Within the next several days on the streets of San Ysidro they had broken up into groups of three or more and had been accosted by many street hoodlums, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-nine years. They had been threatened with knives, sticks, rocks, screwdrivers, and asked to give up money. A couple of the Mexican-American street crooks had tried to escape and a couple had succeeded. Otherwise there was no problem arresting them. The decoy business was a piece of cake.
There were lots of show biz gags about who was going to be the next Robert De Niro. Then they decided to take their act on the road, into the canyons where the real bandits did business, the banditos from the other side who sometimes left their victims rotting in the mesquite.
They were already beginning to form a class structure. At this stage of the experiment there were three walking teams. The first was inevitably comprised of Manny Lopez, Tony Puente and Eddie Cervantes. Tony Puente was one of the senior men in terms of police experience. Eddie Cervantes, the smallest, was the most aggressive and outspoken. He was from Texas and talked a slightly accented Tex-Mex English. He had grown up speaking Spanish and was fluent.
The fourth member of “the varsity,” as they began calling themselves, would vary. Manny Lopez would give the others a rotating shot at walking with the varsity. On this night it was Carlos Chacon, and very soon his extraordinarily expressive eyes would get about three times as big as the muzzle on the sawed-off 12-gauge under his coat. And the slithering question mark of a right eyebrow would be crawling all over the balding forehead of Manny Lopez. This, when a Tijuana bandit walked up and introduced himself.
At dusk the varsity had begun walking their new foot beat on the top flatland along the international border between the Tijuana airport and Deadman’s Canyon. They were about one hundred yards inside the line and were walking west. They were tense, excited, alert, but not very afraid. This was their first night posing as pollos in the canyons but they were already finding enough confidence to talk with parties of real pollos heading north. Manny Lopez and Eddie Cervantes could fool anyone. Manny did most of the talking. Tony Puente spoke such poor Spanish he was ordered by Manny to keep his mouth shut. Carlos Chacon carried the sawed-off shotgun under the oldest and funkiest jacket he owned.
The happening of note on that very first evening occurred in the vicinity of the Tijuana airport. The four cops were walking like a covey of quail, alien style, when just before nightfall they saw a blue and white Tijuana Municipal Police car on a dirt road south of the fence. There were no cops inside. The cops were behind them talking through the fence to three girls who had just crossed into the United States. Three Tijuana policemen then stepped over the barbed wire fence onto American soil. One of the cops caught his tan uniform pants on the wire and began to curse.
One Tijuana policeman said, “¡Vengan!” but Manny Lopez and his three men continued walking.
Then all three Tijuana cops, without wasting any more breath, simply drew their automatics, jacked rounds into the chambers and said, “¡Vengan, cabrones!”
And the neophyte pollos responded. They said:
“Holy shit!”
“Hey! Hey! HEY!”
“What the fuck!”
And while the Tijuana cops were puzzled by these weird pollos babbling in English, Manny Lopez pulled his badge and his gun. Then his three subordinates drew their guns.
The first evening in the canyons, their first hours in the canyons, there were seven cops pointing guns not at bandits but at each other.
“That’s what you’d call a righteous Mexican standoff,” Eddie Cervantes later said.
But not at the moment. Nobody was thinking up gags at the moment. They were all staring down very large gun barrels and getting very tense.
“¡Policías!” Manny Lopez warned. “¡Somos policías!”
“Ooooooh! ¡Policías! Well, we thought you were banditos. You weren’t acting like pollos! We wanted to get you back to our side,” the cops told them.
But Manny Lopez wasn’t buying any of it. There had been too many reports of Tijuana policemen robbing aliens.
“Why don’t you control the bandits from your side. That’s where they’re from,” he told them in Spanish. “Now let’s see some identification.”
They, being on American soil, reluctantly obeyed, and Eddie Cervantes took the Handie-Talkie out of the plastic drawstring “pollo bag” he was carrying and relayed the names of the Tijuana cops to communications.
Then there were many apologies while the Tijuana cops tried to convince Manny Lopez that they, too, were after bandits.
“Cops and robbers,” Manny said disgustedly in English. “These motherfuckers’re cops and robbers! Take a walk, Jack,” he said finally to the senior Tijuana policeman, who understood that well enough.
“What the hell kind a job is this going to be?” Tony Puente wanted to know as they resumed walking. He thought about Manny drawing down on them while facing their guns. He thought maybe he should start wearing his glasses even if it did blow their cover. Then it got so dark that glasses wouldn’t have helped much.
When the sun dropped, the huddled masses unhuddled to begin the nightly crossing ritual. One of them was a twenty-five-year-old campesino named Lino Ariza. Lino Ariza was of course very frightened to begin with, and even more so when he and his party were instructed by their coyote to remain near the international border until their guide came for them. Lino was from Durango, as was one of his companions, Luis Rodrigues. A third man, who had introduced them to the coyote in Tijuana, was from Jalisco. There were also three women in this crossing party whom Lino did not know.
There was so much for Lino to fear waiting there—just seventy-five yards inside the line, yet so close to the lamps and noises of Colonia Libertad—that he had to relieve himself repeatedly, making many trips down the trail to disappear behind the bushes for a few moments. After his journey, and the money he had already been forced to pay, Lino had only 24 U.S. dollars left, and a $15 wristwatch, his most prized possession, and a leather cowboy belt with a big metal buckle. That and the clothes on his back. Yet Lino Ariza was by far the richest in his party that night. And somehow these border people, the coyotes and guides and criminals, seemed to sense it. Or so Lino imagined.
At 10:00 P.M. they were standing on the rim of Dead-man’s Canyon with their backs to the flickering lamps of Colonia Libertad. They crouched when a blue and white Tijuana police car drove slowly past the fenceless invisible line and flashed a perfunctory beam of light toward some children playing with an old truck tire.
Then the party of trembling aliens saw three shadows approaching slowly in the darkness. It was so dark the shadows were only a few yards away when they materialized. Lino immediately suspected the worst because the three men were dressed slightly better than the pollos. They wore tight jeans and warm Pendleton shirts. All had long hair past their collars and two had bandannas tied around their heads in the manner of movie pirates. And they didn’t walk like pollos. They strode boldly toward them so that Lino and his party instinctively crouched down to show their submissiveness.
Lino wasn’t sure who saw the knives first, but one of the women stood up screaming and began running back toward the border. It probably prevented a multiple rape, because the other women panicked and followed her, leaving the bandits to deal with the squatting men.
The bandits were of course more than a bit angry at having lost the women, but there were lots more where those came from. The leader, who wore a scraggly goatee, suddenly stepped behind Lino’s friend Luis and placed the blade of his knife against the throat of the terrified unprotesting alien. Lino saw a trickle of blood and when Luis began to cry, another bandit smashed him in the face with a huge rock. Luis fell to the ground whimpering and pleading.
The bandits never said anything except “Danos tu feria” the whole time they searched them. Only that slang demand for money. And only once. They were efficient. They didn’t waste movements or breath. They got the $24
from Lino and his treasured watch and his leather belt. Luis Rodrigues, happy to be alive, gladly surrendered the only thing of value he had left, a cowboy belt with a big metal buckle. It had cost him 5 American dollars in Tijuana when he first arrived.
The cops all wore the oldest grubbies they owned and the rattiest tennis shoes, but still were not quite properly costumed. Manny Lopez was thinking of making a Salvation Army or Goodwill run to outfit his troops like proper aliens. As they got to the rim of Deadman’s Canyon, they were startled by three shapes squatting in the manner of pollos.
Manny Lopez, who was getting the docile inflection down pat, simply said “Buenas noches” very respectfully as they passed. The squatting men did not reply respectfully, nor at all. The three were wearing jeans and had collar-length hair and two wore bandanas tied around their heads.
One of the squatting men stood up. He had a scraggly goatee that fluttered in the wind. He told them in Spanish to watch out for la migra. And when they saw a pair of headlights in the distance which could not have been Border Patrol, he told them to duck.
And then, sick and tired of the charade, and more than satisfied that these pollos were pluckable, one of the bandits walked up to Eddie Cervantes and introduced himself in a manner that the cop had never before experienced.
Eddie Cervantes had sad eyes that turned down at the corners. He was short enough to be the brunt of all the Munchkin jokes, and his gung-ho Marine haircut was boyish. He looked perhaps the easiest for the bandits to intimidate. The bandit merely smiled and brought a blade straight up, glinting in the moonlight. Without warning he grabbed Eddie Cervantes by the throat and whispered in his face, “Hórale, cabrón.”
That quickly. To be grabbed by the throat. To be staring at a blade. No by-your-leave. No how-about-a-cigarette? No foreplay.
The cops would learn about bandit styles. The style of this trio was to intimidate through violence, not just the threat of violence. The goateed bandit swung the heavily buckled belt he’d just stolen from Lino Ariza at the face of Manny Lopez.
The bandits could not have been more surprised. There was a hell of a lot of yelling and screaming when Manny whipped out his two-inch revolver, and as it later said in the arrest report, his bandit “suffered a slight injury to his forehead as he struggled for the weapon.” Which, translated into regular English, meant that Manny Lopez smacked him right between the freaking eyes.
Eddie Cervantes did not use his weapon. It happened instantly. The flash of steel, the hand at his throat. Manny yelled something, the gun cracking the bandit between the horns. Eddie Cervantes had his gun in his hand but instinctively grabbed for the knife. He kicked his bandit’s balls clear up around his head rag.
The arrest report would also say, “Only the force necessary to effect the arrests was used by the arresting officers.”
But these three bandits got a whole lot of lumps. They were the first real bandits the cops had encountered. And they had scared the living shit out of Eddie Cervantes. And people who are scared often play catch-up.
The fact is that after Eddie Cervantes threw a shoulder into his bandit and knocked him flat and pounced on him and beat the living crap out of him, he was still very tense and very mad. He shoved his snub-nosed revolver into the teeth of the bandit and said, “I could kill you right now!”
And it dawned on him. He could! Out in these canyons, in the darkness, with the others still handcuffing and wrestling and beating the hell out of the other two, he could kill this bandit right now. His hands were shaking. He had never fired his gun outside of target practice.
“I could kill you right now!” he repeated, bumping the bandit’s teeth with his gun muzzle.
“Don’t kill me, ’mano!” the bandit pleaded. “Don’t kill me!”
“I could, you son of a bitch!” Eddie Cervantes said. “I could!”
But he didn’t.
“We were afraid to use our guns at first,” he would later say. “We were still normal policemen.”
At about the time that Eddie Cervantes was flossing the bandit’s teeth with his gun muzzle, the other teams found a brace of dazed and bewildered pollos not a hundred yards away in the darkness. One of them had a knife wound on his throat and a contusion on his forehead where he had been smashed by a rock. Lino Ariza and his party were driven to the substation, where they identified the bandits who had robbed them.
Lino Ariza told the cops that he would give one leg and one arm if he could just make enough money to survive in Durango. He didn’t see how a person could ever be happy in such a violent country as America.
When Tony Puente got home that night from the beer party to celebrate the bandit bust, he was hoping that his wife, Dene, would be awake. When he wanted something badly enough, he’d hope for it. He never prayed for anything since he had stopped being a Catholic. And anyway his wife—who had plunged into tract-dispensing, Bible-reading, self-denigrating Fundamentalism with a vengeance—was praying enough for both of them.
“Maybe I coulda stopped it in the beginning,” he would say over and over to his comrades during the months to come. When he’d been drinking enough.
Sometimes he wondered if he should have married a Mexican girl. Would it still have happened? She was, after fourteen years of marriage, not yet thirty years old. She was slender and still looked to him like the child he had married. The fact is, Tony Puente was mad about her and would remain so even when her plunge into religion would come to dominate not only her life but his. When in fact her faith would become the single most important force in his life.
She was not awake. It was just as well. He was drunk. But she looked so young. He didn’t go to sleep. He went unconscious. The next day he couldn’t remember driving home. For a while, he couldn’t find his glasses.
During the last week of October 1976 there would be no less than seven newspaper stories dealing with rather routine arrests made by the new Border Crime Task Force. The wives and the cops themselves began searching the department stores for suitable scrapbooks.
They all knew that Manny Lopez was a friend of the San Diego Police Department’s press relations man, Bill Robinson. Manny called Robinson, and a good account was released to the newspapers about their first real bandit arrest.
Eddie Cervantes, whose down-turned eyes were a little baggy that morning from booze and a nightmare, couldn’t wait to get a copy of the newspaper. He wondered if he should maybe buy a leather-bound scrapbook. He opened the newspaper. There was a terrific story dealing with the attack on Manny Lopez by a bandit swinging a belt buckle. And of how Manny Lopez and his men disarmed and captured the crooks, who turned out to be heroin addicts. There was no mention of the knife at Eddie Cervantes’ throat. There was no mention of Eddie Cervantes’ throat, nor of the rest of him.
And his sad eyes turned down a little more and he thought maybe a plastic scrapbook would be good enough.
And he wondered if Manny Lopez had stolen his glory.
¿SABES QUÉ?
THERE WAS ONE SIGNIFICANT INCIDENT IN THE MONTH OF November which influenced the way future cards would be dealt and played in those canyons in the months to come. For the second time in their short history the squad became involved in a dangerous Mexican standoff.
Manny Lopez was not teamed with the varsity on this particular night. He was leading a walking team consisting of one customs officer, a border patrolman and two of the San Diego cops. An illegal alien they had encountered earlier, thinking they were fellow pollos, had warned them that there were two Tijuana policemen robbing aliens near the railroad tracks on the Mexican side.
The reports of rogue cops from Tijuana had been mounting. Technically such police officers were not robbers but extortionists. It was uncommon for a Mexican cop to shove a .45 automatic in somebody’s face and empty his pockets, bandit style. They suggested, under color of authority, that the pollo get his ass back to his own country unless he could make the cops’ miserable job worthwhile. After all, the cops had kids too.
The Mexican police might reason that they were charging a tariff to close their eyes to something their government didn’t discourage in the first place: the migration of its boldest and most desperate citizens.
The alien had warned them to watch for a station wagon on the Mexican side. They were about two hundred yards from the railroad tracks and walking east at 11:00 P.M. but did not see any cars south of the fence. When they were one hundred yards closer to the tracks they saw a vehicle, maybe a station wagon or van, crawling along the tracks without headlights.
They heard a car door slam just south of the international fence. They continued walking and saw two figures running westbound in the darkness as though to cut them off. They froze and watched two dark figures climb through a fence hole just above the Border Patrol’s welded landing mats. The figure in the lead was wearing the black uniform of a Tijuana auxiliary officer.
He charged forward, yelling: “¡Vengan acá!”
He brought up a four-inch .38 revolver and pointed it at the face of Manny Lopez. And for the second time, the sergeant was staring down the muzzle of a gun, and for the second time he made a decision others might not have made: he did not explain who they were. Just as he had done with the Tijuana cops near the airport, he looked straight into the gun barrel, and risked being shot to death by reflex or design.
While facing the gun he jerked out his own revolver and badge and said: “¡Policías!”
A second Mexican standoff. Manny’s men followed suit. The black-uniformed Mexican did not jerk the trigger through reflex or design. He looked at the handguns and shotgun facing him. He heard someone say he would die at once unless he dropped his gun. He stepped back two paces in the moonlight. His gun was still aimed directly at Manny Lopez. Then he lowered it.
The second man turned and ran to the fence. There was some confusion then in the darkness as the cops fanned out, dropped down, fearing a sniper attack, but heard the door slam on a vehicle and got to the fence in time to see a jeep wagon with white numbers on the side. The second man powered that jeep up the hill, lights out like a movie stunt man. Backward. Within seconds he was gone.
Lines and Shadows Page 6
