by Don Winslow
“You talked about triage,” Keller says. “Short-term and long-term solutions. I want you to know my long-term intentions. I’m going to move DEA onto a new course, more in the direction of what you were talking about earlier. Away from the revolving door of arrest and incarceration, more into rehabilitation. I want us to back local initiatives with federal power and remove federal obstacles.”
“Can you?” Mullen says. “Your people aren’t going to like it.”
Keller knows what Mullen isn’t saying but what he’s thinking, that DEA has a vested interest in keeping the drug war going—its own existence.
“I don’t know,” Keller says. “But I’m going to try. If I’m going to succeed, I’ll need support from police forces like NYPD.”
“And the short term?”
“Until we change the baseline,” Keller says, “we have to do everything we can to slow the flow of heroin.”
“No argument from me.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t do much in Mexico,” Keller says. “They’re too protected. If I’m going to attack the problem, it has to be here in New York, which has become the heroin hub.”
Mullen smiles. “Any other epiphanies, Art?”
“Yeah,” Keller says. “We can’t answer the question of why people do drugs. But we do know why people deal them. Very simple—money.”
“So?”
“So if we really want to do something, we go after the money,” Keller says. “And I don’t mean down in Mexico.”
“You know what you’re talking about here.”
“Yeah, I do,” Keller says. “And I’m ready to go there. I guess the question is, are you?”
Keller knows what he’s asking of the man.
It’s a potentially career-ending move.
You go after junkies and street dealers, they don’t have a way to fight back. You attack the centers of power, they have more than enough ways of fighting back.
They can bury you.
Mullen doesn’t look scared.
“Only if you’re going to go all the way,” he says. “I’m not interested in sending a few patsies to Club Fed for a few years. But if you’re going to take this wherever it goes, then . . . what do you need?”
A banker, Keller tells him.
A Wall Street banker.
On the train back, Hidalgo has another burger and tells Keller that actually it isn’t so bad.
“That’s good,” Keller says.
Because you’re going to be spending a lot more time on the Acela.
It’s the start of Operation Agitator.
Guerrero, Mexico
Heroin reminds Ric of Easter.
The poppies shimmer vibrant purple in the sunlight, and the flowers that aren’t purple are pink, red and yellow. Set against the emerald-green stalks, they look like candy baskets.
The plane banks hard against the Sierra Madre del Sur as it angles for its landing at a private airstrip outside the Guerrero town of Tristeza. Ric’s father has brought him here as sort of a tutorial, “to learn the business from the ground up, as it were.” It’s part of his ongoing “Your Generation” lecture series, along the lines of “Your generation is separated from the soil that has made you all rich.”
As if, Ric thinks, my lawyer father spent a single day in the fields. His closest brush with being a campesino was a thankfully brief attempt to grow tomatoes in the backyard that ended in a declaration that it was more “economically efficient” to buy them at the market, notwithstanding a previous installment in the lecture series entitled “Your Generation Doesn’t Know Where Its Food Comes From.”
Yes, we do, Ric thinks.
Calimax.
The plane lands with a hard bounce.
Ric sees the Jeeps full of armed men beside the airstrip, waiting to take them up the winding dirt roads into the mountains. A convoy is necessary because this part of Guerrero is increasingly “bandit country,” relatively new to the Sinaloa cartel.
The cartel’s fields in Sinaloa and Durango can’t keep up with the growing demand for heroin, so the cartel has expanded into Guerrero and Michoacán.
Both states are producing more and more opium paste, Ric knows. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn’t yet caught up to the production and they have to rely on smaller organizations as middlemen between the growers and the cartel.
Not a bad thing in itself, if the middlemen weren’t at war with each other. So this beautiful country, Ric thinks as the Jeep passes through stands of tall ocote pines, is rife with gunmen on the hunt for one another.
First there are the Knights Templar, mostly in Michoacán, the survivors of the old La Familia organization, still possessed (and that is the word, Ric thinks) with a crazy quasi-religious zeal to eradicate “evildoers.” Sinaloa tolerated them as long as they were helping to fight the Zetas, but now their utility is fast coming to an end and they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Especially as these “do-gooders” are heavily involved in meth, extortion and murder for hire.
The Knights insist on fighting Los Guerreros Unidos, a splinter group of the Tapia organization founded by the old Tapia gunman Eddie Ruiz, now residing in an American penitentiary.
Ruiz was the first American to be the head of a Mexican cartel. Ric met him once or twice as a kid, but mostly knows him from the famous YouTube videos when “Crazy Eddie” filmed himself interviewing four Zetas before he executed them. Then he sent the tapes to all the television stations and put the clip out on the internet.
It started a trend.
Now “Eddie’s Boys,” as Guerreros Unidos are sometimes known, are running amok in Guerrero, Morelos and Edoméx, killing rivals, kidnapping for profit, extorting businesses and just generally being a pain in the ass.
We can’t step on them because we need them, Núñez has told Ric. Especially here in Guerrero, where they control Tristeza. A city of about a hundred thousand people, Tristeza has importance beyond its size because it sits on the crossroads of several highways, including the all-important interstate down to Acapulco. The mayor of Tristeza is a longtime member of GU, and we need, at least for the time being, to stay in her good graces.
GU has a blood feud with Los Rojos, yet another splinter group of the Tapia organization, which, it should be fairly noted, was itself a splinter group of the Sinaloa cartel.
“The conflict is over smuggling routes,” Núñez explained, “but when you really analyze it, what they’re fighting over is us. It’s a flaw in the system that we set up, and Adán was too busy fighting the Zetas to repair it, and since his death, it’s only gotten worse.”
The Sinaloa cartel, Ric has learned, doesn’t actually own heroin farms in Guerrero. Most of them are just a few acres large, tucked away deep in the mountains, and are owned by small farmers who harvest the poppy and then sell the opium gum to middlemen, such as GU and Los Rojos, who transport it north—mostly hidden on commercial buses out of Tristeza to Acapulco and then to labs in Sinaloa or closer to the American border.
So they’re killing each other, Ric thinks, his breath getting tight as they climb up past the ten-thousand-foot mark, for the right to sell to us.
Then there’s his old friend Damien Tapia.
Now glossing himself the Young Wolf and making himself another pain in Sinaloa’s ass.
Damien has reassembled some of his father’s old loyalists and started to sell cocaine and methamphetamine in Culiacán, Badiraguato, Mazatlán, and even Acapulco, where he’s reportedly based, protected by some of Ruiz’s former people, extorting bars and nightclubs. There are rumors that he’s been spotted in Durango and here in Guerrero, and, if that’s the case, he’s going to try to get into the heroin market as well.
“Such a nice young man,” Núñez had said about Damien. “It was a shame that his father went insane and had to be put down like a mad dog.”
The convoy comes into a sharp curve and Ric sees a flash of color ahead—hidden behind a stand of tall pines on a steep slo
pe are the bright blooms of the poppy. He can see and smell the charred stumps where the farmer burned down the trees to create land for opium cultivation.
The field is maybe only two acres, but Núñez tells his son not to be deceived. “A well-irrigated, skillfully tended acre in Guerrero can yield as much as eight kilos of opium sap in a season, which is enough to produce a kilo of raw heroin.
“Just last year,” he says, “that kilo of sap sold for about seven hundred dollars; already the price has doubled to fifteen hundred dollars as demand has grown, and we’ve only managed to keep the price that low by being the sole buyer, Walmart, if you will.
“This farmer might have as many as eight to ten of these patches scattered around the mountainside, hidden from the army helicopters that patrol the terrain in order to spray herbicides. At three thousand dollars a patch, you’re starting to talk real money.”
Three thousand dollars is lunch money to my old man, Ric thinks, but a fortune to a poor farmer in rural Guerrero.
He gets out of the Jeep to watch the rayadores work the patch.
They make good money, he learns. A productive worker can make thirty to forty dollars a day, seven times what her parents can make working in fields of corn or avocado groves. The rayadores are mostly teenagers and mostly girls, because their hands are smaller and nimbler. Wearing small razor blades attached to rings on their thumbs, they carefully slice tiny slits into the opium pods until the gum seeps out like a teardrop.
It’s delicate work: Cut too shallow and you get no sap. Cut too deep and you ruin the pod, a disaster to profitability. The rayadora will come back to the same plant again—a pod can be scored as many as seven or eight times to produce the maximum amount of sap.
Once the cut is made, the seeping liquid is allowed to harden into brown gum and the rayadores use the razors to gently scrape the gum into pans, then take it to sheds or barns where other workers roll it into balls or cakes, which can be stored, for years if necessary.
When the farmer has harvested enough opium paste, he contacts the middleman, who comes and collects it, pays for it, and takes it to a lab to be processed into cinnamon heroin. From there it goes to a transshipment point like Tristeza, where it’s loaded onto buses for what’s called “shotgun shipping” north.
The middleman marks it up by as much as 40 percent—up to $2,100 a kilo—and then sells it to the cartel, which, again, controls the price by being virtually the only buyer.
A kilo of raw heroin will sell for somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000 in the States.
“The margin is excellent,” Núñez says, “and even when you factor in the costs of transport, smuggling, security and, of course, bribes, we can still undersell the American pharmaceuticals and make a healthy profit.”
Ric is a city kid, but he can’t help but appreciate the beauty of the scene in front of him. It’s idyllic. The air is crisp and clean, the flowers beautiful, and the sight of the young girls with their white smocks and long black hair moving quietly and efficiently as they do their work is peaceful beyond description, beautiful, really, in its simplicity.
“It’s gratifying to know,” Ric hears his father say, “that this business gives so many people gainful employment at a salary they could never otherwise realize.”
There are hundreds of these farms scattered around Guerrero.
Plenty of work for everyone.
Yeah, Ric thinks, we’re social benefactors.
He gets back in the Jeep and the convoy snakes its way down the mountain, the sicarios on the lookout for bandits.
Damien Tapia, the Young Wolf, watches the convoy through the telescopic sights of a sniper rifle.
From the cover of trees on the facing slope, he has the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ricardo Núñez—one of the men who made the decision to kill his father—literally in the crosshairs.
When Damien was a boy, his father was one of the three bosses of the Sinaloa cartel, along with Adán Barrera and Nacho Esparza, two men Damien thought of as his uncles. The Tapia brothers were powerful then—Martín as the politician, Alberto the gunman, and his father, Diego, the undisputed leader.
When Tío Adán was captured in the States, it was Damien’s father who took care of the business. When Tío Adán was transferred back to Mexico, to Puente Grande prison, it was Damien’s father who arranged for his protection. When Tío Adán got out, it was Damien’s father who fought alongside him to take Nuevo Laredo from the Gulf and the Zetas.
They were all friends then, the Tapias, the Barreras, the Esparzas. In those days, Damien looked up to the older boys like Iván and Sal and Rubén Ascensión and Ric Núñez, who was closer to him in age. They were his buddies, his cuates. They were Los Hijos, the sons who would inherit the all-powerful Sinaloa cartel, and they would run it together and be brothers forever.
Then Tío Adán married Eva Esparza.
Little Eva is younger than I am, Damien thinks now as he centers the sights on Ricardo Núñez’s graying temple; we used to play together as kids.
But Tío Nacho wanted Baja for Iván, and he pimped his daughter out to get it. After Eva married Tío Adán, the Tapia wing of the cartel became the stepchild—slighted, ignored, pushed to the side. The very night Adán was popping little Eva’s cherry, his tame federales went to arrest Damien’s uncle Alberto and shot him dead. It turned out that Adán had sold out the Tapias to save his nephew Sal from a murder charge.
My father, Damien thinks, was never the same after that. He couldn’t believe the men he called his primos, his cousins—Adán and Nacho—would betray him, would kill his flesh and blood. He started to get deeper and deeper into the Santa Muerte, deeper into the coke. The anger, the grief, ate him alive and the war he launched to get revenge tore the cartel to pieces.
Shit, Damien thinks, it tore the whole country to pieces, as Diego allied the Tapia organization with the Zetas to fight the Barreras and the Esparzas, his old partners in the Sinaloa cartel.
Thousands died.
Damien was only sixteen that day, just after Christmas, when the marines tracked his father down to an apartment tower in Cuernavaca, went in with armored cars, helicopters, and machine guns, and murdered him.
He keeps the photo on his phone as a screen saver. Diego Tapia, bullet holes in his face and chest, his shirt ripped open, his pants pulled down, dollar bills tossed over him.
The marines did that to his father.
Killed him, mocked his corpse, put the disgusting photos out on the net.
But Damien always blamed Tío Adán.
And Tío Nacho.
His “uncles.”
And Ricardo Núñez, Ric’s father.
What they did to Diego Tapia is unforgivable, Damien thinks. My father was a great man.
And I am my father’s son.
He wrote a narcocorrido about it, put it out on Instagram.
I am my father’s son and always will be
I’m a man of my family
A man of the trade
And I’ll never turn my back on my blood
This is my life until I die.
I’m the Young Wolf.
His mother has begged him to get out of the business, do something else, anything else, she’s already lost too many loved ones to the trade. You’re handsome, she tells him—movie star, rock star, Telemundo handsome, why don’t you become an actor, a singer, a television host? But Damien told her no, he wouldn’t disrespect his father that way. He swore on Diego’s grave to bring the Tapias back to where they belong.
At the top of the Sinaloa cartel.
“They stole it from us, Mami,” Damien told his mother. “And I’m going to take back what they stole.”
Easy to say.
Harder to do.
The Tapia organization still exists, but with only a fraction of the power it used to have. Without the leadership of the three brothers—Diego and Alberto dead, Martín in prison—it operates more like a group of franchises giving nominal allegiance to the Tapia
name while they each operate independently, trafficking coke, meth, marijuana and now heroin. And they’re scattered, with cells in southern Sinaloa, Durango, Guerrero, Veracruz, Cuernavaca, Baja, Mexico City and Quintana Roo.
Damien has his own cell, based in Acapulco, and while the other cells give him a certain level of respect because of who his father was, they don’t view him as the boss. And Sinaloa—maybe out of guilt over what they did to his family—tolerates him as long as he’s subservient and not looking to get revenge.
And the truth, Damien knows, is that he’s not much of a threat—hopelessly outgunned by the combined forces of the Barrera and Esparza wings of the cartel.
Until now, he thinks.
Now Tío Adán and Tío Nacho are dead.
Iván and Elena Sánchez are at war.
Game changer.
And now he can pull the trigger on Ricardo Núñez.
“Shoot,” Fausto tells him.
Fausto—squat, thickset, mustached—was one of his father’s loyalists who went with Eddie Ruiz after Diego’s death. Now, with Eddie in prison, he’s back with Damien.
Based in Mazatlán, Fausto is a stone killer.
What Damien needs.
“Shoot,” Fausto repeats.
Damien’s finger tightens on the trigger.
But stops.
For several reasons.
One, he’s unsure of the wind. Two, he’s never killed anyone before. But three—
Damien shifts the scope onto Ric.
Ric is sitting right next to his dad, and Damien doesn’t want to take the chance on missing and killing his friend.
“No,” he says, lowering the rifle. “They’d come after us too hard.”
“Not if they’re dead.” Fausto shrugs. “Shit, I’ll do it.”
“No, it’s too soon,” Damien says. “We don’t have the power yet.”
It’s what he tells Fausto, what he tells himself.
He watches the convoy turn into the next switchback, out of sight and out of range.
The plane takes an unexpected turn.
Ric expected that they’d fly directly back to Culiacán, but the plane banks west toward the ocean to Mazatlán.
