Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me

by Donal Macintyre

  Meanwhile, the team were becoming concerned. Mcquillan called the surveillance guys, wondering if anybody knew where I was. They were monitoring me on the GPS systems but had lost me in the concrete jungle of the flats complex.

  Gary was, naturally, slightly suspicious that someone would so willingly go with him at midnight into an estate with a bad reputation, especially just after being robbed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah, sure I’m just over here for the weekend and I’m up for the craic,’ I said.

  ‘The crack?’ he asked, startled. The Irish-ism was lost on the young crack addict.

  He marched me to a nearby balcony and kept me there while he went to look for his cousin. Even this didn’t worry me. I simply was not thinking about the danger and was just going with the flow. I was, however, aware that I had lost contact with the team. All radio communications were down. It’s something that can happen at any time, but, as luck would have it, they went down just when they were really needed. The comfortably familiar crackle and hiss were absent and I knew I was on my own, without the comfort blanket of Mcquillan’s soothing voice or the ability to phone for back-up.

  When Gary came back, he was twitchy and nervous. I thought he was distracted and that something was wrong. We chatted a bit more. We had been together for nearly 30 minutes now, and he was becoming difficult and belligerent. He asked me for more money.

  ‘I thought you were one of the good guys,’ I said to him, suggesting that he was fleecing me. ‘I would rather believe in the Good Samaritan than think the worst of you.’

  ‘I’m not being funny, but you look like a cop,’ he said.

  ‘Not many Irish cops around here.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I am from Dublin. You know the history of the blacks and the Irish.’

  ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish,’ he said.

  Then, in the blink of an eye, he pulled out a 7" blade and screamed: ‘Look, no more fucking about! Give the bag to me, or else.’

  I hadn’t been expecting this. I turned and ran and ran until I had the flats well behind me. The team had lost me and I had never felt so vulnerable – ever. One second I was toying with drug dealers and the next I was crying like a baby and sprinting away from the scene.

  I had wanted to get mugged, but as soon as it happened for real, it took me by surprise and I was a blubbing wreck. I think I had become so inured to danger that I didn’t respond appropriately to it anymore. It dawned on me that if I didn’t stop doing this kind of work, it would leave me for dead.

  Later, I tracked down Gary and we became friends. I was keen that this violent meeting wouldn’t be our only connection. I wanted to follow up on his story and discover what he was really about. At 23 years of age, he was a crack addict and a father of one. He had been in and out of prison all his life. He was doing his best to beat his addiction, but on the night of our first meeting, it had got the better of him. He was not used to his victims wanting to re-engage with him, but he rolled with it.

  We were both aware that our meeting was the conclusion of a strange series of events and an odd collection of motives. I was, after all, the only person in the country trying to get mugged that night and he had had the bad fortune to rob someone who happened to be wearing a secret camera.

  ‘You were lucky you were mugged by me. I would never have stabbed you, but plenty of my mates would have. There would have been a show,’ he said, ‘but you might not have been in it.’

  I wondered afterwards why I broke down. I had been shot at, beaten up, threatened, bombed and kidnapped, and still held it together. But when Gary pulled the knife on me, I had had enough. I had to stop pretending I was invulnerable and I had to accept that danger posed the same risk to me as to anybody else. Mcquillan was worried about me and about my state of mind, but his partner was delighted that I had finally been mugged, and that she could get on with having her baby. Shortly afterwards, she gave birth to a beautiful little girl.

  These days I try to avoid getting mugged, just like the rest of the sane population. There are some jobs that place you in the path of danger, and they are seductive and fun – but sometimes you have to realise when your days are numbered. I’m just glad I was given this stern lesson in life by Gary and not by one of his mates.

  14

  CALPOL AND KIDNAPPING

  Occasionally, terrible events can enrich and enlighten. The horrors of one of my recent journalistic assignments did just that – in ways that I could never have predicted.

  I was in Mexico City working on a project very subtly entitled World’s Toughest Towns. Despite the tabloid-sounding name, it was quite an in-depth exploration of the dark side of some of the world’s most iconic cities, from Washington to Istanbul.

  On the night in question, I was meeting up with the journalists, radio hacks, and photographers whose job it is to get to a crime scene faster than flies to a corpse. It was as close as you could get to the crime paparazzi of 1930s Chicago without watching The Untouchables. This is a trade fuelled by the Mexican public’s fascination for violent crime and a seemingly unending rise in brutal murders and kidnappings.

  We were at the Monumento a la Revolución, Plaza de la Republica, a memorial to the country’s dead heroes and a meeting place for snappers on the hunt for dead drug dealers and other victims of violent gangland crime. Photographers and journalists meet here every night and chain-smoke Mexican cigarettes in the menacing shadows of the streetlights. These men of the night work the ‘dead beat’ – and there are no shortage of corpses on these streets, as drug-related killings in Mexico have escalated to record levels; 6,587 people were murdered in 2009 alone. These hacks wait around for news of a murder or an accident and then race to the location, in pursuit of the front page and a big payday.

  The neon signs of late night bars and the bark of wild dogs on the streets created an appropriate atmosphere for the night ahead. ‘Let’s go!’ The off was sounded by one of the photographers when he got news of a possible drug shooting across town. The motley crew scurried like rats into their cars and dispersed into the night. The destination was revealed en route through the whispered crackle of a radio scanner. I was a terrified member of this posse as they careered through the insane city traffic at over 100 mph. Red lights are a matter of opinion here, and none were observed in the mad dash across town.

  I had no clue where we were heading, but had a fair idea of what we would find at our destination. The adrenaline was clearly addictive. Among the pack there seemed to be a primal enjoyment of this vulture-like behaviour.

  This is a dangerous job, and not just because of the Formula 1 dash: often the press pack arrives in the middle of a gun fight and has to duck and dodge the violent action before they can start doing their own shooting.

  Dead bodies are the currency of this ambulance-chasing set. Drug mayhem and kidnap victims are the spit and sawdust of their trade. In Mexico, grizzly images of victims of the nation’s war between rival drugs barons are devoured by city folk. Crime is the staple diet of the media not just because of the public’s appetite for the macabre, but also because it is so prevalent that it touches everyone. Dead bodies crowd the front pages of the papers and this can pay bills for the men who hunt out the pictures of the fallen and the slain.

  The little dignity that remains is reserved for their own. Veteran journo, Valente Rosas, told me that, essentially, the brotherhood of newshounds is afforded a dignity in death that is denied to others: ‘If one of us gets killed, we have a golden rule: we never photograph one of our own.’ With his full beard, soft plump cheeks and full belly, he could easily have passed for Santa Claus, were it not for his dark hair.

  Photographer David Alvardo is top dog in this press pack and told me that he has been ‘covering death’ for over 20 years. He looks more like a teacher with his NHS-style glasses, brown Hush Puppies and dark blue chords. ‘The majority of people here go first to the murder pages in the papers, look at th
e photos and stay there …. We love our blood,’ he said.

  This is not a country for the faint-hearted. Mexico is fast descending into lawlessness, evolving into a so-called narcostate, in a mirror image of Columbia in the 1990s. As it stands, whole swathes of the country are ungovernable because of gangland bribes and gun-barrel intimidation.

  Screeching to a halt, we arrived at the scene with the first Police officers. It was an ordinary suburban street with a mix of restaurants and houses that wouldn’t have been out of place in comfortable West London, but the emergency lights cast a new, more sinister hue on this part of town. The killing was over and the scavenging had begun. A young man in his early thirties was lying crumpled, half on the pavement, half on the street. He was dead, and yet there were only smiles among my colleagues. I was still high on the thrill of the car chase, but the reality of the situation was beginning to hit me. I felt like I had stumbled onto the set of a Quentin Tarantino movie.

  The man had been dead a little over 20 minutes. He had left a local bar with two men chasing after him. As he turned the corner onto a side street, a gunshot had rung out and the hunted man fell where he was shot, according to one local snoop who scuttled around the aftermath of the execution, enjoying the attention that his eye-witness status earned him. There were squinting windows on both sides of the street, but no one else was brave enough to talk: it can be a dangerous pastime in these quarters.

  I walked over to the body to gawk like the rest of the pack. The victim was wearing black trainers and jeans, and had ended his days as he had begun them, in the foetal position. There was blood on the collar of his jacket and on the beaten-up road. His eyes were open and appeared to be staring into nothingness. My gaze was drawn to the gap between his trouser hem and his socks. The exposed skin of his shin seemed somehow vulnerable and out of place. I was somehow more affected by his bare shin than the horrific wound in the back of his head.

  Here was a corpse still warm to the touch. He was likely a husband, a father, and was certainly someone’s son. And yet I was embarrassingly nonplussed. All I felt was a kind of numb confusion. A dead dog on the street would have moved me more. None of the assembled cast of journalists and paparazzi showed any human response to the sight either. Nobody blessed themselves and not a prayer was uttered; no one even seemed shocked.

  I heard the clink of metal skidding along the ground. My foot had kicked a stray bullet sideways, but the Police seemed unconcerned that I had contaminated the evidence; they were well used to the press overstepping the mark. The casing of the bullet that killed the man was later found by David, the photographer. The Police made half-hearted efforts to clear us from the scene, but they allowed the photographers time for their snaps and shared some locker room jokes while everybody got their work done. This lenient attitude further underlined the banality of this kind of drug-related murder here, and to me was a clear sign that the authorities had nearly given up the fight.

  Ultimately, it appeared that the business of death was more important than the life of the victim. This was no way to die and no way to be found dead.

  One of the press pack told me that the forensics would be minimal at the crime scene, but I really needed to take a CSI look at myself. I took a breather to consider my own reaction. I felt like scum. I felt that there must be something seriously wrong with me, if my only reaction to this scene was the occasional smog-induced cough. Was my work allowing my humanity to slowly ebb away into the gutter? I had worried for some time that I was becoming inured to such scenes and now I feared that I would end up like the hacks I saw in front of me, seeing only opportunity in the pain of others.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to the crew.

  * * * * *

  We were here in Mexico to report on the kidnapping and murder epidemic in the country and I was being forced to examine a side of myself that I did not like. Images played through my mind of the bodies of the victims of genocide I had seen in Rwanda, the emaciated refugees of the Congo, and the terrible sight of the slum dogs of Bangalore selling their kidneys so they could buy food. I had flashbacks to seeing disabled children chained to their cots in India, baby orangutans being packed into tiny wooden crates in Indonesia, lines of refugees in Bosnia and bullet-ridden bodies shot by the Burmese Army in the Golden Triangle. My work has taken me to many dark places over the years. I had seen horrors that night and was shocked by how unmoved I had been by the sight of a dead body.

  But in my kids I have a refuge from the worst that life could throw at me.

  Back at the hotel baby Tiger was running a temperature. It was three o’clock in the morning and she had been out of sorts all evening. Calpol was not doing the trick and all Mummy’s cradling had been to no avail. Tiger’s saucer-like blue eyes were rheumy and her cheeks were ruby-red and hot. This was during the gestation phase of swine flu in Mexico, which, apart from drugs, is its most famous recent export. The hotel doctor was called in a panic, but he just said, ‘Do as you are doing and double the dose of Calpol’ – the parents’ best friend in such circumstances.

  When I got back from work, I took over the night shift. This was daddy and daughter time. I held her limp limbs to my chest and drizzled water over her hot brow. The thermometer had shown 103°F. By 4 a.m. she was stable. I caressed the fawn curls that fell down her tiny neck and tapped her bottom. She tapped my back in return and then set about walking around the room. She stumbled over suitcases and pillows, regaining some of her spirit.

  Unfortunately, baby Tiger’s temperature soared again. I bathed her again and washed the water over her dimpled, chubby body. She played with her mermaid and her wind-up frog and I fished and hooked little plastic minnows for her amusement. As the heat evaporated from her blue-white skin, her mood rose again and I felt a kind of relief I never understood before I was a parent. It was five in the morning now. I was jet-lagged, war weary, and life felt fragile.

  Just before dawn, Tiger seemed to have turned a corner. At the time she was not really speaking, but was eloquent enough to make herself understood. ‘No! No way,’ was my favorite phrase, and one she had perfected. At eight months we thought we heard her say ‘daddy’ but she never uttered it again. Months on and she had yet to complete a full sentence, until at that moment in our Mexico City hotel, when out of sorts and out of the blue, she suddenly said, ‘Dada, I love you.’

  A wave of emotion washed over me. Tiger turned her head and teased her curls with her tiny fingers, unaware of the significance her words held. For her the moment was over. As for me, I burst into tears.

  This was a special moment for a father, especially for one who grew up without a dad.

  I am determined not to repeat the sins of my own father, and to be a constant presence in my kids’ lives. My mom brought up five of us single-handedly, and every day of her hard life was a small reminder of the dad deficit. Because of that, I take the gift of fatherhood very seriously and I relish my role as daddy to my beautiful girls.

  As the tears fell, I thanked God there was still a place in my heart for meaning and a home for unconditional love. I was caught halfway between the potential of a life yet to be lived and the smell of death still in my nostrils. The tears told me that I was at least not completely dead to the world.

  Considering the kind of stories that I had covered, it was perhaps inevitable that my empathy switch would be turned off at some stage. With a few simple words, my daughter had flipped it back on again. It was five months before she spoke a full sentence again. But I think she knew what I needed to hear that night.

  * * * * *

  Such an emotionally-charged state of mind is not necessarily ideally suited to engaging with Mexico City’s disturbed underworld, but that was my day job and there was work to be done. With just three hours’ sleep, I set out to meet a man whose only daughter who had been tortured, raped and murdered. This would no doubt mean a car crash of emotions and I was not looking forward to it.

  Kidnapping is endemic in this part
of South America. It is not only the rich and famous that are targeted: the crime has percolated down to all sectors of society. It is so prevalent that cases of neighbour kidnapping neighbour have become increasingly common. In one case, a young boy from one of the city’s poorest districts was kidnapped for a ransom of $200. When his parents could not find the money to pay the kidnappers, he was killed with an injection of battery acid to his heart. His suffering is unimaginable. The boy was just five years of age; his abductor was a 17-year-old friend of the family.

  My assignment that morning was to meet Eduardo Gallo, who once had a little girl just like mine. His story was a devastating contrast to the picture-postcard scenes of Mexico that entice millions of tourists there on a regular basis.

  Eduardo is a handsome man in his fifties. He sported a thick goatee and his welcoming smile expressed a warmth that belied his pain. He had the confidence of a man who has been to hell and back, and is wiser for the experience. It was a strange and disconcerting confidence that seemed to say: ‘Do your worst: nothing you can do could hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt.’ I understood that perspective and I could see that there is a certain liberation to be had from it.

  Eduardo wanted to share his story, to offer hope to those who think that justice is beyond them; to kick the judiciary and the Police into more honest practices; and to tell fathers that love, not revenge, is what must be born out of the kind of tragedy he has suffered.

  Where I have hopes and dreams for my daughters, he is left with just memories. At the age of 23, with her whole life ahead of her, his little princess, Paola, was kidnapped, raped, and brutally murdered, despite the ransom having been paid. During the delivery of the ransom, three of his daughter’s kidnappers had themselves been robbed and killed. When the ransom failed to materialise, the other members of the gang shot Paola in the neck.