What are you doing here?” the man who looked like Rambo asked again, English and Spanish bleeding into one another. He took a grenade off his chest belt, tossed it from hand to hand like a tennis ball.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said, his jaw sore; his eyes hard, glazed, drifting.
“Where are you from?”
“We go to college in Texas,” Gabriel said. “We work in McDonald’s.”
“Oh yeah? What do you study?”
“Law.”
“Bullshit!”
“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.”
He stepped closer to Gabriel. “Se mira tranquilo. Demasiado tranquilo. ¿Porque?” You look calm. Too calm. Why?
“Yo no sé.” I don’t know.
“Hijo de tu pinche madre. Te crees bien verga.” Son of a fucking bitch. You think you’re all that. “¿Con quien jala? ¿A quién le andabas vendiendo la troca?” Who do you work with? Who were you selling that car to?
Earlier that night, Gabriel and Wences Tovar had taken a Jeep Cherokee to Nuevo Laredo. Wences said he had a new connection, a Mexican cop who would pay a little more than the standard rate of one thousand dollars per SUV. Sure, Gabriel said, always game to expand his network. He and Wences drove to the Nuevo Laredo police barracks, and asked for the cop. They met blank stares. So they left. It was dark. As they headed back to Guerrero Street, which would return them to International Bridge One and Texas, a Mexican police truck pulled them over. Gabriel and Wences were handcuffed, led into the brush, and told to stand still. The cops made a call.
La gente nueva, Gabriel knew, were cleaning Nuevo Laredo, wiping away past dealers and putting a halt to all local drug selling. If you possessed drugs, and they didn’t know you, it meant someone was selling them to you, or you were selling them without authority. You’d be tortured until you spilled your source. Gabriel hurried to step through his handcuffs, arranging them at his front, and reached inside his jeans. He was about to throw the baggie into the brush, but thought better of it and swallowed all five roches instead.
A caravan of black Suburbans arrived on the side of the road, police lights flickering. These people didn’t look like cops. They wore all black. Gabriel and Wences were blindfolded and put in the back of a truck. Ten minutes later they arrived at another place, got out, and were escorted into some kind of structure. The blindfolds removed, their eyes adjusted to a narrow, windowless room. It looked like a caballeriza, a horse stall made of brick. Beyond the open door was a circular driveway and what appeared to be a large ranch, an ejido with a bunch of small houses on it. They were left alone. More Suburbans arrived.
Gabriel and Wences had been searched for guns, but Gabriel still had his cell phone. He dialed his older brother.
“¿Qué onda, güey?” his brother answered. What’s up, dude?
“They picked us up across,” Gabriel said. “Now we’re at some finca and I don’t know whether . . .” Gabriel tried to spit the words but couldn’t accelerate his speech.
More men were getting out of the Suburbans. In the illumination of headlights, a cloud of dust rose and hung in the air, moved forward, then dissolved. “Qué?” Gabriel heard his brother say before snapping the phone shut. From the shadow plodded a phalanx of men led by an individual wearing a gun holstered on one thigh, a knife on the other: Miguel Treviño.
“Who were you just calling?” Miguel asked.
“Nobody, sir.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” Miguel threw his head back, flexed his neck, and looked down his nose with penetrating eyes. “Are you fucked up?”
“No, sir,” Gabriel said, then glanced at Wences for confirmation. Terrified, and without roches to steel his confidence, Wences’s sober eyes looked to Gabriel as if they had a conscience of their own, and wanted to get out of the sockets and run away. Gabriel pursed his lips, but couldn’t stop himself: He erupted in laughter.
Miguel, surprised, knocked Gabriel down with a powerful hook. Gabriel fell; was helped up. More questions were asked, and more bullshit answers provided.
The grenade came out. Miguel left the horse stall.
Gabriel now told Wences that he loved him, and that it was good to have been friends. Wences, his heart beating wildly, couldn’t understand how Gabriel remained so calm. Wences didn’t want to die! Gabriel continued: It was a shame to go like this, but there were worse ways. They both watched Miguel confer with the others outside, holding the grenade against his hip like a pitcher cups a baseball.
A thought popped into Gabriel’s mind: Meme.
“I work for Cero Dos!” Gabriel shouted, using the code name for Meme Flores: 02.
Miguel turned around. “What?”
“I bring him cars and trucks. I also cross juguetes”—toys, guns.
Miguel laughed. “Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t know who we were dealing with. I didn’t want to be saying something to the wrong people. Nuevo Laredo is still mixed.”
“It’s not mixed anymore. We’re the only dominant ones.”
Gabriel nodded. Miguel explained that the cop they tried to sell the troca to was a contra, an enemy, and had been borrado del mapa the previous day.
Thirty minutes passed, then Meme arrived.
“Yeah, he’s my guy,” Meme said. “Get him off.”
Gabriel and Wences were uncuffed.
Meme introduced Miguel to the boys as a comandante for Los Zetas. Meme had never met Wences. But Meme told Miguel that he could vouch for anyone whom Gabriel called a pareja, a partner. Gabriel, Meme explained, was a stellar worker, a firme vato who supplied Meme with vehicles and guns from Texas.
In his mind, Gabriel now made the connection: All those stolen trucks and smuggled guns went, ultimately, to la gente nueva, the Zetas. Neither Gabriel nor Wences had heard of Miguel Treviño until this evening, but they now understood him to be a high-ranking member of the new cartel.
“You can call me Cuarenta,” Miguel told the boys, referring to his Zeta call sign, Z-40. He slapped Gabriel on the back. No hard feelings, eh?
That night, Miguel, Gabriel, Wences, and Meme drove around Nuevo Laredo in a caravan. Gabriel smelled burning rubber and branches; outside, he saw ragged groups of huddled Mexicans stretching their arms over tambos, fifty-five gallon drums, nudging each other aside for access to the flame. The driver called ahead to a restaurant, and by the time they arrived it was empty.
Over dinner, Miguel elicited a sense of Gabriel’s work with Meme, and inquired about the boys’ legal problems in Texas. Wences, sober and still recovering emotionally from their near-death experience, didn’t speak much. But Gabriel sensed an opportunity. Perhaps his connection to Meme could be converted into something bigger. Gabriel spoke to Miguel confidently, as if they were equals. Despite the pills, his youthful mind remained a trap for details and dates. He unfurled a litany of transgressions, as if enumerating bullet points on a resume: drugs, weapons, assaults.
Miguel listened. Boys like these could be useful.
A YEAR EARLIER, IN 2003, the Gulf Cartel leader and Zeta founder, Osiel Cárdenas, had been apprehended in Mexico. The DEA-led manhunt for Osiel, which lasted several years, entailed tracking Osiel’s girlfriends and working with producers of the TV show America’s Most Wanted during what DEA reports referred to as the “media blitz” part of the operation. The Zetas tried to break Osiel out of prison with a squad of helicopters, but the attempt failed when the weather turned bad and a pilot backed out.
If Osiel thought it was going to be easy to escape, it might’ve been because his cross-country rival, Chapo Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, had escaped one of Mexico’s most secure prisons in 2001. Now, with Osiel in prison and Chapo roaming free again, the Company—the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas—faced its first real threat: Chapo wanted to expand his organization’s reach east, beyond Juárez, to the most lucrative border crossing of them all, Nuevo Laredo.
In early 2004, when Miguel Treviño met Gabriel Cardona and Wences Tovar, he would’ve been aware of Chapo’s ambitions. He also would’ve been aware of an American smuggler from Laredo who’d recently spurned the Zetas and sided with the Sinaloa Cartel instead.
In the 1980s, Edgar Valdez Villareal grew up on Laredo’s wealthy north side and played linebacker for United High. Known as “La Barbie” for his blond hair and blue eyes, a look Mexicans refer to as güero, he was in a dope-dealing gang of rich kids called the Mexican Connection. La Barbie passed up college and joined a group of smugglers, shipping marijuana, then cocaine to Georgia and beyond. Indicted for smuggling in 1997, La Barbie relocated to Nuevo Laredo. In 2002, when the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas came to Nuevo Laredo and killed La Barbie’s boss—the leader of the Chachos, the one who turned up dead wearing nothing but a thong—La Barbie staged a revolt.
From a DEA report:
Edgar Valdez Villareal was advanced (“adelantado” or “fronted”) 100 kilos of cocaine by the Gulf Cartel for which Valdez Villareal later paid. Valdez Villareal was then advanced 300 kilos of cocaine by the Gulf Cartel and later paid for those in full. Valdez Villareal was then advanced 500 kilos by the Gulf Cartel and only paid for 250. Valdez Villareal then convinced the Gulf Cartel to advance 1000 kilos. Valdez Villareal failed to make any payment for this shipment. The resulting debt, considered a theft, led to the initiation of hostilities. . . .
After killing a Zeta operative sent to kill him, La Barbie fled to Acapulco and joined a family of Sinaloa-affiliated smugglers—the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, who imported forty tons of coke per month through the southern Mexican port at Zihuatanejo. A Beltrán-Leyva underboss owned a marble business in San Antonio, Texas, which the organization used to smuggle coke to buyers in Atlanta and New York. La Barbie, together with Chapo and the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, decided to fight for Nuevo Laredo.
La Barbie, Miguel knew, was organizing soldiers, with the backing of the Beltrán-Leyvas and the Sinaloa Cartel, and a battle was coming.
Now, in the restaurant, Miguel asked who Gabriel knew in Laredo, and by his tone it was clear that he meant high-profile people in the underworld.
Gabriel thought back to those Sunday night cruises on San Bernardo Avenue, when he used to ask the older boys which ride belonged to which smuggler. He nodded and spit some names. Moises Garcia. Chuy Resendez. Richard Jasso.
Impressed, Miguel mentioned a training camp in southern Mexico. Gabriel appeared interested; Wences remained largely silent. Miguel said Meme would be in touch about coming to the camp.
Gabriel and Wences returned to Laredo, having met the deadly crew, la gente nueva, the Zetas, the ones who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
IN LATE 2003, ROBERT GARCIA had returned to Laredo PD after a stressful six years in DEA. He served his stint with the feds, and stuck with it longer than most. He was glad to be done, glad to be finished with the constant travel. He was thirty-five and looking forward to spending more time with Ronnie and the boys. Trey had just started high school and Eric was a senior.
But if Robert envisioned returning to the small-town pace of the city he patrolled in the 1990s, he was mistaken. Murders and drug crime were up. Laredo was becoming America’s car theft capital. Its juvenile crime was out of control.
Laredo’s new chief of police, Agustin Dovalina, called Robert into his well-appointed office. Flanked by his deputies, Chief Dovalina joked that they were going to put Robert in a more relaxing job.
“What?” Robert asked.
They said they needed another detective in the homicide division.
If they expected resistance, they didn’t get it. After drugs, the prospect of turning to murder came as a relief. Robert knew what homicide detectives did. There was a body. You helped the family with their loss, and tried to figure out what happened. He didn’t need the willful ignorance of a drug cop to believe in the job. Murder was apolitical. The pressure of homicide work also appealed to him, as did the win-lose nature of the job: You either caught the murderer and locked him up, or you didn’t.
“The cartel stuff,” as he would later call it, was not on his mind when he took the job. Laredo law enforcement knew about the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, and the Sinaloa Cartel. There had been intelligence floating around about cartel conflicts in Mexico. But there was no reason to think those conflicts would affect Laredo. To the extent Miguel Treviño was known at all among Laredo law enforcement, he was known as another “flunkie” in the Nuevo Laredo underworld, one of many local criminals who worked for whichever organization dominated the area.
Upon returning to Laredo PD, in the final days of 2003, Robert had no idea that a clash between two cartels would spill into Texas, turning his new job into something more than garden-variety homicide work, a fight for the city itself.
GABRIEL CARDONA, THE LAREDO YOUNGSTER whom Robert would soon meet, was also ignorant about the future. Since the ninth grade, Gabriel lived day to day. He had no idea where his association with Meme Flores, or his initial meeting with Miguel Treviño, would take him. At seventeen, he had stolen some cars, smuggled some guns, moved some drugs, and been in some fights. He was an intelligent thug, but a roche-addled high school dropout nonetheless, oblivious to the political twistings taking place above him and in far-off lands.
Gabriel’s cartel initiation would unfold over the coming year. His first meeting with Miguel had taught him only that his underworld mentor, Meme Flores, was “deeper in the game” than Gabriel realized.
Neither Gabriel nor Robert could’ve known that, through a series of escalating events, they’d both be plunged into the inaugural battle of one of the most brutal wars in modern history, a war that would bring a standard of violence back to the Americas not seen since pre-colonial times, or ever.
With Gabriel set to go global, as a cartel member, and Robert set to go local again, as a homicide detective, they appeared to be on separate tracks.
They were heading right for each other.