Dreamland (12 page)

But David Tejeda’s murder was the important one in the story of the Xalisco Boys and black tar heroin in America. His extended family had hundreds of relatives. He’d shown poor families they, too, could rise by selling heroin retail in the United States. Younger guys naturally went to him for advice. He supplied many of them as they expanded beyond the San Fernando Valley.

Tejeda’s death had a strangely liberating effect on his extended family and other Xalisco crews. When he was alive, “a lot of people depended on him because he had everything going for him,” said the kid from Reseda. “They didn’t have to figure out how to do things for themselves. But once he was killed, they had to start doing things on their own. They didn’t have nobody to depend on.”

Forced now to become more intrepid, “everybody scattered everywhere.”

Just a Phone Call Away

Portland, Oregon

In his forties, Alan Levine lost both legs to frostbite when he fell asleep drunk under an overpass in an Illinois snowstorm. Somehow he survived this and in time he migrated west, ending up in Portland, Oregon.

He was already a longtime heroin addict. Levine first used heroin at age twenty in New York and that first shot made him feel the way he wanted to feel the rest of his life—like the King of the World and the President of Everything.

All his life, Alan Levine loved drugs and the charge they gave him. But his lack of legs got in the way. He shuffled around on prosthetics. Usually, he procured dope from some house where he had a connection, or by wandering around the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood north of Portland’s downtown, an arduous trek repeated three or four times a day. Levine hobbled along, driven by his addiction. Each time, he never knew what he was getting, or whether he would be robbed or arrested. He’d make it back to his motel, fix, and zone out until it was time to go look for more, surviving on panhandling and a monthly disability check.

In 1993, Levine returned to Portland after a year away. He heard that dealers had come to town who now delivered dope if you called in an order. Somehow Levine got their business card, though years later he couldn’t remember precisely how. He had never known of a heroin dealer with a business card and a convenient number you could call.

With that card, well, Alan Levine might’ve just died and gone to heaven.

Wayne Baldassare, meanwhile, was sure he was entering hell.

Baldassare was a cop who loved dope work. He’d been on the Portland Police Drugs and Vice Division since 1982. He loved the creativity the job required, that he had to use and care for informants. Each day was different: an undercover buy in the morning, a search warrant in the afternoon. The job required imagination, because the dealers were themselves endlessly creative.

For years, heroin was the easiest drug to work because it was sold out of houses. You arrested a junkie. Terrified of withdrawing in jail, he’d tell you how a dope house worked. The junkie would bring an undercover officer to the dealer. Then you busted the place.

But in about 1991, Baldassare saw all that change. Young Mexican guys, clean-cut, courteous, and looking quite out of their element, were driving the town in old cars, delivering heroin. “All of a sudden you got a dispatch center taking orders and calling these delivery guys,” he said. “It made it very hard to get a good case. You were looking at hours of surveillance for five or six small bags of dope.”

The delivery drivers did tours of six months and then left. If they were arrested they were deported, not prosecuted, because they never carried large amounts of dope.  The cases were always light. Baldessare first figured they were small-timers. Later he realized that, quite to the contrary, they had learned how drug investigations worked: prosecutors prized cases with large quantities of drugs. Crack and methamphetamine were the priorities then, each measured in kilos. As camouflage, these Mexican heroin guys used just-in-time supplying, like any global corporation, to ensure they had only tiny quantities in their cars or apartments. This, too, was sophistication Baldessare didn’t see in the heroin underworld.

Soon these delivery drivers crowded into Portland. Heroin prices dropped and Baldassare watched the drivers get wise. They drove in circles to lose the officers following them. It took four or five officers to tail one car. Up to then, Portland hadn’t much of an aerial police service. One officer owned a four-seat Cessna and charged the city for gas when he used it for police work, which wasn’t often. Now the airplane was pressed into regular service, with a pilot and an observer watching the heroin delivery car on the street below. Baldassare was the observer. Peering through binoculars from above, he radioed locations to his colleagues on the ground.

It was grueling work and went on for hours. Baldassare was one of the few officers who could peer through binoculars from the plane, as it went around in circles, without getting airsick. As the drivers tooled around Portland all day making deliveries, Baldassare spent ten, twelve hours a day in the plane, watching from twenty-five hundred feet in the air, stopping only to refuel. This was before GPS; nor were there cell phones to track.

“It was line of sight,” he said. “If you looked away, you could lose them. So you picked your times to look away. If your neck was getting a kink in it, you had to choose when to massage it.”

Above downtown, Baldassare could follow a heroin car for a half circle of the plane, then lose it behind a building as the Cessna completed its circle, hoping to pick up on a new go-round. Cars easily got lost under Portland’s dense canopy of trees.

Before long, the department had to expand its air force. An air force was a luxury most police departments the size of Portland’s can’t afford, but which this new heroin system made necessary. The city hired another two pilots. Finally, the department bought a new plane with full-length windows for easier surveillance.

Their business card was yellow. It had a phone number and an eagle with a snake in its talons, the emblem on the flag of Mexico. That was all. No names. No slogan. Call anytime, Alan Levine was told. One night, he did.

Give us twenty minutes, said the guy on the end of the line. To Levine’s immense surprise, within fifteen minutes, a Mexican kid was knocking at his motel door. He was young and nervous and clean-cut. He looked like a farm boy. He spoke no English. But he had sixty dollars’ worth of black tar heroin.

Levine had never forgotten the first rapturous feeling he got from heroin back in the 1960s. But through the years that followed, he also never felt that high again. Until, that is, he shot up black tar heroin that night. Levine called the number three times a day after that. The delivery guys changed often and he called them all Pedro. They were reliable. They arrived quickly. Now, instead of having to brave Old Town on his two fake legs, Alan Levine could sit in his motel room, aware that he was “just a phone call away from getting loaded.”

The Mexicans were the only dealers Levine had encountered who never ran out of dope. In time, prices dropped to as little as five dollars a hit as these crews brought huge supplies of high-quality tar heroin to Portland and competed against each other. Yet he noticed that they never feuded. They gave him credit. They often gave him a little extra, avid to keep him as a customer.

One night, one of these kids, a driver as Alan Levine remembers it, tried to scam him, offering eighteen balloons for a hundred dollars when the deal, already long established, was twenty-five balloons. Levine objected. Let’s see what the boss says, the boy said. Levine got in his car and followed the driver across Portland. They came to a house. Out came a man Levine years later determined to be Enrique Tejeda-Cienfuegos, but whom he came to know then as El Gato.

Tejeda-Cienfuegos was from the village of Aquiles Serdán, a few miles south of Xalisco. He and his four brothers ran a heroin franchise in Portland. Levine knew nothing of this. He only knew that the delivery kid was trying to screw him and he explained this to El Gato that night. The boy now produced the twenty-five bags of heroin, saying in Spanish that this is what he offered Levine the whole time and there’d been some misunderstanding. El Gato was apologetic and gave Levine those twenty-five bags of heroin for free. Levine never saw that driver again.

El Gato “was evidently powerful,” Levine remembered, when I spoke with him in a motel room near downtown Portland one night many years later. I tracked Levine down through his ex-wife because by then I realized the history of heroin was best told by addicts, the older the better. I sat in a chair while he, legless, sat in his bed, smoking constantly. Cigarettes gave his voice a growl as grizzled as his face and a strange chop to his jaws that sounded, when he spoke, as if he were chomping on a juicy steak. Sure enough, he knew the story of the Xalisco Boys’ arrival in Portland as well as anybody, even if he knew them only as a rotating series of Mexicans he called Pedro. When I showed him a mug shot, he definitely remembered El Gato.

“When he spoke, they acted,” he said. “He had some status. He took a liking to me because I paid on time. After that, they’d come and say, ‘Gato said to give you this; Gato said to give you that.’ They called me Liver because I told them I had hepatitis C and I didn’t want to share needles.”

El Gato later gave Levine a Buck knife, perhaps feeling he could use some protection. Levine realized he was worlds away now from how heroin had operated for so long.

“You didn’t have to leave your house. Dealing with those people was paradise. You could nickel-and-dime them, too, when they got there. They were eager for the green money.”

Levine had never known any dealer to give away free drugs to get people hooked, or to keep addicts from getting clean—the kind of mythical pushers the government and the media had invented amid the “dope fiend” scare. Until he met the Xalisco Boys.

“This marketing technique
was
about that. They knew what they were doing. They were marketers.”

Enrique Adrift

A Rancho in Nayarit, Mexico

The morning after Enrique’s big homecoming party, following his return from Canoga Park, his mother was happy and his father held his tongue. California gave Enrique a new option. If his father mistreated him, he’d leave again. So they ate together as a family and tried to forget past misery now that their new Northerner, as they called him, had come home.

The problemas between both sides of his mother’s family grew worse. The shootings didn’t stop. Most of his grandfather’s relatives had to leave. Relatives of his grandmother dominated the barrio. But Enrique felt his experience up north elevated him above this petty world. He spoke to both sides. He could think of nothing but California. His life would be different and this he believed was entirely due to El Norte and heroin. Yet, he still had only a skinny horse that he thought looked more like a dog. His California sojourn had left him little to offer his girlfriend. He wanted a rematch with California; that’s how he looked at it. A test of wills. No one would use him again. His uncles, he saw, made some money and then backed out of the business for a while for fear of village gossip. Enrique was more afraid of poverty.

Other kids were now going north the way he had. The retail system that Xalisco immigrants were devising in the San Fernando Valley allowed even the humblest to do more than just dream. It was also ending his rancho’s dismal isolation. For years, when cars passed through, villagers would hide, fearing it was a child kidnapper. Girls covered their faces when someone brought out the first video cameras at a party. But as men went north to sell dope and returned with money, they brought with them a feel for the outside world and an enhanced vision of what was possible. Everyone could have his own business, be his own boss. The Xalisco heroin system was a lot like the United States in that way. America fulfilled the promise of the unknown to rancheros, and an escape from humiliation for Mexico’s poor from villages just like Enrique’s. The Xalisco heroin system did it faster. Plus it was risky and this beckoned farm boys who saw they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. By risking a lot, they added to their status back home.

After a few months, in about 1991, one of Enrique’s uncles called from the San Fernando Valley and offered him work with good pay. This time Enrique arrived confident and brash, proud of his worldliness, no longer the scared village kid.

He saw immediately why his uncles had called him. More heroin dealers from Xalisco had followed the lead of the pioneers and crowded into the San Fernando Valley’s already-proven market. Competition intensified. Prices were dropping.

By this time, the families who would make heroin their lives’ work were established in the Valley. Of course, David Tejeda and his brothers were there. Beto Sánchez and the Sánchez clan were growing big. So, too, were Beto Bonque and his family, as well as the Bernals. The Langaricas—brothers Julio, Chuy, and Tino, whose father was a witch doctor back in Xalisco—had cells, as did their cousins, the Garcia-Langaricas, Polla and Macho. There were others as well; one family had Pasadena to itself.

Each family had two or three cells going, and each cell had at least a couple drivers working shifts from six
A.M
. to noon and noon to six
P.M
. every day. At night, they met at apartments and rolled heroin into balloons for the next day. It was not a glamorous business. You were there to work, said the family bosses, who paid each driver six hundred dollars a week and wanted every hour accounted for. The job of heroin driver resembled sweatshop work. The cell owners changed the drivers in and out, moving them into apartments and out again six months later, switching cars even more frequently, and ordering drivers to hand out beeper numbers to junkies on the street along with free samples. By the early 1990s, the San Fernando Valley was like a convention, a reunion of people from Xalisco County. Everyone wanted in.