Dreamland (10 page)

In the 1970s, East Coast heroin dealers, mostly blacks by then, began printing brands on glassine bags broadcasting the supposed potency of the drug inside, or the headlines of the day: brands like Hell Date, Toxic Waste, Knockout, NFL, Obamacare, Government Shutdown.

Over the decade the drug that square America despised became the choice drug of despised America: urban outcasts, wandering con men, homosexuals, pickpockets, artists, and jazz musicians populated the early heroin world. Underground classics such as William Burroughs’s
Junky
described its nonconformist denizens, and mesmerized later generations intent on rebellion.

But heroin was never about the romantic subversion of societal norms. It was instead about the squarest of American things: business—dull, cold commerce. Heroin lent itself to structured underworld businesses. Addicts had no free will to choose one day
not
to buy the product. They were slaves to a take-no-prisoners molecule. Dealers could thus organize heroin distribution almost according to principles taught in business schools, providing they didn’t use the product. And providing they marketed.

Stories about selling opiates quickly became tales of business models and the search for new markets.

Easier than Sugarcane

Xalisco, Nayarit

One afternoon in April 1996, a funeral procession left the village of Aquiles Serdán, in the state of Nayarit, Mexico.

Dozens of people trudged uphill, heading north to the town of Xalisco, the county seat, blocking traffic on the highway that also led south down to the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta. A banda—a brass band of trumpets, clarinets, bass and snare drums, and a massive tuba—serenaded the marchers with “Te Vas Angel Mio” (“You’re Leaving, My Angel”). Men fired guns in the air and took turns shouldering the casket that contained the corpse of a man named David Tejeda.

He grew up a ranchero kid, better off than some by rural Mexican standards. But by the time he died, his Andalusians and quarter horses were the finest animals in the county. He was also a master horse dancer. Horse dancing is a popular pastime among northwest Mexican rancheros. It involves spurring and prodding the horse to prance and hop in time to a banda’s staccato beat. At the county’s annual Feria del Elote (Corn Fair), following the traditional horse parade that winds through Xalisco, David Tejeda would display his horse-dancing prowess to the admiration and envy of all.

Now, as the men from his family carried Tejeda’s body to be buried, they also led his favorite animal—a white quarter horse named Palomo, saddled and riderless—and prodded it to dance as the banda played. For an hour, the procession moved up the highway, then over cobblestone streets to the Xalisco cemetery.

David Tejeda was among the first from Xalisco County to sell heroin in the San Fernando Valley. Just as important, he was among the first to publicly display what black tar heroin could do for a ranchero kid. He built stables and attached them to the large new houses he also built for his family.

I heard about David Tejeda well after I began piecing together the story of the Xalisco Boys. By then, what began on the day that I stood on the banks of the Ohio River in Huntington, West Virginia, had turned into an obsession with the rancheros from this one small town of Xalisco, Nayarit. Thousands of Americans were addicted to the tar heroin the Xalisco Boys sold that netted millions of dollars a month. I found nothing written about them, yet I could see they were changing drug use in many parts of the country. I wondered how they wound up in so many places: Memphis, Omaha, Myrtle Beach, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis.

They reminded me, in fact, of another group I’d heard of—the Herreras. The Herreras were Mexico’s first vast drug-trafficking ranchero family in the United States. They lived in and around a rancho known, aptly, as Los Herreras, an isolated, roadless place in the mountains of Durango, founded in the late 1600s and accessible for centuries only on horseback. Like so many from the ranchos of Mexico, they were actually a clan, made up of numerous intermarried families: Nevarez, Medina, Diaz, Villanueva, and Venegas were other last names. They intermarried with the Corral family from the rancho Los Corrales. Law enforcement estimated the clan comprised a thousand people, spreading across several ranchos in Durango, all involved in producing, transporting, or selling heroin.

The first Herreras appear to have intended to work legitimately when they arrived in Chicago sometime in the 1950s. But poppies grew well in the mountains of Durango. In time, they moved to heroin.

Much of the U.S. market was then supplied by Turkey, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia half a world away, their dope coming through New York City. But after police dismantled the Turkish and European heroin network known as the French Connection in 1972, the Herrera clan grew into the most important source of heroin in much of the country, annually importing seven and a half tons of the brown powder known as Mexican Mud.

The Herreras were “not really a cartel per se. It was an old-time organized crime family,” said Leo Arreguin, a retired DEA agent I tracked down who infiltrated the clan in the early 1980s. Most Herreras looked like auto mechanics, scruffy and unassuming, driving beater cars, he said. Arreguin used to buy from one Herrera who’d drive to the McDonald’s meeting spot in a car so worn-out that it burned oil and left a smoke cloud behind. One of the clan, Baltazar Nevarez-Herrera, owned a beef slaughterhouse in Chicago. For a while, the clan shipped its heroin in small metal tubes they fed to cows in Mexico. When the cows reached Chicago, they were slaughtered and the tubes retrieved, Arreguin said.

The clan moved to Denver, Detroit, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and many other towns. Each clan member was an independent entrepreneur, buying the family heroin. A Chicago police investigation into the Herreras estimated it took sixty million dollars in profits out of that town alone, funneling all that to Durango through shady currency exchange shops around South Chicago. The clan used its money, in part, to build parks and roads and other stuff that tends to endear villagers to narcos in the mountains of northwest Mexico.

Directing the clan was its patriarch, Don Jaime Herrera-Nevarez, a former police officer, who never left Mexico. It’s said that he had something to do with the reason that a Mexican ounce of heroin—known as a
pedazo
, or piece—is actually twenty-five grams, and not twenty-eight, which is the normal measure of an ounce. (This difference has caused many disputes among buyers who, unaware of the difference, feel they’re getting ripped off.) Legend has it that Don Jaime had a large spoon holding twenty-five grams that he used to scoop heroin. That became a standard ounce in the Mexican heroin world. I never learned whether this legend, recounted by several older DEA agents who tracked the Herreras, was true.

In 1985, Don Jaime, several brothers and cousins, and his son, Jaimito, along with dozens of other relatives, were busted. Many went to prison. That didn’t end the clan’s activities, but they didn’t have quite the same power.

The shorter distances from Latin America to the United States, which allowed the region to remain more competitive in many agricultural commodities, eventually pushed out the Turkish and Asian heroin. Colombians began introducing their brown powder in the eastern half of the United States in the 1980s, along with their more famous cocaine. It was much cheaper than the white powder from Asia. Other Mexicans, especially the Sinaloans, began sending black tar heroin north to the western United States in the early 1980s, replacing the Mexican Mud. Even as the Herreras played a reduced supply role, heroin’s price in America trended downward.

Black tar, the most rudimentary form of heroin, was especially cheap to make. With Mexico so close by, tar’s price could keep dropping. This, as I found out, was crucial to the story I came upon as I discovered the Xalisco Boys’ networks.

The Xalisco Boys seemed like a modern version of the Herreras, and as hard to get a handle on. I sifted through shards of information about their hazy underworld that came to me from indictments and interviews with addicts and cops, with prosecutors, DEA and FBI agents, and imprisoned Xalisco traffickers. Slowly a picture emerged of how a small town of sugarcane farmers grew by the early twenty-first century into the most proficient group of drug traffickers America has ever seen.

The first migrants from Xalisco settled in the San Fernando Valley—in Van Nuys, Panorama City, and Canoga Park. Many Xalisco migrants were there illegally, but worked legitimate jobs in construction, landscaping, and restaurants. However, by the early 1980s, a few families set to selling black tar heroin on Valley streets and in parks. The opium poppy grew bountifully in the mountains above Xalisco, and these families had relatives who mastered the folkcraft of cooking opium goo into black tar. Tar had the advantage of being moldable, like clay, and thus easy to shape into, say, the battery compartment of a boom box. Their tar was also potent and very condensed, and, as it was heroin, which addicts needed every day, it lent itself to retail, where the real profit was. The quantities needed were relatively small. A courier could take across a kilo in a purse, or strapped under clothing. Xalisco families living in Tijuana hired themselves out as these couriers.

The first Xalisco heroin traffickers mostly hailed from a single clan, many of whose members bore the last name Tejeda. Back in Xalisco County, the Tejeda clan spread across several ranchos in webs of cousins, sisters, uncles, brothers, and in-laws. The last names also included Sánchez, Díaz, Ibarría, Lizama, López, Navarro, Cienfuegos, Lerma, Bernal, García, Hernández, and others knitted together through blood, marriage, and rancho life—the children of farmers, who also raised sugarcane, coffee, corn, and cattle.

They were not the poorest of Xalisco’s peon farmworkers. On the contrary, “they were people who had access to enough money to get up north, pay a coyote, and look for new kinds of work,” said a Tepic professional I spoke with, who is from Xalisco. “Xalisquillo had many well-known sugarcane families. They were why Xalisco was first in production of sugarcane in the state of Nayarit. Their sons were the ones who started this [heroin business] in the eighties and nineties. These parents tried to teach the sons agriculture. The sons worked in the fields. It’s really hard work. They didn’t want to keep on doing what their dads did. They saw that [heroin] was a good business and so they began to leave. It’s easier to make money in the business than to continue working in sugarcane.”

In the early 1980s, before cell phones or beepers, these Tejedas would stand on the street or in some San Fernando Valley park. Buyers approached and the dealer would cut off a piece of heroin with a small knife.

That they lived in the San Fernando Valley, I suspected, made their story possible. They were far from the Sinaloans. Sinaloa is the state in Mexico where drug trafficking began. Sinaloans tend to be brash, brazen, violent. Other Mexicans hold them in something like awe. Sinaloans came to dominate the east side of Los Angeles County in the 1980s. The tiny suburbs southeast of Los Angeles—Paramount, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, South Gate, and others—began as bedroom communities for ex-GIs from World War II, but by the 1980s these cities were solidly Mexican, and Sinaloan in particular. When that happened, these towns also became distribution terminals for Sinaloan drugs to cities across the United States. But the San Fernando Valley is far away, across hills in the northwest part of Los Angeles, and out there Sinaloans aren’t as numerous. Other traffickers had room to expand.

Among the first Xalisco Boys to do so was David Tejeda. He was the oldest of six sons of a wealthy sugarcane farmer in the rancho of Aquiles Serdán. Wealthy by local standards, anyway. His family had land, cattle, horses, and houses, even before he went north to sell dope. David Tejeda was a light-skinned guy with a fondness for white cowboy hats and leather jackets with epaulets, in the style of the slain narco-balladeer Chalino Sánchez. Tejeda lived in Canoga Park and drank at the Majestic, the Van Nuys bar that was a favorite of Xalisco dealers like Enrique’s uncles. He fought a lot, had a lot of girlfriends, and made a few enemies that way. But he gave jobs in the San Fernando Valley to poor kids from back home. A lot of people respected him for that.

“We all dreamed of coming up here to work for him,” said one Xalisco trafficker I talked to in a U.S. prison. “I went to him and asked for work. I was like thirteen or fourteen. He said no, that I was too young. Many kids came and knocked on his door with the same request. I have cousins and friends who came and did work with him.”

Los Angeles was a hive of gang activity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In some neighborhoods, a different gang controlled every few blocks. Crack was big. Mobs of young men sold it by standing on L.A. streets. Gangs began levying taxes on these street dealers. About this time, the Xalisco Boys took their heroin trade off the street, out of the parks, and went to cars. Addicts were given a phone number to call. When they called, they were told where to meet a driver; the driver was directed to waiting clients by codes sent to them via beepers. Cars and beepers allowed a heroin crew access to a broader client base, and made the Xalisco Boys less obvious to police. In cars, dealers avoided gang taxation and the violence that accompanied the street crack trade.

With the rudimentary delivery model in place, business boomed. Word of the business spread around Xalisco. More young men arrived from the town. They copied the system. They called their new businesses
tienditas
—little stores. Owning a business was a narcotic itself for young rancho kids who had nothing. Some drivers learned the business with an established cell, then went out and opened their own. Each cell was an independent business, competing with others. Shootouts were unthinkable. Violence brought police attention; guns earned long prison time. Plus everyone knew each other from Xalisco, so violence would have created repercussions back home. A sell-and-let-sell ethos took hold and by the early 1990s, Xalisco heroin tienditas quietly crawled all over the Valley. As more people entered the business, profits dwindled. Police wised up and arrested several dealers.