Crossing the Line (17 page)

FIFTEEN

S
ince it was my state and my judge, I made them wait until 7:00
A
.
M
. before I dialed Judge Ronald Koals’s home telephone number. His wife didn’t sound pleased when she answered the phone with a sleepy voice. I identified myself and she sounded even less pleased.

“Good Lord,” she said. “Can’t you people ever call at a decent hour?”

I didn’t have an answer to that, and I didn’t get the chance anyway. A gruff, also sleepy voice came on the line.

“Just bring it by my house like you guys usually do,” the judge said. “I’ll be here until eight-thirty, when I leave for court.”

“Where do you live, Judge?”

There was a pause. He sounded more awake now.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Antonio Burns. I’m with DCI.”

Now there was a longer pause.

“Never mind. I’ll meet you at the courthouse, Agent. You can find that, can’t you?”

I wondered what he meant by that. Pinedale is tiny. Just a few thousand people live anywhere near the town, which has one main street. And the fact that he apparently had recognized my name wasn’t exactly auspicious. He hadn’t wanted me to meet him at his home, where warrants were usually signed.

“I think I can find it, Judge. It’ll take about an hour to get there.”

“Then why are you calling me now?”

I didn’t get to answer this question, either. He’d already hung up on me.

The judge’s chambers were as unkempt as the man who occupied them. The small room was crowded with file cabinets, counters, and chairs, all piled high with stacks of statute books, binders, and assorted papers. I guessed that his chambers probably also served as the county’s law library. The man himself was small and old, bald but for wisps of white hair that stuck out in all directions, and he had eyebrows that stood like lifted wings, as if his head were about to take flight. He had not put on his robe but instead wore a frayed flannel shirt and a suspicious expression.

His desk, though, was uncluttered. The entire oversized surface was clear.

“I’ve read about you, Agent Burns,” he said to me when I walked in the door with Tom and Mary following. “I can’t say it made for pleasant reading.”

He didn’t get up from behind his desk.

I met his gray eyes and held them, trying not to appear insolent, only honest.

“I’m afraid the press was misinformed, Judge. A lot of what they wrote about what happened in Cheyenne was fiction.”

I hoped that Tom wasn’t smirking behind me.

“Is that so?”

His question seemed to be rhetorical. The tone wasn’t exactly challenging or disbelieving, but it didn’t sound entirely convinced either. He held my eyes for a long time.

Mary broke in by introducing herself, then Tom. They both held their credentials out to him in their left hands the way they were taught at the academy. The judge rose and leaned over his desk, first studying the proffered badges and ID cards then solemnly shaking their extended right hands. He didn’t offer to shake mine. Nor did he need to see my credentials—my face having been already seen enough on the front pages of Wyoming papers.

“I wasn’t aware the FBI was operating in this county. To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

He had yet to smile. I wondered if he was just taciturn by nature or whether he liked having the Feds in his county even less than he liked having me in it. The federal government isn’t exactly welcome in a lot of parts of Wyoming.

Mary had handed me the application with the attached affidavit and the copy of Roberto’s note before we’d walked in the door. I now handed it to the judge. He spread the eleven pages out on his expansive desk in two rows, aligning them side by side.

“This is a joint operation,” Mary explained modestly as the judge squared the edges of the pages. “We’re working in conjunction with Mr. Burns and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation. That application should help explain the reason we’re here and the importance of this investigation.”

“What I mean is, Ms. Chang, why are you seeking a warrant from me? Why not the federal district court in Casper?”

The man was bright. It only took him seconds to ask questions that I should have been asking days ago. He was cutting right to the heart of the matter, without even having yet read the application. Without even knowing who we were investigating. It wasn’t a particularly good sign—smart judges tend to be suspicious of law enforcement.

“Your Honor, we thought perhaps this case would best be pursued on a local level. At least initially,” Mary said.

The judge looked at me. “I take it then that Mr. Burns will be left holding the bag if anything goes wrong with your investigation?”

No one said anything.

The judge went on, “And am I to understand that this case will be charged and prosecuted in my county? In my courtroom?”

Now there was a hint of mockery in his tone. Again, no one said anything. Mary stood very prim and still with her eyes focused somewhere out the window behind the judge. I glanced over my shoulder at Tom and saw that his jaw was tight. His face was growing darker, too. It was pretty clear the judge didn’t like us. Not any of us.

“Our primary concern at this time, Your Honor,” Mary said, still looking out the window, “is to arrest a drug kingpin and murderer who is hiding out in your county. No one’s given much thought yet as to who will get the credit for the eventual prosecution or in what jurisdiction it will finally end up. That will have to be worked out between your District Attorney and the United States Attorneys.”

“Of course,” replied the judge. “Of course.” He let a moment of silence pass, disbelief thick in the air. Then he said, “Have a seat. Give me a moment to read this.”

While he bent to study the application, Tom, Mary, and I looked around at the chairs. There were three of them, but they were all piled high with papers, binders, and books.

“You can set those on the floor,” the judge said without taking his eyes off the pages aligned so perfectly before him.

It wasn’t easy to find room on the floor, but as he read we managed to get the three chairs in front of his broad desk and ourselves in them.

This judge didn’t just pick up a pen and sign the accompanying order like they so often do. Most of them scarcely even bother to read them. Some will even give you permission for a warrant over the phone after simply being told the barest facts and conjecture. Judge Koals, however, took a red pencil from a drawer beneath his desk and actually began making marks on the application.

Now it was Mary turning a darker shade of tan. She probably felt like she was back in law school. And
Professor
Koals was jabbing at her with the Socratic method. She managed to keep silent, although it looked like it was taking some effort.

Finally the judge looked up at the three of us.

“I find it hard to believe that Mr. Hidalgo, a Mexican drug ‘kingpin,’ as you call him, would move to this county and to this state.”

Mary launched into an explanation.

“Your honor, Jesús Hidalgo has been having considerable trouble in Mexico over the past year. And his problems have been increasing these past few months. He recently fought and won a war with the Arellano-Felix cartel, but now the other rival syndicates are targeting him as well as the surviving Arellano brothers. Additionally, the new Mexican government under President Vicente Fox has sworn to finally end the corruption in that country—the corruption that has allowed Mr. Hidalgo’s ‘Mexicali Mafia’ to flourish for so long. His operations have been subjected to raids by the various Mexican drug task forces, and as a result, his own cartel, based in Mexicali, has been forced to go to war with them, too.”

The judge nodded. “I believe I saw a mention of this new attempt to rein in the cartels on CNN.”

“Yes, sir. There’s more, though, than just President Fox’s efforts. You see, we had an FBI agent working undercover in Hidalgo’s Mexicali Mafia.” Her voice was beginning to grow tight with rare emotion. Her words were coming clipped and fast. “He was working his way up toward exposing the leadership. He’d been under deep cover for more than a year, and we believed he was quite close. Somehow, he was discovered. Or perhaps just suspected. It makes little difference when you’re dealing with an organization like Mr. Hidalgo’s. He was murdered—”

The judge interrupted.

“If this is a vendetta by the FBI, Ms. Chang, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“No, sir. Excuse me.” Mary took a moment to compose herself, then went on. “After the death of Agent Walker, the DEA, FBI, ATF, and other American agencies, in conjunction with their Mexican counterparts, began to turn things upside down. It’s our understanding that all this added scrutiny did not please the other kingpins with Hidalgo. They are already suffering due to the increased border security since 9/11. It’s also our understanding that the bribes they pay to border guards on both sides of the line went up astronomically due to this new, additional scrutiny. The other members of the cartel thought killing a U.S. agent was a stupid and reckless thing to do—they’ve told us as much, wanting us to know that they do not condone what Mr. Hidalgo did or had done to Agent Walker. Increased attempts were made on Hidalgo’s life and his operations—perhaps in part to appease the United States. In any event, Mr. Hidalgo fled here, where, frankly, he’s a lot physically safer than he’s ever been in Mexico. And we expect he’s going to stay here until it’s safe for him to go back—until his rivals have been assassinated by his own men.”

“How come Mr. Hidalgo hasn’t been charged and arrested for the killing of this Agent Walker?”

“I’m afraid we don’t have any direct evidence. Hidalgo operates through layers and layers of associates.”

“Ah, so this is a variation of the Capone stratagem,” the judge said.

“To be candid, Your Honor, we expect a lot more serious charges against Mr. Hidalgo than tax evasion. All we’re asking for here is a search warrant for his home and the mine on his property.”

I wondered where she was choosing to draw the line on her candidness. Something still seemed wrong.

The judge asked, “You’re asking for a warrant that will allow you to fish for those ‘more serious charges,’ correct? Such as the murder of Agent Walker, which could even result in the death penalty for Mr. Hidalgo under the federal government’s Kingpin Statute?”

Mary didn’t need to say anything to confirm it. Her fierce expression said it all.

The judge went on, nodding at the documents now. “I see that you are alleging that Mr. Hidalgo is in possession of cocaine and marijuana within his house, and that you suspect he may be operating a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory in this defunct mine on his property.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what our confidential informant has told us.”

“Do you have any evidence of that, other than the word of your CI?”

Tom, who knew drugs from his time in Juárez with the DEA, answered before Mary could.

“No, Judge, but it makes sense. In the Midwest, crank sells for about twenty thousand dollars a pound. Say Hidalgo can make, as our informant says he claims, fifty pounds once or twice a week, allowing time for cleanup. That’s one to two million dollars a week. On meth alone. And no worries about getting it across a heavily patrolled border. He wouldn’t even need to go back to Mexico ever if he didn’t want to.”

I threw in my two cents.

“And with each pound of meth he’s producing five to seven pounds of highly toxic waste and dumping it under the ground, Judge. Right here in your county. Down near the water table.”

Tom surprised me by saying, “Yeah. That’s right. It doesn’t help that your state has the most liberal pollution laws in the country.”

Tom’s green? I hadn’t known he was an environmentalist. And I didn’t know if the judge was, too. In Wyoming, the odds were against it. But it still seemed like a clever way to push the judge in the right direction.

I added, “There wouldn’t be much obvious evidence of a lab in an abandoned mine. It’s really the perfect setup for a clandestine lab. The toxic and highly volatile waste is how we usually find them when we don’t have an informant. Either somebody smells them or they explode. In a mine, though, you could just dump the waste down a shaft and forget about it. It will dissolve into the rock and the groundwater. We’ve seen before that it can make a lot of people sick, and no one knows the long-term effects.”

“Perhaps you and Mr. Cochran should call your state representative, Agent Burns,” the judge said wryly. “I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

Nope, the judge wasn’t green. I shut up and Tom did, too. “QuickDraw” Burns was the last person a state politician would want to hear from. And an environmental appeal wasn’t going to score us any points from this judge.

“So besides trying to appall me with this threat of water pollution, you’re asking me to hang my hat on the word of your CI and what ‘makes sense.’ I’ve found that when it comes to crime, what ‘makes sense’ does not very often turn out to be true. And I need more than ‘making sense’ to find that there is probable cause for a search of private property.”

Oh shit.
I almost couldn’t believe it. He was turning it down.

He pushed the papers across the desk toward us.

“I want to hear about these drugs firsthand from this felon, your informant. I want to consider his veracity myself while I look him in the eye. And I want his sworn testimony as a part of the four corners of this affidavit. Then maybe I’ll reconsider my ruling.”

“We can’t do that, Judge,” Mary protested. “It would be extremely suspicious to pull out our informant right now. It would put him in grave danger.”

The judge just looked at her with his gray eyes, holding out the papers until she took them.

SIXTEEN

T
here was no conversation on the ride back to the hunting camp. Mary sat next to me in the front passenger seat, perfectly still but radiating heat. Behind us Tom fumed more volubly by working his jaw and muttering curses. Mungo kept batting at his face with her tail whenever she stuck her head out the window, and then stepping on his thigh when she forced her way up between the front seats. When he tried to shove her away, she would push her snout at him apologetically and lick his face.

It was at almost the peak of the midday heat by the time we got back to the camp. Even in the main lodge the temperature was high enough that Mungo couldn’t stop panting. Mary fetched us sweaty bottles of Snake River Ale from one of the ice chests.

“Goddamn hick judges,” Tom said, opening one of the beer bottles and throwing the cap across the room. “That yokel doesn’t know his head from his ass. Now we’ll just have to run around him. Give it to a judge who knows what the hell he’s doing.”

While in a way Tom was defending my brother, confirming his veracity, his words caused me to bristle. The judge was right. Perfectly right. If I were in his shoes—not knowing the parties, not knowing that Roberto wasn’t a liar despite his other faults—I would have ruled the same way.

Mary was shaking her head at Tom.

“We can’t, Tom. You know that.”

U.S. law on the issue is the same as Wyoming’s. When one judge rejects your application, you can’t just go knocking on some other judge’s door. Not without attaching a full and complete statement concerning all previous applications and explaining why you’ve already been shot down and who had done the shooting. No judge is going to sign a tainted warrant like that. Judges don’t do that to one another—it would be a professional insult. Plus it would create all kinds of hell at a later hearing to suppress whatever evidence was obtained via the once-refused warrant.

“You think a federal judge is going to care how some yokel in the sticks ruled?”

“Yes. I think any judge will care,” Mary replied.

Tom pressed his hands against the sides of his head and squeezed shut his eyes while making a face.

“Christ, Mary. Do I have to spell it out? Forget the notice of a prior application. Fuck it. Don’t mention it. We should have gone federal in the first place.”

Mary shook her head harder.

“Without the approval of the Deputy Director? Without bringing in the U.S. Attorneys? Without revealing what just happened with Judge Koals? No. No way.”

Suddenly Tom was almost shouting.

“Yes! Yes way! Once we get in there, no one’s going to give a shit how we got the warrant signed! The Deputy Director will be jumping out of his socks to take credit and cover his ass at the same time! Hidalgo’s operating the biggest lab anyone’s ever seen in there, and when that comes out, none of this preliminary shit is going to matter!”

There was a moment of silence before Mary answered him, speaking low, but with her tone and emphasis on each word she might as well have been shouting right back.

“This is my operation. I am the senior officer here. We will not take shortcuts. We will play this game by the rules.”

I almost leaned back, away from the quiet force of her words. Tom was glaring at her, so red in the face that I thought he might have a heart attack. He stared at her for a long moment, his close-set eyes bulging, then he kicked through the blanket and the door and stormed out into the daylight.

“Fuck!” I heard him yell.

I’d kept out of the argument. I didn’t like it, but Mary was right. At least from a legal perspective. She was also right about it being a game.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she now said to me. “How are we going to get Roberto out of there long enough to testify without people getting suspicious?”

“We put up the abort flag.”

That was the signal for Roberto to run—a bit of black cloth would be tied to a juniper branch not far from the notch. If he saw it, he was supposed to get the hell out, as fast as he could.

“No. We can’t. Then he couldn’t ever go back in.”

“Good. Let’s do it.”

“No, Anton. What if the judge insists on getting more information, or if the warrant gets overturned at a suppression hearing? What about you and your family? Hidalgo will certainly know who informed on him if your brother bolts. And that’s only a small number of Hidalgo’s men across the river. Even if we manage to arrest and hold them all, others will come after you. That’s Hidalgo’s signature. Retaliating against the families of those he suspects.”

La corbata,
she didn’t need to say. His other signature.

We had thought it would be so easy. We’d send Roberto in and he’d smuggle out the necessary observations for us to get a warrant. Then all we’d have to do would be snap the ammo clips onto Tom’s precious submachine guns, call in a few more guys, and crash through the gate. It had made a lot of sense at the time, when you didn’t think about a Wyoming judge’s obstinacy and suspicion.

“Shit,” I said.

I didn’t say anything about how maybe this could have been avoided if they’d let me in on everything at the beginning. If they’d told me from the start that this was an unsanctioned operation, that they would need Wyoming warrants and law. But if I’d known, I might not have let my brother go in there. No, I definitely wouldn’t have. I couldn’t really blame them. And I think I was beginning to want Hidalgo as bad as they did.

So how to get word to Roberto that he needed to slip out for a day or two?

“You have any ideas?” Mary asked.

“Let me think about it.”

I whistled to Mungo and followed Tom out into the daylight. The heat was visible, wavering to a height of six feet off the red earth like high, transparent grass. I could hear Tom scrambling up toward the notch but I didn’t look after him. Pulling off my shirt, I instead headed for the rocks. Thankfully, the one Roberto and I had chosen as our bouldering wall had fallen into the shade. Touching the places my brother had touched two days earlier, I moved onto the rock. Even shaded, the stone was still hot enough to make my fingers tingle. I traversed the rock for a half hour, until my fingertips were bleeding, my toes were aching, my skin was dripping, and my mind was clear.

Then I sat close to Mungo and panted for a while as hard as she was.

God knows I didn’t like him, but at least Tom’s way of doing things would keep Roberto safer. But it also might blow the case against Hidalgo in court. If the warrant was found to have been issued without sufficient probable cause, or if it was discovered to have intentionally left out the fact of an earlier ruling against, all the evidence discovered subsequently would be suppressed.

It had happened to me before. And there is nothing worse than having overwhelming evidence on a perp and then seeing it suppressed, the charges dropped, and the case forever dismissed.

Although I hadn’t intentionally hidden anything, what had happened then still shamed and infuriated me.

One night in Rock Springs I was riding in a patrol car with a uniformed cop. He was helping me look for a guy I had a warrant on. Then, right in front of us at a stoplight, a big pickup coming at a right angle toward us blew the light and slammed into a car pulling out of a fast-food joint. The collision was enormous—it tore half the back end of the cheap Japanese car right off. One of the pickup’s oversized desert tires went wobbling down the street. As I was throwing open the door to go help, the pickup backed off, the wheel-less axle grinding into the asphalt, and tore down the street.

Inside the compact was a man in the driver’s seat, a woman next to him, and three children without seat belts in the backseat. The ones who weren’t unconscious were bleeding. There was blood and glass everywhere.

The local cop and I did what we could until an ambulance arrived. Rage built in us both while we tried to calm the screaming children and their parents. How could anyone just cream an entire family and drive away? It was so fucking arrogant. So outrageous.

Finding the pickup’s driver was easy. The cop and I followed an inch-deep gouge in the asphalt for about a half-mile until it ran up a driveway and into an open garage. There was the pickup.

We walked up the driveway. It was the pickup. There was no doubt. A missing wheel, the front end smashed, the windshield spiderwebbed in the shape of a head. Absolutely no doubt. The engine was still ticking as it cooled off. Green fluid was puddling beneath it. There was also an interior door leading into the house.

“This guy,” the cop said through clenched teeth. “This guy. I’m going to fuck him up.”

I grabbed his arm before we stepped under the open garage door.

“No. This is clean. The court’s going to fuck this guy up for us.”

I pounded on the door. A woman answered it. She was small and scared-looking, not willing to meet my eyes. She was unmarked, too—she obviously hadn’t been the driver.

I didn’t have to say anything. She motioned us into the house without saying a word, then she turned and led the way. I walked behind her into a kitchen that was cluttered with trash, and she pointed through it to a filthy living room where a man was slumped in a chair. Blood from his face ran down his neck and had soaked his shirt. You could smell the liquor on him from all the way across the room.

“Shit,” he said, holding his ruined face. “Didn’t see the damn light.”

We took him clean. No sneaky sucker punches to places where bruises wouldn’t show, no “popcorn ride” in the back of the squad car—breaking and accelerating to throw our prisoner all over the cage. It was totally by-the-book. Eight months later I appeared in court to testify at the standard suppression hearing. I’d studied the motions in the County Attorney’s office before going into the courtroom. They were the usual bullshit: a motion to suppress the arrest (and all evidence arising from it) for lack of probable cause, a motion to suppress any and all statements because they’d been coerced, etc. I was looking forward to seeing the judge deny these outrageous motions. I always hoped the judge would order the defense attorney horsewhipped for having the nerve to file such frivolous paper and waste the court’s time, but judges tended to take it as just another part of the game—an exceedingly hopeful roll of the dice by the defense attorney or simply a way to bill the defendant for more in-court time.

What was strange was the way the defense attorney wore such a wicked smile when he asked me about entering the garage and then the house—as if he were accusing me of breaking down the door instead of being waved in by the defendant’s distraught wife. The prosecutor, like me, seemed to think it was just the usual theatrics. I didn’t like that grin, though.

It wasn’t until the closing argument that I learned what was behind that smirk.

“I’ve got a case for you, Your Honor. Decided last month. An officer may not make a warrantless entry into a suspect’s garage.”

He handed the County Attorney and the judge a thin sheaf of papers. It was a slip opinion—not yet published.

I gripped the table while the County Attorney first argued that the garage was open, that I’d been invited inside. The judge shook his head sadly—the Wyoming Supreme Court, in their infinite wisdom, had been clear. Even if it were just a carport with no walls whatsoever, an officer may not cross the threshold without a warrant or consent.

“Emergency exception,” I’d hissed at the County Attorney.

He tried to claim it, stating that I had reason to believe someone was critically injured inside the house, but the judge wouldn’t buy it. We’d crossed the threshold without permission. Motion granted. Charges dropped. Case dismissed.

The defendant walked out of the courtroom laughing. No doubt to go get drunk again and run over somebody else.

The County Attorney, of course, blamed me for somehow not knowing, eight months in advance, the contents of a future state-court decision. The suits at the AG’s office called me in for a gleeful ass-chewing. Not one bothered to call the family—who had no insurance, one of the children still hospitalized—and I had to do it myself.

Mungo lifted her head and looked down the slope. Mary was coming up. It was almost dusk, and the sun was turning a little red over the river as it got ready to impale itself on the Winds’ sharp peaks.

“Have you figured it out yet?” she asked. “How we’re going to get him out of there long enough for him to testify?”

“Yeah. Listen, he’ll tell Hidalgo that he’s going climbing in the Winds. Going to go do a big wall up there or something. He can even invite Hidalgo to go with him. You know that Hidalgo used to think he was a climber?”

She nods.

“Roberto told us.”

“Well, Hidalgo won’t go. So Roberto will just head out on his own.”

“How do you know Hidalgo won’t want to go? Maybe he still thinks he’s a climber.”

“He won’t.”

He’d never been a climber. Not even the time Roberto met him on Aconcagua, when Hidalgo was so foolishly dressed in his designer alpine wear. And I’d seen the gut pushing out over his belt and heard my brother say that he’d gotten fat. Even if he wanted to go, he would never be able to keep up with Roberto.

“I’ll pick him up somewhere in the mountains and lead him to where we’ll have a car waiting. With the judge in it, if he’s willing. Roberto can wander back down to Hidalgo’s place after that. Then we’ll either kick in the doors or be back to square one.”

But the question still remained: How to get Roberto word that it was time for him to head out, purportedly to climb?

While we discussed options, Tom fast-forwarded through the surveillance tape that had self-recorded while we were visiting the judge. It showed a few of the prostitutes splashing—with swimsuits on this time—in the pool. They cleared out when Hidalgo came out to do his morning laps. A little later they were escorted in a caravan of cars back to the airstrip beyond the hill and the plane took off. Apparently a night and a day’s debauchery was all Hidalgo would allow himself and his men.

Roberto was visible for what the camera’s timer showed as almost an hour. He wasn’t with the others, though, around the pool or taking the girls to the airstrip. He was out of their sight, hidden by a wing of the house. He walked halfway up the hillside to boulder around on a shelf of rock there.