Gangland (26 page)

Puroll was later fired for remarks made to another reporter that he had been approached by cartel members who offered him cash to cooperate. “They didn't want me to sell or buy the stuff,” he said. “Just that they'd make it worth my while to look the other way out in the desert if I bumped into them.” Although he did not say he took the bribes, he did not follow police procedure by arresting the men, reporting the offers or calling for backup.

While Puroll's integrity suffered serious setbacks, Babeu was still making hay with the event. In June, he appeared on television to discuss the deaths of two alleged drug smugglers (one of whom had been caught and deported seven times) in the same part of the desert Puroll had been shot in. He showed night vision videos of men with assault rifles carrying backpacks he alleged were full of drugs to vehicles parked on Interstate 8 in an area of Pinal County well known to be a highway for illegal immigrants. “How is it that you see pictures like these, not American with semi and fully automatic rifles. How is that okay?” he asked, claiming that he had lost control of large parts of the county to the cartels. “We are outgunned, we are outmanned and we don't have the resources here locally to fight this.” He pointed out that many areas of Arizona that had been popular recreation spots now had signs warning that dangerous drug smugglers frequented the area.

He was not alone. While the mainstream media and many other politicians argued that Babeu was overstating the cartels' presence on U.S. soil, his supporters went online with their observations. One of them, syndicated conservative radio host Roger Hedgecock, published photos of warning signs posted by the U.S. federal government that read (in part): “Danger—Public Warning Travel Not Recommended” and pointed out that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had closed off a 3,500-acre section of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge to visitors because of what he called cartel activity. The staff at Buenos Aires played the incident down. Bonnie Swarbrick, the park's outdoor recreation planner and spokeswoman, said that the closure was to allow “National Guard and construction workers to patrol the area” without encountering the public. She also said that since the park had replaced its old barbed-wire fence with a 12-foot wall in 2006, there had been fewer sightings of illegal immigrants in the park. She did not explain what exactly the National Guard was doing in the park, however.

Babeu and his supporters were not convinced. When asked if the 1,200 National Guard troops promised by President Obama to reinforce Border Patrol would help, Babeu replied: “It will fall short. What is truly needed is 3,000 soldiers for Arizona alone.”

A month later, another Arizona sheriff —Maricopa County's Joe Arpaio, a nationally known opponent of illegal immigration who styled himself “America's Toughest Sheriff” after his treatment of inmates had been challenged as cruel and unethical—made the news. A man who wished to remain anonymous told local news that his wife had received a garbled Spanish message on her voice mail that offered a $1-million bounty on Arpaio's head and $1,000 for anyone who wanted to join the Juárez Cartel. “She showed it to me. I was kind of disgusted,” he said. “I reported it to the sheriff's department yesterday ... they said they were going to direct the threat squad on it.” It also gave instructions to pass the threat along, and soon other people in the area were reporting that they had received the same message.

The sheriff's office took the threat seriously. “Arpaio gets threats pretty routinely, but obviously with this heightened awareness of his role in the immigration issue we've got to take this one a little bit more seriously with a million-dollar contract out on him,” said county spokeswoman Lisa Allen. “It's going so many different places that our folks are looking at it and thinking well at any given point in time it could land in front of some crazy person who thinks ‘I can do that.'”

Cartel involvement in the banking crisis

Any thought that the Mexican cartels' presence in the U.S. was local and small-time were shattered in the summer of 2010. As part of a widespread investigation into U.S. banks after the economic collapse of 2008, financial giant Wells Fargo made a plea bargain with the federal prosecutors. The deal was made in March, but only made public in July.

As financial institutions all over America were failing in 2008, Wells Fargo had purchased North Carolina-based Wachovia, which the federal government had forced to sell its assets to prevent a failure. According to a report by Bloomberg World News (which broke the story), investigators found that Wachovia “didn't do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican currency exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That's the largest violation of the
Bank Secrecy Act
, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history—a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product.” In a three-year period, one loosely run American bank had in effect laundered as much money for the cartels as was legally earned of all of Mexico in a year.

The investigation began in April 2006 when Mexican soldiers seized a DC-9 cargo jet at the Ciudad del Carmen airport. Inside were 5.7 tons of cocaine in 128 identical briefcases. The cocaine was linked to the Sonora Cartel (which had since been absorbed by the Sinaloa Cartel), and the jet had been purchased by money that had been laundered by Wachovia and then deposited into accounts in North Carolina-based Bank of America.

“Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” said the lead investigator, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Sloman. His team also uncovered more cartel deposits at Bank of America and London-based HSBC, and that Miami-based American Express Bank had paid a fine in 2007 for a smaller version of the same problem.

Later, an investigation of Arizona outlets of Colorado-based Western Union, the world's biggest money transfer firm, showed widespread corruption when it came to dealing with cartel cash. Undercover officers visiting more than 20 Western Union offices were allowed to use multiple names, pass fictitious identification and smudge their fingerprints on documents, investigators said in court records. “Their allegiance was to the smugglers,” said Arizona's assistant attorney general Cameron Holmes. “What they thought about during work was ‘How may I please my highest spending customers the most?' In all the time we did undercover operations, we never once had a bribe turned down.”

As 2011 opened, there was little hope the war would end soon. Statistically, things were actually getting much worse. The death toll in 2010 was 15,273—a 59 percent increase over 2009 and an incredible 42 people killed per day.

But perhaps even a bigger toll was the widespread feeling that Mexico had drawn itself into a war without an end. “After the news of El Ponchis broke, the whole country just kind of got depressed,” said Jaime R, a former Juárez shop owner who now lives in El Paso. “It just seemed like the stories were all the same; you'd just see that the numbers and places had changed, but it was always the same.” Like many Mexicans, Jaime R checks Facebook and Twitter frequently to ensure that his family and friends are safe. “You can't trust the news,” he said. “So you have to trust your family.”

Not long after El Ponchis was arrested, the news was dominated by a huge gunfight in Apatzingán. It began on the morning of Thursday, December 9, 2010, when masked gunmen opened fire on Federales. The armed men then confiscated cars, used them to barricade all five road entrances into the city and set them on fire. While they were collecting the cars, they killed the teenage daughter of a former Apatzingán mayor and an eight-month-old baby who was riding in the back of a taxi with his mother.

The firefight went on for two solid days. Five Federales and one more bystander were killed. Videos of cartel members carrying away their dead showed one body that police claimed belonged to Nazario “El Más Loco” (the Craziest) Moreno González, leader of La Familia cartel.

After the shooting stopped, one of the captured cartel members, Sergio Moreno Godinez, confirmed that El Más Loco had indeed been killed in the fighting, but he did not know where his body was. He also claimed that La Familia was in decline and that an e-mail campaign that was sent to reporters all over the state of Michoacán in which La Familia promised to quit trafficking in exchange for total amnesty was real.

Whether they were ready to give up or not, they were implicated in a massacre not long after. At 1 a.m. on January 8, 2011, police were called to Acapulco's Plaza Sendero, a shopping mall on the east side of the city, which is rarely seen by tourists, to investigate a fire. When they arrived, they found a group of cars, some of which had been set ablaze. Once they had doused the flames, authorities found the decapitated bodies of 15 men in the twenties. In another car at the other end of the parking lot, they found another body of a man of 30, head intact. They also uncovered two notes signed by “El Chapo's people” that threatened Los Zetas and La Familia. As morning broke in Acapulco, 13 more bodies were found, including six stuffed in the backseat of a taxi parked behind a supermarket a block away from Plaza Sendero.

In fact, since the capture of Teodoro “El Teo” García Simental last January led to a drop-off in violence in Tijuana, Acapulco had been getting more violent as rival cartels fought for the Pacific port. On the day before the Mexican Open tennis tournament was to be played there on February 21, broad-daylight shootouts killed 13 people. Three heads were found just outside a traffic tunnel downtown on March 7.

Tourism from North America fell off sharply, down 50 percent from the almost-as-violent year before. But Acapulco's hotels reported 90 percent occupancy rates as Mexicans—eager to take advantage of bargain prices and perhaps desensitized to the violence around them—flocked to the resort.

And Acapulco was hardly alone. At 4 a.m. on February 28, seven naked, tortured, decapitated bodies were found hanging from three separate bridges in Mazatlán on the Mazatlán-Tepic highway. The next day, a collection of bodies (authorities said 20, social media said 70) was uncovered in the village of La Gavia in the municipality of San Miguel Totolapan in Guerrero. It created little buzz in the media and was often reported as “another narcofosas,” a word coined by Mexican media to refer to a mass grave filled by the cartels. The following week, a gunfight broke out between elements of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel at 6:50 a.m. in the town square of Abasolo in Tamaulipas. Before the army came to stop it, 18 men were dead. And two days later, on March 10, curious people in Santiago Tangamandapio in Michoacán approached a car that they found stopped in the middle of a busy intersection at 6 a.m. Inside was the dead body of the city's director of public security, Jorge Hernández Espinoza.

Violence was relatively constant in Juárez, but it was silenced for a brief period on February 3 when a storm that sent blizzards through much of North America, dumped a few inches of snow on the city. There were 28 auto accidents in Juárez that day, but no fatalities.

Arizona candidates for governor face off

As the Arizona gubernatorial election approached, political tensions and rhetoric started to become more intense. Democratic challenger Terry Goddard accused incumbent Brewer of spreading false information regarding Mexican cartels beheading illegal immigrants in the Arizona desert. “I'm astonished, frankly, everybody who [has] studied this knows there are no beheadings,” Goddard said, citing a survey of state medical examiners. “Arizona has the lowest violent crime rate we've had since 1983, our law enforcement has done a great job, and why the governor won't simply say I was wrong, there were no beheadings, Arizona is safe, I do not understand, this is hurting us incredibly.”

Brewer did not answer Goddard's accusations directly. Instead, on October 10, 2010 a discovery was made that convinced many in Arizona that the Mexican Drug War had indeed moved north of the border. Martin Alejandro Cota Monroy lived in Perris, California, a predominantly Hispanic city in Riverside County. He was an illegal immigrant and professional drug trafficker, working in association with the Sinaloa Cartel.

That spring, he was ferrying a shipment of 400 pounds of marijuana and a small amount of meth for the cartel when he decided to keep it, and sell it himself. When his contacts in U.S. asked him where the drugs were, Cota Monroy told them that they had been intercepted by the Border Patrol.

They weren't convinced for long and Cota Monroy was kidnapped the next time he was in Mexico. The men who kidnapped him were hired to kill him, but he managed to bargain with them, saying he would pay them back for the shipment, putting his house in Perris up as collateral.

They released him, but when they found out that Cota Monroy did not actually own the house, his fate was sealed.

At about 5:00 a.m., a man talking to his girlfriend at a row of townhouses in Chandler, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix that had been named to
Forbes
magazine's “most boring cities in the U.S.” list) noticed some Hispanic men arguing a few doors away and then leaving in a Ford Expedition SUV with California plates. He called police. They arrived at the house at about 5:30 and found the door open. Cota Monroy's body was just inside and his head was a few feet away. His body and head both showed signs of significant trauma and torture. “It was a very gruesome scene,” Chandler police detective David Ramer said. “Anytime you see a headless body stabbed multiple times, obviously that's gruesome. And this is a message being sent—not only are they going to kill you but they're going to dismember your body, and ‘If you cross us, this is what happens.'”

An investigation into Cota Monroy's death led to the arrest of Tuscon-based illegal immigrant Crisantos Moroyoqui, who worked for the PEI Estatales/El Chapo organization, better known as the Sinaloa Cartel. Three other men—including one identified as “El Joto” (the Queer) were QMAT fugitives. It was alleged that the men were part of El Gio, an enforcer unit operating on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. “The cartel hired hit men specifically to kill him,” said Detective Dave Ramer, spokesman for the Chandler police. “He lied his way out of being killed the first time. He said he was going to put up his house for collateral to pay for the drugs, but he didn't own a house. You're going to say whatever you can to save your life.”