When the other Barfers came panting across the canyon toward the direction of the gunfire, they found Joe Castillo putting surgical dressings on the man, trying to apologize for kicking the shit out of him while he was dying.
Except that he wasn’t dying. He pushed Joe away and got to his feet on his own. Then he waved away all help and said, “I can do it myself.”
And he walked with them out of the canyons to the nearest dirt road just as the ambulance came bouncing over the horizon.
And he continued a running dialogue with Manny Lopez all the time he was leaking blood, saying things like: “Yes, I know it’s a bad way to work smugglers.” And, “Yes, it was stupid to be on U.S. soil.” And, “It was wrong of me to draw my gun on you even though I thought you were smugglers.” And, “I really screwed up and understand perfectly why you shot me.”
He understood perfectly. He was full of holes and dripping all over the canyons and he could cook up a story as he walked out unassisted.
The Barfers were amazed. By now Carlos Chacon was on the scene trying to direct the Border Patrol chopper via Handie-Talkie. Joe Vasquez was stumbling around with a radio earpiece in his ear and the cord dragging the ground, thinking that his new job might be interesting. Darkness had fallen and they were staggering all over the place trying to fight their way up the embankment with two prisoners, one on a gurney. Everyone was yelling and bitching and slipping and falling and finally the wounded Mexican said, “Leave me alone! I can do it better myself!”
Shot full of holes, he apparently had only one worry: that these coconut assholes might accidentally drop him over a cliff and kill him. And in fact he climbed the escarpment better than any of them and walked all the way out.
There was of course pandemonium on all police frequencies. The Border Patrol chopper was WOP-WOP-WOPPING over their heads. The Mexican judiciales and municipal police had heard the action on their frequencies and were pouring into the canyons from the direction of Colonia Libertad. There were rubberneckers flowing out of the lantern-lit shacks south of the line and Manny Lopez was screaming, “Let’s get the hell out a here!”
Just then some kids from Colonia Libertad decided to have a little fun and set some tires afire, rolling them down into the canyons at them, which made it a bit tough for the San Diego P.D.’s homicide team to come in and investigate, as they must, officer-involved shootings. When they arrived it was all they could do to keep from getting set on fire by rowdy Mexican kids who were bombarding them with rocks and burning tires.
The tire rolling stopped after about thirty minutes, and Carlos Chacon, who was guarding the shooting scene, found another well-dressed stranger making his way down the hill into the canyon. He was a Mexican immigration official and he was carrying a walkie-talkie and speaking into it. He wasn’t very happy and advised Carlos Chacon that others were following him into the canyons to find out what had happened.
The wounded immigration officer, Luis Tamez, was booked into the San Diego jail, as was his companion, who told the cops that he was an informant for the wounded migra. They both stuck to the story that they were looking for alien smugglers and mistook the Barfers for their men.
There was a bit of difficulty in making a case, since Tamez had never said anything but “migra.” It was true that two weeks earlier they had received a report from an arrested alien that he had been robbed in the canyons by an armed man in the uniform of the Mexican Immigration Service. Nevertheless, Luis Tamez had not uttered anything except “Immigration” prior to being ventilated by Manny Lopez.
The assistant district attorney wrote a letter to the San Diego chief of police which made Manny Lopez crazy. It said:
We have been advised that you and members of your Department have met with officials of the Mexican Immigration Service who have acknowledged the error of allowing their officers (and specifically, Mr. Tamez on this occasion) to operate in United States territory. You have advised us that you believe the interest of important law enforcement cooperation between the Republic of Mexico and your Department would be adversely affected by a prosecution of Mr. Tamez. We must consider that interest as well as maintenance of harmonious relationships between the United States and Mexico.
In view of these considerations and the technical nature of possible criminal acts for which Mr. Tamez probably has a legitimate defense, we believe the interests of justice dictate that no criminal complaint or prosecution should be instituted.
The story even received a big play in out-of-town newspapers. Stern magazine sent German reporters to do a story on these lawmen who were shooting down other lawmen on the border. Pete Wilson, the mayor of San Diego, asked President Jimmy Carter for federal assistance with border crime which had directly led to a tense international situation.
There was no getting around it; these Barfers were getting ink. They were hot. They were turning into something like media darlings. Maybe they were … useful?
When Manny Lopez heard about the district attorney’s refusal to issue charges, he immediately resigned from the Barf squad. He put it in writing to Dick Snider. Manny received an urgent telephone call from the chief of police.
Chief Kolender said, “What do you think about us not issuing charges against the guy?”
“Chief, I think it’s fucked,” Manny answered. “It makes it look like I screwed up! I hear his father’s a big government official in Mexico City. So what? He’s a thief with a badge. The worst kind a thief anyone can be.”
“You can’t quit this squad,” Chief Kolender told him.
“Yes I can, Chief. I quit,” Manny said.
“What do you want me to do?” the chief of police asked.
“I don’t know,” Manny Lopez answered. “You’re the chief.”
“I know I’m the goddamn chief. What do you want me to do?”
“My guys feel like nobody’s backing them up,” Manny Lopez said. “I want you to come … to my house and explain to my guys, and maybe … apologize if you feel we deserve it?”
“How about Sunday?” the chief of police quickly asked.
And he did it. Chief Bill Kolender also knew a thing or two about machismo and stroking. He almost apologized twice. Despite the district attorney’s letter to the contrary, he said that the police department took a strong stand but that there wasn’t any way of convincing the district attorney to issue criminal charges. He said that he was sorry if they felt let down, because he thought they were the ballsiest bunch of cops he had ever encountered in his entire police career. He said that he appreciated the job they were doing out in those hills. He said that he would never have the nerve to go out there in those godforsaken canyons at night and belly up to armed desperados.
They had never had a high-ranking officer talk to them like this, let alone the chief of police himself. Manny beamed and passed around the beer and everyone looked at him in wonder. He could quick-draw looking down the throat of a cocked .45 automatic. He could even persuade the super-chief himself to come to his house. And almost apologize. He was some kind of hardball motherfucker, this Manny Lopez! He had prunes, they whispered to one another. Manny’s prunes were big as honeydews. Manny Lopez had balls to the walls!
There was one thing that really pissed off the chief though. He said that the head of the Mexican Immigration Service told a lowdown lie about one of the Barfers. It seems that there was a rumor going around down south that a Barfer ran up and kicked the wounded officer who was lying on the ground shot to pieces. Chief Kolender assured the squad that he told the Mexicans what he thought of a preposterous story like that.
It was the first shootout for the Barf squad. Manny Lopez said, “We’d been in fights. We’d been threatened by Mexican cops with guns and by robbers with knives. We’d even been shot at by Loco through the fence. But I’d never faced anything like this immediate deadly threat. I knew that fucker was gonna shoot. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it. And I didn’t try to run. I didn’t cry. Who knows, maybe I was a split second from c
rying or running or pleading, but I didn’t. I knew I could do it now. Whatever happened—rain, blood, shit or flood—I could deal with it. I never felt like this before. I never felt so confident. Or something.”
Manny told Dick Snider to tear up his resignation letter. He was going to stick with BARF to the end. Then he had to run off because a local network affiliate wanted a television interview.
LAST OF THE GUNSLINGERS
SOME WAGS HAVE SAID THAT THERE ARE TWO THINGS TO talk about in America’s Finest City: the predictably even temperature and the San Diego Chargers. And that when football season is over there is only the temperature.
San Diego is truly a scenic place, virtually perfect for the armies of joggers who live there. But sometimes the resort mentality seems to run amok and permeate everything, including the police force. It’s almost as though the city is a thousand miles from the Baja Peninsula, gateway to all of Latin America with its millions of have-nots. For example, when Tony Puente first joined the police department and was sent to the border substation, Manny Lopez was the only other Mexican-American there. Including Dick Snider, that made three Spanish speakers, and Tony’s Spanish was minimal.
Yet that was nothing compared to how it was in the bad old days. Manuel Smith, one of the cops working “Mexican Liaison” for the police department, remembered how it was. He’d been a cop for exactly twenty-one years on the night that Mexican immigration officer Luis Tamez was shot by Manny Lopez and survived. The surnames of Manuel Smith and his partner Ron Collins were a big joke around the department in that they were both of Mexican descent. Manuel Smith’s ancestor James Wilcox Smith came to the Baja Peninsula from England in 1810, converted to Catholicism, married a Mexican girl, and stayed. The Baja Peninsula is full of Mexicans with Anglo surnames: Collins, Johnson, Blackwell, Simpson, Smith.
Manuel Smith was a second-generation San Diego policeman and had relatives throughout the Baja Peninsula as well as around the border on both sides. He was a shrewd, jovial cop with wavy hair and great white teeth. And he was big, nearly big enough to be protected by the Greenpeace ship, they used to say. His partner, an ex-football player, was also so big that this pair could wear out the shocks of a Plymouth in about two weeks. Their combined weight was somewhere between five hundred and six hundred pounds. Everyone said that if the San Diego naval base would just lash them together and float them, they could afford to decommission the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Both cops were of patrolman rank, Ron Collins having been a liaison officer longer but Manuel Smith generally thought of as the spokesman by virtue of his incredible connections south of the imaginary line. He had a cousin in the judiciales and another in the municipal police. Just watching him operate was a thing to behold. Manuel Smith couldn’t even cross the border without having to pause and chat with the Mexican border guards, who normally only stopped cars heading south when they wanted to peddle some tickets to the police rodeo at the downtown bullring.
And when he got to the headquarters of the judiciales it was as though Santa Claus had arrived. Tijuana cops had a thousand problems that needed solving up north. There were personal problems, relatives who needed assistance with documents, immigration problems, insurance problems, employment problems. There were professional needs, the endless information search by cops who had no access to computers. There was impounded property linked to persons who traveled south to do business, legal and otherwise. The Mexican authorities had to labor under a maddening information gap that Manuel Smith and Ron Collins could help them narrow through American sources.
By the time he could even step foot inside state judicial police headquarters, Manuel Smith had a laundry list hanging out every pocket, and more to come when he got inside. An F.B.I. agent coming to the same headquarters might cool his heels in the lobby for a whole afternoon, while Manuel Smith had ten judiciales falling all over themselves just to help him locate the son of some American cop who was last seen smoking pot laced with PCP and running naked through the Tijuana cemetery on a big frat weekender.
He’d often worked San Diego homicide cases that took him south, and he admired the cunning ways of cops who have no crime lab and have to make do. When the Tijuana cops came to San Diego for tours, Manuel Smith would show them the police department’s crime lab and computers and communications center and other law-enforcement gadgetry, and they would say, “Yes, it’s just like ours.”
It would make Manuel Smith sad because he knew that he was showing them wonders, and they were embarrassed. And they always called him ’mano and pareja, “brother” or “partner,” affectionately.
He understood the need for liaison between two countries living cheek by jowl, and he understood how delicate was his position. Former San Diego police administrators did not even want a Mexican-American cop being the liaison with Tijuana authorities. “They” might think of the possibility of profit and corruption if “they” got together with “their own kind.”
Manuel Smith was old enough to be very careful. He well remembered a promotion board when a former deputy chief had said to him: “Smith, what’re you doing trying to make sergeant? You people ought to be happy you have a job.”
And how it still was when a Mexican-American cop would say to another: “When’re you gonna retire so I can go to homicide?”
Manuel Smith and his father before him had experienced a lot of that during their careers as San Diego policemen, so he had learned to tread softly. He would not join San Diego’s Latino law-enforcement society.
“It was hard enough trying to get accepted all those years,” he told them. “I can’t see segregating ourselves again.”
He knew about Mexican protocol and understood how Mexicans differ from Mexican-Americans so profoundly. He appreciated their hospitality down south and was embarrassed that Mexican lawmen could not come to a San Diego police station and be treated with the respect they showed him.
He remembered a homicide case prosecuted in San Diego where at his request a pathologist from Mexico volunteered to come and testify for the San Diego police about a man, injured in San Diego, who died in a Tijuana hotel. It seemed that a border patrolman ruptured the spleen of an alien who managed to get back across the border to the hotel before dying. There was no way that a U.S. officer was going to be convicted of killing an illegal alien, but when the judge said in open court, “I’m sure glad I don’t live in Mexico and have to go to a doctor like that,” Manuel Smith wanted to crawl out of the courtroom rather than face the pathologist.
Once, when he was on holiday working at his ranch in Baja, he had occasion to see a dilapidated pickup truck break down on the rutted dirt road by his property. It was obvious that the truck’s starter was inoperative, and while Manuel Smith considered giving a push with his own four-wheel-drive vehicle, he was surprised to see two little Mexicans start working like ants without looking for help. First they stacked flat rocks under the rear axle; then they dug holes under both rear wheels; then they took a length of rope and wrapped it around the wheels much as you’d string a yo-yo. While one man sat in the truck, the other grabbed the rope and took off running down the road.
The wheels started spinning. The man in the truck popped the clutch. The engine fired up at once. The two little Mexicans refilled the holes and moved the truck off their rockpile, chugging away never to be seen by him again. It reminded him of the way the judiciales had to work homicides and other crimes. They made do, and did it surprisingly well.
Manuel Smith clearly understood Mexican lawmen and their bewilderment when they were criticized in the north for, say, shooting a kidnapper dead as he tried to retrieve the ransom, after he’d confessed where the victim was.
“A man like that?” would be the inevitable response to northern critics. “Why would anyone care about a man like that?”
Well, it was their way and their country. He wouldn’t want to be suspected of being “a man like that,” but given their resources they kept a teeming city relatively crime-free. By
American standards, Tijuana was pristine.
But he was a San Diego cop, second generation, and he never forgot it. “I had to back the play of our men,” he said, referring to the Tamez shooting. “When the police down there would ask, ‘Why, Manuel, why?’ I’d always back our play.”
Manny Lopez and his men became convinced that Manuel Smith was not backing their play. Smith and Collins were ordered to meet with Mexican authorities to deal with the Tamez shooting in such a way that international police relations would be served. Manuel Smith and Ron Collins sat in the headquarters of a deputy chief of Mexican Immigration while he dictated a report to his stenographer. When it got to the part about the guns and shooting, the chief stopped the steno and did some careful editing.
When the report was finished, Manuel Smith and Ron Collins were asked to read it and sign it as representatives of the San Diego Police Department and, by implication, the United States authorities. Ron Collins, who could hardly read Spanish, signed the report. Manuel Smith, who could read much better, signed it anyway.
“They’re satisfied,” he said later. “They’ve saved face and we’ve preserved our relationship, and that’s what’s important.”
But it wasn’t important to Manny Lopez, who lost his right eyebrow completely when he heard that the Mexican government had a statement signed by the San Diego Police Department admitting that Tamez was confused and had wandered a short distance onto U.S. soil by accident.
Manny Lopez and his Barfers were in their little squad-room the night Ron Collins came to explain the letter. Manny Lopez was livid.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “What gives you the right? You and Smith ain’t even sergeants, for chrissake, and you’re signing documents without talking to the Man? That Mexican was a crook! They’re all crooks!”
Ron Collins said, “If you’d calm down, maybe I could explain.”
Lines and Shadows Page 13
