In the office of the law, Gabriel tried a new tactic: When talking could’ve helped him, he said nothing, and cut no deal. Fear and prudence trumped pride. Motivated by a wish to protect his family from the Company, he decided not to contest his case, nor cut his sentence by snitching on the Zetas, and instead be the stand-up guy that Angel Moreno had rarely seen in twenty years as a prosecutor.
For his alleged roles in the murders of Bruno Orozco, Moises Garcia, Noe Flores, Chuy Resendez, and Chuy’s nephew, he pleaded guilty. His three fifty-year sentences and two eighty-year sentences would all run concurrently, meaning he’d serve a total of eighty years in state prison.
As for his wiretapped confession to the murder-by-beating of the two American teens in Nuevo Laredo—Poncho Aviles and Inez Villareal—it didn’t matter that no bodies or evidence had been collected, nor even that the murders occurred in Mexico. Though there were many options for charging Gabriel, Moreno let him plead guilty to one charge: a new post-9/11 federal law intended to be used against Americans who enlisted with a terrorist group and went abroad to fight. It covered the murder of an American by an American on foreign soil.
Moreno’s federal indictment in Operation Prophecy named more than thirty defendants, including Miguel and Omar Treviño, Rene Garcia, and even the Black Hand, the Mexican Mafia leader.
When Gabriel and Richard appeared for their 2008 arraignment in federal court, Gabriel, having decided to plead guilty, balked a little before the judge. “I didn’t know I was giving up my right to appeal in the plea bargain,” he told Judge Micaela Alvarez. Judge Alvarez explained that if he didn’t want to give up his right to appeal, then it was the government’s right—Moreno’s right—to pull the plea agreement and head to trial. Gabriel relented: “I’ll go ahead and give up my right to appeal.”
Judge Alvarez wanted to make sure he understood what giving up his appeal meant. “Let’s say I sentence you to life, which is a possibility,” she said. “You’re sitting in prison. You’re thinking, My lawyer didn’t do a good job for me. My lawyer should’ve fought harder. If you file a notice of appeal—it’s kind of funny to say; people still file them even though they gave up their right—the first thing the government is going to do is say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, he gave up his right.’ And the Fifth Circuit”—the federal court of appeals—“will say, ‘Yeah, he gave up his right.’ Now, the other thing I talked about, the 2255. Let’s say you’re sitting in prison. You’re talking to prisoners. And they say, ‘You know what, there is something you can file called a 2255’ ”—a so-called collateral attack that can be filed by a defendant within a year of sentencing. “I look at it. I say I explained all of this to him. I told him he wouldn’t be able to do this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Moreno then read aloud the facts that the government intended to prove if the case went to trial: the disappearances of Poncho Aviles and Inez Villareal; their murder by torture; Gabriel’s admission on the seventeen-minute phone call with Bart.
When Moreno was done, Judge Alvarez asked Gabriel: “Are there any actions here attributed to you that you would say you did not engage in?”
“No, everything is correct,” Gabriel said. He denied only the statements attributed to him in which he allegedly talked about third parties. He wished not to be on the record as having discussed Miguel Treviño, Meme Flores, or any other Company leader.
Gabriel’s sentencing date came seven months later. At the sentencing hearing, when Judge Alvarez asked if any victims wished to address the court, the mother of fourteen-year-old Inez Villareal stepped forward. She could’ve been speaking for thousands of Laredo mothers when she explained how she lost a year of work looking for her son, and was about to lose her house and car as well. She addressed Gabriel directly: “I am going to tell you this, son, because I know your mother is going through the pain that I am. But the stronger sorrow is mine, because your mother knows where you are. I ask you, even if you want me to ask on my knees, if you know where my son is buried, please tell the judge.”
The judge thanked her, told Gabriel to give his attorney any information he had about the whereabouts of Inez Villareal, and then asked if he had anything to say on his own behalf.
The young man who once aspired to be an attorney said: “I apologize to the government of the United States and to the community of Laredo for having participated in these kind of crimes. And just give me the least amount of sentence that you can. That’s all. Thank you.”
Gabriel’s lawyer in the federal case, Jeff Czar, urged the judge to give Gabriel “some hope in terms of a light at the end of the tunnel.” Czar argued that Gabriel’s personality was “a strong one,” but disagreed that he supervised other parties. “There’s nothing that shows us that his intelligence is such that he was somehow brighter or smarter than the rest of that group.” Czar said drugs played an aggravating role; that Gabriel was a high school dropout and lived on the streets most of his life. “The history and characteristics of my client are not good. There’s nothing I can do about that in the report. There’s no way to doctor it up.” The facts being tossed about, true or not, had, he claimed, turned his client into an “urban legend.”
Angel Moreno replied.
Since the arrests of Gabriel and his crew, three years earlier, Laredo’s murder rate dropped to less than half of what it was when they were operating, Moreno argued. He emphasized Gabriel’s leadership role, and that he had direct contact with cartel heads in Mexico. “He was the one that was calling the shots.” Although Gabriel was young, he was no younger than the men and women who served our country in war. He was arrested several times. Regrettably, he was always released on bond. But he had plenty of opportunity to stop. “As to whether this case has become a legend, your honor, I would say ninety percent of what’s in the report came directly from him. His statements. His admissions. The interceptions of the calls. The videos. Maybe, in his head, it was romantic to be part of this group and engaged in these activities. If it’s become a legend, it’s become a legend because the defendant has elected to make it so.”
The judge conceded that Gabriel “was not in charge of the entire organization,” but said the record clearly reflected that he was “in charge at least of his own particular group.” Whether a problem of environment, DNA, or drugs—or because he lived in a fantasy world where he thought committing these murders glorified him—the judge concluded that, bilingual though he may be, she and Gabriel did not speak the same language, “the language of humanity.” She said: “Very frankly, I see nothing in this report to indicate that you have any consideration for your fellow human beings.” For the safety of Laredo, for the safety of the entire United States, a sentence of life imprisonment, she held, was warranted. He was lucky, she said. In her opinion he deserved the death penalty.
THERE WERE STILL MANY ARRAIGNMENTS to come on the Operation Prophecy indictment. But, observing Gabriel’s sentencing from the back benches, Robert was disappointed. The media feted Laredo law enforcement for the case. Narrating a TV documentary about Gabriel and Bart, an actor from The Sopranos called Robert “the Sherlock Holmes of the Tex-Mex border.” But Robert had hoped Gabriel would contest the federal charge and take the case to trial. He wanted the snitches to be paraded onto the witness stand, the curtain pulled back on the gruesome reign of Miguel Treviño, a man who was only a few years into his ascent in the Company when he told Gabriel and Wences that he’d killed more than eight hundred people.
Back in 2006, three months after Operation Prophecy stepped on the safe house, there had been hope of a big Zeta trial in Laredo. In Mexico, Bart Reta had defied Zeta orders and attacked a night club in Monterrey, killing four and wounding others. Without Company protection, he landed in the hands of Mexican authorities. When they arrested Bart, they raided his house and found $275,000 in cash, a bulletproof BMW M3, a diamond ring valued at $25,000, and about $50,000 of new Versace clothes. Psychological evaluations judged Bart’s condition as “personality dissociative disorder,” and concluded that he was not only unstable but a security threat to whichever institution housed him.
Each country had different extradition requirements. If Moreno wanted to extradite someone from Canada, he sent a small envelope of papers. Mexico was at the other end of the spectrum: Their system demanded a truckload of paperwork. Extradition took years, or didn’t happen at all. But Mexico offered up Bart without a single document filed—and Bart was eager to get out of Mexico. If he stayed, he faced the wrath of the Zetas. In Texas, he believed authorities had only weak evidence linking him to the murders of Moises Garcia and Noe Flores. So, on the day after Bart turned seventeen—July 28, 2006—Robert met the mythic killer in the middle of the night on a tarmac at the San Antonio airport. Handcuffed and shackled, Bart grinned widely and recited the license plate number of Robert’s undercover car.
For several days in the interrogation room—over Bart’s requested meal of Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwiches, and bottles of Big Red with cups of crushed ice—Bart told Robert stories from his time in the Company. Killing made him feel like James Bond and Superman, he said. He was basically a detective, just like Robert. He had a job, like any man, and he was good at his job. He never showed emotions. One minute you were having fun, kicking it like brothers, and the next minute he was putting a bullet to your head. No, it wasn’t normal. He knew that. And yes, at first he did it for the money. But after a while it got addictive. He couldn’t stop. He used to get a high out of it. It got to the point where if he didn’t kill someone that day he wasn’t satisfied. Taking the gun away, he said, was “like taking candy from a baby.” Shit, he was so gone he could’ve killed his own father and felt nothing.
Their blood-soaked chatter assumed a weird, affable normality. Robert and Bart spoke nonchalantly of live humans fed to tigers and burned in oil drums; of hacking and torture; of the camps. Miguel Treviño was a smart man, Bart believed, and ruthless. Miguel trusted Bart like a son, molded him into an assassin. Bart even wanted to purchase two white tigers so he could be like Mike. And yes, it was true, absolutely, what Gabriel had said: Bart was nothing but thirteen when he joined up. Miguel practically raised him, sent him to a special-force military camp where he always got the highest scores in guns, explosives, hand-to-hand combat, how to move as a ghost. Then he was sent to different places around the nation, to unknown places—the only evidence of his being there a trail of dead bodies.
Robert had interviewed dozens of killers. They all went straight to the excuses, the justifications. But for whatever bullshit Bart fed Robert, he was the first murderer who came right out and said that he killed not because he was from poverty or because his mother didn’t hold him enough as a baby. He killed because he liked to kill. Robert’s feelings for Bart were complicated. Sure, the kid had wanted to whack his ass, had even threatened his family, but Robert liked him. He actually liked the kid.
Bart’s candor was certainly part of his charm, but so perhaps was his naïveté. Surprised to discover that his forthrightness in the debriefings would curry no favor with the state court on the murder charges for Moises Garcia and Noe Flores, Bart was also deeply hurt when Robert told him that Gabriel gave him up on the Flores murder. Bart wondered: How could his brother do that? Robert pretended to empathize, playing up the betrayal until Bart decided to challenge his case and go to trial.
The following summer, all of downtown Laredo was secured during Bart’s state trial, with squad cars parked at every intersection near the courthouse. Robert took the stand and explained the investigation of the Flores murder, how the cell phone trail led to the tattoo artist. The tattoo artist, fearing for his family, took the witness stand and pleaded with the judge to send him home. When Christina took the stand, she was so scared that she refused to confirm anything she’d said in her deposition a day earlier. The Lord, per Isaiah 3:16, had laid bare her secret parts, taken away the bracelets, scarves, and perfume. Due to her involvement in the case, she was fired from her job at a bank. In Bart’s trial, however, neither the tattoo artist nor Christina was necessary. The evidence against Bart was heavy. On the third day of trial, he decided to end it and plead guilty.
“I hope you take the time in prison to reflect on your life,” the judge told Bart as he announced a sentence of seventy years. “It’s a young life.”
IT WAS UNCLEAR HOW MANY people on Miguel’s List of 40 avoided being killed. Interviews and debriefings helped Laredo PD identify many targets on the list. Mike Lopez, the Laredo smuggler who slept with Miguel’s ex-girlfriend, ignored law enforcement’s advice to leave Laredo; in 2007, a gang member from the Texas Syndicate murdered Lopez while he was standing in front of a Laredo bar that he had just opened.
New informants cycled through Robert’s office, and he learned some interesting facts. Miguel had been wrong about the next president being “on lock”: The Company bet on the wrong horse. The Company now wanted to execute President-elect Felipe Calderón for refusing the bribe. Company brass believed Calderón favored the Sinaloa Cartel.
When Calderón took office, at the end of 2006, the Harvard grad said he planned to wage war on the cartels. If he did, Washington’s Mérida Initiative would send Mexico $1.5 billion in crime-fighting aid. It wasn’t much next to the approximately $50 billion a year in tax-free business (about 5 percent of Mexican GDP) that drug users did with the cartels. But it was enough to buy a war. Calderón launched his ill-fated effort to purge Mexico of the cartels.
In Mexico, the cartels quickly saw the difficulty of fighting each other and Calderón’s government. In 2007, Chapo Guzmán met Heriberto Lazcano at a hotel in Valle Hermoso. They agreed to divide the country. The meeting ended with a party and enemies coming together over whiskey and cocaine. But, like most promises in the cartel world, the Valle Hermoso Pact was short-lived. Far from ending the conflict, it marked the beginning of its most bloody phase. The cartels fought the government, rival cartels, and even fought among themselves. Catorce—the original Zeta who co-led the organization with Lazcano and ran the Company’s business in Veracruz—was shot dead at a Veracruz horse race, possibly on orders from Miguel. After Catorce’s death, Miguel killed Catorce’s loyalists in the Company, and plotted his rise.
The Mexican Drug War had begun.
GABRIEL CARDONA NEVER GOT HIS shot at La Barbie. But Gabriel and the other Wolf Boys served their masters well. By the end of 2006, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel had repelled the Sinaloans and maintained the Company’s grip on the Gulf Coast and the Laredo crossing.
La Barbie scrambled. He separated from his first wife, his high school sweetheart, and married Priscilla, the teenage daughter of a Laredo trafficking associate. But La Barbie was losing friends and money fast. Via his attorney, he contacted the DEA office in Laredo. DEA wanted an informant to help capture Arturo Beltrán-Leyva (ABL), the Sinaloan associate who was La Barbie’s boss, as well as Chapo, the Sinaloan head. La Barbie told DEA that he would surrender only under certain conditions. From an internal DEA memo:
(1) VALDEZ-Villareal will provide information and intelligence on top corrupt Mexican Gov’t officials, whom DEA and other federal agencies in Mexico work with;
(2) will not provide information on [cartel leaders] discussed in the first negotiation;
(3) if and when arrested, VALDEZ-Villareal wants to immediately be extradited to the U.S.;
(4) wants immunity from prosecution for himself and two of his cousins;
(5) does not want to testify against any person who he provides information on.
“Legal considerations still need to be reviewed by AUSA Angel Moreno,” the memo said. “The terms agreed upon by the District Office and the McAllen District Office are listed below.”
(1) VALDEZ-Villareal must agree to meet with Agents of the DEA in a neutral country in order to fully debrief;
(2) VALDEZ-Villareal must provide information which will result in the arrest of one of three [cartel leaders] (BELTRAN-Leyva, GUZMAN-Loera, or ZAMBADA-Garcia);
(3) VALDEZ-Villareal will not be granted full immunity from prosecution (possibly consider minimum jail time);
(4) VALDEZ-Villareal will turn himself in to U.S. authorities at a U.S. port of entry or a country where extradition is possible; and
(5) VALDEZ-Villareal will surrender an amount equal to the amount he wants to bring into the U.S. (VALDEZ-Villareal has expressed his desire to bring $5 million into the U.S.)
La Barbie offered to help nab ABL or Chapo, but not both. Laredo agents were eager to strike a deal, but their boss in Houston quashed the negotiations: “He’s a fucking doper; if he doesn’t want to cooperate, screw him.”
At the time, the American government was talking to one of its biggest cartel cooperators. Osiel Cárdenas, the Gulf Cartel leader from whose mind the Zetas sprung a decade earlier, was extradited to the States in 2007, and sentenced in 2010. Eligible for a life sentence, Osiel was scheduled for release in 2025. His plea agreement remained sealed. But Osiel, through his own informant, passed along information to U.S. authorities about drug loads and the whereabouts of Gulf Cartel and Zeta underbosses—the kind of meaningful, real-time intelligence that only a top capo could possess. There may have also been an exchange of money between Osiel and the U.S. government. In 2013, in a Zeta-related federal trial in Washington, D.C., a former Zeta lieutenant would testify that the Company sent $60 million for Osiel “to use in the United States to lower his sentence.”I
The kingpin strategy—in which American and Mexican authorities sought to dismantle cartels by going after their top leaders—was not just a fallacy (extradited leaders cut great deals for short sentences, while lackeys tended to get much heavier sentences) but a catastrophe: When a capo was captured, the ensuing power vacuums only ignited more violence. As one scholar observed, President Calderón’s effort to clean up his country locked Mexico into “a self-reinforcing equilibrium of instability.”
It wasn’t all Calderón’s fault. He may have lost Mexico to the savages, just like Presidents Fox, Zedillo, and Salinas before him . . . all the way back to Benito Juárez, Mexico’s twenty-sixth president, from 1858 to 1872, who ran off the French and Spanish occupiers but established a too-weak central government of his own. Like the lord of Culhuacán, ruler of the old empire when his Aztec mercenaries revolted, Calderón and Fox inherited a doomed kingdom. The paternalism of American drug policy—combined with the Great Father’s clever trade agreements, geopolitical agendas, and tricky systems of debt—ensured that Mexico remained, as the intelligentsia put it, problematic.
I. The government excluded this testimony from the public record, and denied the author’s request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The transcript, provided to the author by a confidential source, shows that the judge held a private meeting with the lawyers and said: “The witness implied that $60 million was sent here to help reduce [Osiel’s] sentence. Are we going to let that stay just the way it is on the record?” The judge added: “It leaves a certain implication that one would like to have cleared up, if the $60 million was going to affect his sentence. I hope that wasn’t the case. If it was $60 million to pay an attorney, maybe we could bring that out rather than making it sound like something different.” The issue was never resolved and never raised again on the record.