Dreamland (8 page)

They’re all from a town called Xalisco. Ha-LEES-koh—he said, pronouncing the word. Don’t confuse it with a state in Mexico pronounced the same way, but spelled with a
j
. The state of Jalisco is one of Mexico’s largest and Guadalajara is its capital. This town, he said, spells its name with an
x
. The informant had never been there, but believed it to be a small place.

All these guys running around Denver selling black tar heroin are from this town of Xalisco, or a few small villages near there, the informant told Chavez. Their success is based on a system they’ve learned. It’s a system for selling heroin retail. Their system is a simple thing, really, and relies on cheap, illegal Mexican labor, just the way any fast-food joint does.

From then on, Chavez sat with the informant, at bars and in a truck outside the man’s house, as the informant talked on about these guys from Xalisco and their heroin retail system—which was unlike anything the informant had seen in the drug underworld.

Think of it like a fast-food franchise, the informant said, like a pizza delivery service. Each heroin cell or franchise has an owner in Xalisco, Nayarit, who supplies the cell with heroin. The owner doesn’t often come to the United States. He communicates only with the cell manager, who lives in Denver and runs the business for him.

Beneath the cell manager is a telephone operator, the informant said. The operator stays in an apartment all day and takes calls. The calls come from addicts, ordering their dope. Under the operator are several drivers, paid a weekly wage and given housing and food. Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth. They look like chipmunks. They have a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons. The balloons remain intact in the body and are eliminated in the driver’s waste. Apart from the balloons in their mouths, drivers keep another hundred hidden somewhere in the car.

The operator’s phone number is circulated among heroin addicts, who call with their orders. The operator’s job, the informant said, is to tell them where to meet the driver: some suburban shopping center parking lot—a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a CVS pharmacy. The operators relay the message to the driver, the informant said.

The driver swings by the parking lot and the addict pulls out to follow him, usually down side streets. Then the driver stops. The addict jumps into the driver’s car. There, in broken English and broken Spanish, a cross-cultural heroin deal is accomplished, with the driver spitting out the balloons the addict needs and taking his cash.

Drivers do this all day, the guy said. Business hours—eight
A.M.
to eight
P.M.
usually. A cell of drivers at first can quickly gross five thousand dollars a day; within a year, that cell can be clearing fifteen thousand dollars daily.

The system operates on certain principles, the informant said, and the Nayarit traffickers don’t violate them. The cells compete with each other, but competing drivers know each other from back home, so they’re never violent. They never carry guns. They work hard at blending in. They don’t party where they live. They drive sedans that are several years old. None of the workers use the drug. Drivers spend a few months in a city and then the bosses send them home or to a cell in another town. The cells switch cars about as often as they switch drivers. New drivers are coming up all the time, usually farm boys from Xalisco County. The cell owners like young drivers because they’re less likely to steal from them; the more experienced a driver becomes, the more likely he knows how to steal from the boss. The informant assumed there were thousands of these kids back in Nayarit aching to come north and drive some U.S. city with their mouths packed with heroin balloons.

To a degree unlike any other narcotics operation, he said, Xalisco cells run like small businesses. The cell owner pays each driver a salary—$1,200 a week was the going rate in Denver at the time. The cell owner holds each driver to exact expenses, demanding receipts for how much each spent for lunch, or for a hooker. Drivers are encouraged to offer special deals to addicts to drum up business: fifteen dollars per balloon or seven for a hundred dollars. A free balloon on Sunday to an addict who buys Monday through Saturday. Selling heroin a tenth of a gram at a time is their one and only, full-time, seven-days-a-week job, and that includes Christmas Day. Heroin addicts need their dope every day.

Cell profits were based on the markup inherent in retail. Their customers were strung-out, desperate junkies who couldn’t afford a half a kilo of heroin. Anyone looking for a large amount of heroin was probably a cop aiming for a case that would land the dealer in prison for years. Ask to buy a large quantity of dope, the informant said, and they’ll shut down their phones. You’ll never hear from them again. That really startled the informant. He knew of no other Mexican trafficking group that preferred to sell tiny quantities.

Moreover, the Xalisco cells never deal with African Americans. They don’t sell to black people; nor do they buy from blacks, who they fear will rob them. They sell almost exclusively to whites.

What the informant described, Chavaz could see, amounted to a major innovation in the U.S. drug underworld. These innovations had every bit the impact of those in the legitimate business world. When, for example, someone discovered that cocaine cooked with water and baking soda became rock hard, the smokable cocaine known as crack was born. Crack was a more effective delivery mechanism for cocaine—sending it straight to the brain.

The Xalisco traffickers’ innovation was literally a delivery mechanism as well. Guys from Xalisco had figured out that what white people—especially middle-class white kids—want most is service, convenience. They didn’t want to go to skid row or some seedy dope house to buy their drugs. Now they didn’t need to. The guys from Xalisco would deliver it to them.

So the system spread. By the mid-1990s, Chavez’s informant counted a dozen major metro areas in the western United States where cells from tiny Xalisco, Nayarit, operated. In Denver by then he could count eight or ten cells, each with three or four drivers, working daily.

As I listened to Chavez, it seemed to me that the guys from Xalisco were fired by the impulse that, in fact, moved so many Mexican immigrants. Most Mexican immigrants spent years in the United States not melting in but imagining instead the day when they would go home for good. This was their American Dream: to return to Mexico better off than they had left it and show everyone back home that that’s how it was. They called home and sent money constantly. They were usually far more involved in, say, the digging of a new well in the rancho than in the workings of the school their children attended in the United States. They returned home for the village’s annual fiesta and spent money they couldn’t afford on barbecues, weddings, and quinceañeras. To that end, as they worked the toughest jobs in America, they assiduously built houses in the rancho back home that stood as monuments to their desire to return for good one day. These houses took a decade to finish. Immigrants added to their houses each time they returned. They invariably extended rebar from the top of the houses’ first floors. Rebar was a promise that as soon as he got the money together, the owner was adding a second story. Rods of rebar, standing at attention, became part of the skyline of literally thousands of Mexican immigrant villages and ranchos.

The finished houses of migrant Mexico often had wrought-iron gates, modern plumbing, and marble floors. These towns slowly improved as they emptied of people whose dream was to build their houses, too. Over the years, the towns became dreamlands, as empty as movie sets, where immigrants went briefly to relax at Christmas or during the annual fiesta, and imagine their lives as wealthy retirees back home again one day. The great irony was that work, mortgages, and U.S.-born children kept most migrants from ever returning to Mexico to live permanently in those houses they built with such sacrifice.

But the Xalisco heroin traffickers did it all the time. Their story was about immigration and what moves a poor Mexican to migrate as much as it was a tale of drug trafficking. Those Xalisco traffickers who didn’t end up in prison went back to live in those houses. They put down no roots in this country; they spent as little money in America as they could, in fact. Jamaicans, Russians, Italians, even other Mexican traffickers, all bought property and broadcasted their wealth in the United States. The Xalisco traffickers were the only immigrant narcotics mafia Chavez knew of that aimed to just go home, and with nary a shot fired.

Denver became a Xalisco hub as their operations expanded, and probably no cop in America learned more about them than Dennis Chavez. By the time I met him, hundreds of arrests and sweeping federal indictments had not stopped them. They had spread like a virus, quietly and unrecognized by many in law enforcement, who often mistook Xalisco franchises for isolated groups of small-time dealers.

“I call them the Xalisco Boys,” Chavez said. “They’re nationwide.”

Enrique Alone

Tijuana, Mexico

Chaotic Tijuana was the biggest city Enrique had ever seen. Thousands of people flowed like a river through the central bus station before crossing into the United States. The station roiled with humble, hungry folks from ranchos like his. Boys darted in and out of traffic, washing windshields for change. Men who’d tried to cross and were turned back had fallen into alcohol. They reminded Enrique of the drunks in the rancho.

Enrique slept on the bus terminal’s chairs and wandered the city streets during the day. He found a coyote and asked the price to the place called Canoga Park. When he told the man he had no address for his uncles, but figured he’d just ask around, the coyote laughed.

“Canoga Park is huge. It’s not like your rancho.”

Still, he hung on in Tijuana, fearing to return home a failure. He washed in the bus station bathroom, every morning looking more like a Tijuana urchin. Finally, famished, his prized clothes filthy and stinking and his money almost gone, he dialed the village’s telephone in tears. His departure was the talk of the rancho. Aunts and uncles crowded around the phone. On a second call, his hysterical mother answered. She gave him a number for uncles in Los Angeles who were coming for him. They arrived and arranged for him to cross the border posing as the son of a man with papers. Two mornings later, Enrique was sitting in an uncle’s apartment in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley.

“Now,” the uncle said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars and a suitcase and you’ll go home.”

“No, what I want from life you can’t buy with a thousand dollars.”

His uncles took him to eat and then to another apartment. One uncle opened a closet and there, like a glorious revelation, were dozens of pairs of Levi’s 501s, with labels and price tags attached.

“Take what you want.”

With that, the boy who had never had more than two threadbare pairs of pants now had his first new, tough dark-blue 501s. 501s marked his time up north. Much later he would remember the first time he bought a pair for himself in America, and then the first time he came home wearing 501s.

Back home, villagers, and Enrique himself, had always assumed his uncles were working hard in some honorable trade up in the great El Norte, one that paid enough to fund bountiful gifts every time they returned. Now they sat him down. One uncle pulled out a shoebox filled with golf-ball-sized chunks of a dark, sticky substance and balloons of every color.

“What’s that?” Enrique asked.

“
Chiva
,” his uncle said. Goat, the Mexican slang term for black tar heroin. “This is how we make our money.”

Cora Indian campesinos grew the poppies in the mountains above Xalisco. They harvested the opium goo from the flowers and sold it to cookers whom Enrique’s uncles knew. A newly cooked kilo of vinegary, sticky chiva would head north in a boom box or a backpack within a couple days, virtually uncut, and often hit L.A. streets only a week after the goo was drawn from the poppy.

As Enrique’s uncle spoke, he rolled little pieces of the gunk into balls the size of BBs. He put each one in a tiny balloon and tied each balloon. Finally, he wrapped the telephone in a towel to muffle the ring. As Enrique was wondering why, the uncle plugged in the phone and the calls started coming and never stopped.

These are customers, his uncle explained over the ringing. We have guys out there driving around all day with these balloons. We give each caller a different intersection to meet a driver. Then we beep a driver the code for the intersection where that customer will be. We do this all day long.

“We wouldn’t have told you had you not showed up,” his uncle said. “But now that you’re here . . .”

Enrique saw his chance. He begged to work for them. You’re too young, said one uncle. You need to go to school. Or we send you home. But Enrique pleaded and finally the uncles relented. They put him to work driving the place most Angelinos refer to simply as the Valley.

The San Fernando Valley comprises 260 square miles, larger than Chicago, and contains the sprawling northern chunk of Los Angeles. At its west end is Canoga Park, a district of sixty thousand people, bisected by boulevards with palm trees. Classic, modest suburban ranch-style houses made of stucco line its residential streets.

For years after it emerged from citrus groves in the 1950s, Canoga Park and the Valley had been famously white, with only small islands of Mexican American barrios. But the mass migration of Mexicans to Southern California and the end of the Cold War changed the area. Defense contractors departed; so did many white people. Soon, districts of Los Angeles such as Van Nuys, Reseda, North Hollywood, and Canoga Park were largely Mexican. Those changes were beginning as Enrique arrived.