El Narco (37 page)

But once kingpins are extradited to the United States, many become toads themselves, supertoads. They broker deals to give up other kingpins and tens of millions of dollars in assets. Then drug agents can make more busts and bring in more villains; and the jailed capos can write their memoirs and become movie stars.

This prickly prosecution process, developed over four decades of the war on drugs, is crucial to understanding the future of El Narco in Mexico, because a key question is whether Mexican and American agents can beat the beast of drug trafficking down by arrests and busts. DEA chiefs and the Calderón government keep pursuing this tactic. It has been hard and there have been a lot of casualties, they argue, but if they keep at it, then justice will prevail.

With their reign of terror, cartels often appear like invincible organizations, impervious to attacks from anything that police or soldiers throw at them. But if agents really got their act together, would cartels collapse like paper tigers? Can the good guys actually win the Mexican Drug War and lock El Narco safely behind bars? Or at least if the police arrest enough kingpins, will drug smugglers stop being a criminal insurgency threatening national security and go back to being a regular crime problem?

DEA agent Daniel’s career offers startling insights into the attempt to put El Narco in jail. He has personally infiltrated a major Mexican drug cartel and a Colombian cartel. And he has lived to tell the tale. His story shows what the drug war strategy formed in Washington means on the streets of Mexican border cities.

Like many soldiers, Daniel comes from the rough end of town. DEA undercover agents are the coarse cousins of well-heeled CIA spooks. A Harvard-educated Anglo-Saxon is unlikely to be any good setting up cocaine deals with the Medellín Cartel. So the DEA needs people like Daniel, who was born in Tijuana, hung round with a California street gang affiliated with the Crips, and spent his teenage years beating the hell out of anyone who got too close. He was saved from a life of crime, he says, by joining the U.S. marines. He went to Kuwait and fired a machine gun in the First Gulf War before going to the trenches in the drug war.

I meet Daniel in an apartment and he tells me his story over Tecate beer and pizza. He is powerfully built, wears a suit and tie, and uses precise militaristic terms, common of veterans and cops. But his wayward youth also shines through and I catch him reciting old hip-hop and punk songs from the eighties, from Suicidal Tendencies to Niggaz With Attitude. He also loves the 1983 gangster movie
Scarface.
It helps to have the same cinematic taste as the mobsters you are dealing with.

“
Scarface
was the best movie ever. It was the American Dream, especially to an immigrant; the dream of coming to America and being successful.”

Daniel already knew something of the world of drug trafficking when he watched
Scarface
as a kid in Imperial Beach, San Diego. He had spent his infancy over the line in Tijuana when the marijuana trade boomed in the seventies. One of his first memories was seeing his father invite strange men to their family home and pull stashes of money out of a secret compartment in a mahogany center table. Looking back, he believes his father was himself running weed. Then at age ten, his mother passed away and Daniel went to live with his grandparents in the United States.

“My mother was very hard with me and then she died five days before my birthday and I harbored a lot of resentment. That was one of the demons that haunted me throughout my life. I did a lot of things and I didn’t fucking care.”

Moving home and country was a tough challenge for a preadolescent. Daniel couldn’t speak fluent English until he was fourteen, and by that time he was a troublesome kid and got thrown out of three high schools because of fighting and other misbehavior. Some of his friends were stealing cars or motorcycles and bringing drugs over the border, and Daniel was smoking weed and getting drunk a lot, especially on peppermint and schnapps.

“I was one of those bad drunks who ruined the party. Every time I was about to get in a fight, I stripped off my shirt. I was very into lifting weights and I did wrestling in high school. I wanted to show off and say, ‘Are you sure you want to fuck with me?’ It was a ritual.”

Daniel finally got his high school diploma at a last-chance school in San Diego. Then it was straight into the Marine Corps. He enjoyed the physical training and left behind the weed-smoking wastoid. Talented at a number of sports, he was selected for an elite unit within the marines, and the military seemed to be a lot of fun. Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and it wasn’t such fun anymore. After training in Oman, Daniel went into a hole in the desert and fired a SAW at Iraqi troops as they poured out of Kuwait City, probably killing many.

“It was sad because people surrendered. But some of them fought, especially the Republican Guard, so they got what they got.

“I froze my ass off. They said it was going to be hot so they threw all our cold-weather gear away. Then it was fucking freezing. It poured and rained the whole time, and the holes would fill up with water. It was miserable.”

After four years in the marines, Daniel went back to civvy street carrying some of his misery home in the form of Gulf War syndrome, a condition believed to be caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, whose symptoms range from headaches to birth defects in the children of veterans. His military experience got him his first job busting traffickers, in California’s antidrug task force. Alongside other veterans, Daniel would buzz around the state in a helicopter carrying an M16 automatic rifle and raiding marijuana plantations. Most were run by Mexicans and located inside national parks and forests and included some huge farms with up to twelve thousand plants. During one bust, some thugs from Michoacán fired at them with Kalashnikovs.

“I was getting close to the plantation and they fired. We hit the ground first, kneeling down, and we fired back, and they were gone. These people have balls, they are crazy.”

Daniel’s next job was in the U.S. Customs Service busting runners as they came over the border. Because of the huge quantity of traffic at Tijuana–San Diego, agents can only toss a tiny percentage of vehicles. So the key for Daniel and other agents was to try to read people and smell who was dirty. Daniel found he had a special talent for spotting smugglers.

“It is like a sense. I look at them and see if the person that is driving does not match the car or the car does not match the person. I get close up to their face and say, ‘How are you doing?’ And if you’re carrying a bunch of money or drugs, I’m going to get all over your ass.

“The problem was, people on the streets knew me because I grew up there. They would say, ‘This is a contradiction. We used to smoke grass together.’ Well, that was then, this is now. To avoid retribution, I had to segregate myself and move way up north.”

As Daniel scored big results busting marijuana, crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin, DEA agents spotted his talent and invited him over. Suddenly, he was a federal agent on a higher salary and working on the big investigations; his career had rocketed. First he would stay at the border and be called in when customs agents had made a bust. His job was to flip the smuggler and persuade him to work for the DEA. He found his knowledge of border culture gave him a special talent at turning suspects into informants.

“I don’t even need a bad cop. I just need me because I sell the product. You did what you did. That is on you. How can I help you go forward? I can’t go back and erase your fucking life. If you want to move forward, let’s do it. I sell myself, I sell myself the way I reach people and the way I talk to them.

“I don’t lie to them. I already know what is in the car. I know where you are going. Either you take it and I’ll arrest the people who it really belongs to, or you can just sit on this shit for a while and just do your fucking time. If it’s coke, heroin, or ice you are fucked. You are fucking fucked. Don’t worry about it. The only way I can help you is if you fucking take it where you need to go. I’m not lying about any of the things, they are all true. If you have got five or ten keys [kilos] you are fucked. If you have got more than that, you are fucking destroyed.”

Daniel would persuade the smugglers to take the drugs to their delivery point, followed by agents. Then they could bust a whole drug warehouse—in San Diego or often up in Los Angeles. Or they could keep following the gang and bust a whole smuggling operation.

Daniel also learned the art of cultivating informants and training them to get deeper into the cartels. As the “rats” get closer to the DEA, they can be used for a whole range of tasks, such as introducing other infiltrators to higher-ranking mobsters.

“Informants are a big key. They can say they are my buddy, say they went to school with me for ten years. They can make a whole bunch of stuff up. As long as you treat each other like it is true, the gangsters will believe it. You have got to believe it too.”

Use of informants is ethically questionable. The DEA ends up paying money to dubious characters, albeit toward busting bigger drug loads and bigger criminals. In theory, agents cannot pay informants actively involved in criminal activities. In practice, agents try not to know what their informants are up to. As they admit, “these guys are not choirboys.” Agents are also worried the informant could be a double agent who is feeding info to the cartel. Or a triple agent. Daniel discovered you have to push into an informant’s mind to make sure he is playing straight.

“I’ve got to make sure they are not fucking lying and setting me up so I can fail. Who wants to fucking die for nothing? I can’t do that.

“Informants are all dirty. All of them. Except maybe they are clean for a moment. They are like a dirty person who took a shower that day. Guess what? He’s clean for that day. Tomorrow he is dirty again.”

During the Mexican Drug War, two high-profile cases of bad informants have caused scandals for American law enforcement. They didn’t involve the DEA, but Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, an agency that is part of the Bush-created Homeland Security department and has also moved into fighting drug gangs. ICE agents broke the rules and hired informants who carried out murders in Ciudad Juárez. It caused a bad stink on both sides of the border—thugs on the American payroll killing in Mexico.
¹

That was a case of bad agents. But even the best agents have to take risks because the very nature of the drug trade sows conspiracy. It is not a crime like a bank heist, where sobbing victims will help the probe and testify against the robbers. In the narcotics trade, billions of dollars spread round among thousands of people. There is no classic victim—only drug takers on the street, who willingly take their dose and haven’t a clue about who is moving it. So drug agents have to infiltrate the industry through informants and undercover. They have to get into the espionage game.

After two and a half years flipping smugglers at the border, DEA officers saw that Daniel had huge potential. He had a perfect profile for undercover work south of the Rio Grande: Mexican, tough, street-smart, an ex-marine, and with a proven track record. So they sent him to the school where agents learn to work undercover—in a two-week course.

“You can’t learn shit in two weeks. Not a damn fucking thing. That is just for protocol, and that is just to check to say you have been to it. You learn nothing more than the streets will teach you growing up.”

With a license to work undercover, Daniel started going after major international trafficking operations. He didn’t care about kilos anymore; he was looking for tons.

Several years into this work, he built up his huge case in Panama. He flew down to Central America’s skyscraper paradise, packed with businessmen and criminals from all over the planet, glitzy discos, sparkling casinos, and high-class prostitutes, all in a sweltering tropical climate. Like most big cases, this one started with an informant, a Colombian who inherited a transportation company from his father. The man introduced Daniel to major traffickers, and he built up the relationship from there.

Modern drug traffickers contract a lot of their transportation work out to freelancers. This saves them the hassle of owning so many ships or airplanes and cuts down the number of their own people close to the product. This all helps create the diverse structure of cartels, so much tougher to bring down than all-encompassing organizations.

Daniel posed as one of the freelancers tendering transport services, offering them a price per ton to move cocaine on his ship. That way, the traffickers would put a huge amount of product onto a boat that the DEA was really controlling—and give the agents a pile of their cash. It is a pretty simple sting when you break it down; but it was on an aggressive scale that the cartels hadn’t caught onto.

To be convincing, Daniel had to build up his role as freelance drug trafficker, his alter ego. He shows me a photo of himself in that character. He has his long hair with a bandanna tied round it and a wild look in his eyes.

“I created somebody else but very realistic so I didn’t fuck it up. The difference between that guy and me”—he clicks his fingers—“it could be me right now. That is the problem. He is a lot like me. I grew up so raw that it is nothing. People ask me, ‘Are going to go into your mode?’ What mode? I am that fucking guy.”

Daniel rented out a huge suite at an old Panama hotel where all the traffickers hung out. He would also go to the best table-dance clubs and let himself be seen throwing money round. It was all part of being convincing. (The DEA footed the bill for his hotel, but the strip clubs came out of his own pocket.) He went back and forth to Panama over several months building relations with the traffickers. He would meet them at flash restaurants. First he met with one, then two, then four. Then one time he sat with eight Colombian traffickers.

“It is a little concerning because that is a lot of eyes looking at you. I broke the ice and talked about a soccer game. I follow a lot of soccer—I like Arsenal and I like Boca Juniors—and then we talked for hours. They are very eager and hungry for money.