Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  Rudy had seen it all before in El Paso. He’d seen what happened in a trafficking war, and how, when things got serious, the DTOs sent in “the scariest people you ever saw—people who do things like what they did to my brother.” (Coincidentally, the month before, the new police chief of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was gunned down by traffickers just four hours after being sworn in.) Ottuwma would be fine, said Rudy, as long as nothing happened to make the DTOs want to further consolidate the market or fight over turf. “If that happens,” Rudy said, “watch out.” At that, McAndrew once again stood and looked out the window.

  Ironically, ignoring the DTOs is in some ways to the advantage of local police and sheriffs’ departments of the rural United States for the reason that confronting them would almost certainly result in failure. In Oelwein, chief Jeremy Logan had been enormously successful in the fight against local meth production. When I asked him what he’d do about the DTOs, he said flatly, “Who knows.” Barring instances like the ones in Ottumwa, where traffickers threatened the local police, those in the employ of the major narcotics networks largely work unseen within the small-town immigrant community. As Rudy noted, part of the DTOs’ success is because their vendors go unnoticed, work long shifts, and remain highly mobile. Phil Price had once noted that the traffickers’ subtlety works nicely for everyone involved. “If Joe Blow torches his mom’s house,” he said, “you have to respond. But if smart traffickers are quietly moving hundreds of pounds, totally out of sight, you don’t really have to pick that fight. You’re a small-town cop and federal help is two hundred miles away, in the state capital. You’re probably smart not to look too close.”

  How Ottumwa would deal—or not deal—with what was quickly becoming a newer, more violent phase of the meth epidemic was on curious display one sweltering July night, as Tom McAndrew oversaw the last of three exercises designed to train the Wapello SWAT team how to respond to a meth lab, along with the often-well-armed men who work at them. It was eleven o’clock, and we were sitting in the dark amid several hundred acres of chest-high corn adjacent to the Des Moines River. I was pretending to be a meth cook, along with McAndrew, a local pharmacist, and a fire-man from the nearby town of Eldon. Armed, like the SWAT team, with paintball guns, and protected by motocross helmets, we were to resist arrest as vehemently as we could once the SWAT team made their move on our position. We weren’t sure when that would be, and waiting to be attacked had everyone on edge. Especially since the day’s two previous exercises—one in an old barn, another at a former batch site in the woods—had gotten increasingly aggressive. We were all supposed to be acting. But the heat and the isolation had conspired with the adrenaline, nearly leading to two fistfights. The fourteen-man SWAT team took the training seriously, bearing down in full body armor, their paintball guns designed to look like automatic weapons. The tackling and cuffing took place at full speed. If one of us “killed” one of them, it was taken as a very real failure.

  Now we’d been waiting for two hours in the heat of the river bottom while the unseen SWAT team belly-crawled toward our position through the corn. As we sat around a fire we built in the small clearing where our imaginary lab was, the adrenaline and fear keening through our bodies grew tempered by fatigue. So McAndrew, seated in a lawn chair with his paintgun across his lap and his motocross helmet propped on his forehead, began telling stories.

  The first story was about a famous Ottumwa meth cook, who was thirty-five years old and lived in a nice three-bedroom house with his twenty-year-old girlfriend. This was back in the late 1990s, when McAndrew’s team was raiding an average of one meth lab every four days. (One task force member, Doug Hurley, personally helped to dismantle fifteen hundred meth labs in the first nine years he worked in southeast Iowa.)

  What McAndrew and his men found in the kitchen of this particular house was a typical “user lab”: an electric heating pad, some chemistry glassware and tubing, a small machine that popped cold pills one sheet at a time from their aluminum-backed packaging, a few kerosene containers full of anhydrous ammonia, and some Coleman lantern fluid. It was enough to make three to five grams of crank at a time. Or, if done wrong, to blow up the house.

  In the living room, said McAndrew, there were three old-fashioned porcelain bathtubs full of human excrement. Mounds of excrement, McAndrew said, neatly piled as though the shape—measured by the proportion of length to width to height, like Mayan or Aztec ruins—were of utmost importance.

  “This wasn’t just shit,” said McAndrew. “It was architecture.”

  Kept neatly in manila folders were hundreds of photos. These, too, fit together with what McAndrew, in his quiet drawl, called “some kind of a hell of a deal.” Roughly, the cook and his girlfriend would get high on meth, which they liked to do intravenously. Then the cook would instruct his girlfriend to insert a store-bought enema into his sphincter. Next, to keep the enema from coming out, she inserted pigs in a blanket, small hot dogs wrapped in dough sold frozen in bags at the grocery store. According to his scientifically detailed notes, the cook’s record was to have one full pound of pigs in a blanket in his anus at one time. Another time his girlfriend inserted into him seven blowgun darts, a lit cigar, and a large dildo, which McAndrew described as being as big around as a Coke can. According to his journals, the man was capable of going up to two days without defecating. When he could no longer hold all this inside himself, it was off to one of the bathtubs. He could, if he took enough methamphetamine, begin the entire process all over again following just a few hours’ sleep.

  McAndrew said such bizarre scenarios were not uncommon back when home-cooked crank still accounted for a quarter or so of the Ottumwa meth market. The real point of the story, though, is that McAndrew sees no difference between the man with the user lab and the traffickers who follow his men. McAndrew isn’t the type to choose his battles or to walk away from a fight. He and his men had handled the local meth market and its users just fine. Now, though, they were confronting something different, and it wasn’t clear McAndrew saw how poorly equipped he might be.

  By midnight, McAndrew was nearly done telling his story, pausing every few minutes to look out into the darkness beyond the fire. The pharmacist and the fireman were quiet. In the sullen silence they seemed to be wondering where in the world they were. Not because they were in a cornfield waiting for the SWAT team to attack them, but because they were in Iowa, and it no longer seemed recognizable. When the pharmacist asked what happened to the meth cook, McAndrew’s story ended, in a way, with the man being sentenced to six years, and with him getting out of jail in nine months.

  In another way, the story ended like this: with the enormous boom of a concussion grenade, followed immediately by the SWAT team racing in from all directions, weapons raised, wearing full body armor and night-vision goggles, screaming, “Police! Police! Get on your knees!”

  Unlike the day’s two previous scenarios, they did not wait for us to shoot first this time.

  CHAPTER 13

  DISCONNECTED STATES

  Thomas P. M. Barnett and Moisés Naím are two post-cold-war thinkers who have come to prominence recently. A reading of their work suggests a framework for understanding the changing manner in which Ottumwa and Oelwein fit into the world—and ultimately, how meth has become such an inherent part of life there. Barnett is a professor and researcher at the U.S. Naval War College. One of the anchors of his worldview, as put forth in his book The Pentagon’s New Map, is the idea that nations can be divided into two types: the “functioning core” and the “non-integrated gap,” or “disconnected” states. The former—the G8, plus Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan, Australia, and other similar industrialized nations—play by one “rule set” predicated on global political and economic integration. The latter—and for Barnett this includes most of the world’s nations—are a collection of rogue states, battered economic and political shell states, dictatorships, and otherwise wayward entities. This non-integrated gap relies on a separate rule set predicated on
the black market and the movement of goods and services that are a threat to the stability of the functioning core.

  The global drug-trafficking business is by nature disposed to operate outside the bounds of law, politics, and traditional economics. Though, as the meth trade has shown, this doesn’t stop traffickers from functioning in tandem with, or from preying on, government policy and stable financial systems. One might say that the makers and distributors of narcotics function as a disconnected state, which nonetheless exerts tremendous influence within the borders and cultures of nations without regard to whether they’re functioning or disconnected—globalized or marginalized. And just as methamphetamine from the non-integrated gap state of North Korea travels to the core nations of Japan and Australia, so too does pseudoephedrine from the core nation of India get shipped to Mexico (another core nation), where it is made into crank which is sent to the United States (perhaps the core nation). This happens through a loose network of market forces that combine the ideas of connectivity and division deep within the same borders. The state of Michoacán, Mexico, is an example, as are the cities of Nuevo Laredo, Juárez, Nogales, and Matamoros, where even the Mexican army holds no sway.

  But what about inside the United States? What about California’s Central Valley; or the so-called Methlehem section of tiny Oelwein, Iowa; or the tinier still town of Benton, Illinois? What about Algona and Lu Verne and Congressman Souder’s poultry-rich Third District of northeastern Indiana? How connected, really, are these places to the rest of the United States, and to the world? In some ways, the link is clear. There is a very good chance, for example, that most of what you ate today came from the Central Valley, whether eggs or beef or dates or oranges or lettuce. The chicken you had last night stands a better-than-average chance of having come from somewhere within a hundred miles of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

  In another way, though, many of the towns of the rural United States are quite disconnected from the rest of the nation. Poverty rates are higher, fewer people have achieved secondary levels of education, and substance abuse is far more prevalent than in urban America. It’s worth noting that the reason your dinner moves an average of fifteen hundred miles to get from its source to your plate is because the source—or sources, really—is determined by companies like Tyson and Cargill and ConAgra based on where they can pay the cheapest labor costs. Barnett posits that when one piece is no longer part of the system—that is, when it is disengaged from the standard rules—everyone is vulnerable. Oelwein may look very different from In dependence, but Oelwein’s problems nonetheless affect its neighbor. Oelwein’s vulnerabilities are Iowa’s vulnerabilities, and America’s.

  Naím, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and the former minister of trade and industry of Venezuela, is saying much the same thing as Barnett is in his book Illicit. Rather than a nation, the victim in his paradigm is more likely a car manufacturer in Detroit who suffers from Chinese knockoff parts, or Hollywood taking a hit from the black market DVD trade in the Golden Triangle of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. For Naím, when everything and anything can essentially be stolen before it ends up in the hands of consumers, no one can be truly inoculated from the “system” of chaos. Now, instead of Hollywood DVDs or cars, think of jobs in Oelwein and Ottumwa, Greenville and Gooding. When those towns are in trouble, so too are Scarsdale, New York, and Ladue, Missouri—the second-and fourth-richest cities in the nation, respectively. The proof is in the meth that ends up in New York or St. Louis after stopping at a small, rural transhipment point.

  Were Naím or Barnett an epidemiologist, it stands to chance they would gravitate toward the study of RNA viruses, like the flu. The power of the common flu relies in part on what is called antigenic drift, meaning that, as humans develop antibodies to ward off infection, the virus mutates its proteins so that the antibodies can no longer bind to the viral surface. Basically, you make a lock, and the virus makes a key. When the key turns, you get sick. What happens once in a lifetime, on average, is that these same RNA viruses “reassort” themselves. That is the fear with H5N1, commonly referred to as bird flu, which places like the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are carefully monitoring. The fear is that this particular strain of flu will “figure out” how to adopt (or co-opt) the genetic attributes of the same regular old infection that makes large numbers of people in the world vomit and feel puny for a few days or a week each year. By rearranging, or reassorting, its RNA, H5N1 could theoretically use the common flu to make the jump from chickens and ducks to humans. Once a human falls ill with both flus, the two viruses would be able to replicate in the same cells at the same time, resulting in an antigenic shift. The key to unlock your immunity, if you will, would be passed along with every sneeze and cough on every airplane and in every office around the world in a matter of days or weeks. As a UCLA professor writes in his opening lecture for a class on viral epidemiology, “this is not good!”

  Drug trafficking is a lot like the common flu. It’s long been guaranteed to mutate periodically within a fairly closed system. Drug traffickers stay around by making keys to government locks, at times before the locks are even thought of. This is what happened when the DTOs began moving to meth production via pseudoephedrine in anticipation of—as opposed to as a reaction to—Gene Haislip’s legislation in 1996. But drug trafficking, says Naím, has gotten a lot easier in the last twenty years. Or at least a lot harder to follow. Traffickers, like an RNA virus, affect antigenic drift all the time, and infections come and go as epidemics every decade: LSD and PCP in the seventies, cocaine in the eighties, crack in the early nineties, and crank ever since. All a drug needs in order to mutate is a body politic; the shift occurs where that body is weakest—where unemployment is high and poverty is rife, and people are disabused of their marginalization, or their “disconnectedness” from the “core.” The places where this occurs are not just the rogue states that Barnett imagines—the Yemens and the Tajikistans and the Ecuadors of the world. The “core” has holes of its own, in Ottumwa and Oelwein, in Cylinder and Algona, and in El Paso.

  Naím writes that since “the early 1990s, global illicit trade has embarked on a great mutation. It is the same mutation as that of international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or Islamic Jihad . . . All have moved away from fixed hierarchies and toward decentralized networks; away from controlling leaders and toward multiple, loosely linked, dispersed agents and cells; away from rigid lines of control and exchange and toward constantly shifting transactions as opportunities dictate. It is a mutation that governments in the 1990s barely recognized and could not, in any case, hope to emulate.”

  When I read that, it reminded me of one of the fears I heard voiced many times while researching this book: that drug traffickers will someday team with terrorist organizations. Or, at the very least, to exploit the same weaknesses in the social fabric that the Arellano Felix Organization and the Gulf Cartel have so successfully exploited. In truth, this has already happened at least once.

  In 2001, Tony Loya—who’d run Operation Snowcap from Guatemala back in 1987—retired from DEA and took a job as the director of the National Methamphetamine Chemical Initiative (NMCI). His job was to track the meth business on behalf of the Department of Justice and to anticipate the DTOs’ next moves. Loya noticed that gas stations that sell soda, cigarettes, and basic pharmaceuticals like cold medicine—or what Loya calls “stop-and-robs”—were buying enormous amounts of pill-form pseudoephedrine. In addition, the gas station owners had special machines that could pop entire rows of pseudoephedrine pills from their blister packs in the way that a garlic press squeezes the meat from the skin. In the Central Valley, agents found dump sites littered with thousands of empty blister packs near dismantled labs.

  Once Loya noticed this, he began investigating whether the same thing was happening in other areas of the country. It was: convenience stores in New Jersey were doing the same thing. As it turns out, the Jersey stores were owned by Yem
eni nationals who were not only importing bulk cold medication; they were illegally importing powdered pseudoephedrine and routing it to trafficking organizations. When DEA moved to close down their businesses, the Yemenis moved to Canada, mostly to Toronto and Montreal, where there were no laws governing the importation of bulk pseudoephedrine. There was nothing Loya could do.

  By 2002, DEA agents had informed Loya, who cultivates law enforcement contacts the world over, that high-level Mexican traffickers were going regularly to Detroit. Loya knew from other contacts that production of meth in the Central Valley was expanding exponentially, and reasoned that the Mexicans were courting the Yemenis by meeting them in Detroit, close to the Yemenis’ home turf. On a hunch, Loya authorized nighttime surveillance of remote roads at Canadian points of entry. Where there typically wouldn’t have even been any cars at night, he said, the video caught images of dozens of eighteen-wheelers. When searched, several of the vehicles were found to have loads of pseudoephedrine hidden in the fender wells.