When Gabriel came out of jail in September 2005, people treated him differently. In Tampico, on the Gulf Coast’s Miramar Playa, a hotel room waited when he showed up for a few days of vacation with Company men. In the clubs there, people murmured that he was one not to be messed with.
The Company’s Laredo presence had grown in the three months Gabriel was away. There were more recruits; a new safe house on Hillside, a neighborhood by the public library; and a block of rented apartments in Lazteca, around the corner from his mother’s house at 207 Lincoln. These places were stocked with food, weapons, cars—and more hit men, more American Wolf Boys who’d been recruited while Gabriel was away.
Something about these new recruits bothered him. They appeared to be “chukkies,” wannabes, guys who’d never done shit, wouldn’t be on point when it was “time to ride.” Or the opposite: lunatics. One chukkie snorted so much coke that a crust of blood always ringed his nostrils. Another chukkie was cool, but his girlfriend was known to work for the other side, “the Chapos.” If that secret ever got out, it would not go over well.
As the summer of 2005 faded, Gabriel and Meme Flores made their way back to Nuevo Laredo from the beach in Tampico, up Highway 85, over the mountains of southern Tamaulipas, and through the city of Monterrey. Driving in Meme’s bulletproof Jeep Cherokee, Gabriel was edgy. If the contras appeared, protocol demanded that Gabriel, the subordinate, shoot it out, while Meme escaped. They both had .38 Supers strapped, eyes popped. Gabriel monitored radio frequencies to make sure the road ahead was clear, and answered calls on several cell phones plugged into the console. In the back of the Cherokee, a long-arm assault rifle—una larga—was attached to a tripod bolted to the floor. In his head he rehearsed the steps to unlock the clavo, the hidden compartment behind the dashboard, where more guns were stashed: 1) AC to high; 2) gear in neutral; 3) lock door; 4) pump brakes.
The Bruno Orozco debacle, and three months in county, had taught him that operating on the American side was more difficult than Mexico. He wanted to keep working for Meme, bringing him cars and weapons and maybe transporting small drug loads, but he’d decided he wanted out of the Company. He didn’t want to do more jobs in Texas. He didn’t want to go back to jail. During the four-hour ride to Nuevo Laredo, he tried to feel Meme out about the future.
“You could’ve been assigned to a hotter plaza like Monterrey or a city in Michoacán,” Meme explained. “In those places you’d get in gun battles with the contras and the federales every day.” Gabriel knew Meme was right. Since getting out of jail, Gabriel and friends from Lazteca had kept in touch with Wences. Wences would call to say “what’s up” from some place like Michoacán, the southern state, and tell them about missions down there. The next day they’d see it in the paper and say, “Damn! That squirrel is flying high!” “You’re assigned to the border,” Meme said, “because you’re the most trusted sicario for difficult jobs. The Company has plans for you. You’ve been singled out.”
“Singled out?” Gabriel asked.
“Absorb everything,” Meme said. “Be ready. It won’t be long until you’re sent to the six-month camp, and you become a commander.”
Meme had been instrumental in Gabriel’s development, taking him to Reynosa and Matamoros, teaching him how to operate. Meme vouched for him and oversaw his progress. And Meme was generous. Once, they’d been in a club when Gabriel complimented Meme’s style. “That’s a cool shirt, güey.” And right there, as strippers swirled on poles, Meme took off his Versace shirt and traded it for Gabriel’s old raggedy Guess shirt. Meme loved him. Plus, Meme was Catorce’s favorite, his consentido, an adviser, and Catorce was the co-chief of the Zetas.
The most trusted for difficult jobs?
A commander?
Who’s my man?
I’m the true one.
If Gabriel ever questioned the organization’s loyalty, Meme’s words changed his perspective. He felt something for Meme. It was stupid to think of him as a father. But Meme had saved Gabriel’s life, showed him how to do business, and imparted confidence. So when Meme said being assigned to the border meant Gabriel was privileged, well, it made sense. He had met Meme while smuggling cars and weapons. Of self-made capos, underworld lore often had it that they started out in precisely such jobs, in precisely the way Gabriel started. I remember when Osiel would get us cars! I remember when Miguel ran mota to Dallas for so-and-so! You got what you set your mind to attain.
Maybe the chukkies weren’t that bad, Gabriel thought. Wannabes, sure. But also brothers who could stand up and do jobs instead of you. He thought of his murder case. By the time his trial came around he’d most likely be in Mexico full-time, where he was untouchable.
As he and Meme neared Nuevo Laredo, Gabriel asked what running a plaza entailed. Meme thought about it—a good question!—and responded with several generalities. “Always be disciplined. Respect everybody. Compliment your sicarios. Don’t degrade them.”
Gabriel nodded. Surely there was more to running a plaza. But there would be time to learn.
They reincorporated in Nuevo Laredo, where everyone was watching the video.
LIKE ANY TRANSFORMATIONAL EVENT, A story about the video developed internally and filtered down through Company ranks. Five Zeta sicarios had gone to Acapulco with instructions to kill cops on the payroll of La Barbie and capture the plaza. They knew the rules: Don’t go clubbing, don’t go out at night, and never go out alone. Whether it was insubordination, or a youngster’s inability to resist the seaside resort’s nightlife, the traveling assassins went to a club, where their norteño looks marked them as outsiders in Acapulco’s insular narco-community.
It was fifteen minutes before cops tipped off La Barbie: Los Zetas were in town to kill him. The next day, La Barbie’s men raided their safe house and rounded up three of the assassins. While escaping, the fourth assassin dropped his cell phone in the backyard. The fifth was in town, using a pay phone to call his sister, when La Barbie’s guys punched him in the stomach and hustled him into an SUV along with his wife and two-year-old stepdaughter, brought along to enjoy vacation. The escaped sicario drove through the night. When he delivered the news in Nuevo Laredo, Miguel Treviño called the lost cell phone, asked for La Barbie, and requested the return of his men: “I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“Nah,” La Barbie said, “I have money.”
“Okay, the plazas. Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo—Las que más quieres, las que por más peleas.” The ones you most want, the ones you fight for.
La Barbie wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that one. “La guerra es guerra,” he said.
“Then let the family go.”
La Barbie kept the wife and stepdaughter overnight. The next morning, he made the girl a bowl of cereal with a banana, and let her play in the pool. “Your husband said to tell you that he loves you,” he told the new widow, and gave her a thousand pesos, about seventy bucks, to get home.
In the DVD video that had now surfaced, months later, four men, three of them shirtless, sat on the floor, bruised and bleeding, against a backdrop of black garbage bags taped to the wall. La Barbie, standing behind the camera, asked the captives to identify themselves and describe their jobs.
“I was in the army for eight years,” said the first. “I have the contacts in the military to find out about the patrols.” He explained that the Zetas were upset with the attorney general of Tamaulipas because he was taking bribes yet consenting to military operations against the Company. He also said Nuevo Laredo’s newly elected police chief would be killed for raising too much attention—referring to the police chief who was assassinated the prior June, hours after taking the oath.
La Barbie moved on.
“I was in GAFE,” said the second. “Now I’m a recruiter.” The Zetas recruited people even if they weren’t GAFE deserters, he said, and trained them in one of four camps—Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey, Miguel Alemán, or Ciudad Mier.
“I used to work as a hawk,” said the third, meaning a spotter, someone who lurked in the plaza and looked for contras. “Then they put me on the caravans, picking up people with Miguel. After capturing someone, Miguel or Meme Flores says whether or not to take the captive to the guiso.”
“What’s the guiso?” La Barbie asked.
“It’s when they grab someone, they get information about moving drugs or money, they get what they want, and then, after torturing him, they execute him. They take him to a ranch, they shoot him in the head, they throw him in a can, and they burn him with different fuels like diesel and gasoline.”
La Barbie asked about a female radio reporter in Nuevo Laredo who’d recently turned up dead.
“Lupita Escamilla was responsible for writing the news, and making sure things didn’t come out on the national level. But then she refused to continue working for them so they sent someone to kill her.”
“And you, buddy?” La Barbie asked the fourth, a young man known as Pollo, whom Gabriel knew from childhood. But before Pollo could answer, a gun came into the camera frame and blew his head off. It was the first time Gabriel had seen a friend killed. The film cut off there, but presumably the others were shot the same way.
The Company put a million dollars on La Barbie’s head. By most accounts, he had taken up residence in Acapulco, on Mexico’s south coast, but some believed that he visited family frequently in Laredo.
Out of jail for one week, Meme’s words still ringing in his head, Gabriel—having returned to the roches after finding religion in jail over the summer—decided he would do whatever it took to succeed in the Company, kill La Barbie, and become the next American drug lord.
IN SEPTEMBER, AROUND THE TIME Gabriel Cardona bailed out of jail, Angel Moreno’s opinion about the possibilities of opening an OCDETF investigation of Zeta leadership changed. Moreno took a routine plea meeting with a busted American drug smuggler from Dallas.
Mario Alvarado’s pink stash house on Topaz Trail, in north Laredo, had been busted following a routine crime-stopper’s call. Alvarado had eighty pounds of weed stuffed in a couch, and a few kilos of coke hidden in a TV—personal-use quantities for a guy like Alvarado, but enough weight to warrant serious prison time. Looking to cut a deal, and reduce his sentence, the twenty-two-year-old Alvarado entertained Angel Moreno with an epic story of dealing directly with Zeta leadership for the past four years. Alvarado said he knew the Treviño brothers, Miguel and Omar, and their Zeta network personally. Alvarado said he hunted with them, did business with them; was even held hostage by them.
Moreno thought back to his summer lunch meeting with Robert Garcia, and began to wonder: Could he use that Gabriel Cardona kid and Mario Alvarado—unconnected but for their common link to the Zetas—as the basis for an OCDETF investigation? In theory, yes. But to get an OCDETF case approved, he needed at least one other federal agency to sign on. There were many possibilities: FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE. Every agency had a strong presence in Laredo, and Moreno knew all the bosses. He made the rounds, trying to build support.
The goal of an OCDETF investigation was to get big cartel bosses. But what did it mean for a drug lord to be “big”? The factors that formed the government’s perception of “bigness” were the same factors that formed the public’s perception: media coverage. The Treviños were not well known in the States, nor was Zeta leadership, composed, as it was, of obscure former special-force troops like Heriberto Lazcano and Efraín “Catorce” Teodoro Torres.
La Barbie, on the other hand, had been beefing up his PR campaign. He published newspaper editorials in Mexico claiming to be a legitimate businessman and imploring the Mexican government to eliminate the Zetas, whom he called “delinquents.” Over the summer, Robert and Laredo PD had decided against publicizing the “Barbie Execution Video,” as it was now known. But they did share it with some people from federal agencies—such as FBI, the agency in charge of investigating missing persons—to make sure there was no confusion about the growing threat. A FBI agent leaked the video, which somehow wound up at a small newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, in the hands of reporters who didn’t know much about Mexican drug cartels and couldn’t translate the Spanish. The Washington State reporters ran an Internet search for “Zetas,” which turned up news stories by Alfredo Corchado, the Mexican-American journalist who ran the Mexico City bureau for the Dallas Morning News. They mailed the video to Corchado, who investigated the claims made in the video, wrote a story for the Dallas Morning News, and posted the video footage online. The Barbie Execution Video went viral, shown on a loop all over Mexican and American TV, and gave La Barbie a global reputation, erasing any doubts about what kind of business he was really involved in.
From his Laredo upbringing and earlier trafficking cases, American authorities knew La Barbie. Miguel Treviño’s reputation was growing within Laredo law enforcement, as informants cycled through interview rooms and told stories about him, but many still believed he was a minor player. In reality, La Barbie was a successful smuggler and capable soldier, but a middling player, overall, in Mexico’s narco-hierarchy, no more or less important than Miguel. Yet the gruesome video, the articles, the Laredo pedigree, and the blond preppy appearance all helped make La Barbie the new symbol of the war—in the eyes of the public, and therefore in the eyes of American government. Washington, D.C., wanted La Barbie. The DEA had a source inside La Barbie’s circle; in fact, it turned out to be the same guy who gave Robert the video in the first place.
And so the agency heads declined Angel Moreno’s OCDETF plan for the Zetas. Moreno had more power than the local agency bosses, but they had jurisdiction over their own offices. They respected Moreno. But some carried bitter memories of him undercutting their influence in the past—ordering around their agents, or going directly to their regional bosses in Houston. La Barbie, they said confidently, was the target.
AFTER RECEIVING THE DVD OF the Barbie Execution Video and watching it several times, Alfredo Corchado, the Mexico City bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, travelled to Tamaulipas state to meet with José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a prosecutor who served as drug czar to President Vicente Fox. Vasconcelos, alleged in the video to be taking money from the Company, wasn’t eager to be interviewed by Corchado, and canceled three times. Corchado finally scored the interview, but only after asking President Fox’s administration to force Vasconcelos to meet with him.
Vicente Fox, a former broccoli farmer and Coca-Cola executive, became president of Mexico in 2000. Despite promises of change, he’d taken what many considered a lax approach to pursuing drug lords. American law enforcement sent tips to the Fox administration regarding key criminals in Mexico. But the tips went nowhere, or were shared with the criminals themselves. Corchado had interviewed Fox many times, and believed that Fox was simply unwilling to acknowledge the growing cartel menace. Fox didn’t like how foreign coverage of cartels eclipsed the image of Mexico that he wanted to establish, that of a rising democracy.
“Total lies,” said Vasconcelos when Corchado finally got in and forced him to watch the DVD, in which a Zeta hit man accused him of receiving bribes. “They will say any lies, especially when they’re being tortured. This is nothing new.” He told Corchado: “This isn’t a story for you. Why don’t you focus on tourism stories? They’re safer.”