by Don Winslow
The product—DEA, State, and Mexican government notwithstanding—is cocaine.
The Federación made a very simple and profitable deal with the Medellín and Cali cartels: The Colombians pay $1,000 for every kilo of cocaine the Mexicans can safely deliver to them inside the United States. So, basically, the Federación got out of the drug-growing business and into the transportation business. The Mexicans take delivery of the coke from the Colombians, transport it to staging areas along the border, move it across into safe houses in the States and then give it back to the Colombians and get their thousand bucks per kilo. The Colombians move it to their labs and process it into crack, and the shit is on the streets weeks—sometimes just days—after leaving Colombia.
Not through Florida—the DEA has been pounding those routes like a rented mule—but through the neglected Mexican “back door.”
The Federación, Art thinks—when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
But how? he wonders. Even he has to admit there are some problems with his theory. How do you fly a plane under the radar from Colombia to Guadalajara, across a Central American terrain that is swarming not only with DEA but, thanks to the presence of the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, with CIA as well? Spy satellites, AWACS—none of them is picking up these flights.
And then there’s the fuel problem. A DC-4, like the one he’s looking at right now, doesn’t have the fuel capacity to make that flight in one shot. It would have to stop and refuel. But where? It doesn’t seem possible, as his bosses have cheerfully pointed out to him.
Yeah, well, it may not be possible, Art thinks. But the plane is sitting there, fat with cocaine. Just as real as the crack epidemic that’s causing so much pain in the American ghettos. So I know you’re doing it, Art thinks, looking at the plane. I just don’t know how you’re doing it.
But I’m going find out.
And then I’m going to prove it.
“What’s this?” Ernie asks.
A black Mercedes pulls up to the office shack. Some federales trot up and open the back door of the car and a tall, thin man in a black suit gets out. Art can see the glow from a cigar as the man walks through the cordon of federales into the office.
“I wonder if that’s him,” Ernie asks.
“Who?”
“The mythical M-1 himself,” Ernie says.
“M-1” is the Mexican sobriquet for the nonexistent head of the non-existent Federación.
The intelligence that Art has managed to gather over the past year is that M-1’s Federación, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts: the Gulf States, Sonora, and Baja. Together they cover the border with the United States. Each of these three territories is run by a Sinaloan who was forced out of the home province by Operation Condor, and Art has managed to put a name to all three.
The Gulf: García Abrego.
Sonora: Chalino Guzmán, aka El Verde, “The Green.”
Baja: Güero Méndez.
At the top of this triangle, based in Guadalajara: M-1.
But they can’t put a name or a face to him.
But you can, can’t you, Art? he asks himself. You know in your gut who’s the patron of the Federación. You helped put him in office.
Art peers through his night scope into the little office, focuses on the man who now sits down behind a desk. He wears a conservative black business suit, a white button-down shirt open at the neck, no tie. His black hair, flicked with a little silver, is combed straight back. His thin, dark face sports a pencil mustache, and he smokes a thin, brown cigar.
“Look at them,” Ernie is saying. “They’re acting like this is a papal visit. I mean, I haven’t seen this guy before, have you?”
“No,” Art says, setting the binoculars down, “I haven’t.”
Not for nine years, anyway.
But Tío hasn’t changed much.
Althea’s asleep when Art gets home to their rented house in the Tlaquepaque district, a leafy suburb of single-family homes, boutiques and trendy restaurants.
Why shouldn’t she be asleep, Art thinks. It’s three o’clock in the morning. He’s spent the last two hours in the charade of tailing M-1 to find out his identity. Well, it was skillfully done, anyway, Art thinks. He and Ernie had laid way off the black Mercedes as it pulled out onto the highway that led back into downtown Guadalajara. They tailed the car through the old Centro Histórico district and past the Cross of Squares—Plaza de Armas, Plaza de la Liberación, Plaza de la Rotonda de los Hombres and Plaza Tapatía—that has the cathedral at its center. Then into the modern business district and back out toward the suburbs, where the black Mercedes finally pulled off at a car dealership.
German imports. Luxury cars.
They’d stayed a block away and waited while Tío let himself into the office, then came out a few minutes later with a set of keys and got into a new Mercedes 510—no driver this time, no guards. They followed him out to the wealthy garden district, where Tío pulled into a driveway, got out of the car and went into his house.
Just another businessman coming home after a late night’s work.
So, Art thinks, in the morning I’ll go through another charade, entering the car dealership and the home address into the system to come up with the identity of our alleged M-1.
Miguel Ángel Barrera.
Tío Ángel.
Art goes into the dining room, opens the liquor cabinet and pours himself a Johnnie Walker Black. He takes his drink and walks down the hallway and looks in on his kids. Cassie is five and looks, thank God, like her mother. Michael is three and also favors Althea, although he has Art’s thicker build. Althea is thrilled that, due to a Mexican housekeeper and a Mexican nanny, both kids are on their way to being bilingual. Michael doesn’t ask for bread anymore, he asks for pan; water has become agua.
Art sneaks into each of their rooms, kisses them softly on the cheeks and then goes back down the long hallway, through the master bedroom and into the attached bathroom, where he takes a long shower.
If Althie was a crack in Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, the kids were a hydrogen bomb. The moment he saw his daughter born, and then lying in Althie’s arms, he knew his shell of “himself alone” had been blown to bits. When his son came along, it wasn’t better, it was just different, looking down at that little version of himself. And an epiphany—the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.
And he’s been a good one. A warm, loving father to his kids; a faithful, warm husband to his wife. So much of the anger and bitterness of his youth has faded away, leaving only this—this thing with Tío Barrera.
Because Tío used me, back in the Condor days. Used me to take out his rivals so he could set up his Federación. Played me for a sucker, let me think I was destroying the drug network, when all I was doing was helping him set up a bigger and better one.
Face it, he thinks as he lets the hot spray hit his tired shoulders, it’s why you came here.
It had seemed an odd assignment request, a backwater like Guadalajara, especially for the hero of Operation Condor. Bringing down Don Pedro put his career on a bullet. He went from Sinaloa to Washington, then to Miami, then to San Diego. Art Keller, the Boy Wonder, was about to be, at thirty-three, the youngest RAC—Resident Agent in Charge—in the agency. He could pick his spot.
Everyone was stunned when he picked Guadalajara.
Took his career off the fast track and derailed it.
Colleagues, friends, ambitious rivals asked why.
Art wouldn’t say.
Even to himself, really.
That he had unfinished business.
And maybe I should leave it that way, he thinks as he gets out of the shower, grabs a towel from the rack and dries off.
It would be so easy to back off and toe the company line. Just take the small-time marijuana dealers the Mexicans want to give you, dutifully file reports that the Mexican anti-drug effort is going swimmingly (which would be a good joke, given that the
U.S.-funded Mexican defoliation planes are dropping mostly water—they’re actually watering the marijuana and poppy crops) and sit back and enjoy your tour here.
No investigation of M-1, no revelations about Miguel Ángel Barrera.
It’s in the past, he thinks. Leave it there.
You don’t have to kiss the cobra.
Yes, you do.
It’s been eating away at you for nine years. All the destruction, all the suffering, all the death brought by Operation Condor, all so Tío could set up his Federación with himself as its head. The Law of Unintended Consequences, bullshit. It was exactly what Tío intended, what he planned, what he set up.
He used you, set you like a dog on his enemies, and you did it.
Then you kept your mouth shut about it.
While they lauded you as a hero, slapped you on the back, finally let you on the team. You pathetic son of a bitch, that’s what it’s been about, hasn’t it? Your desperation to finally belong.
You sold your soul for it.
Now you think you can buy it back.
Let it go—you have a family to take care of.
He slips into bed, trying not to wake Althea, but it doesn’t work.
“Time is it?” she asks.
“Almost four.”
“In the morning?”
“Go back to sleep.”
“What time’re you getting up?” she asks.
“Seven.”
“Wake me,” she says. “I have to go to the library.”
She has a reader’s ticket at the University of Guadalajara, where she’s working on a post-doc thesis: “The Agricultural Labor Force in Pre-Revolutionary Mexico—A Statistical Model.”
Then she says, “You want to mess around?”
“It’s four in the morning.”
“I didn’t ask for time and temperature,” she says. “I asked you to do me. C'mon.”
She reaches for him. Her hand feels warm and in a few seconds he’s inside her. It always feels like coming home to him. When she climaxes she grabs his ass and pushes him in tight. “That was beautiful, baby,” she says. “Now let me sleep.”
He lies awake.
In the morning, Art looks at the pictures of the airplane, of the federales off-loading the coke, then opening the car door for Tío, then Tío sitting at the desk in the office.
Then he listens to Ernie brief him on what he already knows.
“I got on EPIC,” Ernie says, referring to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a computer databank that coordinates DEA, Customs and Immigration information. “Miguel Ángel Barrera was a former Sinaloa state policeman, in fact, the bodyguard to the governor himself. Heavy connections with the Mexican DFS. Now get this: He played on our team—he was one of the state cops who ran Operation Condor back in ’77. Some EPIC reports credit Barrera with single-handedly dismantling the old Sinaloan heroin operation. He left the force and disappeared off the EPIC radar after that.”
“No hits post-'75?” Art asks.
“Nada,” Ernie answers. “You pick up his story here in Guadalajara. He’s a very successful businessman. He owns the car dealership, four restaurants, two apartment buildings and considerable real-estate holdings. He sits on the boards of two banks and has powerful connections in the Jalisco state government and in Mexico City.”
“Not exactly the profile of a drug lord,” Shag says.
Shag is a good old boy out of Tucson, a Vietnam vet who found his way from military intelligence into the DEA, and is in his own quiet way as much of a hard-ass as Ernie is. He uses his “aw-shucks” cowboy persona to disguise his smarts, and a number of drug dealers are now in prison because they underestimated Shag Wallace.
“Until you see him supervising a shipment of coke,” Ernie says, pointing at the photographs.
“Could he be M-1?”
Art says, “Only one way to find out.”
Taking, he thinks, one more step toward the edge of the cliff.
“There will be no investigation of the Barrera cocaine connection,” he says. “Is that clear?”
Ernie and Shag look a little stunned, but they both nod.
“I want to see nothing on your logs, no paperwork of any kind,” he says. “We’re just chasing marijuana. In that connection: Ernie, work your Mexican sources, see if the Barrera name rings any alarms. Shag, work the airplane.”
“What about surveillance on Barrera?” Ernie asks.
Art shakes his head. “I don’t want to stir him up before we’re ready. We’ll bracket him. Work on the street, work on the plane, work in toward him. If that’s where it leads.”
But shit, Art thinks. You know it does.
The DC-4’s serial number is N-3423VX.
Shag works through the tangled paper chase of holding corporations, shell companies and DBAs. The trail ends at an airfreight company called Servicios Turísticos—SETCO—operating out of Aguacate Airport in Tegu-cigalpa, Honduras.
Someone running drugs out of Honduras is about as surprising as someone selling hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Honduras, the original “banana republic,” has an old and distinguished history in the drug trade, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century when the country was out-and-out owned by the Standard Fruit and United Fruit companies. The fruit companies were based in New Orleans, and the city’s docks were out-and-out owned by the New Orleans Mafia through its control of the dockworkers’ union, so if the fruit companies wanted their Honduran bananas off-loaded, the boats had better be carrying something else under those bananas.
So much dope came into the country in those banana boats that Mafia slang for heroin became banana. The Honduran registry isn’t surprising, Art thinks, and it answers the question of where the DC-4s are refueling.
The ownership of SETCO is likewise enlightening.
Two partners—David Núñez and Ramón Mette Ballasteros.
Núñez is a Cuban ex-pat now living in Miami. Nothing extraordinary there. What is extraordinary is that Núñez was with Operation 40, a CIA op in which Cuban expatriates were trained to go in and take political control after the successful Bay of Pigs invasion. Except the Bay of Pigs was, conspicuously, not a success. Some of the Operation 40 guys ended up dead on the beach, others went to firing squads. The lucky ones made it back to Miami.
Núñez was one of the lucky.
Art doesn’t really need to read the file on Ramón Mette Ballasteros. He already knows the book. Mette was a chemist for the gomeros back in the heroin heyday. Got out just before Condor and went back to his native Honduras and into the cocaine business. The word is that Mette personally financed the coup that recently overthrew the Honduran president.
Okay, Art thinks, the two profiles actually walk the company line. A major coke dealer owns an airline that he’s using to fly coke to Miami. But at least one of SETCO’s planes is flying to Guadalajara, and that doesn’t conform to the official line.
The next normal step would be to call the DEA office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but he can’t do that because it was closed last year due to “lack of business.” Honduras and El Salvador are now both being handled out of Guatemala, so Art gets on the horn to Warren Farrar, the RAC in Guatemala City.
“SETCO,” Art says.
“What about it?” Farrar asks.
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Art says.
There’s a pause that Art is tempted to describe as “pregnant,” then Farrar says, “I can’t come out and play with you on this, Art.”
Really? Art wonders. Why the hell not? We only have about eight thousand conferences a year, just so we can come out and play with each other, on things exactly like this.
So he takes a shot. “Why was the Honduras office closed, Warren?”
“What are you fucking around with, Art?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
Because I’m wondering if the quid pro quo for Mette financing a presidential coup was the new government tossing out the DEA.
; In response, Farrar hangs up.
