by Mia Flores
Olivia
When we’d crossed the border, we had nothing but the clothes on our backs and enough cash to buy food and gas. Knowing that we had to live on something, we picked up some money. I’ll be honest; it was millions of dollars. But when you lived the way we lived in Mexico, that kind of money doesn’t seem abnormal. We’d actually be downsizing in the United States. Plus, we thought, How else are we supposed to support ourselves while we were in hiding? In our minds, we weren’t doing anything wrong.
Mia
We’d known for a long time that the court was going to order our husbands to forfeit money, goods, and property at their sentencing, but that was most likely years away. And while we knew it was possible that we’d have to give up some stuff sooner rather than later as part of the administrative process, we never dreamed the government wouldn’t give us notice.
Unfortunately, the process and what happened because of it couldn’t have been rockier.
Olivia
One morning in September 2010, I’d just dropped off Brandon at preschool. Benjamin was in the backseat in his car seat, and I kept looking in the rearview mirror, like I always did. Suddenly, I noticed something didn’t seem right. I’d just switched lanes, and the pickup truck behind me had put on his turn signal and edged in right behind me.
My normal route home was taking the main street in town, but I instead got on the expressway. As I took the entrance ramp, so did that damn truck. I put my foot on the gas and accelerated, and he sped up just as fast as I did. I was starting to sweat and my heart was racing, so I gunned it, moved two lanes to the right, and took an exit off the highway.
The pickup was a few cars back, but it exited, too. Then suddenly, I noticed something: there wasn’t just one pickup. There were three, and all of them had blacked-out windows.
I continued onto an access road, then got back on the expressway. Oh my God, I thought. This is it. They’ve found me, and they’re going to kill me. I accelerated to about 120 miles an hour and started zigzagging to get through traffic, even jumping into the emergency lane with my gas pedal all the way down. I kept thinking, If I crash, I’m going to flip this truck over, and my son and I are going to die.
I pulled off the expressway once again. I couldn’t see the trucks anymore, so I moved off onto a side street. As I stopped and looked at the beat-up houses on either side of the street, I suddenly realized, Oh, shit. This neighborhood is bad news. I’m sticking out like a sore thumb in a Range Rover. Shaking, I put the car in drive and pulled into a nearby 7-Eleven, then just sat with the motor still running.
I idled there for maybe three minutes, scanning left, then right, and looking in my rearview mirror. Believe it or not, Benjamin was sound asleep. Then, out of nowhere, I saw the three pickup trucks coming down the road behind me. I put the car in drive and floored the gas, and the pickups started chasing me again. All that was going through my head was, I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
My phone rang. I looked down at the screen and saw that it was Adrian.
“Someone’s trying to kill me!” I screamed when I answered. “Three trucks are following me!”
“Olivia!” he yelled. “It’s the feds. Calm down. I’m here with one of them, an agent named Todd. Meet me at my house.”
The feds were chasing me? I said to myself. What the living fuck were they thinking? I could have been killed!
I made it to the house in a few minutes, got out of my truck, and started screaming at the handful of agents who were standing there.
“What the fuck is your problem? How could you do this to me and my son? We both could have been killed. I could have flipped my truck. We’re here hiding, and you’re going to come and expose my family like this? People here have no idea who I really am, but when they see a bunch of DEA agents, you can imagine what they’re going to think. I’m fucked.”
“Please, calm down,” one agent said. “My name is Todd, and I just need to ask you some questions.”
I was still livid. “My husband is the one cooperating, so I have no idea what you want with me. I’m not talking to you unless I speak with a lawyer first.”
I pulled out my phone and called Junior’s new attorney, David. He didn’t answer, so I called Joe, and again, got no answer. Later on, I found out that both attorneys were at Peter and Junior’s prisons meeting with them while the feds decided to ambush us.
When I finally heard back from David, he explained the discussions the feds, Junior, and Peter had had separately: they’d come to an agreement that Mia and I would have full immunity from prosecution if we met with the US Attorneys and told them everything we knew.
“So you mean Junior knew about the feds coming and didn’t call me?” I asked.
“No,” he explained. “He had no idea they’d be coming after you.”
That’s how great communication was. It was time for me to speak to the feds, yet I’d gotten no notice, apparently, and the only way to tell me was to chase me off the road.
Mia
The feds hadn’t done a great job of tracking me down, either.
First, they’d gone to my house in Kansas and discovered I wasn’t there. Then, thinking I might be visiting Chicago, they’d traveled to my parents’ place. Realizing I wasn’t there, they called Joe. He’d been meeting with Peter, so he called me.
“I’m about to hop on a flight back to Chicago,” he said. “Meet me at the airport immediately.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there,” I said, and then got in my car.
“You’re going to get called into a meeting with the feds,” he said when I got to him. “You’ve got immunity from prosecution, but they want you to talk. You’re going to have to surrender some of your possessions.”
Right then, I handed him the keys to my brand new Bentley. “Take them,” I said. “I know I’m going to have to give the car up, so just take it now.” He took the keys, and I left the car in the parking lot.
I looked calm, but I was so upset. I kept thinking, I just surrendered my car, and I’m going to have to meet with the feds any day now. Yet no one really prepared me for this. Why is this happening after everything our husbands have done?
Olivia
At the end of 2010, Adrian, Mia, and I flew to Chicago. On separate days, each of us went to the US Attorney’s office. When I walked in, there was a whole panel of DEA agents, the prosecutor Tom, and assistant US Attorney Mike. I looked at them sitting there, and fear shot through me. All I could think was, Oh my God. I know I’ve got immunity, but what if I say something wrong? Then I realized what I had to do: just tell them the truth, like my husband and Peter had, twelve hours a day, five days a week, for the almost six months they’d been at MCC Chicago.
“What happened the day your husbands turned themselves in?” one of the feds asked me after I sat down and got situated.
I looked at him with my eyes wide open. No one had ever asked me that, not even my husband. Adrian, Mia, and I hadn’t even talked about it. That whole traumatizing day had just laid there like a lump in my stomach since it happened. I sat for five seconds, thought about it, and immediately burst into tears.
I couldn’t even talk. I felt so embarrassed; I just hadn’t seen that question coming. When I finally pulled myself together, I went through everything: how and when we’d gotten the call from the DEA, saying that it was time for Peter and Junior to turn themselves in. How our husbands had had two hours to get to the Guadalajara airport. How I’d run around like a crazy woman taking down photos and video cameras. How we’d gotten a flat tire at the border.
We talked all day, and the feds peppered me with questions. Going through all the details of the last two years felt terrible, like I was living through every painful moment all over again. The agents listened carefully, never interrupting me, and when we finally finished up they only had one thing to say: “We want to know about the money you have.”
Mia
The government wanted to know exactly where we got the money w
e’d been living on for two years, so Olivia and I sat with the feds and proffered. Then we had to account for every penny, showing exactly what we spent it on.
Olivia
Once the feds knew how much money we had, they ordered us to give it up.
Mia and I flew to Chicago and bought a few plastic storage bins—you know, the kind you put your winter clothes in, then stack up in the basement—and drove to my house in the suburbs. We pulled out each and every stack of bills we had stashed in my theater room and piled them into the bins, probably ten or twelve bins. We carried them to my big Audi Q7 truck, put the backseats down, and loaded all the bins into it. They were stacked to the roof, so high you couldn’t even see out the windows. As I started driving, I was so nervous. I thought to myself, If we get pulled over and the cops catch us with storage containers full of money, they’re going to confiscate it before we even get a chance to hand it over to the feds.
Then we called Junior’s lawyer, David.
“Come meet us at my car,” I said. “We’ll be at your office parking garage in half an hour.”
David had no idea what to expect, so he greeted us in the garage with a big smile on his face. Then he stepped back, saw the clear storage bins in the back, and practically jumped out of his skin.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with all of those?”
“David,” I said, “the government wants this money, and we can’t live with it. Please take it.”
David looked positively baffled. “What am I going to do, leave this in my office? I’m not going to be responsible for this.”
“I’m sorry I put you in this position,” I said, “but you’re a smart guy, and I need you to figure it out.”
He made a phone call to the feds, then said, “Let’s get back in the car.”
We drove to the bank on the corner, right near his office, and together, we deposited the cash into Junior’s account. It would stay there till sentencing, when he and Peter would forfeit it. You should have seen the looks on the tellers’ faces when we dragged those bins in. It looked like a scene from the movies.
Except for that one moment, the whole episode was frustrating, but pretty soon, I came to understand that the feds had just been doing their jobs. They had to do a thorough investigation, and they had to follow procedure. Even though my husband and brother-in-law might have been the most important cooperators in US history, that didn’t mean they or we got free passes or any type of special privileges.
Mia
Almost immediately, Olivia and I actually felt great. We wanted to start a new life and have a clean slate, and that meant getting rid of everything. We needed to clear out all that dirty money and fancy stuff that had come from a criminal past. A part of us had been living in la-la land, with me driving around in a Bentley like it was just the way life was. It was time to fall off the cloud nine we’d been on in Mexico and accept reality.
CHAPTER 28
Arrests
Olivia
When Junior and Peter began cooperating, they started a chain reaction of indictments against the entire North American drug trafficking network. Early on, the dozens of players hauled in through raids on their stash houses and warehouses were low-level workers, dealers and wholesalers. But by the end of 2009, the domino effect was in full force, and US Attorneys were reeling in bigger and bigger fish across the country.
Mia
The indictments weighed on Peter and Junior, and the whole time they were proffering, they tried to convince some of their associates and workers to turn themselves in. Peter told me that while the prosecutor and DEA agents were sitting right next to him listening in, he would practically beg his associates to cooperate. He’d say, “You’re about to get caught, but you can save yourself. We can help you.”
He didn’t want them to go to jail because he genuinely cared about them and their families, and he knew they might face life sentences. But many refused. They were arrested and charged to the full extent of the law.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst that happened to many of them.
In December 2010, Kiley Murray, a close friend and associate of Peter and Junior’s, was shot to death while he was out on bond. Kiley had always lived large; he had a six-bedroom, six-bath mini-mansion about 150 miles west of Chicago, and his neighbors assumed he was a former NFL player when he moved in. In reality, he was helping Peter and Junior traffic drugs throughout Chicago, and he was eventually charged with conspiring to distribute cocaine and heroin. In this business, people will murder you out of fear you might snitch, and we assumed that was the case with Kiley.
I was the one who told Peter, and he took it so badly.
“Remember the first time you met him?” he asked me.
“Yeah, he was such a good friend to you and your brother. He lived like a celebrity. They didn’t call him Hollywood for nothing.”
“I was planning to ask his forgiveness next time I saw him. I wanted to say I was sorry and tell him I loved him. Now I’ll never have that chance.”
The whole time my husband was waiting for his plea agreement, from 2009 on, it was just like that, one arrest right after the other. Someone would be caught, and it would lay heavy in his heart. I’d be there to pick him up, but I knew he’d never fully shake off his guilt.
Olivia
But at the end of the day, their cooperation gave us protection. Just look at what happened with Sergio Gomez.
Mia
If you can believe it, Sergio was still out to get us.
Peter and Junior had a longtime courier named Gordo, who was like a brother to them. In the period of time my husband and brother-in-law were trying to convince him to turn himself in, Gordo heard through a friend that Sergio was looking for Olivia because he wanted to kidnap her. Because Gordo had always been close to our family, he didn’t want anything happening to her, so he decided to cooperate and told the feds about Sergio’s plot.
Olivia
Officials couldn’t arrest Sergio right away, though. In order to do so, they had to set him up. Peter and Junior came up with a plan.
Mia
The idea was for Gordo to start badmouthing Peter and Junior, then tell Sergio that he knew where my husband and brother-in-law had stashed six hundred kilos. He knew that Sergio wouldn’t be able to resist getting his hands on it, so he tried to convince the DEA that this was the perfect way to nab Sergio. It took a long time, but the feds finally went for it, and Gordo was willing to help out.
Sure enough, on April 9, 2009, Sergio took the bait. The DEA filled up a blue cargo van with bricks of fake cocaine, parked it in front of a suburban Chicago warehouse, and had Gordo call Sergio’s associate and tell him the address.
“The key is in a Doritos bag inside a green garbage can,” he said.
Five of Sergio’s guys showed up to rob the van, geared up in bulletproof vests, ski masks, and guns. They were busted by the feds, and all of them were sentenced to life, except for Sergio.
Olivia
I can’t tell you how happy I was that Sergio got arrested. I don’t wish prison on anyone, but I hated that guy. He was nothing but a thief who tortured and killed people for a living, and everything about him just made me sick.
But in the scheme of things—and I mean the whole North American drug trade—Sergio was nothing. Junior and Peter had their eyes on the prize, and they’d always imagined the government would go for people like Chapo and Mayo and the BLO immediately. Not seeing them do that was frustrating.
Mia
After all, every other federal organization in Mexico seemed to be hard at work trying to dismantle the cartels. They’d even killed one of the big guns.
Olivia
On December 11, 2009, the Mexican Navy’s elite special forces raided a Christmas party being thrown by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and in an exchange of gunfire, four people were killed and Arturo fled. Five days later, on December 16, two hundred Mexican marines located him in a small town an hour north of Mexico Cit
y, raided his safe house, and in a ninety-minute gun battle, killed him and five of his associates. One marine also died.
Mia
Then, one of the “good guys” decided to decorate Beltrán’s bullet-ridden body with dollar bills, like some sick joke out of a gangster film, and photos flooded the internet. In retaliation, BLO members stormed a candlelight vigil for the dead marine and killed his mother, aunt, brother, and sister.
Olivia
Nothing so dramatic—so critical in stopping the drug trade—had happened between Mexico and America, though. Chapo, Mayo, Vicente, and all the other suppliers were still at large, and the United States just seemed to be focusing on the little people in their conspiracy: the US-based distributors and dealers like Sergio. Junior and Peter thought the DEA wasn’t prepared for just how many players they’d arrest, and it drove them nuts.
“They’re going backward,” Junior would say. “We’re giving them the biggest people in the world, the most wanted, and they’re starting at the bottom of the ladder.”
Then the feds got Vicente, and we all realized they actually were using the information our husbands were giving them.
Mia
Vicente was arrested in Mexico City on March 19, 2009, and charged with trafficking over a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin.
Peter and Junior signed his extradition papers, and the most significant cartel member the United States had ever captured was transported to Chicago in February 2010.
