by Mia Flores
The next morning, they were transported to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. It only took an hour for them to get there; they were in a caravan of black Suburbans, surrounded by US Marshals, that raced at top speed and blew through every red light. Barack Obama had just taken office, and we later heard that a few bystanders who saw them pass just assumed that Secret Service was moving the president.
Almost immediately after they got situated in the MCC, they orchestrated a massive reverse sting. Federal agents facilitated a few controlled deliveries, and then seized the drugs. Because of that, a lot of their workers had been arrested, but many of their wholesalers were still working the streets. When raids and seizures weren’t happening, they were proffering—offering evidence and testimony to the US Attorneys—for twelve hours a day, every day. They’d do this for six straight months.
“We’re telling the feds everything,” Junior said. “Names, locations, all the ins and outs of our business, the whole bit.”
Mia
Peter told us that all the proffering and recording happened in the federal building right where we were sitting, but that they were being housed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, right across the street.
The MCC is a massive, brown, windowless building, and it’s essentially a holding pen for federal criminals awaiting trial, sentencing, or placement in another prison.
“When they move us out of the MCC every day,” he said, “we have twelve Marshals lead us out. They cover up the windows on everyone else’s cells so they won’t know who’s passing by.”
“As long as you’re safe, baby,” I said. “That’s the most important thing.”
God, I was naïve. That wasn’t all that mattered. They didn’t just need to be safe; they deserved to be treated with some basic human dignity, too.
Olivia
The MCC was hell on earth. Sure, no one was going to kill them there, but spending ten minutes within those walls was kind of like dying. Junior was always the type of person who was so selfless he never complained, but looking into his eyes every time I visited, it was hard to miss his pain and suffering. I wanted to tell him how bad I was feeling, but knowing how awful he had it and how traumatized he looked, I didn’t have it in my heart to. He was already too broken.
Mia
Junior and Peter were such a big deal at the MCC that the guards there grew to hate them. They made their jobs harder because they had to jump through all these hoops just to get them out the door. So they cut their privileges, letting them have fewer showers, restricting their phone calls, and locking them down 24/7.
Olivia
While other inmates were pacing around their cells shirtless because it was so warm, Peter and Junior had been deliberately put into a cell that was so cold, the walls were covered in a thin sheet of ice. Yet the guards wouldn’t give them any blankets. Peter and Junior lay together in the bed just to create body heat between the two of them. They were shaking the entire time.
The guard who checked on them at night once caught them and said, “Get the fuck out of that bed before I give you both a shot!” That was a disciplinary action that would force them each into solitary confinement, which didn’t make a difference because they were already there.
Junior responded, “We’re brothers, are you fucking kidding me?”
But the guard kept on. “Get out of that bed before I write you up!”
Mia
The guards finally moved them into a different cell, and when Peter walked into it, it looked like a mass murder had just gone down. There was blood on the walls, on the mattress, and on the floor. It smelled terrible. But the guards wouldn’t clean it up till the next day.
The guy in the cell across from them would scream all day and night that he was going to commit suicide, then he’d rub his own shit all over the walls and the doors. The hall dividing them was so small Peter could smell it all day, so he’d just sit in the cell, put his arms over his head and think, I’m living in hell. This is not a place for a human being to be.
Olivia
It broke my heart to watch my husband and brother-in-law suffer. Every time I left my weekly visit, I’d get so angry that as soon as I got into my car I’d call up our lawyer, Joe, and let him have it.
“How the hell can they do their jobs if they’re hurting like that?” I’d scream. “If you don’t help make things better for them as soon as possible, you’re going to hear from me every day of your life.”
But all my calls didn’t do any good. In the government’s eyes, Junior and Peter were criminals, and all that mattered was that they kept feeding the feds intel.
Mia
Getting back to Olivia’s house didn’t provide much of a relief for us. We were still living together, but we never felt “at home.” We were so consumed by what our husbands were going through that we became imprisoned in our own minds. Day by day, we were making ourselves miserable thinking about Junior and Peter, and we felt stagnant, like this could all go on forever and nothing would ever actually happen.
Then, in the middle of that winter, something did happen. We started feeling the heat from the people Peter and Junior were helping haul in.
Olivia
Junior had always made every day feel like Valentine’s to me, but around the actual day he treated me extra special. No matter what we did, where we went, or what we gave each other, Valentine’s Day wasn’t just a Hallmark holiday; it really said something about our love.
That’s why, just before Valentine’s Day 2009, I fell into a major depression.
All I wanted to do was sit around, sulk, and think about all the good times I’d had with Junior, but Adrian and Daniela refused to let me and dragged me out of the house to get me over my funk. Brandon and I love sushi, so we all drove to a Benihana-type Japanese restaurant near my house.
After we sat down, got situated, and ordered, I got up to go to the bathroom. Just as I walked out of the ladies’ room, holding Brandon in my arms, I ran right into one of the wholesalers Junior had informed on a few months before. Apparently, he was out on bond, and when he laid eyes on me, he was pissed. He got right up in my face, put his fingers to my head, and started yelling at me.
“I know Junior is telling! He and Peter fucking ratted me out!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I was trying to sound innocent. “That’s not true.” I was scared out of my mind, thinking he was going to hurt me and my son, and I hugged Brandon closer to me.
“I got paperwork,” he said, “and it says ‘informant one and informant two’ on it. Who else could that be?”
Just then Adrian walked out of the men’s bathroom, saw what was happening, and put himself between the wholesaler and me.
“You need to calm down and relax,” he said. “This is bullshit. How can my brothers be telling if I’m still here working? Wouldn’t I be in jail, too?”
The wholesaler looked at Adrian and realized he had a good point. He backed off and shrugged. Then he turned to Adrian and said, “Can I get your number for some work then?”
This guy was out of jail on bond, and he was still looking to grab a few jobs. That just tells you how connected Junior, Peter, and our family were known to be.
Mia
People had expressed their suspicions to Junior and Peter directly, too. There was one occasion when Peter was on the phone setting up a drug bust, and a customer paused and said, “I need to ask you something. Are you a rat? Just be honest.” Peter would deny it backward and forward, but a big part of him just wanted to fess up and answer, “Yes, I am.”
He and Junior were feeling guilty. They were putting people they loved behind bars and knew their families’ lives were going to be changed forever by it. These were workers who had children. Each time they helped the feds set up a controlled delivery, they were letting go of a long friendship, and it broke their hearts to turn their backs on the same people that they’d taken care of for years.
When I saw Peter ever
y Friday, the pain showed on his face. The light he’d always had in his eyes had started to dim. He was so cold and pale all the time, and when I’d hug him, he couldn’t let me go. He’d ask me to comfort him, saying, “Just remind me that I’m doing the right thing.”
I lived for those Fridays, but staying home with Olivia was getting easier. Maybe we were just getting used to our new lives. We started cleaning the house every day so we wouldn’t be surrounded by mountains of dirty diapers. We weren’t getting new vehicles every month like we had in Mexico, so we took our cars to the shop for oil changes and new tires; even after everything they’d gone through, our husbands kept saying how worried they were about us driving in the snow. No one was running our errands anymore, so we did them ourselves. On the weekends we watched happy family movies, and it may sound silly, but they helped us see life in a positive light. We shoveled snow together and took the garbage out twice a week. Once, Olivia fell on her butt when she was hauling trash, and we both burst out laughing. As she lay there in the snow, I looked at her, smiled, and said, “I can’t believe this is what our lives have become.”
It was hard—our lives were like night and day compared to what they’d been six months before—but we were making it. Little did I know, though, that I’d need that strength because my life was about to become even more complicated.
CHAPTER 25
Alabama
Mia
Valentine’s Day 2009 was on a Thursday, but because Olivia and I only got to visit Peter and Junior on Fridays, we decided to celebrate the day after the holiday. I used to write Peter ten-page love letters at night after Bella was asleep, so I packed one up, along with some new family photos I’d recently taken, and got in my car. When we arrived and settled into the visiting area, I turned to Olivia and Junior with a plan.
“Can you distract the guards for a little bit?”
They agreed, then cornered them and immediately began talking.
“Peter, let’s go to the bathroom,” I whispered.
“We can’t,” he answered. “Someone will catch us.”
I put my foot down. “I don’t care.”
It had been months since we’d made love, and we missed each other desperately. I knew a prison bathroom isn’t the most romantic place to be with your husband, but we needed that closeness and would have done anything to get it. Plus, Peter needed to feel like a human being again, and, honestly, so did I.
A few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. Bella was barely three months old.
I was shocked. But with a husband in prison and the rest of my life so uncertain, was I even just the tiniest bit worried or disappointed? Not for a second. My baby was a beautiful new beginning. In fact, having something so innocent growing inside me shielded me from what was happening to me and Olivia: the word was out about our husbands, and we’d been receiving threats.
Olivia
DEA agents were receiving intel and had been tapping phones for months, but sometime that winter they’d intercepted a suspicious call. A group of armed men were standing outside a hair salon, waiting for someone they thought was me to come out so they could kidnap me.
Junior and Peter’s attorney, Joe, called me in a panic with the feds on the line, and when I picked up the phone, I heard the fear in their voices.
“Liv, you’re in danger,” they said. “People are after you.”
I hadn’t been anywhere near the salon. The person inside looked a lot like me, but it was the wrong girl. The kidnappers were about to kick in the door, but the feds showed up and prevented anything from going down.
Still, the whole incident scared the shit out of me. I knew the feds couldn’t intercept every call, and they wouldn’t always be there to save the day.
Mia
The feds investigated one death threat after another against me and Olivia in the months after Peter and Junior were moved into the MCC. In fact, there were so many that I started to lose count.
There was one incident that stood out the most. An informant gave information that Sergio Gomez had been staking out Olivia’s house, armed and ready to kidnap her. The feds called us immediately, and they practically banned us from the state.
“You girls cannot be here anymore,” they said. “The threats are coming in every direction, and we aren’t going to be able to intercept every single one. Before it ends in tragedy, we think you should move to throw off anyone who’s looking for you.”
It had become a job in and of itself to protect us, and they needed to focus their efforts on the cases they had to build.
It didn’t take much convincing; Olivia and I decided to leave town right away.
Olivia
We’d missed Junior and Peter’s family since we’d been back in the States. While we’d gone straight to Chicago, they’d settled far away in Alabama because they wanted to be somewhere quiet and warm, far from Chicago. Besides the time Adrian had come to visit, it had been months since we’d seen them. We’d only been able to talk about Junior and Peter on the phone. They were going through the same emotions we were, and I didn’t just think they could help us cope; I realized they might also be able to help me with Brandon. He’d been going through so much being away from his dad, and when we’d lived in Mexico he’d always enjoyed being with Junior’s family. He missed them—we all did—and I hoped being around family would help us feel closer to Junior.
So we packed up our things, and my boys and I moved in with Daniela and Adrian, while Mia and Bella looked for their own place.
Mia
After six months in the MCC, Peter and Junior had been transferred to a county prison in Wisconsin, then to a federal facility in Kansas. We planned on visiting them every week. Life for them in Kansas was so much better, and Peter couldn’t have been happier. The MCC had been so bad that anyplace else was going to feel like the Ritz-Carlton.
Olivia
In the middle-of-nowhere Kansas, there were fifty or more prisoners housed at a federal prison. They were all informants protected under the Witness Protection Program, and everyone except for Junior and Peter had been convicted and sentenced. Some were mobsters and others were drug dealers, but none were on the level of Peter and Junior. There are only a handful of these prisons in the country, and the government doesn’t place just anyone who’s worked with the feds there. You have to be a really big deal and be in an extremely dangerous situation.
Mia
When Olivia and I visited Junior and Peter, there was no glass separating us from them, and there was no dirty black phone you’d have to speak through. Instead, we sat on chairs in a super tiny visiting room, and Brandon, Benjamin, and Bella could actually play because they had a small area for kids. The guards were so nice to us because they saw us every weekend, and realizing how family-oriented Peter and Junior were, they treated them well. They let them hold the babies, which they hadn’t been able to do in Wisconsin. It certainly wasn’t like being at home, but Junior and Peter said that if they could have served their whole time there, they would have.
Olivia
They weren’t locked down 24/7, so they spent their days working out, writing love letters to us, signing extradition papers, and meeting with prosecutors and DEA agents when they were needed. Even though they worried so much about our safety, they were happy because they felt closer to us, with three hundred phone minutes a month and visiting privileges every weekend.
Plus, it may sound funny, but the company was better.
“It feels good to be around people and just talk about normal things that have nothing to do with business,” Junior said.
Junior’s such a people person, and I knew he needed that socialization. And he loved our visits, which were finally regular.
I rented an apartment in Kansas and would fly up there every Friday from Alabama, staying till Sunday. I didn’t care if there was a blizzard or fifteen inches of snow on the ground.
“We might as well buy our own snowplow to hook up to the front of our trucks,�
�� I joked with Mia, “because nothing’s going to stop us from getting to our visits.”
As much as I loved seeing Junior, it was so difficult to travel with my kids being so small. Benjamin always cried a lot on the flights, and people would give us dirty looks when he did. Prisons are never close to cities, so the drive from the airport there was two hours in the best of conditions, which they rarely were in winter. On Christmas, one of my flights was delayed because of snow, so I only got to spend thirty minutes with Junior. I didn’t care; I would have driven across the country just to see him for three minutes.
When I got back home on Sunday, I pretty much had to start repacking right away for the next weekend. I constantly felt like a truck had run over me, but I knew I depended on my visits as much as Junior did. They got me through my week. Sometimes, the travel made me despise my life, but Junior always kept me grounded; he’d remind me how blessed we were that we were alive and healthy and had each other.
Most importantly, visits were the only time our boys had with their dad, and it was amazing to see the bond that grew every weekend. Brandon absolutely lives for Junior. Every year, when he blows out the candles on his birthday cake, his only wish is for his daddy to come home. Benjamin doesn’t know what it’s like to have Junior home, but like his brother, he loves him unconditionally, and when his birthday comes around we count the years Junior’s been gone.
