The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (32 page)

Manning and Davis persuaded Rogers to let them watch the show. Also coming along in another vehicle were two black bodyguards from Houston who had presumably been hired by Townsend to make sure nothing happened to Bisexual. The caravan headed toward the town of Jasper. But when they reached the show’s location, the dogman handling the Louisiana dog said the kennel owners, perhaps realizing their dog would be no match for Bisexual, wanted to back out of the fight.

According to Manning, one of the Mexicans then called Townsend in Mexico. He put the call on speakerphone, and Manning was able to eavesdrop on the entire conversation. He heard the Mexican ask if he should shoot the gringo dogman from the Louisiana kennel. Townsend told him to instead arrange a deal with the kennel owners to obtain the dog that was supposed to fight—or else suffer the consequences. A deal was indeed struck, and the Mexicans disappeared back into Mexico with Bisexual and the Louisiana dog.

“They’ll be back to get Bisexual that grand championship,” Rogers told Manning and Davis. “I promise they’ll be back.”

I
N FACT
, the Mexican brothers were rumored to be coming back with Bisexual for a show on December 6, and Manning and Davis proposed that on that night teams of DPS and local police officers sweep into three spots, including their own, where several shows would be taking place. Maybe they’d get lucky and nab Bisexual, the Mexican brothers, and Townsend too. At the least, the officers declared, the roundup could bring down close to two hundred dogmen and spectators.

But the DPS commanders ordered the officers to close their investigation and arrest those they already had on videotape. At dawn on a Friday morning in November, more than one hundred peace officers stormed some of the dogmen’s homes and various properties where Manning and Davis knew that large numbers of fighting dogs were being kept.

Over the next several days, more suspects were arrested. When it was all over, 85 men, including White Boy Rob and Fat Don, were indicted for either dogfighting (a state felony with a maximum punishment of two years in jail) or being spectators at a dogfight (a class A misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of one year in jail). Animal control officers also confiscated 185 fighting dogs. When Rogers’s dogs and their puppies were carried off, his wife and children burst into tears. The dogs were the family pets. Every night, they would curl up on the couch and lie on their backs to be rubbed on their stomachs. “It’s not fair,” one of the children cried out.

Because dogmen have been known to break into animal shelters to steal confiscated pit bulls, Harris County stationed constables around the facility where the dogs had been taken. But there was no way, Belinda Smith told reporters, to rehabilitate dogs that had been bred to be so wildly aggressive toward other dogs. It was also important, she noted, to keep those dogs, especially the champion dogs belonging to Fat Don and Rogers, from passing on their fighting bloodlines. So the decision was made to euthanize all of them, including the pit bulls that Manning and Davis had used. Before they were put down, the officers showed up to say goodbye. “I’m not much of an emotional guy, and I knew it was the right thing to put those dogs down,” said Manning. “But when I was saying, ‘Good girl,’ to one of my dogs, petting her on the head, she started wagging her tail. It was not easy to walk away from that.”

The bust was trumpeted in the news as one of the biggest in the nation, and predictably, most citizens were outraged. Someone commented on the
Houston Chronicle
Web site that dogmen should be tied down, covered with pork chop grease, and mauled by “20 hungry pit bulls.” As it turned out, the animal rights organizations were not angry at all that Manning and Davis had fought dogs: They were thrilled that someone had finally gone after the dogmen.

But the writers on the dogfighting Web sites were furious that the informant, one of their own, had become a snitch. (Manning and Davis refuse to comment on whether the informant had struck a deal regarding any previous charges in return for his cooperation.) One described the cops as “scumbags” who’d entrapped the dogmen. On the
Chronicle
Web site, someone who said he wasn’t a dogman wrote, “It’s laughable that so-called mistreatment of animals gets more attention than many of the horrendous things that happen to humans every day.”

Nevertheless, the criminal cases were open-and-shut. By June of this year, almost all the defendants had worked out deals, including Fat Don, who, according to Smith, quietly agreed to a two-year felony sentence. To just about everyone’s surprise, however, one of the few dogmen who initially refused to cop a plea was White Boy Rob.

When I talked to Rogers, in early June, he and his family had left their Channelview trailer after receiving death threats and moved into a nearby apartment. Instead of working with dogs, Rogers was spending his evenings taming feral cats, getting them to drink milk out of a saucer he kept right outside the front door. “Maybe I’ll get them tame enough that the kids can adopt them,” he said.

I asked Rogers what he thought of Manning and Davis, who had just been named officers of the year by a Houston law enforcement organization. His voice almost softened—almost. “It never occurred to me, not once, that those boys were cops. I thought they wanted to be real dogmen, so I taught them how to fight the right way—with dignity and honor, not letting their dogs get chewed up. And I know, deep down, they started loving it as much as I did. I could tell they had the blood for it. But now they get to go free and get all kinds of publicity while I go off to prison.”

He paused. “It don’t matter. Locking me up ain’t nothing compared to what they’ve already done to my dogs. They even took away our two boxers and killed them. Do you think that’s right? Do you think any of those dogs really wanted to be rescued so they could have a needle stuck in their ass? Come on, now, you tell me who the monster is. All of you people who call yourselves civilized go to boxing matches. You watch wrestling, and you watch those Ultimate Fighting Championships on television. What’s really the difference here?”

After viewing the DPS videotapes of Rogers standing in the box at the Dog House, exhorting his dogs to keep fighting, Rogers’s attorney, Rick Detoto, a respected young Houston criminal defense attorney, knew it would be an uphill battle to get an acquittal. “But I agree with my client. Morally, a juror should have a problem with cops deliberately subjecting all these dogs to abuse in order to arrest someone else,” Detoto said. “Would those cops stick a child in a house where a suspected child abuser lives in order to catch him? I don’t think so. And I have to say, when you see the undercover officers in those videotapes, they look like they’re having a really good time.”

Manning and Davis insist they were just playacting and that they were never seduced by Rogers or the other dogmen. But they do admit that their experience taught them about the dogmen’s fierce devotion to what they do. “We definitely forced dogfighting around here to go more underground,” Manning said. “We’ve noticed the talk on the dogfighting Web sites has gotten a lot more coded. But we’ll never get dogfighting to go away. There will always be a show every weekend night.”

Though Rogers believed he could have taken the stand and convinced a jury that dogfighting was a legitimate sport and not a crime, he finally decided in late June to accept an offer from the district attorney’s office: He agreed to plead guilty and will serve a one-year felony sentence in county jail, which means he could be out in six months—not bad compared with the two-year sentence he could have received. Smith said she decided to offer him the deal because he had no prior criminal record, which would have allowed a jury to give him probation. But, she added, if he is caught dogfighting again, he can be sent away to prison for two to ten years.

When I asked Rogers if he would ever go back to dogfighting, he said, “I don’t know, to be honest with you. But I will tell you that every night, I dream about my dogs making their moves, feinting to the left and then attacking to the right. My dogs were great dogs. They were beautiful, strong dogs. Oh, man, they were beautiful.”

S
KIP
H
OLLANDSWORTH
,
an executive editor of
Texas Monthly,
writes two or three crime stories a year for the magazine. Since publishing the story about dogfighting in August 2009, he has written about a powerful federal judge in Galveston who for years sexually abused women in his own court house, and he also has chronicled the story of a sweet, shy young mother in suburban Houston who suddenly stabbed her husband 193 times and buried him in their backyard.

Coda

The massive Texas bust ultimately resulted in prison time for sixty Texas dogfighters and spectators (including two women). Since then, the federal government has carried out another dogfighting bust that rounded up thirty top dogfighters in five states, including Texas. But Belinda Smith of the Harris County district attorney’s office insists that dogfighting in Texas hasn’t been dealt a fatal blow. “It’s just gone deeper underground,” she says. Determined to bring down the next group of big-time dogfighters who have taken over from Fat Don and White Boy Rob, she has been meeting with various local police departments, hoping to set up more undercover operations. “But, of course, we know when we get them, there’s going to be someone ready to step right up to take their place,” Smith admits. “It remains the great mystery: Why do men love dogfighting the way they do? Why is it so important to them?”

FROM
Harper’s Magazine

I
AM READY FOR THE STORY
of all the dead men who last saw his face.

As I drank coffee and tried to frame questions in my mind, a crime reporter in Juárez was cut down beside his eight-year-old daughter as they sat in his car letting it warm up. This morning as I drove down here, a Toyota passed me with a bumper sticker that read, with a heart symbol,
I LOVE LOVE
. This morning I tried to remember how I got to this rendezvous.

I was in a distant city and a man told me of the killer and how he had hidden him. He said at first he feared him, but he was so useful. He would clean everything and cook all the time and get on his hands and knees and polish his shoes. I took him on as a favor, he explained.

I said, “I want him. I want to put him on paper.”

And so I came.

The man I wait for insists, “You don’t know me. No one can forgive me for what I did.”

He has pride in his hard work. The good killers make a very tight pattern through the driver’s door. They do not spray rounds everywhere in the vehicle, no, they make a tight pattern right through the door and into the driver’s chest. The reporter who died received just such a pattern, ten rounds from a 9mm and not a single bullet came near his eight-year-old daughter.

I wait.

I admire craftsmanship.

The first call comes at 9:00 and says to expect the next call at 10:05. So I drive fifty miles and wait. The call at 10:05 says to wait until 11:30. The call at 11:30 does not come, and so I wait and wait. Next door is a game store frequented by men seeking power over a virtual world. Inside the coffee shop, it is all calculated calm and everything is clean.

I am in the safe country. I will not name the city, but it is far from Juárez and it is down by the river. At noon, the next call comes.

We meet in a parking lot, our cars conjoined like cops with driver next to driver. I hand over some photographs. He quickly glances at them and then tells me to go to a pizza parlor. There he says we must find a quiet place because he talks very loudly. I rent a motel room with him. None of this can be arranged ahead of time because that would allow me to set him up.

He glances at the photographs, images never printed in newspapers. He stabs his finger at a guy standing over a half-exposed body in a grave and says, “This picture can get you killed.”

I show him the photograph of the woman. She is lovely in her white clothes and perfect makeup. Blood trickles from her mouth, and the early-morning light caresses her face. The photograph has a history in my life. Once I placed it in a magazine and the editor there had to field a call from a terrified man, her brother, who asked, “Are you trying to get me killed, to get my family killed?” I remember the editor calling me up and asking me what I thought the guy meant. I answered, “Exactly what he said.”

Now the man looks at her and tells me she was the girlfriend of the head of the
sicarios
in Juárez, and the guys in charge of the cartel thought she talked too much. Not that she’d ever given up a load or anything, it was simply the fact that she talked too much. So they told her boyfriend to kill her and he did. Or he would die.

This is ancient ground. The term
sicario
goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (
sicae
) in their murders of Romans and their supporters.

He leans forward. “Amado and Vicente”—the two brothers who have successively headed the Juárez cartel—“could kill you if they even thought you were talking,” he says.

These photographs can get you killed. Words can get you killed. And all this will happen and you will die and the sentence will never have a subject, simply an object falling dead to the ground.

I feel myself falling down into some kind of well, some dark place that hums beneath the workaday city, and in this place there is a harder reality and absolute facts. I have been living, I think, in a kind of fantasy world of laws and theories and logical events. Now I am in a country where people are murdered on a whim and a beautiful woman is found in the dirt with blood trickling from her mouth and then she is wrapped with explanations that have no actual connection to what happened.

I have spent years getting to this moment. The killers, well, I have been around them before. Once I partied with two hundred armed killers in a Mexican hotel for five days. But they were not interested in talking about their murders. He is.

W
E WILL NEVER SEE HIM COMING.
He is of average height, he dresses like a workman with sturdy boots and a knit cap. If he stood next to you in a checkout line, you would be unable to describe him five minutes later. Nothing about him draws attention. Nothing.

He has very thick fingers and large hands. His face is expressionless. His voice is loud but flat.

He lives beneath notice. That is part of how he kills.

He says, “Juárez is a cemetery. I have dug the graves for 250 bodies.”

I nod because I know what he means. The dead, the 250 corpses, are details, people he disappeared and put in holes in death houses. The city is studded with these secret tombs. Just today the authorities discovered a skeleton. From the rotted clothing, the experts peg the bones to be those of a twenty-five-year-old man. He is one of a legion of dead hidden in Juárez.

That is why I am here. I have spent twenty years now waiting for this moment and trying to avoid being buried in some hole. At that party long ago with the two hundred gunmen, a Mexican federal cop wanted to kill me. He was stopped by the host, and so I continued on with my tattered life. But I have come to this room so that I can bring out my dead, the thousands who have been cut down on my watch. I have published two books on the slaughter of the city, reporting there from 1995, when murder in Juárez ran at two to three hundred a year, until 2008, when 1,607 people were killed. And that is only the official tally—no one really keeps track of those who are taken and never heard from again. I am a prisoner of all this killing.

We sit with a translator at a round wooden table, drapes closed.

He says, “Everything I say stays in this room.”

I nod and continue making notes.

That is how it begins: nothing is to leave the room, even though I am making notes and he knows I will publish what he says because I tell him that. We are entering a place neither of us knows. I can never repeat what he tells me even though I tell him I will repeat it. Nothing must leave the room even though he watches me write his words down in a black notebook. I do not even know his name, nor can I verify the particulars of what he tells me. But this killer has come to me with a pedigree, established through the hands that delivered him to me: a man who once used him, a former cartel member and leading state policeman who now has produced him as a favor.

He tells me to feel the tricep on his right arm. It hangs down like a tire. Now, he says, feel my left arm. There is nothing there.

He stands, puts a chokehold on me. He can snap my neck like a twig.

Then he sits down again.

I ask him how much he would charge to kill me.

He gives me a cool appraisal and says, “At the most, $5,000, probably less. You are powerless and you have no connections to power. No one would come after me if I killed you.”

We are ready to begin.

I
ASK HIM
how he became a killer.

He smiles and says, “My arm grew.”

He takes a sheet of paper, draws five vertical lines, and writes in the spaces in black ink: childhood, police, narco, god. The four phases of his life. Then he scratches out what he has written until there is nothing but solid ink on the page.

He cannot leave tracks. He cannot quite give up the habits of a lifetime.

I reach for the paper but he snatches it back. And laughs. I think at both of us.

“When I believed in the Lord,” he says, “I ran from the dead.”

“I had a normal childhood,” he insists. He will not tolerate the easy explanation that he is the product of abuse.

“We were very poor, very needy,” he continues. “We came to the border from the south to survive. My people went into the
maquilas
. I went to a university. I didn’t have a father who treated me badly. My father worked, a working man. He started at the
maquila
at 6:00
P.M.
and worked until 6:00
A.M.
, six days a week.
The rest of the time he was sleeping. My mother had to be both father and mother. She cleaned houses in El Paso three days a week. There were twelve children to feed.”

He pauses here to see if I understand. He will not be a victim, not of poverty, not of parents. He became a killer because it was a way to live, not because of trauma. His eyes are clear and intelligent. And cold.

“Once,” he says, “my father took me and three of my brothers to the circus. We brought our own chilis and cookies so we did not have to spend money. That was the happiest day of my life. And the only time I went somewhere with my father.”

But now we turn to the time he worked for the devil.

He is in high school when the state police recruit him and his friends. They get $50 to drive cars across the bridge to El Paso, where they park them and walk away. They never know what is in the cars, nor do they ever ask. After the delivery, they are taken to a motel where cocaine and women are always available.

He drops out of the university because he has no money. And then the police dip into his set of friends who have been moving drugs for them to El Paso. And send them to the police academy. In his own case, because he is only seventeen, the mayor of Juárez has to intervene to get him into the academy.

“We were paid about a hundred and fifty pesos a month as cadets,” he says, “but we got a bonus of $1,000 a month that came from El Paso. Every day, liquor and drugs came to the academy for parties. Each weekend, we bribed the guards and went to El Paso. I was sent to the FBI school in the United States and taught how to detect drugs, guns, and stolen vehicles. The training was very good.”

After graduation, no one in the various departments really wanted him because he was too young, but U.S. law enforcement insisted he be given a command position. And so he was.

“I commanded eight people,” he continues. “Two were honest and good. The other six were into drugs and kidnapping.”

Two units of the State Police in Juárez specialized in kidnapping, and his was one such unit. The official assignment of both units was to stop kidnapping. In reality, one unit would kidnap the person and then hand the victim over to the other unit to be killed, a procedure less time-consuming than guarding the victim until the ransom was paid. Sometimes they would feign discovering the body a few days after the abduction.

That was the orderly Juárez he once knew. Then in July 1997, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the head of the Juárez cartel, died. This was an “earthquake.” Order broke down. The payments to the State Police from an account in the United States ended. And each unit had to fend for itself.

“I have no real idea how and when I became a
sicario
,” he says. “At first, I picked up people and handed them over to killers. And then my arm began to grow because I strangled people. I could earn $20,000 a killing.”

Before Carrillo’s death, cocaine was not easy for him to get in Juárez because “if you cut open a kilo, you died.” So he and his crew would cross the bridge to El Paso and score. He is by now running a crew of kidnappers and killers, he is working for a cartel that stores tons of cocaine in Juárez warehouses, and he must enter the United States to get his drugs.

That changed after Carrillo’s death. Soon he was deep into cocaine, amphetamines, and liquor and would stay up for a week. He also acquired his skill set: strangulation, killing with a knife, killing with a gun, car-to-car barrages, torture, kidnapping, and simply disappearing people and burying them in holes.

He mentions the case of Victor Manuel Oropeza, a doctor who wrote a column for the newspaper. He linked the police and the drug world. He was knifed to death in his office in 1991.

“The people who killed him taught me.
Sicarios
are not born, they are made.”

He became a new man in a new world.

I
N THE EYES OF THE
U.S.
GOVERNMENT
, the Mexican drug industry is very organized, its cartels structured like corporations, perhaps with periodic meetings. But on the ground with the
sicario
, there is no structure. He kills all over Mexico, he works with various groups, but he never knows how things are linked, he never meets the people in charge, and he never asks any questions. And so he visits the various outposts of this underground empire, but does so without any map and with no directory of the management. He is in a cell and can betray only the handful of people in his cell. He will never even be certain which cartel organization pays him.

He tells me of a leader—a deputy of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the current head of the Juárez cartel—“a man full of hate, a man who even hates his own family. He would cut up a baby in front of the father in order to make the father talk.”

He says the man is a beast. He is drifting now, going back in time to a place he has left, the killing ground where he would slaughter and then drop five grand in a single evening. He remembers when outsiders would try to move into Juárez and commandeer the plaza, the crossing. For a while, the organization killed them and hung them upside down. Then, for a spell, they offered Colombian neckties, the throat cut, tongue dangling through the slit. There was a spate of necklacing, the burned body found with a charred stub where the head had been, the metal cords of the tire simply blackened hoops embracing the corpse.

He has lived like a god and been the destroyer of worlds. The room is still, so very still, the television a blank eye, the walls sedated with beige, the exhaust fan purring. His arms at rest on the wood table, everything solid and calm.