Midnight closed in, the full moon set the river on fire, and the Treviño brothers were coming to collect.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
Mario Alvarado’s cell phone skittered across the table again. On the third call he answered.
“You messed up,” said Miguel. “You shouldn’t have left. Why’d you leave?”
“You didn’t tell me to stay or nothing,” Mario mustered.
“You’ve got to pay this cuenta,” Miguel said, referring to Mario’s debt. “You owe a lot of money to the gente. Meet Omar on this side. Bring your Hummer, pa entregarlo”—for exchange.
Mario Alvarado, the young American, hung up. Two roads appeared before him. He could kiss the drug-smuggling business goodbye, and disappear. The cuenta was a million dollars. Would the Treviño brothers hurt his family for that much money?
Was Mario really asking?
Option two: Return to the Treviño brothers in Mexico, confront Miguel and Omar, hope they valued their cuenta more than Mario’s head, and then rely on Wayo, Mario’s assistant, to hustle up the debt while Mario offered himself to the brothers as collateral.
Mario Alvarado . . .
Most runners who smuggled bricks and bundles north were mere Company subcontractors: commission men. But Mario Alvarado was American, and he worked for himself. He bought coke and marijuana directly from the Treviño brothers in Mexico, which was like buying directly from the Company. This relationship made Mario more like a partner of the Company than an employee. Granted, he was only one of many runners who moved a piece of the approximately ten tons of coke that the Company sent across each week—about $100 million of product at the 2004 border price of $11,500 per kilo. There were bigger movers working the Dallas hub: José Vasquez, for instance, moved 1,000 kilos to Dallas every month. But José was a Company man making 3 percent per load. On a $20 million deal, Jose’s $800,000 commission equaled Mario’s profit on much smaller and less risky loads. A freelancer with “a direct connect,” Mario “owned” the drugs he moved: The full price spread between the border and Dallas—or between the border and New York—belonged to him. As did the risk in the event, say, that law enforcement stopped one of Mario’s drivers. For three years, Mario’s privilege kept him motivated, a little smug as he hustled across the country, buying and modifying vehicles and expanding his network of northern buyers. On most days he was proud of his position. Tonight, hiding from the brothers, it felt like a sentence.
It began in 2002, when Mario was eighteen and selling enough dime bags of coke in Dallas to finance a hunting trip to Nuevo Laredo. A guide there named Adolfo Treviño, whom everyone called Fito—pronounced “FEE-toh”—charged five hundred dollars for a weeklong deer hunt on his ranch. Mario met Fito’s brothers, Omar and Miguel. Fito and Omar called Miguel “Michael,” but no one else did.
Miguel was a sure shot and a fun guy, generous with instructions about marksmanship. He snacked often on Rolo candy, seemingly addicted to the caramel-filled chocolates. When they posed for pictures with their kill, Miguel threw his head back, smiled thinly, and extended the pinkie and pointer fingers of his right hand—“throwing the goat” as it were. Miguel had dark eyes and high-chiseled cheekbones. He was not tall, but thick in the chest, arms, and thighs. The Treviño brothers carried guns in restaurants. They drove twice the speed limit. Cops never bothered them.
On return hunting trips, Mario felt at home in Nuevo Laredo nightclubs, where his gringo dollars earned him consideration he was unaccustomed to in Dallas. One night he ran into Miguel and Omar, who were dressed in black fatigues and riding around town in a caravan of Suburbans. It was now clear to Mario that the Treviño brothers were into more than hunting. They recognized Mario as well. “¿Qué onda, güey?” Miguel said. What’s up, dude?
Mario thought: I want to work.
He asked Omar Treviño about getting kilos, and Omar said Mario could buy as many kilos as he wanted.
The economics were simple. It was a matter of paying $11,500 per kilo in Nuevo Laredo versus paying $18,000 in Dallas. Mario would have to cross the coke over the border himself. But the risk was worth the profit. He returned to Nuevo Laredo with $57,500 in cash and bought five kilos—eleven pounds—from the brothers. Mario and his man, Wayo, rented a stash house in Nuevo Laredo. To prepare the product to be smuggled across the border and up to Dallas, they designated one room for the first wrapping—“the dirty room.” After the first wrapping, they took off their clothes and passed the drugs to the second room, “the clean room,” then showered and put on new clothes before the final wrapping. On Mario’s first big coke deal he made $25,000 in profit, then set about expanding his new operation.
Mario purchased pickup trucks from which he removed panels and lights. The trick was packing the drugs in a part of the vehicle where the body wouldn’t lose its hollow sound when slapped. It got to where Mario was buying ten kilos per week. Then twenty. Then thirty-five. When the brothers saw that Mario was a reliable and steady client, they began to front, or advance, the youngster his kilos.
It wasn’t long until Mario discovered he could trade guns for drugs. The brothers would take all the guns Mario could smuggle south. The profit on a dozen AR-15s—purchased for a total of $18,000 at a gun show in Texas and sold to the brothers for $30,000 in Mexico—covered one kilo and the payment to the “straw purchasers” who bought the guns for Mario at the Texas gun shows. With every dozen assault rifles Mario smuggled south, the “brick” was therefore free and the entire $18,000 sale price in Dallas was profit. Mario began moving fifty kilos per week to Dallas. He used a Buick Riviera, a Lincoln Navigator, a Ford Expedition, a Dodge Ram. When Nuevo Laredo started becoming more violent, in 2004, he rented a new stash house across the river, a cute pink house on Topaz Trail, an upscale suburban street on Laredo’s expensive north side.
A diligent hustler was a hot commodity in the Company, and the Company’s social fabric absorbed Mario. They invited him to barbecues in Nuevo Laredo, where up-and-coming comandantes, always looking to expand their own networks, schmoozed Mario. Any ranking Company man knew that in order to rise, and remain a welcome member, he needed to generate income.
“Nah,” Miguel said when his Company colleagues tried to tempt Mario with better deals. “He’s my gente.”
Mario was getting in deep, and it wasn’t long before he started to learn about the downside of doing business with the Company. For one, if he wanted to move the “white” he’d have to move the less profitable “green” as well. Mario woke up in Dallas one day and found 1,200 pounds of marijuana on his doorstep unbidden. Lacking storage, he kept the eighty-pound bundles in his mom’s garage, unaware that his parole-violating cousin was staying there. It was a depressing day when, after the cops came to the house to retrieve his cousin on the parole violation and discovered the pot in the garage, Mario’s mom, who’d been arrested with the cousin for possessing 1,200 pounds of pot, called Mario from jail and Mario had to remind her to keep her mouth shut. A few times, Miguel sent kilos that were no good, and Mario had to pay anyway. Being gente, it turned out, meant taking the good with the bad. The bad could be pretty shitty.
But there was one outcome he dreaded the most. And it came in late 2004, when he had to call Miguel and say, “My calves drowned.” Ninety bricks of the white had been seized from his transporter on the way to New York. Mario, having been fronted nearly two hundred pounds of cocaine, owed the Company a million dollars. He went to Nuevo Laredo to try to make good with Miguel, to ask for another load to make up the loss. But Miguel wasn’t receptive. He kept Mario overnight. In the morning, a panicked Mario left without permission.
Now, in the fancy pink stash house on Topaz Trail—surrounded by the paraphernalia of a smuggling operation: Food Saver machines and plastic wrap for vacuum-packing drugs; hollowed-out TVs for transporting kilos; and a lifetime supply of tire shiner and Windex for concealing aromas—Mario and Wayo reached a decision. Mario would hand himself over to the brothers, and trade in his Hummer for credit. Wayo would stay in Laredo and wait for instructions.
“We have to handcuff you,” Miguel said when Mario returned to Nuevo Laredo. “You might try to run off on us again.”
They went hunting, and then Mario rode along on stash-house raids. Mario watched Miguel respond casually to chaos and gunfire. He rarely looked over his shoulder or surveyed a room before walking in. Miguel’s escolta, his squad of soldiers, protected him; but on missions, Miguel went first, always moving toward the engagement with the same strutting brutality: chin up, toes out.
They gave Mario kilos to send across to Wayo, who brought them to Dallas. Ten keys here, ten there. Mario got his cuenta down to $120,000. He cut that number in half by giving them $60,000 worth of jewelry.
After four weeks of detention, they were at a restaurant when Miguel announced, “I’m going to let Mario leave now.”
Mario was elated; paying his debt hadn’t guaranteed his freedom, or even his life. Some in the cartel world were loath to let any debtor live. Those who’d been threatened over money tended to hold grudges. Suppose Mario decided to become an informant for the government?
But this prospect, apparently, didn’t bother Miguel. For a drug kingpin in Chicago or New York, insulating yourself against the snitching of arrested subordinates was a constant concern. But Miguel had the greatest insulation ever: a two-thousand-mile border that divided the Company from American law enforcement, and ensconced it in a world of its own rulemaking. Besides, Mario was an American, and it was hard to justify killing a good American runner.
No, it made sense for Miguel to let Mario live. But someone else would eventually pay for this smuggler’s reprieve