As a federal prosecutor, Angel—pronounced “AHN-hell”—Moreno believed in the righteousness of American law more than Robert Garcia ever could. Robert, for instance, didn’t care whether marijuana remained illegal or not; for all he cared, it could be punished with the equivalent of a traffic ticket rather than prison. But Angel Moreno wouldn’t hear of it. Moreno dismissed arguments about drug legalization as liberal crap. Yet Moreno, whom Robert respected for his courtroom tenacity and willingness to chase hard cases, was one of the most important people in Robert’s professional life. The two met for lunch, or after-work drinks, several times a year.
A career prosecutor with graying hair who looked like a Hispanic Donald Sutherland, Moreno emigrated with his family from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo when he was seven. He finished Marine Corps service in 1977—the same year Robert arrived in Eagle Pass, Texas, with his family. For Moreno, Martin High led to Laredo Junior College, which led to Texas A&M International University and then law school at University of Texas in Austin, during the mid-1980s, around the time Gabriel Cardona was born.
As a young prosecutor, Moreno did capital murder cases and corruption cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney on the federal side—an AUSA—he spent a year in Washington, D.C., training incoming prosecutors. Back in South Texas, he handled drug cases along the border. In 2000, over the objection of his wife, he volunteered to participate in the U.S. State Department’s plan to reform Colombia’s justice system in the wake of Pablo Escobar’s death. Moreno would, among other things, help Colombia establish programs for wiretapping, witness protection, and port security. His wife hadn’t liked the idea of uprooting their five-year-old son to go live in a war zone for two years.
One night, Moreno and his wife saw the film Proof of Life, in which Russell Crowe’s character goes to Latin America to rescue the kidnapped executive married to Meg Ryan’s character. Moreno enjoyed the movie; in fact, it inspired him a little. At home that evening, after receiving a follow-up phone call from the Department of Justice to ask if he was interested in the Colombia assignment, Moreno told his wife that he’d like to do it.
In Colombia, Moreno quickly discovered that State Department bureaucracy stifled any possibility of achieving real reform. The State Department, Moreno saw, merely wanted him to spend his $88 million budget ASAP, and then leave the country. Moreno left Colombia a year early, when the Bush administration took office and summoned him back to Texas. But he did learn something while there.
What distinguished Colombia from other Latin America countries torn by drug trafficking and corruption, Moreno believed, was the dedication of Colombia’s idealists. Moreno saw Colombian prosecutors and cops, the noncorrupt minority, get car-bombed and shot in their driveways regularly. And yet they continued to show up for work every day. Sure, drugs still flowed out of Colombia, but Moreno came away from the experience believing that a small bunch of true believers could make real progress.
Bullshit, Robert thought. This drug war optimism was where Moreno, the prosecutor, and Robert Garcia, the cop, parted ways. Unlike Robert, the imperfections of the drug war didn’t keep Moreno awake at night. In Moreno’s view, just because prohibition wasn’t a booming success didn’t mean the alternative was superior. Moreno enjoyed a drink. But legalizing coke? Heroin? Why would you add more things to the mix of stuff that can screw up people’s lives?
After coming back from Colombia, Moreno returned to his role as AUSA for the Southern District of Texas. One of four federal districts in Texas, the Southern District covered seven prosecutorial territories: Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Houston, McAllen, Laredo, and Victoria. Moreno served as the district’s “drug chief,” running the office’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, OCDETF, pronounced internally as “OHSA-def.”
As the OCDETF supervisor, Moreno organized multiagency investigations of cartels on both sides of the border. He instructed agents and cops on how to gather enough evidence to make a federal case. He helped get warrants for searches and wiretaps. And, after busts were made, he negotiated with defendants and took cases to trial.
Moreno understood the reality of drug interdiction, that most drugs got through the border, but this didn’t bother him as much as it bothered Robert. Nor did he see any great travesty in the fact that prosecutors like himself regularly cut deals with the worst capos, murderers, and smugglers, while low-level lackeys got much stiffer sentences. In Moreno’s mind, if you accepted a drug-free society as a worthy goal, then you had to accept the realities of pursuing that goal. No system was perfect. Moreno preferred to focus on what went right. And OCDETF, when considered in isolation, was an efficient prosecutorial machine.
The OCDETF program grew out of the original idea for the South Florida Task Force, established in the early 1980s. The goal was to dismantle drug syndicates by prosecuting their leaders. At bottom, OCDETF was a funding mechanism: It streamlined investigations of drug-trafficking organizations by forcing law enforcement agencies to powwow with each other, pooling intelligence before deciding where to funnel money. OCDETF avoided several agencies working independently against the same target, repeating one another’s work and wasting resources.
About 40 percent of organized-crime cases in America were prosecuted in the southwest region of the United States, and much of that chunk was concentrated in South Texas. To agents and cops in Laredo, Angel Moreno was the gatekeeper at the federal level: the person who told you whether your leads could be parlayed into a Big Case—something to build an agent’s promotional “package,” to move up a pay grade—and, if so, what further evidence you needed for Moreno to open a case and get an indictment.
As “the face of the federal government in court,” as Moreno put it, he was the judge before the judge. He held the keys to the Kingdom of Judgment. If an agent from DEA or FBI, or any other federal agency, needed a subpoena or a wiretap warrant to make a case, Moreno, Monk of the Fourth Amendment—that constitutional provision that prohibits searches and seizures without probable cause—was the guy who read the agent’s affidavit and said yea or nay.
Now, at their lunch date, Robert and Moreno gossiped about cases. Robert mentioned the recent bust of Gabriel Cardona and explained what was known about the murder of Bruno Orozco. A Nuevo Laredo cop and former Zeta, Orozco betrayed the Zetas and channeled Zeta intelligence to a Sinaloan in Laredo named Chuy Resendez. Moreno knew about Chuy Resendez; everyone in Laredo law enforcement did. Chuy—pronounced “Chewy”—controlled the smuggling routes through Rio Bravo, a small border town just east of Laredo.
Robert said that, ironically, on the day before the Bruno Orozco hit, Cardona met a guy named the Marine, Z-47, at Jett Bowl in Laredo to plan the hit while the Laredo Police Department held a bowling tournament there. They laughed. Even more ironically, Robert said, Border Patrol raided the Laredo motel room where Cardona was staying that day. Illegal aliens were constantly being kept at the Hacienda Motel, so Border Patrol did periodic sweeps. Cardona, Robert explained, concealed the AR-15 in the trunk of his Jetta. All Border Patrol found in Cardona’s motel room was an industrial-size roll of cellophane.
Robert described his interrogation of Cardona. The cop-assisted whackings. The guiso. La Compañía.
“¿La Compañía?” Moreno asked.
“It’s what they call the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas now.”
Robert said the kid claimed to be a Zeta, and that there were more like him, working both sides of the border.
“He told you this?”
“Bragged about it.”
Moreno asked for more on cartel activity. Robert said he recently investigated a shoot-out at a Laredo soccer field. A team of Zetas tried to gun down a team of La Barbie’s assassins, many of whom were also American teens from Laredo. Like Chuy Resendez, La Barbie was a Laredo local and everyone in law enforcement knew him.
“La Barbie has his own assassins now?” Moreno asked.
In the aftermath of the soccer field incident, Robert said, Laredo PD turned up assault rifles and grenades. During the interrogation that followed, one of La Barbie’s guys, a twenty-year-old hit man from Laredo, flirted with the idea of becoming an informant, even gave Robert a copy of a video, not yet publicized, appearing to depict four Zeta operatives being questioned and then executed by La Barbie himself.
Later in the day, Robert stopped by Moreno’s office and showed him the video. One Zeta talked about plans to kill the attorney general of Tamaulipas and the new police chief in Nuevo Laredo. Another Zeta talked about training camps. Subjects of discussion included the guiso, and the reasons behind the recent assassination of a Nuevo Laredo reporter.
After the video, Moreno pressed his lower back and laughed. “Well that was interesting.” Where Robert treated atrocity intellectually, and expressed awe only if the social dynamic called for it, Moreno treated the violent criminals they dealt with as sort of amusing. He believed that you couldn’t do this kind of work and not let it affect you. Humor was a way to internalize and process the violence without going crazy.
Robert and Moreno were accustomed to seeing cartels hire American gang members to carry out hits in Texas. But rarely did the cartels themselves handle violence in the States; they were wary of risking the political blowback, which often translated into heightened enforcement on both sides of the border. But even when they hired an unaffiliated killer, heavy artillery such as grenades and assault rifles were unheard-of. Recorded executions, American teen assassins—those things were definitely new.
“These fuckers are here among us,” Robert and Moreno agreed.
The goal of OCDETF—the “kingpin strategy” of America’s war on drugs—was to go after whoever in Mexico was ordering this violence: La Barbie, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, or Chapo Guzmán; or a leader of La Compañía. Since the goal of OCDETF was to prosecute big cartel bosses, and because OCDETF investigations were expensive, a prosecutor, before requesting support and funding for an OCDETF case, wanted to make sure that arrests of low-level guys, such as Gabriel Cardona, would lead up the chain of command, and provide enough evidence, eventually, to bring charges, like RICO and conspiracy, against a top cartel boss.
But with no proven connection between Gabriel Cardona and Company leadership, there was no OCDETF case to be made. Moreno and Robert needed more than one kid’s tale of high-level connections. And without a clear connection to drug trafficking, Moreno wouldn’t be able to convince DEA to agree to join a case.
For the time being Gabriel Cardona’s murder charge for the Bruno Orozco hit would stay at the state level, and never touch Mexican organized crime.
THREE MONTHS AND ONE WEEK after the Orozco hit, a magistrate judge reduced Gabriel’s bond from $600,000 to $75,000. Miguel sent someone to pay it. On September 14, 2005, one day after his nineteenth birthday, Gabriel walked out of jail and rode the jail bus back to Laredo, where he spent that first night of freedom with Christina.
“Leave it behind and start over,” Christina whispered during their reunion. “We have us.”
Maybe it was the summer of solitude in jail, or the positive role he had played in Yulianna’s life. Or maybe it was something about reembracing the religion of his youth, or turning nineteen. Maybe it was just the detoxifying hiatus from the roches. But Gabriel thought of this cartel life, of how it risked everything, and he became emotional. He wasn’t from a terrible family. They loved him. And he had a good girl who loved him. He’d seen enough movies to blame the absence of a superior male figure for part of his situation, which he recognized now as a kind of bondage.
He asked Christina: “Why do you prefer a cagapalo over a calmado?” A troublemaker to a civilized person.
Christina had never given that much thought. She guessed it was something to do with boredom. Or it was just the way she felt. She had no dad figure, and he had no dad figure. Gabriel was possessive, and she kind of liked that. She wanted to be protected. Unlike Gabriel’s brother, and unlike Wences—indeed, unlike most of the assholes around Laredo—Gabriel never hit her and promised he never would. Why a cagapalo over a calmado? Where were the calm ones?
Gabriel, Christina knew, idealized the north side, where she was from. But he didn’t understand it. Christina’s family could afford to move to the north side only because her dad was in the drug business. Once they were there, he tried to get out; then they were going to lose the north-side house so he got back in and now he was in prison, too.
There was no fear in Christina’s love for Gabriel. Still, she wondered: Was it okay to want a person like Gabriel, someone confident and handsome and tender, but also someone not like him? She didn’t know the details of what he did to earn the money he gave her, but she knew it wasn’t good. Her relation to Gabriel now put her in the center of gossip concerning underworld news. But on the Bruno Orozco thing, everyone knew that Wences pulled the trigger, not Gabriel. She didn’t like what Gabriel did, but she loved him. Beneath that arrogance, she believed, he was just insecure. Every word from her mouth, every look, had an effect on him, and she enjoyed that little bit of power.
She didn’t know how to articulate any of these thoughts. So, parroting her older girlfriends, she responded, “Los calmados son jotillos.” The calm ones are faggots.
Then she lay back and offered him the pepa. The humid air doused them and they fucked till their nerves rang numb.
The next day, Yulianna called from jail to thank him and wish him well.
ROBERT GARCIA WOULD USE THE notes that Gabriel told Yulianna to save to force her confession:
Shanea, Yulianna’s six-year-old daughter, was throwing a tantrum because she wanted to go to a cousin’s house. Yulianna’s boyfriend grabbed a belt and struck Shanea repeatedly. Yulianna watched, then turned her back. When Yulianna couldn’t take it any longer, she went into the bedroom. Later, while helping Shanea bathe, she noticed the lacerations on her daughter’s face and scalp. Shanea went to sleep, complaining of a stomachache, and never woke up. The boyfriend took the body from the house and came back without it.
Robert looked through the family’s file. There had been signs. When visiting the apartment several times over the previous ten months, CPS had discovered a battered woman plus the usual hazards: floors covered with dirty diapers; exposed wires; tiny scarred bodies. The CPS mandate, however, was to help “rehabilitate families,” not break them up, which meant that most of the time a child like Shanea was returned to the same broken home again and again and again.
When Robert presented Yulianna’s confession to the boyfriend, he attacked Robert while other cops rushed into the interrogation room. A jury sentenced the boyfriend to life plus sixty. But it didn’t placate Shanea’s biological father, who killed the brother of the boyfriend because the brother helped dispose of Shanea’s body. “An eye for an eye,” said the Webb County sheriff. The prosecutor had no interest in taking the revenge killing to trial. What jury would convict?
As for Yulianna, she pleaded guilty to injury of a child. On the sentencing date, she was recovering from a cesarean section after giving birth to a third son. The judge sentenced her to twenty years, and sent the infant to foster care to join his brothers. With any luck she’d be out by the time her oldest son was Gabriel’s age.