by Eldon Asp
Except it wasn’t. One day, I think it was almost sundown, Heladio was walking through the corral between the tanks with just two or three of his guys. I don’t remember who all was with him, but one of ‘em for sure was Ramón. Ramón was Heladio’s number-two capo, his right-hand man in other words. He was this young, strapping cowboy type from a wealthy family in Sinaloa, I believe. They were connected to the narco trade somehow; I think they were pot farmers or maybe they grew poppies. And Ramón carried himself like that, like a rich kid who was used to getting his way. But he was tough, too. He was fierce as hell, and Heladio trusted him completely. If he didn’t already, he would after this. (Ramón was also the steady boyfriend of Irma, the smoking hot blonde I first laid eyes on when she was in Heladio’s bed the day Johnny Bigotes took me up there to buy a carraca. She was Ramón’s girl, but every girl was Heladio’s when he wanted them. That was just the way things were.)
So they were walking through the corral, talking, whatever, when one of the vultures sort of stumbled into their path. This wasn’t unusual; the vultures staggered around all the time with no idea where the hell they were, they were so out of it. So one junky got right up close to Heladio, and Heladio moved like he was gonna push him aside—again, not unusual, that’s just what everyone did—when all of a sudden this kid pulled out a knife and stabbed him right in the stomach!
Out of nowhere, about a dozen other vultures just swarmed on them. They all had knives or iron rebar canes. Just scrawny little strung-out dirty street junkies, and here they were mounting this coordinated attack; it was wild. I was standing right close to them, so I saw the whole thing. They piled on, stabbing and slashing and hacking away at Heladio. They got him a couple more times, bad, in his belly.
And then Ramón just went apeshit. It was unreal. He took his fist and I swear he just about caved this one kid’s head in, just totally destroyed his face with one punch. The kid fell down like he was dead, and Ramón grabbed the knife off him, then stepped in between Heladio and the rest of them and started swinging this knife around like he was possessed. It was unbelievable how hard he fought. He must have cut at least five or six of these guys, while still punching the rest of them with his other hand and kicking them in the nuts with his cowboy boots. Eventually he grabbed a cane off one of them and he did most of the rest of his fighting with that. He was like a blur. After a few seconds of getting their asses kicked, these vultures were like, “Screw this,” and they sort of fell back a bit because they were scared.
Ramón and his buddies saw that this was their big chance to get Heladio the fuck out of there because he was really in bad shape; he was all cut up, he couldn’t fight at all. So they dragged him off, basically carried him, running back to his carraca. Meanwhile, the vultures regrouped and ran after them, I imagine because they knew they were never gonna get another chance this good, and also they knew that if they didn’t finish him off, Heladio would come back for revenge and then they’d be fucked. So they chased after him, and I and everybody else who was rubbernecking this whole deal chased after them, because this was major—this was the biggest thing to ever happen in there as far as we were concerned.
We all went running out of the corral over to the square, and the vultures ran up the stairs to Heladio’s carraca, but they couldn’t get in because Heladio’s guys had the steel security door shut tight. The vultures were yelling and banging on the screen, but it was no use, they couldn’t get in. So they dispersed, we all did, because by now the guards were coming and we knew they’d be in a shooting mood after all this shit. So everybody scattered.
The guards ran up the stairs and talked to Ramón through the gate for a little while. Then they brought over a stretcher from the infirmary, and a little while later there was an armed escort, with the guards all circled around Heladio’s guys as they carried him out on the stretcher. They were taking him to the hospital because there was no way in hell he was going to make it without a real hospital working on him. I just caught a glimpse of him, and I was like,
“Holy shit. Heladio’s dying.”
Sueño
Blind Murder
I’M NOT SURE IF THIS next story is directly related to the power struggle between Heladio and Estrella, but it happened around that same time and it just goes to show how crazy and on-edge everyone felt.
What happened was, the head capo in my tank, this guy Mundo, was married to the sister of Flaco, who was another guy in the tank. Mundo and his wife used to love to sit in their carraca at night and eat their Mandrax. They did it almost every night, every chance they got. And so one night they were getting high eating the Mandrax, and Mundo got paranoid. Then he turned violent; he beat her up real bad. She ran out—she was screaming and crying and stuff—and she ran down to her brother’s carraca so he could protect her. Flaco up until this point had been good friends with Mundo; they were tight. But when he saw his sister all beat up he went to Mundo’s room to confront him, and he ended up stabbing Mundo a bunch of times. He didn’t kill him, but he stabbed him repeatedly. The tank capo!
So Mundo went to the hospital for a while, but he couldn’t afford to stay there until he was fully recovered. The way it worked was you had to pay your own way if you were going to get actual hospital care. Mundo could only afford the most basic emergency care necessary to save his life and stitch him up. He was only in the hospital a day or two before they brought him back to the tank to continue his recovery. They hauled him up to his carraca and laid him out on his bed. Now, in the meantime, while he was still in the hospital, he had sent word back to Flaco that there wasn’t going to be any retribution, that he wouldn’t hold it against him, because Flaco was just sticking up for his sister. It was water under the bridge. Mundo was saying he deserved it, basically, but it’s possible he was simply trying to make sure Flaco didn’t come after him again, because he knew he was going to be in a weakened state when he came back into the tank.
Anyway, where I say this incident sort of reflects the general paranoia going around at the time is that Flaco didn’t buy it. Mundo promised him everything was forgiven and he refused to believe it. He went out and bought a pistol, a nine millimeter, because he was totally convinced it was a trick, that Mundo was setting him up. He decided he wasn’t gonna wait around for Mundo to get revenge on him; he was gonna attack him first. And because they were friends before this and Flaco had been in Mundo’s carraca dozens of times to hang out, he knew where everything was, how it was all laid out. For instance, he knew that Mundo’s bed was right along the front wall next to the door, and that Mundo always slept with his head to the right, and he knew how high the bed was.
So one night Flaco went creeping right up to the wall outside Mundo’s carraca. He lined up the pistol and emptied it into the wall. Remember, these walls were basically cardboard, they didn’t even count when it came to stopping a bullet. This guy pumped all these shots into the wall and every single one of them hit Mundo where he was sleeping on the other side. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! In his head, in his chest, in his stomach. Killed him right there, multiple times over. I don’t know what happened to Flaco after that. I don’t even know if his sister appreciated it.
Cojo
Careful What You Wish For
WHEN HELADIO WAS STABBED, EVERYTHING went crazy. They locked everybody down, suspended visiting privileges, the whole deal. They wanted to make sure we weren’t going to burn the place down or anything. But as long as the drugs kept flowing and there weren’t any more open gunfights in the yard, the average prisoner could care less. In the confusion, the youngster Estrella stepped up to take charge of the heroin market, and that kept things under control for the most part. It was a real uneasy calm, though, as you can probably imagine.
I would have thought that Ramón, Heladio’s number two, would have stepped into the head capo role. But he did a smart thing: as soon as they let us back out to circulate again, he went to consult with The Brothers. Robert and Johnny were huge on the streets of L.A.; to th
em, figuring out the politics inside our little city was nothing. It was like tee ball to them. They’d know what to do.
I happened to be hanging out playing cards with Johnny when Ramón showed up. He came in looking pretty shellshocked and said he wanted to get Johnny’s take on the situation. They asked me to split while they talked, which I was happy to do because there’s a lot of things you’re just better off not knowing, but before I left they both told me not to worry, that everything would be back to normal soon. I took that to mean that they were going to knock off Estrella, that they were just biding their time for now.
What I gathered from talking to them later—just bits and pieces here and there—was that they were going to wait and see. Estrella was such a dipshit that I think they half expected him to flame out on his own before they had to do anything about him. Either way, nothing had been done that couldn’t be undone; Ramón had the experience and the manpower to take over whenever he wanted and everybody knew it except Estrella and his raggedy-ass gang of vultures. They were real cocky for a while there. They thought they were untouchable now that they were in the driver’s seat.
In all of this, the thing no one said, I think because they didn’t have to, was that they were waiting to see if Heladio would live or die. We were getting daily reports through the grapevine back from the hospital. He had suffered a lot of internal damage, and they were still worried about infection. He was conscious but very weak, and they still didn’t know for sure if he’d be able to return to La Mesa or if they’d have to keep him in the prison ward of the hospital for the rest of his sentence. That would have a major impact on Ramón’s options, whether Heladio was in the picture or not. Even though Ramón was respected and well-liked, Heladio was the kingpin. If he did come back, with a big triumphant return, the whole crew could ride the momentum of that right back into power. If he didn’t, Ramón would have a much tougher time. Best to wait for now and play it cool. So that’s what he did.
As the days went on, it became fairly clear that Heladio was gonna be okay, and that made it a lot easier for Ramón to bide his time. He just kicked back with a little smile on his face and watched it all play out. The vultures saw Estrella as their campeón, their champion, and he let it all go to his head almost as soon as he established himself as head capo. He was always kind of a cocky prick, but now he was just ridiculous. He started carrying a little black book, like a small ledger, around with him everywhere he went, and he used it to keep track of everyone who owed him money (or everyone he said owed him money). But he kept the heroin flowing, so the vultures took it. However, I think they pretty quickly regretted putting their weight behind that guy.
Estrella’s biggest weakness, though, was he simply didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He didn’t have the brains or the temperament or the experience to head up a big organization. Heladio, by comparison, always made sure his guys knew who was boss, but he also made sure to treat them like junior partners. He’d give them little bonuses here and there, hand out papers of chiva or pot at the end of meetings, that kind of thing. He’d make sure the hookers took care of them. And they’d give their lives for him. Compared to that, Estrella was dumber than shit. He didn’t do any of that, and his organization came off as being exactly what it was: a bunch of confused junkies pretending to be a gang.
So anyway, it was two or three weeks after the stabbing, and Heladio was almost well enough to come back. I’m not sure if it came down from him or Ramón or somebody else, but it was apparently decided that it would be best if Estrella wasn’t around when Heladio made his return; it’d be better if he were dead. So the job went to this young street kid who was always hanging around Heladio’s guys, always trying to get his foot in the door of their organization. He hadn’t been in long, but as soon as he got there, he figured out which crew was the best and just pursued them like a dog with a bone. So I guess his tenacity impressed them. This kid—Alejandro was his name—was skinny and dirty like everybody else, and he got around on this shaky homemade crutch because I guess he’d been shot before they brought him in. I don’t know if the cops shot him or somebody else did, but he had a bad leg and he would limp around on this crutch of his. He was a pretty pathetic figure when you got right down to it, but he was also just an evil, soulless little piece of shit. I think in the end that was his main qualification.
But he couldn’t do it all by himself. True, he didn’t look like a threat, but the vulture who took down Heladio didn’t, either. Even as naïve and cocky as Estrella was, the element of surprise was pretty much played out; no one would fall for that again anytime soon. For the hit to work, they needed a distraction. As it turned out, Alejandro had a buddy in Estrella’s crew. They knew each other from the streets. Gordo was his name, which means “fat,” and he was. For a little bit of cash, Gordo agreed to help set up Estrella.
They planned to do it on the soccer field. That’s where Estrella was always at his cockiest, and where they figured he’d be most likely to be thinking about himself and not about whether or not someone had plans to off him. There was a prison team—I forget what they were called, the Tigers or something—and Estrella was like the captain of the team. They would play against teams from outside. All home games, obviously; the Tigers didn’t travel. Anyway, so this happened on a day when another team had come in to play against the prison team, and there was a big crowd of visitors, including Estrella’s wife and kids. His wife was real pretty and he had two kids, a boy and a girl, about three or four years old. They were standing on the sidelines watching the game.
So halftime rolled around and Estrella came over to the side to get a drink, and that’s when Gordo called him over to give him a little sniff of coke, a little bump. Gordo held up the spoon for Estrella, and right as he was snorting this coke, Alejandro came limping out of the crowd behind him with a pistol in his hand. He shot him right in the middle of the back. Gordo backed up as Estrella crumpled to the ground, and everybody scattered from the sound of the gun, but they were also craning their necks, whipping their heads all around trying to see who had been shot. As Estrella was groaning and trying to crawl away, Alejandro limped up behind him and put a second shot right in the back of his head. That was it. As soon as it was done, he dropped the gun and put his hands up, just waiting for the guards to come and grab him. Immediately, at the first shot, Estrella’s wife started freaking out, just screaming uncontrollably. The guards ran up; some of them hustled her and her kids out toward the gate, others grabbed Alejandro and dragged him off in the same direction. That’s the last we’ll see of that kid, I figured.
Estrella’s body was still lying there, facedown in the dirt. All of a sudden his guys pounced on it, all of them at once like a feeding frenzy. They grabbed everything of value: his chains, his shoes, his watch. They picked him clean. His number-two capo, this real treacherous older guy named Diablo, snagged what he figured was the most valuable thing of all: Estrella’s little black ledger book.
Rey
The Return of Heladio
A SHORT TIME LATER, HELADIO came back. Jesus Christ, was that ever a scene! It seemed as if the entire prison population had turned out to see him. There were literally hundreds of people crowding around the main entrance. Guards, prisoners, families, everybody. If you had been planning an escape attempt, that would have been the time to do it, as long as you were going out on the other side, away from the gate. It was a ghost town over there.
Anyway, even though he wasn’t totally better just yet, it was important to Heladio to return under his own steam. He had to walk in with his head up high so everybody could see he wasn’t afraid. They’d tried to kill him, but here he was, still the top dog, you know? And it’s true, he was the top dog, more popular than ever. In some ways that attempt on his life was the thing that made him a legend. He was well-known before that, but afterward he was much more famous. Nowadays it’s common to have songs written to glorify drug lords, killers, etc., but in those days I think it was still kin
d of a novelty. There was a new one playing on the radio as he walked in; they must have planned it, because every radio around was tuned to the same station and at that exact moment when he was limping into the prison, they were playing a song about how Heladio Diaz was unkillable, a total gangster superstar. It was a trip.
He came in all alone, which was symbolic in a way, too, because it really showed he wasn’t afraid, and even though you could tell he was hurting more than he let on, he smiled and waved to everybody as he walked slowly across the yard to his carraca. A couple of his capos were there to help him up the stairs and then he went inside and pretty much stayed there for a couple more weeks until he was fully recovered. I think he maybe jumped the gun a little bit coming back so soon, but with Estrella gone he wanted to reassert himself before anyone else tried to fill the void.
Even with Heladio back in La Mesa, with everything supposedly back to normal, there was still a lot of tension around at that time. Starting with the stabbing of Heladio, then with the murder of Estrella, it really felt like shit was spinning out of control. We all wondered if anyone was crazy enough to take another shot at Heladio, and the vultures were shitting themselves with fear that Heladio was gonna come after them for retribution, even as they kept buying his chiva. Estrella’s little organization had mostly disbanded, but everyone knew who they were, and that must have driven those guys crazy, the fear of what was gonna happen to them. They started turning on each other, they were so freaked out.
First they went after Gordo, the fat-ass who set up Estrella that day on the field. Even if the kid Alejandro, the one who’d actually pulled the trigger, hadn’t disappeared to who-knows-where, they couldn’t have made a move on him anyway because he was with Heladio now. He was too well connected; no one wanted to fuck with that. But Gordo was a nobody, a traitor with no friends. He was fair game. I happened to be right there when it went down. It was evening lockdown, when everyone had to go back to the tanks for the night. I was sort of dragging my ass, slow-walking along; there were only about four or five of us total out there. I was almost to the corral when all of a sudden I heard some yelling coming from behind me in the yard. I turned and saw that it was Gordo and these other guys, two or three other guys who were also part of Estrella’s crew. They were yelling at Gordo, calling him out, calling him names.
