El Narco (40 page)

“From L.A. they will break it into segments and then fucking disperse it. It can go to the Midwest, either Minnesota or South Dakota. But it can in fact go all the way from L.A. to New York or Boston or Chicago. Why? Why do you think? Because in L.A., a kilo of cocaine could be eighteen grand. Take it to New York, it is about twenty-five a kilo. That is seven grand profit.”

In other words, once in the United States, drugs move by a tangled web of routes all over the country. New York gets kilos of cocaine that have moved through Tijuana, passing through the Arellano Félix Cartel, and also cocaine bricks that have passed through the territory of the Juárez Cartel and the Zetas. Agents do make some maps of these drug corridors, but they look like spaghetti-style knots, and all roads lead to New York City. All the gangs sell their narcotics in the Big Apple, and none try to claim it as their own. It is not anyone’s turf, but everyone’s turf. And New Yorkers’ bottomless appetite for drugs makes a big enough market to sustain this.

Within this web, Los Angeles is a hub, a major redistribution point for drugs. The other major hubs are considered Houston, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. These hubs tend to have drugs from the cartels that control the nearby border cities—you find more Tijuana Cartel dope in Los Angeles and more Zeta dope in Houston. But no evidence suggests these cartels have imposed monopolies on these cities. Neither Los Angeles nor Houston has seen significant violence related to cartel warfare in Mexico. Once in America, it seems, traffickers don’t care who else is selling. The monopoly, and all the violence, is soaked up on the Mexican side of the border.

One exception to this free-for-all rule could be Phoenix, Arizona, which has seen a rash of drug-related kidnappings in recent years. Some commentators scream this shows the Mexican Drug War is taking root in the United States. In 2008, there were 368 abductions, making Phoenix the kidnapping capital of America.
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Back in Mexico, rumors say the Sinaloa Cartel has claimed Phoenix as its sole property. The city is just 160 miles from Sonora, which is the core border state controlled by the Sinaloan mafia.

I drive round the seething-hot desert city of Phoenix looking at the homes where the abductions have taken place. Almost all are large bungalows in predominantly Mexican neighborhoods. It is soon revealed that most of the kidnappings aren’t about drugs at all—they are about human trafficking. The Sonora-Arizona corridor with its vast desert is the biggest path for undocumented migrants looking for the American Dream. Once they arrive in Phoenix hoping to go out and make their fortunes, the hired smugglers demand an extra $1,000 or so from their families before the migrants are released.

This migrant extortion is a rough game. Victims are often badly beaten until they pay up. Girls describe being raped. It is a traumatic first experience in the United States. But it has nothing to do with the drug trade. Rather it is another symptom of a broken immigration system, in which migrants are given jobs but not papers.

Some of the kidnappings are, however, connected to drugs. Sergeant Tommy Thompson, a chirpy officer in the Phoenix Police Department, says they usually suspect narcotics are involved when the ransom demands are high, ranging from $30,000 to $1 million.

“I know the average person can’t get thirty thousand dollars cash together at the drop of a hat, let alone three hundred thousand. And quite often the kidnappers throw in, as part of that ransom, the request for illegal drugs as well.

“Sometimes they will smash in the victim’s hands with bricks. But we don’t see the violence in Mexico where they are cutting fingers off or cutting hands off.”

Sergeant Thompson shows me a house where such a kidnapping took place. The nice-looking brick home has a double garage and a basketball court. The homeowner, a Mexican national, was pulling out of the house one night when gangsters boxed in his car and put a gun to his head. Neighbors saw the kidnapping and called the police. (Authorities hear of many of these abductions from neighbors rather than family members themselves.) Phoenix’s special antikidnapping unit then hit the case hard, with masked police storming the neighborhood. Seeing they were being targeted, the kidnappers released the victim and ran for their lives. Even though the victim may have been a drug dealer, Sergeant Thompson says, it is worth the effort to save him.

“The victim came out of this okay and that is the important thing. No matter what these people who are kidnapped are involved in, first and foremost we see them as victims, as human beings.

“Now if the kidnappers fire rounds, those rounds don’t discriminate between innocent victims and non-innocent victims and that is where we’re concerned. And the bottom line is that it is happening on our streets.”

The Phoenix Police Department has thrown a lot of resources into rescuing these drug dealers from kidnappers. Sometimes a hundred officers can be drawn in to bust a victim out of a house. They are absolutely right to hit back hard; it is best to hammer the problem straightaway rather than let it get worse. The Phoenix zero-tolerance approach seems to have borne some fruit. In 2009, kidnappings showed a 14 percent drop. (Although with 318 abductions, it was still concerning.)
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However, while they are responding to the problem, neither the Phoenix police nor the DEA can offer much explanation as to why these drug-related kidnappings are happening. One speculation is that freelance gunslingers like to jack drug traffickers. While that may explain some cases, it seems unlikely that rogue crooks would really have the balls to take on traffickers linked to the Sinaloa Cartel. Another theory is that the pressure of enforcement means more loads are captured, so gangsters are kidnapping people to make them pay up for lost drugs. That makes more sense, but seizures at the Arizona-Sonora border have not significantly risen in recent years.

It is telling that the kidnappings mushroomed in 2008, just as Mexican cartels exploded into their civil war. Perhaps they do show the Sinaloa Cartel is trying to assert itself in its principal hub north of the border and make traffickers there pay their taxes. But whatever is happening, it is still on a thankfully more peaceful scale than in Mexico. The number of murders in Phoenix has actually been going down: from 167 in 2008 to 122 in 2009.
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Mexican cartels are the biggest importers of narcotics into the United States. They smuggle an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine; the majority of imported marijuana and meth; and a substantial amount of heroin. DEA has acknowleged this in congressional hearings for more than a decade. But less publicized is that Mexican gangsters are also moving further down the distribution ladder. In the last five years, Mexicans have increasingly been selling drugs at the kilo level in cities and towns across the United States. This is borne out by busts of Mexican nationals in possession of wholesale quantities of cocaine bricks, brown heroin, and sparkling crystal, especially in the South. They are also pushing into corners of the country they had never before ventured, from the Great Lakes region to the Midwest. In the days of Matta Ballesteros in the eighties, cocaine wholesale was typically handled by Colombians and Anglo- and African-Americans, but now it is often handled by Mexicans.

This development increases the amount of money flowing into Mexican organized crime and is another factor why the drug war has heated to boiling point south of the border. Mexican gangs have expanded toward both ends of the supply chain, both nearer to the leaf in Colombia and nearer to the nose in America. But in the United States, the creep of El Narco doesn’t seem to have had adverse effects. The drug trade stays the drug trade; who cares if the dealer flogging the kilo brick is a white biker, a Jamaican yardie, or a Mexican? It is the same brick of yayo.

The most comprehensive study of Mexican cartel activity across the United States was done by the government’s National Drug Intelligence Center in 2009.
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They compiled data from local, state, and federal police agencies across the United States and used the information to draw a detailed map of El Narco’s networks north of the border. The map shows cartel activity in 230 cities and in every state, even Alaska and Hawaii. In two thirds of the cities with a narco presence, the report says, links with specific cartels were found. For example, the Sinaloa Cartel was identified in Nashville and Cincinnati among other places, while the Juárez Cartel was traced to Colorado Springs and Dodge City. In other cities, agents could not say for certain whom the gangsters were working for.

The report sparked alarm about the scope of the Mexican mobs, but it left a lot of questions unanswered. It fails to explain exactly what type of representation cartels have in these cities. And it doesn’t make clear how the links back to Sinaloa or Juárez are made. Have agents traced phone calls? Or been given solid info from informants? Or are they are more speculative connections? These answers are needed to make better sense of how deeply entrenched El Narco has become in the United States. Because if the crook serving up blow in Bismarck, North Dakota, just happens to have brought some drugs that once belonged to the Sinaloa Cartel, it is one thing. If he is on the direct payroll of Chapo Guzmán, that is a lot more concerning, signaling that the ruthless techniques employed in Mexico could be used there.

Several ongoing criminal cases offer deeper insight into El Narco’s American connection. One of the biggest is in Chicago, home to a booming drug market and a deep-rooted Mexican community. In 2009, a Chicago federal court indicted top Sinaloan Cartel leaders, including Chapo Guzmán, in what the district attorney called “the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago.” The numbers were huge. The indictments said the Sinaloan Cartel smuggled two tons of cocaine a month to the Windy City, bringing it in on tractor trailers to Illinois warehouses. The gangsters had allegedly made $5.8 billion bringing drugs into the region over almost two decades. Forty-six people were indicted. Among them were Sinaloans, such as Chapo Guzmán himself, and a number of Americans, of all races, accused of moving the drugs in Illinois.
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At the heart of the alleged conspiracy were Mexican American twin brothers Pedro and Margarito Flores, who were twenty-eight at the time of their arrests in 2009. Chicago detectives say the Flores twins come from a large family with long links to trafficking into Chicago’s Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods. The brothers took over a barbershop and a restaurant, but court documents say they were also the main point men for bringing the Sinaloan narcotics into Chicago.

Problems began when the Sinaloan Cartel was split by civil war in 2008. As Chapo Guzmán and the Beard Beltrán Leyva cut off heads back home in Culiacán, they also bickered over their contacts in Chicago. According to the indictments, both Beltrán Leyva and Chapo put violent pressure on the twins to buy from them rather than their rival. Amid this conflict, DEA agents infiltrated the operation and busted the twins and others in the conspiracy.

What is interesting is how the Sinaloan capos fought over the Flores twins as customers. The Flores brothers bought drugs from the Sinaloans rather than worked for them; they were clients rather than employees. The Flores twins also, according to documents, sold the drugs on rather than paying people to move them. As the indictment says:

“The Flores Crew in turn sold the cocaine and heroin for cash to wholesale customers in the Chicago, Illinois, area, as well as to customers in Detroit, Michigan; Cincinnati, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; New York; Vancouver, British Columbia; Columbus, Ohio; and elsewhere. Wholesale customers in these cities further distributed the cocaine and heroin to other cities, including Milwaukee, Wisconsin.”

The conspiracy shows a chain of sale rather than a top-down organization. Chicago gangsters may be working with the Sinaloa Cartel, but they are a separate entity. They play by American crime tactics, which include the odd murder and breaking some bones here and there, rather than Mexican crime tactics, such as massacres of entire families and mass graves. Groups of fifty thugs armed with RPGs and Kalashnikovs have thankfully not been seen anywhere near Chicago. Yet.

Getting down to the street level—the retail of grams of cocaine or ounces of ganja—there is no evidence of any Mexican cartel involvement on American corners. This may sound confusing. Surely, Mexicans are busted selling drugs all over the United States; and surely those drugs have passed through Mexico. That is correct. But Mexican cartels themselves are only interested in the wholesale of narcotics in America. Chapo Guzmán doesn’t care about a few grams being sold to a junkie on a street corner in Baltimore; he is busy making billions bringing in drugs by the tons.

This retail drug trade is run by a huge array of people, from college kids selling ganja in their Harvard dorms to gangbangers serving up crack in New Orleans. Like most drug dealers on the bottom rung, they have no idea where their product comes from beyond the local supplier who sells them doggie bags.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans are certainly among this army of street sellers, and their numbers have in recent years increased. Much has been made of migrants selling meth to sustain workers through long shifts at meat factories. Mexicans can be found flogging drugs on corners from San Francisco to Queens. But all evidence suggests they are doing it as part of local gangs or as individuals rather than kicking to or receiving any money from the cartels.

Jacobo Guillen, the pudgy-faced meth addict, sold crystal in East Los Angeles. His experience confirms that El Narco hasn’t penetrated to the street level. He had no contact at all with the Mexican cartels, he says. Instead, he worked for the U.S. gang the Mexican Mafia. Despite its name, the Mexican Mafia is entirely north of the border, born and based in American prisons. It is, of course, run by people of Mexican descent. As Jacobo says: