by Mia Flores
Everything surrounding Brandon’s birth was our happiest time, and as Junior looked me in the eyes, he reminded me why he fell in love with me and how much he loved me. As the nurse laid our beautiful boy on my chest, we were overwhelmed with joy. He looks like an angel sent from God, I thought, and when Junior picked up Brandon and held him in his arms, I realized: Junior has the sweetest, gentlest soul, and he’s given me my beautiful son. In return, I’ve given him the gift of knowing what a beautiful family is.
Right at that moment, I finally let go. With Junior I didn’t need to guard my heart. I trusted him, and I stopped caring about his job. I stopped wanting to give him a hard time. He’ll change when the time is right, I thought. He’s given me his word, and I believe him.
A few days later, we were home, and it was time to celebrate Christmas as a family.
Mia
Christmas Eve was five days after Brandon was born, but Olivia still wanted to host a big family dinner. She and Junior had put up a massive tree and placed white lights all over their house, which lit up the whole block. They’d wrapped all their presents and decorated every inch of their place with something Christmasy. It was my first Christmas as a newlywed, and, honestly, Peter and I would have stayed in bed all day if we could have. But Olivia had gone all out, and I knew she’d make it the best Christmas ever.
Olivia
Family gatherings are a huge deal in my family, especially to my mom. She has seven brothers and sisters, and every year, she cooks for all of them and invites them, their kids, and their grandkids over. Honestly, I don’t remember a holiday without at least fifty people in our house. Mom still takes photos at all our get-togethers and creates albums from them, which she gives to each of us at Christmas. I sometimes tease her, saying, “You didn’t pick the prettiest pictures of me!” But I’m kidding; I love and admire her so much for how she holds her family together—how she shows us what family is all about—and I’ve always wanted to do the same in my home.
Especially on my first Christmas with my brand new son.
I’d bought everything we needed for dinner, then lined up the ingredients in rows in the refrigerator and pantry. We were about to sit down to an American feast of turkey, ham, potato salad, yams, mashed potatoes and gravy, and six different desserts. After two weddings that year, this was our first official Christmas as the Flores family, and I wanted it to be the happiest we’d ever remember. No one was in jail, no one had been kidnapped in months, and there was nothing to do but celebrate the season.
Mia
Peter and I were holding Brandon every second he wasn’t eating, and Junior’s girls, Samantha and Sasha, kept staring at him and saying, “He looks like a doll!”
Everyone was there: Xavier, Adrian and Daniela, Daniela’s son and daughter, all of Junior and Peter’s sisters and their families. And of course, there were my in-laws, who in many ways I was still learning to understand.
My father-in-law was so traditional. He thinks a wife should be home barefoot, pregnant, and cooking, so he was beyond happy Liv had been prepping dinner all night and cooking all day, even though she’d had a C-section less than a week before. He kept talking about it, and pretty quickly, it got irritating. I had to say something.
“She’s done a lot more in her life than just cook, you know.”
“But she’s roasting a turkey when she can hardly stand!”
Olivia had produced records, had a kid when she was fifteen, and lived through a husband getting murdered, and yet cooking that damn dinner was the most impressive thing she’d ever done.
So much of the time, I thought my father-in-law was completely inappropriate, and he could drive anyone crazy. He wasn’t at all like my dad, who was genuinely caring and always warm. I wasn’t sure I’d ever really feel comfortable with him, but like everything in Peter’s world, I was going to accept him because I loved my husband.
I’d started to realize my father-in-law was smart, though. I knew where Peter got his brains from. He didn’t use his intelligence for the right things, but he could be impressive.
I remember meeting with a real estate agent in Guadalajara when I first moved there. Señor had his little notebook out—something he always carried—writing down everything he wanted to know about real estate. He asked, “So, you might list this property at a low price in order to start a bidding war?”
“Sí, Senor.” Then my father-in-law opened up his notebook and took notes.
He hadn’t made it through middle school, but no matter who he was talking to, he wanted to learn from them. He wasn’t affectionate, but he had a lot of good qualities. He just happened to be in the wrong business, and he never failed to make bad decisions.
Olivia
My father-in-law was never careful. He lived in this little town in the middle of nowhere, and he had a beautiful ranch with waterfalls, ten horses, and all kinds of roosters for cockfights. He was obviously the richest guy for miles, yet he refused to have security. “No one’s going to touch me here!” he’d say. “I know everyone!”
Gambling was his thing—it made him feel alive—and he loved flashing his money around. In San Juan, there was this little place in the center of town where people would go play cards and dominoes, and he’d walk in with $50,000 in cash. Then on weekends he’d go to the horse races and bet $100,000–200,000, easy, and not care if he lost it.
“You can’t do that,” Peter and Junior would say. “And you can’t go out alone. Take security. Take a friend. Just protect yourself.”
But he didn’t listen. He wanted to do what he wanted to do, and no one could tell him otherwise.
Mia
The day after Christmas, my father-in-law left Guadalajara to go home to San Juan. It was commonly known that he had another family there, a second wife and three little kids, but none of us ever talked about it openly. Not a single person in the family or town approved of it, but we all just didn’t want to discuss it.
Sometimes before bed, though, Peter would begin to talk about it out of nowhere.
“Why does he do this to my mom?” he’d ask.
I had no answer. I wondered the same thing myself.
He and my mother-in-law, Amilia, had been married since she was just a teenager, and oh my God, did they fight about it when it came up. My father-in-law would be gone for a night or two, staying with his other family, and when he’d come shuffling in with his walker, my sweet mother-in-law would become another person and let him have it. She’d scream, “Where were you?”
“I was at the gambling hall.”
She’d rail at him, he’d ignore her, and then an hour later, she’d come out of her room, make him breakfast, iron his clothes, and take him shopping. Every time I’d see them together I’d think, Why does he do this shit? And why does she put up with it?
Olivia
I hated that he hurt my mother-in-law. She was a wonderful woman; the kind of mother I wanted to be. Junior and Peter worked all night, so sometimes we’d all go to her house at three a.m., and she’d wake up with a smile on her face and cook us a full five-course meal like it was three in the afternoon. She was always so warm and loving. Watching her really helped me soften up, but not when it came to my father-in-law’s other family, and especially not when he walked out the day after Christmas to be with them. I told him exactly how I felt, and trust me, I had no filter.
Mia
Not long after my father-in-law left, Olivia was resting, and Peter and I were sitting with Junior, who was doting on Brandon. I was amazed at what a great father he’d become instantly, effortlessly. Then, one of Peter’s phones rang, and when he answered it and started talking, he looked grim.
“Oh, no. I can’t believe it.”
“What happened?” asked Junior.
“Dad’s been kidnapped. He was walking through town with his three-year-old son, and someone grabbed them both.”
“Fuck,” Junior said. “It was only a matter of time. We told him not to go back to San Juan a
lone.”
It was true. Walking around flashing money, with no security, you might as well have a target on your chest.
“We have to leave now,” said Peter. “Whoever got them might be after us, too.”
Olivia
It had taken me a month to make sure Brandon’s nursery was perfect before he was born. And when we brought him home from the hospital our home felt so warm. But in our family, you couldn’t have something happy occur without some sort of tragedy involved. In Mexico, we knew we might have to give up everything and leave at any given moment, so I’d taught myself to detach and stop caring about material things. Our safety was our number one priority, and our family always had to come first. When Peter and Junior said we had to leave the house, all I could think about was my father-in-law and his son tied up God knows where. It was devastating to me—to all of us—and I knew we had no other choice.
We decided we’d check into a hotel. Unfortunately, since it was Christmastime, everything was booked, so we ended up at this cheap motel a few miles away. The whole gang piled into a few rooms: my mother-in-law; Junior and Pete’s sister; Xavier; Junior’s girls; Peter’s daughter, Sophia; Adrian, Daniela, and their kids; Peter and Mia; and me, Junior, and our less-than-one-week-old baby. I’m a germophobe, to the point that I used to make our housekeepers clean the bottom of our shoes with Clorox every day, and I remember looking around that nasty place thinking, Oh my God, I can’t be here. This hotel is not sterile enough for my newborn baby.
Mia
We huddled up in that fleabag hotel for days, all crowded together. Peter was a wreck, mostly because he’d lived through two kidnappings and knew what these monsters were capable of. He’d pace around the room, wringing his hands, looking like he was putting his thoughts together, but going completely crazy at the same time. “What kind of people would kidnap a baby?” he’d say.
I’d just shake my head. “I don’t know, Peter. But all we can do is wait.”
Around the second day, one of the kidnappers called Peter. Peter had designated a particular phone for them, with a dedicated line. It was a silver flip phone with caller ID on it, pretty basic for 2005, and when that thing lit up that morning—and once every day after that—my stomach would start to hurt. We were convinced that the baby and my father-in-law were dead.
Peter was on the call for a few minutes, with a full-on serious look that I’d seen a million times before. He looked twenty-four going on sixty. When he finally got off, he didn’t seem relieved, even though he had good news.
“They’re alive,” he said.
“Thank God!” I said, “Why don’t you look happy?”
“The kidnapper wants $6.5 million. He sounds like he does this for a living.”
I was confused. “Why does that matter?”
“Because this is not just about some random rich guy getting grabbed off the street for a ransom. The kidnapper’s a professional; he knows what he’s doing, and he wants me to be afraid of him. To tell you the truth, I am.”
Junior was all business, basically ignoring his brother’s feelings. “What else?”
“He wants me to refer to him as Comandante. He wants to be the boss, to be in total control. And he keeps calling whoever ordered the kidnapping ‘the Old Man.’”
“‘The Old Man’?” Junior kept pushing. “Anyway, anything else?”
Peter paused. “They say they’re going to dismember the baby if we don’t act fast.”
I thought I was going to throw up right then and there. I didn’t know that people actually did things like that. Torturing a child? In my world, that stuff didn’t happen. In 2005, there weren’t movies about cartels, so I hadn’t heard of all the awful things they’d do before they’d kill people. I’d never considered that anyone, anywhere, would even think about cutting up a child.
Olivia
At that second, my world came crashing down again. I’d dreamed of stability, and I thought when I had Brandon everything just might be normal. Junior and I finally had it all: two daughters and two sons; it was like our little family was complete. But right then, hearing about that poor baby, my life just turned upside down.
Mia
From that moment on, Peter and Junior spent almost every day, all day, talking about the kidnapping. They quickly realized that the kidnapper was giving them clues. The nickname “Old Man” was strange. The ransom amount seemed off: $6.5 million is such a precise number, almost too exact. Most kidnappers ask for $10 million or some other nice, round figure. $6.5 million obviously stood for something. It had to.
The one person who could find out was Chapo. He practically ran Mexico, and nothing went down without him knowing. If Peter and Junior were going to get to the bottom of it, they had to fly to the mountains to see him.
My husband and brother-in-law each packed a small bag and decided to head out the next morning for Culiacán. They weren’t going to be gone long; they were just as worried about me and Olivia as they were about their dad.
Before Peter walked out the door, he looked at me and said, “Mia, I think you should go somewhere. If this ends badly, I don’t want you to be here.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m waiting for you.”
“Then I’ll call the second I get there. I’m so sorry. This is not what I want for you. This is not the honeymoon you deserve.”
“Peter, it’s okay,” I said, lying to him. But it wasn’t okay. I wasn’t okay. I was sitting in a dirty hotel realizing that loving Peter, that being married to him, wasn’t just about accepting his lifestyle. It was about living through all its terrible moments, over and over and over.
He kissed me hard on the lips and walked out the door. I knew he’d be fine, but for the first time since our wedding my ideal world shattered, and I thought, Why are we living like this?
Olivia
They weren’t gone long, but the meeting was productive. El Chapo told them a lot more than they expected.
He revealed that back in May Uncle Pablo had dodged a meeting he was supposed to have with him. When the boss sends for you, you don’t ignore it, so Chapo declared Pablo his enemy and decided to tap his phone and keep him under surveillance.
Mia
Months later, Pablo’s $6.5 million debt to Chapo went unpaid. Then Peter and Junior’s dad was kidnapped, under incredibly suspicious circumstances and with a $6.5 million ransom demand. While Chapo couldn’t confirm that Pablo was the kidnapper, he strongly suspected he was, and he ordered Peter and Junior not to pay the kidnappers one penny until he investigated.
Olivia
The kidnapper had to be Uncle Pablo. Goddamn Pablo who’d taken Peter not even seven fucking months before had snatched his dad and his baby to pay back a $6.5 million debt he owed the Sinaloa Cartel. That man would stop at nothing.
Mia
Chapo hadn’t just ordered Junior and Peter not to pay a ransom; he’d also told us we should go back home, and that he’d send someone to check on us.
That person was his main sicario, or hitman, whose name was Rambo.
Olivia
When you’re the most powerful man in Mexico, you’re going to have some pretty ruthless people working for you. The most dangerous of all of them was Rambo.
Rambo looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. He was stocky and light-skinned, with super short hair and a mustache. He was always on edge, very serious, especially about his “operations.” As I got to know him, I could tell he didn’t really trust anyone because when a new person came around, he started to actually look like a hitman. Like deadly serious. Yet around Peter and Junior, he’d crack jokes. Anyone felt comfortable around them.
Mia
A few days after Peter and Junior got home, Rambo showed up with a group of men. Peter led them to the back of our house, and Junior sent Olivia and me to pick up dinner for everyone.
When we got back with the food, we walked into the kitchen, which was full of about twenty sicarios, dressed head to toe in m
ilitary gear. Laid out neatly on the table were the kinds of weapons I’d only seen in movies: high-capacity automatic weapons, rounds of ammo, cartridges stacked up ten high, and grenades scattered on the island. The men looked like they were ready for battle, and it made me sick to my stomach.
This is not who Peter and Junior are, I thought to myself. It’s one thing for us to have security; they’re there for protection. But it’s another to see an army of assassins.
I realized, right then, that the cartels were about way more than making money. They were about death and domination, at all costs.
Olivia
But was that something you’d take personally? Apparently, never. While Mia and I were putting down the food, worried sick and slowly dying inside, Rambo turned to Peter.
“You know, one of my men kidnapped you in April. He’s right over there, my gift to you.” Rambo pointed to one of his sicarios and motioned for him to come over.
The kidnapper started walking fast toward Peter, and, I swear, he couldn’t have been more than twenty. That well-dressed kid kidnapped my brother-in-law? I thought.
Suddenly, Peter grabbed one of the guns off the table and pointed it at him. As the sicario froze, Mia gasped. Peter put his weapon down and began laughing.
