The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  Teresa was living in Atlanta, and when she came to the door and saw Keller she turned pale.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Your husband is all right, Mrs. Ruiz.”

  She packed up the kids, nine and twelve years old, and they flew not to El Paso, where the airport might be under watch, but to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and drove down from there. Keller brought them to Eddie’s quarters on the fort and then left them to have some privacy, picking them back up and taking them back to Las Cruces in the morning.

  It was more complicated with Priscilla.

  Their daughter, Brittany, was two and Priscilla was expecting any day. Keller was loath to drive her to El Paso, where there were about as many halcones as there were in Juárez. Instead, they dressed Eddie up in an army uniform and drove him to Alamogordo, where Priscilla, Brittany, and Priscilla’s mother met them at a motel. Keller had their car followed from El Paso to make sure they didn’t have a tail.

  He gave Eddie the afternoon with his second family and then drove him back to Bliss, where he was comfortably ensconced in a bachelor officer’s apartment on base, with a twenty-four/seven guard of U.S. marshals.

  Eddie had other demands—he wanted an iPod, loaded with the Eagles, Steve Earle, Robert Earl Keen, and some Carrie Underwood. He wanted more visits with his families. And he wanted to watch the Super Bowl on a flat-screen HDTV, preferably with some decent chili and some cold beer.

  “Shiner Bock,” Eddie specified.

  He watched the Packers beat the Steelers on a sixty-inch LED with two federal marshals, chili, and beer.

  Keller turned down Eddie’s invitation to join them.

  Now he spreads the Dos Erres photos out on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “Is that them? Forty and Ochoa?”

  “Yup.”

  Keller looks down at the photos that show two men standing outside the school in Dos Erres. Both are wearing black ball caps, but their faces are still visible. One is full-fleshed with a thick black mustache. The other is thin and hawklike. Handsome.

  “You’re sure,” Keller says.

  “They burned Chacho García to death in front of me,” Eddie says. “You think I’m going to forget those faces? I promised myself I’d kill both those motherfuckers.”

  Well, we have that in common, Keller thinks.

  He leaves Eddie at Fort Bliss and flies to Washington.

  —

  Keller slams his fist on the table. “We goddamn know where they are! We have positive IDs and we know exactly where they are!”

  He points to the photos spread on the table.

  The State Department rep from its Narcotics Affairs Section yells back, “And that’s exactly the problem! They’re in a foreign country!”

  Keller had flown straight from El Paso to Washington to make his case for a strike on the Zeta camp at Dos Erres. It isn’t going well—the administration, drone-happy as it is in South Asia, won’t authorize a strike of any kind, manned or unmanned, in Guatemala.

  “We already have marines there,” Keller argues, “on an antitrafficking mission.”

  Operation Mantillo Hammer has placed three hundred U.S. Marines and FAST teams in Guatemala to combat drug trafficking.

  “They are there in a strictly advisory capacity,” the NAS guy says, “with authority to only use their weapons in self-defense. We can’t just go cross international borders to sanction anyone we want.”

  “Tell that to bin Laden,” Keller says. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t—he’s dead.”

  Like most other Americans, Keller had sat transfixed by the news of the bin Laden raid, and remembered 9/11, and quietly celebrated alone in his room with a single beer.

  The president was one cool cat during all that, Keller remembered thinking. Cracking jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner like Al Pacino at the baptism in The Godfather while he knew he was ordering hits.

  “That was bin Laden,” the NAS rep says now.

  “Ochoa is as bad.”

  “Get a grip.”

  “You think Ochoa isn’t a terrorist?” Keller asks. “Define terrorist for me. Is it someone who kills innocent civilians? Commits mass murder? Plants bombs? What criteria are we missing here?”

  “He has committed none of those acts in the United States,” the rep answers.

  “Ochoa sells millions of dollars’ worth of drugs in the United States,” Keller says. “He traffics human beings into the United States. He has caches of arms and cells of armed men in the United States. He ordered the killing of a United States federal agent. How is he not a terrorist threat to the United States?”

  “The Zetas have not been officially designated a terrorist organization,” the rep says. “And even if they were, it’s more complicated than you think. Even with the jihadists, authorizing a strike requires convening a ‘kill panel’ to evaluate the necessity, the legal ramifications, the ethical justification…”

  “Convene it,” Keller says. “I’ll testify.”

  I’ll give you ethical justification.

  The horrors go on and on.

  Just last week, the Zetas tried to tap into a pipeline to steal Pemex oil and caused an explosion that killed thirty-six innocent people. If it had happened inside the United States it would be all over the news for days, with Congress screaming for action. Because it’s Mexico, it doesn’t matter.

  “It’s a nonstarter,” the rep says.

  “We have spent months,” Keller says, “and millions of dollars finding these people, and now that we have, we’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it?!”

  Yes.

  Ochoa has found himself a sanctuary where the U.S. won’t touch him.

  Because he’s a Mexican narco, not an Islamic jihadist.

  That’s when Keller gets the idea.

  But he needs a break to implement it.

  He gets it from a horse ranch in Oklahoma.

  —

  Forty’s little brother raises horses at a ranch outside of Ada.

  Rolando Morales has been very successful, and recently rocked the quarterhorse world by buying a colt at auction for close to a million dollars. It strikes a few people as odd, because prior to buying the multimillion-dollar ranch, stables, and the thoroughbred horses to put in them, Rolando was a bricklayer. The FBI shows his highest annual income was $90,000.

  There are whispers in the quarter-horse world about where Rolando’s money comes from, but to the FBI they’re more than whispers. They know it comes from big brother down in Nuevo Laredo—the ranch near Ada is a money laundry on hooves.

  The technique is simple.

  The Zetas send cash north to Rolando, who buys a horse for well over market value and then sells the horse back to the Zetas for true market value.

  Money laundered.

  And you still have your horse.

  And participation in an expensive hobby, the sport of kings. It’s almost pathetic, Keller thinks, how badly the narcos want social status—polo, horse racing. What’s next, America’s Cup yachts?

  The crowd here is different from the polo set in Mexico City. Here there are a lot of cowboy hats, and thousand-dollar custom boots, and denim, and turquoise jewelry. This is western American aristocracy, people with the money and leisure to play with expensive quarter horses.

  The particular horse in question today is a colt named, with an almost unbelievable sense of impunity, Cartel One, and the race is the All American Futurity, the Kentucky Derby of quarter-horse racing.

  Keller watches the jockey take him into the gate.

  “You have money down?” Miller asks him. Miller is the FBI agent assigned to Operation Fury, the bureau’s surveillance of the Morales quarter-horse scam. Miller had contacted Keller because there was a red flag, an interdepartmental alert that anything to do with “Forty” Morales was to be forwarded to Art Keller.

  “I’m not a gambler,” Keller says.

  “Put a few bucks on Cartel One.”

  “He’s an eight-to-on
e shot.”

  “He’s a lock,” Miller says.

  The horses come out of the gate. Cartel One starts slowly and gets trapped along the inside rail. But then a gap miraculously opens, the jockey works the colt to the outside, and Cartel One is third as they go into the home stretch. The two lead horses fade, and Cartel One comes in by a nose.

  Keller looks down into the paddock, where Rolando and his wife and friends are jumping up and down, yelling, screaming, and embracing. Quite a celebration for a race that was fixed, Keller thinks. Miller has established that tens of thousands were passed out to other jockeys and trainers.

  The prize money for the All American Futurity is a flat million.

  Not a bad day’s pay.

  Still, chicken feed for the Zetas, who would have paid over a million to “win” the million. What they want is the bragging rights, the status. Rolando looks like his older brother, the same stocky build, the same curly black hair, even the thick mustache. Except he wears a white cowboy hat instead of a black ball cap.

  “We thought we’d pick him up at the airport,” Miller says.

  “You have enough to charge?”

  “Money laundering, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, tax evasion,” Miller says. “Oh yeah.”

  “Do me a favor?” Keller asks. “Hold off a little?”

  “Can’t hold off for long,” Miller answers. “Rolando is planning a trip to Italy.”

  “What?” Keller asks, feeling a jolt of excitement.

  “He’s going to Europe,” Miller says. “Starting in Italy but going on some kind of Grand Tour, I guess—Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain. We’ve had a tap on his e-mail.”

  “Family vacation?” Keller asks, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  “Nope, just him.”

  Yeah, just him. No married man takes a “vacation” to Europe without his wife. It just doesn’t happen. Rolando is going for work, and Keller hopes he knows what the work is.

  He’s praying that Rolando is going to Italy as the Zetas’ ambassador to ’Ndrangheta.

  The wealthiest criminal organization in the world.

  ’Ndrangheta is based in Calabria, in southern Italy at the toe of the boot, and it makes the older, more famous Sicilian Mafia look like a poor country cousin. Eighty percent of the cocaine that flows into Europe comes through ’Ndrangheta at its port of Gioia Tauro. The organization’s income from drug trafficking is estimated at $50 billion annually, a whopping 3.5 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product.

  They’re untouchable.

  The Gulf cartel used to have an exclusive relationship with ’Ndrangheta—now Barrera is competing with the Zetas for the European market. The apparent motive behind the sadistic murder of Magda Beltrán was that she had been making successful inroads with ’Ndrangheta.

  Is Rolando Morales going on a diplomatic mission to secure an alliance with ’Ndrangheta for the Zetas? Keller wonders.

  Wars are fought with money, and the European market would give either cartel an insurmountable financial advantage with which to buy weapons, equipment, protection, and, most of all, gunmen.

  If the Zetas can become ’Ndrangheta’s suppliers, while at the same time cutting Barrera’s Guatemalan route, they’ll have the money and resources to beat him in Mexico.

  So Rolando’s diplomatic mission—if that’s what it is—represents an enormous opportunity for the Zetas.

  It’s an enormous opportunity for Keller, too.

  “Let him go,” he says to Miller.

  “Back to Oklahoma?”

  “To Europe,” Keller says.

  —

  They pick him up in Milan’s San Siro stadium, where the red-and-black-clad AC Milan players are going up against the black-and-white-striped Juventus rivals.

  Keller watches the video feed from a situation room at Quantico, supervised by the FBI, which is understandably reluctant to jeopardize an operation that has taken them years, cost them millions of dollars, and would result in convictions and headlines. DEA is equally reluctant to allow a Zeta ambassador freedom to leave the country and possibly escape arrest.

  That’s just the domestic side.

  Keller’s plan demands a complex multinational effort involving not only Italy’s Direzione Antidroga, but INTERPOL, as well as Switzerland’s Einsatzgruppe, Germany’s BND, the French Sûreté, Belgium’s Algemene Directie Bestuurlijke Politie, and Spain’s CNP—the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía.

  The protocols are complicated, language barriers difficult, and negotiations intricate, requiring Keller to adopt a diplomatic persona that he hasn’t used for years. If it weren’t for the common umbrella of INTERPOL, the operation wouldn’t happen, but in the end everyone agrees to track Rolando’s movements and not make arrests, with each country free to do what it likes regarding its own territory after the operation is concluded.

  The logistics are at least as complicated, with detachments of elite police swapping surveillance while keeping each other in touch, exchanging video, audio, and photos, keeping a loose net around Morales while not getting in close enough to spook him.

  They’re going to use him as a dye test, let him run all the way through the bloodstream of the European drug-trafficking body.

  The first place he goes is Milan, where Direzione Antidroga picks him up, and now their agents have him under surveillance, sending live video feed back to Quantico as Rolando talks into the ear of a translator who in turn talks to Ernesto Giorgi, the quintino, the underboss, of the ’Ndrangheta’s Milan ’ndrine—the equivalent of a Mexican plaza.

  The noise in the stadium—the chanting, singing, banging of drums—is terrific. So there’s not a chance of grabbing audio in the noisy stadium—doubtless why Rolando and Giorgi chose to meet there. Keller can’t read lips, but the DEA techie at his side can—Giorgi had been friends with Osiel Contreras, and Rolando is explaining why the Zetas went against their old bosses, and why ’Ndrangheta should side with them.

  Keller knows that Giorgi will forgive the treachery—business is business. What he won’t tolerate is losing, and the ’Ndrangheta mob boss would have been briefed on the recent Zeta defeats in Veracruz.

  The crowd erupts in a cheer.

  Giorgi jumps up and pumps his fist in the air as a Milan player runs around the stadium celebrating the goal he just scored. When Giorgi sits back down, he leans over to Rolando and says something.

  Keller looks to the translator.

  “ ‘We were thinking of doing business with the woman,’ ” the translator says. “ ‘Magda Beltrán.’ ”

  Keller doesn’t need the translator to catch Rolando’s response in Spanish. The words are clear on his lips. “Está muerta.”

  She’s dead.

  —

  Rolando and Giorgi dine in a private room at Cracco.

  Two Michelin stars.

  Rolando spent the afternoon in Milan shopping, and now he wears a gray Armani suit with brown Bruno Magli shoes, a red silk shirt, and no tie. Giorgi is more conservative in a brown Luciano Natazzi cashmere jacket.

  A camera hidden in an overhead pin light provides an image, and this time, the audio is crystal clear as Rolando repeatedly asserts that the Zetas have control of the Petén and will dominate the cocaine trade. Giorgi isn’t convinced, and he brings up another issue.

  GIORGI: Barrera has the government.

  MORALES: That’s overstated.

  GIORGI: He has the military and the federal police. Don’t blow smoke up my ass.

  MORALES: But there’s an election coming up. PAN will lose. The winner is not going to prosecute the so-called war on drugs for the benefit of Adán Barrera. It will be up for bids.

  GIORGI: You have the money?

  MORALES: If we have your business, we’ll have the money.

  Rolando is right, Keller thinks.

  The PRI candidate, Peña Nieto, is making the end of the drug war a platform of his campaign. The other front-runner, PRD’s López Obrador, would go
even further, refuse the Mérida funds, and boot the DEA and CIA out of Mexico altogether. It’s the wild card in all of this. No wonder Adán is in a hurry to grab all he can before the July elections, and before Peña Nieto would take office in December.

  The irony is that we are, too.

  We have to take the Zetas out before we get shut down.

  “Who are they?” Keller asks as two men come in and sit down at the table.

  No one in the room—not the FBI guys or the DEA people—knows. Keller gets on the phone to Alfredo Zumatto, his counterpart in DAD, who is also watching the video feed from Rome. He runs still frames through his database. Thirty minutes later an ID comes back—the two men are the vangelista and quintino—the second and third in command for Berlin.

  “ ’Ndrangheta has 230 ’ndrines in Germany,” Zumatto says on the phone. “Your boy is making some impressive connections.”

  He’s also trying to assure Giorgi that the Zetas won’t do business in Germany except through ’Ndrangheta, Keller thinks.

  He watches as the men socialize. The rest of the talk is mostly about fútbol, horses, and women.

  —

  From Milan, Rolando takes the train to Zurich, meeting with bankers and potential dealers; from there he trains to Munich, meeting the local ’Ndrangheta members and some German nationals.

  From Munich, Rolando goes to Berlin, where he hooks back up with the two men from the restaurant, who pick him up at his hotel near the Brandenburg Gate. The German counterpart in BND tails them to the Kreuzberg neighborhood, down the Oranienstrasse, where they go into a nightclub and meet three men that the BND guy identifies as Turkish immigrants.

  From Berlin, Rolando trains to the ancient Baltic port city of Rostock, where ’Ndrangheta has a strong presence. He goes to a yacht moored at the marina, stays for two hours, and then goes to his hotel on Kröpeliner Strasse. BND personnel track the yacht owners to a drug ring known for trafficking throughout the former East Germany.

  Rolando backtracks by train to Hamburg. He connects with the local ’Ndrangheta and a Hamburg local and together they go down to the Reeperbahn, an upscale version of Nuevo Laredo’s Boy’s Town, only with more neon in lurid pinks, reds, greens, and purples. Rolando and his escorts walk past clubs with names like the Dollhouse, Safari, and the Beach Club and finally go into Club Relax, a brothel featuring women clad in masks and lingerie.