Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel

Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel Joe Tone Two brothers live parallel lives on either side of the US-Mexico border. This is the dramatic true story of how their worlds collided in a major criminal conspiracy.Jos? Trevi?o was raised in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican border town and major smuggling gateway. He grew up loving the sprawling countryside and its tough, fast quarter horses, but in search of opportunity he crossed the border into Texas.While Jos? built a modest living laying bricks, his younger brother Miguel ascended to the top of the infamously bloody Los Zetas cartel. As Jos? settled down with a wife and kids, his brother was said to be burning rivals alive, eating victims’ hearts and launching grenades at the US consulate.Then one day Jos? showed up at a quarter-horse auction and bid close to a million dollars for a horse. The bricklayer suddenly became a major player on the scene, catching the attention of FBI agent Scott Lawson. Lawson enlisted Tyler Graham, the young American rancher breeding Jos?’s champion horse – nicknamed Huesos, or Bones – to infiltrate what he suspected was a major money laundering operation.The goal: capture Miguel Trevi?o.Set against the high-stakes world of horseracing, Bones takes you deep into a violent drug cartel, the perilous lives of American ranchers and the Sisyphean work of drug cops, revealing how greed and fear mingle with race, class and violence along the vast Southwest border. At its heart, this riveting crime drama is a gripping story of brotherhood, family loyalty and the tragic cost of a failed drug war. Copyright (#ulink_2d2d646e-0e88-5b7e-9f34-39cbdcd250a3) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk) First published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2017 First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017 This eBook edition published in 2017 Copyright © 2017 Joe Tone Joe Tone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 Map copyright © 2017 David Lindroth Inc. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008245573 Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008204822 Version: 2017-07-14 Dedication (#ulink_6422bc75-702e-52d0-89a4-f5ed2ba184da) FOR MELISSA Epigraph (#ulink_c7d0a711-f191-5687-b1d2-f784f20d895b) Every man suddenly became related to Kino’s pearl, and Kino’s pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man’s enemy. —JOHN STEINBECK, The Pearl Contents Cover (#u5ae92025-d9b6-5f8b-99fb-0471ea2035f0) Title Page (#ucde262bc-d509-507b-ad6b-c259c73de4db) Copyright (#u7885c96c-b9aa-5b3c-abd6-8e651e512741) Dedication (#u28ae544b-9275-5731-a0cb-642780f8aad5) Epigraph (#uecc75ef5-2044-5fb6-92e9-07994cc08998) Map (#u03b90ea9-1155-5c38-ad5e-5e47517ebacf) Prologue: Pocket Trash (#u2446d710-2c68-5f50-879f-d86685266cbb) Chapter One: Foundations (#ud5a804e3-235e-5150-9eb3-eb2113c91dfe) Chapter Two: Bloodlines (#ud77cc210-c03a-5aca-bae2-803540b1af40) Chapter Three: Follow Kiko (#uc54143c4-64b3-51df-8e53-e9b61297c909) Chapter Four: Cuarenta (#u55ac13e7-e4a4-5272-8e85-9e0968c569c1) Chapter Five: El Huesos (#u9915b7f4-6a9e-5252-b0bd-714c81173ead) Chapter Six: The Laundry (#ua2933fe0-80c8-5912-b2dd-65b64c85444a) Chapter Seven: Wildcat (#u4cd68015-f960-559e-9987-20588cb048ac) Chapter Eight: One Fast Booger (#u3321fb39-b92f-5f6a-a8bc-4a22b44fd2ea) Chapter Nine: The Winner’s Circle (#ueb7e84ae-ad50-5e3a-b015-a675d0db94f1) Chapter Ten: New Players (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven: Too Tempting (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve: Mountain Gods (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen: FMES (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen: Christmas Tamales (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen: Where’s Papi? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen: Otherwise Illegal Activity (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen: Operation Fallen Hero (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen: Little Black Dots (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen: Flush (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty: The Wire Room (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One: Homestead (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two: Tripwires (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three: Cartel Wedding (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four: Land Rush (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five: Paper Chase (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six: Intervention (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven: We Hit the Family (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Eight: Exit Benefits (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue: Kiss My Hocks (#litres_trial_promo) Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo) Reporting and Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Map (#ulink_1cb4f00d-4722-5988-aec3-acc554e7e12f) PROLOGUE (#ulink_f661644a-7c10-5823-a3fd-db5648db48c5) POCKET TRASH (#ulink_f661644a-7c10-5823-a3fd-db5648db48c5) NUEVO LAREDO, TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO June 2010 As he walked across the bridge that morning, approaching the invisible line that separated him from Texas, it wasn’t hard for Jos? to envision what would come next: the welcoming American half-smile, the face-down scan of his passport, the keyboard pecking, the faux-polite please come with me, sir, and the pat down, always a pat down, before a waterfall of questions about his brother. He’d be lucky to get out of there by lunchtime. It was only eight in the morning, but already it was 80 on its way to 101, with the sun preheating the pedestrians on the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. “Bridge One,” as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents called it, was the span used by the thousands of people who crossed by foot each day between Nuevo Laredo, in northern Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, and Laredo, Texas. Jos? inched across, U.S. passport at the ready. He was forty-three. He was thick through the chest and shoulders, soft in the middle, filling out his five-foot-seven frame. His black hair was thinning on top and fading at the temples; his round face was Etch-A-Sketched with proof of his status as lifelong laborer and father of four. He’d been trudging across this bridge for most of his four decades. Crossing was once a breeze. Mexican or American, you could stroll across the bridge in either direction, the Rio Grande slogging beneath you, and through the checkpoint in a matter of minutes, often by just declaring yourself a citizen. It was the ease of crossing that made living on the border alluring: the ability to visit a favorite relative, attend a birthday celebration or quincea?era, play in a soccer game, or party in a country other than your own. You crossed the border the way people in other towns crossed a railroad track, so fluidly that residents referred to the two cities as one: Los Dos Laredos. Over the years, though, the one-thousand-foot walk across had become excruciating, even for those who weren’t yanked out of line the way Jos? was. It started after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when more agents were dispatched to keep the cable-news nightmares at bay. Armed with scanners, X-rays, and political consensus, Customs and Border Patrol agents, soon to be rebranded as “Border Protection” agents, started scrutinizing every crosser, looking for reasons to turn someone away. The line into Texas could take hours now, even if your name didn’t make the feds’ hard drives spin. Jos? made his way between the chain-link fence that lined this section of the bridge and the metal barriers that protected him from cars inching past to his left. At around five after eight, he finally approached the kiosk and handed the agent his passport. Do you have any weapons? No. Do you have more than ten thousand dollars to declare? No. For years his answers had been good enough. Lately, though, when the feds scanned Jos?’s passport, they got a notification from a proprietary security platform telling the agent there was some reason not to let Jos? pass. This time was no different. An agent escorted him into the fading beige U.S. Customs and Border Protection building. It was a maze of offices and interrogation rooms, connected by hallways with moldy tile and wheezy elevators that seemed forever on the verge of breaking down. The whole building smelled a little like a teenage boy’s locker. There were holding cells for criminals caught crossing, furnished with nothing but metal toilets and wooden benches, handcuffs attached and waiting. There were rooms for counting currency, equipped with computer terminals and scales. There was an intake center for families, mostly Central American mothers and children who were fleeing gang violence and hoping for asylum. There were dog cages but usually no dogs. They were all outside sniffing. An agent patted Jos? down and escorted him into an interview room. They called this “secondary inspection” or “hard secondary.” For Jos?, a more apt name might have been a “We Know Who Your Brother Is, So Sit the Fuck Down for an Inspection” inspection. When Jos? drove across, which was infrequent, they would comb his car and his person for guns, drugs, large amounts of cash, or anything else actionable. He had walked across this time, so they had to settle for what they called his “pocket trash”: the contents of a bag he was carrying and the pockets of his clothes. Agents moved in and out of the room. They didn’t announce it, but Jos? could guess what they were doing: making calls to whatever agency might have some questions about his little brother. Thirty years before, when Jos? was just a teenager, he had crossed this river on his way to lay bricks in Dallas. In time, people like him—Mexicans crossing north in search of work their homeland couldn’t provide—would be weaponized and dragged to the front lines of America’s culture war. But back then, for teenage Jos?, it was as simple as crossing the bridge, driving seven hours north, finding a job, and going to work. He laid his share of bricks in those early years. A few of his brothers did, too. They were constructing what could have been the foundations of a working-class American life. But before long, Jos? was the only Trevi?o Morales brother left in Dallas. Now, as his wait on Bridge One stretched into its second sweaty hour, two of those brothers were dead. One was in an American prison. Another was enmeshed in Mexico’s trafficking business. Then there was Miguel, the brother these feds so badly wanted to know about. He was a leader of Los Zetas, a criminal organization raking in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, much of it controlled by Miguel. Because of this vast accumulation of power and wealth—and because of Miguel’s unrivaled lust for mass, public, and grotesque violence—he was one of the most wanted drug lords in Mexico. It had been this way for several years now. So for several years, this was who Jos? was when he showed up at the border: the bricklaying brother of one of Mexico’s most wanted men. For all this harassment, Jos? was never any use to the feds. He’d spent three decades as a mason; his callused hands had helped build Dallas’s exurban excess and then revive its urban core. No matter how hard the feds tried, they had never been able to connect brick-laying Jos? to brick-smuggling Miguel. But Jos? was no longer a bricklayer, and that interested the feds. Recently, he had remade himself into a successful racehorse owner. He’d taken the racing business by surprise, quickly maneuvering into its upper ranks by hanging on to the fluttering silks of an undersized colt and partnering with a down-on-its-luck stud farm. Now, after winning a couple of big races, Jos? was buying up some of the most expensive breeding mares in quarter-horse racing, the brand of racing preferred by the cowboys of the American Southwest and Mexico. Jos?’s new career opportunity had come just in time. In thirty years of laying bricks, he had never been able to do much more than keep his family afloat, even as his cartel-affiliated brothers in Mexico amassed cash, property, and power. Now his teenage daughter wanted to be the first in his extended family to finish college, with her three younger siblings hopefully not far behind. A few more breaks on the track and Jos? might be able to pay for it all. But his success at the track also made these crossings more titillating for the agents who swarmed these borderland interview rooms. Because however mysterious Jos?’s little brother was to them, there was one thing they all seemed to know: Miguel loved horses. About ninety minutes after Jos? got pulled in, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up to ask all the usual questions. I’m not proud of my brother, Jos? said. My brother has made my life hell, Jos? said. I don’t know where my brother is, Jos? said. He almost definitely didn’t. Few people knew where Miguel was at any given time. The moment people did know, his whereabouts changed. At about ten-fifteen that morning, two hours after Jos? had been pulled out of line, at least three since he’d stepped into it, the agents handed him back his belongings. There were some clothes, boots, toiletries, and a few coloring books and crayons, which he was bringing back for the youngest of his four kids. They were waiting for him in Dallas, and he was finally on his way. CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_4f663271-2904-5dbb-a324-facbb42db29a) FOUNDATIONS (#ulink_4f663271-2904-5dbb-a324-facbb42db29a) You’ve seen a horse race. Maybe you’ve leaned over the rail at your local track, hollering at the seven because you bet the seven, for reasons that made sense at the time. Maybe you’ve donned a floppy hat and gotten hammered off mint juleps, running in from the kitchen to catch the end of—or maybe a replay of?—the Derby. Maybe you’ve been in a Vegas sportsbook, where not even the immortal gods of American football can muscle the ponies off those little TVs in the corner. Somewhere, someway, you’ve seen a horse race. Most likely you saw thoroughbreds, the horses that were loping down the backstretch when you stumbled in from the kitchen. Maybe you watched a steeplechase, for the novelty of seeing these graceful beasts leap through a manicured obstacle course. But it’s unlikely that you’ve ever knowingly watched a quarter-horse race, and, for our purposes, you’ll need to see one, if only in your mind’s eye or on YouTube. Be forewarned: There are no mint juleps here. The best we can offer is a lime in your Corona. The colonists who settled Virginia and the Carolinas invented quarter-horse racing in the 1600s. It was more or less an accident. They’d brought a handful of Arabians and thoroughbreds with them on the voyage, and between shifts tilling the New World, they started racing through the main streets of their newly settled villages. The races were informal and short, usually about a quarter of a mile, run between two horses down straight streets lined with villagers. But winning them became a point of pride, and over time, the colonists discovered that breeding their horses with those ridden by the natives resulted in even faster racehorses. They called this new breed the quarter-of-a-mile running horse, accurately if not cleverly. Around this time, a British military captain visited North Carolina and wrote home about his experience. He marveled at the lush tobacco fields, the “shocking barbarities of the Indians,” and the horses: They are much attached to quarter racing, which is always a match between two horses to run a quarter of a mile, straight out, being merely an exertion of speed. They have a breed that performs it with astonishing velocity … I am confident there is not a horse in England, or perhaps the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed. In the 1800s, as settlers moved west, they encountered a racing culture similar to the one established by those original colonists. Three centuries of ranching across Mexico—including in the northern state of Coahuila y Tejas—had propagated a breed of stock horses built for working the farm. They were short, muscular, and placid amid the chaos of a cattle herd. They were “cow ponies,” first and foremost. But they could run, too, if only for a few hundred yards, and their serenity with a rider in the saddle made them easy to settle down at the starting line. The Southwest in the nineteenth century was defined by bloodshed, as Coahuila y Tejas became the Republic of Texas, and then an American state. Throughout it all, though, the white American settlers, Mexican ranchers, and Native Americans challenged each other to quarter-mile races all across the disputed territory. Gamblers would line the track, forming a human rail, with money and property at stake. One race was said to attract such prolific betting that it bankrupted and shuttered an entire Texas town. The eastern settlers touted their “quarter-of-a-mile running horses.” The Texans swore by the speed and smarts of their cow ponies. An imported stallion named Steel Dust quickly extinguished the East-West rivalry. He was already thirteen when he arrived from the East in 1844, but he beat every cow pony they lined him up against. Before long he was being bred with ranch horses from across the new state of Texas, infusing the Spaniards’ placid cow-pony breed with a burst of speed and additional weight. The resulting horses were, as one quarter-horse historian described them, “small, [with] alert ears, a well-developed neck, sloping shoulders, short deep barrel, a great heart girth, heavy muscled in thigh and forearm, legs not too long, and firmly jointed with the knee and pastern close.” They were rarely taller than fifteen hands but could reach twelve hundred pounds. (Thoroughbreds are lither, averaging sixteen hands but just a thousand pounds.) The new breed of horse was even better on the farm and unbeatable in a rodeo ring or on the track, provided the track wasn’t longer than a quarter mile. They called him the American Quarter Horse. By the 1940s, an industry had sprung forth around the breed. In Texas, a group of cowboys founded the American Quarter Horse Association, to manage and regulate breeding and competition. In New Mexico and California, businessmen pushed for pari-mutuel betting, allowing racetracks to collect the bets and manage the payouts. That lured horsemen and gamblers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico for weekends spent drinking and betting on the races, which could now feature six or eight horses instead of two. The quarter-horse meccas built in the 1940s and ’50s still anchor the sport today, especially Ruidoso Downs, in the mountains of New Mexico, and Los Alamitos, in the palm-studded suburbs of Orange County, California. They host futurities, for two-year-old racehorses, and derbies, for three-year-olds, with millions on the line. And on any given day, at tracks sprinkled across the Southwest and Mexico, quarter horses as old as five, six, even seven run races with a few grand on the line and a few hundred people in the stands. The best of these horses are descendants from American Quarter Horse royalty—sired by name-brand stallions like First Down Dash, Corona Cartel, or Mr Jess Perry. They’re ridden by jockeys who often learned to ride in unsanctioned match races in the countryside of Texas, Oklahoma, or Mexico. Many of the best are Mexican immigrants. The races typically cover between 350 and 440 yards. The best feature a little bumping out of the gate and all the way through the finish line. The fastest 440-yard races are run in about 20 seconds, compared to the two minutes it takes the top thoroughbreds to circle Churchill Downs. The short track leaves little time to overcome a stumble. The horses are loaded up, rearing and kicking up dust, and everything goes still. The gates fly and and the race is already almost over. The horse that best taps into its English-Spanish-Mexican-Tejano cow-pony DNA has the advantage, using its hulking haunches and quiet demeanor to go from dead still to full speed in a few strides. Now maybe you can see it, even if you’ve never seen it: stocky horses raised by cowboys, racing on short tracks, ridden by jockeys trained in the thick brush of cow country, all a safe distance from the floppy-hatted dignitaries of the Jockey Club. They call thoroughbred racing the sport of kings? This is the sport of cowboys. Muddle your mint elsewhere. CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b2cca6b4-b172-5b28-aff6-9d5aacd61896) BLOODLINES (#ulink_b2cca6b4-b172-5b28-aff6-9d5aacd61896) POMONA, CALIFORNIA December 2008 The calculations started as soon as Ramiro’s loafers shuffled into the barn, kicking dust particles into the crinkles of the cowboys’ boots. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Ramiro’s brain started receiving dispatches about what he was seeing: thick haunches, hinged backs, steep shoulder slopes, and all the other variables that make the difference between racehorse and runner. There were some runners in the barns this morning. That was the only takeaway from a stroll through here, some babies that would be blazing down the track by spring. It was winter in Pomona, one of the dozens of suburbs splayed east of Los Angeles that everyone’s heard of but few have visited, a kissing cousin to Covina and Pasadena. Ramiro was born, raised, and still lived in Monterrey, the industrial heartbeat of northeastern Mexico. But he spent a lot of time traversing these suburbs in rental cars. He went to the track in Los Alamitos for the races, the stud farm in Bonsall to buy breedings, private ranches, public auctions, and anywhere else he might find a quarter horse worth studying. This particular suburb was home to the Barretts auction house, where the final quarter-horse auction of 2008 was about to get started. It was a small sale, 160 head, compared to 500 or even 1,000 at bigger auctions. Ramiro’s particular interests made it feel even smaller. He bought mostly yearlings, one-year-old horses that would hit the tracks as two-year-olds the following year. He also targeted weanlings, which hadn’t yet turned one, as well as embryos and foals still in utero, counting on the strength of their genetics alone. This sale would feature a mix of all kinds of quarter horses, including foals, weanlings, yearlings, stallions, and broodmares. Still, Ramiro had reason to be excited. The Schvaneveldt Winter Mixed Sale, as this auction was called, was run by the family of one of the sport’s winningest trainers, Blane Schvaneveldt, and had attracted horses from the best bloodlines in the business. It was also a new venture, so attendance was sparse. That meant less competition on the way to the gavel. Ramiro moved through the barns, peering through the metal bars of the stall doors. He made small talk in his choppy English with the other horsemen milling about—trainers looking for their next champions, breeders hoping to make a big sale. They were some of the best in the business. Ramiro knew them all. They knew him, too. They knew him by various nicknames, including “the Horseman” and “Gordo,” which they recognized as the Spanish word for “fat.” It made sense, given the way his cheeks and midsection curved like birthday balloons, pushing his five-foot-nine frame over 250 pounds. But at thirty-five years old, Ramiro was handsome, too, with eyes that played puppeteer to an electric smile, hair that crashed like a Malibu wave, and polo shirts in every color of Ralph Lauren’s rainbow. He was a fresa—a “strawberry,” a preppy—through and through. Most of the quarter-horse cowboys knew Gordo by his real name, Jos? Ramiro Villarreal Guajardo. Even if Ramiro didn’t exactly fit in—if his loafers seemed impractical, his polos a little bright for this hour, his double-fisted cellphones more than a little obnoxious—Ramiro knew the sellers welcomed the sight of him. He could be a pain in their asses when it came time to collect, and the old cowboys occasionally had to remind Ramiro just how Ford Tough they were. But Ramiro knew—everyone knew—that when the auctioneer started bellowing his gibberish, Ramiro was welcome here. Especially these days. The Great Recession was grinding toward its thirteenth month. Home prices were in a free fall. A drought was ravaging Texas and other parts of the West, driving up hay prices. That meant the wealthy ranchers, oilmen, and businessmen who drove the quarter-horse industry were doing what wealthy people did in historic droughts and capital-R recessions: selling their planes and selling their horses. Sale prices were falling. A mixed sale like the Schvaneveldts’ averaged ten thousand dollars per horse in a good year; this year might only average six thousand. That was bad news for the Schvaneveldts but good news for brokers like Ramiro. He was buying not for himself but for horsemen back in Mexico, who trusted him to pick out well-bred babies and haul them back across the border. He never said who his buyers were; they were “Mexican businessmen” and nothing more. He could safely assume that everyone in the barns knew what kind of business those Mexicans were in. But the industry didn’t care, so long as Ramiro kept showing up to spend his clients’ money. Ramiro kept coming, and the money kept coming—eventually. Since Ramiro was a reliable big spender, the auction-house managers didn’t demand that he settle up before he hauled his horses off to Mexico, as they might with lesser-known buyers. They let him take possession of the horses and then pestered him throughout the year to send the balance. So long as he zeroed out his account before the next auction, he remained a valued customer. Recently, though, Ramiro’s clients had been spending bigger and sending money less reliably. At a small sale in Dallas that summer, he’d spent $112,000 on four yearlings, more money than any other buyer. In two auctions in Oklahoma that fall, he’d spent $370,000 on twenty-eight horses—and then promptly bounced ten checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one in New Mexico, he’d spent $357,000 on eleven horses. And at another in California, he’d spent $405,000 on seventeen horses. No other buyer came close to spending that much. The checks eventually cleared; the wires eventually came through. But Ramiro was falling behind, despite spending hours fielding and making phone calls in an effort to settle his debts. The industry was losing patience. Twice recently, sale managers had pushed Ramiro against auction-house walls, demanding he pay off the balance of his bills. Yet when Ramiro’s hand went up at the next auction, they never told him to lower it. They needed his clients’ money. Today especially. The crowd was thin, which meant sellers would be either giving deep discounts or buying back their horses and waiting for a new day. But Ramiro’s Mexican clients seemed impervious to economic downturns. They wanted more horses, and the best horses, always. Walking through the barns, Ramiro could get a sense of a horse’s demeanor, its build, its balance, all data points that might influence how high he might be willing to bid. Sometimes he asked one of the handlers to heave open a stall’s sliding door and walk the animal around, so he could see how the horse handled itself in space. But the real data was in the catalog he was holding. Each page was covered in size-nothing type detailing a single horse’s lineage—sire, dam, their sires and dams, and the career highlights of every horse along the line. Wins in “stakes races” were set in a heavier black font, which allowed seasoned buyers to assess the pedigree with a flip of the page. Their eyes were trained to scan for that coveted black type. Like all buyers, Ramiro was especially interested in a horse’s sire. Like all buyers, he was especially interested if that sire was First Down Dash. A champion racehorse in the 1980s, First Down Dash was the sport’s most prolific breeder, responsible for hundreds of winners and millions in earnings. The auction house offered two positions from which to bid. One was inside, in the small gallery that circled the sales ring. The other was outside, around the artificial-turf walking ring, where the horses were displayed before being led up a faux-brick walkway and inside. Ramiro liked it outside. There was a bid-spotter out there, looking for flying hands, and it was a good place to get one last glimpse of a horse before the bidding started. Ramiro found his post along the rail and struck his usual pose, his belly flung out in front of him and his sales book resting on top of it. He started slowly. He placed a bid on a “foal in utero,” an embryo or fetus still developing in the womb. Buying an unborn horse was sort of a blind wager, with big risks and a big upside. Instead of buying on the strength of a horse’s pedigree and conformation—its genetic promise and its physical reality—here Ramiro was betting only on the horse’s lineage. He did it often. He nabbed that first embryo for $1,500, and several horses later, his hand rose on another. This one had been sired by famous First Down Dash, but it was still a long shot, given that the foal could be born with any number of defects, or could just be slow, or could goddamn die on its way into the world. Still, Ramiro bid $13,500 on it. Ramiro kept on like that, stocking up on quality breedings for relatively cheap. He paid $30,000 for a horse called Bench Mark Dove, $16,500 for Azeann, $6,700 for Beduinos First Down. By the time the auction reached its final hour, he’d spent a little more than $100,000 on seven horses, including some of the sale’s most expensive. Then the auctioneer called hip number 140, the 140th horse of the auction, its number penned on its hip. A handler walked into the ring beside a sorrel yearling colt. A white racing stripe bisected the horse’s face, falling down the steep angle from brow to nose. “Tempting Dash,” the auctioneer bellowed. Ramiro’s hand twitched back to life. The bidding climbed through the low five figures. Ramiro steadily lifted his hand as the other bidders fell away. Maybe it was the horse’s May birthday, which meant he’d be one of the younger two-year-olds on the track the following year. Maybe it was his size; he was small, shorter and skinnier than the prime yearlings, which stood somewere around fourteen hands and weighed 850 pounds. Whatever the reason, Ramiro found himself the last bidder to raise his hand, with the price stuck at $21,500, a meager sum considering Tempting Dash’s lineage. “Sold,” the auctioneer said, to the ruddy-cheeked fellow in the bright polo with the phone pressed to his ear. Another bargain for his clients back in Mexico. CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_45459984-c236-57c5-af05-4737c39718cd) FOLLOW KIKO (#ulink_45459984-c236-57c5-af05-4737c39718cd) PIEDRAS NEGRAS, COAHUILA, MEXICO Summer 2008 I’m here, where are you, are you coming? Jos? was standing outside a gas station one summer evening, talking—and hoping—into his phone. He was in Piedras Negras, a snaking two-hour drive north of Laredo’s Bridge One, where he would soon find himself emptying his pocket trash for a rotating cast of badge-wielding Americans. This was a different crossing point on a different day, but Jos? could expect the same riverside indignities whenever he decided to cross back into Texas, probably in a day or two. For now, though, there was a party to attend. It was a family affair, thrown by his little brother in rural Coahuila, a Mexican border state about a seven-hour drive from Jos?’s house outside Dallas. Leaving the United States didn’t come with the same harassment, since the Mexican authorities didn’t scrutinize Jos?’s entries as the American ones did. Still, crossing into Mexico could be treacherous for Jos? and people like him. It was a travel experience unique to the friends, families, and associates of Mexico’s most-wanted criminals. Some American defense lawyers make the trip when they’re invited to off-the-radar meetings, traveling to undisclosed locations to update drug lords on the status of various cases against them, their families, and their organizations. The actor Sean Penn took the trip and made it famous with his 2015 visit to El Chapo—the long, blind journey into the remote Mexican countryside, no cellphones allowed. Jos? made the trip only occasionally, usually for family gatherings or parties like this one. For baptisms, Mother’s Day, and other occasions—tonight was a nephew’s birthday—his brother Miguel liked to throw the doors open at one of his ranches and invite in people he loved and trusted. He sent out for beer and made sure it was cold, sent out for cabrito and made sure it was perfectly smoked. With a busy family life in Dallas, Jos? didn’t get there often. This time, he made the trek. After crossing, Jos? found his way to a gas station near the border, where one of his brother’s workers was supposed to pick him up and deliver him to the party. But visiting an extraordinarily wanted criminal is never that simple. Jos? waited there for hours, while his little brother’s men surveilled the gas station to ensure that they didn’t catch a tail—that a Mexican soldier or cop, with an American agent as backup, wasn’t lying in wait, hoping Jos? would lead them to his brother. Jos? kept calling back to the party, calling and calling. I’m here, where are you, are you coming, but they didn’t come for hours. Eventually, after the sun ducked behind Coahuila’s scrubby landscape, a pickup pulled up, and his brother’s guys drove Jos? down a long road that snaked away from Piedras Negras and into the more remote countryside of Coahuila state, transitioning along the way from pavement to dirt and slipping through thickets of mesquite trees. Even five hundred miles from Dallas, it must have felt like home. Jos? had every reason to love life out there, in the countryside south of the river, surrounded by rolling hills, towers of hay, and roving bands of livestock. Some of the images he and his brothers clung to from their childhood were of them standing amid horses and cattle and whitetail deer in the open space of Tamaulipas. There were centuries of tradition in ranching this territory. It was here that, in the 1600s and 1700s, Spanish missionaries established ranchos and missions on both sides of the river. When they couldn’t find enough Spaniards to staff them, they turned to the Indians they’d managed to convert. This introduction to horsemanship would backfire in later decades, when Mexican and American soldiers encountered more and more Comanches who were lethal on horseback. It was also here, in the mid-1800s, that Richard King, a United States Army steamboat captain, recruited Mexican vaqueros, cowboys, to staff his King Ranch in newly established Texas. A century and a half later, the 825,000-acre Texas ranch is so famous that its name graces a line of Ford pickups. It’s also credited with the proliferation of the quarter-horse breed. And it was here, across those same centuries, that Spanish, Mexican, and even some Anglo ranchers developed the heavily Spanish, Catholic culture, known as Tejano, that would come to define the region long after more aggressive Anglo settlers arrived to dispossess the Mexicans of their land and power. By the time Jos? Trevi?o Morales was born, in 1966, these borders were settled. Ranching still ruled. His father worked as a vaquero on ranch land south of Nuevo Laredo, where he taught Jos? and his brothers to care for cattle and the sensible cow ponies that roamed their home state of Tamaulipas. But sometime before Jos? hit high school, his dad left the family. It’s unclear whether he abandoned them, migrated in search of work, or disappeared under some other circumstances. Whatever the reason, he was gone, and so was the rancho lifestyle Jos? and his brothers knew. There was nothing for the remaining Trevi?o clan in the countryside, so they moved into urban Nuevo Laredo and tried to survive. The economics of that state of Mexico had long been fraught. Cities in the southeast were positioned along the Gulf of Mexico and offered jobs at the ports and in the oil industry. In the West sat Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. But the state’s northern tip, where Jos? grew up, was an economic fault line, always shifting and occasionally rupturing. During World War II, as the American agriculture industry struggled to find cheap labor, the United States and Mexico developed the Bracero Program, which invited Mexican laborers to cross legally into the United States to work farming jobs left unfilled by soldiers. The program offered a minimum wage, temporary housing, and health benefits, and it drew hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers every year, especially from borderland cities like Nuevo Laredo. It also upended the culture of migration between the two countries. By the mid-1960s, the United States had issued more than four million work visas to Mexican farmworkers. Then, under pressure from American labor groups, the United States suspended the Bracero Program. But the migratory spigot wasn’t so easy to turn off. With Mexican families now accustomed to work-driven migration, and with fifty thousand American farms now accustomed to a steady flow of cheap labor, workers stayed, and workers kept coming—papers or not. Together with new visa limitations and waning Mexican farm jobs, the end of the Bracero Program sparked the influx of undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United States, which helped double the country’s Mexican-born population every decade through the 2000s. Instead of a hub for seasonal migrant workers, Nuevo Laredo became a key passageway for undocumented immigrants. A year after the Bracero Program’s demise, the Mexican government launched the Border Industrialization Program, designed to absorb the suddenly idle labor force along the border. The program allowed American and other foreign manufacturers to build maquiladoras, factories, in Mexico and import materials tax-free. Hundreds of new factories created thousands of low-skill, low-wage factory jobs assembling electronics, toys, and other Black Friday grist. But manufacturers, in Mexico and across the globe, targeted women for the jobs, banking that their inexperience in the workforce, combined with old-fashioned sexism, would keep wages low. Eight out of ten maquiladora jobs were filled by young women. That didn’t help the Trevi?o boys. The Trevi?o boys—all the Tamaulipas boys—needed jobs. Jos? and his brothers washed cars and worked as gardeners, doing whatever they could to bring in money. But it wasn’t enough. If they didn’t want to smuggle drugs, the best place to find work was north of the river. Jos?’s big brother Kiko—short for Juan Francisco—went first, in 1978. He had shaggy black hair and a jawline that cast a shadow on his long, muscular neck, which was often exposed by a gaping shirt collar. Kiko was the oldest of the thirteen Trevi?o children, and he was smooth, able to talk himself up without stumbling into braggadocio. He was savvy, too, not just dreaming of a better way but figuring out a plan. He served as the de facto patriarch after their dad left, and he modeled manhood for his six younger brothers, marrying a local girl and raising a border-zigzagging family in the tradition of Los Dos Laredos. Kiko’s in-laws were bricklayers in Dallas, so Kiko decided to try laying bricks in Dallas. It was a good time, and a good place to start a career in construction. Thanks to an oil boom, Texas’s population was growing twice as fast as the country’s, as workers and moneymen came to cash in. By 1980, one hundred thousand people were arriving in the Dallas–Fort Worth area every year. Some of the new Texans were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans like Kiko and his family, but many were middle-class and wealthy white Americans. They needed houses, and schools, and strip malls. They needed Mexicans to build them. Kiko had never laid a brick, but he learned to do it by watching his in-laws work the trowel. Jos? came a few years later, when he was fifteen, bailing on high school. By the mid-1980s, Kiko had his own company, Trevi?o Masonry, and a crew of thirty-two fellow Mexicans building three houses at a time. He and Jos? got their work visas, and got their Social Security numbers, and got their tax bills, and paid their tax bills. They banked enough money to buy a few shoebox houses in the working-class neighborhoods southeast of downtown Dallas. After laying bricks all day, they spent their nights remodeling those houses for their families. More work as bricklayers would mean more houses to buy and remodel, and more houses would allow more of their kin to move north. Their sisters had already made their way, and Mom was spending a lot of time in Dallas, too. By the early 1990s, Jos? was pulling in $43,500 a year, a decent wage for a no-diploma son of Tamaulipas. Kiko was doing well, too. But Kiko craved more, and he saw it in the arrival of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was well known that NAFTA would open the floodgates all along the United States’ two-thousand-mile southern border, increasing imports from $40 billion to almost $300 billion over the next two decades. Laredo would benefit especially from its place at the southern tip of U.S. Interstate 35, a thumping artery that stretched north from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and beyond. Once NAFTA passed, Interstate 35 would be clogged with thousands of eighteen-wheelers, carrying goods through Texas and into the Midwest. In 1992, the year before lawmakers passed NAFTA, Kiko bought a 1958 tractor-trailer and returned to the Mexican side of the border. He started moving loads of raw materials from Nuevo Laredo to the maquiladoras of interior Mexico. But he wasn’t just preparing for NAFTA’s promised impact on U.S.-Mexican trade; he was also betting on the effect both governments refused to acknowledge: the increased flow of drugs across those same borders. By truck, train, car, and foot, traffic across the border was expected to skyrocket when the law took effect on January 1, 1994. Every vessel that crossed offered an opportunity to satisfy America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal narcotics—cocaine, from the wilds of Colombia but shipped through Mexico; heroin, from the poppy fields of Sinaloa; and weed, from whatever patch of land industrious growers could find. Kiko started using his new truck to transport marijuana. Not much is known about Kiko’s previous history as a smuggler, if he had any. But he had come up during a golden age of pot smuggling, after America developed its taste for weed but before its government declared war on it. If you grew up poor in Nuevo Laredo, the business, and the connections, came easily whenever you decided you wanted in. Kiko wanted in. He bought weed from suppliers in Mexico and smuggled it across the river into Laredo, presumably tucked away in his new tractor-trailer. Then he hired couriers and paid them a few thousand bucks a load to transport it to Dallas. In previous eras, shipping narcotics north on Interstate 35 was the easy part: keep the speed limit and stay inside the lines and no one would bother you. But in the 1970s, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Border Patrol agents at checkpoints within the country’s borders could stop and question motorists regardless of whether they suspected wrongdoing. Now, at checkpoints like the Laredo North station, located thirty miles north of the border on Interstate 35, agents could stop and question any motorist. And they could pull cars and trucks into hard secondary with only the slightest hint of probable cause. Kiko’s drivers moved a few hundred pounds of weed at a time. Usually they concealed it amid construction materials in a trailer. Other times, they used a ranch just off the highway to avoid the checkpoint altogether. They paid a few hundred bucks per trip to enter the ranch on one side of the checkpoint and exit on the other. Kiko was hardly a kingpin. Other Texas smugglers around that time imported ten times what he did. But he made enough to expand his trucking company. He moved back to Nuevo Laredo, sleeping in a small living space behind his office while his wife and kids stayed back in Dallas. He had nine employees, including a bookkeeper, messengers, and drivers who delivered paper, aluminum, and other raw materials to factories across Mexico. Between legitimate shipping and marijuana smuggling, Kiko was making enough to keep expanding the Trevi?o clan’s nest in Dallas. He bought new trucks for his shipping business, a new pickup for himself, and a motorcycle for his son. Jos?, now in his mid-twenties, stuck to bricklaying. He met a woman named Zulema, an American citizen eight years his junior. She had dark-chocolate eyes and wavy black hair, and her round cheeks gave shape to a determined face. She shared Jos?’s Mexican heritage, privilege-free upbringing, and bottomless work ethic. She was just seventeen when they married, around the time Kiko pivoted into smuggling. She gave birth to their first child, Alexandra, a couple of months later. Jos? became a naturalized citizen and kept working the trowel for whatever contractor would take him. He rose before the sun and put in long days, building homes and schools and stores in and around Dallas. He wanted nothing to do with smuggling. If he lived with some festering indignation over his family’s economic abandonment—by his father, by his fatherland, by his adopted homeland—he never expressed it to the people around him. Instead, he was building a life the way he stacked bricks in the morning shade: slowly and dutifully, actively rejecting the smuggling heritage of his hometown. But occasionally, big brother Kiko called in a favor. Jos? likely longed to say no. But he was lugging that word of rejection uphill. He possessed a deep sense of what social scientists call “familism,” a commitment to family over self. Social scientists routinely pin that quality on immigrants, especially Mexican ones, citing a cocktail of factors: religion, large family size, and economic necessity. And maybe immigrants do rely more heavily on family, as a tool against marginalization, using flexibility and fluidity as antidotes to systematically limited opportunity. But also, it’s just what some families do: They stick the hell together. They say yes. The Trevi?o brothers’ early years in Dallas would have tantalized those familism-obsessed social scientists. The siblings found each other work, built each other homes, shared cars, and cared for each other’s kids. This unflagging devotion to family may or may not dissipate in future generations, but Jos?’s generation was the first. If big brother asked, Jos? said yes. Whenever Kiko’s drug couriers arrived in Dallas with the weed, they would hole up at the La Quinta, the Travelers, or some other access-road dump, waiting for one of Kiko’s workers to pick up the delivery. Before they returned to Laredo, they wanted their few-thousand-dollar delivery fee. A few times, they beeped Jos? to collect it. He got the cash from Kiko and delivered it to the motels. Kiko’s enterprise didn’t last long. Late in 1993, before NAFTA even took effect, Kiko’s couriers tried to pass through the Laredo North checkpoint at three-thirty in the morning. A drug-sniffing dog named Wondo perked up, leapt onto the tires, sniffed, leapt back down, and sat up straight. The agents knew what that meant, so they opened the trailer, and the dog started jumping like, Let me in. He was an old dog, so for him to be jumping, that meant something. The agents waved the truck into secondary. The trailer was stuffed with Saltillo tile, destined for the kitchen of some Spanish-style McMansion. The agents hoisted themselves in and clinked their way to the back, following Wondo. That’s where they found the duffel bags, stuffed with 280 pounds of cellophane-wrapped marijuana. Kiko went to trial in 1995. Jos? wasn’t indicted, but his name did come up a couple of times. That probably explained why Jos? wasn’t in the courtroom to see Kiko sentenced to twenty years—two decades in a Colorado federal prison for moving a drug that, by the time he got out, would be legal in the state where he served his time. With Kiko in prison, the Trevi?os kept grinding. Zulema earned a high-school diploma online and slogged through the best work she could find. She made $6 an hour working food service at a middle school; $6.50 as a McDonald’s crew member; and, now, $500 a week working full-time for a temp agency. Jos? found a steady masonry gig with a residential contractor in the suburbs, and he stuck it out there for six long years. In 2007, he landed a full-time job with a contractor who did brickwork on some of the city’s most prestigious projects: the new basketball arena at Southern Methodist University; the new campus of Booker T. Washington High School, one of the country’s best performing-arts schools; and the new Cowboys Stadium, a monument to American excess fans dubbed “the Death Star.” Jos? surely knew he worked harder than his paychecks suggested. The incomes of immigrants were systematically stubborn, especially in Texas, where so-called right-to-work laws suppressed union organizing and wages. Texas bricklayers made less than those in most every other state, and 50 or 60 percent less than those in Illinois, California, and New York. Jos? did manage the occasional pay bump, and he was up to $20 an hour by 2009, from $16.50 when he’d started his previous job. He could load up on hours, too. He’d clocked 240 hours of overtime in his first full year at his new job, including 28 overtime hours one week when the average temperature was 104 degrees. Still, it was hard to do any more than survive. That’s why they were stuck on their stubby street in Balch Springs, one of the inner-ring suburbs southeast of Dallas. Seventy-five percent of the suburb was black or Hispanic. Almost a quarter were immigrants. Half of the people there spoke something other than English at home. A quarter lived in poverty. The rest lived where the Trevi?os did, just above it, with the city’s median household income barely scraping forty grand. If this was the American Dream, it was a sweaty, stressful version of it, land of the free but also of the overdraft fee. The Trevi?os kept a savings account, but it had never held more than $100. Their checking account had topped out in recent years at $8,692, and that was after a $4,900 tax refund. Most months it hovered around a couple grand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to take the kids back-to-school shopping at American Eagle and Limited Too; to dine on whatever they could afford at Carnival, the Latin-food grocery chain; to load up at Walmart; to make small donations to the March of Dimes; and to pay for Alex’s braces. And, soon, to help Alex pay for college. She was their biggest investment, really, the asset they nurtured in hopes that it would pay off for future Trevi?os. In this and other ways, Jos? and his brothers seemed rooted by the same qualities. They were strivers, willing to bust their butts for what they felt they deserved, and willing to take risks to accelerate their return on investment, which was sluggish by design and decree. They just assessed that risk differently. Kiko had tried to complement his legal shipping business with illegal shipping. His other brothers, the ones Jos? was visiting at the ranch, had written off their own futures in pursuit of riches that paid out sooner and bigger. Jos? was playing a longer game. If he stayed the course, his American Dream would be deferred to his daughter and her siblings. Jos? may never experience the payoff, but perhaps one day he could see it in her round, beaming face. He made sure to pay the orthodontia bill. Despite the relentlessness of this life, and despite the travel ordeal, Jos? managed to get to Piedras Negras for the party at Miguel’s ranch. There were four or five structures on the property, including stables for the horses and a sprawling house, and outside a cook grilled meat and veggies. Jos? found his way under the palapa and sipped from his beer. A man named Poncho approached. Poncho was one of Miguel’s guys, known for his skills as a logistics manager, overseeing the exportation of vast quantities of cocaine into the United States, and the importation of millions of dollars back into Mexico. Jos? told Poncho about his life. How he’d grown up like this, in the country, among the animals. How he worked as a bricklayer—“like a regular person” were the words that would stick with Poncho. They sat there for hours, drinking and talking. From the palapa, Jos? could surely see that his brother had managed to remake their old life on this ranch. A couple of calls and Poncho could cut Jos? into all this, no sweat. But Jos? told Poncho no, that he “didn’t want to have anything to do with what was crooked.” The code of familism seemed to have found its limit. So they just sat and drank beers while the sun set on the ranch of the man they called “Cuarenta.” CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_774ba1ae-8e84-5d80-a2c0-2b5a5eadf5a4) CUARENTA (#ulink_774ba1ae-8e84-5d80-a2c0-2b5a5eadf5a4) Miguel Trevi?o Morales was born in 1973, seven years after Jos?. Like Jos?, he was just a kid when Kiko led the family expedition north for Dallas. Like Jos?, he idolized trailblazing Kiko. Like Jos?, he dropped out of school after eighth grade and came to Dallas as a teen, staying with his mom in one of the small brick houses bought by Kiko. Miguel learned English and worked odd jobs, cutting lawns and sweeping chimneys, taxing work for a scrawny teenager whose family called him “Miguelito.” As he approached manhood in the early nineties, though, Miguel could hardly be described as the baby brother. He was still a raily five foot eight, and his black mustache worked hard to announce itself, but he carried himself with an edge. He could throw back his head and squint his eyes to send a vague but unmistakable message: Don’t fuck with this. Even at the baptism of Jos?’s baby daughter, Alexandra, eighteen-year-old Miguel’s glare overpowered the pastels in his shirt and the chubbiness of his niece’s cheeks. Miguel talked openly about wanting to lift his family out of poverty, finishing the job Kiko started. In 1992, when Miguel was nineteen, a door creaked open in that pursuit. He married a young American woman named Ana, in a ceremony in Laredo, and they had a baby. They moved in together, into one of the houses Kiko had bought in Dallas, and Miguel’s wife filed a “Petition for Alien Relative,” the first hurdle on the way to securing Miguel a green card. Along with that petition, the government required Miguel to submit to a medical and psychological examination, which found him to be in relatively good health. He tested positive for marijuana, which he admitted to smoking occasionally, and he said he’d been drinking since he was seventeen, though never heavily. He’d never been violent, and though the doctor found that he exhibited some antisocial behavior, he showed no signs of being harmful to other people or himself. His wife’s petition was approved, putting him on the path to citizenship. Then Kiko got indicted. It’s unknown what, if any, role Miguel played in his big brother’s smuggling racket, though it’s likely he played some small one, especially in the absence of more legitimate work opportunities. Around the same time, the cops tried to pull Miguel over in an unregistered Cadillac. Police records don’t say whose car it was or where he was going, and Miguel apparently didn’t want to discuss it. He blew a stop sign and ignored the wailing pleas of their sirens for a few blocks before turning down a dead end and surrendering. He pleaded guilty to evading arrest, and they cut him free. Not long after, as Kiko’s trial approached, Miguel crossed back into Mexico, basically for good. He loved his native Mexico enough to get the words Hecho en Mexico—“Made in Mexico”—tattooed onto his back. But he also saw his homeland as a country that rewarded only the powerful and left poor and broken families like his for dead. He saw the United States as the country that stood by and did nothing about it. In Mexico, he returned to the barrios of Nuevo Laredo, where the job market offered opportunities that didn’t require the backbreaking servitude demanded by his homeland or his brothers’ new home across the border. He found work as a gofer for Los Tejas, a gang of local smugglers. Los Tejas was part of a tradition that went back generations: smuggling illicit product over the Rio Grande. During prohibition, smugglers loaded boats with cases of whiskey and tequila and floated them across under moonlit skies. In the 1960s, American demand for Acapulco Gold was so high, and regulation so lax, that Mexicans were throwing it across the river to hankering buyers. Cocaine and meth and heroin have floated across. And people—wading, boating, swimming, and trudging, hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants were making the trip every year as Miguel was coming of age in the 1990s, when the United States’ Mexican-born population grew from about four million to about nine million. As business boomed for Los Tejas, its bosses accumulated cars that needed washing and cash that needed retrieving or delivering. As a gofer, Miguel performed these sorts of tasks well enough that he graduated to driver and bodyguard, making sure the boss got where he needed to go safely. No doubt he could see himself in the boss’s seat one day. He just needed a chance to take it. Back then, most Mexican border towns were controlled by the so-called drug cartels. The term was birthed by Pablo Escobar’s famous Colombian cocaine mafia, the Medell?n Cartel. It wasn’t precisely what an economist would label a “cartel,” since it wasn’t collusion that kept cocaine prices so high but the toxic mix of American demand and American prohibition. But the name “cartel” stuck and became synonymous with the gangs that ruled Mexico’s underworld. The cartel label wasn’t the only thing Colombia’s cocaine producers shared with Mexico’s smugglers. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Escobar and company had come to rely on Mexican traffickers to ferry their cocaine into the United States. For the Colombians, it meant slightly less in profits, since they’d have to pay the Mexicans a piso, or a tax, for smuggling the cocaine into the States. But it also meant less risk. For Mexican traffickers, it meant an inroad into a new market. Cocoa plants require tropical conditions, which limited Mexican growers to cultivating marijuana and heroin. Partnering with the Colombians offered a way into the lucrative cocaine and crack-cocaine business. The arrangement became known as the “Mexican Trampoline.” By the 1990s, the Colombians were moving billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine through Mexico every year—more than 90 percent of all the coke snorted, shot, and smoked in the States. The two thousand miles of border between Mexico and the United States were becoming more valuable to Mexican criminals every year. Each region had its dominant player in the cocaine market. Two hundred miles southeast of Nuevo Laredo, the Gulf Cartel leveraged its geography to import and export Colombian cocaine by air, land, and sea. To the northwest of Nuevo Laredo, where Ciudad Ju?rez bled into El Paso, Texas, the Ju?rez Cartel ruled. Farther west, the Arellano-F?lix Organization moved product from Tijuana into San Diego and up California’s own narcotics superhighway, Interstate 5. Looming over all of them was the Sinaloa cartel, the richest and most powerful gang in Mexico. Based in the poppy-draped hills of Sinaloa state and nestled against the Gulf of California, the Sinaloa cartel was helmed by Joaqu?n Guzm?n Loera, better known as “El Chapo.” His main operational advantage was experience. Sinaloans had been cultivating their lush native soil for opiates for decades, and exporting those opiates across the U.S. border since Chinese immigrants pioneered the trade in the early 1900s. His innovation was to turn the old trade into an empire, effectively controlling the smaller cartels in Mexico’s western half. El Chapo was also believed to have the support of the Mexican government, all the way to the halls of Los Pinos, the presidential palace. As Miguel Trevi?o rose through the ranks, no cartel controlled his hometown. Instead, a series of small, family-run gangs, including Los Tejas, moved drugs across the river. They’d done it this way for decades, dividing up Nuevo Laredo’s streets under the guidance of an independent drug lord nicknamed “El Chacho.” Each group paid El Chacho sixty grand or so a month. In exchange, El Chacho kept the peace among the groups and with the neighboring cartels. As Kiko had intuited, though, NAFTA changed all that. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of trucks crossing north through Los Dos Laredos nearly doubled, from about 68,000 a month to 133,000, each offering an opportunity for traffickers to conceal drugs flowing north. As a result, the city became more porous, more lucrative, and more attractive to every cartel. It was only a matter of time before they came for Nuevo Laredo. The Gulf Cartel was the city’s most natural suitor. It already controlled Matamoros, another major port of entry from Tamaulipas to Texas. And it had a new boss who longed to control Miguel’s hometown. His name was Osiel C?rdenas Guill?n. He’d risen to the Gulf’s helm after arranging the murder of his co-leader. The killing earned C?rdenas a nickname, “El Mata Amigos,” or “the Friend Killer.” It also earned him control of a business that was believed to be clearing a billion dollars a year, if not more. Before C?rdenas advanced on Nuevo Laredo, he approached his bodyguard and confidant, a former elite soldier who’d deserted the Mexican military to serve as his personal protector. C?rdenas wanted more soldiers like him. “I want the best men,” C?rdenas said. “The best armed men that there are.” “They are only in the army,” his mercenary said. “I want them.” They started recruiting. It wasn’t hard. Mexico’s Grupo Aerom?vil de Fuerzas Especiales del Alto Mando was a special-ops unit trained in guerrilla tactics: sniping, breaching, mountain climbing, survival. Some of its men had been trained by American Special Forces at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and at the controversial School for the Americas, where the United States Army trained Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. C?rdenas worked them slowly. First he brokered peace by sending food, women, and cash. Then he offered them jobs, including pay raises, better working conditions, and a chance to win for once. They defected by the dozens. Under C?rdenas’s command, the defectors created an elite unit of mercenaries whose job was to protect and expand the Gulf’s interests. They imported strict military principles and practices, preached discipline and loyalty, and vowed never to leave a compatriot on the battlefield, dead or alive. They even honored their military roots in their name. Colloquially, they became known across Mexico as La Compa??a, or “the Company.” Officially, they needed something slicker. In the federal police, C?rdenas’s bodyguard had used the radio call sign Z-1. Since he was a “Z,” they would all be “Z”s. They called themselves Los Zetas. One of the Zetas’ first orders of business was to take over Nuevo Laredo. C?rdenas sent his most trusted men, including Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, or “the Executioner,” and a gangster they called “El Winnie Pooh.” They showed up in convoys and informed Los Tejas and the town’s other incumbent smugglers that they would work for the Gulf or be vanquished from the city. As it turned out, Los Tejas’ leaders weren’t interested in subcontracting for the Gulf and the Zetas. But Miguel was. He helped the Zetas track down and kill his Tejas boss. He worked for the Zetas now. Miguel teamed up with another freelance smuggler from his neighborhood—Iv?n Vel?zquez Caballero, nicknamed “El Talib?n”—to make sure Nuevo Laredo fell under the command of the Zetas. They dressed in fatigues and roamed their hometown in caravans, recruiting young men who could help the Zetas eradicate the remaining holdouts and discourage other cartels’ aspirations. Now in his late twenties, Miguel no longer drank or did drugs. He preferred to be outdoors. His brother Fito was a hunting guide on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, and Miguel spent many mornings hunting whitetail deer. But he was always working. On one hunting trip, he befriended a visitor from Dallas, offering him shooting tips and inviting him out to meals. Soon Miguel was plying the young man with thirty-five kilos of Gulf Cartel coke a week, to be smuggled into Texas. They found other recruits in the clubs clustered near the border. Se?or Frog’s was the more tourist-friendly chain bar, with a dress code management said kept the “riffraff” away. The gangsters preferred a club called 57th Street, which blasted hip-hop and was considered a safer place to conduct business. And there was always Boys Town, the walled-off strip of cantinas and brothels where young prostitutes offered cheap fucks on creaky mattresses. These were the places frequented by the boys Miguel and Talib?n hoped to recruit. Boys like them—young Mexicans and Tejanos who might exist on both sides of the border but didn’t feel wanted or needed on either. Teenagers who’d dropped out or been kicked out of school. Guys who needed jobs and weren’t troubled when the job description included a possible prison sentence or death. Miguel and Talib?n also made sure the local cops and journalists fell in line. They made the traditional offer, ?Plata o plomo? (“Silver or lead?”): You take the bribe or you take the bullet. The prices across Tamaulipas ranged from a few hundred bucks a week for a street cop or reporter to a couple grand for a local police chief. Many took the bribe, but the town didn’t fall easily to Miguel and Los Zetas. Not all of Nuevo Laredo’s independent smugglers were on board with the hostile takeover; nor did every cop, civic leader, and businessman accept their bribes. A turf war broke out, and violence rocked Nuevo Laredo. Bodies were discovered buried in backyards and on ranches. A state police commander and his lieutenant were gunned down in broad daylight. Mexico fought back, too. In 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was vanquished from the presidency after seventy years of rule. The election of Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola executive and member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), led Mexico into a new era. It also undercut the government’s existing relationship with the cartels, with whom they could occasionally forge compromises and understandings. Without one-party rule, cooperation fizzled. Fox flooded the disputed territories with troops, aiming to take down top drug bosses. In 2003, troops swooped into Gulf Cartel territory and captured the Zetas’ founder, Osiel C?rdenas, leaving Nuevo Laredo up for grabs. To the west and east, every other key city—the “plazas,” as the cartels called their crucial smuggling outposts—was controlled by Mexico’s most powerful criminal gangs. Now those gangs saw a chance to take Nuevo Laredo. None more so than El Chapo’s Sinaloa gang. In the weeks after C?rdenas was captured, El Chapo called a summit with a loose network of gangsters who controlled smuggling from Ju?rez to Tijuana. These were generational smugglers playing under the old rules, which respected history and geography and traditional power. They divided up territories, leaving the Ju?rez natives to control Ju?rez, the Baja families to run Tijuana, and so on. They honored whoever was next in line, paid off whoever needed paying off, and killed only when necessary, though “necessary” was loosely defined. To take on the Zetas, El Chapo dispatched his own native of Los Dos Laredos, a former Texas high-school football player named Edgar Valdez Villarreal. His nickname, “La Barbie,” had been coined by a Texas football coach enamored of his light-blue eyes and pale skin. But La Barbie had fallen into Laredo’s street gangs and fled across the river when American law enforcement caught on, and he’d been a faithful drug warrior ever since. He’d earned his stripes as a cartel assassin, and now he was expected to build an army of sicarios to take on the Zetas. A war broke out. Miguel and La Barbie were its colonels, two formerly impoverished street kids fighting for control of their hometowns. La Barbie recruited gang members from El Salvador’s powerful criminal gang, MS-13, and showed up in Nuevo Laredo with a message for the Zetas: Retreat or face the wrath of Los Negros, which is what Barbie had dubbed his own mercenary unit. The name translated to “the Black Ones.” As the Zetas battled Los Negros, Miguel revealed himself to be a charismatic leader but also happy—desperate even—to mix it up in firefights. The specific roots of Miguel’s bloodlust are hard to pinpoint. People who have fought and done business alongside him take it for granted now, as if his thirst for violence is among his immutable traits, like his chocolate skin or night-sky hair. But there was no known violence in his childhood; his de facto patriarch, Kiko, wasn’t believed to spill any blood during his short-lived criminal career. It appeared that Miguel was driven by a combustible combination of resentment, ambition, and cynicism, a man seizing at power that was once, and would soon be, laughably out of grasp. He didn’t expect to live into his forties, and he behaved that way as he and the Zetas seized Nuevo Laredo. He and the Zetas murdered four cops associated with El Chacho, then killed El Chacho, dumping his body in the town square clad in women’s underwear. Later, he ordered the Nuevo Laredo police, whom the Zetas now basically controlled, to round up any smuggler who had resisted the Gulf’s takeover. There were thirty-four such holdouts crammed into the house by the time Miguel arrived dressed in black fatigue pants and black boots, a makeshift uniform designed to evoke the power of a Special Forces unit. He picked one out and brought him forward, then asked the assembled men whether anyone knew the location of the heart. No one answered, so Miguel offered a visual anatomy lesson, plunging his knife into the man’s chest and watching him die. As the battle for Nuevo Laredo raged, the Zetas continued recruiting ex-soldiers, growing in power as the arm of the Gulf Cartel. Each was assigned a call number based on seniority: the first to defect was Z-1; the second, Z-2; and so on. Technically, only soldiers could be Zetas. But Miguel exhibited such savagery that he was bequeathed a call number, despite never having served a day in the military. By then he was the fortieth so-called Zeta, Z-40, but everyone just called him Cuarenta. “Forty.” Throughout the 2000s, Forty accumulated enough power within the Zetas, and enough enemies outside of it, that he could have gotten away with hiding out on his ranches all day while his killers fought his war. But he remained a grunt. He dressed modestly and ready for battle, in fatigues and T-shirts, with knives, assault rifles, and grenades on his hips. He was still among the first out of the truck when the bullets started flying. He continued roaming the streets of Nuevo Laredo, enticing poor teenagers to join up. But there was a problem: they couldn’t fight. Though the Zetas now included hundreds of members, most had no military training at all. So Forty improvised. He traveled to Guatemala to recruit former Special Forces, known as Kaibiles, to train his young recruits. He shipped them to a camp in the mountains near Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, where they slept side by side on cots. In grueling training sessions, former Special Forces from Mexico and the Kaibiles taught them to wage war. They crawled and breached and ran, stripped guns and shot all manner of weapons. They learned the art of urban warfare, practicing bursting through doors and clearing houses. Forty himself taught them to kill. He tied up some enemy he’d captured and offered his recruit the choice of a sledgehammer or a machete. The ones who didn’t start swinging were relegated to duty as halcones—“hawks,” or lookouts. The ones who did became Forty’s sicarios, and they helped the Zetas grow their brand, which was defined by headline-grabbing violence. From decapitations to swinging corpses to bodies burned in oil drums, Zeta-style killings would come to define Mexico’s drug war. It was a blood binge fueled by several factors, starting with the Zetas’ background as paramilitary soldiers. Smuggling had long been a family business in Mexico, governed by unwritten rules like the ones that governed the American mob wars. But the Zetas weren’t a party to that social contract. They were mercenaries, with all the training of an elite killing squad but none of the duty to protect. There were other factors at play, too. Scholars believe the Zetas’ penchant for beheadings was influenced by the Kaibiles, who favored the practice. It’s believed the Zetas’ desire to videotape the beheadings, and to use social media to disseminate them, was inspired by Al-Qaeda. There may have been religious influences, too. Though Forty and most other traffickers practiced Catholicism, some Zetas worshipped at the feet of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a folkloric goddess whose graces are sought by some impoverished Mexicans. Shrines to her stand tall in stash houses and prison cells across Mexico. Some other Zetas practiced Santer?a, an Afro-Caribbean faith that borrows from Catholicism. One early Zeta named Mamito considered himself a brujo of this faith, someone to whom the burden of violence fell directly from the hands of God. Or maybe the extreme violence was a simple business calculation. Forty and the Zetas were disrupters, a small upstart seeking power in a system tightly guarded by dynastic, politically influential families. They’d come to fuck things up. If fighting off La Barbie and the Mexican government wasn’t enough, the Zetas soon discovered a new enemy: its patrones at the Gulf Cartel. In 2007, four years after he was captured, Osiel C?rdenas, the Zetas’ founder, was extradited to Texas, where he faced charges that would land most drug dealers in prison for life. But C?rdenas agreed to plead guilty and forfeit fifty million dollars in assets. In exchange, the inventor of an elite killing squad would spend just twenty-five years in prison. Though his agreement was shrouded in secrecy, it was easy for the Zetas to deduce how C?rdenas had landed such a sweet deal. He’d agreed to snitch. Feeling betrayed, Forty and the Zetas started to splinter off from the Gulf Cartel, a division that would alter the criminal landscape and increase bloodshed across Mexico. It was the rise of the paramilitaries. As the Zetas helped the Gulf expand, and Barbie’s Los Negros fought for Sinaloa, rival cartels responded the way rival businesses do: they chased the trend. The Ju?rez Cartel recruited former police officers for its enforcement wing, La Linea. Artistas Asesinos, a Ju?rez street gang, went to work there as enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel. These new groups weren’t generational smugglers, inheriting traditions from their poppy-farming fathers and grandfathers. They were embittered warriors who had opted out of Mexico’s rule of law. Human smuggling, gun-running, oil thievery—all crime was now on the table. All violence in its pursuit was an acceptable cost of doing business. Paramilitary tactics became the norm. Local politicians and business owners, once in contract with community-oriented, moblike smuggling enterprises, decried the new tactics, putting even more pressure on the Mexican government to respond. It did. Capos kept falling. Leadership shifted. New factions and alliances formed. The paramilitary groups, the best equipped to seize power, seized it. The Zetas seized the most. Vicente Fox’s strategy—using military force to aggressively target cartel leaders—was clearly hopeless. Yet in 2006, his successor, Felipe Calder?n, doubled down, declaring “war” on the cartels. He found a willing partner in the Bush administration, which agreed to send billions of dollars in aid, to be spent on training, military helicopters, and surveillance planes. In accepting the Americans’ aid, Calder?n was accepting the American strategy of attacking the source of supply (the farmers in Colombia, the traffickers in Mexico, the dealers in the States) rather than the source of demand (American users and drug prohibition laws). It was plainly Sisyphean, if Sisyphus had lugged his boulder by Black Hawk. Economists far and wide argued that spending money on treatment and education in the United States would have a greater impact on the flow of drugs. Even more impactful would be decriminalization. Reducing the risk involved in making and selling drugs would, economists believed, reduce prices, decrease the value of the shipping channels, and decrease the blood spilled defending them. But the economists’ notion is hopelessly rooted in basic respect for black and brown bodies. The Nixon campaign, searching for answers in 1968, had figured out that the nation’s fascination with getting high was not an addressable issue but a political opportunity. Demonize weed, demonize the hippie; criminalize heroin, criminalize black people. The politicians contrived evil. Capitalism took it from there. Industries sprang forth from a racist campaign strategy, including militarized counternarcotics forces and a profiteering private prison system. Across the United States and Latin America, curtains fell on new theaters of war, with a bonus for the white warmongers in the directors’ chairs: most of the bodies piling up were black and brown. Things would change one day. White people would fall victim to heroin addiction, and white politicians would discover how much money there was in weed. Until then, send in the choppers. In the years after Calder?n’s declaration of war, the murder rate across Mexico doubled. Forty ordered hundreds of those murders, and committed scores himself. He told the people around him he had trouble sleeping if a day passed without someone dying by his hands. In his early years with the Zetas, Forty occasionally snuck up to Dallas, where his brother Jos? and other family still lived. He laid no bricks. He was a different dude than the thin-mustached Miguelito who used to live there, joyriding in Cadillacs and looking up to his weed-slinging brother. He was thicker now and prone to wearing tight black shirts that showed off his huskier build. He was the patriarch now, a boss in every way. He frequented the city’s grittier strip clubs and a Latin hip-hop joint called DMX Club, apparently in search of workers for the Zetas’ fulfillment operation in Dallas. How much time, if any, Miguel and Jos? spent together during those trips is unknown. They weren’t known to be the closest of brothers. Miguel was tight with his younger brothers back in Mexico. Jos? was close to Rodolfo, his fellow stateside construction worker, who, like Jos?, had tried to shun the smuggling business. As Forty rose in the ranks, he couldn’t get to Dallas anymore. He was under indictment in Mexico and Texas for drug trafficking, and federal agents across the American Southwest were beginning to obsess about his whereabouts. They perked up every time an intercepted phone call included mention of a “Miguel,” “Mike,” or “MT,” and they had snitches lined up to tip them off if he sneaked into the States. If the brothers were going to see each other, Jos? would have to come to Miguel. CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_e3d39ebf-a63c-53de-86ad-3d49148f5845) EL HUESOS (#ulink_e3d39ebf-a63c-53de-86ad-3d49148f5845) NUEVO LAREDO, TAMAULIPAS April 2009 The crowd formed early for the Futurity Nuevo Laredo, the town’s big annual race for promising two-year-old quarter horses. The race typically drew about two thousand people, but there was an early buzz and a swelling crowd at this year’s event, which marked a new era: it was the first big race at the town’s new track. Fans settled into the shiny bleachers that flanked the track, shaded by sweeping steel overhangs. Others found tables inside the air-conditioned restaurant that was perched at the top of the grandstand, protected from the elements by tinted glass. When all those seats filled up, people stacked themselves four or five deep near the sturdy new rail, relying on their collective canopy of wide-brimmed cowboy hats for shade. The trainers on the backside had no such worries, prepping their horses in covered stalls built from brick and painted a pristine white. And all across the track, from the shit shovelers in the stalls to the cops roaming the concourse, people whispered gratitude for the track’s benefactor and foreman, Forty. He loved horse racing so much that he’d built his hometown a new track, using farm equipment bought with drug proceeds in the United States and shipped back across the border. Pretty soon his most prized colt would burst from the track’s new starting gate. Like Jos?, Forty talked longingly about the family’s upbringing on the ranches of Tamaulipas, and about his family’s collective passion for days spent under the beating sun, among roaming cattle and sensible horses. If their father’s departure had cost the Trevi?os a romantic countryside life, Forty seemed hell-bent on re-creating it. And he’d found a man who could help him do it. His name was Mario “Poncho” Cuellar. An experienced trafficker in his forties, Poncho had been on hiatus from the cocaine-smuggling business for a few years, trying to make a go of selling and junking old cars along the border between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass. He was also spending more of his time racing horses. A few years back, Poncho had started buying racehorses in the United States and shipping them to Mexico to race against his friends. To get the best horses he used the best broker, Ramiro Villarreal. Then, in 2007, Forty and the Zetas showed up in Piedras Negras. Their relationship with the Gulf Cartel on the rocks, the Zetas were branching out from mere enforcement, starting to buy, smuggle, and sell their own cocaine. The Zetas asked Poncho to go to work for them. He wanted to say no, but the way they asked—stripping him to his underwear, binding his hands and feet, killing his friends who’d tried to refuse—made him think otherwise. They delivered five hundred kilos of cocaine to Poncho. He went to work, smuggling it through Eagle Pass. Business got good fast for the Zetas in Piedras Negras, and Forty started spending more time there. He bought multiple ranches, sometimes by force. (Plata o plomo is a versatile ultimatum.) Then, with Poncho’s help, he started stocking his new ranches full of high-end quarter horses and hosting regular races. More than ever, racing became a fixture in Zeta culture. Traffickers have a hard time articulating their passion for horse racing, which is hardly a staple of Mexico’s modern sporting culture. Soccer dominates the landscape, especially in cities. In the country, charrer?a, a more artistic cousin to American rodeo, rules. But in their rural hideaways, traffickers, especially those from the Gulf and Zeta cartels, have embraced match racing as one of their go-to pastimes. There is a romance to it, a link to Mexico’s past. If they knew their homeland’s history, they could picture Hern?n Cort?s’s army arriving at Veracruz in the early sixteenth century, overwhelming the natives with his lance-wielding soldiers, who blazed across the battlefield on hulking creatures the natives had never seen. Actual racing, too, could be traced back to Cort?s’s first days on Mexican soil, when he ordered his soldiers to race in pairs across the sand in an effort to impress the natives. Early Spanish colonizers of Mexico organized races not unlike the ones being run in Virginia and the Carolinas: You bring your fastest horse, I’ll bring mine, and we’ll put some property on the line. In the mid-nineteenth century, horse owners joined forces and created clubs that could compete against each other in occasional meets, but they were still informal—parties, basically, with two runners and lots of side bets as the entertainment. Later in the 1800s, as Mexico’s ruling class thrived under military dictatorship, Mexico City’s elite appropriated the sport. They formed a Jockey Club and organized regular races attended by buttoned-up generals and elegantly dressed women. But the sport has always thrived in Mexico when it has embraced its ranching roots, pitting one horse, one ranch, one town against another with as much pride as money on the line. All of this is romanticized in countless corridos, the traditional, poetic folk songs that chronicle working-class Mexican history and culture. The most traditional corridos tell epic tales from the revoluci?n; today, so many songs are devoted to drug criminals that they’ve given birth to a new subgenre, narcocorridos. But horses and match racing have always played key roles in corridos, reminding working-class Mexicans of the animals that helped their countrymen win wars, land, money, and pride. The traffickers are also drawn to the controlled violence of quarter-horse racing, an adrenaline-pumping competition that rarely ends with anyone dead. Gambling helps fuel the intensity, like dice, cards, and sports betting for other gangsters. There is a soothing escapism to horse racing, too. When you’re as deeply entrenched in the drug trade as Forty and his compadres, there is hardly a person in your life untouched by its pistol-whipping reach, or one whose loyalty can’t be questioned. The horses just nuzzle and run. By the time Forty arrived in Piedras Negras, Zetas and other narcos all across Mexico and South America were obsessed with weekend match races. As Forty bought up horses and land in and around Piedras Negras, he began holding regular private races there. Bring your best runners, Forty would say to Poncho and other associates, and they would race all afternoon. Sometimes it would be just the bosses and their inner circle, plus the armed guards clustered in armored SUVs that formed a perimeter around the property. Other times they invited people from the nearby towns and villages, to create goodwill and build their network of potential lookouts. There was always beer in the cooler and some cocaine in case a boss wanted a taste. They bet big, $100,000 or more for each race. Forty usually took it home. Sometimes he had the best horse. Sometimes the winner was reluctant to collect. Sometimes Forty’s opponents told their jockeys to take it slow to avoid disrespecting the boss. It was around this time that Forty ordered his sicarios to take out a man nicknamed “El Gato” at a track in Saltillo. The conventional wisdom was that Forty had ordered El Gato killed because he was a rival trafficker, which he was. But Forty’s beef wasn’t work related; he told friends he killed El Gato because El Gato’s horses had been outrunning Forty’s. After the murder, Forty ordered his associates to keep racing, and bragged when his horses took home the money. Horses consumed Forty, and he was amassing some truly fast ones with the help of Poncho and Poncho’s favored broker, Ramiro. None was faster than an undersized yearling that had arrived in Piedras Negras late in 2008. His name was Tempting Dash. At the auction in California, Ramiro had actually intended to purchase Tempting Dash for a gangster named Jes?s Enrique Rej?n Aguilar, nickname “Mamito.” He was Z-7, the seventh Special Forces defector to join the Zetas. But after Ramiro had hauled Tempting Dash to Poncho’s ranch, Forty had decided to keep the colt for himself. He’d ordered Tempting Dash shipped to Monterrey to be worked into shape by one of the best trainers in Mexico. There’s a cutoff for racehorses just as there’s a cutoff for kindergartners, and breeders, like overattached parents, work hard to be on the right side of it. For racing purposes, all horses born in a given year are considered one-year-olds the following January 1. Breeders, then, naturally prefer foals to be born as close to January 1 as possible, but never before, so their one-year-olds become two-year-olds with the earliest possible birthdays. Tempting Dash was born in May. So when he arrived in Monterrey, he was young and skinny, still growing into the frame bestowed on him by his famous sire. The grooms in the stables started calling him “El Huesos.” “The Bones.” It stuck, becoming the name Tempting Dash raced under in Mexico. Early that spring, before El Huesos even turned two by the calendar, Forty put his new colt to the test. He entered him in a qualifier for the annual Futurity Nuevo Laredo, one of the first futurities on the Mexican quarter-horse calendar. El Huesos stumbled in the trials, failing to qualify for the main event. But he did earn a spot in a consolation match race the day of the big futurity, and Forty’s trainer made sure the colt was ready. It’s unclear whether Forty was there that day. He would make appearances at that track and others over the years, but his fugitive status made his presence hard to guarantee. If he was there, he was probably hanging near his fleet of pickups, surrounded by watchful bodyguards and left alone by whatever local cop might see him. El Huesos versus El Caramelo was the eighth race of the day. For Forty and his fellow Zetas, things weren’t going as planned. They’d entered horses in most of the races that day, but the big futurity and the bulk of its quarter-million-dollar purse had been won by a horse owned by Los Piojos, a small, rival drug gang whose dominance on the quarter-horse tracks was driving Forty mad. El Huesos was Forty’s last chance to show his hometown what was up. At just 250 yards and with a five-figure purse, the race was mostly designed to test the young colts’ speed in competition. But a race was a race, so the crowd stuck around, huddling in the shade of the bleachers. The gates flung open. The jockey riding El Huesos pulled the horse hard left, toward his opponent, then in front of him, then away, leaving him in a literal cloud of dust. No one was quite sure how hard the opposing jockey was trying, given that El Huesos was rumored to be owned by Forty, but official heats like this were generally run fair and square. Either way, everyone agreed: El Huesos could fly. After that, Forty decided he wanted to race El Huesos in the United States. Zetas had run horses in the States before, usually under Ramiro’s name or some other front. As usual, Forty didn’t find his predecessors’ strategy aggressive enough. Now in his mid-thirties, Forty had existed in this underworld for more than a decade. He had managed to stay alive, but two of his brothers had been killed in Mexico: Jes?s, reportedly gunned down by fellow Zetas for ignoring company rules, and Fito, the hunting guide, murdered by Forty’s rivals despite apparently staying out of the smuggling business. Forty knew his time would come, too, and the heat was cranking. In the summer of 2009, after El Huesos went blazing across Forty’s new hometown track, the United States Department of Justice unsealed indictments in New York and Washington, D.C., naming Miguel and his brother Omar as principal leaders of the Zetas. The government was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to Forty’s capture. He knew what that meant: the snitches were lining up at the feds’ door. So, Forty decided it was time to secure some assets for his family. If El Huesos ran well in the States, he would win his money not under Ramiro’s name but under Jos?’s. Like all of Forty’s schemes, this one was fraught with risk but filled with upside. If it failed, he might needlessly drag Jos?, Jos?’s family, Ramiro, and others onto the feds’ radar. If it succeeded, whatever money he could earn in the horse business would forever stay in the Trevi?o family, untouchable by the whims of the drug war. His associates were skeptical. They worried that it would draw too much attention from the Americans. But Forty was done playing by the old rules, the ones that said that Mexican traffickers couldn’t operate in the United States without American law crashing down on them. Fuck the Americans, he seemed to be saying: They snort our drugs, they use our beaches, they buy their cheap shit made by our poor workers. The least they can do is lose to our horses. Whether Forty ever discussed this plan directly with Jos? remains unknown. Talking on the phone was impractical, given the likelihood the feds would be listening, and it was hard to meet in person. Forty going to Dallas was out of the question, and Jos? didn’t often come to Mexico. But it was around this time that Jos? found his way across the border, to the gas station, onto the ranch, and under that palapa, to sip beers and talk with Poncho Cuellar—about loving the country life but not wanting anything to do with drugs. Forty had a different plan for Jos?, and he’d told Poncho to put it in motion. Poncho knew the horses, knew the Horseman, and had connections on both sides of the border. He was the perfect guy to kick off what they called Operativo Huesos. CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_e53f3bbe-5cb3-58d0-8253-ca2b2ec105eb) THE LAUNDRY (#ulink_e53f3bbe-5cb3-58d0-8253-ca2b2ec105eb) Say you’re at a party. You didn’t want to come, because you’ve been running in the mornings, trying to form a habit as the self-help book you’ve been skimming suggests. Being at this party is not going help you keep your streak. But you came! You’re here! You’ve also been trying to say yes more, to form a habit of being open to things, like that other self-help book recommends, so you turned on music and drank a Modelo in the shower and made a thing of it. You got here and you’re here and— Wait, what? Your friends still fuck with drugs? Your friends still fuck with drugs, as evidenced by the fact that you’re in a bedroom, pushing aside a pile of coats and sitting on the edge of a low-slung IKEA bed. Katy is pulling a bag from her pocket, and it’s been so long that you honestly don’t know what she’s going to dump from it. You hope it’s not weed, because you could have smoked that at home, and you hope it’s not Molly, because people in their thirties should not be doing drugs with cute nicknames, and you hope it’s not heroin, because you read the news. You sort of hope it’s not cocaine. But you also hope it is. It is. Katy angles the baggie and taps her finger to shake the coke loose. It falls in a line, forming a little ski run on the metal serving tray she’s hunched over, a few moguls but nothing you can’t navigate. She starts smoothing it out, and you, being an educated, Narcos-binging citizen of the world, start thinking about the journey that cocaine made—from the jungles of Colombia; to the safe houses of Mexico; to the border; over the border or maybe under it, if you prefer Weeds; to Katy’s dealer; to Katy; to here, in the bedroom with the cheap bed and the coats. You’re thinking about it wrong. The cocaine’s journey is interesting, but the more epic odyssey is the one that will be taken by the twenty in your wallet, which you’re planning on leaving on the tray for Katy after using it to snort that line, and which Katy is planning on using to buy more cocaine. Here’s what happens to that twenty. Say it’s 2009, and say you live in Dallas. In these days, in these parts, most of the rolled-up cocaine twenties wind up in the possession of a Dallas-based kingpin named Junior. Though only in his late twenties, Junior is one of the largest regional cocaine distributors in the United States, responsible for moving one thousand kilograms of cocaine every month. That means he’s responsible for sending around $20 million a month in cash back to his supplier in Piedras Negras, Mexico, who is a Los Zetas operative named Poncho. To help him pull this off, Junior owns, under various names, at least a half-dozen stash houses spread across Dallas, some for drugs and some for money. He also keeps a fleet of “trap cars” to move the money south. He owns tractor-trailers that he packs with millions of dollars, stuffing stacks of cash into the recesses of Whirlpool washers and LG ovens. He owns a minivan, too; a 2003 Toyota Sienna. Junior paid some guys in Guadalajara $18,000 to get it retrofitted with a secret compartment that can be accessed only by starting the car, engaging the parking brake, putting the car in reverse, turning on the defrost system, and selecting a specific fan combination—in that order. It’s some real MacGyver shit, but it fools the dogs every time. Sometimes, if Junior’s drivers aren’t satisfied with their trap-car options, they improvise, like the time one bought a horse hauler, hollowed out the bottom, stuffed it with cash, piled hay on top of it, and then bought a cheap, old horse to complete the effect. No one’s sure what happened to the horse, but the money made it across, no problem. Above all, Junior prefers to use pickups, with the cash vacuum-sealed and floating in the gas tanks. He hires drivers to haul anywhere from $300,000 to $800,000 back to Mexico at a time. They usually cross in Eagle Pass without issue. Once they get the money across, the drivers find their way to one of the Zetas’ stash houses in Piedras Negras, and Poncho and his team go to work “cleaning up” the bills. They start by removing anything smaller than a twenty, as well as anything that’s been ripped or written on. They use these small and damaged bills to pay off drivers, lookouts, and other workers who help the drugs and money flow smoothly. They package up the remaining money—the big, clean bills—and deliver it to a man named Cuno. Cuno is the Zetas’ accountant in Piedras Negras. He keeps meticulous records, using both a paper ledger and laptop to track every shipment of cocaine that comes in or goes out, every American dollar that accumulates, every buyer, and every supplier. Thanks in part to Junior’s steady shipments, there is always $30 million, $40 million, $50 million stacked high in Cuno’s stash house. Much of it will be counted, packaged, and shipped back to Colombia. But much of it will be distributed to the cartel leadership, including Forty. And Cuno’s money house is just one of several where the Zetas have millions piled. All told, as Katy texts her dealer and you roll up a second twenty, the Zetas are clearing $350 million, most of it in U.S. dollars. It is a fraction of the American drug market, estimated to be tens of billions of dollars, but still far too much to leave piled in Cuno’s stash house. Forty and the others can spend some of this money freely in Mexico. They can buy cars, homes, horses, and sex, all with “dirty” American cash. Some of the Zeta bosses even buy exotic animals. According to narco lore, Forty and the Zetas’ leader, Lazcano, liked to feed their lions and tigers with the corpses of Zeta rivals. But Forty knows that eventually his run will end and he will disappear—into the ground, into a prison cell, or into hiding. He knows that for his money to last beyond his time as a kingpin, and for his family to make use of it beyond the underworld, he has to somehow turn your tainted twenty into a crisp one pulled from the ATM. He has to launder it. The first step to laundering drug money is called “placement”—getting it out of the safe house and into a legitimate financial system. The easiest places for criminals to start the laundering process are banks, which, despite increased regulation, accept and move trillions of dollars of drug proceeds. As the Zetas rose to power in the 2000s, the Mexican branches of HSBC, a British bank, accepted large cash deposits so willingly that cartel operatives started making them in boxes designed specifically to fit through teller windows. Around the same time, a Zeta operative opened an account with Banamex USA, a division of Citigroup that operated along the Mexican border. In his application, the operative described himself as a small-time cattle breeder who would deposit only hundreds of dollars a year. Then he deposited $60 million in drug proceeds without raising a single red flag at the bank—not even after he was indicted on money-laundering charges. Eventually, the banks, like the operatives using them, get caught. The only difference is what happens next. For “cleaning” just $550,000 of drug proceeds, launderers caught in the United States can face up to twenty years in federal prison, and the feds can seize every dime they can find. When investigators discovered that HSBC allowed Mexican and Colombian traffickers to launder $900 million through its U.S. bank, among other violations, the Justice Department called it too risky to the international financial system to indict any bank officials. Instead, they reached a settlement with the bank, which would forfeit about a billion dollars, plus pay a $700 million fine. With $2.7 trillion in assets, HSBC managed to survive. Once in bank accounts, drug money can easily be “layered”—moved from account to account in an effort to distance it from the initial deposit and confuse investigators. It can be whisked across borders, into businesses and investments. Eventually it can land in the hands of family members living cleanly in Mexico, the United States, or elsewhere. By then, it’s harder for the feds to trace or seize. The Zetas bosses flow a good chunk of money through small businesses. They use your rolled-up twenties to open nightclubs, restaurants, car washes, and other businesses in Los Dos Laredos and across northern Mexico. The other cartels do the same. One Gulf Cartel money launderer famously laundered drug proceeds through a soccer club called Los Mapaches, or the Raccoons. The team wasn’t any good and didn’t have much apparent revenue, but they pulled new uniforms out of the box for every game. In Mexico, the top drug lords, like El Chapo and Forty, have the assets, power, and connections to pour their money into larger-scale ventures. They use their illicit cash to invest in real estate developments, oil-field companies, and other big-money enterprises, creating assets that they or their families can cash out of down the line, often with the help of well-paid lawyers. In the United States, washing cash through bigger business is often too difficult: too much red tape, too much paperwork, too much regulation, and too much talking. It can be done, though. The Sinaloa cartel did it for years through the Los Angeles garment and textile industry, paying a fee to flow hundreds of millions of drug proceeds into the middle of international textile transactions. And around the time your twenty makes it from your wallet to Katy to Junior, from the stash house to the gas tank to Cuno’s stacks, Forty will have decided to pump some money into the American horse business. CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_a5754d9c-6311-5c0c-be19-47bf29f579bb) WILDCAT (#ulink_a5754d9c-6311-5c0c-be19-47bf29f579bb) ELGIN, TEXAS November 2007 You can only spread the shit so thick. That’s the headache, Tyler Graham was saying, getting the shit spread evenly across every acre, so the regulators who test the soil don’t accuse you of overshitting it. Spread too little and you end up with excess shit, which is a problem when you shovel fifty tons a week. Spread too much and something will set the regulators off—if not the nitrates, then the potassium; if not the potassium, then the sulfur. It’s always something with “the environmental people.” Tyler was talking a lot about shit. He was doing an interview with a food journal called Southern Foodways Alliance about his grandfather’s cattle-feed yard, one of a handful of livestock businesses his family owned in the rolling hills east of Austin, Texas. The feed yard was an hour south in Gonzales, but luckily Tyler and his interviewer were on his family’s thirteen-hundred-acre horse farm in Tyler’s hometown of Elgin. Even with their heyday receding in the rearview, these stables remained the jewel in the Graham dynasty’s crown. They smelled better, too. There wasn’t much to Elgin. The area had been settled in the 1800s by members of Stephen F. Austin’s “Little Colony,” who received land grants from the Mexican government to help make something of the Coahuila y Tejas state. The settlers escaped Comanche raids and survived the Texas Revolution, and in 1871, after a flood forced the Texas Central Railroad to alter its route, their colony became one of the few rail stops between Houston and Austin. Elgin, named for the area’s land commissioner, was born. The population boom in trendy Austin, twenty-five miles to the west, eventually spilled into town some, finally giving the big-box stores reason to open out here. But even by Tyler’s day, downtown Elgin still consisted of just a couple of blocks of red-brick storefronts, including the train depot–turned–history museum and the musty offices of the town newspaper. The rest of Elgin was mostly covered with small, simple homes, some strip malls, and a lot of gnawed-on grassland. Tyler seemed to love his hometown, and why not? He was a star here. His last name got that ball rolling. Tyler’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Charles Graham, founded the Elgin Veterinary Hospital in the 1960s, catering to the cattle and horses that grazed central Texas. From there, Doc Graham built a livestock empire. Down in Gonzales, those thirty thousand cattle Tyler was talking about were fattened up on a mix of brewer’s grain and steamed flake corn, then sent off to slaughter. There was also a cattle-trucking company, a cattle-auction house, and a horse-auction house in Oklahoma. But it was this ranch, Southwest Stallion Station, that really made the Graham name ring in the ears of central Texans. Doc Graham had started it back in the 1960s, and over the years his horses had been responsible, as runners or breeders, for $65 million in racetrack winnings. The Texas ranching business wasn’t always kind. After cattle prices soared in the late 1980s, an oversupply of beef sent them plummeting, forcing ranchers across the country to thin or liquidate their herds. At the same time, peso devaluations in Mexico forced ranchers there to sell their beef for cheap, further flooding the American beef supply. The cattle industry limped through the 1990s; when Doc’s company applied for a $7 million credit line, the bank expressed concern about the business’s negative working capital. But things always rebounded. And Doc himself was well positioned to pass his wealth to future generations of Grahams. By the time his grandson, Tyler, went off to college in 2002, Doc Graham could list more than $30 million in assets on a personal financial statement. In turn, Doc Graham always made sure to reinvest his money in the institutions that supported his interests. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates from both parties in Texas. After watching New Mexico and California become quarter-horse racing meccas, he successfully pressured reluctant Texas lawmakers to approve racetrack gambling. He also pledged enough money to his alma mater, Texas A&M, to get a campus street named after him. He was a member of the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame and the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame, and soon he would be inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, alongside Nolan Ryan, Tommy Lee Jones, and George Strait. Like a lot of successful cowboys, Doc Graham was feared, too, and always game for a fight. He’d sued a neighbor over a road that their properties shared, and he’d sued two business partners. Just recently, he’d sued his own bankers, over some seemingly private and vaguely derogatory comments they’d made about his cattle operation. (The parties agreed to dismiss the case.) Doc’s intensity even appeared to affect his prized stud farm. During the 1980s, Southwest Stallion Station had been the dominant quarter-horse breeding farm in Texas, a page-after-page presence in sales books and industry publications. As Doc bragged to clients, its success was in no small part owed to the farm manager at the time, David Graham, who was Doc’s son and Tyler’s father. David was a workhorse, springing into action whenever a potential stud showed itself on the track. But by the 1990s, David Graham had left Southwest Stallion, a split he attributed to the difficulties of working for Doc. He now ran a small feed-and-supply shop in Elgin. According to David, he and Doc rarely spoke. “Being a Graham ain’t easy,” Tyler’s daddy liked to say, but for better or worse the Graham name went some distance in paving the way for Tyler. To his credit, though, Tyler didn’t just live in the shadow of Doc Graham’s big white hat or David Graham’s commanding personality. From a young age, he formed his own shadow, in the best place a central Texas kid could: under a flood of Friday-night lights. Tyler went to Elgin High, the same school where his dad had played quarterback and been a champion roper. Tyler had a thick neck, and he could muster a stern, don’t-fuck-with-this glare on picture day. He played receiver and cornerback, the positions dictated by his six-foot-tall, 165-pound frame. After high school, Tyler moved on to Texas A&M, just like his granddaddy, and studied animal science. He graduated and came back to Elgin. With Tyler’s dad out of the family business, the Graham empire was Tyler’s to inherit if he wanted it. Now, at twenty-four, he had become the manager of all of Doc’s businesses. It was a big enough job that he’d been asked to give this interview to Southern Foodways. “We’re double-stacking cattle,” he was saying now. “We’re building pens as fast as we can build them, buying land—every piece of land we can pretty much put our hands on.” Along with managing the cattle business, Tyler longed to return Southwest Stallion Station to its former glory. But it had been four decades since Doc Graham founded his stallion business, and things had changed. Breeding had modernized. Without Doc’s son, David, to keep up with the technology—to keep up with the times—Southwest Stallion Station had fallen behind. Every stud farm needs a stud to hang its name on. In California, First Down Dash anchored a famous ranch called Vessels Stallion Farm. In Oklahoma, Lazy E was the dominant breeder, thanks to a topflight stud called Corona Cartel. In Texas, Mr Jess Perry had helped turned the Four Sixes (6666) Ranch into the state’s new top dog. Southwest Stallion Station, meanwhile, had next to nothing. And for Tyler, the simple reality was that as much fun as it would be to run a major stud farm, it was fattening up those thirty thousand cattle that paid the bills. Feed ’em, shovel their shit, and on to the next. “This is where I started and that’s where I’m at,” Tyler told his interviewer. At least until a good stud came along. CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_b78af5de-a2ba-5f29-8e06-bdc1247f6b1f) ONE FAST BOOGER (#ulink_b78af5de-a2ba-5f29-8e06-bdc1247f6b1f) ELGIN, TEXAS October 2009 One day, David Graham, Tyler’s daddy, was behind the counter of his Elgin feed store. This was typical. David had bought the store two decades before, after his falling-out with Doc, and he’d hardly changed a thing, from the wood-paneled walls to the black-and-white letter-board menu hanging behind him. There was a wood-paneled office in the back, adorned with mementos to both his own high-school glory and his son’s. There was a table out on the floor where he could bullshit with friends or customers. And there was a coffee machine to which he made frequent visits, refilling the same Elgin High mug, stained as it was beyond recognition. But most often he was there, behind the red countertop, holding court about better days, his elaborate storytelling punctuated by the occasional plunk of Skoal spit landing in the trash. This day, though, was not typical. Not after Chevo walked in. “Chevo” was the nickname of Eusevio Huitron, a successful Austin horse trainer who owned a ranch nearby and occasionally came in to stock up. He was built like a bowling pin, five foot five with a formidable paunch. He stalked the aisles with his typical fervor, looking for vitamins and going on in broken English about a new colt he had in his stables. David listened up. Despite his falling-out with ol’ Doc Graham, David shared his son’s desire to see Southwest Stallion Station returned to prominence. Tyler was still working to catch Southwest Stallion up with the industry, stocking up on equipment that didn’t exist when the ranch was last relevant. He’d taken some flyers on cheap racehorses that might become decent studs, and he’d found some mare owners who were willing to do business. Chevo was one of those mare owners. But Chevo was best known as a trainer, and he apparently had a new runner in his stables. The horse’s name was Tempting Dash. He’d run fast in Mexico, Chevo said, and in a couple of days the colt would run his first race in the United States, at the track up in Dallas. If he ran well, he would qualify for a big-money race later in the month. David Graham listened from behind the counter. On the one hand, he knew that winning in Mexico didn’t mean much. As big as the unregulated match-racing scene was in Mexico, its sanctioned races didn’t draw the same level of competition as the circuit in the American Southwest. Nor was Graham particularly moved by Chevo’s boasting. Chevo loved to boast. On the other hand, Graham knew that plenty of fast, well-bred horses had been coming north from Mexico lately. He also knew that Chevo had been working closely with Ramiro Villarreal, “the Horseman,” who seemed to have a bead on all the best young runners. Most important, David Graham, after a lifetime in and around the breeding business, knew this: if his son, Tyler, was ever going to lure a real stud to Southwest Stallion Station, it was going to require a shit-barrel full of luck. If Chevo’s colt was indeed a topflight racehorse, then Chevo’s colt might one day be a topflight breeder. And the Grahams might be first in line to breed him. “You got a chance?” Graham asked Chevo from behind the counter. “Oh yes,” Chevo said, roaming the aisles. “Fast sonofabitch.” “Really?” Graham asked. “Oh yes,” Chevo said. “I’m gonna win it. I’m gonna win it.” SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS October 2009 “Hablas medio rapida,” Ramiro was telling his client, trying to get a handle on this latest development. “You talk kinda fast.” It had been about ten months since Ramiro snapped up Tempting Dash at that SoCal auction. Now Ramiro was back in Texas, getting ready for one of the horse’s first big races in the States. He’d just landed in San Antonio when the voice of one of his top clients—maybe his boss?—called out through his Nextel push-to-talk. Traditional cellphones were considered too traceable, so the Zetas relied on a two-pronged communication strategy. For instant messaging, they used BlackBerry’s encrypted system, which required knowing a user’s unique PIN. For conversation, the military-bred Zetas had pioneered a communication system that relied on radios like Nextel’s push-to-talk phones, which they believed were harder for the feds to intercept. To expand the network in Mexico, they installed antennae on buildings, trees, radio towers, and, in one case, the roof of a local police station. Until recently, they even had an in-house communications pro, nicknamed “Tecnico.” He worked out of a storefront radio-equipment shop in the Texas borderlands. But he’d been arrested, so the Zetas had resorted to kidnapping Nextel technicians and putting them to work. One day they’d all be texting over allegedly encrypted smart-phone apps. But today, it was still Nextel for Ramiro, and this incoming “callout” was an important one. It was Forty’s younger brother Omar, Z-42. Forty-Two was in his mid-thirties, the third-youngest of the Trevi?o kids. He was five foot seven, shorter and thicker than Forty, and his black hair was streaked with gray. He liked to wear his shirt spread open to reveal a tan, smooth chest covered in tattoos, including a hulking bird of prey. Like Forty, Forty-Two had never served in the military, making his place among the high-ranking Zetas a curiosity to the group’s ex-soldiers. But like Forty, he’d shown a willingness to protect the Gulf Cartel’s interests with unrepentant force, earning the trust of the Gulf bosses. Forty-Two didn’t care much about horses, but he knew how much his brother did. And a few weeks before, Forty’s best horse, Tempting Dash, had qualified for the Dash for Cash Futurity in Dallas, a Grade 1 stakes race with a $445,000 purse. There was a lot to talk about. But given the news Ramiro had just received, it seemed like a strange time for Forty-Two to check in on Tempting Dash. “Forty told me you just had a shoot-out,” Ramiro said, in Spanish. “Yes, quite a while,” Forty-Two said. “Like an hour.” “And Miguel was there?” “Yeah, he was,” Forty-Two said. “He was there in the truck with me talking to a man, and I was on the passenger side, then I jumped to the seat, and it was off.” “Man, take really good care of yourself,” Ramiro said. “Fuck.” “Once again we took care of them,” Forty-Two said. “But you are all right?” Ramiro asked. “It’s bleeding,” Forty-Two said. “It’s coming out?” “It’s bleeding, it’s bleeding,” Forty-Two said, letting the drama build. “Where’d you get hit?” Ramiro asked. “On the tip of my dick!” Forty-Two told him. Then he started laughing. “No way, man, don’t scare me!” Ramiro said. Ramiro laid down his own laughter over Forty-Two’s. In truth, he was out of his depth. Ramiro was no aspiring trafficker or Special-Forces wannabe. His dad was a bookkeeper; his mom was a teacher. He’d grown up in Monterrey, Nuevo Le?n, a cosmopolitan city long known as a haven from the violence of Mexico’s drug war. There were American companies there, Pepsi and Caterpillar and others. When Ramiro was a child, it was one of the few places everyone seemed to agree should stay quiet. Ramiro’s obsession with horse racing seemed born from native talent. As a teenager in Monterrey, he’d cobbled money from friends and relatives to buy cheap horses at auction and race them at the small tracks that dotted the Mexican countryside. His horses always outperformed their purchase price, which got the attention of other horse owners. Ramiro started making a living by picking and buying promising young quarter horses for ranchers and other wealthy businessmen. Eventually Ramiro’s keen eye got the attention of the drug criminals, including the original Zeta they called “Mamito,” a play on Mamita, the common term of endearment for Latina women. Mamito’s plate was full. He paid bribes to state policemen and soldiers, and he collected pisos from traffickers who wanted to move drugs through the Gulf’s territory. If they didn’t pay those pisos, he was usually ordered to kidnap them, torture them, and, if the piso was offered too late or not at all, kill them. Like many of the high-ranking Zetas, Mamito found time for racing horses. He’d become interested in 2004, and he’d noticed Ramiro’s talent for picking fast horses. He asked Ramiro to pick him some winners at the auctions in the United States and bring them back to Mexico to race. Throughout his twenties, Ramiro had built a sustainable income as a broker, but Mamito’s business offered more revenue. The more expensive the horse, the higher Ramiro’s commission, and Mamito wanted some of the priciest horses. Ramiro started showing up at the big auctions in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and southern California, bidding on horses from Mamito’s favored bloodlines—First Down Dash, Corona Cartel, and others. Usually Mamito found a legitimate Mexican businessman to pay off Ramiro’s debts at the auction houses, instructing them to send a check or a wire and promising to repay them from his stash of drug money. But in 2008, Ramiro smoothed out the process by enlisting a Monterrey currency-exchange house to launder the money. Here’s how it worked: The Zetas took cash from one of their stash houses and delivered it to Ramiro. It always took too long for Ramiro to collect, because the drug lords moved around so much and dropped their phones so often. But he eventually got the money and brought it to the casa de cambio in Monterrey, anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand. Sometimes he showed up himself, parking his silver BMW 750 in front and lugging the cash in an envelope. Sometimes he sent his secretary, a woman who organized his affairs. Sometimes he sent a courier he used to run errands like these, although that didn’t always work out. The courier had a gambling problem and once gambled away $600,000 of drug money. Somehow he and Ramiro survived. The owner of the exchange house didn’t know where the money came from, and didn’t ask. He simply exchanged it for pesos, then back to dollars, in keeping with the normal course of his business. Then he fired wires all over the American Southwest in smaller amounts, to whichever American auction houses and breeding farms Ramiro currently owed money. Once the horses were paid off, Ramiro could either keep them in his name or transfer them into the name of a friend or associate—someone who didn’t care or didn’t even know that he owned a narco’s racehorse. No matter whose name it was in, it was actually owned by Mamito or whichever gangster had instructed Ramiro to buy it. Ramiro collected a fee, anywhere from a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars, depending on the quality of the horse. Ramiro operated like this throughout most of the 2000s, well into his thirties. Though he was buying for narcos, he had managed to remain independent, a safe distance from their business and their culture. But around the time he bought Tempting Dash in 2008, some guys approached and told him that a Zeta named Forty wanted to do business together. Ramiro politely declined, saying he preferred to stick with his freelance horse brokerage. But the guys came back and said, This isn’t optional, Horseman. Soon after, Ramiro showed up at a track in Monterrey. Two armed men found him and escorted him to a cluster of SUVs and pickups parked near the track. A man stepped forward and extended his hand. So you’re the famous Horseman, Forty said. How can I help you? Ramiro asked. I want you to buy horses for me, Forty said. I’m too busy. Think about it, Forty said. He left Ramiro alone to watch the horses run. Later, he returned. I really need you to buy horses for me, Forty said. I’m sorry, Ramiro said. He insisted he didn’t have time. Forty’s bodyguards stiffened. Their boss pulled back his shirt to reveal a pistol. Forty asked, Do you have time to save your family? What do you mean? Ramiro asked. If you don’t buy my fucking horses, Forty said, you won’t have a family. So now, Ramiro bought for Forty. The machismo of Mexico’s narco culture didn’t suit Ramiro, but he tried his best. He could talk like a narco at least, prattling on about associates who could “fuck off” and occasionally feigning a violent streak. He was prone to elaborate descriptions of his friends’ flatulence, and he talked constantly to friends about women. Sometimes he actually talked with women, sex past and future crackling through the phone calls. Mostly he spoke with one woman, an apparent girlfriend in Mexico. They spoke several times some days, about the innocuous things that make up the closest relationships, including a skin cream she’d bought for him. He liked it, but he wasn’t using it daily as directed. “My skin is already beautiful,” he told her. “Do you miss me?” she asked. “All day long,” he said. Ramiro spoke with friends about wanting to move in with her, but they rarely saw each other. She lived in Guadalajara, a territory controlled by the Zetas’ rivals in the Sinaloa cartel. Ramiro wasn’t going there. And she couldn’t come to Monterrey. Not now. The turf battle between the Gulf and the Zetas was in the process of shattering the city’s relative placidity, as hooded gunmen bombed police stations, traffickers jacked cars to use for transportation, and the American consulate sent anxious cables back to Washington: “It is now clear that the ongoing war between the Gulf and Zeta drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has reached Monterrey.” The increasing violence had Ramiro spooked. When friends back home told Ramiro of the bloodshed, he responded by saying he would remain in the States for a while. He stayed in San Antonio a lot, though he preferred California. He talked about moving there someday. Spooked or not, Ramiro at least appeared to have a luxurious life under Forty and the Zetas. As he traversed Mexico and the American Southwest, he racked up $300 bills at steakhouses and found time to jaunt to Las Vegas. And, damn, could he shop. He preferred the colorful short-sleevers at Lacoste, where those little gator logos could make $240 or $360 of Ramiro’s money disappear in an afternoon. But he also made trips to Louis Vuitton, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and other high-end stores. His voracious spending kept his checking account from ever climbing, but there was always enough to spend. If seventeen grand went out one month, twenty grand came in. There was no sign of business slowing down. With every passing year, the Zetas’ zeal for horses seemed to increase. The group’s leader, Lazcano, was prone to throwing private parties anchored by match races, including one where he injected his horse with so much cocaine that it died on the track. But it was second-in-command Forty who really changed Ramiro’s business. Forty didn’t want Ramiro just to buy horses in the United States; he wanted Ramiro to run them there. And he wanted them to win. For Ramiro, even getting the horses into the country required some ingenuity. A highly contagious tick-borne disease called equine piroplasmosis had broken out in Mexico. Then it started to show up in horses in South Texas, after an outbreak at the famous King Ranch. Health regulators were panicking. The Texas Animal Health Commission had once crossed into Mexico to test horses before they could be imported, but the violence made that too dangerous. Instead, they set up bays at border checkpoints to quarantine and test horses. Since some of the horses the Zetas wanted to race in Mexico likely carried piroplasmosis, there was no hope of legally trucking them across the river. Even if they weren’t infected, there was a waiting list and paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles that Forty and the Zetas had no time for. So Ramiro smuggled them across. There was a tradition of informal movement of horses across the border, just as there was with smuggling drugs and humans. Mexicans, Tejanos, and Americans, both native and imperialist, had ridden horses across the river in battle and in search of new land to ranch. But by 2009, the folks on the American side of the river were actively policing the border for rogue horse crossings. The United States government had even employed cowboys to roam the borderlands in search of livestock that had either strayed or been smuggled across the border. They caught and captured hundreds every year. They didn’t catch Ramiro’s horses. He hired associates from the racetracks to ride the horses across the river at night, at the same low-flowing sections where the Zetas crossed some of their cocaine. Once they were across, he made sure they got wherever they needed to go. After Tempting Dash won his heat in Nuevo Laredo, Ramiro had smuggled him across to run in the States. Once the horse was safely in the States, Ramiro knew just where to take him: Chevo’s place. Chevo and Ramiro had met at the track years before, and they’d struck up a partnership. It was easy enough to understand what Ramiro saw in Chevo. Since around 2006, he had become a fixture in the stables at some of the sport’s biggest tracks—Sam Houston Race Park in Houston, Retama Park in San Antonio, Lone Star Park in Dallas, and Remington Park in Oklahoma City. He worked his horses hard, and more and more they were finding their way into the money. Ramiro also may have appreciated Chevo’s willingness to test the limits of his horses, and the limits of his sport’s feeble doping regulations. Horse racing had for years been known as a place where performance-enhancing drugs were abused with too little oversight or punishment. Even in higher-profile thoroughbred racing, trainers were known to use any substance they could to gain an advantage. Steroids helped horses recover more quickly from workouts. Painkillers helped mask injuries, allowing horses to pass prerace medical exams. Stimulants made them run faster. Like other sports, thoroughbred racing had promised to crack down but lagged behind industrious cheaters, who always found a drug their horse wouldn’t be tested for. Cancer drugs were popular. Viagra, too. It would take an especially attentive lab worker in Denver to identify one of the stranger painkillers trainers were using: a natural opioid squeezed from the back of an exotic South American frog. Quarter-horse racing had been even slower to change. Needles remained rampant and testing limited. Even when a doper was caught, the punishment was often laughably light. Two years earlier, five of Chevo’s horses had tested positive for elevated levels of banned substances, including phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory drug that’s legal in training but banned on race days. Too much “bute” can cause ulcers and other issues in horses, but if the sport was taking it seriously, it wasn’t reflected by its discipline schedule. Those five bad tests cost Chevo only about twelve hundred dollars in fine money, and no track time was taken away. Later that year, another of Chevo’s horses tested positive for too much nicotinamide, a form of vitamin B3. That earned Chevo a six-month suspension from the track in Houston, but those six months basically covered when the quarter-horse season was dark. He was back at Sam Houston the next summer, racking up small-time fines for entering ineligible horses into races. He was also at Texas’s other tracks, like Austin’s Manor Downs, where he was suspended for three months after a horse tested positive for an unnamed substance, and Dallas’s Lone Star Park, where he was fined $250 for having two hypodermic needles in his truck. Later, his horses would test positive for elevated levels of clenbuterol, a respiratory drug that mimics a steroid and helps horses build muscle. Whatever Ramiro saw in Chevo, they made formidable partners. The summer Tempting Dash arrived in the States, they teamed up on a few winning horses. Chevo finished the season as Sam Houston’s second-winningest trainer, taking down $75,000 in earnings. Ramiro finished as one of the track’s top “owners,” though his horses all actually belonged to Forty or other narcos. So, Ramiro told Chevo, let’s keep it going. He hauled Tempting Dash down the gravel road that led to Chevo’s falling-down training center southeast of Austin. Chevo and his brother had built it a few years back, after Chevo, who’d learned to train in Mexico, started winning races. They’d constructed crude stables from sheet metal and plywood, poured dirt for a quarter-mile track, and trucked in a used starting gate. The plywood was rotting now; the white fence posts that formed the track’s rail were rusted. Trash piled up outside the two-story house the brothers had built on-site for the grooms and assistant trainers who came on staff to help. Even by the standards of quarter-horse racing, a sport proud of its comparative humility, the place was a dump. For Chevo, it was an American Dream fulfilled. Ramiro had gone out there to watch Tempting Dash run the day before Forty-Two called him. The horse was a bit of a diva; whenever no one was tending to him, he huffed and kicked dust onto the rotting plywood that formed his stall. They took him out and walked him on the red-and-white hot walker, the sort of equine merry-go-round trainers use to cool down a hot horse or warm up a cold one. They hosed him down in the bathing pen, its red paint chipping a little more with every spray. They led him through the deep training pool Chevo’s crew had constructed, and Tempting Dash, head held high, clung to the bit with his teeth, as the white racing stripe that bisected his face peeked out of the murky water. Eventually, they took the horse out to the track on the edge of the property. He liked company in the stall, but he hated it out there. He basically refused to run if there was another horse on the track. So Chevo cleared the other horses and put Dash in the gates alone. He flew. On the phone with Forty-Two, Ramiro, still reeling from the phantom dick-shooting, steered the conversation back to the horses. He said Tempting Dash was looking good. “What’s up with Chevo?” Forty-Two asked. “How’s the forecast? How’s he?” Chevo was ready, Ramiro said. But that was hardly enough for the Zetas. They were under assault from so many angles—from the Gulf, from the Sinaloa, from Calder?n, from the Americans. The idea of losing something as simple as a horse race seemed unfathomable to them, and they took every step to avoid it. Along with doping their horses, they loved to fix races, especially the unregulated ones in Mexico. Sometimes they bribed the “starters,” who manage the gates, and their assistants, who load the horses into the gates, paying them to hold on to their opponents’ horses for a millisecond. Other times the Zetas paid off the groundskeeper to drag one lane of the track until the dirt was packed tight, letting the briber’s horse fly across the harder surface. Often they slipped their jockeys a little battery-charged device that sent a shock wave into the horse, reminding him to pick up the pace. All of these cheats were methods favored over the years by American cowboys, but the Zetas were especially zealous in their application of them. Ramiro told Forty-Two about the deal he’d cut with the gate crew at Lone Star Park: five hundred dollars each, plus four thousand for the head starter and an extra thousand for the one who made sure Tempting Dash got out clean. Operativo Huesos was in motion. But there was a second phase, which was what Forty-Two wanted to talk about now. “Hope he wants to run, because once the jolts are applied, it doesn’t matter,” Forty-Two said, referring to the electric-shock mechanism he wanted Ramiro to slip the jockey. The jockey they’d tapped to ride Tempting Dash was Julian Cantu. He’d grown up navigating the bush tracks of rural Mexico, unregulated, poorly groomed courses carved out of the trees or desert, with fans forming the rails. Julian was known as a smart jockey who raced with an edge—sometimes too much of an edge. He’d been fined recently for bumping his horse into another. Julian was on board, Ramiro assured his boss. (Cantu was never formally accused of being a buzzer, and no evidence was ever found that he did. This may only have been bravado on the part of Ramiro.) Forty-Two would soon hang up abruptly, as he often did. But not before making his prediction. “You will win, Gordo,” Forty-Two said. “We’re going to win.” DALLAS, TEXAS October 2009 Ramiro hardly had time to reflect on what it might mean to win the Dash for Cash Futurity. His days barreled past. Trainers called to ask when shipments of medicine would arrive. Vets called to talk about horses they’d treated. Auction managers called to ask Ramiro whether he planned to pay up before the next sale. His secretary called to outline options for whatever flight or hotel or rental-car reservation he wanted to change at the last minute. He moved perpetually and impetuously among Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and Monterrey, not to mention the ranches dropped into the barren stretches in between. He never wanted to pay the change fee. He always paid the change fee. Everyone pays the change fee. The morning of the Dash for Cash, Ramiro flew to Dallas from Oklahoma City, where he’d just spent $113,000 on nine horses. He drove to the track in a rental Nissan. It was finally cool in Dallas, that brief window of fall that graces north Texas around Halloween. He called his parents, who were flying in from Monterrey for the race. Ramiro’s dad reminded him to bring a jacket. Ramiro arrived early at Lone Star Park, a prefab oasis of stucco and glass rising from the suburbs west of Dallas. The track was built in 1997, and after twelve years, it felt only gently used. Many nights, it was. Racetrack attendance was in decline across the country, as the sport faded in the shadow of more popular pastimes. The tracks in Texas were falling prey to the sport’s most deadly predator, casino gambling, which flourished across each of Texas’s American borders. At Lone Star, and at tracks around the country, the betting window looked ever more like something that belonged in a sports museum. Only big-money quarter-horse races brought crowds of more than a couple thousand people, and the Dash for Cash Futurity was one of them. It was the first stakes race of the track’s quarter-horse meet. Lone Star wasn’t the highest-dollar track in quarter-horse racing; only New Mexico’s Ruidoso Downs and California’s Los Alamitos could reasonably make that claim. But since Lone Star’s meet took place late in the season, it offered one of the last chances of the year for owners to squeeze another quarter-mile from their best colts and fillies. That, along with the purse, lured some decent horses and a decent crowd. Ramiro found a table with his parents, and they fixed their eyes on Tempting Dash. He moved fluidly, which was lucky. He was the youngest horse in the field. He had also chipped a bone in his knee during one of the races in Mexico, so Ramiro had taken him to a Texas vet to get the knee cleaned up. Technically, he was running on a surgically repaired leg, and he’d run hard on it just a couple of weeks earlier, in the qualifier for this futurity. That’d been quite a sight: Tempting Dash, the horse no one had heard of, crashing hard toward the rail and cutting off half the field on his way to a two-length win. Chevo and Ramiro figured that his hard move toward the infield was just his way of shielding his young eyes from the track’s harsh lights, since he’d never before run at night. But it had looked like an act of aggression. That was just a qualifier, though. This was the race Ramiro cared about, because this was the race Forty cared about. The starters herded the horses into the gates one by one. Their cow-pony genes kept them calm, but even in that regard, Tempting Dash stood out. The vet from the Texas Racing Commission, who’d examined all the horses before the race, couldn’t help noticing how placid Tempting Dash was as the race approached. A two-year-old? With this kind of crowd on this kind of night? As chill as the doc had ever seen. All went quiet. The gates flung open. If Ramiro really had paid off the gate crew, they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. Another well-bred horse, one of the favorites, burst into an early lead. Who knew if a chipped-knee horse, once so skinny they called him— El Huesos! About six seconds in, Tempting Dash sped past the lead horse and shaded toward the rail, away from those lights again. Just like that, he was ahead. His lead grew, and suddenly Ramiro could feel his family’s eyes turning away from the track and toward him. When he checked the scoreboard, it confirmed that Tempting Dash had not just won the $445,000 race—$178,000 to the winning owner—but that he’d covered the 400 yards in just 19.379 seconds. It was a track record. Ramiro pushed through the crowd and down to the winner’s circle. His Nextel rang out with calls of congratulations, and he called friends to tell them the news. He made plans to celebrate that night, and he secured some kick-ass tickets for the next day’s Dallas Cowboys game, from a friend who happened to play in a Grammy-winning norte?o band called Intocable. “Untouchable.” As Ramiro pulled out of the parking lot, another call came through. It was El Flaco, a Zetas boss in Monterrey. Ramiro could hear Forty in the background. “His horse won, right?” El Flaco asked in Spanish. They rarely called Forty by his name on the phone, worried the Americans might be listening in. He was referred to only in vague terms like “the boss” or “that guy.” “Yes, his horse won,” Ramiro said. “It’s a track record.” “Again?” El Flaco asked him. “I didn’t get that last part.” “Tell him it is a track record,” Ramiro repeated. “A track record.” “Got it, sir,” El Flaco said. “Got it.” “We have to celebrate!” Ramiro told him. “I know. That’s how he is also,” El Flaco said. “My boss will respond later, sir. When you—” The phone went dead. DALE, TEXAS October 2009 One prolific stallion—a horse like First Down Dash or Corona Cartel—can turn a stud farm’s luck around. He can come out of nowhere, too, taking his genetic gifts and somehow multiplying them, changing the course of his lineage. That’s part of the allure of breeding, in horses as in all animals: the potential to make something better of the next generation, and the next. Knowing all that, Tyler Graham paid close attention when Chevo bragged about Tempting Dash. “I’m gonna win it!” Chevo had said, and he had won it, not once but twice under the lights at Lone Star Park. If he kept winning, Tyler’s relationship with Chevo might one day put him in position to lure Tempting Dash to Southwest Stallion Station to breed. Tyler was a big college football fan, his Aggies specifically. When he talked about running a stud farm, he sounded like a college coach. First came the scouting. After Tempting Dash’s big win, Tyler and his dad drove down to Chevo’s training center. It would be a while before Tempting Dash would retire and start breeding. He had more races as a two-year-old and likely a three-year-old season, which could be almost as lucrative as this one. But Tyler knew he needed to get in line early if he wanted the horse to eventually stand at Southwest Stallion Station. They arrived at Chevo’s place to find a party in progress. Smoke, scented with the flesh of pig and goat, rose over the property. Mexican men leaned over the rusty rails, waving five-dollar bills as yearlings clambered past with kids on their backs. The Grahams found a ranch hand and asked if they could see Tempting Dash. He walked them into the stables. They peered inside a dark, rotting stall. “No,” Tyler’s dad said, looking at the short, thin colt. He hadn’t seen the horse up close at the race, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t him. “We want to see the horse that won the futurity last night.” “That’s him.” They walked into the stall. “This is the horse that set the track record?” “Yeah.” They’d gone looking for Godzilla and found a horse built more like an insurance-shilling gecko. He couldn’t weigh a thousand pounds. They asked the guy to pull Tempting Dash out of the stall and walk him around. He did, and they started drawing invisible lines across his body, this way and that, doing their horseman geometry. That’s when they saw it. His short back created a tight, fast hinge. His deep heart girth gave him great lung capacity. The slope of his shoulders, the proportions of his legs. It all added up to “one fast booger,” as Tyler’s old man put it. Tyler already knew Ramiro “the Horseman” Villarreal—everyone in the business did—but Chevo had made it clear that Ramiro was the owner in name only. It wasn’t clear who the real owner was, but Tyler knew how to find out: by getting to the racetrack in Dallas. CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_7fc9e0e9-a845-5249-ae3b-3af497abb2a7) THE WINNER’S CIRCLE (#ulink_7fc9e0e9-a845-5249-ae3b-3af497abb2a7) DALLAS, TEXAS November 2009 Night fell on Lone Star Park, a winter night in name if not forecast, and the horses clicked beneath the grandstand and through a parting sea of horse-racing fans, who themselves were swarming from the track to the ornate saddling paddock. This ritual had repeated itself before each of the night’s ten races: the grooms paraded the horses from the track, beneath the grandstand, through the crowd, around an ornately landscaped walking ring, and into the saddling paddock, where the horses were prepped by their trainers, loved by their owners, mounted by their jockeys, and led back through the crowd, toward the starting gate, to wait for the gates to fly. At other tracks, this ritual took place on the inside of the track and felt like something private for the horse’s connections. At Lone Star, it happened behind the grandstand. A crowd formed. Bettors squinted and looked for signs of a winner. Kids marveled from high on their daddies’ shoulders. The crowd grew especially large before the Texas Classic, the biggest race of the night. Outside the paddock, the onlookers studied the horses, which snorted and neighed as their trainers jostled to get riding saddles and blinkers in place. The crowd strained to find the favorite and found him in the seventh paddock. If the horse was small, he didn’t look it next to his squat, mustachioed trainer, Chevo, or the man who was now listed as the owner, Jos? Trevi?o. After Tempting Dash’s record-breaking win in the Dash for Cash, Operativo Huesos had been put into motion. Forty tasked Poncho, the Piedras Negras trafficker, with making sure Tempting Dash was legally transferred into Jos?’s name from Ramiro’s. That way, any money the horse won could be kept in the Trevi?o family. Jos?, Ramiro, and Poncho met in Mexico to finalize the deal. Thirty years after leaving Tamaulipas, Jos? was back in northern Mexico, taking on the challenge and responsibility of owning an animal, and he seemed thrilled. Thrilled, and yet insistent that the deal come with a clear paper trail. He and Ramiro signed a sales agreement. Poncho asked his wife, a notary, to authenticate it after the fact. Jos? would never say publicly what he knew of Forty’s plan. He had a chance to buy Tempting Dash for cheap, he’d say, and he took it. The stated sale price was twenty-five thousand dollars, a bargain given that the horse had already won a half-million-dollar race. So they backdated the agreement to September, before Tempting Dash’s first big win. Later, if anyone wondered why Ramiro would sell a winning horse so cheap, the paper trail would show that he sold it before Tempting Dash ever won a thing. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joe-tone/bones-a-story-of-brothers-a-champion-horse-and-the-race-to-stop-a/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.