The Cartel: A Novel Read online

  Three guards still refused to take the money. Diego congratulated them for their integrity. Each was found the next morning sitting primly at his post with his throat cut.

  The rest accepted Adán’s largesse. A cook was paid $300 American a month, a senior guard as much as a thousand, the warden $50,000 above and beyond his annual salary.

  As for the men lining up to kill Adán, there were several of them, all beaten to death by other inmates wielding baseball bats. “Los Bateadores”—“the Batters”—Sinaloan employees of Diego, would be Adán’s private security squad inside Puente Grande.

  “How long do I have to be here?” Adán asks.

  Diego answers, “In here we can guarantee your safety. Out there…”

  He doesn’t need to finish—Adán understands. Out there are people who still want him dead. Certain people will have to go, certain politicians have yet to be bought, cañonazos—huge bribes—have to be paid.

  Adán knows he’ll be in Puente Grande for a while.

  —

  Adán’s new cell, on Block 2, Level 1-A, of CEFERESO II, is 635 square feet, has a king-sized bed behind a private partition, a full kitchen, a bar, a flat-screen LED television, a computer, a stereo system, a desk, a dining room table, chairs, floor lamps, and a walk-in closet.

  A refrigerator is stocked with frozen steaks and fish, fresh produce, beer, vodka, cocaine, and marijuana. The alcohol and drugs are not for him but for guards, inmates, and guests.

  Adán doesn’t use drugs.

  He saw his uncle become addicted to crack and watched the once powerful patrón—Miguel Ángel Barrera, “M-1,” the genius, the progenitor of the cartels, a great man—become an addled-minded, paranoid fool, a conspirator in his own destruction.

  So a single glass of wine with dinner is Adán’s only indulgence.

  A closet holds a rack of Italian-made, custom-tailored suits and shirts. Adán wears a clean white shirt every day—the dirty ones go to the prison laundry and come back pressed and folded—because he knows that in his business, as in any business, appearances are important.

  Now he goes about the business of putting back together the pieces that Keller shattered. In his absence, the Federación has splintered into a few large groups and dozens of smaller ones.

  The largest is the Juárez cartel, based in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Vicente Fuentes seems to have won the battle for control there. Fine—he’s a native Sinaloan, tight with Nacho Esparza, whom he allows to move his meth through the Juárez plaza.

  The next in importance is the Gulf cartel—the Cartel del Golfo, the “CDG”—based in Matamoros, not far from the entry points in Laredo. Two men, Osiel Contreras and Salvador Herrera, reign there now that Hugo Garza is in jail. They’re also cooperative, allowing Sinaloan product, via Diego’s organization, to pass through their territory.

  The third is the Tijuana cartel, which Adán and his brother Raúl ran before, using it as a power base to take the entire Federación. Their sister, Elena—the only surviving sibling—is trying to maintain control but losing her grip to a former associate, Teo Solorzano.

  Then there’s the Sinaloa cartel based in his own home state, the birthplace of the Mexican drug trade. It was from there that Tío built the Federación, from there that he divided the country into plazas that he handed out like fiefdoms.

  Now three organizations collectively comprise the Sinaloa cartel. Diego Tapia and his two brothers run one, trafficking cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. Nacho Esparza has another, and has become the “King of Meth.”

  The third is Adán’s own, made of old Federación loyalists and for which Diego and Nacho have been the dual placeholders, awaiting Adán’s return. He in turn insists that he has no ambition to become the boss of the cartel, just the first among equals with his fellow Sinaloans.

  Sinaloa is the heartland. It was the black loam of Sinaloa that grew the poppies and the marijuana that first gave birth to the trade, Sinaloa that provided the men who ran it.

  But the problem with Sinaloa is not what it has, it’s what it lacks.

  A border.

  The Sinaloan base is hundreds of miles from the border that separates—and joins—Mexico from the lucrative American market. While it’s true that the countries share a two-thousand-mile land border, and that all of those miles can and have been used to smuggle drugs, it’s also true that some of those miles are infinitely more valuable than others.

  The vast majority of the border runs along isolated desert, but the truly valuable real estate are the “choke point” cities of Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros. And the reason lies not in Mexico, but in the United States.

  It has to do with highways.

  Tijuana borders San Diego, where Interstate 5 is the major north–south arterial that runs to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, product can be stored and moved up the West Coast or anywhere in the United States.

  Ciudad Juárez borders El Paso and Interstate 25, which connects to Interstate 40, the main east–west arterial for the entire southern United States and therefore a river of cash for the Juárez cartel.

  Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros are the twin jewels of the Gulf. Nuevo Laredo borders Laredo, Texas, but more importantly Interstate 35, the north–south route that runs to Dallas. From Dallas, product can be shipped quickly to the entire American Midwest. Matamoros offers quick road access from Route 77 to Interstate 37, then on to Interstate 10 to Houston, New Orleans, and Florida. Matamoros is also on the coast, providing water access to the same U.S. port cities.

  But the real action is in trucks.

  You can haul product through the desert—by foot, horse, car, and pickup. You can go by water, dumping loads of marijuana and vacuum-sealed cocaine into the ocean for American partners to pick up and bring in.

  Those are all worthwhile methods.

  Trucking dwarfs them.

  Since the 1994 NAFTA treaty between the United States and Mexico, tens of thousands of trucks cross the border from Tijuana, Juárez, and Nuevo Laredo every day. Most of them carry legitimate cargo. Many of them carry drugs.

  It’s the largest commercial border in the world, carrying almost $5 billion in trade a year.

  Given the sheer volume of traffic, U.S. Customs can’t come close to searching every truck. Even a serious effort to do so would cripple U.S.-Mexican trade. Not for nothing was NAFTA often referred to as the “North American Free Drug Trade Agreement.”

  Once the truck with drugs in it crosses that border, it’s literally on the freeway.

  “The Fives”—Interstates 5, 25, and 35—are the arterial veins of the Mexican drug trade.

  When Adán ruled the trade, it didn’t matter—he controlled the border crossings into El Paso, Laredo, and San Diego. But with him out of power, the Sinaloans have to pay a piso—a tax—to bring their product across.

  Five points don’t sound like a lot, but Adán has an accountant’s perspective. You pay what you need to on a flat-fee basis—salaries and bribes, for instance, are just the cost of doing business. But percentages are to be avoided like debt—they suck the life out of a business.

  And not only are the Sinaloans paying 5 percent of their own business—which amounts to millions of dollars—but they aren’t collecting the 5 percent of other people’s businesses, the piso that was theirs when he controlled all the plazas.

  Now you’re talking serious money.

  Cocaine alone is a $30 billion market in the United States annually. Of the cocaine that goes into the United States, 70 percent of it goes through Juárez and the Gulf.

  That’s $21 billion.

  The piso on that alone is a billion dollars.

  A year.

  You can be a multimillionaire, even a billionaire, moving your own product and paying the piso. A lot of men do, it’s not a bad life. You can get even richer controlling a plaza, charging other traffickers to use it and never touching or even going near the actual drugs. What most people
don’t understand is that the top narcos can go years or even their entire business lives without ever touching the drugs.

  Their business is to control turf.

  Adán used to control it all.

  He was the Lord of the Skies.

  —

  Adán’s days in Puente Grande are full.

  A thousand details require supervision.

  Supply routes into Mexico from Colombia have to be constantly refreshed, then there’s transportation to the border, smuggling into the United States.

  Then there’s money management—tens of millions of dollars flooding back from the United States, in cash, that need to be laundered, accounted for, invested in overseas accounts and businesses. Salaries, bribes, and commissions that need to be paid. Equipment to be purchased. Adán’s operation employs scores of accountants to count the money and keep an eye on each other, dozens of lawyers. Hundreds of operatives, traffickers, security lookouts, police, army, politicians.

  Adán hired a convicted embezzler to digitize all his records so he can track accounts on computer, laptops that are swapped out once a month and freshly encoded. He uses scores of cell phones, changed every other day or so, the replacements smuggled in by guards or other of Diego’s employees.

  Los Bateadores are in charge of managing Block 2. The rest of Puente Grande is a bedlam of gangs, robberies, assaults, and rapes, but Block 2 is quiet and orderly. Everyone knows that the Sinaloa cartel runs that part of the prison on behalf of Adán Barrera, and it is a sanctuary of calm and quiet.

  Adán rises early, has a quick breakfast, and then goes to his desk. He works until 1:00 p.m., when he has a leisurely lunch, then goes back to his desk until 5:00. Most evenings are quiet. His chef comes in every day to cook his dinner and select the appropriate wine. It seems to matter a great deal to the chef—it matters less to Adán.

  He’s not a wine snob.

  Some evenings Los Bateadores convert the dining hall into a cinema, complete with a popcorn machine, and Adán invites friends in to watch a movie, munch popcorn or eat ice cream. The guests call these sessions “Family Nights” because Adán prefers PG films—lots of Disney—because he doesn’t like the sex and violence that come with most Hollywood films these days.

  Other nights are less wholesome.

  A prison guard cruises the Guadalajara bars and comes back with women, and then the dining hall is converted into a brothel, replete with liquor, drugs, and Viagra. Adán pays all the “fees” but doesn’t take part in these evenings, retreating to his cell instead.

  He’s not interested in women.

  Until he sees Magda.

  —

  Sinaloans like to brag that their mountain state produces two beautiful things in abundance—poppies and women.

  Magda Beltrán is certainly one of the latter.

  Twenty-nine years old, with a tall frame, long legs, blue eyes—Magda is a mixture of the native Mexican people and the Swiss, German, and French who migrated to Sinaloa in the nineteenth century.

  Seven Sinaloanas have been crowned Miss Mexico.

  Magda wasn’t one of them, but she was Miss Culiacán.

  She competed in beauty pageants since she was six years old and won most of them. In doing so, she attracted the attention of agents, film producers, and, of course, narcos.

  Magda was no stranger to that world.

  Her uncle was a trafficker in the old Federación, and two cousins had been sicarios for Miguel Ángel Barrera. Growing up in Culiacán, she simply knew traffickers; most people did.

  She was nineteen when she started dating them.

  Narcos flock around local beauty queens like circling vultures. Some of them even sponsor their own pageants, narcoconcursos de misses, to bring out the talent. When some other pageant officials expressed concern about the girls associating with drug traffickers, one local wag asked, “Why would you not want these women representing the state’s biggest product?”

  It’s a natural combination—the girls have looks, and the narcos have money to treat them to gourmet dinners, clothes, jewelry, expensive vacations, spas, beauty treatments…

  Magda took them all.

  Why not?

  She was young and beautiful and wanted to have a good time, and if you wanted good times in Culiacán, if you wanted to hang with the cachorros—the jet-set kids of the drug barons—you had to go where the money was.

  Besides, the narcos were fun.

  They liked parties, music, dances, concerts, and clubs.

  If you were on the arm of a narco, you didn’t stand in line behind the rope; they opened the rope for you and showed you into the VIP room with the Cristal and the Dom, and the owners—if the narco himself didn’t own the club—would come over to greet you personally.

  Some of the girls found themselves enmeshed with the older narcos who became obsessed with them, but Magda avoided that trap. She watched what happened to girls a few years ahead of her. A fifty-year-old chaca, a boss, would become enamored, make the girl his mistress, and make sure no other man—especially a young, handsome one—came near her. Sometimes he would “marry” her in a faux ceremony, fake because he was already married (at least once). The poor girl would waste her youth imprisoned in a luxury condo somewhere until the narco went to prison, was killed, or simply grew tired of her.

  Then she would have money, yes, but also regrets.

  Magda had none.

  She was nineteen when Emilio, an up-and-coming twenty-three-year-old cocaine trafficker, came to one of her pageants, swept her off her feet and into his bed. He was handsome, funny, generous, and a good lover. She could see herself with him, marrying him and having his babies when she was done with the pageant world.

  Magda was heartbroken when Emilio went to prison, but by that time she was competing for Miss Culiacán and gained the attentions of Héctor Salazar, a younger associate of her uncle’s. Héctor sent a dozen roses with a diamond in each one to her dressing room, stood politely in the shadows as she was crowned, and then took her to Cabo.

  Emilio was a boy, but Héctor was a man. Emilio was playful, Héctor was serious, about business and about her. Emilio had been puppy love—her first and therefore beautiful in that way—but with Héctor it was different, two adults building a life together in an adult world.

  Héctor was very traditional—after Cabo he went to Magda’s father to ask permission to marry his daughter. They were planning the wedding when another narco who was also very serious about business put four bullets into Héctor’s chest.

  Technically Magda wasn’t a widow, but in a way she was, and expected to play the part. She was heartbroken, she knew that, but she also knew that somewhere, in a secret part of her mind, she was at least a little relieved at not having to take the role of wife and presumably mother so early in her life.

  She also learned that black became her.

  Jorge Estrada, a Colombian who had been one of Héctor’s cocaine suppliers, was at his funeral and noticed her. A respectful man, he waited what he considered a decent interval before approaching her.

  Jorge took her off to Cartagena, to the Sofitel Santa Clara resort, and while, at thirty-seven, he was older than Emilio or Héctor, he was just as good-looking, and in a manly rather than a boyish way. And where Héctor had money, Jorge had money—generational wealth, as they say—and he took her to his finca in the countryside and his beach house in Costa Rica. He took her to Paris and Rome and Geneva, introduced her to directors, artists, important people.

  Magda wasn’t a gold-digger.

  The fact that Jorge was rich was just a bonus. Her mother—as generations of mothers have—said, “It is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” Jorge did give her things—trips, clothes, jewelry (a lot of jewelry)—but what he didn’t give her was a ring.

  She didn’t ask, didn’t demand or nag or even hint, but after three years with the man she had to wonder why. What was she not doing? What was she doing wrong? Was she not pretty e
nough? Sophisticated enough? Not good enough in bed?

  Finally she asked him that question. In bed one night in a suite on the beach in Panama, she asked him where this was headed. She wanted marriage, she wanted children, and if he didn’t, she would have to get on with her life. No hard feelings, this has been wonderful, but she would have to move on.

  Jorge smiled. “Move on where, cariño?”

  “I’ll go back to Culiacán, find myself a nice Mexican man.”

  “Are there such creatures?”

  “I can have any man I want,” she answered. “The trouble is, I want you.”

  He wanted her, too, he said. Wanted to give her a ring, a wedding, babies. It was just…business had been bad lately…a couple of shipments seized…debts unpaid…but after these small reversals were ironed out…he was hoping to pop the question.

  There was just one small thing.

  He needed a little help.

  There was some money, cash, in Mexico City. He’d go himself, but things were…difficult…there at the moment. But if she would go, perhaps visit her family, see friends, and then pick up the money and fly it back…

  Magda did it.

  She knew what she was doing. Knew that she was crossing the line from “association” to “participation,” from dating a drug trafficker to money laundering. She did it anyway. Part of her knew, deep down, that he was using her, but another part wanted to believe him, and there was yet another part that…

  …wanted in.

  Why not?

  Magda grew up around la pista secreta, learned about the trade from Emilio, learned much more about it, and on a much higher level, just being with Jorge. She had the experience, the brains—why did she always have to just be eye candy on the arm of some male narco?

  Why couldn’t she be a narca?

  A chingona, a powerful woman on her own?

  Other women—admittedly few—had done it.

  Why not her?

  So when Magda packed two suitcases with $5 million in American cash and headed for Mexico City International Airport, she couldn’t really say, then or later, if she was going to deliver the money to Jorge or steal it from him to start her own business. She had a ticket to Cartagena and a ticket to Culiacán, and she didn’t know which she was going to use. Go to Colombia and see if Jorge was really going to marry her, or go back to Sinaloa and fade into the protective cradle of the mountains, where Jorge would never dare come to demand his money back. (Really, what was he going to do? She would simply say that the police seized the money, and what was he going to do?)