Dreamland (50 page)

Apparently a rumor spread around Xalisco that the commonwealth states (Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts) had more lenient drug laws. Several Xalisco drivers had been arrested in Weymouth, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

The Boys remained decentralized, resilient, and adaptable. They embodied America’s opiate epidemic: they were quiet, nonviolent. They focused on new opiate markets where the only customers they wanted were the white people. They were, it seemed to me, the Internet of dope, a drug delivery system for the twenty-first century, working in as many as twenty-five states, and all of this coming out of one small town in Mexico. These drivers had their own addiction nipping at their heels. It was the ranchero’s dream to return home a king, to pay the banda, to dance with the girls, to see other men’s envy, and to feel the embrace of their families as they opened boxes containing precious Levi’s 501s and designer jeans. Meanwhile, the local government noted in a report that Xalisco was the 111th wealthiest of Mexico’s 2,445 counties (municipios).

The Xalisco crews owed a good part of their success to the prescription pill addiction that was now in every corner of the United States. Whether any of them knew this is an interesting question. I knew drivers who’d never heard the name OxyContin. This made sense to me; they spoke no English and socialized only with other drivers. I also spoke, though, with Harry Sommers, the DEA honcho who’d coordinated the Tar Pit investigations years before. Maybe the Xalisco peons knew nothing, Sommers said. But, he told me, “we know from information provided by members of these Nayarit networks and other intelligence that some of them were well aware of painkiller abuse and targeted areas where they believed it was rampant and knowing those areas would be fertile ground for their product.”

Whatever the Xalisco Boys knew, the way they flogged black tar heroin early on combined with the aggresive marketing of pain pills in virgin territories then forming into the OxyContin Belt to create catastrophic synergy, and presaged the transition from pills to heroin that would happen in the rest of the country years later. Kids who started on pills ended up alone and dead in their cars, slaves to a molecule. The forces set up to insist people consume it were as relentless as the molecule itself. Pills had been prescribed with wanton carelessness. Then black tar heroin from the Nayarit mountains was sold to them like pizza. More and more parents continued on without their children. They suffered pain as chronic and life mangling as any those doctors and Purdue Pharma decided should be treated with opiate pills.

A lot was changing for the Xalisco Boys. By 2014, heroin trafficking was expanding dramatically across America, with new dealers, many of them addicts, getting in on the action every day. None had the Xalisco Boys’ franchised heroin delivery system; nevertheless, they gnawed at markets the Boys had been cultivating for years, and they found new ones full of pill addicts ready to switch. The potency of brown powder heroin, from other regions of Mexico and sold by black gangs out of Detroit and the East Coast, was getting stronger. The Sinaloa Cartel seemed to have massively upped its heroin exports to Chicago and New York City and elsewhere. Heroin seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border had risen sixfold since 2007.

Back in Xalisco, meanwhile, an incipient avocado industry was overtaking sugarcane and coffee, and providing work for many. The industry dates to about 2009 when growers from the state of Michoacán, Mexico’s avocado center, brought money and partnered with local farmers to plant avocado orchards. By 2014, those orchards were bearing fruit. The coffee warehouse where David Tejeda was gunned down was now an avocado warehouse. Many of the young men who applied for jobs were those who’d been arrested and served prison terms in the United States for selling heroin. Now with a criminal record, they faced lengthy prison terms if they were caught again up north. So they were turning to work in the avocado industry.

Still the town continued to live from tar heroin revenue in one way or another. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of men from Xalisco County had gone north to sell heroin. Cars with U.S. license plates were common around town. Mostly they bore plates from California, Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Colorado, and Oregon, and many of the vehicles had been used to hide and move large amounts of cash back home. Yet few men from Xalisco seemed substantially better off. Cell owners did well. But heroin-cell workers remained tied to a cycle of boom or bust, spending money with ostentation, then having to return to the U.S. to work some more. In the Landarenas and Tres Puntos neighborhoods, the money’s effect was hard to see, other than in the men who hung out on street corners drinking and using cocaine. Several streets there were still unpaved.

Little of the drug trade lucre trickled back to the Man anymore. “I don’t ask them for nothing,” he told me. “I hope they make a lot of money. As long as they acknowledge me when I’m over there. I just want respect. That’s all. I don’t tell them ‘You owe me,’ or ‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have this.’ They earned what they got.”

He had used the cartel peace in Xalisco to return for Christmas. He saw many of the older guys. Some were still going hard. Others were barely getting by. The onetime black tar wholesaler, Oscar Hernandez-Garcia—Mosca—was back in Xalisco with his wife. He and his brothers were rumored to own the local rodeo arena at the entrance to town. The Man had seen the Nayarit, his friend from the Nevada prison and partner in his first heroin cells. During the cartel conflicts, masked gunmen broke into the Nayarit’s home while he and his family were out and took the television, jewelry, and a lot more. They brought a trailer to the robbery and made off with prized horses that he often rode in the parade through town.

The Man came back to California. Here in the Central Valley, he was frail and anonymous. None of his neighbors knew the story of the heroin cells of Xalisco, Nayarit. So he spoke often of going home for good—to Xalisco, his adopted town, the big rancho, where families knew all he had done for them.

That looked unlikely. Life as a drug merchant, from the pills in Tijuana in the 1960s to the countless kilos of black tar, had left him slouched, gray, and weak with liver problems. As we talked that morning, his body seemed to slowly deflate into the chair. A wide television and a lamp on a stand stood nearby. His speech grew faint and slurred. His eyelids fell to half-mast.

“You never apologize for what you are. I don’t. I did what I did,” he said, grazing a palm down his face. “I never intentionally set out to hurt anybody. Payback’s a sonofabitch, but, what the hell, you live with it.”

One Friday morning months later, I sit in a Columbus, Ohio, courtroom.

The room is so crowded that it looks at first like it could be traffic court, except that almost everyone is young and white. Guys in backward baseball hats and splotchy whiskers. Girls with fading dye jobs, designer jeans, and rhinestone-studded sweatshirts.

This is heroin court.

Fifteen years ago, the Man brought black tar heroin to Columbus. The city became the jumping-off point for the expansion of the Xalisco Boys’ system through large parts of the eastern half of the United States just as prescription pills were accepted in medicine as “virtually nonaddictive” when used to treat pain.

Now, in a city that once never had heroin, almost every seat in heroin court is filled.

All are junkies, most started on pills, and three quarters of them use black tar heroin.

Judge Scott VanDerKarr annually handles about four hundred heroin addicts convicted of nonviolent felonies dropped to misdemeanors, which the clients are trying expunge. A few months back, this court was standing room only. VanDerKarr finally divided the court and extended the hours to accommodate the demand. The early two-hour session is for people whose last names begin with
A
through
L
.
M
through
Z
come later in the morning.

Franklin County has several specialized courts—one for veterans, and one for people with mental health problems. There’s even a drug court—for offenders with drug- and alcohol-related crimes. But heroin users overwhelm them all. This weekly court was formed in 2010. But even it couldn’t contain the demand. In another court, for prostitutes, almost half the women are also heroin addicts.

VanDerKarr wears a black robe and sits high on the bench, and a very large gavel is mounted on the wall behind him. But the atmosphere is relaxed, resembling a group meeting more than court. A table to one side offers stacks of brochures about treatment centers and drug and mental health resources for veterans. VanDerKarr calls several clients before him, applauds their days clean, and asks about their job searches and whether they have 12-step sponsors. Each must seek counseling, submit to random drug tests, and attend ninety NA meetings in ninety days. After that, they attend his session every week for up to two years. Almost half finish the program. But many relapse; some die.

VanDerKarr is a former prosecutor with almost twenty years on the bench. He counts himself one of Franklin County’s more understanding magistrates. But years in heroin court have also taught him that addicts, like children, need clear limits and consequences.

“What it’s taught me is that jail is actually a good thing” for those who relapse, he tells me after court adjourns. “I mean, give them a consequence of a couple weeks or thirty days. A lot of time it takes maybe two of those” to motivate them.

The fear of incarceration pushed Robert Berardinelli after his arrest in Operation Tar Pit in Santa Fe.

After more than a year in which he put Xalisco Boys cars and apartments in his name, Berardinelli was given probation by a judge who threatened him with a long prison sentence if he didn’t get clean. With that, he finally kicked. He spent a couple years as a counselor in a treatment center. He spoke weekly at a jail and kept on though many people weren’t listening. Years later, Berardinelli was a leader in NA and a delegate to the group’s 2014 international convention in Southern California, where we met.

“There’s no logical reason why I should be sitting right here and not in some federal penitentiary. I’m so blessed that I got out of it and never did time,” he said as we sat near a fountain outside a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, only a few miles from where the Xalisco Boys got their start. “I believe in the power of the twelve steps. It’s why I’m here right now. It’s tailor-made for people like me.”

Neither Santa Fe nor New Mexico had escaped the opiate plague. Crews of Nayarit black tar vendors had rotated through Santa Fe and northern New Mexico. In the Española Valley, pills had combined with heroin. In 2012, the local newspaper reported, the area set an overdose-death record. “We remain firmly at the top of the national list for drug overdose deaths per capita,” an editorial stated.

The number of kids involved had alarmed Berardinelli and changed the makeup of NA in his region. Now the discussion within the organization was how to reach these youngsters. This had been happening in 12-step groups across America, from Portsmouth to Portland. Grizzled, veteran recovering addicts in their fifties and sixties were seeing their sparsely populated NA meetings overwhelmed with kids in their twenties, enough so that special meetings were created for the new opiate addicts.

I asked if he ever wondered what became of the boss called Enrique and the drivers who gave him all his dope. Not really, he said. It seemed so long ago. But he felt no rancor. They were nice guys, clean-cut, not killers, just working-class boys trying to get ahead and were probably living back in Mexico somewhere. He marveled that they were the only dealers he’d encountered in forty years doing heroin who didn’t use their product. He was still startled at how organized they were. After Tar Pit, he remembered, there was no dope on Santa Fe streets for exactly one day.
That’s
how organized they were.

He vividly remembered the moment early that morning fourteen years before when DEA agent Jim Kuykendall and his team rolled up to arrest him. Their indictment held a dozen Mexican names and his. They had phone bills and car titles in his name. Berardinelli was gaunt, pocked, scabbed, and worn-out. He could lie no more.

Kuykendall led him to a patrol car in handcuffs.

“This is the first day of the rest of your life,” the agent said as he put him in the car.

It took a while, but Robert Berardinelli came to see that as the truth. He was now a grandfather and felt lucky to have survived decades of enslavement. At his request, I passed a message from him to Kuykendall.

“Jim Kuykendall saved my life,” Berardinelli said. “For years now, I’ve wanted to just say, ‘Hey, man, thank you.’”

Out in Portland, following the death of her brother, Toviy, Elina Sinyayev assured her parents she had cleaned up. She was actually using more than ever. She was rarely at home, escaping Toviy’s memory and her own responsibility in his death.

One night, her father came to her room, knowing something was wrong. They had never understood each other. As he sat down, he took her purse from the chair and heard metal clinking. Inside, he found two heroin spoons.

She expected rage. Instead, his eyes grew teary. For the first time in her life, he pleaded with her.

“Elina, you need help,” he said.

Elina broke down and cried, too. That night, rushing to heroin, she texted a friend and asked for money. The friend texted back, “No, but I know a church. It’s different.”