the seventeen-year-old a break and sent him to rehab, the “youth recovery home.” But all Gabriel saw in rehab were drug fiends. He didn’t feel he belonged, so he escaped.
All the while, he never felt like a gangster in training. Nor like he was making a conscious decision to go one way or the other. It was never “This or that.” It was always just “Okay, let’s do this.” You get thrown out of high school and placed in reform school. You get thrown out of reform school and placed in the Alternative. You get thrown out of the Alternative and sent to juvie. By then you are long gone, and the system appears to be funneling you from one stage of dereliction to the next. Nothing, it seemed, could halt his slide.
In Gabriel’s mind, this perpetual state of delinquency, bouncing between reform schools and underworld pursuits, led somewhere. His trouble with school was no proxy for failure. A militant work ethic burned through the fog of the roches, and shaped into ambition the energy released by their powerful effects. He ran guns and made money. He stole cars and made money. During slow times, he and a friend broke into an abandoned theater in Lazteca and stole boxes of clothes and other goods stored there by local merchants. When you found a calling, Gabriel believed, you devoted yourself to it. And though he’d never felt beholden to any group, he now felt as though he were drifting toward some entity that merited his respect.
This activity with Meme, Gabriel thought, “wasn’t kid shit no more.” No slinging nicks and dimes. No stupid beefs. Meme and his associates in Nuevo Laredo were serious men who stuck to codes and took care of their own. Meme’s partner resided in a Nuevo Laredo prison where his cell had leather furniture, a kitchen, and a flat-screen TV. Friends visited. Women entertained while guards brought beer. How terrible was that?
So when Gabriel broke free of rehab and sprinted through the onion fields of Webb County, kicking up clouds of dust on the way back to Lazteca, he didn’t ditch the system aimlessly. He ran back to these enterprises, which benefited his mother, aunts, uncles, and brothers in the form of cash. His criminal lifestyle also meant he met new people constantly, and affiliated with desirable underworld elements. Whatever dreams he’d had, at six or eight or ten, of becoming a lawyer, of wowing audiences with his charisma . . . well, he was taking his talents elsewhere.
It was now 2004, and, according to underworld rumor, a new group with a “suicidal philosophy” was taking over Nuevo Laredo. Some referred to them as la gente nueva—the new people.
TO GABRIEL, ONE LAZTECA “HOODIE”—A homeboy from the neighborhood—stood apart from the others. Richard Jasso was the closest thing Lazteca had to smuggling royalty. A couple years older than Gabriel, Richard lived across the street with his wife’s family. Richard didn’t work for a gang, didn’t have to. When he was six, he started smuggling immigrants with his grandmother. At eight, his father took him on coke runs to Houston.
At sixteen, Richard registered a “ghost company” called R.J.’s Trucking Inc. It specialized in shipping bulk loads of Mexican pottery and plastic scrap, which he could buy cheaply at the border and use as a “cover” for his marijuana loads. He shipped tons of marijuana to places like Georgia and North Carolina. He searched online for companies in those states that dealt in pottery or plastic scrap, and listed them as buyers on the shipping manifest, the “bill of lading,” which contained a phone number for a female friend who answered in a sexy secretary’s voice: “R.J.’s Trucking.”
Richard purchased used Freightliner trucks, then stole permits and license plates from other trucks that looked like them. Instead of paying $8,000 apiece to buy cargo boxes, he rented them from a guy who waited two weeks before reporting the box stolen. By then Richard had taken a load or two north, and left the cargo box in some area where the cops could easily find it and return it to the owner. By seventeen, Richard had introduced roughly fifty tons of marijuana into the States.
But marijuana was just a start. Now, at nineteen, thanks to a connection brokered by his sister’s husband, Richard was adding a more lucrative product to his business: cocaine. Richard bought a new line of trucks, as well as insurance and permits, hired a full-time mechanic at a thousand bucks a week, and rented a warehouse in San Antonio, where he and his brother-in-law now spent most of their time. Richard transitioned from the hood-chic style of Guess jeans and Polo boots to the business-casual uniform of DKNY pants and Steve Madden shoes—“the preppy college guy look,” as he referred to it. He offered to take Gabriel, who was still working for Meme, on as a bodyguard, errand boy, and courier.
Richard represented much of what Gabriel wanted. He was married to a woman who came from a family of hustlers herself. Richard had partied in Miami Beach with one of his cocaine clients, a Cuban gentleman who supplied South Florida. In Lazteca, Richard told exotic stories, set in places like “Ocean Boulevard,” about being at the Mansion nightclub and drinking Cristal champagne straight from the bottle while the most beautiful women you ever saw, dressed in the classiest clothes, made the air taste sweet. It wasn’t bullshit, either. Gabriel and Luis, who also worked for Richard, saw Richard’s setup in San Antonio. They saw how the VIP sections at the most popular clubs, like Planeta Bar-Rio and Ritmo Latino, were always reserved for Richard and his brother-in-law and whoever tagged along. How Buchanan’s scotch and Patrón tequila were always on the table, and how Richard handed envelopes of several hundred dollars each to the person in charge of security, the waitress, and the club manager, who made his office available for activities that required discretion. One time, when Richard brought his mother to a Los Tigres del Norte concert at Planeta Bar-Rio, a couple occupied the table he wanted near the stage. Richard offered them two thousand dollars to move. A Volvo, an Avalanche, a GMC Denali, and a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Joe Brand, Versace, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Prada, GBX, Fendi, Rolex, and custom jewelry. Family dinners at the best Mexican restaurants with the mariachis playing requests all night. Richard lived a dream.
He had lots of “weekend girls” who loved his warehouse of cocaine. The manager at Embassy Suites also loved him. The carousing led to fights at home. But his wife and kids lacked nothing. His mother-in-law, a friend of La Gaby, drove a new SUV. Every time Richard dropped another five thousand dollars at Toys “R” Us, the cashiers asked if he didn’t want to adopt their kids. Gabriel noted the lust in the hoodrats’ eyes when Richard drove his Hummer through Lazteca, Assassyn chrome wheels glimmering in the sun like knife blades spinning. Even Richard’s wife’s friends flirted with him openly. Handsome in a way that was less thuggish than Gabriel, but somehow also less delicate, Richard was a gregarious guy with the magnetic quality of someone who made you feel better about yourself, whose beaming, big-toothed smile seemed to say, “I’ll show you a very good time.”
In Lazteca, if someone owned a flashy car, such as a Tahoe or Escalade, customized with nice rims, a stereo, and tinted windows, people considered the guy to be se mueve, pushing, and he was respected. But if he had multiple such vehicles he was considered to be se mueve pesado, moving heavy, and that label came with a different level of respect. In the eyes of the community, Richard was a model young man, a young pesado who was “about his business.” In Lazteca, to be about one’s business was about the best thing you could be. Gabriel envied him.
In Richard’s employ, Gabriel’s awareness of success expanded from trappings—Versace, Mercedes—to behavior. How did power act? How was it established and how was it maintained? Richard had a business frame of mind. He was social, always on the lookout for upstate buyers, piojos who could bulk up his bottom line. Richard made his aptitude for violence known, but left it to others whenever possible. Gabriel saw how carefully Richard formed trust, and how quickly it could be broken. Richard even accused his own wife of “ripping loads,” stealing drugs from him. Loyalty was fleeting in a world with such large amounts of money at stake.
Richard, now managing operations at the San Antonio warehouse, made $15,000 a week, sometimes twice that. And yet he seemed to think that paying Gabriel $300 a week and covering the clubs was adequate. What about the loads Gabriel ran to Austin? Did Richard think Gabriel was too dumb to know he deserved commission? Well, maybe the next shipment would have to go missing, and maybe the shipment after that as well.
In a traditional, arm’s-length smuggling deal between professionals—in which the Laredo drug supplier hires a transporter to carry a drug load to a northern buyer—it’s quite hard for one party to rip the other off. Both supplier and transporter protect themselves with something called a “letter.” The supplier wants to protect himself against the transporter selling the drugs to another buyer, pocketing the entire sale price, then claiming that the vehicle crashed or that the load was seized by law enforcement. The transporter wants to protect himself against the supplier—who might be an informant—“dropping a dime” on him, reporting the details of the transporter’s vehicle to the cops. In the “letter,” the transporter writes the details of the vehicle he’s going to use to transport the load, seals the letter in an envelope, and gives it to the supplier. The supplier can open the letter, later, only if something goes wrong with the deal. If the transporter returns with a story about a vehicle crash or a seized load, the supplier can confirm the story by opening the letter and comparing the vehicle details to, say, police paperwork or a report in the news. But if the deal goes as planned, the supplier must return the letter to the transporter unopened.
Normally, Richard used a letter with his transporters, but not with Gabriel because Gabriel was an old friend and he only moved small loads.
And so, with his childhood friend Wences “Tucan” Tovar, Gabriel jacked fifty pounds of weed from Richard and pushed it north, all the way to a connection in Springfield, Illinois. He jacked another load—two hundred pounds—and drove it to San Antonio. This time, however, the dope was concealed in a steel box inside the gas tank. They bought an electric saw, and parked in a nice neighborhood. Sparks flew as they tried to cut the tank in half. People gathered in their yards to watch. When the sparks ignited the fuel, the truck caught fire. Gabriel scrambled for a pail and a hose while spectators ushered their children inside, but the flames engulfed the truck too quickly so Gabriel and Wences ran away. Gabriel told Wences not to come around the hood for a couple of weeks. He told Richard that Wences had been arrested.
Tucan in the pen? It was plausible.
Born in Texas and raised in Lazteca until the age of ten, Wences moved across the border to Mexico when his dad “caught” a smuggling charge and had to flee. Wences moved back to Laredo at fifteen. Following his own early stints in Lara Academy and JJAEP, Wences applied to return to Martin High. The principal gave him one last chance not to fuck up. But when a sophomore challenged him to a fight over a girl, Wences cut open the guy’s cheek with a punch. The guy said Wences hit him with brass knuckles, which wasn’t true, but Wences landed in county jail for a few months, then pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and got probation. Word spread: Wences took a “felony two” charge—a second-degree felony—and walked away with only probation!
“Get a job!” his mother screamed. Wences labored at Expediters Inc., a warehouse on the west side, but didn’t like working for minimum wage. He cared about having enough money to own a decent ride, smoke pot, entertain preppy girls from the north side, and buy some flashy jewelry, the thick chains, esclavas, that were prized in the hood.
Having lived on both sides of the border, Wences, like Gabriel, had a wide network, and they would need it, because their association with Richard would not last much longer.
MOST OF GABRIEL’S SOCIAL LIFE now took place across the border. In the Nuevo Laredo nightclubs, where teenagers from Mexico and the States hung out, the hoodrats beckoned, their sweat-soaked tanks clinging to their breasts as they thumb-hooked booty shorts and hula-hooped their hips to Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina.” They guzzled Budweiser and grinded against whichever baller’s pocket showed the “gangster bulge” of a good week. The long-braided fresas congregated in the corner and sipped Boone’s Farm, the bottom-shelf wine, while the rat waited for DJ Kuri to announce the next lap dance. Purple strobes flashed electric on rolling asses; eyes pulsed, teeth glowed.
There was a cap culture among border youngsters. On occasion Gabriel wore an L.A. Dodgers hat for “La Amalia,” the Nuevo Laredo neighborhood controlled by Meme. Americans with a little money, especially those connected to prominent gangsters like Meme, had power in the Nuevo Laredo club scene. Most Americans went to Señor Frog’s, which was stricter on security, more of a hookup scene. Clubs like 57th Street had less security, so they attracted a more thuggish crowd.
But as long as Gabriel didn’t piss off the wrong people, his work for Meme Flores, which had continued while he worked for Richard, made the clubs a veritable zone of impunity. One night, roched out and feeling untouchable, Gabriel approached an enemy at the 57th Street nightclub and said, “What’s up, fucker?” This enemy was a former friend. But following a disagreement over a gun swap, the friend had become hostile, at one point sucker-punching Gabriel, then threatening his younger brother. Gabriel had trusted the fool. And now this. Nah.
The roches having severed any last thread of restraint, he called the enemy outside and pummeled the larger boy to the edge of consciousness. It was the worst beating Gabriel’s crew had ever seen. The boy was driven back to Laredo and airlifted to San Antonio that evening. Gabriel now had the reputation of someone who nearly killed someone with his hands.
On the American side of the border, back in Lazteca, Gabriel’s business relationships frayed. Richard Jasso, suspicious over the missing loads, stopped giving Gabriel work. Smuggling, Gabriel learned, was a tough game. The moving parts, the responsibilities.
His separation from Richard was a setback. But he still had Meme—the cars, the guns—and who knew where that might lead?
I. Literally an ox or a beast, güey—pronounced “way”—is border slang for “dude,” or “idiot,” depending on how it’s used.