The Coyote's Bicycle (44 page)

At a village built in the Nevada desert, role players lived on set for twenty-one-day stretches. They commuted and ran errands on the swamp bikes. They shopped in fake markets that became real markets. They repaired their real bikes at the fake gas station. Because training exercises were ongoing, the swing gang was required to wear Iraqi “garb” while at work. The pyro explosions rattled even their private thoughts. Special Forces training at the facility didn't
live in the village but occupied the surrounding mountains. They raided the hamlet at night and at random intervals—shakedowns that put the swing gang on edge.

“Where exactly did you take the bikes?” I asked.

“Everywhere. Every set had bikes there.”

Garrison, Nua, and Amavisca began dropping place names like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery drawing: Hawaii, Canada, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Nevada, California, and Arizona. “Bill Anderson is in Japan right now, at Okinawa—he's got bikes,” Garrison said.

The place names became a blur of camps, forts, and airfields, but then as they dwindled, the men began to mention the places with no names. Nua described a “compound” near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that was limited to Special Forces training. The outer perimeter of the installation was odd, like a rectangular box with the far two corners sheared by walls set at angles. The main building was three stories high and had a walled balcony.

“The inner layout was a maze that they told us to build,” Nua said. “Some hallways led to nothing.”

He was describing what he said he later came to believe was a replica of Osama bin Laden's estate in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “I shit you not, this compound we put up with these big-ass walls: when I seen [bin Laden] got caught, I was on it. I was like, ‘Whoa, that's like the shit we built out in North Carolina.' I mean, to the exact T.”

I asked if he brought bikes to the location. “Yeah,” Nua said.

“We took bikes everywhere,” Garrison said.

I asked again because, well, Nua was suggesting the possibility that
SEAL
Team Six members, the killers of Osama bin Laden and, for a time, the most celebrated defenders in America, might have trained in the presence of—and, if other scenarios are any example, likely pedaled—the same bikes that El Indio's migrants used to infiltrate the United States.

Kim Zirpolo doubted that Strategic Operations contributed to the re-creation of the Abbottabad compound. And there might have been more than one. When I talked to the swing gang on August 22, 2012, however, no details of the top-secret training facility had been released. Only a select few in the world knew for certain that it existed, and where. Then, former
SEAL
Team Six member Matt Bissonnette's book
No Easy Day
, which described the training and hunt for bin Laden, was published on September 4. A paragraph placed the “mock-up” where they had trained in North Carolina. Two months after I met with the swing gang, a whistle-blower website called Cryptome.org referenced
No Easy Day
and posted old TerraServer satellite images housed on the Bing search engine. These revealed a compound of near exact proportions to that of bin Laden's Abbottabad compound. It had the high walls and shipping containers. It was located near Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Bissonnette described the compound as constructed of plywood and shipping containers. He complimented the construction workers who built it. “The level of detail on the mock-up was impressive . . . changes were made. The construction crew didn't ask why and they never said no.”

By way of advice, Garrison warned me off the search for the bicycles. He described a fairly open base in Louisiana. “The townspeople would come in and steal a bike. Once we were done training in [any] village, people would steal bikes. And I've never been to a spot where the
POC
[point of contact] wasn't saying, ‘I want a bike. I need a bike.'”

Eventually, I'd reach Bill Anderson on the phone, and he'd describe a similar scene. “The bicycles tend to walk away. Marines would pull up and throw them into the back of their pickups. They're just kids. They will do stupid stuff. You see 'em riding around on the bikes, doing wheelies. Kim would yell at them and say, ‘Get off those
bikes.' But pretty soon everyone in the lot would end up with a bike to ride.”

At the end of our meeting in Oceanside, Garrison said, “The only place you're going to find those bikes is on San Clemente Island.” He was describing a crescent-shaped desert island forty miles offshore, the southernmost rock in the Channel Island chain. Part of the island was used as a bombing range for cruisers. Regardless, the whole thing was off-limits to civilians. The swing gang had once been sent there with props and bikes.

“They told us we were going to be gone for four days”—but the gang was stuck on the island for two months, wearing the same four sets of clothes. They knew how hard it was to get off that island.

35

The status they'd attained felt something like that of a plucky local soccer club on an unexpected rise from the bottom of the draw. If not stars, they were lauded as wily, cunning, and brave. The money that came with that success was something none of the
polleros
had ever experienced. There were rumors of El Indio having thrown lavish parties for authorities, the chief of police among them—one in which he had entertained the attendees with an unannounced performance by the famous cumbia group La Sonora Dinamita.

Solo, however, had fallen deeply in love with a local girl, and so certain was he of their future together, he quit the people-smuggling business in its headiest days. El Negro found Indio's former lieutenant in the Postal neighborhood with a new baby in his arms. Solo was surprised to see the bathroom worker, but he was friendly. He said he worked in his mother-in-law's packing plant now, and because he'd been focusing on his family, he was living up to his solitary nickname more than ever. Solo hadn't talked to his childhood friend and former boss in some time. He described his final days with the operation, when El Indio, in the smoldering energy of his loss, pushed the gang to cross more people than ever. The week following Marta's funeral, Solo said, they crossed 495 migrants. At
some point, Solo felt he couldn't expose his young wife to the risks they were taking on the border and he quit. Because of this, he said, he didn't know what had happened in the end. Solo could only judge the outcome according to alternating rumors he'd heard: that El Indio was in prison, or that El Indio lived in security with his parents and siblings on the other side.

El Cholo, the deportee who'd stumbled into El Indio's camp nearing the point of starvation—“dog hungry” is how he described it—and worked his way from bike mechanic to the bagman who personally doled out bribes to customs agents and police commanders, also retired in 2007. He now owned a house with a bit of land near the border. He pointed out the new cars in the driveway and the fact that he was able to pay for his mother's hernia surgery as indications of his windfall. Like Solo, El Cholo had no knowledge of the gang's final days. In his heart, he believed that El Indio had been caught, and that was why the operation ceased so suddenly and the workers scattered so completely.

Juan, El Indio's early friend from the bus station, was more difficult to find because he'd fled Tijuana for a safe house in Tecate. As the drug wars escalated in 2008, Juan got caught up in some bad dealings—unrelated to migrants, though he wouldn't be specific—and there were people who wanted to “take [him] down.” Early in his flight, El Indio had sent Juan $30,000 to help his
compa
make a new start. But because, as Juan said, “I can't go back to Tijuana if I want to stay alive,” he had lost all communication with the gang. El Negro found Juan through a mutual acquaintance, a taxi driver, and this only after El Negro displayed the scrawled pages of his interviews there in the back of the cab.

Javy was also residing in Tecate, and though prior arrangements had been made, he was not at all happy to be visited by El Negro. He didn't like the idea that a gringo writer knew anything of the bicycle business. And he didn't want the story told. With his gains from the
smuggling operation Juan had purchased a couple of party vans, and he ran charters. He didn't want to put his business, or himself, in jeopardy. El Negro suspected that his own personal appearance was what had sparked Javy's reassessment of the situation. Negro pegged Javy as arrogant and vain. Negro was dressed in his normal, well-worn clothes. And it dawned on him that Javy had expected to greet a journalist wearing a crisp suit, maybe followed by a cameraman, and now Javy was biased against Negro and declined to talk.

Seated in the shade on a park bench, Javy and Negro argued. With his reading glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, El Negro reminded the young man that Javy himself had promised their mutual friend Solo that he'd be open and honest. Only on the strength of that promise had Negro made the expensive trip from Tijuana. Javy seethed. Negro then threatened to relay the details of their encounter to a dear friend of his, a man named Roberto. At this—because, Javy said, he thought so “highly” of El Negro's friend—the interview proceeded, halting with intermittent argument until Javy bellowed, “I can't understand journalists. They always get involved in stuff that they shouldn't. That's why they get killed.”

The interview degraded into a trade of insults and character judgments that precluded further inquiry into the ultimate fate of El Indio, or anything else.

El Sombra figured El Indio was dead. El Ruso said he was imprisoned, not in the United States but in Mexico, which, in his opinion, was much worse. So Negro tracked down the police officer who'd provided protection and escorts for the operation from the lookout at Summit Canyon. “El Indio disappeared like magic,” the officer said. “Everything ended without us knowing anything about his whereabouts, where he was headed, or if something had happened to him. Maybe he is in Paris—a man with money is appreciated everywhere.”

I was pretty certain of El Negro's declaration on the day we met, the day I first heard the name El Indio: “You are never going to find that person.”

Given the discrepancies in the accounts of their final days, it is interesting to note that the
polleros
seemed to settle with finality, as a group, on a single number: seven thousand. Independently, each of them said that they crossed seven thousand cyclists beyond the most enforced and technologically advanced five miles of a two-thousand-mile border—that they then dumped the bikes and delivered the people to their destinations.

Accurate migration numbers are so difficult to come by that Customs and Border Protection is unable to supply Congress with the real numbers that might put their successes or failures into context. A simple reason for this is that successful crossings go uncounted and, most often, undetected. Many in Congress have demanded a border security plan that would stop 90 percent of all illegal entries. The obvious question is: 90 percent of what? It's just not possible to estimate a percentage of an unknowable number. The bicycles, however, left an interesting tally. A bike cannot pedal itself. Presumably, each abandoned bicycle represented one or more migrants. After talking to the residents of the Tijuana River Valley, I could account for roughly half the volume of bikes that El Indio's
polleros
claim to have shepherded across.

Yet, I arrived at the border much too late in the game. Abandoned bikes had been wheeling back into America's streets, uncounted, in every imaginable fashion for two years. It is more than likely that copycats picked up the trade, too. There is also anecdotal evidence that bikes were collected from the valley floor and sent back to Tijuana and returned with a new migrant on top.

If the bicycle
polleros
' claim is true, however, at $4,500 per migrant—in Tijuana, an average sum for the time—El Indio's
gang pulled in over thirty-one million tax-free dollars in under three years. Everybody along the chain was paid: the customs agent (who bought a Lincoln Navigator), the police (who were soon swept up in Tijuana's most violent period ever), the American police departments that sold the bikes, the truck drivers, bike mechanics, recruiters,
checadores
,
comunicadores
,
ganchos
,
guías
, and
levantons
. In every operation,
el coyote
received the largest chunk. Which would suggest that a child whose parents left him with an elderly grandfather in an impoverished village, who attended school part-time to the seventh grade, came to the border, lost everything dear to him, and became a millionaire.

Then, he vanished.

Around about April, I finally accepted something I'd long suspected in Dan Watman. It occurred in the obvious, sudden way one discovers that the Easter Bunny isn't real. It was that Watman possessed almost no ability to lie. Moreover, he was terrible at withholding information of any kind. At first I thought he'd made a philosophical stand related to his activism. Watman's group was called Border Encuentro—border meeting—and its primary purpose was to get people talking across the boundary. To show any tendency to fabricate, I assumed, ran counter to his faith in complete and open dialogue. The problem with this was that Watman worked on a dangerous border, and communicated with everyone from petty criminals and smugglers to enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. All of these people lied to Watman. Be it inability or moral stance, his transparency placed him on a lonely one-way street.

There was, however, one curious instance in which Watman withheld information—for a little while at least. He lived in Tijuana and crossed the border daily to teach Spanish at a law college in San Diego and to work with other activists. But because he had a punk
streak in him, and just didn't care for the whole idea of a militarized wall separating our sister cities, one day, he presented himself to customs agents at the end of the long line to cross the border and refused to produce documentation, his identity, or any citizenship status. To questions, he replied, simply, “I don't want to say.”