Dreamland (29 page)

His father said nothing.

“You have to change,” he upbraided his father. “No more yelling.”

Rancho fathers didn’t speak to their children, but instead resolved every problem with blows or orders. Heroin changed that in Enrique’s house.

Still, there were headaches, the kind every small businessman faces. Enrique was constantly having to set up apartments for his guys in Santa Fe, getting them new cellular phones and Nextels. When a cop stopped one of his drivers, that car was useless. Finding new workers wasn’t that hard; many men knocked on his door back home asking for work. But making sure they were trustworthy, then getting them up north and trained—that was a chore, and costly, too. He lived in the rancho but was always returning to Santa Fe to supervise, make changes, corral his workers, and get them straight.

From Santa Fe, he soon discovered the huge heroin market in tiny Chimayo, twenty-five miles north. He was content to supply the clans. With his black tar, the town that had endured decades of heroin addiction began to cave in. Two percent of the population—eighty-five people, veteran addicts many of them, who had lived for years on weaker heroin—died of black tar heroin overdoses over the next three years.

Enrique’s networks changed heroin in Santa Fe, too.

Now all Robert Berardinelli had to do was call a number. These new Mexicans had a delivery service just for heroin. Like pizza.

For years before they arrived, the dope was brown powder sold by junkies, who would dilute it; quality varied widely week to week. But the Nayarit guys didn’t cut their heroin; they were always careful to deliver only balloons containing a standard weight of black tar heroin, which was uniformly potent. Most surprising, they didn’t use their product. Every heroin dealer Berardinelli had known up to that point was a user, prone to cutting his dope. But these guys couldn’t care less about using; they seemed interested only in making money.

“I always dreamed of that: ‘I’m going to get clean and make some money doing this,’” Berardinelli said. “Every junkie I knew had that plan and never did it. These guys were fulfilling every addict’s dream.”

To Berardinelli and the street dope fiends, those Nayarit balloons became a brand every bit as dependable as a Coke can or a Holiday Inn sign. You always knew what you would find inside.

One day the Mexicans asked if Berardinelli could find them a car. They would pay him in heroin to put it in his name. So Robert Berardinelli undertook another life, that of facilitator for a cell of Xalisco, Nayarit, heroin dealers. He charged them three grams to put the car in his name, and another two grams to insure it.

Then the jobs multiplied. They asked him to wire their money back to Mexico, and he did. He put their pagers and phones in his name—and was paid in heroin. Occasionally, he would get a call from police telling him that a car registered in his name was being used by Mexicans who were stopped for speeding. He’d retrieve the car—and the Mexicans would pay him in heroin. When they asked him to find an apartment for a driver, he charged them a gram to find the place, two grams to fill out the lease application, and a gram and a half to put the utilities in his name.

Meanwhile, drivers rotated through every three months. “They’d be taught the routes,” Berardinelli told me when I tracked him down fourteen years later in Santa Fe. “They’d come up and make money and they’d be gone and you may never see them again. Some would be back six months later. They were just kids trying to make money—the American Dream kind of deal. They said they were from Nayarit. They talked about how little money they’d make back home and how great it was that they could come and get away with this and help their families. Back home, they were doing farm labor, any damn thing they could get without a lot of education.”

At a car lot once, Berardinelli met Enrique, who appeared to be the boss. He wanted to trade a Nissan for a Cadillac. Berardinelli signed the purchase agreement and Enrique gave him five grams of heroin.

Berardinelli spoke a little Spanish. Over nine months, Enrique visited him often, usually with a request—to put a car or a cell phone in Berardinelli’s name. He always came with free dope. Berardinelli remembered Enrique liked to play the tough guy at first, and usually came with an entourage of three or four. But he lightened up when he discovered Berardinelli was an old smuggling hand. Berardinelli told them stories of crossing weed southeast of El Paso in airplanes driven by former Korean War pilots. He offered them Cokes, since apparently they didn’t drink. He never saw them high.

“Because of the way this business model ran, it was so much more relaxed,” he said. “There wasn’t that element of fear in it. The dope was never cut; you got what you paid for. For a dope fiend like me, it was just really nice.

“I go from struggling every day to cop my drugs to having all the dope in the world, and all I have to do is put my name on a bunch of documents. They were giving me all this dope to do things I said I’d never do—buy them automobiles, rent apartments. When you’re strung out on that shit, you just don’t think properly. Reason goes out the window. You compromise your moral compass. All I had to do was call them and they’d give me whatever I wanted. My addiction got worse and worse. Like it did for a lot of people in northern New Mexico when they got here.”

Heroin Like Hamburgers

Los Angeles, California

One day in January 2000, a hundred federal agents and police officers from twenty-two cities gathered at the DEA office in Los Angeles.

Paul “Rock” Stone came in from Portland. Jim Kuykendall came in from Albuquerque. Others came in from Hawaii, Denver, Utah, Phoenix, and elsewhere to discuss a tangle of investigations into black tar heroin traffickers across the United States. These investigations had once seemed separate things, as if heroin dealers had independently sprouted in Maui or Denver. But in 1999, DEA agents in Los Angeles had received information that a heroin dealer in San Diego was being supplied by a couple out of an apartment in the Panorama City district of the San Fernando Valley. Agents obtained a warrant for the Panorama City couple’s phone records.

Oscar Hernandez-Garcia and his wife, Marina Lopez, were from Xalisco, Nayarit, it turned out. Agents learned that Hernandez-Garcia was calling numbers all over the United States from that apartment. They got a wiretap. They heard him arranging shipments of black tar, usually packed into the innards of electric ovens. Among the people Hernandez-Garcia spoke to frequently was the Man, who needed product for his stores in Columbus, Nashville, Wheeling, and Charlotte. They discussed the packages en route; occasionally, the Man, speaking English, followed up with Federal Express on packages that had gone missing.

The list of cities Hernandez-Garcia called grew long. With each new city, the agents contacted counterparts in those towns.

At DEA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, a supervisor named Harry Sommers watched these heroin cases mount all over the country. Sommers’s job was to coordinate far-flung DEA investigations as they expanded. The Nayarits got his attention simply because of the number of cities involved. Most of the cases appeared to be pretty small-time, involving a few ounces of heroin at the most. What was new, though—what caught Sommers’s eye, besides the expanse of the cases—was that the heroin was far stronger than typical street-level dope, but it was being sold cheaper than ever. Plus the dealers were all from Nayarit, and as the cases poured in, they seemed to be everywhere in America.

They were even in Boise, Idaho, which surprised Sommers. A while before, Ed Ruplinger had put an end to his case and arrested a half dozen of Polla’s drivers and couriers in Boise. Polla—Cesar Garcia-Langarica—was in Los Angeles at the time. A federal prosecutor wasn’t interested then in pursuing the case to California or other places where Ruplinger had tracked the trafficker’s cells. Polla presumably now lives in Nayarit; an indictment awaits him in Boise should he return to the United States. But at the time, Ruplinger never could get anyone to see that Boise was only a small part of a large web.

By 1999, though, that attitude was changing.

Sommers in Washington had never seen a system like this. These Xalisco heroin cells competed, yet borrowed dope from each other when supplies ran low. They were all connected, but the connections were easy to miss if you looked at each case individually. “You had to see it from the macro point of view,” Sommers said.

He organized the January meeting of investigators at the DEA’s L.A. office, and dubbed the operation Tar Pit.

That meeting made graphically clear the national scope of the Xalisco Boys for the first time. In Portland, the Tejeda-Cienfuegos brothers were already the focus of something called Operation Nytar. In Hawaii, there’d been a rare case of violence among workers at the cell David Tejeda had started years before. It had been run by two of his cousins, who were murdered in 1997 by their drivers whom they hadn’t paid. In Phoenix, the FBI was onto several brothers, the Vivanco-Contrerases, who had stores in Arizona and other states, and sometimes supplied Enrique in Santa Fe. Oscar Hernandez-Garcia supplied them all, and many others, from that Panorama City apartment. He had brothers who were veteran heroin cookers down in Xalisco and kept him stocked.

At the L.A. meeting, an agent from each city got up and described the local investigation, what each was seeing. It was the same story over and over: Drivers would spend a few months working, tooling around mid-major cities of America with mouths full of balloons. Drivers were caught with only small amounts of drugs and thus were usually deported without even doing much jail time. The cells practiced just-in-time supplying, like a global corporation. They presumed that anyone asking to buy more than a few grams was a cop.

“It was eerie how uniform [the stories] were from town to town,” said Rock Stone. “What we were seeing in Portland is what L.A. is seeing is what Denver is seeing. These [Xalisco Boys] are following exactly the same playbook. You couldn’t help but feel how corporate these guys are, how standardized they are. It’s like McDonald’s, where you get the same burger in Louisiana as you get in California.”

Yet no single person called the shots. Rather than one large organization, the thing appeared to agents to be an agglomeration of cells, each run by small entrepreneurs, each with employees, all of whom knew each other through rancho connections in Xalisco County. Hernandez-Garcia may have supplied them all, but that didn’t mean he gave orders. Nor were their profits funneled to him. His tapped phone calls made that clear. He was just a wholesaler; they were retailers relentlessly focused on the bottom line and achieving efficiency through technology just like any other business. The evolution of Nextel push-to-talk phones by the late 1990s was one example. It allowed bosses to monitor their drivers and make sure they were working through the day.

In the room that day in Los Angeles, Jim Kuykendall listened and thought back to that first meeting in Chimayo a year before, amazed at what it had led to. The whole thing was like a web, and thus more flexible and resilient than the rigid hierarchies of so many Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

And it all led back to that little town in one of Mexico’s smallest states.

Tar Pit

Panorama City, California

“You’re cheating on me, you bastard,” a woman yelled into the phone at her husband in Mexico.

Marina Lopez was mad. Here she was in that run-down apartment, packaging dope all day. Her husband, Oscar Hernandez-Garcia, was philandering down in their hometown of Xalisco and now Marina was hearing the gossip all the way up in Panorama City.

The argument escalated.

“That’s it, woman!” Hernandez-Garcia yelled into the phone. “I’m not coming back. I’m staying down here.”

Unbeknownst to the couple, narcotics agents were listening in. The marital spat sent jolts across the country to the highest levels of American law enforcement.

It was June 12, 2000. By now, the case dubbed Operation Tar Pit reached across more of the United States than any other drug investigation in the country’s history. The bust was set to take place three days hence. At the top of the indictment, the lead defendant, the guy around whom the case was built, was Oscar Hernandez-Garcia, wholesaling heroin across the country from his Panorama City apartment.

The June 15 bust date had been set weeks before by officials at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, who had the job of coordinating dozens of law enforcement agencies in cities across the country. But it almost required the presence in the United States of Oscar Hernandez-Garcia. And now it appeared that a marital tiff was going to keep him in Mexico. Given icy relations between the two countries regarding criminal extraditions, he might forever be out of the reach of U.S. justice.

Lisa Feldman, the federal prosecutor in charge of the case in Los Angeles, got on the phone to officials in Washington.

“We can’t change the date,” she was told.

“But he’s my lead defendant.”

“We’ve got too many resources committed. Sorry. It’s gotta happen then.”

For the next three days, Feldman and the agents waited on edge to see whether Oscar and Marina would make up. They did. Oscar Hernandez-Garcia got on a plane to Los Angeles. Hours later, a SWAT team hit their apartment. They found dope in the dishwasher and money in a container of baby formula. At the same time, federal agents and local cops swarmed into apartments in Cleveland and Columbus, in Salt Lake City and Phoenix, and Maui, Hawaii.