by Eldon Asp
The authors are grateful for the assistance of Roger Sachs, Ernesto Hernandez, Paula Peters, Roberto Salinas, Pawel Sasik and Bernardo Mendez.
LOCKED UP IN LA MESA
Copyright © 2011 by Steve Peterson & Eldon Asp
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover Photograph © 2011 by Darin Marshall
DEDICATION
STEVE PETERSON:
For every member of my huge, loving family.
ELDON ASP:
For Michelle (for everything)
and for Steve—thank you for sharing your stories with me.
CONTENTS
Foreword
How It Went Down
La Ocho
Okay, Showtime
George Couldn’t Adapt
A Place of My Own
Bull’s-Head Tacos and the Salad Dog
Yosemite Sam and the Laundry Girls
Treasures in the Minefield
Doctór and the Hot Sauce Cure
Shootout at the Corral
Fiesta of the Greased Pole
The Great Radio Heist
Goat For Sale
American Shit Bath
The Babysitter
Goofy the Rock Star
The Cannibal
Three Wise Men
Hank the Fallen Hero
Guards Are Prisoners, Too
Robbie Was A Ladies’ Man
The Flames of Passion
A Star Is Born
Tunnel To Nowhere
Rock and Roll Will Set You Free
Steve the TV Star
Money From Home
Rise of the Vultures
Blind Murder
Careful What You Wish For
The Return of Heladio
Heladio Meets the Devil
The Lady and the Dragon
Going Home
FOREWORD
MY NAME IS STEVE PETERSON, and in 1974 I was sentenced to four and a half years inside of the worst prison in Mexico—which is saying something, because Mexican prisons in general are pretty goddamned bad.
It’s gonna seem hard to believe at times, but everything in this book really happened, most of it exactly the way I describe it (although I have combined a few characters and events here and there to make it flow a little smoother). I’ve also included a couple small things that happened to friends of mine and I only heard about it—some stories are just too good to pass up. Lastly, I’ve changed a lot of the names. Even though it’s nearly four decades later, there’s a lot of good people who don’t need their pasts dredged up, and a couple bad ones who might not appreciate me airing their dirty laundry.
In all other respects these stories are true, as crazy as they might sound. I lived through them, and after all this time I finally feel like I’m ready to share them with others. So imagine you just sat down on the next bar stool over, and I’ll get started…
Burro
How It Went Down
THEY RECENTLY FILLED it in—I think it was Homeland Security that did it—but for years and years there used to be this little canyon running north/south through the mountains west of TJ. Everyone called it “Smugglers’ Gulch.” I guess they used to run all sorts of shit through there, but toward the end of the ’60s on into the ’70s, when the drug scene really got rolling, it was mostly pot. I mean tons of it, in big bales and tight little kilo bricks.
Guys would carry it over in backpacks, or on burros for the bigger loads. I think at that time a kilo was going for around forty bucks down in Mexico, and you could turn around and sell it for a couple hundred once you got it across the border. Good money, okay? And it was my feeling that it never should have been illegal in the first place, so when the opportunity presented itself for me to make some quick cash smuggling pot I jumped at it, and that’s how I ended up in the gulch that night.
The original plan, which I still think was pretty solid except for a couple key problems (mostly in the areas of tactics and personnel), was for me and my friend Chicago Joe to hike over the border from the American side, which was only a couple of miles, and then wait in the canyon while our other friend Roger drove up with the pot.
Shit, I gotta back up.
Before this, I had been in Colorado doing construction work at a little candy factory that my uncle owned out there. And back home where I was from, in Oceanside, California, this guy Roger, who I kind of knew because we moved in similar circles, was renting a room in my old house. One day I came home for a visit and Roger asked me if I wanted to get something going because he had heard I was a guy who could get things done. He’d heard I had a couple connections down in Mexico, and he had some guys back east in Tennessee or somewhere that wanted to get their hands on quite a bit of pot.
It was perfect timing for him to ask me because I really needed some cash, so right away I said yes. It didn’t seem like that big a deal because in those days pot was everywhere and like I said, I knew it was illegal but I didn’t believe that was right. (For some reason that seemed like a sensible thing to factor in at the time, the unfairness of the law. I look at it now and it’s like, who gives a shit if it should have been illegal or not, it was illegal, and that should have been the end of the story right there. Well, whatever.) So I said, “Yeah, let me go down there and talk to some of my guys and we’ll make it happen.”
There were a few different connections down there that I could have called on, but most of them weren’t right for one reason or another. For example, one of them, this dude Jorge, was a big player but just completely nuts. He lived in a big old hacienda and he had this .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod up in the front window. He used to get wasted and shoot up the yard during parties just to freak everybody out—screw that. I had another guy, Joe (not Chicago Joe, a different one), down in Playas de Rosarito, and he had a regular house in town, although it had a wall around it, and there were broken bottles, all kinds of broken glass, stuck into the cement around the top to keep people from climbing over. I told him what I needed; he said he could get it no problem.
“When can you guys be ready?” he asked me. This was on a Wednesday, I believe, so I said we’d do it that weekend.
When I got back and told Roger the news he was so excited he could hardly stand it; we both were. We thought we were really doing something. We planned the whole thing out like a military operation—synchronized our watches, walkie talkies, the whole bit. It was pretty silly. The car we planned to use was a blue-green Chevy Vega station wagon with paisley curtains around the back and sides. (Believe it or not, that was a pretty inconspicuous car in those days.) Roger got it off his girlfriend, Barbara, who later on became his wife.
One thing I remember I was real proud of that was probably totally unnecessary but still pretty neat was this system I rigged up where you could pull a handle and open the hatchback without ever leaving the driver’s seat. It was like a kind of rope-and-handle deal, attached to the latch. That was gonna save us valuable time, is what I figured. I’ll explain that in a minute…
So Joe—Mexico Joe—had about a thousand kilos that he was prepared to sell us. We didn’t have that kind of money available yet, so I told him we’d only take a little bit at first, and that I wanted to pay for the first load up front, sort of as a good-faith type of gesture. We had a little under five grand, enough for 120 kilos, so that’s what we got. Our plan was we would smuggle that across the border, sell it, and then come back at a later date either with an inflatable raft, like a Zodiac, or
else with a plane. Then we’d really be in business.
Joe had another place which was basically a shack with a trailer behind it, and that’s where the pot was gonna be. On Friday we drove down—me and Chicago Joe in my truck, Roger, Barb and our other friend Mark Corey in the Vega. Those three went to a little motel in Rosarito and holed up there while me and Joe went to pack up the pot. We had four big army-style duffel bags that we’d brought with us. (They were nylon; this was around the time they were just coming out with the first nylon bags, which we chose because they were lighter than the canvas ones.) Anyway, we went out back and unlocked the trailer and the smell just about floored us. Really good stuff, kilo bricks all wrapped up in crinkly green cellophane like you almost never see anymore. We loaded it up in the bags and got it all ready for the next day and then left it locked up in the trailer. After that we drove down to the motel and partied with the others, psyching ourselves up for the big mission we would do the next day.
When the time came, Joe and I drove back to the trailer and grabbed the bags of pot, then dropped them off with Roger and Barb at the motel. Then we had Mark drive us across the border in my truck. He dropped us off at the end of the gulch on the American side, which was basically farmland, real rural. This was around dusk; we wanted to get there when there was still a little bit of light so we could choose the best path through the rocks. The plan was for Mark to drive around for a bit and then come back and wait for us so he could pick us up when we came back with the pot. He was our getaway driver.
We crossed south through the gulch no problem. It was mostly deserted, just a couple small families and some young dudes by themselves, all sneaking north. We were the only ones heading south, because who the hell sneaks into Mexico? Anyway, we knew we were getting close to the end when we could hear the sounds of the traffic coming from the highway up ahead. I got down on my belly in the bushes and watched the road. Joe hung back in the canyon. Everything looked good, so I switched on the walkie talkie and pressed the button to send Roger the signal (there was a button you could press, for Morse code or whatever). After a few seconds his signal came back. All right, here we go.
I watched the road, and pretty soon I saw his headlights. I sort of waved at Joe hiding back there in the rocks, to let him know to get ready. And I watched real carefully as Roger drove past on the far side of the road. I didn’t see anyone following him so I gave him the signal again. (There was a little overpass down the road a bit, and the plan was for him to cross the highway and come back to the pullout where Joe and I were waiting once I gave him the all-clear.)
So Roger crossed the overpass and eased the Vega off the highway right in front of us. This is where my rope contraption came in—he flapped open the hatchback right from the driver’s seat as we ran out of our hiding places. The duffel bags had handles on the ends of them, and Joe and I grabbed hold of two each while Roger hit the gas. All told, he was stopped at the pullout for no more than about two or three seconds. As the bags slid off the back, I looked over at Joe, and I saw that he was looking at the road. He looked real scared, so I turned to see what had him so spooked. Directly in front of us, on the other side of the highway across the little grass median, a Tijuana city cop car went past, and these guys were hauling ass. I didn’t see them slow down or look at us, not at all, so I figured we were probably okay, but when I turned back to Joe he was already gone. He left the bags right where they landed and just booked back up the canyon. I couldn’t believe how fast he ran. Roger and Barb were gone too, just like we planned. I was all by myself with four huge bags of pot.
The first thing I did was drag two of the bags—Joe’s two bags, I thought, all bitter—over to the bushes and stash them there, kind of covering them up with some brush. Then as I was heading back to grab the other two, I got a funny feeling like I’d better check for the cops. I figured there was no way in hell they had seen us, not when they were going that fast, but I had to be sure, so I kind of crept out to the edge of the pavement and looked down to where the overpass connected with the near side of the highway, where they’d be coming from if they were coming for me. I didn’t see them, but my sight line was obstructed by a little outcropping of rock that clipped the corner of my view, so I couldn’t actually get a clear look all the way to the ramp.
But anyway, I figured I was in the clear, so I went to grab the other two bags. I decided to stash one and carry the other, because there were several stretches of the canyon where you had to hoist the stuff up from one ledge to another; this was definitely a two-man job. I figured I could probably swing it if I only had to wrestle one bag up to the next ledge, but two would be pushing it. All of this was running through my head as I dragged those bags around… then I heard the crunch of car tires on gravel, fifteen or twenty yards off. I ran over and poked my head out, saw the cop car creeping up with its lights off. That’s how they snuck up on me, they just cut the lights and cruised right up to the pullout. Needless to say, I dropped the pot and bolted.
I was wearing cowboy boots, which turned out to be a poor choice because they skidded and slipped all over in the loose rock, but I booked up the canyon, back up Smuggler’s Gulch, and in no time at all I heard the cops behind me, already closing in on me and yelling at me to stop. And then they started shooting. That was the first time anybody had ever intentionally fired a gun at me, that I was aware of. I near about shit my pants; I’m serious. So I poured it on, but the next shot was even closer. It went right past my head and exploded against the canyon wall. There was shrapnel from the rocks, little chips of it, flying back at me, it was so close. And that was it—I wasn’t taking any more chances.
My heart was just pounding, but I stopped where I was and I put my hands up high as I could and I turned around and marched back out of the gulch toward these cops. The whole time, I was yelling “¡Cálmate!” over and over, which means “chill out,” basically. Fuckin’, “Don’t kill me,” right? And these guys were yelling back at me and I had no idea what they were saying, but their attitude was really frantic. I don’t know if they thought it was a trick, like Joe was gonna shoot them from up in the rocks someplace, but just as I was thinking it was over, like the whole situation oughta be winding down because I just gave up, these guys were getting more and more agitated. I wished I spoke better Spanish so I could know what the hell they were saying, if they were telling me to do something, so I could do it, because even though I was trying to surrender, I was starting to think they might shoot me anyway. I admit, part of me was thinking “Shit—I should have kept on running.”
I got almost all the way over to them and they still hadn’t shot me, so that was good. They were still yelling, but at least they could tell I was unarmed and they could see that I was just completely freaked out. So I didn’t look like a guy who was pulling a fast one. Still, they weren’t taking any chances with me. As soon as I got close enough, the first guy took his pistol butt and clocked me with it, right behind the ear, and I went down. They jumped on me and cuffed me and beat me up some. Then they lifted me up to my feet and started marching me out of there, back toward the car. And I know I’m screwed for the two bags sitting right out in plain sight, but they still hadn’t found the rest of the pot, so at that point I was actually thinking we might be able to salvage something out of the situation.
No such luck, because they had these flashlights, these shitty weak little flashlights, and they were shining them on the trail as we walked out of there, and one of them for some reason just swept his flashlight over at the last second and spotted a corner of one of the bags. That’s it, it was over; I was twice as screwed. They smacked me around some more and shoved me in the car and then they went back for the bags. I was looking out the back window and I could see them tossing those bags in the trunk: Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump!
In Mexico the drug laws are actually fairly harsh; that was enough pot to ruin my life, and I knew it. So I was bumming out pretty hard on the ride back into town, as you can imagine. These
guys were laughing at me and talking to me in Spanish so I didn’t have any idea what they were saying, except when one of them said, “Tienes dinero?” Do you have any money?
Well shit—of course! This was Mexico! Of course I should have brought some money for bribes, but I didn’t even think of it. What I should have done is bought about a hundred kilos of pot off of Mexico Joe, or even a little less maybe, and then saved the rest of the cash for an emergency just like this one. Because I swear to God, for five hundred bucks they would have definitely let me go. For a thousand they would have let me keep the pot, and for two thousand they might have even helped me get it across the border. We didn’t think of that in our big master plan.
So I was sitting there kicking myself, feeling about as low as it gets, and by now we were all the way back in town, driving along through the busy streets. All of a sudden the cop in the shotgun seat started getting real agitated; he was talking fast and pointing at something a few cars up in the next lane over. The other guy kind of craned his neck to try to see it, and I started doing the same and then I was just like, “You gotta be kidding me.” It was Roger and Barb in the goddamn Vega. Remember, their one job after pulling over with the pot and popping the hatchback and all that was they were supposed to turn around and head back to the motel and lay low. So what were they doing hanging around TJ? I don’t know if they stopped off for a drink, or if they got spooked and figured maybe they would head for the border right then or what, but here they were, and that cop recognized them. He recognized the car, I should say, so maybe it wasn’t as inconspicuous as we thought.
I don’t think they even had a siren in there, or at least it wasn’t working if there was one. The one cop, the driver, just kept on honking the horn while the other guy leaned out the window and waved his arms around, trying to get over. Finally he stuck his gun out the window and waved that around, and that worked; people let him in. So we got behind Roger and he pulled over to the side. He really didn’t have any other choice because there was so much traffic. There was nowhere for him to go.
