When Junior and Peter began cooperating, they started a chain reaction of indictments against the entire North American drug trafficking network. Early on, the dozens of players hauled in through raids on their stash houses and warehouses were low-level workers, dealers and wholesalers. But by the end of 2009, the domino effect was in full force, and US Attorneys were reeling in bigger and bigger fish across the country.
The indictments weighed on Peter and Junior, and the whole time they were proffering, they tried to convince some of their associates and workers to turn themselves in. Peter told me that while the prosecutor and DEA agents were sitting right next to him listening in, he would practically beg his associates to cooperate. He’d say, “You’re about to get caught, but you can save yourself. We can help you.”
He didn’t want them to go to jail because he genuinely cared about them and their families, and he knew they might face life sentences. But many refused. They were arrested and charged to the full extent of the law.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst that happened to many of them.
In December 2010, Kiley Murray, a close friend and associate of Peter and Junior’s, was shot to death while he was out on bond. Kiley had always lived large; he had a six-bedroom, six-bath mini-mansion about 150 miles west of Chicago, and his neighbors assumed he was a former NFL player when he moved in. In reality, he was helping Peter and Junior traffic drugs throughout Chicago, and he was eventually charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine and heroin. In this business, people will murder you out of fear you might snitch, and we assumed that was the case with Kiley.
I was the one who told Peter, and he took it so badly.
“Remember the first time you met him?” he asked me.
“Yeah, he was such a good friend to you and your brother. He lived like a celebrity. They didn’t call him Hollywood for nothing.”
“I was planning to ask his forgiveness next time I saw him. I wanted to say I was sorry and tell him I loved him. Now I’ll never have that chance.”
The whole time my husband was waiting for his plea agreement, from 2009 on, it was just like that, one arrest right after the other. Someone would be caught, and it would lay heavy in his heart. I’d be there to pick him up, but I knew he’d never fully shake off his guilt.
But at the end of the day, their cooperation gave us protection. Just look at what happened with Sergio Gomez.
If you can believe it, Sergio was still out to get us.
Peter and Junior had a longtime courier named Gordo, who was like a brother to them. In the period of time my husband and brother-in-law were trying to convince him to turn himself in, Gordo heard through a friend that Sergio was looking for Olivia because he wanted to kidnap her. Because Gordo had always been close to our family, he didn’t want anything happening to her, so he decided to cooperate and told the feds about Sergio’s plot.
Officials couldn’t arrest Sergio right away, though. In order to do so, they had to set him up. Peter and Junior came up with a plan.
The idea was for Gordo to start badmouthing Peter and Junior, then tell Sergio that he knew where my husband and brother-in-law had stashed six hundred kilos. He knew that Sergio wouldn’t be able to resist getting his hands on it, so he tried to convince the DEA that this was the perfect way to nab Sergio. It took a long time, but the feds finally went for it, and Gordo was willing to help out.
Sure enough, on April 9, 2009, Sergio took the bait. The DEA filled up a blue cargo van with bricks of fake cocaine, parked it in front of a suburban Chicago warehouse, and had Gordo call Sergio’s associate and tell him the address.
“The key is in a Doritos bag inside a green garbage can,” he said.
Five of Sergio’s guys showed up to rob the van, geared up in bulletproof vests, ski masks, and guns. They were busted by the feds, and all of them were sentenced to life, except for Sergio.
I can’t tell you how happy I was that Sergio got arrested. I don’t wish prison on anyone, but I hated that guy. He was nothing but a thief who tortured and killed people for a living, and everything about him just made me sick.
But in the scheme of things—and I mean the whole North American drug trade—Sergio was nothing. Junior and Peter had their eyes on the prize, and they’d always imagined the government would go for people like Chapo and Mayo and the BLO immediately. Not seeing them do that was frustrating.
After all, every other federal organization in Mexico seemed to be hard at work trying to dismantle the cartels. They’d even killed one of the big guns.
On December 11, 2009, the Mexican Navy’s elite special forces raided a Christmas party being thrown by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and in an exchange of gunfire, four people were killed and Arturo fled. Five days later, on December 16, two hundred Mexican marines located him in a small town an hour north of Mexico City, raided his safe house, and in a ninety-minute gun battle, killed him and five of his associates. One marine also died.
Then, one of the “good guys” decided to decorate Beltrán’s bullet-ridden body with dollar bills, like some sick joke out of a gangster film, and photos flooded the internet. In retaliation, BLO members stormed a candlelight vigil for the dead marine and killed his mother, aunt, brother, and sister.
Nothing so dramatic—so critical in stopping the drug trade—had happened between Mexico and America, though. Chapo, Mayo, Vicente, and all the other suppliers were still at large, and the United States just seemed to be focusing on the little people in their conspiracy: the US-based distributors and dealers like Sergio. Junior and Peter thought the DEA wasn’t prepared for just how many players they’d arrest, and it drove them nuts.
“They’re going backward,” Junior would say. “We’re giving them the biggest people in the world, the most wanted, and they’re starting at the bottom of the ladder.”
Then the feds got Vicente, and we all realized they actually were using the information our husbands were giving them.
Vicente was arrested in Mexico City on March 19, 2009, and charged with trafficking over a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin.
Peter and Junior signed his extradition papers, and the most significant cartel member the United States had ever captured was transported to Chicago in February 2010.
Vicente had never been your average drug lord. While most narco juniors drive around in Lambos, Ferraris, and Maseratis and dress themselves in designer clothes, red bottoms, and iced-out jewelry, Vicente seemed humble. He wasn’t looking for everyone to cater to him. Instead, he was serious about his business, and that’s why he’d become number three in the Sinaloa Cartel.
Junior got along with Vicente and talked to him pretty regularly. Vicente was charming and sophisticated almost all the time, but on occasion, he displayed these really strange quirks. One of them was that he liked to blow shit up.
Once Junior went to visit Chapo in the mountains. Vicente was there, surrounded by a crowd of guys in military gear. It wasn’t any big thing for cartel bosses to have militia with them, but Vicente liked to be around men with hand grenades and AK-47s just a little bit more than most people. This time was no different.
Vicente turned to Junior and said, “Hey, look at that truck over there.” He pointed toward a brand new pickup truck, with dealer plates and shiny leather seats.
“That’s a nice truck,” said Junior.
“It is,” answered Vicente. “But watch this.”
Vicente motioned for one of his guys, who then walked over with a rocket launcher in his hand.
“Ready. Aim. Fire!” Vicente yelled. Then Junior heard a huge boom and jumped back as the truck burst into flames.
I guess blowing shit up was just Vicente’s thing.
Vicente was one of the last cartel members Junior caught on tape, so we figured that was why the feds jumped on his case faster than everyone else’s. Maybe the trail of evidence was shorter, or possibly it was because Vicente was already feeding the US government information about rival cartels. Snitching like that wouldn’t have been unusual, in fact; it’s believed that the Sinaloa Cartel became so powerful because they would rat out other cartels’ members, in an attempt to dismantle their organizations.
Because of Vicente’s position and all that our husbands had on him, Junior and Peter were going to have to testify against him.
Well before the trial date, Vicente hired a dream team of lawyers from New York City, who argued that the US government promised Vicente immunity in exchange for intel while he was in Mexico. In their minds—and his, too—he had carte blanche as long as he was feeding the government info.
As Vincente’s trial approached in 2012, Junior and Peter’s faces were plastered all over TV because they were the biggest witnesses against him, and his was one of the biggest drug cases ever to happen in a US court of law. Unfortunately, the proceedings kept getting delayed again and again.
Worried about the upcoming trial and the threats we’d been receiving, eight DEA agents drove up to my house in blacked-out minivans, Chevy Tahoes, and a working van so that they could sweep my home for bugs and tracking devices. They asked me to wait in the kitchen with my babies as they brought out these huge pieces of surveillance equipment that looked like something out of the movies. While they were sniffing around, I peeked out the window and saw two agents lying on plastic under my car, holding flashlights to search the undercarriage. When they were finished, they came inside and spoke to me.
“You should look under your car once a week,” they said.
They hadn’t found anything, but that didn’t mean I never would.
Unfortunately, Olivia had suffered something worse, and her whole life was about to be turned upside down.
Sergio Gomez was an orderly at the Chicago MCC while Vicente was being held there, awaiting trial. Sergio was allowed to move around freely, doing odd jobs around the center, and he befriended Vicente and gained his trust.
At the time, my first husband, Leo, was imprisoned there, too. Sergio knew I’d been married to Leo, so he cozied up to him, trying to get information from him about where my parents lived. He knew that Vicente wanted to kill Peter and Junior, so Sergio’s brilliant plan was to sell this information to Vicente. He even went so far as to transfer $6,600 into Sergio’s lawyer’s account for it.
Even though Leo snitched on me and sent me away to prison, I’m sure the last thing he wanted was to see the cartels kill me or my parents. So he told the feds everything. I’m pretty sure he benefited, but I was still appreciative. As a result, prosecutors ripped up Sergio’s plea agreement for tampering with a federal witness. Sergio’s now serving forty years.
Unfortunately, Sergio getting punished once again didn’t ensure a happy ending. The feds took his threat so seriously that they relocated my parents from the home they’d lived in for twenty years. My innocent parents who had worked so hard to give me a decent life, and who had loved me unconditionally despite all I’d put them through, had to uproot their lives and move, far from everything and everyone they knew. Junior and I felt horrible. My mom and dad didn’t deserve to be affected by any of this, and Junior and I will forever live with guilt for the burden we put on them.
The dangers posed didn’t end there. In fact, they only got worse.
In August 2011, I had moved to the Midwest and was beginning to settle in. I’d just unpacked all our things and was trying to make my kids and myself feel at home.
One night I was looking out my window, which I do routinely, and I noticed a man sitting outside my house in a car, with a blue light shining up into his face. I realized right away he was staring at a computer.
What the hell? I wondered. This can’t be good.
I immediately ran into the living room and unplugged my router, turned off all the lights, and lay down on the couch. Every hour or so for the rest of the night, I’d stand up in the pitch dark and walk to the window to peek out and see if the man was still there. Sure enough, all night long, he sat in his car on his computer, and all night long, I panicked, thinking, This guy is going to kick in my door any minute and kill me and my children.
The next morning, I didn’t take my kids to school and refused to let them go outside to play. I crawled on my knees past my windows, crouching so I could peek out and try to get a visual of him. I started to write down his schedule, which didn’t consist of much except him leaving for fifteen minutes or so every now and then. I just assumed he was driving to Walmart so he could go to the bathroom.
One of my neighbors called the cops, and they showed up while the guy was on one of his fifteen-minute pee breaks. When he returned, they questioned him, and the man drove off. Just before the police left, I walked out of my house, pretending to be a concerned citizen rather than the focus of the guy in the car, and cornered them.
“Did you find out who that man is?” I asked innocently.
“He’s a private investigator working on a case,” the officer said. “And we can’t tell him to leave. He has every right to be here.”
I walked back inside, defeated. I wanted more than anything to march up to his car, bang on his window, and tell him I knew exactly who he was working for. I wanted to get up in his face and scream, “You’re working for the cartels, you fucking coward. How can you live with yourself knowing that your boss wants to kill me and my kids? I hope you rot in hell.”
I called the feds, and they told me they were sending agents to investigate, but I needed to get my things and leave immediately.
That evening, I packed up my car in the garage, waited for the man to drive away, put my boys in their car seats, and drove to a hotel as fast as I could and never looked back. We lived there, in hell, for six months.
The three of us were crammed into a tiny room with double beds. I needed space, so the hotel removed the desk and office chair, and I stacked up plastic storage bins full of all of our possessions. One had teddy bears in it, another held toys, another had books, and the rest held clothes.
After we woke up in our little beds side by side, I’d open up the mini fridge, take out a half gallon of milk, and serve cereal. After breakfast, I’d put on Brandon’s and Benjamin’s backpacks, and we’d walk through the lobby, where the maids and front desk staff would wave at them and say, “Have a good day at school!” I’d drive them to school, go back to the hotel, lock my door, close the blinds, and sit in the dark all day.
But when it was time to pick the boys up, I always had a smile on my face. “This is so much fun! It’s a mini vacation!” I’d say.
I don’t know who I thought I was kidding. At night Brandon would cry that he just wanted to go home, and in the dark I would lie and cry silently so that he couldn’t see or hear me. My breaking point was when I came back to the hotel after his kindergarten graduation, and he threw himself on the bed in a little ball and screamed, “I just want Dad!”
I wanted the exact same thing.
I started questioning whether or not cooperating was the right thing to do, wondering, If this is hurting my kids and feels so wrong, how can it be right?
I knew I was being selfish, but all I could think about was how much pain and suffering my family was going through. We did this for a normal life, but running for your life in the middle of the night was not normal.
After six months, the government finally relocated me to a different state. The US Attorney investigated who had hired the PI, but they weren’t allowed to tell me their findings. Maybe I’ll never know. All I can do is be thankful that no one killed me or my kids.