Dreamland (17 page)

Years after his
Pain
paper, suggesting that pain patients treated with opiates might not be at risk of addiction, Portenoy said it was based on “weak, weak, weak data” and called it “a little paper [that] turned into an important paper.”

Nevertheless, with that 1986 paper, a debate among researchers broke wide open. That debate quaked medical practice and changed the lives of people oblivious to these discussions going on in the corridors of hospitals and medical academia. The great new question of pain management was: Can opiate painkillers be used without risk of addiction by chronic-pain patients, who would live for years, in the same way that these drugs were now used on patients dying of cancer?

With crusaders’ confidence, and fed in part by the discovery of what was increasingly called a “report” in the
New England Journal of Medicine
coauthored by a Boston doctor named Hershel Jick, more and more people—especially Dr. Russell Portenoy and salespeople from the little-known pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, which was about to release a new painkiller—answered yes.

All About the 501s

Boise, Idaho

From what Ed Ruplinger could tell, there was nothing dumb about Polla.

Polla was a Mexican in his midforties. He was about five feet nine and the type of guy who could have easily grown heavy had he not gone to the gym, which he did a lot. Polla was trim, conservative, respectable, and looked to the world like a small businessman. He had a wife back in Mexico who nagged him about doing the books, about making sure the flow of inventory was reliable, and that his salesmen weren’t abusing their expense accounts out in the field.

Polla’s real name was Cesar Garcia-Langarica. He was in the black tar heroin business and he was from Xalisco, Nayarit, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. It was 1995 and Ed Ruplinger was a narcotics investigator with a drug task force in Boise, Idaho.

Polla’s young workers were both the source of his profits and the bane of his existence. Motivating them while he was out of town took most of his working hours. He did this without threat or coercion, and handled their misadventures with patience, it seemed to Ruplinger. When one of them crashed into a sign outside the complex where Polla had rented them an apartment, he appeared at the manager’s office the next day with money to pay for the damage. Ruplinger heard this story from the apartment complex manager.

Through the 1990s, the Xalisco system had refined through trial and error. The Boys compared notes at barbecues back in Xalisco and slowly a set of rules evolved that was passed along like folklore. One rule: no violence. At the time, the best-known drug gangs, the Bloods and Crips, shot it out over crack cocaine on street corners in towns far from Los Angeles, garnering police attention wherever they went. Watching all this, the Xalisco Boys quietly began to expand nationwide by doing exactly the opposite. Polla was part of that 1990s expansion and one place he showed up was Boise.

Ruplinger’s interest was first piqued when the drug unit suddenly began arresting Mexican drivers tooling around town selling heroin in balloons they kept in their mouths. They were easy to spot and bust, particularly with the help of addicts who, once arrested, were terrified of withdrawing in jail. As Dennis Chavez had seen in Denver, and as drug agents elsewhere would later discover, Ruplinger noticed that these Mexican drivers often had only a small amount of heroin and no weapons. So they never did much jail time. But it struck Ruplinger’s best police nerve that whenever he could determine where they were from, it turned out they were from a state in Mexico called Nayarit. What’s more, these guys were replaced within a couple of days. After a while, Ruplinger realized it didn’t matter how many Nayarit heroin drivers his task force arrested, more drivers filled the open slots.

Anybody could have taken the case, but Ed Ruplinger alone set about trying to answer the questions that arose as the Ada Metro Narcotics Task Force arrested more and more of these drivers. Who was behind them? he wondered. It was way too organized. This could not be unique to Boise, which was no one’s natural choice of a place to start up a drug-dealing enterprise. It had to have started somewhere else.

Ruplinger had been puzzling this out for a few weeks, and not getting very far, when he first noticed Garcia-Langarica’s name. It surfaced on the apartment records of these drivers, or the cars they drove. One day, Ruplinger watched a driver swing by an apartment building and pass a trim fellow some money. Here, clearly, was the boss, Ruplinger thought.

Yet the first time Ruplinger and his colleagues followed Polla, the suspected ringleader walked into a Mexican restaurant and took his place as a cook behind the grill. The man Ruplinger took for a heroin kingpin appeared instead to be a simple cook and not worth the unit’s time. But Ruplinger’s hunch proved correct. A month later Garcia-Langarica quit the job. From then on, when Polla was in town, he spent all his time supervising his heroin drivers.

Polla’s drivers had been operating for a while and seemed to have Boise to themselves. Then a sharp-eyed postal inspector, just before Christmas 1996, came upon a package that alerted a drug-sniffing dog. Inside was a Santa Claus doll and inside the doll was black tar heroin. The local narcotics task force, which included Ruplinger, had the parcel delivered to the apartment it was addressed to. A Boise drug team burst in and found four well-dressed, middle-aged Mexican men sitting around a card table already breaking up the heroin into small packets. They, too, were all from the state of Nayarit—last name of Tejeda.

The Santa Claus bust actually marked the beginning of the end of Polla’s dominion over Boise. Ruplinger figured that word of Boise had spread among the Nayarit heroin traffickers, and crew after crew descended on the town to compete with Polla and what he had set up in Idaho’s capital. One of Polla’s former drivers ran a new cell, Ruplinger was amazed to note. He had gone back to Mexico, then returned to Boise with his own drivers, a dispatcher, and a supply source to compete head-to-head with his former boss.

“Polla was one of the founding fathers. He comes in and sets it all up,” Ruplinger said, when we met in Boise. “The word gets out back home. Then every operative in Nayarit ends up moving in.”

Much later, as I continued to piece through the story of the Xalisco Boys, I met a woman who said she was married to one of the drivers who worked for Polla back in the mid-1990s. Polla, she said, started in the San Fernando Valley, but competition pushed him to move his cells to Pomona and Ontario, forty miles east of Los Angeles. His drivers often hung out at her mother’s restaurant in Pomona, she said. There she met one of Polla’s drivers, married him, and had children with him. They visited Xalisco twice.

When we met, she told me that her now ex-husband had helped start a cell for Polla in Salt Lake City in the 1990s, then broke off and began competing with him; her brother-in-law helped open Boise for Polla, then also started his own cell there in competition with his ex-boss.

At the time, the cities had only small populations of heroin addicts, people scrounging every day to get their fix. A stagnant market left only one place to get customers. “We were just poaching from Polla,” she said. “We would make the balloons bigger to attract [his] customers. Then we’d give specials, six for a hundred dollars instead of just five. It was a back-and-forth competition. ‘Don’t go with them. We can give you a better deal.’”

But as we talked, what she told me about her ex and his family intrigued me even more. He came from a family that had land and farm animals; they grew sugarcane and made cheese. They were middle-class by the standards of Mexican farm communities, she said. I expected most of these traffickers had come from the dirt-poorest families. That was true of the drivers, particularly those who came later, she said, but most of the heroin pioneers of Xalisco County were the sons of farmers who were pretty well-off, again by Mexican agricultural standards. They had some money to invest. With resources also came broader horizons of what was possible and what they wanted, or expected, from life.

Selling heroin was just easier than growing sugarcane; it was more adventurous, and involved more cash. It gave them the means to build better houses, and this set off a construction boom across Xalisco County that employed dozens if not hundreds of construction workers by the end of the 1990s. The houses went up in a few months, not in a decade. No house in downtown Xalisco had rebar extending from the top of it. That was the difference between Xalisco and every other Mexican immigrant town. Xalisco had notably less rebar.

Then she said something strange. After building their houses, and providing for their families, what the guys she knew from Xalisco, Nayarit, seemed to want most of all were Levi’s 501s.

Levi’s 501s were the pantswear gold standard for men in Mexico’s ranchos in the 1990s. They were very expensive in Mexico. One thing that made the Xalisco Boys’ retail system so popular, and young men eager to work in it, was that the system provided a way to accumulate quantities, large stacks, of 501s very cheaply. That was because U.S. junkies soon learned these dealers’ tastes and offered endless supplies of shoplifted 501s in exchange for their daily dope. Before long the junkies took orders according to size and color and traded them two for one: two pairs of 501s for one twenty-dollar balloon of black tar.

While she was married into the Xalisco world, “it was more about the jeans than anything,” she told me. “From day one, any opportunity to barter for jeans—they’d take it. They had stacks of jeans. They’d bring back home exactly the sizes people wanted.”

This thirst for Levi’s 501s, she said, is part of what propelled the Xalisco system as it began to expand out of the San Fernando Valley and through the western United States in the mid-1990s. Back in the ranchos, nothing said that a man had moved up in the world like walking around in public in dark-blue 501s. Seeing others in brand-new Levi’s 501s, meanwhile, inspired many youngsters—who had only thin, cheap jeans, if they had any at all—to hire on as drivers.

The more I asked about Levi’s 501s as fuel to the expansion of the Xalisco heroin networks, the more people had to say about it.

“I once brought home fifty pairs of Levi’s, in suitcases, which I took with me coming down on the bus from California,” said one Xalisco trafficker who worked crews from San Fernando Valley to Columbus, and eventually was made manger of a crew in Denver as well. “I’d get them from clients who’d steal them from Sears. Many dealers like me were bringing back big quantities of Levi’s. I’d give them away to friends and my family. But then after a while they started demanding them. `Send me this, send me that.’ Then they wanted shirts, tennis shoes. They wanted everything.”

Levi’s 501s were, in fact, part of a larger keep-up-with-the-Joneses competition that heroin revenue fueled back in the small town. Very quickly, the families got caught up in this. Around town, the gossip would start weeks in advance: So-and-so’s coming home with gifts and then we’re going to kill a cow and he’s going to pay for the banda. Every trafficker’s return was like Christmas Day as relatives lined up for gifts, especially those jeans. Some traffickers came pulling trailers full of clothes.

“The family wants more and more and more, so the guys start feeling the pressure,” the ex-wife I interviewed told me. “‘Give me, give me. You need to provide for me.’ Their own family starts thinking they deserve this. My ex’s sister was demanding, ‘You need to give me this, or you need to give me that.’ Whatever’s yours is mine. My ex used to send all kinds of clothes home. First it was 501s, but then later it was ‘I want Guess jeans,’ then Tommy Hilfigers.”

Just as an addict couldn’t choose not to use dope, these men couldn’t
not
return to sell it. Up north, they slept on the floors of apartments, unwilling to invest even in a mattress, awaiting the day when they could go home bearing gifts. Once back in Xalisco, she said, they walked the town the object of other men’s envy, paying for the banda and the beer, and surrounded by women. And no driver ever wanted to miss the Feria del Elote in August. “That’s when you get to show off the most,” she said. “It’s like a kid going to Disneyland for the first time. They walk around with their chest out. Everybody looks at them.”

I imagined their
mu
receptors jolted in endorphins.

“They live for it. They save their fricking pennies for it,” she said. “It’s a euphoria. They get high on it. They’re in fantasyland, in a dream where they think they’re the kings. Until the money runs out.”

Thus with an addict’s energy and single-mindedness, she said, the Xalisco Boys sought new markets with higher profit margins, awaiting the chance to go back home, the kings of their dreamland for a week or two. Only the self-centeredness of addiction, she said, explained how farm boys from a traditional and conservative small town could sell a product, anathema to their parents, to sad-eyed, vulnerable junkies and not be tormented.

“I used to work in a laboratory where they did research on animals, and have to kill them,” the ex-wife said. “The way you deal with that is you disassociate yourself from that animal. You don’t let it get to you. You put up that barrier. That’s what they do. They do that with people.”

Ed Ruplinger struggled to keep up as more crews started up in Boise. He created timelines and flow charts of connections between Polla and drivers and other U.S. cities. Others in the unit thought he was crazy. When had Boise figured in any kind of international narcotics conspiracy? Plus so many Hispanic names wearied the mind.