After finishing a midnight workout on the weight set he bought for the Hillside house, Gabriel sat on the balcony with an AR-15 across his lap and a corta, a handgun, in his belt. He smoked weed by converting an orange into a pipe, carving out a bowl on top and poking a hole through the middle.
The marijuana opened and focused his mind.
What is this game, he wondered, snapping people as if they were flies?
And then he was outside his head. He watched himself pull out the corta, release the clip, roll a bullet between his fingers. He thought: I possess an AR. I possess a corta. I have a Versace shirt and a roll of cash in my pocket. Lines by Tupac Shakur ran through his head.
He thought about the book he read in jail during February and March. It was an investigation of the murders of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G. Gabriel turned ten on the day Tupac, twenty-five, died in 1996. Tupac and his producer, Suge Knight, were in Vegas, driving from the Mike Tyson fight to a party, when a Cadillac screeched to a stop in front of Suge’s BMW. The rear window came down, and .40-caliber bullets tore open the “Thug Life” tattoo on Tupac’s torso as he tried to scramble for cover in the backseat. Six months later, a twenty-four-year-old Biggie Smalls—Tupac’s East Coast rival in the 1990s hip-hop scene—was also killed in a drive-by.
Gabriel had always believed that Tupac and Biggie died in a gang war between West Coast and East Coast rappers, Bloods versus Crips.
This book told a different story. In this account, Tupac was in the midst of a tricky comeback when he was murdered. The year before his death, Tupac sat in a New York prison, settling into a fifty-two-month sentence for the sexual assault of a groupie. By then, he’d put out two bestselling albums, and starred opposite Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice. He’d also been arrested eight times, escaped conviction in the shooting of two off-duty police officers, and cheated death when he was shot in the lobby of a Manhattan music studio. Plaintiffs tried to sue Tupac in civil court, blaming his lyrics for the shooting of a Texas trooper, and for the paralysis of a woman hit by a bullet during one of his concerts. Of Tupac’s many assault cases, one charged him for attacking the filmmakers of Menace II Society when he felt they were casting him as a sucker.
Imprisoned, finally, for sexual assault, Tupac felt ready for a change.
He’d helped build gangsta rap into a bazillion-dollar business with crossover appeal. All those white suburban kids living vicariously through his ghetto rhymes. Yet, financially, Tupac was ruined. Thug life ate his earnings in legal fees. If that life was real, he began thinking in prison, let someone else represent it.
Suge Knight, the book said, visited Tupac in prison. Tupac’s problems made him more attractive to Suge. If Tupac agreed to join Suge’s music label, Death Row Records, Suge said, he could spring Tupac. One week later, Tupac was released from prison.
If Tupac was the warrior-poet, Suge was the general, buying and intimidating his way to impunity. Within the hip-hop castle, however, they were competitors vying for the same subjects, a core ghetto audience that demanded crime and sex from their rap-industry stars, in art as in life. But they also did socially minded activities. Suge hosted Mother’s Day celebrations and sponsored Christmas toy giveaways, Gabriel read. And Tupac had his own milk-and-honey stuff, such as his ode to mothers in the song “Dear Mama.” In another song, “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” Tupac encouraged kids to ignore negativity and rise above the hood. But take away those assaults, the cop shootings, that prison time: Without all that crazy shit to woo the illest, Tupac, like South Park Mexican, would’ve had no stage, would’ve been no nigger for the times.
The bad, Gabriel decided, made the good possible.
When he came out of prison and joined Death Row, Tupac’s idea was to maintain a friendship with Suge but slowly separate his business from Death Row and start his own label, Makaveli Records, the name inspired by his prison reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Unwinding the business relationship with Suge was difficult. That prospect faded when Tupac’s first album on the Death Row label, All Eyez on Me, earned $10 million in its first week, second only—at the time—to The Beatles Anthology as the best commercial opening in history. But, Gabriel read, Tupac remained determined to cut loose. He relied more on his East Coast attorney, a Harvard professor, and fired Death Row’s lawyer.
The Tyson fight in Vegas was ten days later.
The book maintained that everything about Tupac’s murder was strange. In a typical drive-by, the shooter’s car pulled up alongside the victim’s car, such that both passenger and driver were in the line of fire. It also made the getaway easier. But the Cadillac pulled in front of Suge’s BMW. The shooter had a frontal shot at Tupac, and only Tupac. The murder appeared, at first, to be retaliation for an attack Tupac made on a Crips gang member earlier that night, as Tupac and Suge were leaving the Tyson fight. The book suggested that Suge staged the altercation to create the appearance of a motive.
Blood in, blood out, Gabriel thought.
Well, he didn’t admire Tupac any less. But Gabriel’s own code was different. If he used to think of himself as independent, he’d matured into a soldier, a Company man—more than a mere Wolf Boy—and now he lived by the principles of duty and loyalty. Por y sobre la verga. For and about the idea. Anything within the business was nothing more than business. Do the job and make yourself valuable, he had always told himself. And he did. Big brother Mike would be there, he had assured himself, and he was right.
The law kept letting him out, the Company kept paying for it. What clearer validation could there be?
His leadership skills were impeccable. With those Wolf Boys beneath him in the hierarchy, he was generous but stern. He respected authority. He listened first, then spoke. He knew the organization. He knew who controlled each plaza in Mexico. He knew, for instance, that Cancún was up for grabs, and that he was a contender to run it. Mexico would be easier. A beachside plaza of his own. He and Christina living like royalty among a crew of his closest homies.
He slept.
The next day, Richard and another Wolf Boy came by with news. Alfonso “Poncho” Aviles, a sixteen-year-old whom Gabriel remembered from school, had joined the Sinaloa Cartel and was recruiting other kids from Laredo.
Gabriel called Meme, who said, “Find out who he works with and what he does.”
Gabriel, Richard, and the third Wolf Boy, who knew Poncho, went to Poncho’s house and passed themselves off as fellow Sinaloans. Poncho mentioned the names of a few prospective recruits, then a suspicious relative came outside and the Wolf Boys left. A few minutes later, Poncho called. He said he knew that they were really working with Forty, and that if he ever saw them again, it wasn’t going to be nice.
No, Gabriel agreed: It wasn’t.
THE SIX WEEKS GABRIEL SPENT in jail during February and March were not a waste. They were a write-off. He met a young man named Pantera, who was in jail because his brother-in-law, Chuy Resendez, betrayed him. The Sinaloa-allied Chuy controlled the trafficking routes through Rio Bravo, the Texas border town just east of Laredo.
Chuy would be a hard kill, a trophy for any rising Company man. Cooking Chuy would all but guarantee Gabriel’s promotion. So when Pantera made bail, a week after Gabriel made bail, Gabriel and Richard asked Pantera to get a picture of Chuy. Richard blew the picture up on a Xerox machine, and the three of them drove across to meet with Miguel.
Surrounded by ten gunmen wearing bulletproof vests and armed with AR-15s, Miguel greeted Gabriel, Richard, and Pantera, and invited them into his Porsche Cayenne.
“Okay,” Miguel said. “How much is it going to be?” He looked back at Gabriel and Richard, awaiting a number. When Gabriel didn’t speak, Richard said: “Fifty for us and forty for Pantera?”
Miguel agreed: $50,000 would be split between Gabriel and Richard, and $40,000 would be paid to Pantera for setting up Chuy. Pantera would alert the Wolf Boys when Chuy was in town, tell them where he stayed, and who he was going to visit.
As Richard and Gabriel exited the Porsche, Miguel said, “Hey, Gaby. There’s another group over there trying to locate Chuy. Meet up with them, use them however you want. You run it, but stay back. Me entiendes?” Understand?
“Sí, Comandante,” Gabriel said, and ran off.
Later that day, they met the six other Zeta assassins in a park in Siete Viejo to coordinate their protocol. Then Gabriel, with Pantera, went out scouting for Chuy in the Dodge Ram while Richard and several Wolf Boys from “the B team,” the “chukkies,” waited at a safe house. Pantera and Gabriel relayed Chuy’s movements to Richard and the others: Chuy’s truck was on Highway 83. Richard and the Wolf Boys ran out to a green Chevrolet pickup and sped away from the safe house.
Armed with a 9 mm, Richard lay down in the bed of the pickup, between two boys with AK-47s. The driver spotted Resendez’s truck on 83, pulled next to it, then pulled ahead. When the boy in the passenger seat of the pickup began to shoot, Richard and the two in back popped up like skeletons from a grave and shredded Chuy’s Suburban with more than ninety rounds. Chuy’s truck slowed, then coasted away, crossed lanes, and stopped when it hit a wrong-way sign.
Later that day, Sunday night, Gabriel and Richard showered, picked up Richard’s wife, and went cruising on San Bernardo Avenue.
On Monday, Miguel and Meme invited Gabriel and Richard to Nuevo Laredo for lunch. It was Gabriel’s biggest commission yet: $50,000 to be split between him and Richard. Gabriel would take $30,000 and Richard would get $20,000.
At the meeting with Miguel, they bantered about business. Two months after Fito’s death, Miguel still bemoaned the loss of his little brother. “It wasn’t fair,” he kept saying. “Fito wasn’t involved.” Gabriel sympathized. But Richard thought: How many innocent people have you killed, Miguel? Weren’t you the one who started all this family stuff? Killing children no older than ten?
Miguel wanted to know if they’d located Robert Garcia yet. Gabriel said he knew Robert’s schedule, where he lived, even where his son played hockey; knew his Jeep and had memorized the license plate. He also knew, but didn’t say, that killing an American cop got you sent “straight to the chair.”
The detective, Miguel said, was worth $500,000.
J. J. GOMEZ AND CHRIS Diaz fumed.
They’d made a lot of promises to a lot of people. Funding was laid out. Angel Moreno backed them. As far as confidential sources, they didn’t consider the death of Chuy Resendez a major loss. They had several sources within the Zetas; Rocky was the closest one to the cartel’s top commanders. But if Operation Prophecy failed now, because their informant got locked out, well, Diaz and Gomez would be Fucking New Guys forever. They berated Rocky.
“We’re not losing our careers over this!”
“Get them in the fucking house!”
Calm under pressure, Rocky ran scenarios through his head, discarding those that seemed likely to end with him being tortured and killed. He thought back to the day when his body lay broken in a Nuevo Laredo stash house, and Omar Treviño was seconds away from putting a bullet in his head. On that day, it was Iván Velásquez-Caballero, the Zeta leader known as Talivan, who saved Rocky’s life.
So, on the morning of Saturday, April 8, 2006, Rocky called Talivan. He mentioned that he was waiting to hear from a commander about a safe house, and wondered if Talivan had heard anything about it. Thirty minutes later, Rocky’s phone rang. The commander told him to meet two guys in the parking lot of Best Buy, just east of I-35.
And just like that, Operation Prophecy was back. The federal, state, and local agencies mobilized. The DEA techs booted up the wire room at the main DEA office, on Shiloh Drive, and rechecked all the wire equipment that had been installed at the safe house on Orange Blossom Loop, a quiet suburban street on Laredo’s north side. DEA planes were reserved if needed. Four marked PD squad cars would be on standby, plus a dozen unmarked units. Two SWAT teams, one from PD and one from the sheriff’s office, would alternate eight-hour shifts, hanging out in a DEA conference room set up with cots and food. A DEA tractor-trailer, rigged with cameras and microphones, would handle mobile surveillance of the house and the hit men.
At 2 p.m. on Saturday, Diaz and Gomez followed Rocky to the meeting at Best Buy, but couldn’t get close enough to see the two guys that Rocky gave the keys to.
Rocky escorted the assassins to the safe house, a white-brick rambler on Orange Blossom Loop, nestled inconspicuously in suburbia.
Back in the wire room, at the DEA office on Shiloh Drive, less than a mile away, three screens displayed three camera feeds. The first camera, installed above the safe house garage and facing outward, showed the house’s driveway and the street in front of it. The second screen showed the kitchen, with a white Formica island in the middle, cabinets above it, and a breakfast nook with a small table overlooking the lawn and the house next door. The third screen showed the furniture-free living room. Microphones picked up everything, except in the bathroom and bedrooms. The cell phone of everyone in the safe house would also soon be tapped.
As Operation Prophecy got under way, there was no reason to think Gabriel Cardona figured in the sting. Such were the vagaries of Laredo’s bail protocol that no one even knew Gabriel had walked out of jail three weeks earlier. From the wire room, Robert and the agents watched the assassins enter their new pad and settle in.
“Holy shit!” Robert said. “That’s the guy I’ve been arresting all year!”