Dreamland (44 page)

The benefit prosecutors see in Len Bias is that it allows investigators to work up a chain of drug distribution. To save himself from a Len Bias prosecution, a dealer needs to flip, and quickly, burning the dealer one link above him in the chain, hoping for leniency at sentencing time. The last man detectives can trace the drugs to faces the twenty years if convicted—a fateful game of musical chairs.

Thus, a heart-to-heart takes place in an interrogation room. Investigators can’t threaten a suspect, but they do tell him what he faces under federal law. “The tone in the room definitely changes,” Garrett said. “You’re not joking with them. It’s a very powerful conversation.”

Speaking through a Russian interpreter, Dzyuba bridled at this idea. People die every day for their addictions, he told his interrogators. He wasn’t to blame for their choices. Finally, though, a defense attorney explained the situation. Dzyuba gave up the name of the junkie dealer he bought from. With that, Garrett and his colleagues began working up the chain.

Dzyuba’s dealer gave them the name of his supplier, who in turn gave them his dealer. This dealer, three levels up from Toviy, said he bought daily from a Mexican he knew only as Doriro.

This is how, on April 12, 2011, Garrett and his colleagues began calling the number of a man from Nayarit they would later learn went by the name Joaquin Segura-Cordero.

They received no answer. They called through the afternoon. Nothing.

Unbeknownst to them, Segura-Cordero was at that moment being arrested by another department. Portland police had their own Len Bias death case against him. This one originated three hours away, in Bend, Oregon, where a kid named Jedediah Elliott had overdosed and died a couple months before.

Both heroin chains led to Segura-Cordero, who, as it turned out, was a kind of regional sales manager for a Xalisco heroin cell. Normally, as a Xalisco regional manager, Segura-Cordero would have been insulated from the kind of day-to-day heroin sales that would expose him to arrest. But Segura-Cordero had faced a classic small-business problem: a labor shortage. “He had several runners arrested, so he’d run out of runners,” said Steve Mygrant, one of the prosecutors in the case. “He was having to expose himself. He was taking calls and making deliveries himself.”

Mygrant is a Clackamas County prosecutor deputized to try federal cases. Segura-Cordero was his first Xalisco Boys case. By the time I spoke with him, a couple years after Toviy’s death, Mygrant sounded both harried and amazed by the Xalisco system.

“It used to be you go into the ghettos to buy heroin from street corners,” he said. “Now these organizations are coming to the neighborhoods, to suburbia. They come to you. That’s unique to this organizational model. They’re all coming out of Nayarit and all operating off of this dispatch style. Like the fishermen in Alaska; they work seven days a week and go back home and play.”

The Segura-Cordero case showed that Xalisco heroin spread for 150 miles around Portland. It went out to the quietest rural counties, where kids, addicted to pills, learned to drive to Portland, buy cheap black tar, and triple their money back home while feeding their own habit. In classic Xalisco style, every junkie became a salesman.

The federal prosecutor who has done more Len Bias cases than any other, who worked out the kinks in the way these prosecutions work, is a woman named Kathleen Bickers. Bickers’s first heroin cases in the late 1990s were of Xalisco cells. “We were doing the Nayarit guys but we didn’t really realize it,” she told me.

But in time she saw the cells’ connections to Nayarit and to each other, how they stretched from Portland across the West and out to Columbus and the Carolinas. Now she called the whole thing Corporation Heroin.

“They are the Philip Morris of heroin,” she told me in her office in downtown Portland one day. “They think like cigarette company executives. The corporate nature of the model—they depend on that cash flow. They’re not going to go away because you incarcerate a few individuals. You have to cut the labor force off at the knees. You have to make the people from Nayarit realize: When you come up here, you may never go back, or it may be fifteen years before you go back.”

As she spoke, I thought back to the conversation with that fellow in prison from whom I first heard the name of the town of Xalisco so long ago now. He had lived in Portland, working legally as a mechanic as he watched the Xalisco system expand. “In Portland,” he said, “I’d see [the police] grab people with twenty or thirty balloons and they’d let them go. That’s why people began to come to Portland, because they weren’t afraid. They saw there were no consequences. ‘We get caught with this and they let us go.’”

Word spread back in Xalisco that cells did well in Portland, and, furthermore, arrested drivers were only deported. More cells crowded into town, he said.

This reminded me so much of small-town Mexican business culture. I once visited a village in central Mexico—Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán. Tzintzuntzan had at least two-dozen vendors all selling the same kind of pottery on its main street. Once one person did well selling pottery, everyone started doing it. No one thought to vary the offering. The stores stretched for five or six blocks—with each selling identical pots and bowls, eager to undercut the others. Mexican small-business culture, born of crisis and peso devaluations, was risk averse and imitative. That described the Xalisco cells. They came and imitated those who’d come before. In so doing, they dropped prices and raised their potency and the natural result, particularly as OxyContin tenderized the market terrain, was more addiction and overdoses. None of this was on a kingpin’s order. It was something far more powerful than that. It was the free market.

Portland’s catch-and-deport policy was an important reason why. The policy was designed for the small-time street addict/dealer who city officials didn’t want taking jail space from more serious felons. The Xalisco Boys’ drivers worked hard to look small-time. In reality, they were the only visible strands of large webs that sold hundreds of kilos of black tar a year across America, by the tenth of a gram. So for many years, when they were caught they were deported and faced little jail time, and no prison time. As farm boys on the make, they drew a very different message from leniency than what these Portland officials intended. To them, catch and release looked more like an invitation.

By the time OxyContin came to Portland in the mid-2000s, the city was famous back in Xalisco, Nayarit. The Boys crowded into the Rose City. What’s more, the arrival of OxyContin meant they no longer had to rely on the old street clients like Alan Levine. There were now many hundreds more to help jump-start a heroin cell. The addicts were younger and wealthier. Seizures of a few ounces of heroin were big news a decade ago. Now, Bickers said, cops routinely found pounds of the stuff.

Len Bias became Portland’s new strategy to combat the Xalisco Boys. In Portland, and for presumably the first time in the history of heroin in America, police began responding energetically—two or three detectives at a time—to a dead junkie in a gas station bathroom. The deceased’s cell phone was mined for contacts that could lead them up the Xalisco ladder. Runners were no longer automatically deported. They were told they faced twenty years in federal prison.

For Len Bias to work, federal, state, and local government agencies had to cooperate completely. The state medical examiner had to be willing to quickly perform an autopsy; the local DA had to give up the case if it appeared the feds had more leverage.

Above all, investigators had to share information. This was because, unlike traditional Mexican drug organizations, Xalisco cells actually shared supplies, even with competitors. Xalisco cases tended to connect like webs. This was forcing investigators to discard turf battles.

“The ego of a narcotics cop is what makes them great,” Bickers said. “They’re creative, innovative, persistent. They know how to dog a target. But they’re very territorial. We constantly have to remind ourselves to break those barriers down, to think organizationally, and not just think that ‘it’s my case.’ You are going to go up a couple levels and you’re going to run into somebody else’s case. You get down to the dead people, and [the cases] all look like they’re separate. But you work them hard and high enough and you keep your mind open, you’ll see connections.”

Joaquin Segura-Cordero was one example. He was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for selling dope that killed Toviy Sinyayev in a suburb of Portland and Jedediah Elliott out in the Oregon countryside 150 miles away.

Bickers had another case against two brothers from the village of Pantanal, near Xalisco, who were the ninth level up a Len Bias chain. They faced life in prison because of the death of a young woman in Salem from an overdose of black tar that they were accused of importing. As one level led to the next, Bickers watched a web emerge that connected the brothers’ alleged Portland cell to suppliers and cells in other parts of Oregon, Las Vegas, and Colorado Springs—and, of course, to Nayarit.

From Bickers’s office, I walked a few blocks to the office of a public defender to speak to an attorney who had agreed to talk to me as long as I left his name out of it. He had convinced many Xalisco Boys that their cooperation was the only way to avoid twenty years in prison under Len Bias. The attorney had a standing order to detectives to call him immediately when a Len Bias case began. He supported quick cooperation with investigators—a controversial idea among defense attorneys.

“The value of your information is at its maximum the closer you are to the time of your arrest,” he said. “If you’re in really quick you can derive great benefit for your client.”

Still, he didn’t see much effect from prosecutors’ new strategy. The pills were so widespread; new kids were getting addicted every day. They were switching to heroin all the time. Against that backdrop, he figured, prosecutors were only temporarily disrupting the market.

“My dental hygienist came to talk to me,” he said. “Her son was involved with heroin to the point where he was stealing stuff out of stores. This is a middle-class person you’d think would never be touched by something like this. But it’s so prevalent. It’s almost like you were trying to stop drinking coffee [with] a Starbucks on every corner.”

No Scarface, No Kingpins

Denver, Colorado

That was a daunting thought. I kept it in mind as, not long after that, I stood in an apartment twelve hundred miles away in northeast Denver, watching a thin kid with short-cropped hair tell detectives a story.

Jose Carlos was a classic Xalisco Boy. He was twenty-one and a faint moustache was trying to sprout above his lip. Shackled to a chair, he was shirtless and nervously watched Dennis Chavez and a team of narcotics officers go through every bit of his apartment.

The day before, a narcotics officer named Jes Sandoval had spotted a woman making heroin deliveries at a southeast Denver parking lot. When officers pulled her over, she gave up the apartment and Jose Carlos.

So the narcs busted in. Jose Carlos said he’d been in town for only three months selling heroin. He owned to being from the town of Acaponeta in Nayarit. The cops asked who his boss was. He started tearing up and shutting down at that point. He’d been in Columbus, Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Working construction, he said. None of the cops in the room were buying that. But as long as he wasn’t giving up anybody above him, they didn’t care what his story was.

The case, like hundreds before, would go no higher than this scruffy kid. His one-bedroom apartment contained nothing they could use against him. In fact, it contained almost nothing at all: a Walmart card table, four folding chairs, a small flat-screen TV, votive candles to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a pile of clothes, some DVD action flicks, and packets of Pizza Hut hot sauce. No bed, no sofa.

No weapons, no cash, either. On the table were balloons and a plate with only a couple grams of tar heroin. Jose Carlos, it appeared, supplied the Denver drivers with their balloons. There was a slight twist to this operation. This Xalisco cell had its addicts call a Denver number. Those calls were forwarded down to a phone in Nayarit, where an operator answered, then relayed the addict’s order to a driver up in Denver. A heroin call center.

This bust was small-time by traditional narcotics standards. Yet, short of arresting the cell owner down in Mexico, the narcotics team, from Denver’s District 3, was doing what probably harmed the Xalisco heroin business model most: raising its cost of business.

The Xalisco system succeeded because it reacted to how American cops traditionally worked drugs. Narcotics teams found barren apartments and peons like Jose Carlos; the money and most of the drugs were back in Mexico. This deflated cops and prosecutors. Thus, more so than any traditional drug network in the country, the Xalisco Boys were forcing law enforcement to rethink old strategies, particularly as the opiate epidemic took hold.

The upper- and middle-class junkies scrounging for dope hung around District 3’s trendy University of Denver and Washington Park neighborhoods. The Xalisco drivers were there, too. District 3 cops didn’t have the manpower or budget to work long undercover cases. Their approach to the Xalisco Boys was simpler, born of necessity, and revolved around Officer Jes Sandoval.

After twenty-two years as a cop and sixteen working drugs, Sandoval had become curiously like the Xalisco runners he tracked. He was as inconspicuous as they were, and about as relentless. In many years as a crime reporter, I have never encountered a narcotics officer as low-tech as Sandoval. He uses only a department-issue flip-up cell phone and a 2007 Honda SUV. He works business hours because the department pays no overtime. He works alone. In his cubicle is a photo of the Lone Ranger, a gift from colleagues. He almost never uses informants, never buys drugs undercover, never works wiretaps.