Rosarito Beach (8 page)

U
.S. Marshal Kevin Walker's job was to get Tito Olivera from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to the Federal Courthouse, to protect the court during Tito's arraignment, then get Tito back to the correctional center. And although he thought that Jim Davis was overstating what Caesar Olivera might do to free his brother, Walker decided he couldn't take the chance that Davis might be right. Kevin Walker was not going to allow the Olivera cartel to keep him from doing his job.

The Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego is connected to the Federal Courthouse by a tunnel through which prisoners are taken for court appearances. Mother Nature, however, had caused the normal transport process to be changed. About a year before, an earthquake registering 5.9 on the Richter scale struck San Diego. There had been no fatalities, but cracks were found in the courthouse transport tunnel, and city engineers decided it needed to be reinforced. Then, as is often the case with construction work, a job that should have taken three months managed to expand to a year and triple in cost.

What this all meant was that for the last twelve months, it had been necessary to drive prisoners from the jail to the courthouse. Typically, they were transported in groups in a van with a couple of marshals for escorts. The van had benches in the back and metal rings in the floor that prisoners could be chained to; the van wasn't armored. The good news was that the door-to-door distance from the correctional center to the courthouse was only a quarter mile and it took only a few minutes to transport the prisoners.

Walker also figured that Caesar Olivera's people knew everything there was to know about the prisoner-transfer process because a lot of cartel people had spent time in the jail. Furthermore, he suspected that Jim Davis had probably been right when he said at the meeting that Olivera had MCC jailers on his payroll.

The first thing Walker did was call the city bureaucrat in charge of the tunnel work and tell him that no workers would be allowed back into the construction zone until after Tito's arraignment. Walker said he didn't want to deal with potential security problems posed by the workers. When the bureaucrat asked Walker who was going to pay for the delay, Walker told him to send a memo to his boss, the Attorney General of the United States. This was Walker's way of saying
I could give a shit
.

To transport Tito, Walker scrapped the van that was normally used and obtained an armored truck, like the type used to move money from bank to bank. He also told the MCC guards that Tito would be transported alone, not as part of any group. In addition to the armored truck, he arranged for an SUV containing four heavily armed marshals to escort the vehicle holding Tito. He suspected that everything he told the guards would eventually be relayed to somebody in Olivera's organization.

To get from the jail to the courthouse, the transport vehicle would drive up a loading ramp on the north side of the correctional center, take a left onto F Street, travel two short blocks on F, turn left on First Avenue, cross E Street, turn left on Broadway, then left again on Front Street and drop Tito off at the back of the courthouse. About five short blocks, the distance made longer because of one-way streets. SDPD patrol cars would stop traffic while Tito was being transported, blocking the cross streets: where First Avenue intersected F Street, E Street, and Broadway. Total elapsed time to get Tito from the jail to the court should be just over a minute.

Inside the courthouse, additional U.S. marshals brought in from L.A. would stand guard near the metal detectors and provide security for the court during the arraignment. These men would be armed with assault rifles as well as sidearms. The courtroom would be swept by bomb-sniffing dogs half an hour before the arraignment.

The correctional officers at MCC, a liaison from the San Diego Police Department, and Walker's men were all briefed on the plan. At six in the morning, Walker did a dry run from the jail to the courthouse to see how long it would take to get Tito from his cell to a chair in front of the judge's bench.

—

A
t eight-thirty a.m., Tito, dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit, was led down to the transport holding area by two MCC jailers and two federal marshals. Tito's hands and ankles were manacled. As soon as Tito was in the holding area, one of Walker's men—a man who was the same height and weight as Tito and had the same light brown hair—put on a jumpsuit. Manacles were placed on his hands and legs, but the manacles weren't locked.

“What the hell's going on?” Tito said.

“Shut your mouth,” Walker said.

Moving rapidly—so rapidly that anyone outside the jail would get just the briefest glimpse of the man—marshals surrounded the Tito imposter and hustled him into the back of the armored truck. One marshal then joined the imposter in the truck and four other marshals climbed into the SUV that would lead the armored truck to the courthouse. Walker told the driver of the SUV that he was to depart in exactly three minutes.

As the MCC guards stood there looking confused, Walker took the leg irons off Tito Olivera, then turned to one of his men, pointed at the MCC guards, and said, “You keep these guys here for five minutes and don't allow any of them to use a cell phone.” Then Walker and four other marshals—one of whom was holding a large bolt-cutter—walked Tito in the direction of the tunnel that led to the courthouse.

“Hey! You can't go that way,” an MCC guard called out. “The tunnel's closed.”

Walker ignored the guard.

Because of the construction under way to repair the damage caused by the earthquake, the normal door and control point leading to the tunnel had been replaced with a temporary wall and a door large enough to bring materials and equipment into the tunnel. But because MCC was still a jail, the wall was made of half-inch steel plates and the door was also steel. The door had a padlock on it, and a guard watched that door twenty-four hours a day.

As the MCC guard asked him what the hell he was doing, Walker cut the padlock on the tunnel door. Then, with one big hand on Tito's upper left arm, and his men armed with Remington semiautomatic shotguns, Walker marched Tito past cement mixers, piles of rebar, and stacks of lumber, stepped over air hoses and electrical cords and jackhammers, and proceeded to the courthouse tunnel exit where another federal marshal was waiting.

So although Walker didn't believe that Caesar Olivera would be so bold as to attempt to free his brother, he decided to set up a diversion. He figured that if an attempt were made, it would happen while Tito was being transported, that being easier than Olivera's people trying to blast their way into the courthouse to free him during the arraignment. He let everybody think that Tito would be transported to the courthouse in a relatively normal manner—meaning that he would be more heavily guarded than other prisoners—but he never told anyone that he planned to use the tunnel.

Walker also figured his own people would be safe. They were heavily armed, the transport time would be just a couple of minutes, and the armored transport vehicle would be moving at a high rate of speed. How could anyone stop them?

Marshal Kevin Walker, like Judge Benton Foreman, turned out to be wrong.

—

T
he convoy containing the Tito Olivera imposter reached the intersection of F Street and First Avenue about thirty seconds after it departed the correctional center. An SDPD patrol car was in the middle of First, stopping traffic going north, and another patrol car was parked a block away, stopping traffic going east on E Street from crossing First Avenue. The truck containing the imposter made the turn onto First Avenue—and all hell broke loose.

From two different rooms in the Westin Hotel in Horton Plaza, three powerful rocket-propelled grenades were fired simultaneously. Two grenades hit the patrol cars blocking the cross streets and the third hit the SUV leading the armored truck. When the SUV was hit, the driver of the truck containing the Tito imposter slammed on the brakes, but not in time to avoid ramming the rear of the SUV. An instant later, a sniper fired a .50 caliber bullet through the bullet-resistant glass of the armored truck, instantly killing the driver. The sniper was one of the specialists Raphael Mora had brought with him from Mexico.

Two open-top Hummer H2s roared down F Street, moving at approximately fifty miles an hour. One went up a grass strip on the north side of the street and the other used the sidewalk on the south side. A woman walking on the sidewalk was killed instantly when she was hit by one of the Hummers and her body was thrown thirty-five yards through the window of a restaurant called the Athens Market Taverna.

The patrol car intended to stop traffic going north on First was on fire in the middle of the intersection of First and F. The cop driving the patrol car had luckily gotten out and been standing near it when the grenade hit; although he'd been knocked down by the blast and cut by shrapnel, he was still alive, trying to get to his feet. When the Hummers reached the intersection, the men inside shot the injured cop with M16 rifles on full automatic, then the Hummers came to a stop next to the armed truck.

At this point, the only U.S. marshal able to respond to the attack was the one sitting next to the dead driver in the armored truck. If he'd been a coward, he would have remained inside the cab of the armored truck, where he would have had some protection. But he wasn't a coward. He jumped out and began firing at the men inside the Hummers with a shotgun, and he was immediately killed by return fire.

One of the gangsters ran up to the back door of the armored truck, placed a shaped explosive charge on the door, and blew it open. The occupants inside the truck—a U.S marshal armed with a shotgun and the Tito imposter—were both knocked to the floor by the explosion. As soon as the door was blown off, the bomber tossed a flash bang grenade inside the truck, momentarily deafening and blinding the men inside. Then the bomber shot the U.S. marshal in the head. The Tito imposter, a man named John Newman, was lying on the floor with his hands over his ears, his eyes shut, dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit. The bomber didn't notice that Newman wasn't manacled; he didn't notice the sidearm lying on the floor of the truck near Newman's right hand.

The thing was, none of the attackers had ever seen Tito Olivera, and they naturally assumed the man in the jumpsuit was him. Two of the attackers grabbed John Newman, saying in Spanish, “We got you, man, we got you. You're going to be okay,” then hustled him into a black Ford Explorer that had pulled up next to all the burning, damaged vehicles in the street.

The Explorer containing John Newman went barreling up First Avenue, made a right on E Street, and a block later turned into an underground parking lot beneath the North Island Credit Union on Broadway Circle. In the parking lot, the dazed man the gangsters thought was Tito was then transferred to an inconspicuous yellow taxicab.

By now a few SDPD cops had arrived on the scene and engaged in a brief gun battle with the men in the two Hummers. The cops were armed with sidearms and shotguns; the men in the Hummers were armed with M16s and Ingram MAC-10 machine pistols. The cops got off a few shots, one of the gangbangers was killed, and the rest of them piled into the Hummers and took off. The cops gave chase. They called in reinforcements.

When Mora developed his plan to free Tito Olivera, he told the bangers that once Tito Olivera was freed they were on their own getting away from the cops. One of the Hummers containing five men got away that morning. The other Hummer, containing four men, was boxed in by San Diego cops an hour after the attack and all four men were killed.

The cops were in no mood for taking prisoners.

—

K
evin Walker and the real Tito Olivera had just entered Judge Foreman's courtroom when the attack started. As the battle lasted less than four minutes, he was still standing there when he was called and told what had happened. His first instinct was to leave the courthouse and check on his men; but he didn't follow his instincts. Instead, he barged into Judge Foreman's chambers, told the judge what had happened, and demanded that Foreman immediately arraign Tito.

In one of the shortest arraignment hearings on record for a capital crime, Judge Foreman accepted Tito's not guilty plea and refused to give him bail. While the arraignment was taking place, Walker received an update on his cell phone regarding the attack and his face drained of color. Following the arraignment, he and his marshals escorted Tito back through the courthouse tunnel to a solitary confinement cell on the eighth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Then Walker went to see for himself the carnage that had occurred on the corner of First Avenue and F Street. Who said this wasn't Mexico?

—

E
ighteen people died in the attack: three San Diego cops, seven federal marshals, five of the attackers who were later identified as belonging to the MS-13 gang, and three private citizens. One of the private citizens was the woman struck by one of the Hummers. The other two citizens were men who had occupied the rooms in the Westin Hotel from which the rocket-propelled grenades had been fired. Both men were accountants attending a convention at the Westin. One federal marshal, one of the men in the escort SUV, survived the attack. He had burns on twenty percent of his body and had lost his left leg.

Another marshal who died was John Newman, the Tito imposter, but his body was not found until the day after the attack. He had been tortured before he was killed, and horribly mutilated. Walker refused to let John Newman's wife see his body; he told her that her husband had been shot in the face and, thankfully, had died instantly. It had actually taken several hours for John Newman to die.

Walker also offered his resignation. His boss told him he was thinking about accepting it.

—

T
he reaction of the American media and American politicians was as bad as Raphael Mora had predicted.