He started pacing in front of the lectern.
“Anyone have an idea how much money from illegal drugs leaves the United States each year for Mexico and Colombia?”
“Tens of millions!” a young man in a tan blazer called.
Byrth smiled and shook his head. “Perhaps that much in a week,” he said. “Our friends in the federal government estimate that just those two DTOs—the Mexican and Colombian drug-trafficking organizations—take out of the U.S., either physically or by laundering it, somewhere between nine billion and twenty-five billion dollars. That’s billion-with-a-‘b.’ Every year. And that’s a lot of available cash floating around.”
The room fell silent.
Byrth added, “And that’s just from the wholesale distribution of marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin from Mexico, and cocaine and heroin from Colombia. Doesn’t begin to count the other Central and South American countries, nor, say, heroin from Afghanistan, which basically supplies the bulk to the world markets.”
“That’s staggering,” a male voice said.
“Anyone want to take a guess at how much was budgeted in a recent year for the Merida Initiative, the U.S.’s antidrug program?”
No one took a guess.
“About three hundred million to Mexico,” Byrth said, “and another hundred million to Central America. Million-with-an-‘m.’ Meanwhile, not long ago, in a single raid in Mexico City, agents seized more than two hundred million in U.S. currency. Just from a single supplier of chemicals for making meth. That’s only one-fifth of one billion bucks. Imagine the logistics of keeping safe the multiple billions in cash of a wholesaler of final product.”
“Absolutely mind-boggling,” another man’s voice declared from the middle of the room.
“Small wonder there’s so much corruption south of the border,” the young man in the tan blazer added.
Byrth was silent a moment, clearly considering his words. “Not just south of the Rio Grande. . . .”
Someone grunted.
Byrth paced again, then went on: “So, for just two countries, something between nine and twenty-five billion dollars in illicit money. And it’s a cash business. None of those annoying things we honest folk have to deal with, like taxes.” He paused. “But they do, however, have to deal with death. And sometimes that comes to them a little sooner than they expected.”
Byrth smiled. “Here’s a bit of trivia. There are a hundred one-hundred-dollar notes in a banded packet. That’s a stack worth ten grand, and it’s not quite a half-inch high. A hundred of those banded ten-grand packets equals one million bucks. And call it—what’s fifty inches?—call it four feet high. Or two stacks of two feet high.”
A very distinguished-looking silver-haired lady in a navy blue linen outfit raised her hand. She looked perhaps fifty-five or sixty years old.
“You could carry around a million dollars in a briefcase. No one would be the wiser,” she said in a very soft feminine voice.
“Yes, ma’am. Or in a UPS or FedEx box. A million bucks delivered overnight.”
Some of the faces looked incredulous. Most appeared shocked.
Byrth then said, “But a billion is . . . ?”
“A thousand million,” a young man’s voice offered. “Using your ballpark figure, that’d be a pair of stacks two hundred feet high.”
“Right,” Byrth said. “And multiply that by more than twenty-five billion a year. Every year. And it’s not all in hundred-dollar notes. Twenties are common.”
The faces continued to look incredulous and shocked.
“The logistics of moving the money push the bad guys to the point of desperation,” Byrth said. “With so much cash, they smuggle it by truck, car, Greyhound bus. They will even ship it like a Christmas fruitcake via UPS, FedEx, or even the U.S. Postal Service. The drug traffickers drive out to suburbia and find a house with its yard littered with newspapers, indicating the homeowner’s out of town. Then they phone down to their stash house along the border and give them the address. Next day, a box gets delivered, no signature required. The courier just rings the doorbell and drives off. Soon as it’s dark, the traffickers drive back out and collect their package. If they lose a few in the process, it’s just the cost of doing business. Cash gets shipped back the same way.”
“So how is this cash laundered?” the distinguished woman asked.
“With U.S. law requiring that any cash transaction in excess of ten thousand dollars be reported to the U.S. Treasury, it’s a real challenge to move nine billion, let alone twenty-five billion. Year after year.”
“Then how—” she repeated.
Byrth put his right hand to the side of his head, the pinky at the corner of his mouth and the thumb to his ear. “Hello, Western Union?”
He put down his hand. “Not only that, of course. Lots of money moves through electronic transfers and other types of wire remittances. Prepaid Visa gift cards are popular. There’s also the Black Market Peso Exchange; you can guess how that works—the dirty dollars buying clean pesos at a steep premium.”
Matt Payne was writing down “Black Market Peso Exchange” and “FedEx” on a piece of paper. He saw Tony Harris move suddenly.
Harris had felt his cell phone vibrate.
He pulled it from its belt clip and tried to discreetly check its screen.
Both Payne and one of the waitstaff, a male, noticed him. Payne then saw the male walk over and slip what looked like a business card on the table before Harris.
Byrth looked over at it and read:
LEAGUE POLICY:
No Cellular Telephone Conversations Permitted
Kindly Turn Off All Such Devices.
Thank You.
Payne rolled his eyes.
He whispered, “I’ve collected enough of those to start a fair-size bonfire.”
Harris showed Payne the screen.
“Shit!” he whispered after he’d read: 1 OF 2 CARS BURNED IN W KENSINGTON WAS CHEVY CARJACKED BY MATT’S SHOOTER.
“Forget getting any fingerprints or blood from that burned hulk,” Payne whispered.
Harris nodded as he put the phone back on his belt clip.
Payne looked back at Byrth.
He was pacing again as he spoke: “And, of course, often they don’t even bother to launder it. They just smuggle bricks of cash across the border. They do it exactly as they brought in the drugs, but, of course, in the opposite direction. Once it’s out of the country, it’s easier to clean. Want to guess how many of those multimillion-dollar high-rise condos on the water from South Beach Miami to West Palm got bought with squeaky-clean pesos?”
And all those Porsches, Payne thought, recalling his car search on the Internet.
Byrth made a face. “I know you’ve heard of the annual list of the world’s richest people published by Forbes magazine.”
The crowd responded quickly with “Of course” and “Yes” and “Uh-huh.”
Byrth went on: “In 1989, that list ranked Pablo Escobar, the cocaine drug lord based in Medellín, Colombia, as the seventh-richest man in the world. Net worth of twenty-five billion. And that was in 1989-valued dollars. Here was a man responsible for murdering countless of his enemies, including hundreds of police, thirty judges, and an unknown number of politicians.”
“Mind-boggling,” the young man in the tan blazer said. “But, hey, he’s dead.”
Byrth nodded. “Yep. Score one for The Good Guys—our U.S. Army Special Forces by name. But there’s been plenty of boys ready and willing to take his place. The head of the Sinaloa cartel, for example, one Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman—who happens to be a fugitive, having ‘escaped’ from a Mexican prison—recently earned a place on that Billionaire Boys’ Club list.”
The room was quiet.
Then the distinguished-looking silver-haired lady in the navy blue linen outfit raised her hand again. She looked clearly concerned.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” she said softly. “I seem to be taking over this meeting. But I ha
ve to ask: What would you say is the solution, Sergeant? Is there one?”
“Ma’am, I don’t begin to suggest I’m smart enough to have the answers. But there are highly intelligent people who have spent a lot of time studying exactly that. And, as part of that, they have stated the obvious: We could follow the model of Thailand.”
“I am not familiar with that,” the distinguished lady said.
“In 2003, Thailand began embracing Mao Zedong’s example. The Royal Thai Police reported that in a three-month crackdown, some twenty-two hundred drug runners were summarily shot and by year’s end another seventy thousand arrested. Those seventy thousand were lucky. Chairman Mao’s com munists, calling illegal drug users and suppliers social parasites, just outright killed them all.”
Professor Hargrove’s inbred buddy called out somewhat indignantly, “That’s never going to happen here.”
Byrth nodded. “I agree. Nor is the other option, what the economist Milton Friedman, among others, calls for—legalize drugs and end the war. Get rid of today’s Prohibition, which is what some of those on that side call it.”
“That won’t happen either,” the inbred buddy called out, this time somewhat disappointedly.
“And I agree again.”
“So, what do we do?” the silver-haired lady said softly.
Byrth was quiet a moment, before he answered with: “Dante said, ‘The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintained their neutrality.’
“And I agree with that,” Byrth said after another moment. “As well as with those who’ve said that the illegal drug problem is (a) not going away and (b) is going to get worse if we do nothing—that is, ‘maintain neutrality.’ And these brighter minds have said that the solution is very simple. The laws are already in place. Start with real border security. Start applying RICO—that’s the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has been successful at so many levels. Use all the other laws on the books. And use those twenty-five billion dollars a year as funds to enforce the laws. Nothing more, nothing less.” He paused, and sighed audibly. “I believe I’ve overstayed my welcome up here. I’ll say one final thing: Continue your fine support of those in law enforcement. Thank you very much for your kind hospitality.”
He turned to Commissioner Coughlin. “And for your hospitality, Commissioner.”
He handed back the microphone to him.
The room, with the notable exception of Professor Hargove and his pal, erupted in applause. D. H. Rendolok was pounding his table and calling out, “Hear, hear!”
Coughlin said into the microphone, “If there are no other questions . . .” He waited a long moment, and when no one raised a hand or called out, he added, “Then we’re adjourned till next time. I hope to see everyone again then.”
As Payne was standing and taking a sip from his fresh drink, Professor Hargrove said in another stage whisper, “Better start next time without me. What unmitigated bullshit propaganda. . . .”
Payne walked around to that part of his table, then suddenly found that his left shoe had become snagged on the thick woolen carpeting. Luckily, he caught himself and his very full cocktail glass from falling.
But it had been an absolute shame that his trip caused him to dump a perfectly good Famous Grouse onto the head of Professor Stanton Hargrove, the distinguished chair of Marsupialia Studies in the Biology Department of Bryn Mawr College. Some even managed to strike his inbred buddy.
X
[ONE]
4606 Hatcher Street, Dallas Wednesday, September 9, 9:06 P.M. Texas Standard Time
There were only the women and children and teenagers now with Jorge Ernesto Aguilar and his TEC-9 in the kitchen of the old wooden house.
Almost all were either whimpering or outright sobbing. Each toddler, in nately understanding that something was terribly wrong with Momma, cried uncontrollably. The mothers made what limited efforts they could to try to soothe them. They could see that El Cheque was becoming more and more agitated by all the commotion.
Minutes earlier, Miguel Guilar, after grabbing the older male by the back of the shirt collar, had taken him and a length of medium-size chain and a lock back to the smallest of the house’s five bedrooms. Juan Paulo Delgado had done the same with the teenage boy, but had gone to the master bedroom, which he considered to be his room when in town. Both handcuffed men had protested loudly and made some effort to resist being moved. And both men had been quieted when struck on the side of the head with the black Beretta semiautomatic pistol.
And so began the women’s whimpering and sobbing and uncontrollable crying.
While it was the least of their immediate problems, the women could see that the house was squalid. It clearly had been a long time, easily years, since there had been any kind of upkeep—never mind preventative maintenance—performed on the sixty-year-old house. The same could be said for any house-cleaning. The dirty appliances in the kitchen had last been replaced when the fashionable color had been a dark avocado green. The single kitchen sink, chipped and rusty, was filled with filthy dishes and glasses. The countertop suffered the same misfortune as the floor—both had linoleum that had separated at the glued seams and both had places where the linoleum had been ripped away long ago, revealing the raw plywood beneath.
Dirt had actually piled up in the corner of the kitchen by the back door, where there was an industrial-size thirty-gallon plastic garbage can. The trash was overflowing.
The women had found that the bathrooms were no better. Worse, there was no running water. The toilet tank, which had no top, had to be filled manually from a heavy plastic ten-gallon water bottle.
And soon they would learn the same was true, if horribly worse in other ways, in the bedrooms.
In the master bedroom, Juan Paulo Delgado led the teenage boy to a back corner. The room was furnished with a somewhat new queen-size bed—it was Delgado’s bed, after all—a bedside table, and an older set of dresser drawers. A crudely cut sheet of plywood was nailed over the window.
Delgado kicked the boy’s feet out from under him. The teenager, unable to break his fall because his wrists were still zip-tied behind his back, yelled as he fell and struck the floor forcefully, smacking his head on the matted green shag carpeting. It stunned him to the point where he just lay there groaning softly.
Nearby, there was a black iron natural gas heater bolted to both the floor and the wall. Delgado began threading the chain around one of the heater’s iron feet, then took the two ends and made a single wrap around each of the teenager’s wrists. Then he took the small steel padlock and, removing all the slack in the chain so that the links squeezed the boy’s flesh, ran its hasp though the two loops of chain and snapped it shut.
He turned and walked over to the dresser, which had three rows of two drawers. He opened the bottom right one and was relieved that no one had touched his stuff. He removed a handheld digital voice recorder and a roll of duct tape.
He tossed the roll of tape over by the boy’s head.
He then walked over and put the recording device on the bedside table.
I’ll make two, Juan Paulo Delgado thought.
One with him making noise and one with his mouth taped shut.
Then Delgado went back out into the kitchen.
All eyes turned to him. He saw that the pretty girl in the tight jeans and pink shirt had fire in her eyes. Others’ eyes showed a mix of anger and fear. Clearly, everyone had heard the teenage boy’s yell and the sound of his fall, and then the quietness.
El Gato smiled at them.
They watched as he walked over to a kitchen cabinet beside the dirt-smudged faded-white Kenmore refrigerator, opened the cabinet, and took out a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila. He uncapped it and took a long swallow, then held out the bottle, waving it as an offering to the women. There were no takers. He shrugged and took another pull.
Miguel Guilar walked into the kitchen and wordlessly looked around the gr
oup for the next person to be chained in the bedroom. He shook his head out of annoyance and grabbed the nearest girl by her upper right arm. It was the pudgy eighteen-year-old with the streaks of bleached hair. She pulled back from him, but when Guilar used more force, and El Cheque motioned menacingly with the TEC-9, she reluctantly went with him.
Delgado walked over to the very attractive girl in the tight jeans and pink lace blouse. She narrowed her eyes at him.
He smiled, reached out with his index finger, and stroked the soft skin of her throat on up to her chin.
The fire in her eyes grew, and she made an angry face and slapped away his hand. Then the look on her face and the fire in her eyes changed to fear as she recoiled at the thought of his response.
El Gato laughed aloud.
“Come,” he said, holding out his hand for her to take. “Let us go show your boyfriend a thing or two.”
She stood frozen. He grabbed her by the upper left arm and jerked, herding her toward the hallway that led to the master bedroom. She shook free of his grip and walked ahead of him.
When they entered the master bedroom, the pretty girl in pink saw her boyfriend lying on the carpet at the far end of the room and ran to him. He was still somewhat groggy from hitting his head on the floor.
Delgado went to them, grabbed the boy by the shirtsleeves at his shoulders, pulled him into a seated position, and leaned him against the gas heater. Then he slapped him.
The girl whimpered.
The boy opened his eyes, dazed. But it was clear that he recognized the girl and, when he made a face, Delgado, too.
“Bueno,” Delgado said.
Then El Gato stood.
The eyes of the boy and girl followed him as he walked over to the small table between them and the bed, then picked up a small electronic device and pushed a button on it. A pinhead-size red light came on. He put the device back on the table and walked back over.
Then he bent over, grabbed the girl by the waist with both of his hands, lifted her completely off the floor, and threw her onto the bed.
The pretty girl in pink started screaming hysterically. The teenage boy began yelling. The girl kicked at El Gato and flailed with her arms, fighting off his advances with a great effort.
The Traffickers Page 33
