El Narco (25 page)

There were also huge piles of peso notes. Mexican police said these pesos were worth $157,000, until journalists studied the photos and pointed out it looked like a lot more money. Oh, the police replied, you’re right, and adjusted the peso amount to $1.5 million. The world’s biggest-ever cash bust had just got bigger. It was finally counted in at worth more than $207 million.

Zhenli Ye Gon himself was spotted in Las Vegas at the time of the raid enjoying his favorite hobby—gambling. Mexican federal agents had got onto his case, and probably alerted his attention, after they busted tons of pseudoephedrine at a Mexican Pacific port in December. The businessman was importing these chemicals, they alleged, and selling them to Mexican mobsters to cook into crystal meth. Zhenli Ye Gon was buying the chemicals from a pharmaceutical company in the People’s Republic of China.

Zhenli Ye Gon then gave an interview to the Associated Press in New York.
¹²
In a videotaped rant, Zhenli Ye Gon threw out some wild accusations in his defense. He confessed the money had been in his home but said that a Mexican politician had told him to stash it there under threat of death. He also said he was afraid that if he returned to Mexico, he would be killed. But some of his most startling statements concerned the United States. Zhenli Ye Gon said he had blown $126 million in Las Vegas, but been given 40 percent of his losses back as well as gifts of luxury cars. He was explaining a simple way to move suitcases full of dollar bills into the system: buy millions of dollars’ worth of chips in a casino and get losses back in checks and cars.

American police nabbed Zhenli Ye Gon in a restaurant on the outskirts of Washington and charged him with conspiracy to import crystal meth. However, after a key Las Vegas witness recanted and the Chinese government refused to hand over documents, American prosecutors agreed to drop charges on the understanding that he would be extradited and tried in Mexico. Ye Gon was still fighting extradition in 2011 arguing that he wouldn’t get a fair trial south of the border. He admitted he had imported chemicals from China, but argued that he had no knowledge that any of it would be used to cook up the kind of crystal stew that General Solórzano showed me.

The case shows that while the journey of a line of cocaine from farmer to nostril can be weird, the journey of a drug dollar can be even weirder. Imagine a Walmart–employee meth addict in Nebraska buying a bumper batch of crystal with five ten-dollar bills. The crisp notes travel from local dealers to Mexican distributors and float south over the border in a trap car. One ends up in the building of a narco mansion on the hills of Sinaloa; one ends up in a Mexico City mansion to line the floors for a record-breaking raid; one goes to China to pay for raw ingredients; one gets carried back up over the border and buys chips in Las Vegas.

Free trade in the twenty-first century can be surreal. This is mafia capitalism at its most spectacular. It’s all about the money. That is why thugs are chopping off heads and rolling them into discos. And that is where our Nebraska addict’s fifth bill goes: to pay for El Narco’s second-biggest product after drugs: murder.

CHAPTER
9

Murder

A killer arrived in hell,

To inspect his work,

Without knowing that his dead,

Were already waiting for him,

He just went through the door,

And there began his end.

—
GRUPO
CARTEL
, “
A
KILLER
ARRIVED
IN
HELL
,” 2008

Twenty seconds of shooting. Four hundred and thirty-two bullets. Five dead policemen.

Four of the corpses sprawl over a shiny, new Dodge Ram pickup truck that has been pierced by so many caps it resembles a cheese grater. The cadavers are twisted and contorted in the unnatural poses of the dead; arms arch backward over spines, legs spread out sideways; the pattern of bodies that fall like rag dolls when bullets strike.

After arriving at too many murder scenes, I often felt numb staring at the lead-filled flesh spread out on the concrete, dirt roads, and car seats. The images all blur into one. But then little details come back: the twists of elbows over backs, heads over shoulders. These patterns come into my mind when I think about the murder scenes; and these patterns then filter into bad dreams when I am sleeping in a bed a thousand miles away.

This particular crime scene is on a sweaty December evening in Culiacán. The state policemen had hit a red stoplight next to a shopping center when the triggermen attacked.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The assassins shot from the side and back, unleashing bullets in split seconds. A customized Kalashnikov with a circular clip can unload a hundred rounds in ten seconds. This is lightning war. People tend to shudder at Mexican gangsters having rocket-propelled grenades. But the AK is far more lethal.

The fifth dead policeman is a muscular, forty-eight-year-old commander laying ten feet away from the pickup, bathing in his own blood. His right hand is stretched upward clasping a 9 mm pistol, creating a death pose that could have been set up for a Hollywood movie. When the hit men sprayed, the commander had managed to jump out and run, pistol in hand. But the killers followed him with their shower of bullets, finishing him off by the edge of the sidewalk.

The commander has hard features, with high cheekbones and a broad nose over a finely trimmed mustache. His eyes are wide-open staring at the heavens. The left side of his face, just above his neck, was ripped open by a Kalashnikov bullet, distorting his visage with a gaping hole. Up close, it somehow looks like a rubber mask rather than the face of a real human being. Death is hard to comprehend.

We arrive ten minutes after the shooting and the police have yet to cordon off the area or cover the bodies with plastic sheets. Soon the block will be swarming with soldiers manning mounted machine guns, ski-masked homicide police, and forensic teams. But for now we can walk all over the bullet shells and stick our cameras to the faces of the victims.

A crowd of onlookers thickens on the street. Four young teenagers breathlessly analyze the attack. “That one is a Kalashnikov bullet. That one is from an AR-15,” says a skinny kid in a baseball cap, pointing at a long, silvery shell next to a shorter, gold one. Beside them, middle-aged couples, old men, and mothers with small infants all gawk at the morbid display. The local press corps huddle together on the sidewalk, checking photos on viewfinders to make sure they have the best images for the police pages. They are relaxed, cheery; this is their daily bread.

Thirty minutes after the attack, a battered Ford Focus speeds through the crowd and screeches to a halt against the police tape. The wife of one of the victims jumps out and screams hysterically at the olive-clad soldiers guarding the scene. Her swinging arms are held back by her brother, his eyes red with tears. A few feet away, I grab the shoulder of my cameraman and pull him away to make sure he doesn’t get a smack from an angry, grieving relative. Only when I see the pained look on their faces does the loss of human life really sink in. The screams show the suffering of those who knew the man in his best and worst moments, as a husband at the altar, as a father dancing with his daughter on her fifteenth birthday, as a lover in the dark of the night.

Another day. Another murder. In the Mexican Drug War, such violence has become so common that the slaying of five police at a stoplight was a brief tucked in local crime sections. The victims become more numbers for newspaper and government tallies, their human stories and struggling families soon forgotten.

These ambush-style killings account for the vast majority of deaths in the conflict. They are known as
ejecuciones
, or “executions.” Even the name is chilling; it explains that someone has ordered a death sentence on the target. The gunmen rarely miss. Mexico has no death penalty, but the worst days have seen more than sixty executions—two dozen in Ciudad Juárez, more sprinkled over Michoacán, Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Durango, Tijuana. The next-highest number of war victims are people who are kidnapped, murdered, and have their bodies dumped. Deaths in shoot-outs account for a small percentage. This is a war fought by assassins. Their hit-and-run tactics are extremely difficult to defend against.

In the mid-twentieth century, assassination was a lucrative and niche trade in Mexico. The killers were known as
gatilleros
, or “triggermen.” They were skilled professionals who carried on their trade into middle age, using pistols and dispatching their victims at close range, often in the dark of the night.

One of the earliest
gatilleros
was Rodolfo Valdés, a Sinaloan known as the Gitano, or Gypsy. Valdes headed a gang of gunmen called the Dorados, the Golden Ones, who were paid by landowners to kill uppity peasants in the 1940s. This was the origin of many Sinaloan murder squads—to protect the crops and property of the wealthy against agrarian reform. El Gitano is reported to have taken the lives of more than fifty people. He is even alleged to have killed the governor of Sinaloa, who was gunned down in a carnival in Mazatlán in 1944. Governor Rodolfo Loaiza angered landowners by making too many expropriations. He is also reported to have annoyed opium growers by seizures of their crops.
¹

Other professional
gatilleros
worked in Mexico City in the employ of senior politicians and security officials. They did the dirty work that didn’t go in the files. The most famous of these government hit men was José González, who wrote a book about his deeds in 1983. The son of Spaniards, Gonzalez claimed that he carried out more than fifty murders for various officials, but especially Mexico City police chief Arturo “Blackie” Durazo. Durazo was eventually imprisoned for extortion and other crimes.

González personifies the “professional” assassins of old. He had a university degree, didn’t start murdering until he was twenty-eight, and carried on killing into his fifties. In his memoir, he attributes his ability to kill in cold blood to the murder of his own father in a bar brawl. “I believe that this incident sowed in my soul the disdain for the life of others and my eagerness for revenge,” he wrote.
²

In the 1980s, the Colombian mafia revolutionized the murder business. The architect of its killing machine was Isaac Guttnan Esternberg, a Colombian of German descent who worked for Medellín traffickers. Guttnan invented the “school of motorcycle assassins,” to which young men from the slums enrolled in their thousands. He understood that alienated youth can be won by little more than a decent salary and sense of purpose. The assassins still used pistols, but they attacked on motorcycles, with one driver and one shooter. They became known as
sicarios
—from the ancient sicarii, Jewish Zealots who carried small daggers under their cloaks to stab Romans.

In 1986, Guttnan was himself assassinated by a
sicario
.
³

I drive through Medellín to meet a
sicario
. It is a pleasant city. A cool breeze keeps the mountain valley fresh. Airy plazas are illuminated with sculptures of comically plump people based on the paintings of Medellín artist Fernando Botero. The most beautiful women in the world stroll down wide sidewalks.

Back in 1991, Medellín was the most murderous city per capita on the planet with some 6,500 homicides, among a population of 2 million. Now that crown has passed to Ciudad Juárez. But while Medellín has reduced the numbers of killings, it is still very violent, with 2,899 homicides in 2009.
⁴

The man I am going to meet pulled the trigger on several of those hits. German photojournalist Oliver Schmieg arranges the interview. The Munich native has spent eleven years in Colombia and taken incredible photos of clandestine cocaine labs and guerrillas in combat with the army. I am blown away by how dogged and determined Oliver is. He works through his network of narcs, police informers, and street thugs. But the best contact is a former soldier who became chief of security for a prominent Medellín paramilitary leader. The contact pulls strings and Oliver is soon talking to the
sicario
on the telephone. The
sicario
first has to clear the interview with his direct boss, so he asks us to call back. Oliver phones again the next morning and the man says we can come over. We drive nervously to the address.

We arrive at an apartment block in Envigado, a middle-class neighborhood that has long been the heart of operations for the Medellín mafia. A doorman calls to the apartment and we are ushered upstairs. Our man opens the door and invites us to sit down at a large wooden table. The big apartment has little furniture, but a state-of-the-art plasma TV and a PlayStation 3 console.

Gustavo is twenty-four years old and strikingly thin, with light brown skin and crew-cut hair. He is dressed in a trendy green, short-sleeved shirt, Hawaiian shorts, and bright green canvas boots. A bulky childhood friend—and fellow
sicario
—shares the apartment and is pacing around with his shirt off, revealing tattoos on his back. Gustavo sits down with us and pins his elbows to the wooden table, fiddling around with a cigarette tin. At first he is a little nervous. But as we talk, he becomes more friendly and open. We talk for hours. The more we chat, the more I like him. He is clever and charismatic while being modest. I keep forgetting that he is a contract killer. Later I ask myself if it is wrong to like someone who robbed human lives. Can I really separate a human side of someone from the deeds they have done?

The flashy apartment we are in contrasts with the slum where Gustavo grew up. He was born in the
comunas
that snake up steep mountain slopes overlooking Medellín. The neighborhoods of unpainted breeze-block homes with tin roofs were squatted by thousands who swarmed to the city from Colombia’s peaks, valleys, and jungles. Many had fled bombings and firefights between the government and communist guerrillas. Others just came looking for enough money to feed their families.