Dreamland (11 page)

About that time, in 1990 or maybe a year or two later, it appears, David Tejeda discovered Hawaii. He’d been selling to addicts who came over from Hawaii. Now he moved a crew of drivers there, and used those addict customers as guides to this new market where heroin fetched triple the price.

Slowly, others followed his lead and Xalisco dealers expanded. Before long, they also were in Pomona, San Diego, and Portland. Then in Las Vegas. Tejeda “was okay with others starting up their own tienditas. There’s plenty for everybody, he thought,” said another trafficker.

But that wasn’t always true. Most cities then had a small universe of heroin addicts, who were usually old and poor. A crew new to town had to steal customers from the crews who were already there. The zero-sum game that ensued taught the Xalisco Boys the importance of branding and marketing. To keep customers, they learned to emphasize customer service, discounts, the convenience and safety of delivery. They had to ensure their dope was always good quality—meaning uncut and potent.

The competition for a limited number of addicts also kept them moving on through the 1990s in search of new, less-saturated markets. When they did this, they defied the norms of Mexican drug trafficking.

Most Mexican traffickers naturally followed the immigrants from their home states. This was astute and common sense, for no immigrant group has settled in such numbers in so many parts of America as Mexicans had by the end of the 1990s. Mexican immigrants were in rural areas where local police were often monolingual and understaffed. Those areas had cash-only businesses—Mexican restaurants and money-wiring services—that could be used to launder cash. By the 1990s, small towns and communities in rural Colorado, Georgia, and Arkansas, where Mexicans worked in meat plants, became major hubs for traffickers, places where they divided the dope loads they’d brought in and with which they supplied much larger towns. Mexican traffickers did this by following the immigrants. Thus by the 1990s, for example, it was possible for Sinaloan traffickers to find drug markets in many parts of America using Sinaloan immigrant communities as their point of contact and place to blend in. Michoacan traffickers did the same in the many U.S. regions where Michoacan immigrants became essential parts of the local economy.

But Nayarit is Mexico’s fifth-smallest state, with barely a million people. Its migrants are few and have congregated mainly in Los Angeles and Reno. To find new heroin markets, the Xalisco Boys would have to move where they had no natural family or rancho connection. That’s exactly what they did. Like Spanish conquistadors, venturing beyond the comfortable hometown networks became part of the Xalisco Boys’ DNA.

To do this, though, they needed guides. Spaniards relied on Indians who hated the Aztecs to guide them across the New World to Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, now Mexico City. Junkies did the same for the Xalisco Boys. The Xalisco Boys supplied these junkies’ habits in exchange for help in moving into a new area, and in renting apartments, in registering cellular phones, and buying cars.

“You get one person to show you around and pass around the [phone] number and it’s like bees to a hive,” one imprisoned Xalisco Boy told me. “They all know each other. It’s like having a scout. That’s what happened in Las Vegas. A female addict there told some of the families, ‘I know people in Tennessee.’ So they went with her to Memphis. It became one of the biggest markets for a while.”

They went to towns with large Mexican populations, where the Boys could blend in, and where no gang or mafia controlled the drug trade. But junkies got them there and found them their first customers. Junkies allowed the Xalisco Boys to expand far beyond where they might have had they only relied on Nayarit immigrant connections. With faith in the addictive power of their dope, the Xalisco Boys harnessed these junkies who led them to rich new markets where almost no Nayarits lived, but where thousands of middle-class white kids were beginning to dope up on prescription opiate painkillers.

Junkies could track the telltale signs through the streets of a new city to the hidden customers that the Xalisco Boys might never find otherwise. Junkies knew the slang and could read looks of desperation.

Most important of all—and crucial to the expansion of the Xalisco Boys—was that junkies could navigate America’s methadone clinics.

The painkiller known as methadone was synthesized by German scientists in the effort to make Nazi Germany medicinally self-reliant as it prepared for war. The Allies took the patent after the war, and Eli Lilly Company introduced the drug in the United States in 1947. U.S. doctors identified it as a potential aide to heroin addicts.

That idea was taken up by Dr. Vincent Dole, an addiction specialist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. Methadone, Dole found, was the only opiate whose addicts did not demand increasing doses every few hours. Instead, they were happy with the same dose once a day, which could carry them through the next twenty-four hours. Methadone addicts could actually discuss topics unrelated to dope. This was not true of heroin addicts, whom Dole found tediously single-minded in their focus on the drug. Dole believed addicts could be maintained on methadone indefinitely, and that with one dose a day they could function as normal human beings. In 1970 in New York City, he opened the first methadone clinic for heroin addicts.

Dole believed that rehabilitation was dependent on human relationships—group therapy, 12-step meetings, and the like. But as a last resort for those who defied all efforts to kick the habit, methadone, Dole believed, could be a crutch, helping them through life.

President Richard Nixon permitted methadone as a treatment for heroin addiction, which plagued many soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. By the late 1970s, federally regulated methadone clinics were popping up around the country. These clinics quietly showed how a narcotic might be dispensed legally in a safe, crime-free environment. Methadone stabilized an addict and allowed him to find a job and repair damaged relationships. There were also no dirty needles, no crime, and addicts knew they couldn’t be robbed at the clinics. What’s more, methadone undercut and replaced the street heroin dealers’ trade with a clean, well-lighted place for opiates; everyone was better off.

Methadone clinics opened before sunrise. One reason for this was that many addicts, looking for trades easy to enter, had become construction workers, carpenters, painters. They had to get to these jobs early. Methadone users were like ghosts, showing up early in the morning for years on end, drinking their dose, and silently going about their lives. In time, though, methadone became a battlefield between those who thought it should be used to wean addicts off opiates, and those, like Vincent Dole, who saw it as a lifelong drug, like insulin for diabetics.

One strategy or the other might well have worked. But the worst of both emerged at many clinics. Methadone was often dispensed as if the goal was kicking the habit, with small doses. But as methadone clinics became for-profit affairs, many cut the counseling and therapy that might help patients kick opiates altogether. Critics could be forgiven for seeing some clinic owners as drug dealers, stringing patients out for years, and charging twenty and thirty times what the drug actually cost, which was about fifty cents a dose. In 1990, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that half the clinics were poorly managed, unaccountable, and provided little counseling or aftercare.

The result was that many methadone clinics maintained core populations of opiate addicts in cities all across the country, but on doses that were too small, and usually without much therapeutic support. Addicts who weren’t given high enough doses craved another opiate later in the afternoon, after the clinics closed. They had to find their dope elsewhere, usually on the street, and thus remained tied to the heroin underworld. At clinics that combined low doses and insufficient rehab therapy, addicts took to using methadone and heroin interchangeably.

Methadone was a better alternative to weak powder heroin, which was more expensive and available only in dangerous housing projects or skid rows. But maintaining large numbers of people on any kind of opiate, particularly on low doses, made them easy prey for someone with a more efficient and convenient opiate delivery system. For years, though, no one could conceive of such a thing: a system of retailing street heroin that was cheaper than, as safe as, and more convenient than a methadone clinic.

But in the mid-1990s, that’s exactly what the Xalisco Boys brought to towns across America. They discovered that methadone clinics were, in effect, game preserves.

Methadone clinics gave Xalisco Boys the footholds in the first western U.S. cities as they expanded beyond the San Fernando Valley in the early 1990s. Every new cell learned to find the methadone clinic and give away free samples to the addicts.

One Xalisco Boy in Portland told authorities of a training that his cell put new drivers through. They were taught, he said, to lurk near methadone clinics, spot an addict, and follow him. Then they’d tap him on the shoulder and ask directions to someplace. Then they’d then spit out a few balloons. Along with the balloons, they’d give the addict a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

“Call us if we can help you out.”

The value of each Xalisco heroin tiendita was in its list of customers. “This is how they would build and maintain it,” said Steve Mygrant, a Portland-area prosecutor. “It was an ongoing recruiting practice, in the same way a corporate business would identify customers. They’d lose people along the way. So they were constantly engaged in this.”

In time, most cells developed addicts they could trust, and some of these, in turn, helped tiendita owners expand to new cities in exchange for dope. Some of their junkie guides became legend down in Xalisco. In Cincinnati, I spoke with a girl in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood, home to transplanted Appalachians and overrun with heroin. She had been rustling up business for a series of Xalisco dealers intent on shaping a customer list as they came and went over the years. This girl was, in her own words, “a known quantity” down in Xalisco, a town she had never visited. Xalisco Boys who were just getting started in Cincinnati asked for her, looked her up, and pushed dope in her face wanting her help in establishing heroin routes throughout the Cincinnati metro area. It made kicking the habit almost impossible.

“They can’t even say my name. But they tell them down there, ‘Ask somebody for White Girl. Lower Price Hill.’ One guy even came with a note with my name on it. Somebody had written my name and misspelled it,” she said. “Over these years, I get out [of jail or rehab] and they’re there looking for me. People will say, ‘How do you always got this connection?’ I don’t know. It’s not like I call Mexico and say can you send me a guy? But it’s always there.”

One prolific addict turned guide was a woman named Tracy Jefferson. Jefferson was a longtime drug user and manic depressive from Salem, Oregon. She hooked up with Luis Padilla-Peña, a Xalisco dealer in Reno, Nevada, in 1993. Padilla-Peña had come to the United States in 1990 and found work in Las Vegas with the heroin crew run by a friend from the Tejeda-Sánchez clan. From there, he went off on his own. His big break was meeting Jefferson. Over the next two years, she helped Padilla-Peña and his family carve out heroin markets in Salem, Denver, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Oklahoma City, and Omaha—usually by enrolling herself in methadone clinics and giving away free black tar to the clinics’ clients she met.

From Omaha, Jefferson said when she testified in federal court, she and the family were scouting Kansas City, St. Louis, and Des Moines. They would drop a town that didn’t generate at least two thousand dollars in daily profit. For this reason, she testified, they passed on Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Yakima and Vancouver, Washington.

Another such guide was a kid from Mexico who grew up in Reseda. He didn’t use drugs, but he had something else the Xalisco Boys needed. He was bilingual. He was from Mexico but was raised in the San Fernando Valley. In Reseda he met many Xalisco immigrants. In 1995, he was seventeen when a new cell leader hired him to work in Maui, Hawaii.

“None of them spoke English. That’s why I was important to them,” he said. “There were a lot of things they couldn’t do. When I got there, I helped them expand.”

By then, Hawaii had two Xalisco cells: one owned by David Tejeda, the other by a man named Toño Raices, who was from the small rancho of El Malinal in the hills near Xalisco.

Back in Xalisco, people say that Toño Raices aimed to be somebody in the drug world. Some say he envied David Tejeda. The story goes that Tejeda was owed four hundred thousand dollars for product by a man from the rancho of Pantanal who didn’t want to pay. This man was backed up by Toño Raices.

One day in 1996, outside a Xalisco dance club, Tejeda met with his rivals. From there, they moved to a coffee warehouse Raices owned and, in a dispute over money, Tejeda was shot to death by Raices’ men under a guayabo tree. No one was arrested. Vaqueros Musical, a local band, recounted Tejeda’s death this way in a corrido:

He got a call, they say from a cellular.

David, come to the Magueyes Bar and here I’ll pay you . . .

Thursday, 4th of April, 1996, they got him when he wasn’t expecting it.

They shot him point-blank with AK-47s.

Three years later, Toño Raices was shot to death at the cemetery where Tejeda was buried. The way I heard the story, his enemies killed a boy who worked for him. At the boy’s funeral, mourners paid city police to let them shoot guns in the air at the cemetery. But during the ceremony, state police arrived, presumably allied with the Tejedas. A shootout erupted between state police and armed mourners. A commandant died. So did Toño Raices. Vaqueros Musical recorded another corrido.