Dreamland (28 page)

Sante Fe, New Mexico

In Chimayo, the heroin clans’ dominance went back years. It didn’t matter that members of these clans had all been arrested, as had their workers. The problem was, Chris Valdez told Jim Kuykendall, that none had done much prison time; then always returned home. The families grew stronger with each demonstration of impunity. Still, the old cases interested Kuykendall. Drugs had been seized in each case. A historical record of the clans’ control existed throughout those cases. Kuykendall saw there was a story to be told. Witnesses, people in prison now—users or low-rung workers who could talk about the clans—had been there when the cops barged in on one family or another. Plus those who’d died from heroin overdoses could speak from the grave, if only their loved ones would talk. Their stories might tell best of all how deeply the clans’ power resided in Chimayo.

To Jim Kuykendall, all this history was important, for it formed a story of the clans’ control that might become the basis of a federal conspiracy case. He formed a team of local cops and targeted the main heroin-dealing families in Chimayo, and in particular Felix Barela, who said he made his money from cutting firewood.

A short while later, Kuykendall briefed top federal agents and prosecutors. The FBI wanted to contribute agents to go up on wiretaps. Kuykendall resisted. Wiretaps were unnecessary. “The key to the case are the bodies,” Kuykendall said. “They each tell a story. There’s a story behind who these people are, where they bought their drugs, and how they died. We need to tell that story.”

He got the medical examiners’ reports of dozens of overdose cases and divided them among the investigators. They fanned across the Española Valley, interviewing families of the deceased. Years before, as black tar heroin accelerated the valley’s decay, each dead junkie had been viewed as one less problem. No one had cared enough to interview their families. But the families were integral to the Chimayo heroin tale, Kuykendall believed. Addicts, even those well into adulthood, often returned to live with their parents once they lost their jobs, houses, and spouses. Parents lived in torment, as their children stole from them, slaves to the morphine molecule. It turned out many parents and siblings, unable to withstand the torment that would ensue if they refused—and afraid that if they let their family member borrow the car that it would never be seen again—had driven the addicts to their dealers’ houses.

These parents, it turned out, were eager to talk. They greeted the investigators with tears and hugs; they recounted watching helplessly as their kids fell apart. One mother, in tears, pinched Kuykendall’s cheeks as she made him promise he would get the people who sold her child heroin. These parents said the Barela family, as the school year approached, would hand out lists of what clothes their children needed. When they wanted new televisions or stereos, they’d let the addicts know. Soon junkies would be plying them with newly stolen pants for their kids.

One afternoon, Kuykendall went to visit Dennis Smith, a man in his seventies whose son, Donald, had died. Donald Smith had moved back to live with his father after a fight with his girlfriend over his heroin use.

Sitting with Kuykendall, the elder Smith said that on the trip home from an outing one night his son had demanded they return to Chimayo so he could buy heroin. He threatened to jump from the car if his father didn’t turn around. Dennis Smith said he drove his son back to the Barela compound—a place where he had taken him several times before. The elder Smith turned the car around and headed back to the Barelas’ for his kid’s dope. He found his son’s corpse in the trailer in the back of his property the next morning.

One resident, George Roybal, told the detectives that he often took his disabled brother, Ernie, to buy dope from the Barelas and the Martinezes. Another, Lynette Salazar, told them she took her son, Armando, to a clan house, as she had done often, to trade auto supplies for a hit of dope, and from this Armando died later that day.

Kuykendall flew to Montana to visit a woman who had driven through the valley one fall. Enchanted with its natural beauty, she decided to stay. She moved in right next to a member of the Martinez clan. At first, she told Kuykendall, she believed her next-door neighbor—Jesse “Donuts” Martinez—was a Boy Scout leader from all the youths who would visit the house all afternoon. Soon, though, she saw kids with belts around their arms. Her young son began finding syringes in the yard. She called the cops and began noting every car that pulled up—thirty a day sometimes. She spent a year watching junkies coming in and out, shooting up in the backyard in full view of her window. She called police repeatedly; finally she gave up and moved to Montana.

In the end, the case against the clans involved relatively few undercover drug buys. It revolved instead around testimony of people whom Kuykendall and the agents had tracked down. The families and friends of the dead told their stories to a grand jury, with Kuykendall finishing up to recount the history of heroin in the valley and the clans’ control. The grand jury indicted thirty-four people, including Felix Barela, Josefa Gallegos, “Fat Jose” Martinez, and his brother “Donuts.”

At six
A.M
. on Wednesday, September 29, 1999, a five-mile caravan of law enforcement officers rolled into Chimayo as three helicopters buzzed like dragonflies across the skies. They seized land and motorcycles and Felix Barela’s beloved lowrider, the Wizard. Two months later, they seized his prized sorrel racehorse, Red Hot Mag, which his trainer had secreted out of the state, but brought back to race at the SunRay racetrack in Farmington. After the horse won the eighth race, Kuykendall and his agents stopped the jockey leaving the track, produced a judge’s order, and confiscated the horse. They went to the track office and seized the twenty-two thousand dollars in prize money as well. They later auctioned Red Hot Mag for fifteen thousand dollars.

Fifteen acres of the Barela compound, where hundreds of addicts once used to buy, was deeded to the Boys and Girls Club. Without land, the clans had no base of operations. Even after leaving prison, they did not return to Chimayo.

But the story of the Chimayo clans is important to our own because months before that bust, in April 1999, as Jim Kuykendall and his newly deputized agents sifted through the clans’ history, a body turned up in Santa Fe. A twenty-one-year-old Mexican kid named Aurelio Rodriguez-Zepeda, from the small town of Xalisco in the state of Nayarit, was found in the trunk of a car beaten and bloody.

The town of Xalisco, Nayarit, meant nothing to the agents at the time, other than it ironically happened to be the sister city to nearby Taos, New Mexico. Nor was the kid’s murder especially intriguing. But the car in which Rodriguez-Zepeda was found was registered to Josefa Gallegos, the heroin matriarch of Chimayo. So they stuck with it.

As it happened, Rodriguez-Zepeda was found with a cellular phone. The agents plugged the numbers found in the phone into a federal law enforcement database. One number turned up as connected to another heroin case that the FBI was investigating in Phoenix.

Kuykendall called the FBI in Phoenix and spoke to an agent named Gary Woodling.

Woodling had a strange story to tell. He was part of a group of agents tracking black tar heroin traffickers from the state of Nayarit, Mexico. From Phoenix, these traffickers had set up retail heroin cells across the United States in mid-major towns. Three Nayarit brothers ran the Phoenix cell and seemed to have decided that wherever US Air flew from Phoenix would make a good heroin outpost. These were not the traditional drug hubs of, say, Philadelphia, Miami, or Chicago. Instead, Woodling said, Nayarits were going to towns like Boise, Salt Lake, Omaha, Denver, Pittsburgh, even Billings, Montana. A local narc in Boise named Ed Ruplinger, in fact, had already run a sizable investigation into some of these guys, Woodling told him.

Kuykendall and his agents went back and combed the subpoenaed phone records for the heroin clans of Chimayo. From the records, it seems that when the clans wanted to order supplies they called a central number—apparently a dispatcher. This dispatcher, the records show, then quickly called the number for Aurelio Rodriguez-Zepeda. It seemed the dead kid was some kind of black tar deliveryman, being sent regularly to supply the Chimayo dealers.

Kuykendall and the agents had long assumed that those who supplied the Chimayo heroin clans were an isolated group of Mexican dealers who had stumbled into the fertile heroin terrain of the Española Valley. Woodling dispelled this notion. As the investigation into the Gallegoses, the Barelas, and the Martinezes drew to a close, and five miles of police cars streamed into Chimayo that day in September 1999, Kuykendall and his investigators knew they were onto something bigger.

Enrique on Top

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Robert Berardinelli knew a good thing when he saw one. When the Nayarit Mexicans came to town, this was, to him, a good thing.

A balding man in his fifties from a family that owned a funeral home in Santa Fe, Berardinelli was a heroin addict. He’d been addicted to the morphine molecule since back in 1969. He’d smuggled pot from Mexico in the 1970s and done some prison time. He’d been desperate to get off dope for years, tried methadone, but it didn’t help. For most of his addiction, he purchased his dope from various Santa Fe street dealers. This was risky. His family had been active in public service in Santa Fe for most of the century; Berardinellis had served as judge, city councilman, postmaster, and county treasurer. For him to be hustling hits of heroin on the street from people he didn’t always know exposed him to arrest and his family to shame.

But a lot changed back in the summer of 1997, he later told the detectives, when a group of heroin traffickers from the Mexican state of Nayarit showed up in Santa Fe, led by a guy who occasionally went by the name Enrique.

Heroin had taken Enrique a long way from the Toad.

On the plane out of the Yuma airport heading to New Mexico, on the day that he watched those migrants rounded up, Enrique knew this trip was his moment, the one he had waited for. He’d been through childhood poverty, sold dope as a kid in the San Fernando Valley for uncles who underpaid him, then sold for that boss in Phoenix. He was married and had a lot to prove. He knew the business and was confident in his abilities as a salesman and motivator of people. Now, in 1997, he was heading off to start his own heroin cell.

Before leaving home, he asked his parents for their blessing.

“I don’t know if I’ll be returning,” he told them.

Watching
la migra
roust those dusty immigrants from the Yuma airport put something of a closure on the last nagging qualms he had about selling chiva.

He arrived in Albuquerque, intending to make it the site of his first heroin business. But early on, he met an addict from Santa Fe who said construction workers in that town were heavily addicted. He paid the guy five thousand dollars for an introduction to some addicts. He found Santa Fe wide-open—no gangs, no competition. There, he set up the heroin cell that had been his goal for almost half his life by then.

He brought in kids from his village. Right off, that felt good—to be an employer, a benefactor. He taught them how to drive, how to package heroin in balloons. He taught them the streets. He paid them six hundred dollars a week, plus all expenses, including the coyote’s fee to cross them into the United States. Soon his cell was selling balloons around Santa Fe. He returned to Nayarit.

He employed almost two dozen kids over the next three years, from the poorest ranchos. They worked harder, didn’t steal, and were grateful. Some wanted to work for a bit and then return home to party. Others, as he had, wanted their own business and would work for him only as long as it took to gain experience and capital. Either way, he saw their serious moods as he sent them off to go drive for him in northern New Mexico. Some pretended to joke around, but he knew it was a bluff. He knew how much was riding on their trips—a truck, a piece of land, a girl, the threat of many years in prison.

Xalisco Boys were church mice in the United States. That ended as soon as they got home. They were young men and wanted to party. Enrique liked to think of himself as a guy who took care of his employees, because he had been there himself. He took them to El Queros strip club in Vallarta, all expenses paid, or to beach resorts in Nayarit. No sugarcane farmer was ever going to get into one of those places.

Meanwhile, he hired his mother a maid. He paid for a sister’s quinceañera—the traditional Mexican coming-out birthday party for a fifteen-year-old girl. He paid for another to attend college. In a speech at her graduation party, she thanked her brother for all he had made possible. He took his family to fine restaurants in Tepic where they nervously rubbed elbows with the city’s middle classes.

He would look around these restaurants and realize that chiva had finally allowed him to cross that river that separated his rancho from the world.

“At least I’m not going to die wanting to know what’s on the other side,” he told himself.

Enrique bought the land where he and his father were born. He hired men to help his father in the field.

Seeing his son with some cocaine one day, his father took Enrique aside. Be careful with that stuff, he said. Don’t use it. He admitted he had been a drunk for too long. It was the first time he had spoken to Enrique as a father should to his son.

“That’s all fine,” Enrique said. “But why didn’t you speak to me like this before?”