In late January 2006, two young DEA agents contacted Angel Moreno to say they had an informant who claimed to be connected to Miguel Treviño. The informant—“Rocky”—was a former Zeta employee who’d come out of a long hospital stay after being beaten nearly to death by Omar Treviño. The DEA agents were confident they could use Rocky to make big cases against high-level guys in the Company.
It was one of the greatest aspects of the system, and one of the worst: the incredible discretion given to someone like Angel Moreno. For agents looking to make a case, Moreno was the guy they had to come to, go through, for a simple reason: In court, before the actual judge, the federal prosecutor was the face of the American government. Arguably, Moreno had more influence over a criminal’s future than any judge. Who got charged; when; how many times and for how much; and whether a mandatory minimum sentence got tossed in—these decisions were all up to Moreno. He liked to say he did more for defendants’ rights before they got charged than any defense attorney did afterward.
Prosecutors at the border entertained two kinds of drug cases: “reactive” and “proactive.” The reactive ones were simple. Border Patrol busted a guy coming across the border with a load of dope, and called DEA or ICE—agencies with arresting powers. An agent drove to the bridge, or the checkpoint, made the arrest, and interviewed the smuggler about his network. Could the guy lead to bigger fish? Was he willing to cooperate in exchange for a sentence reduction? Then the prosecutor opened a case, and the negotiations began.
The proactive cases were the ones where agents pitched the prosecutor: Joe Blow doesn’t have a job but he owns lots of trucks. We have good information that he’s moving coke. We want a search warrant. The agents submitted an affidavit, and the prosecutor opened a case.
Moreno handled pitches for a subset of proactive cases: Agents who wanted to submit a case for OCDETF designation and funding came to him. Each agent had his or her own pitching style. Some agents, often the newer ones, wanted to come in and tell Moreno the whole story with a PowerPoint presentation, and Moreno would sit there thinking, Thanks, but I can read. But he always tried to listen and act interested. As a boss, stifling enthusiasm got you nowhere.
J. J. Gomez and Chris Diaz had everything short of a PowerPoint presentation when they came into Moreno’s conference room talking about the promise of Rocky—their new informant, or confidential source. J. J. Gomez was a twenty-six-year-old local boy who went to Martin High seven years ahead of Gabriel Cardona. He played the drums in school and liked to study. He thought the barrio gangs were childish. He was more scared of his mother. On summer weekends, his father took him and his brother to a construction site, where temperatures reached 115 degrees in July and August. The lesson: Do everything you can to avoid this fate. At Martin, J.J. remembered, there were the good people and the bad people and you knew the screwups. They walked tough in the hallways and talked shit to teachers. They hung out across the border, had cars and chicks. Many students in J.J.’s class were the Gabriel Cardona type, and now they were dead.
The second DEA agent, Chris Diaz, was a twenty-nine-year-old former cop from Virginia who spoke gringo Spanish. Chris knew the streets. His father was a Mexican who grew up in East Los Angeles. Chris was tall, lumbering, and wore a long goatee—an undercover look. His devotion to DEA was evident by his very presence in the Laredo office, a hardship post to all but the most ambitious outsider.
In federal circles, particularly in the U.S. attorney’s office, newer agents like Chris Diaz and J. J. Gomez were known as “FNGs,” Fucking New Guys. FNGs, Moreno believed, rarely had a clue what they were doing. He didn’t know that Diaz and Gomez had eight years of DEA experience between them, nor that they’d been investigating cartel activity in Laredo since 2003. As for this “Rocky,” any new informant was risky. But after Rocky helped the FNGs set up two successive Zeta drug busts by the river, Moreno reconsidered his assessment of Diaz and Gomez and took a closer look at the case—and so did the DEA boss.
A couple of months earlier, the agencies had been set on La Barbie, the size of La Barbie’s public profile correlating to the value of his hide. But in December 2005, the DEA’s La Barbie informant walked away. It turned out he’d been playing both sides all along. Now, in retrospect—as was often the case with informants—what had come before made sense. When the informant first appeared, back in June, he gave the “Barbie Execution Video” to Robert Garcia, who held it for a while and then shared it with agents at DEA and FBI. La Barbie never sent the video to the Dallas Morning News, as was reported. A FBI agent leaked it. La Barbie’s face wasn’t even in the video. La Barbie’s purpose hadn’t been to build his reputation but to have independent news organizations broadcast the other side’s depravity.
Tell us about the guiso, and burning people with different fuels.
Tell us about that journalist you killed.
With voluntary informants (and even with involuntary informants, the ones you had a charge against), it was impossible to tell if they were genuine. Often, the supposed informant had nothing, and simply wanted to get paid by the government. Or he was there on the orders of a capo to extract (or deliver) intelligence (or misinformation) and then disappear. Even if you got a case out of it—even if you got a guilty plea or a conviction—you never knew whether you had been played. Cops and criminals called the war on drugs “the game,” but that was a misnomer. In games, opponents were delineated and a winner emerged.
Informants were a consequence of an escalating war. As each new interdiction strategy was countered systematically by a new evasion technique, the war relied increasingly on paid snitches. In Mexico, criminals paid cops. In the States, cops paid criminals. In Laredo, aspiring informants networked with drug agents, called the office, and stopped by all day long, pitching business like hopped-up entrepreneurs:
AGENT: How can I help you?
SNITCH: I want to start school again and do Job Corps. I need to report to my probation officer. I owe about four hundred dollars.
AGENT: What’s the fine for?
SNITCH: I was caught at school with clonazepam for my anxiety. I’m eighteen but I’ve lived a forty-year life. Do I have regrets? No, because it made me the man I am today.
AGENT: Okay. How can you help me?
SNITCH: I can help you take down heroin and coke. Can you talk to my PO?
AGENT: The faster you work the faster you get paid. Tell me the addresses of the houses. I hope it’s not ones we already have.
SNITCH: You don’t have these, trust me. They’re not addresses. They’re deliveries.
AGENT: Delivery guys?
SNITCH: Yeah. I used to be a heroin addict, so they trust me.
AGENT: Who are they?
SNITCH: Family friends. Cousins. The biggest heroin dealers in Laredo. They were the ones who hooked me, so fuck them. I constructed their house.
AGENT: Like you actually built it?
SNITCH: I painted it. Look, the only reason I’m doing this is for my girl and my child. I’ve seen friends die of overdoses. I love my city too much to see it go down this fast.
AGENT: Do you have the delivery numbers?
SNITCH: No, they’re in my phone and I broke my phone.
AGENT: [Looking at snitch’s phone] What phone is that?
SNITCH: My girl’s.
AGENT: And you mentioned some bad cops earlier?
SNITCH: I’ve sold to them. I’m not gonna mention names.
AGENT: Why not? You’re already here.
SNITCH: [phone rings] Hello? . . . yes . . . Ma’am, can I call you back? [to agent] Sorry, I’m trying to get meds for my ADHD. But let me see how this works first. It’s all about trust. You can’t find trust nowadays. That’s why I wish I was born in the seventies and eighties. . . .
To use snitches, and not get used by them, you had to understand their motivations. First, there was the “regular informant” who just wanted to get paid. This informant was a person who perhaps sold real estate or banking services, and who’d never been arrested. Regular informants stood at a distance from crime, were generally trustworthy, but provided the least information. Second, there was the “political informant”—a foreign official who had to be approved at the highest level of DEA. They were a black box; you could only guess at their true allegiances.
Third was the “restricted informant,” the most common type of snitch. This informant was a criminal who wanted money or revenge, or who wanted to move out his competitor. Or it was someone who had soured on the underworld and felt as though he should’ve been law enforcement all along. It could be a drug-addled liar who woke up one morning and decided it would be fun to play cop, wear the badge, fantasize. Restricted informants could make huge cases, and were always difficult partners. They went back on their word, and played both sides. When you finally made a plan and went undercover, the informant invariably changed the plan at the last minute and blew the operation if you didn’t get him out of the way fast enough. One of every twenty was a decent informant, but it could take multiple meetings to assess. To employ them, you had to provide endless paperwork on their criminal pasts.
History of coke?
Heroin?
Domestic abuse?
Assault?
Well, we’ll have to massage that for the paperwork.
If the case went to trial, and the informant got called to testify, the defense attorney would try to use the informant’s criminal history to impeach his testimony. It rarely mattered, however. Jurors assumed informants were liars.
The economics of the border complicated the spy game. The best informants could earn six figures over a snitching career, but the majority were lucky to make a few thousand dollars. So, without a personal vendetta driving an informant, or some black-market prerogative, the meager snitching salary often proved insufficient against the lure of criminal paydays and the risk of community banishment, or worse.
Rocky, however, was ready to work. He wanted revenge for the time he was mistaken for a traitor and beaten by Omar Treviño. Rocky maintained a healthy coke habit, chattered incessantly, was highly manipulative, and beat his wife from time to time. But at least he had no murder raps, at least not on this side. If he delivered as promised, he’d earn his snitching salary.
After he proved himself by helping DEA set up two drug busts at the river, Zeta leadership asked Rocky to service a new hit squad in Laredo. On the wire that Rocky now wore, the DEA agents, Diaz and Gomez, learned that Miguel had dispatched two hit men to make the loudest statement yet: a Scarface-style massacre at Agave Azul, the hot Laredo nightclub owned by La Barbie.
THE BLACK HAND, THE LEADER of the Mexican Mafia in Laredo, was supposed to use Miguel’s $10,000 to rent a safe house in Laredo for one of Miguel’s hit squads. But the Black Hand spent the money, which was why he asked Rene Garcia, still looking to avenge his brother Moises’s death, to check Miguel’s hit men into Laredo’s El Cortez Motel, then serve as their concierge and chauffeur.
“We need to kill a lot of people so we can make our point here,” one hit man said in the presence of Rocky, who was working with Rene to service the hit men. “So they can know who the Zetas are!” They snorted lavadita at the motel, and vowed to use grenades if the cops showed up.
Rene, working as co-concierge with Rocky, took the hit men to the mall and to bars. He helped procure guns, drugs, and prostitutes. One hit man told Rene that he looked like Moises Garcia, and asked if they were brothers. “No,” Rene said. He had to play it cool long enough to meet Bart Reta, then cook the fool where he stood.
But Rene would never get his chance.
When Rocky was sent out on another errand, Diaz and Gomez ordered local police, led by Robert, to raid the motel and make “wall-off arrests” in order to conceal federal participation.I
In just two months, Rene went from witnessing his brother’s murder, to seeking revenge, to being arrested for aiding the organization responsible. It was a bizarre path whose logic somehow made perfect sense in Laredo.
FOR MORENO, THE BIGGER CASE was saddling up nicely. Rocky was legit. The DEA pledged support for Moreno’s OCDETF case.
A trial unfolded in his mind. He’d use info obtained from Zeta minions to indict the leadership. At trial, when the defense attorney pointed out that the only witnesses were killers, Moreno would pull out a line he hadn’t used in years. He’d tell the jury that you can’t have angels as witnesses for crimes committed in hell.
He smiled at the thought of it, and recalled his favorite Christopher Walken movie, The Prophecy, in which one character says: “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what that creature must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood? Would you ever really want to see an angel?”
Moreno submitted the OCDETF proposal under “Operation Prophecy,” and signed the request for a federal war chest.
COPS FILE CHARGES. PROSECUTORS REVIEW warrants for probable cause. And judges decide bail. But in Laredo, drug dealers drive luxury cars with ads on the windows supporting their favorite judge. A Mercedes says, “Elect Ricardo Rangel for Justice of the Peace.” Rangel was convicted of federal bribery charges. A Jaguar says, “Elect Manuel Flores for District Judge.” One of Flores’s sons provided the weapon in a triple homicide; another was indicted for shooting someone with a gun given to him by his mother.
In Texas, the prosecutor could ask the court to deny bail in cases of multiple homicides, or cases of murder-for-hire. But that never happened in Gabriel’s situation. Instead, a justice of the peace reduced his bail on the “engaging in organized crime” charge to $50,000, and his bail on the murder charge for Noe Flores to $150,000. When Gabriel went before Judge Manuel Flores (no relation) on the Orozco murder, Flores set bail at $2 million, putting Gabriel’s total bail at $2.2 million, 10 percent of which—the amount it would cost to “bond out”—was $220,000.
The Zetas wouldn’t pay that.
When David Almaraz, one of Laredo’s prosecutors-turned-cartel-lawyers, convinced Judge Flores to call a bail-reduction hearing, no one at Laredo PD was notified. A different state prosecutor appeared than had appeared at the first hearing. Almaraz said he and the new prosecutor agreed to $200,000 for the Orozco charges, putting Gabriel’s total bail at $600,000, meaning it would cost only $60,000 to bond out.
Texas had become a stock market for killers. Miguel Treviño didn’t like Gabriel at $220,000, but loved him at $60,000. So on March 20, 2006, a jail guard at Webb County screamed “Cardona! Con todo y chivas!”—an old saying meaning “Grab all your stuff,” literally: “Everything including the goats.”
A nineteen-year-old Zeta killer tied to multiple murders on this side, and more in Mexico, walked out of jail for the third time in six months.
CHRIS DIAZ, J. J. GOMEZ, and Robert Garcia met for lunch at Danny’s, a popular chain of Laredo diners specializing in classic Mexican fare. They traded information about the cartels—but didn’t share everything.
For instance, Diaz and Gomez didn’t tell Robert that Chuy Resendez was a former Zeta; nor that Chuy, now a Sinaloa-allied smuggler in Laredo who worked with La Barbie, was a “source of information” for DEA. Back in the 1990s, before the Zetas moved in, the old gunslingers—independent smugglers—were well known around Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. People feared and respected Chuy Resendez—including Miguel and Omar Treviño, who grew up with Chuy in Nuevo Laredo, stealing cars and trafficking drugs together. When Miguel assumed control of the Nuevo Laredo plaza for the Zetas, he tried to charge his old friend Chuy a smuggling tax. “Come on, güey,” Chuy said. “We grew up together. We’re buddies.” But Miguel insisted: Chuy could pay the tax or get borrado del mapa. Chuy refused to fold. In 2003, when Miguel sent Zeta hit men to Chuy’s Nuevo Laredo house, Chuy was ready with grenades and AK-47s. He killed all of Miguel’s men, then “jumped the river,” partnered with La Barbie and the Sinaloa Cartel, set up a new smuggling operation near Laredo, and began passing intelligence about the Zetas to two young DEA agents: Chris Diaz and J. J. Gomez.
While his relationship with DEA appeared to benefit Chuy’s bottom line, it didn’t always protect him. The Zetas hunted Chuy, and nearly killed him, recently, at the Laredo Wal-Mart. They had Chuy on the run. In murdering Bruno Orozco, another Zeta traitor, in June 2005, Wences Tovar and Gabriel Cardona removed one of Chuy’s best sources for Zeta intelligence, thereby diminishing Chuy’s value to DEA.
The cop and the agents ate and talked. From the parking lot, Gabriel watched them.
“I’M HERE,” ROCKY TOLD THE comandante after walking across the bridge from the United States to Mexico.
“Okay, I couldn’t come get you. But go around the block. There’s going to be a guy in a silver Jetta waiting for you.”
Rocky was nervous he’d be killed, and for good reason: He’d been present at two drug busts at the river, and at the bust of the hit men at the Cortez Motel, and all three times he walked away without being arrested.
There was a guy around the corner in a silver Jetta. The guy put a gun to Rocky’s head while he searched him. “Everything’s okay,” the guy told Rocky. He mentioned that the Company had a long list of targets in Laredo, then handed Rocky $5,500 and asked him to set up a new safe house in Laredo, a large house for a new group of assassins.
Rocky returned to Laredo on foot with the money, and critical new intelligence: The Zetas had a long hit list of people in Laredo. Who was on the list? Rocky didn’t know. But there seemed to be dozens of targets.
Robert Garcia, Chris Diaz, and J. J. Gomez met with Angel Moreno. If you wanted to kill one guy, or attack a nightclub, you ordered it done and your hit men fled back to Mexico. But several hit men and several targets? A safe house? They were planning on a slaughter.
This new information altered Moreno’s thinking: Operation Prophecy was no longer just about an OCDETF investigation, and building a case against capos in Mexico. Moreno, the agents, and Robert needed to try to identify some or all of the targets on the hit list so they could foil the murders before they happened. Simply arresting hit men didn’t mean stopping the murders; if a cartel wanted someone dead, it would keep putting out a contract until the job was done.
Moreno proposed a plan: wiring a safe house for sound and video, and then using Rocky to lure Zetas into the house, where the government would monitor their movements and record their phone calls with Zeta leadership in Mexico, trying to find out who was on the hit list and gathering as much evidence as possible against top Zeta leaders before kicking down the door. Moreno, the agents, and Robert mulled it. It could be insane, or it could be brilliant.
Letting assassins roam Laredo while the government watched? It was definitely without precedent.
What if people died while agents watched from the wire room? What if the assassins asked Rocky to get them guns? Could the government provide criminals with weapons? Absolutely not, ATF said. Well . . . maybe under certain circumstances. Maybe if the guns were nonfunctioning. Actually, they didn’t know. What if the assassins asked Rocky for drugs? Could the government provide drugs? Probably not, but DEA could watch the criminals consume their own drugs without shutting the operation down. More questions came up. What would air and ground support cost per day? What if there was a shoot-out around the safe house? Would there be an extraction plan for neighbors? Did they need to alert the neighbors? Just ignore those kids across the street . . . they’re assassins.
Moreno called a meeting of every agency boss in Laredo and described the plan.
“If it works, we’ll all be heroes,” he told the room. “If it doesn’t, I’ll get indicted.”
The agency heads stared at Moreno with grudging respect. They were all federal bosses. But Moreno, as prosecutor, had the power to make charging decisions and authorize investigations. Every boss had his or her share of war stories about bitter face-offs with Moreno—usually over a wiretap or a subpoena that he wouldn’t submit to the court, usually because the affidavit wasn’t sound. The disgruntled DEA agent, for instance, would kick it up to his local boss. The local boss would call Moreno and say, “You need to push this forward. Our legal counsel says the affidavit has enough.” And Moreno would say, “Yeah, but your legal counsel doesn’t rely on it in court when the case goes to trial. I do.” And then the local boss would kick it up to the regional boss in Houston, and the regional boss would call Moreno: “You need to do this now. Time’s wasting.” And Moreno’d say, “Have you read the affidavit? No? Well read it, then call me.” And then instead of taking five minutes to read the affidavit, the DEA’s regional boss would call the Department of Justice’s regional office in Houston and demand to speak with the drug chief, only to be told that the drug chief was Moreno. Then the regional boss would call the head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, then Washington, and up and up and up.
Prosecutors like Moreno tended to have a different relationship with the more esoteric federal agencies. Fish & Wildlife, for instance, would get pretty excited, and be extremely thankful, when a prosecutor took on a case that would land the agency in the headlines. But the bigger agencies, the ones Moreno dealt with every day—DEA, FBI, ATF, Homeland Security—they were the worst, and Moreno had no patience for their bullshit. If Operation Prophecy succeeded, the younger agents would get bumped up a pay grade, to GS-13 or journeyman status. But if it failed—or even if it succeeded while a minor part went wrong—they would not share in the ignominy. The weight would fall on Moreno alone. He knew a fellow AUSA who was prosecuted for advancing himself cash on his government ATM card. A dumb move, granted, but an infraction for which an agent might’ve caught, at most, a reprimand. If an agent pissed off a judge, or screwed up testimony, it was hardly mentioned. But if a judge bad-talked a prosecutor, that prosecutor had better self-report before it became news. When Moreno took a hard line, agents wondered why he was being an asshole, and he just thought: not compared with what they do to us. This arrangement was the prosecutor’s trade-off, and part of the reason why the American legal system largely worked. Complete power came with complete responsibility.
Moreno amassed the resources of nine federal, state, and local agencies, including DEA, FBI, ICE, ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, Border Patrol, and Laredo PD. The DEA bosses were gung ho about the investigation and committed to seeing it through. Rocky, after all, was their informant. But the other agency heads clashed over a complex, high-stakes operation. They wanted the case but they didn’t. It was their case one day, when the outlook was good, then not, the next, when the investigation hit a bump. If it succeeded, every alpha dog wanted credit. If it didn’t, no one wanted liability. This, Moreno knew from experience, was the essence of a multiagency OCDETF investigation.
Diaz and Gomez worked hard. It was their case, and they owned it. They reviewed Fourth Amendment law to find out what could and couldn’t be recorded in the safe house. Diaz wrote the Title III warrants for the wiretaps. Robert got guns from the Laredo PD evidence room, took them to the shooting range, and filed down the firing pins just enough so that the guns clicked when the trigger was tested but didn’t actually spit rounds. His drive and controlling approach to work pissed a lot of people off; those who hadn’t worked with him before came around to the same opinion as those who had: asshole. But Robert was used to this dynamic in team situations, and didn’t stop moving long enough to process the gossip. Far as he was concerned, the same rule applied. Lead, follow, or get out of my way.
IN LATE MARCH 2006, THE Prophecy team was still getting the legal aspects of surveillance squared away when Zeta leadership called Rocky and asked if the safe house was ready. It was painful to put the criminals off, to risk losing the operation, but bureaucrats moved at a glacial pace. Diaz and Gomez told Rocky to ask for a couple more days.
By April 1, when the wiretap warrants were signed by the judge and everything was set to go, Rocky’s phone had turned cold. Miguel Treviño had grown impatient. Zeta leadership turned to a different concierge. A new cell was setting up somewhere in Laredo, a massacre was coming, and the agents of Operation Prophecy were helpless to do anything about it.
I. When making an arrest, federal agents often use local cops to “wall it off.” Bigger fish are less likely to be scared away if they think their subordinates have been busted by local law enforcement. Signs of federal involvement can tank the larger investigation.