by Mia Flores
Junior and Peter always had a plan B. They invested about $600,000 in a furniture company that used trains to ship goods. They’d hide drugs in the walls of the rail cars. It was slow, but it was guaranteed with hardly any risk.
The furniture company was their only legitimate business, but they also spent money on dozens and dozens of semis with hydraulic stashes that concealed their drug shipments. These semis and trains would bring the drugs into a city, but to get the drugs from place to place within that town, they commissioned custom-fitted cars.
These vehicles were crazy. To get to the hidden drugs, you’d have to get in the car, fasten your seatbelt, put the car into drive, then press a certain button like the defrost or back window to trigger it. You’d hear this whoosh sound, and the whole back or floor would open using hydraulics. In these secret compartments, you could fit about one hundred kilos, or maybe $1 or $2 million. Bigger vehicles like pickup trucks could hold 150 kilos. The people who drove these cars wore ties and dress shirts, like white-collar workers, not drug runners. They didn’t want to attract the cops’ attention, so they were clean cut, and they didn’t run red lights or speed. This was ground-level drug transport, but Peter and Junior had elevated it to an art form, with a fleet equipped with the latest technology.
Mia
With more direct control of transport, things became increasingly intense. Peter became such a micromanager, making up all kinds of rules for his workers. “Don’t even say where the stash house is over the phone.” Or “Walk through the house exactly the same way every day. Don’t leave any mail in the mailbox.” He’d make his people confirm accounts every time they went into the house, and if they took any kilos away from the stash, he would have them put them to the side, then recount the kilos that were there. He even made them wear gloves so they would never leave fingerprints on the kilos. He knew that cleaning up the mess from a problem was harder than just getting it right the first time.
Olivia
Their employee relationships got more sophisticated, too. They had this idea to build a team, so they’d have not only the best prices but also consistency. There are a lot of traffickers who don’t have a steady drug flow, which means no cash flow, so no day-to-day workers. You need stable, happy employees who are on your team, pushing the drugs out and bringing the money in.
This was a dangerous business, so the more comfortable you were with the people you worked with, the better. Junior and Peter spent a lot of time building trust and good relationships. They wanted serious commitments, not a bunch of “one-night stands” with suppliers or customers. That can cause a lot of trouble; you could end up with the wrong person and get burned.
Mia
With so much more to manage—and so many more people—Peter and Junior went from having twenty lines each to thirty or forty each. It was insane. They never put two people on one phone. Their cash counter at one stash house in Chicago got one, the guy who delivers money got another, and the head of their furniture company had another. We would put little stickers on each phone with someone’s initials. These phones would last a few weeks, then they’d destroy them and get another burner phone with a new number. We even had one phone designated for pizza orders because, in this business, you never had a home phone.
Olivia
Before Chapo met Junior and Peter, he’d never answer his phone. He had people do it for him. But seeing Junior and Peter with all those burner phones must have inspired him because he started doing it himself. He labeled them just like my husband and his brother did, too. Those phones were the first thing Sean Penn wrote about in his Rolling Stone story about his meeting with Chapo, and when I read it, I just laughed and thought to myself, I bet Sean Penn thinks Chapo’s so original. Little does he know.
Mia
Our husbands were so busy, but it didn’t take them away from us emotionally. If anything, they wanted us closer to them. Having a wife and family took a lot of the pressure off, or at least some of it. Peter wanted his life to be as routine as possible outside of work, which is why he went everywhere with me. I remember, once, I was about to leave to get a manicure.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“To get my nails done.”
“I’m going with you,” and he followed me right out the door. I sat under the UV light waiting for my polish to dry, and there he was with his bag of phones, just hanging out with me. It’s not that he didn’t trust me, and he wasn’t worried I’d be hurt. After his kidnapping, we had security to make sure nothing ever happened to one of us. He just wanted to be with me, like a regular husband who was so bored he’d decided to join his wife at the nail parlor. I suppose it made him forget all his problems. I imagine it gave him a sense of peace.
Olivia
The Mexican government had started to squeeze the cartels in 2006 and 2007, and everyone from Chapo down was feeling it. They were reacting to it with full-on terror.
On December 1, 2006, Felipe Calderón was elected president of Mexico, and ten days later, he sent 6,500 army troops to the state of Michoacán, just southeast of Guadalajara, to fight the cartels. They fought back, and over the next six years, almost 85,000 people would die because of cartel violence.
Mia
Terrible things were happening near the border. In 2007, Chapo and Mayo went to war with the Juárez Cartel in an attempt to take over the highly active, lucrative drug smuggling route from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. A city of over 1.5 million that’s just over the Rio Grande, Ciudad Juárez had always been different than its smaller sister city, but when the turf war began, the gap between the two grew even bigger. In 2007, Ciudad Juárez recorded 300 homicides. By 2008, that number hit 1,500. In 2010, there were over 3,000. Over all that time, El Paso’s murder rate hovered around three to five per year. It was the safest city to live in the United States.
Olivia
All during 2007, Junior and I took business trips to Ciudad Juárez, and we witnessed the mayhem. I remember seeing the streets filled with federal police; it was obvious that the Mexican government had sent up the army to fight the cartels. I would sit there and worry my head off, thinking, I’ve never felt more unsafe in my life. Then I’d cross the border and go shopping in El Paso just to get away, and it was like night and day.
The violence had gotten worse in Culiacán, too. When Junior and I would go there a few times a month, the newspapers would be full of pictures of dismembered people, their body parts scattered everywhere. Or photos that showed dozens of bodies hanging from bridges, with banners on them sending messages to their enemies. Newspapers in Mexico are not like in the United States, where they blur out blood or gunshot wounds. There, they show everything.
Those images were one of the things that pulled me out of the bubble I’d created after I had Brandon. When I saw them, I realized, That could be Junior. I started thinking about these people’s poor wives and kids who would have to grow up without a father. I’d been the wife whose husband got murdered, so I knew what it felt like firsthand.
It was eating away at Junior, too. And with so many people dying because of the cartel wars, it would soon be too much.
Mia
Then, all this talk about submarines started.
Olivia
Chapo’s transportation system had always been out of hand. To get drugs from Colombia to Mexico, he’d taken control of thousands of container ships and had a fleet of 747s. He had more planes than Aeromexico airlines. In each plane, he took out the seats, then filled them with clothes or supplies, supposedly for humanitarian missions. He’d unload those goods in Colombia, then reload them with twelve thousand kilos of coke. That’s fourteen tons. All that coke would make its way back to Mexico, where corrupt federal officials would help unload it, then it would find its way via train, tractor-trailer, bus, or secret tunnel to the vehicles with secret compartments like my husband had built.
These systems weren’t foolproof, though, and Chapo was always looking to improve his transport. So he d
ecided to invest in submarines. He bought one sub from the Russians, then started manufacturing others in Colombia for $1 million each. The plan was to have ten submarines in the water at a time, holding eight to ten tons of cocaine each. That would be over a billion dollars in the water, and Junior and Peter were invited to be in on the load.
The subs were managed by different men Chapo and Mayo trusted. Alfredo Vásquez-Hernández was in charge of one of the subs, and he stopped by our house one day to talk to Junior and Peter.
“How much do you want to put in?” he asked.
“Let’s do twelve hundred,” Junior said.
The way it worked out, though, is that when Alfredo put the load together, Chapo and Mayo would end up getting 20 percent, or two tons, for free. You know how much two tons is? It’s like $20 million for free every time each submarine goes. It sure paid to be the boss.
Junior and Peter were responsible for turning in their 1,200 kilos to the Colombians to load onto the sub. To do this, they started working with a close friend named Andy, who was their contact out of Colombia, and a part of our extended family. He would purchase, mark, and deposit the work with the people in charge of loading the subs. If the bosses were ever short on kilos, he’d go to Colombia or Panama and put in the difference.
Once the subs got to Mexico and were unloaded, guess what the cartels did with them? They’d sink them, because they didn’t want to risk sending them all the way back.
Holy shit, I remember thinking. This is going a little too far. Sure, I knew about the 747s and the tunnels across the border, but submarines were on a whole different level. Only the navy had submarines. Regular people didn’t.
But at that point, we were far from being regular people. Yet we didn’t try to change that till we almost lost our lives.
CHAPTER 16
The Strip Club Incident
Mia
I hadn’t felt comfortable in Puerto Vallarta since our wedding. I lived for the beach, but that immigration officer who’d tried to extort us lived there, and being anywhere close to him was terrifying. Plus, the last time we’d been out in Puerto Vallarta, a few weeks before we got married, we’d run into a Chicago police officer at a club downtown. He’d looked Peter and Junior right in the eyes and said, “I know who you are.” Then he pulled out his cell phone and snapped a photo of them.
At the end of January 2008, Peter and Junior had business associates in from China, and they wanted to go to the beach. If you were looking to impress someone and take them out, Punta Mita, which was right outside of Puerto Vallarta and where Olivia had gotten married, was the place to go, so Peter and Junior planned a short trip.
“I don’t want to go,” I said to Peter. “That immigration officer might find out we’re there.”
“There’s no way. We’re going to be so far away from their office downtown. We won’t even be on their radar.”
I relented, and the next morning, we packed up our things.
Olivia
The two guys who’d flown in from China owned an import/export business, and they were there to talk about these things called buckets.
Junior and Peter had gotten into the meth business recently, and the buckets were the key to the whole operation. They were five-gallon tubs, sort of like paint barrels you might pick up at Home Depot, and they were full of pseudoephedrine powder, which everyone just calls “pseudo,” which is one of the main ingredients in meth. They had a contact in Canada who was getting them from New Delhi, India, but the Chinese guys promised to sell them cheaper. Each bucket cost $150,000, and there were forty buckets in a ton. If Junior and Peter bought four tons, that would cost $24 million. The pseudo was worth way more in California than Mexico, and they could sell it to a manufacturer over the border for $80 million, a profit of $56 million. It was hard to buy pseudo in bulk in the United States since the government had cracked down with all kinds of new laws, so Junior and Peter were in a great position to make a lot of money.
The day before the men from China were set to show up, Junior explained to me how he’d transport the buckets once they’d made the deal.
“When the guys from China ship the buckets,” he explained, “I’ll pay off the piso to clear customs agents at the port in Manzanillo, and then I’ll have the fleteros send them up to Mexicali. Then Puerca helps get them over.”
Junior and Pete had just moved their infrastructure to Mexicali, so they were seeing Puerca, who controlled the tunnels from Mexicali to Calexico, a lot more regularly. Puerca was handsome and very charismatic, older than all of us, but I always thought he was fun to have around. He’d become one of Peter’s best friends, in fact.
Junior added, “These Chinese guys approached me years ago about buying buckets, but I didn’t think much of it till Chapo and Mayo were talking to me about wanting pseudo because they have a chemist in California. I looked at them and said, ‘I know who to talk to.’ Then I thought to myself, You have no idea how long these guys have been bothering me about these buckets.”
Mia
A few hours later, buckets were the last thing anyone was talking about when we sat down to dinner with the Chinese businessmen and their associate.
“We’d like to see some girls,” they said.
“Then we know exactly where to go,” answered Peter.
When associates came into town, they always wanted to go to strip clubs. It was just what you did. And because Olivia and I went everywhere with Junior and Peter, they asked us to join them. I was reluctant, though.
“Can’t we just have some girls come over to our house? I’m worried about being out.”
Peter looked at me and burst into laughter. “Brandon will be home. These are strippers, not babysitters.”
He had a point. Brandon had just turned two, and he’d be staying home with Adrian and Daniela. I finally agreed, and it was just after dark when we piled into a few SUVs and drove about twenty minutes away.
Olivia
It was a Saturday night, and the club was packed. The music was pumping, we were popping bottles, having a good time. We were seated in the VIP section, in a roped-off area the owner had specially reserved for us. He’d called a bunch of girls over, and they’d started dancing for the Chinese guys, who looked like they were having the time of their lives.
In Mexico, women do not go to strip clubs, so I could see some guys nearby staring at us. I shrugged it off; it had happened a lot, and wasn’t a big deal. As I scanned the room about five minutes later, though, I noticed one guy who looked strange. The expression on his face just didn’t seem normal. It was like he knew us, or like he wanted something from us. I turned to my husband.
“That guy is staring at us, Junior. Something’s wrong.”
“No, babe, it’s fine. He’s just not used to somebody’s wife being in a strip club. He probably thinks you should be home cooking and cleaning.” He laughed a little bit, and I did, too, nervously.
A few minutes passed, and he kept looking. I pulled on Junior’s arm. “This isn’t good. I don’t like that guy.”
Junior grabbed my hand, “It’s okay. We’re fine.”
But it wasn’t. I just felt it.
I went back to drinking my champagne, watching a parade of girls make their way over to our table. This wasn’t a high-class, VIP strip club like some we’d gone to in Guadalajara, but the customers were well dressed. They were spending good money. But the guy who’d been looking at me and Mia was different. He had something on his mind, and it wasn’t a lap dance. Another minute passed, and the man stood up, walked past us, his eyes glued to the side of my head, and moved out the door.
As I turned to tell Mia, I saw the front doors swing open. A group of men dressed in black poured in, their faces covered with ski masks and AK-47s drawn. They began shouting in Spanish, “Get down! Get down!”
The music cut off. It sounded like something from the movies, when a DJ’s record stops spinning, the needle scratches the vinyl, and the speaker blasts, errrr… I saw
half-naked girls running back and forth on the stage, screaming at the top of their lungs. Then, I watched a crowd of masked men sprinting toward us. Mia had been right next to me, but there was no sign of her. Junior and Peter were still across from me, and in what seemed like less than a second, the men shoved the points of their AK-47s into the backs of our heads, forcing us to the floor.
I’m going to die right here in this fucking strip club, I thought. God help us.
Just then one of the men who’d been hightailing across the floor picked me up like a rag doll. I started fighting, kicking, and punching like a wild woman, and he dragged me toward the door with my shoes scraping across the floor as I flopped around. When he got me outside, I saw about five Suburbans lined up, their windows blacked out. In front of each car was a line of men, all armed with semiautomatic weapons. The man who’d pulled me out of the club pushed me forward, then picked me up and threw me into the passenger seat of one of the Suburbans.
Peter and Junior were in the backseat with two armed men sitting behind them with guns to their heads, and someone outside slammed the door shut.
Mia
When the music stopped, I was already on the floor, next to Olivia. Men and naked girls were running toward the door, screaming. It was a madhouse. As people were scrambling past me in every direction, the girls who’d been dancing for the Chinese guys grabbed me by the arm and dragged me. I glanced back, terrified, and saw Peter. He was looking right at me, his eyes big as saucers. Then someone ran up to him and put a gun to his head.
