In prison, lots of reporters visited Bart: the History Channel, Investigation Discovery, Fox, the New York Times.
His story suited a smorgasbord of prerogatives. The Fox correspondent, the sole female to interview Bart, became emotional. Another journalist compared Bart to child soldiers in Africa, and referenced Ishmael Beah, who, as a teenager, slaughtered villagers during Sierra Leone’s civil war. After living in a rehabilitation camp, Beah flew to New York, addressed the United Nations, attended college in the States, and became a bestselling memoirist. Bart wondered if he could produce a similar literary work—something that fell between Beah’s A Long Way Gone and A House in the Sky, the harrowing memoir by Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout about her captivity in Somalia. He even had a title picked out: Memoirs of a Teenage Assassin.
Bart had an uncanny way of intuiting what his questioners wanted. In some interviews, he acted callous and proud. Even though the Zetas wanted to kill him for taking his case to trial, he remained in awe of Miguel, the general who led by example. In moments of cold bravado (“Too bad for them,” referring to his victims), Bart’s voice remained soft and melodic even when his words were menacing, noted the Times. The Times reporter observed how Bart’s “countenance shifted back and forth, from the deadpan of a street tough with emotionless eyes to the oddly innocent laugh and smile of a boy for whom everything is a lark.” In other interviews, Bart described atrocities with an air of reluctance, haltingly, as if wrestling with trauma and trying to make sense of repressed memories. In this mode—which, he learned, was a hit with his public—he expressed glassy-eyed regret and portrayed himself as a victim of “that world.”
In 2011, Bart found new inspiration. He began exchanging letters with a mother of two in Massachusetts. Ten years Bart’s senior, Eryca cried after watching the documentaries about him. She liked the devilish flames he tattooed around his eyes. She wanted some kind of relationship.
It seemed to Bart that her intentions were pure, but how could he be sure? He had a lot of time to do. He didn’t want to start something that wouldn’t be finished. He asked Eryca never to lie to him. A friendship, he wrote to her, should be based on trust, and earned, not just summoned upon request. He opened up. He explained that he was more of a lovey-dovey type. He said he never got tired of listening to R&B, but he also liked “instrumental music” such as Mozart. In school, which he attended till sixth grade, he was good in biology and biochemistry. He had always wanted to be a medical examiner who performed postmortem examinations. But shit, he wrote, he didn’t want her to think he was a sicko. He certainly wasn’t the monster they portrayed him as; in his circle, it was important to remember, it was either kill or be killed. But Bart never killed an innocent person, he said. It was a job. They were all just price tags with different prices on them. But yes, it was true. Where he was from, “Bart” was a feared name. When Eryca had problems with her ex, Bart told her she needed to buy herself a gun and blow his brains out. They fell in love and agreed to get married.
Eryca told Bart that she obtained something called “a proxy marriage,” in which her sister stood in for Bart at the ceremony. But she never produced documentation when Bart asked for it. She wrote that she was looking at options for in vitro fertilization, and researched whether Bart could send his semen through the mail.
In one of Bart’s TV segments, with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Eryca told the camera, “He became close with Miguel Treviño, he became real close with the big boss. He gave Rosalio the big jobs. . . . Miguel Treviño, he was a monster. The stuff he forced Rosalio to do should never have been forced on anybody.” On Twitter, Eryca reveled in her new status as a “cartel wife.” But when the Center for Investigative Reporting aired her videotaped interview without concealing her identity, she sued for $500,000 in damages. Since the 2013 broadcast, her complaint stated, “Ms. Almeciga has endured public humiliation . . . as well as the overwhelming fear that Los Zetas cartel at any moment may take retribution against her. . . . She has developed paranoia and has been treated for depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (‘PTSD’), specifically, symptoms which contributed to extreme anxiety, lack of sleep, constant nightmares, and so forth.” A federal judge said Eryca “is not a remotely credible witness” and dismissed the case.
More reporters came, and Bart grew irritated with them. They were only interested in his past. No one asked about his future, his plans to appeal and move out of the Texas prison system to a state where the Mexican Mafia wouldn’t bother him. (He’d been stabbed in prison as retaliation for the Moises Garcia hit.) But the journalists did give Bart an idea. What if he used an interview to make people see how he’d changed? That could help get his case reopened. He needed “a world-wide publicity.” He wondered if a major media outlet might even pay for the interview. Then, to demonstrate his benevolence, he could donate the money to the families of his victims.
He connected with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, who made time for Bart in 2013, after Miguel Treviño’s capture in Mexico. Bart prepared extensively. But when the CNN piece aired on Anderson Cooper 360, he wasn’t happy. Describing what he claimed was his first hit for Miguel, Bart told Lavandera: “I had to do it. What other options do I have? If I don’t do it, I know what’s gonna happen to me.” He continued: “The first day I had to take someone’s life—that’s a day I’m never gonna forget. ’Cause after that I didn’t have no life.”
“But you kept on killing after that first time,” Lavandera pointed out.
“I had to,” Bart replied. “That’s what a lot of people don’t understand.”
In voice-over, Lavandera said: “That’s what Reta says now. But in this police interrogation video [with Robert Garcia] the young killer relished the deadly power he wielded. . . .”
The editing trick that Lavandera pulled, Bart felt, was “a bitch move.” Why, after Bart talked about being coerced into executing a helpless man, did Lavandera have to play the interview of the Superman bullshit, then mention the “facial markings” even after Bart told “that hypocritical bastard” that the tattoos had nothing to do with the cartel lifestyle?
By contrast, Gabriel’s frankness with Lavandera—“I guess I was trying to put an image out there”—didn’t help Bart’s cause.
As Bart’s options closed, and media interest faded, advice arrived from the female Fox reporter who interviewed him.
She didn’t pretend to understand how lonely and depressed Bart felt, and wished there was something she could say or do to make it better. No one was worthless, she wrote. Everyone possessed the ability to contribute to society. If Bart looked a bit harder, she had no doubt that he, too, would find a way. The sooner he moved away from the old world he lived in, the more freedom he’d have. That world gave him a false sense of power and belonging. Now he was going through withdrawal. But he’d rebuild his life, of that she was sure. It might take time, but he’d get there.
LIKE BART, GABRIEL WAS CLASSIFIED as a security threat and a high-profile inmate, and housed in a segregated unit where he saw other inmates infrequently. His days began at six o’clock, when an officer knocked on his cell and screamed, “Get your ass up!”
At eleven, he went outside for an hour of recreation in one of six fenced-in boxes. In his first state prison, he was housed on the same segregated tier as his old rap idol, South Park Mexican. They played a form of basketball, tipping the ball back and forth over the fence. SPM reinforced what Gabriel always believed—that the star was fooled by female fans who dressed up to appear older than they were. In fact, SPM got forty-five years for sneaking into his daughter’s bedroom and performing oral sex on her nine-year-old friend.
Gabriel was caught between the image for which he had sacrificed everything and the better person he believed existed beneath it. To embrace the latter, he needed to disown the former. He could start by enrolling in a prison course called GRAD, Gang Renunciation and Disassociation. But it wasn’t so easy. He was in a prison gang called HPL. Zetas were not well received in prison, and Gabriel was loath to relinquish the protection HPL provided. Besides, the old image was useful.
Since he didn’t talk much, people often mistook him as weak. Others were tattooed from head to toe and rarely got disrespected. Aside from four tattoos of Santa Muerte on his back, arm, and legs, he didn’t have many visible tattoos, except for “Christina” on his wrist and a second pair of eyes on his eyelids. People often tried to “throw game” on him. The worst were the Latinos from up north; they’d rather associate with the blacks than with “straight-up Mexicans” from South Texas, never minding that their parents all came from the same places: El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico. When Gabriel got moved to a new unit, he looked for the “gossip guy, the girl” and talked with him about “the cartel stuff.” Then Gabriel sent articles, and the gossip spread.
That fool a killa for real!
That fool square bidness!
In his cell he did push-ups and sit-ups. He read magazines and legal texts. Random people wrote to him, mainly women and journalists. But they tended to disappear after a letter or two. One correspondent kept at it.